Archive of Our Own ^beta

Twice Iroh goes to the Spirit World.

The first time he is lost.

The second time he is found.

oooooooooo

Lu Ten is everything he could have possibly wanted in a child. The boy is born with bright eyes, strong lungs, and four healthy limbs. Although Lu Ten’s mother dies within a year of his birth, Iroh dedicates himself to being a consummate father.

Only the best tutors and materials for Lu Ten. He is the heir to the throne after Iroh, after all, and he must be educated and trained.

When the prince starts bending at age four, his little arms bursting into flames, the Dragon of the West simply laughs. “Just like his father,” he jokes to Azulon, “and his grandfather the Fire Lord, of course.”

Azulon smiles—a rare thing.

By the time Lu Ten has turned ten, he frequently displays his magnificent firebending before the court with the flourish that only a prince can possess. The nobles clap, and Ozai’s eyes glint. “Congratulations, brother,” he says once. The praise tastes like ash to Iroh.

As Lu Ten grows older, he learns more. Most of what he learns is about war.

Expensive maps, constellations charts, and diagrams of ocean currents pattern his walls. Astrolabes and sketches litter the desks in his private study. A rams-hair brush with a scratched inkstone sit on the table before the window. On a piece of thin rice paper blooms a detailed fire lily in ink.

Soon after turning twelve, Lu Ten waits outside Princess Ursa’s door and greets Prince Zuko—a serious, still baby. Little more than two years later, Princess Azula enters the world, throat already raw from screaming.

But by then, Lu Ten has left to train in the eastern islands.

When Iroh and his son leave for Ba Sing Se, many years later, the older man takes with him two mementos: first, a portrait of the Fire Nation Royal Family, flames wreathing their heads like burning crowns; and second, a priceless porcelain tea set that Prince Ozai’s wife gifted them.

Of the two, it is obvious which Iroh likes better.

oooooooooo

Iroh’s favorite tea is ginseng, but Lu Ten likes jasmine.

His son has always had a penchant for sweet things.

oooooooooo

The letter comes in the dead of night.

A messenger hesitantly pokes his head into the tent. “General Iroh?” he asks.

Not looking up from a detailed map of the Outer Ring, the Dragon of the West beckons to the man. “Please, come in. Sit. Do you bring me a message, soldier?”

When the messenger approaches but doesn’t move to sit, Iroh glances up, brows raised. The messenger’s face is equal parts fear and pity. He holds a scroll smudged with dirt.

“I do have a. . . message, General,” the soldier says. “Perhaps you should sit down.”

“Bad news, at this time of night? Ah, only inevitable, I suppose. Nothing good comes while the crickets chirp beneath the moon.” Iroh pauses, rubbing his cheek and leaving behind a streak of red ink in its wake. “Would you like a cup of tea, young soldier?”

But the messenger only shifts uncomfortably. “Please, General Iroh. It’s important.”

oooooooooo

Iroh burns the notice of his son’s death in a conflagration that consumes his entire tent.

When his attendants arrive the next morning, the only thing left untouched is a tea set sitting in a pile of ashes.

oooooooooo

Upon hearing the news:

Azulon commands the family to wear white until Iroh returns—they don’t speak about why he returns, or why the war engines outside Ba Sing Se’s walls have retreated—and Lu Ten’s body is ceremonially burned.

Ozai dons white garb in public, but wears his usual robes in his private chambers, swearing his servants to secrecy on penalty of death. He asks for an audience with the Fire Lord. Azulon grants him one.

Ursa gathers a sobbing Zuko into her arms, feeling his tears soak through her silk gown, and eyes her husband suspiciously.

Azula sneers. Her limbs keep moving, blue flames bursting from her hands and decimating a rosebush. “We shouldn’t think so much about it,” she says over dinner, “because if he died, he deserved to die. Only fools die and only fools abandon sieges.”

Her brother exclaims and her mother scolds, but her father is silent.

oooooooooo

The guru lives on a small western island in a bamboo hut overlooking a lazy beach. Swaying palms leave long shadows on the sand and coconuts litter the path that Iroh walks. He reaches the door and knocks. Several minutes pass. A man with wild grey hair finally appears, staring at the firebender before retreating inside the hut. He leaves the door open behind him. “Mind your step,” he says.

