Wow. My favourite fanfiction of all time is a timeloop character piece, and this lives up to the standard set in my mind, truly excellent! Looking forward to more
Arsonist's Lullaby: An Azula Timeloop Quest
- Thread starter Magery
- Start date
- Location
- Who knows?
Well acknowledging she doesnt want Zuzu dead is a rather big step forward for Azula. Given everything
infinityDivided
Prince Of Doom
- Location
- USA
Two things just occurred to me: one, that the first words Azula hears each loop probably struck at the core of her very self during her early loops:
Guys, I think the next loop is going to start with her telling them the truth.
because yeeeesh, and two, I think there's been something that we might have overlooked. At the end of the 'first' loop, we had the choice to vote on what Azula told Ty Lee and Mai, and what lie she would tell herself. Now, at the end of the 'second' loop, we didn't get a chance to vote on what lie she told herself because yay character development... but we also didn't get to vote on what she told her friends.
Guys, I think the next loop is going to start with her telling them the truth.
Julian Bradshaw
MSY Historian
- Location
- Local Group
"You miscalculated," comes the chorus of your rebirth. "I love Zuko more than I fear you."
"Wonderful," you reply, with an ease that causes both your friends to blink. "You know, I have something to confess to you as well."
Ty Lee shifts her stance, moving closer to you.
"Go on," Mai says, subtly readying herself for combat.
"Yes, I've decided to elope with Ty Lee!" you grin. "We'll run away, and join the circus together. You can go babysit Zuzu and the rest of the Fire Nation for me; I believe you'll find your boyfriend encamped at the Western Air Temple, if you hurry."
Mai stares at you, and then at Ty Lee, whose mouth is hanging open in shock. You take the opportunity to grab Ty Lee's arm, and begin to briskly walk away.
"Great," Mai drawls. "She's finally lost the rest of her sanity."
(But seriously, I don't think she's going to tell them about the loops just yet.)
infinityDivided
Prince Of Doom
- Location
- USA
I suppose it's possible that she's using the same answer for both questions, but I'm still leaning towards her finally deciding to let them in on everything. After all, a lack of trust is the main reason she initially decided against telling them, but now she does. Or at least she's realized she cares more about them than their utility to her.
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- Location
- France
That made me think of something: through the story it's made clear that Azula truly loves the flame, and not just as an instrument of power and fear, but also the beauty of it (best shown in the Fire Dancing scene), and through the narration and her stats on how "she is the flame", that love of it led her to master it to great heights, she loves the whole element of fire in all its aspects.
PERHAPS WHAT WE SEEK
IS NOT EXCELLENCE THAT SURPASSES EXCELLENCE
BUT ACKNOWLEDGEMENT THAT SURPASSES CRITICISM
ARE YOUR FLAMES BLUE BECAUSE YOU ARE AZULA
OR ARE YOU AZULA BECAUSE YOUR FLAMES ARE BLUE?
And notably, she got her own title of "the Blue" that she hates and never use because she found it dumb, but deep down she loves the fact that this title will stay with her no matter what other official titles she gains or lose, because those blue flames are the one thing that belongs to her and only her and that will accompany her for her whole life, the proof of her love of the element of fire...
Now imagine if Aang takes her bending away. Maybe that was what Zuko did to her that was "far worse" in the loops where she kills Mai and Ty Lee? Because that would be a fate truly worse than death for her.
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- He/Him
If Aang didn't somehow teach Zuko spiritbending, it would be weird to think of that as something Zuko did. Maybe it would make sense if Zuko drove the large pack animal that brought Aang to her, but probably not, and anyways the most likely animal to bring Aang to Azula is Appa, and I don't think he listens to Zuko.
My guess is still in the general area of "he pitied me," because it's both something Azula would resent and something Zuko would do (for a sufficiently broad definition of "pity".
- Location
- France
It depends on how much time passes between Aang defeating Ozai and him going back to the Fire Nation. If it's fast enough to happen before the loop's end, maybe Azula got her bending taken away for a couple of hours before the end of the loop.
Or maybe what Zuko did "worse" was to defeat Azula and make her suffer as long as possible before killing her as retaliation for killing Mai and Ty Lee?
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I never questioned whether Azula might get her Bending taken, only why she would attribute it to Zuko.
That falls into the category of "not something I think Zuko would do".
- Location
- France
Maybe Zuko was the one who asked Aang to do it?
I think a sufficiently enraged Zuko could do this.
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I doubt he'd do that within earshot of Azula.
I can see a scenario where Zuko would kill his sister in a fit of burning rage. I can't see one where he'd "make her suffer as long as possible" first.
You can probably construct a scenario where it's possible to connect Zuko to spiritbending, or where he'd torture his sister. But it takes way fewer mental gymnastics to construct a scenario where he does something that's "worse" only by Azula's myopic standards, mercy that feels like pity, kindness interpreted as an insult, and where Azula would remember that as "something worse".
I don't see Zuko going for torture. During the series, angry is basically his default state. We have seen him at any stage from calm to simmering to almost murderous, but no matter what he was never sadistic.
- Location
- USA
Please don't, it was quite well-put! (and I, at least, wasn't aware of the link between autism and the proposal of ASPD as potentially genetic)
This seems plausible.
Aang doesn't take away her bending by default.
But if Zuko came to him distraught saying that Azula killed even her own closest friends and partners? He might very well decide she was just as mad and dangerous as Ozai, and worthy of equally extreme measures of containment.
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- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I can imagine Zuko asking Aang to take Azula's bending. Maybe events would line up so that Aang would go check on Zuko while he's near Azula; maybe this happens when Zuko is in the mood to ask Aang to spiritbend his sister; maybe Azula hears this clearly; maybe she attributes enough of it to Zuko that it's "worse" than being killed.
But that's a lot of maybes. If I had to guess, I'd guess that Zuko did something himself, rather than asking someone else to do something that Azula myopically considers worse than death.
But that's a lot of maybes. If I had to guess, I'd guess that Zuko did something himself, rather than asking someone else to do something that Azula myopically considers worse than death.
[x] Iroh. Coward. General. Prince. Once, he was the favoured heir, a legendary firebender, the greatest hero the Fire Nation had known since Sozin—now he's a pathetic, doddering fool who thinks he can make everything right with tears and tea. How did he fall so far? How can he possibly think he's still able to rise?
infinityDivided
Prince Of Doom
- Location
- USA
The vote's been closed for over a week.
buttt the option you voted for won congrats!
Well that's something at least.
"Third" 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 howl
a scream
solar flares and smoke
the blood of the sun
cold and blue and sparking
—alive. As ever.
"You miscalculated. I love Zuko more than I fear you."
Your own personal harbinger, echoing through the ages.
You let it sit in silence for a breath. And another. And another. Just enough to let the words sink through you—let them fall through the hollow of your heart and the pit of your stomach, where they have settled every time before.
But the weight is easier now. It no longer flattens your spine, or your lungs, or your smile.
So you take one more breath, and when you stare straight into Mai's golden eyes, your voice comes light and lilting.
"How cruel, Mai," you say. "You really chose the words meant to hurt me most, didn't you?"
She's glaring at you, sharp and fierce, but it doesn't matter. You know her heart. You have seen what moves her—the seething fury that sits behind her silence. The Boiling Rock is not a betrayal. The Boiling Rock is just the first time she's been desperate enough to let it out.
You can no longer find it in yourself to fault her for that.
Desperation has driven you to far more terrible choices than saving Zuko, after all.
Somewhere between the two of you, Ty Lee is a hesitant shadow, flitting from toe to toe, starting toward you, then toward Mai, then snapping back to herself. It's a strange dance, especially when her only partner seems to be her own conscience.
By all rights, the fact she seems to be struggling at all is base and vacillating treachery—you are the Crown Princess of the Fire Nation, heir to all the light touches across a full half of the world. All must turn to you, as flowers turn to the Sun.
But Ty Lee is the girl who doesn't choose. Who questions your Father's triumph and still takes you to a festival—who thinks love is like the sky, and still sees you in the shade.
What can you do but forgive her for the crime of daring to feel?
You look from Mai to Ty Lee, and again to Mai, and when you speak, it is almost fondly.
"Well, that's fine," you say. "I've always liked that about you."
It's even true. Mai's nearly as good as you at cutting someone down to size. It's not something people expect from such a seemingly-silent wallflower, but—well, there's a reason you were sharing your… observations on the fire dancers with her, rather than Ty Lee.
You brush off the approaching guards with a pointed glare towards the cacophony emanating from the prison. They have a riot to suppress—poorly enough that you'll have to do something about it, of course, but suppress nonetheless. They certainly don't have any business here.
