neutronium95
Mad Rocketeer
- Location
- The test site
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Arsonist's Lullaby: An Azula Timeloop Quest
- Thread starter Magery
- Start date
- Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Sirrocco
Pedantic
Ah. You are meaning Yomi. Dave Sirlin discusses it extensively.
- Pronouns
- Reader
Omg. This still hits so hard. My poor sides.
[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?
Just discover this quest and I loving it.
Edit: I mist the vote, but there still be next time
Just discover this quest and I loving it.
Edit: I mist the vote, but there still be next time
Last edited:
a long-overdue conversation
Most recent voting round was closed methinks, Fantasy explorer (but glad to have you aboard this crazy train)!
Poking back in to add to some of Randino's readthru. The more recent choices our Azula has made, and the composure she's kept even in close proximity to would-be adversaries (a run-in with Katara trying to ambush her... there was even some playful "can't touch this" defensive volleys against Aang's bison). I am liking this side of her. Good voting thus far.
My personal favorite, is third loop where she tells Mai and Ty Lee to go on ahead, while she confers with Zuko-meister.
Art:
Poking back in to add to some of Randino's readthru. The more recent choices our Azula has made, and the composure she's kept even in close proximity to would-be adversaries (a run-in with Katara trying to ambush her... there was even some playful "can't touch this" defensive volleys against Aang's bison). I am liking this side of her. Good voting thus far.
My personal favorite, is third loop where she tells Mai and Ty Lee to go on ahead, while she confers with Zuko-meister.
Art:
A long-overdue conversation.
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- Pronouns
- Reader
My top 3 per loop are
1st loop:
¹ Ty lee calls out Azula on her inability to play the Erhu
² Azula respects the danger of the boomerang
³ Katara admits that she knows Zuko is an idiot
2nd loop:
¹ the Dynamic trio unite to bully the guards
² Azula accepts that burning the earth kingdom down with the comet was her worse idea ever
³ Azula decides that her question is stupid, because obviously she's going to save her friends
3rd loop
¹ Lo & Li Telling Azula she always deserves to be loved and to never forget who she is
² Mai Explaining why she's going ahead to get Zuko to talk to Azula
³ Azula, giving Ty Lee permission to commit regicide
Honorable mention: Azula never forgiving an ancestor for keeping her from getting a perfect score on a practice test.
"Fourth" Loop - The Boiling Rock, Parts 1-2
Magery
Life blooms like a flower, far away or by the road
- Location
- Australia
You are Azula, and you are—
a flurry
a flame
shadows across open ground
the sun fallen to earth
hands too cold for fire
—alive, as if torn out from a dream. Or a grave.
"You miscalculated," says a friend. "I love Zuko more than I fear you."
There's an honesty to those words you've never really come to appreciate before now. It's only here, in the shadow of the end of your world, that Mai is finally willing to tell you the truth. She's always been straightforward, of course, but—it's just interesting, you suppose, how these things come to be.
Maybe this is why she and Ty Lee always end up so insolent: you don't strike Mai down here, so they finally feel free enough to speak every little feeling that fills their hearts.
You sigh, long and low and frustrated.
Not at them. At you.
Because you're still going to save them anyway, aren't you? No matter the indignity they'll inflict on you in return.
Honestly.
How hopeless.
(How simple.)
"Well," you say into the silent air—as silent as anything can be above the cauldron of a bubbling volcano, anyway, "as far as justifications for treason go, it's at least traditional."
Mai blinks her champagne eyes. You've rattled her. It's probably the joke—or the way you're not even bothering to look at her, instead staring up at the thin, sinewy cables that led your brother to his freedom and Mai to her rebellion. In a way, they might as well be heartstrings; there's something almost arterial about the way they stretch across the sky.
No wonder you could have unraveled them so easily: snipped them apart with lightning, or seared them over with flame. You just… chose not to, then.
You choose not to now.
(You're not talking about the cables anymore.)
"Still," you say, studying them and the sky beyond, the vast, soaring heavens that cage you beneath, "I hope you have a better justification prepared for when the palace finds out. Maybe you could claim that you were trying to save your uncle out of familial loyalty, and it was that devotion that moved me to mercy—unless, of course, it's instead part of our secret plan to convince dear Zuzu you're actually on his side so that you can get close enough to the Avatar to assassinate him? Or perhaps you've already discussed what to say with Zuko. He does have so much experience in making excuses for his failures, after all."
"Azula," she asks, somewhere between baffled and belligerent, "what in the world are you talking about?"
"Isn't it obvious?" Finally, you turn to her—and to Ty Lee, floating in the middle of the two of you, torn between the currents of fear and friendship. "I'm asking you if you've thought this little bout of treachery through. I'm capable of many things, Mai, but if you want me to save you here you're going to need to give me something to work with."
"I… wasn't expecting you to." There's a certain stiffness to her expression you recognise from the way it's so often sat on your own these past few cycles: when the mind behind is abruptly confronted with a reality that doesn't quite unfurl the way it's supposed to. Like the first time you speak a word you've only ever read, just for your tutor to correct your pronunciation—though perhaps with slightly higher stakes than minor academic embarrassment. "I'm not you, Azula. Not everything I do forms one of my thirty-six stratagems for world domination."
These days, you're finding you might well have been better off without either strategies or world domination, frankly. They don't really seem to have worked out for you.
"Well, this is part of mine," you say anyway, because she doesn't have to know exactly how unprepared you are for all of this. "So I'm afraid that you won't be escaping the consequences of your actions through something as passé as prison or execution. I still have use for you, after all."
A flick of your wrist paints the sky with a flower of lightning, short and sweet and sudden enough to snap the attention of every useless guard in the vicinity straight toward you. You drop the hand back down and point it toward the yawning mouth of the prison, where the faint clanging and banging of a riot in progress—accompanied on vocals by what might as well be a distant pack of tiger-monkeys—filters back up to the platform. "Don't you have something to be doing?"
As the last guard sprints back into the Boiling Rock, you start walking towards Mai and Ty Lee, your steps slow and simple, boots soft against the metal grate keeping you all from the volcano's oozing maw. You can see the way Mai tenses, drawing herself up like a spider-snake, a long, thin, dangerous streak of a girl. Ty Lee shuffles a bit closer to her side, but she's looking between you and Mai with what could almost be a contemplative tension to her eyes.
"Look," you say, stopping just outside the reach of their arms, your own held up, palms wide, hands empty of flame. "I understand this may come as a shock to you, but I don't really want to toss my only friends into the Boiling Rock—and if you were going to betray me, at least you did it for something irrational like love, rather than because someone else managed to manipulate you better than I can. Now that would make me angry."
One of Mai's hands massages her hip, briefly, right over where her thick robes conceal a set of throwing stars. "You were pretty angry when I did it."
"Perhaps I was," you allow, dragging out the words as if to mock the very idea of them. To her, it was a few minutes ago; to you, it was another lifetime. "But I got over it. Right now, I think I'm mostly bemused."
You signpost the finger-poke you thrust in Mai's general direction blatantly enough that she doesn't try to stab you on reflex. Thank the spirits for small mercies.
"Honestly, I understand a life of emotional repression at the hands of a constantly-disappointed mother has left you somewhat unprepared when it comes to thinking rationally through your feelings, but really. You could have been cleverer about this." For some reason, Ty Lee's whole face twists halfway between laughter and tears as you finish speaking. She truly is bafflingly emotional at the most unusual of times. "Now I need to convince every last buffoon who saw you cut the line and blather on about love and fear that this was all according to my plan, or else my Fath—or else someone is going to question why I haven't tasked the palace executioner to sharpen his axe."
Her eyes intent on your face, each one narrowed to an arrow-tip of attention, Mai remains silent for a few seconds.
Ty Lee, however, does not; she flits in from the side as a sugary little shield between you and Mai, gently grabbing your still-raised other hand and dragging it down to her side.
"Azula," she begins, limping across each word like her voice is carrying a bruise, "are you… feeling alright?"
You snort. "I've just failed to stop my brother from breaking open the most secure prison in the Fire Nation because one of my friends is apparently less afraid of what I'll do to her for treason than she is of losing him, and the other is trying to pretend she's not expecting me to try and murder both of them at any given moment, and you ask me if I'm okay?"
You gently fend Ty Lee away and snap out a spark, twirling it around on a finger like a lesser firebender might juggle a flame before snuffing it against your palm.
"I am, actually," you add, somewhere between nonchalant and amused, "but oddly enough, I don't think you'll believe me."
"You can say that again," Mai mutters under her breath.
A smirk threatens to flash across your lips. You let it.
"Listen," you say, walking over to the edge of the platform, the white steam that drifts across it curling around your boots as you lean against the low railings, "if it helps, there is something I want to ask both of you, and I can't exactly do that if you're not here and healthy and happy."
"What do you want to ask?" Ty Lee says from behind you at the same time as Mai says, "Because your question went so well last time."
You feel, rather than see, the glare Mai shoots at Ty Lee and the way it washes off her like wind.
"Something better discussed somewhere else," you say, because you are not pouring your heart out with the stink of sulphur invading your nostrils. Not again. "Shall we reconvene in the Warden's office, ladies?"
There's a longer pause than you were anticipating.
"I… suppose we could," Mai says eventually, her voice almost rusty, like each word is being unwound out of some derelict place in her iron heart. "At least it has seats. My legs are starting to ache with the heat."
"Mine aren't!" Ty Lee says, and you know that if you turned around she would be doing some kind of standing-split stretch to show off.
You turn around.
She's doing some kind of standing-split stretch.
A corner of your lip twitches up in amusement.
"Very well then," you say. "It's your family's prison, Mai. Lead the way."
There's another second or so where Mai just stares at you, head slanted to the side, a bead of sweat leaking down her forehead and barely missing one of her eyes. Then she shrugs and starts walking.
"Sure," she says, "why not."
The Warden's office is no better the second time around: the same overcompensating desk, the same lurid reds and golds splashed across the walls and furniture and baffling ceramic decorations in pathetic imitation of the palace, the same domineering portrait of your Father crowning the wall behind the uncomfortable chair whose looping, awkwardly-studded armrests so poorly pay homage to the Dragon Throne.
You're almost tempted to drag it around to the other side of the desk, where Mai and Ty Lee have settled onto the stools that are all the Warden has to offer his guests. But in the end, you—well, it would be better to have a little distance. Ty Lee is far too fond of hugging for your liking. Or your dignity.
So instead you settle into your chair, hands folded formally into your lap, back as straight as your fingers before lightning. Across from you, Ty Lee is—somehow—sitting cross-legged on top of her stool, while Mai has her feet flat on the carpet and her fingers hidden in the shadows of her sleeves.
"So, Azula!" Ty Lee says with an easy smile. "Are you going to tell us what you wanted to ask now?"
You blow out a breath, your eyes flickering shut and your cheeks drawing tight as you firm your jaw enough to speak.
"I want to ask you," and you don't stumble on a single syllable, not at all, "something about me."
"That," Mai says, both eyebrows raised perhaps a quarter-inch in some of the most dramatic surprise you've ever seen on her face, "was not what I was expecting."
Rather than reward her with a response, you instead snap your fingers to light the torches that ring the metal walls, chasing the afternoon shadows away.
"Okay," Ty Lee says slowly, nodding encouragingly, like you're some—some kind of child, in need of a friendly face to open up. She doesn't falter at all at your scowl and the way it twists your lips into a scar. "What about yourself, Azula? What do you want to say?"
It's—
You take another breath.
Mai stops looking disinterested.
Her impeccable posture becomes, somehow, even sharper.
Ty Lee continues to smile; it sits so easily across her cheeks, like they were made for nothing else.
Fine.
You can do this.
Surely you can.
"I have… everything," you begin, slow, hesitant, like each word is a hand feeling itself through the dark, reaching out for something it cannot see. "Do you understand that? I have everything. I am the Crown Princess of the most powerful nation in the world. Come Sozin's Comet, I will become the Crown Princess of the only nation in the world."
The torches around the room start to ebb away until they are a soft, simmering blue barely beyond an ember.
"Of course I will be. I bent lightning earlier than any other in history—I broke Ba Sing Se where a hundred years and the Dragon of the West failed. I nearly killed the Avatar. No princess of the Fire Nation has ever had a brighter star than mine before they were crowned. No prince, either."
Something even Ty Lee wouldn't be kind enough to call a smile spreads across your face.
"Don't you see? I'm perfect."
The words hang in the air like arrows before a charge, in the moment when the cavalry glance at the sky and realise they cannot see the Sun.
"So please. Mai. Ty Lee. Tell me: if all of that is true…"
The weight of the words choke in your throat, heavy as armour to a sailor drowned. Cold the way lightning isn't.
You could bear it, once. Or, better: you never knew it was there, once. Because you didn't realise (you had forgotten) it was possible to burn without it. This hollowing thing that became your breath. This quiet, gravedirt filigree etched into the heart of the girl called monster.
But you are—
You are tired. Of failure. Of pain. And your stupid brother looked at that monster and bowed like he thought she wasn't, and your treacherous friends are still here and watching you with eyes wide enough to swallow the Sun.
So your jaw firms and your mouth opens and you finish the last few words of a question a monster wouldn't understand.
"...then why aren't I happy?"
Your eyes are sore, but your cheeks are not wet. A princess does not cry.
(An easy lesson to learn, when there's no-one left to listen.)
"Azula…" Ty Lee says, pulling your hands from your lap and over the tabletop to clasp them helplessly, nearly dragging you out of your seat. As ever, her flesh is cool against your own. That's half the problem, really. You've always burned hotter than anything around you. "I'm sorry."
What a strange thing to say.
"For what?" you ask, watching how the rain slips from her stormcloud eyes. "I hardly think you are the one to blame for my unhappiness, Ty Lee."
You remember her smile, in the air, with the whole festival beneath and stamping their feet in celebration. It was the same smile you caught her with so many lives ago, before you called out at that mangy little circus in the backwater nowhere of the Earth Kingdom. You wanted her then, so you took her, but you—you are not so yourself now that you haven't come to understand that may have hurt.
Ty Lee shakes her head, almost petulantly, braid jerking awkwardly across her shoulders. Her whole face squeezes into a grimace, or a flinch, but when she lets it go and blinks a couple of times her cheeks smooth out and nothing threatens to spill across her cheeks any further. It's like—like she needed to feel the pain just so she could let it go.
