"What," you say very, very softly, "do you mean,
she escaped?"
The lines of kneeling guards—unmasked, unarmoured—do not have an answer.
Out of their cages of iron and steel, they spread from one end of the Fire Nation to the other. Some have rounded cheeks, others narrow noses, three share the same shade of gold that marks them as natives of Shuhon, and one has the distinctive scars where her traditional Ma'inka temple jewellery was removed prior to her service. The sergeant's skin is three tones darker than the shivering captain next to her.
You do not need to see their faces to taste their fear—to see it in the nervous twitch of one guard's finger against his thigh, in the way another at the end of the row blinks a little faster than might be healthy. You do not need to have them genuflecting in only their padded tunics and trousers and sandals to be able to burn them where they sit.
But it's not about the need.
It's about the message.
"Ty Lee," you say, and she freezes where she's been awkwardly pacing behind the second and last row of guards, not
technically part of the ranks but nonetheless given the same task, "I am going to ask the captain three questions. If he answers truthfully, you are going to nod. If he lies, you are going to shake your head. If he, or anyone, turns around to look at you, I will assume their guilt and punish it accordingly. You may all speak to answer
I understand, Princess Azula."
Ty Lee sounds a little half-hearted, but the rest shout as if their lives depend on it.
How apt.
"Very well. We shall begin."
You say nothing at first, instead allowing your eyes to examine the room in feigned curiosity. There's nothing really interesting about it—after fourteen years of living in them, most of the expensively-panelled meeting rooms around the Fire Nation blend into one another—save for your throne. Hard-backed, it rests on a raised dais at the back of the room, exaggerating the shadow you cast across the assembled unfortunates thanks to the row of simmering blue torches that line the wall behind you. Nevertheless, you keep looking, pausing to admire the swirling constellations in the replica of
The Passing of Lady Jingwei hanging behind Ty Lee, and then to contemplate a non-existent chip in the paint of one of your curved nails.
Eventually, finally, you speak.
"Captain Gong," you say, and the man starts nervously, jowls quivering, "two days ago, I gave you a valuable political prisoner. The last living bender in the Southern Water Tribe. I gave you the facility to hold her. I gave you twice as many guards as you asked for. I gave you a chi-blocker with experience subduing her. Tell me: if I asked you to produce my prisoner, what would you say?"
"I—" he begins, before swallowing and jerking his head back down as he remembers you have not yet given him permission to view your face, "I have no excuses, Princess Azula."
"Good," you say, seemingly pleasant—until you snap your fingers and an arc of lightning
cracks above your hand to punctuate your next few syllables, "because I did not ask for them. I asked you what you would say if I told you I wanted to see my prisoner."
"I, I, I would say that I could not, because she escaped last night, Princess Azula."
Ty Lee nods, though her eyes are wide with worry.
"Yes. You would."
You roll the spark of lightning over your knuckles, a theatric only Ty Lee can see but that every firebender in the room can
feel, the exquisite shattering of the cold fire rolling over them with every breath they take. None of them have ever been this close to it. None of them have ever met someone who can toy with it like this. You hope they understand exactly how grateful they should be.
Not for your mastery—for the fact the hollow-void meditation you have fallen into is the only thing keeping you from
burning them alive.
"Next question, Captain. You have just told me she escaped. What would you say if I asked you how?"
You know, already, that he has no explanation. Even if you could not follow the slight twitch of his ducked eyes to the sergeant by his side and another two guards in the row behind—the three primary witnesses—it would be clear to you simply because a man who had valuable information that might interest his princess enough to spare his life would not be so terrified of being asked for it.
He opens his mouth, eyes pale with fear—and for once, surprises you, because instead of immediately trying to deflect your attention to the sergeant who was on duty in the west hall or the two guards who brought the waterbender her dinner that fateful evening, he tries to answer your question directly. "I would say that—Princess Azula, I would say that the prisoner somehow overpowered the guards who delivered her food, which allowed her to escape into the prison complex, where she somehow overpowered the guards patrolling and escaped into Caldera City, where the pursuit lost her in a local spirit festival."
