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Arsonist's Lullaby: An Azula Timeloop Quest

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Ooo glad to have good news on this resuming! It's some of the best Azula writing I've seen, especially for writing trying to humanize her. A lot of attempts to do that go too far and excuse all her behavior without examining it.
 
So I saw this and I figured that I would reread, just to make sure I remembered everything and I did because as it turns out, fantastic writing is hard to forget, but also now I'm sad because there's no other chapters to read so... I'll see y'all tomorrow?
 
Just discovered this, Azula Quest? Count me the fuck in. I love Azula so fucking much. One of my most favourite characters of all time.

Really hope this ends up as Fire Lord Azula, it's depressing how few fics/quests have her end up in charge over Zuko, even when she's the mc and it actually fits the narrative, nope, still Zuko.

I get why it was skipped over, but I do really wish we could have seen the Iroh-Azula fight because how the hell did Iroh stand a chance.

This Azula is basically a God of Lightning, his redirection would have been useless when she can use it like Electro/Cole McGrath/Livewire etc can.
Would have loved to have seen his and Zuko's reaction to Azula doing stuff with lightning that has literally never been done before.

At this point she bends lightning like others bend fire/water/air/earth.

Which suits her to a t. I've always felt Azula's embodies lightning waaaay more than she does fire and her lightning is actually far more iconic then even her blue fire. To the point I'd actually love to see her describe/think of herself as a lightning bender first, NOT a firebender, the worlds first true lightning bender.

She's not fire incarnate. She's lightning incarnate. She's Zeus, Thor, Raijin in the flesh.
 
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"Third" Loop - The Southern Raiders
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    • "Azula," Mai says, the wind buffeting your war balloon and throwing the ends of her long hair into loose disarray, "please tell me you don't plan on just walking up to Zuko and waving."

    Your hair, in its careful topknot, stays as tightly bound as your expression. "Yes, Mai, I was going to march straight to his campsite without warning and announce myself. What do you think about Hello, Azula here! as a greeting? I think it establishes quite nicely how friendly and harmless I am, don't you?"

    "Ooh," Ty Lee interjects, appearing behind your shoulder, "you could even bring the Avatar and his friends a present, too! Like a housewarming gift! Though maybe without the warm, since then they might think you want to burn them!"

    There's a moment of silence as Mai looks from you to Ty Lee—and then she sighs, hand twitching by her side like she wants to bury her forehead in it. "I give up."

    You take a couple of steps forward to lean on the railing, the metal bar clacking against the ceramic of your armguards. It's a long way down from here—the Western Air Temple hangs like a tooth in the mouth of the great, fractured ravine that cuts through the northern mountains of the Fire Nation, so deep that the mist swelling between the cliffs seems as distant below as the clouds above.

    The fall alone takes minutes.

    "I don't—that is, this is difficult to plan for," you confess eventually, staring out at rock and vapour and the bare green edges of the forest atop the cliffs cowering away from the drop. "I find myself lacking in experience—or examples—when it comes to matters such as these."

    You have spent a fair amount of time over the course of your life talking to Zuko. You have not, however, had much cause to spend any of that time listening to Zuko. It has rarely been necessary.

    Now, for the first time, it just might be.

    And you are coming to realise, with a strange feeling pulling at your stomach—like something's dragging it a few inches lower than it's meant to sit—that you're not really sure how to face your brother when you're not trying to hurt him.

    "I know what I shouldn't do," you say, the words quiet enough that the breeze nearly tosses them away, "but I don't know what I should do. Should I treat him as a courtier in need of careful flattery? An honourable general whose surrender I must negotiate? A traitor to the crown whose execution may only be postponed but never forgiven? Obviously not. But what else is left?"

    There are many rules in the palace, and you have mastered them all.

    There are no rules for this.

    "If it were my sisters," Ty Lee says, slow and hesitant, "I think I'd, I don't know, it depends what I'd want to talk about, I guess? But I'd—there'd be honesty. Whatever I said, I'd have to be honest. Even if they didn't like it. Even if it didn't work. You can't… you can't build a world on lies. You can't even build a bridge."

    Her clothes—still bright, still gaudy, despite the way discomfort sits poorly on her smiling face—flutter as she steps up to your side and joins you in contemplating the fall.

    "Azula always lies," you quote, with a couple of sharp coughs of laughter. When you inhale, the air tastes wet and cold. "Unfortunately, Ty Lee, I don't think that one's going to work out."

    "I don't know," Mai says, a long stretch of black as she moves to lean against the railing on your other side, eyes fixed on the upended ziggurat of the Temple. "Have you ever tried it before?"

    You have. But they don't remember that.

    "When Zuko said he 'liked it when you express yourself', Mai, I doubt that was intended as a generalisable principle." He definitely didn't mean it about you, if your last few conversations are anything to go by. "My brother might not have learned any real firebending from that old wreck, but he certainly learned hypocrisy."

    Mai snorts a laugh. "Something the two of you can bond over."

    "I am not a hypocrite," you say, head turning to glare at her with narrowed eyes. "Watch your tongue, Mai."

    "Whatever you say, Azula," Mai says, not even deigning to acknowledge your stare. The nerve.

    "Maybe it'd help if you knew what you wanted to talk to him about?" Ty Lee asks. Her braid jerks in the rushing squall, snapping against her thighs. "You always say it's important to know your enemy! Even if, uh, he's not your enemy, and actually this is about knowing yourself. Sorry. I don't really know where I was going with that."

    The advice is more apt than she realises. Since you were old enough to remember, you have fought Zuko in more than a hundred battles—and sometimes it does seem that for every victory you have gained, in the end you inevitably suffer a defeat.

    "Zuko is angry," you say, closing your eyes to let the wind slip across your face like the close touch of a blade. "He always has been. And now I find myself seeking him out with the thought that perhaps, finally, I can relate."

    "You weren't angry at us." Mai doesn't shift her attention from the ziggurat, the old, weathered stone testament to a thousand years of spiritual significance. "Thanks, by the way. For not being."

    A wry smile curls its way across your lips. Would she still thank you if she knew the cost of it? If she knew how many times she'd choked on smoke or spasmed to a heart attack? You doubt it.

    But she thanks you here all the same.

    "I have found more… deserving targets," you say, "for the bulk of my fury."

    Like the world.

    Like Iroh.

    (Like yourself.)

    "Sooooo…" Ty Lee says a little later, when your war balloon hangs close to the edge of the cliff the Temple protrudes from, a thick layer of craggy rock breaking the sightline, "who's going down first?"

    "Definitely not Azula," Mai says, apparently assuming she has the right to command your comings and goings.

    Ty Lee nods as if Mai has said something eminently sensible. "Yeah, I more meant which one of us would go first, y'know?"

    "Girls," you say, drawing your tongue across the words like steel across a whetstone, "you do realise I am right here, yes?"

    "Well…" Ty Lee doesn't shy away from your stare, smile sitting on her face the way an awkward conversation sits in the memory, "I was just thinking that I'm pretty good at being nice and Mai is Zuko's girlfriend, whereas you're…"

    She trails off, gesturing helplessly in your direction with both hands.

    "I'm what, Ty Lee?"

    "Yourself," Mai says.

    How rude.

    "Still doesn't mean I'm wrong," Mai says, with a slight twitch to a corner of her lips that suggests she might have, perhaps, thought briefly of smiling. "Seriously though, I'll go first."

    "And why is that?" you ask.

    The answer is obvious, of course, but you need to hear how she says it.

    "Zuko doesn't want to hurt me," she says, "and I know the Avatar's group saw me saving his life. It's only logical that I go."

    "But that's not why, is it."

    You are not asking a question.

    Mai turns to face you, looking down to make sure she can match your gaze. Her eyes, gold the way sunlight is as it filters through a storm, settle directly on your own.

    You stare straight back.

    "No," she says, slowly, carefully, "it's not. That's why I would be the best choice to go. But that's not why I will go."

    Mai doesn't really do things like "touching people", occasional Zuko-induced fits of insanity aside. It's another of her admirable qualities: she understands the decorum of distance. So she doesn't reach out to clasp your shoulder, or press her fingers against your own, the way Ty Lee would.

    But she does smile, small and hesitant—and for her, that might as well be the same thing.

    "I don't want to hurt Zuko either," she says, "and I think, Azula, that maybe there's finally a part of you that feels the same. And I—"

    She sighs, and the smile drops, but the memory of it sits in the slightest curl of her syllables, each word a little softer than you'd expected.

