Chapter Text
Azula thought she was past the worst of her episodes, but this is beyond her.
And persistent.
When it was her mother creeping closer as the Comet swept across the heavens, like fire ants crawling under her skin, she was fleeting. Vague like ink in water at her edges. The delicate sweep of her hair across her forehead and the muddied bow of her lips were uncertain shadows. Voice clear but directionless. The mirror showed her standing at Azula’s shoulder, but she could’ve been across the room for the way her words curled distantly into the shell of her ear—pithy, oozing comfort and guilt in equal measure.
Azula had been all but alone that day—unable to use anyone else’s eyes to gauge how long her mother spoke, only sure that the moment she seemed substantial, she bled away as quickly as she came.
This apparition has been sitting in front of her cell for what must be going on twenty minutes.
It talked—at first in a steady stream, then more sporadically as Azula refused to entertain it, spewing nonsense and hollow platitudes.
It looks . . .
Azula can’t decide. Which is irksome in itself.
The sight makes her vaguely ill.
She’s seen portraits of her father in his youth, and this thing is almost that. It has his fine, imperious features, the coal-dark hair rushing down his back—longer than hers. A section has been pulled into a top knot glistening with the Firelord’s five-pronged flame. She’s been mulling over the idea of a different ancestor’s spirit tormenting her with her ineptitude, but its face is thinner than Sozin’s, not as angular as Azulon’s.
And its voice—
“I know you can hear me.”
The rasp is Zuko’s. Inimitably.
It makes her want to howl, but when she’s loud, her keepers say she’s being uncooperative and are less likely to give her chopsticks with her next meal lest she turn them into weapons, so she sits and studies the unmarked, unsettling planes of his royal face.
Zuko’s scar is permanent. Azula knew it when she was twelve and saw the skin peel from his skull in the arena, and she knew it when he told her, during those odd, winding months when Azula brought him home, what that Water Tribe girl had offered him in the crystal caverns beneath Ba Sing Se. What Zuko had forsaken forever by joining Azula’s cause, a jagged blade to her excising heat. Not a whole, together, but a formidable weapon even with the missing parts.
Zuko almost looked threatening, under the red of the Comet, with half of his face wrinkled with the burn and his Agni-forsaken dedication to bringing her down on the most important day of her life.
He still couldn’t win, though.
Zuko is branded, above all, with loss, with the unquantifiable absence of what makes the likes of Azula and her father so great, and she carved the shape of it into his chest.
This smooth, undeterred aberration is not him.
“Whether or not you respond, you’re not staying here,” it clips, undaunted by her silence.
Azula blinks, squinting.
Her visions, treacherous as they may be, are not typically illogical. In her moments of lucidity, she reasons that it’s because they spawn from her cunning, even as they conspire against her.
Anything Zuko-adjacent cannot possibly kill her on account of being a coward and miserable failure that is only strong when he hides behind allies.
“Whatever you are, you do not have the stomach to murder me,” she announces, which is absolutely true.
The apparition pinches the space between its two dark, even brows. Also not Zuko-like. “Have you been listening to a word I said?”
“I’ve listened to all of them. They don’t make any sense, and this little charade has grown bothersome.”
“I know that it’s strange—“
“You are strange,” Azula bites in return. “A bizarre mistake that I would very much like to disappear and never return.”
The thing rolls its eyes. Gold. The same shade as her mother’s. Both darker than Azula’s and her father’s. Sullied with their affliction of caring. “You’re being dramatic.”
Azula leans forward, unable to help herself even with the restraint of the jacket, and she snaps her teeth in the way that usually makes the guards jump back, afraid she’ll break skin. “I’m dramatic? You’re the piece that won’t fit. Leave me. I have no use for delusions. Zuko has decreed that I’ll rot here, and you’re not even a worthy distraction. You’re a bag of parts. Useless.”
Something darkens across the phantom’s face, and it reminds her of herself in her worst moods. Like her father before he sets an execution.
But then it breathes deeply and rubs its temples and speaks again, now more removed. Wintry. “Your Zuko couldn’t prevent this if he tried. You can’t stay here.”
Azula’s heart slams into her ribs. More harshly than it has in some time.
Maybe since the Water Tribe girl chained her to the ground and everything Azula had staked her life on leached into the palace aqueducts.
Her defeat had been so cold. No matter how she screamed. How the water vaporized around her panting, desperate breaths.
The helplessness and the damp had sunk into her bones.
Even so, the amalgamation can’t mean to transfer her. It’s not real, anyway—it can’t make that decision, and Zuko, weak-willed as he is, surely shut the Boiling Rock down under his rule. There’s no place in the Fire Nation aside from her current prison that might handle the likes of her.
But even if the creature isn’t real, the visions are sometimes affected by what is, clips of conversation she overhears when the guards think she’s asleep. Perhaps an abstruse part of her has gathered that something’s amiss, and this is how she’s grappling with the truth of it. But then—
The creature’s pale hand rises, and the flickering light of the torches lining the hall reveals a key tucked into its palm.
Azula doesn’t see it all that frequently, with the meals they shove through the slats, but she knows well enough what it’s meant to unlock.
Azula lurches from the front of the cell, trying to pull herself back into the corner. “Don’t you dare,” she snarls.
The Earth Kingdom then? That’s what’s left for her?
Fire Nation soldiers, at least, fear her—and that’s not so far from respect. The Earth Kingdom brutes, she’s been told when she’s provoked a guard enough to resort to threats, see her as a beast and will treat her as such should she be released into their clutches.
Azula has been to the circus.
For all her showmanship, Ty Lee’s airy, frittering drivel hadn’t been able to spin anything soft to say about the animals’ whips.
“I am a Princess of the Fire Nation, and I deserve to be kept by my country. Even for all your wretchedness, you can’t—Zuko can’t extradite me—I won’t stand for it! I’ll tear through their pathetic little armies again if I have to, and you can tell him that—tell him it will be because of him, and I’ll make sure the Earth Kingdom knows it. He has to keep me here,” Azula demands, but even she can hear the humiliating plea slipping through her bared teeth.
The apparition acts as though she struck it. Those fine brows knit, and it flinches back, key still in hand.
“I’m not—“ Its mouth opens and closes a few times. “I wouldn’t let anyone hurt you, Azula.”
So casual. Affected.
It grates.
“You’re nothing. You can’t save me now. It’s too late. He won, and the throne will crumble to ash, and he’ll leave me here to decompose so he never has to think about me again,” she spits, and she’s right and always has been.
