You will learn respect, and suffering will be your teacher.
It is in his quietest moments that he recalls his father's words. They echo in his mind, a poison and curse. The words etched into the scar very meant to shame him. To stare back at him as a reminder of his failings.
His speaking out of turn at that war meeting was the opening his father had needed.
Not only had Ozai saw an opportunity to make an example out of his son. His saw another opportunity to punish Ursa.
Ozai had sought to punish his son. To root out the softness in him, to stamp out the kind hearted sweet boy he'd been. He sought to erase his mother's presence from his life. He burned him because he could not look at him and not see her.
So he marked him in an effort to erase the woman who was once his wife. The mother of the son who was his bitterest disappointment. The reason it all fell apart.
This revelation does not shock him. From what he knows of their marriage, it had been tumultuous from the very start. From his shuttered memories he knows there were glimpses of happiness.
But grown and matured as he was, he can not help but think about how much of it was true. And how much of it he had blocked out and supplied. He doubts his memories, how much of it had been true? How much had it been false?
His mother had shielded both her children from Ozai's harhness the best she could. Painted a kinder picture in their young minds that left no doubt that their father however distant, loved his family.
And Zuko had believed it, he thinks his sister had too.
But Zuko now has grown and has seen life, all facets of it. And he knows what it is to love someone. To love so deeply that his heart aches from it (his mind goes to the blue eyed waterbender who rests in the adjacent room and sometimes he cant quite believe she is here and loves him just as much as he does her).
He knows now that it hadn't been quite the case for either his parents.
Complicated doesn't quite encompass all what they had, but it's what he tells himself and others.
It transcends something beyond love and hate and he doesn't think he can understand it. He can't fathom ever hurting someone he loves, he can't understand how Ozai could.
He doesn't have his mother's side of it, and that is a bitter thought. He can never ask her.
He doesn't know if it's a blessing to finally know the truth of what happened or another tragedy he must learn to live with. The curse of that knowledge of how much his mother had done, of what she in her desperation had done and what Ozai had done in the end to them all.
And for what? A bid for power for a crown so soaked in blood and fire.
Ozai would see the world burn, and if it came at the cost of his wife and two children than so be it.
For as long as he lives, Zuko doesn't think he'll ever really get over it.
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every time i drop my partner off at the university i pass through this traffic-calming bottleneck on the campus road that's only wide enough to let cars through in one direction at a time. my country uses road signs for this situation that are carefully designed to be extremely different depending on whether you're approaching from the direction that gets to go first or whether you need to yield. they use different colours and shapes and everything. the university, in its infinite wisdom, decided instead to use the same sign (the blue rectangular "you go first" sign) for BOTH directions, and simply flip one of them upside-down. there isn't even text on that one, you'd only notice by paying close attention to what the arrows are doing. it's very funny. can't wait for the university to be liable for a low speed head-on collision.
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I'd like to hear about Marble and the exact context behind her... unfortunate demise.
Why, yes - we absolutely can!
Let's start with this: Marble is a Wasp Bomber, by game terms. She is very competent in making and employing explosive charges. She is, in fact, so competent at making and employing explosive charges that she is capable of producing bombs that can melt a hole in a kaiju. She was also banned from military service for collateral damage before the Wasp King turned up.
Wasp Kingdom military attitudes tend to, overwhelmingly, be shaped by the environment they live in - they border on deadlands, but more specifically Northern deadlands, where them being classified as Deadlands because of the sheer number of hazards to bug life that they have around there meaning that anything that isn't specifically adapted to the environment will be incapable of surviving well enough for any children it might produce to not end up Lesser.
There are monsters. The Wasp Military is, on a regular basis, pitted against a very large number of Beasts of all sorts, which means that having a decent supply of bugs capable of fighting them off is a necessity. Pretty much any wasp with capacity to serve is set to work as some part of fighting forces at some point, be it out in the field or repairing equipment for those who can be out in the field. Conscription is very much mandatory, and it is considered a deeply important role and a core part of a wasp's duty in the hive to, at one point or another, contribute to the fighting fitness of the Hive.
This demand - and the need for bugs associated, especially when the general danger of the territory will lead to wasp lives lost even on very standard patrols, goes to the point that the Wasp Kingdom will actively pull from demographics that most kingdoms prefer to either avoid or keep out of the line of fire - drones, kept out of the line of fire in nearly every other kingdom, are drafted just as often as workers, and the Wasp Kingdom is just about the only kingdom to actively welcome brood parasites and random out-of-kingdom bugs for the potential strategic advantages that they may offer.
With this established, Marble was been banned from active service the Wasp military forces after approximately two months of service due to her flagrant disrespect of safety procedure and astronomically high risk of friendly fire. She is, in fact, not actually allowed to do mechanical work without supervision, because not keeping track of what she's doing has an extremely high risk of her including improvements that, even while working as intended, are capable of maiming or killing their users if mishandled even slightly.
Even if Marble herself is capable of handling her inventions safely, for the most part, the Wasp Kingdom under Vanessa was entirely unwilling to take that risk. As such, she was banned from military service, as she was deemed unsuitable for just about any other potential role available to her and no one was really willing to put her within reach of any sort of potentially volatile equipment that absolutely anyone else might handle, and she spent a few years mostly just hanging around Defiant Root and making friends with the inhabitants of the Black Market.
Hoaxe put her back into military service after taking over the Wasp Kingdom.
Unfortunately, a Marble who is being actively mind controlled by someone who doesn't know shit about bomb safety and is simply setting her to whatever will be most effective offensively is even worse at safety than a Marble who is creating highly volatile explosives constructed with the assumption that whoever is using them Also has exactly as much knowledge of her own work as her.
She blew herself up. Badly.
Technically, it wasn't immediately lethal - the specific bomb that did it wasn't something that would instantly vaporize her like some of the other options! It was, instead, a crowd-control weapon, which released a fucking massive amount of heat energy and cooked everything in a hideously wide radius to cinders.
Technically, there are forms of treatment available to Bugaria that could keep her from straight-up dying to that, if they got to her in three minutes or so - mostly just Gold save crystal restoration or flat-out replacing most of her body with charmcraft, and definitely not without major damage to just about every organ in her body. Depending on the specific circumstances that she blows herself up in, it might even be survivable - it's possible for her to die even while handling the bomb properly due to things like "it has an effective range that can be measured in human-size metres" and "Hoaxe is not an effective strategist". However, this is a very remote chance, and most of the time she just dies badly.
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Tbh it's easier to count the mecha in this au who don't know about the blatant megop (at the time of Soundwave discovering Silverlight) than the ones who do. A few vehicons who are like. Freshly spawned in might not, but they'll learn. Tarn doesn't but I think we can apply that to him not usually being on the frontlines and him living in Tarn world. Rung will arrive very shortly and learn woefully soon. The Griffin Rock crew don't know a lot of the specifics but they know there is drama and that ~Optimus~ is involved with ~something~.
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