Ty Lee nods again. Of course she does. Even the festival part is true—the capital city of the Fire Nation has many such celebrations, some localised to only a few alleys, and with Sozin's Comet just a handful of days away their frequency continues to grow.
Your hissing, spitting spark bounces from one hand to the other, and for a little while you do nothing but flick it from finger to finger like you're conducting some short-lived electric symphony. Eventually, you look up again, watching a bead of sweat slip down the captain's voluminous chin and splash against the dark fabric of his tunic.
"Very well, Captain Gong. Last question." The words slither out of your mouth like poison. "What would you say if I asked you to tell me the names of those guards who the prisoner so conveniently
overpowered?"
He swallows, knuckles whitening where they rest on top of his knees.
"I would beg for your mercy, Princess Azula, and give you my name instead."
There's a sharp intake of breath from the sergeant, who almost makes the mistake of looking up to see your silhouette on the throne, all sprawled angles and looming judgement.
Ty Lee looks mildly impressed, somewhere beneath the dread.
A flick of your wrist, and the snap of lightning you've been cultivating splinters the wood in front of the captain's full-body bow. He flinches, one stray shard of wood carving a line of blood across his cheek, just under his eye.
"You lost any right to my mercy when you lost my prisoner."
You rise from the throne like a catapult stone rises above a castle wall, boots clicking against the stone dais and then the wooden floorboards until you stand directly in front of him. The only things he is permitted to see are the narrow, black points they taper to.
"So until you bring her back, you shall not have it."
Crouching down, you place a finger under his chin, and tilt his head up to meet your sunlit stare. The hook of your nail digs into the flabby flesh.
"If my prisoner is not returned to me by the day of Sozin's Comet, I will see you all dishonourably discharged from the Domestic Forces and sent to the colonies. I hear Yu Dao has been
begging for some reliable manual labour that isn't in a place to question orders."
When you drop his jaw, it thuds back to the ground, as if his body has lost the strength to hold it up.
"You may all speak to say
I understand, Princess Azula."
The shout is just as loud as the first time.
"Now get out of my sight."
The guards press fists to their hearts—still kneeling—and then stand as one to file, or in some cases run, out of the sliding screen doors at the other end of the room. You notice the sergeant surreptitiously supporting the captain, whose knees don't seem to be quite communicating with the rest of him.
As the last leaves, almost slamming the screen closed in his haste before abruptly realising he would be slamming a door on a princess and instead sliding it very carefully the last few inches, Ty Lee… doesn't quite bounce across the floorboards towards you. There's not enough pep in her step to call it a bounce. She's nervous.
"I am surrounded by
blithering incompetence," you snarl as she approaches, forcing another bristle of lightning out of your mind and into your hands. "
One thing. I asked for
one thing. Explain to me, Ty Lee. Explain to me how I can be here
without my prisoner."
"It—what she did, Azula." Ty Lee blanches, like someone's poured the blood from her cheeks out in front of her. "She could move your body. She moved my body. The moon was full and she
moved my body."
A small part of you thinks that must be a special horror for Ty Lee, to have the instrument she has honed for the whole of her life suddenly march to a different tune.
"What do you mean?" the larger part asks. "What was she bending?"
"Blood," Ty Lee answers with a shudder. "She said it was blood."
Ty Lee sticks close to you in the days to follow.
She's there when you train—sunrise, midday, sunset, and briefly in the hour before you sleep so you're always familiar with what your firebending is like at its weakest. There when you harangue the practically-armchair generals and admirals of the Domestic Forces for ignoring the significant concern that, Sozin's Comet or not, the pacification of the Earth Kingdom will take all of your nation's most powerful military assets out of the Home Islands and therefore
make them vulnerable. There when you eat twice as much as Zuko did at your age for each meal and take four times as long to eat it because a princess must maintain her dignity no matter her hunger; there when you finally find an hour between a debriefing with the Ministry of the Interior and a strategy council with the Home Fleet to soak in your personal spa.
Unfortunately for her, she's also there when you eventually get so sick of her ridiculous hovering that you throw a scroll at her head the next time she interrupts your attempt to study an intelligence report on the waterbender's possible movements.
It bounces off the marble pillar she's standing next to, and flutters ignominiously to the carpeted floor.
