Arsonist's Lullaby: An Azula Timeloop Quest

Content warning: This chapter contains discussions of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and their victims from the perspective of a character raised in the culture and family that engaged in and perpetuated them.


"Ty Lee," you say sternly, staring at her, "repeat the plan back to me."

She pouts, but speaks nonetheless. "We'll attack the Western Air Temple a little before dawn. You'll draw all the attention, supported by airships. In the chaos, I'll locate and grab the waterbender. Once you've driven the others away, we'll take her back to the Fire Nation."

It's good that she remembers so clearly, given it is, indeed, currently a little before dawn and you are about to drop her a short way off from the Western Air Temple before you fly onward to pick a fight with your brother and the Avatar. There can be no mistakes here. The fate of your entire world—the world that has narrowed to nothing more than an endless nine-day loop—could depend on it.

"Good. Don't fail me." You almost don't say it, but you suppose you need to keep in practice managing your subordinates effectively, so you add a short, "and don't die, either."

Ty Lee throws a mock salute, tapping two fingers across her chest above her heart, and vaults off the railing of your airship to somersault her way to the ground. The rich vegetation that spreads across the top of the cliff concealing the Western Air Temple soon hides her startlingly pink silhouette from view as well, and you turn your attention back to your target.

Below you, under the overhang, sleeps the waterbender. You know, of course, that her name is Katara, that her brother is Sokka, that her father is Hakoda and her mother was Kya, that she is the last Southern waterbender living and that her style is a hodgepodge of self-taught instinct, scrambled scrolls, and Northern traditions. You know these things since you are not an idiot like Zuko, and so you make sure to learn your enemies long before they are ever permitted to understand that they are, in fact, your enemies. It is because you know these things that you think of her as the waterbender: you have dissected the facts of her life and determined the only one that matters.

(She, of course, knows you as Princess Azula, the Fire Lord's prodigal daughter, Avatar-slayer, Zuko's sister, and the face that smiles in her dreams when her family collapses around her time and time again.

This is the glory of Sozin's line. You are always more important to your victims than they will ever be to you.)

You regret, almost, that you won't be the one to face her this cycle. There was a time that the sight of her was ice down your spine, around your throat, against your eyes, a visceral reaction that sometimes broke your jaw open to screaming. You overcame it the only way you know how to overcome anything: you fought her, and you fought her, and you fought her, until you started to win, until you sublimated fear into confidence through the purity of violence.

It was painful. It was embarrassing. But it was necessary.

You are the one in control; of your body, of your mind, of your soul.

You must always be the one in control.

That's why you're here today, after all.

The waterbender is the key to ensuring you have control over Zuko and the Avatar on the day of the Comet, one way or another.

Just as you begin to wonder if Ty Lee has had enough time to get into position, you feel the tug of the sun low in your gut; it's weak, barely there, but you can feel it nonetheless. Dawn is beginning.

Well, that answers that question. It doesn't matter whether Ty Lee is in position now. It's time to act.

"Captain," you say softly to the ornately-armoured man who's been standing at silent attention behind your left shoulder ever since Ty Lee leapt to earth, "begin the operation."

His fist slams into his dark chestplate with the sharp crack of metal on metal, and he begins shouting orders over the polished metal deck at his men—which are then relayed across the whole fleet through a combination of signal flags and signal flames.

Your airship rocks in the wind as it begins to turn in preparation for the dive. Behind you, stretched out like the wings of a sea-raven, extends the rest of your expeditionary force, each mirroring the behaviour of their master. Wherever you look, soldiers scurry across a dozen identical decks to load a dozen identical bombs into a dozen identical tubes. The Fire Nation at war is many things, but in your hands, it is, and always will be, a perfectly-organised machine.

Moments later, the air is filled with the whistle of projectiles as your airships crest into range and your cannons launch their bombs towards the Western Air Temple. Ancient pagodas tremble and crumble beneath the explosive force brought to bear against them, thunderclap detonations shattering the sacred silence. Birds scream as they spiral away en masse on chaotic updrafts, and even your pristine hair is thrown into disarray by the echoing hammers of sound as your soldiers unfold to violence like petals towards the sun.

