AndrewleTrans
I'm new. Plz help.
- Location
- Tokyo-3, Formerly of Mitakihara
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hmm well hopefully we can solve all of her issues by loop 25
Arsonist's Lullaby: An Azula Timeloop Quest
- Thread starter Magery
- Start date
- Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
I'd argue that Iroh's actions didn't really put Zuko at risk most of the time.
During 1st season he was mostly passive and just supported whatever Zuko wanted to do (I guess you can argue his guidance helped shape Zuko and Iroh is at least partially responsible for choices Zuko made even more questionable ones). Except the during the finale but the whole situation was a mess. He technically betrayed the Fire Nation by opposing Zhao but Zhao betrayed Fire Nation by trying to assassinate Zuko before that and chances are, killing the Moon would not have as positive of an impact for Fire Nation as Zhao hoped not to mention the world.
During 2nd season the only risky move from him I can think of is him deciding to go to Ba Sing Se which ironically he did to lay low for a time, If I remember corectly. His only mistake was not being aware how dystopian the city became and how effective Dai Li were at sniffing people out.
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- Pronouns
- Reader
Yeah, this is precisely what I'm talking about about. Iroh, in his increasingly desperate attempts to have Zuko assimilate to the earth nation and develop sufficient empathy towards them to reach the conclusions Iroh has on his own, attempted to infiltrate a city he had never been to or even understood all that well, risking Zuko's well being in the process. If they really wanted to hide the two of them are perfectly capable of picking an off the beaten track stretch of forest and rough it for a year.
In the end what matters is that Zuko was at risk and Azula, while not able to acknowledge it in all but her most exasperated at Zuko moments, redeemed him for the sake of getting him out of the hostile nation he was stumbling through like a lost turtle duckling.
I am pretty sure main reason they went to Ba Sing Se is to avoid Fire Nation. Softening Zuko up to the people of other nations were not their main concern at the time.
And to be honest by the time Azula found out about Zuko, Dai Li were already eating out of the plam of her hand and the City submited not long after so there is no real risk for him from Earth Kingdom in the city conquered by Fire Nation. No the real reason for her giving him credit for killing Avatar is that it basically was the only way to make Ozai drop the charges against Zuko and welcome him back to Fire Nation. Aka she just wanted her big brother back by her side and not as the enemy of her country.
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flareonflare
the best 'mon is a fluffy 'mon
- Location
- australia
Nice quest, and its named after one of my favourite songs!
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Thinking about it, this is something I've missed terribly in so many other quests, and never knew I needed.
Most quests I'm familiar with have a sort of forced-hothouse atmosphere of growth for growth's sake, to the point where sometimes someone (sometimes me) will outright snap and start grossly overreacting about "X is such a bad idea, won't anyone please think of the opportunity costs!" Somehow we want to win on the behalf of the main character.
Here, there is no real way to win by making any single decision, since even the work of nudging Azula into a mental space where she is capable of not making these terrible, terrible choices is gradual and unpredictable. And people understand that, by and large. It's nice.
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"Third" Loop - Sozin's Comet: Into the Inferno
Magery
Life blooms like a flower, far away or by the road
- Location
- Australia
The Dragonbone Catacombs are cold with the weight of history.
Nothing lives here.
Nothing breathes here.
The Catacombs are as deep and dark as the hollow of a grave, for a grave is what they are: the perforation of tunnels that wind sluggishly beneath the High Temple of the Fire Sages, like blood through the veins of a corpse, lead to the dozens on dozens of mausoleums dedicated to the Fire Lords of old. Down one of those sparsely-lit corridors rests Fire Lord Zoryu; down another waits Fire Lord Gonryu; down another still moulders Fire Lord Yosor.
But you are not here to pay respects to your ancestors, or to marvel at the strength of a line that traces unbroken to the unification of the Fire Islands. You hardly have the time for ancient relics. Zoryu might have crushed the clans, but unfurling the nightmare of his specific tax regulations for the non-hereditary farmers on Shuhon Island once cost you a perfect score on a practice test you sat to prepare for the Academy's graduation examinations and for that you will never wholly forgive him.
No: you are here for Fire Lord Sozin, the great progenitor of all that you know and all that you have ever sought to become.
The scrolls the Head Archivist returned to you following your inquiry had been largely boring genealogies, but they had confirmed that Zuko had not been lying—or, rather, had not been lied to. Your mother was indeed descended from Roku. So is Zuko.
So are you.
The old windbag had been thorough, though. Scattered among the genealogies were stories and excerpts from the lives of each of the Avatars you'd inquired about. Some were plainly dated propaganda extolling the virtues of their character, some were more biting historical criticisms of their political acumen (or lack of it), and some were just peculiar excerpts that served little purpose except, you imagine, to humanise the Avatar in the eyes of the less aware.
But one of them had led you here, to the Catacombs—in the shadow of the night, so as not to concern your Father with trivial reports of your whereabouts the day before his coronation—and the grand hall that bloated its way to Sozin's tomb.
It had seemed almost an afterthought at first in the deluge of information you'd received; a small, square piece of carefully-gilded card, the same kind that all important palace letters were written on. You'd almost skipped over reading it. Why would you care about the guest list for Roku's wedding?
Almost skipped—but not quite. It would have been the height of carelessness to disregard any information you could gather on your enemy, even if only to determine why it wasn't important. So you had read the card, and it had immediately rewarded your attention to detail, because it had been that silly romantic frippery that had told you Fire Lord Sozin had been Roku's best man.
No wonder Zuko had stooped to asking you about your "great-grandfather's history". He must have been so confused by whatever Iroh had told him—Iroh, who had clearly known it, and had clearly manipulated your brother down whatever winding path of wisdom and weakness and tea had been necessary for him to learn it—that he'd been willing to risk you finding out the truth just to try and make sense of it.
If only you'd been a little more willing to wonder why he was asking. Not that it would have changed anything. It just would have been… interesting to know.
The implications, after all, are fascinating. Roku had died Sozin's enemy, but Sozin had clearly remembered him—enough to ensure that Roku's blood eventually joined Sozin's own, whether by his own command or that of Azulon—and you suspect, given the invitation, it may have been with a kind of rotting, bruised fondness.
Like the echo of a fist struck across the face: a wound kept to remember the blow.
How maudlin.
Perhaps the musty, sulphurous air is getting to you.
Or maybe it's the skeletons—the ribs and bones and skulls that line the march to Sozin's final rest. Whoever designed this place had an eye for a particular kind of grandeur you imagine Mai would appreciate; the yellowing corpses of dragons stand in military procession either side of you, their horns towering from their skulls in silent salutes.
To make this pilgrimage is to know, inescapably, which genocide Sozin was prouder of.
You click your fingers and swallow the torches that burn in those long-dead mouths with the simmering blue of your chi.
You'd like to fight a dragon, you think as your boots disturb the dust carpeting the stone floor; it swirls and whirls in silent eddies around your feet with each step. It would be the truest test of firebending you can imagine. You've done most everything else, after all. Facing down the original source and seeing if you have surpassed it… now that would be something.
But you don't—you don't think you'd kill a dragon.
Not out of any misplaced, childish sentiment, of course. You're hardly Zuko, who's never met a misshapen creature he couldn't love. Rather, it's simply that killing one seems like a… waste. Why would you copy something Iroh has already done, especially when all it would prove in the eyes of the world is that you were as good as him? No.
Far better to do something Iroh thought too small to do.
So no. You wouldn't kill a dragon.
You'd tame a dragon.
Even Sozin had one, after all.
It would simply be following in the paths of your great forebears.
Unfortunately, it seems this particular path to your great forebear stretches for far too long to be reasonable. You understand that Sozin deserves the acclaim—he is, after all, the greatest Fire Lord in history since the first, he who became the Sun-who-Walked and whose true name has long been lost. But it is quite late at night and you do have a coronation to attend in the morning, so while counting the number of colossal rib-bones that crawl across the rocky ceiling at regular intervals has led you to quite an impressive number, at this point you'd prefer a door.
As if to mock you, however, it takes another five minutes of carefully managing your breath to avoid choking any of the dry dust you've been kicking up as you walk before you reach the towering metal aegis that protects Sozin's tomb from unworthy eyes. His imposing visage glares down at you from where he has been carved into the door as you tilt your head back—the fabric of your hood squashing against your neck—to take in the mechanism.
Oh. How disappointingly simple.
You reach out a gloved hand and press it against the ornate, three-pronged imperial emblem that rises slightly from his impressively-rippling robes; the metalworkers truly gave it their all for this particular depiction of the Fire Lord. The teardrop flame is slightly more worn than the rest—not too much, clearly only a few people have made regular visits here since his death, but enough to make things clear.
You exhale; an idle whisper of flame curls from your fingers and palm and sweeps through the whole statue until every inch of Sozin's cloak is edged in blue, until his mouth and nose and eyes fill with your fire and it seems as if you have granted the Fire Lord the one gift even he never had in life.
There's a slightly echoing click. The door groans open on hidden hinges when you give it a gentle push. Sozin's tomb is revealed to you in all its glory—or at least it is when you snap your fingers again and the fire that opened the door leaps instead to the row of torches half-hidden in the walls just below where the roof curves into a vast dome.
A museum's worth of imperial artefacts—blades and benches and bottles and books—scatter themselves around the room, largely dominated by a series of grand funerary urns. A beautifully-carved stone dragon guards the centre, curling like a castle wall around a single much smaller urn that you are quite sure holds Sozin's own ashes. Right before the urn is a narrow teak table, and—
—Zuko has been here before you, hasn't he?
The scrolls that should be neatly arranged on that table, Sozin's last will and testament to be buried with him so that even the Spirit World knows the Fire Lord's final decrees, are unfurling lazily like the tongue of a panting dog, and only four of them are even on the table to begin with. The fifth has rolled to rest under the most garishly-decorated urn you've seen since the one Ukano had in his office in Omashu.
How terribly undignified.
Your brother really has no respect for the traditions of his ancestors, does he?
Boots scraping against the tiles, well-polished but nonetheless worn by the indifference of time, you step forward to collect the loose scroll and replace it back on the table, carefully rolling the others back up, shifting them gently with your fingers until they sit in perfect formation once again. This is Sozin's tomb.
From the mouth of a dragon, his urn watches you with cold dismissal.
You breathe out. The flames on the walls flare until the whole room is empty of shadow; until you are illuminated by a dozen cerulean suns.
Sozin, you think, would not admire you. Maybe he would have, if you were still the same girl who set out to hunt the Avatar all those years ago: if you were still the executor's edge of the Fire Nation's blade, cold and sharp and honed to conquest.
You're not quite sure what sort of girl you are now. Still a princess; still the favoured heir; still Azula the Blue. You found the lightning and in it found yourself. Clawed yourself back from a mind made molten. You are stronger now than you have ever been.
But here, kneeling before Sozin's grave, with your fingers soft on the parchment that holds his final truth, it's impossible to ignore that if tomorrow the endless cycle of your life threw you only a few months further back, you would try to suggest that maybe his Comet had a more precise use than a second genocide.
You hardly think he would approve of that—not even if you were doing it for the sake of the Fire Nation.
(You would never dare to call Sozin short-sighted.)
The first scroll unfurls carefully under your touch, whispering against the wood it rests on. It is titled simply, because simplicity is all it needs: this is the final testimony of Fire Lord Sozin. The characters are gentler than you expected, each stroke and line slightly sloped as if traced by a hand that couldn't quite keep the brush entirely straight. It seems even Sozin was vulnerable to the trials of old age, as you have heard Lo and Li name them.
You breathe in.
Time to read.
One scroll.
Five.
You breathe out.
What a sordid tale.
You thought you'd been the closest any member of Fire Nation royalty has come to killing the Avatar—but Sozin had you beaten even there.
How surprising the world can be.
You can see how the story would have gripped and despaired Zuko in equal measure. How he would have flipped through the scrolls faster and faster as brotherhood turned to betrayal and friendship turned to fury and finally, finally, at the end of all things an outstretched hand and—the scroll thrown away, history once again reminding him that happy endings are only ever the province of overblown, poorly-acted plays.
You can even see how it would have tied him closer to the Avatar's side. Zuko has always had the strangest sense of responsibility, and a chance to make amends for his forefather's sins would have had him champing at the bit to prove his own honour.
But to think, you muse as you rearrange the scrolls to once again sit in perfect regiments across the table and settle back on your haunches in precise seiza, that you owe your birth to Sozin two times over. Once, for pushing Roku past his own cowardice and towards the woman who became his wife, Ta Min; twice, for whatever festering affection he'd still held for Roku that led to his line not being excoriated from the halls of power but rather being allowed to marry into its apex.
There's a certain symmetry to it, you suppose—a rhyme repeated a century later. No wonder Iroh must have been so proud to tell Zuko about the warring legacies in his blood; to know that he had the perfect fulcrum upon which to tilt Zuko's self-image just ever-so-slightly in the direction of the light, or whatever other pretty words he'd have used to satisfy your brother's martyr complex.
Because Zuko, you find it easy to admit, is much more a man like Roku than he is like Sozin.
You suppose, as ever, that it had been inevitable you'd end up playing his villain. Had he seen it then, in that war council? Had he thought of Roku, who had sought to defy Sozin's ambitions, while you'd regurgitated them for your Father's smile? Probably not. For all that he's obsessed with plebeian dramatics, Zuko has never thought in narratives—a hilarious irony, given he spent three years by the side of someone trying to fit him in one.
The last laugh, admittedly, is probably on you, since the universe has bent the cycle of your life to demonstrating that Iroh had succeeded.
How tiresome.
You turn your attention away from the scrolls and to the room at large, the fabric of your dark cloak shifting and creasing as you turn to study it from one side to the other. There's no point keeping your hood on here, so you brush it back with a hand. Your top-knot—it would have been more unusual to not have one, here in Caldera, even when disguised—still feels a little pinched from where it's been cramped against your skull for so long, your scalp drawn bitingly tight. You almost want to shake it out, but you are not redoing the style without a mirror in front of Sozin's ashes. There's a limit to how much indignity you'll endure.
It's plain what Iroh had wanted Zuko to learn from this whole affair. Your brother had even said it himself: good and evil might always war inside of me, but I definitely know who won inside you.
How easy it is to move him.
Just give him a choice.
You offered one in Ba Sing Se, and he came to you. Iroh offered one in Caldera, and he went from you.
Maybe one day Zuko will offer you a choice.
Wouldn't that be funny?
You sigh. An idle twitch of your fingers snuffs the flames flickering in the alcoves. Now the room is as dark as Mai's sense of humour. Or perhaps the direction of your thoughts. But you hardly have the time to dwell on them—to let them linger as the dust does, in this tomb without fire that few except you and your brother have visited in what might be a century.
It's… this is Sozin. The architect of empire. One of the most important figures in the history of the Fire Nation. And you sit here, folded on your knees and shins, armourless save for the plates defending your forearms and the gorget around your neck, as perhaps one of the four people in the world who still know how awful a joke he told at Roku's wedding.
It shouldn't matter, particularly. You are hardly unfamiliar with Fire Nation propaganda, especially in matters of royalty. Of course Sozin had his secrets excised from memory. You lied to the face of the nation, too, when you told the world Zuko had killed the Avatar. Some things are simply a necessary part of infallibility.
But at the same time, you can't help wondering why he chose to bury it like this.
How easy it would have been, to wholly demonise Roku—to emphasise that the Avatar had pretended to be Sozin's friend when all along he was working with traitors to overthrow the Fire Lord and his rightful efforts to uplift the world. How simple, to blame him for the volcano that had killed him. Even someone with an elephant-rat's cunning like Long Feng would have seen it. You know Sozin must have.
Though perhaps wondering is the wrong word. Even though Sozin would not admire you, you have always admired him. You were named after Azulon as a show of favour, but for all his competence as Fire Lord and incompetence at selecting his successor, how could he compare to the man who made the world?
And you are—well. If Zuko is the side of your family that is Roku, you think it's clear you are certainly the side that is Sozin.
No. You're not really wondering, are you?
You know.
You know why Sozin wanted the world to forget he and Roku had ever even known one another, and still couldn't stop himself from writing it all down.
You know why Sozin was willing to commit genocide to eliminate the threat of the Avatar, but couldn't bring himself to paint Roku as a cold-hearted traitor instead of just another enemy of progress.
You know why Sozin left his best friend to die in burning suffocation while his favoured son still ensured their bloodlines would eventually join as one.
Guilt would be the easy answer. Shame, too. It's not quite either of those things, though. It rhymes with them, like grief does with regret. But it's something sharper. Not something that mourns. Not something that haunts. It's not anything like that—like the things people like Ty Lee or the Avatar look for so that they can keep pretending it's possible for someone to be sorry enough that they're no longer bad.
Sozin wasn't sorry.
He just didn't want to let go of any of the things he'd decided were his.
Not even when he felt they'd betrayed him.
Not even when it hurt.
How relatable.
Is that why your mother came to hate her time in Caldera Palace? Is that why she came to despise your Father—you know she did, all they ever did was argue when she wasn't coddling Zuko or looking at you as if you'd set fire to her precious peonies just for showing him up, like it was supposed to be a crime instead of a reflex he just wasn't smart enough to learn.
You're not sure you're willing to give her the credit. But she did manage, if nothing else, to kill the sitting Fire Lord in a way your Father seemed to have little difficulty covering up. There's a certain cunning in that, even if it pales in comparison to the bloodless conquest of Ba Sing Se.
So maybe she did figure it out. Maybe she finally realised after the second child that she wasn't there to be a princess, or even your Father's partner—she was there to be a possession, a trophy hung among Sozin's halls for nothing more, and nothing less, than the blood sloshing through her tainted veins.
So she saw Zuko, who she'd already loved too long to let go, and she saw you, the inescapable evidence that her only value was in popping out proof that Roku's line had been subsumed by Sozin's, and she made her choice.
But you doubt it.
(Nobody's ever needed a reason to find you unlovable.)