"What are you doing, Azula?" Mai asks as they leave. Her expression is as dark as her hair, and you can track the way her weight shifts through her knees and her hips, ready to run—or ready to throw. The hitch of Ty Lee's breath suggests she can track it too. "You don't even look like you want to kill me."
"How strange," you say. "Perhaps it could be because I don't?"
"Azula."
Your lips quirks up to the side.
You think you might actually be having fun.
"Look, Mai," you say, basking in the heat that wafts from the boiling lake below, the steam budding your armour with quivering beads of condensation, "I'm not really sure what you want me to say. Am I meant to be surprised that your frankly inexplicable affection for my brother convinces you to save his life? I was mostly curious if you'd be willing to admit it."
Mai stares, her eyes flicking across your face like she's taking a knife to it, flensing you open to find the liar beneath. But the longer she looks, the more baffled she gets—which, for Mai, involves a slight narrowing of the eyes and a bare tilt of the head—until finally, finally, she says, "…you're not even angry. You're actually not even angry."
"Naturally," you say. "You saved Zuko. So what? Somebody has to take on the responsibility. He certainly can't be trusted with his own life."
"Did you hit your head in the fight?" Mai hasn't relaxed an inch. "The Azula I know wouldn't sound so happy about that."
"I guess you just don't know me as well as you think you do."
Ty Lee makes a strangled noise that seems somewhere between a gasp and a laugh.
"Really," you add, before Mai can recover from the complicated disbelief that wrangles its way across her face, "if I wanted Zuko dead, I'd have hardly bothered to drag him back from Ba Sing Se and gift him Father's favour on a silver platter. That he chose to throw it all aw—"
"If you wanted Zuko dead," she interrupts, her voice grasping at the words as if steadying herself in a storm, "then Caldera Palace is the most likely thing in the world to kill him."
"Lucky you were there to protect him, then, isn't it?" you say, rolling your eyes in one exaggerated motion. Honestly, Mai is so dramatic sometimes. "I'm still waiting to hear a thank-you for saving your," you fail to suppress a shudder, "boyfriend from his exile, by the way."
"Maybe I don't know you as well as I thought," Mai says with an affected shrug, "but if there's one thing I have learned about you, Azula, it's that I should be very wary of thanking you for something if I don't understand why you did it."
"I'm sure I don't understand what you mean," you say. First Zuko, now Mai. Why is it that the people who benefit most from your decisions always end up being the ones questioning them?
This time, she's the one who rolls her eyes, her feet quiet against the metal platform keeping you all from boiling alive as she takes a couple of steps closer. The garrotte tension in her fingers is gone now, but based on the way she's folded her arms, that might only be because her irritation has overpowered it completely. "Don't play dumb, Azula. You manipulated Zuko into joining you in Ba Sing Se, and then instead of turning it into a trap, you lied to the Fire Lord so that Zuko would come back a hero and think he was loved. What gives?"
"If this is how you express gratitude," you say, frowning, "I'm beginning to wonder why I bothered."
"You didn't do it for me," Mai says. "You did it for yourself. Are you going to answer the question, or are you going to keep deflecting like an airbender?"
How dare she.
"Fine," you say, "since you won't stop being so annoying about it, here you go: because it was embarrassing. My brother, a prince of the blood, running around the Earth Kingdom like a headless turtle-duck, failing at everything he ever put a hand to, contemplating joining the Avatar? Ridiculous. Something had to be done."
"So you… decided to give him credit for slaying the Avatar, and pretend he helped take Ba Sing Se. Because you were embarrassed." Mai sounds as dubious as a dirt peasant's personal hygiene. "Sure. I believe you."
You're not so sure you're having fun anymore.
"Mind what you insinuate, Mai," you say, each syllable cold and court-sharp. "You may have caught me in a merciful mood, but I will not allow you to suggest I am moved by something as inane as childhood sentiment."
Because you're not. Of course you're not. Your childhood was an exercise in realising that Zuko didn't know how to win and your mother didn't want you to win. There was hardly any room in it for feelings. You only needed to study the mouldering wreckage of the Dragon of the West, or listen to the empty space where the servants no longer said Princess Ursa, or inhale the sweet stench of a boy's face cooking, to understand that.
Sentiment was an easily-discarded weakness, in the end.
(As easily discarded as Mai and Ty Lee.)
"It's okay, Azula," Ty Lee says, slipping closer to your side, soundless across the steel. "I don't like most of my sisters most of the time, but I still want them to be happy."
What—
No.
How absurd.
"Don't be ridiculous," you say, swiping an arm as if to swat her stupidity from the air. "I don't care if Zuko is happy. Sometimes I barely think I care if he's still alive. Why are both of you making these ludicrous assumptions?"
"Well, I mean…" Ty Lee has both your hands in hers, her flesh a shallow chill against your own. There's no threat in the touch, so you allow the press of her fingers for a breath or two before you pull away. "Honestly, Azula, I don't think you want Zuko to be happy either. Not like that. But Mai's right too, you know? Embarrassment has nothing to do with it. Maybe you don't know what does."
She pauses, takes a heavy breath, and adds, "But I think you gotta figure it out, before you do something you can't undo."
You snort. "Like run away to the circus without a word and never look back."
"Yeah," Ty Lee says, looking away, smile slipping at a corner like a poorly-hung portrait. "Kinda like that."
You realise, perhaps a moment or two too late, that you can't quite recall the last time Ty Lee told a story about one of her sisters.
(What would it be like, to no longer remember the shape of Zuko's name in your mouth?)
"Real smooth, Azula," Mai says, seemingly reaching a similar conclusion.
"I… may have spoken too hastily, Ty Lee," you say, snapping a glare at Mai out of the corner of your eyes. She shrugs, unrepentant. "You didn't deserve that."
"It's fine!" Ty Lee says, and she even looks like she's telling the truth, her cheeks soft and her eyes crinkled around the edges. You don't understand how she does it. "This place is just kinda lame. All the steam is making my aura fog up."
"It is getting pretty stuffy," Mai says, brushing her hands down the side of her thick, elegant robes. "And boring. Can we go back now, Azula?"
There's an edge to the way she says it—a slight pause on the can, weighted the way her knives are.
"I don't know," you say, just as carefully. "Do you want to? Or is there somewhere else you'd prefer to go?"
On anyone else, Mai's long, slow blink would have been a startled gasp.
"No," she says eventually, looking at Ty Lee, the hanging shadows of the gondola's cables stretching through the sky above, and then finally back at you. "I have the house to myself in Caldera. It could be worse."
"Ooh," Ty Lee says, now bouncing in place, long braid flailing in the wind, "we should have a girl's night! That would be fun! It's been ages since we had one of those."
Mai rolls her eyes, but doesn't say anything, which for her is practically enthusiasm.
"I suppose it has been a while," you allow.
Ty Lee actually cheers.
A day or so later, you find Lo and Li together in the Royal Gallery, shuffling past the towering portrait of Azulon with nary a sideways glance.
The truth is, you don't think you've ever seen them apart. You try to picture one without the other and it just seems wrong, like an unfinished kata, or a play missing a third act. They're not Lo, and Li—they're Lo and Li, something inseparable. Two hearts, one soul, as the saying goes.
You wonder what they think of it.
Were they born into the world knowing it could not conceive of them apart? Or did they shatter and rage, beating their fists against the glass as the universe of their choices narrowed, and narrowed, and narrowed? You doubt it. They smile too much to be so angry.
But if they had, you think you could relate.
When they see you, they each turn and bow—an easy, natural reflex.
"Princess Azula," Lo begins,
"Your next practice is not until,"
You nod your head in acknowledgement.
Lo and Li have guided your training since you were twelve, shortly after you surpassed the last of the so-called firebending masters who had sought the honour of instructing the prodigious Crown Princess. That two-year streak, broken only by the week where your Father taught you lightning, is the longest you have ever retained a teacher. An impressive achievement, and doubly so when they cannot even firebend themselves.
But that, you think, is actually Lo and Li's secret. Their knowledge is solely theoretical. When they envisage firebending, they probably see characters before they see flame—whether the ancient, curling scripts of the times before Fire became Nation, or the sharper, simplified strokes that would have recorded the likes of Sozin. They can only recognise your form by how far it strays from diagrammatic perfection.
It makes them useful in ways your old instructors never could be. You don't need some mediocre 'master' telling you to shift your left foot a half-inch back in the fifth movement of the thirty-first imperial kata. You already know what you're doing wrong, and you already know how to fix it. What you need are the sorts of eyes that know when a single hair is out of place—the sorts of eyes that see firebending as a millennial history of refinements towards a more perfect art.
The sorts of eyes that may be the only others in the world to recognise what you see in the fascination of an open flame.
"I have a question for you," you say.