It's chaotic. It's brutal. And it took your enemies completely by surprise.

You can see it in the way the Avatar scurries madly through ground and air, deflecting bombs while trying and failing to disrupt the airships threatening to land and disgorge their faceless complements of the Fire Nation's finest. Most of him wants to reach the metal door that conceals his campsite and the fools who follow him—Zuko most definitively included—but unlike most of the times you mount this assault, the fact you're committing ground troops has him a little hesitant. A stray bomb flung into the wind poses little threat to the last airbender, and usually the record shows that the same holds for a squad of military firebenders, but combining the two complicates the situation enough that the military genius of an untrained pacifist monk has to think about it.

Eventually, he decides discretion is the better part of valour and flees toward the shelter dug into the thickest part of the pagoda he's holed up in, the metal doors slamming shut behind him with a fierce clang.

Good.

It's just as he disappears that your airship levels out of its dive, falling out of the shadowy cover of the crumbling cliff.

The whole of your focus narrows to heartbeat and breath.

You inhale.

Your hands circle.

Your blood boils cold.

The world splits against your fingertips.

You exhale—

—and wind becomes lightning.

There's nothing left of the doors the Avatar had put his faith in. Just cherry-red shards, splintered across rock.

You blow the smoke off your fingers with theatrical insouciance, and gesture towards the door. "Well? What are you waiting for?"

Your soldiers, individually indistinguishable in their concealing red-and-black armour and skull masks, practically sear across the smoking courtyard in their haste to follow your command. Sometimes you really do have to applaud your armourers and their attention to aesthetics—a Fire Nation charge resembles a howling flame long before its members begin to firebend. It's almost unfortunate that your own fire blazes blue; you can't really have your personal guard painted in your colours, lest someone think they're meant to be water peasants instead.

For a moment, you drum your fingers on the gold splash of your belt, thinking. You know you aren't trapping the Avatar and his fellows here. They have a competent earthbender in the middle of a forest of stone temples, and a flying bison. You'd have needed to bring a far larger force to even threaten that.

No, the question you're contemplating is something else entirely: where is Zuko?

Among his many irritating habits is the ability to be in the stupidest possible place at the stupidest possible time. It makes him predictable, especially when you can design the situation ahead of time to maximise the stupidity right where you want him to be—just like in Ba Sing Se—but when you can't, you just have to assume that something, somewhere, is going wrong because of him.

In an uncoiling whip of brown hair and fluttering silk, Ty Lee handsprings back out of the mouth of the entrance, just under a snaking whip of water that abruptly hisses to steam as a wayward blast of fire incinerates it before it can be redirected to wrap around Ty Lee's ankles. A high-pitched yell of watch where you're aiming, you idiot! bounces off the walls, clashing against a lower but no less indignant yell of then tell me before you attack! and you sigh.

"Oh, hey Azula!" Ty Lee says with a grin. "Look what I found!"

She holds out… the Avatar's pet winged lemur, which she has somehow managed to chi-block based on the way it droops awkwardly between her hands like some kind of furry slug.

Zuko and the waterbender sprint out of the tunnel and skid to a stop. "Give Momo ba—"

Their voices trail off as their eyes take in you, and your airship, and the fleet that still fills the sky behind you.

You smile.

"And you brought her right to me, Zuzu," you say, clapping once, twice, three times. "Well done, brother."

"What are you doing here?" he growls, settling into that strange new stance of his, whose origin you've never learned in all your cycles. If it weren't so unorthodox he'd almost look impressive, even with his dishonourably short hair—his anger sits around him as a cloak rather than a collar, and the ripples of heat that pulse in time with the furnace of his breath are almost respectable.

Not quite respectable enough to save him from the fierce, wave-backed shove that sends him sprawling as the waterbender turns on him in a flurry of dark skin and darker scowls, though. "I can't believe I'm surprised you betrayed us again!"