"I don't care about blame," she says. "Holding grudges makes my aura all dingy. I'm sorry because you're feeling sad, Azula. I don't want you to be sad. That's all it is."
You feel the shadow of a smirk twitch up the corner of one rouged lip. "If only the world was so accommodating."
"You could have given me a million years and I don't think I'd have ever predicted what you were going to say when we sat down here, Azula." Mai's voice is a dull blade; something that lands with weight, but without wound. "But maybe I should have. Of course, after Zuko, and the prison riot, and my uncle, we'd still be talking about you."
Slowly, she draws an arm from where it sits demurely in her lap and lays it on the table. Her fingers—so pale, so thin, aristocratic save for the blade-calluses that speckle her skin—settle near yours and Ty Lee's. Not close enough to touch. But close enough that it feels like, if she were another girl, they might have.
"Whatever. You're an asshole, but you're still my friend. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm not exactly an… expert on happiness," she says, and Ty Lee startles herself into a snort. "I gave up on it for a long time. I still want to sometimes now. But I think—I think the most important thing is to imagine yourself happy."
"Because that, of course, will solve everything," you say, too caustic to pretend you're feeling it at Mai.
"I didn't mean it like that," she says with an eyeroll. "I meant that if you don't know why you aren't happy, have you ever tried to picture what being happy would be like? That's how I…"
She trails off, eyes cutting down and away. Is she—is that embarrassment? You haven't seen that on her since childhood.
A rictus of disgust paints itself across your face. "You did not just suggest you only realised you could be happy because you fantasised about your life with my brother."
Mai snaps you a glare—an infinitesimal narrowing of her thin eyebrows, a certain sharpness of the lip—and then, with a second, quieter glance at you and then at Ty Lee, says, "Not only Zuko, no."
Ty Lee makes a sound like the boiler whine of an empire-class Fire Nation battleship. There's a whole-body twitch that turns her into a ruffle of pink and red and paleness, and Mai goes briefly still the way a jackalope might before a sandshark. But in the end, Ty Lee just squeezes your hands tighter instead, and says, "Mai's right! Happiness is a movement, not a place. You gotta visualise it before you can do it. Like when you're swinging from a trapeze. Or when you're bending, right?"
She lets go to briefly tap you on the temple, a liberty taken as if your retribution isn't even a concern. "You gotta see the flame in here before you see it in here," a second tap on your palm, and an embarrassed smile, "or at least I think you do? You don't really talk about bending much, even though it's, like, your favourite thing literally ever."
You're still processing that completely incongruous non-sequitur when Ty Lee gives your hands one last squeeze and lets go.
"So, yeah," she says, "I think that's really important to figure out. What do you see when you imagine yourself happy?"
What a stupid question. Does she think you're a child?
Imagination has never saved anyone. You can't drag yourself from whatever pathetic pit the universe has cast you into by hoping to be happy or wishing to be well. It won't put a crown on your head—won't flatten the world to obedience like a fist full of flame and a tongue sharper than lightning. The only way to get what you want is to refuse to let anyone else have it first.
This, after all, is what it means to be strong. It is what your Father has always taught you, and what your mother only remembered when it was Zuko's life she wanted. Never yours.
You have learned their lessons well.
But the thing is—
It's like you said to Mai and Ty Lee.
Who you are in this moment is the strongest you've ever been: the unquestioned heir to the Dragon Throne, the second-greatest firebender in the world behind your Father, the most accomplished princess in the history of the Fire Islands. You are a single step from the apex of heaven.
(Something always, always stops you from taking the last.)
If you want to be happy, you shouldn't need imagination. You should just be able to reach out and take it.
And yet, here you are, and instead of happiness all you have is a question.
Because you're not happy.
But Zuko is.
Useless old Zuzu, with his mediocre bending and myopic morality and ten thousand failures weighing him down like hooks—he's happy.
You saw it when he smiled at you.
I just didn't figure out until now that I needed to show you too.
And if there's one thing you know Zuko is good at, it's being a child.
So you sigh, and you mutter, "Fine," and you close your eyes.
And you try to imagine yourself happy.
The first thing you feel
You breathe out.
So does your brother.
A woman.
It sits in your hands.
Up and down the beach.
The last thing you feel
You open your eyes.
Ty Lee stares imploringly at you.
Mai watches with faux-distant curiosity.
"I don't think that was any help," you say eventually, studying the dull metal of the door behind them in lieu of meeting their gaze.
"Why not?" Ty Lee is practically vibrating. "What did you think of?"
A mirage.
Heatstroke.
Hallucination.
Something that never was.
Something that can never be.
And isn't that just so fitting: the only world where you think you might be happy is a world that no longer exists.
A bitter smile crawls across your face. "I saw a lie, or maybe two. Or three. Or four. It doesn't really matter. If they were ever true, the moment's long since lost."
Lost.
Or maybe stolen.
But who stole it?
To whom should fall the blame?
You're tempted to say your mother, but—then she'd have won. She'd have ruined you the way she always wanted to. You won't give her that honour.
So no. Some of it must fall to you.
You can allow that much, at least—not every choice you've made is the choice you thought it was.
Not every choice is one you'd choose again.
(But there's a question you don't want to ask:
Who was the one to teach you how to choose that way?)
That's what makes your cycles so frustrating—of all those choices, you can change maybe two.
You can save Mai and Ty Lee; you can try not to fight Zuko. Every other mistake you've ever made remains a branch in the funeral pyre of your future.
There's just nothing you can do.
(You can't even give up.
It's just not something you're capable of.
You're better than Zuko at bending, but neither of you know how to break.)
You don't have any other choices.
None of the ones that matter, anyw—
"—so what?"
Mai's voice transfixes the air like a knife does a palm.
You blink.
"Excuse me?" you say, dragging out the syllables in disdain.
"So what if it's lost?" she says again, looking at you like you're an idiot—like she's explaining something to Tom-Tom instead of the next Fire Lord. "Of all the people in the world I didn't think you would run away from the impossible, Azula. Or was all that about lightning and Ba Sing Se just empty bragging?"
"You don't understand," you snap, the torches on the walls hissing and spitting. "Even if the Avatar itself bowed to me, if I tore that monstrous spirit out and swallowed it until the very heart of the world bent to my hands, I would never find myself on that beach."
"That beach?" Ty Lee asks, infuriatingly gentle. In the ghostly firelight, her eyes are wide with something you recognise from Iroh, from Zuko—that feeling that's like sympathy cut sharper and plunged into your chest. "What beach?"
"It's nothing," you say, still glaring at Mai, who sets her narrow shoulders in challenge and glares right back. "Just a useless dream."
"And what were you dreaming of, Azula?" Mai sets her other arm on the desk, voluminous sleeves whispering over the wood, as if to suggest she's placing all her tiles on the table. "If you're going to insult me for what makes me happy, surely you're not coward enough to hide yours."
You shatter out a spark and snuff it in your fist, fast enough it's almost a flinch. How dare she.
"You want me to tell you? Fine. I'll tell you." Your jaw is as tight as bowstring; the pauldrons of your armour feel like your shoulders are trying to hold up the sky. "I thought of Ember Island. We were on holiday, like when I was a child, but we weren't children. Zuko and I were throwing lightning back and forth until one of us fumbled and dropped it. Obviously it was him. You and Ty Lee were laughing. Father was proud of us. Are you happy now?"
"Was anyone else there?" For some reason, you thought it would be Mai who asked that—but it's Ty Lee, quiet against the loudly decorative paintings that plaster themselves across the Warden's office.
"No," you say, and don't look at her.
Mai opens her mouth—and then her teeth click shut almost like she's wincing. She snaps to face Ty Lee, who seems to be ignoring her entirely, instead drawing her hands back from where she'd dropped them into her lap to tease your fist back open one gentle finger at a time.
"Okay," Ty Lee says, "so if you don't really want to talk about that, then how about this: let's play a game!"
Your eyebrows draw together in two thin lines of incomprehension. "Why would I want to do that?"
"It's a very easy game," she says, bobbing on her stool and somehow not looking like she's going to overbalance over her crossed ankles. "We just go around in a circle naming all the things that make us unhappy!"
"Now that's the sort of game I can get behind," Mai drawls.
It seems you're outnumbered.
You sigh.
"If you insist," you say, rolling your eyes. "I'll go first: this conversation."
"People who hurt animals!" Ty Lee chimes in.
"Azula's refusal to deal with her own emotions," Mai adds without a moment's hesitation.
"Your refusal to mind your own business," you shoot back, jabbing a finger in her direction.
"People who are nasty to each other." Ty Lee is frowning at both of you.
"You don't get to decide whose business it is," Mai says, low and frustrated. "You asked us why you weren't happy, Azula. Stop hiding from the answers we give you just because you find them uncomfortable. It's embarrassing. It's beneath you."
Ty Lee makes a shushing motion towards Mai, a rare edge of irritation in the line of her jaw—and then, in a complicated movement, somehow has your hand and Mai's hand and her own hand each pressed against the other in the centre of the table, like the three of you are preparing some kind of war cry before a game of kuai ball.
"Listen," she says firmly, glittery nails sparkling in the flare of your flame, "this isn't okay. Azula is being vulnerable for the first time in her life, Mai. She's allowed to be bad at it. But she's not allowed to be mean about it, either."
She punctuates the last couple of sentences with a meaningful stare at Mai, and then at you.
Then she lifts her hand away.
You and Mai slowly follow suit.
"So, Azula," she says, her voice high and sweet like nothing ever happened, "you don't have to talk about what makes you unhappy, either. But you should think about it."
She nods, an exaggerated bounce of the head and neck almost like she's pretending to fall.
"Happy isn't something you can just be," says the happiest person you know. "Only kids and tiger monkeys can do that. You need to figure out who you are when you're happy, and who you are when you're not. Then you have to do the things that help you be the happy person, and avoid the things that make you the unhappy person."
Mai doesn't quite react fast enough to escape the leaning hug Ty Lee captures her in, arm a bright splash of colour against the dark fabric of Mai's robes. Her lips flatten slightly, but in the end she seems resigned to Ty Lee's enthusiasm. In this, at least, you can relate.
"And sometimes that's really hard. Some people's auras try to make them grey even when they want to be pink. But they're trying. I like to think everyone's trying, you know? Everyone wants a happier world." Her eyes dart to the towering portrait of your Father behind you. "Even if some of them are, like, really bad at it. But that's not the point!"
She releases Mai and stands in the same motion, twirling out of her seat like her words are bouncing around inside her very bones in their haste to escape.
"So if being the Crown Princess and conquering the world and killing the Avatar hasn't made you happy, all that means is that you've been trying the wrong things the whole time!"
Ty Lee's face becomes the horizon on which the Sun of her smile dawns, until there is nowhere in her expression that joy does not touch. She spreads her arms wide as if in invitation—or embrace. Like she wants to hug the whole of the sky.
"Isn't that a good thing? Now you have a reason to try something new!"
What else can you do but laugh?
It spills out of you as sand through an hourglass.
Spirits.
If only she knew.
Mai is chuckling softly.
Ty Lee is giggling too.
"If you insist," you manage to say, once your belly stops jumping against the inside of your armour. "I suppose I can consider it."
Somehow, her smile turns wider.
A few hours later, you find yourself trying to drown out Ty Lee's snores with, of all things, a game of pai sho.
She's sprawled over the bed in the captain's cabin on the slow, meandering ferry that is now your only way home from the Boiling Rock—just as he always does, Zuko stole your airship—with her arms akimbo and one leg dangling off the edge of the mattress, one cheek already soaked with drool. You'd compare her indignity to a coral urchin's, but that would be cruel. To the urchin.
You and Mai have shifted the pai sho board as far away as the room allows, facing each other down on opposing stools. Unlike Ty Lee, the both of you do know how to play, which adds a certain intellectual relish to the way you are slowly dismantling all of Mai's positions as she watches helplessly. It's nearly satisfying enough to stave off your distaste at finding yourself enjoying that leaf-brained fool's favourite game.
"You know," Mai almost muses—almost, because she's the most precise person you know outside yourself—as she retreats another tile only to realise she's fallen into your Masquerade of Broken Flowers and frown, "you get surprisingly snippy about me and Zuko for someone who's been trying to push us together since we were kids."
"I didn't realise you'd noticed," you say, raising an eyebrow. She knows as well as you do that you're not talking about her frankly spurious accusation.
"I see more than you think, Azula," she says without inflection. An observation, rather than a criticism. "I'm just curious why."
"You seemed to like him, baffling as the reason may be," you say with a shrug, "and distracting my brother with romance makes for an easier path to the throne. It's simple politics, really."
"You're way worse at lying than you used to be, like, yesterday." She lays down her chrysanthemum in an attempt to start the Camellia-Peony Gambit, but in four moves' time she'll find out you predicted that ten moves ago. "It's kind of funny."
"Be careful how you speak to your princess, Mai," you say, toying with the blue lotus tile between your fingers. It's the same colour as your flame, burning in the lamps that jut out from the walls. "No amount of loving Zuko makes the ice you're on any thicker."
She snorts. It's shockingly unladylike, for her. "If you didn't kill me there and then, you're not going to now, and you know it."
Be as that may, it's moments like these that make you miss the days when she was still afraid of you.
"I can see why he likes you." You flick a tile onto the board without even looking. Will she think you're getting overconfident, or will she think you're trying to hide how important the move is? It's futile either way. "You really are both as stubborn as each other."
Mai rolls her eyes, a flash of annoyed gold. She points over towards the door to the cabin's ensuite, which waits politely in one corner between a painting of Abalone Bay and a pair of garishly crossed cutlasses. Perhaps the captain learned his taste in internal decor from the Warden. "If you want to see stubborn, the mirror is over there."
"I'm hardly going to sully my glorious visage in such a smeary, smudgy mess," you say, tossing your hair haughtily, or at least making the best attempt at it you can while it's bound into a tight topknot. "You should apologise for even suggesting it."
"I'm terribly sorry they didn't design this prison boat up to imperial standards, your Highness," Mai says, and she sounds so perfectly like all the obsequious courtiers you've grown up around that you have to blink to make sure you're not actually in the palace. "However can this humble servant possibly make it up to you?"