"We are, as ever,"
You fix your eyes on the colossal Azulon for a moment; the sun that rises behind his twice-curved headpiece, the long-necked turtle he stands symbolically over. Your Father's father. Your Grandfather.
You owe your very name to him—the second-most useful gift he's given you, after his death.
At the end of it all, he was a doddering old man, but he cannot have always been; not when you and your Father are descended from him, not when he ruled the Fire Nation for over seventy years and engineered not just the deep conquest of the Earth Kingdom but the near-annihilation of the Water Tribes as influential polities. If nothing else, he was worthy of his title.
You are not here to ask about Azulon, though.
You are here to ask about his eldest son.
Iroh.
Unworthy, cowardly Iroh, who runs and runs and runs and thinks, just because he's still alive, that means he's allowed to try and come back.
A careful breath kills the heat licking through your gut.
"The Dragon of the West," you begin, "is fat, decrepit, and useless. He can hardly get through a sentence without revealing his ridiculous addiction to tea, and the only thing about war he seems to know these days is how to get attached to lost causes. There is nothing to him but treachery, and even in that he cowers from his own weakness, fleeing in the eclipse instead of facing the consequences of turning against the blood that now waters in his veins."
You throw your arms wide, sleeves rustling, fingers spread towards the distant roof.
"How did that happen? How did the Crown Prince—a renowned general and the last dragonslayer—forget himself so thoroughly he couldn't even avenge the death of his son? How did he… how did someone like that learn to fail?"
"An interesting question," Lo says, her voice scratching over each syllable.
You could lie.
It's not like they'd ever know.
(But you would.)
"I have been… given reason to reflect on the meaning of disgrace," you say, "and I thought your perspective on the nation's most infamous might prove useful."
They hum, glancing at each other, eye to eye, gold to gold. When they speak, it is low and thoughtful.
"Our nephew has led a complex life,"
Lo and Li shake their heads, the thick, curving blades of their white topknots bound so tightly not a hair shifts out of place. Even in the Royal Gallery, where no others beyond royalty are permitted to enter, their postures are sharp and precise, arms folded neatly in front of their waists and hands hidden in their long, draping sleeves.
"In his youth, he was much like you, Princess Azula."
Your face must reflect something of the disgust that churns its way through your body, because Lo and Li both cough out a laugh, low and wheezing.
"We have learned much on how to teach you,"
"He would have made a great Firelord."
As one, they turn to study your Father's portrait—the black smog of industry burning in his hands, the ornate accoutrements framing the grandeur of his robes.
"But the death of his heart was the death of his ambition."
"How was he so weak?" you ask, hands straining to fists. "Lu Ten died when he broke the Outer Wall of Ba Sing Se and that was somehow a reason to run rather than repay it in ash and blood?"
You have never imagined what it would be like to have a child.
But in those three long years of Zuko's banishment, you had occasion to wonder if you would wake up tomorrow to learn that he had fallen to bandits, or Earth Kingdom rebels, or even to the Avatar.
You're not really sure what you would have done, if that had happened. Maybe you would have done nothing. You'd have been a thousand miles away in Caldera, after all, with your throne forever secured. In many ways, Zuko bleeding out of the line of succession would have been simply repaying the debt he owed for your mother's murderous choice. You're sure you could have put it out of your mind eventually.
But if you had been there, like Iroh was for Lu Ten, with only a corpse left where your brother used to breathe?
"If I were him," you say, staring up at your Father's portrait, "there would have been no Ba Sing Se for me to conquer five years later."
Lo and Li smile—each an ugly, gap-toothed thing, but still wide, still proud.
Still proud of you.
They turn their attention to the flames flickering in the massive lanterns that hang from the cavernous roof, watching them with a sharpness that twitches their heavy jowls and the bags under their eyes into something you've long thought might well be hunger.
"Iroh was loved," Lo says, wizened head held low, shadows playing across her face.
"His drive to live up to that love made him strong,"
"Iroh had built himself on the backs of others."
"when, eventually, the only love he had left,"
They sigh together—and then turn to look back at you, two identical stares from two identical faces.
Lo and Li's voices are heavy with truth.
"If you stake yourself to the ground with another's heart,"
"But if you lose that heart,"
"then there is nothing tying you to the earth."
"for the Dragon of the West."
You frown. "I wouldn't have thought the same people who preached the virtues of Ember Island and its ability to help us 'understand ourselves and each other' would be the ones agitating against love. Even I can tell you love each other, if nothing else."
They smile, with the same sardonic uptick of the lip your own face knows like breath.
"You should always love."
(Has anyone ever said those words to you before?)
"All we are trying to say,"
"When there was no-one left to want him,"
"What he had not yet understood, Princess Azula,"
"rather than be who they are so that they are loved."
They each take a step forward and rest gnarled hands on your shoulders, the parchment of their skin pale and rasping against the dark cloth of your robes. You can hardly feel the weight.
Lo and Li are strange, and lively, and sometimes incredibly embarrassing.
It makes it easy to forget that they are so terribly, terribly old.
"If you are seeking to avoid our nephew's fall,"
"Princess Azula,"
"no matter how things,"
Lu Ten's old room is clean.
That's the strangest part of being there.
Not the scorch mark still browning the edges of one of his rich red sheets, remnants of a tantrum that was probably Zuko's fault; not the distant familiarity of the knife glittering on the mahogany table beside his bed; not the hideous clay dragon taking pride of place above his wardrobe, children's fingerprints still obvious in its hard-baked flesh. You know these things as you know ships on the edge of the horizon—the shapes they cut slip smoothly into the patterns of your mind, no matter the distance.
But the way the Sun gleams through the pristine glass window? The neatly-stacked pillows? The polished floorboards that sing their nightingale song under your boots?
Your cousin is five years into his grave, and someone still believes his room should be kept neat.
Do they fear the Dragon of the West that much? Or, worse, respect him that much? Maybe it's neither of those things. Could Lu Ten have been loved by the palace, not just by his father? He was a popular prince, but was that because he was Iroh's son, or for his own merits?
It's hard to tell. Your memories of Lu Ten are sparks in the dark——fast and fleeting, slipping from your grasp to scatter themselves across minutes and hours and days and weeks lost among the halls of this palace. You have nearly lived longer with his death than his life; maybe you even have, if you could be certain of how many cycles you fractured through before you finally found yourself in the wreckage.
The wood of the floor creaks as you step across it and onto the luxurious, gold-patterned rug bridging the space between the bed and Lu Ten's personal library, a towering mahogany edifice stacked neatly with scroll after scroll after scroll in its narrow shelves. You run a finger across one at random, shifting the tightly-wound ribbon to reveal its title as The Thirty-Six Stratagems of Wang Jingze.
Sensible.
The one next to it, however, is not a treatise on foundational warfare but instead The Pillow Book, which strikes you as a peculiar thing for a prince to be reading about, especially as a quick glance confirms that, yes, Lu Ten's pillows are just as luxurious as your own. Maybe it was research, to learn how to re-sew them in the field?
You suppose you'll never find out.
After all, Lu Ten is dead.
You wouldn't be here otherwise.
(But when you imagine a life where he never died, the strangest thing of all is that you think you might have been happy.
Might have still been happy. Because you're happy now, too.
Of course you are.)
It's funny. For most of your life, when you thought about love, you thought about your mother. Your brother. Your Father. You thought about Mai, and Ty Lee, and sometimes even Lo and Li.
But here, in this room, in this life, when you think about love, you think about Lu Ten.
Not because you loved him. You hardly even remember him, and you certainly don't know if he loved you. Probably not. Zuko was right there.
No: you think of Lu Ten because you still just don't understand how Iroh can pretend to have ever loved him at all.
You know your mother loved Zuko because she killed for him. You know Mai loves Zuko because she was going to die for him. You know you love your Father because you have done both in his name.
But Iroh ran. He gave up. He left Lu Ten to rot in someone else's dirt and came back to the palace a useless, weeping waste of the spark.
You don't get it.
Lo and Li called it love. Iroh called it strength.
What would Lu Ten have called it?
And why do you even care?
You push the scrolls back into place and turn your attention to the portrait behind the bed-frame, hanging proudly in the centre of the polished marble wall. It shows Lu Ten—tall and slightly tanned—offering his father a smile and the sign of the flame while the remarkably brown-haired Iroh grins broadly and reaches for a hug.
Is that who they were? Lu Ten, the dutiful prince to his gregarious sire?
Or are the smiles all that matter, the easy joy that sits on their faces without price or weight?
It's nothing like how Iroh smiled at you when he spoke of trading pointers.
Strands of black hair whip around like claws as you shake your head to clear it. All these useless thoughts keep popping back into your skull, springing up like bubbles from the lips of the drowning.