Ty Lee looks at you, the whole of her face bent into a question. You shrug a single shoulder in reply. That wasn't supposed to work.

Zuko is nearly stupid enough to turn his back on you to yell at the waterbender—but he must realise what kind of invitation that would be, because he catches himself at the last moment and ends up in a pose that looks more like he's trying to calm a pair of wild animals than anything else. It would probably work better if he actually were; animals have always had a strange affection for your brother.

"I'm not!" he shouts, syllables scraped out like metal against gravel. "Katara, it's Azula! She always lies! Why are you trusting her over me?"

"Because I just try to kill her, instead of pretend to be her friend and then try to kill her," you interject helpfully, tapping out a short code to Ty Lee in the faux-bored drumming of your fingers against your arm guards as you cross them over your chest.

"Not helping, Azula." Zuko glares at you with his sun-bright eyes, though his body is still tilted more towards the waterbender than you.

She is much the same, attention bouncing between you and your brother like a weathervane spinning in the wind… but you can see her hands twitching in your direction. As much as she distrusts your brother, and isn't that glorious, she still hates you more. It's a little childish of her, really. The Avatar was a legitimate military target engaged in combat against Fire Nation forces, and if you expected his twelve-year-old mask to make you hesitate, well, that is the sort of hypocrisy you'd expect from a Water Tribe savage.

(After all, nobody hesitates when they see you. That's just how wars are fought these days: with children.)

"Well," you say, "this has been fun, but I do have places to be, so…"

You breathe in air, and breathe out lightning.

Your fingers pluck it from the air in arcing circles like the turning of the world, and with a stabbing lunge the blade of your hand blasts it towards Zuko with an echoing crack.

As you expected, he steps into the bolt, catching it in his arms and hurling it into the sky just above your head—or he would have, had you aimed it directly at him like an idiot.

But you were aiming at the ground just in front of his feet the whole time, so all Zuko's instinctive attempt to redirect your lightning amounts to is tripping over the fragmented rocks that blast across his calves and knees, ripping sharp lacerations through his billowing trousers.

He falls with a cry of surprise, palms nonetheless turning it into a coiling handspring because flashy acrobatics regrettably run in the family. By the time he lands, though, the harsh grimace across his face the only sign he feels the sluggishly-bleeding wounds on his legs, it's already too late.

The smoke clears to reveal that Ty Lee has already knocked the waterbender unconscious.

The plan had been simple. You'd instructed Ty Lee to sidle towards the waterbender while her attention was focused more on you and Zuko than Ty Lee, and to strike on your signal. In the end, Ty Lee had timed it to perfection: for a fatal instant the waterbender had flinched at the sound of your lightning—just for the shadow of a second, nothing that would have mattered in any other circumstance but this, yet flinched nonetheless. Ty Lee had needed nothing more.

Now the waterbender is in your custody, and your work here is done.

"Good work, Ty Lee," you say. "Take her back to the airship and make sure she's secure and unconscious until we reach Caldera. Oh—and let go of that useless flying rat, would you?"

"Okay, Azula!" Ty Lee says, carefully placing the winged lemur on the ground and, pulling out, of all things, a small scarf as a pillow for its head. She lifts the waterbender into her arms with a little less care, biceps straining but steady nonetheless. A couple of soldiers disembark the vessel and run across the pockmarked stone slabs toward her, presumably to help, but you tune them out in favour of looking back at your brother.

"Sorry, Zuko," you say, "but I was never actually here for you."

"What do you want with Katara?" There's fire burning in his hands, and more in his stare. If you were anyone else, you might even be intimidated by the way his scar twists across his face to match.

(But you were there, when he burned. It's never been the scar that intimidates you.)

"Don't play the fool." You frown at him. "You'll never be a convincing challenge for the throne if you don't understand leverage, Zuko."

A flicker of confusion passes over his expression, before he settles back into that intense, whole-body focus. "Why do you need leverage, Azula? Worried that Fa—that the Fire Lord won't be able to defeat Aang?"