    "They said you laughed when it happened. But I don't think you'd laugh now. And if there's a chance I can help you, help Zuko, get one thing out of that palace that isn't hatred…"

    She shrugs, a strangely helpless gesture from such a terribly capable girl.

    "Maybe you'll call it out of character, but I have to try."

    Ty Lee swallows Mai in a hug so tight you wonder if she'll stab herself on one of Mai's knives, cooing something the same way she does when she sees a badger-mole or some other hideous creature. You don't move—such physical indignity sits far removed from someone of your stature. But there's a swelling feeling in your chest, like a war balloon inflating before flight, and you look down and to the side so you don't have to see your expression reflected in the polished silver of the railing.

    "I see," you say. "I suppose—I suppose I can allow it. A princess should always be preceded by her retinue."

    And so you turn away, to give instructions to the bare few thoroughly-vetted soldiers who are piloting the balloon, to direct them where and how to land and to remind them of the value of their silence.

    Just not before you hear Mai say, "Thanks, Azula. For letting me try."

    (Just not before you wonder why she's thanking you.)


    You are cross-legged on stone when Zuko comes, elbows on your knees, fingers curled and eyes closed. Your breath swells to the rhythm of the Sun—the strange, ineffable heartbeat of heaven, which fills you with life and fire both. It is not the cold silence of the void-before-lightning; this is like stretching out on hot sand, luxuriating in the slow burn of muscle and skin, but for the spirit rather than the self. To inhale is to taste the sky; to exhale is to warm the world.

    It is as close to peace as you know to be.

    Your brother does not greet you. Not at first. For a time he just… watches, his breath a mirror to your own. You can feel it build in him as it builds in you. He seems strangely—settled is the wrong word, but for someone you have seen so often unravelled by fury, you think if you opened your eyes you might not even see him scowling.

    "Azula," Zuko says, with the burnt-gravel rumble that characterises a voice seared raw by screaming, "why did you come?"

    "Why did you?"

    He snorts, and you briefly contemplate asking if that's meant to be his version of Mai's eyeroll—before immediately deciding the less relationship embarrassment you have to deal with, the better.

    "I asked first."

    At that, you open your eyes, tilting your head to meet his stare, framed as it is by the old, creaking trees that surround you both at the edge of this little clearing. "How mature of you, Zuzu."

    "You're younger than me," he says, jabbing a finger for emphasis.

    "And doesn't that reflect so well on you, all things considered."

    "Just like Father's lightning." Zuko juts a jaw in challenge. "Want to try yours too?"

    Maybe spending time around others closer to his intellectual level has allowed him to actually practise his repartee. You'd almost give that one a passing grade.

    "I hardly need lightning for the likes of you, brother," you say, dismissively flicking dust off the pristine, red-stained tip of a nail. "Come back in a few years and then maybe I'll consider it."

    "You always have to get the last word, don't you?" Zuko doesn't relax—his arms are taut by his side, his feet placed suspiciously close to his peculiar bending stance—but he does, at least, lean back against the stiff bark of the tree behind him. It towers over him; forests like these haven't been touched by human hands for centuries, and it shows. "At least that hasn't changed."

    "And what has?" You don't know what Mai said to him, to get him to come. You don't even know where Mai is. Whatever it was, though, it worked: he's here, and not a flicker of flame curls from his lips. "It's rare for a traitor to find the courage to face the Crown Princess alone."

    "Somebody has to do it," he says, scowling, his scar pulling and stretching into something that could almost be mistaken for intimidating. "The Fire Nation is wrong, and Fath—the Fire Lord wants it that way. So do you. And I… Uncle doesn't want the throne. I'm not sure if he even thinks it's home. I'm the last one left. So here I am."

    There's a thought tickling the tip of your tongue—a cruel little observation about how it's no wonder Zuko seems almost comfortable with it, since he's spent his whole life learning how to be last. Nothing you haven't said a thousand times before. Nothing you haven't meant a thousand times before.

    He can probably sense it. There's a pull to his scowl that might be anticipation. If nothing else, life has long since taught him how to be hurt.

    But you are tired of fighting him.

    So instead of speaking, you slowly unfold your legs—not to stand, just so instead of meditation you sit on the stone like you would a throne, feet not quite reaching the earth, armour a dark shimmer in the sunlight. You lay your hands on your knees, fingers curled to fists, and look Zuko in the eye.

    Gold to gold.

    Sister to brother.

    "So here you are," you say, the words rough in your throat from being forced into a different shape. "And here I am. No fire. No plan. Just a question."

    Zuko hesitates. His boots shift in the soil, almost fidgeting; his head tilts ever-so-slightly to the side, like he's listening to something. Maybe whatever Mai told him. Maybe whatever warning Iroh gave him about you. Maybe whatever it was you said the last time you dug your teeth into his spirit and tore. But in the end, he pushes off the gnarled wood of his tree and approaches you, plainly dressed, short-haired by Fire Nation standards, looking as far from your Father as you have ever seen him.

    There's a collection of rubble scattered across this clearing. You chose the most comfortable for yourself, but there's space enough for another—and it's another that Zuko chooses, not even bothered to sweep the dust off it before he settles down with awkward grace. He's never been one for sitting. Or posture. Or appearances.

    "Okay, Azula," he says, less spoken than exhaled, "what do you want?"

    This time it's you who hesitates.

    It's one thing to decide on the bed of your long-dead cousin that maybe you need to talk to your brother at some point before he's facing you down for the throne.

    It's another to be sitting less than six feet across from him and actually say the words.

    To actually ask him for help, no matter how indirectly…

    The whole and sum of your life has been bent for another purpose. You are cold and strong and alone, as all great rulers must be.

    As your Father has always been.

    (And where has that ever led him?)

    But that's—it's not as true as it once was. You are not as alone as you once were. Three times, you have offered Mai and Ty Lee a chance. Three times, they have taken it.

    (Three times, they have offered it to you.)

    Lo and Li think that you deserve to be loved.

    And even—

    Even the Dragon of the West may come to believe—too little, too late—that you and Zuko can live under the same sky.

    You cannot let yourself be shamed by him.

    "Everything should be perfect," you say. "Between your treachery and my successful defence of the nation, my star has never shone brighter. The Comet comes and with it the final victory of the Hundred-Years War. Even Mai and Ty Lee have seen sense. I should be happy now."

    Your brother watches you with slowly-widening eyes.

    "But I'm not. I'm angry, Zuko. I don't think I've ever been this angry. It chokes the wind in my lungs until I can hardly breathe for it."

    The words simmer in silence.

    Until, eventually, looking half-convinced he's about to be struck by lightning, Zuko asks, "Who are you angry at?"

    You choke a laugh. "Who aren't I angry at?"

    Is this how Zuko feels all the time?

    You keep laughing, jagged, like glass scraped against glass, your belly jumping, your shoulders jerking. Raw and undignified and Zuko looks on with his mouth gormlessly open and one of his hands twitching like he almost wants to reach out and touch you which is the funniest thing of all so you laugh even more.

    When it finally stops, you keep your eyes on your knees, so he can't see how wide your pupils have blown, a dark sky swallowing the sun of your gaze—so he can't read the way your pulse trembles in your neck like your own personal earthquake.

    You breathe in and taste smoke on the tip of your tongue.

    "There's something wrong with this world, Zuko," you say into the silence. "Nothing about it happens like it's supposed to. Nothing about it happens the way I want it to. And the worst part is that no matter how much I rage, it doesn't change anything at all."

    "That… almost sounds like self-pity," he says, half-delicate, half-marvelling.

    One of his legs bangs into the stone in some unusual rhythm—more deliberate than a fidget, but too natural to be a signal to the earthbender. Maybe it's some kind of music that's stuck in his head. The Avatar seems the type to break into song at any given opportunity.

    "I suppose it does," you say. "You'd be the expert, after all."

    Zuko rolls his good eye. "Okay, now this feels less weird. That's the Azula I know."

    "Do you?" You shake your head, dragging your palms across your face, lifting it to finally meet his eyes again. "Some days I wonder if we really know each other at all."

    You can predict Zuko.

    That much is easy enough. He's no different than most everyone else you've ever met that way.

    But you have come to realise, thanks to Mai and Ty Lee, that there is a very important difference between being able to predict and being able to know.

    (It's only one word long, and it starts and ends with the letter 't'.)

    "I thought you knew everything," Zuko says. You're not quite sure if he's mocking you or not.

    He doesn't look sure either.

