Arsonist's Lullaby: An Azula Timeloop Quest

[Magery]

You are Azula, and you are—

"You miscalculated," Mai says. "I love Zuko more than I fear you."

—alive. Again.

How frustrating.

"Doesn't everybody?" you say into the silence, the knife-edged violence, the—oh, you're rhyming, like this is some kind of accursed theatre. That's not good. You really are a little off-balance this time around. "You, Mother, Uncle, the waterbender girl, the peasantry, that one prison guard with the ludicrous moustache, even Ty Lee… honestly, Mai, tell me something I don't know."

Mai blinks her dark eyes and squints at you, which is probably the most surprised any living person has ever seen her. To your right, Ty Lee is halfway through sputtering a tense denial when you wave a hand at her, dismissing whatever lie she's stumbling to concoct. You might have stolen her from the circus, but you were never after a clown.

For a moment, there's little more than the eerie hissing of the lake that gives the Boiling Rock its name. If you weren't one of the greatest firebenders in the world, the sheer heat of it, wafting through the metal platform, might have made you sweat—but you are one of the greatest firebenders in the world, so instead you're the only person here without a hint of perspiration to spoil the perfection of your image.

Then the quiet stretches a little longer and you realise that, like usual, it's up to you to do everything around here. Honestly.

Well, there's nothing to it but make a decision: what are you going to do, Princess Azula?

[ ] Kill Mai.
You already know how that ends.
[ ] Surprise and kill Ty Lee, then turn on Mai.
Sometimes you're not fast enough to get both. Sometimes you are, and what Zuko does to you is worse.
[ ] Put them somewhere you'll never have to see their faces again, and let them rot.
Never usually lasts about nine days, you find. What's the point?

You're going to try something you haven't before.

You're going to lie.

(Your sense of humour is, as ever, a work in progress.)

"Well, whatever," you say, turning your back on Mai with a parade-perfect flourish and marching towards the nearest guard captain. Your boots are a conqueror's drum against the steel beneath you, and your voice is loud enough to be easily overheard. "Good job on selling the act, Mai. I'm certain even these fools believed you. Our plan proceeds apace."

You snap your fingers, and a spark of lightning cracks out to accompany it, drawing the attention of every person there. If there were any decent firebenders present, they might have marvelled at your mastery of the cold fire, but also, if there were any decent firebenders present, they would either be your father or trying to kill you, so… you will have to accept the lack of adulation your skills so richly deserve.

"Now, guards: secure the remainder of the prison. Get the wretches back in their cells, seal the island, and inform the Ministry of Security that I expect an investigation into this debacle to have begun by the time I return to Caldera proper. The only reason it is an investigation instead of an execution is that my brother was involved, and as far as he has fallen, it is still to be expected that the blood of Agni proves itself superior to the common rabble. Thank me for my mercy and go."

A chorus of "Thank you, Princess Azula!" echoes out, and you smile in satisfaction. Fear isn't entirely unreliable yet.

As the guards scatter, a faceless wave of armoured bodies bent entirely to your will, Mai seems to find her courage and speaks again. Ty Lee has moved to stand by her, a hand on her shoulder. What a contrast they must make: tall, pale, gloomy Mai in her thick, well-stitched robes, and bubbly, effervescent Ty Lee, brave enough to expose her belly to the air even when above a literally boiling lake.

"Azula," Mai says, almost… carefully in the way she says your name, like you're something wild she's not quite willing to startle. "I wasn't lying. I meant what I said."

You stop in place, heels clicking. For a second, you just breathe in—ignoring how you can hear Mai and Ty Lee's bodies shift in response—and savour the taste of the air, thick and hot and volcanic. Most people probably despise the near-sulphuric rot of it; most people are not fire enfleshed. Between the heat, the sunlight, and the dozens upon dozens of nine-day lifetimes bubbling beneath your skin, you're nearly enjoying yourself.

Then you look back, meet Mai eye to eye, and let everything poorly concealed by that "nearly" fill your stare until you're close to weeping with it.

She flinches.

Ty Lee actually gasps.

"Good job on selling the act, Mai," you repeat, softer this time. "I'm certain even these fools believed you."

With that, you smile at her—for a given value of smile, generally only redeemable by corpses—and once again start to walk away. You do not beckon for her or Ty Lee to follow. You know they don't have anywhere else to go.

At the end of the day, all roads have always led to you.

(Except, of course, that you're currently trapped in a seemingly-endless reincarnation that appears tailor-made to argue that, in fact, no roads lead to you. But that's the sort of thing Father would say about Zuko, not the sort of thing you would say about you. So it doesn't cross your mind. Not at all.)

"Oh, and you," you say, pointing at the unlucky guard who's returned with a mop and bucket to start cleaning away the evidence of the battle, "go tell the Warden I require his office. If he asks whether I require him as well, tell him you hope he's properly paid up at the Ministry of Internment. I'm sure he'll get the message."

The guard drops both mop and bucket in his haste to follow your instructions.

You do so appreciate diligence.

As you leave, Ty Lee rights the bucket, and carefully leans the fallen mop against its side. You wonder why—some latent instinct to fix something because she already knows she can't possibly fix this? Some lost remnant of her time at the circus, where she probably had to do peasant things like clean up after herself? Or, worse, some little impulse of kindness, the sort that leads to things like knuckles in your spine and traitors left to rot?

You inhale, and exhale, and in the hollow of your mind you feed the thought to the cold purity of the void before lightning; the moment when the energy splits and there is nothing left but to choose how it will ignite the world. It's funny, that way—it was only when you learned to separate yourself from your anger that you truly began to understand the cold fire, and in turn, began to understand yourself.

"We are going to the Warden's office," you say as you pass under the corrugated archway back into the prison proper. The sconces on the walls ignite as you move through the halls, a flicker of your attention and breath enough to turn them intimidatingly blue. It's a reminder and a message all in one. "After we get there, we are going to talk. And when we do, I hope you have something better to say than this nonsense about love, Mai. At least have the dignity to pretend it's because you're supporting Zuzu's bid for the throne, or because you're planning some deep-cover double-cross right when he least expects it, or because you wanted to ruin your family's name to make up for the way they treat you. Give me something I can work with."

"Azula…" Ty Lee tries, before abruptly falling silent. Good.

Maybe she can tell from the set of your shoulders—perfect marching form, with your hands tucked behind your back and your shoulder-pads flat and level—that you are thoroughly not in the mood.

Though probably not for the reason she thinks.

Where you once might have held fury, you only have… not resignation, because you are not resigned to anything, you are the one in control of every aspect of your life. No, you have… expectation. Yes. That's a better word. You expected this to happen, because it always does, and it always has. Someone betrays you and you are left to move on alone, down a road that leads you back to this moment.

Every time you open your eyes on the tenth day, it's to Mai, and the Boiling Rock, and the idea that somebody loves Zuko more than they fear you.

It's more annoying than anything else by now. You get it. Frankly, you've always gotten it. Zuko is fundamentally loveable, like a turtleduck, or a flower; you are fundamentally not, because there is something wrong with you. There's no point dwelling on it. At least Father is willing to treat you like you're worth something.

(Except when he tosses the crown you've bent your whole life for into the trash so he can try and fail to burn the world down, just like you told him to, and doesn't even care to let you come along. But you are Princess Azula, the only living loyal heir, so that doesn't bother you at all.)

Regardless, you have more important things to do—like figure out where you're going to take this.

So, Princess Azula: when you're finally alone with your two treacherous ex-friends (even if Ty Lee hasn't fully realised it yet), what are you going to say to them?

[ ] The truth. You're from the future, and you want to get out.
You're not going to tell these traitors anything of the sort, not when your own father didn't believe you.
[ ] A lie. Childhood sentimentality means you're unwilling to hurt a friend, and royal practicality tells you to keep your enemies closer. It's Mai's choice which one she intends to be. Ty Lee's, too.
[ ] A lie. You wanted Zuko to get away, because Zuko would lead you to the Avatar, but then Mai just had to make a fool of herself when you had it all under control. You're eager to hear how she intends to fix this—and what Ty Lee thinks of her actions.
[ ] A lie. You engineered this confrontation as a test, and Mai and Ty Lee failed. The worst part is, they didn't even fail it cleverly. If Zuko's supporters are going to conspire against you, is it too much to ask for a little challenge?

---

Welcome to Arsonist's Lullaby, a timeloop quest centred around Azula. The core conceit is simple: you need to help her escape the seemingly endless cycle of her life, and let her see the Sun rise on the day after Sozin's Comet.

However, as you will have already noticed from the narration, there is a twist. The quest begins when Azula has already been looping for some time. As a result, there are some choices she will refuse to consider; after all, she's already tried that! Some of these choices—these fragments of the histories of her loops—will be alluded to through her narration, and some will be revealed directly when a vote opportunity arises.

You should not expect Azula to escape immediately, but provided you are thoughtful and considered in your choices, you should also not expect her to still be trapped in a hundred loops' time either. You've caught her at a relatively pivotal point, where she's more open to alternatives than she once was—whether those alternatives are good for her or not.

Good luck, and remember: flameo, hotman!​

 

[Magery]

The Warden's office is, as ever, suitably garish for a man of his talents.

You're not sure what's worse: the size of his desk, the tacky red-and-gold colour scheme it tries to pretend is dignified, or the gigantic portrait of your father that sits behind it. It seems that no matter where you go, or when you are, his shadow is always there to greet you. Thankfully, your decision to take the Warden's uncomfortable seat—or, at least, uncomfortable by the standards of Caldera Palace, which you suppose is… actually, by the way Zuko treated it, arguably comparable to a prison—means you are framed by the glowering Fire Lord and don't have to look at him at all.

It's Mai and Ty Lee who have to meet his gaze, unless they're willing to meet yours. You hope they do. Your judgement in friends might be… slightly less than perfect, perhaps, but you know they aren't cowards. Just traitors, and fools, and treacherously foolish to boot.

You study them across the flat of the desk, folding your hands under your chin and resting your chin on your palms. It's one of your favourite poses, for the sheer psychological dissonance of it: as a firebender, your hands are your most dangerous weapons, and you are keeping them up and visible and away, but at the same time, you are the princess of the Fire Nation and you are staring at someone over your hands with an air of visible expectation. Are you trying to be politely unthreatening, or are you implying that your firebending should be the least of their concerns?

At least one general has fled your presence with fumbled excuses when all you did was look at him, just like this.

(And yet here you are, using it on the only people in the world you used to call 'friend'. How subtle of you, Princess Azula!)

"Well?" you ask, golden eyes sharp. "What do you have to say for yourself, Mai?"

Mai sighs, expression—such as Mai can ever be said to hold an expression—thin with irritation. But there's a little confusion in it, too. She wasn't expecting to survive; or at least, not survive like this. Frankly, you weren't really expecting her to either, but at this point in the endless cycle of your life, sometimes you're willing to just give things a try because you can.

"What do you want me to say?" Her voice is low and flat. "Zuko was going to die if I didn't do something, so I did. I don't have a "better" reason for you. Not everyone wants to fit into your boxes, Azula."

"I can see why Zuzu said you were boring," you say, shaking your head. Naturally, even after the chaos of combat, your topknot is so perfect that your hair hardly shifts in place. "Betraying your nation, your princess, and your Fire Lord, all for something as predictably pedestrian as love? And after he abandoned you at that. Let me guess: did he tell you that he could finally recognise your devotion? When you found him in that cell, were you whispering to each other sweet nothings about willing hearts, given in return?"

(Of course you remember the words to Love Amongst the Dragons. You remember a lot of things you hate, especially when you once fooled yourself into thinking you didn't.)

"Because you're one to talk about love," Mai snaps back. "Some days I wonder if you're even capable of it."

"Mai!" Ty Lee looks a little frantic, her eyes wide and her fingers tense where they clasp Mai's forearm over her maroon sleeves. It's not something you ever really paid attention to until the Avatar had ruined you several lifetimes in a row, but the colour of her irises, somewhere between hazel and grey, is the kind usually found only in the history books. How interesting. "That's an awful thing to say!"

You're not sure why Ty Lee is trying to defend you. Probably because she wants to look better by comparison in the hopes it'll keep her safe, or, worse, because she wants to try and keep Mai safe. There's no point to either, and—well, it's not like Mai is even wrong. She's far from the first person to say something like that to you.

Instead of giving voice to any of that, though, you place a fine-fingered hand over your heart and reel backward with dramatic exaggeration, pressing your spine into the thick red leather of your chair. "You wound me, Mai. You're still alive, after all, aren't you?"

What Mai doesn't know about how many times you've learned how her flesh smells when lightning cooks it from the inside out won't hurt her. Yet, anyway.

"What's with you, Azula? Is this all just a big joke to you? I saw your face when I started cutting the line. Now you're mocking me like we never moved on from Ember Island." You must be really getting to Mai. She hasn't spoken this many words in a row since you plucked her from New Ozai. "Just get to the point, so I can get back to sitting in whatever dank, damp little cell you want to throw me in."

Well, she did ask.

"The point…" you muse, tapping your chin with a finger in a mockery of thought. "Yes, I suppose I must have had one of those, mustn't I? That's why I'm different from you. That's why I'm the monster. Because when I look at the world, I don't see people, do I? Just levers. So when one refuses to be pulled, the only thing I know how to do is to break it."

Your smile is a masterpiece. It falls crooked across your jaw, like you're trying to keep an amusement on your face that you're struggling to feel—like you're lying to yourself about how well you're lying to everyone else.

(It's a smile that has your eyes focusing anywhere else but the glint of the knife poking out of Mai's sleeve, lest you see yourself in it.)

"Tell me, Mai." You lean forward across the table, pressing your palms into the surface until your knuckles whiten. "How broken are you feeling right now?"

Ty Lee gets it first, you think. Her arm twitches over Mai's, like she's thinking about reaching out to you instead; her cheeks pale and her lips open. Mai, by contrast, takes a little longer—and then it hits her and her eyes narrow even as her frown softens ever-so-slightly.

"Not enough to believe you," she says, but with an edge that bruises instead of cuts. "Nice try, though."

"You're such a softie, Azula!" Ty Lee says, which is the first and hopefully last time the universe has ever heard that sequence of words in that order. She's smiling at you, now, like she did when you crossed to her for the spike at the volleyball game; like she does when you've done something she's proud of.

It's not the same smile she has when she believes you.

But it's close.

You'll take it.

(This is friendship, to you, after all. It's all about "take". No doubt Father would approve.)

"Well then, Mai," you say, clapping your hands together briskly, "in the interests of trying, perhaps you'll answer me this: what is it about dear Zuzu that makes him such an appealing proposition, compared to me? Be as honest as you like; it'll hardly be the most asinine drivel I've heard today."

Like most of your questions, it's one you already know the answer to. Zuko is your lesser in everything that matters to you—not just firebending, but politicking, military strategy, academics, anything and everything that should pave the way to the throne—but, it seems, your greater in everything that matters to everyone else.

It's not that you care about the answer particularly, either. You are quite content with who you are and what you're capable of, and you have no interest in neutering yourself and your capabilities, or whatever inane remedy for the problem of your personality Mai will inevitably suggest.

No: this is just you indulging your curiosity on a whim. You've never bothered to ask your ex-friends about their feelings before—just the thought is positively mortifying. If you're asking now, it's only because you might as well take the chance here, when nobody else will remember the conversation but you. And if they do, if this is the price you have to pay for escaping these accursed cycles, you can surely bear the indignity just this once.

For a moment, Mai just looks at you, all dark hair and disregard; the same Mai she always is, and the same Mai she'll probably always remain. Then there's an imperceptible shift in her posture, a slight flicker of an eyebrow—the sort of movement that in anyone else would be a cocked head and a verbalised "Huh."—and suddenly she straightens in her chair, rests her own hands demurely in her lap, looks you straight and unflinching in the eye, and says, "You really think I wouldn't have done the exact same thing if Zuko had escaped and you were going to fall, don't you?"

You blink.

What?

"I can't deal with this," she says, and stands. "One royal idiot is enough for today. I am not handling two. Ty Lee, you're up."

Then she pulls her wooden stool out, neatly steps around it, tucks it back in, and stalks out of the room. Her robes flutter in the torchlight as she leaves, like the undulating banners once above New Ozai.

"Mai, get ba—" you start, and then cut it off before you embarrass yourself. A princess should never give commands she knows will not be followed. You will deal with Mai's blatant insubordination later.

(You know, after your brain stops echoing with if Zuko had escaped and you were going to fall.)

"Azula," Ty Lee says gently, "what's going on?"

You take a sharp inhale, tinged with the cold, biting taste of the sky before lightning, and look at her. "Why must something be 'going on', Ty Lee?"

"You're answering questions with questions." Her voice is still gentle, like you think an embrace is supposed to be. How hateful. "And you usually lie way better than this. Did you—is Mai right?"

The torchlight—still a bright, flickering blue—dapples across the round curves of her face. You don't recognise the emotions she's wearing: the low turn of her mouth, the way she blinks a little too slowly. The closest thing you can think of is grief, but it's not. It's too careful for that.

"Mai made her choice," you say, because you refuse to dignify that ridiculous hypothetical with a direct answer. "She can pretend what she likes, but she chose Zuko—and you were going to choose her, don't think I didn't see that, Ty Lee."

Something dips in her expression, like the first few stones slipping down a cliff before the whole thing crumbles into the sea.

Except then she shakes her head—ponytail jiggling like a particularly brown and lively entrail—and slaps her cheeks, a peculiar ritual you've seen her perform several times before when she wants to remind herself to think positive or something similarly childish. It works like it always does: she bursts into a bright smile that shifts from practised to enthusiastic halfway through, and… reaches out to clasp a hand with one of yours, because it's been so long that you'd nearly forgotten that Ty Lee affirms her positive feelings through touch.

Her skin is cool against yours, and her fingers are as firm and calloused as your own.

"I don't really believe in choosing people, you know?" Ty Lee says. "There's not a finite amount of love in this world to give. It's forever. Like the sky. Or dancing! Just because I danced once doesn't mean I don't want to dance again. Just because Mai's my friend doesn't mean I don't want to be your friend. Or Zuko's friend. Or that cute boy who runs with the Avatar's friend. Honestly, don't you think everything would be better if we were all friends?"

That is so utterly beside the point you can hardly do anything but blink at her for a second or two.

"…I really don't," you say, and remember only a second later to pull your hand out from under Ty Lee's.

"Maybe not," Ty Lee gives easily, "but you know, Azula, you're actually pretty bad at being friends, so I don't think your judgement really counts."

You have never been bad at anything in your life.

"Yes you have," she says, apparently reading your words directly from your disgruntled stare. "I was there when you tried to learn the erhu. I'm glad the Fire Lord put a stop to that."

You open your mouth to castigate Ty Lee for speaking on matters far above her station and abruptly come to understand that, somehow, you have entirely lost control of the conversation, and may have never had it at all.

The plan was simple. You would suggest to Mai and Ty Lee that you spared them out of misplaced childhood sentimentality, a lie they would not believe, and in the ensuing argument they would reveal the motives for their treachery, which would allow you to prevent repeats down the line by taking preemptive actions to prevent similar flaws in all your future subordinates. Once "caught" in the lie, you would remind them of the old adage that one should keep their enemies closer, and they would see a truth they could understand in your actions: the cold-hearted pragmatism of royalty.

Instead, you are… almost about to argue with Ty Lee about your (lack of) instrumental talents, while Mai is off sulking somewhere because she's mad at you for something entirely separate to what you wanted her to be mad at you for.

How did it come to this?

"Just… get out of here, Ty Lee," you say, waving her off. "Go find Mai and make sure her idiot of an uncle hasn't done something stupid like try to arrest her. I need to think and your insipid smile is entirely too loud to let me."

"No worries, Azula!" Ty Lee says, bouncing towards the door in a flurry of pink. "Come find us when you're ready, okay?"

You will most certainly not.

(Liar.)

---

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 are indicated in bold.

Spoiler

(2/2) Azula, Alone?

You have nothing and no-one to rely on. Your friends have proven themselves traitors a hundred times over, whatever meaningless platitudes they choose to try to trick you with, your mother left and your brother couldn't be bothered to stay. Your father is all that remains, and you're trying to stop yourself from realising that does not mean what you once thought it did.

---

"I'm going to Yu Dao," is the first thing Mai says to you when you find her.

Not that you were looking—you were on a therapeutic stroll through the prison, inspecting the guards' progress in fixing their own incompetence as you made your way to the gondola and from there, the docks. You'd left orders earlier to ensure a ship was prepared for you—there's no point looking for your war balloon, you know from experience it's gone the way of Zuko—but you've found your presence often helps your lessers find a little extra effort they might otherwise misplace.

That Mai seems to have had a similar idea is convenient, but convenience is all it is.

"And hello to you too, Mai," you say, because a princess is always polite, in the same way a knife is always sharp.

She just looks at you, turning her head over her shoulder with an annoyed squint, trails of dark hair rustling against her narrow collar. "You can't plagiarise a sense of humour, Azula."

Whether or not you borrowed that line from something Ty Lee has said to you—more than once—is irrelevant to the conversation you intend to have, so you ignore her spurious accusations. "You seem confident that I will allow you out of my sight."

"I'm going to Yu Dao," Mai repeats, attention turned back to the winding, rocky path leading down to the docks now that you've stepped up to her side, "because frankly even dealing with my Father crying about how that crazy king tossed our entire palace out of Omashu and into a farm is better than having to deal with you and Zuko tugging me between you like a toy. Find me after it's done. But if you kill Zuko, I'll find you."

Most of the time, you'd be eager to remind her that you know a rather edifying number of terrible things that can be done to a person without killing them, but… the worst thing you could do to Zuko, your Father already did. You'd just embarrass yourself if you tried to pretend otherwise.

"I've tried that," you say instead, "but it never seems to stick."

Really, you have: you've killed Zuko at the Western Air Temple and at the Agni Kai quite a number of times, but you're still no closer to escaping this hateful cycle. That was the first possibility you eliminated. Whatever you have to do to escape, it doesn't require you to murder your brother.

Honestly, it's somewhat of a relief. Zuko turning out to be useless even for dying is so in-character that it reminds you not every constant of the universe is out to get you.

"There really is something different about you, Azula." Mai stops walking, choosing to lean up against the ragged cliff wall that frames this section of the pass—dark and porous, it towers above the both of you, though it stands far from tall enough to prevent the sun from soaking through the rock and your skin both.

The gravel crunches roughly beneath your armoured boots as you stop opposite her. "Is there?"

Mai doesn't say anything more, though.

She just stands there and waits.

Where did she get this accursed spine from?

"Think what you like," you say, staring her straight in the eye, gold to gold. No matter what platitudes she offers you, neither she nor Ty Lee deserve anything resembling the truth. They'd hardly believe you if you told them. "It's no concern of mine."

Mai shrugs, pushing off the wall and returning to the path. "Whatever. Ty Lee can't say I didn't try."

The rest of the walk to the dock passes in silence.

---

At the end of the day, it's easy to let Mai go: to Yu Dao, and to whatever happens in the world outside your cycle.

It's the best solution to the problem of her presence. You can't trust her around you, and you can't trust her within reach of Zuko, but you can't just throw her back in a cell. And you've grown so used to being abandoned that it doesn't even hurt this time. Of course she's leaving. The sun rises, the wind blows, and you are left alone. That's just how the world works.

Which is why it's quite inexplicable that Ty Lee isn't going with her.

"You're staying," you say, and barely bite off the unbecoming upward lilt of your voice that would turn it into something as revealing as a question.

"Yep!" Ty Lee is standing on her head, feet kicking at what looks to be a repurposed children's ball-and-cup—the cup is hooked on a pipe across the ceiling, snagging the ball in place so it can swing around every time Ty Lee taps it with a toe. "Aren't you happy, Azula? I'm happy!"

You eye the way her brown side-bangs sway across the dull metal of the ship's floor, sheen scraped away by hundreds of soldiers' boots, with carefully hidden distaste. "It does seem to be one of your most… noteworthy habits."

"You always have the funniest ways to pretend you're not insulting people," she says brightly, smiling up at you. It's a strange thing to see, upside-down as it is, but nonetheless Ty Lee's face is so built for joy that you can read it easily regardless. "It's one of the things I like about you, Azula."

You weren't aware she had ever realised what you meant.

"I have no need for your pity, Ty Lee," you say with a sigh, "and you do not need to flatter me to get what you want. If you wish to return to your circus, I shan't stop you. There's no point in pretending you want otherwise."

"Weeeeeeeell," she hums, contorting her bare feet to catch the ball between her heels while simultaneously exerting so little pressure on the ground with her fingertips that she almost seems to be hanging from the string attached to the ball, "I thought about that, actually, but then I realised it would clash with my aura, so I decided to stay with you instead. Isn't that exciting? It's been so long since it was just the two of us!"

"I am quite aware," you say, which you… did not mean to. What is wrong with you? That's three conversations in a row where your tongue has flailed around like a child's. Have you gone so long without talking to someone across anything but an open flame that you cannot even remember how to keep your thoughts inside your head? Spirits, at this rate you'll turn into Zuko—Zuko, who can't keep his mouth shut to save his face.

"Yeah," Ty Lee says, almost softly, "I thought you might be. But that doesn't matter now! It's going to be you, and me, and Mai in spirit!"

Mai has never done anything with spirit in her entire life, and you're certain she's not about to start now.

"That's not the point, Azula." Ty Lee shakes her head, which somehow does not move any other part of her body an inch. She truly is wasted as a performer. That kind of physical control is far better suited to violence. "But don't worry about it. I'm here to help!"

"You can help by getting out of that ridiculous pose." Must she flaunt her flexibility at every opportunity? You know she was attention-starved as a child and acts out dramatically to force others to engage with her on her terms, but there is nobody here but you, and you are already well aware you cannot match her absurd contortions. "This is a transit hall on a warship, not Bohai's Big Top Bonanza or whatever nonsense circuses pass for names these days."

Ty Lee backflips to her feet, casually avoiding hitting you, or the narrow steel walls, or the corrugated floor, landing perfectly on her toes without the slightest trembling in her posture. There's not even a thin sheen of sweat across her neck or belly. You can hold a plank with only your hands and turn it into a double-footed kick forwards while balancing on the edge of a moving gondola in the middle of a fight, but there's something irritating about Ty Lee's easy mastery nonetheless.

"Alright, alright," she says, grey-eyed gaze finally level with yours instead of originating from somewhere near your boots. "Sheesh, you're impatient today, Azula. Are we going somewhere once we get to Caldera?"

There is an assumption in that "we" that you are…

…probably going to entertain, you realise glumly, pressing an armoured forearm into your hip in lieu of clenching a fist or a jaw.

(You're in the Fire Nation, after all, on your way to Caldera Palace. You can no longer afford to show your feelings so easily. You know exactly who is watching.)

With Mai gone, and Zuko's death no longer on the table, Ty Lee is… you doubt she'll betray you before Sozin's Comet, at least. Well, you suppose she's the most likely person you know outside Zuko to get all teary-eyed about burning the Earth Kingdom to the ground, but where your brother is stupid enough to actually turn his feelings into actions, you don't think Ty Lee is quite as willing to tell the Fire Lord to his face that he's wrong. Fear may not be as reliable an ally to you as you thought, but your Father is another matter entirely.

And if nothing else, she'll be a useful distraction to whichever one of Zuko or Iroh or the waterbender or the Avatar comes to try and take your rightful place on the day of the Comet.

Speaking of Zuko and Iroh and the waterbender and the Avatar, though, Ty Lee's question does remind you that you have another decision to make.

Where are you going once you get to Caldera, Princess Azula?

[ ] To kill the Avatar at the Western Air Temple. You know where he sleeps, and perhaps it is ending one cycle that will free you from another.
It never works. Honestly, it's frustrating. You kill a spirit once, and suddenly everyone around him looks for you in every shadow.
[ ] To test your brother. Sometimes, when you fight across the airships, you taunt him about Mai, but it only makes him stronger. How will he react instead when he learns she's safe, and sound, and waiting somewhere far from your impending coronation? Will conflicting loyalties split his party, or will he finally prove as ruthless as a royal ought to be? Either way, he'll be more off-balance when the Comet comes, and maybe you'll finally be able to talk to him.
[ ] To abduct your brother. With your Father's attention fixed on Sozin's Comet and the plan to scour the Earth Kingdom to ash, you're sure you can find a suitable hole to toss Zuko in without him knowing. There you can interrogate him at your leisure, and find out what drives him to a stupidity as relentless as the loops that confine you. For all you know, the two are related. He does seem to be their most recurring feature.
[ ] To ignore your brother. You're not actually interested in him. You want the waterbender. She won't let you refuse Zuko's challenge on the day of the Comet, and if you kill her someone always kills you, so there's only one solution left: you'll remove her from the board, and ransom her back for the opportunity to negotiate with Zuko and the Avatar. They'll never see it coming.
[ ] Nowhere. You're going to wait in the palace until the day of the Comet, trying to convince your Father to take you along. Together, you will kill the Avatar, and maybe this way you can end two cycles at once.
Your Father does not change his mind without a fait accompli, like you presented him with after Ba Sing Se. Anything less than that—like the begging of his only son, prostrate on the floor—moves him only to violence.

 

[Magery]

Content warning: This chapter contains discussions of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and their victims from the perspective of a character raised in the culture and family that engaged in and perpetuated them.

---

​

"Ty Lee," you say sternly, staring at her, "repeat the plan back to me."

She pouts, but speaks nonetheless. "We'll attack the Western Air Temple a little before dawn. You'll draw all the attention, supported by airships. In the chaos, I'll locate and grab the waterbender. Once you've driven the others away, we'll take her back to the Fire Nation."

It's good that she remembers so clearly, given it is, indeed, currently a little before dawn and you are about to drop her a short way off from the Western Air Temple before you fly onward to pick a fight with your brother and the Avatar. There can be no mistakes here. The fate of your entire world—the world that has narrowed to nothing more than an endless nine-day loop—could depend on it.

"Good. Don't fail me." You almost don't say it, but you suppose you need to keep in practice managing your subordinates effectively, so you add a short, "and don't die, either."

Ty Lee throws a mock salute, tapping two fingers across her chest above her heart, and vaults off the railing of your airship to somersault her way to the ground. The rich vegetation that spreads across the top of the cliff concealing the Western Air Temple soon hides her startlingly pink silhouette from view as well, and you turn your attention back to your target.

Below you, under the overhang, sleeps the waterbender. You know, of course, that her name is Katara, that her brother is Sokka, that her father is Hakoda and her mother was Kya, that she is the last Southern waterbender living and that her style is a hodgepodge of self-taught instinct, scrambled scrolls, and Northern traditions. You know these things since you are not an idiot like Zuko, and so you make sure to learn your enemies long before they are ever permitted to understand that they are, in fact, your enemies. It is because you know these things that you think of her as the waterbender: you have dissected the facts of her life and determined the only one that matters.

(She, of course, knows you as Princess Azula, the Fire Lord's prodigal daughter, Avatar-slayer, Zuko's sister, and the face that smiles in her dreams when her family collapses around her time and time again.

This is the glory of Sozin's line. You are always more important to your victims than they will ever be to you.)

You regret, almost, that you won't be the one to face her this cycle. There was a time that the sight of her was ice down your spine, around your throat, against your eyes, a visceral reaction that sometimes broke your jaw open to screaming. You overcame it the only way you know how to overcome anything: you fought her, and you fought her, and you fought her, until you started to win, until you sublimated fear into confidence through the purity of violence.

It was painful. It was embarrassing. But it was necessary.

You are the one in control; of your body, of your mind, of your soul.

You must always be the one in control.

That's why you're here today, after all.

The waterbender is the key to ensuring you have control over Zuko and the Avatar on the day of the Comet, one way or another.

Just as you begin to wonder if Ty Lee has had enough time to get into position, you feel the tug of the sun low in your gut; it's weak, barely there, but you can feel it nonetheless. Dawn is beginning.

Well, that answers that question. It doesn't matter whether Ty Lee is in position now. It's time to act.

"Captain," you say softly to the ornately-armoured man who's been standing at silent attention behind your left shoulder ever since Ty Lee leapt to earth, "begin the operation."

His fist slams into his dark chestplate with the sharp crack of metal on metal, and he begins shouting orders over the polished metal deck at his men—which are then relayed across the whole fleet through a combination of signal flags and signal flames.

Your airship rocks in the wind as it begins to turn in preparation for the dive. Behind you, stretched out like the wings of a sea-raven, extends the rest of your expeditionary force, each mirroring the behaviour of their master. Wherever you look, soldiers scurry across a dozen identical decks to load a dozen identical bombs into a dozen identical tubes. The Fire Nation at war is many things, but in your hands, it is, and always will be, a perfectly-organised machine.