"What is
wrong with you, Ty Lee? Must you haunt my every waking hour? Did the savage spook you so terribly that she turned your spine to water too, not just your blood?"
She flinches back from the scalding hiss of your voice, almost spilling the tea she's carrying from its delicate, gold-edged cups. A precariously-balanced set of walnut cookies slips off the edge of one of the saucers and lands on her foot with a dry little
slap.
Even when someone tries to be a little kind to you, you can't help but spit in their face.
You did
not go through the painstaking process of burning out every shard of your mother's ghost fracturing across your brain only to have her replaced by the
waterbender instead.
"I… may have misspoken," you say grudgingly, flattening your scowl into something resembling neutrality. Laying your hands on the rich
nanmu wood of your desk, you inhale, exhale, and speak more softly. Not much. But a little. "Perhaps I meant to say I understand that losing control of your body to forces beyond your control can be a… disruptive experience. But you must stop hovering, Ty Lee. Sozin's Comet comes the day after tomorrow, and with it our final victory. I have work to do."
Ty Lee blinks a couple of times in surprise, having likely expected a far harsher castigation to follow. Her grey eyes flick down to the cookies on the floor and then back at your face.
"You never worked this hard when we were chasing the Avatar," she says, perhaps a bit petulantly.
Well, no. Of course not. You didn't need to. The Avatar practically chased himself.
(It helped that you were halfway across the world from anyone who might be watching.)
"This is Caldera, Ty Lee," you say, "and I am the Crown Princess. Zuko might have been able to escape his duties to swan about with Mai by getting banished for so long he forgot he even had them, but I am not Zuko. I have responsibilities, and
clearly a clown like Senior Undersecretary Wang is too incompetent to be trusted to fulfil them in my stead if he thinks the waterbender is hiding in cabbage shipments."
Ordinarily, you might not have to waste so much of your time at a desk, but it's not just the oncoming Comet that's delegating more and more of the Fire Nation's day-to-day inanity to you as your Father prepares for the invasion—it's the fact that you
also need to prepare for Zuko's arrival, and hunt down the waterbender, and now, apparently, manage Ty Lee's feelings as well.
You sigh. "Very well. If you're going to stay, you will at least make yourself useful. Sort this pile," you brush a hand towards the stack of scrolls unceremoniously dumped in the basket beside the desk, "by order of importance. The lower the rank of the signatory, the more important it is."
She cocks her head to the side with a quizzical smile. "Shouldn't that be the other way around?"
"If a petition from the junior assistant to the Caldera dockmaster makes it to
my desk," you say dryly, "trust me that it is a
significantly more valuable use of my time than the latest noble minister complaining that his family mansion still hasn't been repaired after the Day of the Black Sun."
Ty Lee carefully sets the tea down in front of you with the slight
clack of porcelain against wood, and… bends into a full backward arch, which is apparently the most comfortable position for sifting through scrolls. It's almost as peculiar as her sorting technique, which involves a great deal of quiet muttering as she sounds her way through court script she hasn't read in years, and the occasional explosive flurry of gossip as she asks you about the latest salacious detail some fool has included, likely in the hopes of currying your favour with a drip of useless information about some other court frippery.
The worst thing, though, is that the sheer absurdity of watching her work is nearly relaxing.
How hateful.
It is the day before the Comet, and your Father is about to be crowned.
This time, you are not late.
You have been waiting for hours, in fact—watching as Fire Sages and soldiers and servants hurry about, faces pale with urgency and hardly a word that is not an order or a question. They organise the rows in which the supplicants will prostrate themselves, a hundred wide and a hundred strong, a sea of red robes who will press their lips to the sandstone dust to symbolise the eternal flame your Father brings in his wake; they mount the banners that will fly before him and the banners that will soar after him; they practise dressing a mannequin with the mantle-and-helm of the Phoenix King until donning it will hardly disturb a hair in your Father's goatee.
By contrast, you have almost nothing to do. You are a witness. All that is required of you is to watch.