    "These days I find myself knowing less and less," you say with all the disgust it deserves. "Honestly, Zuzu, how did you ever cope?"

    He puffs up for a moment, scowling, eyes narrowing, arm lifting to jab a finger in your direction—and then stops. Deflates. Falls back into the Zuko so familiar and so simultaneously unrecognisable; the Zuko you see every nine days, striding to your doom, who walks differently, bends differently, and loses differently, if he even loses at all.

    "I didn't," he says with a wry twist to his scar-hard lips. "It took Uncle and the Avatar and the Fire Nation and the Earth Kingdom and Zhao and Ba Sing Se and Father and you and the Day of the Black Sun and three whole years to help me figure that out. And if I believe Mai, it might have taken you three days. That's just typical."

    "I am a prodigy," you say, because what he doesn't know about how long you've been repeating this life won't hurt his opinion of you. "This much is only to be expected."

    "Yeah, yeah," he says, rolling his eyes. "Father's precious little princess who can do no wrong. Don't you ever get tired of it?"

    He doesn't know.

    He can't know.

    "Would a perfect little princess be here, Zuzu?" you don't deflect, because deflection betrays discomfort and you are not uncomfortable. "Would she have redeemed your honour in Ba Sing Se? Would she have left Mai and Ty Lee happy and whole after their betrayals?"

    Your voice echoes from the rubble and the tree-trunks, high and sharp, as if your tongue is a knife across the glassy air.

    Zuko blinks, unscarred eye a little wide.

    You… didn't mean to do that.

    Or say that.

    You press your lips together firmly, just to make sure nothing else untoward escapes.

    "You know how you asked what had changed?" your brother says eventually, frowning heavily as he shifts his gangly legs around in search of some kind of comfort against the stone. "I think that's a pretty good example."

    "What?" you snap. "What is?"

    Has Iroh already told him that you're crazy and you need to go down? Is that why talking to him never works—because your brother thinks you're insane?

    You breathe out.

    The void falls in.

    "Mai told me what happened at the Boiling Rock. Sokka even backed part of it up." He's watching you with an expression you don't quite recognise; brow slightly furrowed, mouth flat, not quite puzzled, not quite angry. A few dark strands of his off-putting hair dip toward his nose. "And maybe we don't really know anything that matters about each other, Azula, but that doesn't change the truth."

    His hands fist on his knees, knuckles tight.

    "You don't forgive anything you think is betrayal. And you certainly don't forget it." Zuko's voice is a bowstring pulled to cheek. "But I looked Mai in the eye and I asked her if she was safe and she said yes and she wasn't even lying."

    Your brother shakes his head with fast, jerky movements.

    "All the other stuff could just be part of some grand evil plan. You always have one. But you let Mai go. And she believed you."

    He says it again with something that might almost be wonder.

    "She believed you."

    Zuko sighs.

    "I don't get it. I don't get you."

    He drags a hand through his hair, calloused fingers spread wide.

    "So you had a question. Well, while I wait for you to get to the point and ask it, here's mine," he says. "What's up with that, Azula? What are you so angry at that you can't even find any room to be angry at Mai?"

    You—

    It's what you wanted to talk about. It's everything you wanted to talk about, and here he is, asking you directly, and your mouth won't move. Your lips are pressed together as tight as your teeth, and your eyes won't settle on his face.

    Because you're angry at a lot of things. Some days the Sun pulls you from slumber and all that's left of your dreams is rage: chained to stone, chained to water, sparking and spitting and impotent. You're so many cycles from that corpse of a girl but in the end both of you woke up the next day to your only friends betraying you to your face so are you really that different at all?

    You snort a laugh.

    Of course you are.

    If nothing else, that girl didn't know the thing she should be most angry at was—

    "—myself."

    Zuko freezes, Yuyan-still.

    "Come now, Zuzu," you say, though it comes out somewhere a little deeper than the light and airy nonchalance you'd been aiming for. "After I copied your little speech and everything. Isn't that one of the things you hate me for? Always doing what you do, but better? Surely you should be happy now. For once, I'm second—even if only to the pity party."

    Absurdly, your throat feels dry, so you swallow before it can prompt you to do something as unseemly as cough.

    Zuko looks at you, down at your hands—you still their traitorous tremble a breath too late—and then back up at you.

    "I don't like you, Azula," he says, something like relish on his lips. "I think you're a prissy little arrogant know-it-all. I think you're awful and I think you like hurting people and I think you are literally the least nice person I've ever met who wasn't Fa—the Fire Lord."

    You blink. "No, by all means, tell me how you really feel."

    "See," he says, and for some reason he's laughing, low and raspy like he does when he means it, "this is exactly what I'm talking about. You're so obsessed with sounding clever you won't even let me finish speaking. You're so annoying, Azula. But I—"

    Zuko sighs, throwing his hands back on the rock behind him so he can stretch and study the sky. It stares back, bright and blue and scattered with clouds like foam across the sea.

    "—I've been given a reason or two to think about hate recently. Hate, and anger." He exhales a puff of sun-tinged flame and watches it coil to smoke above him. "I was right on Ember Island, but I was also wrong, because I am angry at you. At what you've done. At what you want. At what you're helping the Fire Lord to do. But I don't hate you."

    His unscarred eye slants back down to meet yours, gold to gold.

    "Still doesn't mean I'm not gonna kick your ass while Aang takes out the Fire Lord, though."

    Time passes to nothing but the soft sigh of leaves in the wind. The bone-deep warmth of the Sun. The echoing silence in your skull so much wider than even the void you have learned to make of your heart.

    You are Azula, and your brother doesn't hate you.

    Even though your mother did.

    Even though your Father would have wanted him to.

    (The same way he wanted you to hate Zuko.)

    You inhale roughly, dragging the air through your lungs with a form so poor you think you breathed better even when you were insane. The rich, earthy scent of the forest and the stones and the moss fills your lungs. "You won't win."

    "Maybe," Zuko says. A shoulder rolls into an easy shrug under the red ochre of his shirt. He seems more—relaxed, now. Comfortable, almost. Like something you've done has given him the impression you're not a threat. He really is a fool. "It's not like it really matters, though."

    Your whole body snaps to face him like a raven-eagle. "What do you mean, it doesn't matter?"

    It's the only thing that matters.

    You, and Zuko, and a fight before the throne you can sometimes win and never escape.

    A fight you are so, so tired of fighting.

    "I mean, If I beat you, I can save the Fire Nation," he says. "That does matter. It matters a lot. This war is awful even for our own people. It makes us into hateful things the world is terrified of. But that's it, see? I'm not fighting you just for the Fire Nation. I'm fighting you for the world. The one the Fire Nation is part of. And I'm not alone. I can't believe how long it took me to figure that out."

    Zuko leans forward on the stone until his face is level with yours, dark hair falling across his eyes, the tips tickling the stiff flesh of his scar.

    "It matters if I beat you, Azula. But it doesn't matter if you beat me. Because Aang is going to defeat the Fire Lord. The invasion fleet is going to fail. And eventually, so will you. Don't you remember the plays we watched as kids? Back on Ember Island you said you were a monster. Did the monster ever win?"

    His voice is heavy.

    It presses on you like a bruise.

    "I think that's why you're angry at yourself. It's why I was angry at myself. I didn't even truly realise I was trying to be the monster until the dra—the fire showed me that. But I was. And I just kept losing. And losing. And losing." Each word echoed by a fist into a palm. "And I was angry because I was losing when all along I should have been angry that I was trying to be the monster. That's why you always found me so funny, right? Because I was mad at myself for how bad I was at being someone who was never me when it was always so easy for you."

    You open your mouth and he just.

    Keeps going.

    "But it's not easy anymore, is it? Mai said something to me when she found me earlier today that I didn't get then but I do now. She said Azula's not herself. I thought it might have been a warning, just in case. But it wasn't. She was just telling me why you're here, wasn't she?"

    Your brother reaches over and pokes you in the sternum, finger thudding against the lacquer of your armour.

    "You've realised you don't like who you are, and it makes you so, so furious that you were ever stupid enough to try and be it in the first place. So you came running to the only person you know who can understand what that feels like."

    Zuko's eyes narrow—scar twitching as it strains to move—and his hand drops to his side.

    "Not so funny now, huh?"

    You spit out a shard of lightning, the way a pugilist spits blood after being punched in the face. It sizzles the grass by your boot. The sharp, acrid tang of burning settles in your chest as you breathe it in. You almost wish you were a bad enough firebender to cough, just so you'd have an excuse not to speak.