Moments later, the air is filled with the whistle of projectiles as your airships crest into range and your cannons launch their bombs towards the Western Air Temple. Ancient pagodas tremble and crumble beneath the explosive force brought to bear against them, thunderclap detonations shattering the sacred silence. Birds scream as they spiral away en masse on chaotic updrafts, and even your pristine hair is thrown into disarray by the echoing hammers of sound as your soldiers unfold to violence like petals towards the sun.

It's chaotic. It's brutal. And it took your enemies completely by surprise.

You can see it in the way the Avatar scurries madly through ground and air, deflecting bombs while trying and failing to disrupt the airships threatening to land and disgorge their faceless complements of the Fire Nation's finest. Most of him wants to reach the metal door that conceals his campsite and the fools who follow him—Zuko most definitively included—but unlike most of the times you mount this assault, the fact you're committing ground troops has him a little hesitant. A stray bomb flung into the wind poses little threat to the last airbender, and usually the record shows that the same holds for a squad of military firebenders, but combining the two complicates the situation enough that the military genius of an untrained pacifist monk has to think about it.

Eventually, he decides discretion is the better part of valour and flees toward the shelter dug into the thickest part of the pagoda he's holed up in, the metal doors slamming shut behind him with a fierce clang.

Good.

It's just as he disappears that your airship levels out of its dive, falling out of the shadowy cover of the crumbling cliff.

The whole of your focus narrows to heartbeat and breath.

You inhale.

Your hands circle.

Your blood boils cold.

The world splits against your fingertips.

You exhale—

—and wind becomes lightning.

There's nothing left of the doors the Avatar had put his faith in. Just cherry-red shards, splintered across rock.

You blow the smoke off your fingers with theatrical insouciance, and gesture towards the door. "Well? What are you waiting for?"

Your soldiers, individually indistinguishable in their concealing red-and-black armour and skull masks, practically sear across the smoking courtyard in their haste to follow your command. Sometimes you really do have to applaud your armourers and their attention to aesthetics—a Fire Nation charge resembles a howling flame long before its members begin to firebend. It's almost unfortunate that your own fire blazes blue; you can't really have your personal guard painted in your colours, lest someone think they're meant to be water peasants instead.

For a moment, you drum your fingers on the gold splash of your belt, thinking. You know you aren't trapping the Avatar and his fellows here. They have a competent earthbender in the middle of a forest of stone temples, and a flying bison. You'd have needed to bring a far larger force to even threaten that.

No, the question you're contemplating is something else entirely: where is Zuko?

Among his many irritating habits is the ability to be in the stupidest possible place at the stupidest possible time. It makes him predictable, especially when you can design the situation ahead of time to maximise the stupidity right where you want him to be—just like in Ba Sing Se—but when you can't, you just have to assume that something, somewhere, is going wrong because of him.

In an uncoiling whip of brown hair and fluttering silk, Ty Lee handsprings back out of the mouth of the entrance, just under a snaking whip of water that abruptly hisses to steam as a wayward blast of fire incinerates it before it can be redirected to wrap around Ty Lee's ankles. A high-pitched yell of watch where you're aiming, you idiot! bounces off the walls, clashing against a lower but no less indignant yell of then tell me before you attack! and you sigh.

"Oh, hey Azula!" Ty Lee says with a grin. "Look what I found!"

She holds out… the Avatar's pet winged lemur, which she has somehow managed to chi-block based on the way it droops awkwardly between her hands like some kind of furry slug.

Zuko and the waterbender sprint out of the tunnel and skid to a stop. "Give Momo ba—"

Their voices trail off as their eyes take in you, and your airship, and the fleet that still fills the sky behind you.

You smile.

"And you brought her right to me, Zuzu," you say, clapping once, twice, three times. "Well done, brother."

"What are you doing here?" he growls, settling into that strange new stance of his, whose origin you've never learned in all your cycles. If it weren't so unorthodox he'd almost look impressive, even with his dishonourably short hair—his anger sits around him as a cloak rather than a collar, and the ripples of heat that pulse in time with the furnace of his breath are almost respectable.

Not quite respectable enough to save him from the fierce, wave-backed shove that sends him sprawling as the waterbender turns on him in a flurry of dark skin and darker scowls, though. "I can't believe I'm surprised you betrayed us again!"

Ty Lee looks at you, the whole of her face bent into a question. You shrug a single shoulder in reply. That wasn't supposed to work.

Zuko is nearly stupid enough to turn his back on you to yell at the waterbender—but he must realise what kind of invitation that would be, because he catches himself at the last moment and ends up in a pose that looks more like he's trying to calm a pair of wild animals than anything else. It would probably work better if he actually were; animals have always had a strange affection for your brother.

"I'm not!" he shouts, syllables scraped out like metal against gravel. "Katara, it's Azula! She always lies! Why are you trusting her over me?"

"Because I just try to kill her, instead of pretend to be her friend and then try to kill her," you interject helpfully, tapping out a short code to Ty Lee in the faux-bored drumming of your fingers against your arm guards as you cross them over your chest.

"Not helping, Azula." Zuko glares at you with his sun-bright eyes, though his body is still tilted more towards the waterbender than you.

She is much the same, attention bouncing between you and your brother like a weathervane spinning in the wind… but you can see her hands twitching in your direction. As much as she distrusts your brother, and isn't that glorious, she still hates you more. It's a little childish of her, really. The Avatar was a legitimate military target engaged in combat against Fire Nation forces, and if you expected his twelve-year-old mask to make you hesitate, well, that is the sort of hypocrisy you'd expect from a Water Tribe savage.

(After all, nobody hesitates when they see you. That's just how wars are fought these days: with children.)

"Well," you say, "this has been fun, but I do have places to be, so…"

You breathe in air, and breathe out lightning.

Your fingers pluck it from the air in arcing circles like the turning of the world, and with a stabbing lunge the blade of your hand blasts it towards Zuko with an echoing crack.

As you expected, he steps into the bolt, catching it in his arms and hurling it into the sky just above your head—or he would have, had you aimed it directly at him like an idiot.

But you were aiming at the ground just in front of his feet the whole time, so all Zuko's instinctive attempt to redirect your lightning amounts to is tripping over the fragmented rocks that blast across his calves and knees, ripping sharp lacerations through his billowing trousers.

He falls with a cry of surprise, palms nonetheless turning it into a coiling handspring because flashy acrobatics regrettably run in the family. By the time he lands, though, the harsh grimace across his face the only sign he feels the sluggishly-bleeding wounds on his legs, it's already too late.

The smoke clears to reveal that Ty Lee has already knocked the waterbender unconscious.

The plan had been simple. You'd instructed Ty Lee to sidle towards the waterbender while her attention was focused more on you and Zuko than Ty Lee, and to strike on your signal. In the end, Ty Lee had timed it to perfection: for a fatal instant the waterbender had flinched at the sound of your lightning—just for the shadow of a second, nothing that would have mattered in any other circumstance but this, yet flinched nonetheless. Ty Lee had needed nothing more.

Now the waterbender is in your custody, and your work here is done.

"Good work, Ty Lee," you say. "Take her back to the airship and make sure she's secure and unconscious until we reach Caldera. Oh—and let go of that useless flying rat, would you?"

"Okay, Azula!" Ty Lee says, carefully placing the winged lemur on the ground and, pulling out, of all things, a small scarf as a pillow for its head. She lifts the waterbender into her arms with a little less care, biceps straining but steady nonetheless. A couple of soldiers disembark the vessel and run across the pockmarked stone slabs toward her, presumably to help, but you tune them out in favour of looking back at your brother.

"Sorry, Zuko," you say, "but I was never actually here for you."

"What do you want with Katara?" There's fire burning in his hands, and more in his stare. If you were anyone else, you might even be intimidated by the way his scar twists across his face to match.

(But you were there, when he burned. It's never been the scar that intimidates you.)

"Don't play the fool." You frown at him. "You'll never be a convincing challenge for the throne if you don't understand leverage, Zuko."

A flicker of confusion passes over his expression, before he settles back into that intense, whole-body focus. "Why do you need leverage, Azula? Worried that Fa—that the Fire Lord won't be able to defeat Aang?"

You don't really think it counts as worry when you have never made it to a future where your Father has won, despite how absurd it is to imagine that the Fire Lord empowered by a once-in-a-century celestial event can't even crush the same spirit you killed without it.

The only thing you allow to show on your face, however, is the curl of your lips into a scoff. "Hardly. It's called the long game. Do try to keep up."

"Then take me instead," Zuko says. It's plain to see he doesn't even have to think about it. The words just spill out like heartsblood. "Aang's… different. Any one of his friends would work. It doesn't have to be Katara. It could be me. And I'm his firebending teacher, too. He's only just started learning. He needs me way more than he needs her."

The argument is actually sound. Does Zuko's brain only switch on when it comes to planning self-sacrifice?

"No," you say anyway. Your Father will execute him on sight, and that would defeat the entire point of this exercise. "Goodbye, brother. I'll see you on the day of the Comet."

You exhale a wall of cerulean flame—the taste of it like spice charred to ash—and turn away.

It's nothing like what you can make when Sozin's legacy crowns the sky, but it serves as a useful enough distraction. By the time Zuko punches through it with a firm Hah! you are already halfway to your airship, short sharp shocks of fire directed from your feet propelling you across earth and air to land, somewhat gracefully, on the deck of your airship with the thump of boots against steel.

Something glints out of the corner of your eye.

You spin and lash out with a coruscating whip of flame that blasts the metal projectile—the water peasant's boomerang—out of the sky and well away from you.

You are not falling for that again.

One loop was more than enough.

The Avatar's bison—the white-furred flying menace barely sensible enough to be afraid of fire—swoops around from the side, but you have nothing to be afraid of. The Avatar has to fly it, the earthbender is too blind to be dangerous in the air even with all this metal, Zuko is on the ground, the waterbender is below the deck in your custody, and the peasant just threw away their only remaining ranged weapon.

Unless they're willing to ram you, your escape is inevitable.

"Captain," you say, "take us to Caldera."

The bison swoops and turns, spiralling through the sky with surprisingly agility for such a lumbering beast, but the barrage of fire and falling bombs from all sides—your ships taking special care to fill any firing line between your ship and the Avatar—stymie its progress enough that you are soon away.

You watch the impotent fury of the Avatar's expression carefully until it fades from sight.

Mission accomplished.

You breathe out.

It's time to go home.

---

​

There had been a point in the Hundred Years War where the Fire Nation had thought it could take the benders of the Southern Water Tribes and make them its own.

Some over-ambitious bureaucrat in the early days of Azulon's reign, burning with righteous fervour, had envisaged a future where all elements bent themselves for the glory of Fire. It was a dream that hadn't lasted, through a combination of fierce resistance from the captured waterbenders and the idea's champion being executed for spouting what seemed like suspiciously pro-Avatar rhetoric in support of his plans. But a few of its legacies remain to this day, dotted in obsolete protocols and mouldering libraries—and in the room whose door you stand outside.

Beyond that door is a cell, designed from fundamental principles to be completely inimical to waterbending. In this, it is nothing unusual. The Fire Nation has dozens of these cells across dozens of its cities and ports and outposts. Most have been empty for decades: the North cowered like a gormless badgerfrog for a century, and you could have rendered the South summarily extinct on the flight over, if you'd so chose.

What makes this cell different from all the rest is that it has a bed. And a desk. And a chair. It has a selection of dresses; a mirror and a set of skincare powders; a small bookcase filled with scrolls about the Fire Nation. It has all of these things and more besides.

It's a cell designed for the slowest and most insidious torture of all—the kind Long Feng so crudely aped with the Dai Li and the Joo Dee's. The kind gently described in the records of this place as a 'program of cultural reeducation'.

Frankly, it's a ludicrous idea. The savages who populate the frozen wastelands of the world will never understand the strength of the Fire Nation's civilisation, and all the mouth-breathing about the 'enlightened conquest' to 'bring the light of Agni to all corners of the nations' the army likes to sell to the common people has never shared the same air as an Earth Kingdom peasant. You don't fight this war to help people. Nobody fights wars to help people.

You fight this war to win it, because that is the only choice available to the strong.

(Because that is, of course, the true definition of strength: the inability to choose.)

Regardless, you are thankful this once, at least, for the hubristic pretences of your forebears. Without this cell, you wouldn't have anywhere to put the waterbender that wouldn't end up with you on the opposite end of an angry Zuko and an angry Avatar. The conditions of an ordinary waterbender-proofed cell are… not particularly appropriate for a valuable political hostage.

It's with that thought in mind that you unlock the door with a careful whisper of cerulean flame through the intricate mechanism and step into the gilded cage.

It's well-apportioned; the colour scheme is wholly Fire, from the red carpet to the gold curtains around the bed, the flame-etched scrollwork across the wooden cupboards and bedside table, and the torches whose light flickers from orange to blue as their flame becomes yours, smoke sweet with incense. The only inside that isn't wholly Fire, in fact, is the waterbender.

The waterbender who, of course, tries to brain you with a stool as you walk in.

There's a bravery in it. You'll give her that. She's alone, unarmed, in a part of Caldera she's never seen, in a building whose extent she does not know, and her first instinct is still to fight, and in that fighting, seize a chance to flee.

Such a pity that bravery is not enough.

You duck under and into the swing, stamping an armoured boot right between her bare feet, and your hand shoots upward to dig your painstakingly-filed nails around her throat. From afar, they'd almost be mistaken for stains of blood themselves. Your other hand presses two fingers into the flesh of her belly, pinching the thick white fabric of her belt.

A lazy flicker of blue, like the sky ignited to spark, kisses the back of your palm.

She freezes.

"When you were a child, they taught you to scrabble in the snow," you say conversationally. "When I was a child, they taught me to cook my assassins in their own skin."

You breathe in, swallow even that tiny shadow of a flame, and step out and away, not bothering to take the stool she still holds in a surprisingly steady grip.

"You may be an adequate bender," you admit, because as much as you would love to forget it you know what it's like to lose to this girl, "but your approach to murder is disappointingly obvious. Next time try a cupboard. Or under the bed."

You didn't think someone outside your brother could make confusion look so angry, but you suppose that explains at least a little why he'd chosen to fight alongside her. A shared language is a shared soul, or however the proverb goes.

"Why are you giving me advice on how to better assassinate you?" is the first thing she says to you. "Shouldn't you be monologuing about how you're so great and invincible before you drag a turtle-duck in here and set fire to it for fun?"

What has Zuko been telling them about you, exactly?

(You only ever burned a toy turtle-duck, and your mother wasn't even proud.)

Rolling your eyes, you reply, "I am not some cheap theatre cut-out. If I wanted to scare you, I'd ask you if you remember what it was like to feel the Avatar's heart fail under your palms."

Then you smile, bright and political. "But I don't. So stop wasting my time and sit down so we can talk like they do in civilised parts of the world."

"Civilised?" she snaps. "I barely have a civilisation because of people like you!"

There are no people like you, but you suppose you'll accept the compliment—such is the heavy burden of royalty, to claim and owe responsibility for the glories of your entire nation.

"You barely had one long before we began to liberate the world," you say. "No need to make a fuss. Sit down. I picked this room especially for you—would you really refuse the generosity of a princess?"

She throws the stool at you.

You breathe out a tongue of flame.

Ash sifts through the air like sand tossed in the wind, staining the carpet between your bodies.

You raise a single, sharp eyebrow.

"Are you quite finished, peasant?"

"Oh, wow, the murderous maniac princess calls me a peasant, I'm so surprised," she says, blue eyes flashing. "Even Zuko had better manners."

"I'm not sure what you intend to accomplish here," you say mildly. "I am the only reason you are still alive, and the only way you will remain still alive. I understand that your people appear to love doomed, suicidal resistance if the way they still fight our armies indicates anything, but surely you are not so uneducated as to think there is any purpose in…"

You extend a hand in her general direction—the tension in her arms and neck, the slight acceleration of her breath, the way her toes dig into the carpet—with your palm up.

"...whatever this is."

"I don't care. I would rather die than give you a single thing that you want."

You'd be frustrated if this wasn't all so incredibly predictable.

"Look, waterbender—"

"I have a name, it's Katara. Use it, Princess Azula."

"—I don't know what you're expecting to happen, but I will be honest with you—"

"You know how to do that?"

"—this childish display will achieve nothing except to solidify my impression that you are as dull as your pedestrian morality suggests."

Okay, maybe you're a little frustrated.

"I'm sorry you were too busy listening to Daddy talk about kicking polar puppies to learn how to be a good person." She smirks, a flash of white teeth stark against the smooth brown of her skin. "See? I can lie too. I'm not sorry at all."

"How compassionate of you," you observe, hands falling to natural parade rest behind the small of your back. "But hypocrisy is the heartbeat of the weak, so colour me wholly unsurprised."

"Says the Fire Nation propaganda reel."

This is getting you nowhere.

You sigh.

Why is it that every conversation you've tried to have this cycle has turned out so terribly?

"Your insecurity is quite aggravating," you say, taking a couple of steps backward to lean against the dark wood of the wall, relaxing your shoulders and knees so your whole body seems to slump without actually losing any part of your core stance. "No wonder you were arguing so much with my brother."

"What are you talking about?" She doesn't sound any less furious, but you've disrupted her rhythm.

You examine her for a moment: a near-perfect picture of Southern Water Tribe hostility in patriotic blue-and-white, dark skin and dark hair a sharp contrast to the bright colours of her robes. The hoop braids are a tactical weakness—easy to grab and drag for a headbutt—but likely cultural, though they lack the stately dignity of your own topknot and crown. The only break in her image is the necklace, which as you understand it stems from a Northern tradition. How curious.

"Your insecurity," you say again. "Come on now: you surely have nightmares about being abducted by a Fire Nation raid, the way your mother only avoided because she died in front of you instead. Now you're torn between hoping the Avatar will rescue you and hoping that he focuses on the Fire Lord instead, and that internecine conflict has you lashing out at the first target you see to try and feel less helpless."

The last few words fall to a silence broken only by the sounds of her breath—short and hitched, like her body isn't sure whether to scream or cry.

Her mind already knows, though, based on the way her face swells with fury like thunderclouds before rain.

"What is wrong with you?" she spits, both hands curled to fists and shaking by her sides. "What is wrong with you?"

You raise a languid shoulder.

"Funny, my mother asked the same question," you say. "Chin up, waterbender. At least yours was willing to die for you. Mine didn't even want to stay."

You're expecting something like no wonder but instead she doesn't speak at all—she just stares, watching you in simmering silence. If you were Zuko, her eyes would be fixed right on your scar.

"What?" you ask, drumming your fingernails against the wall in artfully-feigned boredom. "Do I have something on my face?"

She shakes her head, ponytail coiling behind her back. "What's funny is that both you and Zuko tried the same thing."

Oh? This'll be interesting. "And what did we try?"

"Zuko said the Fire Nation had taken his mother away from him, too," she says, folding her arms fiercely across her chest. "I almost felt sorry for him. You know, before he betrayed me to go running off after you. Now here you are: same dead mother story, but this time I. Don't. Care."

There's a little too much venom in that last sentence for you to actually believe her.

"Oh, don't worry—I don't either. It's Zuzu who's all broken up about it." You smile, though it feels a little sticky on your face. "I suppose I can't blame him too much. She picked him, like Father picked me. Which one did your mother pick: you, or the boy? I suppose it must have been you, or else she'd still be alive."

She's about to shout, lips curled into a snarl and fingers clawed into her thighs as if to hold herself back from throwing herself at you, when she suddenly seems to process something—her face shuts down and she takes a half-step back, almost bumping into the side of the chair behind her. One hand catches itself on its mahogany ridges, and then she takes a steadying breath, deep in her lungs, in-two-three-four, out.

When she looks at you again, the tilt of her mouth and the set of her jaw reminds you a little of Mai, when she asked you that ridiculous question, or Ty Lee, when you told her about choices.

But she says nothing and the impression soon passes, like smoke in the wind.

No matter.

"I hope whatever epiphany you think you came to about me was useful in understanding the situation you're in," you say, deliberately indifferent, "but perhaps I should reinforce it further. You are my prisoner. I will not be releasing you before Sozin's Comet. You will not be harmed or mistreated unless you prove so uncooperative that stricter measures are required to keep you here until then. You may nod if you understand, but I don't really care."

"What do you even want with me?" she asks instead. "Are you so scared of Aang you need a hostage after he beats the Fire Lord and comes for you?"

Much like Zuko, she will never understand that it has nothing to do with fear, and everything to do with escaping these accursed cycles.

"My Father is the greatest firebender in the world," you say rather than answering. "All your precious Avatar has is a few weeks of instruction from the worst firebender in our family. Do you really believe a fourth half-bitten element will make a difference, when I alone was enough to kill him with three?"

You know, of course, that it does—but she does not.

And yet: her eyes are clear and firm as she says, "I believe Aang can save the world."

The faith these people have in each other is as baffling as ever.

(Almost as baffling as the fact they are, time and time again, proven spectacularly right.)

"I suppose I shouldn't have expected anything else," you say with a sigh, briefly glancing at the ceiling and the swirling pattern of stylistic flame that decorates it. "Well, whatever. Think what you will—until the day of the Comet, that is the only freedom allowed to you. After that… we shall see how much of a fool my brother intends to be this time."

"Why do you call him that?" she asks, cocking a hip so that she's leaning against the upholstered armrest of the chair behind her. For once, there's more curiosity on her face than anger.

Your raised eyebrow would have withered even an ocean. "You have met Zuko, yes?"

"No, no that," she says. "Trust me, I know he's an idiot. What I meant was: why do you call him your brother?"

…what?

Has she gone mad?

"We have the same mother and the same Father," you say slowly. "Do they not teach genealogy in the Water Tribes?"

"That's why Sokka is my brother, yes," she says with… patience? "But it's not why he's my brother. Or why Aang is his brother. Or why Toph is our sister. We're together. We're one. Family first and always. But you're not like that at all, are you? If I asked you to think about family the first thing that would probably come to your mind was violence."

You must know the pain of losing a first-born son. By sacrificing your own!

You will learn respect, and suffering will be your teacher.

The showdown that was always meant to be. Agni Kai!

Something shifts across your face without your permission. It might be fury.

It might be truth.

Whatever it is, she seems satisfied and disappointed all at once.

"Yeah, I thought so." One of her hands comes up to clasp her necklace, cradling the jewel—as light as the sky, and as smooth as moonlight—between her fingers. "What I don't get is that most of the time, you say Zuko's name like a threat, but sometimes… sometimes you say it like—"

"—like what, peasant?" Your voice, when you finally find it, would have been mistaken for ragged in anyone else's mouth.

She snorts, ignoring the question. "I guess that's the other thing you share. Even when someone tries to be a little kind to you, you can't help but spit in their face. No wonder that gloomy girl betrayed you. She was probably sick of how awful you are."

This savage is very,

very,

very lucky you are not your brother.

(Or your father.)

When you breathe out, the temperature of the room visibly rises; the air trembles with haze and the metal door creaks as pockets of it expand faster than others.

But that is all.

The rest becomes the flame-in-void, the perfect nothingness that is the moment before lightning.

You open your eyes and wonder if they, too, howl as bright as the sun.

"Katara, daughter of Kya, daughter of Hakoda, sister of Sokka." You wonder if she knows the Fire Nation only names their citizens like this before an Agni Kai. Or an execution. "If I thought you understood a single thing you are talking about, you would find what I did to the Avatar was the closest thing I have to mercy. You know nothing about Mai. Or my brother. Or me. Take whatever pale insights you think you have and lock them up to rot before I do the same to you."

She just raises a dark eyebrow, seemingly unimpressed.

That's fine.

You know exactly how to respond, and it begins by leaving.

You push off the wall, boots pressing into the carpet, and step toward the doorway as if you're storming out.

One breath. Two breaths. A slight stutter as she opens her mouth to speak, and—

"—oh, but before I go. I know how much you love being kind, so here's a gift for you."

You stop just before the door, and turn, smiling like a mongoose-lizard.

"The man who killed your mother was Commander Yon Rha, who retired with full military honours four years ago after a long and dedicated career. He lives with his mother in a small village in our south islands. I'd point it out to you on a map, but—duty calls! The life of a princess is ever so busy."

You linger just long enough to see the shock on her face start to displace itself with rage, and then let the door slam shut behind you.

---

​

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

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

Spoiler

(2/3) Monster

There is a path in the palace. At the end of that path is a room. And in that room is a monster. Her name is Azula, and she has understands neither friends nor feelings. She hardly even has understands family. All that is left to her is what she has learned: and what she has learned is to want, to take, and not to care if the taking hurts. She might just end the world, if you let her.

---

​

After that very successful conversation, and another, shorter conversation with Ty Lee to ensure she remains as part of the waterbender's guards, your attention turns to the handful of days left before the Comet comes.

Most of the time, by this point in a cycle your attention is entirely on your father's looming 'change of plans'. But you have come to realise that there has never been anything you can do about it. No matter how much you ask. No matter how much you beg. All you get is his ha—

No.

The Phoenix King always soars alone.

(The Phoenix King always soars without you.)

All you can do is accept his decision and move on with your own intentions.

You have the shape of your overall plan—use the waterbender to guarantee that Zuko will sit down, shut up, and listen for five seconds instead of trying to fight you. It's a chance you've never had before, an opportunity to do something different, and you will seize it with grasping hands for naught but that alone.

However: you cannot afford to improvise something like this. You need to be sure of what you will say, and where you will say it, and why Zuko needs to hear it.

So, Princess Azula, it's time to make a decision.

How are you going to approach that final confrontation?

[ ] With violence. Killing Zuko might be off the table, but that doesn't mean you can't make him hurt. He made his choice, and now it's time he learned the consequences. Who ever said an Agni Kai can't be won with words alone?
And prove the waterbender right? You would sooner contemplate regicide.
[ ] With curiosity. Just this once, you'll hear Zuko out. Suppose your Father loses. Suppose you relinquish your throne. What does he plan to do? Where will he take the Fire Nation from here? How will he handle the fact that the war is almost won? What will he do with the soldiers, the factories, the fleets? How will the history books describe the reign of Fire Lord Zuko? And how will he react, when he realises he doesn't know?
[ ] With frustration. In the end, everything always turns out for Zuko. Mother saves his life, Iroh holds his hand, and he hardly has to turn his back on your Father for a month to see him fall. You have bent your entire life to perfection—to the only way there ever was to win—and all it's given you is nine days, after nine days, after nine days. Why is he born lucky, while these days you sometimes find yourself wondering if you were unlucky to be born? Why? Why?
[ ] With truth. You have a chance to talk to Zuko alone, on the day of the Comet, without fear of what you'll see should you stare too deep into a nearby mirror. You will never have a better chance than this to convince someone about what is happening to you—and Zuko has surely seen stranger things on his travels across the Four Nations.
Tell Zuko? Tell Zuko? You couldn't even trust him to stay when you gave him literally everything he had ever claimed to want: to be home, with your Father's approval, the nation's acclaim, and Mai's attention. How could you possibly trust him with this?
[ ] With ennui. It always seems to end this way. You meet Zuko on the day of the Comet, and never see the day after. It feels like you've spent your whole lives chasing after each other's shadows, and everyone who ever mattered to either of you apparently made sure to encourage it. How many times have you killed him? How many times has he killed you? If there's a point to it, you've long lost it in these endless cycles. So why is he here?

 

[Magery]

"What," you say very, very softly, "do you mean, she escaped?"

The lines of kneeling guards—unmasked, unarmoured—do not have an answer.

Out of their cages of iron and steel, they spread from one end of the Fire Nation to the other. Some have rounded cheeks, others narrow noses, three share the same shade of gold that marks them as natives of Shuhon, and one has the distinctive scars where her traditional Ma'inka temple jewellery was removed prior to her service. The sergeant's skin is three tones darker than the shivering captain next to her.

You do not need to see their faces to taste their fear—to see it in the nervous twitch of one guard's finger against his thigh, in the way another at the end of the row blinks a little faster than might be healthy. You do not need to have them genuflecting in only their padded tunics and trousers and sandals to be able to burn them where they sit.

But it's not about the need.

It's about the message.

"Ty Lee," you say, and she freezes where she's been awkwardly pacing behind the second and last row of guards, not technically part of the ranks but nonetheless given the same task, "I am going to ask the captain three questions. If he answers truthfully, you are going to nod. If he lies, you are going to shake your head. If he, or anyone, turns around to look at you, I will assume their guilt and punish it accordingly. You may all speak to answer I understand, Princess Azula."

Ty Lee sounds a little half-hearted, but the rest shout as if their lives depend on it.

How apt.

"Very well. We shall begin."

You say nothing at first, instead allowing your eyes to examine the room in feigned curiosity. There's nothing really interesting about it—after fourteen years of living in them, most of the expensively-panelled meeting rooms around the Fire Nation blend into one another—save for your throne. Hard-backed, it rests on a raised dais at the back of the room, exaggerating the shadow you cast across the assembled unfortunates thanks to the row of simmering blue torches that line the wall behind you. Nevertheless, you keep looking, pausing to admire the swirling constellations in the replica of The Passing of Lady Jingwei hanging behind Ty Lee, and then to contemplate a non-existent chip in the paint of one of your curved nails.

Eventually, finally, you speak.

"Captain Gong," you say, and the man starts nervously, jowls quivering, "two days ago, I gave you a valuable political prisoner. The last living bender in the Southern Water Tribe. I gave you the facility to hold her. I gave you twice as many guards as you asked for. I gave you a chi-blocker with experience subduing her. Tell me: if I asked you to produce my prisoner, what would you say?"

"I—" he begins, before swallowing and jerking his head back down as he remembers you have not yet given him permission to view your face, "I have no excuses, Princess Azula."

"Good," you say, seemingly pleasant—until you snap your fingers and an arc of lightning cracks above your hand to punctuate your next few syllables, "because I did not ask for them. I asked you what you would say if I told you I wanted to see my prisoner."

"I, I, I would say that I could not, because she escaped last night, Princess Azula."

Ty Lee nods, though her eyes are wide with worry.

"Yes. You would."

You roll the spark of lightning over your knuckles, a theatric only Ty Lee can see but that every firebender in the room can feel, the exquisite shattering of the cold fire rolling over them with every breath they take. None of them have ever been this close to it. None of them have ever met someone who can toy with it like this. You hope they understand exactly how grateful they should be.

Not for your mastery—for the fact the hollow-void meditation you have fallen into is the only thing keeping you from burning them alive.

"Next question, Captain. You have just told me she escaped. What would you say if I asked you how?"

You know, already, that he has no explanation. Even if you could not follow the slight twitch of his ducked eyes to the sergeant by his side and another two guards in the row behind—the three primary witnesses—it would be clear to you simply because a man who had valuable information that might interest his princess enough to spare his life would not be so terrified of being asked for it.

He opens his mouth, eyes pale with fear—and for once, surprises you, because instead of immediately trying to deflect your attention to the sergeant who was on duty in the west hall or the two guards who brought the waterbender her dinner that fateful evening, he tries to answer your question directly. "I would say that—Princess Azula, I would say that the prisoner somehow overpowered the guards who delivered her food, which allowed her to escape into the prison complex, where she somehow overpowered the guards patrolling and escaped into Caldera City, where the pursuit lost her in a local spirit festival."

Ty Lee nods again. Of course she does. Even the festival part is true—the capital city of the Fire Nation has many such celebrations, some localised to only a few alleys, and with Sozin's Comet just a handful of days away their frequency continues to grow.

Your hissing, spitting spark bounces from one hand to the other, and for a little while you do nothing but flick it from finger to finger like you're conducting some short-lived electric symphony. Eventually, you look up again, watching a bead of sweat slip down the captain's voluminous chin and splash against the dark fabric of his tunic.

"Very well, Captain Gong. Last question." The words slither out of your mouth like poison. "What would you say if I asked you to tell me the names of those guards who the prisoner so conveniently overpowered?"

He swallows, knuckles whitening where they rest on top of his knees.

"I would beg for your mercy, Princess Azula, and give you my name instead."

There's a sharp intake of breath from the sergeant, who almost makes the mistake of looking up to see your silhouette on the throne, all sprawled angles and looming judgement.

Ty Lee looks mildly impressed, somewhere beneath the dread.

A flick of your wrist, and the snap of lightning you've been cultivating splinters the wood in front of the captain's full-body bow. He flinches, one stray shard of wood carving a line of blood across his cheek, just under his eye.

"You lost any right to my mercy when you lost my prisoner."

You rise from the throne like a catapult stone rises above a castle wall, boots clicking against the stone dais and then the wooden floorboards until you stand directly in front of him. The only things he is permitted to see are the narrow, black points they taper to.

"So until you bring her back, you shall not have it."

Crouching down, you place a finger under his chin, and tilt his head up to meet your sunlit stare. The hook of your nail digs into the flabby flesh.