Iroh, finally realising he hardly knew you at all. Zuko, who doesn't want to kill you, but still wants to stop you from taking the throne. Mai and Ty Lee, refusing to believe that you don't care about anything to do with your brother except that he remains breathing. Lo and Li, warning you about the dangers of love as if your mother hadn't already left you with a far more object lesson.
Even your Father's expectations are no longer clear.
And above it all: the weight of the cycle, compressing you down through time.
The nine-day chunks of your life leave little chance for introspection.
But as you rest your weight on Lu Ten's bed, knees hanging off the edge and head collapsed into the sheets, you find at least a moment to close your eyes and think.
Naturally, you think about death.
Lu Ten might have died in ignominy, swallowed by mud and dirt—but in that dying, he changed the future of the Fire Nation irrevocably. His father's grief broke a six-hundred-day siege within a week of its greatest triumph; your father's conspiracy won him the throne in the chaos to follow. As far as legacies go, Lu Ten's death might have been the most important historical event since Sozin began the Hundred-Years War.
You laugh, dry and hollow.
Somehow, you don't think your own has ever quite lived up to the strength of your cousin's example.
Your eyes trace the whirling constellations spinning across Lu Ten's roof in white and gold, a starscape surrounding the Sun who wears no face but radiance. There's probably meant to be some deep, hidden meaning to it—some old philosophical nonsense about how all are equal beneath the sky.
Or maybe that's just a whisper of Ty Lee, asking you why Ba Sing Se has to burn.
You don't have an answer for that particular ghost of memory. Would Lu Ten's ask the same? He died for that city. Surely he'd want to be buried in ash instead of earth.
But Iroh went to Zuko to fill the hole Lu Ten had left. They must bear some essential similarity—after all, Iroh only ever sees what he wants to see until it's far too late. And Zuko doesn't want Ba Sing Se cracked open like a reef crab to let fire feast on its marrow either.
He's always been too soft to do what must be done.
That doesn't change just because, for once in his life, he might actually be right.
That's the worst part, isn't it?
This time it was Zuko who realised your plan might have been a bad idea long before you were ever able to entertain the thought. Not the other way around.
You're not sure how you'll ever live that down—though it would be funny to see his face if you just admitted it.
You'll never do it, of course.
(But it would be funny.)
Your eyelids slip shut with a sigh.
All of this is just spinning around the point.
You don't actually know what to do.
You have fought, and fought, and fought, and it hasn't mattered once whether you've won or whether you've lost. You've stepped over so many bodies you could coronate yourself before nothing but corpses—and still the Boiling Rock awaits. If only you could fight the cycle itself; plunge a fist of cold fire through the ribcage of the world and tear out its beating heart.
(But even when you killed the Avatar, the universe spun him right back out at you anyway.
Is that meant to be a warning, or a lesson?)
You roll over, the silk of Lu Ten's sheets soft against your cheek.
The truth is absurd, and the truth is this: there is no path to victory that flows through the tips of two outstretched fingers.
It is the entire edifice of your life, and it has crumbled to nothing.
No matter the circumstance, no matter the problem, you have always faced the world knowing that in the end, it is more afraid of violence than you are.
And yet here you are, at the end of all things, and suddenly the world is no longer afraid.
You snort, thumping your head against the mattress a few times to feel something in the bounce.
Maybe it just loves Zuko more than it fears you.
That would be typical.
The thought lingers, like the burn of a muscle after exercise, or too-rich food in the hour before sleep. Is that what you're supposed to do? Love Zuko more than you fear the cost of it? Like Mai? Like Iroh? Like your mother? Is that the lesson the universe wants to teach you?
Your fingers stab into the sheets until you're almost convinced the fabric is red with blood instead of dye. The tension hooks through your knuckles and tendons until they strain against your skin, and you have to focus to breathe out air instead of flame.
Don't be ridiculous. Lo and Li's ramblings must have infested your brain, probably fertilised by Mai's impertinence and Ty Lee's flowery nonsense.
You'll allow, as you've said before, that you don't want your brother to die. It would be… a waste. Yes. That's the best way to describe it. Killing him would be inefficient, and you despise inefficiency. But that does not, under any circumstance, mean you love him. There are plenty of things you don't love even though you don't want them to die, like mongoose-lizards, or the woman who gave you that egg tart at the festival.
(It's the truth.
Of course it's the truth.
You can't love Zuko—
—after all, your Father doesn't.)
Unfortunately, Zuko keeps trying his hardest to get himself killed anyway. And even in the rare moments he isn't, there's always someone around him who seems to be straining to ensure somebody has to die.
You need only look to the last cycle, or the cycle before that, to see it.
You'd gone to face the Comet only wanting to talk to Zuko, the same way you'd ended up talking to your friends, or today, to your teachers—and like every other time before, someone, or something, had stopped you. Even when you'd tried to anticipate it.
Take the waterbender out of the equation; she turns right around and bleeds her way back in. Leave Zuko and his merry band of imbeciles alone so maybe they return the favour; he brings along Iroh to weep his way onto your throne.
No matter what, you just can't get him to listen.
It's ridiculous.
Surely there must be some way to figure out what Zuko wants.
But you're running out of ideas—and it's not like there's anyone left you can go to for advice.
Mai and Ty Lee have questions, but not answers. Lo and Li have answers, but those answers just give you more questions. And your Father is not a man to be questioned or to come before without answers—especially not when Zuko is involved.
(You don't want to ask Iroh for something for as long as you live.)
Who else is even…
You spring bolt-upright in the bed, eyes wide.
No.
That cannot be it.
That cannot be it.
You are not—
You are not going to ask Zuko for the answer.
Zuko is the problem!
"I," you say through gritted teeth, "think I need to talk to Zuko."
Mai looks at you the same way she looked at Ruon-Jian. "You really would only realise this now, wouldn't you?"
Ty Lee tries to strangle you with a hug. "Aaw, Azula, you're growing up!"
They really are the worst.
"Remind me again why I keep either of you around?" you say, brushing Ty Lee off while glaring at Mai over the top of the ornately-decorated couch.
A beat.
Mai and Ty Lee glance at each other, as if to say no, you first.
"Girls," you say, sweet as wound-sting, "whatever you're thinking: don't."
Ty Lee giggles, covering her mouth with her hand. Once she recovers, she stretches back on the couch next to you, spine arching and eyes closing with bliss.
You sigh.
"Alright," Mai says, lounging up against the wall, a splash of black against the red, like a bruised nail freshly bled. "I'll bite. What brought this on, Azula?"
"I am… tired," you say, rubbing your forehead with your fingers, nails close to leaving welts in your skin, "of fighting my brother. The thought of it grows tedious, and the experience stale. I do not want to spend the rest of my life with a flame to his throat. But I look ahead to Sozin's Comet and I know—I know he is coming, because he thinks my Father should fall to the Avatar and the nation should fall to anyone but me."
What does Zuko even know about being the Fire Lord? He hasn't been in the Fire Nation for the last three years, save for a few short months. He's hardly even been to the colonies. You could probably find use for him as a diplomat, given the way he's bounced across half the world, but Fire Lord? Maybe if you believed Iroh's nonsense about a 'good heart' you might be sympathetic to the idea, but this is war.
The only thing good about a heart in war is that it provides a place to aim.
"So you want to, like, convince him to give up?" Ty Lee asks. You're willing to forgive her for the dubious dip of her voice. The idea of Zuko giving up on anything is about as likely as the Sun failing to rise.
"No," you say, shaking your head, topknot hardly shifting with the motion. "Maybe I just want to see if he's as tired of all this as I am."
(Maybe you just want to know if the only person in the world who could possibly understand how you feel is willing to try.)
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.
You have declared your intentions aloud, and in that declaration made them final:
You are going to see Zuko at the Western Air Temple, and you are going to ask him if he wants to talk.
Most likely, this will cause him some consternation—to say nothing of the Avatar or his ship of fools. But that's fine. You are perfectly capable of defending yourself from any unprovoked aggression. A show of force might even make your position clearer, if you make a particularly exaggerated performance of trying not to hurt them.
Regardless, you're not particularly worried about setting the meeting up. You know Zuko will come, and you can handle any unwanted visitors. What's important is your agenda. Your plans. Your intentions.
So, Princess Azula, it's time for you to consider that question:
What are you going to talk to Zuko about at the Western Air Temple?
[ ] The past. It's what has driven you here. It's what you're trapped in. It's what you want to break out of. But it's Zuko's past, too. You've spent the whole of your lives chasing each other's shadows—on your whole family's encouragement. Has he ever realised? Does he even care? And why does it seem so impossible to escape?