    Is this—

    Is this what it feels like to be on the other end of you?

    "Yeah," Zuko says, almost kindly. "That's exactly what it feels like."

    "I didn't ask you to be honest," you say. You don't remember asking him anything at all. You haven't even gotten to your question yet.

    (He answered it before you could.)

    "Mai did." Zuko's lips jerk into something like a grin. "I never figured it out before now, but you're really bad at dealing with people who just say what they mean, aren't you?"

    "I am not bad at anything," you scoff, tossing your hair—insofar as you can when it's in a tightly-coiffed Imperial topknot. "You're the one who's bad at things."

    He starts laughing.

    There's a beat.

    Then you do too.

    It shudders your ribs and your belly and your shoulders and your knees and y—

    —ou reel it back, thread by shaking thread, spooling the void back into the hollow of your skull. Your brain feels tight, your heart tighter still, but that's just what it means to be angry, isn't it?

    For the first time in the conversation, you're the one who slumps on your rocky throne, your back thumping down with the harsh clack of ceramic on stone, your fingers spread wide and flat across the moss that clings to its sides. A sigh drifts like smoke from your lips.

    Your entire life.

    Your entire world.

    It ticks, it tocks, and the truth never clicks no matter how many times you spin around the clock. You've got rhyme, but no reason—time, but a nature without season. And you don't even care because Zuko brought up theatre first so it's his fault that you're wobbling on the edge of poetry.

    Everything you are.

    Everything you do.

    They always bring you back to the Agni Kai.

    The showdown that you wish was never meant to be.

    The universe has pinned it to the stars and now your brother wants to tell you it's never even mattered?

    "It matters," you say, sounding as certain as soil above an earthquake. "It has to. It has to. What has been the point of anything if it doesn't?"

    "I don't know," Zuko says, like he can possibly understand the depth of the question. "Maybe it didn't have a point at all. But I think Uncle is right when he talks about destiny. I think we all have something we're meant to do. And I want mine to be restoring the Fire Nation's honour. Fighting you isn't the purpose. It's just in the way."

    Another laugh bubbles out of your chest. "That's the most Zuko thing I've ever heard."

    You can feel his eye-roll from here. Maybe Mai taught him how to project it? "Don't use my name when you mean 'stupid' instead, Azula."

    "Honestly," you say, and it might even be true, "I'm not certain that I did."

    "Whatever," he says. You can hear his boots banging that silly little rhythm against the bottom of his rock. "The point is that if you really think your destiny is to fight me, you have a pretty lame idea of destiny for a girl who decided she was going to be the Dragon Emperor when she was five."

    A pretty lame idea of destiny.

    If only he knew.

    (He could. If you told him.

    But that would be stupid.

    You haven't even told Mai and Ty Lee.)

    "And that's your brilliant solution to being angry? Throw away your whole life and everything that's ever mattered to chase some childish dream?"

    You should sound scornful. Dismissive, at the very least.

    You don't.

    You sound like the sky that presses against you with the same cool blue as the flame of your soul: vast and empty and waiting for something.

    "It's not childish," Zuko snaps. Then he pauses. "But yeah, I guess. That's how it worked for me."

    "And we are, of course, so similar." You run a hand over your face, scraping the skin smooth. "I can't believe this. I go to all the trouble of arranging a secret meeting, let Mai run off to you without supervision, tolerate your traitorous presence without so much as a," you snap out a wrist and a sliver of lightning pirouettes across your knuckles in lieu of words, "just so that I can ask you about the only thing in the world you can claim to be an expert in outside first-rate idiocy, and all I get in return is a bit of babble about choosing my own destiny. You'd sound just like that tea-addled fool if only you had the vocabulary."

    Spirits.

    Zuko will probably take that as a compliment, won't he?

    You sit up—both in the sense of raising your body and in the sense that you do it with nothing but the flex of your core—so you can deliver a more appropriately castigating rejoinder and notice your brother is staring at you.

    Or, rather, he's staring at the fracture of cold fire that you're toying with around your fingers. It crackles, loud and stark in the quiet of the clearing, a coruscating curl of silver and blue.

    "I've never seen anyone else do that with lightning," he says. There's something you can't quite place in his eyes—until, suddenly, you can. You saw it in Lo and Li only a day or two ago. You see it every time you watch your practice in front of the mirror. You just didn't know what it looked like in Zuko until now.

    (You've never seen it in your Father.)

    "It is beautiful, isn't it?" You try for arrogant, but you're still a couple of steps behind the beat, so it just comes out proud instead. "Naturally you haven't seen anyone else do it. I'm the only one who can."

    "Not even the Fire Lord?"

    You were expecting a boast about Iroh. Why is Zuko bringing up your Father now? About this, and not about the invasion plan, or his treachery, or anything else that would actually make sense? The strangest thing is that he sounds nearly like you, when your tongue wraps around the sort of question normally asked by the edge of a cliff.

    But Zuko isn't you, so when you say, "Our Father is the greatest firebender in the world," as all good people of the Fire Nation should, he seems to take it as the answer it isn't.

    "Aang's still going to beat him," he declares, less competitively than certainly.

    Though that might just be how you hear it—you, who know it as you know the rise and fall of the Sun, a whole and immutable law of your existence.

    Your brother brushes a few errant bangs off his forehead with the back of his hand, the dirt of a life now lived on the run sticking to the creases and calluses of his skin. It's almost eerie how he seems so much more comfortable like this; the whole of the Fire Nation arrayed against him, and nothing but the guttering ember of his honour to drive him.

    Almost, because you've always known Zuko fits the palace like his scar fits his face.

    "Your precious hope," you say, turning your eyes from your brother to admire the way the lightning spins around your fingers when you twist-and-release like you're trying to draw and then drop a sword. "Proud and strong and able to endure anything."

    It takes him a moment to remember—but when he does, his whole face twists into a scowl, something dark and angry. Angry at you. Good. He wasn't lying about that, either.

    The air gets a little warmer.

    Where your brother's nails curl into the rock, the moss begins to char.

    "Do you regret it?" he asks.

    Of course you do.

    It's the worst idea you've ever had.

    But you can't tell Zuko that.

    (How can you possibly tell the only person you know who was brave enough to try and say the same to the Fire Lord's face?)

    "I don't know what you want me to say." You sigh, and it might be the most honest thing you've ever let your brother see. "If you really think that room, and that conversation, was the first time our Father had contemplated the idea of burning the Earth Kingdom to the ground, then I am going to turn around and leave because I have clearly been conversing with a koala sheep instead of even someone as boneheaded as Zuzu."

    "Of course it wasn't," Zuko says, each syllable made sharp by offence. "Zhao gave a speech about the exact same thing nearly a year ago, right before I stole Aang right from under his stupid sideburns, and the Fire Lord made him an Admiral. But you still said it. You didn't have to."

    His voice rises.

    "If he was going to do it anyway, you didn't have to say it. But you did. And you were proud. I remember that. You smiled. And you were proud."

    You were.

    You're not now.

    But it doesn't really matter, because as ever, Zuko doesn't get it.

    "You should be thanking me," you snap, jaw taut with anger—as much at your brother as at yourself. "So I said it. So I spoke up. So I put the Fire Lord's will into someone else's words, like all loyal servants of the Dragon Throne should."

    You push yourself off the stone and shove a finger into Zuko's sternum, exactly where he poked you with his irritatingly long arms earlier. Your nail sizzles against the summer-thin fabric of his shirt.

    "But while I did that, what were you saying? Blathering about hope like you forgot it was our Father's favourite food? Trying to disagree with him in front of his entire war council? Again? Didn't you learn from last time?"

    Zuko goes very, very still.

    That's fine.

    You're shaking enough for two.

    "I went out of my way to bring you home in Ba Sing Se, to serve you everything you've ever wanted on a silver platter, and then when I have to cut in and save you from getting the other half of your face burned off you ask me if I regret it?" With an effort so great you can hear your bones creak, you draw the splinters of your flame back into your heart and exhale nothing but hot air. "I don't know what you want me to say."

    "That wasn't why you spoke up," Zuko rasps—though whether it's the rasp of a sword drawn or sheathed, you can't tell. "And you know it."

    "You're right," you agree, because he is. In the moment, the thought hadn't crossed your mind at all. "Aren't you glad?"

    Zuko snorts. Less smoke billows out than you were expecting. "No. Are you?"

    You open your mouth and—

    —what, exactly?

