[ Poor, sweet, awkward boy. He's not sure how to reply. He's getting so much better than he once was at talking with people he's just met, after so much practice away from home, but it's a slow burn still. He knows he's talking to an adult and it's different talking about losing parents then, but— losing a parent early in life hurts forever, he imagines. He tries to relate even though he knows he can't exactly. He may not ask "Tell me more about your family" directly, strange to ask that of an adult outright anyway even if he were to pry so, but by sharing anything of his own family life at all, that's his way of implying his interest in Nobunaga's. His own social subtext when playing getting-to-know-you is very much a "tit for tat" game, "I share, you share," as if his own opening up is an unspoken word of consent, an indirect invitation replacing more attentive listening questions one apparently doesn't pick up when growing up "alone together" in the scenario he goes on to describe. ]
We lost our mom, sort of... I was eleven. Azula was nine. She just disappeared. But— it's not the same, I know. ...I think my mother's still alive. Maybe. I don't know.
[ He pauses for a breath, glancing aside uncomfortably as if he might find his next words lying about somewhere, unsure what he meant to follow this with, clearly not so prone to opening up about himself as this guy seems to be. But there's something intriguing that keeps a promise about him, Zuko can't quite put his finger on... So, unprompted nervous rambling trying to match his energy to some minor degree, it is! ]
...Our family is small. But not close. We never knew our mother's parents, never met her family. Our paternal grandfather died the same day as our mother disappeared. And our only cousin around the same time, too. Our grandmother and our only aunt had been dead for some time, by then. So now it's just me and Azula, and Father and Uncle — he's our father's only sibling, his older brother... That's it. A couple years after Mom left, I left home and Uncle raised me on his own, but Azula stayed home and Father raised her alone. We had very different upbringings even though we were raised in the same house most our lives... I mean, we get along better now, since being spirited away together, but— that was never the case before... We fought a lot back home.
[ He says all of this in such a muted way, as if it's normal, defused, severely understating the gravity of the real dynamics at play in this "small-but-not-close" family. He's still not revealed he's royalty explicitly, even if it's not hard for Nobunaga as a nobleman himself to probably see through the thin veneer and connect the dots, like having never met his mother's family at all inexplicably, typical of brides married into royalty. But under the guise of a normal commoner family assumption, as he's somewhat spinning it by not filling in these key details, while it's sad that most of their family has died, that's normal, too, for a wartorn world. It's also normal that siblings "fight," the understatement of a century. Zuko's leaving it at that. They don't do that anymore, anyway. ]
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[ Poor, sweet, awkward boy. He's not sure how to reply. He's getting so much better than he once was at talking with people he's just met, after so much practice away from home, but it's a slow burn still. He knows he's talking to an adult and it's different talking about losing parents then, but— losing a parent early in life hurts forever, he imagines. He tries to relate even though he knows he can't exactly. He may not ask "Tell me more about your family" directly, strange to ask that of an adult outright anyway even if he were to pry so, but by sharing anything of his own family life at all, that's his way of implying his interest in Nobunaga's. His own social subtext when playing getting-to-know-you is very much a "tit for tat" game, "I share, you share," as if his own opening up is an unspoken word of consent, an indirect invitation replacing more attentive listening questions one apparently doesn't pick up when growing up "alone together" in the scenario he goes on to describe. ]
We lost our mom, sort of... I was eleven. Azula was nine. She just disappeared. But— it's not the same, I know. ...I think my mother's still alive. Maybe. I don't know.
[ He pauses for a breath, glancing aside uncomfortably as if he might find his next words lying about somewhere, unsure what he meant to follow this with, clearly not so prone to opening up about himself as this guy seems to be. But there's something intriguing that keeps a promise about him, Zuko can't quite put his finger on... So, unprompted nervous rambling trying to match his energy to some minor degree, it is! ]
...Our family is small. But not close. We never knew our mother's parents, never met her family. Our paternal grandfather died the same day as our mother disappeared. And our only cousin around the same time, too. Our grandmother and our only aunt had been dead for some time, by then. So now it's just me and Azula, and Father and Uncle — he's our father's only sibling, his older brother... That's it. A couple years after Mom left, I left home and Uncle raised me on his own, but Azula stayed home and Father raised her alone. We had very different upbringings even though we were raised in the same house most our lives... I mean, we get along better now, since being spirited away together, but— that was never the case before... We fought a lot back home.
[ He says all of this in such a muted way, as if it's normal, defused, severely understating the gravity of the real dynamics at play in this "small-but-not-close" family. He's still not revealed he's royalty explicitly, even if it's not hard for Nobunaga as a nobleman himself to probably see through the thin veneer and connect the dots, like having never met his mother's family at all inexplicably, typical of brides married into royalty. But under the guise of a normal commoner family assumption, as he's somewhat spinning it by not filling in these key details, while it's sad that most of their family has died, that's normal, too, for a wartorn world. It's also normal that siblings "fight," the understatement of a century. Zuko's leaving it at that. They don't do that anymore, anyway. ]