You start—not giggling, because giggling is juvenile and unbecoming of a princess, but laughing until your belly bounces with it.
Mai offers a few dry chuckles as well… which is to say, she's practically in hysterics.
Over in the corner, Ty Lee mumbles in her sleep, rolling over to flop down on her stomach.
"Are you actually going to answer my question?" Mai asks a few minutes later, once you've both recovered. She pushes a tile forward, and sighs when you finish your counter-move before her hand is even back in her lap.
"I'm still tossing up whether I want you to tickle Ty Lee awake or go and polish the mirror so I can review my appearance before we arrive at the palace," you say. Perhaps not the most dignified ways for Mai to recompense her offence, but she did offer. "Patience is a virtue, you know."
"Azula." Despite the serrated syllables, she's not looking at you. Instead, she's staring intently at her few remaining tiles, then at yours, then back to hers, then—she shrugs as if in resignation and flips all hers upside down in ritual surrender. "This isn't court. There's no-one here but you and me and Ty Lee. You're allowed to actually speak your mind."
"You seem remarkably certain I want to."
She snorts. "How long has it been since we were in my uncle's office, exactly?"
"Not long enough," you say, content to leave your tiles in the shape of your victory. "His sense of aesthetics is second only to his ability to manage a prison."
"I didn't realise you'd taken up airbending," she says, not even bothering to acknowledge your wit, "what with the deflecting and all."
It's not even the first time you've heard her make that joke and it's still infuriating. "Is it so difficult to understand that I have no interest in discussing this further, Mai?"
"No," she says, "that part is easy. But you were the one who said she'd consider trying something new. Why not honesty?"
You've been the most honest you think you've ever been with anyone—except maybe Zuko, in that forest—to both Mai and Ty Lee for your last three cycles in a row, and she still wants more?
Your friends are, without a doubt, the most ungrateful pair of ill-mannered ingrates you've ever had the misfortune to encounter in your whole life.
"Even worse than Long Feng?" Mai might actually sound insulted.
"Nobody is worse than that," you say, less out of any desire to soothe her furrowed brow and more out of a desire to avoid giving even the semblance of a compliment to Long Feng.
"Good enough," Mai says. "Now, for the last time: are you going to answer my question, or do you want me to start answering it instead?"
Your mouth opens—and then snaps right back shut, because maybe it isn't a good idea to tell Mai to go ahead and do her worst. Every time you've surrendered her the conversational initiative, you've ended up talking about something bafflingly irrelevant that nevertheless manages to tilt your entire world a few degrees off-centre. You refuse to let it happen again if you can possibly prevent it.
So instead you will… do exactly what she wants you to do.
Your eyes narrow until your glare wouldn't have been out of place staring up from the Boiling Rock.
A corner of Mai's lip twitches in what might be triumph.
How hateful.
"Very well," you say, so clearly and carefully enunciated that nobody under the sky could dare accuse it of being a huff. "If you want honesty, you can have it."
On her own head be it.
"You are well aware that your relationship with Zuko is politically convenient," you begin, because it's not as if Mai, of all people, needs her value as a commodity explained to her, "both to the Royal Family as a marriage candidate and to me as an ally. And no doubt you have realised that no matter who becomes Fire Lord, to have you and my brother making moon-eyes at each other opens avenues of vulnerability that are useful to me while closing others that are not. I would be a fool not to encourage your… romance," your lips purse together on reflex, "regardless of my personal opinion on the matter."
"Your personal opinion is what I'm asking for," Mai says, rolling her eyes again. "We both know you weren't thinking about dynastic security and balancing factional interests when you set fire to an apple on my head and watched Zuko flail to put it out."
"Perhaps not my finest moment," you allow, resettling your feet on the gaudy golden rug covering the floorboards as the ferry rumbles into a turn. "Regardless, my point was that even though your obstinate softness toward dear Zuzu has led you to make some questionable choices, you are—well, certainly a more palatable prospect for a sister-in-law than some winsome tart with delusions of grandeur or an easily-impressionable wallflower likely to sway in every courtly breeze."
A spark rolls out of your hand and across to the other, bridging the space between them with the subtle thrum of your spirit. You watch it rather than the severe angles of Mai's face.
"I refuse to spend the rest of my life being forced to tolerate the same simpering incompetence that defined our classmates. At least you keep things interesting."
"I think—I think that's the nicest thing you've ever said about me," Mai says quietly. She so rarely stumbles over her words that you're almost in shock. A glance up from the lightning in your fingers reveals her whole posture has shifted backward, like she'd had to sway to avoid a blow. But at the same time, it doesn't feel like she was flinching from the thought of being hurt.
"You may thank me for my magnanimity at your leisure," you say, taking a shallow breath and snuffing the spark on the exhale. Your shoulders feel strangely stiff under your pauldrons, so you roll them and lift your head to return your full attention to Mai's face. "Though I suppose I have not wholly answered your question, and I will not have you accuse me of cowardice a third time."
You've never truly thought too deeply about why it was funny to toy with Mai about Zuko and with Zuko about Mai. It was always an easy way to remind Mai of her position and an even easier way to rile Zuko up, which was perennially useful—it made him more predictable, it made him more likely to make a mistake in front of your Father, and it frustrated your mother. Three purposes achieved in one.
But that's not really enough, is it? Why did you need to remind Mai of her position, when she has always been your friend? What was the point in riling up Zuko, when you don't hate him and he doesn't hate you?
(There's a whisper in the back of your skull.
It sounds like all your life, you've used fear to control people.)
You sigh. If only your feelings were like your flame—something you have never found wanting, no matter how much you question it hour after hour in the training fields. "I think the strangest thing about it all is that you and Zuko manage to be both familiar and a threat simultaneously."
Mai doesn't interject, though you'd expected her to. She just looks at you, face set into something like softness, the sort of expression you'd expect to see her give to someone like Ty Lee, or Tom-Tom—never someone like you.
This time, you don't look away.
"Really, I wasn't lying when I said it was convenient. My brother courting my friend keeps things right here." One arm traces a circle that vaguely encompasses the room and metaphorically encompasses your life. "It's… uncomplicated. Easy. Not something I particularly have to account for, recent events notwithstanding."
A wry smirk briefly curls up a corner of your lip.
"Though at the same time, I suppose it has always felt… inevitable." Not quite the kind you spoke of to Ty Lee—but nearly. Rhyme, rather than repetition. "Even if I never consciously understood it. Of course you would choose Zuko in the end. That was always the threat."
You sigh again. Longer. Lower. A hand brushes a couple of stray strands back into your bangs. "Naturally, I recognise now that this is not a particularly useful perspective, nor one that is wholly… reflective of the truth. It is just that I—"
"—don't feel comfortable," Mai interrupts, "unless you're in control."
On the bed, Ty Lee rolls over and over until she's half an inch from falling off the end and onto the low wooden cabinet tucked into it. Presumably it holds fresh pairs of sheets. Maybe they'll help staunch the bleeding when she overbalances and cracks her skull against it.
"I was going to say," you snap, like the first crack of wood beneath a bonfire, "that I find it hard to believe in anyone but my Father."
"Maybe you were, but that wasn't what you meant," Mai says, flat as the earth over a grave. "But I get it. I know what it's like to have the people who are supposed to love you value something else instead."
You snort, a little rueful. You can't really deny her that.
"Listen, Azula," she says, leaning a degree or two closer over the board, her palms pressing on either side of it. Her hair-buns seem almost purple in the low blue of the lamps, blooming as they are with the gift of your flame. "I don't know what will make you happy. I thought I used to, but it's—honestly it's kind of weird, but you're different, now. Or maybe you were always like this and I never looked hard enough."
She shakes her head, exaggerated to overcome the way the ferry is bouncing in the wake of some much larger vessel—perhaps the dispatch sent to fully secure the Boiling Rock, steaming their way past.
"But I do know that Ty Lee is right. Because I've spent a lot of time doing all the things I'm supposed to do and I hate it." Her voice actually rises; her syllables catch jagged on the air instead of falling as slow and smooth as stones. An honesty so raw it hurts to look. "I hate it. And I think—I think you might too. Maybe not everything. But enough."
"We all have responsibilities to our families and our nation," you observe, the same way a prisoner marching to his execution might comment admiringly on the weather.
(It's not a disagreement.)
"We do," she agrees. Something shifts in her face—not quite a smile, not quite satisfaction. Just the echo they leave behind. Then she asks, so casually it's obviously deliberate, "Do you think Zuko is fulfilling his?"
For a moment, your brain shudders to a halt, a battleship engine with its coal ducts suddenly jammed shut.
What sort of question is that?
"Of course he isn—"
I just didn't figure out until now that I need to show you too.
Your mouth slowly clicks shut. In his own way—his own stupid, thoughtless way—your brother has the strongest sense of responsibility out of anyone you've ever known. It's just that he's never figured out where he should direct it.
(But maybe, under the shadow of the black Sun, he finally did.)
"You are nearly speaking treason, Mai," you say eventually—far too softly to be taken seriously.
"I'm only asking a question, Azula." She meets your stare with fearless disregard. "You were the one who said you were driven by responsibility. I just want to know what you think that means."
There's a dull thud and a sharp ow! as Ty Lee finishes rolling off the bed and thumps head-first onto the cabinet. She slowly pushes herself off it with a mulish glare at the well-polished wood that so carefully caught her temple and the side of her ear in its embrace.
Gingerly, she turns to face you and Mai, holding a hand to her head.
"Were you," a yawn cracks open her jaw, "really playing pai sho while I was asleep? Boooooring. Please tell me you had at least a little bit of girls' talk too!"
Mai rolls her eyes. Her eyesockets must be worn smooth at this rate. "Yes, Ty Lee, we spent the whole time talking about boys."
She's—well, in a way, she's not wrong.
You stifle a smile and instead tell Ty Lee that you're glad she's finally awake, because now it's her turn for a lesson.
The ensuing dramatic wailing lasts you until the ferry has pulled into the harbour and you find yourself returned to the palace.
And all the while, you can't help but think:
You still don't have an answer for Mai.
Not in any way that matters.
A few days later, Ty Lee bursts into your office, practically cartwheeling through the doorway, feet barely skimming under the gilt doorframe as she lands like a human equivalent of a shout right in front of your desk.
You reach over and catch a pile of scrolls before they collapse and tumble off the edge onto the plush carpet below.
"Azula!" she squeals, and you wince as too many long nights of bureaucratic banalities knock themselves on the inside of your skull in eager accompaniment, "I just had the best. Idea. Ever!"
A carefully-raised eyebrows, curved like a desert blade, allows you the moment or two you need to recover from her auditory assault. "Have you forgotten the rules, Ty Lee?"
She freezes in place, so suddenly still it's like she no longer remembers how to move at all. Her rain-sky eyes take in the brush in your right hand, the obsidian writing seal of the Crown Princess sitting next to its well of rich black ink, and the fingers of your left hand still clasped against the precarious pile of scrolls teetering to one side.
"I didn't… not forget?" she tries with a sheepish smile.
"And what didn't you not forget?" you ask, eyebrow still raised.
"That nobody is allowed to yell when Azula is working?" She presses her palms together and takes a half-step back. Thankfully, so does the volume of her voice. "I didn't mean it! I was just excited!"
"It's fine," you say, depositing the brush back in its pot and starting to re-stack the scrolls into stability. "What is your idea, Ty Lee?"
"Weeeeeeeeeeee," she drags out, like a singer trying to show off, "should go to Ember Island!"
You cock your head to the side, bangs sliding against your forehead. "What."
"We should go to Ember Island!" she repeats, as if the issue was with your hearing and not her absurdity. "You said you were happy there, right? So if you're trying to be happy, then we totally have to go there again! It made us all smooth last time, too. That's two benefits in one!"
"Ty Lee," you say, gesturing to the parchment crowding your desk and the baskets blooming with scrolls—arranged in order of priority—that line the carpet beside it, "do I look like I have the time to take a holiday? Sozin's Comet is less than a week away."
"That's even more reason that you should take a holiday," Ty Lee says, suddenly serious. It sits on her so awkwardly, but all the more sincerely for it. "You said it yourself, didn't you? Or at least you kind of did. Actually maybe I did, but I was definitely right! All this Crown Princessy stuff you're doing now, that awful invasion plan, everything—this isn't what makes you happy. It's just something you learned to be good at, yeah?"
"Be as that may," you say, "I cannot exactly simply up and abandon my—"
Your mouth has barely opened around the first syllable of responsibilities before your tongue thickens and prevents you from speaking.
"—work," you finish a couple of seconds later, ignoring the confusion swirling across Ty Lee's face. "Questions would be asked. Some of them quite urgently."
No matter how many times you've failed to escape the cycle, you can't give up. You can't treat even these sometimes-pointless requests from puffed-up functionaries or poorly-delegated administrative concerns that really shouldn't be on your desk to begin with, Vice-Minister Sen, like they don't matter, like they'll disappear once Sozin's Comet sinks below the sky. It's not really hope. Just the same kind of clawing desperation that must have dragged Zuko onwards after the Avatar for those three fruitless years.
But it's yours, and you'll never let it go.
"It doesn't have to be a big holiday," she says, drawing up against the front of your desk so that she can lean forward and peer curiously at the missive you were drafting before she arrived: a sealed order to the Ministry of Security to quietly begin vetting potential candidates to replace Mai's uncle. "What about a day trip? We could hang out on the beach in the morning and go see a performance in the afternoon!"
"Please do not tell me," you say, so sharply Ty Lee almost flinches, "that you have fallen for the propaganda of the Ember Island Players."
"They… have a new play?" she says with a hesitant smile. "The Boy in the Iceberg. Apparently it's about the Avatar! You and Zuko are both in it!"
"Ty Lee," you say, standing up, the silk of your robes a sibilant whisper against the back of your chair, one hand snapping out a spark to emphasise the point, "the Ember Island Players are such an affront to their art that one of the few things Zuko and I both agreed on as children was that his first decree as Fire Lord would be to disband them entirely in defence of culture."
You start counting your arguments out on your fingers, each one a searing cerulean flame balanced above your nails.