[ ] The present. Here you stand, before your brother. Here doubt has driven you. Does Zuko doubt, too? Is he still angry at himself? If you were him, you would be. But maybe that's his secret. Maybe he's always angry. Maybe you're angry too. The world isn't what you thought it was—and you think Zuko can relate. What will happen if you let him?
[ ] The future. The one place you cannot seem to reach, throne or no throne. Has Zuko ever wondered what it'll be like? No, not whether the mantle is heavy enough to cramp the shoulders, or what his first command as Fire Lord could be—just about the shape of the Sun's path through the sky, the day after Sozin's Comet, and what the world will have become in the face of that light. What does he see? What do you?
[ ]The .
This is not a time to imagine worlds that will never be.
a howl
a scream
solar flares and smoke
the blood of the sun
cold and blue and sparking
—alive. As ever.
"You miscalculated. I love Zuko more than I fear you."
Your own personal harbinger, echoing through the ages.
You let it sit in silence for a breath. And another. And another. Just enough to let the words sink through you—let them fall through the hollow of your heart and the pit of your stomach, where they have settled every time before.
But the weight is easier now. It no longer flattens your spine, or your lungs, or your smile.
So you take one more breath, and when you stare straight into Mai's golden eyes, your voice comes light and lilting.
"How cruel, Mai," you say. "You really chose the words meant to hurt me most, didn't you?"
She's glaring at you, sharp and fierce, but it doesn't matter. You know her heart. You have seen what moves her—the seething fury that sits behind her silence. The Boiling Rock is not a betrayal. The Boiling Rock is just the first time she's been desperate enough to let it out.
You can no longer find it in yourself to fault her for that.
Desperation has driven you to far more terrible choices than saving Zuko, after all.
Somewhere between the two of you, Ty Lee is a hesitant shadow, flitting from toe to toe, starting toward you, then toward Mai, then snapping back to herself. It's a strange dance, especially when her only partner seems to be her own conscience.
By all rights, the fact she seems to be struggling at all is base and vacillating treachery—you are the Crown Princess of the Fire Nation, heir to all the light touches across a full half of the world. All must turn to you, as flowers turn to the Sun.
But Ty Lee is the girl who doesn't choose. Who questions your Father's triumph and still takes you to a festival—who thinks love is like the sky, and still sees you in the shade.
What can you do but forgive her for the crime of daring to feel?
You look from Mai to Ty Lee, and again to Mai, and when you speak, it is almost fondly.
"Well, that's fine," you say. "I've always liked that about you."
It's even true. Mai's nearly as good as you at cutting someone down to size. It's not something people expect from such a seemingly-silent wallflower, but—well, there's a reason you were sharing your… observations on the fire dancers with her, rather than Ty Lee.
You brush off the approaching guards with a pointed glare towards the cacophony emanating from the prison. They have a riot to suppress—poorly enough that you'll have to do something about it, of course, but suppress nonetheless. They certainly don't have any business here.
"What are you doing, Azula?" Mai asks as they leave. Her expression is as dark as her hair, and you can track the way her weight shifts through her knees and her hips, ready to run—or ready to throw. The hitch of Ty Lee's breath suggests she can track it too. "You don't even look like you want to kill me."
"How strange," you say. "Perhaps it could be because I don't?"
"Azula."
Your lips quirks up to the side.
You think you might actually be having fun.
"Look, Mai," you say, basking in the heat that wafts from the boiling lake below, the steam budding your armour with quivering beads of condensation, "I'm not really sure what you want me to say. Am I meant to be surprised that your frankly inexplicable affection for my brother convinces you to save his life? I was mostly curious if you'd be willing to admit it."
Mai stares, her eyes flicking across your face like she's taking a knife to it, flensing you open to find the liar beneath. But the longer she looks, the more baffled she gets—which, for Mai, involves a slight narrowing of the eyes and a bare tilt of the head—until finally, finally, she says, "…you're not even angry. You're actually not even angry."
"Naturally," you say. "You saved Zuko. So what? Somebody has to take on the responsibility. He certainly can't be trusted with his own life."
"Did you hit your head in the fight?" Mai hasn't relaxed an inch. "The Azula I know wouldn't sound so happy about that."
"I guess you just don't know me as well as you think you do."
Ty Lee makes a strangled noise that seems somewhere between a gasp and a laugh.
"Really," you add, before Mai can recover from the complicated disbelief that wrangles its way across her face, "if I wanted Zuko dead, I'd have hardly bothered to drag him back from Ba Sing Se and gift him Father's favour on a silver platter. That he chose to throw it all aw—"
"If you wanted Zuko dead," she interrupts, her voice grasping at the words as if steadying herself in a storm, "then Caldera Palace is the most likely thing in the world to kill him."
"Lucky you were there to protect him, then, isn't it?" you say, rolling your eyes in one exaggerated motion. Honestly, Mai is so dramatic sometimes. "I'm still waiting to hear a thank-you for saving your," you fail to suppress a shudder, "boyfriend from his exile, by the way."
"Maybe I don't know you as well as I thought," Mai says with an affected shrug, "but if there's one thing I have learned about you, Azula, it's that I should be very wary of thanking you for something if I don't understand why you did it."
"I'm sure I don't understand what you mean," you say. First Zuko, now Mai. Why is it that the people who benefit most from your decisions always end up being the ones questioning them?
This time, she's the one who rolls her eyes, her feet quiet against the metal platform keeping you all from boiling alive as she takes a couple of steps closer. The garrotte tension in her fingers is gone now, but based on the way she's folded her arms, that might only be because her irritation has overpowered it completely. "Don't play dumb, Azula. You manipulated Zuko into joining you in Ba Sing Se, and then instead of turning it into a trap, you lied to the Fire Lord so that Zuko would come back a hero and think he was loved. What gives?"
"If this is how you express gratitude," you say, frowning, "I'm beginning to wonder why I bothered."
"You didn't do it for me," Mai says. "You did it for yourself. Are you going to answer the question, or are you going to keep deflecting like an airbender?"
How dare she.
"Fine," you say, "since you won't stop being so annoying about it, here you go: because it was embarrassing. My brother, a prince of the blood, running around the Earth Kingdom like a headless turtle-duck, failing at everything he ever put a hand to, contemplating joining the Avatar? Ridiculous. Something had to be done."
"So you… decided to give him credit for slaying the Avatar, and pretend he helped take Ba Sing Se. Because you were embarrassed." Mai sounds as dubious as a dirt peasant's personal hygiene. "Sure. I believe you."
You're not so sure you're having fun anymore.
"Mind what you insinuate, Mai," you say, each syllable cold and court-sharp. "You may have caught me in a merciful mood, but I will not allow you to suggest I am moved by something as inane as childhood sentiment."
Because you're not. Of course you're not. Your childhood was an exercise in realising that Zuko didn't know how to win and your mother didn't want you to win. There was hardly any room in it for feelings. You only needed to study the mouldering wreckage of the Dragon of the West, or listen to the empty space where the servants no longer said Princess Ursa, or inhale the sweet stench of a boy's face cooking, to understand that.
Sentiment was an easily-discarded weakness, in the end.
(As easily discarded as Mai and Ty Lee.)
"It's okay, Azula," Ty Lee says, slipping closer to your side, soundless across the steel. "I don't like most of my sisters most of the time, but I still want them to be happy."
What—
No.
How absurd.
"Don't be ridiculous," you say, swiping an arm as if to swat her stupidity from the air. "I don't care if Zuko is happy. Sometimes I barely think I care if he's still alive. Why are both of you making these ludicrous assumptions?"
"Well, I mean…" Ty Lee has both your hands in hers, her flesh a shallow chill against your own. There's no threat in the touch, so you allow the press of her fingers for a breath or two before you pull away. "Honestly, Azula, I don't think you want Zuko to be happy either. Not like that. But Mai's right too, you know? Embarrassment has nothing to do with it. Maybe you don't know what does."
She pauses, takes a heavy breath, and adds, "But I think you gotta figure it out, before you do something you can't undo."
You snort. "Like run away to the circus without a word and never look back."
"Yeah," Ty Lee says, looking away, smile slipping at a corner like a poorly-hung portrait. "Kinda like that."
You realise, perhaps a moment or two too late, that you can't quite recall the last time Ty Lee told a story about one of her sisters.
(What would it be like, to no longer remember the shape of Zuko's name in your mouth?)
"Real smooth, Azula," Mai says, seemingly reaching a similar conclusion.
"I… may have spoken too hastily, Ty Lee," you say, snapping a glare at Mai out of the corner of your eyes. She shrugs, unrepentant. "You didn't deserve that."
"It's fine!" Ty Lee says, and she even looks like she's telling the truth, her cheeks soft and her eyes crinkled around the edges. You don't understand how she does it. "This place is just kinda lame. All the steam is making my aura fog up."