    What are you going to say?

    What are you going to change?

    Throwing the fact you probably saved Zuko's life back in his face doesn't mean anything when you both know you just wanted to one-up him at what was effectively his own inauguration—his official welcome back into the fold. It was pure and simple palace reflex. Don't simply tell the Fire Lord what he wants to hear. Tell the Fire Lord what he wants the world to hear: fire, and strength, and the sifting of ash.

    It's only with your brother staring at you, face to face, scar to skin, and the memory of his question—well, Azula? Are you glad?—lingering like the sweet stench of seared flesh, that you realise

    (you wish you'd never been taught that reflex at all)

    just saying it might not have been your only mistake that day.

    "Does it matter?" you ask, stepping away and slumping down, cross-legged in the crackle of dry grass made brittle with heat beneath you, crown clanging against the stone you were once sitting on as you throw your head back. "In a few days you'll fight me for the throne while our Father faces the Avatar. Maybe it's not meant to be either of our destinies but even if I told you I wished I'd never said a single word that won't change what either of us have to do. Nothing will."

    "If you're so certain of that, Azula," Zuko says, still standing, haloed by the Sun until he seems to decide the symbolism isn't worth craning his neck to look down and drops to an ungainly sprawl in front of his own stone, "then why did you even bother to come?"

    "I suppose I just wanted to know if you were tired," you say, looking at him but not really seeing him, or at least not only seeing him—not just the Zuko before you, but also the Zuko's past you, all the last faces you've ever seen swollen together like you're staring at them through a window smeared with rain. "Because I am."

    "Tired of what?"

    You roll your eyes, too exhausted for exaggeration, too languid to make the arch as perfect as the coiffing of your eyebrows. "The price of egg tarts in Caldera. What do you think, idiot?"

    "I think I wish Uncle was here." Zuko sounds exasperated, each word clipped short like a bird within a cage. "You're so annoying it almost makes me want to start reciting proverbs. 'Are you so busy fighting you cannot see your own ship has set sail?'"

    How marvellously profound. "That feckless old fool doesn't even know how useless he is, let alone anything of value."

    Your brother's glower is nearly as odious as Mai's. "Yeah, well, before he broke out of prison, Uncle told me one thing even you don't know."

    "What? Your vaunted lightning redirection?" Your lip curls up into a smirk for the first time since you arrived. "Hardly a shocking revelation at this point, Zuzu."

    "As shocking as the fact Roku is our great-grandfather?"

    You blink.

    What.

    "Sozin is our great-grandfather, you ninco—"

    "Of course you would manage to forget Mother even exists," Zuko says, jerking a hand in your direction like he's trying to cut the air, fast enough that a drunkard would mistake the whoosh for genuine airbending. "Evil and good might always be at war inside me, but I definitely know who won inside you."

    "And of course you would believe whatever nonsense Iroh told you as long as it let him fit you in his little narrative of redemption—but I have to admit this one takes the cake." Disdain oozes from your voice like pus. "Our mother, who couldn't even bend, related to the Avatar? Pull the other one, Zuko, it's got bells on it."

    A wave of confusion passes over his face—much as it did yours, the first time you heard Ty Lee say it—before he clenches his fists, arms drawn back to ball them on the loose fabric of his black pants, right above his thighs. "I'm not lying. I don't know why you hate Uncle so much, but he was telling the truth. Roku is our great-grandfather. That's why it's my destiny to restore the honour of our family and the Fire Nation. I'm the only one who can."

    Laughter spills out of you like your belly's been cut open. Of course. Of course. "I concede. You're right. Iroh wasn't lying. We really are from the line of the Avatar itself."

    "That was… fast. Wait. Why are you laughing?" Zuko asks, hesitant, and surely not—maybe—a hair's breadth from concerned. "What's so funny about that?"

    "Oh, nothing." You drag yourself back up into proper posture, fingers flat on your armoured knees, thin white slivers of skin against the hungry black. "You just keep saying 'I' and 'my'. My destiny. I'm the only one who can. Tell me, Zuko—when our dear benevolent uncle was telling you all about how the great Roku's blood meant you weren't as evil as the rest of us, did he spare a single word for me?"

    Zuko frowns, eyebrows pinching together. "Why would Uncle have anything to say about you?"

    Your brother really does have such a way with words.

    "I don't know," you say. For some reason, Zuko is edging away from you, back flattening against the stone. How strange. All you're doing is smiling, after all. "Maybe the senility was catching up with him, and he simply forgot that whatever blood runs through your veins—"

    Your fingers lash out and snap around Zuko's forearm like the jaws of an armadillo-bear, so the arteries that reach to the very base of your wrists sit above each other's. Two parallel rivers of life.

    "—runs just the same in mine too."

    One of your long bangs drapes itself across your cheek as you tilt your head to the side.

    "Or maybe it just wasn't convenient for him to remember I'm your sister if it happened to get in the way of whatever design he and his Lotus friends have for the world."

    "How do you know abou—" Zuko begins, before shaking his head roughly in a flurry of dark hair and wrenching his arm from your grip. "Whatever. If you're trying to turn me against Uncle, it won't work. You tried to kill him, Azula. Then you had him arrested and dragged home in chains. Even a kind man like Uncle isn't going to forgive something like that."

    "Why not?" Your stare bores directly into Zuko's until it almost seems like both of you are looking straight into the Sun. "He forgave you."

    "Not this time," Zuko says. His face falls into a kind of weariness, his voice low and thick with guilt.

    You're not sure what's more irritating: Zuko's propensity to be loved by nearly anyone and everyone around him, or his complete inability to recognise it.

    "Whatever," you say. "You were interesting for a while, brother, but now the self-righteousness is starting to bore me."

    Zuko stiffens, and the mess of anger and disappointment and self-flagellation that spills over his face like tea-dregs at the bottom of a cup smooths out under a combination of wariness and concentration.

    It's nice to see he still has at least something rattling around in his head, even if it's only long-suffering instinct.

    "Oh, don't be like that," you say, waving dismissively as you slowly rise to your feet, pressing your soles into the grass and breathing in the sunlight that sweeps across your skin. It settles under your bones, a kind of heat that makes your heart beat easier and the hollow in your skull press a little softer at the cracks in your thoughts. "Attacking you would be the very last thing that would help alleviate my boredom, Zuzu. Weren't you listening?"

    Zuko stands too, the gentle breeze fluttering at the tips of his clothes, obscuring his edges in ripples of red and black and gold. He's crownless, his hair dishonourably short, his lips a flat frustrated line and his shoulders rolling awkwardly as he unlimbers his arms. He might even be a little thinner, more like when you first ran into him after those three lost years than when he fled the palace on the Day of the Black Sun.

    All in all, not a believable picture of Fire Nation royalty, let alone the former Crown Prince.

    But when you lift your head to make sure you can meet his eyes, you realise something:

    Zuko really does seem taller like this.

    How annoying.

    You were hardly towering as it is.

    "I was listening," Zuko says. "But what if I don't care? What if I want to attack you?"

    You arch a singular eyebrow with the same smooth precision as Mai throws a blade. "Do you?"

    A silence stretches until you're almost worried about what he's going to say.

    Then Zuko sighs heavily and says, "Not really."

    You are far too controlled to breathe anything so obvious as a sigh of relief.

    "Well," you say instead, "this has truly been illuminating, Zuko, but duty calls. A princess' work is never done—not that you would know, of course."

    Your brother opens his mouth to snap right back and then… doesn't. His jaw slams shut with a click and instead of speaking he studies you with the same sort of careful intensity you use for firebending forms. Sunrise eyes trace you from head to toe and back again, but you get the sense he's not seeing the proud polish of your armour, the haughty precision of your topknot, or even the artfully-engineered condescension in the sneer you offer his attention.

    You can feel it hook into your flesh like the war-chipped edge of a dao.

    "You're right," he says quietly, "you do look tired, Azula."

    Then he just


    turns and walks away.


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

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

    (?/?) ???

    (3/2) The Blood of Rava

    There are not many things Zuko knows that you do not, but this is one of them.

    The Avatar is the spiritual locus of the world, gifted with wisdom, and immortality, and power. It has ten thousand bodies and ten thousand lives. But the same essence that once ran in its veins when it was Roku runs in yours too. Yours, and Zuko's. He thinks he knows what that means. You're not so sure. But it has to—it has to mean something.