"If my prisoner is not returned to me by the day of Sozin's Comet, I will see you all dishonourably discharged from the Domestic Forces and sent to the colonies. I hear Yu Dao has been begging for some reliable manual labour that isn't in a place to question orders."

When you drop his jaw, it thuds back to the ground, as if his body has lost the strength to hold it up.

"You may all speak to say I understand, Princess Azula."

The shout is just as loud as the first time.

"Now get out of my sight."

The guards press fists to their hearts—still kneeling—and then stand as one to file, or in some cases run, out of the sliding screen doors at the other end of the room. You notice the sergeant surreptitiously supporting the captain, whose knees don't seem to be quite communicating with the rest of him.

As the last leaves, almost slamming the screen closed in his haste before abruptly realising he would be slamming a door on a princess and instead sliding it very carefully the last few inches, Ty Lee… doesn't quite bounce across the floorboards towards you. There's not enough pep in her step to call it a bounce. She's nervous.

"I am surrounded by blithering incompetence," you snarl as she approaches, forcing another bristle of lightning out of your mind and into your hands. "One thing. I asked for one thing. Explain to me, Ty Lee. Explain to me how I can be here without my prisoner."

"It—what she did, Azula." Ty Lee blanches, like someone's poured the blood from her cheeks out in front of her. "She could move your body. She moved my body. The moon was full and she moved my body."

A small part of you thinks that must be a special horror for Ty Lee, to have the instrument she has honed for the whole of her life suddenly march to a different tune.

"What do you mean?" the larger part asks. "What was she bending?"

"Blood," Ty Lee answers with a shudder. "She said it was blood."

---

​

Ty Lee sticks close to you in the days to follow.

She's there when you train—sunrise, midday, sunset, and briefly in the hour before you sleep so you're always familiar with what your firebending is like at its weakest. There when you harangue the practically-armchair generals and admirals of the Domestic Forces for ignoring the significant concern that, Sozin's Comet or not, the pacification of the Earth Kingdom will take all of your nation's most powerful military assets out of the Home Islands and therefore make them vulnerable. There when you eat twice as much as Zuko did at your age for each meal and take four times as long to eat it because a princess must maintain her dignity no matter her hunger; there when you finally find an hour between a debriefing with the Ministry of the Interior and a strategy council with the Home Fleet to soak in your personal spa.

Unfortunately for her, she's also there when you eventually get so sick of her ridiculous hovering that you throw a scroll at her head the next time she interrupts your attempt to study an intelligence report on the waterbender's possible movements.

It bounces off the marble pillar she's standing next to, and flutters ignominiously to the carpeted floor.

"What is wrong with you, Ty Lee? Must you haunt my every waking hour? Did the savage spook you so terribly that she turned your spine to water too, not just your blood?"

She flinches back from the scalding hiss of your voice, almost spilling the tea she's carrying from its delicate, gold-edged cups. A precariously-balanced set of walnut cookies slips off the edge of one of the saucers and lands on her foot with a dry little slap.

Even when someone tries to be a little kind to you, you can't help but spit in their face.

You did not go through the painstaking process of burning out every shard of your mother's ghost fracturing across your brain only to have her replaced by the waterbender instead.

"I… may have misspoken," you say grudgingly, flattening your scowl into something resembling neutrality. Laying your hands on the rich nanmu wood of your desk, you inhale, exhale, and speak more softly. Not much. But a little. "Perhaps I meant to say I understand that losing control of your body to forces beyond your control can be a… disruptive experience. But you must stop hovering, Ty Lee. Sozin's Comet comes the day after tomorrow, and with it our final victory. I have work to do."

Ty Lee blinks a couple of times in surprise, having likely expected a far harsher castigation to follow. Her grey eyes flick down to the cookies on the floor and then back at your face.

"You never worked this hard when we were chasing the Avatar," she says, perhaps a bit petulantly.

Well, no. Of course not. You didn't need to. The Avatar practically chased himself.

(It helped that you were halfway across the world from anyone who might be watching.)

"This is Caldera, Ty Lee," you say, "and I am the Crown Princess. Zuko might have been able to escape his duties to swan about with Mai by getting banished for so long he forgot he even had them, but I am not Zuko. I have responsibilities, and clearly a clown like Senior Undersecretary Wang is too incompetent to be trusted to fulfil them in my stead if he thinks the waterbender is hiding in cabbage shipments."

Ordinarily, you might not have to waste so much of your time at a desk, but it's not just the oncoming Comet that's delegating more and more of the Fire Nation's day-to-day inanity to you as your Father prepares for the invasion—it's the fact that you also need to prepare for Zuko's arrival, and hunt down the waterbender, and now, apparently, manage Ty Lee's feelings as well.

You sigh. "Very well. If you're going to stay, you will at least make yourself useful. Sort this pile," you brush a hand towards the stack of scrolls unceremoniously dumped in the basket beside the desk, "by order of importance. The lower the rank of the signatory, the more important it is."

She cocks her head to the side with a quizzical smile. "Shouldn't that be the other way around?"

"If a petition from the junior assistant to the Caldera dockmaster makes it to my desk," you say dryly, "trust me that it is a significantly more valuable use of my time than the latest noble minister complaining that his family mansion still hasn't been repaired after the Day of the Black Sun."

Ty Lee carefully sets the tea down in front of you with the slight clack of porcelain against wood, and… bends into a full backward arch, which is apparently the most comfortable position for sifting through scrolls. It's almost as peculiar as her sorting technique, which involves a great deal of quiet muttering as she sounds her way through court script she hasn't read in years, and the occasional explosive flurry of gossip as she asks you about the latest salacious detail some fool has included, likely in the hopes of currying your favour with a drip of useless information about some other court frippery.

The worst thing, though, is that the sheer absurdity of watching her work is nearly relaxing.

How hateful.

---

​

It is the day before the Comet, and your Father is about to be crowned.

This time, you are not late.

You have been waiting for hours, in fact—watching as Fire Sages and soldiers and servants hurry about, faces pale with urgency and hardly a word that is not an order or a question. They organise the rows in which the supplicants will prostrate themselves, a hundred wide and a hundred strong, a sea of red robes who will press their lips to the sandstone dust to symbolise the eternal flame your Father brings in his wake; they mount the banners that will fly before him and the banners that will soar after him; they practise dressing a mannequin with the mantle-and-helm of the Phoenix King until donning it will hardly disturb a hair in your Father's goatee.

By contrast, you have almost nothing to do. You are a witness. All that is required of you is to watch.

So watch you do. The frenzy of preparation never reaches your little bubble—perhaps it is your armour, black and gold and so well-worn it sits on you as skin, or perhaps it is the way you file your nails with one of Mai's old stiletto knives—save for near the end when a nervous Sage, still shy of forty and yet already with peppers of grey in his beard, trembles to remind you that your place is on the top of the dais, one rank in front of even the War Council.

For a fourteen-year-old princess, heir apparent or not, it's a very flattering position.

(Just as flattering as being left behind.)

You wave an acknowledgement and return your attention to the skyline. You can see your Father's palanquin approaching in the distance—a steady, stately axis that mimics the Sun's.

Stowing the dagger in a hidden pocket of your armour, you step across the magnificently expensive phoenix-patterned rug that holds centre court at the dais' apex until you stand before the empty space where War Minister Qin would be, were he not assisting the administrating of your victory over Ba Sing Se.

Fixing the rest of the War Council with an even stare, you turn your back on them, and fall to one knee, one fist supporting your opposite side.

This, more than anything, more than the title of princess, more than the exalted position you occupy in the coronation, is what marks your prominence in the Fire Nation:

Where all others must bow to the Fire Lord, you are only required to kneel.

(Are you not grateful for the honour?)

You hold your obeisance for long enough that a muscle on the inside of your thigh—thankfully concealed by your ceremonial armour—begins to twitch before your Father finally arrives. Released from his palanquin, he ascends the steps with imposing dignity, the red-bodied gilt of his robes trailing across the carved rock as lava might. You can hardly hear the sound of a soul breathing, or even the waves on the ocean that stretches out behind you, scintillating in the sunlight: it is as if the world itself fears drawing the attention of the nascent Phoenix King.

This is the first time you have seen him in person since this cycle began.

He crests the top of the dais and you know, almost immediately, that he sees you. It's a skill you've had years to hone: Zuko used to be better, before his banishment, but three years away from your Father's eyes dulled his reactions. The Fire Lord's eyes do not linger, however; you are where you are supposed to be, and that is all that matters.

Your Father takes in the assembled dignitaries and luminaries of the Fire Nation, and a pleased smile curls across his face. Of course it does: once again, all the power in the world bows to him. It is the only triumph that matters. The only triumph that means anything at all.

(The only triumph that never, ever lasts.)

He steps forward, once, twice, until his shadow drowns you. If you were to look up, you would hardly be able to see his face, such is the strength of the Sun that frames him.

You do not look up.

It is a mistake you have made too many cycles before to make again now.

"Rise, Azula," your Father rumbles, and only then do you lift your body and gaze to witness him. "There has been a—"

change of plans

"—change of plans. I've decided to lead the fleet of airships to Ba Sing Se alone. You will remain here in the Fire Nation."

but i thought we were going to do this together

you can't treat me like zuko!

"May I ask why, Father?"

"I need you here to watch over the homeland. It's a very important job that I can only entrust to you."

i deserve to be by your side!

"I am your ever-loyal servant."

"And for your loyalty, I've decided to declare you the new Fire Lord."

but what about you?

"You honour me, Father. Fire Lord Azula has a certain… ring to it. Have you decided on a new title?"

"Just as the world will be reborn in fire, I shall be reborn as the supreme ruler of this world. From this moment on, I will be known as… the Phoenix King."

The banners rise; the flames uncurl; the helmet gleams in the sunlight; the Fire Lord sheds his husk and the crownless is finally king.

You stand, watching, long after your Father's battleship has cut the ocean asunder in its passing.

No matter how far away it gets, you can still see the smoke.

---

​

Sozin's Comet wakes you two hours before dawn.

You can't see it. Not yet. It's still too far away.

But you can feel it.

Even after so many loops, you can feel it.

In your gut. In your skull. In your heartbeat. Sometimes you wonder if this is what it feels like to be the Avatar—to be as a spirit in a world of men. You flick your wrist and melt every candle in your room to slag, but it doesn't matter, because you are a firebender under the Comet. The dark no longer exists for you.

There is only the flame.

Your maids flock into the room, too well-trained to be so sloppy as to need a summons to attend to your needs, and soon you are dressed for your own coronation: a pale shadow of your Father's, and one you don't particularly feel like seeing through, but a coronation nonetheless. They select your finest silks, a fresh set of ceremonial armour that's far too stiff compared to the sets you wore across the Earth Kingdom, and tend to your hair until it shines sharp enough to kill a man.

They do not, at any point, use a mirror or serve you cherries.

It is actually dawn by the time they are done, and by then it takes genuine effort to remember your veins still pound with blood instead of lightning. Sometimes you have to pinch your fingers together to stop yourself from toying with a spark. The punch-drunk stutter in your breath will fade as your body slowly acclimates to the Comet, but it's still frustrating. No matter how many times you go through this, there is always a stretch of time when you are not the master of your own fire.

A stretch less time than near any other firebender on the planet, but a stretch nonetheless.

You breakfast with Ty Lee, who seems to have found some semblance of the girl who could still parade a tightrope while her safety net was on fire by the way she's stopped clinging to your presence. Something to be thankful for, at least. Instead, she chatters away with curiosity, asking you this question and that about how Sozin's Comet feels (all-consuming), whether you could bend a wall of flame higher than Caldera Palace now (yes), if you're literally invincible (regrettably not), and so on and so forth.

Your morning is full of a long list of well-wishers ahead of your coronation; ministers, noblemen, generals, admirals, the head of the Dai Li, even Lo and Li. It's tedious and repetitive and you're often tempted to just banish them all for the sins of being so hatefully boring, but you resist valiantly. So instead, you sit there, acknowledging them with just-as-repetitive platitudes—save for Lo and Li, who you generously gift with a vacation to Ember Island for the next month as 'an honour earned by their devoted service to the Crown Princess', effective immediately.

Eventually, the parade peters out, and you are finally left to your own devices—Ty Lee has wandered off somewhere, probably to admire the turtle-ducks or steal food from the kitchens, and all you have to do now is wait.

Not for your coronation.

For Zuko.

You know he's here, somewhere. The palace is bustling, lit from within not just by the preparations for the ceremony but by the jittering, pounding, pulsating call of the Comet. It's exactly the sort of opportunity you'd use to sneak in when you couldn't risk a frontal assault, and Zuko's talents at turning up unseen in unexpected places, regrettably, exceed even your own.

Usually he arrives just as the headpiece is about to rest upon your topknot, but you have—had—the waterbender, and that will have made him urgent. Chances are he's stolen a guard's uniform and is waiting outside some useless door while some equally useless functionary waffles over which colour earrings to pair with her robes, hoping for an opportunity to slip away.

You could look for him, and you know you would find him—after all, you've found him every other time you've cared to.

But today, you think, for once in his life Zuko can find you.

So you walk through the palace, past winding hall after winding hall, where paintings of old and storied war heroes sit alongside ancient pottery that depicts the conquests that made the Fire Islands into the Fire Nation; past a sparring ground filled with Imperial Firebenders being shouted down by their commander for apparently not realising firebending under the Comet might risk setting the whole place on fire until they were more used the feeling; past a courtyard of frantic, book-flapping scholars almost coming to blows over whether to use 'bow' or 'kneel' in their pledge of allegiance to the new Fire Lord; into a distant garden largely off-limits to any except royalty.

You sit in front of a fountain, cross-legged, and only now—hours after the Comet first detonated like a bomb inside your stomach—start to thread a coil of lightning through your fingers. In and across; over and out; in and across; over and out.

For a time, there is just your breath and the spark.

It's rhythmic.

It's meditative.

It's—

"—about time you showed up."

Zuko, who is surprisingly not dressed as a guard but instead, of all things, in the ceremonial crimson of a Fire Sage—which he is somehow wearing perfectly correctly—stares down at you from the edge of the garden.

"Why are you here, Azula?"

The more things change, the more Zuko asking stupid questions stays the same.

"This is my palace, Zuzu. Didn't you hear? Father declared me Fire Lord. My coronation is an hour or two away." You exaggerate a sigh. "And here I'd hoped you'd come to pay your respects."

"You're not gonna become Fire Lord today." Zuko's face is stiff. Like a painting. Or a corpse. "I am."

"You're hilarious," you say, idly tossing the spark you've been toying with somewhere to his right. It hits a tree and detonates, shattering it to splinters. Zuko doesn't flinch. "When I serve the throne to you on a silver platter, you cut and run, but now the whole of the palace and an Agni Kai stand in the way, that's when you find your nerve? Really, brother, your ability to make things hard for yourself never ceases to amaze."

"What are you talking about?" he says, sounding almost as he usually does when speaking to you: like he's confused, angry, angry about being confused, and confused about being angry.

Did he—was he not even paying attention?

"You were here, Zuko," you say, spreading your arms wide to encompass the whole of Caldera. The grass rustles against your legs as you rise to match him. "You had our Father's respect. You had the nation's respect. You had everything you spent three years of your life fruitlessly chasing and you threw it all away for some stupid little set of principles—and now you come running back expecting me to give it to you a second time?"

You scoff, turning your back on him to study the crest of Sozin's Comet through the air. The whole of the sky burns, now.

You can relate.

"You'll have to do better than that."

Though he won't, really. You already know how this ends. Zuko doesn't need to be better. Zuko's never needed to be better. You're the one who's always had to be—

(and here, on this particular day, in this particular garden, you finally allow yourself to think that terrible, treacherous thought)

—and look where it's gotten you.

"Azula," Zuko says, gravelly as ever, "I have no idea what you're trying to say."

"Don't be a fool," you say, spinning to jab a finger—only one, not two—at him. How someone with a scar burned across half his face can look so positively gormless is beyond you. "How can you expect to be Fire Lord if you can't even tell when someone does you a favour?"

"I shouldn't have joined you." He says it so easily. That's the worst part. Everyone says it so easily. "It was wrong. You were wrong. The Fire Nation is wrong."

"The Fire Nation is strong," you snap back. "If the rest of the world didn't deserve to be conquered, maybe it shouldn't have lost. Whatever nonsense your bleeding heart tries to convince you of, Zuko, you know that."

You deliberately look right at his scar: the marred, ruddy flesh, the way his left eye is permanently narrowed into a watery squint. A lesson branded for the whole nation to see.

"Are you even listening to yourself, Azula?" He doesn't back down from your stare, though his good eye does narrow to match the other. When he speaks, it's not quite a shout, but his voice nevertheless drowns out the hissing bustle of the fountain that dominates the garden's centre. "Deserve to be conquered? Nobody deserves what we're doing to them! It's just hate and hurting people! And for what? What do we even need the world for?"

"You sound like the waterbender," you say dismissively. He just doesn't get it. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. If you can cry over a turtle-duck, you can cry over a savage."

(And yet: would he cry over you?)

"Where is Katara? What did you do with her?" There's fire in his hands, now, like he's plunged his fists into the heart of the Sun. "And what did you do with Mai?"

"Always so suspicious, Zuzu," you say with a sardonic smile. "Are my intentions truly so nefarious?"

"Answer the question."

Really, Zuko is so boring sometimes. "Since you asked so nicely."

He watches you with that sort of wild-animal wariness you've always inspired in him, but all you do is take a step closer to the fountain, admiring the spot where he once fell in. Typical Zuko. Always landing face-first onto his own problems.

"Don't worry. They're both alive. Unhurt, even. Though the waterbender did seem a little emotionally distressed when I told her who killed her mother." You're studying Zuko in turn, out of the corner of your eye, so you see the way his lips flatten and his gaze flicks sideways in shame. "Mai should be in Yu Dao by now—you might be able to make it there today if you hurry."

Zuko looks a little baffled. "Yu Dao?"

"Well, she was going to go to New Ozai, but that geriatric madman took it back on the Day of the Black Sun, so it seemed the next-best place. Apparently she's sick of being tugged between us like a toy. A little dramatic, don't you think?"

His face twists into something that's probably meant to translate as I agree but also if I agree I know Mai will find a way to stab me, but all he says is, "Why should I believe you?"

Even though he clearly does. You exhale, letting the void fill your eyes until they no longer threaten to twitch in irritation.

"Contrary to popular belief, Zuko, not everything I do is a lie intended to hurt you."

"Could've fooled me," he says.

"Yes," you sigh, "that's plainly obvious."

For a moment, neither of you say anything further. This close, the fountain sounds almost as if it's chortling: at you, at your brother, and at the insensible inanity of your conversation. You look down and study your reflection in the crystalline water—perfect bangs, a perfect topknot, rouged lips and well-pinched eyebrows. Such a contrast to Zuko, whose shaggy hair spills haphazardly from under the precariously-tall hat that crowns his Fire Sage's disguise.

Such a contrast indeed.

"Was your plan truly just to come here and challenge me to an Agni Kai?" you ask into the silence. "Alone, without any hand to aid you, without even someone to bury you when you lose? I know you've never seen a hopeless cause you haven't dived for head-first, but really, Zuko?"

"I'm stronger than you think I am, Azula," he says, as if you don't know that.

Inside your skull, the void sharpens.

"That's not the point," you say, the words falling out a little faster than your usual drawl. "Behind me stands a hundred years of the Fire Nation's glory. Out there," you throw a hand sideways, pointing past him to the sea and beyond it, the Earth Kingdom, "our Father flies with the mandate of Sozin's Comet to burn the Earth Kingdom to the ground. All you came here with was some half-hearted ideal about how the world should be."

And every single time

in the end

he wins

and you lose.

"You have nothing." You look away from your reflection, fixing your gaze on the horizon and the way it seems to bleed, as if the Comet's path is a wound in heaven. "You have nothing, and yet, when the sun rises tomorrow, you'll probably have everything. You always seem to."

Distantly, as if heard through glass (as if heard through the void), Zuko says, "Azula?"

Something shatters.

It might have been your lightning through the sky.

It might have been your self-control.

"Why, Zuko?" You whirl on him, the whole of your body taut and wild. "Was our mother not enough for you? Was Uncle Fatso and Mai not enough for you? Was Father not enough for you? Why are you here too?"

"I… don't understand," he says. Reflexively, he reaches up to scratch his head, finally knocking that stupid hat to the ground. "Azula, I don't understand what you're talking about."

"Of course you don't. You never had to. You just had to be yourself and mother would love you. You just had to be yourself and the Dragon of the West would train you. You just had to be yourself and Mai would choose you." You're shaking. How embarrassing. But you just—you just can't stop. "Father burnt half your face to a crisp and still welcomed you back by his side. And you don't even know how lucky you are, do you?"

That finally provokes a reaction. Scowling, Zuko says, "Father told me, to my face, that the only thing lucky about me was the fact I was born. But go on, Azula. Tell me how hard your life was, swanning around in the palace learning to bend lightning while I was trapped on a smelly ship with one working eye searching for a ghost."

"And you found him, didn't you?" You take a step closer, crushing a stray flower beneath your boot. "That's how it always seems to go for Zuko. A little whining, a little hardship, a lot of broody glares and at the end of the day the world gives you everything you want."

Another step, and your fist ignites without your consent, bleeding hot, blue tears of flame.

"But I had to earn it. By being strong. By being ruthless." Zuko's left foot draws back into that strange stance of his. "You could have been the Fire Lord for nothing. Just because you were born first and because Father believed in a victory I gave you. And ye—"

"Why did you?" he interrupts. There's heat wafting off his body in waves, lensing the air around him, but no fire. Not yet.

Your mouth opens, but no words come out.

"You didn't need me in Ba Sing Se. You've never needed me. So why did you pretend, Azula?" he says. "Why did you lie?"

That's—

"This isn't about me," you snarl, low and rough. "This is about you."

"You're… deflecting," he says, good eye wide. "You're actually deflecting."

"Deflect this," you say, and hurl a titanic fireball directly at his face. The backdraft smears your bangs across your forehead.

Annoyingly, he does: his arm sweeps across his body and, like the sun rising to meet the sky, a pillar of orange fire three times as tall as he blasts your fireball off course.

There's another little pause in the aftermath—you make no attempt to follow up, and Zuko almost looks like he's trying to hold in a laugh.

What in the world are you doing?

Your lips part and—

a shiver through the fountain

his deep voice yelling "Stop!"

a glacier slamming into your back

—your breath ignites.

You skip across the garden, fire flaring from your heels and scorching the grass to ash and the soil to dust until you land far behind Zuko, who is surrounded by a fading corona of flame where he'd shielded himself from your instinctive, all-encompassing retaliation.

On the other side of the courtyard, the waterbender lowers one hand and raises the other, which coils what remains of the fountain's water into writhing tendrils around her.

Zuko lets out a breath.

Then he turns so he's facing you too, and folds his hands flat like blades.

"So that's how it's going to be," you say. Your voice echoes in your ears. After everything: here you are again. "No Agni Kai, Zuzu? Just cold-blooded murder? I suppose it does run in our family, given what mother did to Grandfather."

"She would ne—" he starts, and then trails off. There's something vulnerable in his eyes. Did he… did he genuinely not realise? Has he lived for so many years not even knowing how deeply your mother chose him? A spark snaps around your finger and grounds itself in the earth. "No, that's… it doesn't matter. Somebody needs to stop you, Azula."

His jaw firms.

"With the dragons as my witness, I am Zuko, son of Ursa, son of Ozai, brother of Azula, prince of the Fire Nation," he says, "and I challenge you to an Agni Kai."

You laugh. It's not wild. Just a little angry.

"I am Azula, daughter of Phoenix King Ozai, daughter of Ursa, sister of Zuko, heir apparent to the Fire Nation, and I reject your challenge."

You throw yourself forward on a sea of blue fire.

---

END OF "FIRST" LOOP.

YOU HAVE FAILED.

THE BOILING ROCK AWAITS.

---

​

When you wake up you will be faced with the question, again, of Mai and Ty Lee.

Last time, you spared their lives and lied to them about childhood sentimentality. That seemed to solidify Ty Lee's obedience, but left Mai far from your side. Was that a victory, or a defeat?

That's up to you.

What is also up to you, of course, is what you will do this time. Such are the nature of your cycles: if nothing else, you can do your best to learn from what came before.

So, Princess Azula: how are you approaching Mai and Ty Lee this time? What are you going to tell them when they ask why they're still alive?

[ ] The truth. You're from the future, and you want to get out.
You can hardly be sure you trust them. Ty Lee might be malleable, but Mai is far too defiant to be reliable.
[ ] A lie. You've learned that Mai and Ty Lee, too, hold some measure of childhood sentiment. Not enough to be truly loyal, but enough to disrupt your offensive. You are not repeating that embarrassment—so this time you will explain nothing at all, and task them with hunting Zuko down instead. They can come to their own conclusions about your motives.
[ ] A lie. You've learned that Zuko responds well to hostages. How much better will he respond when the hostage is the lover who sacrificed herself to save him? Obviously, that means you can't hurt Mai, or Ty Lee by proxy—but you will insist that they do not leave your side. For their own safety.
[ ] A lie. You've learned that neither Mai nor Ty Lee support Zuko as enthusiastically as they first appeared to, but you don't know why. Mai never quite answered your question. Accusing them of conspiracy will, if nothing else, reveal the crux of their loyalties—something you need to cultivate, since it seems you are at a tactical disadvantage without any to call your own.

But you shouldn't get ahead of yourself, Princess Azula. There's another question you need to answer. Last time, you saved Mai and Ty Lee out of nothing but vacuous boredom—out of an indecorous hope that trying something new might give you something new. It didn't. You still lost.

So why, exactly, are you going to save them again this time?

(What is the lie you're going to tell yourself?)

[ ] Because it's useful. Zuko and the Avatar have proven time and time again that having others by your side can be advantageous, when the rest of the world is against you—and you know from experience that a small, elite team can work wonders. It's only practical to try and reassemble yours.
[ ] Because it's a victory. You can admit that theirs is the worst betrayal you have ever faced, and by now you have faced it again, and again, and again. To turn it around, then, is to demonstrate that there truly is no setback your brilliance cannot overcome.
[ ] Because it's interesting. After so many cycles surrounded by nothing but incompetence and faceless obeisance, at least keeping them around provides something fresh—something new. That was what they offered you, all those years ago at the Academy, and again when you reunited to hunt the Avatar; fitting that it's what you make use of them for once more.

 

[Magery]

You are Azula, and you are—

a blink,

a breath,

the celestial echo

ash and salt water

a spark grounded in earth

—alive once more.

"You miscalculated," comes the chorus of your rebirth. "I love Zuko more than I fear you."

What can you do but laugh?

It fills you, high and free, like birdsong in the wind, or lightning in clear sky. At the end of everything: here you are again. It's almost reassuring, the same way a cut is when it stings.

"Azula…" Ty Lee says hesitantly, but you wave her off. You need neither her pity nor her concern. In fact, you almost believe you need nothing from her at all. Almost.

(Because you're going to save her, aren't you?

Even though it didn't change a thing, you're going to save her again. And you'll save Mai too.

After all, it's a change of pace. A breath of fresh air. Something different. Something new. All these things the endless cycle of your existence hasn't had in what seems like forever—

—and everyone knows how much you love unexpected things you can't predict.)

"…do you think this is funny," Mai says, so flatly it lacks even the inflection of a question. "Seriously, Azula?"

Your laughter slowly trails off, and you tilt your head back down, brushing a loose black bang—how unseemly—out of your eyes. The steam rising from the boiling lake beneath breaks up her lanky silhouette slightly, making the edges fuzzy, as if seen through smudged glass. How fitting. All your conversations feel much the same.

Speaking of, you're almost tempted to tell her yes, because most things people are willing to die for are funny. But Mai seems to be more wilful when she's being lied to, even if she doesn't know what about, or why, so perhaps you'll put that one aside for now.

"Not particularly," you say instead, slowly ambling toward the edge of the platform that protects you from the lake. Below, it spits and hisses and bubbles, the faint stench of sulphur grasping at your nostrils. It's a little soothing: a reminder you're still here.

Much better than being down there. Boiling is an ugly way to die.

(You don't recommend it.)

"Guards," you say, loud enough to be heard, but not loud enough that you can't hear the way one of Mai's knives slips out of her long sleeve and into her hand, "leave us. You have a riot to suppress."

"But what abou—" one hapless, black-armoured idiot tries.

Something crackles around your fingers, and he immediately falls silent.

"I do not recall granting you permission to speak," you say without turning around. "Only to obey."

You hear the sound of boots stamping against metal—so many that the platform briefly trembles with the weight of the stampede.

Good.

You probably won't have to banish them, then.

Clapping your hands briskly, you spin to face Mai again—and not Ty Lee, who still hasn't moved from her point of the triangle, near equidistant from the both of you. Interesting. Is she reacting to the (false) perception of your vulnerability? That would fit her to a tee. How quaint.

"Well, Mai," you say, "since you said it so proudly, I'm sure you're positively dying to explain: what is it about darling Zuzu that has you so enamoured? Is it his charming scowl? His stunning inability to think even one step ahead? His fascinating attempt at a haircut?"

She opens her mouth, and that's precisely when you choose to speak again.

"I suppose that's unfair. You're a political girl, after all. I'm sure you have much deeper reasons to support his flailing at the throne than that."

You smile.

"Don't you, Mai?"

Mai narrows her eyes, thin eyebrows pinching. "What's your angle, Azula?"

Cocking your head to the side, you tap a sharp-nailed finger against your jaw. "I haven't the faintest clue what you mean."

"You don't—" she begins, and then seems to reconsider.

"Oh?" you ask, looking away from her for a moment as if to admire the ring of the volcano that frames her. "What don't I?"

Mai sighs, a short, low sound of exasperation. "Who cares about the throne?"

Does she want the itemised list?.

"Rhetorical question, Azula," she says, perhaps seeing your bemusement on your face. "I didn't save Zuko because I want him as the Fire Lord. He'd be insufferable."

"Perhaps you didn't," you allow, because that does line up with what she said the last time around, "but surely you understand how it appears. When the eldest male heir declares his treason before the Fire Lord, runs off to join a ragtag gang of rebels, and busts their allies out of prison—well, it paints a certain picture. And then for his erstwhile lover to betray the only remaining loyal heir in order to protect him…"

You shrug, one shoulder-pad bobbing.

"Isn't there a saying about walking like a turtle-duck?"

"She didn't mean it like that!" Ty Lee interjects, wide-eyed and frantic. "I—Azula, she didn't!"

"That, Ty Lee," you say, studying her out of the corner of your gaze, "is not yours to decide."

"Azula, please," she says, desperation dripping from her tongue. "Don't do this."

"I haven't done anything yet." You return your attention to Mai, who stands tall and proud despite the bead of sweat running down her cheek from the oppressive heat that gave the Boiling Rock its name. "Calm yourself, Ty Lee, or you'll make me wonder if you're starting to be overcome by misgivings of sympathy."

The punishment for treason against the crown is clear and unambiguous and drilled into children as soon as they are old enough to understand: death, and not a merciful one.

In some ways, Mai is lucky she's not a firebender.

At least she won't be buried alive, to die where the Sun cannot see.

Regardless, despite your proclamation, Ty Lee's eyes start to bud with tears—even as Mai exhales a breath and crosses her arms over her chest, the trails of her sleeves draping over her waist.

"I thought you'd be angrier," she says frankly, pale-gold stare fixed on yours. "But you almost sound like you care. You know, beneath all the posturing and threats."

You do not posture.

You are entirely willing to do whatever is necessary.

You always have been.

(Except, of course, the very first time you ever faced the Boiling Rock, you still kept Mai and Ty Lee alive.

Funny how that works, isn't it?)

"Oh, I'm furious," you say, voice dropping into a ragged, volcanic hiss that has Ty Lee flinching and Mai's pupils threatening to dilate. "I travelled a thousand miles to return you to my side, led you across the world to the conquest of Ba Sing Se and a reunion with your precious Zuko, and even brought him back home, and the moment he fusses about the details, this is how you repay me?"

Then you smile, bright and certainly not manic.

"But I'm willing to let bygones be bygones, if you can offer me something interesting enough to excuse it." The smile drops, and you study her with what's meant to be curiosity. "So, Mai. I'll ask you again: why would you do it, when you know the consequences?"

Mai studies you in return for a little while, something budding in her gaze, like clouds drawing together before thunder. A finger taps against the glinting silvery blade of the knife that's sprouted—seemingly on reflex—from the voluminous shadows of her sleeve. When she uncrosses her arms, the blade disappears; or, perhaps, becomes her tongue, because her voice as she speaks threatens to leave blood in the air that carries it to you.

"You still don't get it," she snaps. "Or maybe you're just not trying to. Are you still so fixated on the idea that the only value someone has is their proximity to the Fire Lord that you can't comprehend that I don't care?"