Even when she lost, she knew why—because she chose their father, and Zuko chose their mother, and his protector had come back for a last spat. To detail her disappointment with Azula and hand Zuko the crown like every toy Azula was too rough with, as if it’s Azula’s fault the world can’t contain her without breaking. As if Azula could change what she holds within herself. As though her mother didn’t create it in the first place. Every too-sharp line of Azula’s limbs and the thorns in her bloodstream, nurtured and discarded once brought into the world.
Zuko and Mother both. No stomach for consequences.
The creature lifts its hands in surrender. “I know I look different than your brother, and it must be confusing to see me here. But I promise you that I’m on your side. You’re still my sister—and we’re going home.”
Its impression of a thing that can express earnestness is admirable, the way its lips press together, the supplicating gleam in its aureate eyes.
Azula looks at the creature, and then she laughs so hard it hurts, falling onto her side within her constraints.
So the apparition has a sense of humor.
Someone here has to, she supposes, but even as she cackles, the creature only looks annoyed, mouth pinching as it inserts the key into the lock.
Azula watches it slink nearer, and if she had the breath, she might murmur the things that frighten so many of the guards—that she’s been known to bite at close range, that fire can still erupt from her maw, that when she’s free she’ll remember who caged her.
But it steps closer and closer, and when she pants a warning burst of flame, it waves it off as though swatting a gnat and kneels beside her in all its finery. And its hands that land upon the buckles of the jacket binding her arms are steady and very, very real, and when the fabric is off and has been cast to a different corner of the cell, when Azula is reeling because the thing carrying smudges of Zuko in its charcoal hair and tawny gaze can touch her—can save her—the fire that leaps from its hands and devours her former restraints is the same shade as her own perfect, cerulean blue.
The creature pulls her to her feet and seems to study her face, and whatever it finds makes its uncanny face look unmistakably sad.
“Let’s go,” it says, offering its hand, and although Azula has certainly, palpably gone mad, she is not so far gone as to ignore a gift Agni has presented her.
She takes its wrist and brings herself to her feet.
When she sags against the apparition, unused to supporting her own weight, it is warm.
Azula doesn’t dwell on it.
//
It brings her to the palace.
Of all places.
Azula finds herself teetering on her feet on the way, unacquainted, as of late, with the necessity of balance, but it seems to anticipate when she’ll stumble, its touch fleeting on her back. She has no idea what sort of permutation of the royal family would bother knowing how to be a nursemaid to a sight so pitiful, but she also hasn’t heard of any ancestor that shares her flame.
By that, Grandfather was, at least, impressed.
The visions have never been so elaborate, but despite the fury and everything else that has hooked into the rise and fall of her rib cage, winding through her as easily as the air she takes into her lungs, Azula has grown deeply tired of boredom, most of all.
This is novel, so it’s tolerable.
She considers that she could have grown sloppy—that the guards could have resorted to drugging her food and she missed the tells of their underhandedness. But this doesn’t feel like sedation.
She feels clumsy but cognizant. Decidedly able to form and act on opinion. And whatever the purpose of this poorly designed hallucination is, it is accommodating, waiting without comment for her to catch her breath. Azula would call it kindness if not for Zuko’s voice it insists on using, promising that the palace guards won’t touch her.
As if it matters. The palace guards won’t touch her because, convincing as it may be, none of this is real.
When she mentions as much, fed up with the apparition, it sighs and goes quiet, for a moment, which provides some respite from its senseless rambling.
The creature takes her to her room.
The bed is still unmade from when Azula banished all of her servants. The mirror, too, remains broken, and her hairbrush is on the floor.
Azula had never thought much of storage when she could have all she needed brought to her, and for the first time, the barest layer of dust clings to her sparing furnishments.
Her eye for detail is impeccable in this vision, and the apparition takes in the neglect.
“Would you prefer a different room?” the apparition ventures, staring at her.
She does not look back. “This one is mine.”
“I can find someone to clean it.”
“No need. I broke it, after all. The glass at least makes for a decent blade.”
“Why would you need a blade?”
“My guards prefer when I don’t have weapons. I have fun making them nervous. We go tit for tat, that way.”
“You can have whatever you want, and you’re not going back there.”
“I can’t fathom why I would ever conceive of a vision so committed to irritating me.”
A pause. “What?”
“That’s you, dumb-dumb.”
She can feel it blinking. She must’ve given it Zuko’s bungling way with words, too, despite its otherwise sophisticated visage.
When will it end?
She hopes, childishly, not too soon. She hasn’t gotten to have a conversation with someone on equal footing with her for some time now.
Briefly, it strikes her as pathetic to be clinging to what she knows is an empty comfort, but then, everything she believed in already flaked away to nothing.
A new Firelord that ran from his country and threw a century’s worth of fighting away for a few paltry friends and is still, inanely, beloved. Or so she’s been told.
She pads forward and collects her brush from the floor. The handle appears to have cracked when she threw it, but it’s otherwise the same as it’s always been. Reliable. She runs her thumbs along the boarcupine bristles, the grain of the keyaki wood framing them. It never snags, never tugs at what it shouldn’t.
A very frightened handmaiden chopped a few inches from her hair when she first arrived in her cell. Someone declared it too gnarled to save, after she twisted herself in knots trying to escape where the peasant chained her—left her to steam and whimper as the Comet faded from view.
Azula’s lip curls in disgust, and she sets the brush on her nightstand. She must have missed the luxury of decent craftsmanship more than she’d thought to bother perseverating on it.
“I’m quite tired from our little escapade. Have the servants bring me tea, and then I’ll rest.”
The palace soldiers stayed in her periphery. Easy to imagine as insects—too aware of their place to twitter close to a proper predator.
A handmaiden would be more difficult to illustrate alongside the apparition.
Surely, the extra strain will break even her exacting mind.
She’s seen little aside from her four walls for months and months. Her creativity must run dry eventually, and it’s already done an excruciating job of making something with her father’s face and her brother’s voice and her mother’s fruitless, perfunctory compassion.
It will not bother with something so menial, and Azula will return to the destiny forced upon her.
“Of course,” says the creature and helps her draw back the covers of her bed as though she is fragile.
//
The servant girl needs a cleaner updo to be attending royalty and a new apron, since there’s something staining her current one, and she has three moles on her right cheek and perfectly straight, only slightly yellow teeth and a nose that has a bump where it's been broken before.
Azula screams and hurls the brush at her, and nothing changes except for the apparition’s swift hand catching the handle before it makes contact with the peasant’s face and the apology and dismissal he murmurs to the shaking girl.
The tea pot and cup lay splintered on the floor. Spilling the ornate blend along the perfect floorboards of her bedroom. Warping the wood with the heat of the water.