    "So, Azula…" Ty Lee drawls from where she lounges across your bed, undoubtedly a garish splash of pink fabric and pale skin against the stately dignity of your maroon sheets, "what did you and Zuko talk about?"

    Your brush barely flinches on the downstroke as you finish a missive to the Head Archivist, requesting information about the last three previous Avatars and their families for the purposes of psychological profiling, prioritised in order of recency. You'll have one of the Dai Li deliver it later.

    The crisp, relaxing scent of paper mixes with the wet, heady smell of ink as you sweep the missive to the side with one hand while the other unfurls another blank message slip. War, it seems, brings out the incompetence in everyone, especially when it appears victory is freshly at hand.

    Why else would the Vice Director of the Directorate of Astronomy have sought to order the Ministry of Rites to forbid all spiritual festivals in Caldera as part of an apparent effort to avoid offending Sozin's Comet? Hardly an order they would listen to, and hardly an order they could entirely ignore, especially when the Minister of Rites had just been murdered by his wife's lover—the Vice-Minister of Rites—and their entire chain of command was in chaos.

    At least one of the clerks nominally in charge of writing up the command had enough sense to choose to write to the palace instead, apparently deciding that anything to do with Sozin's Comet should really be under the purview of the Fire Lord in the first place.

    Your Father, obviously, should not be bothered with such trivial matters of governance, and so untangling this blistering bureaucratic idiocy has fallen to you. Thankfully, the solution is relatively simple; all you need to do i—

    "—Azula? Hello? Are you there?"

    You suppress a sigh, and deliberately complete the character you're writing before gracing your interlocutor with an answer. "What do you want, Ty Lee?"

    "I want to know what you and Zuko talked about!" You can hear the pout curling across her lips.

    "Destiny," you say. It seems the safest option. "His, and mine."

    There's the slither of silk on silk as Ty Lee must shift whatever contortionist's nightmare she's arranged herself in, but you have no interest in glancing over and feeling your muscles wince in sympathy, so instead you return your attention to the message. It only takes another minute to complete, and then you're signing it with imperial precision and sliding it into the correct pile.

    Your shoulder cramps awkwardly with the movement. This is why you hate working at this desk—it's far too low—but your bedroom guarantees you a privacy that even your office doesn't.

    A privacy Ty Lee has decided to entirely ignore, as if she can't see you are far too busy for social inanity.

    Rolling your arm to ease the ache, you take a moment to rest the back of your head on the top of your carved-teak chair. The undulating, flame-like curve that runs across its top bar digs into your scalp.

    Around you, the bedroom stretches luxuriously—a ceiling so towering it dwarfs even the eight-pole canopy that sits over your bed, all the walls patterned with polished jade and artfully-weathered bronze, the air scented with sweet incense. Unlike most of the other important rooms in the palace, there are no carpets to sink your toes into, only smooth dark stone; far be it for you to allow any assassins the courtesy of being able to muffle their footsteps.

    The sconces in the wall simmer with soft blue embers, flaring subtly in a near-hypnotic pattern that's mostly an idle effort on your behalf to see how long you can keep the rhythm entirely offset with your breath. Even for a firebender, they barely cast enough light to see by, let alone write by, the shadows stretching long and lazy across every corner.

    Naturally, your superior eyesight barely notices the strain.

    "Ooh, destiny!" Ty Lee says. She seems oddly cheery for so advanced an evening. For such a high-energy girl, she's usually awful at staying up late. "Do you believe in it too, Azula?"

    There was a time when you didn't. Or at least not in the way she means: not the personal. Only the political.

    You believed in the righteousness of the Fire Nation's cause by the whole and perfect virtue of its strength. You held it as given that it would be your Father's armies that one day conquered the world simply because the world had demonstrated it was better at losing than winning. If that was a destiny, it was a manifest destiny—not something given but something taken, seared into the sea and stone and air until the course of the universe could only pour through the jagged valleys of its wounds.

    Or so you thought.

    But there is no path to victory that flows through the tips of two outstretched fingers.

    You know this now.

    And you know it because your own personal destiny has been to have it rubbed in your face not until you went insane, but until you went through insane and came out the other side—until your skull could no longer hold any fractured ghosts because it needed the space instead for one more memory of one more way you have learned it is possible for someone to die.

    "I wouldn't say believe," you muse, watching the stately red drapes you could pull around your desk—were you so inclined—ripple slightly in the air your flames disturb. "Some things just seem… inevitable."

    (But not the ones that held your entire life up.

    A castle of sand where there should have been a palace of stone.)

    "That's a gloomy way of looking at it," Ty Lee replies. "You've been listening to Mai too much!"

    "I'll be sure to tell her," you say. Time to get back to work.

    You squeeze your eyes together to refresh your vision and drag your head back off the chair, reaching for another square of paper from the teetering pile on your left and re-inking your brush at the same time.

    There's another rustle of sheets behind you. "This is private girls' talk, Azula. You're not allowed to share it!"

    "Mmm," you hum, straightening in your chair. The loose red-and-gold of your sleepwear shifts across the polished wood as you bend toward the desk and start to write. "Another circus rule, I presume."

    She has a lot of those. You've stopped bothering to keep track.

    "Not everything has to be a rule, Azula," she says with a huff. It sounds a little more forced than usual, but Ty Lee's moods come and go like summer rain. "Some things are just common sense!"

    If only they were.

    Between your last set of commands and this one, common sense hardly seems common at all.

    The Fire Nation permits some minor embezzlement for those posted in the Imperial Censors, for the same reason it does across the rest of its bureaucracy—corruption is a useful lever to expose, or conceal, when court politics require it—and Third Secretary Hong's is practically public knowledge at this point, but thinking to take advantage of the budgetary reorganisation brought by the final preparations for the Comet and your coronation?

    Spirits save you from jumped-up merchant families whose greed swallows their sense.

    "But seriously," Ty Lee continues once it's clear you're not going to reply, valiant against all efforts on your behalf to tune her out, "I don't think destiny and inevitability are the same thing. It's kind of like… y'know, you and the circus!"

    This time, your brush does pause. A spot of ink threatens to spill from the tip and blotch your instructions, but a flick of your finger evaporates it with a precise burst of heat. "What could I possibly share with something so…" you should probably bite back your more precise descriptions, tempting as they are, so you end up finishing with, "loud?"

    "Weeeeeeeell," she says, stretching out the syllable like she's swinging it between a pair of trapezes, "like I said, joining the circus was my calling. It's the thing that made me me and not somebody else: Ty Lee the acrobat. That's like destiny, right? It's what I was meant to do."

    Your hand snaps up, sharp and firm, fingers spread. The long sleeves of your night robes slip down your arm to bunch around your bicep.

    "If you're trying to make me feel guilty," you say, frown distending the rouge of your lips, "you shou—"

    "I thought about it." That is—unexpectedly blunt, for Ty Lee. Almost enough to tempt you to look at her, instead of trying to read her by voice alone. "But no, I just want to… you said you were tired of fighting Zuko. You even decided to go and talk to him."

    "I did," you say. "Is there a point you intend to get to, Ty Lee? I am quite busy."

    There seems to be, if the haste of her reply is any indication. There's an edge to it you don't quite recognise—a slip to each syllable that's almost glassy.

    "Not fight him," she repeats. "Talk to him. That's huge, Azula. Because I like you, and I like Zuko, and I want you to be happy and you never seem happy when you fight him. Just… satisfied. Like how you used to seem satisfied when you got a perfect score on a test after skipping hanging out with me and Mai so you could study."

    Of course you did. You certainly weren't about to disappoint your Father with anything less than perfection, especially not when he so often made note of yours to remind Zuko how far he still had to go. It hadn't been particularly hard, anyway. The Academy was just another system to solve—find out what the teachers wanted, provide it when and how it was required—and like most systems that everyone else around you failed to properly understand, it was as simple as sitting down and looking at the big picture. What were you being taught, and why would someone want you to learn that?

    You are, however, starting to realise that Ty Lee may not appreciate a full explanation, because you haven't been hearing your bedsheets rustle and whisper in a couple of minutes, and that means Ty Lee hasn't been moving for a couple of minutes.

    Ty Lee is always moving. It's one of her defining traits.

    "Studying is a perfectly rational pursuit for a stude—"

    This time you don't even get to finish the sentence.

    "But now you're back and your aura's all dingy and you're giving me half-sentence answers and talking about inevitability." Ty Lee's voice pinches as she speaks, like there's something wrapping around her throat, and with each word her pitch crests a little higher. "You won't even look at me. I don't care about guilty right now, Azula. I care about you, and I'm worried."