Sighing, you slip to your feet, cloak brushing against your legs as you turn to leave the tomb. You're not sure you've learned anything useful today, and your Father's coronation is in a concerningly small number of hours given you need both to sleep and to prepare. Then you'll need to meet with Mai and Ty Lee—and eventually, inevitably, Zuko.
You suppose you've figured out your angle at least. If Zuko knows about Roku, and about Sozin, if he remembers Azulon and the conversation in the throne room that gave your mother her final opportunity to demonstrate which child she truly loved, if how he thinks of your Father and your Father's choices is in any way reflected by how many times he's fought you over them… well, surely he should have realised that to be Fire Lord is to be someone your brother most assuredly does not want to be.
Lucky for him that you're right here, isn't it?
Truly, your magnanimity is unmatched.
(After all: to be Fire Lord is to never see the day past Sozin's Comet.)
The Sun is distant when your Father is crowned.
It still burns just as hot, just as large, transfixing the sky with a radiance to which all else, even the Fire Lord, must kneel. No clouds dare to obstruct its sight. The perfectly-polished limestone bricks—the ones that raise the three-stage dais above those worthy only to kneel in rank after rank at your Father's feet—gleam in its reflected light until any non-firebender would be forced to squint. Your fresh set of armour, made sleek with ceremony and without the slightest scratch to show it has ever defended a Princess of the Nation from harm, glimmers slightly, even the dragonbone paint unable to fully swallow the Sun's brilliance.
But as you close your eyes and bow your head so that as your Father crests that final step and takes in the horizon that will soon be his, it will not be obstructed by something as unnecessary as his daughter's face, you still can't help but think:
The Sun is distant when he is crowned.
His smile spreads slow and satisfied, like pitch poured before flame. You can't see it—he has not yet given you permission to look—but you know it as your heartbeat, as the blood that lingers between your veins.
(The blood that is half his, and half the Avatar's.
It doesn't mean anything, really.)
He takes a moment more to study all that has bent to his will; you feel his gaze slide across your back, over the generals and ministers and Fire Sages who fill the rest of the dais with obsequiousness and grey hair, over the rows of genuflecting soldiers and nobles who line either side of the royal carpet like a dragon's teeth around its tongue.
Then he speaks, and for a moment there is no other sound than this—not even the faint wash of the waves against the cliff, or the infinitesimal scrape of armour against stone as the less intelligent generals move to pretend they are giving your Father the full attention they should have already been offering from the start.
"Rise, Azula," he says, and you bite down on the sigh of relief that threatens to escape your throat even as you stand with the same careful obedience another would use to bow. "There has been a change of plans."
You know. "Yes, Father."
"Not even a protest," he muses, returning his attention to the grand vessel from which he will lead his conquest, smokestacks already steaming in preparation. "Where is your fire, my daughter?"
Your Father is unquestionable. "A Princess obeys her Fire Lord, Father. Your decision is final."
"Very good," he says. "I've decided to lead the fleet of airships to Ba Sing Se alone. You will remain here in the Fire Nation. I need you here to watch over the homeland."
That is the duty of the Fire Lord. "I will serve you with loyalty."
"And for your loyalty," he says, as if it's only just occurred to him, "I've decided to declare you the new Fire Lord."
Sorry, but you're not gonna become Fire Lord today. "I am grateful for this honour, Father, but if the Dragon Throne is to be mine, what will be yours?"
"Fire Lord Ozai is no more. Just as the world will be reborn in fire, I shall be reborn as the supreme ruler of the world." The words are heavy in the air. Like a war balloon. Like a comet. "From this moment on, I will be known as… the Phoenix King."
The Fire Sages are seamless—it takes your Father only moments to discard his old office like a spidersnake discards its skin and be crowned as no other has been or will ever be again. He raises his hands to the sky, the golden phoenixes of his pauldrons almost seeming to take flight. Behind him, the flagpoles swallow themselves in flame; below him, the crowds rise only so that they can bow again in staggered rows as if to mimic the ripple of your Father's glory across the Fire Nation.
This is his grand moment: the strict and eternal proof that he will outshine every Fire Lord who came before or after. Even Sozin.
(Especially you.)
There is nothing in your head except obedience and awe.
You are a loyal daughter of the Fire Nation.
All you are is meant to serve.
That's—that's why you need to ask.
So you can serve better.
So that you do not dare to interpret your Father's mind, but instead obey it.
(Didn't you tell your brother something about that once?)
Yes. That's the only reason.
That's why you take a hesitant step closer to his side, where the generals and the ministers and the Fire Sages cannot hear.
That's why you open your mouth and say, quietly, "Father, if Zuko infiltrates Caldera while you are conquering the Earth Kingdom, would you prefer that I kill him or simply imprison him for your triumphant return?"
That's why it's nothing to do with Ty Lee at all when your Father says, easy, casual, "Don't be foolish, Azula. I have no time to waste on traitors."
It's not until the late afternoon that you find the time to share lunch with Mai and Ty Lee.
The garden blooms in white and red around you; summer is slowly giving way to autumn, but in Lo and Li's private courtyard it almost seems like spring. You haven't been here in years—when they first became your instructors, they would often deliver their rambling lectures on firebending philosophy while tending to the flowers. There's no one reason why they stopped and returned your lessons to the gilded training halls of the palace, but your complaints about how these 'old fuddy-duddies were wasting your time' probably helped. You were a little more fractious, then. Growing pains, Lo and Li had called it.
A soft breeze slips among the fire lilies—somehow blooming out of season, thanks to whatever arcane horticultural wisdom it seems comes naturally to all old women—and rustles the leaves of the wisteria trees until their flowers sway like falling snow. The air is sweet with their fragrance. Almost too sweet. It makes you want to cough.
Ty Lee seems to enjoy it, though; she's flitted up at least three times to "soak my aura in the lovely flowers!" while you and Mai heroically resist her best efforts to drag both of you along. Frankly, you find her whole attitude very strange. Not because she's behaving differently toward you after vastly overstepping her place and being banished from your room, or even because she's not behaving differently—because you can't quite bring yourself to stay angry at her for it. Baffling.
(Is it really? It's like you told Zuko: you don't have any room to be angry at your friends when a much easier target is sitting right across from them.)
There's no-one here save the three of you. You'd dismissed the servants after the last dish had been laid (a plate of smoked sea slug) and instructed the Dai Li to keep that dismissal secure. So it's just you, and Mai, and Ty Lee, and the flowers, and the half-eaten stack of komodo chicken skewers that is the sole survivor of your lunch spread, most of which fell victim to your prodigious appetite. It's a good thing you were never stupid enough to get banished and forced to subsist on whatever inadequate rations got Zuko through the years. You'd have practically been a skeleton by comparison.
Thinking about Zuko and skeletons, however, may have been a mistake. Because now is when you're supposed to be interrupting Ty Lee's inane chatter about her latest attempt to remodel Mai's hairstyle so you can instruct them clearly and precisely on how they are to approach tomorrow as the Comet burns deep across the sky. Now is when you're meant to lay out the groundwork not just for convincing Zuko to surrender the throne but for ensuring they are best positioned to aid you in convincing him.
But instead, all that falls out of your mouth is, "Father wants me to kill Zuko."
Mai's chopsticks freeze halfway to her mouth.
Ty Lee jerks to face you.
"Did he tell you that," Mai says, slow, questing, with a twitch of the eyes like she's trying to study both you and Ty Lee simultaneously, "or are you making an assumption?"
"Don't be an idiot, Mai," you snap like a collision of ice-floes, "I do not make assumptions when it comes to the Fire Lord's will."
Dragging Zuko back from Ba Sing Se wasn't an assumption. It was a careful calculation of cost-benefit analysis, just like you were taught.
"I asked my Father if he would like me to kill Zuko or keep him alive for his return and he said he had no time to waste on traitors." Each syllable falls like you're exiling it. "Is that enough for you, or am I to ensure his death warrant is signed and sealed in front of the Fire Sages too before you'll believe it?"
They'd do it, too. Sanctifying your brother's murder is hardly unorthodox compared to sanctifying the Phoenix King. No wonder fewer and fewer go to the Temples each year. The peasantry knows where true power lies. As they should. Even the Comet was named after a Fire Lord.
"Azula," Ty Lee says, reaching across the gnarled old table you're all sitting at, her fingers almost icy where she threads them between your own, "it's okay. I know you won't do it."
She could have slapped you and it would have been less surprising.
You exchange a glance with Mai on reflex. She raises a dagger-thin eyebrow at you and says nothing.
"What does that have to do with anything?" you ask, dragging your arm away and folding both over the gold sash that wraps your red robes tight to your belly.
"You were being rude to Mai," she says, and before you can think to protest the accusation, Mai inclines her head in agreement, dark hair stark in the sunlight as it rustles across her back. "You're rude to people when you think they're dumb or annoying, but you're rude to us when you're worried about what we're gonna think. So I told you! Now you don't have to be worried, right?"
You. Do not. Understand Ty Lee.
(Yes you do.)
"I am not worried," you say, glaring at her. She recoils a little, fingers spread in a warding gesture—which causes the spoon she was holding in her other hand to drop and clatter against the side of the elegant kintsugi teapot Lo and Li insisted you had to use if you were going to have lunch out here. "I simply responded to stupidity as stupidity deserves."
"Wow," Mai says, sounding about as shocked as whoever Zuko first tried to summon lightning at, "you actually were worried. Come on, Azula. I wasn't asking because I thought you'd do it either."
Why is it that you always start to lose control of a conversation the moment somebody mentions your useless brother?
It's absolutely hateful.
"Then why did you?" you say, not quite with a sigh but certainly with the spirit of one.
"You and Zuko are both very good at overcomplicating things." Mai places her chopsticks back on the table, threading the tips through the snarling mouth of the finger-sized ceramic dragon carved to hold them. "People just don't notice when you do it because you're also much better than he is at solving those complications."
She shrugs, quick and casual.
"So I had to check."
"Are you sure it is a sensible decision to speak to your princess and future Fire Lord like this, Mai?" you ask, narrowing your eyes. With the Sun playing across your face, so bright, so close, your stare must seem almost molten. "While in the halls of her palace, at that?"
Mai's lips flick in what you benevolently describe as a smile, rather than a smirk or some other, far more impertinent expression. "More sensible than lying to you. I thought you hated that."
"It's true," Ty Lee chimes in, clapping her hands together with a surprisingly enthusiastic slap. "You get really mad when people you don't expect to lie to you actually do! Which is funny because you lie all the time anyway. But that's when you're at your pinkest!"
What in the name of all the spirits of the world is that supposed to mean?
Mai is no help at all, too busy pressing her mouth into a flat line the way she does when the alternative would be to do something as unladylike as laughing in public.
Honestly.
"I come here to instruct you both on how to go about our plan tomorrow, and instead I am forced to deal with blatant insubordination," a stern glance at Mai, who manages to communicate total unrepentance without a single shift in her angular face, "and words that I am quite sure do not actually exist in that particular sequence, Ty Lee."
You shake your head, the blades of your bangs whispering against your cheeks. If you weren't sitting on a stool, you'd have slumped backwards out of sheer exhaustion. But you are, so instead you lift a hand from your waist so you can breathe out a shard of cold fire and watch it slowly circle around your sleek red nails.
"It was not a surprise that Father ordered Zuko's demise," you say, because whether or not she fully understood it, this is what you meant when you were telling Ty Lee about inevitability. As long as your Father holds supreme, in the end there is only ever going to be one. That's what Zuko never understood. You think your mother might have. She just chose the wrong sibling. "The Fire Lord cannot tolerate an openly treasonous heir."
"Right, but he's not the Fire Lord any longer," Ty Lee says, nodding as if she's just come to some magnificent insight. "You're going to be, and you don't want to fight Zuko even if he is your heir! I think. Anyway, Mai told me that when she bullied him about your conversation after he got back, Zuko also said he kinda didn't want to fight you anymore either. So there's no problem, see?"
You snuff the spark you were toying with in your own forehead as you bury your face in your palm. Your voice comes out muffled with disbelief. "There are so many problems with every single word you just said that I am not even going to dignify them with an answer."
"No," Mai says, "I think she has a point."
Your brow furrows as you lift your head back up to study Mai with what might politely be termed dubious disregard. "Please don't tell me you've decided to add borrowing his sense of humour to the list of mistakes you've made regarding my brother."
"What, like it's worse than yours?" Mai rolls her eyes with such overwhelming drama it almost overshadows the disrespect of her retort. "Whatever. Ty Lee's right. You're going to be the Fire Lord. I don't know why you're being so silly about it now. There's only one person who can question you and you've been handling him your whole life. You can do it here too. So just do what you want."
What you want is for somebody else in this conversation to understand what it means that your Father told you to kill Zuko, because it clearly seems that they do not.
"Trust me, Azula," Mai says, her voice dark as days-old blood, "I understand very well what it means. I'm reminded every time I look at my boyfriend's face."
Ty Lee reaches over to rub soothing fingers over her coiled-wire knuckles.
"If you think that was my Father trying to kill Zuko, you very clearly don't."
You know Mai is more sensible than that. So what is she playing at? Why are you the only one who recogn—oh.
Of course.
It's because you're the only one here who remembers what happened the last time the Fire Lord ordered Zuko's execution.
"Listen," you say, forestalling whatever the two of them are going to say with a raised hand, "do you know how my Father earned his throne?"
"Uh, yeah?" Ty Lee says, eyebrows scrunched quizzically. "Fire Lord Azulon named him as his heir because General Iroh gave up on becoming Fire Lord after his son died? Everyone knows that."
"The official version also mentions his brilliance in leading the development of our industry and war machines to new heights, and emphasises Iroh's failure at Ba Sing Se," Mai adds. "What does that have to do with anything?"
You take a moment to settle your palms on the table. The wood is pleasantly warm, the Sun soaked deep into its pores. A slight lean forward acts to suggest intimacy; a lowered voice suggests both secrecy and trust. Ty Lee instinctively matches your posture. Mai raises an eyebrow before grudgingly doing the same.
"If a single word of what I'm about to say passes your lips before anyone but me or Zuko," you say, slow and heavy, "you will be lucky to escape execution. Unless you sell me out immediately as the one who told you, you may end up begging for it instead. Nod if you understand."
Wide-eyed, Ty Lee nods immediately.
Mai follows, a little hesitant, a lot careful.
"My Father is the Fire Lord," you say into the hush that follows, even the breeze slipping away as if in fear, "because Azulon ordered him to kill Zuko and my mother made the same choice she'd been making my entire life: Zuko was more important than anyone else. More important than me. More important than Father. More important, even, than Azulon."
You smile. It sits on your mouth like a song sung out of key.
"So she killed him. Murdered the sitting Fire Lord just to save an eleven-year-old boy. That was the deal: Zuko's life for my Father's throne. Don't you remember what I told you, Mai? Somebody has to take on the responsibility. Surely you didn't think you were the first."
She opens her mouth to speak and you cut across it like a throat.
"Our mother. Iroh. You. And now me. I wonder—will Zuko ever learn to save himself?" You start laughing, high and cold. The sound shatters against the garden's walls. "Honestly, it's sickening. I can't believe the one thing I have to share with that woman outside Roku's tainted blood is being forced to choose between obeying the Fire Lord or protecting Zuko and getting it wrong."
Because it is wrong. You know that. Disobeying the Fire Lord makes you a traitor. Your Father isn't the Fire Lord anymore, but he still has no time for traitors. It doesn't matter that he'll never know because he'll fight the Avatar and always, always lose because you'll know.
You'll know you had the choice to be a good daughter and didn't take it.
You'll know you had the choice to be strong and didn't take it.
You'll know you had the choice to not be like Zuko and didn't take it.
(Did you really, though?
You still remember that first loop.
The edifice of your entire life in six words: you can't treat me like Zuko!
And your Father did anyway.
Just like he has every single time since.)
It takes a few minutes for Ty Lee to muster up the courage to speak. She's fidgeting in place, hands twisting around each other, the shadow cast over her as the Sun slips behind a cloud making even the saccharine frills of her outfit seem muted. "Why are you talking about Roku? Isn't he the old Avatar who betrayed Sozin and died in a volcano?"
You snort. "He's Zuko's other great-grandfather. Mine too. It's not important."
Iroh might have manipulated Zuko into caring about it, but you'll tame a dragon before Zuko succeeds in manipulating you.
"Woah," Ty Lee says, her open-mouth amazement interrupting her best attempt to mimic a flutter-bat, "you're related to the Avatar! That's so cool. Is that why your fire is so strong?"
Your fingers twitch as a cat's paws do, when they can't quite decide whether to knead or to claw, and you clench your jaw around a snarl. But in the end, all you do is exhale, a short, bitten-off hah, and then say, not quite tersely, "If it were, then maybe Zuko wouldn't be so hopeless."
You don't think Ty Lee understands exactly how much she's insulted you, because she just laughs a little, as if you've told a joke instead of made a salient observation on the nature of reality. Mai might, though. She's looking at you with something you learned first from your Father's face: pride. It's a subtle thing, on her; a slightly softer set of the mouth, a brief hooding of the eyes. But you see it nonetheless.
You look away.
Honestly. The nerve of her. How ungrateful.
"Anyway," Ty Lee says, her earlier awkwardness apparently chased away by whatever furnace of happiness sits where her heart should be, "I don't think you're getting it wrong! I know it's, like, super special illegal to try and kill the Fire Lord, and special illegal to disobey him, so I get why your Dad wants Zuko dead and why you're scared that you're saying no, but… it's kinda like I said before, yeah? I don't think it's right that he asked you. I don't think it's right that you think you're supposed to."
Her elbow clinks against one of the plates as she reaches across the table to lay her fingers over yours. They're cold against your skin.
"But I do think it's right that you don't want to."
"Honestly, though," Mai says, somehow managing to sit even more dao-edge straight in her seat, folding her arms under the delicate embroidery over her chest, "you're even weirder than Zuko is about your Dad, and—"
"I am not weird about my Father," you interrupt, eyes stiff with warning. "I love and respect him as both my parent and the Fire Lord. And he loves me. Zuko's problem is that he never figured out how to earn it. I did. "
Of course Zuko never figured out how. He probably didn't even know he had to—it's not like he had to earn anybody else's. They just gave it to him. Just like they never gave it to you.