This time, she's the one who waits until the precise moment your mouth opens to say something, and then barrels right over the top.

"Because you can pretend what you want about bids for the throne, but if I could keep Zuko a hundred miles away from that stupid thing for the rest of his life I would." She thrusts her jaw forward as someone else might thrust a spear. "And I think you know that, Azula. I think you just don't want to think about what it means."

Mai steps forward, once, twice, upcurled shoes soft on the steel beneath her, and a part of your brain is caught up on the fact she probably learned the mannerism from you. The rest is like stuttered clockwork—you know what you want to say, what you should say, but the thoughts just clog and rotate inside your skull without ever spurring your tongue to action.

"That palace has only ever hurt Zuko. Your father has only ever hurt Zuko. And nobody ever talks about it. I don't talk about it. Because Zuko hates it. Because I wasn't there. On that day. All those years ago. But you were, Azula. And they said you laughed." You don't think you've ever seen Mai this angry. You don't think anyone ever has. Not even Ember Island twisted her face like this, thinned her mouth to cutting and carved her jaw from marble. "So why wouldn't I do it? At least this way no matter what happens Zuko knows there's still one person in this whole damn place who cares."

She snorts.

"Even if he doesn't."

"Mai…" Ty Lee seems to teleport to her side in a pink blur and tries to hug her, which is the second-most embarrassing thing you've ever seen after your total inability to actually say anything when Mai started to speak. "I'm sure he does!"

After that, it's quiet for a time.

Mai doesn't seem to be interested in speaking; Ty Lee appears terrified of it; and you are just… thinking.

Remembering.

Reconsidering.

I never expected this from you may have been a slight understatement.

"I didn't laugh," you say, a fraction before you realise you've actually said it. For some reason, it feels like the most important thing to address. "I did smile. But I didn't laugh."

Mai just looks at you. "Thanks, Azula. I'm so glad to know that."

What did she even want you to say?

On that day, in that arena, Zuko was burned by the Fire Lord's will. That's just how the Fire Nation works: uncompromising in its greatness, ruthless in its equality. It's like your Father once told you: all things must be the flame, or else they become the fuel. Zuko had refused to be one, so your Father had been right to brand him as the other.

It had been as correct as it had been inevitable.

Of course you had witnessed it with joy.

(Zuko had not refused to be the flame, though, had he?

He'd refused to raise a hand to the Fire Lord, whom you had both looked on as others might the Sun.

Would you have done the same?

Would you have been right to burn?)

"So, Mai," you say some time later, without awkwardness because a princess is never awkward, "I think it is clear that you have… strong feelings about my brother, which I may have underestimated and which may have blinded you to the political implications of your actions."

Is this what that other Mai had meant, when she'd said she'd have done the exact same thing for you?

That it was never about the throne, and always about the person?

You—

—well. You suppose there's a sense to it.

Zuko has often inspired others to pity.

You don't think you ever have.

It's what makes you strong.

(Isn't it?)

"I am therefore willing to excuse your… indiscretion in this instance," you add, fixing your attention on the steam-stained horizon rather than her face, "provided that you swear before the flame that you have no intention to, and will never, support his treacherous bid for the throne."

Now Ty Lee is hugging you, which is… not even the most ridiculous thing about this situation, actually.

No, the most ridiculous thing about this whole situation is that if Zuko had been able to just sit down and shut up for a month longer, come Sozin's Comet he would be the Fire Lord.

You were almost finished beating that into his thick skull before the waterbender interrupted.

Or, at least, that's how you are choosing to remember that conversation: and if nobody else will, that makes you automatically right.

"I think you and I have very different definitions of the word support," Mai deadpans, "but sure, whatever. I promise. No throne for Zuko."

She looks at Ty Lee attached to your arm like a particularly bouncy limpet with an expression that best translates to better you than me, and adds, "But seriously, are we ever going to talk about how you saw me save my boyfriend's life because he was literally about to die and assumed it was because I wanted him to be the Fire Lord?"

Mai shrugs, languid and lazy.

"Because that was stupid, and you're not usually stupid."

Usually?

You are never stupid.

"Yes you are," Mai says, as if your thoughts had somehow shown on your face—an absurd prospect, of course. "I remember when you thought the reason they were called starfish was that they fell from the sky, and you wouldn't believe any of us when we told you because Zuko had also disagreed and you were convinced he couldn't be right about anything."

How dare she.

You were six.

And more importantly, your logic was sound! Trusting Zuko, who didn't even know his square numbers by then, now that would have been stupid!

"Thank you for your fascinating perspective, Mai," you say through clenched teeth. "Regrettably, I believe we should table this discussion for another day. The guards should have finished handling the riot by now. Given their failures in every other area of the situation, however, it would behove us to inspect their progress. Thoroughly."

If there is one thing you have learned from Ember Island, it is that the correct response to an emotionally overloaded conversation is to express any lingering frustrations on the less fortunate afterwards.

Back then, it was Chan and his gaggle of gawking idiots.

Now, it is the Warden—Mai's uncle—and his band of buffoons.

You're sure it will be just as cathartic an experience.

For the first time since you began to talk, Mai smiles. A slow, dangerous uptick of the mouth. "Finally. Work I can actually get behind."

You have a feeling she is not particularly fond of her uncle.

It's something you have in common. You don't like yours either—or hers, for that matter.

So maybe it's two things you have in common.

"Ooh, are we playing bad guard, bad guard?" Ty Lee asks by your elbow, just a little too brightly to be believable. "I'm not very good at it."

You are not sure Ty Lee actually knows how to be bad—not by your standards, at least. The last time she tried, she made herself cry.

"Don't worry, Ty Lee," you say, with your best attempt at sounding reassuring. "Just stand near the Warden, and you'll look competent by comparison no matter what you're doing."

The man couldn't even manage something as simple as dying. Maybe you should dismiss him from his duty, and promote Mai to replace him.

If nothing else, it would be a refreshing change of pace.

(And that's why you're keeping her and Ty Lee around, right?)

You float the suggestion as the three of you walk together back into the prison, but regrettably, Mai refuses.

She did look tempted for a moment, though. Maybe you ought to workshop the pitch a little more. You're sure you can get her to agree.

In the meantime, though, you wave a hand idly to fill all the sconces with flickering blue as you turn left into the hallway that leads to the Warden's office. In the distance you can hear shouting, the dull whoosh of freshly-summoned flame, and even the sharp crack of metal against stone. It appears the riot is yet to be quelled.

How utterly unsurprising.

"Come on, girls," you say, curling your fingers around a spark of lightning that winds its way around your fist. "Duty calls."

Behind you, Ty Lee is flexing on her toes, and Mai is sharpening a sleek bronze hairpin.

There's the sound of pounding feet, and a bedraggled, shivering wretch who's clearly still recovering from a session in the cooler staggers around the corner and almost falls over at the sight of you—and your crown, and the two girls behind you.

"Ooh, dibs!" Ty Lee says, about one second after the hairpin—and three others just like it—have embedded the man into the wall by his collar. "Aaw, Mai, no fair!"

"Sorry, Ty Lee," Mai says, lowering her arm. She sounds as apologetic as a cat sitting over a dead turtleduck. "My hand slipped."

You might admit to a chuckle or two as Ty Lee flits over to knock him out with a sharp couple of jabs, a disgruntled pout on her lips.

"I'm sure we can leave you one or two," you say, and might even mean it.

---

​

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.

Spoiler

(2/2) Azula, Alone?

You have almost nothing and almost no-one to rely on. Your friends have proven themselves traitors a hundred times over, whatever meaningless platitudes they choose to try to trick you with 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 is all that remains, and you're trying to stop yourself from realising that does not mean what you once thought it did.

---

​

By the time you finally assemble the Warden's coterie—and every guard not on essential duty—in the plainly decorated eating hall, you've probably had to do half their job for them. Ordinarily, that might frustrate you; a princess is far beyond such menial labour. But thankfully, it actually proved to be quite satisfying. By the end, you didn't even need your fire. You just had to stare and the previously-rampaging prisoners would throw themselves to the ground blubbering in fear.

Much like the young guard who cowers behind her heavy-set sister-in-arms at the back of the room, as if standing with as many tables between the two of you was any meaningful impediment to your disgust. Peasants really are peculiar sometimes, even if to become a guard at the Boiling Rock probably means some latent noble ancestry or a particularly bribe-happy merchant family. Probably the latter. The Warden is an imbecile, but he is too jealous of his record to accept nepotism over competence.

Which says truly dire things about what competence in the Fire Nation is when you aren't there to personally encourage it, really.

You snap your fingers. A spark of lightning follows, writhing around your fist.

If the deep, vicious thrum of it weren't so loud, you could probably hear a tear drop from the other end of the hall.

Good.

You look out over the sea of helmets—black and gold, with thick red visors—and frown.

The crowd trembles like wheat in the wind.

"I find it curious," you say, stalking back and forth on top of the table, still circling the cold fire in your palm, "that after apparently being fooled by the stunningly bold infiltration strategy of wearing a face-concealing helmet, there is not a single person in this room intelligent enough to consider a simple adaptation."

Your armoured boots count a slow, dangerous tattoo on the wood.

"Take them off." You let the lightning crackle up your hand until you're balancing the spark on the tip of your index finger the way a lesser bender might a flame. "Unless you want me to do it for you."

There's a frantic scramble followed by a jangling clatter as every person in the room wearing a helmet races to become the first without one. A couple even try to force others' helmets back on their heads, as if to sabotage their competitors—a fine show of initiative, if it didn't get in the way of your orders.

You shift the rhythm of your pacing just so, and don't even need to speak; a fan of knives hisses out hilt-first from beside you, introducing those two guards first to blunt trauma and then to the poorly-scrubbed floor.

Mai, who's standing on the stool behind and a little to your left, crosses her arms at her back, the very picture of a demure young lady.

Smiling, you flick your wrist to dismiss the spark with a deliberately exaggerated crack, and the room falls silent once more. Around the walls, the torches swell blue with your every breath, painting eerie shadows onto the metal railings that ring the second floor. You nearly decided to deliver your speech from up there, looking down, but in the end you think you made the right choice: it's much more fun to be able to see how the Deputy Warden swallows every time you look his way.

"The Fire Nation can forgive many things," you say, continuing to pace, "but failure is not one of them. This is the most famous prison in the world. The most feared prison in the world. Or it was. Now it's the funniest prison in the world—or at least it would be if you asked my brother, or the Water Tribe savage, or any other of the half-dozen enemies of the Fire Nation who just walked in here and, if not for my arrival, would have just walked straight back out without even a fight."

You stop, abruptly, and stare straight out into the crowd.

"Do I look like I am laughing?"

There are a couple of half-hearted attempts to answer that each shift a couple of octaves into squeals of pain, as the more intelligent in the crowd stamp on the feet of the idiots attempting to speak before their princess without permission.

Unfortunately for him, none are bold enough to stamp on the Warden's feet as he joins the maladroit chorus.

Fortunately for him, what he says is so patently ridiculous you don't feel any need to chastise him for it.

"Princess Azula! I beg you, please forgive Mai for her rash behaviour! She was just overcome by the thought of her beloved uncle dying and acted without thinking!"

He drops to his knees, sallow face still looking severe despite his best attempts at adopting a pleading expression.

You exchange a nonplussed glance with Mai, while Ty Lee is overcome by a sudden coughing fit and nearly falls off her own stool. That… is technically one way to interpret the situation, if you were too far away to hear Mai explain why she was actually preventing anyone from cutting the line.

Family truly is the strangest thing in the world.

"Don't worry, Warden," you say, after deciding to simply appreciate the absurdity, "I promise that Mai is absolutely the least of your concerns right now."

You step off the table with bladed dignity, the curved gold prongs of your headpiece glittering in the deep-sky firelight that grows a little brighter, a little more present, with your every footfall. By the time you reach the kowtowing Warden, only the unrelenting precision of your control stops the torch-flames from melting the railings they now reach.

"You should be more worried about what will happen to you."

He looks up, incomprehension and concern warring across the harsh lines of his cheeks.

"After all," you muse, light and airy, the same way ash is after cremation, "what else would they call the man who oversaw the Boiling Rock's first escape but a failure?"

The Warden swallows. You can hear his knees knocking together under his formal skirt.

Your lips unfurl into a smile.

"I hope you've prepared your explanations well," you add. "After all—by the time they've interrogated all your subordinates, I imagine the Ministry of Security will be quite tired of hearing the same excuses over and over again, don't you?"

He actually whimpers.

Oh, how you've missed this.

---

​

After that fortifying session of exercising your absolute power over all the lives beneath you, it's time to return to Caldera Palace.

Mai and Ty Lee share your cabin on the boat over—normally an unbearable indignity, but with no vessels fit for a princess and her entourage you've had to make do with the captain's quarters. It's a… new experience. You've never left the Boiling Rock like this, with Mai and Ty Lee pretending to play pai sho on the bed because Ty Lee decided on a whim she wanted to learn and Mai glumly volunteered to teach her since the alternative was Ty Lee learning from you.

If you close your eyes, you could be back in the Earth Kingdom, roaming the untrammelled wilds in search of the Avatar, or your brother, or failing that, at least somewhere that wasn't a backwater sneeze of a village with nothing to recommend it except the joy of leaving it behind.

You're not entirely sure how you're supposed to feel about that. The past is what you're trying to escape. The past is what traps you. But you don't feel trapped with Mai and Ty Lee and memories of a less circular life. You feel—

—like smiling, only also not like smiling, because usually your smile varies between a threat and a victory parade, and neither seem appropriate for the way your cheeks are trying to twitch. Naturally, you don't let them, but it's… unusual that you have to even try.

Honestly, it's all very troublesome—which is why you're not actually in the cabin right now, laughing at Ty Lee mixing up the Swallow's Flush and the Tigerdillo's Gambit. Instead, you're leaning your elbows on the metal railing that surrounds the ship's deck, staring across the glittering sea and towards Caldera.

Towards the future, or more accurately, your efforts to ensure you have a future.

It's very clear to you where you went wrong in the last cycle: you tried to kidnap the waterbender without understanding the extent of her power, and so she became worthless as a hostage. Zuko was also frustratingly unresponsive to your conversation, but you're sure if you have a better lever to pull this time around, a better outcome will inevitably result.

All of those levers are, of course, at the Western Air Temple, and that's where you need to go. Though, you suppose that's not quite correct; it's actually only almost all of them. Mai is here with you—so here you could remain instead, if there's some virtue to be found in waiting.

And thus, the question remains: which lever are you going to pull this time, Princess Azula?

[ ] The dirt child. You've done your research. You know who Toph Beifong is. And you know she has a family. The Earth Kingdom is only a messenger hawk away—and you already know you can lie to her, if your orders are not carried out in time. In many ways, she will be the easiest of them all to turn, however unwillingly it will be.
No matter the simplicity, you are not bringing an enemy combatant who can bend earth and metal into Caldera City—not when you haven't encountered her enough yet to learn which way she'll crack under pressure.
[ ] The water peasant. Obviously the issue is that you chose the wrong sibling last time—the one who is occasionally capable of competence. If you take the useless one as a hostage instead, you can guarantee he won't escape, and finally have a bargaining chip that will keep Zuko and the Avatar from demanding anything from you but discussion.
[ ] Your brother. You have plenty of tools to work with to engender a conversation this time around; not just Mai, but also the knowledge he's never actually processed what happened the night your mother left. And if neither works… well, abducting him is always on the table. A captive audience might be precisely what the two of you need.
[ ] The waterbender. You're wise to her tricks now. This "bloodbending" sounds hideously dangerous, but if it was as accessible as lightning, she'd use it all the time. You suspect it has something to do with the full moon, given what Ty Lee said and your own reading on waterbending—a simple task, then, to sedate her with something like shirshu venom and a sleeping powder until it passes.
You are not going through that indignity again. She can keep her moralising about family in the same place she keeps her mother.
[ ] None. You're going to stay behind in the palace, but not to convince your Father to change his mind about the day of the Comet (you'd sooner convince the Sun not to rise)—to work on securing Mai and Ty Lee's loyalties, not just their apparent friendship. Zuko always has an ally somewhere at his back when he faces you. It's time you turned the tables and faced him with two.

 

[Magery]

"Azula, why am I here?"

Instead of answering, you glance meaningfully at the second of the two sumptuous, gilt-edged couches in the centre of the room.

Mai rolls her eyes, but sits down nonetheless, gracefully arranging her legs under her skirt in a careful motion worn smooth with practice—likely the same kind that wore smooth everything else about her. As she sits, she considers you dubiously over the top of the dark, polished wood of the rounded table that sits between the couches; naturally, you ignore her, instead taking your seat opposite, your hands folded to fists on your knees, back parade-perfect.

"Mai," you begin once the both of you are settled, staring straight at her face, "what are your intentions for my brother?"

She blinks. "Azula, what."

"It was a simple question," you say, frowning. "Zuko. Your intentions. What are they?"

This time, it's not a blink: Mai squeezes her eyes shut, creasing her forehead. She doesn't open them again until she begins to speak. "You cannot possibly be asking me if I want to marry Zuko."

Your face scrunches in confusion—or at least it would have were you not a proud and dignified princess with complete control over your expressions. "Of course not. Nobody in their right mind would want to marry Zuko. I am asking what you plan to do with him."

"...that doesn't really clarify anything, Azula."

You sigh. And here you thought Mai was supposed to be the sharp one.

She rolls her eyes at you, shifting to lounge back across the couch's plush maroon cushions, dark robes draping around her like curtains. "Just hurry up and explain so I can understand what you're being stupid about this time."

"I," you say, pointing a dangerously crackling finger right above her nose, "am still the Crown Princess, Mai. Show some respect."

Honestly. Why is it that every time you give her even the slightest leeway, she finds some abominable excuse for a spine at the most exasperating of times?

"Whatever," she says without even the slightest hint of subservience.

You let the lightning fizzle, and take a pointed bite of one of the walnut cookies artfully arranged on the ceramic plate in the middle of the table. Mai—who has never shared your appreciation—takes the time to instead study the ornate, hard-angled scrollwork that decorates the wall to her right. You doubt she recognises it; this part of the royal palace is rarely frequented, with most of the architecture last in vogue when Fire Lord Zoryu held the throne.

"The Fire Nation is not in a succession crisis," you say, once there are no longer crumbs decorating your lips. If Mai takes umbrage with your lecturing cadence, she can blame her own inability to keep up. "Nor is it in a civil war. Father is a powerful leader, at the forefront of a war we are perhaps a week from winning, and I am unquestionably qualified as heir. The line, in isolation, is strong and clear."

Then you frown.

"However, as usual, Zuko is doing his best to cause everyone else around him as many problems as he can. Regardless of his current proclivities, he remains the eldest legitimate son of the sitting Fire Lord. That's a strong claim. Strong enough, if backed by blood and fire."

"...you think he's going to challenge you to an Agni Kai," Mai says, no longer sitting so casually on the couch.

You raise a carefully-coiffed eyebrow.

"You know he's going to challenge you to an Agni Kai," she corrects.

"Sozin's Comet is coming. Father's plan is coming. Zuko left because of his ickle baby feelings about one," you say, with something of a sneer, "and if the Avatar's hapless gang didn't already know, he's surely told them about the other. They have a deadline, and since we crushed their pathetic attempt at an invasion they have hardly anything to work with. They're desperate."

"Great," Mai says, flat enough to build a temple on. "I love desperate."

"Please don't talk about your relationship with my brother around me," you say. "It disagrees with my constitution."

Mai narrows her eyes at you, suspicion plain on her face.

What? You can tell jokes sometimes.

Especially when you're not joking.

Seeing the two of them together on that picnic truly was nauseating.

"You told me you'd keep Zuko a hundred miles from the throne, if you could." Your stare is sharp, unblinking gold. "Is he a hundred miles away, if he's storming the palace to challenge me to an Agni Kai while the Avatar fights my Father?"

"No," Mai says slowly, "he's not."

"Now, while Zuko has grown into an adequate warrior, given his fundamental deficiencies," you allow, "he is still the worst firebender in our family, and he understands very little about what it means to rule."

"Why do you sound like you're pitching to some nameless courtier?" Mai says, watching you closely. She's mirroring your posture fully now, straight-backed, with the only difference that her hands are folded neatly in her lap instead of pressed against her knees. "Just say what you mean, Azula."

"Very well," you say. "I want you to stop him."

Stop him from being there. Stop him from challenging you. Stop him from ruining everything with his fruitless belief in honour and inability to ever quit.

(Stop him from being the last thing you see before the Boiling Rock.)

"Stop him." It's not a question.

"Yes. Tell him you have a secret picnic date on a garden rooftop where you can sit together and judge anyone who so much as threatens to smile. Tell him I've kidnapped your brother to keep you in line and you need his help to rescue Tom-Tom. Tell him his beloved Uncle Iroh is fighting our Father and desperately needs his aid to turn the tides. I don't care what it is. Knock him out if you have to. Just stop him from being my problem. I have far more important concerns than Zuko's misbegotten idealism."

Like whether or not the road to freedom is some airbender nonsense about negative jing, or whatever foolhardy preaching left them entirely defenceless against Sozin's ruthless cunning.

"You have a lot of faith in my ability to sway Zuko's decisions," Mai says, "when the idiot barely wrote a letter the last time he left me behind."

Frankly, she should be grateful. At least he tried something.

Nobody ever tries anything when they leave you behind.

"And I'm sure you made him thoroughly regret that," you say, "so much so that he's sure to agree to whatever you propose this time."

A corner of Mai's lip twitches up, once. "Maybe."

Then she shakes her head. "But I won't, Azula. I can't."

Your stomach feels strangely heavy.

"I see." It takes you a second too long to compose your thoughts. "Then—"

"Look, I don't want Zuko to die," Mai interrupts, uncharacteristic not in her honesty but in the fact it sits raw on her face, in the stiffness of her jaw and slight width of her eyes, "and I don't want him on the throne. But I can't—Azula, if I stop him from standing up for what he believes in no matter the consequences, I stop him from being Zuko. And that's…"

That's the point, yes.

"I know you think it is," she says, ungratefully insightful. "And honestly, you're probably right. But I can't do that to him. I won't."

"You fear being the person to him that your mother was to you," you say, because she might as well have said I like it when you express yourself.

"I hate it when you do that."

You shrug a shoulder with a whisper of silk as your robes brush against your ceremonial mantle—with the way the colours clash, rich red and earthy brown, you imagine you look like an old wound, cracked open and just starting to bleed again. How positively maudlin.

"And yet, you know I'm right."

"Yes, Azula," Mai says darkly, "that's why people hate it when you do that."

So now it's people. You see how it is.

Rather than fall for her amateurish rhetorical gambit, however, you choose to return to the issue at hand.

"We seem to be at an impasse, then," you say, without surprise. At the end of the day, there was never any hope of convincing Mai to choose you over Zuko. "You don't want Zuko on the throne, but you won't stop him from trying to usurp me as heir."

And Fire Lord, technically, but you can hardly tell her that.

For a moment, Mai says nothing, quiet save for the slow rise and fall of her breath and the shift of her long hair against the expensive, imported linen of her robes. Then, with an odd look in her eyes, something you don't quite recognise (it might nearly be concern), she says, "You're acting like you're going to lose, Azula."

What is she talking about?

"I am not afraid of Zuko," you say, sharp enough it almost cuts your tongue to speak. "Don't be stupid."

"I… didn't say you were." Mai shifts in place, leaning forward. One of her hands twitches in her lap. Not for a knife. You know what that looks like. This is something else. "I just thought you'd be threatening me with his safety by now."

You scoff. "I hardly need to. Zuzu can manage that just fine all by himself."

"Azula."

"What do you want, Mai?" You resist the call of the void, keeping your fire—cold or otherwise—leashed firmly under your skin thanks to a deep breath you disguise as a sigh. "You're not a firebender. You throw the same knife whether it's the day of the Comet or not. I don't. And Zuko doesn't either."

Even if you hadn't experienced it over and over again, you've done your research. The libraries and catacombs are full of scrolls from the first Comet, hundreds on hundreds of firebenders desperately trying to explain what it felt like to reach for the flame and know they could burn out the stars. By now, you've probably read them all, just in case there was some secret about your cycles hidden in that hundred-year legend.

There wasn't.

But it did help you understand exactly how vast the gulf is between a firebender with and without Sozin's legacy.

"I am not worried about fighting Zuko," you say, and it's probably true. "I'm just tired of how much effort he makes not killing him. Honestly, he's so proud of the whole redirecting lightning technique, but—"

"—he can redirect lightning."

"A parlour trick," you say, waving a hand. "Apparently General Fuddy-duddy taught him."

Mai's eyebrow raises. It seems she shares your opinion about why a member of the Royal Family might choose to invent a way to nullify the cold fire—and then only teach it to his favoured nephew. "Can you do it?"

You smirk, a whiplash twitch of the mouth. "After a fashion."

One of the only upsides of eternal repetition is that you no longer have to worry about training injuries. No matter how horrific, they never last. But the learning remains, burned into the hollows under your veins.

So too remains a brief moment of quiet.

While you wait, you take another walnut cookie and eat it in delicate bites, as a princess should. It crunches delightfully in your mouth, crisp and nutty. Mai does not partake, instead looking down at her hands—her slender, calloused fingers and the scars that bite around them in faded white strips from stray blades over the years.

You wonder if Zuko's are similar. You have some of your own, picked up from the same sharp school as Mai's and carefully concealed with a vast array of cosmetics, but your brother is the one who's spent nearly as many years learning the sword as he has learning the flame. Does he wear it the same way?

Eventually Mai's gaze lifts back to yours.

One of her more useful qualities is her surety—the way she never makes it seem like she's somewhere she shouldn't be, whether it's in the blasted wilds of the Earth Kingdom or an out-of-the-way room in Caldera Palace, surrounded by old wood and older stone.

But she doesn't look so sure now.

"I don't want Zuko to fight you," she says, voice quiet, knuckles even paler than usual; a stark contrast to the black shadows of her clothes. "I don't want you to fight Zuko. I want…"

Mai sighs, a low, heavy sound. Something rolls out of her, in the slight slump of her posture, in the flattening of her lips. "Whatever. It doesn't matter. I can't promise I'll stop him, Azula. But I'll talk to him."

That's… more than you were expecting, really.

"See that you do," you say, smoothing your robes over your knees and preparing to stand, shoes pressing into the soft, red rug that covers the cold stone of the floor. "Perhaps he will take leave of his nonsense and recognise that this futile rebellion serves nothing and nobody."

He won't.

But at the end of the day, what else is left but to try, when the alternative is surrender?

Mai snorts. "Perhaps."

---

​

It's Ty Lee who seeks you out the next day—not Mai, as you would have expected.

Almost in a mirror of the previous cycle, she catches you in your office, brush sweeping across the flat of a scroll as you prepare a missive to the Ministry of Security about their investigation into the debacle at the Boiling Rock. Another, similar missive—this one to Lieutenant Colonel Zhu, who heads the scouting division of the Home Forces, warning him about reported Avatar sightings in the vicinity of the Western Air Temple—sits beside your elbow, ready to join the teetering stack waiting for your messengers to return from the last time you dispatched them across Caldera.

Ordinarily, your desk is far neater than this, but needs must; as your Father focuses on the future, so it falls to you to maintain the present. It's an irony that would be bitter were you not a dutiful heir thankful for the privilege of field experience in learning to rule.

Regardless, you have learned from the last time Ty Lee came to visit, so you replace the brush back in its pot, nudge the scroll to one side, and steeple your fingers under your chin.

"What brings you here, Ty Lee?" You know Mai has gone back to her own house in Caldera for the day, something about ensuring her family's maids hadn't just left it to rot, and while Ty Lee does theoretically have the run of the palace as your personal friend and subordinate, she rarely uses it when it isn't all three of you together. "Is there a matter that requires my personal attention?"

"Azula," she says, slightly hesitantly, body curving forward as if imparting a secret, "can I ask you a question?"

You probably shouldn't observe that she just did, so instead you tilt your head slightly in invitation, bangs—which hang down either side of your face like sharp black knives—brushing against your cheeks. "You may."

"Is the Fire Lord really going to burn the Earth Kingdom to the ground?"

If it weren't for the way her belly hitches slightly with her breath, you wouldn't be able to tell how nervous she is—for someone so incredibly emotional, Ty Lee is wearing her composure well. Then again, given how oddly stilted she sounded from the first moment she entered, perhaps she's just practised. What for, you're not entirely sure. It's a simple question, with a simple answer.

"Of course he will," you say. "After all, it was my idea."

(And yet, you are never permitted to participate.)

"It was your idea," Ty Lee repeats, lingering on the words. Her cheeks seem paler than they were when she entered, almost wan in the light cast by flickering blue torches that ring the walls.

"Zuko pointed out that the Earth Kingdom would fight to the end, if they had anything to fight for. It seemed the most expedient solution, and Father agreed." You smile, without a hint of dissatisfaction on your face. "Surely that can't be what you wanted to ask about."

"Azula," she asks quietly, "do you know how many people live in the Earth Kingdom?"

"Would you prefer the official census, or the Dai Li's figures?" It's one of the reasons you appreciate them. They keep excellent records.

Ty Lee forces a laugh. "Of course you know, what am I saying? It's just—Azula, that's a lot of people. Isn't burning them to death a bit… you know… much?"

"Careful, Ty Lee," you say, high and cold. What is she doing, saying something like that in the middle of Caldera Palace? "You're starting to sound a little treasonous."

"Oh come on Azula," Ty Lee says, rolling her eyes in a very Mai-esque motion, "we both know nobody's listening. As if you would have even set foot in this office without checking that."

She may be right, but at the same time, she's certainly not correct.

You push back your chair, the tips of its clawed feet rasping across the luxurious rug it sits on, and walk swiftly to the left wall, rapping your knuckles three times on the polished sandstone. The bricks slide apart silently, and the face of one of your Dai Li agents peers back from the gloom of the secret passage, barely visible in his forest-dark uniform.

"Nobody is to pass within four rooms of this office unless they are my Father, and in that event I expect to be informed before he even enters this wing of the palace. Understood?"

The agent nods, and the bricks slip shut as softly as they had opened.

You walk back to your chair, sit down with exaggerated grace, and then stare pointedly at Ty Lee. "Now nobody's listening."

Strangely, she doesn't relax. If anything, she seems more nervous, her grey eyes wide as stormclouds and one hand twisting her hanging braid around her fist.

"If I didn't hurt Mai for betraying me to my face, I'm not going to hurt you for having a sudden attack of morality, Ty Lee," you say, frowning. "Yes, a lot of people are going to die. That's war. And this is how we win it."

(But you won't, will you?

You won't win it.

And you know that.)

"It's not the same," she says, nearly snapping, her voice pitching and yawing like a war balloon tossed in a gale. Her braid is yanked taut; you're surprised the pain isn't cutting across her face. "My circus spent months at a time in the colonies. Half my friends have sisters or aunts or cousins or exes in Omashu or Ba Sing Se or Gaoling or a dozen other places even you wouldn't recognise. They might be numbers to you but they're people to me and it's wrong. Why do they all have to die? Isn't there a better way?"

This is the better way. That's the whole point. War is a struggle between pride and life. As long as the people of the Earth Kingdom have the former, they will sacrifice the latter. In that, you agree with Zuko. To defeat them, once and for all, and bring about the culmination of a hundred years of glorious conquest, you must take away anything they have to be proud of. Anything that gives them a reason to hope.

You lean back in your chair, settling your elbows on the top of your desk and clasping your hands in front of your face to project an air of deliberate unconcern.

"Because Sozin's Comet provides the perfect opportunity to win the war as eas—"

"I don't care about the war! You get that, right? The only reason I came with you hunting the Avatar in the first place was because you threatened me, Azula," she says, with the beginnings of tears budding across her lashes like newborn constellations. "It's not why I stayed—not that you'd have let me leave—and it's not why I'm here now but… you get that, right? You get that just because I like you and I like Mai doesn't mean I like what we do all the time?"

What an absurd contradiction. If you don't approve of what someone does, you don't approve of them. It's a simple principle your life has demonstrated at length. How can she turn around and think otherwise?

"I—then why did you stay, Ty Lee? Why are you here?" You keep your confusion out of your voice as best you can; it needs to be as clear and smooth as glass, a perfect mirror of your expression.

"Because you're my friend," she says, hugging an arm around her bare waist, gaze drooping to the floor. "I don't want to see you get hurt. And I want—you're really cool, Azula. Sometimes you're really awful too but you're cool and you're yourself and I… well, I guess I want to be like you a little. I said circus freak was a compliment but nobody would dare call you that and they still all know your name."

She slumps against the marble pillar behind her.