    Silence falls, interrupted only by the broken rhythm of her breath.

    Slowly, you lay the brush down and shift your chair to face her on the bed. The wood scrapes roughly across the stone as you settle it in place.

    In the relative gloom, Ty Lee's face is a luminescent moon.

    "There is no need to be worried," you say, smile reaching for reassuring. "Zuko merely… had a lot to say, some of which I did not expect. I imagine he felt much the same. We did not lay a hand on each other."

    "Okay," Ty Lee says, and she doesn't sound okay at all. "Then tell me what's so inevitable. Please."

    You are certainly not obligated to explain yourself—least of all about something as profoundly personal as this. It is none of Ty Lee's concern.

    "No matter the choices I make," you cannot stop yourself from saying anyway, "I always find myself in the same place. Sometimes by a different route, or for a different reason, but never a different end. The destination eclipses the journey. Is that not inevitability, Ty Lee?"

    "Okay," she says again. "I still don't get it. How does that relate to Zuko?"

    How does that relate to Zu—

    You swallow the thought with the void that separates the lightning and the earth.

    Of course Ty Lee doesn't get it. You've never told her. Or Mai. Not once. Cycles upon cycles and you are the only one who ever knows.

    (Are you tired of that too, Princess Azula?)

    "I do not remember a time," you say, softly, slowly, the words creeping up on you like your mother's ghost, "when my brother was not my enemy. We have spent our entire lives in competition. That he makes it so easy to win changes nothing except the effort I must expend in the fight. Even if he were to return tomorrow with the Avatar's corpse over his shoulder, having used his apparent conflict with Father to infiltrate their party and strike from within, all that will have changed is the battlefield."

    You turn your hand over and study the flame that trembles in it like a heartbeat. In the dark, you imagine the way the light seeps over your face accentuates the stark shadows under your eyes, usually concealed by careful cosmetics, until you must be somewhere between ethereal and horrifying.

    "I was there when our Father burned him. He screamed so loud I almost wanted him to die just so he would shut up." You don't want to know what your smile looks like, or if it's even a smile at all. "I think you were right, Ty Lee, at the Burning Rock. I don't want Zuko to be happy. But he asked me, when we were talking, whether I was glad—at that last, fateful War Council before the Day of the Black Sun, when he was moments from forcing Father to have to burn him a second time—that the reason I spoke up wasn't because I wanted to save him."

    You choke a laugh.

    "I stood there and I watched Zuko nearly make the same mistake that melted half his face off and got him banished for three years and instead of remembering the sound of that scream I thought that this was just another opportunity to steal his thunder." The flame in your palm bleeds to lightning. It splinters across your fingers the way a scar would. "I didn't care that he got burned the first time. I didn't care that I stopped him from getting burned the second time."

    A muscle spasms in your forearm and your fingers clench shut around the spark, crushing it to fizzles and ash.

    "So there you go, Ty Lee. That's inevitability."

    When you look up, she's no longer on the bed.

    She's standing right in front of you, thundercloud eyes wet with rain.

    "Oh, Azula…" She kneels as nuns do, cupping your hands with her own. The red prongs of her skirt crease against the thick puff of her pants. Her skin is icy. Your temperature control must be slipping. "I'm sorry."

    "Why?" You snort. The air distorts around your face, scattering your bangs and rippling with heat, but you claw it back to equilibrium before it can scald Ty Lee. "It's not like you can do anything about it."

    "That's why I'm sorry," Ty Lee says, and you can almost hear Mai's you idiot tacked on to the end. Great. She's miles away in Caldera, preparing the family home for her parents' return—as if Ukano somehow thinks the sensible thing to do isn't to stay well away from Caldera for a few years until his disgrace isn't quite as fresh—and yet you still cannot escape her recalcitrance. "I thought I had it bad: my Dad can't recognise me, but at least he never made me fight my sisters until I hated them."

    The clockwork of your skull screeches to a halt.

    What?

    What sort of non-sequitur is that?

    "I mean…" Ty Lee squeezes your fingers before letting go and rocking back on her haunches, bare feet now flat against the floor. Each word spills out somewhere between reluctant and rebellious, like weeds sprouting across a desert. "Isn't that why you bullied Zuko when we were kids? Even when your mother yelled at you, you always said the Fire Lord was proud of you. And then there's, like, everything that happened in the Earth Kingdom and after we got back."

    "Yes," you say, "it was, but your tone, Ty Lee. Setting aside that you are speaking of the Fire Lord, in Caldera Palace, in front of the Crown Princess—why are you phrasing it like Father did something wrong?"

    Only the strongest deserves the Dragon Throne. That is why your Father rules where Iroh does not. That is why you will rule where Zuko will not. All of your childhoods have just been the crucible through which to decide that outcome. Nothing more, and nothing less.

    "I don't know," Ty Lee says, watching you with a tear-stained fragility that doesn't fit her at all, "do you feel like he did something right?"

    You—

    You—

    You can't answer that.

    She can't make you answer that.

    There is no answer to that.

    Of course there isn't. Answers require questions and your Father is unquestionable.

    No matter what Ty Lee thinks.

    (No matter what you've already thought.)

    "Get out."

    Your voice is the last whisper of a corpse.

    "Azula—" she starts.

    "Get out."


    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 strikethrough indicate replaced or removed text.

    (2/2) Azula, Alone?

    You have almost nothing and almost no-one to rely on. You may have been too hasty in considering your friends irredeemably treacherous, but your mother still left and your brother still couldn't be bothered to stay. And beyond them all, only your father remains, and you're trying to stop yourself you can't stop yourself from realising that does not mean what you once thought it did.


    Once more, Sozin's Comet approaches.

    Once more, you will face your brother for the throne.

    You don't want to.

    You don't think he wants to, either.

    There must be an answer there, somewhere. The thought of it sits in you too heavily to be otherwise. Maybe Zuko is right that it doesn't matter who wins. Maybe that's never the question you were supposed to be asking. But you know he's wrong, too, because all that means is that you need to find the question that does matter.

    You can do that.

    And maybe you know where to start.

    Your discussion with Zuko was… revelatory. For the first time in all your lives, you sat down with your brother and actually talked. And it worked. Perhaps not how you'd intended it to, but that is a minor matter and easily corrected with better planning—the point is that as long as you catch him in the right frame of mind, Zuko seems genuinely amenable to meaningful conversation.

    It is clear what you must do.

    If fighting Zuko for the throne is off the table, and talking to Zuko is on the table, then all things converge toward a singular outcome:

    You simply need to persuade him to surrender you the throne.

    Ty Lee can imply what she likes, but when the world makes the contest between the two of you the pivot about which your whole universe turns, something about how it is resolved surely holds the key to releasing you from this cyclic prison.

    You've tried most everything else, but you've never been in a position to try this.

    Naturally, Zuko, as the most stubborn person you've ever met and a fool consumed by the promise of his own destiny, is not particularly easy to argue with at the best of times. Let alone when you need to convince him that you are better than him, something he has historically always had trouble accepting for all that he's never been able to deny it.

    You can soften him up with Mai, and you can use Ty Lee to distract whoever he drags along in his wake—unless it's Iroh, on whom you will instead set Lo and Li—but still the question of strategy remains.

    So, Princess Azula, master of court intrigue who talked her way into conquering Ba Sing Se: how are you going to persuade your brother to give up on the Dragon Throne?

    [ ] With practicality. If Zuko truly wants what is best for the Fire Nation, he must recognise that unlike you, he simply does not know how to be Fire Lord. It has been years since he was last taught to rule, and he was never a talented student to begin with. There is no purpose to his blathering about honour and destiny if the nation crumbles under his leadership within a few years, torn apart by enemies within and without. You're willing to allow some degree of compromise, to permit him back within the halls of power as an influence, but the Fire Lord must be strong, and so the Fire Lord must be you.

    [ ] With a question. You are the acknowledged heir to the Dragon Throne, the legacy of imperium who stands superior in flame and deed. You are the epitome of all the Fire Nation stands for, while Zuko has turned from it, run from it, even tried to fight it. Why does he even want the throne? What would it even give him, to rule over a nation whose ideology he rejects and whose goals he opposes? Why doesn't he just swan around with the Avatar on some nauseatingly heroic mission of peace instead?
    You already know why Zuko wants the throne, and you're not really interested in sitting down for another lecture about honour and kindness and the importance of destiny.