Azula grabs for a shard of clay and throws it at the phantom, next.
“Leave,” she hisses to the creature, who dodges. “I’m done pretending! End it. Put me back. Disappear to whatever Spirit World pit you crawled out of to torment me—I’ve suffered plenty.”
“I’m not here to be cruel,” it attempts to placate her.
“Leave!” she shrieks. “You’re an amalgamation of the worst parts of them, and you haven’t even bothered to act like it. You can’t—” It reaches deftly for the next sharp edge she scrabbles for and moves it out of her limited reach, lunging for ammunition from her mattress. “—stop it!”
“You’re going to cut yourself,” it mutters. “I just—”
“Shut up,” she seethes, pulling herself to her feet in response and beginning to pace, heedless of the noise of protest the thing makes when she draws too close to the mess. “What are you? Why won’t you disappear like the others?”
Its mouth opens and closes a few times before it finds words, miffed. “I told you back there!”
“Why would I have listened to a hallucination? That would be asinine."
“I freed you from prison.”
She whips around to glare at it. “You pretended to free me from prison.”
“Where are we, then?”
She throws up her hands, beginning to throw sparks that fizzle as they hit the damp floor. “It’s false. An illusion. The palace and the servant girl and everything else. I’m grasping at straws to make the nothingness bearable.” Blue flame bursts forth, swathing her palms in heat as she marches closer to the creature’s blood-red robes and fine, flammable hair. “You are not—you are some strange, cobbled-together entity sent to lower me further, but I will not be made a fool of again. I am a princess, and I know better, and you will leave me to my slow decay without any new humili—“
A moment before she clutches its face and sets the mirage ablaze, it catches her wrists.
The grip is firm but not painful.
“. . . are you trying to scare me?” it asks, incredulous.
She jerks against the hold, but it doesn’t falter. The flesh on its pale hands does not imitate blistering.
“I’m Zuko,” it tells her in that terrible voice. “A different Zuko. I don’t know how I came here. Uncle thinks the spirits tangled fate. Put me where I’m not supposed to be. But it doesn’t matter. I’m here, now. And you’re my sister. That means something.”
It means that Agni himself has chosen to punish her with two worthless brothers. Or a pantomime of them.
Azula’s chest heaves, sucking in air until it hurts as she stares at the apparition.
It is unblemished.
Not Zuko.
“Let me go,” she whispers, appalled, now, to be making contact with its unnatural mimicry, and it does.
Not Zuko. Zuko doesn’t listen—ever. He’s headstrong. Stupid. Reckless. Victorious, somehow. Draped in sunlight.
This thing stands with her in the dark, in the silence of what was taken from her.
She will make it leave.
It’s never been difficult for her to shove. Force Zuko into fountains and her friends to the ground and any piece she wants into its next move. Executing her will as any good pawn must.
She extends two fingers on each hand and aims lightning at its heart, and it leans in to catch the current and channels it into the wall with a devastating explosion that knocks them both onto the floor.
In the aftermath, its golden eyes catch Azula’s through the smog.
Unperturbed.
Patient.
Wrong.
“Are you done?” it asks. “If not, we should probably go outside. If your brother listened to Sokka’s advice too, the budget for palace upkeep isn’t what it used to be, so—” it trails off, stilted but looking at her expectantly.
Each buffering breath cycling through her chest murmurs the same horrible truth: only Zuko knows how to divert a blow of that caliber.
And it's the same moronic weight in his gaze. The certainty that she will make the decision that settles things.
“You’re a nightmare,” she determines, then coughs in the dust, and like she’s made a joke, it laughs.
Rare as it may be, that’s Zuko’s, too.
//
The apparition takes her to one of the rooms the palace used to reserve for visiting dignitaries and promises to stay until she falls asleep.
She does not reply and does not intend to acquiesce to rest, but it tows her under anyway.
//
Azula doesn’t know how long she’s slept when she’s woken by harried whispers from the hallway. The apparition’s rasp and another that’s vaguely familiar—enough to chafe at her calm, even in this strange facsimile of relief.
“She was back in the palace for ten minutes and tried to kill you. You can’t seriously think you’re going to fix this.”
“She’s confused.”
This version of her brother’s voice is cold—but even in the most grave depths of his resolve, what accepted the Agni Kai that ended with her lightning arcing through his blood, he burns. He was born to be lit, to gutter and corrode and blacken.
Azula has understood this for as long as she’s known him.
Zuko isn’t capable of change. Still afraid of her bite. Still buoyed by Uncle’s fawning and his desperate belief in his princehood.
The apparition must still be hovering, then. Like the silk sheets cradling her body and the faint smell of incense. Superfluous, though she breathes deep to take the memory back with her when it ends.
It has to end.
“Sure. Doesn’t change the fact that she blew a hole through a wall in five seconds.”
“That was me, actually.”
“Semantics don’t matter when she’s trying to murder you! Look, Zuko—our Zuko—can change how they’re treating her if you’re worried, but—”
“Your Firelord is lucky I haven’t killed him myself.”
“. . . you’re not making a great case for why we should trust you with this, man.”
“Go to bed, Sokka.”
“Don’t make that face! She—”
“It’s not like any of you could make us do anything we didn’t want to, anyway. You might as well get some sleep.”
We, the apparition says.
It may be the most unnerving thing she has deceived herself with yet.
//
In the morning, different servants bring tea and breakfast while the apparition lingers just behind them.
She can see the individual hairs of their brows, faint scars curling around their fingers and the creases around their eyes.
“I know this can’t last forever,” she tells the apparition. “Whatever your plan is to drag this out isn’t working.”
“It can last forever because I said so,” it responds. “They’re not allowed to send you back there.”
“I made you up, you banal thing. You don’t get a say in anything.”
“You didn’t make anything. The spirits sent me here as some sort of—” The creature fumbles with its words, looking, for a moment, not particularly impressive as it squints unhappily at the sun coming through the windows. “—joke, I think. It seems insane, but it’s not. You’re not, I mean.”
“You’re not going to win me over by tripping over yourself like Zuko does. Too much doesn’t match up with him. You’re a pale imitation.”
“I’m not imitating,” the thing snaps, irritated. “I’m a version of him. From a place where things went differently. We both exist. We just weren’t supposed to exist together.”
It does not seem pleased at this.
That makes two of them, at least.
“And what changed, my dear brother?” Azula sneers with a tone that would make her Zuko—the real one—know to retreat before she starts trying to cut.
This creature just goes blank. Unreadable in a way Zuko has never been and never will be.
His burn patterns are cripplingly obvious every time.