"It is getting pretty stuffy," Mai says, brushing her hands down the side of her thick, elegant robes. "And boring. Can we go back now, Azula?"
There's an edge to the way she says it—a slight pause on the can, weighted the way her knives are.
"I don't know," you say, just as carefully. "Do you want to? Or is there somewhere else you'd prefer to go?"
On anyone else, Mai's long, slow blink would have been a startled gasp.
"No," she says eventually, looking at Ty Lee, the hanging shadows of the gondola's cables stretching through the sky above, and then finally back at you. "I have the house to myself in Caldera. It could be worse."
"Ooh," Ty Lee says, now bouncing in place, long braid flailing in the wind, "we should have a girl's night! That would be fun! It's been ages since we had one of those."
Mai rolls her eyes, but doesn't say anything, which for her is practically enthusiasm.
"I suppose it has been a while," you allow.
Ty Lee actually cheers.
A day or so later, you find Lo and Li together in the Royal Gallery, shuffling past the towering portrait of Azulon with nary a sideways glance.
The truth is, you don't think you've ever seen them apart. You try to picture one without the other and it just seems wrong, like an unfinished kata, or a play missing a third act. They're not Lo, and Li—they're Lo and Li, something inseparable. Two hearts, one soul, as the saying goes.
You wonder what they think of it.
Were they born into the world knowing it could not conceive of them apart? Or did they shatter and rage, beating their fists against the glass as the universe of their choices narrowed, and narrowed, and narrowed? You doubt it. They smile too much to be so angry.
But if they had, you think you could relate.
When they see you, they each turn and bow—an easy, natural reflex.
"Princess Azula," Lo begins,
and Li finishes, "what brings you to us?"
"Your next practice is not until,"
"the Sun crests halfway across the sky."
You nod your head in acknowledgement.
Lo and Li have guided your training since you were twelve, shortly after you surpassed the last of the so-called firebending masters who had sought the honour of instructing the prodigious Crown Princess. That two-year streak, broken only by the week where your Father taught you lightning, is the longest you have ever retained a teacher. An impressive achievement, and doubly so when they cannot even firebend themselves.
But that, you think, is actually Lo and Li's secret. Their knowledge is solely theoretical. When they envisage firebending, they probably see characters before they see flame—whether the ancient, curling scripts of the times before Fire became Nation, or the sharper, simplified strokes that would have recorded the likes of Sozin. They can only recognise your form by how far it strays from diagrammatic perfection.
It makes them useful in ways your old instructors never could be. You don't need some mediocre 'master' telling you to shift your left foot a half-inch back in the fifth movement of the thirty-first imperial kata. You already know what you're doing wrong, and you already know how to fix it. What you need are the sorts of eyes that know when a single hair is out of place—the sorts of eyes that see firebending as a millennial history of refinements towards a more perfect art.
The sorts of eyes that may be the only others in the world to recognise what you see in the fascination of an open flame.
"I have a question for you," you say.
"We are, as ever,"
"at your disposal, Princess Azula."
You fix your eyes on the colossal Azulon for a moment; the sun that rises behind his twice-curved headpiece, the long-necked turtle he stands symbolically over. Your Father's father. Your Grandfather.
You owe your very name to him—the second-most useful gift he's given you, after his death.
At the end of it all, he was a doddering old man, but he cannot have always been; not when you and your Father are descended from him, not when he ruled the Fire Nation for over seventy years and engineered not just the deep conquest of the Earth Kingdom but the near-annihilation of the Water Tribes as influential polities. If nothing else, he was worthy of his title.
You are not here to ask about Azulon, though.
You are here to ask about his eldest son.
Iroh.
Unworthy, cowardly Iroh, who runs and runs and runs and thinks, just because he's still alive, that means he's allowed to try and come back.
A careful breath kills the heat licking through your gut.
"The Dragon of the West," you begin, "is fat, decrepit, and useless. He can hardly get through a sentence without revealing his ridiculous addiction to tea, and the only thing about war he seems to know these days is how to get attached to lost causes. There is nothing to him but treachery, and even in that he cowers from his own weakness, fleeing in the eclipse instead of facing the consequences of turning against the blood that now waters in his veins."
You throw your arms wide, sleeves rustling, fingers spread towards the distant roof.
"How did that happen? How did the Crown Prince—a renowned general and the last dragonslayer—forget himself so thoroughly he couldn't even avenge the death of his son? How did he… how did someone like that learn to fail?"
"An interesting question," Lo says, her voice scratching over each syllable.
In precisely identical intonation, Li says, "What leads your mind along this path?"
You could lie.
It's not like they'd ever know.
(But you would.)
"I have been… given reason to reflect on the meaning of disgrace," you say, "and I thought your perspective on the nation's most infamous might prove useful."
They hum, glancing at each other, eye to eye, gold to gold. When they speak, it is low and thoughtful.
"Our nephew has led a complex life,"
"but his focus on the lost blinds him to the gain."
Lo and Li shake their heads, the thick, curving blades of their white topknots bound so tightly not a hair shifts out of place. Even in the Royal Gallery, where no others beyond royalty are permitted to enter, their postures are sharp and precise, arms folded neatly in front of their waists and hands hidden in their long, draping sleeves.
"In his youth, he was much like you, Princess Azula."
"Sharp and charismatic, unmatched in ferocity and flame."
Your face must reflect something of the disgust that churns its way through your body, because Lo and Li both cough out a laugh, low and wheezing.
"We have learned much on how to teach you,"
"from how many grew frustrated teaching him."
"He would have made a great Firelord."
"Just as you will."
As one, they turn to study your Father's portrait—the black smog of industry burning in his hands, the ornate accoutrements framing the grandeur of his robes.
"But the death of his heart was the death of his ambition."
"And there is no Fire Lord without ambition."
"How was he so weak?" you ask, hands straining to fists. "Lu Ten died when he broke the Outer Wall of Ba Sing Se and that was somehow a reason to run rather than repay it in ash and blood?"
You have never imagined what it would be like to have a child.
But in those three long years of Zuko's banishment, you had occasion to wonder if you would wake up tomorrow to learn that he had fallen to bandits, or Earth Kingdom rebels, or even to the Avatar.
You're not really sure what you would have done, if that had happened. Maybe you would have done nothing. You'd have been a thousand miles away in Caldera, after all, with your throne forever secured. In many ways, Zuko bleeding out of the line of succession would have been simply repaying the debt he owed for your mother's murderous choice. You're sure you could have put it out of your mind eventually.
But if you had been there, like Iroh was for Lu Ten, with only a corpse left where your brother used to breathe?
"If I were him," you say, staring up at your Father's portrait, "there would have been no Ba Sing Se for me to conquer five years later."
Lo and Li smile—each an ugly, gap-toothed thing, but still wide, still proud.
Still proud of you.
"You know your duty well, Princess Azula."
They turn their attention to the flames flickering in the massive lanterns that hang from the cavernous roof, watching them with a sharpness that twitches their heavy jowls and the bags under their eyes into something you've long thought might well be hunger.
"Iroh was loved," Lo says, wizened head held low, shadows playing across her face.
Li's golden eyes are soft in the firelight. "By Azulon. By his mother. By his wife and son."
"His drive to live up to that love made him strong,"
"but it also made him vulnerable."
"Iroh had built himself on the backs of others."
"So how could he bring himself to go on,"
"when, eventually, the only love he had left,"
"was our ageing brother's?"
They sigh together—and then turn to look back at you, two identical stares from two identical faces.
"Living for love has a cost, Princess Azula."
Lo and Li's voices are heavy with truth.
"If you stake yourself to the ground with another's heart,"
"no storm will ever blow you off your feet."
"But if you lose that heart,"
"for any reason at all,"
"then there is nothing tying you to the earth."
"A lesson learned too late,"
"for the Dragon of the West."
You frown. "I wouldn't have thought the same people who preached the virtues of Ember Island and its ability to help us 'understand ourselves and each other' would be the ones agitating against love. Even I can tell you love each other, if nothing else."
They smile, with the same sardonic uptick of the lip your own face knows like breath.
"You should always love."
"And you always deserve to be loved."
(Has anyone ever said those words to you before?)
"All we are trying to say,"
"is that Iroh once sought to be the man everyone wanted."
"When there was no-one left to want him,"
"how could he know who Iroh even was?"
"What he had not yet understood, Princess Azula,"
"is that a person should be loved for who they are,"
"rather than be who they are so that they are loved."
They each take a step forward and rest gnarled hands on your shoulders, the parchment of their skin pale and rasping against the dark cloth of your robes. You can hardly feel the weight.
Lo and Li are strange, and lively, and sometimes incredibly embarrassing.