"It was fun, chasing the Avatar. We got to meet all kinds of people, had all kinds of crazy fights, and we even got to hang with a king and steal his city! And then we came back and people actually remembered who I was because of your and Zuko's whole victory parade thing. But I don't—Azula, burning down the Earth Kingdom isn't going to be fun."

She levels you with a watery smile that she clearly doesn't mean.

"It might be the worst idea you've ever had, actually."

No jokes about an embarrassing moment from your childhood this time.

She really is serious.

"Then what would you have us do, Ty Lee?" you ask, as if it matters, as if your Father is not entirely set on his course, as if his mind will be changed about any aspect of his triumph.

(And yet, every time, a change of plans.

Was it ever that? Or was it always decided from the start?)

Ty Lee chokes a laugh, low and wet. "I don't know. I'm not a genius like you, Azula. But there's got to be something, right? You only needed the three of us for Ba Sing Se. How much harder can the rest be?"

You have never actually… contemplated the matter. There has never been any need. Your Father accepted your proposal, took it for his own, and made it the first act of his ascension as the Phoenix King. Not once in all your cycles has anyone asked you if you have another idea—and you don't, because what would be the point? You don't say things your Father doesn't want to hear. That's just common sense.

Something Zuko has always lacked.

"A nation is very different from a city," you say, trying your best to look sympathetic, because at the end of the day misguided or not Ty Lee is crying in front of you and you have never really known what to do with tears. Normally you'd just tell her to quit blubbering, but you don't want to. You're not sure why. "Very few rebellious villages in the Earth Kingdom have fools like Long Feng pretending at power, and the land is too large to cover with our soldiers alone. We still need to retake New Ozai to solidify our overall control, and even that won't snuff out their fruitless struggle as long as they don't believe it's fruitless."

You sigh. Ty Lee's expression hasn't changed, so clearly you need a new tactic.

"I recognise that you have… concerns about our military plans," you say, picking each word with care, "and appreciate that you are willing to share them with me. But these hypotheticals serve no purpose. There is nothing that can be done. The Fire Lord—Father—is committed. Victory will be ours."

"I thought we won in Ba Sing Se. Took the city, killed the Avatar," she says, not quite petulant, not quite frustrated, but somewhere in their muddled mix. Her old-steel eyes, so eerily reminiscent of the Avatar's, bore into yours. "Wasn't that the whole idea?"

"It was."

"Then why are we still worrying about victory?"

Ty Lee lets herself slide down the pillar at her back, until she's sitting cross-legged on the floor, head tilted back to face the ceiling, the brown whip of her hair coiling on the carpet. The bulk of your desk—large and imposingly officious, as befits the Crown Princess—blocks most of her from view, until you have to actually stand in order to see her in full.

"I just don't get it, Azula," she says, and she sounds nothing like Ty Lee at all. "If we've already won, why do we need to burn it all back down?"

The question lingers long after she leaves—long after you release the Dai Li security cordon around your office, long after you dispatch your returning messengers with yet more missives vital to the function of the nation. Long after the Sun has slipped from the sky and you are meditating on smooth stone, cooling down from your night practice, breaths slow and even.

You will sleep soon, but not yet. Not when the inconveniences of your thoughts filter through your skull like moonlight through the high windows of the training hall.

What frustrates you most, what would send the torches embedded in the walls flickering to madness were you not one of the greatest firebenders in the world, is that the answer should be obvious.

You have not secured victory so long as there exists opposition to your rule: rebellion, sympathy, malaise, and disobedience. That you conquered Ba Sing Se where a hundred years of the Fire Nation's greatest generals including the vaunted Dragon of the West failed, only for your Father to turn around and incinerate it to ash mere months later, is irrelevant. You might be the nominal ruler of the Earth Kingdom—you suppose it'll need a new name now, though hopefully one more dignified than the proposals you heard for renaming Ba Sing Se—with Long Feng surrendered to your will and Kuei in exile, but your duty is to your country, and your Father, and above all to winning.

Besides, your Father was clearly uninterested in Shinu's plan from the outset: more soldiers, more armies, more fighting, more time. An unambitious plan from a boring man. Your Father was the one who realised the only way to win was to destroy their hope. You merely facilitated that realisation—offered your Father a way to ensure the Earth Kingdom would never hope again.

(Offered your Father a way to ignore that Zuko was about to publicly disagree with the Fire Lord's plans in a war meeting for the second time in his life.)

It is, as you expressed to Ty Lee, the perfect opportunity to end the war once and for all.

Except—

Except every time you think that, you can't ignore the little part of you that says but it doesn't.

Because you know how this goes.

Sometimes, one of the invasion fleet's airships limps back from the battle just in time.

Sometimes—usually if Zuko's already dead—the Avatar turns from defeating your Father to defeating you, if Iroh doesn't beat him to it.

Sometimes you just know, the same way you knew Zuko would dive in front of the waterbender in the very first Agni Kai.

The plan to burn the Earth Kingdom down is what drove your brother into the Avatar's arms, breaking everything you'd worked for and taking Mai and Ty Lee with it.

The plan to burn the Earth Kingdom down is what compels the Avatar to confront your Father on the day of the Comet and conquer him just like he wanted to conquer the world.

The plan to burn the Earth Kingdom down is what leads Zuko to the steps of Caldera Palace to face you again, and again, and again.

You don't want to think it.

You can hardly bring yourself to think it.

But Ty Lee might be right.

You exhale and stand, snuffing the torches with a twitch of your fingers.

Your feet are silent across the thick-cut bricks as you leave the training hall, the shadows falling amorphous as smoke across your path, sliced apart by the thick moonbeams that each open window invites. This late, only a few servants shuffle through your personal wing of the palace, and they know better than to let you see them as anything but faceless, bowing scenery.

So you find yourself largely alone, in the empty dark of the palace, on your way back to a set of rooms that never change from one cycle to the next.

And all the while, you still think it:

The plan to burn the Earth Kingdom down might actually be the worst idea you've ever had.

But it's what your Father wanted.

And there's nothing you can do about it.

(You're not Zuko, after all.)

---

​

"Come on, Azula," Ty Lee says, tugging your wrist with impressive temerity. "It's just a festival!"

Mai, standing in traitorous safety behind you, stifles a laugh. You can tell by the way her breath hitches for a half-second. No matter. You will remember this indignity.

"It is not a festival, Ty Lee," you say, eyeing the dubious revelry painting the street from where you rest against a wall, concealed in the shadow of an alley. You're not sure what's worse: the bodies bouncing in absurd acrobatics across the array of poles and nets hastily—and no doubt shoddily—constructed in the centre of the road, or the screaming, laughing children who sprint from stall to stall, mouths stuffed full of dumplings and osmanthus cake and sweet rice balls. "It is at best a zoo."

"That's horrible!" she exclaims, but she's laughing, hand still cool around your wrist. Her other hand brushes past your shoulder and latches onto Mai's fingers; now she's trying to drag the both of you forward, which, given her ridiculous core strength, probably isn't beyond her if she really, really tries. "Both of you have been locked away for the past few days doing boring nobility and princess stuff. It's time you had some fun!"

You exchange a glance with Mai.

It would be just like Ty Lee to have completely forgotten—after years in the circus and on the road—that she is just as much nobility as Mai is, if less politically prominent.

"It's noisy, and crowded, and I have to wear this stupid thing," Mai says, poking the Dark Water Spirit mask grinning up from her waist. "How is any of that supposed to be fun?"

Ty Lee grins conspiratorially. "They have a knife-throwing competition."

"Mai." You glare at her from the corner of your eye. "Don't you dare."

She dares.

Mai steps out from behind you, affixing the mask to her face. It's slightly too large, and you suspect you know why, but she still looks genuinely demonic, her hair-buns highlight the Dark Water Spirit's white horns by contrast and the thick black side-locks that hang down either side of her face suggest the lashing, hungry tendrils it fights with. A sai blurs in her hand as she spins it with a casual flick of the wrist.

"I could use a little practice," she drawls.

For a moment, there's nothing but the pounding drumming echoing off the houses and storefronts and Ty Lee's wide, pleading eyes.

You groan.

"Fine." Pulling the snarling, red-and-gold Dragon Emperor mask Ty Lee forced you to bring along over your face—fitted for a child, it pinches your cheeks terribly—you pull your arm out of her grip and step from the shadows. "But you owe me, Ty Lee. What am I even meant to do here among all these peasants?"

It's been a very long time since you were last at a festival—back when your mother hadn't skipped town, when your Father wasn't Fire Lord, when Zuko had two working eyes. You remember them mostly as loud and exciting, but that you were never allowed to run off and actually see the exciting things. Zuko was, though. Or maybe he just didn't care about getting into trouble for it. That would have been a Zuko thing to do.

You always made him bring you back sweets, and one time even a hand-sewn dragon puppet, so you suppose it wasn't awful.

"Come watch me," she says brightly, tossing herself into a backflip for no apparent reason. "One of the performers got sick, so I volunteered to take his place!"

When she lands, she covers her face with her own mask; the design seems to be based on Avatar Kyoshi, and she's done her hair up the same way she did when you were all pretending to be Kyoshi Warriors, gilded chopstick included. A bold choice, given she's in Caldera City and by the side of the Crown Princess, but then again, there's a large man over there selling carved wooden animals and wearing a Koh mask of all things, so maybe she won't stand out as much as you first imagined.

"I reserve the right to leave whenever I want," you say by way of reply.

"I heard a rumour that there's going to be a parade of fire dancers a little later," Ty Lee says, completely ignoring you. "We should all watch them together!"

You cannot think of anything worse than a group of amateur benders polluting the imperial forms with vapid showmanship, but you suppose if nothing else Mai will probably appreciate your acerbic commentary.

"Well?" you ask, gesturing toward the street, and the masked, meandering crowds that the children dart in and out of. "Don't you have a performance to get to?"

Mai, of course, has already disappeared, though if you strain your ears against the pulsating lion drums hammering a beat your heart thuds to match and the low roar of conversation, you think you can hear the occasional gasp and groan of despair that inevitably become her audience whenever she takes the competitive floor.

"Please don't burn the safety net this time!" Ty Lee says, skipping off.

You find a relatively open space near the bright yellow tent of a pastry stall, almost reaching over to take an egg tart before remembering this isn't the palace and they probably expect you to pay, since you have no intention of revealing your identity. Thankfully, you catch yourself in time, and must be content with the sweet smell that wafts from the stand the tarts sit on—when you can taste it against the chaotic mix of spices and sweat and roasting meat that swirls through the festival.

Ty Lee has reached the eclectic pole-and-net structure the other performers are using; unlike her circus, none are wearing any kind of matching costume, so there's a girl in full formal robes launching a man in unfortunately short shorts and little else high in the air so he can somersault in the waiting arms of two more fox-masked girls who seem to be wearing suspiciously similar uniforms to the palace guard. On the ground, a thin, rakish-looking man with a threadbare shirt and a lion-vulture mask is clapping out beats—you count fifteen until Ty Lee starts bouncing on her toes, and thirty until whatever arcane rhythm governs the performance permits her grand entrance.

In a darting arrow of pink and red, she leaps from pole to pole and launches into a backflip that inexplicably lets her push off the broad back of short-shorts man without interrupting his own backflip and land on one finger on the central wooden pole—where she does a hand-stand push-up and catches a sparkling hoop tossed by the rakish man easily with a bent leg. Ty Lee shimmies it around her belly and in an inexplicable movement of her hips gets it to start spinning around her, the attached bells tinkling to the same beat as the clapping. Then—much like she did in that forest against the waterbender—she starts to spring from pole to pole using only her hands, never letting the hoop stop spinning.

It's strange, but as you watch her here, you start to think that Ty Lee looks more comfortable in the air than the Avatar does. Sure, he's just as quick, just as agile, just as flashy, and the only one out of the two who can fly—but even so, at least when Ty Lee flings herself into the sky, she never looks like she's running.

She looks like she's coming home.

(Of course she does.

After all, the Avatar's home is just ash and empty space.)

The reason she's only using her hands becomes clear when the other performers get involved.

The two poorly-disguised palace guardswomen—who you can tell are not here because of you and would probably be mortified if they knew—take on the role of human obstacles, occasionally grasping at her feet and swinging Ty Lee in a different direction than she had apparently intended. Short-shorts man, his bald head glistening wetly in the low light of the festival's lanterns, has a similar task, but his appears to be to lift the very poles Ty Lee is touching down on, muscles bulging as he heaves them up like spears and catches them again on the way down. Only formal-robes girl seems to be on her side, but clumsily so, getting in Ty Lee's way more often than not and forcing her to spring to riskier ground.

If you were a layperson, you'd probably be gasping—and in the case of one particularly teeth-chattering man, actually trembling—in fear at what appears to be Ty Lee's valiant efforts to not die, the very stage of her performance becoming a battlefield on which she must fight even to move.

But even if you hadn't trained those same skills, if not as spectacularly, you'd be able to pierce the mystique, because you actually know the battlefield in a way all these huddled civilians will never understand.

This is not violence and chaos and the frenzy of survival, nor is it the cold movement of flags over a table map.

This is careful, and choreographed. The two guardswomen only ever toss Ty Lee to a pole short-shorts man isn't lifting, and never to one closer than four or five metres away; short-shorts man only lifts a pole on the thirty-second beat of the rakish man's clapping, which Ty Lee's hoop keeps perfect rhythm to; formal-robes girl always leads her position with her eyes and bows of apology a full six counts before she starts to move.

And more than that, more than any of that:

You can see Ty Lee's smile.

She didn't smile like this, the last time you caught her performing. It's wide and gleaming and you think she'd almost be laughing if she wasn't managing her breathing so closely.

Have you ever seen her having this much fun before?

(Surely not since you were children.

Perhaps not even then.)

Something presses against your hand, firm but not sharp, and you bite back the instinctive flare of heat that would detonate your whole body in a cerulean corona.

It's an egg tart, in a fine-boned hand with black-painted nails.

"Take it, honey," says the middle-aged woman running the pastry stall, her hair curling in thick brown waves around her Dragon Empress mask. The teal-and-white wings of its cheeks match the soft fabric of her shirt, though you have no idea why she thought to pair them with such bright orange pants. "Girls should always enjoy a snack at a festival."

"I did not bring any currency with me," you say, a beat too slow in your surprise.

"I figured," she says with an expansive shrug. "But I'd like you to have it anyway. Is that your friend performing on the poles? She must have practised hard, to be that good at this age."

Lacking any easy way to refuse her charity without revealing your identity, you suppose you are begrudgingly required to accept the tart. It's probably not poisoned, so you devour it in three swift bites, the rich, creamy taste filling your mouth. It feels a little sweeter than the ones at the palace do, and the flavour lingers a moment or two longer. Clearly you need to whip the chefs into shape when you return—literally, if necessary.

"Ty Lee is very… dedicated to her art," you reply, reasonably certain you shouldn't bring up the fact she literally ran away to a circus. "I understand that her intentions are to enter the profession. A waste of her potential, frankly."

"A waste?" the woman says, and you wonder why you're confused by the fact she doesn't sound angry. "She's having a lot of fun."

You are not entirely sure how the two sentences are related, but you suppose that's just how peasants are—even in Caldera City, where most are at least part of a minor mercantile family.

"She is." Your eyes track Ty Lee as she contorts herself into some bastard child of a handstand, a somersault, and a backflip, which looks almost like one of the Avatar's airbending forms, and lands with one bare foot on each of short-shorts man's wide shoulders. She hasn't stopped smiling since she first took to the poles. "I'd forgotten she enjoyed it this much."

"You, forget something?" Mai interrupts, having sidled up to the tent at some point during your conversation. Her mask is tilted back across her forehead to reveal her mouth so that she can take delicate bites of her turtleduck skewer. "About what?"

"Nothing," you say. "I assume you did not disgrace yourself in the competition."

"Yes, Azula, I did win." Mai levels you with a flat stare, somewhat obstructed by the fact the grinning maw of her mask is currently blocking her eyes. "Thank you for asking."

"Azula, after the princess?" the woman asks, with a glance at Mai's tall, wraithlike figure. "That's a powerful name."

You find your lips are threatening to curve into a smile of their own, and do not permit it. "You flatter me."

Before she can reply, a trio of wizened old men shuffle in front of the stall, wearing a series of wooden masks so worn and faded you can't actually tell what they're supposed to be. A ponderous conversation about which flavour of glutinous rice dumpling is the best soon drones on, which you tune out in favour of Mai and the frantic festival drumming that bounces over the crowds.

"Ty Lee seems to be enjoying herself," you say, tapping your fingers against your belt.

"She's always had strange preferences," Mai says, watching Ty Lee run vertically up the central, thickest pole so she can fling herself off halfway and bow to the audience mid-air.

The stars filter through the sky above, peering through the haze and smoke of the torches and lanterns and cooking stalls and occasional enthusiastic displays of firebending less-than-prowess. The array of flags and spirit charms that line the same strings as the lanterns sit quiet and still in the lacking breeze, and the thronging morass of people has only thickened towards the climax of the acrobatics, though you can also hear the occasional whisper of fire dancers! weaving through the crowd that suggests what may be coming next.

The whole street is bright and alive, full of happy families and awkward couples and even two incongruously young women totally ignoring their surroundings to play a very intense game of pai sho.

It's completely at odds with almost everywhere you've ever been.

"Why are we here, Mai?" you ask, voice quiet enough that it would be easy enough for her to pretend she hadn't heard at all.

"Because Ty Lee asked," she replies, punctuating the words with a bite of her roasted turtle-duck skewer.

"It must have been six or seven years since the last time," you say. "I don't know what possessed her to try asking again."

"It isn't so bad," Mai says, just as quiet. "Maybe it'd be a good thing if it isn't six or seven years until the next."

You suppose it's a pretty enough dream.

Ty Lee comes bounding over, plastered in sweat, breath hammering through her lungs, and you and Mai both recoil as one when she tries to sweep both of you into a hug.

"That was amazing," she squeals. "I've missed this so much! Come on, Azula, Mai. The fire dancers are starting down the other end. Let's go!"

You reluctantly permit her to drag you down the street, where a combination of Mai's reputation as "that girl who destroyed the knife competition!" and Ty Lee's status as a star performer has the people opening up around you until you're directly at the front of the ring that's been set aside for the fire dancers. They come in all shapes and sizes, with the same lack of attention to uniform as the acrobats—this time, you don't recognise any palace guard livery, but you're pretty sure the shirtless old man at the back might actually be Senior Undersecretary Hou, which is a sight you frankly did not need to see.

With a theatrical gesture and a deep inhale, the well-dressed woman standing at the front of the two rows of dancers sweeps the flames out of the nearest two rows of lanterns and catches them in her hand. It's all very dramatic, but she's lucky you realised what she wanted to do and didn't instinctively oppose it. She has reasonable control for an amateur, but that's about it.

"From the sun comes the spark! From the spark comes the fire!"

The dancers move as one, but not actually to the beat of the drums that seem to be coming from one of the nearby rooftops—they draw sweeping arcs through the air with their flickering excuses for embers to match the twanging voice of an erhu, played by a young top-knotted boy sitting in a tall chair that puts him well out of the reach of any stray flames at the back of the ring.

Some clearly have scattered snapshots of formal training that they've shared with the others, likely learned from tours with, or relatives in, the military. Others have haphazardly slapped together their own understanding of the flame from little more than sensationalist scrolls and ill-informed experimentation—the choreography hides it well, so you suppose you can give the startlingly red-haired woman leading it her due, but really. This is embarrassing.

They dance on and on, Ty Lee gasping excitedly at some of the more visually dramatic mistakes they play off as part of the performance and Mai occasionally snorting when you drop a particularly cutting castigation of their general inability.

You've just watched the frumpy-looking husband and wife pair in the second row miss catching each other's fireballs and duck hastily out of the way—so it looks like they were always meant to be caught by the stickish young boy and heavyset young girl to either side of them—when the lead performer, her sharp-cut robes whirling as she spins with something approaching closer to grace than any of her compatriots have managed, calls out to the audience.

"Remember our challenge! If any of you can dance better than us, you drink for free—but if you can't, you owe your favourite dancer one instead!"

A novel idea, if rather pedestrian in its appeal to a firebender's generally competitive nature. No doubt they've earned many a drunken stumble home off the back of it.

Beside you, Mai and Ty Lee exchange a look over your head.

"Hey, Azula," Ty Lee says, "I bet you can dance better than them."

What is sh—no.

You are not falling for this.

There would be nothing more embarrassing than for the Crown Princess to be caught at some two-street festival throwing down with a crowd of firebenders nearly more bumbling than Zhao.

"She did have a lot to say about their skills," Mai says, tapping one of the outwardly-curled fangs of her mask. "Maybe the Dragon Emperor should show them a thing or two."

"No," you say. "This is far beneath my dignity."

"Well, if you're that worried about losing," Mai says, "I suppose that's fair enough."

Ty Lee pats you slowly on the back. "Don't worry Azula, I still think you're the best!"

The performance builds to a dramatic crescendo—a huge fireball built from every dancer's flame, then split apart into dozens of spiralling strands that fizzle out into a glittering rain of embers to thunderous applause.

As it fades, you turn to face Mai and Ty Lee the same way you would if it were an Agni Kai.

"When I am finished," you hiss, "we are going to have words, girls."

You step into the ring, rolling your shoulders.

"Our first challenger approaches!" the well-dressed woman calls with an easy grin. "Though I think she's a bit too young for drinks!"

"You can keep them," you say. "You'll need something to drown your pride in."

The crowd goes oooooooooh but it doesn't matter.

Whatever the woman says next doesn't matter.

However ridiculous you'll feel in the aftermath doesn't matter.

Because in this ring,

in this moment,

there is just you,​

and the flame.​

It sings from your breath in searing cerulean arcs.

Blue? Is that… Princess Azula?​

It grins from your mouth as you exhale as a dragon does.

There's no way it's her!​

It sways from your fingertips as you let it burn cold with your joy.

Lightning? It's her! It's her!​

For a time, you are nothing but the Dragon Emperor—but there is no Dark Water Spirit for you to challenge, no Dragon Empress to charm back to your side.

There's just the way your feet slide from stance to stance as you accelerate through kata after kata and never miss a step, even when you start inventing your own because the most complex Imperial forms still don't let someone toy with fire like a ball on a string, like it exists only and always and forever for you.

There's just the way a bare flicker of your attention is enough to keep every lantern and every torch burning blue even as you fill the sky with a hundred crackling stars and swallow them with a raging maw of flames that splits into a dozen soaring comets that crown the night with the radiance of your soul.

There's just the way the erhu has stopped trying to give you rhythm and started trying to catch yours instead, your one-two heartbeat the only music the flame has ever needed.

You can hardly tell what this looks like to the crowd by this point—you can barely see their faces, aware mostly of their general vicinity so you can make sure you don't set them alight. All your focus has narrowed to the hollow void in your skull, where the lightning lives.

Where it begs once more to be free.

You press two fingers against your heart and draw it out, a sharp, trembling shard of cold fire more dangerous than anything the whole band of dancers could call combined. It wreathes your fist, then your wrist, then your elbow, until it looks like you plunged your hand into a storm and dragged it down to earth—and then a languid flex of your shoulders rolls it across your back until it crawls up your other arm as well.

Until you hold a lightning bolt around you as others might a lover.

You thrust both arms to the sky and with a ferocious boom, the bolt blast outs from both of your bladed fingertips at once to converge back on itself precisely above your head, bright enough to blind anybody watching if not for the smoke of the collision.

When it clears, there's a new Sun in the sky.

It's small.

It's hissing, sparking, spitting.

But it's bright enough that when you snuff every lantern and every torch in the whole street, light still fills every hole they should have left behind.

Your whole body is shaking, hammers pounding on the inside of your brain, your skin hot enough that your sweat starts to boil off as steam, but you still force the words out, impossibly loud in the sudden silence.

"From the fire," you say, "comes all."

You force your hands together in a clap, and the ball lightning hanging twenty metres overhead swells to three times its original size, large as a komodo rhino—

—and then you tear them apart and the ball shatters, hurling electric embers across the stars in mimicry of the grand lunar fireworks that the Fire Nation welcomes each new year with.

You hold out your hand, one finger extended, and wait.

One final, fizzing fragment of the cold fire drifts through the air and lands right on your fingertip.

You lift that fingertip to your lips and swallow the spark.

There's one beat of silence.

Two.

The crowd roars, an explosion of noise that may have knocked you off your feet if not for Ty Lee throwing her arms around you for a hug that she almost immediately releases, yelping as the heat lingering in your body nearly singes her.

"Azula! That was incredible!" She's beaming, jumping up and down on her toes. "I didn't know you could do half of that!"

"Yeah," comes Mai's voice, lower, flatter, but just as impressed. "That was pretty cool, Azula."

You carefully grip the side of Mai's sleeve—she wears much thicker fabric than Ty Lee, so you probably won't burn her with the residual run-off of exerting your flame to such a degree—to make sure you don't fall over, and with a titanic effort, lift your lips back into a smile.

"Just wait until Sozin's Comet," you say, each word more panted than spoken. "You haven't seen anything yet."

Even though you know Mai is still concerned about Zuko, even though you know Ty Lee still doesn't approve of the invasion, this time, the same shadow mentioning the Comet alway brings doesn't cross their eyes at all.

"I look forward to it," they say as one, then glance at each other with rueful smiles.

Or at least Ty Lee does. Mai's is mostly in the slight crinkling of her eyes.

Then Ty Lee giggles, quick and sudden.

"Can you imagine how that lady dancer must have felt when she realised who you were?"

---

​

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.

Spoiler

(2/3) Monster?

There is a lonely path in the palace. At the end of that lonely path is a room. And in that room is a girl called monster. Her name is Azula, and she understands neither friends nor does not understand feelings. She hardly even understands family. All that is left to her is what she has learned been taught: and what she has learned been taught is to want, to take, and to not care if the taking hurts. She might just end the world if you let her. But it does.

---

​

In an endless life, you would expect that moments to breathe are so invariably common they descend to boredom. But they are not. The time you have spent with Mai and Ty Lee—despite being, objectively, a waste of precious opportunities to poke and prod the world you cycle through to see how it reacts—over the past week is valuable to you in ways you cannot articulate but that feel, nonetheless, like the truth.

If you never have another chance like this, you think you might be glad you took this one.

Just to see what it was like.

Just to wonder, for a little while, how things could have been.

But reality asserts itself, as it always does. The cold and immutable truth of the universe is that nothing lasts—except, apparently, you, and the cycles that you rage against as a child might the sea. And as all children must, it is time to grow up and face the Sun.

Your Father's coronation is tomorrow.

Sozin's Comet comes the day after.

And, as ever:

Zuko awaits.

Last time you went to him with frustration boiling through your veins and brain and tongue. You spat it at him and he spat it right back and just when there might have been a moment of something before the waterbender tried to knife you between the shoulderblades. You're still not really sure what any of it accomplished except for the fleeting feeling of satisfaction you took with you at Zuko's face when you denied his challenge—and the sharp moment of understanding when you realised he doesn't know exactly what your mother did on that diabolical night.

(Or, worse—he knows just enough to figure it out and is actively refusing to, because he can think well of the woman who left but never the sister who stayed.)

This time, you will go to him with something else.

And not alone.

You have Mai and Ty Lee by your side; Mai who's promised to "talk" to him, and Ty Lee who's promised nothing at all. The first time you confronted Zuko with the two of them, they turned on you. You think that might have been the first crack in everything. But you understand better, now. You know why they turned—and if you haven't wasted your time here, carefully consolidating your relationship, you don't think they'll turn again.

So here comes the big question, Princess Azula: what will you go to Zuko with, this time?

[ ] A knife. Metaphorical, of course. But you've stumbled enough under Mai's blunt honesty, and Zuko hardly seemed to realise when you were circling around him with truths he was always too naive to understand. So tell him how hard he makes not killing him. Tell him he's unqualified to rule. And tell him—tell him about your mother.
[ ] A performance. Or, more precisely, a question about his own. You're tired of being the only one spending your life bouncing from doubt to doubt, never sure what mistake might have led you here, never sure what even counts as a mistake in the first place. Now it's his turn: if he were you, on this day, in this place, watching a sibling march on the throne… would he stand aside?
[ ] A lie. It's clear Zuko understands nothing about the life he has been given or the privileges he carries that he thinks his scar entirely outweighs. That's fine. You're used to Zuko understanding nothing at all. It's what makes him so easy to deceive. All you need to do is make a few choice observations about your mother, and Azulon, and the night she left, and he might go running for the wrong facts and knock her off her hateful pedestal along the way. As satisfying as it would be to convince Zuko your mother never loved him either, you don't think Mai or Ty Lee would approve, and you're trying to keep them on your side.
[ ] A lightning bolt. With Mai and Ty Lee there to keep Zuko's second in check, for the first time you may well be able to have a genuine Agni Kai. Just you, and Zuko, and the flame. The way it really was meant to be. And when you win—well, he'll probably have the waterbender there to heal him, and then you can talk, once your claim is so secure even the Avatar can't dislodge it.
[ ] A crown. All hail Fire Lord Zuko. Let him have the Fire Nation for the day. It was yours to give when you hauled him back from Ba Sing Se, so why not give it again now? See what he has planned. See how he reacts when he realises he doesn't have a plan at all. And see, when his shoulders begin to buckle under the weight of the world, if he recognises who he should be asking to take it back. You have given Zuko far too much for how ungrateful he is. If he wants the Fire Nation, he can earn it with his own two hands—and explain to Mai why that's a good idea.

 

[Magery]

Mai and Ty Lee are not invited to your Father's coronation.

So you kneel there alone, in the place of honour, a fiercely youthful contrast to the ash-tipped beards and once-imposing bodies gone to seed of the War Council. Your ceremonial armour is finer even than theirs—rather ironic, since as best as you have ever been able to determine, their entire purpose is to be ceremonial.

But nevertheless, only the Royal Family are permitted to lacquer their armour like yours: in a paint mixed from volcanic ash, crushed obsidian, and most precious of all, ground dragon bone from the catacombs beneath the palace. So the way you gleam, from head to toe a perfect black mirror for the glaring Sun, is a radiance they cannot ever come to match, no matter how much of their war profiteering they pour back into their appearances.

It is those same appearances that stiffen—sucking in their breath the same way you have long since learned to hide—when your Father rises over the last step before the top of the dais. From here, he towers over the sea of bowing soldiers and dignitaries and all those others lucky enough to witness their Fire Lord ascend to an even greater title, in celebration of his impending conquest of the world.

(None of them know this is the last time they will see him with any title at all.

None of them except you.)

At the sight, he smiles, as he always does. You know this smile well. It is the smile that taught you how to smile. It stretches across his mouth in sharp satisfaction, and widens when he must pick, as you do, the palpable air of relief that fills the platform at the sight of their Fire Lord's pleasure.

Your Father's feet fall loudly against the embroidered phoenix that dominates the dais' central rug, and you know, without thought or observation but simply in the hollow of your gut, that he is looking at you. That he is seeing you. Of course he is. Your Father is the only one who ever sees you: for what you are, and for what you can become.

You do not look up.

It is not your place to see him.

"Azula," he says, as light as a father's hand on a child's face, and for a moment you nearly fail to shift the angle of your shoulders and the tilt of your head to signal your complete attention because he—this isn't how this meeting goes. He never tells you not to rise. Why doesn't he want you to rise? What have you done wro— "I have heard you attended a festival in Caldera."

"Yes, Father."

A flush of sweat. A lump in a throat.​

"I—I thought it prudent to—"

"It matters not."

He waves a hand dismissively.

A shadow cast across a face. Two eyes blown wide.​

"I am pleased to see you enjoying yourself. Perhaps when I return from the Earth Kingdom, you will grace my triumph with a similar performance."

A bow. A forehead on the floor.​

"I would be honoured, Father."

"It must run in the family."

He pauses. He smiles.

"Your mother did so love fire dancers."

A full-body flinch.​

"I had forgotten, Father."

A lesson learned.​

"Rise, Azula."

You obey.

---

​

The torches burn low and blue along the walls of your office.

Sitting on the other side of your desk—what little of it can be seen beneath the mounds of scrolls that spill across it, testament to the fact that you have to prepare your own coronation—are Mai and Ty Lee. In deference to the late hour, Mai had been yawning before she even arrived, but Ty Lee is as bright-eyed as ever. You, of course, are perfectly alert. It doesn't matter that you rose with the dawn, or that you have spent the entire day either at your father's coronation or organising your own—you cannot afford to sleep. Not yet.

Not when you have spent so much time on frivolities already.

"I hope you're going to make this quick, Azula," Mai says, punctuating the sentence with two of the daintiest yawns you've ever seen. "Tomorrow's a big day."

"I am aware," you say. "That is why we are here."

"...I should have known this was going to be a strategy meeting." Mai's head thuds against the cushions of her high-backed chair.