Only your Father ever has.
(Hasn't he?)
"You don't have to earn someone's love, Azula," Mai says, somewhere between softness and resignation. Like she's saying something she wished she didn't know. "You can't."
Your smile tastes bitter. "You're right. I can't. Funny how it seems to work out for everyone else."
Ty Lee squeezes your hand tight. "Azula…"
"Why are we even talking about this?" You lift your jaw so you're no longer looking at Mai's sunrise stare or the way Ty Lee's collar shifts in the renewed breeze. Beyond them both, the courtyard stretches in petal-strewn marble, each flower-bed carved into the imperial insignia and so filled with fire lilies they almost seem ablaze. Wisteria trees loom over them like clouds tied to earth. "Every time we're meant to have a conversation about something important, we always end up talking about trivial inanities instead."
It's so frustrating.
"When something's on your mind, it'll always come out somehow," Ty Lee says with something resembling a smile, though in the same way that the Water Tribe has something resembling a civilisation. "Just like Ember Island!"
"I hardly think something as pathetic as love is constantly on my mind, Ty Lee," you say, and do not understand why both of their expressions freeze for a second before shifting into something so complicated you haven't a hope of deciphering it. "Let alone treason against my Father."
"You really need to forgive yourself for that, you know," Mai says, about as lightly as anyone truly can when their sartorial style would make even the Day of the Black Sun jealous.
"Excuse me?" What in the world is she talking about?
"You forgave me for my… treachery at the Boiling Rock," she explains, stretching the word out like she's trying to draw-and-quarter it, "because I was doing it to save Zuko. Why are you being so stupid about forgiving yourself for the same thing?"
"That's—they are entirely unrelated matters." For the second time in this conversation, you jerk your hand out of Ty Lee's grasp so you can fold your arms in clear dismissal. "You are not the Crown Princess and you do not have my responsibilities."
"Yeah, but tomorrow you're the Fire Lord, right?" Ty Lee chimes, bright and clear as the Academy bell of your youth—and with just as inconvenient a timing. "It's like I said before! There's no problem if you just pardon yourself. Isn't that what being royalty is all about?"
It is most certainly not. "Perhaps you mistake me for some odious, jumped-up bureaucrat like Long Feng."
"He was pretty annoying," Mai agrees. "But whatever. If you're going to keep beating yourself up because you're experiencing a human feeling and don't know how to handle it, you do you, Azula. Are we ever going to get to talking about this plan of yours?"
"Ooh, the plan!" Ty Lee bounces on her stool, braid flapping over her shoulder and back. "I wanna hear the plan too. Yours are always so exciting, Azula!"
You narrow your eyes in suspicion, certain she's trying to mollify you so you forget about reminding Mai exactly where she can keep her tongue, but Ty Lee's teeth are blinding in the afternoon Sun, her cheeks pinched wide with joy. It's—difficult to hold onto your anger that way, especially when for all her blatant insubordination even Mai is leaning a little closer to the table, body threatening to curve in like a question-mark.
A sigh slips from your mouth—without a trace of smoke. "Very well. If you insist, I suppose I can explain."
There is a hallway in the palace.
At the end of that hallway is a throne.
And on that throne sits a girl called you.
You could have chosen anywhere in Caldera to wait for Zuko and his inevitable companion. You've met him in the gardens; you've met him at the coronation; once you even met him in the still-smouldering ruins of the ruined Avatar temple the ghost of Roku broke. As far as you can tell, the location doesn't really matter. It always ends the same.
But today, you are here: lounging on the Dragon Throne, drumming your fingers on an armrest worn so smooth by so many before you that it's said Fire Lord Hanyu once escaped an assassin by spotting their reflection in it. You think you might believe it. It's not like there's anything else interesting to look at from here. Just a sea of polished mahogany floorboards interrupted by gilded red carpets emblazoned with scenes from the Unification, regimented rows of gold-plated columns marshalling the space as if someone buried a battalion helmet-first, and at the very end a towering double door carved into the imperial flame.
You suspect it would look more impressive if you'd lit the wall of flame that is meant to separate the Fire Lord from all who genuflect before him—but you are not crowned yet, and it would give the wrong impression. It's not like you're planning on staying in the seat once Zuko arrives, anyway. It's hard enough not to talk down to him as it is; you'd be a fool to feign sympathy while sitting in your Father's seat.
(It's not, though, is it?
He threw it away just like Ba Sing Se.)
There are no courtiers here today. It might be mere hours before your coronation—at midday, when the Sun is highest in the sky—but you have sent away even your Dai Li. Not banished, of course. You are hardly so lost to your delusions. Just… reassigned, given duties that the more intelligent will have grasped are designed to ensure there are no witnesses to whatever it is you intend to do. As ever, though, they obey. Long Feng trained them well—in a delicious irony, too well. Just a touch more loyalty to the nation, to the idea, over the man and you wouldn't have broken them.
But break them you did. It's funny how that jumped-up peasant never realised: when you build a cult of personality around yourself as a enlightened dictator with absolute power who symbolises the true and only path for the people and to whom all obedience is ultimately given, are you talking about Long Feng, or are you talking about the Fire Lord? You're almost tempted to invite him to court one year, just so you can watch as he realises the depth of his mistake.
For that, though, you'll need to make it to court in the first place.
And in the end, that's why you're here, isn't it?
You snap out a spark, just to listen to the hiss, to take something away from the vast, smothering silence that fills the rest of the room. It shudders over your fingers, fierce and violent and solely, wholly yours. Even Sozin's Comet cannot take it from you—though it wants to, screams to, the crackling cry of lightning begging to ground itself in earth. It would be so easy to let it go. To sip so deep of the flame-that-is-you that not even the centre of the world would be safe from your fury. But you don't. You can't.
It's funny. In all your endless cycles, you've never had a chance to truly test your limits. If you actually make it to Sozin's Comet, there's always something to do. Somewhere to go. Somebody to fight. Even if you escape this time—if convincing Zuko to surrender the throne without an Agni Kai is the answer the universe wants from you—it's not like you'll know until you open your eyes somewhere that isn't the Boiling Rock, and by then, it will be too late.
Sometimes you think it might be a tragedy: the transcendental flame brought by a celestial miracle, turned only to destruction. Not a single living person will ever experience this day again except a few squalling babes. It seems almost a shame that it has only ever served as a tool for war.
(And whose shame is that?
What a silly question.
It's right there in the name.)
But you don't have time to spend on childish fantasies.
After all, Zuko is on the other side of the door.
His flame dawns against your own like a sunrise slipping through clouds—you've known he was near since he entered the palace, but this close it's almost like you can see him through the wall. You wonder if he can see you too. Probably not. Your brother might have found another way to burn—not just a strange new stance but a strange new soul, a bonfire where there once was a blaze—but even a few weeks on the run with the Avatar can't erase three years of wasteful coddling by the old fuddy-duddy. For all that Zuko claims a new perspective, at the end of the day, he's still so very blind.
(Of course he is.
Your Father near enough to burned out one of his eyes, didn't he?)
"Are you going to come in, Zuzu?" you call, sweet as sword-sting. "If you really want to become Fire Lord, the first step is certainly not being afraid of a room."
He might actually be, which is the most hilarious thing of all. This, after all, is where Azulon pronounced his execution and your Father declared his banishment. The ruin of his life twice over echoing off four overly-embellished walls. You almost wouldn't blame him for a little trepidation.
Whether or not Zuko is vacillating out of fear or indecision is, however, rather moot, since almost as soon as you finish speaking you feel his spirit spike. There's a short ripple of flame that ignites the ridges of the doors until it's like the carved dragons have burst to incandescent life, lit by dramatic sunrise hues, and then they slide open on ponderously silent hinges.
Revealed behind them is your brother, dressed just as you saw him at the Western Air Temple, in a peasant's muddy reds and a pair of dusty sandals—accompanied by both Mai and Ty Lee.
There was only supposed to be one.
Your instructions were very clear that there was only supposed to be one.
The lightning stills on the top of your finger.
"Azula, guess what?" If Ty Lee has noticed the bowstring tension in your spine, she's doing an excellent job of ignoring it. "Zuko actually came here alone!"
Zuko… came here alone?
Today?
When you don't have a hostage?
He sighs, weary with irritation. "Did you have to tell Azula that, Ty Lee?"
"Yes," she says, with a sudden flash of seriousness you're not wholly convinced you actually see before it's replaced by another cheery smile. "Isn't it great? It's only the four of us again, just like Ember Island!"
"Which part?" Mai asks, eyes flicking from your hands to Zuko's face. "When we were arguing, or when we were trashing a house?"
"The smoothing part, silly!" You feel as nonplussed as Mai's blink. It appears Ty Lee has taken temporary leave of her senses, rather than merely her post. "We should go back there one day."
"There are slightly more pressing concerns before us than a holiday, Ty Lee," you say, aiming for a sarcasm you can't quite seem to carry. "You may have noticed I am sitting in one of them."
"Not for long." Zuko shifts slightly in place, muscles pulling as tight as his flame. "Sorry, Azula, but you're not gonna be Fire Lord today."
You flick your wrist to snuff the spark threatening to crawl up your forearm, sleeves rustling as you move. Your robes—ornately tailored across your shoulders and waist, a gold-stitched ripple of flame hidden under the Crown Princess' ochre mantle—are a stark contrast to Zuko's humble shambles of an outfit. To think he had the foresight to prepare an escape but not a change of clothes. Your brother's brain is truly a mystery.
"Oh?" you say, drawing out the sound for a half-breath too long for genuine curiosity. "And how do you intend to stop me?"
"You know how." In the shadows of the throne room, Zuko's eyes are as bright as sunlight on the edge of a sword. "Maybe we're both tired of this fight, Azula, but that doesn't mean I'm afraid of it."
In another life, you should be sits on the tip of your tongue. But you have lost to this Zuko—the Zuko under the Comet, who shatters Sozin's legacy with Sozin's own power—too many times before. It serves you no purpose to pretend he has any reason to be afraid of you.
"Thankfully," you say instead, "I have no intention of having it in the first place. I refuse your challenge."
The surprise that settles in his partly-open mouth and partly-narrowed eyes is as gormless as it was when he was seven and you first beat him in pai sho. "What?"
"You're an exile sentenced to death in absentia for treason, Zuzu," you explain—not as if to a child, because you would never lower yourself to something so undignified, but nonetheless nearly drawled out, each word given time to linger like blood in a cut. "Surely you don't believe even being my brother is enough to compel my honour."
"You're a lot of things, Azula," he says, "but you're not a cowa—"
"—are you just going to keep posturing, Zuko?" You allow yourself the curl of a smirk, which withers immediately under Mai's dangerously raised eyebrow. When she speaks again, you think the Royal Engineers would weep to measure the flatness of her tone. "You too, Azula. Both of you really came here to talk. Not fight. So stop acting like children and talk."
In hindsight, letting Mai learn you're not angry at her was a terrible mistake. She seems to have taken it as an invitation to treat you like she's forgotten disrespecting royalty is what filled a quarter of the Boiling Rock. Perhaps a reminder is in order.
You open your mouth, and Ty Lee says, "But Mai, we are children."
You successfully disguise your bark of laughter as a cough by covering your mouth with a hand. "I suppose I cannot blame dear Zuzu for his… hot-headedness. No doubt he's finding it difficult to control himself under the influence of the Comet—aren't you, brother?"
Zuko rolls his eyes. "Whatever you say, Azula. Are you going to stay lazing up there on the throne, or are you going to come down here and pretend you don't think you're better than me?"
You jut your chin forward so you can stare imperiously down your nose at him. "I hardly think I would be pretending, but very well."
Drawing yourself up from the Dragon Throne in a movement as precise as any of your kata, you take a few steps forward and drop off the edge of the dias, landing softly on your sandals with an easy flex of your knees. Your shoes hardly make a noise against the smooth floorboards as you walk towards your brother and your friends.
Has Zuko noticed you're not wearing your armour yet?
You imagine so. If nothing else, he's always been good at considering you a threat.
"Mai. Ty Lee." You fold your hands behind your back until you could be lecturing—or standing in military parade. "Since it seems Zuko does, in fact, wish to negotiate, fetch us a table, would you? You'll find one just outside in the hall."
"No, I'll get it," Zuko says. How manly of him, to disguise a desire to have some time to think—and presumably flail at strategising—behind a thinly-veiled attempt to show off his strength. You're sure Mai is swooning.
Well. Even if she isn't quite that far gone, there's still something wrong with her head, because instead of taking the excuse to sit around and do nothing, she says, "I'll help. Ty Lee can stay here."
"Okay!" Ty Lee says sunnily, before you can think to protest. She prances forward until she's next to you and says, much too loud to fake even trying to whisper, "Aren't they so cute, Azula?"
You cannot think of anything less adorable than the idea there is a person in the world who finds your brother attractive, actually.
Sure, he's a prince, and he's determined, and he has that whole honour tomfoolery going on, and he's an adequate firebender, and that book that was most certainly not about pillows Lu Ten had did mention that men with deep voices are less hateful than others, but, seriously—he's Zuko.
Ty Lee must glean the direction of your thoughts from the shape of your frown, because she giggles and pats your shoulder—or at least as close as she can get to it, given the thick formality of your robes and the added royal mantle. "Don't worry. It'll make sense to you eventually!"
"If there comes a point in my existence where that," you say, gesturing to where, in the distance, Mai lifts a hand to press her palm against Zuko's cheek and pull their heads together to whisper something, "begins to make sense to me, you have my royal permission to commit regicide."
Ty Lee giggles again, high and sweet like the cry of a flute. "You're so funny, Azula."
You were entirely serious.
"I know," she says, falling into a handstand for no apparent reason, fingers wide against the wood. "That's why it was funny!"
As she is clearly feeling far too moody to respect your intellect, you close your eyes rather than reply. Close to you, the shallow sound of her breathing laps against you like waves to a shore; far from you, the dull scrape of wood against wood reveals that Zuko is finally heaving the table in; all around you, the Comet looms, reflected across every flame in every torch in the palace, a thousand thousand fragments of the burning sky dragged down to earth.
You breathe in.
It tastes like wet ash and lightning.
You breathe out.
No matter what happens, at least this will never leave you.
You open your eyes as Zuko drops the corner of the table to a rough stop near the two of you, Mai's gaze flicking over his arms and shoulders as if checking for injury before she returns her attention to where it belongs: you.
"Well," you say, stepping toward the nearest flat edge of the table—a thick, square piece with legs carved to resemble swirling ripples of flame—and settling yourself into perfect, straight-backed posture, calves under your thighs and hands folded together, "shall we?"
Ty Lee falls out of her handstand and flits to your side, braid flapping loosely. Zuko drops roughly into something cross-legged he probably copied from the Avatar, jaw firm. Mai looks at you, then at Zuko, then back to you, and finally takes a seat at his side as if she is a dagger slipped back into a sheath.
You raise an interrogative eyebrow; one of her shoulders twitches into a shrug, as if to say you were the one who told me to take responsibility.
Well.
You suppose that's fair enough.
(It still hurts.
But you won't bleed to death with the pain of it.
Not this time.)
There are a few awkward beats of silence—awkward, of course, for everyone except you, who has never been awkward in your life.
Eventually, though. someone speaks up.
"Alright, Azula," Zuko says, watching you steadily over his folded arms, "what do you want?"
Hah.
Where do you start?
But you can't afford to get distracted like that. Not here. Not now. Not today.
You have a mission.
And that mission begins with:
"I want you to give up on the throne," you say, chin held high, the very picture of a princess, "and attend my coronation in peace."
"I can't do that," he says without a flicker of hesitation. He doesn't even have to think to refuse you. It's a reflex like breathing. "The Fire Nation needs to change."
"Maybe it does." You ignore Ty Lee's gasp, Mai's raised eyebrow, the circle of Zuko's mouth. "Maybe we won the war months ago when we took Ba Sing Se. Maybe I wish I never said we should burn it all back down. Maybe you're right."
You lean forward, slamming your palms on the low table, fingers spread so wide it hurts to hold them there.
"But why does it have to be you who changes it, Zuko? Why does it always have to be you?" The words slip out like blood, even though you can't find the wound. "You don't even understand what it means to be Fire Lord. You know what you want to do, but you don't know what doing it will do to you."
"Azula—"
Three people speak as one, but your heartbeat hammers them out. The torches that bristle across the walls and pillars are pulsing to that atavistic rhythm: orange, then blue, then orange, then blue. You're not even sure if Zuko knows he's fighting you for control. The shadows that cower away in the corners those coruscating flames cannot reach writhe as if they're being strangled—the same way your voice strangles out from your throat.
"Did you ever think about it? The sort of person the Fire Lord has to be? So what if the Fire Nation has to change?" Your nails gouge into the tabletop, the tips charring dark wounds in the wood as if the red polish that covers them is fire in truth. "For a hundred years the only thing we have bowed to has been men like Sozin. Like Azulon. Like our Father. Like me. Do you really think, after all that, it will listen to you?"
If you were any less a firebender than you are, your breath would be coming in sharp pants.
"You have a dream," you say, soft as ash, falling back onto your knees, closing your eyes. He was right. You do look tired. "Seen in a certain light," like the haunting quiet of Lu Ten's room, under the tapestry of stars spinning across his ceiling, "it might even be beautiful. But the Fire Lord does not dream. The Fire Lord does not rule out of beauty. You can try to change that, but in the end, it will change you."
There was a time, at the feeble dawn of your memories, little flickers of sensation and feeling cresting over the horizon of your consciousness, when your Father was a different man. When your mother was a different woman. When you and Zuko would crash about in the sand on Ember Island, playfighting and play-fighting; when your Father saved Zuko from drowning and your mother smiled at you.
(When, for a few scattered summers, you might have even been happy.)
It didn't last.
How could it?
No light burns in the shadow of the Dragon Throne.
Why else would even Sozin be buried down in the dark?