    [ ] With sympathy. Zuko wishes to be Fire Lord for the sake of his dreams. But the Fire Lord does not dream. The Fire Lord does not feed scraggly turtle-ducks in quiet afternoons beside the pond. The Fire Lord is the scale on which all life in the Fire Nation is weighed. Even if he could survive the pressure, the man who emerged from that crucible would not be the man Zuko wishes to be. But you? You are already a monster. You are already willing to do all the things it would ruin your brother to do. The sooner he sees that, the sooner he will understand you are the only choice to rule.

    [ ] With a secret. Reveal the truth of the cycle—the eternal return that transfixes you to life. Tell him you're trying to get out, and that you think this is how. Offer him an opportunity to satisfy his martyr complex and you know he'll leap on the chance to 'save' someone. Even if it's you.
    You are not going to come to Zuko like some supplicating peasant and beg him to save you, especially if it requires a revelation he hardly deserves to hear.

    [ ] With a challenge. Suppose Zuko becomes Fire Lord. Has he thought about what he's going to do about you? You are, after all, the previous Fire Lord's favoured heir and a bending prodigy with a proven military history who knows all those roaming the corridors of power by name, ambition, and vice. You undermine his rule just by existing; surely he paid enough attention in his studies to recall the Camellia-Peony war, if nothing else. But the Zuko who wishes to be Fire Lord is the Zuko whose fantasy of peace and brotherhood across the lands will refuse to purge you until it is too late—and that is why you must be Fire Lord instead. Not because you are willing to purge him, but because you would not need to.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • [X] With a challenge. Suppose Zuko becomes Fire Lord. Has he thought about what he's going to do about you? You are, after all, the previous Fire Lord's favoured heir and a bending prodigy with a proven military history who knows all those roaming the corridors of power by name, ambition, and vice. You undermine his rule just by existing; surely he paid enough attention in his studies to recall the Camellia-Peony war, if nothing else. But the Zuko who wishes to be Fire Lord is the Zuko whose fantasy of peace and brotherhood across the lands will refuse to purge you until it is too late—and that is why you must be Fire Lord instead. Not because you are willing to purge him, but because you would not need to.

    Best way to settle this dispute is through Agni Kai and this time, Azula would win this.
     
    Practicality won't work on someone who operates on Destiny mindset and sympathy especially wont work since that he would be willing to bear that burden even for Azula's sake.

    The Fire Nation turns on the Fire Lord's will but it is supported by the vast bureaucracy of state filled with people that allows it to function. Can Zuko who has betrayed the Nation be the one to lead it? To do what is necessary to represent his Nation and not the World.

    [x] With a challenge. Suppose Zuko becomes Fire Lord. Has he thought about what he's going to do about you? You are, after all, the previous Fire Lord's favoured heir and a bending prodigy with a proven military history who knows all those roaming the corridors of power by name, ambition, and vice. You undermine his rule just by existing; surely he paid enough attention in his studies to recall the Camellia-Peony war, if nothing else. But the Zuko who wishes to be Fire Lord is the Zuko whose fantasy of peace and brotherhood across the lands will refuse to purge you until it is too late—and that is why you must be Fire Lord instead. Not because you are willing to purge him, but because you would not need to.
     
    [X] With practicality. If Zuko truly wants what is best for the Fire Nation, he must recognise that unlike you, he simply does not know how to be Fire Lord. It has been years since he was last taught to rule, and he was never a talented student to begin with. There is no purpose to his blathering about honour and destiny if the nation crumbles under his leadership within a few years, torn apart by enemies within and without. You're willing to allow some degree of compromise, to permit him back within the halls of power as an influence, but the Fire Lord must be strong, and so the Fire Lord must be you.
     
    [X] With practicality. If Zuko truly wants what is best for the Fire Nation, he must recognise that unlike you, he simply does not know how to be Fire Lord. It has been years since he was last taught to rule, and he was never a talented student to begin with. There is no purpose to his blathering about honour and destiny if the nation crumbles under his leadership within a few years, torn apart by enemies within and without. You're willing to allow some degree of compromise, to permit him back within the halls of power as an influence, but the Fire Lord must be strong, and so the Fire Lord must be you.
     
    [X] With a challenge. Suppose Zuko becomes Fire Lord. Has he thought about what he's going to do about you? You are, after all, the previous Fire Lord's favoured heir and a bending prodigy with a proven military history who knows all those roaming the corridors of power by name, ambition, and vice. You undermine his rule just by existing; surely he paid enough attention in his studies to recall the Camellia-Peony war, if nothing else. But the Zuko who wishes to be Fire Lord is the Zuko whose fantasy of peace and brotherhood across the lands will refuse to purge you until it is too late—and that is why you must be Fire Lord instead. Not because you are willing to purge him, but because you would not need to.

    I feel like this one has a nice symmetry to it. On the face of it, it's a challenge to Zuko

    On the other, it feels like it opens up for a retort about Azula's relationship with Ozai, and the dynamic of power and legitimacy between the two of them.
     
    [X] With a challenge. Suppose Zuko becomes Fire Lord. Has he thought about what he's going to do about you? You are, after all, the previous Fire Lord's favoured heir and a bending prodigy with a proven military history who knows all those roaming the corridors of power by name, ambition, and vice. You undermine his rule just by existing; surely he paid enough attention in his studies to recall the Camellia-Peony war, if nothing else. But the Zuko who wishes to be Fire Lord is the Zuko whose fantasy of peace and brotherhood across the lands will refuse to purge you until it is too late—and that is why you must be Fire Lord instead. Not because you are willing to purge him, but because you would not need to.
     
    Magery said:
    [ ] With a challenge. Suppose Zuko becomes Fire Lord. Has he thought about what he's going to do about you? You are, after all, the previous Fire Lord's favoured heir and a bending prodigy with a proven military history who knows all those roaming the corridors of power by name, ambition, and vice. You undermine his rule just by existing; surely he paid enough attention in his studies to recall the Camellia-Peony war, if nothing else. But the Zuko who wishes to be Fire Lord is the Zuko whose fantasy of peace and brotherhood across the lands will refuse to purge you until it is too late—and that is why you must be Fire Lord instead. Not because you are willing to purge him, but because you would not need to.
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    I think this is clever because it plays on the father-son relationship. Ozai left behind the Fire Lord title too become the Phoenix King. Zuko can leave behind that crown to become something more. A true symbol of renewal and harmony.

    Which is why this is the exact wrong option for this. Zuko no longer wants to mimic his father. Zuko no longer wishes to surpass his father. Ozai has no hold on him. Well, except for the mom thing, but that's separate. This isn't about Daddy Issues Boy. It's about Breakdancing Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight.
     
    WE'RE SO BACK

    [X] With sympathy. Zuko wishes to be Fire Lord for the sake of his dreams. But the Fire Lord does not dream. The Fire Lord does not feed scraggly turtle-ducks in quiet afternoons beside the pond. The Fire Lord is the scale on which all life in the Fire Nation is weighed. Even if he could survive the pressure, the man who emerged from that crucible would not be the man Zuko wishes to be. But you? You are already a monster. You are already willing to do all the things it would ruin your brother to do. The sooner he sees that, the sooner he will understand you are the only choice to rule.
     
    In typical Azula style, none of these are good options. But neither an appeal to practicality of all things or a personal challenge will accomplish anything besides making Zuko dig his heels in, so the only option remaining is

    [X] With sympathy. Zuko wishes to be Fire Lord for the sake of his dreams. But the Fire Lord does not dream. The Fire Lord does not feed scraggly turtle-ducks in quiet afternoons beside the pond. The Fire Lord is the scale on which all life in the Fire Nation is weighed. Even if he could survive the pressure, the man who emerged from that crucible would not be the man Zuko wishes to be. But you? You are already a monster. You are already willing to do all the things it would ruin your brother to do. The sooner he sees that, the sooner he will understand you are the only choice to rule.
     
    [X] With a challenge. Suppose Zuko becomes Fire Lord. Has he thought about what he's going to do about you? You are, after all, the previous Fire Lord's favoured heir and a bending prodigy with a proven military history who knows all those roaming the corridors of power by name, ambition, and vice. You undermine his rule just by existing; surely he paid enough attention in his studies to recall the Camellia-Peony war, if nothing else. But the Zuko who wishes to be Fire Lord is the Zuko whose fantasy of peace and brotherhood across the lands will refuse to purge you until it is too late—and that is why you must be Fire Lord instead. Not because you are willing to purge him, but because you would not need to.
     
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