"Aaw," says Ty Lee, "I just wanted to know what the coronation was like!"

The coronation.

"It was—illuminating."

"That's boring," Mai says, eyes closed, face still tilted to the ceiling. "Did those blowhards on the War Council make a fuss because the Fire Lord relegated them behind you?"

"No."

"Now that's boring," Ty Lee says, bouncing up out of her seat to lean over your desk, elbows crinkling the layer of parchment that covers it. "They should have. That general with the stupid sideburns like he's shoved clams on his face always looks at me funny. Hearing you kicked his ass would have made my aura all sparkly."

"I would not dare waste Father's time."

Ty Lee looks over at Mai—who is looking over at Ty Lee—and then retreats from your desk to plop back down in her seat. Mai sits up straighter, no longer the very picture of a bored noblewoman in a dark sleeping gown and darker circles under her eyes.

"Okay, Azula," Mai says, gaze passing over the torches that frame either side of your luxurious, silk-and-velvet armchair before settling back on you. "We get the message. What's the plan for tomorrow?"

You breathe out, and the flames flaring in those torches fall back to the same cool blue they should have been simmering at all along.

"Zuko will be arriving tomorrow to challenge me to an Agni Kai," you begin. Mai might already know, but Ty Lee doesn't, and you prefer to explain things once and without interruption. "Likely before I am officially crowned, but the timing is largely irrelevant. While his goal is to prevent me from taking the throne, taking it from me serves his purposes just as well."

Ty Lee opens her mouth to ask a question, then visibly reconsiders, teeth snapping shut over what looked like the first syllable of the sentence how do you know?

"I know because it is the single most stupid thing he could do," you say, "and therefore as predictable as the water peasant tripping over his own boomerang."

"You could stand to insult Zuko less often, Azula," Mai says, though surprisingly without rancour. "He's better than you think he is."

"Trust me," you say, meeting her gaze, eye to eye, gold to gold, "I know exactly what my brother is capable of."

That's a large part of what makes him so irritating these days—he's actually competent enough to get in the way.

Mai raises a stiletto eyebrow, but doesn't speak.

"Okay," Ty Lee says, clapping her hands. "Zuko is coming, he's gonna challenge you to an Agni Kai, and you're… going to accept?"

"Of course," you say. "It's the showdown that was always meant to be."

"Is it?" Mai's voice is as flat as the surface of a blade. "You don't actually have to fight him, Azula. I know you don't want to."

It doesn't matter what you want. The world has been quite clear on that.

No matter what happens, you always, always have to fight Zuko.

But you can't say any of that. Not here. Not now. So instead, you say, "I don't want to kill him."

"Aaw, Azula!" Ty Lee smiles, bright as the Moon. "That's the nicest thing I've ever heard you say about Zuko! You're so sweet!"

Mai looks thoughtful for a moment, and then nods. "You know, I actually think it might be."

"Very funny," you say, dry and entirely without laughter. Not even a twitch of the lip. "If we could return to the problem at hand, girls?"

Mai rolls her eyes, long hair for once entirely unstyled, just a dark, hanging wave falling over her sleeping gown. "If you don't want to kill him, the easiest way is still to just not fight him."

"We've already spoken about this, Mai." Has she forgotten that she's the reason that's not an option? "If you won't tell Zuko to turn back, there is nothing I can do to turn him away."

"Why not?" You were expecting Mai, and so nearly don't register that it's actually Ty Lee, soft and curious, who's speaking. A curl of brown falls across her forehead, and she brushes it away. "You've blown him off for way less than this before!"

"This is not a strategy meeting to discuss how not to deal with Zuko," you say, sharper than you might have preferred. "We will fight an Agni Kai tomorrow. It is inevitable. What I need from both of you is to understand your role in the events of the day. Is that clear?"

A brief shadow of silence falls over the room.

Ty Lee is frowning at you; Mai isn't even looking at you at all, eyes lower, almost like she's studying your hands.

Oh.

You hadn't noticed your nails were starting to tear the scroll they were curled into.

Very carefully, you flatten your fingers, palms to the tabletop, the slight burr of the parchment rasping against your skin.

"Azula," Ty Lee says, each word held by her voice with the same exquisite care as a flower holds dew, "did something happen at the coronation?"

The coronation.

(You don't want to talk about the coronation.)

"No," you say shortly. "Stop trying to distract me."

Ty Lee's frown only grows.

This is going nowhere.

You shove yourself out of your seat, which scrapes hard enough against the rug that you might have left a mark in it. Your boots—the same perfect, imperial black as the rest of your armour, each gilded plate flexing as you move—stamp against the swirls of royal flame embroidered into it. "I need to train. Mai, I expect you to talk to Zuko before he challenges me. Ty Lee, you and the Dai Li will ensure that whoever else he brings along does not interfere once we begin. Fight them if you have to, but don't make a spectacle of it. Goodnight."

You are out the door before Ty Lee can muster more than a startled, "Hey, Azula, wa—!"

Mai must yank her back into her seat, because instead of a pink blur cartwheeling into the hall you hear some frantic whispering, like the hiss of a rocket before it detonates.

Soon enough you hear nothing, the drum of your feet against the stone floor hammering it all away.

It's fine.

You weren't lying.

You have an Agni Kai tomorrow.

You can't afford for your firebending to be distracted with theatrics.

(Not even if you enjoy them.)

---

​

You kneel atop the dais, surrounded by the Fire Sages.

High above, Sozin's Comet has set the sky alight—in the plaza below, a hundred firebenders answer, their hands cupped before their bodies as they hold the ceremonial flame before them. They genuflect as one, offering their fire to you; there a general, there a governor, there a war hero, there a minister. The greatest and most noble of all the nation, pressing their noses to the ground and their lips to the dust.

They are only the beginning.

Walls of bodies ring the plaza, so tight among the stands and the buildings that all they have room to do is press their fists into their palms and bow their heads, whether schoolchildren or venerable grandmothers. If you cared to look, you would see they stretch from one end of the Fire Nation to the other—some are even colony-born.

In the air, a dozen airships circle in stately passage; every soldier in the resplendent red and five-pronged helmets of the Imperial Firebenders, a precise match for the guards who stand like spears sprung from the earth at equidistant points around the plaza.

The sound of it is incredible, because there is no sound at all. Not a soul dares to speak; to whisper; to cough; to sigh. Nobody shifts in place, rustling fabric over fabric or scraping steel over steel. They are perfectly silent and perfectly still.

Even Ty Lee—a riotous splash of pink and sparkles in an ocean of red—is as quiet as a flutter-bat.

This is the whole of the world, and it is bent to you.

Its heartbeat hammers in your bones, your gut, your lungs, your throat.

So you close your eyes and fall into the flames—

—and one by one, they begin to burn blue.

First the dignitaries. Then the guards. Finally the crowd. Anyone who holds fire in their hands, who offers it to you, feels your touch. Feels their spirit ignite. Feels the once-in-a-century miracle that is your flame.

Not one among them will ever know it again.

That is why you offer it.

Not as a gift.

As a reminder.

(You hardly use your epithet even in official documentation. You don't brag about it to your enemies. The Head Sage will not speak it when he lists the titles you will lose in exchange for the one you will gain.

But when the first cobalt flicker crept into your fist, that old windbag of a Head Archivist dug into the vault of scrolls he wasn't supposed to have, and pulled two words from a mouldering list that had not been relevant since before Sozin took the throne.

Some days you wish he didn't. It's a very stupid name, frankly. At least Zuko gets to add Spirit to his.

But there's still some comfort in knowing that no matter how many times you fail to become the Fire Lord, you will always remain Azula the Blue, she who bears the sky-stained flame.)

Only the Comet permits you control like this: the Comet, and the endless cycles of your life that have seared your fire to your soul until you cannot tell where the flame ends and the girl begins. And even with the Comet, it is almost too much—your skin sizzles with evaporating sweat, your pupils swallow your irises, and your tendons are like taut wires beneath the thick mantles and cloaks of the Fire Lord.

But you hold it for six counts of six breaths, until your mastery is undeniable.

And then you let it go.

A wind blows through the plaza and the stands; the exhaled breath of every firebender present, as their fire slips back to orange. Some stare down at their hands as if grieving the loss. Others are openly weeping.

Behind you, the High Sage—the gleaming, golden headpiece of the Fire Lord held tight within his gnarled fingers—opens his mouth to speak. You can hear it in the way he inhales, an echo that resounds across so very many, many cycles.

You hold up a hand.

"Not yet," you say. "One guest remains."

In the sky, a swooping smudge of white, with two dark silhouettes huddled on its back.

"My brother, you see." Your tone is light. Conversational. "It would hardly be a coronation without family, would it?"

(And yet, your Father is never here.)

Your hand becomes a fist thrust to the sky, releasing a soaring jet of flame. The airships abandon their delicate formation, splitting into two straight lines above the stands, a formal escort to the centre of the plaza.

The Avatar's bison stalls, a little hesitant, and you lower your fist to spread both arms wide in invitation.

"Come on, Zuko," you call, high and bright, "it's poor manners to keep your sister waiting."

There's a space before the stone stairs that lead from the plaza to your dais—you'd told the Sages it was to ensure the dignitaries understood the distance between the throne and the earth, but conveniently it also happens to be large enough for the flying beast to land.

And land it does, thick tail thumping against the ground and three-toed feet flattening beneath its weight. From its back springs Zuko, as you expected, and after hi—

"—you."

A sliver of lightning crawls into your clenched fingers.

The Dragon of the West, straightening up from his crouch, considers it with cold, unsmiling focus.

"Ba Sing Se is free, Azula," he says gravely. "Now it is the Fire Nation's turn."

"It's over." Zuko watches you like he might a naked blade. "You're not going to be Fire Lord today."

"And how, exactly," you say, soft as smoke, "do you propose to stop me?"

"You know how," Zuko says.

"Do I?" You descend the steps one at a time, the long crimson cloak of the Fire Lord dragging against the carved rock. The initial clamour at the unexpected arrivals has faded now. Only a funeral hush remains. "Do you see where you are, Zuko? Do you see the nation gathered in my name? You landed because I let you. You landed because I knew you were coming."

When your feet press into the floor of the plaza, no more than a body-length fills the space between you and Zuko.

"So tell me, brother: are you sure, in your heart of hearts," you say, tapping the fabric above your own in glacial mockery, "that it will truly be so simple?"

Despite everything—despite the fact he must know that you are toying with him—he still hesitates. A flicker of doubt scowls across his face, until it is chased away by Iroh's thick hand on his shoulder.

"She is playing you, Zuko," he says. "Remember your heritage. Remember your destiny. Ozai has taken many things from you, but he cannot take this. And neither can she."

Inside the hollow void of your skull, the cold fire seethes like steel scraped against glass.

"You're pathetic." Out of the corner of your eye, you see Ty Lee leaping from the stands, twirling through the air, and hitting the plaza at a dead run. Mai is already halfway to your side, a knife cutting slits in her ceremonial robes to maximise her range of motion. "You won't fight Father, but you want Zuko to fight me. Are you truly so colossal a coward, or do you just hate me that much?"

"I do not hate you, Azula," Iroh says heavily. For a moment, the weathered creases of his face turn soft. "I feel sorry for you, and the evil Ozai has taught you."

You scoff. "Hypocrite."

"Uncle is wiser than you'll ever understand!" Of course Zuko chooses that, of all things, to defend. "Stop wasting time, Azula. Or are you afraid to fight me?"

"If I'm afraid of anything, Zuko," you say, and do not look at his scar, "it's how irritating Mai will be if I kick you into the dirt before she's had her turn."

A tall black shadow stalks past you.

"Mai? What did you do to her? Is she sa—"

"Zuko," comes Mai's voice, low and urgent, "we need to talk."

"Mai! You're—"

"Annoyed? Yes." Her eyes are a little wider than normal, and despite the vast crowd who are all intensely fixated on the three of you—the four, when Ty Lee skids to a stop on your other side—she actually reaches out to grab his wrist. "Zuko, we need to talk."

The harsh lines of his stance slip slightly, but he doesn't move. "I have to stop Azula from becoming Fire Lord."

"By all means," you say, smiling, "go ahead. With the Comet as my witness, I promise I won't make a single move until you're finished."

"Your promises are rarely what they appear," Iroh says, but he's looking back from Zuko to Mai with something approaching fondness.

"She means this one." If Mai notices Iroh's attention, she doesn't show it, still staring intently at Zuko. "Please, Zuko."

You think it might be the shock of Mai actually saying please and meaning it that finally convinces Zuko to go with her. He rubs a hand against his temple, frowning, but eventually sighs and turns entirely to face her. "Okay. I trust you, Mai."

"How sweet," you drawl.

"You're so right, Azula!" Ty Lee says, clapping her hands and entirely ignoring your sarcasm. "Aren't they cute?"

You can feel Mai's eyeroll, even though she's not looking your and Ty Lee's way at all.

"Whatever," she says. "Come on."

Impressively, despite the fact she's released her grip on his wrist, Mai still manages to make it seem as if Zuko is being dragged away as he hurries to catch up with her brisk walk across the plaza. She chooses a space halfway between you and the walls of one of the stands and pulls to a halt, shooting you a careful glance before turning back to Zuko. This far, you can't hear what they're saying—you can only observe that sometimes Mai will point at you, or gesture sharply, and that Zuko looks progressively more and more baffled as the conversation continues. Business as usual, then.

"Ty Lee," you say, "tell the Sages that we will be postponing the coronation for the moment, will you? Just until the lovebirds have finished their little chat."

Her grey eyes dart between you and Iroh. "Are you sure, Azula?"

"I would hardly be fulfilling my promise if I wasn't." Your gaze cuts to the Dragon of the West. "Don't worry. I'm feeling quite straightforward today."

Ty Lee dithers for a second or two longer, swaying on the balls of her feet, before eventually deciding obedience is the better part of valour and slipping away to leap up the stairs.

As she leaves, you consider your Father's brother.

Gone is the affable, corpulent fool—this version of Iroh is swollen with strength instead of tea, the barrel of his chest straining at the blue-and-white of his robes. His beard is cut sharp, grey spikes stabbing out from his cheeks, and his topknot protrudes from the back of his skull like the hilt of a sword. But most dangerous of all is this: his breath swells to the same inexorable rhythm as your own.

You remember the first time you fought; when he stole your lightning and tossed you into the sea. He could have killed you then. There are cycles where he has—when Zuko's blood spills from your lips at the Western Air Temple and it is Iroh alone who faces you beneath the Comet.

Uncle Iroh is a disgrace to his name and nation. But the man who faces you now is someone else: someone remembers he was once the Dragon of the West, whose heroism you and Zuko briefly grew up on before the tragedy of Lu Ten.

And yet, he's still content to hide behind your brother and the Avatar and all the other feckless children who believe they can save the world.

He really is pathetic.

"It's funny, you know," you muse, sweet as rot. "When I returned Zuko to his home, after three years under your tutelage, he was hardly a better firebender than when he left. But a bare month or two with the Avatar, and he's almost progressed to competence. I wonder—were you deliberately sabotaging him all along, or are you just that great a failure as a teacher?"

"There is more to life than firebending," he says, so stern, so judgemental. "A forest has never sprouted from kindling."

"My first patented Uncle proverb!" Your sarcasm falls as heavily as a hammer. "Truly, it's no wonder Zuko is so good at rushing off without thinking—I would be too, if it would let me get away from listening to this, day-in, day-out."

"You underestimate your brother, Azula. There is no failing in allowing a good heart to drive you." He looks at you, and then at the sea of silent souls in the stands, in the plaza, on the roofs, all watching the drama unfold. "It is the finest quality a ruler can have."

"Oh, so now he's my brother." You grind down the sparks that threaten to spit from your hands. "Was I his sister when you told him the only way to restore honour to the Fire Nation was to strike me down?"

"It is Zuko's destiny to guide our country to a future of peace and order." Iroh shakes his head slowly, the white of his mantle stained red by the Comet-torn sky. "We have lived astray too long."

He's not—

He's not even listening to you.

"You're so lost in your myopic self-righteousness you can't even comprehend what I'm saying, can you?" Your lips threaten to curl into a snarl—so you let them, baring your teeth so each word comes more bitten than said. "Nothing more than a hollow hypocrite, who ran from Lu Ten, who ran from Father, who ran and ran and ran and ran until he finally found enough children to hide behind. All you do is preach about peace and temperance and forgiveness and tea and hope someone else does the dirty work because it's easier than confronting the fact you failed your son, you failed your throne, you failed to stop Father burning Zuko, and after all that you even failed to stop me from taking him back home anyway."

Without wholly realising when it happened, you find yourself nose-to-nose with Iroh, glaring into his golden eyes—the only thing the two of you have ever shared.

"Why are you even here?" Each syllable shatters out like glass. "Too scared to let Zuko face me alone, too scared to fight me instead! What is the point of you, Dragon of the West? I'd almost think you were clever for managing to swan in at the very end, waiting in the wings because if Zuko wins he's young enough to need a regent and then the throne is yours and you've never even needed to lift a finger. But you're not, because I know what you are."

You dig your fingers into your cloak—the thick, heavy trappings of the Fire Lord.

"You're terrified. Of this. Of the Dragon Throne. Of the responsibility. Because deep down you're the same tired old fool who left Lu Ten to die under a ton of rubble and didn't even love him enough to burn Ba Sing Se to the ground for it and you think you're just going to do it again if you ever have to run anything more serious than your stupid little tea shop."

A smile splits your lips like a razor.

"So lie to yourself about destiny all you want, Uncle Iroh. Maybe if you say it enough times, you might even believe it."

In the silence that follows, you're not panting for breath at all.

Iroh's expression is—there's fury, and there's grief, and there's bewilderment, and there's a dozen other things you can't place at all. The air around him smokes and shimmers, but not a lick of flame curls from his mouth or hands.

"You make it easy to forget how young you are, Azula," he says eventually, quiet the way the battlefield is, once only corpses remain. "That is my error, to have believed the same lie you show the rest of the world. It does not forgive the words you have spoken, or the wounds you have tried to shove your fingers in so you can see how deep I bleed. But it does lend your approach a surprising… familiarity."

He sighs, and the Dragon of the West falls away like so many unwashed clothes to reveal the tired man beneath.

"And beyond that still: nothing you have said to me is something I have not said to myself. But where you think that is weakness, I have come to learn that it is strength." Before you can quite react, he reaches out a large hand and presses you back, firm but without violence. You slap his arm away almost immediately in the aftermath. "I am an old man, with an old man's regrets, and an old man's mistakes. Every day, I wake to them."

He smiles, small and worn and strong, like a stone ground clean by the weight of a river.

"That is not such a bad thing. It is how life reminds me that there are always more lessons to be found." Iroh folds his fingers over his stomach. "No single step paves the road, but it is only when you stop to look back that you may see how far you have come. I hope that when you stop, Azula, you look back and feel as proud as I have learned to be."

Your time, you think with an inadvertent glance at the position of the Sun, usually comes around about twelve hours from now.

"I'm sure you do," you say dismissively, shifting away to face Zuko and Mai, who have finally returned.

Mai looks a peculiar mix of frustrated and satisfied, arms crossed and fingers drumming against her sleeves; Zuko is glancing warily between you and Iroh, with an odd weight to his gaze whenever it falls on you in particular. Somewhere behind you comes the raindrop rhythm of Ty Lee's feet on the stairs, which you suspect has far less to do with how long it took her to talk to the Sages and far more with a desire not to get close enough to interrupt you shouting at Iroh.

"Azula," Zuko asks, rocking back on his feet, shaggy hair falling as messily over his face as his worn red tunic falls over his torso, "are you really not planning to kill me?"

You level a glare at Mai, who shrugs.

Fine.

Your… discussion with Iroh has already aired enough Royal Family drama before the entire nation. What does it matter if they—the souls who still surround you in the plaza, and the stands, and the temple, watching with rapt attention what might be the greatest spectacle of their entire lives—hear a little more?

"Keep that gormless look on your face and you'll convince me to change my mind," you say.

"Why don't you?" Zuko says, and then stumbles over his tongue trying to make his meaning clear. "Want to kill me, that is. Not why don't you change your mind. That was not a dare, Azula."

You snort a laugh, and then seamlessly disguise it as a cough. "Do you want to kill me, Zuko?"

"Of course not!" Like most things in his life, your brother doesn't even seem to think about it. He just glances at Mai, then Ty Lee, then Iroh, and then finally you. "You're… You're annoying, and awful, and arrogant, and you make me want to kick your ass just so you'll stop being like this," he gestures at you, dragging a hand from your head to your toes, "for like five seconds, but I don't want to kill you."

Then he smiles, and it seems—it seems so strange, to see him smile. To see him smile at you. Like at some point you'd forgotten how it sat on his face, and only now can you catalogue how his scar-side lip is stiffer than the other and it quirks his smile accordingly, how only one eye widens but how both irises soften.

"Well, I guess I did want to kill you for a bit when you stole the last of my fire flakes on Ember Island even though you're meant to be fourteen, Azula, not four. But apart from that, I don't."

You… haven't been fourteen in a little while, now.

But Zuko doesn't know that.

Zuko doesn't know any of that, and he still doesn't want to kill you at all.

That's—

"—can't believe they're having a moment, Mai, isn't it great?" comes the end of whatever nonsense Ty Lee had been babbling.

"We are not," you snap out at exactly the same time as Zuko.

Even your grimaces are simultaneous.

How hateful.

"I'm still going to fight you, though," Zuko says bluntly, into the quiet that comes after. "You shouldn't be the Fire Lord. Not when burning the Earth Kingdom down to the ground was your idea."

"You'll lose," you say. "I can beat you without killing you, Zuko, no matter how hard you try to make it sometimes. There was a time not so long ago when I beat you without even needing the flame. Can you say the same?"

He scowls. You'd say it sits on his face like a scar but… no. It doesn't really compare.

"I don't know, and I don't care. The Fire Nation is wrong. You're wrong. If nobody else in our country can see that, then it's my duty to show them. Even if I… don't die trying." His scowl deepens. "That sounded better in my head."

"Your courage becomes you, my nephew," says Iroh, who's been suspiciously silent until now, thumbing through the spikes of his iron-dark beard. What is he plotting?

"You have no right to speak to anyone about courage." You stab a finger in his direction. "Stay out of this."

"Uncle's as much my family as you are, Azula." Zuko's back to glaring at you. How original. "More, actually."

"And aren't you lucky for that," you say, spinning on him, cut-blood nails jabbing at his chest. "But he's as much my family as mother was, so frankly I don't care."

"Don't talk about her like that," Zuko hisses, embers curling from his breath. "She loved us. Just because you hate her doesn't mean you can pretend she never existed."

"Of course you would say that," you hiss right back. The storm rages inside the glass bottle of your skull. "She loved you. So much that she killed Grandfather just to keep you safe. The only thing she ever did for me was give birth, and she probably hated every minute of it. Good. I hope it hurt."

Zuko's good eye widens, and he stumbles back a step—though whether from your vitriol or the revelation, you're not entirely sure. Mai and Ty Lee are both looking between the two of you with shock and sympathy painted across their faces in the paling of their cheeks and the parting of their lips; Iroh studies you and Zuko in turn with pity (or is it, also, sympathy?), but without surprise.

"You're lying," Zuko says, though he doesn't sound like he believes it. "Mother would never kill anybody."

"A mother's love is a great and terrible thing," Iroh says with a soothing rumble, "and Ursa loved you very, very much, Prince Zuko."

He jerks towards Iroh, a wild flurry of too-worn clothes and too-short hair. "You're agreeing with her?"

"I never thought I'd see the day." There's no satisfaction in your smile. Just dark amusement. "I'm almost impressed you never put it together, Zuzu. Your ability to repress obvious truths about the world just because they're inconvenient to your worldview is truly admirable."

You carefully ignore Mai's raised eyebrow.

"Why did no-one ever tell me?" Zuko pleads, arms flung wide. You have to sway back to avoid being struck in the face—just like Mai, who's stepped closer to rest her fingers softly on the side of his waist in a fleeting touch. "Why was it Father who was the first person to even imply it? That she left because of me? That we lost our mother because of me?"

Because your Father never uses a weapon until it gives him an advantage.

(Because your Father never uses a weapon until he's sure how best to make it hurt.)

"Oh, don't be so dramatic, Zuzu," you say, waving a hand. "It's really not that big of a deal."

"Shut up, Azula." He's yelling. The rippling haze in the air around him, lit by the furnace of his breath, makes it hard to see his expression.

Iroh inhales, and the heat saps from the air enough that Mai and Ty Lee stop sweating. His exhale shunts it behind the five of you, rippling over those luminaries foolish enough to remain genuflecting in the plaza instead of fleeing for the relative safety of the stands.

You're not sure if Zuko even notices.

"No, I don't think I will," you say. There's a cracking noise inside your head. The cold fire spits from your fingertips, grounding itself in the stone below. "Sorry to shatter your little pedestal, Zuko, but our mother was a regicide who murdered the sitting Fire Lord for her son and didn't even say goodbye to her daughter—a refreshing change of pace, since she usually alternated between lecturing me for being a monster or foisting me off at the Academy while you got to swan around with her inside the palace."

Your smile spreads across your face like a wound.

"I can admire the ruthlessness in finally making it clear exactly how much she would have preferred I didn't exist," you add, "but like I said: it still hurt."

Ty Lee's fingers are icy even through the thick fabric of your sleeves.

"Azula…"

It's strangely hard to focus on telling her to leave you alone; strangely hard to glare at Iroh, who is considering you, and Zuko, with a kind of dawning sorrow that fills the ridges and valleys of his cheeks like spilled blood; strangely hard to wonder what Mai is whispering desperately into Zuko's ear.

"So there you have it, Zuzu," you say. Your voice is a wretched thing, your pitch entirely crooked and your intonation like the aftermath of an earthquake. "Are you going to change your mind and try to kill me now, just so you can follow mother dearest's footsteps one last time?"

"No! I mean. I'm—"

a footstep like the slap of a war drum

a mountain of white and blue

sunfire eyes

"—Iroh, uncle of Zuko, uncle of Azula, son of Azulon, brother of Ozai, and I challenge you, Princess Azula, to an Agni Kai."

Zuko's shocked gasp. "Uncle?"

Mai's face is white.

Ty Lee yells, "No!"

"I knew this would happen," you say, and you can't stop laughing, jagged and shrill and sharp, the sound of steel when it splinters, "I knew you hated me!"

The Dragon of the West is crying. Fat, wet tears spill salt down his face even as he shifts his feet back the same way Zuko does before he bends.

"I am beginning to understand," he says, heavy and slow, like each word is being cut out of his heart, "that I will wake tomorrow to a far greater history of mistakes than I thought I had carried here today. I do not hate you, Azula. My niece. I was arrogant to say I felt sorry for you. I hardly think I even know who you are."

Iroh shakes his head, ponderous with disgust, but not—not aimed at you?

"All I know is that if I allow you to fight Zuko, and Zuko to fight you, I will be making the same mistake I have been making since before I lost Lu Ten." He breathes in, and you can feel the scrape of his flame against your own, like flint sparking across flint. "If this family must see one more day of violence, let it not be a brother against a sister, a sister against a brother. Let it be instead an uncle who is finally willing to trade pointers with his niece."

His smile is shallow, and watery, and undeniably, hatefully there.

"Come, Princess Azula. Let us see if this failure of a teacher has anything you might, one day, feel interested enough to learn."

"I will never," you snarl, "want to learn anything from you."

Lightning crawls through your veins and plunges out of your skin.

"That, too," he says with palpable grief, "is my error."

You cannot bear to look at him any longer.

"Clear the plaza!" you howl, brushing past Mai and Ty Lee and even the hesitant hand Zuko reaches toward your sparking arm.

How dare Iroh pretend, after all these years, that he's finally willing to see you?

How dare he pretend that he regrets only ever choosing Zuko?

How dare he pretend that he actually cares?

How dare he?

"If you wanted me to listen to a word you've said, Uncle," you say, hurling the Fire Lord's cloak to the side as easily as your Father hurled it to you, "then maybe—"

(—he shouldn't have been so late.)

---

END OF "SECOND" LOOP.

YOU HAVE FAILED.

THE BOILING ROCK AWAITS.

---

​

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

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

Spoiler

(3/4) Born Lucky?

If you had not known the spark, you would still be a once-in-a-generation genius. You are good at almost anything you try, and great at almost anything you enjoy. Your star even rises over Ba Sing Se, unconquerable legend of the Hundred-Year War. Is there anything you could not succeed at, if you truly wanted to? After all—you're not Zuko. In all ways, you are nothing like Zuko, who must stumble, and fail, and try again—Zuko, who is offered so many hands to lift him back up, when you have only ever been able to fill your palms with flame.

---

​

The world is no longer as simple as it once was.

Your days are filled with truths you would have once sworn to understand and yet are now strangers to your thoughts.

Your nights are spent sleepless with secrets you cannot admit even to yourself.

Life slides past like you are following it through a window stained with the frantic fog of your breath—you know the shape of it, the colour, the style, but every time you try to describe it you get the details wrong. And wrong. And wrong.

There is something you are lacking. Something you don't have. Something… that reminds you of your lessons in strategy, where your tutors would sometimes leave a crucial fact out of the scenario and then spring it on you only after you'd just signed the last proud flourish in your solution. Sometimes they wouldn't spring it at all: they'd just describe the result, and force you to figure out what you didn't know in reverse. You'd hated them for it—for the embarrassment, for the cruelty, for the failure. You think you still do.

But it taught you the value of good information. It taught you the value of contingency plans.

And above all, it taught you the value of perspective.

If you are so wrong, so often, about the life you have lived over and over and over, then it must be because you are not seeing the right problem. You are fighting a scenario you do not properly understand.

(What a fascinating way to describe your family.)

There is only one path forward. One way to truly step outside the box.

You are going to have to ask a question.

It is shameful. It is demeaning. It is admitting that you are not good enough to find the answer entirely on your own merits.

(It is almost like accepting that you are going to fail alone.)

But it must be done.

There are things that have stopped making sense to you. There are things that fester under your skin like rust on a knife. And there are things that are both.

You need to see them through someone else's eyes.

You need a different perspective: on your friends, on your family, on your life.

You need… Lo and Li.

Azulon's sisters. Your tutors. And the only two people who have never, once, left—not unless you ordered them to.

(Not even your Father can say the same, can he?)

Only they might have the answers you're looking for.

But before you get an answer, Princess Azula, you need a question.

So: what are you going to ask Lo and Li about?

[ ] Your mother. Zuko is obsessed with her. He won't hear a word against her—won't even think that she's capable of doing wrong. Especially not when you're the one saying it. But Lo and Li have been around since before Zuko was born. They've seen it all. They know it all. They can give you the evidence you need to finally drive home to Zuko only he was ever loved—and prove you right that you were not.
[ ] Your Father. He is the embodiment of the Fire Nation—the greatest firebender there is. Grandfather was a fool not to see it from the start. But even your Father must have stumbled, once, like you have been. Even your Father must have made mistakes. How did he deal with them? What did he do to keep going?
You are not a traitor, to look for evidence of the Fire Lord's weakness. You are loyal, and he is strong.
[ ] 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?
[ ] Azulon. He was the one who favoured Iroh. He was the one who sentenced Zuko to death. He is the reason your mother is gone and your Father holds the throne. But why? What sort of man was he, in the decades before he was your Grandfather? When did he finally slip and start to lose control?
There are more important things to ask about than a dusty old man whose best gift to you was dying.
[ ] Sozin. The visionary. The genius. The conqueror. Every living person in the world must know his name—and for the last hundred years, most of the dead as well. What led him there? What made him decide to burn the world down, a century before you ever thought the same? And at the end… what did he think of it all?

But there's something you're forgetting. Lo and Li are not at the Boiling Rock. You need to leave it first—and that means you need to come up with an answer for Mai and Ty Lee. Last time, you saved them because it would be interesting. And it was.

But why are you going to save them this time, Princess Azula?

(What excuse will you use to pretend?)

[ ] Because they can help.
No.
[ ] Because it's how you win.
No.
[ ] Because Zuko wouldn't expect it.
No.

What a stupid question.

You don't need reasons like that.

You're just going to save them because, after everything, they're still your friends.

 

[Magery]

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,

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 strikethrough indicate replaced or removed text.

Spoiler

(2/3) Monster?

There is a lonely path in the palace. At the end of that lonely path is a room. And in that room is a girl called monster. Her name is Azula, and she does 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.

---

​

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.

 

[Magery]

"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.

Spoiler

(?/?) ???

(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.

Spoiler

(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.

 

[Magery]

The Dragonbone Catacombs are cold with the weight of history.

Nothing lives here.

Nothing breathes here.