So watch you do. The frenzy of preparation never reaches your little bubble—perhaps it is your armour, black and gold and so well-worn it sits on you as skin, or perhaps it is the way you file your nails with one of Mai's old stiletto knives—save for near the end when a nervous Sage, still shy of forty and yet already with peppers of grey in his beard, trembles to remind you that your place is on the top of the dais, one rank in front of even the War Council.
For a fourteen-year-old princess, heir apparent or not, it's a very flattering position.
(Just as flattering as being left behind.)
You wave an acknowledgement and return your attention to the skyline. You can see your Father's palanquin approaching in the distance—a steady, stately axis that mimics the Sun's.
Stowing the dagger in a hidden pocket of your armour, you step across the magnificently expensive phoenix-patterned rug that holds centre court at the dais' apex until you stand before the empty space where War Minister Qin would be, were he not assisting the administrating of your victory over Ba Sing Se.
Fixing the rest of the War Council with an even stare, you turn your back on them, and fall to one knee, one fist supporting your opposite side.
This, more than anything, more than the title of princess, more than the exalted position you occupy in the coronation, is what marks your prominence in the Fire Nation:
Where all others must bow to the Fire Lord, you are only required to kneel.
(Are you not grateful for the honour?)
You hold your obeisance for long enough that a muscle on the inside of your thigh—thankfully concealed by your ceremonial armour—begins to twitch before your Father finally arrives. Released from his palanquin, he ascends the steps with imposing dignity, the red-bodied gilt of his robes trailing across the carved rock as lava might. You can hardly hear the sound of a soul breathing, or even the waves on the ocean that stretches out behind you, scintillating in the sunlight: it is as if the world itself fears drawing the attention of the nascent Phoenix King.
This is the first time you have seen him in person since this cycle began.
He crests the top of the dais and you know, almost immediately, that he sees you. It's a skill you've had years to hone: Zuko used to be better, before his banishment, but three years away from your Father's eyes dulled his reactions. The Fire Lord's eyes do not linger, however; you are where you are supposed to be, and that is all that matters.
Your Father takes in the assembled dignitaries and luminaries of the Fire Nation, and a pleased smile curls across his face. Of course it does: once again, all the power in the world bows to him. It is the only triumph that matters. The only triumph that means anything at all.
(The only triumph that never, ever lasts.)
He steps forward, once, twice, until his shadow drowns you. If you were to look up, you would hardly be able to see his face, such is the strength of the Sun that frames him.
You do not look up.
It is a mistake you have made too many cycles before to make again now.
"Rise, Azula," your Father rumbles, and only then do you lift your body and gaze to witness him. "There has been a—"
change of plans
"—change of plans. I've decided to lead the fleet of airships to Ba Sing Se alone. You will remain here in the Fire Nation."
but i thought we were going to do this together
you can't treat me like zuko!
"May I ask why, Father?"
"I need you here to watch over the homeland. It's a very important job that I can only entrust to you."
i deserve to be by your side!
"I am your ever-loyal servant."
"And for your loyalty, I've decided to declare you the new Fire Lord."
but what about you?
"You honour me, Father. Fire Lord Azula has a certain… ring to it. Have you decided on a new title?"
"Just as the world will be reborn in fire, I shall be reborn as the supreme ruler of this world. From this moment on, I will be known as… the Phoenix King."
The banners rise; the flames uncurl; the helmet gleams in the sunlight; the Fire Lord sheds his husk and the crownless is finally king.
You stand, watching, long after your Father's battleship has cut the ocean asunder in its passing.
No matter how far away it gets, you can still see the smoke.
Sozin's Comet wakes you two hours before dawn.
You can't see it. Not yet. It's still too far away.
But you can feel it.
Even after so many loops, you can feel it.
In your gut. In your skull. In your heartbeat. Sometimes you wonder if this is what it feels like to be the Avatar—to be as a spirit in a world of men. You flick your wrist and melt every candle in your room to slag, but it doesn't matter, because you are a firebender under the Comet. The dark no longer exists for you.
There is only the flame.
Your maids flock into the room, too well-trained to be so sloppy as to need a summons to attend to your needs, and soon you are dressed for your own coronation: a pale shadow of your Father's, and one you don't particularly feel like seeing through, but a coronation nonetheless. They select your finest silks, a fresh set of ceremonial armour that's far too stiff compared to the sets you wore across the Earth Kingdom, and tend to your hair until it shines sharp enough to kill a man.