"Their star performer is barely fit to act if playing the role of Zhao, their scriptwriter is the kind of hack better made with an axe than a pen, their set design could be outsourced to Tom-Tom's finger paintings without noticeable loss of detail, and the only person in their entire troupe I have any respect for is their ticket-saleswoman, purely because it takes genuine talent as a con artist to be able to keep that theatre open for all these years." A lesser firebender may have needed to take a breath there, such is the force of your delivery. "Frankly, she would make an excellent undercover agent in the Censorate or the Bureau of Public Affairs."
Clenching your fist shut to snuff the fires, you lean forward until you are nose-to-nose with Ty Lee. She almost goes cross-eyed trying to focus on you.
"If I were on those hideously uncomfortable benches, watching their bumbling attempts to fit within the limits of the imperial censors while still managing to butcher the entire narrative, I cannot guarantee you the building would remain as anything but ash afterwards."
Ty Lee blinks a number of times, her eyelashes fluttering like she needs to remind herself of what she's actually looking at. "Wow, Azula. I'd almost forgotten how much you liked plays!"
Your head draws back, a scowl slipping across your lips. "How did you get that from a single word I said, Ty Lee?"
Much like fire dancing, your mother was also a fan of theatre—and you are nothing like her.
"You sounded so," she breaks down into a little giggle, "so insulted when you were talking about their group! Do you really hate them that much?"
"Yes," you say. "Choose anything else but a performance, Ty Lee. I will not have it."
A smile sings across her lips, so wide, so bright that it crinkles her eyes shut. It takes you a moment to realise why—you seem to have accidentally agreed to the idea of the trip in exchange for escaping the Ember Island Players.
If Ty Lee were anyone but herself, you'd almost be convinced that had been her plan from the start.
How irritating.
But a Princess does not go back on her word.
(Except for all the times you have before, of course.)
"Alright!" Ty Lee says, bouncing in place like a startlingly pink spring, braid whipping across her back. "If you don't want to go to a performance, I have an even better idea: let's do one ourselves!"
"It is far beneath my dignity to play-act for the peasantry," you say with sneering disdain, "even if I were to be playing the Dragon Emperor. Try again."
"I didn't mean like that, silly," she says, slipping back from the monolithic slab of your desk to prance around on the carpet the way she always does when she's excited. "It's been ages since you and me and Mai got together and showed off our skills! You only saw me at the circus for a little bit, Mai's had years to practice all sorts of knife tricks because of her boring family, and you can do this whole clicky-lightning-thingy now!"
A revolutionary development in firebending that is not even recorded in mythology, reduced to a 'clicky-lightning-thingy'.
"Well maybe I'd know what to call it if you ever explained what you're doing." Ty Lee's pout has embarrassed many a man and maiden over the years, and she's truly testing its limits here. Unfortunately for her, you've always thought it makes her look a bit like a badgerfrog. "Seriously, Azula, I wasn't kidding when I said you never talk about your bending. Well, unless you're, like, using it as a threat or something. It's kinda weird. It'd be like me talking about the circus only when I'm trying to chi-block someone!"
"Don't be foolish," you say. "I quite regularly discuss both theory and practice with Lo and Li, and before them every so-called teacher who couldn't keep up with my talent. I hardly see why that is so strange."
Ty Lee is already shaking her head before you finish the sentence, her eyes drooping shut with disappointment. How rude. "That's not what I meant. I'm just saying that you're, like, the best firebender ever, right? That's cool. That's so cool! And you always seem so happy when you're bending. Like, you totally get frustrated and annoyed in fights and stuff, but at the same time it's kinda like the challenge makes you come alive? It's really impressive."
She claps her hands together, so suddenly it interrupts the way you were going to remind her that the flattery, while appreciated, is getting in the way of whatever laborious point she's trying to make.
"But that's not what I mean, either, I guess. It's more like…" Her whole face brightens, as if realising something, and she falls over herself into a handstand, fingers spread against the rug, mouth grinning up at you from an angle that already makes your neck ache in sympathy. "Like this! I love performing. I love my art. And sometimes I just feel like I have to do it. Even when it would be odd. Even when it makes me look silly. And maybe Mai was right, on Ember Island, and I also do it because I want attention."
She shrugs—an impressive gesture to manage while upside down, you'll give her that.
"But, like, attention doesn't help when you're burning your palms raw practicing rope tricks or throwing up because you got so frustrated at one trapeze flip that you kept trying it until your stomach physically couldn't keep going anymore, yeah?"
Your eyes flick to the delicate, branching striation that webs down the inside of your wrist, usually so carefully concealed by the armoured bracers you wear to battle. "You could say that."
"See, I knew you'd get it!" Somehow, despite the fact it's flipped and should look like a frown, you don't have any trouble at all telling that Ty Lee is smiling again. "So what I'm saying is that I do what I do because I want to. That's it, really. That's the whole trick, yeah? That's what makes me happy. That's why it makes me happy."
"If this is a convoluted way of trying to ask if bending makes me happy," you say, eyebrows creased together—below you, Ty Lee stares straight back, her arms not even trembling with the effort of holding herself against your attention, "you could have just said the words. Of course it does. I'm not sure why you think I don't understand that much."
"Don't be silly!" A startling flex of her elbows and an elegant twist of her torso and legs tosses her back to standing in a swirl of pink-and-red fabric. "All I've been trying to say is that I think you're a firebender the same way I'm an acrobat. For some people, it's just a description, right? A thing they can do. But for me, it's a thing I am."
Ty Lee reaches over the gulf of your desk and pokes the intricate embroidery of your well-starched robes, right above the heart.
Her finger depresses the silk so softly you almost can't feel the touch.
"That's what it's like for you too, isn't it? In here," she draws her hand back to press it above her own heart, squashing her red mantle against her chest, "just like in here."
"And so what if it is?" You still cannot figure out where she's going with this. Of course you know that you love the flame. You have loved it for so long you would have forgotten what the world felt like without it, if not for the Day of the Black Sun. When everything else in the world fails you, when time itself fails you—fire remains. It is yours in a way you think that maybe only the Avatar could ever understand. "Get to the point, Ty Lee."
"Well," she says, smiling away your brusqueness, "have you ever thought about running away to join the circus too?"
Ty Lee snatches your hands in her own, twining your fingers together in an instant.
"I bet you'd be an incredible fire dancer!"
She—
You—
What?
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.
In the end, your 'holiday' to Ember Island is not scheduled until four days before Sozin's Comet: enough time for you to handle anything important enough to truly require your personal attention, as well as organise your final preparations ahead of your impending, always-abortive coronation.
Part of those preparations, of course, include quietly leaking your plans to a few choice ears, who will ensure it spreads into the kinds of places that bands of fugitives hiding out in the Fire Nation might find themselves frequenting over the next week.
You do still need to talk to your brother, after all.
No doubt Mai knows exactly what you're doing, but given the only thing she says is that it'd be nice to get a chance to throw a knife at Zuko too, just to make sure he knows what he's missing—well, that's practically enthusiastic encouragement by her standards.
You've never been wholly sure where Zuko goes after you drive him from the Western Air Temple, and it's been a long time since you've bothered to care when all that really matters is where he will inevitably be on the day of the Comet. But you have some educated guesses, based on which parts of the archipelago he's familiar with, his dangerously sentimental attitude, and the gaggle of bleeding hearts he surrounds himself with, and you don't think it's much of a stretch to expect to run into him on Ember Island in the days before the Comet.
He might even be stupid enough to hide out in your old family beach house, which would be hilarious.
Though you suppose doing something so stupid that nobody would expect you to be that stupid is, paradoxically, not actually that stupid—not that you imagine Zuko capable of that kind of thinking. He's far too straightforward. Like the blade of a dao. Or perhaps a particularly blunt stick.
Regardless, the point is: you intend to establish a rendezvous with Zuko on Ember Island, a chance to talk about the truth that transfixes you both to eternal conflict before you must stare each other down for real. It almost worked last time. You were so close. You just didn't have the right perspective to understand what it is Zuko actually wants—not just from his fate, or the Fire Nation, but from you.
Because he does want something, and it isn't a fight.
But that's the problem, isn't it? Maybe that's always been the problem.
You and Zuko don't really know each other without the war.
Not just the Fire Nation's against the world—yours against Zuko, and Zuko's against you.
That's the way it's always been. For your Father's approval, everything was permitted and nothing was sacred. Of course it was. That's what makes him so strong. The only thing that matters is power.
And in the end…
…power has always failed you.
A truth impaled on the universe with a nine-day spear plunged straight through your spirit.
That's why you're still here, isn't it?
Because you have to find another way.
You've tried a lot of things when it comes to Zuko. You've killed him until you were certain that there was nothing about the shape of the world that wanted his death—until you knew you never had to kill him again.
You've distracted him, delayed him, and even disregarded him. It never changed a thing.
You've given him frustration, and a knife, and the present, and sympathy. Each one taught you something. But not enough.
Sometimes you wonder what's left to give. The crown? Your hope? Your responsibility?
You're not quite that far lost yet.
But there is something else, isn't there?
(And you've always tried so hard to stop anyone from seeing it, agrees your brother.)
Mai and Ty Lee might have both tried to bludgeon you half to death with the same half-baked rhetoric the moment you opened up instead of shutting down, but—they tried. You gave them a truth to work with—a truth about you—and they pounced on the chance to help. Or at least to make you feel like an idiot, which in your experience seems to keep amounting to the same thing.
Zuko isn't your friend. He isn't close to being your friend.
But he's still a bleeding heart.
And if you don't know each other without the war—
—would you be happier, if you did?
You don't know.
But Ty Lee still told you to avoid the things that make you the unhappy person.
So maybe, here and now, that can be enough.
…you suppose you're decided, then.
For once, you won't go to Zuko wanting to get something.
This time, you'll go to give something.
Honestly.
The things you find yourself doing these days.
What is there to do but laugh?
Before you do, though, Princess Azula, peace-maker, magnanimous personification of earthly charity, there's just one last thing to figure out: what are you going to give to your brother?
[ ] A flame. It's funny—despite everything, even sharing lessons for a year or so before you accelerated past him, you don't think you've ever taught Zuko a single thing about firebending. He's certainly never taught you. You've only ever used your fire to hurt each other. Maybe you should try, just this once, to offer a moment of your incandescence for something other than pain.
[ ]An empire. You have a vision for your nation, just like Zuko does. Maybe it's time to share it. Give him an honest opportunity—from Crown Princess to renegade Prince, from heir by triumph to heir by blood—to see who Fire Lord Azula would truly be. You doubt he'll accept her. But what could it hurt just to give him a chance to try?
You are not going to let Mai force you into this particular corner, thank you very much. Zuko's sense of responsibility can wait.
[ ] A traitor. It's what you are—or what you make of yourself, each and every time you decide to keep Mai and Ty Lee alive and free. In this, at least, you and Zuko are two of a kind. Neither of you are the sort of children you believe you should be. Mai once said you needed to forgive yourself for that. Maybe it's worth seeing how Zuko did.
[ ] A child. You understand, now, why it hurt when your mother called you a monster. You might even know why you said she was right. Maybe it's finally time to let Zuko know, too, before he ends up fumbling his way into figuring it out at the worst possible moment. At least there's some kind of dignity in surrender.
[ ] A future. The one you never live to see. Of all the people in the world, you know Zuko will understand the perpetual spiral of life and failure that traps you with every turn. Maybe he won't believe you—but he'll understand. He lived as many years of it as you, after all.
Just because you're thinking of making nice with him in case the universe really does want the impossible from you doesn't mean he deserves this—and certainly not first.
a flurry
a flame
shadows across open ground
the sun fallen to earth
hands too cold for fire
—alive, as if torn out from a dream. Or a grave.
"You miscalculated," says a friend. "I love Zuko more than I fear you."
There's an honesty to those words you've never really come to appreciate before now. It's only here, in the shadow of the end of your world, that Mai is finally willing to tell you the truth. She's always been straightforward, of course, but—it's just interesting, you suppose, how these things come to be.
Maybe this is why she and Ty Lee always end up so insolent: you don't strike Mai down here, so they finally feel free enough to speak every little feeling that fills their hearts.
You sigh, long and low and frustrated.
Not at them. At you.
Because you're still going to save them anyway, aren't you? No matter the indignity they'll inflict on you in return.
Honestly.
How hopeless.
(How simple.)
"Well," you say into the silent air—as silent as anything can be above the cauldron of a bubbling volcano, anyway, "as far as justifications for treason go, it's at least traditional."
Mai blinks her champagne eyes. You've rattled her. It's probably the joke—or the way you're not even bothering to look at her, instead staring up at the thin, sinewy cables that led your brother to his freedom and Mai to her rebellion. In a way, they might as well be heartstrings; there's something almost arterial about the way they stretch across the sky.
No wonder you could have unraveled them so easily: snipped them apart with lightning, or seared them over with flame. You just… chose not to, then.
You choose not to now.
(You're not talking about the cables anymore.)
"Still," you say, studying them and the sky beyond, the vast, soaring heavens that cage you beneath, "I hope you have a better justification prepared for when the palace finds out. Maybe you could claim that you were trying to save your uncle out of familial loyalty, and it was that devotion that moved me to mercy—unless, of course, it's instead part of our secret plan to convince dear Zuzu you're actually on his side so that you can get close enough to the Avatar to assassinate him? Or perhaps you've already discussed what to say with Zuko. He does have so much experience in making excuses for his failures, after all."
"Azula," she asks, somewhere between baffled and belligerent, "what in the world are you talking about?"
"Isn't it obvious?" Finally, you turn to her—and to Ty Lee, floating in the middle of the two of you, torn between the currents of fear and friendship. "I'm asking you if you've thought this little bout of treachery through. I'm capable of many things, Mai, but if you want me to save you here you're going to need to give me something to work with."
"I… wasn't expecting you to." There's a certain stiffness to her expression you recognise from the way it's so often sat on your own these past few cycles: when the mind behind is abruptly confronted with a reality that doesn't quite unfurl the way it's supposed to. Like the first time you speak a word you've only ever read, just for your tutor to correct your pronunciation—though perhaps with slightly higher stakes than minor academic embarrassment. "I'm not you, Azula. Not everything I do forms one of my thirty-six stratagems for world domination."
These days, you're finding you might well have been better off without either strategies or world domination, frankly. They don't really seem to have worked out for you.