You don't really think it counts as worry when you have never made it to a future where your Father has won, despite how absurd it is to imagine that the Fire Lord empowered by a once-in-a-century celestial event can't even crush the same spirit you killed without it.

The only thing you allow to show on your face, however, is the curl of your lips into a scoff. "Hardly. It's called the long game. Do try to keep up."

"Then take me instead," Zuko says. It's plain to see he doesn't even have to think about it. The words just spill out like heartsblood. "Aang's… different. Any one of his friends would work. It doesn't have to be Katara. It could be me. And I'm his firebending teacher, too. He's only just started learning. He needs me way more than he needs her."

The argument is actually sound. Does Zuko's brain only switch on when it comes to planning self-sacrifice?

"No," you say anyway. Your Father will execute him on sight, and that would defeat the entire point of this exercise. "Goodbye, brother. I'll see you on the day of the Comet."

You exhale a wall of cerulean flame—the taste of it like spice charred to ash—and turn away.

It's nothing like what you can make when Sozin's legacy crowns the sky, but it serves as a useful enough distraction. By the time Zuko punches through it with a firm Hah! you are already halfway to your airship, short sharp shocks of fire directed from your feet propelling you across earth and air to land, somewhat gracefully, on the deck of your airship with the thump of boots against steel.

Something glints out of the corner of your eye.

You spin and lash out with a coruscating whip of flame that blasts the metal projectile—the water peasant's boomerang—out of the sky and well away from you.

You are not falling for that again.

One loop was more than enough.

The Avatar's bison—the white-furred flying menace barely sensible enough to be afraid of fire—swoops around from the side, but you have nothing to be afraid of. The Avatar has to fly it, the earthbender is too blind to be dangerous in the air even with all this metal, Zuko is on the ground, the waterbender is below the deck in your custody, and the peasant just threw away their only remaining ranged weapon.

Unless they're willing to ram you, your escape is inevitable.

"Captain," you say, "take us to Caldera."

The bison swoops and turns, spiralling through the sky with surprisingly agility for such a lumbering beast, but the barrage of fire and falling bombs from all sides—your ships taking special care to fill any firing line between your ship and the Avatar—stymie its progress enough that you are soon away.

You watch the impotent fury of the Avatar's expression carefully until it fades from sight.

Mission accomplished.

You breathe out.

It's time to go home.


There had been a point in the Hundred Years War where the Fire Nation had thought it could take the benders of the Southern Water Tribes and make them its own.

Some over-ambitious bureaucrat in the early days of Azulon's reign, burning with righteous fervour, had envisaged a future where all elements bent themselves for the glory of Fire. It was a dream that hadn't lasted, through a combination of fierce resistance from the captured waterbenders and the idea's champion being executed for spouting what seemed like suspiciously pro-Avatar rhetoric in support of his plans. But a few of its legacies remain to this day, dotted in obsolete protocols and mouldering libraries—and in the room whose door you stand outside.

Beyond that door is a cell, designed from fundamental principles to be completely inimical to waterbending. In this, it is nothing unusual. The Fire Nation has dozens of these cells across dozens of its cities and ports and outposts. Most have been empty for decades: the North cowered like a gormless badgerfrog for a century, and you could have rendered the South summarily extinct on the flight over, if you'd so chose.

What makes this cell different from all the rest is that it has a bed. And a desk. And a chair. It has a selection of dresses; a mirror and a set of skincare powders; a small bookcase filled with scrolls about the Fire Nation. It has all of these things and more besides.

It's a cell designed for the slowest and most insidious torture of all—the kind Long Feng so crudely aped with the Dai Li and the Joo Dee's. The kind gently described in the records of this place as a 'program of cultural reeducation'.

Frankly, it's a ludicrous idea. The savages who populate the frozen wastelands of the world will never understand the strength of the Fire Nation's civilisation, and all the mouth-breathing about the 'enlightened conquest' to 'bring the light of Agni to all corners of the nations' the army likes to sell to the common people has never shared the same air as an Earth Kingdom peasant. You don't fight this war to help people. Nobody fights wars to help people.