It makes it easy to forget that they are so terribly, terribly old.
"If you are seeking to avoid our nephew's fall,"
"then you need remember only this."
"Princess Azula,"
"clever and beautiful,"
"no matter how things,"
"may seem to change,"
"Never forget who you are."
Lu Ten's old room is clean.
That's the strangest part of being there.
Not the scorch mark still browning the edges of one of his rich red sheets, remnants of a tantrum that was probably Zuko's fault; not the distant familiarity of the knife glittering on the mahogany table beside his bed; not the hideous clay dragon taking pride of place above his wardrobe, children's fingerprints still obvious in its hard-baked flesh. You know these things as you know ships on the edge of the horizon—the shapes they cut slip smoothly into the patterns of your mind, no matter the distance.
But the way the Sun gleams through the pristine glass window? The neatly-stacked pillows? The polished floorboards that sing their nightingale song under your boots?
Your cousin is five years into his grave, and someone still believes his room should be kept neat.
Do they fear the Dragon of the West that much? Or, worse, respect him that much? Maybe it's neither of those things. Could Lu Ten have been loved by the palace, not just by his father? He was a popular prince, but was that because he was Iroh's son, or for his own merits?
It's hard to tell. Your memories of Lu Ten are sparks in the dark——fast and fleeting, slipping from your grasp to scatter themselves across minutes and hours and days and weeks lost among the halls of this palace. You have nearly lived longer with his death than his life; maybe you even have, if you could be certain of how many cycles you fractured through before you finally found yourself in the wreckage.
The wood of the floor creaks as you step across it and onto the luxurious, gold-patterned rug bridging the space between the bed and Lu Ten's personal library, a towering mahogany edifice stacked neatly with scroll after scroll after scroll in its narrow shelves. You run a finger across one at random, shifting the tightly-wound ribbon to reveal its title as The Thirty-Six Stratagems of Wang Jingze.
Sensible.
The one next to it, however, is not a treatise on foundational warfare but instead The Pillow Book, which strikes you as a peculiar thing for a prince to be reading about, especially as a quick glance confirms that, yes, Lu Ten's pillows are just as luxurious as your own. Maybe it was research, to learn how to re-sew them in the field?
You suppose you'll never find out.
After all, Lu Ten is dead.
You wouldn't be here otherwise.
(But when you imagine a life where he never died, the strangest thing of all is that you think you might have been happy.
Might have still been happy. Because you're happy now, too.
Of course you are.)
It's funny. For most of your life, when you thought about love, you thought about your mother. Your brother. Your Father. You thought about Mai, and Ty Lee, and sometimes even Lo and Li.
But here, in this room, in this life, when you think about love, you think about Lu Ten.
Not because you loved him. You hardly even remember him, and you certainly don't know if he loved you. Probably not. Zuko was right there.
No: you think of Lu Ten because you still just don't understand how Iroh can pretend to have ever loved him at all.
You know your mother loved Zuko because she killed for him. You know Mai loves Zuko because she was going to die for him. You know you love your Father because you have done both in his name.
But Iroh ran. He gave up. He left Lu Ten to rot in someone else's dirt and came back to the palace a useless, weeping waste of the spark.
You don't get it.
Lo and Li called it love. Iroh called it strength.
What would Lu Ten have called it?
And why do you even care?
You push the scrolls back into place and turn your attention to the portrait behind the bed-frame, hanging proudly in the centre of the polished marble wall. It shows Lu Ten—tall and slightly tanned—offering his father a smile and the sign of the flame while the remarkably brown-haired Iroh grins broadly and reaches for a hug.
Is that who they were? Lu Ten, the dutiful prince to his gregarious sire?
Or are the smiles all that matter, the easy joy that sits on their faces without price or weight?
It's nothing like how Iroh smiled at you when he spoke of trading pointers.
Strands of black hair whip around like claws as you shake your head to clear it. All these useless thoughts keep popping back into your skull, springing up like bubbles from the lips of the drowning.
Iroh, finally realising he hardly knew you at all. Zuko, who doesn't want to kill you, but still wants to stop you from taking the throne. Mai and Ty Lee, refusing to believe that you don't care about anything to do with your brother except that he remains breathing. Lo and Li, warning you about the dangers of love as if your mother hadn't already left you with a far more object lesson.
Even your Father's expectations are no longer clear.
And above it all: the weight of the cycle, compressing you down through time.
The nine-day chunks of your life leave little chance for introspection.
But as you rest your weight on Lu Ten's bed, knees hanging off the edge and head collapsed into the sheets, you find at least a moment to close your eyes and think.
Naturally, you think about death.
Lu Ten might have died in ignominy, swallowed by mud and dirt—but in that dying, he changed the future of the Fire Nation irrevocably. His father's grief broke a six-hundred-day siege within a week of its greatest triumph; your father's conspiracy won him the throne in the chaos to follow. As far as legacies go, Lu Ten's death might have been the most important historical event since Sozin began the Hundred-Years War.
You laugh, dry and hollow.
Somehow, you don't think your own has ever quite lived up to the strength of your cousin's example.
Your eyes trace the whirling constellations spinning across Lu Ten's roof in white and gold, a starscape surrounding the Sun who wears no face but radiance. There's probably meant to be some deep, hidden meaning to it—some old philosophical nonsense about how all are equal beneath the sky.
Or maybe that's just a whisper of Ty Lee, asking you why Ba Sing Se has to burn.
You don't have an answer for that particular ghost of memory. Would Lu Ten's ask the same? He died for that city. Surely he'd want to be buried in ash instead of earth.
But Iroh went to Zuko to fill the hole Lu Ten had left. They must bear some essential similarity—after all, Iroh only ever sees what he wants to see until it's far too late. And Zuko doesn't want Ba Sing Se cracked open like a reef crab to let fire feast on its marrow either.
He's always been too soft to do what must be done.
That doesn't change just because, for once in his life, he might actually be right.
That's the worst part, isn't it?
This time it was Zuko who realised your plan might have been a bad idea long before you were ever able to entertain the thought. Not the other way around.
You're not sure how you'll ever live that down—though it would be funny to see his face if you just admitted it.
You'll never do it, of course.
(But it would be funny.)
Your eyelids slip shut with a sigh.
All of this is just spinning around the point.
You don't actually know what to do.
You have fought, and fought, and fought, and it hasn't mattered once whether you've won or whether you've lost. You've stepped over so many bodies you could coronate yourself before nothing but corpses—and still the Boiling Rock awaits. If only you could fight the cycle itself; plunge a fist of cold fire through the ribcage of the world and tear out its beating heart.
(But even when you killed the Avatar, the universe spun him right back out at you anyway.
Is that meant to be a warning, or a lesson?)
You roll over, the silk of Lu Ten's sheets soft against your cheek.
The truth is absurd, and the truth is this: there is no path to victory that flows through the tips of two outstretched fingers.
It is the entire edifice of your life, and it has crumbled to nothing.
No matter the circumstance, no matter the problem, you have always faced the world knowing that in the end, it is more afraid of violence than you are.
And yet here you are, at the end of all things, and suddenly the world is no longer afraid.
You snort, thumping your head against the mattress a few times to feel something in the bounce.
Maybe it just loves Zuko more than it fears you.
That would be typical.
The thought lingers, like the burn of a muscle after exercise, or too-rich food in the hour before sleep. Is that what you're supposed to do? Love Zuko more than you fear the cost of it? Like Mai? Like Iroh? Like your mother? Is that the lesson the universe wants to teach you?
Your fingers stab into the sheets until you're almost convinced the fabric is red with blood instead of dye. The tension hooks through your knuckles and tendons until they strain against your skin, and you have to focus to breathe out air instead of flame.
Don't be ridiculous. Lo and Li's ramblings must have infested your brain, probably fertilised by Mai's impertinence and Ty Lee's flowery nonsense.
You'll allow, as you've said before, that you don't want your brother to die. It would be… a waste. Yes. That's the best way to describe it. Killing him would be inefficient, and you despise inefficiency. But that does not, under any circumstance, mean you love him. There are plenty of things you don't love even though you don't want them to die, like mongoose-lizards, or the woman who gave you that egg tart at the festival.
(It's the truth.
Of course it's the truth.
You can't love Zuko—
—after all, your Father doesn't.)
Unfortunately, Zuko keeps trying his hardest to get himself killed anyway. And even in the rare moments he isn't, there's always someone around him who seems to be straining to ensure somebody has to die.
You need only look to the last cycle, or the cycle before that, to see it.
You'd gone to face the Comet only wanting to talk to Zuko, the same way you'd ended up talking to your friends, or today, to your teachers—and like every other time before, someone, or something, had stopped you. Even when you'd tried to anticipate it.