The creature observes her face with a bottomless, glassy stare. A koi deciphering the world beyond the pond’s surface—but his mouth doesn’t gape.
“I think you should eat before we talk about that.”
“Coward,” she bites back.
If it affects him, he doesn’t show it, straightening his back and focusing instead on a mouthful of rice.
//
Rather than illuminating anything about its ramblings, the creature takes her on a stroll through the palace and collects casual clothing from her former bedroom for her to wear.
There’s no mention of what’s been done with her crown.
It drones on about this or that, a painting it doesn’t recognize or something that’s been remodeled. Its attempts at deflection are sloppy, but Azula allows it because she has not yet found the patience to entertain how things could’ve gone differently.
If the avatar had stayed dead, bleached bones in a temple long deserted. If Zuko had stayed forgotten, bobbing along the icebergs and forgotten islands on the outskirts of the world. If Azula’s father had kept her with him, in the end.
She could’ve saved him if he’d only cared to let her.
But then, he’s received his own punishment for forgoing his best-forged weapon. They say the avatar stripped him of his bending. Ripped it from his very marrow.
The thought makes Azula draw her arms closer to her core, wound tight around her own flame.
If such a thing were the only option left for her, if it were her beaten into the rock beneath the Comet’s glow, she would beg whatever spirit would deign to listen to just kill her before she lived through such a desiccated fate.
And the avatar thinks himself a pacifist.
Guards occasionally encroach on the space the apparition delineates for the two of them as it strides through the halls, but its glare is fierce and seems to steer most of them away.
All so frail. Untouching.
She continues to study the creature. Finds it austere and removed in ways Zuko has never managed. Its confidence in the palace is, too, foreign to her brother, who remembers how easily it cast him out.
It cleaves through the excess with purpose and takes her to the courtyard. To the turtleduck pond, where the little things quack and chatter around the lily pads. The white stone laid around the water remains bright and clean despite the tree roots fragmenting the rock, in places.
She narrows her eyes.
“Sentimentality won’t endear me to you,” she warns.
“I just wanted to bring you into the sunlight,” it replies, glib. “Is it too much? Should I have someone bring a parasol? I know your eyes have been sensitive, after—”
“I’ve mentioned nothing of the sort.”
Its mouth clicks audibly shut, and it studies part of her face for a long moment.
“Right,” it agrees. And then, weaker, “We can sit then. I’ve had them bring out pai sho.”
Azula casts her gaze to the space next to the pond, where two chairs frame a simple table with the game pieces.
It’s not the worst idea for how to pass the time.
Maybe this is all her reaching her wit’s end with boredom.
She raises an unimpressed brow but sits and reaches for the knotweed tile for her opening play.
The creature smiles just so.
//
Not-days pass quietly.
The apparition provides simple but rich food and eats with her. They play pai sho and mahjong, when pai sho grows boring, and it is, at least, a worthy opponent. When she’s restless, it will stretch and spar lightly with her, though it always deflects her attempts to taunt it if it says she’s exerting herself too much. It leads her into the palace library or archives to read whatever she wishes and shares Zuko’s ridiculous penchant for theatre while she reviews reports on the end of the war.
Azula does not press the apparition on its deception, ultimately.
The air between them is too light, and the longer she exists freely, the more the thought of returning to her binds and the frigid damp of her cell winds like a slowly-tightening snare around her neck.
When the creature leads her through the palace, she lets it prattle, and when it asks about if her bed is comfortable or they should adjust the window shades to make sure her room doesn’t get too warm, she offers input. She sleeps when it suggests or when she’s tired, and it never pushes her to deal with anything she expresses disdain for.
She would consider it benign if not for the way it absorbed her lightning.
Azula is certain she summoned the blast. That, despite everything, is excruciatingly clear. The pulse of her fire flows through the aorta with the same urgency as oxygen. Without it, she would be nothing, and it cannot deceive her like so much else.
So the lightning was there, and her aim was true, and the apparition batted it away and merely asked if she wanted to be outside if she was going to detonate further.
Demeaning.
Compelling.
Bending comes from chi in the human body. Spirits, though powerful, are not benders themselves—not in the Spirit World. They need form to effect change. This one has quite the ability to do so if it can quell her—but why would the spirits deign to interact with her in defeat? They certainly never cared to do so when she was in her prime, and that was just fine with Azula.
But this one has opinions about the merits of noh versus kabuki and needs a second set of hands to help it with its top knot.
Dangerous and confusing both.
She has further decided that this charade is spirit magic. Azula is very good, but the apparition coddles the servants far too much for her to have divined this.
She is, of course, also being coddled, but—
It will end, as all things do. That will flagellate her enough in itself for allowing it.
The apparition is escorting her through the breezeways after breakfast outside when her uncle appears in their path.
Azula rolls her eyes—this is further proof that she’s not orchestrating the facade. She has no need to annoy herself so ardently.
The creature turns toward her, apprehension in its eyes, but she waves it off and resigns herself to leaning against a wall while she waits for this inconvenience to pass along with the rest of them. The apparition is very firm about making her comfortable.
“Zuko,” her uncle greets him. “I was hoping to talk to you alone.”
It steps closer to her uncle, angling its body between the two of them seamlessly. “This is fine, isn’t it?”
Her uncle smiles pleasantly, in a way that sticks in the wrinkles of his tanned face. Last Azula heard, he had a new tea shop in Ba Sing Se, so what business he has back in Caldera eludes her.
She stares into the beams above her head and schools her expression. The creature is very good at mollifying her temper and anything it brings.
Or rather, she’s found it difficult to spit any venom when all it does, at most, is make the apparition quiet.
She’s had plenty of that.
The creature will appease her uncle, too, surely.
He strokes his beard, playing at pensiveness. “I’m not sure your company will like my news.”
The apparition briefly pinches the bridge of its nose. “My company can hear whatever I can, Uncle.”
A sigh. Her uncle twiddles his thumbs in front of his stomach, and a zephyr sweeps a piece of Azula’s hair across her cheek. “The diplomats from the Earth Kingdom and Northern Water Tribe are not pleased she’s been given free roam of the palace. Katara, Sokka, and Aang have had their hands full trying to explain themselves.”
“And why am I not hearing from them?” the apparition clips, suddenly cold.
“The Firelord requested that I—”
The apparition’s lip curls into a snarl that reminds Azula starkly of her father casting down retribution, enough that she blinks and leans to create space apart from it. “The Firelord knows exactly what I think of his opinion. Or any diplomat’s, for that matter. My sister can do as she pleases in her home, and that she was ever taken from it is—”
Her uncle cuts him off as easily as the wind catching a seed before it brushes the earth: “Maybe so—but that still leaves us the problem that this is not your sister.”