"That's the difference between us, Zuko." You want to laugh, but all you can manage is a wry twitch of the lip. "It would change you. It wouldn't change me. And I think—"
—you think that maybe Mai was right. This palace has only ever hurt Zuko.
You've spent your whole life believing that's because he was weak.
But on this endless day, in this endless life, you can finally admit:
Maybe it's because he was strong.
Only in the wrong way.
"—you're right, Azula." It takes you a second or two to process that Zuko is speaking—to recognise that he is saying those words without spite or sarcasm. His arms are unfolded now; they rest on his knees, one hand covered by Mai's, the sharp slivers of her fingers pale against Zuko's slight tan. "Sozin started the war and murdered the Air Nomads. Azulon crushed the Water Tribes and told Father—told Ozai to kill me. And… and Ozai gave me this scar," his other hand comes up to rest on that angry, unfeeling skin, "and is trying to burn the Earth Kingdom to the ground. That's what being the Fire Lord means to the world. That's what being the Fire Lord means to our people."
He shakes his head. His hair is so short it hardly even shifts as he moves.
"But if that's what it means to you, then that's why it needs to be me."
Your knuckles are as white as a corpse's. "Were you actually listening? Fire is the element of power. You don't even know what that is. You've never had it. If you had, you'd never think just being good is enough to change the world."
(Of course it isn't.
Not even being perfect could do that.)
Zuko snorts. "I've done too many things wrong to too many people to think I'm good, Azula. But you'll never convince me not to believe I can't be better. We all can."
You want to scream. Like acrid vomit in your throat. "That's not what I'm saying. Are you so stubborn you can't comprehend anything over the bleating of your own self-righteousness?"
Maybe Ty Lee can hear the creaking tension in your voice, the ice on the verge of collapsing, because she tries to smile, a trembling, tremulous thing, and asks, "Maybe it would—it might help if you explained a bit more?"
"I think she's been quite clear." Mai is frowning, though not—it doesn't seem aimed at you. Or Zuko. Or Ty Lee. She's looking down at her lap, as if the rich black fabric of her dress holds all the secrets the stars will never show. "Azula's right, Zuko. I know you don't think being the Fire Lord will be easy, or even safe, but you can't—just deciding you'll be able to handle it doesn't mean you will. Or that you should."
Your brother's expression stutters to a halt, the firm line of his mouth falling apart and the proud tension in his shoulders slipping. In his chest, you feel his flame flicker. The torches on the walls follow suit.
On his knee, his fingers retreat a little.
"You too, Mai?" he asks. It's not quite betrayal, but for a moment, you almost feel sympathetic.
"Not like that, Zuko," she says, and you see her forearm flex as she briefly squeezes his hand. "I'm here to support you. You tried to get rid of me once and I think I've made clear exactly how stupid a decision that was. It's just that… I was here, before Princess Ursa disappeared. I've watched my father try to rule New Ozai. I followed Azula as she hunted you and the Avatar. And I was here again, when you came back."
Mai shakes her head, hair-buns barely shifting in place.
"As a citizen of the Fire Nation, I want you as my Fire Lord. As your girlfriend, I don't want you to be the Fire Lord." Her eyes flick to yours and hold them before you can look away. "And I don't want Azula to be either. This palace is the last place either of you should be. Frankly, I wish all of us were anywhere but here."
"I—didn't know you felt that way," Zuko manages.
You thought you did.
But—
—And I don't want Azula to be either.
You shouldn't be surprised. You still remember Mai telling you, so casually, that she would have saved you too. You remember Ty Lee telling you about choices.
But every time someone says the words, it still flattens you like a sandcastle before the sea.
"Hey," says Ty Lee, not quite as hesitant as before, rising a little on her haunches from where she sits next to you until her shoulders crest your own, "why do one of you have to be the Fire Lord? Why can't General Iroh do it?"
"I would rather die than serve under him," you spit at the same time as Zuko says, "Uncle would never take the throne."
(Of course you noticed even Ty Lee is assuming your Father is going to lose.
It's just not worth protesting.
Not when she's right.)
You and your brother exchange a glance—despite the snarl still lingering on your face like a bruise, he swallows whatever inane defence of Iroh's character he'd usually toss out. Maybe it's because when it comes to that dusty relic on the throne, the both of you are at least agreed it's never happening.
"He's too much of a coward to take the responsibility," you say; just because Zuko is trying to be the bigger person doesn't mean you have to be. "He ran from it when he ran from Ba Sing Se. Why do you think he's spent so much effort trying to push Zuko here instead?"
You blow out a breath: a short, harsh sound.
"No, Ty Lee. The next Fire Lord is Zuko, or me. The showdown that was always meant to be."
Her face droops, like a flower gone too long without the Sun. "That doesn't seem fair. You're finally getting along!"
Your head cocks to the side in pure bafflement until one of your blade-like bangs rests flat across your cheek like a shadow. Zuko mirrors the gesture, eyebrows pulled together.
In what world could she possibly think this looks like the two of you are getting along?
Mai sighs, briefly resting her forehead on the tips of a couple of fingers.
You'd think it a reflection of the same shared sentiment were it not for the way she'd looked at the two of you, not Ty Lee, before she did it.
You have no idea why.
"Look," you say, your fists finally unclenching in your lap. A spark of lightning sprawls out of one palm and you start to toy with it, bouncing it from finger to finger to match the pounding pulse of Sozin's Comet. "If you're refusing to listen to me, Zuko, listen to Mai. You have your friends. You have your honour. You even have," an involuntary grimace, "a lover. You turned your back on our Father and found your… place."
You're not really sure what you're saying. Or why each word sits in your stomach so heavily it feels like the void is in your belly rather than your skull. But you keep speaking anyway.
"To become the Fire Lord will cost you everything. You know that. You've seen it again, and again, and again. Sozin and Roku. Iroh and Lu Ten. Father and mother. Friends, and honour, and family."
You reach out to Zuko, as if offering him the cold fire that shudders in your hand, a crackling, hissing radiance that he must be able to feel all the way to his bones.
And then your fist snaps shut and snuffs it out.
"Are you really willing to lose all of that? And for what? Some nebulous chance to change things? For who? For what? The better? Nothing's better for everyone. It's always worse for some. Don't pretend it won't be worse for you."
"If I didn't know you," your brother says slowly, warily, speaking the way he might to the edge of a cliff, "I'd almost think you care."
Ty Lee reaches over to squeeze your forearm, where your arm-guards usually are. Her touch is soft even through the silk.
"I am angry at you, Zuko," you say, and wonder if he'll recognise the echo, "but I don't hate you. I just want—it's not important. My point is this: you shouldn't be the Fire Lord. You shouldn't want to be the Fire Lord. You know you were never really raised for it. Not since I started to bend. Not since Father chose me."
You reach into the blade-pocket of your robes—the subtly stitched sheath in which Lo and Li taught you most non-bending noblewomen keep their last resort—and pull out the Fire Lord's crown. In the rippling blue-and-orange fires that illuminate the room, the five-pronged flame gleams as gold as your eyes.
You set it down on the table with the dull thunk of metal on wood.
"Give up on the throne, Zuko," you repeat, "and attend my coronation in peace. It's the right thing to do. For both of us."
He's silent for a long time, staring at the crown.
So is Mai.
So is Ty Lee.
So are you.
And then
and your chest splinters to glass.
Mai and Ty Lee glance up at you and flinch away from the wreckage.
Zuko breathes out, long and heavy, less a sound than a feeling. He drags a hand down his face, nails rasping against the dead flesh of his scar.
He's three years older than you, but he's never looked it until now.
You don't know why you notice.
It's getting hard to concentrate over the thundering silence in your skull.
"You're right, Azula," he says, low, raspy, as if he has to tear each word from his throat. "Father chose you to rule. And I can see why. You're so much better than me at everything the Fire Lord needs. I couldn't do it like you. I've never been able to do it like you."
Then he breathes in and he straightens and his shoulders firm and the last blue torch in the room is swallowed by gold.
"But I think… I think that's why I can't let you do it. Because you talk about being the Fire Lord the same way you talk about being a monster. And you've always tried so hard to stop anyone from seeing it that, if I hadn't met you in that forest, it might have taken me another three years to realise—but there's a little bit of you that's like a little bit of me, isn't there?"
Zuko's looking at you the way Iroh was looking at you when he was crying and you hate it like you hate him like you hate Zuko
(no you don't.)
"And that little bit doesn't want to be a monster. It's only that it doesn't know there's any other way to be. But Uncle showed me. And Song showed me. And Lee showed me. And Jin showed me. And Katara showed me. And Aang showed me. And so did everyone else. They're why I want to be the Fire Lord. So I can show the Fire Nation just like they showed me."
His cheeks pull up into a brief smile. It's lower on one side. His scar doesn't move as easily.
"I just didn't figure out until now that I need to show you too."
Zuko stands. You look up and he seems so
so far away.
His hands fold into the sign of the flame and he bows to you.
He's never bowed to you before.
"Crown Princess Azula. With the dragons as my witness, I am Zuko, son of Ursa, brother of Azula, son of Ozai, prince of the Fire Nation, and I challenge you to an Agni Kai."
Ty Lee is a distant pressure on your hands.
Mai mouths something that might be I'm sorry.
A girl finds herself standing.
"I am Azula," she whispers, "daughter of Ozai, sister of Zuko, daughter of Ursa, princess of the Fire Nation, and I accept your challenge."
You, Princess Azula, have experienced a Revelation, which has Broken one of your Truths.
The modified Truth can be found in the spoiler box below. Changes in bold indicate new text; changes instrikethrough indicate replaced or removed text.
(2/3) Monster?
There is a lonely path in the palace. At the end of that lonely path is a room. And in that room is a girl called monster. Her name is Azula, and she struggles to understand feelings. Or family. All that is left to her is what she has been taught: and what she has been taught is to want, to take, and to not care if the taking hurts. But it does. And even a monster may grow tired of pain.
(2/3) Nothing Wrong With That Child
There is a path in the palace. At the end of that path is a room. And in that room is a girl who doesn't want to be a monster. Her name is Azula, and she's struggling to understand her feelings. And her family. So much of what is left to her is what she has been taught: and what she has been taught is to want, and to take, and to not care if the taking hurts. But it does. And you are tired of pain.
You don't understand.
For the first time since you became a hollow echo of Sozin's Comet, spinning around the world every nine days instead of a century, your brother didn't come to fight. You didn't come to fight. Nobody else came to fight. It was just you, and Zuko, and Mai, and Ty Lee.
What was it that she said? Just like Ember Island.
And just like Ember Island, it all ended in fire.
Even though you did everything right.
Didn't you?
Mai and Ty Lee were alive and well. Zuko's little temple hide-out with the Avatar was safe and sound. None of his friends were kidnapped so he would come running half-cocked and desperate. You didn't give Iroh the space to slink to his side on the day of the Comet. You even—you even sat down and talked about your feelings.
What else does the universe want from you?
You're not supposed to fight Zuko. You know that. You get that, okay? You do. And you tried. You really, truly did. And you think… you think he was trying too. The crown was on the table and the question was in the air and he was thinking for so long—Zuko, who never thinks about anything!
But in the end, he thought, and he thought, and he still didn't pick you.
You weren't even wrong. He said so himself. You were right. You would have been the better Fire Lord.
So why was that his reason to refuse you?
Oh, you know he talked about you not wanting to be a monster and not knowing how to be anything else and wanting to show you what it looked like and all of these soft little things that you shouldn't have any interest in believing but—
But—
But what?
He refused you.
Just like everyone else in your family does.
Iroh. Your mother.
(Your Father.)
Only Lo and Li have ever given you what you asked for.
(Funny how, in your very first cycle, you chose to refuse them.
No wonder Zuko didn't want you to be the Fire Lord.)
They told you to never forget who you are. But the truth is…
…you're not always sure who that is.
Not anymore.
Everything you thought you knew is glass. Sometimes you can look through it and see the truth beyond. Sometimes it just breaks and you're left with nothing but the pieces of who you used to be.
And you think—you think you need someone to help you find them.
It's pathetic, but it's the truth.
So many times you've tried to find the answer and so many times you've been wrong. You could pretend that you were only wrong this time because you didn't use the right approach but you know it isn't. No matter what you'd offered him, Zuko would have spouted something self-righteous (like he was trying to be your brother instead of your enemy) and the throne would have slipped from your grasp again.
You need a new perspective.
Lo and Li have already given you that, once. It wouldn't be new again.
But who else could you go to?
Zuko? On the day of the Boiling Rock? When he's the whole reason you're in this mess to begin with? Hardly.
Your Father?
You couldn't—you couldn't waste his time like that.
But who else is left?
Lu Ten is dead.
Even if your mother wasn't gone, you'd rather rot for a hundred cycles more than ask her.
And quite frankly, you wish Iroh was gone with her.
At this rate you might as well ask…
You might as well ask Mai and Ty Lee.
It doesn't sound as silly in your head as you thought it would.
So many times you've killed them. Once or twice they've even killed you. You've lied to them. You've saved them. You've been to festivals and forests with them. The three of you have talked over weeping volcanoes and crowded desks—in skies and gardens and bedrooms. No matter how many times they betrayed you and you betrayed them, when you've reached out, they've reached right back.
You've told them a lot of things. They've told you so many too. But the closest you've come to a question might well be what are your intentions for my brother?
You suppose it's probably time to change that.
If nothing else, it'll be interesting—and wasn't that a lie you told yourself, once?
There's just one little thing left.
You're searching for certainty. For someone to show you what you're missing. There are so many things it could be. But you have your suspicions. You have a question bubbling in the back of your brain. Sometimes you can feel it on the tip of your tongue, like you've just scoffed down three bowls of extra-spicy fire noodles in a row.
So, Princess Azula: what is the one thing you most want to ask Mai and Ty Lee about?
[ ] Your Father. In every life, they turn from him to save Zuko. Ty Lee has questioned him again and again. Mai has said you're 'weird' about him. But he's still—he's still your Father. The only one in the world who loved you from the start. Why is that supposed to be wrong?
[ ]Your uncle. Lo and Li said he was a lot like you. So why didn't he choose you? Why did he pick Zuko? What did he see in failure that he feared in success?
Even if you thought they had the answers, you refuse to dignify him with the questions.
[ ]Your mother. They were there when you were young. They left when she left. They saw it all. So why did she think you were a monster? What was so wrong with you that your own mother couldn't love you?
You are not going to spill your soul to your only friends over that woman.
[ ] Your brother. It's clear to you now, at least, that when they choose him, it's not because they wouldn't choose you. But the universe has demonstrated at length they are the exceptions. Not the rule. So what is it that he has? What essential part of Zuko's soul makes him worthy of the grace you have never been given?
[ ] You. Princess Azula the Blue. Heir apparent to the Dragon Throne. Conqueror of Ba Sing Se. Half Roku—half Sozin. Where you are, so is the Fire Nation in all its rapacious glory. Yours is the blood and bone of empire. All the things you should have ever wanted to be. But sometimes you think of fire dancing under the Moon; of three girls and the horizon and a flight across half the world. Is that wrong? Are you wrong to dream—to think, so briefly, of being something more?
Nothing lives here.
Nothing breathes here.
The Catacombs are as deep and dark as the hollow of a grave, for a grave is what they are: the perforation of tunnels that wind sluggishly beneath the High Temple of the Fire Sages, like blood through the veins of a corpse, lead to the dozens on dozens of mausoleums dedicated to the Fire Lords of old. Down one of those sparsely-lit corridors rests Fire Lord Zoryu; down another waits Fire Lord Gonryu; down another still moulders Fire Lord Yosor.
But you are not here to pay respects to your ancestors, or to marvel at the strength of a line that traces unbroken to the unification of the Fire Islands. You hardly have the time for ancient relics. Zoryu might have crushed the clans, but unfurling the nightmare of his specific tax regulations for the non-hereditary farmers on Shuhon Island once cost you a perfect score on a practice test you sat to prepare for the Academy's graduation examinations and for that you will never wholly forgive him.
No: you are here for Fire Lord Sozin, the great progenitor of all that you know and all that you have ever sought to become.
The scrolls the Head Archivist returned to you following your inquiry had been largely boring genealogies, but they had confirmed that Zuko had not been lying—or, rather, had not been lied to. Your mother was indeed descended from Roku. So is Zuko.
So are you.
The old windbag had been thorough, though. Scattered among the genealogies were stories and excerpts from the lives of each of the Avatars you'd inquired about. Some were plainly dated propaganda extolling the virtues of their character, some were more biting historical criticisms of their political acumen (or lack of it), and some were just peculiar excerpts that served little purpose except, you imagine, to humanise the Avatar in the eyes of the less aware.
But one of them had led you here, to the Catacombs—in the shadow of the night, so as not to concern your Father with trivial reports of your whereabouts the day before his coronation—and the grand hall that bloated its way to Sozin's tomb.
It had seemed almost an afterthought at first in the deluge of information you'd received; a small, square piece of carefully-gilded card, the same kind that all important palace letters were written on. You'd almost skipped over reading it. Why would you care about the guest list for Roku's wedding?
Almost skipped—but not quite. It would have been the height of carelessness to disregard any information you could gather on your enemy, even if only to determine why it wasn't important. So you had read the card, and it had immediately rewarded your attention to detail, because it had been that silly romantic frippery that had told you Fire Lord Sozin had been Roku's best man.
No wonder Zuko had stooped to asking you about your "great-grandfather's history". He must have been so confused by whatever Iroh had told him—Iroh, who had clearly known it, and had clearly manipulated your brother down whatever winding path of wisdom and weakness and tea had been necessary for him to learn it—that he'd been willing to risk you finding out the truth just to try and make sense of it.
If only you'd been a little more willing to wonder why he was asking. Not that it would have changed anything. It just would have been… interesting to know.
The implications, after all, are fascinating. Roku had died Sozin's enemy, but Sozin had clearly remembered him—enough to ensure that Roku's blood eventually joined Sozin's own, whether by his own command or that of Azulon—and you suspect, given the invitation, it may have been with a kind of rotting, bruised fondness.
Like the echo of a fist struck across the face: a wound kept to remember the blow.
How maudlin.
