Iroh wants to turn.

He can smell the food Zuko left; it's still sitting there, quiet and innocent between the prison bars. Since Ba Sing Se, Iroh has been fed nothing but gruel and misery, and he wants the food—wants that little piece of his nephew, of what was—so badly it's painful, a horrible hard clench in his stomach.

Don't, he tells himself. He needs to distance himself from Zuko, he knows he has to; Ozai has won, for once and for all, and he, Iroh, must cut his losses, and be logical and work for the better good and leave Zuko behind.

He can still smell the dinner, and in his mind's eye he sees it, wrapped in rice paper and cradled in a woven bamboo box. He can see his nephew, kneeling at his cell door, placing it there between the bars.

He sees the opening of the Jasmine Dragon—'Uncle, I need two jasmine and one leechee!'—the young man removing the mask of a demon and placing it in the water—a solitary lifeboat, slipping into the ice of the North Pole—and other moments, too, of a boy's face wrapped in bandages, asking for his father.

The food is reaching out to him, tempting him with these memories, and it's worse than if Zuko were still in the room with him. It's reminding him of all of those little kind pieces of his nephew, the parts that he shouldn't turn away from. But Iroh refuses to eat it, because he's believed in Zuko before and look where that got him. The Avatar is dead and Iroh is in jail and his brother has taken over the world.

He hears Zuko's voice: 'You're a crazy old man, and if you weren't in jail, you'd be sleeping in the gutter!'

The scent is driving him crazy; if it were alive, he would reach out and strangle it, for vexing him so, for making him relive all these horrible wonderful things; but Iroh won't eat it, he will ignore it, because it is time for him to give up on Zuko, to march on ahead and stop letting such a stupid silly little emotion as love get in the way of everything else, everything bigger, power and safety.

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The chicken is bitter and cold; Iroh feels the juice drip down his face, stinging in the tender tracks of his tears.

He feels weak.

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Written for challenge #102, Temptation, at the avatar100. 401 words.

-sugarland31