You fight this war to win it, because that is the only choice available to the strong.

(Because that is, of course, the true definition of strength: the inability to choose.)

Regardless, you are thankful this once, at least, for the hubristic pretences of your forebears. Without this cell, you wouldn't have anywhere to put the waterbender that wouldn't end up with you on the opposite end of an angry Zuko and an angry Avatar. The conditions of an ordinary waterbender-proofed cell are… not particularly appropriate for a valuable political hostage.

It's with that thought in mind that you unlock the door with a careful whisper of cerulean flame through the intricate mechanism and step into the gilded cage.

It's well-apportioned; the colour scheme is wholly Fire, from the red carpet to the gold curtains around the bed, the flame-etched scrollwork across the wooden cupboards and bedside table, and the torches whose light flickers from orange to blue as their flame becomes yours, smoke sweet with incense. The only inside that isn't wholly Fire, in fact, is the waterbender.

The waterbender who, of course, tries to brain you with a stool as you walk in.

There's a bravery in it. You'll give her that. She's alone, unarmed, in a part of Caldera she's never seen, in a building whose extent she does not know, and her first instinct is still to fight, and in that fighting, seize a chance to flee.

Such a pity that bravery is not enough.

You duck under and into the swing, stamping an armoured boot right between her bare feet, and your hand shoots upward to dig your painstakingly-filed nails around her throat. From afar, they'd almost be mistaken for stains of blood themselves. Your other hand presses two fingers into the flesh of her belly, pinching the thick white fabric of her belt.

A lazy flicker of blue, like the sky ignited to spark, kisses the back of your palm.

She freezes.

"When you were a child, they taught you to scrabble in the snow," you say conversationally. "When I was a child, they taught me to cook my assassins in their own skin."

You breathe in, swallow even that tiny shadow of a flame, and step out and away, not bothering to take the stool she still holds in a surprisingly steady grip.

"You may be an adequate bender," you admit, because as much as you would love to forget it you know what it's like to lose to this girl, "but your approach to murder is disappointingly obvious. Next time try a cupboard. Or under the bed."

You didn't think someone outside your brother could make confusion look so angry, but you suppose that explains at least a little why he'd chosen to fight alongside her. A shared language is a shared soul, or however the proverb goes.

"Why are you giving me advice on how to better assassinate you?" is the first thing she says to you. "Shouldn't you be monologuing about how you're so great and invincible before you drag a turtle-duck in here and set fire to it for fun?"

What has Zuko been telling them about you, exactly?

(You only ever burned a toy turtle-duck, and your mother wasn't even proud.)

Rolling your eyes, you reply, "I am not some cheap theatre cut-out. If I wanted to scare you, I'd ask you if you remember what it was like to feel the Avatar's heart fail under your palms."

Then you smile, bright and political. "But I don't. So stop wasting my time and sit down so we can talk like they do in civilised parts of the world."

"Civilised?" she snaps. "I barely have a civilisation because of people like you!"

There are no people like you, but you suppose you'll accept the compliment—such is the heavy burden of royalty, to claim and owe responsibility for the glories of your entire nation.

"You barely had one long before we began to liberate the world," you say. "No need to make a fuss. Sit down. I picked this room especially for you—would you really refuse the generosity of a princess?"

She throws the stool at you.

You breathe out a tongue of flame.

Ash sifts through the air like sand tossed in the wind, staining the carpet between your bodies.

You raise a single, sharp eyebrow.

"Are you quite finished, peasant?"

"Oh, wow, the murderous maniac princess calls me a peasant, I'm so surprised," she says, blue eyes flashing. "Even Zuko had better manners."

"I'm not sure what you intend to accomplish here," you say mildly. "I am the only reason you are still alive, and the only way you will remain still alive. I understand that your people appear to love doomed, suicidal resistance if the way they still fight our armies indicates anything, but surely you are not so uneducated as to think there is any purpose in…"

You extend a hand in her general direction—the tension in her arms and neck, the slight acceleration of her breath, the way her toes dig into the carpet—with your palm up.