A moment of silence passes. Azula is done looking at the walls, and a moorhen crows somewhere outside.
Her uncle’s hands are tucked neatly beneath his sleeves as if he might be preparing to bow, his face placid as his gaze shifts between her and the apparition. Weighing what might happen next—the way a tiger-monkey might observe an aardvark-sloth falling from a particularly treacherous branch.
The apparition’s face is expressionless, the lines of its body elegant and austere in its richly-dyed robes. It has no need to take up any more space than it already does, Azula surmises. Its battles are already fought and settled—this is beneath it, as it’s all been from the beginning.
And then its hands begin to crackle with lightning.
She thinks for half a breath that she’s imagining it.
Lightning as she knows it is arcing, spectacular—not this creeping weapon, winding through pale fingers and bunching with the clench of its fists.
“And how would you know?” the apparition cuts, unmoving and acute. “You let her rot, too. You haven’t been by for her since.” Electricity jumps from his knuckles into the clear morning air. It dies before it touches skin, but it’s the volatility that’s the threat, sinuous as a palmed knife. “You never loved your brother—you have no idea what that might be like.”
“Zuko—”
“If everyone’s so concerned, what have we been doing? Plotting to assassinate the Firelord? Aang? To stage a coup? Ask the staff. We’ve played games and had tea and have been fine for weeks, and no one’s gotten hurt. No one has any right to—”
Azula can hear the breath her uncle takes in, weary, though his scrutiny continues to dart between the two of them. “I am only suggesting that you do not know this terrain as well as where you are from.”
Always with the metaphors.
“If you must know, I already tried to kill it, Uncle. It didn’t work out. It’s quite good under pressure,” Azula offers, unable to help it.
“It?” her uncle responds with an edge, his calm fraying with her—as he’s wont to do.
She thought he might cry, when she convinced Zuko to come with her in Ba Sing Se. She was pleased with pushing him so close to it.
Azula doesn’t remember her uncle and her mother being particularly close, but they held her with the same wariness. The assumption that her poise would slip to do something cruel.
Like putting a city under siege, perhaps.
Not that Azula needed methods so crude.
“The thing that looks like Zuko,” Azula hums, gesturing broadly to the sparking entity.
“She’s confused,” the apparition supplies quickly.
Azula can live with it saying as much. As long as it keeps entertaining her. Even spats with her uncle are preferable to the alternative.
But now Uncle’s only staring at her. Has decided her standing on the wall is a greater danger than the spirit with lightning under its nails. Then again, maybe that’s the spirit's fixation influencing the illusion. The reasoning for it all is getting convoluted—almost not worth the trouble to parse through.
“She needs to be seen by the family physician, then,” her uncle urges.
The apparition’s face twists, even as its bending mellows to an occasional current twisting along his veins. “She’s not sick—she’s just—”
“Forgive me for having doubts that anyone might pluck me out of my cage,” Azula interjects, rolling her eyes.
“You fought alongside your father,” her uncle reminds her, and she hates that he’s able to rein his voice back in, low and sure as he condescends to her. “You knew what that meant.”
Azula can feel her hackles rising, a hound baited, but she can’t stop it. “I did not fight alongside him. He made it quite clear that he didn’t bother factoring me into his plans.”
“You hunted your brother. Tried to kill him.”
“He started it,” she snarls.
“You did the same with the avatar. With Ba Sing Se.”
She staggers forward, pushing past the apparition when he tries to nudge her back, warm palms sliding off her shoulders. “So did you! So did Zuko! Is it my fault that I was better than you two and could actually carry out what my Firelord ordered?”
“You didn’t have to. You never had to,” her uncle says, holding his ground despite her stalking closer.
Azula laughs. She can feel the sound catching on her incisors, and she doesn’t care, lets it balloon and drag for longer than she thought it would when she opened her mouth. “I didn’t? Then where was my convenient escape? My sweet uncle to hold my hand and pour tea and proverbs into my idiot mouth? To lead me around the world and cover for all my mistakes before anyone might find out?”
“You and Zuko fell from the same tree,” her uncle continues, mouth twisting like he’s tasting water with too much lemon.
“I fell perfect, and he fell misshapen and pitiable,” she sneers. “I helped him. Father never found out that he had run off to play house with you before I reminded him of the correct decision. His only decision, or the second the Fire Nation took the city, he would’ve been recognized and executed for treason. I made the palace safe for him again. I did that while you wasted away in that tower, and he was ungrateful and foolish as always and fled the moment things became difficult.”
Her uncle lifts his chin. “You chose to be your father’s sword, Azula.”
What an accusation. The longer she sat in that cell, as her limbs grew numb and they dragged her around like a corpse, shoved her face toward bowls of food, refused her water except at meals, the more apparent it became that there was no other way for her.
Choice—what a luxury.
She stops hardly a foot from his chest, looking up at him. If he wants to, let him stare. Let him see. “And when did you ever tell him no?” she asks.
Her uncle’s mouth opens, but she refuses to let him speak. She knows the answer. Remembers his miserable shadow in the years after her mother left and his troops retreated. He didn’t care. About her, about Zuko. The grief engulfed him as her father ascended the throne, and that was fate as Agni decreed it because her uncle didn’t have the mettle to protest.
She can feel the smile spreading across her face. The one commanders and armies alike flinch from, that made Mai and Ty Lee straighten their backs and fall in line, that won her a war and an ambush intended to cripple her nation.
“I only know one person who spoke against him,” she murmurs, and that, at last, makes her uncle wince. Azula keeps pushing, nearly giddy with success. With the joy of being right. “Just one. Young. My age, even. He told Father, truthfully, that a plan hatched in his war room was dishonorable. Not that he was defecting. Not that he wouldn’t work for the war. That a single maneuver was ill-advised. And Father took half his face for it. So tell me again what I should’ve done differently. Hm?”
Her uncle looks down upon her and releases a long breath as his wise face crumples at its edges with a horrible, knowing sorrow. “You were scared,” he says like there’s never been a more obvious truth. “I should’ve seen.”
Scared?
Scared?
A lifetime of treating her like a beast destined to turn rabid, and that’s what he has to show her for it?
Fire builds at the back of her throat with a furious instinct, and a second before it bursts from her lips and devours him whole, the apparition yanks her back so that it merely scorches the wall. She wrenches against its grip, claws against its arm and chest and feels her nails break skin, but it only grunts, lifts her from the ground, and hauls her away as she continues to spew flame.