Perhaps the musty, sulphurous air is getting to you.
Or maybe it's the skeletons—the ribs and bones and skulls that line the march to Sozin's final rest. Whoever designed this place had an eye for a particular kind of grandeur you imagine Mai would appreciate; the yellowing corpses of dragons stand in military procession either side of you, their horns towering from their skulls in silent salutes.
To make this pilgrimage is to know, inescapably, which genocide Sozin was prouder of.
You click your fingers and swallow the torches that burn in those long-dead mouths with the simmering blue of your chi.
You'd like to fight a dragon, you think as your boots disturb the dust carpeting the stone floor; it swirls and whirls in silent eddies around your feet with each step. It would be the truest test of firebending you can imagine. You've done most everything else, after all. Facing down the original source and seeing if you have surpassed it… now that would be something.
But you don't—you don't think you'd kill a dragon.
Not out of any misplaced, childish sentiment, of course. You're hardly Zuko, who's never met a misshapen creature he couldn't love. Rather, it's simply that killing one seems like a… waste. Why would you copy something Iroh has already done, especially when all it would prove in the eyes of the world is that you were as good as him? No.
Far better to do something Iroh thought too small to do.
So no. You wouldn't kill a dragon.
You'd tame a dragon.
Even Sozin had one, after all.
It would simply be following in the paths of your great forebears.
Unfortunately, it seems this particular path to your great forebear stretches for far too long to be reasonable. You understand that Sozin deserves the acclaim—he is, after all, the greatest Fire Lord in history since the first, he who became the Sun-who-Walked and whose true name has long been lost. But it is quite late at night and you do have a coronation to attend in the morning, so while counting the number of colossal rib-bones that crawl across the rocky ceiling at regular intervals has led you to quite an impressive number, at this point you'd prefer a door.
As if to mock you, however, it takes another five minutes of carefully managing your breath to avoid choking any of the dry dust you've been kicking up as you walk before you reach the towering metal aegis that protects Sozin's tomb from unworthy eyes. His imposing visage glares down at you from where he has been carved into the door as you tilt your head back—the fabric of your hood squashing against your neck—to take in the mechanism.
Oh. How disappointingly simple.
You reach out a gloved hand and press it against the ornate, three-pronged imperial emblem that rises slightly from his impressively-rippling robes; the metalworkers truly gave it their all for this particular depiction of the Fire Lord. The teardrop flame is slightly more worn than the rest—not too much, clearly only a few people have made regular visits here since his death, but enough to make things clear.
You exhale; an idle whisper of flame curls from your fingers and palm and sweeps through the whole statue until every inch of Sozin's cloak is edged in blue, until his mouth and nose and eyes fill with your fire and it seems as if you have granted the Fire Lord the one gift even he never had in life.
There's a slightly echoing click. The door groans open on hidden hinges when you give it a gentle push. Sozin's tomb is revealed to you in all its glory—or at least it is when you snap your fingers again and the fire that opened the door leaps instead to the row of torches half-hidden in the walls just below where the roof curves into a vast dome.
A museum's worth of imperial artefacts—blades and benches and bottles and books—scatter themselves around the room, largely dominated by a series of grand funerary urns. A beautifully-carved stone dragon guards the centre, curling like a castle wall around a single much smaller urn that you are quite sure holds Sozin's own ashes. Right before the urn is a narrow teak table, and—
—Zuko has been here before you, hasn't he?
The scrolls that should be neatly arranged on that table, Sozin's last will and testament to be buried with him so that even the Spirit World knows the Fire Lord's final decrees, are unfurling lazily like the tongue of a panting dog, and only four of them are even on the table to begin with. The fifth has rolled to rest under the most garishly-decorated urn you've seen since the one Ukano had in his office in Omashu.
How terribly undignified.
Your brother really has no respect for the traditions of his ancestors, does he?
Boots scraping against the tiles, well-polished but nonetheless worn by the indifference of time, you step forward to collect the loose scroll and replace it back on the table, carefully rolling the others back up, shifting them gently with your fingers until they sit in perfect formation once again. This is Sozin's tomb.
From the mouth of a dragon, his urn watches you with cold dismissal.
You breathe out. The flames on the walls flare until the whole room is empty of shadow; until you are illuminated by a dozen cerulean suns.
Sozin, you think, would not admire you. Maybe he would have, if you were still the same girl who set out to hunt the Avatar all those years ago: if you were still the executor's edge of the Fire Nation's blade, cold and sharp and honed to conquest.
You're not quite sure what sort of girl you are now. Still a princess; still the favoured heir; still Azula the Blue. You found the lightning and in it found yourself. Clawed yourself back from a mind made molten. You are stronger now than you have ever been.
But here, kneeling before Sozin's grave, with your fingers soft on the parchment that holds his final truth, it's impossible to ignore that if tomorrow the endless cycle of your life threw you only a few months further back, you would try to suggest that maybe his Comet had a more precise use than a second genocide.
You hardly think he would approve of that—not even if you were doing it for the sake of the Fire Nation.
(You would never dare to call Sozin short-sighted.)
The first scroll unfurls carefully under your touch, whispering against the wood it rests on. It is titled simply, because simplicity is all it needs: this is the final testimony of Fire Lord Sozin. The characters are gentler than you expected, each stroke and line slightly sloped as if traced by a hand that couldn't quite keep the brush entirely straight. It seems even Sozin was vulnerable to the trials of old age, as you have heard Lo and Li name them.
You breathe in.
Time to read.
One scroll.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
You breathe out.
What a sordid tale.
You thought you'd been the closest any member of Fire Nation royalty has come to killing the Avatar—but Sozin had you beaten even there.
How surprising the world can be.
You can see how the story would have gripped and despaired Zuko in equal measure. How he would have flipped through the scrolls faster and faster as brotherhood turned to betrayal and friendship turned to fury and finally, finally, at the end of all things an outstretched hand and—the scroll thrown away, history once again reminding him that happy endings are only ever the province of overblown, poorly-acted plays.
You can even see how it would have tied him closer to the Avatar's side. Zuko has always had the strangest sense of responsibility, and a chance to make amends for his forefather's sins would have had him champing at the bit to prove his own honour.
But to think, you muse as you rearrange the scrolls to once again sit in perfect regiments across the table and settle back on your haunches in precise seiza, that you owe your birth to Sozin two times over. Once, for pushing Roku past his own cowardice and towards the woman who became his wife, Ta Min; twice, for whatever festering affection he'd still held for Roku that led to his line not being excoriated from the halls of power but rather being allowed to marry into its apex.
There's a certain symmetry to it, you suppose—a rhyme repeated a century later. No wonder Iroh must have been so proud to tell Zuko about the warring legacies in his blood; to know that he had the perfect fulcrum upon which to tilt Zuko's self-image just ever-so-slightly in the direction of the light, or whatever other pretty words he'd have used to satisfy your brother's martyr complex.
Because Zuko, you find it easy to admit, is much more a man like Roku than he is like Sozin.
You suppose, as ever, that it had been inevitable you'd end up playing his villain. Had he seen it then, in that war council? Had he thought of Roku, who had sought to defy Sozin's ambitions, while you'd regurgitated them for your Father's smile? Probably not. For all that he's obsessed with plebeian dramatics, Zuko has never thought in narratives—a hilarious irony, given he spent three years by the side of someone trying to fit him in one.
The last laugh, admittedly, is probably on you, since the universe has bent the cycle of your life to demonstrating that Iroh had succeeded.
How tiresome.
You turn your attention away from the scrolls and to the room at large, the fabric of your dark cloak shifting and creasing as you turn to study it from one side to the other. There's no point keeping your hood on here, so you brush it back with a hand. Your top-knot—it would have been more unusual to not have one, here in Caldera, even when disguised—still feels a little pinched from where it's been cramped against your skull for so long, your scalp drawn bitingly tight. You almost want to shake it out, but you are not redoing the style without a mirror in front of Sozin's ashes. There's a limit to how much indignity you'll endure.
It's plain what Iroh had wanted Zuko to learn from this whole affair. Your brother had even said it himself: good and evil might always war inside of me, but I definitely know who won inside you.
How easy it is to move him.
Just give him a choice.
You offered one in Ba Sing Se, and he came to you. Iroh offered one in Caldera, and he went from you.
Maybe one day Zuko will offer you a choice.
Wouldn't that be funny?
You sigh. An idle twitch of your fingers snuffs the flames flickering in the alcoves. Now the room is as dark as Mai's sense of humour. Or perhaps the direction of your thoughts. But you hardly have the time to dwell on them—to let them linger as the dust does, in this tomb without fire that few except you and your brother have visited in what might be a century.
It's… this is Sozin. The architect of empire. One of the most important figures in the history of the Fire Nation. And you sit here, folded on your knees and shins, armourless save for the plates defending your forearms and the gorget around your neck, as perhaps one of the four people in the world who still know how awful a joke he told at Roku's wedding.
It shouldn't matter, particularly. You are hardly unfamiliar with Fire Nation propaganda, especially in matters of royalty. Of course Sozin had his secrets excised from memory. You lied to the face of the nation, too, when you told the world Zuko had killed the Avatar. Some things are simply a necessary part of infallibility.
But at the same time, you can't help wondering why he chose to bury it like this.
How easy it would have been, to wholly demonise Roku—to emphasise that the Avatar had pretended to be Sozin's friend when all along he was working with traitors to overthrow the Fire Lord and his rightful efforts to uplift the world. How simple, to blame him for the volcano that had killed him. Even someone with an elephant-rat's cunning like Long Feng would have seen it. You know Sozin must have.
Though perhaps wondering is the wrong word. Even though Sozin would not admire you, you have always admired him. You were named after Azulon as a show of favour, but for all his competence as Fire Lord and incompetence at selecting his successor, how could he compare to the man who made the world?
And you are—well. If Zuko is the side of your family that is Roku, you think it's clear you are certainly the side that is Sozin.
No. You're not really wondering, are you?
You know.
You know why Sozin wanted the world to forget he and Roku had ever even known one another, and still couldn't stop himself from writing it all down.
You know why Sozin was willing to commit genocide to eliminate the threat of the Avatar, but couldn't bring himself to paint Roku as a cold-hearted traitor instead of just another enemy of progress.
You know why Sozin left his best friend to die in burning suffocation while his favoured son still ensured their bloodlines would eventually join as one.
Guilt would be the easy answer. Shame, too. It's not quite either of those things, though. It rhymes with them, like grief does with regret. But it's something sharper. Not something that mourns. Not something that haunts. It's not anything like that—like the things people like Ty Lee or the Avatar look for so that they can keep pretending it's possible for someone to be sorry enough that they're no longer bad.
Sozin wasn't sorry.
He just didn't want to let go of any of the things he'd decided were his.
Not even when he felt they'd betrayed him.
Not even when it hurt.
How relatable.
Is that why your mother came to hate her time in Caldera Palace? Is that why she came to despise your Father—you know she did, all they ever did was argue when she wasn't coddling Zuko or looking at you as if you'd set fire to her precious peonies just for showing him up, like it was supposed to be a crime instead of a reflex he just wasn't smart enough to learn.
You're not sure you're willing to give her the credit. But she did manage, if nothing else, to kill the sitting Fire Lord in a way your Father seemed to have little difficulty covering up. There's a certain cunning in that, even if it pales in comparison to the bloodless conquest of Ba Sing Se.
So maybe she did figure it out. Maybe she finally realised after the second child that she wasn't there to be a princess, or even your Father's partner—she was there to be a possession, a trophy hung among Sozin's halls for nothing more, and nothing less, than the blood sloshing through her tainted veins.
So she saw Zuko, who she'd already loved too long to let go, and she saw you, the inescapable evidence that her only value was in popping out proof that Roku's line had been subsumed by Sozin's, and she made her choice.
But you doubt it.
(Nobody's ever needed a reason to find you unlovable.)
Sighing, you slip to your feet, cloak brushing against your legs as you turn to leave the tomb. You're not sure you've learned anything useful today, and your Father's coronation is in a concerningly small number of hours given you need both to sleep and to prepare. Then you'll need to meet with Mai and Ty Lee—and eventually, inevitably, Zuko.
You suppose you've figured out your angle at least. If Zuko knows about Roku, and about Sozin, if he remembers Azulon and the conversation in the throne room that gave your mother her final opportunity to demonstrate which child she truly loved, if how he thinks of your Father and your Father's choices is in any way reflected by how many times he's fought you over them… well, surely he should have realised that to be Fire Lord is to be someone your brother most assuredly does not want to be.
Lucky for him that you're right here, isn't it?
Truly, your magnanimity is unmatched.
(After all: to be Fire Lord is to never see the day past Sozin's Comet.)
The Sun is distant when your Father is crowned.
It still burns just as hot, just as large, transfixing the sky with a radiance to which all else, even the Fire Lord, must kneel. No clouds dare to obstruct its sight. The perfectly-polished limestone bricks—the ones that raise the three-stage dais above those worthy only to kneel in rank after rank at your Father's feet—gleam in its reflected light until any non-firebender would be forced to squint. Your fresh set of armour, made sleek with ceremony and without the slightest scratch to show it has ever defended a Princess of the Nation from harm, glimmers slightly, even the dragonbone paint unable to fully swallow the Sun's brilliance.
But as you close your eyes and bow your head so that as your Father crests that final step and takes in the horizon that will soon be his, it will not be obstructed by something as unnecessary as his daughter's face, you still can't help but think:
The Sun is distant when he is crowned.
His smile spreads slow and satisfied, like pitch poured before flame. You can't see it—he has not yet given you permission to look—but you know it as your heartbeat, as the blood that lingers between your veins.
(The blood that is half his, and half the Avatar's.
It doesn't mean anything, really.)
He takes a moment more to study all that has bent to his will; you feel his gaze slide across your back, over the generals and ministers and Fire Sages who fill the rest of the dais with obsequiousness and grey hair, over the rows of genuflecting soldiers and nobles who line either side of the royal carpet like a dragon's teeth around its tongue.
Then he speaks, and for a moment there is no other sound than this—not even the faint wash of the waves against the cliff, or the infinitesimal scrape of armour against stone as the less intelligent generals move to pretend they are giving your Father the full attention they should have already been offering from the start.
"Rise, Azula," he says, and you bite down on the sigh of relief that threatens to escape your throat even as you stand with the same careful obedience another would use to bow. "There has been a change of plans."
You know. "Yes, Father."
"Not even a protest," he muses, returning his attention to the grand vessel from which he will lead his conquest, smokestacks already steaming in preparation. "Where is your fire, my daughter?"
Your Father is unquestionable. "A Princess obeys her Fire Lord, Father. Your decision is final."
"Very good," he says. "I've decided to lead the fleet of airships to Ba Sing Se alone. You will remain here in the Fire Nation. I need you here to watch over the homeland."
That is the duty of the Fire Lord. "I will serve you with loyalty."
"And for your loyalty," he says, as if it's only just occurred to him, "I've decided to declare you the new Fire Lord."
Sorry, but you're not gonna become Fire Lord today. "I am grateful for this honour, Father, but if the Dragon Throne is to be mine, what will be yours?"
"Fire Lord Ozai is no more. Just as the world will be reborn in fire, I shall be reborn as the supreme ruler of the world." The words are heavy in the air. Like a war balloon. Like a comet. "From this moment on, I will be known as… the Phoenix King."
The Fire Sages are seamless—it takes your Father only moments to discard his old office like a spidersnake discards its skin and be crowned as no other has been or will ever be again. He raises his hands to the sky, the golden phoenixes of his pauldrons almost seeming to take flight. Behind him, the flagpoles swallow themselves in flame; below him, the crowds rise only so that they can bow again in staggered rows as if to mimic the ripple of your Father's glory across the Fire Nation.
This is his grand moment: the strict and eternal proof that he will outshine every Fire Lord who came before or after. Even Sozin.
(Especially you.)
There is nothing in your head except obedience and awe.
You are a loyal daughter of the Fire Nation.
All you are is meant to serve.
That's—that's why you need to ask.
So you can serve better.
So that you do not dare to interpret your Father's mind, but instead obey it.
(Didn't you tell your brother something about that once?)
Yes. That's the only reason.
That's why you take a hesitant step closer to his side, where the generals and the ministers and the Fire Sages cannot hear.
That's why you open your mouth and say, quietly, "Father, if Zuko infiltrates Caldera while you are conquering the Earth Kingdom, would you prefer that I kill him or simply imprison him for your triumphant return?"
That's why it's nothing to do with Ty Lee at all when your Father says, easy, casual, "Don't be foolish, Azula. I have no time to waste on traitors."
It's not until the late afternoon that you find the time to share lunch with Mai and Ty Lee.
The garden blooms in white and red around you; summer is slowly giving way to autumn, but in Lo and Li's private courtyard it almost seems like spring. You haven't been here in years—when they first became your instructors, they would often deliver their rambling lectures on firebending philosophy while tending to the flowers. There's no one reason why they stopped and returned your lessons to the gilded training halls of the palace, but your complaints about how these 'old fuddy-duddies were wasting your time' probably helped. You were a little more fractious, then. Growing pains, Lo and Li had called it.
A soft breeze slips among the fire lilies—somehow blooming out of season, thanks to whatever arcane horticultural wisdom it seems comes naturally to all old women—and rustles the leaves of the wisteria trees until their flowers sway like falling snow. The air is sweet with their fragrance. Almost too sweet. It makes you want to cough.
Ty Lee seems to enjoy it, though; she's flitted up at least three times to "soak my aura in the lovely flowers!" while you and Mai heroically resist her best efforts to drag both of you along. Frankly, you find her whole attitude very strange. Not because she's behaving differently toward you after vastly overstepping her place and being banished from your room, or even because she's not behaving differently—because you can't quite bring yourself to stay angry at her for it. Baffling.
(Is it really? It's like you told Zuko: you don't have any room to be angry at your friends when a much easier target is sitting right across from them.)