"...whatever this is."

"I don't care. I would rather die than give you a single thing that you want."

You'd be frustrated if this wasn't all so incredibly predictable.

"Look, waterbender—"

"I have a name, it's Katara. Use it, Princess Azula."

"—I don't know what you're expecting to happen, but I will be honest with you—"

"You know how to do that?"

"—this childish display will achieve nothing except to solidify my impression that you are as dull as your pedestrian morality suggests."

Okay, maybe you're a little frustrated.

"I'm sorry you were too busy listening to Daddy talk about kicking polar puppies to learn how to be a good person." She smirks, a flash of white teeth stark against the smooth brown of her skin. "See? I can lie too. I'm not sorry at all."

"How compassionate of you," you observe, hands falling to natural parade rest behind the small of your back. "But hypocrisy is the heartbeat of the weak, so colour me wholly unsurprised."

"Says the Fire Nation propaganda reel."

This is getting you nowhere.

You sigh.

Why is it that every conversation you've tried to have this cycle has turned out so terribly?

"Your insecurity is quite aggravating," you say, taking a couple of steps backward to lean against the dark wood of the wall, relaxing your shoulders and knees so your whole body seems to slump without actually losing any part of your core stance. "No wonder you were arguing so much with my brother."

"What are you talking about?" She doesn't sound any less furious, but you've disrupted her rhythm.

You examine her for a moment: a near-perfect picture of Southern Water Tribe hostility in patriotic blue-and-white, dark skin and dark hair a sharp contrast to the bright colours of her robes. The hoop braids are a tactical weakness—easy to grab and drag for a headbutt—but likely cultural, though they lack the stately dignity of your own topknot and crown. The only break in her image is the necklace, which as you understand it stems from a Northern tradition. How curious.

"Your insecurity," you say again. "Come on now: you surely have nightmares about being abducted by a Fire Nation raid, the way your mother only avoided because she died in front of you instead. Now you're torn between hoping the Avatar will rescue you and hoping that he focuses on the Fire Lord instead, and that internecine conflict has you lashing out at the first target you see to try and feel less helpless."

The last few words fall to a silence broken only by the sounds of her breath—short and hitched, like her body isn't sure whether to scream or cry.

Her mind already knows, though, based on the way her face swells with fury like thunderclouds before rain.

"What is wrong with you?" she spits, both hands curled to fists and shaking by her sides. "What is wrong with you?"

You raise a languid shoulder.

"Funny, my mother asked the same question," you say. "Chin up, waterbender. At least yours was willing to die for you. Mine didn't even want to stay."

You're expecting something like no wonder but instead she doesn't speak at all—she just stares, watching you in simmering silence. If you were Zuko, her eyes would be fixed right on your scar.

"What?" you ask, drumming your fingernails against the wall in artfully-feigned boredom. "Do I have something on my face?"

She shakes her head, ponytail coiling behind her back. "What's funny is that both you and Zuko tried the same thing."

Oh? This'll be interesting. "And what did we try?"

"Zuko said the Fire Nation had taken his mother away from him, too," she says, folding her arms fiercely across her chest. "I almost felt sorry for him. You know, before he betrayed me to go running off after you. Now here you are: same dead mother story, but this time I. Don't. Care."

There's a little too much venom in that last sentence for you to actually believe her.

"Oh, don't worry—I don't either. It's Zuzu who's all broken up about it." You smile, though it feels a little sticky on your face. "I suppose I can't blame him too much. She picked him, like Father picked me. Which one did your mother pick: you, or the boy? I suppose it must have been you, or else she'd still be alive."

She's about to shout, lips curled into a snarl and fingers clawed into her thighs as if to hold herself back from throwing herself at you, when she suddenly seems to process something—her face shuts down and she takes a half-step back, almost bumping into the side of the chair behind her. One hand catches itself on its mahogany ridges, and then she takes a steadying breath, deep in her lungs, in-two-three-four, out.