Take the waterbender out of the equation; she turns right around and bleeds her way back in. Leave Zuko and his merry band of imbeciles alone so maybe they return the favour; he brings along Iroh to weep his way onto your throne.
No matter what, you just can't get him to listen.
It's ridiculous.
Surely there must be some way to figure out what Zuko wants.
But you're running out of ideas—and it's not like there's anyone left you can go to for advice.
Mai and Ty Lee have questions, but not answers. Lo and Li have answers, but those answers just give you more questions. And your Father is not a man to be questioned or to come before without answers—especially not when Zuko is involved.
(You don't want to ask Iroh for something for as long as you live.)
Who else is even…
You spring bolt-upright in the bed, eyes wide.
No.
That cannot be it.
That cannot be it.
You are not—
You are not going to ask Zuko for the answer.
Zuko is the problem!
"I," you say through gritted teeth, "think I need to talk to Zuko."
Mai looks at you the same way she looked at Ruon-Jian. "You really would only realise this now, wouldn't you?"
Ty Lee tries to strangle you with a hug. "Aaw, Azula, you're growing up!"
They really are the worst.
"Remind me again why I keep either of you around?" you say, brushing Ty Lee off while glaring at Mai over the top of the ornately-decorated couch.
A beat.
Mai and Ty Lee glance at each other, as if to say no, you first.
"Girls," you say, sweet as wound-sting, "whatever you're thinking: don't."
Ty Lee giggles, covering her mouth with her hand. Once she recovers, she stretches back on the couch next to you, spine arching and eyes closing with bliss.
You sigh.
"Alright," Mai says, lounging up against the wall, a splash of black against the red, like a bruised nail freshly bled. "I'll bite. What brought this on, Azula?"
"I am… tired," you say, rubbing your forehead with your fingers, nails close to leaving welts in your skin, "of fighting my brother. The thought of it grows tedious, and the experience stale. I do not want to spend the rest of my life with a flame to his throat. But I look ahead to Sozin's Comet and I know—I know he is coming, because he thinks my Father should fall to the Avatar and the nation should fall to anyone but me."
What does Zuko even know about being the Fire Lord? He hasn't been in the Fire Nation for the last three years, save for a few short months. He's hardly even been to the colonies. You could probably find use for him as a diplomat, given the way he's bounced across half the world, but Fire Lord? Maybe if you believed Iroh's nonsense about a 'good heart' you might be sympathetic to the idea, but this is war.
The only thing good about a heart in war is that it provides a place to aim.
"So you want to, like, convince him to give up?" Ty Lee asks. You're willing to forgive her for the dubious dip of her voice. The idea of Zuko giving up on anything is about as likely as the Sun failing to rise.
"No," you say, shaking your head, topknot hardly shifting with the motion. "Maybe I just want to see if he's as tired of all this as I am."
(Maybe you just want to know if the only person in the world who could possibly understand how you feel is willing to try.)
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
(2/3) Monster?
There is a lonely path in the palace. At the end of that lonely path is a room. And in that room is a girl called monster. Her name is Azula, and shedoes not struggles to understand feelings. She hardly even understands Or family. All that is left to her is what she has been taught: and what she has been taught is to want, to take, and to not care if the taking hurts. But it does. And even a monster may grow tired of pain.
There is a lonely path in the palace. At the end of that lonely path is a room. And in that room is a girl called monster. Her name is Azula, and she
You have declared your intentions aloud, and in that declaration made them final:
You are going to see Zuko at the Western Air Temple, and you are going to ask him if he wants to talk.
Most likely, this will cause him some consternation—to say nothing of the Avatar or his ship of fools. But that's fine. You are perfectly capable of defending yourself from any unprovoked aggression. A show of force might even make your position clearer, if you make a particularly exaggerated performance of trying not to hurt them.
Regardless, you're not particularly worried about setting the meeting up. You know Zuko will come, and you can handle any unwanted visitors. What's important is your agenda. Your plans. Your intentions.
So, Princess Azula, it's time for you to consider that question:
What are you going to talk to Zuko about at the Western Air Temple?
[ ] The past. It's what has driven you here. It's what you're trapped in. It's what you want to break out of. But it's Zuko's past, too. You've spent the whole of your lives chasing each other's shadows—on your whole family's encouragement. Has he ever realised? Does he even care? And why does it seem so impossible to escape?
[ ] The present. Here you stand, before your brother. Here doubt has driven you. Does Zuko doubt, too? Is he still angry at himself? If you were him, you would be. But maybe that's his secret. Maybe he's always angry. Maybe you're angry too. The world isn't what you thought it was—and you think Zuko can relate. What will happen if you let him?
[ ] The future. The one place you cannot seem to reach, throne or no throne. Has Zuko ever wondered what it'll be like? No, not whether the mantle is heavy enough to cramp the shoulders, or what his first command as Fire Lord could be—just about the shape of the Sun's path through the sky, the day after Sozin's Comet, and what the world will have become in the face of that light. What does he see? What do you?
[ ]
This is not a time to imagine worlds that will never be.
[X] The future. The one place you cannot seem to reach, throne or no throne. Has Zuko ever wondered what it'll be like? No, not whether the mantle is heavy enough to cramp the shoulders, or what his first command as Fire Lord could be—just about the shape of the Sun's path through the sky, the day after Sozin's Comet, and what the world will have become in the face of that light. What does he see? What do you?
We've already talked about the past, and Azula only sees one present right now so that leaves the future?
We've already talked about the past, and Azula only sees one present right now so that leaves the future?
Azula got a point there about Zuko. Being a diplomat suits him as shown in his old age where he abdicated the throne to his daughter Izumi and traveled around the world with his dragon Druk to meet up with world leaders or White Lotus. Not the type to stay in one place for long before he went on the move again.
[X] The future. The one place you cannot seem to reach, throne or no throne. Has Zuko ever wondered what it'll be like? No, not whether the mantle is heavy enough to cramp the shoulders, or what his first command as Fire Lord could be—just about the shape of the Sun's path through the sky, the day after Sozin's Comet, and what the world will have become in the face of that light. What does he see? What do you?
Nicholas Brooks
Redeemer and Destroyer
- Location
- United States
[X] The past. It's what has driven you here. It's what you're trapped in. It's what you want to break out of. But it's Zuko's past, too. You've spent the whole of your lives chasing each other's shadows—on your whole family's encouragement. Has he ever realised? Does he even care? And why does it seem so impossible to escape?
This is the perfect time for both of them to air out their grievances and express what they think has caused their relationship to deteriorate. There's been talks about before about whether or not Zuko would want to be Fire Lord or what he'd do whilst on the throne, but openly discussing their past has always been interrupted before both sides could realize what the other really means.
This is the perfect time for both of them to air out their grievances and express what they think has caused their relationship to deteriorate. There's been talks about before about whether or not Zuko would want to be Fire Lord or what he'd do whilst on the throne, but openly discussing their past has always been interrupted before both sides could realize what the other really means.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Zuko... probably doesn't have much of a plan. He's not prepped to rule. He's barely prepped for the actual fight to come. If we were looking to prompt his development, that'd be good, but he won't keep the conversation past this loop. My gut is that asking about the future is probably the area where he'd be the least able to give us something that wouldn't just reinforce Azula's worst feelings about her brother.
Both of the other options strike me as stronger, though I think I like the theme of doubt. It's something they both share, but that Zuko's been working through.
[X] The present. Here you stand, before your brother. Here doubt has driven you. Does Zuko doubt, too? Is he still angry at himself? If you were him, you would be. But maybe that's his secret. Maybe he's always angry. Maybe you're angry too. The world isn't what you thought it was—and you think Zuko can relate. What will happen if you let him?
Both of the other options strike me as stronger, though I think I like the theme of doubt. It's something they both share, but that Zuko's been working through.
[X] The present. Here you stand, before your brother. Here doubt has driven you. Does Zuko doubt, too? Is he still angry at himself? If you were him, you would be. But maybe that's his secret. Maybe he's always angry. Maybe you're angry too. The world isn't what you thought it was—and you think Zuko can relate. What will happen if you let him?
[X] The past. It's what has driven you here. It's what you're trapped in. It's what you want to break out of. But it's Zuko's past, too. You've spent the whole of your lives chasing each other's shadows—on your whole family's encouragement. Has he ever realised? Does he even care? And why does it seem so impossible to escape?
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] The future. The one place you cannot seem to reach, throne or no throne. Has Zuko ever wondered what it'll be like? No, not whether the mantle is heavy enough to cramp the shoulders, or what his first command as Fire Lord could be—just about the shape of the Sun's path through the sky, the day after Sozin's Comet, and what the world will have become in the face of that light. What does he see? What do you?