They do not, at any point, use a mirror or serve you cherries.
It is
actually dawn by the time they are done, and by then it takes genuine effort to remember your veins still pound with blood instead of lightning. Sometimes you have to pinch your fingers together to stop yourself from toying with a spark. The punch-drunk stutter in your breath will fade as your body slowly acclimates to the Comet, but it's still frustrating. No matter how many times you go through this, there is always a stretch of time when you are not the master of your own fire.
A stretch
less time than near any other firebender on the planet, but a stretch nonetheless.
You breakfast with Ty Lee, who seems to have found some semblance of the girl who could still parade a tightrope while her safety net was on fire by the way she's stopped clinging to your presence. Something to be thankful for, at least. Instead, she chatters away with curiosity, asking you this question and that about how Sozin's Comet feels (all-consuming), whether you could bend a wall of flame higher than Caldera Palace now (yes), if you're literally invincible (regrettably not), and so on and so forth.
Your morning is full of a long list of well-wishers ahead of your coronation; ministers, noblemen, generals, admirals, the head of the Dai Li, even Lo and Li. It's tedious and repetitive and you're often tempted to just banish them all for the sins of being so hatefully
boring, but you resist valiantly. So instead, you sit there, acknowledging them with just-as-repetitive platitudes—save for Lo and Li, who you generously
gift with a vacation to Ember Island for the next month as 'an honour earned by their devoted service to the Crown Princess', effective immediately.
Eventually, the parade peters out, and you are finally left to your own devices—Ty Lee has wandered off somewhere, probably to admire the turtle-ducks or steal food from the kitchens, and all you have to do now is wait.
Not for your coronation.
For Zuko.
You know he's here, somewhere. The palace is bustling, lit from within not just by the preparations for the ceremony but by the jittering, pounding, pulsating call of the Comet. It's exactly the sort of opportunity you'd use to sneak in when you couldn't risk a frontal assault, and Zuko's talents at turning up unseen in unexpected places, regrettably, exceed even your own.
Usually he arrives just as the headpiece is about to rest upon your topknot, but you have—
had—the waterbender, and that will have made him urgent. Chances are he's stolen a guard's uniform and is waiting outside some useless door while some equally useless functionary waffles over which colour earrings to pair with her robes, hoping for an opportunity to slip away.
You
could look for him, and you know you would find him—after all, you've found him every other time you've cared to.
But today, you think, for once in his life Zuko can find
you.
So you walk through the palace, past winding hall after winding hall, where paintings of old and storied war heroes sit alongside ancient pottery that depicts the conquests that made the Fire Islands into the Fire Nation; past a sparring ground filled with Imperial Firebenders being shouted down by their commander for apparently not realising firebending under the Comet might risk setting the whole place on fire until they were more used the feeling; past a courtyard of frantic, book-flapping scholars almost coming to blows over whether to use 'bow' or 'kneel' in their pledge of allegiance to the new Fire Lord; into a distant garden largely off-limits to any except royalty.
You sit in front of a fountain, cross-legged, and only now—hours after the Comet first detonated like a bomb inside your stomach—start to thread a coil of lightning through your fingers. In and across; over and out; in and across; over and out.
For a time, there is just your breath and the spark.
It's rhythmic.
It's meditative.
It's—
"—about time you showed up."
Zuko, who is surprisingly
not dressed as a guard but instead, of all things, in the ceremonial crimson of a Fire Sage—which he is somehow wearing perfectly correctly—stares down at you from the edge of the garden.
"Why are you here, Azula?"
The more things change, the more Zuko asking stupid questions stays the same.
"This is
my palace, Zuzu. Didn't you hear? Father declared me Fire Lord. My coronation is an hour or two away." You exaggerate a sigh. "And here I'd hoped you'd come to pay your respects."
"You're not gonna become Fire Lord today." Zuko's face is stiff. Like a painting. Or a corpse. "I am."
