"Welp. Guess we're on our own for now. Hopefully that doesn't come back to bite us."

Whine.

"We'll be fine. Probably."

They head upstream.

Meanwhile, back on the steamship, someone is practicing firebending forms on the deck. He has been going over the same movements since the sun first peeked over the horizon, and by this point no one else on the boat dares join him up there for longer than it takes to poke one's head out of a hatch and verify that he hasn't yet stopped.

Eventually a small canoe paddles up the river towards the larger boat. One of the passengers calls up.

"Zuko! I had begun to worry you had left us behind entirely!"

He doesn't respond, unless you count launching a fire blast over the railing, but he was about to do that anyway; the flow of the sequence carries him all the way across the deck and back, and he doesn't acknowledge Iroh's presence at all the whole time.

Not a great sign. Also inconvenient because Iroh and the soldier he's with can't actually board the ship from down here unless someone sends a ladder down.

"...anyone else up there?"

Apparently not.

He finishes the entire sequence, stops to catch his breath, and then hauls out the ladder by himself rather than summon one of the crew to do it.

They pay the person who's been paddling the canoe, and then they board the ship.

"I take it it didn't go well?"

"I found the strange girl the rumours were about. She's not the Avatar. I don't know what she is. She doesn't fight like anyone I've ever seen, I don't think she's a bender at all, but her fist hits as hard as an earthbender's boulder." He gestures at his midsection, which is developing a spectacular bruise. "I was fully armoured and she knocked me halfway across the deck with one punch."

"Did she break her hand doing it?"

He shakes his head. "Jumped in the river and swam away. Uninjured. It doesn't make sense," he says, angrily, as though this stranger's unprecedented superhuman abilities personally offend him.

"Well, the world is full of many strange things, Prince Zuko."

"It shouldn't be!" His hands tighten angrily on the railing. "I don't understand! Why were there rumours of her airbending? She's not an airbender! She's something completely different and I want to know what!"

"I don't know. There certainly are powerful warriors who are not benders in this world, though I don't know how many have fists like stone. Have you eaten yet today?"

He scowls. (That's a no.)

"I will make some breakfast. It's so much harder to solve the great mysteries of the world without eating breakfast."

He scowls again, but this time there's an edge of suppressed humour to it, which in his current mood is probably the closest available thing to a smile.

"Fine," he says, in his it's-annoying-how-you-keep-being-right voice.

Breakfast it is. Maybe if he makes something tasty he can get his nephew to remember to eat in the future.

At the moment he can't even get his nephew to stop scowling. Zuko is staring at the food like he wants to beat it up until it tells him its secrets.

Abruptly, halfway through the meal, he says, "—There was some stupid kid in the village who tried to fight me when I was asking after the girl."

"How did that go?"

"The girl appeared and tried to make the kid stop, but the kid refused to back down until I promised I'd let the girl go as long as she told me everything and wasn't the Avatar. I—wasn't expecting the girl to believe that promise, but she did, or seemed to. Don't know if she still does. It was the strangest thing about her before I saw her fight, that she wasn't afraid of me. I don't—" He shakes his head sharply. His voice gets very quiet, like he's making a shameful admission. "I didn't... want to hurt them."

He smiles. "I'm glad. The fire nation has bred more than enough ill will already."

His scowl deepens. "That's not—ugh."

"I am glad that you have good intuitions in this area. An occupying soldier should have no love of using violence against those who are too weak to defend themselves."