The Catacombs are as deep and dark as the hollow of a grave, for a grave is what they are: the perforation of tunnels that wind sluggishly beneath the High Temple of the Fire Sages, like blood through the veins of a corpse, lead to the dozens on dozens of mausoleums dedicated to the Fire Lords of old. Down one of those sparsely-lit corridors rests Fire Lord Zoryu; down another waits Fire Lord Gonryu; down another still moulders Fire Lord Yosor.

But you are not here to pay respects to your ancestors, or to marvel at the strength of a line that traces unbroken to the unification of the Fire Islands. You hardly have the time for ancient relics. Zoryu might have crushed the clans, but unfurling the nightmare of his specific tax regulations for the non-hereditary farmers on Shuhon Island once cost you a perfect score on a practice test you sat to prepare for the Academy's graduation examinations and for that you will never wholly forgive him.

No: you are here for Fire Lord Sozin, the great progenitor of all that you know and all that you have ever sought to become.

The scrolls the Head Archivist returned to you following your inquiry had been largely boring genealogies, but they had confirmed that Zuko had not been lying—or, rather, had not been lied to. Your mother was indeed descended from Roku. So is Zuko.

So are you.

The old windbag had been thorough, though. Scattered among the genealogies were stories and excerpts from the lives of each of the Avatars you'd inquired about. Some were plainly dated propaganda extolling the virtues of their character, some were more biting historical criticisms of their political acumen (or lack of it), and some were just peculiar excerpts that served little purpose except, you imagine, to humanise the Avatar in the eyes of the less aware.

But one of them had led you here, to the Catacombs—in the shadow of the night, so as not to concern your Father with trivial reports of your whereabouts the day before his coronation—and the grand hall that bloated its way to Sozin's tomb.

It had seemed almost an afterthought at first in the deluge of information you'd received; a small, square piece of carefully-gilded card, the same kind that all important palace letters were written on. You'd almost skipped over reading it. Why would you care about the guest list for Roku's wedding?

Almost skipped—but not quite. It would have been the height of carelessness to disregard any information you could gather on your enemy, even if only to determine why it wasn't important. So you had read the card, and it had immediately rewarded your attention to detail, because it had been that silly romantic frippery that had told you Fire Lord Sozin had been Roku's best man.

No wonder Zuko had stooped to asking you about your "great-grandfather's history". He must have been so confused by whatever Iroh had told him—Iroh, who had clearly known it, and had clearly manipulated your brother down whatever winding path of wisdom and weakness and tea had been necessary for him to learn it—that he'd been willing to risk you finding out the truth just to try and make sense of it.

If only you'd been a little more willing to wonder why he was asking. Not that it would have changed anything. It just would have been… interesting to know.

The implications, after all, are fascinating. Roku had died Sozin's enemy, but Sozin had clearly remembered him—enough to ensure that Roku's blood eventually joined Sozin's own, whether by his own command or that of Azulon—and you suspect, given the invitation, it may have been with a kind of rotting, bruised fondness.

Like the echo of a fist struck across the face: a wound kept to remember the blow.

How maudlin.

Perhaps the musty, sulphurous air is getting to you.

Or maybe it's the skeletons—the ribs and bones and skulls that line the march to Sozin's final rest. Whoever designed this place had an eye for a particular kind of grandeur you imagine Mai would appreciate; the yellowing corpses of dragons stand in military procession either side of you, their horns towering from their skulls in silent salutes.

To make this pilgrimage is to know, inescapably, which genocide Sozin was prouder of.

You click your fingers and swallow the torches that burn in those long-dead mouths with the simmering blue of your chi.

You'd like to fight a dragon, you think as your boots disturb the dust carpeting the stone floor; it swirls and whirls in silent eddies around your feet with each step. It would be the truest test of firebending you can imagine. You've done most everything else, after all. Facing down the original source and seeing if you have surpassed it… now that would be something.

But you don't—you don't think you'd kill a dragon.

Not out of any misplaced, childish sentiment, of course. You're hardly Zuko, who's never met a misshapen creature he couldn't love. Rather, it's simply that killing one seems like a… waste. Why would you copy something Iroh has already done, especially when all it would prove in the eyes of the world is that you were as good as him? No.

Far better to do something Iroh thought too small to do.

So no. You wouldn't kill a dragon.

You'd tame a dragon.

Even Sozin had one, after all.

It would simply be following in the paths of your great forebears.

Unfortunately, it seems this particular path to your great forebear stretches for far too long to be reasonable. You understand that Sozin deserves the acclaim—he is, after all, the greatest Fire Lord in history since the first, he who became the Sun-who-Walked and whose true name has long been lost. But it is quite late at night and you do have a coronation to attend in the morning, so while counting the number of colossal rib-bones that crawl across the rocky ceiling at regular intervals has led you to quite an impressive number, at this point you'd prefer a door.

As if to mock you, however, it takes another five minutes of carefully managing your breath to avoid choking any of the dry dust you've been kicking up as you walk before you reach the towering metal aegis that protects Sozin's tomb from unworthy eyes. His imposing visage glares down at you from where he has been carved into the door as you tilt your head back—the fabric of your hood squashing against your neck—to take in the mechanism.

Oh. How disappointingly simple.

You reach out a gloved hand and press it against the ornate, three-pronged imperial emblem that rises slightly from his impressively-rippling robes; the metalworkers truly gave it their all for this particular depiction of the Fire Lord. The teardrop flame is slightly more worn than the rest—not too much, clearly only a few people have made regular visits here since his death, but enough to make things clear.

You exhale; an idle whisper of flame curls from your fingers and palm and sweeps through the whole statue until every inch of Sozin's cloak is edged in blue, until his mouth and nose and eyes fill with your fire and it seems as if you have granted the Fire Lord the one gift even he never had in life.

There's a slightly echoing click. The door groans open on hidden hinges when you give it a gentle push. Sozin's tomb is revealed to you in all its glory—or at least it is when you snap your fingers again and the fire that opened the door leaps instead to the row of torches half-hidden in the walls just below where the roof curves into a vast dome.

A museum's worth of imperial artefacts—blades and benches and bottles and books—scatter themselves around the room, largely dominated by a series of grand funerary urns. A beautifully-carved stone dragon guards the centre, curling like a castle wall around a single much smaller urn that you are quite sure holds Sozin's own ashes. Right before the urn is a narrow teak table, and—

—Zuko has been here before you, hasn't he?

The scrolls that should be neatly arranged on that table, Sozin's last will and testament to be buried with him so that even the Spirit World knows the Fire Lord's final decrees, are unfurling lazily like the tongue of a panting dog, and only four of them are even on the table to begin with. The fifth has rolled to rest under the most garishly-decorated urn you've seen since the one Ukano had in his office in Omashu.

How terribly undignified.

Your brother really has no respect for the traditions of his ancestors, does he?

Boots scraping against the tiles, well-polished but nonetheless worn by the indifference of time, you step forward to collect the loose scroll and replace it back on the table, carefully rolling the others back up, shifting them gently with your fingers until they sit in perfect formation once again. This is Sozin's tomb.

From the mouth of a dragon, his urn watches you with cold dismissal.

You breathe out. The flames on the walls flare until the whole room is empty of shadow; until you are illuminated by a dozen cerulean suns.

Sozin, you think, would not admire you. Maybe he would have, if you were still the same girl who set out to hunt the Avatar all those years ago: if you were still the executor's edge of the Fire Nation's blade, cold and sharp and honed to conquest.

You're not quite sure what sort of girl you are now. Still a princess; still the favoured heir; still Azula the Blue. You found the lightning and in it found yourself. Clawed yourself back from a mind made molten. You are stronger now than you have ever been.

But here, kneeling before Sozin's grave, with your fingers soft on the parchment that holds his final truth, it's impossible to ignore that if tomorrow the endless cycle of your life threw you only a few months further back, you would try to suggest that maybe his Comet had a more precise use than a second genocide.

You hardly think he would approve of that—not even if you were doing it for the sake of the Fire Nation.

(You would never dare to call Sozin short-sighted.)

The first scroll unfurls carefully under your touch, whispering against the wood it rests on. It is titled simply, because simplicity is all it needs: this is the final testimony of Fire Lord Sozin. The characters are gentler than you expected, each stroke and line slightly sloped as if traced by a hand that couldn't quite keep the brush entirely straight. It seems even Sozin was vulnerable to the trials of old age, as you have heard Lo and Li name them.

You breathe in.

Time to read.

One scroll.

Two.​

Three.​

Four.​

Five.

You breathe out.

What a sordid tale.

You thought you'd been the closest any member of Fire Nation royalty has come to killing the Avatar—but Sozin had you beaten even there.

How surprising the world can be.

You can see how the story would have gripped and despaired Zuko in equal measure. How he would have flipped through the scrolls faster and faster as brotherhood turned to betrayal and friendship turned to fury and finally, finally, at the end of all things an outstretched hand and—the scroll thrown away, history once again reminding him that happy endings are only ever the province of overblown, poorly-acted plays.

You can even see how it would have tied him closer to the Avatar's side. Zuko has always had the strangest sense of responsibility, and a chance to make amends for his forefather's sins would have had him champing at the bit to prove his own honour.

But to think, you muse as you rearrange the scrolls to once again sit in perfect regiments across the table and settle back on your haunches in precise seiza, that you owe your birth to Sozin two times over. Once, for pushing Roku past his own cowardice and towards the woman who became his wife, Ta Min; twice, for whatever festering affection he'd still held for Roku that led to his line not being excoriated from the halls of power but rather being allowed to marry into its apex.

There's a certain symmetry to it, you suppose—a rhyme repeated a century later. No wonder Iroh must have been so proud to tell Zuko about the warring legacies in his blood; to know that he had the perfect fulcrum upon which to tilt Zuko's self-image just ever-so-slightly in the direction of the light, or whatever other pretty words he'd have used to satisfy your brother's martyr complex.

Because Zuko, you find it easy to admit, is much more a man like Roku than he is like Sozin.

You suppose, as ever, that it had been inevitable you'd end up playing his villain. Had he seen it then, in that war council? Had he thought of Roku, who had sought to defy Sozin's ambitions, while you'd regurgitated them for your Father's smile? Probably not. For all that he's obsessed with plebeian dramatics, Zuko has never thought in narratives—a hilarious irony, given he spent three years by the side of someone trying to fit him in one.

The last laugh, admittedly, is probably on you, since the universe has bent the cycle of your life to demonstrating that Iroh had succeeded.

How tiresome.

You turn your attention away from the scrolls and to the room at large, the fabric of your dark cloak shifting and creasing as you turn to study it from one side to the other. There's no point keeping your hood on here, so you brush it back with a hand. Your top-knot—it would have been more unusual to not have one, here in Caldera, even when disguised—still feels a little pinched from where it's been cramped against your skull for so long, your scalp drawn bitingly tight. You almost want to shake it out, but you are not redoing the style without a mirror in front of Sozin's ashes. There's a limit to how much indignity you'll endure.

It's plain what Iroh had wanted Zuko to learn from this whole affair. Your brother had even said it himself: good and evil might always war inside of me, but I definitely know who won inside you.

How easy it is to move him.

Just give him a choice.

You offered one in Ba Sing Se, and he came to you. Iroh offered one in Caldera, and he went from you.

Maybe one day Zuko will offer you a choice.

Wouldn't that be funny?

You sigh. An idle twitch of your fingers snuffs the flames flickering in the alcoves. Now the room is as dark as Mai's sense of humour. Or perhaps the direction of your thoughts. But you hardly have the time to dwell on them—to let them linger as the dust does, in this tomb without fire that few except you and your brother have visited in what might be a century.

It's… this is Sozin. The architect of empire. One of the most important figures in the history of the Fire Nation. And you sit here, folded on your knees and shins, armourless save for the plates defending your forearms and the gorget around your neck, as perhaps one of the four people in the world who still know how awful a joke he told at Roku's wedding.

It shouldn't matter, particularly. You are hardly unfamiliar with Fire Nation propaganda, especially in matters of royalty. Of course Sozin had his secrets excised from memory. You lied to the face of the nation, too, when you told the world Zuko had killed the Avatar. Some things are simply a necessary part of infallibility.

But at the same time, you can't help wondering why he chose to bury it like this.

How easy it would have been, to wholly demonise Roku—to emphasise that the Avatar had pretended to be Sozin's friend when all along he was working with traitors to overthrow the Fire Lord and his rightful efforts to uplift the world. How simple, to blame him for the volcano that had killed him. Even someone with an elephant-rat's cunning like Long Feng would have seen it. You know Sozin must have.

Though perhaps wondering is the wrong word. Even though Sozin would not admire you, you have always admired him. You were named after Azulon as a show of favour, but for all his competence as Fire Lord and incompetence at selecting his successor, how could he compare to the man who made the world?

And you are—well. If Zuko is the side of your family that is Roku, you think it's clear you are certainly the side that is Sozin.

No. You're not really wondering, are you?

You know.

You know why Sozin wanted the world to forget he and Roku had ever even known one another, and still couldn't stop himself from writing it all down.

You know why Sozin was willing to commit genocide to eliminate the threat of the Avatar, but couldn't bring himself to paint Roku as a cold-hearted traitor instead of just another enemy of progress.

You know why Sozin left his best friend to die in burning suffocation while his favoured son still ensured their bloodlines would eventually join as one.

Guilt would be the easy answer. Shame, too. It's not quite either of those things, though. It rhymes with them, like grief does with regret. But it's something sharper. Not something that mourns. Not something that haunts. It's not anything like that—like the things people like Ty Lee or the Avatar look for so that they can keep pretending it's possible for someone to be sorry enough that they're no longer bad.

Sozin wasn't sorry.

He just didn't want to let go of any of the things he'd decided were his.

Not even when he felt they'd betrayed him.

Not even when it hurt.

How relatable.

Is that why your mother came to hate her time in Caldera Palace? Is that why she came to despise your Father—you know she did, all they ever did was argue when she wasn't coddling Zuko or looking at you as if you'd set fire to her precious peonies just for showing him up, like it was supposed to be a crime instead of a reflex he just wasn't smart enough to learn.

You're not sure you're willing to give her the credit. But she did manage, if nothing else, to kill the sitting Fire Lord in a way your Father seemed to have little difficulty covering up. There's a certain cunning in that, even if it pales in comparison to the bloodless conquest of Ba Sing Se.

So maybe she did figure it out. Maybe she finally realised after the second child that she wasn't there to be a princess, or even your Father's partner—she was there to be a possession, a trophy hung among Sozin's halls for nothing more, and nothing less, than the blood sloshing through her tainted veins.

So she saw Zuko, who she'd already loved too long to let go, and she saw you, the inescapable evidence that her only value was in popping out proof that Roku's line had been subsumed by Sozin's, and she made her choice.

But you doubt it.

(Nobody's ever needed a reason to find you unlovable.)
Sighing, you slip to your feet, cloak brushing against your legs as you turn to leave the tomb. You're not sure you've learned anything useful today, and your Father's coronation is in a concerningly small number of hours given you need both to sleep and to prepare. Then you'll need to meet with Mai and Ty Lee—and eventually, inevitably, Zuko.

You suppose you've figured out your angle at least. If Zuko knows about Roku, and about Sozin, if he remembers Azulon and the conversation in the throne room that gave your mother her final opportunity to demonstrate which child she truly loved, if how he thinks of your Father and your Father's choices is in any way reflected by how many times he's fought you over them… well, surely he should have realised that to be Fire Lord is to be someone your brother most assuredly does not want to be.

Lucky for him that you're right here, isn't it?

Truly, your magnanimity is unmatched.

(After all: to be Fire Lord is to never see the day past Sozin's Comet.)

---

The Sun is distant when your Father is crowned.

It still burns just as hot, just as large, transfixing the sky with a radiance to which all else, even the Fire Lord, must kneel. No clouds dare to obstruct its sight. The perfectly-polished limestone bricks—the ones that raise the three-stage dais above those worthy only to kneel in rank after rank at your Father's feet—gleam in its reflected light until any non-firebender would be forced to squint. Your fresh set of armour, made sleek with ceremony and without the slightest scratch to show it has ever defended a Princess of the Nation from harm, glimmers slightly, even the dragonbone paint unable to fully swallow the Sun's brilliance.

But as you close your eyes and bow your head so that as your Father crests that final step and takes in the horizon that will soon be his, it will not be obstructed by something as unnecessary as his daughter's face, you still can't help but think:

The Sun is distant when he is crowned.

His smile spreads slow and satisfied, like pitch poured before flame. You can't see it—he has not yet given you permission to look—but you know it as your heartbeat, as the blood that lingers between your veins.

(The blood that is half his, and half the Avatar's.

It doesn't mean anything, really.)

He takes a moment more to study all that has bent to his will; you feel his gaze slide across your back, over the generals and ministers and Fire Sages who fill the rest of the dais with obsequiousness and grey hair, over the rows of genuflecting soldiers and nobles who line either side of the royal carpet like a dragon's teeth around its tongue.

Then he speaks, and for a moment there is no other sound than this—not even the faint wash of the waves against the cliff, or the infinitesimal scrape of armour against stone as the less intelligent generals move to pretend they are giving your Father the full attention they should have already been offering from the start.

"Rise, Azula," he says, and you bite down on the sigh of relief that threatens to escape your throat even as you stand with the same careful obedience another would use to bow. "There has been a change of plans."

You know. "Yes, Father."

"Not even a protest," he muses, returning his attention to the grand vessel from which he will lead his conquest, smokestacks already steaming in preparation. "Where is your fire, my daughter?"

Your Father is unquestionable. "A Princess obeys her Fire Lord, Father. Your decision is final."

"Very good," he says. "I've decided to lead the fleet of airships to Ba Sing Se alone. You will remain here in the Fire Nation. I need you here to watch over the homeland."

That is the duty of the Fire Lord. "I will serve you with loyalty."

"And for your loyalty," he says, as if it's only just occurred to him, "I've decided to declare you the new Fire Lord."

Sorry, but you're not gonna become Fire Lord today. "I am grateful for this honour, Father, but if the Dragon Throne is to be mine, what will be yours?"

"Fire Lord Ozai is no more. Just as the world will be reborn in fire, I shall be reborn as the supreme ruler of the world." The words are heavy in the air. Like a war balloon. Like a comet. "From this moment on, I will be known as… the Phoenix King."

The Fire Sages are seamless—it takes your Father only moments to discard his old office like a spidersnake discards its skin and be crowned as no other has been or will ever be again. He raises his hands to the sky, the golden phoenixes of his pauldrons almost seeming to take flight. Behind him, the flagpoles swallow themselves in flame; below him, the crowds rise only so that they can bow again in staggered rows as if to mimic the ripple of your Father's glory across the Fire Nation.

This is his grand moment: the strict and eternal proof that he will outshine every Fire Lord who came before or after. Even Sozin.

(Especially you.)

There is nothing in your head except obedience and awe.

You are a loyal daughter of the Fire Nation.

All you are is meant to serve.

That's—that's why you need to ask.

So you can serve better.

So that you do not dare to interpret your Father's mind, but instead obey it.

(Didn't you tell your brother something about that once?)

Yes. That's the only reason.

That's why you take a hesitant step closer to his side, where the generals and the ministers and the Fire Sages cannot hear.

That's why you open your mouth and say, quietly, "Father, if Zuko infiltrates Caldera while you are conquering the Earth Kingdom, would you prefer that I kill him or simply imprison him for your triumphant return?"

That's why it's nothing to do with Ty Lee at all when your Father says, easy, casual, "Don't be foolish, Azula. I have no time to waste on traitors."

---

It's not until the late afternoon that you find the time to share lunch with Mai and Ty Lee.

The garden blooms in white and red around you; summer is slowly giving way to autumn, but in Lo and Li's private courtyard it almost seems like spring. You haven't been here in years—when they first became your instructors, they would often deliver their rambling lectures on firebending philosophy while tending to the flowers. There's no one reason why they stopped and returned your lessons to the gilded training halls of the palace, but your complaints about how these 'old fuddy-duddies were wasting your time' probably helped. You were a little more fractious, then. Growing pains, Lo and Li had called it.

A soft breeze slips among the fire lilies—somehow blooming out of season, thanks to whatever arcane horticultural wisdom it seems comes naturally to all old women—and rustles the leaves of the wisteria trees until their flowers sway like falling snow. The air is sweet with their fragrance. Almost too sweet. It makes you want to cough.

Ty Lee seems to enjoy it, though; she's flitted up at least three times to "soak my aura in the lovely flowers!" while you and Mai heroically resist her best efforts to drag both of you along. Frankly, you find her whole attitude very strange. Not because she's behaving differently toward you after vastly overstepping her place and being banished from your room, or even because she's not behaving differently—because you can't quite bring yourself to stay angry at her for it. Baffling.

(Is it really? It's like you told Zuko: you don't have any room to be angry at your friends when a much easier target is sitting right across from them.)

There's no-one here save the three of you. You'd dismissed the servants after the last dish had been laid (a plate of smoked sea slug) and instructed the Dai Li to keep that dismissal secure. So it's just you, and Mai, and Ty Lee, and the flowers, and the half-eaten stack of komodo chicken skewers that is the sole survivor of your lunch spread, most of which fell victim to your prodigious appetite. It's a good thing you were never stupid enough to get banished and forced to subsist on whatever inadequate rations got Zuko through the years. You'd have practically been a skeleton by comparison.

Thinking about Zuko and skeletons, however, may have been a mistake. Because now is when you're supposed to be interrupting Ty Lee's inane chatter about her latest attempt to remodel Mai's hairstyle so you can instruct them clearly and precisely on how they are to approach tomorrow as the Comet burns deep across the sky. Now is when you're meant to lay out the groundwork not just for convincing Zuko to surrender the throne but for ensuring they are best positioned to aid you in convincing him.

But instead, all that falls out of your mouth is, "Father wants me to kill Zuko."

Mai's chopsticks freeze halfway to her mouth.

Ty Lee jerks to face you.

"Did he tell you that," Mai says, slow, questing, with a twitch of the eyes like she's trying to study both you and Ty Lee simultaneously, "or are you making an assumption?"

"Don't be an idiot, Mai," you snap like a collision of ice-floes, "I do not make assumptions when it comes to the Fire Lord's will."

Dragging Zuko back from Ba Sing Se wasn't an assumption. It was a careful calculation of cost-benefit analysis, just like you were taught.

"I asked my Father if he would like me to kill Zuko or keep him alive for his return and he said he had no time to waste on traitors." Each syllable falls like you're exiling it. "Is that enough for you, or am I to ensure his death warrant is signed and sealed in front of the Fire Sages too before you'll believe it?"

They'd do it, too. Sanctifying your brother's murder is hardly unorthodox compared to sanctifying the Phoenix King. No wonder fewer and fewer go to the Temples each year. The peasantry knows where true power lies. As they should. Even the Comet was named after a Fire Lord.

"Azula," Ty Lee says, reaching across the gnarled old table you're all sitting at, her fingers almost icy where she threads them between your own, "it's okay. I know you won't do it."

She could have slapped you and it would have been less surprising.

You exchange a glance with Mai on reflex. She raises a dagger-thin eyebrow at you and says nothing.

"What does that have to do with anything?" you ask, dragging your arm away and folding both over the gold sash that wraps your red robes tight to your belly.

"You were being rude to Mai," she says, and before you can think to protest the accusation, Mai inclines her head in agreement, dark hair stark in the sunlight as it rustles across her back. "You're rude to people when you think they're dumb or annoying, but you're rude to us when you're worried about what we're gonna think. So I told you! Now you don't have to be worried, right?"

You. Do not. Understand Ty Lee.

(Yes you do.)

"I am not worried," you say, glaring at her. She recoils a little, fingers spread in a warding gesture—which causes the spoon she was holding in her other hand to drop and clatter against the side of the elegant kintsugi teapot Lo and Li insisted you had to use if you were going to have lunch out here. "I simply responded to stupidity as stupidity deserves."

"Wow," Mai says, sounding about as shocked as whoever Zuko first tried to summon lightning at, "you actually were worried. Come on, Azula. I wasn't asking because I thought you'd do it either."

Why is it that you always start to lose control of a conversation the moment somebody mentions your useless brother?

It's absolutely hateful.

"Then why did you?" you say, not quite with a sigh but certainly with the spirit of one.

"You and Zuko are both very good at overcomplicating things." Mai places her chopsticks back on the table, threading the tips through the snarling mouth of the finger-sized ceramic dragon carved to hold them. "People just don't notice when you do it because you're also much better than he is at solving those complications."

She shrugs, quick and casual.

"So I had to check."

"Are you sure it is a sensible decision to speak to your princess and future Fire Lord like this, Mai?" you ask, narrowing your eyes. With the Sun playing across your face, so bright, so close, your stare must seem almost molten. "While in the halls of her palace, at that?"

Mai's lips flick in what you benevolently describe as a smile, rather than a smirk or some other, far more impertinent expression. "More sensible than lying to you. I thought you hated that."

"It's true," Ty Lee chimes in, clapping her hands together with a surprisingly enthusiastic slap. "You get really mad when people you don't expect to lie to you actually do! Which is funny because you lie all the time anyway. But that's when you're at your pinkest!"

What in the name of all the spirits of the world is that supposed to mean?

Mai is no help at all, too busy pressing her mouth into a flat line the way she does when the alternative would be to do something as unladylike as laughing in public.

Honestly.

"I come here to instruct you both on how to go about our plan tomorrow, and instead I am forced to deal with blatant insubordination," a stern glance at Mai, who manages to communicate total unrepentance without a single shift in her angular face, "and words that I am quite sure do not actually exist in that particular sequence, Ty Lee."

You shake your head, the blades of your bangs whispering against your cheeks. If you weren't sitting on a stool, you'd have slumped backwards out of sheer exhaustion. But you are, so instead you lift a hand from your waist so you can breathe out a shard of cold fire and watch it slowly circle around your sleek red nails.

"It was not a surprise that Father ordered Zuko's demise," you say, because whether or not she fully understood it, this is what you meant when you were telling Ty Lee about inevitability. As long as your Father holds supreme, in the end there is only ever going to be one. That's what Zuko never understood. You think your mother might have. She just chose the wrong sibling. "The Fire Lord cannot tolerate an openly treasonous heir."

"Right, but he's not the Fire Lord any longer," Ty Lee says, nodding as if she's just come to some magnificent insight. "You're going to be, and you don't want to fight Zuko even if he is your heir! I think. Anyway, Mai told me that when she bullied him about your conversation after he got back, Zuko also said he kinda didn't want to fight you anymore either. So there's no problem, see?"

You snuff the spark you were toying with in your own forehead as you bury your face in your palm. Your voice comes out muffled with disbelief. "There are so many problems with every single word you just said that I am not even going to dignify them with an answer."

"No," Mai says, "I think she has a point."

Your brow furrows as you lift your head back up to study Mai with what might politely be termed dubious disregard. "Please don't tell me you've decided to add borrowing his sense of humour to the list of mistakes you've made regarding my brother."

"What, like it's worse than yours?" Mai rolls her eyes with such overwhelming drama it almost overshadows the disrespect of her retort. "Whatever. Ty Lee's right. You're going to be the Fire Lord. I don't know why you're being so silly about it now. There's only one person who can question you and you've been handling him your whole life. You can do it here too. So just do what you want."

What you want is for somebody else in this conversation to understand what it means that your Father told you to kill Zuko, because it clearly seems that they do not.

"Trust me, Azula," Mai says, her voice dark as days-old blood, "I understand very well what it means. I'm reminded every time I look at my boyfriend's face."

Ty Lee reaches over to rub soothing fingers over her coiled-wire knuckles.

"If you think that was my Father trying to kill Zuko, you very clearly don't."

You know Mai is more sensible than that. So what is she playing at? Why are you the only one who recogn—oh.

Of course.

It's because you're the only one here who remembers what happened the last time the Fire Lord ordered Zuko's execution.

"Listen," you say, forestalling whatever the two of them are going to say with a raised hand, "do you know how my Father earned his throne?"

"Uh, yeah?" Ty Lee says, eyebrows scrunched quizzically. "Fire Lord Azulon named him as his heir because General Iroh gave up on becoming Fire Lord after his son died? Everyone knows that."

"The official version also mentions his brilliance in leading the development of our industry and war machines to new heights, and emphasises Iroh's failure at Ba Sing Se," Mai adds. "What does that have to do with anything?"

You take a moment to settle your palms on the table. The wood is pleasantly warm, the Sun soaked deep into its pores. A slight lean forward acts to suggest intimacy; a lowered voice suggests both secrecy and trust. Ty Lee instinctively matches your posture. Mai raises an eyebrow before grudgingly doing the same.

"If a single word of what I'm about to say passes your lips before anyone but me or Zuko," you say, slow and heavy, "you will be lucky to escape execution. Unless you sell me out immediately as the one who told you, you may end up begging for it instead. Nod if you understand."

Wide-eyed, Ty Lee nods immediately.

Mai follows, a little hesitant, a lot careful.

"My Father is the Fire Lord," you say into the hush that follows, even the breeze slipping away as if in fear, "because Azulon ordered him to kill Zuko and my mother made the same choice she'd been making my entire life: Zuko was more important than anyone else. More important than me. More important than Father. More important, even, than Azulon."

You smile. It sits on your mouth like a song sung out of key.

"So she killed him. Murdered the sitting Fire Lord just to save an eleven-year-old boy. That was the deal: Zuko's life for my Father's throne. Don't you remember what I told you, Mai? Somebody has to take on the responsibility. Surely you didn't think you were the first."

She opens her mouth to speak and you cut across it like a throat.

"Our mother. Iroh. You. And now me. I wonder—will Zuko ever learn to save himself?" You start laughing, high and cold. The sound shatters against the garden's walls. "Honestly, it's sickening. I can't believe the one thing I have to share with that woman outside Roku's tainted blood is being forced to choose between obeying the Fire Lord or protecting Zuko and getting it wrong."

Because it is wrong. You know that. Disobeying the Fire Lord makes you a traitor. Your Father isn't the Fire Lord anymore, but he still has no time for traitors. It doesn't matter that he'll never know because he'll fight the Avatar and always, always lose because you'll know.

You'll know you had the choice to be a good daughter and didn't take it.

You'll know you had the choice to be strong and didn't take it.

You'll know you had the choice to not be like Zuko and didn't take it.

(Did you really, though?

You still remember that first loop.

The edifice of your entire life in six words: you can't treat me like Zuko!

And your Father did anyway.

Just like he has every single time since.)

It takes a few minutes for Ty Lee to muster up the courage to speak. She's fidgeting in place, hands twisting around each other, the shadow cast over her as the Sun slips behind a cloud making even the saccharine frills of her outfit seem muted. "Why are you talking about Roku? Isn't he the old Avatar who betrayed Sozin and died in a volcano?"

You snort. "He's Zuko's other great-grandfather. Mine too. It's not important."

Iroh might have manipulated Zuko into caring about it, but you'll tame a dragon before Zuko succeeds in manipulating you.

"Woah," Ty Lee says, her open-mouth amazement interrupting her best attempt to mimic a flutter-bat, "you're related to the Avatar! That's so cool. Is that why your fire is so strong?"

Your fingers twitch as a cat's paws do, when they can't quite decide whether to knead or to claw, and you clench your jaw around a snarl. But in the end, all you do is exhale, a short, bitten-off hah, and then say, not quite tersely, "If it were, then maybe Zuko wouldn't be so hopeless."

You don't think Ty Lee understands exactly how much she's insulted you, because she just laughs a little, as if you've told a joke instead of made a salient observation on the nature of reality. Mai might, though. She's looking at you with something you learned first from your Father's face: pride. It's a subtle thing, on her; a slightly softer set of the mouth, a brief hooding of the eyes. But you see it nonetheless.

You look away.

Honestly. The nerve of her. How ungrateful.

"Anyway," Ty Lee says, her earlier awkwardness apparently chased away by whatever furnace of happiness sits where her heart should be, "I don't think you're getting it wrong! I know it's, like, super special illegal to try and kill the Fire Lord, and special illegal to disobey him, so I get why your Dad wants Zuko dead and why you're scared that you're saying no, but… it's kinda like I said before, yeah? I don't think it's right that he asked you. I don't think it's right that you think you're supposed to."

Her elbow clinks against one of the plates as she reaches across the table to lay her fingers over yours. They're cold against your skin.

"But I do think it's right that you don't want to."

"Honestly, though," Mai says, somehow managing to sit even more dao-edge straight in her seat, folding her arms under the delicate embroidery over her chest, "you're even weirder than Zuko is about your Dad, and—"

"I am not weird about my Father," you interrupt, eyes stiff with warning. "I love and respect him as both my parent and the Fire Lord. And he loves me. Zuko's problem is that he never figured out how to earn it. I did. "

Of course Zuko never figured out how. He probably didn't even know he had to—it's not like he had to earn anybody else's. They just gave it to him. Just like they never gave it to you.