"Well, this is part of mine," you say anyway, because she doesn't have to know exactly how unprepared you are for all of this. "So I'm afraid that you won't be escaping the consequences of your actions through something as passé as prison or execution. I still have use for you, after all."
A flick of your wrist paints the sky with a flower of lightning, short and sweet and sudden enough to snap the attention of every useless guard in the vicinity straight toward you. You drop the hand back down and point it toward the yawning mouth of the prison, where the faint clanging and banging of a riot in progress—accompanied on vocals by what might as well be a distant pack of tiger-monkeys—filters back up to the platform. "Don't you have something to be doing?"
As the last guard sprints back into the Boiling Rock, you start walking towards Mai and Ty Lee, your steps slow and simple, boots soft against the metal grate keeping you all from the volcano's oozing maw. You can see the way Mai tenses, drawing herself up like a spider-snake, a long, thin, dangerous streak of a girl. Ty Lee shuffles a bit closer to her side, but she's looking between you and Mai with what could almost be a contemplative tension to her eyes.
"Look," you say, stopping just outside the reach of their arms, your own held up, palms wide, hands empty of flame. "I understand this may come as a shock to you, but I don't really want to toss my only friends into the Boiling Rock—and if you were going to betray me, at least you did it for something irrational like love, rather than because someone else managed to manipulate you better than I can. Now that would make me angry."
One of Mai's hands massages her hip, briefly, right over where her thick robes conceal a set of throwing stars. "You were pretty angry when I did it."
"Perhaps I was," you allow, dragging out the words as if to mock the very idea of them. To her, it was a few minutes ago; to you, it was another lifetime. "But I got over it. Right now, I think I'm mostly bemused."
You signpost the finger-poke you thrust in Mai's general direction blatantly enough that she doesn't try to stab you on reflex. Thank the spirits for small mercies.
"Honestly, I understand a life of emotional repression at the hands of a constantly-disappointed mother has left you somewhat unprepared when it comes to thinking rationally through your feelings, but really. You could have been cleverer about this." For some reason, Ty Lee's whole face twists halfway between laughter and tears as you finish speaking. She truly is bafflingly emotional at the most unusual of times. "Now I need to convince every last buffoon who saw you cut the line and blather on about love and fear that this was all according to my plan, or else my Fath—or else someone is going to question why I haven't tasked the palace executioner to sharpen his axe."
Her eyes intent on your face, each one narrowed to an arrow-tip of attention, Mai remains silent for a few seconds.
Ty Lee, however, does not; she flits in from the side as a sugary little shield between you and Mai, gently grabbing your still-raised other hand and dragging it down to her side.
"Azula," she begins, limping across each word like her voice is carrying a bruise, "are you… feeling alright?"
You snort. "I've just failed to stop my brother from breaking open the most secure prison in the Fire Nation because one of my friends is apparently less afraid of what I'll do to her for treason than she is of losing him, and the other is trying to pretend she's not expecting me to try and murder both of them at any given moment, and you ask me if I'm okay?"
You gently fend Ty Lee away and snap out a spark, twirling it around on a finger like a lesser firebender might juggle a flame before snuffing it against your palm.
"I am, actually," you add, somewhere between nonchalant and amused, "but oddly enough, I don't think you'll believe me."
"You can say that again," Mai mutters under her breath.
A smirk threatens to flash across your lips. You let it.
"Listen," you say, walking over to the edge of the platform, the white steam that drifts across it curling around your boots as you lean against the low railings, "if it helps, there is something I want to ask both of you, and I can't exactly do that if you're not here and healthy and happy."
"What do you want to ask?" Ty Lee says from behind you at the same time as Mai says, "Because your question went so well last time."
You feel, rather than see, the glare Mai shoots at Ty Lee and the way it washes off her like wind.
"Something better discussed somewhere else," you say, because you are not pouring your heart out with the stink of sulphur invading your nostrils. Not again. "Shall we reconvene in the Warden's office, ladies?"
There's a longer pause than you were anticipating.
"I… suppose we could," Mai says eventually, her voice almost rusty, like each word is being unwound out of some derelict place in her iron heart. "At least it has seats. My legs are starting to ache with the heat."
"Mine aren't!" Ty Lee says, and you know that if you turned around she would be doing some kind of standing-split stretch to show off.
You turn around.
She's doing some kind of standing-split stretch.
A corner of your lip twitches up in amusement.
"Very well then," you say. "It's your family's prison, Mai. Lead the way."
There's another second or so where Mai just stares at you, head slanted to the side, a bead of sweat leaking down her forehead and barely missing one of her eyes. Then she shrugs and starts walking.
"Sure," she says, "why not."
The Warden's office is no better the second time around: the same overcompensating desk, the same lurid reds and golds splashed across the walls and furniture and baffling ceramic decorations in pathetic imitation of the palace, the same domineering portrait of your Father crowning the wall behind the uncomfortable chair whose looping, awkwardly-studded armrests so poorly pay homage to the Dragon Throne.
You're almost tempted to drag it around to the other side of the desk, where Mai and Ty Lee have settled onto the stools that are all the Warden has to offer his guests. But in the end, you—well, it would be better to have a little distance. Ty Lee is far too fond of hugging for your liking. Or your dignity.
So instead you settle into your chair, hands folded formally into your lap, back as straight as your fingers before lightning. Across from you, Ty Lee is—somehow—sitting cross-legged on top of her stool, while Mai has her feet flat on the carpet and her fingers hidden in the shadows of her sleeves.
"So, Azula!" Ty Lee says with an easy smile. "Are you going to tell us what you wanted to ask now?"
You blow out a breath, your eyes flickering shut and your cheeks drawing tight as you firm your jaw enough to speak.
"I want to ask you," and you don't stumble on a single syllable, not at all, "something about me."
"That," Mai says, both eyebrows raised perhaps a quarter-inch in some of the most dramatic surprise you've ever seen on her face, "was not what I was expecting."
Rather than reward her with a response, you instead snap your fingers to light the torches that ring the metal walls, chasing the afternoon shadows away.
"Okay," Ty Lee says slowly, nodding encouragingly, like you're some—some kind of child, in need of a friendly face to open up. She doesn't falter at all at your scowl and the way it twists your lips into a scar. "What about yourself, Azula? What do you want to say?"
It's—
You take another breath.
Mai stops looking disinterested.
Her impeccable posture becomes, somehow, even sharper.
Ty Lee continues to smile; it sits so easily across her cheeks, like they were made for nothing else.
Fine.
You can do this.
Surely you can.
"I have… everything," you begin, slow, hesitant, like each word is a hand feeling itself through the dark, reaching out for something it cannot see. "Do you understand that? I have everything. I am the Crown Princess of the most powerful nation in the world. Come Sozin's Comet, I will become the Crown Princess of the only nation in the world."
The torches around the room start to ebb away until they are a soft, simmering blue barely beyond an ember.
"Of course I will be. I bent lightning earlier than any other in history—I broke Ba Sing Se where a hundred years and the Dragon of the West failed. I nearly killed the Avatar. No princess of the Fire Nation has ever had a brighter star than mine before they were crowned. No prince, either."
Something even Ty Lee wouldn't be kind enough to call a smile spreads across your face.
"Don't you see? I'm perfect."
The words hang in the air like arrows before a charge, in the moment when the cavalry glance at the sky and realise they cannot see the Sun.
"So please. Mai. Ty Lee. Tell me: if all of that is true…"
The weight of the words choke in your throat, heavy as armour to a sailor drowned. Cold the way lightning isn't.
You could bear it, once. Or, better: you never knew it was there, once. Because you didn't realise (you had forgotten) it was possible to burn without it. This hollowing thing that became your breath. This quiet, gravedirt filigree etched into the heart of the girl called monster.
But you are—
You are tired. Of failure. Of pain. And your stupid brother looked at that monster and bowed like he thought she wasn't, and your treacherous friends are still here and watching you with eyes wide enough to swallow the Sun.
So your jaw firms and your mouth opens and you finish the last few words of a question a monster wouldn't understand.
"...then why aren't I happy?"
Your eyes are sore, but your cheeks are not wet. A princess does not cry.
(An easy lesson to learn, when there's no-one left to listen.)
"Azula…" Ty Lee says, pulling your hands from your lap and over the tabletop to clasp them helplessly, nearly dragging you out of your seat. As ever, her flesh is cool against your own. That's half the problem, really. You've always burned hotter than anything around you. "I'm sorry."
What a strange thing to say.
"For what?" you ask, watching how the rain slips from her stormcloud eyes. "I hardly think you are the one to blame for my unhappiness, Ty Lee."
You remember her smile, in the air, with the whole festival beneath and stamping their feet in celebration. It was the same smile you caught her with so many lives ago, before you called out at that mangy little circus in the backwater nowhere of the Earth Kingdom. You wanted her then, so you took her, but you—you are not so yourself now that you haven't come to understand that may have hurt.
Ty Lee shakes her head, almost petulantly, braid jerking awkwardly across her shoulders. Her whole face squeezes into a grimace, or a flinch, but when she lets it go and blinks a couple of times her cheeks smooth out and nothing threatens to spill across her cheeks any further. It's like—like she needed to feel the pain just so she could let it go.
"I don't care about blame," she says. "Holding grudges makes my aura all dingy. I'm sorry because you're feeling sad, Azula. I don't want you to be sad. That's all it is."
You feel the shadow of a smirk twitch up the corner of one rouged lip. "If only the world was so accommodating."
"You could have given me a million years and I don't think I'd have ever predicted what you were going to say when we sat down here, Azula." Mai's voice is a dull blade; something that lands with weight, but without wound. "But maybe I should have. Of course, after Zuko, and the prison riot, and my uncle, we'd still be talking about you."
Slowly, she draws an arm from where it sits demurely in her lap and lays it on the table. Her fingers—so pale, so thin, aristocratic save for the blade-calluses that speckle her skin—settle near yours and Ty Lee's. Not close enough to touch. But close enough that it feels like, if she were another girl, they might have.
"Whatever. You're an asshole, but you're still my friend. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm not exactly an… expert on happiness," she says, and Ty Lee startles herself into a snort. "I gave up on it for a long time. I still want to sometimes now. But I think—I think the most important thing is to imagine yourself happy."
"Because that, of course, will solve everything," you say, too caustic to pretend you're feeling it at Mai.
"I didn't mean it like that," she says with an eyeroll. "I meant that if you don't know why you aren't happy, have you ever tried to picture what being happy would be like? That's how I…"
She trails off, eyes cutting down and away. Is she—is that embarrassment? You haven't seen that on her since childhood.
A rictus of disgust paints itself across your face. "You did not just suggest you only realised you could be happy because you fantasised about your life with my brother."
Mai snaps you a glare—an infinitesimal narrowing of her thin eyebrows, a certain sharpness of the lip—and then, with a second, quieter glance at you and then at Ty Lee, says, "Not only Zuko, no."
Ty Lee makes a sound like the boiler whine of an empire-class Fire Nation battleship. There's a whole-body twitch that turns her into a ruffle of pink and red and paleness, and Mai goes briefly still the way a jackalope might before a sandshark. But in the end, Ty Lee just squeezes your hands tighter instead, and says, "Mai's right! Happiness is a movement, not a place. You gotta visualise it before you can do it. Like when you're swinging from a trapeze. Or when you're bending, right?"
She lets go to briefly tap you on the temple, a liberty taken as if your retribution isn't even a concern. "You gotta see the flame in here before you see it in here," a second tap on your palm, and an embarrassed smile, "or at least I think you do? You don't really talk about bending much, even though it's, like, your favourite thing literally ever."
You're still processing that completely incongruous non-sequitur when Ty Lee gives your hands one last squeeze and lets go.
"So, yeah," she says, "I think that's really important to figure out. What do you see when you imagine yourself happy?"
What a stupid question. Does she think you're a child?
Imagination has never saved anyone. You can't drag yourself from whatever pathetic pit the universe has cast you into by hoping to be happy or wishing to be well. It won't put a crown on your head—won't flatten the world to obedience like a fist full of flame and a tongue sharper than lightning. The only way to get what you want is to refuse to let anyone else have it first.
This, after all, is what it means to be strong. It is what your Father has always taught you, and what your mother only remembered when it was Zuko's life she wanted. Never yours.
You have learned their lessons well.
But the thing is—
It's like you said to Mai and Ty Lee.
Who you are in this moment is the strongest you've ever been: the unquestioned heir to the Dragon Throne, the second-greatest firebender in the world behind your Father, the most accomplished princess in the history of the Fire Islands. You are a single step from the apex of heaven.
(Something always, always stops you from taking the last.)
If you want to be happy, you shouldn't need imagination. You should just be able to reach out and take it.
And yet, here you are, and instead of happiness all you have is a question.
Because you're not happy.
But Zuko is.
Useless old Zuzu, with his mediocre bending and myopic morality and ten thousand failures weighing him down like hooks—he's happy.
You saw it when he smiled at you.
I just didn't figure out until now that I needed to show you too.
And if there's one thing you know Zuko is good at, it's being a child.
So you sigh, and you mutter, "Fine," and you close your eyes.
And you try to imagine yourself happy.
The first thing you feel
is the Sun.
Soft sand between your toes.
Teeth kissed by salt.
You breathe out.
Paint the sky with lightning.
Thunderous applause.
Your Father looks younger.
So does your brother.
His smile reaches both eyes.
Mai and Ty Lee chatting off to the side.
There's a shadow behind you.
A woman.
I love you, Azula. I do.
You reach a hand to the sky.
Pull the lightning down.
It sits in your hands.
Sharp as a crown.
Zuko redirects it.
It's a game of firecatch.
Up and down the beach.
Like nobody else could.
The last thing you feel
is the Sun.
You open your eyes.
Ty Lee stares imploringly at you.
Mai watches with faux-distant curiosity.
"I don't think that was any help," you say eventually, studying the dull metal of the door behind them in lieu of meeting their gaze.
"Why not?" Ty Lee is practically vibrating. "What did you think of?"
A mirage.
Heatstroke.
Hallucination.
Something that never was.
Something that can never be.
And isn't that just so fitting: the only world where you think you might be happy is a world that no longer exists.
A bitter smile crawls across your face. "I saw a lie, or maybe two. Or three. Or four. It doesn't really matter. If they were ever true, the moment's long since lost."
Lost.
Or maybe stolen.