"You're hilarious," you say, idly tossing the spark you've been toying with somewhere to his right. It hits a tree and detonates, shattering it to splinters. Zuko doesn't flinch. "When I serve the throne to you on a silver platter, you cut and run, but now the whole of the palace and an Agni Kai stand in the way,
that's when you find your nerve? Really, brother, your ability to make things hard for yourself never ceases to amaze."
"What are you talking about?" he says, sounding almost as he usually does when speaking to you: like he's confused, angry, angry about being confused, and confused about being angry.
Did he—was he not even
paying attention?
"You were
here, Zuko," you say, spreading your arms wide to encompass the whole of Caldera. The grass rustles against your legs as you rise to match him. "You had our Father's respect. You had the
nation's respect. You had everything you spent three years of your life fruitlessly chasing and you threw it all away for some stupid little set of principles—and
now you come running back expecting me to give it to you a
second time?"
You scoff, turning your back on him to study the crest of Sozin's Comet through the air. The whole of the sky burns, now.
You can relate.
"You'll have to do better than that."
Though he won't, really. You already know how this ends. Zuko doesn't need to be better. Zuko's never needed to be
better. You're the one who's always had to be—
(and here, on this particular day, in this particular garden, you finally allow yourself to think that terrible, treacherous thought)
—and look where it's gotten you.
"Azula," Zuko says, gravelly as ever, "I have no idea what you're trying to say."
"Don't be a fool," you say, spinning to jab a finger—only one, not two—at him. How someone with a scar burned across half his face can look so positively gormless is beyond you. "How can you expect to be Fire Lord if you can't even tell when someone does you a favour?"
"I shouldn't have joined you." He says it so easily. That's the worst part. Everyone says it so
easily. "It was wrong. You were wrong. The Fire Nation is wrong."
"The Fire Nation is
strong," you snap back. "If the rest of the world didn't deserve to be conquered, maybe it shouldn't have
lost. Whatever nonsense your bleeding heart tries to convince you of, Zuko, you know that."
You deliberately look right at his scar: the marred, ruddy flesh, the way his left eye is permanently narrowed into a watery squint. A lesson branded for the whole nation to see.
"Are you even
listening to yourself, Azula?" He doesn't back down from your stare, though his good eye does narrow to match the other. When he speaks, it's not quite a shout, but his voice nevertheless drowns out the hissing bustle of the fountain that dominates the garden's centre. "
Deserve to be conquered? Nobody deserves what we're doing to them! It's just hate and hurting people! And for what? What do we even
need the world for?"
"You sound like the waterbender," you say dismissively. He just doesn't
get it. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. If you can cry over a turtle-duck, you can cry over a savage."
(And yet: would he cry over
you?)
"Where
is Katara? What did you do with her?" There's fire in his hands, now, like he's plunged his fists into the heart of the Sun. "And what did you do with Mai?"
"Always so suspicious, Zuzu," you say with a sardonic smile. "Are my intentions truly so nefarious?"
"Answer the question."
Really, Zuko is so
boring sometimes. "Since you asked so nicely."
He watches you with that sort of wild-animal wariness you've always inspired in him, but all you do is take a step closer to the fountain, admiring the spot where he once fell in. Typical Zuko. Always landing face-first onto his own problems.
"Don't worry. They're both alive. Unhurt, even. Though the waterbender
did seem a little emotionally distressed when I told her who killed her mother." You're studying Zuko in turn, out of the corner of your eye, so you see the way his lips flatten and his gaze flicks sideways in shame. "Mai should be in Yu Dao by now—you might be able to make it there today if you hurry."
Zuko looks a little baffled. "
Yu Dao?"
"Well, she was going to go to New Ozai, but that geriatric madman took it back on the Day of the Black Sun, so it seemed the next-best place. Apparently she's sick of being tugged between us like a toy. A little dramatic, don't you think?"
His face twists into something that's probably meant to translate as
I agree but also if I agree I know Mai will find a way to stab me, but all he says is, "Why should I believe you?"
Even though he clearly does. You exhale, letting the void fill your eyes until they no longer threaten to twitch in irritation.
"Contrary to popular belief, Zuko, not
everything I do is a lie intended to hurt you."
"Could've fooled me," he says.
"Yes," you sigh, "that's plainly obvious."