When she looks at you again, the tilt of her mouth and the set of her jaw reminds you a little of Mai, when she asked you that ridiculous question, or Ty Lee, when you told her about choices.

But she says nothing and the impression soon passes, like smoke in the wind.

No matter.

"I hope whatever epiphany you think you came to about me was useful in understanding the situation you're in," you say, deliberately indifferent, "but perhaps I should reinforce it further. You are my prisoner. I will not be releasing you before Sozin's Comet. You will not be harmed or mistreated unless you prove so uncooperative that stricter measures are required to keep you here until then. You may nod if you understand, but I don't really care."

"What do you even want with me?" she asks instead. "Are you so scared of Aang you need a hostage after he beats the Fire Lord and comes for you?"

Much like Zuko, she will never understand that it has nothing to do with fear, and everything to do with escaping these accursed cycles.

"My Father is the greatest firebender in the world," you say rather than answering. "All your precious Avatar has is a few weeks of instruction from the worst firebender in our family. Do you really believe a fourth half-bitten element will make a difference, when I alone was enough to kill him with three?"

You know, of course, that it does—but she does not.

And yet: her eyes are clear and firm as she says, "I believe Aang can save the world."

The faith these people have in each other is as baffling as ever.

(Almost as baffling as the fact they are, time and time again, proven spectacularly right.)

"I suppose I shouldn't have expected anything else," you say with a sigh, briefly glancing at the ceiling and the swirling pattern of stylistic flame that decorates it. "Well, whatever. Think what you will—until the day of the Comet, that is the only freedom allowed to you. After that… we shall see how much of a fool my brother intends to be this time."

"Why do you call him that?" she asks, cocking a hip so that she's leaning against the upholstered armrest of the chair behind her. For once, there's more curiosity on her face than anger.

Your raised eyebrow would have withered even an ocean. "You have met Zuko, yes?"

"No, no that," she says. "Trust me, I know he's an idiot. What I meant was: why do you call him your brother?"

…what?

Has she gone mad?

"We have the same mother and the same Father," you say slowly. "Do they not teach genealogy in the Water Tribes?"

"That's why Sokka is my brother, yes," she says with… patience? "But it's not why he's my brother. Or why Aang is his brother. Or why Toph is our sister. We're together. We're one. Family first and always. But you're not like that at all, are you? If I asked you to think about family the first thing that would probably come to your mind was violence."

You must know the pain of losing a first-born son. By sacrificing your own!

You will learn respect, and suffering will be your teacher.

The showdown that was always meant to be. Agni Kai!

Something shifts across your face without your permission. It might be fury.

It might be truth.

Whatever it is, she seems satisfied and disappointed all at once.

"Yeah, I thought so." One of her hands comes up to clasp her necklace, cradling the jewel—as light as the sky, and as smooth as moonlight—between her fingers. "What I don't get is that most of the time, you say Zuko's name like a threat, but sometimes… sometimes you say it like—"

"—like what, peasant?" Your voice, when you finally find it, would have been mistaken for ragged in anyone else's mouth.

She snorts, ignoring the question. "I guess that's the other thing you share. Even when someone tries to be a little kind to you, you can't help but spit in their face. No wonder that gloomy girl betrayed you. She was probably sick of how awful you are."

This savage is very,

very,

very lucky you are not your brother.

(Or your father.)

When you breathe out, the temperature of the room visibly rises; the air trembles with haze and the metal door creaks as pockets of it expand faster than others.

But that is all.

The rest becomes the flame-in-void, the perfect nothingness that is the moment before lightning.

You open your eyes and wonder if they, too, howl as bright as the sun.

"Katara, daughter of Kya, daughter of Hakoda, sister of Sokka." You wonder if she knows the Fire Nation only names their citizens like this before an Agni Kai. Or an execution. "If I thought you understood a single thing you are talking about, you would find what I did to the Avatar was the closest thing I have to mercy. You know nothing about Mai. Or my brother. Or me. Take whatever pale insights you think you have and lock them up to rot before I do the same to you."