There's no-one here save the three of you. You'd dismissed the servants after the last dish had been laid (a plate of smoked sea slug) and instructed the Dai Li to keep that dismissal secure. So it's just you, and Mai, and Ty Lee, and the flowers, and the half-eaten stack of komodo chicken skewers that is the sole survivor of your lunch spread, most of which fell victim to your prodigious appetite. It's a good thing you were never stupid enough to get banished and forced to subsist on whatever inadequate rations got Zuko through the years. You'd have practically been a skeleton by comparison.
Thinking about Zuko and skeletons, however, may have been a mistake. Because now is when you're supposed to be interrupting Ty Lee's inane chatter about her latest attempt to remodel Mai's hairstyle so you can instruct them clearly and precisely on how they are to approach tomorrow as the Comet burns deep across the sky. Now is when you're meant to lay out the groundwork not just for convincing Zuko to surrender the throne but for ensuring they are best positioned to aid you in convincing him.
But instead, all that falls out of your mouth is, "Father wants me to kill Zuko."
Mai's chopsticks freeze halfway to her mouth.
Ty Lee jerks to face you.
"Did he tell you that," Mai says, slow, questing, with a twitch of the eyes like she's trying to study both you and Ty Lee simultaneously, "or are you making an assumption?"
"Don't be an idiot, Mai," you snap like a collision of ice-floes, "I do not make assumptions when it comes to the Fire Lord's will."
Dragging Zuko back from Ba Sing Se wasn't an assumption. It was a careful calculation of cost-benefit analysis, just like you were taught.
"I asked my Father if he would like me to kill Zuko or keep him alive for his return and he said he had no time to waste on traitors." Each syllable falls like you're exiling it. "Is that enough for you, or am I to ensure his death warrant is signed and sealed in front of the Fire Sages too before you'll believe it?"
They'd do it, too. Sanctifying your brother's murder is hardly unorthodox compared to sanctifying the Phoenix King. No wonder fewer and fewer go to the Temples each year. The peasantry knows where true power lies. As they should. Even the Comet was named after a Fire Lord.
"Azula," Ty Lee says, reaching across the gnarled old table you're all sitting at, her fingers almost icy where she threads them between your own, "it's okay. I know you won't do it."
She could have slapped you and it would have been less surprising.
You exchange a glance with Mai on reflex. She raises a dagger-thin eyebrow at you and says nothing.
"What does that have to do with anything?" you ask, dragging your arm away and folding both over the gold sash that wraps your red robes tight to your belly.
"You were being rude to Mai," she says, and before you can think to protest the accusation, Mai inclines her head in agreement, dark hair stark in the sunlight as it rustles across her back. "You're rude to people when you think they're dumb or annoying, but you're rude to us when you're worried about what we're gonna think. So I told you! Now you don't have to be worried, right?"
You. Do not. Understand Ty Lee.
(Yes you do.)
"I am not worried," you say, glaring at her. She recoils a little, fingers spread in a warding gesture—which causes the spoon she was holding in her other hand to drop and clatter against the side of the elegant kintsugi teapot Lo and Li insisted you had to use if you were going to have lunch out here. "I simply responded to stupidity as stupidity deserves."
"Wow," Mai says, sounding about as shocked as whoever Zuko first tried to summon lightning at, "you actually were worried. Come on, Azula. I wasn't asking because I thought you'd do it either."
Why is it that you always start to lose control of a conversation the moment somebody mentions your useless brother?
It's absolutely hateful.
"Then why did you?" you say, not quite with a sigh but certainly with the spirit of one.
"You and Zuko are both very good at overcomplicating things." Mai places her chopsticks back on the table, threading the tips through the snarling mouth of the finger-sized ceramic dragon carved to hold them. "People just don't notice when you do it because you're also much better than he is at solving those complications."
She shrugs, quick and casual.
"So I had to check."
"Are you sure it is a sensible decision to speak to your princess and future Fire Lord like this, Mai?" you ask, narrowing your eyes. With the Sun playing across your face, so bright, so close, your stare must seem almost molten. "While in the halls of her palace, at that?"
Mai's lips flick in what you benevolently describe as a smile, rather than a smirk or some other, far more impertinent expression. "More sensible than lying to you. I thought you hated that."
"It's true," Ty Lee chimes in, clapping her hands together with a surprisingly enthusiastic slap. "You get really mad when people you don't expect to lie to you actually do! Which is funny because you lie all the time anyway. But that's when you're at your pinkest!"
What in the name of all the spirits of the world is that supposed to mean?
Mai is no help at all, too busy pressing her mouth into a flat line the way she does when the alternative would be to do something as unladylike as laughing in public.
Honestly.
"I come here to instruct you both on how to go about our plan tomorrow, and instead I am forced to deal with blatant insubordination," a stern glance at Mai, who manages to communicate total unrepentance without a single shift in her angular face, "and words that I am quite sure do not actually exist in that particular sequence, Ty Lee."
You shake your head, the blades of your bangs whispering against your cheeks. If you weren't sitting on a stool, you'd have slumped backwards out of sheer exhaustion. But you are, so instead you lift a hand from your waist so you can breathe out a shard of cold fire and watch it slowly circle around your sleek red nails.
"It was not a surprise that Father ordered Zuko's demise," you say, because whether or not she fully understood it, this is what you meant when you were telling Ty Lee about inevitability. As long as your Father holds supreme, in the end there is only ever going to be one. That's what Zuko never understood. You think your mother might have. She just chose the wrong sibling. "The Fire Lord cannot tolerate an openly treasonous heir."
"Right, but he's not the Fire Lord any longer," Ty Lee says, nodding as if she's just come to some magnificent insight. "You're going to be, and you don't want to fight Zuko even if he is your heir! I think. Anyway, Mai told me that when she bullied him about your conversation after he got back, Zuko also said he kinda didn't want to fight you anymore either. So there's no problem, see?"
You snuff the spark you were toying with in your own forehead as you bury your face in your palm. Your voice comes out muffled with disbelief. "There are so many problems with every single word you just said that I am not even going to dignify them with an answer."
"No," Mai says, "I think she has a point."
Your brow furrows as you lift your head back up to study Mai with what might politely be termed dubious disregard. "Please don't tell me you've decided to add borrowing his sense of humour to the list of mistakes you've made regarding my brother."
"What, like it's worse than yours?" Mai rolls her eyes with such overwhelming drama it almost overshadows the disrespect of her retort. "Whatever. Ty Lee's right. You're going to be the Fire Lord. I don't know why you're being so silly about it now. There's only one person who can question you and you've been handling him your whole life. You can do it here too. So just do what you want."
What you want is for somebody else in this conversation to understand what it means that your Father told you to kill Zuko, because it clearly seems that they do not.
"Trust me, Azula," Mai says, her voice dark as days-old blood, "I understand very well what it means. I'm reminded every time I look at my boyfriend's face."
Ty Lee reaches over to rub soothing fingers over her coiled-wire knuckles.
"If you think that was my Father trying to kill Zuko, you very clearly don't."
You know Mai is more sensible than that. So what is she playing at? Why are you the only one who recogn—oh.
Of course.
It's because you're the only one here who remembers what happened the last time the Fire Lord ordered Zuko's execution.
"Listen," you say, forestalling whatever the two of them are going to say with a raised hand, "do you know how my Father earned his throne?"
"Uh, yeah?" Ty Lee says, eyebrows scrunched quizzically. "Fire Lord Azulon named him as his heir because General Iroh gave up on becoming Fire Lord after his son died? Everyone knows that."
"The official version also mentions his brilliance in leading the development of our industry and war machines to new heights, and emphasises Iroh's failure at Ba Sing Se," Mai adds. "What does that have to do with anything?"
You take a moment to settle your palms on the table. The wood is pleasantly warm, the Sun soaked deep into its pores. A slight lean forward acts to suggest intimacy; a lowered voice suggests both secrecy and trust. Ty Lee instinctively matches your posture. Mai raises an eyebrow before grudgingly doing the same.
"If a single word of what I'm about to say passes your lips before anyone but me or Zuko," you say, slow and heavy, "you will be lucky to escape execution. Unless you sell me out immediately as the one who told you, you may end up begging for it instead. Nod if you understand."
Wide-eyed, Ty Lee nods immediately.
Mai follows, a little hesitant, a lot careful.
"My Father is the Fire Lord," you say into the hush that follows, even the breeze slipping away as if in fear, "because Azulon ordered him to kill Zuko and my mother made the same choice she'd been making my entire life: Zuko was more important than anyone else. More important than me. More important than Father. More important, even, than Azulon."
You smile. It sits on your mouth like a song sung out of key.
"So she killed him. Murdered the sitting Fire Lord just to save an eleven-year-old boy. That was the deal: Zuko's life for my Father's throne. Don't you remember what I told you, Mai? Somebody has to take on the responsibility. Surely you didn't think you were the first."
She opens her mouth to speak and you cut across it like a throat.
"Our mother. Iroh. You. And now me. I wonder—will Zuko ever learn to save himself?" You start laughing, high and cold. The sound shatters against the garden's walls. "Honestly, it's sickening. I can't believe the one thing I have to share with that woman outside Roku's tainted blood is being forced to choose between obeying the Fire Lord or protecting Zuko and getting it wrong."
Because it is wrong. You know that. Disobeying the Fire Lord makes you a traitor. Your Father isn't the Fire Lord anymore, but he still has no time for traitors. It doesn't matter that he'll never know because he'll fight the Avatar and always, always lose because you'll know.
You'll know you had the choice to be a good daughter and didn't take it.
You'll know you had the choice to be strong and didn't take it.
You'll know you had the choice to not be like Zuko and didn't take it.
(Did you really, though?
You still remember that first loop.
The edifice of your entire life in six words: you can't treat me like Zuko!
And your Father did anyway.
Just like he has every single time since.)
It takes a few minutes for Ty Lee to muster up the courage to speak. She's fidgeting in place, hands twisting around each other, the shadow cast over her as the Sun slips behind a cloud making even the saccharine frills of her outfit seem muted. "Why are you talking about Roku? Isn't he the old Avatar who betrayed Sozin and died in a volcano?"
You snort. "He's Zuko's other great-grandfather. Mine too. It's not important."
Iroh might have manipulated Zuko into caring about it, but you'll tame a dragon before Zuko succeeds in manipulating you.
"Woah," Ty Lee says, her open-mouth amazement interrupting her best attempt to mimic a flutter-bat, "you're related to the Avatar! That's so cool. Is that why your fire is so strong?"
Your fingers twitch as a cat's paws do, when they can't quite decide whether to knead or to claw, and you clench your jaw around a snarl. But in the end, all you do is exhale, a short, bitten-off hah, and then say, not quite tersely, "If it were, then maybe Zuko wouldn't be so hopeless."
You don't think Ty Lee understands exactly how much she's insulted you, because she just laughs a little, as if you've told a joke instead of made a salient observation on the nature of reality. Mai might, though. She's looking at you with something you learned first from your Father's face: pride. It's a subtle thing, on her; a slightly softer set of the mouth, a brief hooding of the eyes. But you see it nonetheless.
You look away.
Honestly. The nerve of her. How ungrateful.
"Anyway," Ty Lee says, her earlier awkwardness apparently chased away by whatever furnace of happiness sits where her heart should be, "I don't think you're getting it wrong! I know it's, like, super special illegal to try and kill the Fire Lord, and special illegal to disobey him, so I get why your Dad wants Zuko dead and why you're scared that you're saying no, but… it's kinda like I said before, yeah? I don't think it's right that he asked you. I don't think it's right that you think you're supposed to."
Her elbow clinks against one of the plates as she reaches across the table to lay her fingers over yours. They're cold against your skin.
"But I do think it's right that you don't want to."
"Honestly, though," Mai says, somehow managing to sit even more dao-edge straight in her seat, folding her arms under the delicate embroidery over her chest, "you're even weirder than Zuko is about your Dad, and—"
"I am not weird about my Father," you interrupt, eyes stiff with warning. "I love and respect him as both my parent and the Fire Lord. And he loves me. Zuko's problem is that he never figured out how to earn it. I did. "
Of course Zuko never figured out how. He probably didn't even know he had to—it's not like he had to earn anybody else's. They just gave it to him. Just like they never gave it to you.
Only your Father ever has.
(Hasn't he?)
"You don't have to earn someone's love, Azula," Mai says, somewhere between softness and resignation. Like she's saying something she wished she didn't know. "You can't."
Your smile tastes bitter. "You're right. I can't. Funny how it seems to work out for everyone else."
Ty Lee squeezes your hand tight. "Azula…"
"Why are we even talking about this?" You lift your jaw so you're no longer looking at Mai's sunrise stare or the way Ty Lee's collar shifts in the renewed breeze. Beyond them both, the courtyard stretches in petal-strewn marble, each flower-bed carved into the imperial insignia and so filled with fire lilies they almost seem ablaze. Wisteria trees loom over them like clouds tied to earth. "Every time we're meant to have a conversation about something important, we always end up talking about trivial inanities instead."
It's so frustrating.
"When something's on your mind, it'll always come out somehow," Ty Lee says with something resembling a smile, though in the same way that the Water Tribe has something resembling a civilisation. "Just like Ember Island!"
"I hardly think something as pathetic as love is constantly on my mind, Ty Lee," you say, and do not understand why both of their expressions freeze for a second before shifting into something so complicated you haven't a hope of deciphering it. "Let alone treason against my Father."
"You really need to forgive yourself for that, you know," Mai says, about as lightly as anyone truly can when their sartorial style would make even the Day of the Black Sun jealous.
"Excuse me?" What in the world is she talking about?
"You forgave me for my… treachery at the Boiling Rock," she explains, stretching the word out like she's trying to draw-and-quarter it, "because I was doing it to save Zuko. Why are you being so stupid about forgiving yourself for the same thing?"
"That's—they are entirely unrelated matters." For the second time in this conversation, you jerk your hand out of Ty Lee's grasp so you can fold your arms in clear dismissal. "You are not the Crown Princess and you do not have my responsibilities."
"Yeah, but tomorrow you're the Fire Lord, right?" Ty Lee chimes, bright and clear as the Academy bell of your youth—and with just as inconvenient a timing. "It's like I said before! There's no problem if you just pardon yourself. Isn't that what being royalty is all about?"
It is most certainly not. "Perhaps you mistake me for some odious, jumped-up bureaucrat like Long Feng."
"He was pretty annoying," Mai agrees. "But whatever. If you're going to keep beating yourself up because you're experiencing a human feeling and don't know how to handle it, you do you, Azula. Are we ever going to get to talking about this plan of yours?"
"Ooh, the plan!" Ty Lee bounces on her stool, braid flapping over her shoulder and back. "I wanna hear the plan too. Yours are always so exciting, Azula!"
You narrow your eyes in suspicion, certain she's trying to mollify you so you forget about reminding Mai exactly where she can keep her tongue, but Ty Lee's teeth are blinding in the afternoon Sun, her cheeks pinched wide with joy. It's—difficult to hold onto your anger that way, especially when for all her blatant insubordination even Mai is leaning a little closer to the table, body threatening to curve in like a question-mark.
A sigh slips from your mouth—without a trace of smoke. "Very well. If you insist, I suppose I can explain."
There is a hallway in the palace.
At the end of that hallway is a throne.
And on that throne sits a girl called you.
You could have chosen anywhere in Caldera to wait for Zuko and his inevitable companion. You've met him in the gardens; you've met him at the coronation; once you even met him in the still-smouldering ruins of the ruined Avatar temple the ghost of Roku broke. As far as you can tell, the location doesn't really matter. It always ends the same.
But today, you are here: lounging on the Dragon Throne, drumming your fingers on an armrest worn so smooth by so many before you that it's said Fire Lord Hanyu once escaped an assassin by spotting their reflection in it. You think you might believe it. It's not like there's anything else interesting to look at from here. Just a sea of polished mahogany floorboards interrupted by gilded red carpets emblazoned with scenes from the Unification, regimented rows of gold-plated columns marshalling the space as if someone buried a battalion helmet-first, and at the very end a towering double door carved into the imperial flame.
You suspect it would look more impressive if you'd lit the wall of flame that is meant to separate the Fire Lord from all who genuflect before him—but you are not crowned yet, and it would give the wrong impression. It's not like you're planning on staying in the seat once Zuko arrives, anyway. It's hard enough not to talk down to him as it is; you'd be a fool to feign sympathy while sitting in your Father's seat.
(It's not, though, is it?
He threw it away just like Ba Sing Se.)
There are no courtiers here today. It might be mere hours before your coronation—at midday, when the Sun is highest in the sky—but you have sent away even your Dai Li. Not banished, of course. You are hardly so lost to your delusions. Just… reassigned, given duties that the more intelligent will have grasped are designed to ensure there are no witnesses to whatever it is you intend to do. As ever, though, they obey. Long Feng trained them well—in a delicious irony, too well. Just a touch more loyalty to the nation, to the idea, over the man and you wouldn't have broken them.
But break them you did. It's funny how that jumped-up peasant never realised: when you build a cult of personality around yourself as a enlightened dictator with absolute power who symbolises the true and only path for the people and to whom all obedience is ultimately given, are you talking about Long Feng, or are you talking about the Fire Lord? You're almost tempted to invite him to court one year, just so you can watch as he realises the depth of his mistake.
For that, though, you'll need to make it to court in the first place.
And in the end, that's why you're here, isn't it?
You snap out a spark, just to listen to the hiss, to take something away from the vast, smothering silence that fills the rest of the room. It shudders over your fingers, fierce and violent and solely, wholly yours. Even Sozin's Comet cannot take it from you—though it wants to, screams to, the crackling cry of lightning begging to ground itself in earth. It would be so easy to let it go. To sip so deep of the flame-that-is-you that not even the centre of the world would be safe from your fury. But you don't. You can't.
It's funny. In all your endless cycles, you've never had a chance to truly test your limits. If you actually make it to Sozin's Comet, there's always something to do. Somewhere to go. Somebody to fight. Even if you escape this time—if convincing Zuko to surrender the throne without an Agni Kai is the answer the universe wants from you—it's not like you'll know until you open your eyes somewhere that isn't the Boiling Rock, and by then, it will be too late.