She steams in its hold, screaming at her Uncle and his audacity until she can’t see him anymore, and then she shrieks at the apparition for denying her justice: “He razed cities to the ground before he ever made it to the wall—he was our best general for years, and he wants to lecture me about kindness, about picking a different path—let me go—I deserve to show him what it’s like—let me find him—let me show him—”
Servants flee in her periphery, dropping trays and linens to scramble out of their path.
She does her best to burn the creature so that the pain might loosen its grasp, but its breaths—infuriatingly even despite her struggles—seem to suck the heat from her flame when it finds its skin.
By the time it drags her back to her room, she’s exhausted but no less livid as she’s at last permitted to heave herself away and starts to pace her room, burning smoking footprints into the floorboards as she begins to rant: “You’re not real, and your game has gone too far if I can’t respond appropriately—you won’t convince me of anything like this. When you put me back, I’ll despise his spinelessness more than ever, and it will be your fault. You should know to give me retribution before I plot it from prison, anyway. They all know I’m—”
What to say? How to convince it to let her off its chain?
“—a liability. Let me have this before I make it worse,” she threatens.
The apparition spreads its hands placatingly. “It is real, and because of that, you can’t kill Uncle. It would be an international disaster. The Earth King likes his tea house best.”
Azula muffles a shout of frustration as she buries her face briefly in her hands, then rakes them up and into her hair. “What is the point?” she seethes.
“The point is to let you get better.”
“The spirits don’t care if I get better. The spirits have watched plenty of more important royals spin off into madness and haven’t done a thing. You’re toying with me,” she accuses.
“I’m not a spirit,” the creature protests, using the fabric of its clothes to dab at the blood pearling where Azula tore its skin. “I’m a version of your brother that wasn’t supposed to be here. You’re right that it doesn’t make sense, but I am real.” It pauses, contemplating. “And human. See?” it insists, motioning to the cuts.
If it thinks she’ll apologize, it’s wrong.
“The spirits are creative enough to come up with a little blood,” she sneers. “You’ll be fine.”
“Thanks for your confidence in me,” the creature replies with an irritated glance, then closes its eyes and seems to collect itself after a brief struggle. “What’s going to convince you?”
“Nothing.”
It blinks very slowly at her. Like a cat being called but refusing to come. “Try again,” it commands.
Azula flushes with the intensity of her umbrage. “You don’t give me orders.”
“Well, we’re not leaving here until you figure it out.”
“I’ll blast my way through the doors, you ridiculous thing,” she grits through her teeth.
“I’ll stop you.”
“You can’t.”
“I already did once,” it insists. “I don’t think it’ll be hard to do it again. And I’m the only one here that thinks you can be contained, so if you did destroy this room, the others would come running, and that would go even worse for you.”
The paradox of it is inane. Mulish like Zuko but untarnished. Not above their quarrels but still possessing patience in spades. Powerful. Vexing. The spitting image of their sire.
She pants, sorting through her indignation.
It can’t prove it, naturally. But if it could—
“Hurt me, then,” she demands.
It startles, eyes widening, mouth opening and closing while it searches for how to refuse.
Her aim remains impeccable.
Feeble-minded as the spirit is, it won’t interrupt its facade for violence. It can’t, Azula has determined, otherwise it would’ve already as she’s provoked it.
Having set her trap, she smirks, the serenity of triumph settling over her at last. “Oh, come on—Zu-zu’s never minded the idea. Always chomping at the bit to outdo me.”
“That’s not—”
“You asked. I answered, Spirit. Or are you too—”
It strides over to her quickly and grabs one hand. Azula blanches, for a moment expecting the long-forgotten pain of a burn, but it merely pinches the skin stretched across the back of it until there’s a twinge. Then, it releases her as though scalded.
“There,” it announces, wiping its palms on its robes. “Satisfied?”
“I—”
“Oh, what?” it snips. “Do I need to—” It tosses its hands around, pacing in aggravated circles. “—disparage you, too? Drag your name through the mud with the ambassadors? Put you back in that hovel and tear you out again? You are—” It cuts off and makes a strangled sound. “—annoying.”
Azula’s mouth has gone dry.
For all his efforts over the years, it’s undeniable that Zuko can rarely land a blow on her that sticks.
The pain was fleeting but unmistakable. Exactly as she asked.
She scrutinizes the creature again. For the millionth time. It—he has the strong brows, the jaw more angular than her own, the lines that appear by his mouth when he’s cross. But her observations snag, this time, on the red, gnarled tissue starbursting across his chest. She left his layers disheveled with her struggles.
It’s the first time she’s noticed it, now that she’s calm enough to catalogue the details of him.
She gave that wound to her Zuko. Tried to kill the Water Tribe girl and left him with a consequence of his compassion. She saw the scar’s inception as she writhed where the peasant shackled her to the aqueducts, but here, it looks more healed than it should be, if this other version of him went down as the Comet passed. This is darker in color. Wider. Less smooth. Not tended to as swiftly.
“How did you get that?” she manages, barely a whisper.
“Get wh—”
“The lightning scar. You took an attack head-on. From me. I cut you down.”
“It wasn’t from my sister,” he clips, bitter. Not at her. Or the idea of her, even, she’s fairly sure. His gaze settles on the fire symbols stitched into his sleeve. “You had it right when you were yelling at Uncle.”
“Of course I did. What specifically about what I told him might you be referring to?”
He snorts, and she resists the urge to scream at him for laughing. “About Father. Telling him no.”
“When?” she chokes out. “If he had aimed like that at Zuko during the Agni Kai, he would’ve died. His body wouldn’t have been big enough to take it.”
The boy shakes his head. “During the eclipse.”
“No, you redirected his lightning,” Azula murmurs. “He told me. He hated that you had found something he wasn’t expecting.”
She had, too. She’d been far too frightened to ask her father to shoot at her so that she might learn too, but she knew the technique was dangerous. Knew it terrified her that her trump card could mean nothing. That someone as weak as Zuko could wrest control from her.
“I didn’t. I didn’t know how. He aimed at me, and I couldn’t dodge fast enough.”
“Another one of Uncle’s failures,” she spits, but he shakes his head again.
“Not really. He hadn’t had a chance to teach me—I made it difficult.”
“Then how did you—”
“Azula. After the dust settled. She hated the scar and made me practice until I could do it backwards and teach someone else. One of the younger servants.”
“Why? Was Father going around threatening to incinerate peasants that you took it upon yourself to protect?”
“Aang had already handled him, but she said it was the principle.”
He hasn’t played into this half of the ruse before. That if there’s another him, there’s another her. A mirror that understands the thorns in Azula’s side, that couldn’t quite keep her brother unscathed.
That he speaks of without complication.
