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The entire group were fairly good foragers (and, in Sokka, Toph, and Iroh’s case, hunters. Zuko, Katara, and Aang were unable to stomach killing adorable, furry, living creatures. Zuko and Katara would eat meat, but they wouldn’t kill it themselves; they’d rather just eat vegetarian with Aang than go hunting themselves). However, sometimes there simply wasn’t enough to be foraged. In these cases, they had to (very carefully) go into a town to replenish.
“That hood is deep enough to hide your scar. Come on, Zuko, you should come into town with us. This is your home, and you haven’t seen it in so long. It’ll be okay if we just grab some supplies and then maybe get some street food,” Katara coaxed. They were no longer quite so tight on money; their father and the fleet had given them some, and there had been even more in the ship they’d, uh… requisitioned. So they could afford to splurge on some street food, and she knew Zuko had missed many things about his homeland, not least the food.
Zuko hesitated, uncertain.
“Go on, Prince Zuko,” Uncle encouraged. “I will stay here and watch the animals. It has been so long since you’ve had fun and behaved like a teenager.”
“That’s not true!” Zuko argued. “I did Blue Spirit stuff.”
“Vigilante justice is not ‘behaving like a normal teenager,’” Iroh scolded.
“It really should be, though,” Toph declared. Then she punched Zuko on the arm, far more lightly than she did with the others. Zuko resented that; he was tired of being treated like he was fragile just because he had a ‘only sort-of barely healed lightning wound’.
“Come on Sparky, you’re going,” Toph ordered, leaving no room to argue. Zuko followed dutifully, unwilling to disobey the world’s greatest (and most terrifying) earthbender. Besides, he had a feeling there was a lot he could learn from someone who was feared by all despite being even smaller than he was (although the difference between their heights was slighter than he would have liked).
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“Fire flakes with that, dear?” asked the kind old lady manning the food stand where they were all buying bowls of noodles after finishing their shopping.
“No thank you, not for me,” Katara replied. “I think my little brother would love some, though.” She motioned to Zuko, who had his arms crossed in a pout. He did not like their cover story. While he had to admit that there would be less suspicion that the mismatched little group was travelling with the traitor prince if he was being introduced as their ‘little brother,’ he strongly disliked being cooed over by the locals.
“Here you go, sweetheart,” the woman said, handing him the biggest to go container she had, absolutely stuffed to the brim with fire flakes. “On the house, for being such good customers.”
Zuko thanked her as he took the container with his non-scarred hand. He preferred them extra-extra crispy, so he would normally roast the flakes before eating them, but he didn’t want to draw attention to himself with the fire that had been coming out in a plethora of rainbow colors lately. Apparently, according to Uncle, it was dragon fire, and he’d accidentally stumbled on the secret of firebending without even going to see the last two dragons (that Uncle apparently hadn’t killed). Even Uncle couldn’t make dragon fire, though, and this confused Zuko, that he apparently had some great talent when he’d always been mediocre at best.
The other day, he’d even shot a blast of white flame while he and Uncle were running forms with each other. He hadn’t even realized that that was possible; white flames were the hottest flames of all, and not even the most talented members of the royal family had ever been able to bend them. It had only been theorized as possible, in fact. The one time Zuko could remember father yelling at Azula, it was for her ‘failure’ to produce them. He said that if she could wield blue fire, she should be able to take the step up, but even she never could. And then it had come out of his own hands unexpectedly among the rest of the rainbow of vibrancy that had taken over his flames.
His new increased abilities baffled him, and as a result he hadn’t really used his firebending much outside of his daily (light, by order of Katara) practice with Uncle. He certainly wasn’t about to use them in public, no matter how much he would prefer his fireflakes to be charred instead of merely regularly crispy.
They were still unusually delicious, though. The sweet village obaasan definitely knew what she was doing. Zuko was so lost in his fire-flake bliss that he nearly missed Aang and Sokka, in the middle of some juvenile argument/playful roughhousing, heading blithely towards a cabbage cart. If they hit it, they would surely destroy it.
“Careful!” he hissed at them, marching up and pulling them away from the cart and the nervous cabbage merchant, who’d been trying in vain to wheel his cart out of their trajectory quickly enough to avoid the onslaught. “That’s a man’s livelihood you two nearly blundered right into!”
The cabbage merchant looked at the small, angry child who was staring down the two hooligans who almost destroyed his cart. They bore an eerie similarity to the avatar and his group of delinquents who had destroyed so many of his precious cabbages that he’d decided to uproot himself and take his business to the fire nation, where the avatar surely wouldn’t follow. Apparently there were delinquents here, too: it figured that his sworn enemy would have a fire nation cousin or something.
But here was his savior, his tiny, scowling angel of righteousness. He was demanding that the little gremlins apologize to him for almost destroying his newest cart, and they were actually listening to him, hanging their cabbage-destroying heads in shame as they mumbled their atonements. The cabbage merchant hadn’t any children of his own, or anyone to inherit his small but fairly profitable business (well, profitable at least when it wasn’t being threatened by nasty, evil little children). It seemed this one could be a worthy successor.
“Thank you, sweet child. Finally, someone to understand the value of manners. Say, do you happen by any chance to be an orphan, possibly down on his luck and looking for a benefactor?”
The taller of the two girls in the group stomped her foot angrily and glowered at him with eyes that surely weren’t that of a pure-blooded fire nation child (not that the cabbage merchant would judge them for that, at least. He himself was from the earth kingdom).
“You can’t adopt Li,” she growled at him. “He’s ours.”
“Well, you could be taking better care of him,” the cabbage merchant harrumphed. “Look how skinny he is. A good bowl of cabbage and pig-chicken soup, and I could fix that right up.”
“Hey, cabbage man!” the smaller, angrier girl barked at him. “We said that Sparky was ours, and you can’t have him. And we can feed his crazy fast metabolism better than you can.”
Sokka wisely dragged his group away before his little sisters could start a street fight with the cabbage merchant. He knew that that would get ugly (and leafy), so he grabbed the two girls by the arm and started marching back to camp. Aang followed, and Zuko turned to do so as well, but not before the cabbage merchant pressed an armful of cabbages into his hands and stared mournfully after the little prince as they left.
For the rest of them, however, he had only a harsh glare, and Sokka stuck his tongue out at the grumpy old cabbage man. Perhaps he’d tell Uncle that someone had tried to steal Zuko from him and let his protectiveness provide them all with a show.
After all, revenge, much like cabbage, is a dish best served cold.