Only your Father ever has.

(Hasn't he?)

"You don't have to earn someone's love, Azula," Mai says, somewhere between softness and resignation. Like she's saying something she wished she didn't know. "You can't."

Your smile tastes bitter. "You're right. I can't. Funny how it seems to work out for everyone else."

Ty Lee squeezes your hand tight. "Azula…"

"Why are we even talking about this?" You lift your jaw so you're no longer looking at Mai's sunrise stare or the way Ty Lee's collar shifts in the renewed breeze. Beyond them both, the courtyard stretches in petal-strewn marble, each flower-bed carved into the imperial insignia and so filled with fire lilies they almost seem ablaze. Wisteria trees loom over them like clouds tied to earth. "Every time we're meant to have a conversation about something important, we always end up talking about trivial inanities instead."

It's so frustrating.

"When something's on your mind, it'll always come out somehow," Ty Lee says with something resembling a smile, though in the same way that the Water Tribe has something resembling a civilisation. "Just like Ember Island!"

"I hardly think something as pathetic as love is constantly on my mind, Ty Lee," you say, and do not understand why both of their expressions freeze for a second before shifting into something so complicated you haven't a hope of deciphering it. "Let alone treason against my Father."

"You really need to forgive yourself for that, you know," Mai says, about as lightly as anyone truly can when their sartorial style would make even the Day of the Black Sun jealous.

"Excuse me?" What in the world is she talking about?

"You forgave me for my… treachery at the Boiling Rock," she explains, stretching the word out like she's trying to draw-and-quarter it, "because I was doing it to save Zuko. Why are you being so stupid about forgiving yourself for the same thing?"

"That's—they are entirely unrelated matters." For the second time in this conversation, you jerk your hand out of Ty Lee's grasp so you can fold your arms in clear dismissal. "You are not the Crown Princess and you do not have my responsibilities."

"Yeah, but tomorrow you're the Fire Lord, right?" Ty Lee chimes, bright and clear as the Academy bell of your youth—and with just as inconvenient a timing. "It's like I said before! There's no problem if you just pardon yourself. Isn't that what being royalty is all about?"

It is most certainly not. "Perhaps you mistake me for some odious, jumped-up bureaucrat like Long Feng."

"He was pretty annoying," Mai agrees. "But whatever. If you're going to keep beating yourself up because you're experiencing a human feeling and don't know how to handle it, you do you, Azula. Are we ever going to get to talking about this plan of yours?"

"Ooh, the plan!" Ty Lee bounces on her stool, braid flapping over her shoulder and back. "I wanna hear the plan too. Yours are always so exciting, Azula!"

You narrow your eyes in suspicion, certain she's trying to mollify you so you forget about reminding Mai exactly where she can keep her tongue, but Ty Lee's teeth are blinding in the afternoon Sun, her cheeks pinched wide with joy. It's—difficult to hold onto your anger that way, especially when for all her blatant insubordination even Mai is leaning a little closer to the table, body threatening to curve in like a question-mark.

A sigh slips from your mouth—without a trace of smoke. "Very well. If you insist, I suppose I can explain."

---

There is a hallway in the palace.

At the end of that hallway is a throne.

And on that throne sits a girl called you.

You could have chosen anywhere in Caldera to wait for Zuko and his inevitable companion. You've met him in the gardens; you've met him at the coronation; once you even met him in the still-smouldering ruins of the ruined Avatar temple the ghost of Roku broke. As far as you can tell, the location doesn't really matter. It always ends the same.

But today, you are here: lounging on the Dragon Throne, drumming your fingers on an armrest worn so smooth by so many before you that it's said Fire Lord Hanyu once escaped an assassin by spotting their reflection in it. You think you might believe it. It's not like there's anything else interesting to look at from here. Just a sea of polished mahogany floorboards interrupted by gilded red carpets emblazoned with scenes from the Unification, regimented rows of gold-plated columns marshalling the space as if someone buried a battalion helmet-first, and at the very end a towering double door carved into the imperial flame.

You suspect it would look more impressive if you'd lit the wall of flame that is meant to separate the Fire Lord from all who genuflect before him—but you are not crowned yet, and it would give the wrong impression. It's not like you're planning on staying in the seat once Zuko arrives, anyway. It's hard enough not to talk down to him as it is; you'd be a fool to feign sympathy while sitting in your Father's seat.

(It's not, though, is it?

He threw it away just like Ba Sing Se.)

There are no courtiers here today. It might be mere hours before your coronation—at midday, when the Sun is highest in the sky—but you have sent away even your Dai Li. Not banished, of course. You are hardly so lost to your delusions. Just… reassigned, given duties that the more intelligent will have grasped are designed to ensure there are no witnesses to whatever it is you intend to do. As ever, though, they obey. Long Feng trained them well—in a delicious irony, too well. Just a touch more loyalty to the nation, to the idea, over the man and you wouldn't have broken them.

But break them you did. It's funny how that jumped-up peasant never realised: when you build a cult of personality around yourself as a enlightened dictator with absolute power who symbolises the true and only path for the people and to whom all obedience is ultimately given, are you talking about Long Feng, or are you talking about the Fire Lord? You're almost tempted to invite him to court one year, just so you can watch as he realises the depth of his mistake.

For that, though, you'll need to make it to court in the first place.

And in the end, that's why you're here, isn't it?

You snap out a spark, just to listen to the hiss, to take something away from the vast, smothering silence that fills the rest of the room. It shudders over your fingers, fierce and violent and solely, wholly yours. Even Sozin's Comet cannot take it from you—though it wants to, screams to, the crackling cry of lightning begging to ground itself in earth. It would be so easy to let it go. To sip so deep of the flame-that-is-you that not even the centre of the world would be safe from your fury. But you don't. You can't.

It's funny. In all your endless cycles, you've never had a chance to truly test your limits. If you actually make it to Sozin's Comet, there's always something to do. Somewhere to go. Somebody to fight. Even if you escape this time—if convincing Zuko to surrender the throne without an Agni Kai is the answer the universe wants from you—it's not like you'll know until you open your eyes somewhere that isn't the Boiling Rock, and by then, it will be too late.

Sometimes you think it might be a tragedy: the transcendental flame brought by a celestial miracle, turned only to destruction. Not a single living person will ever experience this day again except a few squalling babes. It seems almost a shame that it has only ever served as a tool for war.

(And whose shame is that?

What a silly question.

It's right there in the name.)

But you don't have time to spend on childish fantasies.

After all, Zuko is on the other side of the door.

His flame dawns against your own like a sunrise slipping through clouds—you've known he was near since he entered the palace, but this close it's almost like you can see him through the wall. You wonder if he can see you too. Probably not. Your brother might have found another way to burn—not just a strange new stance but a strange new soul, a bonfire where there once was a blaze—but even a few weeks on the run with the Avatar can't erase three years of wasteful coddling by the old fuddy-duddy. For all that Zuko claims a new perspective, at the end of the day, he's still so very blind.

(Of course he is.

Your Father near enough to burned out one of his eyes, didn't he?)

"Are you going to come in, Zuzu?" you call, sweet as sword-sting. "If you really want to become Fire Lord, the first step is certainly not being afraid of a room."

He might actually be, which is the most hilarious thing of all. This, after all, is where Azulon pronounced his execution and your Father declared his banishment. The ruin of his life twice over echoing off four overly-embellished walls. You almost wouldn't blame him for a little trepidation.

Whether or not Zuko is vacillating out of fear or indecision is, however, rather moot, since almost as soon as you finish speaking you feel his spirit spike. There's a short ripple of flame that ignites the ridges of the doors until it's like the carved dragons have burst to incandescent life, lit by dramatic sunrise hues, and then they slide open on ponderously silent hinges.

Revealed behind them is your brother, dressed just as you saw him at the Western Air Temple, in a peasant's muddy reds and a pair of dusty sandals—accompanied by both Mai and Ty Lee.

There was only supposed to be one.

Your instructions were very clear that there was only supposed to be one.

The lightning stills on the top of your finger.

"Azula, guess what?" If Ty Lee has noticed the bowstring tension in your spine, she's doing an excellent job of ignoring it. "Zuko actually came here alone!"

Zuko… came here alone?

Today?

When you don't have a hostage?

He sighs, weary with irritation. "Did you have to tell Azula that, Ty Lee?"

"Yes," she says, with a sudden flash of seriousness you're not wholly convinced you actually see before it's replaced by another cheery smile. "Isn't it great? It's only the four of us again, just like Ember Island!"

"Which part?" Mai asks, eyes flicking from your hands to Zuko's face. "When we were arguing, or when we were trashing a house?"

"The smoothing part, silly!" You feel as nonplussed as Mai's blink. It appears Ty Lee has taken temporary leave of her senses, rather than merely her post. "We should go back there one day."

"There are slightly more pressing concerns before us than a holiday, Ty Lee," you say, aiming for a sarcasm you can't quite seem to carry. "You may have noticed I am sitting in one of them."

"Not for long." Zuko shifts slightly in place, muscles pulling as tight as his flame. "Sorry, Azula, but you're not gonna be Fire Lord today."

You flick your wrist to snuff the spark threatening to crawl up your forearm, sleeves rustling as you move. Your robes—ornately tailored across your shoulders and waist, a gold-stitched ripple of flame hidden under the Crown Princess' ochre mantle—are a stark contrast to Zuko's humble shambles of an outfit. To think he had the foresight to prepare an escape but not a change of clothes. Your brother's brain is truly a mystery.

"Oh?" you say, drawing out the sound for a half-breath too long for genuine curiosity. "And how do you intend to stop me?"

"You know how." In the shadows of the throne room, Zuko's eyes are as bright as sunlight on the edge of a sword. "Maybe we're both tired of this fight, Azula, but that doesn't mean I'm afraid of it."

In another life, you should be sits on the tip of your tongue. But you have lost to this Zuko—the Zuko under the Comet, who shatters Sozin's legacy with Sozin's own power—too many times before. It serves you no purpose to pretend he has any reason to be afraid of you.

"Thankfully," you say instead, "I have no intention of having it in the first place. I refuse your challenge."

The surprise that settles in his partly-open mouth and partly-narrowed eyes is as gormless as it was when he was seven and you first beat him in pai sho. "What?"

"You're an exile sentenced to death in absentia for treason, Zuzu," you explain—not as if to a child, because you would never lower yourself to something so undignified, but nonetheless nearly drawled out, each word given time to linger like blood in a cut. "Surely you don't believe even being my brother is enough to compel my honour."

"You're a lot of things, Azula," he says, "but you're not a cowa—"

"—are you just going to keep posturing, Zuko?" You allow yourself the curl of a smirk, which withers immediately under Mai's dangerously raised eyebrow. When she speaks again, you think the Royal Engineers would weep to measure the flatness of her tone. "You too, Azula. Both of you really came here to talk. Not fight. So stop acting like children and talk."

In hindsight, letting Mai learn you're not angry at her was a terrible mistake. She seems to have taken it as an invitation to treat you like she's forgotten disrespecting royalty is what filled a quarter of the Boiling Rock. Perhaps a reminder is in order.

You open your mouth, and Ty Lee says, "But Mai, we are children."

You successfully disguise your bark of laughter as a cough by covering your mouth with a hand. "I suppose I cannot blame dear Zuzu for his… hot-headedness. No doubt he's finding it difficult to control himself under the influence of the Comet—aren't you, brother?"

Zuko rolls his eyes. "Whatever you say, Azula. Are you going to stay lazing up there on the throne, or are you going to come down here and pretend you don't think you're better than me?"

You jut your chin forward so you can stare imperiously down your nose at him. "I hardly think I would be pretending, but very well."

Drawing yourself up from the Dragon Throne in a movement as precise as any of your kata, you take a few steps forward and drop off the edge of the dias, landing softly on your sandals with an easy flex of your knees. Your shoes hardly make a noise against the smooth floorboards as you walk towards your brother and your friends.

Has Zuko noticed you're not wearing your armour yet?

You imagine so. If nothing else, he's always been good at considering you a threat.

"Mai. Ty Lee." You fold your hands behind your back until you could be lecturing—or standing in military parade. "Since it seems Zuko does, in fact, wish to negotiate, fetch us a table, would you? You'll find one just outside in the hall."

"No, I'll get it," Zuko says. How manly of him, to disguise a desire to have some time to think—and presumably flail at strategising—behind a thinly-veiled attempt to show off his strength. You're sure Mai is swooning.

Well. Even if she isn't quite that far gone, there's still something wrong with her head, because instead of taking the excuse to sit around and do nothing, she says, "I'll help. Ty Lee can stay here."

"Okay!" Ty Lee says sunnily, before you can think to protest. She prances forward until she's next to you and says, much too loud to fake even trying to whisper, "Aren't they so cute, Azula?"

You cannot think of anything less adorable than the idea there is a person in the world who finds your brother attractive, actually.

Sure, he's a prince, and he's determined, and he has that whole honour tomfoolery going on, and he's an adequate firebender, and that book that was most certainly not about pillows Lu Ten had did mention that men with deep voices are less hateful than others, but, seriously—he's Zuko.

Ty Lee must glean the direction of your thoughts from the shape of your frown, because she giggles and pats your shoulder—or at least as close as she can get to it, given the thick formality of your robes and the added royal mantle. "Don't worry. It'll make sense to you eventually!"

"If there comes a point in my existence where that," you say, gesturing to where, in the distance, Mai lifts a hand to press her palm against Zuko's cheek and pull their heads together to whisper something, "begins to make sense to me, you have my royal permission to commit regicide."

Ty Lee giggles again, high and sweet like the cry of a flute. "You're so funny, Azula."

You were entirely serious.

"I know," she says, falling into a handstand for no apparent reason, fingers wide against the wood. "That's why it was funny!"

As she is clearly feeling far too moody to respect your intellect, you close your eyes rather than reply. Close to you, the shallow sound of her breathing laps against you like waves to a shore; far from you, the dull scrape of wood against wood reveals that Zuko is finally heaving the table in; all around you, the Comet looms, reflected across every flame in every torch in the palace, a thousand thousand fragments of the burning sky dragged down to earth.

You breathe in.

It tastes like wet ash and lightning.

You breathe out.

No matter what happens, at least this will never leave you.

You open your eyes as Zuko drops the corner of the table to a rough stop near the two of you, Mai's gaze flicking over his arms and shoulders as if checking for injury before she returns her attention to where it belongs: you.

"Well," you say, stepping toward the nearest flat edge of the table—a thick, square piece with legs carved to resemble swirling ripples of flame—and settling yourself into perfect, straight-backed posture, calves under your thighs and hands folded together, "shall we?"

Ty Lee falls out of her handstand and flits to your side, braid flapping loosely. Zuko drops roughly into something cross-legged he probably copied from the Avatar, jaw firm. Mai looks at you, then at Zuko, then back to you, and finally takes a seat at his side as if she is a dagger slipped back into a sheath.

You raise an interrogative eyebrow; one of her shoulders twitches into a shrug, as if to say you were the one who told me to take responsibility.

Well.

You suppose that's fair enough.

(It still hurts.

But you won't bleed to death with the pain of it.

Not this time.)

There are a few awkward beats of silence—awkward, of course, for everyone except you, who has never been awkward in your life.

Eventually, though. someone speaks up.

"Alright, Azula," Zuko says, watching you steadily over his folded arms, "what do you want?"

Hah.

Where do you start?

But you can't afford to get distracted like that. Not here. Not now. Not today.

You have a mission.

And that mission begins with:

"I want you to give up on the throne," you say, chin held high, the very picture of a princess, "and attend my coronation in peace."

"I can't do that," he says without a flicker of hesitation. He doesn't even have to think to refuse you. It's a reflex like breathing. "The Fire Nation needs to change."

"Maybe it does." You ignore Ty Lee's gasp, Mai's raised eyebrow, the circle of Zuko's mouth. "Maybe we won the war months ago when we took Ba Sing Se. Maybe I wish I never said we should burn it all back down. Maybe you're right."

You lean forward, slamming your palms on the low table, fingers spread so wide it hurts to hold them there.

"But why does it have to be you who changes it, Zuko? Why does it always have to be you?" The words slip out like blood, even though you can't find the wound. "You don't even understand what it means to be Fire Lord. You know what you want to do, but you don't know what doing it will do to you."

"Azula—"

Three people speak as one, but your heartbeat hammers them out. The torches that bristle across the walls and pillars are pulsing to that atavistic rhythm: orange, then blue, then orange, then blue. You're not even sure if Zuko knows he's fighting you for control. The shadows that cower away in the corners those coruscating flames cannot reach writhe as if they're being strangled—the same way your voice strangles out from your throat.

"Did you ever think about it? The sort of person the Fire Lord has to be? So what if the Fire Nation has to change?" Your nails gouge into the tabletop, the tips charring dark wounds in the wood as if the red polish that covers them is fire in truth. "For a hundred years the only thing we have bowed to has been men like Sozin. Like Azulon. Like our Father. Like me. Do you really think, after all that, it will listen to you?"

If you were any less a firebender than you are, your breath would be coming in sharp pants.

"You have a dream," you say, soft as ash, falling back onto your knees, closing your eyes. He was right. You do look tired. "Seen in a certain light," like the haunting quiet of Lu Ten's room, under the tapestry of stars spinning across his ceiling, "it might even be beautiful. But the Fire Lord does not dream. The Fire Lord does not rule out of beauty. You can try to change that, but in the end, it will change you."

There was a time, at the feeble dawn of your memories, little flickers of sensation and feeling cresting over the horizon of your consciousness, when your Father was a different man. When your mother was a different woman. When you and Zuko would crash about in the sand on Ember Island, playfighting and play-fighting; when your Father saved Zuko from drowning and your mother smiled at you.

(When, for a few scattered summers, you might have even been happy.)

It didn't last.

How could it?

No light burns in the shadow of the Dragon Throne.

Why else would even Sozin be buried down in the dark?

"That's the difference between us, Zuko." You want to laugh, but all you can manage is a wry twitch of the lip. "It would change you. It wouldn't change me. And I think—"

—you think that maybe Mai was right. This palace has only ever hurt Zuko.

You've spent your whole life believing that's because he was weak.

But on this endless day, in this endless life, you can finally admit:

Maybe it's because he was strong.

Only in the wrong way.

"—you're right, Azula." It takes you a second or two to process that Zuko is speaking—to recognise that he is saying those words without spite or sarcasm. His arms are unfolded now; they rest on his knees, one hand covered by Mai's, the sharp slivers of her fingers pale against Zuko's slight tan. "Sozin started the war and murdered the Air Nomads. Azulon crushed the Water Tribes and told Father—told Ozai to kill me. And… and Ozai gave me this scar," his other hand comes up to rest on that angry, unfeeling skin, "and is trying to burn the Earth Kingdom to the ground. That's what being the Fire Lord means to the world. That's what being the Fire Lord means to our people."

He shakes his head. His hair is so short it hardly even shifts as he moves.

"But if that's what it means to you, then that's why it needs to be me."

Your knuckles are as white as a corpse's. "Were you actually listening? Fire is the element of power. You don't even know what that is. You've never had it. If you had, you'd never think just being good is enough to change the world."

(Of course it isn't.

Not even being perfect could do that.)

Zuko snorts. "I've done too many things wrong to too many people to think I'm good, Azula. But you'll never convince me not to believe I can't be better. We all can."

You want to scream. Like acrid vomit in your throat. "That's not what I'm saying. Are you so stubborn you can't comprehend anything over the bleating of your own self-righteousness?"

Maybe Ty Lee can hear the creaking tension in your voice, the ice on the verge of collapsing, because she tries to smile, a trembling, tremulous thing, and asks, "Maybe it would—it might help if you explained a bit more?"

"I think she's been quite clear." Mai is frowning, though not—it doesn't seem aimed at you. Or Zuko. Or Ty Lee. She's looking down at her lap, as if the rich black fabric of her dress holds all the secrets the stars will never show. "Azula's right, Zuko. I know you don't think being the Fire Lord will be easy, or even safe, but you can't—just deciding you'll be able to handle it doesn't mean you will. Or that you should."

Your brother's expression stutters to a halt, the firm line of his mouth falling apart and the proud tension in his shoulders slipping. In his chest, you feel his flame flicker. The torches on the walls follow suit.

On his knee, his fingers retreat a little.

"You too, Mai?" he asks. It's not quite betrayal, but for a moment, you almost feel sympathetic.

"Not like that, Zuko," she says, and you see her forearm flex as she briefly squeezes his hand. "I'm here to support you. You tried to get rid of me once and I think I've made clear exactly how stupid a decision that was. It's just that… I was here, before Princess Ursa disappeared. I've watched my father try to rule New Ozai. I followed Azula as she hunted you and the Avatar. And I was here again, when you came back."

Mai shakes her head, hair-buns barely shifting in place.

"As a citizen of the Fire Nation, I want you as my Fire Lord. As your girlfriend, I don't want you to be the Fire Lord." Her eyes flick to yours and hold them before you can look away. "And I don't want Azula to be either. This palace is the last place either of you should be. Frankly, I wish all of us were anywhere but here."

"I—didn't know you felt that way," Zuko manages.

You thought you did.

But—

—And I don't want Azula to be either.

You shouldn't be surprised. You still remember Mai telling you, so casually, that she would have saved you too. You remember Ty Lee telling you about choices.

But every time someone says the words, it still flattens you like a sandcastle before the sea.

"Hey," says Ty Lee, not quite as hesitant as before, rising a little on her haunches from where she sits next to you until her shoulders crest your own, "why do one of you have to be the Fire Lord? Why can't General Iroh do it?"

"I would rather die than serve under him," you spit at the same time as Zuko says, "Uncle would never take the throne."

(Of course you noticed even Ty Lee is assuming your Father is going to lose.

It's just not worth protesting.

Not when she's right.)

You and your brother exchange a glance—despite the snarl still lingering on your face like a bruise, he swallows whatever inane defence of Iroh's character he'd usually toss out. Maybe it's because when it comes to that dusty relic on the throne, the both of you are at least agreed it's never happening.

"He's too much of a coward to take the responsibility," you say; just because Zuko is trying to be the bigger person doesn't mean you have to be. "He ran from it when he ran from Ba Sing Se. Why do you think he's spent so much effort trying to push Zuko here instead?"

You blow out a breath: a short, harsh sound.

"No, Ty Lee. The next Fire Lord is Zuko, or me. The showdown that was always meant to be."

Her face droops, like a flower gone too long without the Sun. "That doesn't seem fair. You're finally getting along!"

Your head cocks to the side in pure bafflement until one of your blade-like bangs rests flat across your cheek like a shadow. Zuko mirrors the gesture, eyebrows pulled together.

In what world could she possibly think this looks like the two of you are getting along?

Mai sighs, briefly resting her forehead on the tips of a couple of fingers.

You'd think it a reflection of the same shared sentiment were it not for the way she'd looked at the two of you, not Ty Lee, before she did it.

You have no idea why.

"Look," you say, your fists finally unclenching in your lap. A spark of lightning sprawls out of one palm and you start to toy with it, bouncing it from finger to finger to match the pounding pulse of Sozin's Comet. "If you're refusing to listen to me, Zuko, listen to Mai. You have your friends. You have your honour. You even have," an involuntary grimace, "a lover. You turned your back on our Father and found your… place."

You're not really sure what you're saying. Or why each word sits in your stomach so heavily it feels like the void is in your belly rather than your skull. But you keep speaking anyway.

"To become the Fire Lord will cost you everything. You know that. You've seen it again, and again, and again. Sozin and Roku. Iroh and Lu Ten. Father and mother. Friends, and honour, and family."

You reach out to Zuko, as if offering him the cold fire that shudders in your hand, a crackling, hissing radiance that he must be able to feel all the way to his bones.

And then your fist snaps shut and snuffs it out.

"Are you really willing to lose all of that? And for what? Some nebulous chance to change things? For who? For what? The better? Nothing's better for everyone. It's always worse for some. Don't pretend it won't be worse for you."

"If I didn't know you," your brother says slowly, warily, speaking the way he might to the edge of a cliff, "I'd almost think you care."

Ty Lee reaches over to squeeze your forearm, where your arm-guards usually are. Her touch is soft even through the silk.

"I am angry at you, Zuko," you say, and wonder if he'll recognise the echo, "but I don't hate you. I just want—it's not important. My point is this: you shouldn't be the Fire Lord. You shouldn't want to be the Fire Lord. You know you were never really raised for it. Not since I started to bend. Not since Father chose me."

You reach into the blade-pocket of your robes—the subtly stitched sheath in which Lo and Li taught you most non-bending noblewomen keep their last resort—and pull out the Fire Lord's crown. In the rippling blue-and-orange fires that illuminate the room, the five-pronged flame gleams as gold as your eyes.

You set it down on the table with the dull thunk of metal on wood.

"Give up on the throne, Zuko," you repeat, "and attend my coronation in peace. It's the right thing to do. For both of us."

He's silent for a long time, staring at the crown.

So is Mai.

So is Ty Lee.

So are you.

And then

your brother opens his mouth​

and he says,​

"No."​

and your chest splinters to glass.

Mai and Ty Lee glance up at you and flinch away from the wreckage.

Zuko breathes out, long and heavy, less a sound than a feeling. He drags a hand down his face, nails rasping against the dead flesh of his scar.

He's three years older than you, but he's never looked it until now.

You don't know why you notice.

It's getting hard to concentrate over the thundering silence in your skull.

"You're right, Azula," he says, low, raspy, as if he has to tear each word from his throat. "Father chose you to rule. And I can see why. You're so much better than me at everything the Fire Lord needs. I couldn't do it like you. I've never been able to do it like you."

Then he breathes in and he straightens and his shoulders firm and the last blue torch in the room is swallowed by gold.

"But I think… I think that's why I can't let you do it. Because you talk about being the Fire Lord the same way you talk about being a monster. And you've always tried so hard to stop anyone from seeing it that, if I hadn't met you in that forest, it might have taken me another three years to realise—but there's a little bit of you that's like a little bit of me, isn't there?"

Zuko's looking at you the way Iroh was looking at you when he was crying and you hate it like you hate him like you hate Zuko

(no you don't.)

"And that little bit doesn't want to be a monster. It's only that it doesn't know there's any other way to be. But Uncle showed me. And Song showed me. And Lee showed me. And Jin showed me. And Katara showed me. And Aang showed me. And so did everyone else. They're why I want to be the Fire Lord. So I can show the Fire Nation just like they showed me."

His cheeks pull up into a brief smile. It's lower on one side. His scar doesn't move as easily.

"I just didn't figure out until now that I need to show you too."

Zuko stands. You look up and he seems so

so far away.

His hands fold into the sign of the flame and he bows to you.

He's never bowed to you before.

"Crown Princess Azula. With the dragons as my witness, I am Zuko, son of Ursa, brother of Azula, son of Ozai, prince of the Fire Nation, and I challenge you to an Agni Kai."

Ty Lee is a distant pressure on your hands.

Mai mouths something that might be I'm sorry.

A girl finds herself standing.

"I am Azula," she whispers, "daughter of Ozai, sister of Zuko, daughter of Ursa, princess of the Fire Nation, and I accept your challenge."

---

END OF "THIRD" LOOP.

YOU HAVE FAILED.

THE BOILING ROCK AWAITS.​

---

You, 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.

Spoiler

(2/3) Monster?

There is a lonely path in the palace. At the end of that lonely path is a room. And in that room is a girl called monster. Her name is Azula, and she struggles to understand feelings. Or family. All that is left to her is what she has been taught: and what she has been taught is to want, to take, and to not care if the taking hurts. But it does. And even a monster may grow tired of pain.

(2/3) Nothing Wrong With That Child

There is a path in the palace. At the end of that path is a room. And in that room is a girl who doesn't want to be a monster. Her name is Azula, and she's struggling to understand her feelings. And her family. So much of what is left to her is what she has been taught: and what she has been taught is to want, and to take, and to not care if the taking hurts. But it does. And you are tired of pain.

---

You don't understand.

For the first time since you became a hollow echo of Sozin's Comet, spinning around the world every nine days instead of a century, your brother didn't come to fight. You didn't come to fight. Nobody else came to fight. It was just you, and Zuko, and Mai, and Ty Lee.

What was it that she said? Just like Ember Island.

And just like Ember Island, it all ended in fire.

Even though you did everything right.

Didn't you?

Mai and Ty Lee were alive and well. Zuko's little temple hide-out with the Avatar was safe and sound. None of his friends were kidnapped so he would come running half-cocked and desperate. You didn't give Iroh the space to slink to his side on the day of the Comet. You even—you even sat down and talked about your feelings.

What else does the universe want from you?

You're not supposed to fight Zuko. You know that. You get that, okay? You do. And you tried. You really, truly did. And you think… you think he was trying too. The crown was on the table and the question was in the air and he was thinking for so long—Zuko, who never thinks about anything!

But in the end, he thought, and he thought, and he still didn't pick you.

You weren't even wrong. He said so himself. You were right. You would have been the better Fire Lord.

So why was that his reason to refuse you?

Oh, you know he talked about you not wanting to be a monster and not knowing how to be anything else and wanting to show you what it looked like and all of these soft little things that you shouldn't have any interest in believing but—

But—

But what?

He refused you.

Just like everyone else in your family does.

Iroh. Your mother.

(Your Father.)

Only Lo and Li have ever given you what you asked for.

(Funny how, in your very first cycle, you chose to refuse them.

No wonder Zuko didn't want you to be the Fire Lord.)

They told you to never forget who you are. But the truth is…

…you're not always sure who that is.

Not anymore.

Everything you thought you knew is glass. Sometimes you can look through it and see the truth beyond. Sometimes it just breaks and you're left with nothing but the pieces of who you used to be.

And you think—you think you need someone to help you find them.

It's pathetic, but it's the truth.

So many times you've tried to find the answer and so many times you've been wrong. You could pretend that you were only wrong this time because you didn't use the right approach but you know it isn't. No matter what you'd offered him, Zuko would have spouted something self-righteous (like he was trying to be your brother instead of your enemy) and the throne would have slipped from your grasp again.

You need a new perspective.

Lo and Li have already given you that, once. It wouldn't be new again.

But who else could you go to?

Zuko? On the day of the Boiling Rock? When he's the whole reason you're in this mess to begin with? Hardly.

Your Father?

You couldn't—you couldn't waste his time like that.

But who else is left?

Lu Ten is dead.

Even if your mother wasn't gone, you'd rather rot for a hundred cycles more than ask her.

And quite frankly, you wish Iroh was gone with her.

At this rate you might as well ask…

You might as well ask Mai and Ty Lee.

It doesn't sound as silly in your head as you thought it would.

So many times you've killed them. Once or twice they've even killed you. You've lied to them. You've saved them. You've been to festivals and forests with them. The three of you have talked over weeping volcanoes and crowded desks—in skies and gardens and bedrooms. No matter how many times they betrayed you and you betrayed them, when you've reached out, they've reached right back.

You've told them a lot of things. They've told you so many too. But the closest you've come to a question might well be what are your intentions for my brother?

You suppose it's probably time to change that.

If nothing else, it'll be interesting—and wasn't that a lie you told yourself, once?

There's just one little thing left.

You're searching for certainty. For someone to show you what you're missing. There are so many things it could be. But you have your suspicions. You have a question bubbling in the back of your brain. Sometimes you can feel it on the tip of your tongue, like you've just scoffed down three bowls of extra-spicy fire noodles in a row.

So, Princess Azula: what is the one thing you most want to ask Mai and Ty Lee about?

[ ] Your Father. In every life, they turn from him to save Zuko. Ty Lee has questioned him again and again. Mai has said you're 'weird' about him. But he's still—he's still your Father. The only one in the world who loved you from the start. Why is that supposed to be wrong?
[ ] Your uncle. Lo and Li said he was a lot like you. So why didn't he choose you? Why did he pick Zuko? What did he see in failure that he feared in success?
Even if you thought they had the answers, you refuse to dignify him with the questions.
[ ] Your mother. They were there when you were young. They left when she left. They saw it all. So why did she think you were a monster? What was so wrong with you that your own mother couldn't love you?
You are not going to spill your soul to your only friends over that woman.
[ ] Your brother. It's clear to you now, at least, that when they choose him, it's not because they wouldn't choose you. But the universe has demonstrated at length they are the exceptions. Not the rule. So what is it that he has? What essential part of Zuko's soul makes him worthy of the grace you have never been given?
[ ] You. Princess Azula the Blue. Heir apparent to the Dragon Throne. Conqueror of Ba Sing Se. Half Roku—half Sozin. Where you are, so is the Fire Nation in all its rapacious glory. Yours is the blood and bone of empire. All the things you should have ever wanted to be. But sometimes you think of fire dancing under the Moon; of three girls and the horizon and a flight across half the world. Is that wrong? Are you wrong to dream—to think, so briefly, of being something more?