But who stole it?
To whom should fall the blame?
You're tempted to say your mother, but—then she'd have won. She'd have ruined you the way she always wanted to. You won't give her that honour.
So no. Some of it must fall to you.
You can allow that much, at least—not every choice you've made is the choice you thought it was.
Not every choice is one you'd choose again.
(But there's a question you don't want to ask:
Who was the one to teach you how to choose that way?)
That's what makes your cycles so frustrating—of all those choices, you can change maybe two.
You can save Mai and Ty Lee; you can try not to fight Zuko. Every other mistake you've ever made remains a branch in the funeral pyre of your future.
There's just nothing you can do.
(You can't even give up.
It's just not something you're capable of.
You're better than Zuko at bending, but neither of you know how to break.)
You don't have any other choices.
None of the ones that matter, anyw—
"—so what?"
Mai's voice transfixes the air like a knife does a palm.
You blink.
"Excuse me?" you say, dragging out the syllables in disdain.
"So what if it's lost?" she says again, looking at you like you're an idiot—like she's explaining something to Tom-Tom instead of the next Fire Lord. "Of all the people in the world I didn't think you would run away from the impossible, Azula. Or was all that about lightning and Ba Sing Se just empty bragging?"
"You don't understand," you snap, the torches on the walls hissing and spitting. "Even if the Avatar itself bowed to me, if I tore that monstrous spirit out and swallowed it until the very heart of the world bent to my hands, I would never find myself on that beach."
"That beach?" Ty Lee asks, infuriatingly gentle. In the ghostly firelight, her eyes are wide with something you recognise from Iroh, from Zuko—that feeling that's like sympathy cut sharper and plunged into your chest. "What beach?"
"It's nothing," you say, still glaring at Mai, who sets her narrow shoulders in challenge and glares right back. "Just a useless dream."
"And what were you dreaming of, Azula?" Mai sets her other arm on the desk, voluminous sleeves whispering over the wood, as if to suggest she's placing all her tiles on the table. "If you're going to insult me for what makes me happy, surely you're not coward enough to hide yours."
You shatter out a spark and snuff it in your fist, fast enough it's almost a flinch. How dare she.
"You want me to tell you? Fine. I'll tell you." Your jaw is as tight as bowstring; the pauldrons of your armour feel like your shoulders are trying to hold up the sky. "I thought of Ember Island. We were on holiday, like when I was a child, but we weren't children. Zuko and I were throwing lightning back and forth until one of us fumbled and dropped it. Obviously it was him. You and Ty Lee were laughing. Father was proud of us. Are you happy now?"
"Was anyone else there?" For some reason, you thought it would be Mai who asked that—but it's Ty Lee, quiet against the loudly decorative paintings that plaster themselves across the Warden's office.
"No," you say, and don't look at her.
Mai opens her mouth—and then her teeth click shut almost like she's wincing. She snaps to face Ty Lee, who seems to be ignoring her entirely, instead drawing her hands back from where she'd dropped them into her lap to tease your fist back open one gentle finger at a time.
"Okay," Ty Lee says, "so if you don't really want to talk about that, then how about this: let's play a game!"
Your eyebrows draw together in two thin lines of incomprehension. "Why would I want to do that?"
"It's a very easy game," she says, bobbing on her stool and somehow not looking like she's going to overbalance over her crossed ankles. "We just go around in a circle naming all the things that make us unhappy!"
"Now that's the sort of game I can get behind," Mai drawls.
It seems you're outnumbered.
You sigh.
"If you insist," you say, rolling your eyes. "I'll go first: this conversation."
"People who hurt animals!" Ty Lee chimes in.
"Azula's refusal to deal with her own emotions," Mai adds without a moment's hesitation.
"Your refusal to mind your own business," you shoot back, jabbing a finger in her direction.
"People who are nasty to each other." Ty Lee is frowning at both of you.
"You don't get to decide whose business it is," Mai says, low and frustrated. "You asked us why you weren't happy, Azula. Stop hiding from the answers we give you just because you find them uncomfortable. It's embarrassing. It's beneath you."
Ty Lee makes a shushing motion towards Mai, a rare edge of irritation in the line of her jaw—and then, in a complicated movement, somehow has your hand and Mai's hand and her own hand each pressed against the other in the centre of the table, like the three of you are preparing some kind of war cry before a game of kuai ball.
"Listen," she says firmly, glittery nails sparkling in the flare of your flame, "this isn't okay. Azula is being vulnerable for the first time in her life, Mai. She's allowed to be bad at it. But she's not allowed to be mean about it, either."
She punctuates the last couple of sentences with a meaningful stare at Mai, and then at you.
Then she lifts her hand away.
You and Mai slowly follow suit.
"So, Azula," she says, her voice high and sweet like nothing ever happened, "you don't have to talk about what makes you unhappy, either. But you should think about it."
She nods, an exaggerated bounce of the head and neck almost like she's pretending to fall.
"Happy isn't something you can just be," says the happiest person you know. "Only kids and tiger monkeys can do that. You need to figure out who you are when you're happy, and who you are when you're not. Then you have to do the things that help you be the happy person, and avoid the things that make you the unhappy person."
Mai doesn't quite react fast enough to escape the leaning hug Ty Lee captures her in, arm a bright splash of colour against the dark fabric of Mai's robes. Her lips flatten slightly, but in the end she seems resigned to Ty Lee's enthusiasm. In this, at least, you can relate.
"And sometimes that's really hard. Some people's auras try to make them grey even when they want to be pink. But they're trying. I like to think everyone's trying, you know? Everyone wants a happier world." Her eyes dart to the towering portrait of your Father behind you. "Even if some of them are, like, really bad at it. But that's not the point!"
She releases Mai and stands in the same motion, twirling out of her seat like her words are bouncing around inside her very bones in their haste to escape.
"So if being the Crown Princess and conquering the world and killing the Avatar hasn't made you happy, all that means is that you've been trying the wrong things the whole time!"
Ty Lee's face becomes the horizon on which the Sun of her smile dawns, until there is nowhere in her expression that joy does not touch. She spreads her arms wide as if in invitation—or embrace. Like she wants to hug the whole of the sky.
"Isn't that a good thing? Now you have a reason to try something new!"
What else can you do but laugh?
It spills out of you as sand through an hourglass.
Spirits.
If only she knew.
Mai is chuckling softly.
Ty Lee is giggling too.
"If you insist," you manage to say, once your belly stops jumping against the inside of your armour. "I suppose I can consider it."
Somehow, her smile turns wider.
A few hours later, you find yourself trying to drown out Ty Lee's snores with, of all things, a game of pai sho.
She's sprawled over the bed in the captain's cabin on the slow, meandering ferry that is now your only way home from the Boiling Rock—just as he always does, Zuko stole your airship—with her arms akimbo and one leg dangling off the edge of the mattress, one cheek already soaked with drool. You'd compare her indignity to a coral urchin's, but that would be cruel. To the urchin.
You and Mai have shifted the pai sho board as far away as the room allows, facing each other down on opposing stools. Unlike Ty Lee, the both of you do know how to play, which adds a certain intellectual relish to the way you are slowly dismantling all of Mai's positions as she watches helplessly. It's nearly satisfying enough to stave off your distaste at finding yourself enjoying that leaf-brained fool's favourite game.
"You know," Mai almost muses—almost, because she's the most precise person you know outside yourself—as she retreats another tile only to realise she's fallen into your Masquerade of Broken Flowers and frown, "you get surprisingly snippy about me and Zuko for someone who's been trying to push us together since we were kids."
"I didn't realise you'd noticed," you say, raising an eyebrow. She knows as well as you do that you're not talking about her frankly spurious accusation.
"I see more than you think, Azula," she says without inflection. An observation, rather than a criticism. "I'm just curious why."
"You seemed to like him, baffling as the reason may be," you say with a shrug, "and distracting my brother with romance makes for an easier path to the throne. It's simple politics, really."
"You're way worse at lying than you used to be, like, yesterday." She lays down her chrysanthemum in an attempt to start the Camellia-Peony Gambit, but in four moves' time she'll find out you predicted that ten moves ago. "It's kind of funny."
"Be careful how you speak to your princess, Mai," you say, toying with the blue lotus tile between your fingers. It's the same colour as your flame, burning in the lamps that jut out from the walls. "No amount of loving Zuko makes the ice you're on any thicker."
She snorts. It's shockingly unladylike, for her. "If you didn't kill me there and then, you're not going to now, and you know it."
Be as that may, it's moments like these that make you miss the days when she was still afraid of you.
"I can see why he likes you." You flick a tile onto the board without even looking. Will she think you're getting overconfident, or will she think you're trying to hide how important the move is? It's futile either way. "You really are both as stubborn as each other."
Mai rolls her eyes, a flash of annoyed gold. She points over towards the door to the cabin's ensuite, which waits politely in one corner between a painting of Abalone Bay and a pair of garishly crossed cutlasses. Perhaps the captain learned his taste in internal decor from the Warden. "If you want to see stubborn, the mirror is over there."
"I'm hardly going to sully my glorious visage in such a smeary, smudgy mess," you say, tossing your hair haughtily, or at least making the best attempt at it you can while it's bound into a tight topknot. "You should apologise for even suggesting it."
"I'm terribly sorry they didn't design this prison boat up to imperial standards, your Highness," Mai says, and she sounds so perfectly like all the obsequious courtiers you've grown up around that you have to blink to make sure you're not actually in the palace. "However can this humble servant possibly make it up to you?"
You start—not giggling, because giggling is juvenile and unbecoming of a princess, but laughing until your belly bounces with it.
Mai offers a few dry chuckles as well… which is to say, she's practically in hysterics.
Over in the corner, Ty Lee mumbles in her sleep, rolling over to flop down on her stomach.
"Are you actually going to answer my question?" Mai asks a few minutes later, once you've both recovered. She pushes a tile forward, and sighs when you finish your counter-move before her hand is even back in her lap.
"I'm still tossing up whether I want you to tickle Ty Lee awake or go and polish the mirror so I can review my appearance before we arrive at the palace," you say. Perhaps not the most dignified ways for Mai to recompense her offence, but she did offer. "Patience is a virtue, you know."
"Azula." Despite the serrated syllables, she's not looking at you. Instead, she's staring intently at her few remaining tiles, then at yours, then back to hers, then—she shrugs as if in resignation and flips all hers upside down in ritual surrender. "This isn't court. There's no-one here but you and me and Ty Lee. You're allowed to actually speak your mind."
"You seem remarkably certain I want to."
She snorts. "How long has it been since we were in my uncle's office, exactly?"
"Not long enough," you say, content to leave your tiles in the shape of your victory. "His sense of aesthetics is second only to his ability to manage a prison."
"I didn't realise you'd taken up airbending," she says, not even bothering to acknowledge your wit, "what with the deflecting and all."
It's not even the first time you've heard her make that joke and it's still infuriating. "Is it so difficult to understand that I have no interest in discussing this further, Mai?"
"No," she says, "that part is easy. But you were the one who said she'd consider trying something new. Why not honesty?"
You've been the most honest you think you've ever been with anyone—except maybe Zuko, in that forest—to both Mai and Ty Lee for your last three cycles in a row, and she still wants more?
Your friends are, without a doubt, the most ungrateful pair of ill-mannered ingrates you've ever had the misfortune to encounter in your whole life.
"Even worse than Long Feng?" Mai might actually sound insulted.
"Nobody is worse than that," you say, less out of any desire to soothe her furrowed brow and more out of a desire to avoid giving even the semblance of a compliment to Long Feng.
"Good enough," Mai says. "Now, for the last time: are you going to answer my question, or do you want me to start answering it instead?"
Your mouth opens—and then snaps right back shut, because maybe it isn't a good idea to tell Mai to go ahead and do her worst. Every time you've surrendered her the conversational initiative, you've ended up talking about something bafflingly irrelevant that nevertheless manages to tilt your entire world a few degrees off-centre. You refuse to let it happen again if you can possibly prevent it.
So instead you will… do exactly what she wants you to do.
Your eyes narrow until your glare wouldn't have been out of place staring up from the Boiling Rock.
A corner of Mai's lip twitches in what might be triumph.
How hateful.
"Very well," you say, so clearly and carefully enunciated that nobody under the sky could dare accuse it of being a huff. "If you want honesty, you can have it."
On her own head be it.
"You are well aware that your relationship with Zuko is politically convenient," you begin, because it's not as if Mai, of all people, needs her value as a commodity explained to her, "both to the Royal Family as a marriage candidate and to me as an ally. And no doubt you have realised that no matter who becomes Fire Lord, to have you and my brother making moon-eyes at each other opens avenues of vulnerability that are useful to me while closing others that are not. I would be a fool not to encourage your… romance," your lips purse together on reflex, "regardless of my personal opinion on the matter."
"Your personal opinion is what I'm asking for," Mai says, rolling her eyes again. "We both know you weren't thinking about dynastic security and balancing factional interests when you set fire to an apple on my head and watched Zuko flail to put it out."
"Perhaps not my finest moment," you allow, resettling your feet on the gaudy golden rug covering the floorboards as the ferry rumbles into a turn. "Regardless, my point was that even though your obstinate softness toward dear Zuzu has led you to make some questionable choices, you are—well, certainly a more palatable prospect for a sister-in-law than some winsome tart with delusions of grandeur or an easily-impressionable wallflower likely to sway in every courtly breeze."
A spark rolls out of your hand and across to the other, bridging the space between them with the subtle thrum of your spirit. You watch it rather than the severe angles of Mai's face.
"I refuse to spend the rest of my life being forced to tolerate the same simpering incompetence that defined our classmates. At least you keep things interesting."
"I think—I think that's the nicest thing you've ever said about me," Mai says quietly. She so rarely stumbles over her words that you're almost in shock. A glance up from the lightning in your fingers reveals her whole posture has shifted backward, like she'd had to sway to avoid a blow. But at the same time, it doesn't feel like she was flinching from the thought of being hurt.
"You may thank me for my magnanimity at your leisure," you say, taking a shallow breath and snuffing the spark on the exhale. Your shoulders feel strangely stiff under your pauldrons, so you roll them and lift your head to return your full attention to Mai's face. "Though I suppose I have not wholly answered your question, and I will not have you accuse me of cowardice a third time."