She just raises a dark eyebrow, seemingly unimpressed.

That's fine.

You know exactly how to respond, and it begins by leaving.

You push off the wall, boots pressing into the carpet, and step toward the doorway as if you're storming out.

One breath. Two breaths. A slight stutter as she opens her mouth to speak, and—

"—oh, but before I go. I know how much you love being kind, so here's a gift for you."

You stop just before the door, and turn, smiling like a mongoose-lizard.

"The man who killed your mother was Commander Yon Rha, who retired with full military honours four years ago after a long and dedicated career. He lives with his mother in a small village in our south islands. I'd point it out to you on a map, but—duty calls! The life of a princess is ever so busy."

You linger just long enough to see the shock on her face start to displace itself with rage, and then let the door slam shut behind you.


You, Princess Azula, have experienced a Revelation, which has Broken one of your Truths.

This modified Truth can be found in the spoiler box below. Changes in bold indicate new text; changes in strikethrough indicate replaced or removed text.



After that very successful conversation, and another, shorter conversation with Ty Lee to ensure she remains as part of the waterbender's guards, your attention turns to the handful of days left before the Comet comes.

Most of the time, by this point in a cycle your attention is entirely on your father's looming 'change of plans'. But you have come to realise that there has never been anything you can do about it. No matter how much you ask. No matter how much you beg. All you get is his ha—

No.

The Phoenix King always soars alone.

(The Phoenix King always soars without you.)

All you can do is accept his decision and move on with your own intentions.

You have the shape of your overall plan—use the waterbender to guarantee that Zuko will sit down, shut up, and listen for five seconds instead of trying to fight you. It's a chance you've never had before, an opportunity to do something different, and you will seize it with grasping hands for naught but that alone.

However: you cannot afford to improvise something like this. You need to be sure of what you will say, and where you will say it, and why Zuko needs to hear it.

So, Princess Azula, it's time to make a decision.

How are you going to approach that final confrontation?

[ ] With violence. Killing Zuko might be off the table, but that doesn't mean you can't make him hurt. He made his choice, and now it's time he learned the consequences. Who ever said an Agni Kai can't be won with words alone?
And prove the waterbender right? You would sooner contemplate regicide.
[ ] With curiosity. Just this once, you'll hear Zuko out. Suppose your Father loses. Suppose you relinquish your throne. What does he plan to do? Where will he take the Fire Nation from here? How will he handle the fact that the war is almost won? What will he do with the soldiers, the factories, the fleets? How will the history books describe the reign of Fire Lord Zuko? And how will he react, when he realises he doesn't know?
[ ] With frustration. In the end, everything always turns out for Zuko. Mother saves his life, Iroh holds his hand, and he hardly has to turn his back on your Father for a month to see him fall. You have bent your entire life to perfection—to the only way there ever was to win—and all it's given you is nine days, after nine days, after nine days. Why is he born lucky, while these days you sometimes find yourself wondering if you were unlucky to be born? Why? Why?
[ ] With truth. You have a chance to talk to Zuko alone, on the day of the Comet, without fear of what you'll see should you stare too deep into a nearby mirror. You will never have a better chance than this to convince someone about what is happening to you—and Zuko has surely seen stranger things on his travels across the Four Nations.
Tell Zuko? Tell Zuko? You couldn't even trust him to stay when you gave him literally everything he had ever claimed to want: to be home, with your Father's approval, the nation's acclaim, and Mai's attention. How could you possibly trust him with this?
[ ] With ennui. It always seems to end this way. You meet Zuko on the day of the Comet, and never see the day after. It feels like you've spent your whole lives chasing after each other's shadows, and everyone who ever mattered to either of you apparently made sure to encourage it. How many times have you killed him? How many times has he killed you? If there's a point to it, you've long lost it in these endless cycles. So why is he here?