Something acrid rounds its back beneath her tongue, pressing it to the roof of her mouth as she considers the concept and finds it ludicrous, repulsive, shameful—
But the pain was real.
And marred by their father, this Zuko at last aligns with the depths of her brother’s shortcomings.
She stares at the back of her hand before moving for her bed. “Leave me,” she directs.
“I’ll have the servants bring lunch in a few hours.”
She crawls under the covers in her day clothes and doesn’t respond.
//
She doesn’t touch her food. The servants—quibbling, interfering things—must tell the other Zuko as much because at dusk he appears again in her quarters with fire flakes.
“Those are bad for your stomach in the evening,” she mumbles, laying on her back with her hands folded on her stomach and staring at nothing in particular.
“So you don’t want them?”
“Don’t make me angry.”
He brings the pouch to her bed and neither of them mention the crumbs they’re getting on pillows stuffed with swan-goose down. Azula drags herself into a seated position.
“You never told me how things differed, for you,” she mutters.
“I don’t know how everything went for you, either.”
“My brother’s allies surely would’ve told you if you asked.”
The other Zuko hums, thoughtful. “Sure. But things went wrong enough for them that they thought it was best to lock you away. You seemed like a more reliable source.”
“Fool.”
“You don’t mince your words, either.”
He’s comparing her to what he knows. This other her.
“You trust her word,” Azula deduces, staring at the spices stuck under her nails, manicured once more.
The handmaiden looked like she was being handed an execution when this Zuko pulled her aside and made the request.
Clever girl.
“She’s one of the smartest people I know. Her opinion is usually helpful, even if it’s—uh—” He takes a second to settle on what he wants to say. “—mean.”
What a simple way to look at the likes of them. Azula and his sister. She used to make her instructors at school cry with the dressing-downs she gave when their lessons failed to be interesting.
“Fine,” Azula mutters. The story’s not all that complex, anyway. Not when she looks at it from the beginning, so she starts there: “Zuko was sentenced to fight Father and lost because he couldn’t keep his idiot mouth shut. Then, for a few years, he galavanted across the world looking for the avatar, who was supposed to remain dead because Father never would’ve given Zuko a task he thought he could succeed at.”
Briefly, Azula glances at the intruder, but he has a hand over his mouth and looks like he might vomit.
How ungainly.
She scoots the fire flakes bag toward him with her knee, in the unfortunate event that he needs a receptacle for any mess. Better he ruin what’s left of their snack than her bedding.
“In the meantime, I went to school and refined my bending while Father tended to the war effort. Eventually,” she rolls her eyes, “the Southern Water Tribe stumbled upon the avatar’s grave and resurrected him, which was merely annoying until he decimated our fleet in an attack on the Northern Water Tribe. Father called me in to castigate Zuko and Uncle for their failure to handle him, so I chased both them and the avatar around the Earth Kingdom.”
“Just you?” Zuko hazards, and she immediately, irrevocably hates him for knowing who was with her.
Who she needed to be something benign to the Dai Li, who took Ba Sing Se with her. Who were as reviled and respected as her and Zuko in the wake of their victory.
“I’ve been much too kind to you if you feel this comfortable interrupting me,” she snaps, and his gaze upon her softens like wagashi in an afternoon’s heat, and she wants to strike him but can’t seem to make him fear her, anyway, so what would it do aside from confirming everything he suspects?
“Keep going, then,” he mutters, and she cuts him a glare for assuming that he might be able to tell her that, either.
“In the process of handling them, I took Ba Sing Se for the Fire Nation and performed a small miracle by reinstalling Zuko as prince while Uncle went to prison. But they’re both disloyal and fled during the eclipse.”
She doesn’t let herself flinch. It hadn’t been her fault, but her father had been furious anyway. Pacing with a rage that ended with Uncle’s primary prison guards dead—for not noticing whatever resources he had gathered to make an escape, for not being strong enough to detain him once more.
Privately, Azula had wondered when the last time her father fought his brother was, but she wasn’t stupid enough to ask. She takes a breath in that makes her inner flame flutter with the swell of her lungs, then continues more steadily.
There’s only so much more to tell.
“Zuko and I squabbled a few times after that, but I suppose it didn’t matter all that much. As it turned out, when the Comet returned, the avatar actually did have the mettle to handle Father. I tried to hold onto the crown, but Zuko challenged me to an Agni Kai for it. He cheated, and I lost, and they deposed the last threat to his throne.” She swallows. Recalls the cold. How all her howling couldn’t shake it, and the cell was no better than where the waterbender had fettered her—a beast caught in a saw-toothed trap. “Surely, even you can follow that much.”
He goes to squeeze her hand, but she yanks it away before he can make contact. “Don’t touch me. Admit it. You abdicated to the avatar’s cause the moment he batted his pitiful eyes at you and made your precious little sister come with until she agreed to help, too.”
This Zuko has all the privileges of hers—she can feel it. The gentleness Uncle treats him with. The ingratiating reverence of his subjects despite the azure flame they recoil from, under Azula’s control. The grace he gets for his mistakes, chalked up to those of a ruler foisted toward responsibility too young. As though he didn’t snatch it from her ready palms.
“It didn’t happen like that,” this Zuko mumbles, still pallid.
“Then feel free to regale me with all the thrilling details of your glory.”
“In a second,” he manages.
Azula could throttle him, but instead, as punishment for his delicate sensibilities, she takes the last fistful of fire flakes for herself, leaving him with the small, brittle crumbs at the bottom of the pouch.
She’s considering leaving him to find another bag, if he’s going to spend all this time brooding, when he speaks, rasping and ashamed: “Did you kill Aang to conquer Ba Sing Se?”
Azula’s nose wrinkles with distaste at his use of the avatar’s name, but nonetheless, she nods.
No one reprimanded her or Zuko for it when it happened. Then, they were war heroes—siblings reunited beneath a swift, indisputable victory. But it must’ve been discussed, after the Comet. They surely held it against her—as if the waterbender hadn’t tried to take her head off minutes before the avatar was slain.
Azula was taught that all is fair in war. A war she won with a single death after a century of struggle.
She grits her teeth and braces herself to be chastised by someone who would never understand the position she was in. But instead, Zuko’s limbs all seem to draw into himself, and he peers out at her from his huddled torment like she might offer some kind of absolution: “I did, too.”
She blinks.
“Purposely?”
Zuko is always stumbling into one accident or another. She wouldn’t put it past his particular flavor of incompetence to manage—
“I felt the lightning reach his heart and pushed until it seized.”