For a moment, neither of you say anything further. This close, the fountain sounds almost as if it's chortling: at you, at your brother, and at the insensible inanity of your conversation. You look down and study your reflection in the crystalline water—perfect bangs, a perfect topknot, rouged lips and well-pinched eyebrows. Such a contrast to Zuko, whose shaggy hair spills haphazardly from under the precariously-tall hat that crowns his Fire Sage's disguise.
Such a contrast indeed.
"Was your plan truly just to come here and challenge me to an Agni Kai?" you ask into the silence. "Alone, without any hand to aid you, without even someone to bury you when you lose? I know you've never seen a hopeless cause you haven't dived for head-first, but
really, Zuko?"
"I'm stronger than you think I am, Azula," he says, as if you don't
know that.
Inside your skull, the void sharpens.
"That's not the
point," you say, the words falling out a little faster than your usual drawl. "Behind me stands a hundred years of the Fire Nation's glory. Out there," you throw a hand sideways, pointing past him to the sea and beyond it, the Earth Kingdom, "our Father flies with the mandate of Sozin's Comet to burn the Earth Kingdom to the ground. All you came here with was some half-hearted ideal about how the world should be."
And every single time
in the end
he wins
and you lose.
"You have nothing." You look away from your reflection, fixing your gaze on the horizon and the way it seems to bleed, as if the Comet's path is a wound in heaven. "You have
nothing, and yet, when the sun rises tomorrow, you'll probably have everything. You always seem to."
Distantly, as if heard through glass (as if heard through the void), Zuko says, "Azula?"
Something shatters.
It might have been your lightning through the sky.
It might have been your self-control.
"
Why, Zuko?" You whirl on him, the whole of your body taut and wild. "Was our mother not enough for you? Was Uncle Fatso and Mai not enough for you? Was
Father not enough for you?
Why are you here too?"
"I… don't understand," he says. Reflexively, he reaches up to scratch his head, finally knocking that
stupid hat to the ground. "Azula, I don't understand what you're talking about."
"Of course you don't. You never
had to. You just had to be yourself and mother would love you. You just had to be yourself and the Dragon of the West would train you. You just had to be yourself and Mai would choose you." You're shaking. How embarrassing. But you just—you just can't
stop. "Father burnt half your face to a
crisp and still welcomed you back by his side. And you don't even
know how lucky you are, do you?"
That finally provokes a reaction. Scowling, Zuko says, "Father told me, to my face, that the only thing lucky about me was the fact I was
born. But go on, Azula. Tell me how hard your life was, swanning around in the palace learning to bend lightning while I was trapped on a smelly ship with one working eye searching for a ghost."
"And you found him, didn't you?" You take a step closer, crushing a stray flower beneath your boot. "That's how it always seems to go for Zuko. A little whining, a little hardship, a lot of broody glares and at the end of the day the world gives you everything you want."
Another step, and your fist ignites without your consent, bleeding hot, blue tears of flame.
"But I had to earn it. By being strong. By being ruthless." Zuko's left foot draws back into that strange stance of his. "You could have been the Fire Lord for
nothing. Just because you were born first and because Father believed in a victory
I gave you. And ye—"
"Why did you?" he interrupts. There's heat wafting off his body in waves, lensing the air around him, but no fire. Not yet.
Your mouth opens, but no words come out.
"You didn't need me in Ba Sing Se. You've never needed me. So why did you pretend, Azula?" he says. "Why did you lie?"
That's—
"This isn't about me," you snarl, low and rough. "This is about
you."
"You're… deflecting," he says, good eye wide. "You're actually deflecting."
"Deflect
this," you say, and hurl a titanic fireball directly at his face. The backdraft smears your bangs across your forehead.
Annoyingly, he does: his arm sweeps across his body and, like the sun rising to meet the sky, a pillar of orange fire three times as tall as he blasts your fireball off course.
There's another little pause in the aftermath—you make no attempt to follow up, and Zuko almost looks like he's trying to hold in a laugh.
What in the world are you
doing?
Your lips part and—
a shiver through the fountain
his deep voice yelling "Stop!"
a glacier slamming into your back
—your breath
ignites.