Sometimes you think it might be a tragedy: the transcendental flame brought by a celestial miracle, turned only to destruction. Not a single living person will ever experience this day again except a few squalling babes. It seems almost a shame that it has only ever served as a tool for war.
(And whose shame is that?
What a silly question.
It's right there in the name.)
But you don't have time to spend on childish fantasies.
After all, Zuko is on the other side of the door.
His flame dawns against your own like a sunrise slipping through clouds—you've known he was near since he entered the palace, but this close it's almost like you can see him through the wall. You wonder if he can see you too. Probably not. Your brother might have found another way to burn—not just a strange new stance but a strange new soul, a bonfire where there once was a blaze—but even a few weeks on the run with the Avatar can't erase three years of wasteful coddling by the old fuddy-duddy. For all that Zuko claims a new perspective, at the end of the day, he's still so very blind.
(Of course he is.
Your Father near enough to burned out one of his eyes, didn't he?)
"Are you going to come in, Zuzu?" you call, sweet as sword-sting. "If you really want to become Fire Lord, the first step is certainly not being afraid of a room."
He might actually be, which is the most hilarious thing of all. This, after all, is where Azulon pronounced his execution and your Father declared his banishment. The ruin of his life twice over echoing off four overly-embellished walls. You almost wouldn't blame him for a little trepidation.
Whether or not Zuko is vacillating out of fear or indecision is, however, rather moot, since almost as soon as you finish speaking you feel his spirit spike. There's a short ripple of flame that ignites the ridges of the doors until it's like the carved dragons have burst to incandescent life, lit by dramatic sunrise hues, and then they slide open on ponderously silent hinges.
Revealed behind them is your brother, dressed just as you saw him at the Western Air Temple, in a peasant's muddy reds and a pair of dusty sandals—accompanied by both Mai and Ty Lee.
There was only supposed to be one.
Your instructions were very clear that there was only supposed to be one.
The lightning stills on the top of your finger.
"Azula, guess what?" If Ty Lee has noticed the bowstring tension in your spine, she's doing an excellent job of ignoring it. "Zuko actually came here alone!"
Zuko… came here alone?
Today?
When you don't have a hostage?
He sighs, weary with irritation. "Did you have to tell Azula that, Ty Lee?"
"Yes," she says, with a sudden flash of seriousness you're not wholly convinced you actually see before it's replaced by another cheery smile. "Isn't it great? It's only the four of us again, just like Ember Island!"
"Which part?" Mai asks, eyes flicking from your hands to Zuko's face. "When we were arguing, or when we were trashing a house?"
"The smoothing part, silly!" You feel as nonplussed as Mai's blink. It appears Ty Lee has taken temporary leave of her senses, rather than merely her post. "We should go back there one day."
"There are slightly more pressing concerns before us than a holiday, Ty Lee," you say, aiming for a sarcasm you can't quite seem to carry. "You may have noticed I am sitting in one of them."
"Not for long." Zuko shifts slightly in place, muscles pulling as tight as his flame. "Sorry, Azula, but you're not gonna be Fire Lord today."
You flick your wrist to snuff the spark threatening to crawl up your forearm, sleeves rustling as you move. Your robes—ornately tailored across your shoulders and waist, a gold-stitched ripple of flame hidden under the Crown Princess' ochre mantle—are a stark contrast to Zuko's humble shambles of an outfit. To think he had the foresight to prepare an escape but not a change of clothes. Your brother's brain is truly a mystery.
"Oh?" you say, drawing out the sound for a half-breath too long for genuine curiosity. "And how do you intend to stop me?"
"You know how." In the shadows of the throne room, Zuko's eyes are as bright as sunlight on the edge of a sword. "Maybe we're both tired of this fight, Azula, but that doesn't mean I'm afraid of it."
In another life, you should be sits on the tip of your tongue. But you have lost to this Zuko—the Zuko under the Comet, who shatters Sozin's legacy with Sozin's own power—too many times before. It serves you no purpose to pretend he has any reason to be afraid of you.
"Thankfully," you say instead, "I have no intention of having it in the first place. I refuse your challenge."
The surprise that settles in his partly-open mouth and partly-narrowed eyes is as gormless as it was when he was seven and you first beat him in pai sho. "What?"
"You're an exile sentenced to death in absentia for treason, Zuzu," you explain—not as if to a child, because you would never lower yourself to something so undignified, but nonetheless nearly drawled out, each word given time to linger like blood in a cut. "Surely you don't believe even being my brother is enough to compel my honour."
"You're a lot of things, Azula," he says, "but you're not a cowa—"
"—are you just going to keep posturing, Zuko?" You allow yourself the curl of a smirk, which withers immediately under Mai's dangerously raised eyebrow. When she speaks again, you think the Royal Engineers would weep to measure the flatness of her tone. "You too, Azula. Both of you really came here to talk. Not fight. So stop acting like children and talk."
In hindsight, letting Mai learn you're not angry at her was a terrible mistake. She seems to have taken it as an invitation to treat you like she's forgotten disrespecting royalty is what filled a quarter of the Boiling Rock. Perhaps a reminder is in order.
You open your mouth, and Ty Lee says, "But Mai, we are children."
You successfully disguise your bark of laughter as a cough by covering your mouth with a hand. "I suppose I cannot blame dear Zuzu for his… hot-headedness. No doubt he's finding it difficult to control himself under the influence of the Comet—aren't you, brother?"
Zuko rolls his eyes. "Whatever you say, Azula. Are you going to stay lazing up there on the throne, or are you going to come down here and pretend you don't think you're better than me?"
You jut your chin forward so you can stare imperiously down your nose at him. "I hardly think I would be pretending, but very well."
Drawing yourself up from the Dragon Throne in a movement as precise as any of your kata, you take a few steps forward and drop off the edge of the dias, landing softly on your sandals with an easy flex of your knees. Your shoes hardly make a noise against the smooth floorboards as you walk towards your brother and your friends.
Has Zuko noticed you're not wearing your armour yet?
You imagine so. If nothing else, he's always been good at considering you a threat.
"Mai. Ty Lee." You fold your hands behind your back until you could be lecturing—or standing in military parade. "Since it seems Zuko does, in fact, wish to negotiate, fetch us a table, would you? You'll find one just outside in the hall."
"No, I'll get it," Zuko says. How manly of him, to disguise a desire to have some time to think—and presumably flail at strategising—behind a thinly-veiled attempt to show off his strength. You're sure Mai is swooning.
Well. Even if she isn't quite that far gone, there's still something wrong with her head, because instead of taking the excuse to sit around and do nothing, she says, "I'll help. Ty Lee can stay here."
"Okay!" Ty Lee says sunnily, before you can think to protest. She prances forward until she's next to you and says, much too loud to fake even trying to whisper, "Aren't they so cute, Azula?"
You cannot think of anything less adorable than the idea there is a person in the world who finds your brother attractive, actually.
Sure, he's a prince, and he's determined, and he has that whole honour tomfoolery going on, and he's an adequate firebender, and that book that was most certainly not about pillows Lu Ten had did mention that men with deep voices are less hateful than others, but, seriously—he's Zuko.
Ty Lee must glean the direction of your thoughts from the shape of your frown, because she giggles and pats your shoulder—or at least as close as she can get to it, given the thick formality of your robes and the added royal mantle. "Don't worry. It'll make sense to you eventually!"
"If there comes a point in my existence where that," you say, gesturing to where, in the distance, Mai lifts a hand to press her palm against Zuko's cheek and pull their heads together to whisper something, "begins to make sense to me, you have my royal permission to commit regicide."
Ty Lee giggles again, high and sweet like the cry of a flute. "You're so funny, Azula."
You were entirely serious.
"I know," she says, falling into a handstand for no apparent reason, fingers wide against the wood. "That's why it was funny!"
As she is clearly feeling far too moody to respect your intellect, you close your eyes rather than reply. Close to you, the shallow sound of her breathing laps against you like waves to a shore; far from you, the dull scrape of wood against wood reveals that Zuko is finally heaving the table in; all around you, the Comet looms, reflected across every flame in every torch in the palace, a thousand thousand fragments of the burning sky dragged down to earth.
You breathe in.
It tastes like wet ash and lightning.
You breathe out.
No matter what happens, at least this will never leave you.
You open your eyes as Zuko drops the corner of the table to a rough stop near the two of you, Mai's gaze flicking over his arms and shoulders as if checking for injury before she returns her attention to where it belongs: you.
"Well," you say, stepping toward the nearest flat edge of the table—a thick, square piece with legs carved to resemble swirling ripples of flame—and settling yourself into perfect, straight-backed posture, calves under your thighs and hands folded together, "shall we?"
Ty Lee falls out of her handstand and flits to your side, braid flapping loosely. Zuko drops roughly into something cross-legged he probably copied from the Avatar, jaw firm. Mai looks at you, then at Zuko, then back to you, and finally takes a seat at his side as if she is a dagger slipped back into a sheath.
You raise an interrogative eyebrow; one of her shoulders twitches into a shrug, as if to say you were the one who told me to take responsibility.
Well.
You suppose that's fair enough.
(It still hurts.
But you won't bleed to death with the pain of it.
Not this time.)
There are a few awkward beats of silence—awkward, of course, for everyone except you, who has never been awkward in your life.
Eventually, though. someone speaks up.
"Alright, Azula," Zuko says, watching you steadily over his folded arms, "what do you want?"
Hah.
Where do you start?
But you can't afford to get distracted like that. Not here. Not now. Not today.
You have a mission.
And that mission begins with:
"I want you to give up on the throne," you say, chin held high, the very picture of a princess, "and attend my coronation in peace."
"I can't do that," he says without a flicker of hesitation. He doesn't even have to think to refuse you. It's a reflex like breathing. "The Fire Nation needs to change."
"Maybe it does." You ignore Ty Lee's gasp, Mai's raised eyebrow, the circle of Zuko's mouth. "Maybe we won the war months ago when we took Ba Sing Se. Maybe I wish I never said we should burn it all back down. Maybe you're right."
You lean forward, slamming your palms on the low table, fingers spread so wide it hurts to hold them there.
"But why does it have to be you who changes it, Zuko? Why does it always have to be you?" The words slip out like blood, even though you can't find the wound. "You don't even understand what it means to be Fire Lord. You know what you want to do, but you don't know what doing it will do to you."
"Azula—"
Three people speak as one, but your heartbeat hammers them out. The torches that bristle across the walls and pillars are pulsing to that atavistic rhythm: orange, then blue, then orange, then blue. You're not even sure if Zuko knows he's fighting you for control. The shadows that cower away in the corners those coruscating flames cannot reach writhe as if they're being strangled—the same way your voice strangles out from your throat.
"Did you ever think about it? The sort of person the Fire Lord has to be? So what if the Fire Nation has to change?" Your nails gouge into the tabletop, the tips charring dark wounds in the wood as if the red polish that covers them is fire in truth. "For a hundred years the only thing we have bowed to has been men like Sozin. Like Azulon. Like our Father. Like me. Do you really think, after all that, it will listen to you?"
If you were any less a firebender than you are, your breath would be coming in sharp pants.
"You have a dream," you say, soft as ash, falling back onto your knees, closing your eyes. He was right. You do look tired. "Seen in a certain light," like the haunting quiet of Lu Ten's room, under the tapestry of stars spinning across his ceiling, "it might even be beautiful. But the Fire Lord does not dream. The Fire Lord does not rule out of beauty. You can try to change that, but in the end, it will change you."
There was a time, at the feeble dawn of your memories, little flickers of sensation and feeling cresting over the horizon of your consciousness, when your Father was a different man. When your mother was a different woman. When you and Zuko would crash about in the sand on Ember Island, playfighting and play-fighting; when your Father saved Zuko from drowning and your mother smiled at you.
(When, for a few scattered summers, you might have even been happy.)
It didn't last.
How could it?
No light burns in the shadow of the Dragon Throne.
Why else would even Sozin be buried down in the dark?
"That's the difference between us, Zuko." You want to laugh, but all you can manage is a wry twitch of the lip. "It would change you. It wouldn't change me. And I think—"
—you think that maybe Mai was right. This palace has only ever hurt Zuko.
You've spent your whole life believing that's because he was weak.
But on this endless day, in this endless life, you can finally admit:
Maybe it's because he was strong.
Only in the wrong way.
"—you're right, Azula." It takes you a second or two to process that Zuko is speaking—to recognise that he is saying those words without spite or sarcasm. His arms are unfolded now; they rest on his knees, one hand covered by Mai's, the sharp slivers of her fingers pale against Zuko's slight tan. "Sozin started the war and murdered the Air Nomads. Azulon crushed the Water Tribes and told Father—told Ozai to kill me. And… and Ozai gave me this scar," his other hand comes up to rest on that angry, unfeeling skin, "and is trying to burn the Earth Kingdom to the ground. That's what being the Fire Lord means to the world. That's what being the Fire Lord means to our people."
He shakes his head. His hair is so short it hardly even shifts as he moves.
"But if that's what it means to you, then that's why it needs to be me."
Your knuckles are as white as a corpse's. "Were you actually listening? Fire is the element of power. You don't even know what that is. You've never had it. If you had, you'd never think just being good is enough to change the world."
(Of course it isn't.
Not even being perfect could do that.)
Zuko snorts. "I've done too many things wrong to too many people to think I'm good, Azula. But you'll never convince me not to believe I can't be better. We all can."
You want to scream. Like acrid vomit in your throat. "That's not what I'm saying. Are you so stubborn you can't comprehend anything over the bleating of your own self-righteousness?"
Maybe Ty Lee can hear the creaking tension in your voice, the ice on the verge of collapsing, because she tries to smile, a trembling, tremulous thing, and asks, "Maybe it would—it might help if you explained a bit more?"
"I think she's been quite clear." Mai is frowning, though not—it doesn't seem aimed at you. Or Zuko. Or Ty Lee. She's looking down at her lap, as if the rich black fabric of her dress holds all the secrets the stars will never show. "Azula's right, Zuko. I know you don't think being the Fire Lord will be easy, or even safe, but you can't—just deciding you'll be able to handle it doesn't mean you will. Or that you should."
Your brother's expression stutters to a halt, the firm line of his mouth falling apart and the proud tension in his shoulders slipping. In his chest, you feel his flame flicker. The torches on the walls follow suit.
On his knee, his fingers retreat a little.
"You too, Mai?" he asks. It's not quite betrayal, but for a moment, you almost feel sympathetic.
"Not like that, Zuko," she says, and you see her forearm flex as she briefly squeezes his hand. "I'm here to support you. You tried to get rid of me once and I think I've made clear exactly how stupid a decision that was. It's just that… I was here, before Princess Ursa disappeared. I've watched my father try to rule New Ozai. I followed Azula as she hunted you and the Avatar. And I was here again, when you came back."
Mai shakes her head, hair-buns barely shifting in place.
"As a citizen of the Fire Nation, I want you as my Fire Lord. As your girlfriend, I don't want you to be the Fire Lord." Her eyes flick to yours and hold them before you can look away. "And I don't want Azula to be either. This palace is the last place either of you should be. Frankly, I wish all of us were anywhere but here."
"I—didn't know you felt that way," Zuko manages.
You thought you did.
But—
—And I don't want Azula to be either.
You shouldn't be surprised. You still remember Mai telling you, so casually, that she would have saved you too. You remember Ty Lee telling you about choices.
But every time someone says the words, it still flattens you like a sandcastle before the sea.
"Hey," says Ty Lee, not quite as hesitant as before, rising a little on her haunches from where she sits next to you until her shoulders crest your own, "why do one of you have to be the Fire Lord? Why can't General Iroh do it?"
"I would rather die than serve under him," you spit at the same time as Zuko says, "Uncle would never take the throne."
(Of course you noticed even Ty Lee is assuming your Father is going to lose.
It's just not worth protesting.
Not when she's right.)
You and your brother exchange a glance—despite the snarl still lingering on your face like a bruise, he swallows whatever inane defence of Iroh's character he'd usually toss out. Maybe it's because when it comes to that dusty relic on the throne, the both of you are at least agreed it's never happening.
"He's too much of a coward to take the responsibility," you say; just because Zuko is trying to be the bigger person doesn't mean you have to be. "He ran from it when he ran from Ba Sing Se. Why do you think he's spent so much effort trying to push Zuko here instead?"
You blow out a breath: a short, harsh sound.
"No, Ty Lee. The next Fire Lord is Zuko, or me. The showdown that was always meant to be."
Her face droops, like a flower gone too long without the Sun. "That doesn't seem fair. You're finally getting along!"
Your head cocks to the side in pure bafflement until one of your blade-like bangs rests flat across your cheek like a shadow. Zuko mirrors the gesture, eyebrows pulled together.
In what world could she possibly think this looks like the two of you are getting along?
Mai sighs, briefly resting her forehead on the tips of a couple of fingers.
You'd think it a reflection of the same shared sentiment were it not for the way she'd looked at the two of you, not Ty Lee, before she did it.
You have no idea why.
"Look," you say, your fists finally unclenching in your lap. A spark of lightning sprawls out of one palm and you start to toy with it, bouncing it from finger to finger to match the pounding pulse of Sozin's Comet. "If you're refusing to listen to me, Zuko, listen to Mai. You have your friends. You have your honour. You even have," an involuntary grimace, "a lover. You turned your back on our Father and found your… place."
You're not really sure what you're saying. Or why each word sits in your stomach so heavily it feels like the void is in your belly rather than your skull. But you keep speaking anyway.
"To become the Fire Lord will cost you everything. You know that. You've seen it again, and again, and again. Sozin and Roku. Iroh and Lu Ten. Father and mother. Friends, and honour, and family."
You reach out to Zuko, as if offering him the cold fire that shudders in your hand, a crackling, hissing radiance that he must be able to feel all the way to his bones.
And then your fist snaps shut and snuffs it out.
"Are you really willing to lose all of that? And for what? Some nebulous chance to change things? For who? For what? The better? Nothing's better for everyone. It's always worse for some. Don't pretend it won't be worse for you."
"If I didn't know you," your brother says slowly, warily, speaking the way he might to the edge of a cliff, "I'd almost think you care."