You've never truly thought too deeply about why it was funny to toy with Mai about Zuko and with Zuko about Mai. It was always an easy way to remind Mai of her position and an even easier way to rile Zuko up, which was perennially useful—it made him more predictable, it made him more likely to make a mistake in front of your Father, and it frustrated your mother. Three purposes achieved in one.
But that's not really enough, is it? Why did you need to remind Mai of her position, when she has always been your friend? What was the point in riling up Zuko, when you don't hate him and he doesn't hate you?
(There's a whisper in the back of your skull.
It sounds like all your life, you've used fear to control people.)
You sigh. If only your feelings were like your flame—something you have never found wanting, no matter how much you question it hour after hour in the training fields. "I think the strangest thing about it all is that you and Zuko manage to be both familiar and a threat simultaneously."
Mai doesn't interject, though you'd expected her to. She just looks at you, face set into something like softness, the sort of expression you'd expect to see her give to someone like Ty Lee, or Tom-Tom—never someone like you.
This time, you don't look away.
"Really, I wasn't lying when I said it was convenient. My brother courting my friend keeps things right here." One arm traces a circle that vaguely encompasses the room and metaphorically encompasses your life. "It's… uncomplicated. Easy. Not something I particularly have to account for, recent events notwithstanding."
A wry smirk briefly curls up a corner of your lip.
"Though at the same time, I suppose it has always felt… inevitable." Not quite the kind you spoke of to Ty Lee—but nearly. Rhyme, rather than repetition. "Even if I never consciously understood it. Of course you would choose Zuko in the end. That was always the threat."
You sigh again. Longer. Lower. A hand brushes a couple of stray strands back into your bangs. "Naturally, I recognise now that this is not a particularly useful perspective, nor one that is wholly… reflective of the truth. It is just that I—"
"—don't feel comfortable," Mai interrupts, "unless you're in control."
On the bed, Ty Lee rolls over and over until she's half an inch from falling off the end and onto the low wooden cabinet tucked into it. Presumably it holds fresh pairs of sheets. Maybe they'll help staunch the bleeding when she overbalances and cracks her skull against it.
"I was going to say," you snap, like the first crack of wood beneath a bonfire, "that I find it hard to believe in anyone but my Father."
"Maybe you were, but that wasn't what you meant," Mai says, flat as the earth over a grave. "But I get it. I know what it's like to have the people who are supposed to love you value something else instead."
You snort, a little rueful. You can't really deny her that.
"Listen, Azula," she says, leaning a degree or two closer over the board, her palms pressing on either side of it. Her hair-buns seem almost purple in the low blue of the lamps, blooming as they are with the gift of your flame. "I don't know what will make you happy. I thought I used to, but it's—honestly it's kind of weird, but you're different, now. Or maybe you were always like this and I never looked hard enough."
She shakes her head, exaggerated to overcome the way the ferry is bouncing in the wake of some much larger vessel—perhaps the dispatch sent to fully secure the Boiling Rock, steaming their way past.
"But I do know that Ty Lee is right. Because I've spent a lot of time doing all the things I'm supposed to do and I hate it." Her voice actually rises; her syllables catch jagged on the air instead of falling as slow and smooth as stones. An honesty so raw it hurts to look. "I hate it. And I think—I think you might too. Maybe not everything. But enough."
"We all have responsibilities to our families and our nation," you observe, the same way a prisoner marching to his execution might comment admiringly on the weather.
(It's not a disagreement.)
"We do," she agrees. Something shifts in her face—not quite a smile, not quite satisfaction. Just the echo they leave behind. Then she asks, so casually it's obviously deliberate, "Do you think Zuko is fulfilling his?"
For a moment, your brain shudders to a halt, a battleship engine with its coal ducts suddenly jammed shut.
What sort of question is that?
"Of course he isn—"
I just didn't figure out until now that I need to show you too.
Your mouth slowly clicks shut. In his own way—his own stupid, thoughtless way—your brother has the strongest sense of responsibility out of anyone you've ever known. It's just that he's never figured out where he should direct it.
(But maybe, under the shadow of the black Sun, he finally did.)
"You are nearly speaking treason, Mai," you say eventually—far too softly to be taken seriously.
"I'm only asking a question, Azula." She meets your stare with fearless disregard. "You were the one who said you were driven by responsibility. I just want to know what you think that means."
There's a dull thud and a sharp ow! as Ty Lee finishes rolling off the bed and thumps head-first onto the cabinet. She slowly pushes herself off it with a mulish glare at the well-polished wood that so carefully caught her temple and the side of her ear in its embrace.
Gingerly, she turns to face you and Mai, holding a hand to her head.
"Were you," a yawn cracks open her jaw, "really playing pai sho while I was asleep? Boooooring. Please tell me you had at least a little bit of girls' talk too!"
Mai rolls her eyes. Her eyesockets must be worn smooth at this rate. "Yes, Ty Lee, we spent the whole time talking about boys."
She's—well, in a way, she's not wrong.
You stifle a smile and instead tell Ty Lee that you're glad she's finally awake, because now it's her turn for a lesson.
The ensuing dramatic wailing lasts you until the ferry has pulled into the harbour and you find yourself returned to the palace.
And all the while, you can't help but think:
You still don't have an answer for Mai.
Not in any way that matters.
A few days later, Ty Lee bursts into your office, practically cartwheeling through the doorway, feet barely skimming under the gilt doorframe as she lands like a human equivalent of a shout right in front of your desk.
You reach over and catch a pile of scrolls before they collapse and tumble off the edge onto the plush carpet below.
"Azula!" she squeals, and you wince as too many long nights of bureaucratic banalities knock themselves on the inside of your skull in eager accompaniment, "I just had the best. Idea. Ever!"
A carefully-raised eyebrows, curved like a desert blade, allows you the moment or two you need to recover from her auditory assault. "Have you forgotten the rules, Ty Lee?"
She freezes in place, so suddenly still it's like she no longer remembers how to move at all. Her rain-sky eyes take in the brush in your right hand, the obsidian writing seal of the Crown Princess sitting next to its well of rich black ink, and the fingers of your left hand still clasped against the precarious pile of scrolls teetering to one side.
"I didn't… not forget?" she tries with a sheepish smile.
"And what didn't you not forget?" you ask, eyebrow still raised.
"That nobody is allowed to yell when Azula is working?" She presses her palms together and takes a half-step back. Thankfully, so does the volume of her voice. "I didn't mean it! I was just excited!"
"It's fine," you say, depositing the brush back in its pot and starting to re-stack the scrolls into stability. "What is your idea, Ty Lee?"
"Weeeeeeeeeeee," she drags out, like a singer trying to show off, "should go to Ember Island!"
You cock your head to the side, bangs sliding against your forehead. "What."
"We should go to Ember Island!" she repeats, as if the issue was with your hearing and not her absurdity. "You said you were happy there, right? So if you're trying to be happy, then we totally have to go there again! It made us all smooth last time, too. That's two benefits in one!"
"Ty Lee," you say, gesturing to the parchment crowding your desk and the baskets blooming with scrolls—arranged in order of priority—that line the carpet beside it, "do I look like I have the time to take a holiday? Sozin's Comet is less than a week away."
"That's even more reason that you should take a holiday," Ty Lee says, suddenly serious. It sits on her so awkwardly, but all the more sincerely for it. "You said it yourself, didn't you? Or at least you kind of did. Actually maybe I did, but I was definitely right! All this Crown Princessy stuff you're doing now, that awful invasion plan, everything—this isn't what makes you happy. It's just something you learned to be good at, yeah?"
"Be as that may," you say, "I cannot exactly simply up and abandon my—"
Your mouth has barely opened around the first syllable of responsibilities before your tongue thickens and prevents you from speaking.
"—work," you finish a couple of seconds later, ignoring the confusion swirling across Ty Lee's face. "Questions would be asked. Some of them quite urgently."
No matter how many times you've failed to escape the cycle, you can't give up. You can't treat even these sometimes-pointless requests from puffed-up functionaries or poorly-delegated administrative concerns that really shouldn't be on your desk to begin with, Vice-Minister Sen, like they don't matter, like they'll disappear once Sozin's Comet sinks below the sky. It's not really hope. Just the same kind of clawing desperation that must have dragged Zuko onwards after the Avatar for those three fruitless years.
But it's yours, and you'll never let it go.
"It doesn't have to be a big holiday," she says, drawing up against the front of your desk so that she can lean forward and peer curiously at the missive you were drafting before she arrived: a sealed order to the Ministry of Security to quietly begin vetting potential candidates to replace Mai's uncle. "What about a day trip? We could hang out on the beach in the morning and go see a performance in the afternoon!"
"Please do not tell me," you say, so sharply Ty Lee almost flinches, "that you have fallen for the propaganda of the Ember Island Players."
"They… have a new play?" she says with a hesitant smile. "The Boy in the Iceberg. Apparently it's about the Avatar! You and Zuko are both in it!"
"Ty Lee," you say, standing up, the silk of your robes a sibilant whisper against the back of your chair, one hand snapping out a spark to emphasise the point, "the Ember Island Players are such an affront to their art that one of the few things Zuko and I both agreed on as children was that his first decree as Fire Lord would be to disband them entirely in defence of culture."
You start counting your arguments out on your fingers, each one a searing cerulean flame balanced above your nails.
"Their star performer is barely fit to act if playing the role of Zhao, their scriptwriter is the kind of hack better made with an axe than a pen, their set design could be outsourced to Tom-Tom's finger paintings without noticeable loss of detail, and the only person in their entire troupe I have any respect for is their ticket-saleswoman, purely because it takes genuine talent as a con artist to be able to keep that theatre open for all these years." A lesser firebender may have needed to take a breath there, such is the force of your delivery. "Frankly, she would make an excellent undercover agent in the Censorate or the Bureau of Public Affairs."
Clenching your fist shut to snuff the fires, you lean forward until you are nose-to-nose with Ty Lee. She almost goes cross-eyed trying to focus on you.
"If I were on those hideously uncomfortable benches, watching their bumbling attempts to fit within the limits of the imperial censors while still managing to butcher the entire narrative, I cannot guarantee you the building would remain as anything but ash afterwards."
Ty Lee blinks a number of times, her eyelashes fluttering like she needs to remind herself of what she's actually looking at. "Wow, Azula. I'd almost forgotten how much you liked plays!"
Your head draws back, a scowl slipping across your lips. "How did you get that from a single word I said, Ty Lee?"
Much like fire dancing, your mother was also a fan of theatre—and you are nothing like her.
"You sounded so," she breaks down into a little giggle, "so insulted when you were talking about their group! Do you really hate them that much?"
"Yes," you say. "Choose anything else but a performance, Ty Lee. I will not have it."
A smile sings across her lips, so wide, so bright that it crinkles her eyes shut. It takes you a moment to realise why—you seem to have accidentally agreed to the idea of the trip in exchange for escaping the Ember Island Players.
If Ty Lee were anyone but herself, you'd almost be convinced that had been her plan from the start.
How irritating.
But a Princess does not go back on her word.
(Except for all the times you have before, of course.)
"Alright!" Ty Lee says, bouncing in place like a startlingly pink spring, braid whipping across her back. "If you don't want to go to a performance, I have an even better idea: let's do one ourselves!"
"It is far beneath my dignity to play-act for the peasantry," you say with sneering disdain, "even if I were to be playing the Dragon Emperor. Try again."
"I didn't mean like that, silly," she says, slipping back from the monolithic slab of your desk to prance around on the carpet the way she always does when she's excited. "It's been ages since you and me and Mai got together and showed off our skills! You only saw me at the circus for a little bit, Mai's had years to practice all sorts of knife tricks because of her boring family, and you can do this whole clicky-lightning-thingy now!"
A revolutionary development in firebending that is not even recorded in mythology, reduced to a 'clicky-lightning-thingy'.
"Well maybe I'd know what to call it if you ever explained what you're doing." Ty Lee's pout has embarrassed many a man and maiden over the years, and she's truly testing its limits here. Unfortunately for her, you've always thought it makes her look a bit like a badgerfrog. "Seriously, Azula, I wasn't kidding when I said you never talk about your bending. Well, unless you're, like, using it as a threat or something. It's kinda weird. It'd be like me talking about the circus only when I'm trying to chi-block someone!"
"Don't be foolish," you say. "I quite regularly discuss both theory and practice with Lo and Li, and before them every so-called teacher who couldn't keep up with my talent. I hardly see why that is so strange."
Ty Lee is already shaking her head before you finish the sentence, her eyes drooping shut with disappointment. How rude. "That's not what I meant. I'm just saying that you're, like, the best firebender ever, right? That's cool. That's so cool! And you always seem so happy when you're bending. Like, you totally get frustrated and annoyed in fights and stuff, but at the same time it's kinda like the challenge makes you come alive? It's really impressive."
She claps her hands together, so suddenly it interrupts the way you were going to remind her that the flattery, while appreciated, is getting in the way of whatever laborious point she's trying to make.
"But that's not what I mean, either, I guess. It's more like…" Her whole face brightens, as if realising something, and she falls over herself into a handstand, fingers spread against the rug, mouth grinning up at you from an angle that already makes your neck ache in sympathy. "Like this! I love performing. I love my art. And sometimes I just feel like I have to do it. Even when it would be odd. Even when it makes me look silly. And maybe Mai was right, on Ember Island, and I also do it because I want attention."
She shrugs—an impressive gesture to manage while upside down, you'll give her that.
"But, like, attention doesn't help when you're burning your palms raw practicing rope tricks or throwing up because you got so frustrated at one trapeze flip that you kept trying it until your stomach physically couldn't keep going anymore, yeah?"
Your eyes flick to the delicate, branching striation that webs down the inside of your wrist, usually so carefully concealed by the armoured bracers you wear to battle. "You could say that."
"See, I knew you'd get it!" Somehow, despite the fact it's flipped and should look like a frown, you don't have any trouble at all telling that Ty Lee is smiling again. "So what I'm saying is that I do what I do because I want to. That's it, really. That's the whole trick, yeah? That's what makes me happy. That's why it makes me happy."
"If this is a convoluted way of trying to ask if bending makes me happy," you say, eyebrows creased together—below you, Ty Lee stares straight back, her arms not even trembling with the effort of holding herself against your attention, "you could have just said the words. Of course it does. I'm not sure why you think I don't understand that much."