Azula hums. As she discovered in the same moment he did, electricity tunnels through flesh intuitively, as though the spirits designed its destruction eons ago and it merely answers their call. She understands—felt the power of it. The ability to clutch a god between her fingers and crush the air out.
It was her duty, brutality and all.
His too, then, and he had the decency to rise to it.
Why is he so contrite?
“Anything less wouldn’t have been good enough,” she reminds him.
“It was monstrous. Aang was twelve.”
She sighs, closing her eyes and rubbing her temples. He fusses over the most pointless semantics. “Then why do it, Zu-zu?”
“He’d taken my sister from me.”
Azula’s gaze snaps back to him and finds him . . . sad. Lonely despite being in arm’s reach.
He continues. “She figured out that Aang was worth helping a long time before I did. I struck him out of the sky, and she still chose his corpse over coming home with me. I was angry.”
But that—
No.
It doesn’t make sense. Just because he’s not scarred in the same way Zuko is doesn’t mean Father would’ve been any kinder about him speaking out of turn—he couldn’t have avoided banishment.
“Why wasn’t she already home? Or at least expected there? She should’ve been chasing you—even if she couldn’t succeed.” It follows, to Azula, that in a series of events where Zuko got her same fire, he might have grown more skilled with it by virtue of being older, having longer to practice. He’s clearly comfortable with his flame in a way her brother has never been, but even so— “Father never would’ve let you go without consequence.”
“She was never told to capture me. She never needed to.”
“Then you both stayed in the palace?” Azula presses, and she hates that she can feel her pulse in the back of her throat, pressing on her airway.
“When I was fourteen and Azula was twelve, I convinced Uncle to let us sit in on Father’s war council.”
“Why was she with you?” Azula bites. “She made your life difficult. She burned your toys and shoved you for fun.”
“We were kids. She didn’t mean it.”
“I did!” Azula snaps. “I hoped that if you complained enough, Mom would realize what an insufferable crybaby you were and finally get tired of you.”
“I wanted Azula there,” he carries on like she hasn’t spoken, and Azula reels back in indignation. “I said that if she was going to be my chief advisor one day, we both needed to see what the meetings were like. And when one of Father’s generals proposed a plan that sacrificed the 41st division, she knew I wanted to speak out against it and got to her feet before I could. Father claimed she had disrespected him and sentenced her to an Agni Kai—” The fine lines of his face shake with the effort to not collapse entirely. “—then exile.”
“You’re lying,” Azula whispers, barely audible as she scrutinizes every inch of him, looking for a distracted stare, a fidget, anything that might be a tell.
This must be the real difference. Her Zuko can’t deceive her, but this one—
His eyes shine, terribly, revoltingly earnest. “I’m not.”
“He likes weapons. He wouldn’t compromise a prodigy.”
Zuko tips his head at her as though she’s said something confusing. “Azula isn’t a prodigy,” he replies, certain.
Her fists blaze as she swings for his head, but he catches her wrist before it comes close enough to singe his face—like it’s easy. Her fingers curl in protest as she pulls against his grasp, but it doesn’t falter. His fair skin doesn’t bubble and peel.
His voice is infuriatingly even as Azula feels how reedy her breaths are becoming, rushing in and out faster than she wants them to. “My sister isn’t a prodigy,” he explains, like that makes anything better. “She struggled more than I did. Her fire is gold.”
“Let go,” she pants, and he does, and she snatches the limb back to herself, staring at the sheets and studying their creases instead of imagining what it might have been like to be in that arena three years ago, kneeling in front of Father for Zuko, of all hopeless causes, without even talent to shield her, and—
“Even so, she sailed to the South Pole and met Aang, Sokka, and Katara. When Father sent me after her because Zhao’s siege failed and she still didn’t have the avatar, she and Uncle escaped and ran into the Earth Kingdom. She decided helping the avatar was the best means to get back at Father for declaring her a fugitive, and she chose his side when he asked her to in Ba Sing Se.”
No.
“Uncle fended me and the Dai Li off long enough for her, Katara and Aang to escape, so Mai and Ty Lee—”
No.
Anything but them.
Azula scrambles for a distraction in a way she’s not sure she ever has. She does not panic, does not cling to undone edges, but she faces the horror laid out for her and the only thing she can come up with to stall is—
“What does it look like?” she manages, hands fisted in the quilt, feeling every thread beneath her touch, each fiber pressed against her flesh.
“What does what look like?” Zuko asks, tired but calm. Measured. “Ba Sing Se can’t be that different here.”
Nothing about this is measurable. The idea of Father—that it happened and that’s why his face is—how he wields her flame with such precision—
“No—the scar. You said Father summoned her for an Agni Kai, and she couldn’t have won. I couldn’t have won at twelve.”
The avatar was twelve, she remembers him saying.
When Azula was that age, she discovered that, despite her brother’s clumsiness and naivety, the palace had been very, very quiet after he left.
Never to return, as she understood it.
“Is it like Zuko’s?” she prods further. “Can she see out of the eye?”
Zuko can’t. Not the same as he could. Since she found him again, it’s been one of his many weaknesses—hide in his blind spot, and she can get close enough to do real damage. And that was different because it was Zuko, and Father loves a sharp blade, and she was flawless and whittled to a lancing point because she knew the consequences for failure and she would never, never let that happen to her—certainly not for her family that has always let her stand alone in perfection, maligned but untouchable in her prowess.
“Her vision isn’t what it was. And the scar covers about the same amount of space, but it’s not solid. It branches—like lightning,” Zuko says, and somehow, his tone has flattened further. He might even get away with appearing unfeeling, if Azula hadn’t seen him tuck his trembling fingers beneath his thighs when he started talking about murdering the avatar.
“How?” Azula breathes.
Children—young children, she means, can’t survive—
Zuko looks utterly devastated as he lifts one hand where she can see it, and in the dim light of the evening’s fading sun, she watches a blue, crackling current wind around his pale hand.
Like this morning. When he was upset.
It’s unlike her to forget these things, but she thought it trivial compared to her fury with her uncle.
Now, though—
“I took longer than Father wanted to master lightning. I came up with this in the interim, and he figured out how to copy the technique,” Zuko mutters, and as quickly as they appeared, the sparks die.
Fast as light.
Bending masters and technical scrolls alike refer to lightning as the cold-blooded fire, but Azula never understood the comparison. It’s always felt so warm, so very alive arcing between her arms and begging to be set free.
But it’s become clear to her now—the icy rush of fear it inspires.
Between one thrum of her heartbeat and the next, she finds herself standing, and then she sweeps out of the room as quickly as her suddenly coltish legs will carry her, following the dogged instinct to outrun her terror until she can no longer hear Zuko calling her name.