Ty Lee reaches over to squeeze your forearm, where your arm-guards usually are. Her touch is soft even through the silk.
"I am angry at you, Zuko," you say, and wonder if he'll recognise the echo, "but I don't hate you. I just want—it's not important. My point is this: you shouldn't be the Fire Lord. You shouldn't want to be the Fire Lord. You know you were never really raised for it. Not since I started to bend. Not since Father chose me."
You reach into the blade-pocket of your robes—the subtly stitched sheath in which Lo and Li taught you most non-bending noblewomen keep their last resort—and pull out the Fire Lord's crown. In the rippling blue-and-orange fires that illuminate the room, the five-pronged flame gleams as gold as your eyes.
You set it down on the table with the dull thunk of metal on wood.
"Give up on the throne, Zuko," you repeat, "and attend my coronation in peace. It's the right thing to do. For both of us."
He's silent for a long time, staring at the crown.
So is Mai.
So is Ty Lee.
So are you.
And then
your brother opens his mouth
and he says,
"No."
and your chest splinters to glass.
Mai and Ty Lee glance up at you and flinch away from the wreckage.
Zuko breathes out, long and heavy, less a sound than a feeling. He drags a hand down his face, nails rasping against the dead flesh of his scar.
He's three years older than you, but he's never looked it until now.
You don't know why you notice.
It's getting hard to concentrate over the thundering silence in your skull.
"You're right, Azula," he says, low, raspy, as if he has to tear each word from his throat. "Father chose you to rule. And I can see why. You're so much better than me at everything the Fire Lord needs. I couldn't do it like you. I've never been able to do it like you."
Then he breathes in and he straightens and his shoulders firm and the last blue torch in the room is swallowed by gold.
"But I think… I think that's why I can't let you do it. Because you talk about being the Fire Lord the same way you talk about being a monster. And you've always tried so hard to stop anyone from seeing it that, if I hadn't met you in that forest, it might have taken me another three years to realise—but there's a little bit of you that's like a little bit of me, isn't there?"
Zuko's looking at you the way Iroh was looking at you when he was crying and you hate it like you hate him like you hate Zuko
(no you don't.)
"And that little bit doesn't want to be a monster. It's only that it doesn't know there's any other way to be. But Uncle showed me. And Song showed me. And Lee showed me. And Jin showed me. And Katara showed me. And Aang showed me. And so did everyone else. They're why I want to be the Fire Lord. So I can show the Fire Nation just like they showed me."
His cheeks pull up into a brief smile. It's lower on one side. His scar doesn't move as easily.
"I just didn't figure out until now that I need to show you too."
Zuko stands. You look up and he seems so
so far away.
His hands fold into the sign of the flame and he bows to you.
He's never bowed to you before.
"Crown Princess Azula. With the dragons as my witness, I am Zuko, son of Ursa, brother of Azula, son of Ozai, prince of the Fire Nation, and I challenge you to an Agni Kai."
Ty Lee is a distant pressure on your hands.
Mai mouths something that might be I'm sorry.
A girl finds herself standing.
"I am Azula," she whispers, "daughter of Ozai, sister of Zuko, daughter of Ursa, princess of the Fire Nation, and I accept your challenge."
END OF "THIRD" LOOP.
YOU HAVE FAILED.
THE BOILING ROCK AWAITS.
YOU HAVE FAILED.
THE BOILING ROCK AWAITS.
You, Princess Azula, have experienced a Revelation, which has Broken one of your Truths.
The modified Truth can be found in the spoiler box below. Changes in bold indicate new text; changes in
There is a lonely path in the palace. At the end of that lonely path is a room. And in that room is a girl called monster. Her name is Azula, and she struggles to understand feelings. Or family. All that is left to her is what she has been taught: and what she has been taught is to want, to take, and to not care if the taking hurts. But it does. And even a monster may grow tired of pain.
(2/3) Nothing Wrong With That Child
There is a path in the palace. At the end of that path is a room. And in that room is a girl who doesn't want to be a monster. Her name is Azula, and she's struggling to understand her feelings. And her family. So much of what is left to her is what she has been taught: and what she has been taught is to want, and to take, and to not care if the taking hurts. But it does. And you are tired of pain.
You don't understand.
For the first time since you became a hollow echo of Sozin's Comet, spinning around the world every nine days instead of a century, your brother didn't come to fight. You didn't come to fight. Nobody else came to fight. It was just you, and Zuko, and Mai, and Ty Lee.
What was it that she said? Just like Ember Island.
And just like Ember Island, it all ended in fire.
Even though you did everything right.
Didn't you?
Mai and Ty Lee were alive and well. Zuko's little temple hide-out with the Avatar was safe and sound. None of his friends were kidnapped so he would come running half-cocked and desperate. You didn't give Iroh the space to slink to his side on the day of the Comet. You even—you even sat down and talked about your feelings.
What else does the universe want from you?
You're not supposed to fight Zuko. You know that. You get that, okay? You do. And you tried. You really, truly did. And you think… you think he was trying too. The crown was on the table and the question was in the air and he was thinking for so long—Zuko, who never thinks about anything!
But in the end, he thought, and he thought, and he still didn't pick you.
You weren't even wrong. He said so himself. You were right. You would have been the better Fire Lord.
So why was that his reason to refuse you?
Oh, you know he talked about you not wanting to be a monster and not knowing how to be anything else and wanting to show you what it looked like and all of these soft little things that you shouldn't have any interest in believing but—
But—
But what?
He refused you.
Just like everyone else in your family does.
Iroh. Your mother.
(Your Father.)
Only Lo and Li have ever given you what you asked for.
(Funny how, in your very first cycle, you chose to refuse them.
No wonder Zuko didn't want you to be the Fire Lord.)
They told you to never forget who you are. But the truth is…
…you're not always sure who that is.
Not anymore.
Everything you thought you knew is glass. Sometimes you can look through it and see the truth beyond. Sometimes it just breaks and you're left with nothing but the pieces of who you used to be.
And you think—you think you need someone to help you find them.
It's pathetic, but it's the truth.
So many times you've tried to find the answer and so many times you've been wrong. You could pretend that you were only wrong this time because you didn't use the right approach but you know it isn't. No matter what you'd offered him, Zuko would have spouted something self-righteous (like he was trying to be your brother instead of your enemy) and the throne would have slipped from your grasp again.
You need a new perspective.
Lo and Li have already given you that, once. It wouldn't be new again.
But who else could you go to?
Zuko? On the day of the Boiling Rock? When he's the whole reason you're in this mess to begin with? Hardly.
Your Father?
You couldn't—you couldn't waste his time like that.
But who else is left?
Lu Ten is dead.
Even if your mother wasn't gone, you'd rather rot for a hundred cycles more than ask her.
And quite frankly, you wish Iroh was gone with her.
At this rate you might as well ask…
You might as well ask Mai and Ty Lee.
It doesn't sound as silly in your head as you thought it would.
So many times you've killed them. Once or twice they've even killed you. You've lied to them. You've saved them. You've been to festivals and forests with them. The three of you have talked over weeping volcanoes and crowded desks—in skies and gardens and bedrooms. No matter how many times they betrayed you and you betrayed them, when you've reached out, they've reached right back.
You've told them a lot of things. They've told you so many too. But the closest you've come to a question might well be what are your intentions for my brother?
You suppose it's probably time to change that.
If nothing else, it'll be interesting—and wasn't that a lie you told yourself, once?
There's just one little thing left.
You're searching for certainty. For someone to show you what you're missing. There are so many things it could be. But you have your suspicions. You have a question bubbling in the back of your brain. Sometimes you can feel it on the tip of your tongue, like you've just scoffed down three bowls of extra-spicy fire noodles in a row.
So, Princess Azula: what is the one thing you most want to ask Mai and Ty Lee about?
[ ] Your Father. In every life, they turn from him to save Zuko. Ty Lee has questioned him again and again. Mai has said you're 'weird' about him. But he's still—he's still your Father. The only one in the world who loved you from the start. Why is that supposed to be wrong?
[ ]
Even if you thought they had the answers, you refuse to dignify him with the questions.
[ ]
You are not going to spill your soul to your only friends over that woman.
[ ] Your brother. It's clear to you now, at least, that when they choose him, it's not because they wouldn't choose you. But the universe has demonstrated at length they are the exceptions. Not the rule. So what is it that he has? What essential part of Zuko's soul makes him worthy of the grace you have never been given?
[ ] You. Princess Azula the Blue. Heir apparent to the Dragon Throne. Conqueror of Ba Sing Se. Half Roku—half Sozin. Where you are, so is the Fire Nation in all its rapacious glory. Yours is the blood and bone of empire. All the things you should have ever wanted to be. But sometimes you think of fire dancing under the Moon; of three girls and the horizon and a flight across half the world. Is that wrong? Are you wrong to dream—to think, so briefly, of being something more?
[X] You. Princess Azula the Blue. Heir apparent to the Dragon Throne. Conqueror of Ba Sing Se. Half Roku—half Sozin. Where you are, so is the Fire Nation in all its rapacious glory. Yours is the blood and bone of empire. All the things you should have ever wanted to be. But sometimes you think of fire dancing under the Moon; of three girls and the horizon and a flight across half the world. Is that wrong? Are you wrong to dream—to think, so briefly, of being something more?
crossover - to be the very best that no-one ever was
Elpis
Ostensibly Hope
- Location
- Berlin
Fire-type Specialist Azula wants to battle.
(Hello, I am Elpis, I draw stuff and also write this quest here: A Ballad for Icarus - A Pokemon Quest - if you like Pokemon and my own take on Otome Webtoon tropes please check it out, it has yuri and I try to draw at least one thing every update, the final update of my first arc should be this week)
neutronium95
Mad Rocketeer
- Location
- The test site
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Holy shit that was good. Gonna need to sleep on it and reread it before making up my mind about the vote.
[X] You. Princess Azula the Blue. Heir apparent to the Dragon Throne. Conqueror of Ba Sing Se. Half Roku—half Sozin. Where you are, so is the Fire Nation in all its rapacious glory. Yours is the blood and bone of empire. All the things you should have ever wanted to be. But sometimes you think of fire dancing under the Moon; of three girls and the horizon and a flight across half the world. Is that wrong? Are you wrong to dream—to think, so briefly, of being something more?
[X] You. Princess Azula the Blue. Heir apparent to the Dragon Throne. Conqueror of Ba Sing Se. Half Roku—half Sozin. Where you are, so is the Fire Nation in all its rapacious glory. Yours is the blood and bone of empire. All the things you should have ever wanted to be. But sometimes you think of fire dancing under the Moon; of three girls and the horizon and a flight across half the world. Is that wrong? Are you wrong to dream—to think, so briefly, of being something more?
Spector29
It Only Gets Worse From Here
Zuko is the only option I think wouldn't break open a key piece of Azula's head (at least in the same way the other two would).
[x] You. Princess Azula the Blue. Heir apparent to the Dragon Throne. Conqueror of Ba Sing Se. Half Roku—half Sozin. Where you are, so is the Fire Nation in all its rapacious glory. Yours is the blood and bone of empire. All the things you should have ever wanted to be. But sometimes you think of fire dancing under the Moon; of three girls and the horizon and a flight across half the world. Is that wrong? Are you wrong to dream—to think, so briefly, of being something more?
We need to have that conversation about Ozai at some point, but I feel like I really want Azula to ask her friends about this right after coming off that last loop. I think the emotional and narrative throughline is much stronger.
[x] You. Princess Azula the Blue. Heir apparent to the Dragon Throne. Conqueror of Ba Sing Se. Half Roku—half Sozin. Where you are, so is the Fire Nation in all its rapacious glory. Yours is the blood and bone of empire. All the things you should have ever wanted to be. But sometimes you think of fire dancing under the Moon; of three girls and the horizon and a flight across half the world. Is that wrong? Are you wrong to dream—to think, so briefly, of being something more?
We need to have that conversation about Ozai at some point, but I feel like I really want Azula to ask her friends about this right after coming off that last loop. I think the emotional and narrative throughline is much stronger.
I think the emotions of the last loop are likely to have her looking inward, she may be more willing to ask Mai and possibly Ty-lee what they think Zuko meant by showing her that she doesn't have to be a monster, and if she doesn't have to be a monster, what can she be? what does she want to be?
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AndrewleTrans
I'm new. Plz help.
- Location
- Tokyo-3, Formerly of Mitakihara
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] You. Princess Azula the Blue. Heir apparent to the Dragon Throne. Conqueror of Ba Sing Se. Half Roku—half Sozin. Where you are, so is the Fire Nation in all its rapacious glory. Yours is the blood and bone of empire. All the things you should have ever wanted to be. But sometimes you think of fire dancing under the Moon; of three girls and the horizon and a flight across half the world. Is that wrong? Are you wrong to dream—to think, so briefly, of being something more?
AndrewleTrans
I'm new. Plz help.
- Location
- Tokyo-3, Formerly of Mitakihara
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Man we are moving in the right direction people
- Location
- SF Bay Area
We're close.
[x] You. Princess Azula the Blue. Heir apparent to the Dragon Throne. Conqueror of Ba Sing Se. Half Roku—half Sozin. Where you are, so is the Fire Nation in all its rapacious glory. Yours is the blood and bone of empire. All the things you should have ever wanted to be. But sometimes you think of fire dancing under the Moon; of three girls and the horizon and a flight across half the world. Is that wrong? Are you wrong to dream—to think, so briefly, of being something more?
- Location
- The Holiest of Cities
This... was a hard choice. I debated, between Zuko, Father and Azula, but one thing convinced me as to the right choice:
Zuko is firstly son of Ursa, secondly brother of Azula, and lastly son of Ozai.
Azula is firstly daughter of Ozai, secondly sister of Zuko, and lastly daughter of Ursa.
That's the penultimate end to this chapter. And that, more than anything, tells me that the right choice is to talk about Ozai. Throughout this chapter there were other allusions, and I thought this one was just as powerful:
I think... I think Azula still isn't ready to confront who she wants to be. She has no idea who she wants to be. She's just broached the idea that she's not what she thought she was, that she isn't a monster. And so I think it's not yet time to think on what could be - I mean, she just spent this chapter trying to convince Zuko she should take the throne because she's the monster, and now she wants to go and think about what she could be? Before we do that, I think Azula needs to understand - who is her father, divorced from her, and why, and what's wrong with that.
[X] Your Father. In every life, they turn from him to save Zuko. Ty Lee has questioned him again and again. Mai has said you're 'weird' about him. But he's still—he's still your Father. The only one in the world who loved you from the start. Why is that supposed to be wrong?
Note how Azula and Zuko define themselves:
Zuko is firstly son of Ursa, secondly brother of Azula, and lastly son of Ozai.
Azula is firstly daughter of Ozai, secondly sister of Zuko, and lastly daughter of Ursa.
That's the penultimate end to this chapter. And that, more than anything, tells me that the right choice is to talk about Ozai. Throughout this chapter there were other allusions, and I thought this one was just as powerful:
I think... I think Azula still isn't ready to confront who she wants to be. She has no idea who she wants to be. She's just broached the idea that she's not what she thought she was, that she isn't a monster. And so I think it's not yet time to think on what could be - I mean, she just spent this chapter trying to convince Zuko she should take the throne because she's the monster, and now she wants to go and think about what she could be? Before we do that, I think Azula needs to understand - who is her father, divorced from her, and why, and what's wrong with that.
[X] Your Father. In every life, they turn from him to save Zuko. Ty Lee has questioned him again and again. Mai has said you're 'weird' about him. But he's still—he's still your Father. The only one in the world who loved you from the start. Why is that supposed to be wrong?
Deadly Snark
Tryhard As Fuck
[x] You. Princess Azula the Blue. Heir apparent to the Dragon Throne. Conqueror of Ba Sing Se. Half Roku—half Sozin. Where you are, so is the Fire Nation in all its rapacious glory. Yours is the blood and bone of empire. All the things you should have ever wanted to be. But sometimes you think of fire dancing under the Moon; of three girls and the horizon and a flight across half the world. Is that wrong? Are you wrong to dream—to think, so briefly, of being something more?
- Location
- Middle Europe
[X] You. Princess Azula the Blue. Heir apparent to the Dragon Throne. Conqueror of Ba Sing Se. Half Roku—half Sozin. Where you are, so is the Fire Nation in all its rapacious glory. Yours is the blood and bone of empire. All the things you should have ever wanted to be. But sometimes you think of fire dancing under the Moon; of three girls and the horizon and a flight across half the world. Is that wrong? Are you wrong to dream—to think, so briefly, of being something more?
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
[X] Your Father. In every life, they turn from him to save Zuko. Ty Lee has questioned him again and again. Mai has said you're 'weird' about him. But he's still—he's still your Father. The only one in the world who loved you from the start. Why is that supposed to be wrong?
Flipped between this an 'You', felt it safe to go with this since You has a lead already, so win-win
Flipped between this an 'You', felt it safe to go with this since You has a lead already, so win-win
Vista
(Verified anomalous street lamp)
- Location
- appears to be in a containment cell
- Pronouns
- They/Them
[X] Your Father. In every life, they turn from him to save Zuko. Ty Lee has questioned him again and again. Mai has said you're 'weird' about him. But he's still—he's still your Father. The only one in the world who loved you from the start. Why is that supposed to be wrong?
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- Location
- france
[X] Your Father. In every life, they turn from him to save Zuko. Ty Lee has questioned him again and again. Mai has said you're 'weird' about him. But he's still—he's still your Father. The only one in the world who loved you from the start. Why is that supposed to be wrong?
[X] You. Princess Azula the Blue. Heir apparent to the Dragon Throne. Conqueror of Ba Sing Se. Half Roku—half Sozin. Where you are, so is the Fire Nation in all its rapacious glory. Yours is the blood and bone of empire. All the things you should have ever wanted to be. But sometimes you think of fire dancing under the Moon; of three girls and the horizon and a flight across half the world. Is that wrong? Are you wrong to dream—to think, so briefly, of being something more?
Edit: Changed my mind. Damn this vote is hard.
Edit: Changed my mind. Damn this vote is hard.
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