You skip across the garden, fire flaring from your heels and scorching the grass to ash and the soil to dust until you land far behind Zuko, who is surrounded by a fading corona of flame where he'd shielded himself from your instinctive, all-encompassing retaliation.
On the other side of the courtyard, the waterbender lowers one hand and raises the other, which coils what remains of the fountain's water into writhing tendrils around her.
Zuko lets out a breath.
Then he turns so he's facing you too, and folds his hands flat like blades.
"So that's how it's going to be," you say. Your voice echoes in your ears. After everything: here you are again. "No Agni Kai, Zuzu? Just cold-blooded murder? I suppose it
does run in our family, given what mother did to Grandfather."
"She would ne—" he starts, and then trails off. There's something vulnerable in his eyes. Did he… did he genuinely not
realise? Has he lived for so many years not even
knowing how deeply your mother chose him? A spark snaps around your finger and grounds itself in the earth. "No, that's… it doesn't matter. Somebody needs to stop you, Azula."
His jaw firms.
"With the dragons as my witness, I am Zuko, son of Ursa, son of Ozai, brother of Azula, prince of the Fire Nation," he says, "and I challenge you to an Agni Kai."
You laugh. It's not wild. Just a little angry.
"I am Azula, daughter of Phoenix King Ozai, daughter of Ursa, sister of Zuko, heir apparent to the Fire Nation, and I
reject your challenge."
You throw yourself forward on a sea of blue fire.
END OF "FIRST" LOOP.
YOU HAVE FAILED.
THE BOILING ROCK AWAITS.
When you wake up you will be faced with the question, again, of Mai and Ty Lee.
Last time, you spared their lives and lied to them about childhood sentimentality. That seemed to solidify Ty Lee's obedience, but left Mai far from your side. Was that a victory, or a defeat?
That's up to you.
What is also up to you, of course, is what you will do this time. Such are the nature of your cycles: if nothing else, you can do your best to learn from what came before.
So, Princess Azula: how
are you approaching Mai and Ty Lee this time? What are you going to tell them when they ask why they're still alive?
[ ] The truth. You're from the future, and you want to get out.
You can hardly be sure you trust them. Ty Lee might be malleable, but Mai is far too defiant to be reliable.
[ ]
A lie. You've learned that Mai and Ty Lee, too, hold some measure of childhood sentiment. Not enough to be truly loyal, but enough to disrupt your offensive. You are
not repeating that embarrassment—so this time you will explain nothing at all, and task them with hunting Zuko down instead. They can come to their own conclusions about your motives.
[ ]
A lie. You've learned that Zuko responds well to hostages. How much better will he respond when the hostage is the lover who sacrificed herself to save him? Obviously, that means you can't hurt Mai, or Ty Lee by proxy—but you
will insist that they do not leave your side. For their own safety.
[ ]
A lie. You've learned that neither Mai nor Ty Lee support Zuko as enthusiastically as they first appeared to, but you don't know
why. Mai never quite answered your question. Accusing them of conspiracy will, if nothing else, reveal the crux of their loyalties—something you need to cultivate, since it seems you are at a tactical disadvantage without any to call your own.
But you shouldn't get ahead of yourself, Princess Azula. There's another question you need to answer. Last time, you saved Mai and Ty Lee out of nothing but vacuous boredom—out of an indecorous hope that trying something new might give you something new. It didn't. You still lost.
So why, exactly, are you going to save them again this time?
(What is the lie you're going to tell
yourself?)
[ ]
Because it's useful. Zuko and the Avatar have proven time and time again that having others by your side can be advantageous, when the rest of the world is against you—and you know from experience that a small, elite team can work wonders. It's only practical to try and reassemble yours.
[ ]
Because it's a victory. You can admit that theirs is the worst betrayal you have ever faced, and by now you have faced it again, and again, and again. To turn it around, then, is to demonstrate that there truly is no setback your brilliance cannot overcome.
[ ]
Because it's interesting. After so many cycles surrounded by nothing but incompetence and faceless obeisance, at least keeping them around provides something fresh—something new. That was what they offered you, all those years ago at the Academy, and again when you reunited to hunt the Avatar; fitting that it's what you make use of them for once more.