"Don't be silly!" A startling flex of her elbows and an elegant twist of her torso and legs tosses her back to standing in a swirl of pink-and-red fabric. "All I've been trying to say is that I think you're a firebender the same way I'm an acrobat. For some people, it's just a description, right? A thing they can do. But for me, it's a thing I am."
Ty Lee reaches over the gulf of your desk and pokes the intricate embroidery of your well-starched robes, right above the heart.
Her finger depresses the silk so softly you almost can't feel the touch.
"That's what it's like for you too, isn't it? In here," she draws her hand back to press it above her own heart, squashing her red mantle against her chest, "just like in here."
"And so what if it is?" You still cannot figure out where she's going with this. Of course you know that you love the flame. You have loved it for so long you would have forgotten what the world felt like without it, if not for the Day of the Black Sun. When everything else in the world fails you, when time itself fails you—fire remains. It is yours in a way you think that maybe only the Avatar could ever understand. "Get to the point, Ty Lee."
"Well," she says, smiling away your brusqueness, "have you ever thought about running away to join the circus too?"
Ty Lee snatches your hands in her own, twining your fingers together in an instant.
"I bet you'd be an incredible fire dancer!"
She—
You—
What?
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
(3/4) Imperium
You are Princess Azula of the Fire Nation, the most powerful nation in the world.But Yet you are not just a princess—you are the princess, the acknowledged heir to the Dragon Throne. There are few who do not know your name, even if they do not know your face, and there are many who are bound by honour or self-interest to obey you. It is what defines you and how you have learned to define yourself. It is why so many know your name even when they have never seen your face, or the transcendent beauty of your flame. And it is why you find yourself, now, shying away from an impossible question: is it everything you will always have to be?
You are Princess Azula of the Fire Nation, the most powerful nation in the world.
In the end, your 'holiday' to Ember Island is not scheduled until four days before Sozin's Comet: enough time for you to handle anything important enough to truly require your personal attention, as well as organise your final preparations ahead of your impending, always-abortive coronation.
Part of those preparations, of course, include quietly leaking your plans to a few choice ears, who will ensure it spreads into the kinds of places that bands of fugitives hiding out in the Fire Nation might find themselves frequenting over the next week.
You do still need to talk to your brother, after all.
No doubt Mai knows exactly what you're doing, but given the only thing she says is that it'd be nice to get a chance to throw a knife at Zuko too, just to make sure he knows what he's missing—well, that's practically enthusiastic encouragement by her standards.
You've never been wholly sure where Zuko goes after you drive him from the Western Air Temple, and it's been a long time since you've bothered to care when all that really matters is where he will inevitably be on the day of the Comet. But you have some educated guesses, based on which parts of the archipelago he's familiar with, his dangerously sentimental attitude, and the gaggle of bleeding hearts he surrounds himself with, and you don't think it's much of a stretch to expect to run into him on Ember Island in the days before the Comet.
He might even be stupid enough to hide out in your old family beach house, which would be hilarious.
Though you suppose doing something so stupid that nobody would expect you to be that stupid is, paradoxically, not actually that stupid—not that you imagine Zuko capable of that kind of thinking. He's far too straightforward. Like the blade of a dao. Or perhaps a particularly blunt stick.
Regardless, the point is: you intend to establish a rendezvous with Zuko on Ember Island, a chance to talk about the truth that transfixes you both to eternal conflict before you must stare each other down for real. It almost worked last time. You were so close. You just didn't have the right perspective to understand what it is Zuko actually wants—not just from his fate, or the Fire Nation, but from you.
Because he does want something, and it isn't a fight.
But that's the problem, isn't it? Maybe that's always been the problem.
You and Zuko don't really know each other without the war.
Not just the Fire Nation's against the world—yours against Zuko, and Zuko's against you.
That's the way it's always been. For your Father's approval, everything was permitted and nothing was sacred. Of course it was. That's what makes him so strong. The only thing that matters is power.
And in the end…
…power has always failed you.
A truth impaled on the universe with a nine-day spear plunged straight through your spirit.
That's why you're still here, isn't it?
Because you have to find another way.
You've tried a lot of things when it comes to Zuko. You've killed him until you were certain that there was nothing about the shape of the world that wanted his death—until you knew you never had to kill him again.
You've distracted him, delayed him, and even disregarded him. It never changed a thing.
You've given him frustration, and a knife, and the present, and sympathy. Each one taught you something. But not enough.
Sometimes you wonder what's left to give. The crown? Your hope? Your responsibility?
You're not quite that far lost yet.
But there is something else, isn't there?
(And you've always tried so hard to stop anyone from seeing it, agrees your brother.)
Mai and Ty Lee might have both tried to bludgeon you half to death with the same half-baked rhetoric the moment you opened up instead of shutting down, but—they tried. You gave them a truth to work with—a truth about you—and they pounced on the chance to help. Or at least to make you feel like an idiot, which in your experience seems to keep amounting to the same thing.
Zuko isn't your friend. He isn't close to being your friend.
But he's still a bleeding heart.
And if you don't know each other without the war—
—would you be happier, if you did?
You don't know.
But Ty Lee still told you to avoid the things that make you the unhappy person.
So maybe, here and now, that can be enough.
…you suppose you're decided, then.
For once, you won't go to Zuko wanting to get something.
This time, you'll go to give something.
Honestly.
The things you find yourself doing these days.
What is there to do but laugh?
Before you do, though, Princess Azula, peace-maker, magnanimous personification of earthly charity, there's just one last thing to figure out: what are you going to give to your brother?
[ ] A flame. It's funny—despite everything, even sharing lessons for a year or so before you accelerated past him, you don't think you've ever taught Zuko a single thing about firebending. He's certainly never taught you. You've only ever used your fire to hurt each other. Maybe you should try, just this once, to offer a moment of your incandescence for something other than pain.
[ ]
You are not going to let Mai force you into this particular corner, thank you very much. Zuko's sense of responsibility can wait.
[ ] A traitor. It's what you are—or what you make of yourself, each and every time you decide to keep Mai and Ty Lee alive and free. In this, at least, you and Zuko are two of a kind. Neither of you are the sort of children you believe you should be. Mai once said you needed to forgive yourself for that. Maybe it's worth seeing how Zuko did.
[ ] A child. You understand, now, why it hurt when your mother called you a monster. You might even know why you said she was right. Maybe it's finally time to let Zuko know, too, before he ends up fumbling his way into figuring it out at the worst possible moment. At least there's some kind of dignity in surrender.
Just because you're thinking of making nice with him in case the universe really does want the impossible from you doesn't mean he deserves this—and certainly not first.
Magery
Life blooms like a flower, far away or by the road
- Location
- Australia
Merry Christmas, everyone, and a Happy Holidays to all those of you who celebrate otherwise. I hope you enjoyed the start of Azula's "fourth" loop.
As many of you may know, thanks to the banners and the whole special subforum, it's Sufficient Velocity's annual Winterfest, where we celebrate all the great things that have been happening all over the site across the year.
You may even know that a major part of Winterfest are the User's Choice Awards, where your favourite threads go head-to-head to decide who will be this year's User's Choice in their respective categories.
What you might not know is that—thanks to the kindness of many in this thread—our very own Arsonist's Lullaby has been nominated for two separate awards (two!): the Best New Work and the Best Ongoing Quest.
If you've enjoyed our little jaunt through Azula's head as she's spun out across time and face-first into her own complexes, I'd appreciate it if you spared a thought to voting for me. The races are quite close, and I've made no secret that I like to see my own numbers go up!
Other than that, all I can really say is thank you all for engaging with Arsonist's Lullaby over the year. I never expected that my wholly indulgent Azula brainrot would blow up quite like this. I know I'm not the most active QM in the thread—as I've said before, I worry that I'll spoil the fun by rambling on too much about my girl at the slightest opportunity—but I do read every single post every single one of you make, and I appreciate them all.
Thank you for a wonderful 2024.
I'll see you in 2025!
As many of you may know, thanks to the banners and the whole special subforum, it's Sufficient Velocity's annual Winterfest, where we celebrate all the great things that have been happening all over the site across the year.
You may even know that a major part of Winterfest are the User's Choice Awards, where your favourite threads go head-to-head to decide who will be this year's User's Choice in their respective categories.
What you might not know is that—thanks to the kindness of many in this thread—our very own Arsonist's Lullaby has been nominated for two separate awards (two!): the Best New Work and the Best Ongoing Quest.
If you've enjoyed our little jaunt through Azula's head as she's spun out across time and face-first into her own complexes, I'd appreciate it if you spared a thought to voting for me. The races are quite close, and I've made no secret that I like to see my own numbers go up!
Other than that, all I can really say is thank you all for engaging with Arsonist's Lullaby over the year. I never expected that my wholly indulgent Azula brainrot would blow up quite like this. I know I'm not the most active QM in the thread—as I've said before, I worry that I'll spoil the fun by rambling on too much about my girl at the slightest opportunity—but I do read every single post every single one of you make, and I appreciate them all.
Thank you for a wonderful 2024.
I'll see you in 2025!
FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS I LAY DORMANT, WHO HAS DISTURBED MY- Oh, it's Magery with a new chapter of Arsonist's Lullaby: An Azula Timeloop Quest.
Glorious.
Glorious.
NuclearConsensus
Herald of the Thorned One
- Location
- the Philippines
Damn, chapter drops right when I was thinking of rereading this.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] A flame. It's funny—despite everything, even sharing lessons for a year or so before you accelerated past him, you don't think you've ever taught Zuko a single thing about firebending. He's certainly never taught you. You've only ever used your fire to hurt each other. Maybe you should try, just this once, to offer a moment of your incandescence for something other than pain.
neutronium95
Mad Rocketeer
- Location
- The test site
- Pronouns
- She/Her
[X] A flame.
This was wonderful, thank you for the Christmas present.
This was wonderful, thank you for the Christmas present.
Nicholas Brooks
Redeemer and Destroyer
- Location
- United States
Oh that's ni-
Azula no, incest isn't the answer! Even if Grey DeLisle said it was during a convention!
[X] A flame. It's funny—despite everything, even sharing lessons for a year or so before you accelerated past him, you don't think you've ever taught Zuko a single thing about firebending. He's certainly never taught you. You've only ever used your fire to hurt each other. Maybe you should try, just this once, to offer a moment of your incandescence for something other than pain.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
[X] A flame. It's funny—despite everything, even sharing lessons for a year or so before you accelerated past him, you don't think you've ever taught Zuko a single thing about firebending. He's certainly never taught you. You've only ever used your fire to hurt each other. Maybe you should try, just this once, to offer a moment of your incandescence for something other than pain.
- Location
- Finland
[X] A flame. It's funny—despite everything, even sharing lessons for a year or so before you accelerated past him, you don't think you've ever taught Zuko a single thing about firebending. He's certainly never taught you. You've only ever used your fire to hurt each other. Maybe you should try, just this once, to offer a moment of your incandescence for something other than pain.
[X] A flame. It's funny—despite everything, even sharing lessons for a year or so before you accelerated past him, you don't think you've ever taught Zuko a single thing about firebending. He's certainly never taught you. You've only ever used your fire to hurt each other. Maybe you should try, just this once, to offer a moment of your incandescence for something other than pain.
[x] A flame. It's funny—despite everything, even sharing lessons for a year or so before you accelerated past him, you don't think you've ever taught Zuko a single thing about firebending. He's certainly never taught you. You've only ever used your fire to hurt each other. Maybe you should try, just this once, to offer a moment of your incandescence for something other than pain.
[X] A flame. It's funny—despite everything, even sharing lessons for a year or so before you accelerated past him, you don't think you've ever taught Zuko a single thing about firebending. He's certainly never taught you. You've only ever used your fire to hurt each other. Maybe you should try, just this once, to offer a moment of your incandescence for something other than pain.
Really torn between this and traitor, but I definitely want to see the fire siblings firebending together without trying to kill each other (or someone else) for once.
Really torn between this and traitor, but I definitely want to see the fire siblings firebending together without trying to kill each other (or someone else) for once.
[X] A flame. It's funny—despite everything, even sharing lessons for a year or so before you accelerated past him, you don't think you've ever taught Zuko a single thing about firebending. He's certainly never taught you. You've only ever used your fire to hurt each other. Maybe you should try, just this once, to offer a moment of your incandescence for something other than pain.
[X] A flame. It's funny—despite everything, even sharing lessons for a year or so before you accelerated past him, you don't think you've ever taught Zuko a single thing about firebending. He's certainly never taught you. You've only ever used your fire to hurt each other. Maybe you should try, just this once, to offer a moment of your incandescence for something other than pain.
[X] A flame. It's funny—despite everything, even sharing lessons for a year or so before you accelerated past him, you don't think you've ever taught Zuko a single thing about firebending. He's certainly never taught you. You've only ever used your fire to hurt each other. Maybe you should try, just this once, to offer a moment of your incandescence for something other than pain.
Requiem_Jeer
The Most High
[X] A flame. It's funny—despite everything, even sharing lessons for a year or so before you accelerated past him, you don't think you've ever taught Zuko a single thing about firebending. He's certainly never taught you. You've only ever used your fire to hurt each other. Maybe you should try, just this once, to offer a moment of your incandescence for something other than pain.
[X] A flame. It's funny—despite everything, even sharing lessons for a year or so before you accelerated past him, you don't think you've ever taught Zuko a single thing about firebending. He's certainly never taught you. You've only ever used your fire to hurt each other. Maybe you should try, just this once, to offer a moment of your incandescence for something other than pain.
I've previously thrown around the thesis that, because of how big of a part her firebending is to her identity (which this update only seems to emphasize), Azula could make great mental health strides if she learned a style that didn't reinforce anger, hate and ceaseless aggression as the only way to success.
I doubt it will be as simple as that, but it very much worth trying imo.
I've previously thrown around the thesis that, because of how big of a part her firebending is to her identity (which this update only seems to emphasize), Azula could make great mental health strides if she learned a style that didn't reinforce anger, hate and ceaseless aggression as the only way to success.
I doubt it will be as simple as that, but it very much worth trying imo.
- Pronouns
- Reader
Wow. A time when Zuko and Azula were unified in the goal of ending meaningless destruction and limitless tyranny.