Iroh does. He closes the door before slipping off his shoes. The strange man is already standing over the fire, an iron teapot dangling in the flames. His smile is a flash of white. “You like ginseng, right?”

oooooooooo

Lu Ten was the sun at the center of his universe. Without him, he is nothing. Orbitless, a meandering planet in the aether. Where there was once fire, calm waves now lap at an empty shore.

What is war?

Azulon is dead.

Ozai is the Crown Prince, Ursa has disappeared, and Azula wreaks havoc among the servants, leaving scars on their arms and claiming innocence with a smirk.

Zuko watches. Zuko cries.

And Iroh enters the Spirit World in search of his dead son.

What is peace?

oooooooooo

When Zuko asks Iroh about his journey to the Spirit World, Iroh laughs, the booming laugh that annoys Zuko to no end.

“Ah, a wonderful and majestic place! The land is unlike ours in every way, young Zuko. And the spirits. . . well, there are those who are unkind, but plenty of kind ones as well. Yet they are all interesting and they all have a story or two to tell.”

Iroh winks, Lieutenant Jee muffles a laugh, and Zuko looks away, disappointed. He challenges one of the soldiers standing nearby to a spar. The man gulps at the prince’s glare, but slides his feet into a familiar pose. With a sudden movement, the deck of the ship explodes with flames.

Zuko ignores the burning pain in his eye.

The healers have told him that it will eventually lessen.

oooooooooo

There are unkind spirits. Then there is Koh.

Iroh first notices when he appears in the Spirit World that he cannot bend. He’d been warned, but the lack of inner warmth unsettles him.

For an eternity Iroh wanders the plains as they give way to forests and wildlands. Each area teems with spirits: bunnies with transparent and sparkling wings, lumbering komodo–rhinos boasting bright red eyes and speaking in high-pitched voices, monkeys wearing plate armor who guard a tall obelisk made of golden stone in a jungle.

Some spirits speak with him, others attack him, while yet others remain silent observers of his journey. A small purple and yellow dragon–nightingale follows him for a day, dubbing him “fire-saver.”

Time passes. He unfurls the mysteries of the Spirit World, slowly but inevitably. But he has yet to find him.

Under an ancient tree is a door. Iroh pushes it and enters a new realm. He pauses, recognizing an uneasy feeling that whispers you are not where you should be. But perhaps this is exactly where he should be. In the Spirit World, such distinctions are blurry.

On a boulder nearby sits a monkey with a blue face and in the far distance, past the ravine scarring the land, a large, dark shape moves through dust-colored mist. In front of him, an upside-down tree grows, tendrils brushing the sky where the sun should hang. But there is no sun here. Just the dull burning of some distant flame beyond the fog.

Cautious, but curious, Iroh pushes aside spiked vines and climbs into the tree.

Iroh reaches the bottom and closes his eyes. Silence. But then—the ominous scratching sound of myriad legs on rock alerts him to the spirit’s presence before he has appeared. With a bland expression, Iroh faces the Face-Stealer and opens his eyes.

“Here in my realm, Dragon of the West? You are indeed far away from home,” it says in a cold, inhuman voice. Faces flash across Koh’s visage: a black-haired woman with grey eyes; a man with a blue arrow tattoo on his forehead; a plain, freckled girl with a startlingly bright smile; an old lady with her grey hair elaborately styled; a tiger–boar that roars deafeningly; a green-eyed man wearing a beaten golden crown.

Iroh watches. “You have no doubt seen much, wise spirit. I seek your help. There is something I would ask of you.”

Koh circles him, holding his gaze. Iroh maintains his emotionless expression.

Finally, Koh says, “I know what you seek, Dragon. And I shall give it to you.”

Koh’s face changes. The face of a young man, perhaps in his late teens or early twenties, emerges. Long-lashed golden eyes rest above a long, straight nose, leading to thin lips. A stubborn chin flanked by a square jawline. High cheekbones that meld into dark sideburns. Iroh almost expects the eyes to crinkle and for a voice to cry out: Father, playing pai-sho again? Shouldn’t you be coming up with battle strategies?

Nothing happens. This face no longer belongs to his son.

Koh laughs and the sound echoes in the winding chamber.

For the last time, Iroh sees Lu Ten’s smile.

oooooooooo

Iroh returns to the Fire Nation capital months later, his pack containing exactly three items: an old pai-sho board with matching tiles carved from dogwood, a worn copy of Love Amongst the Dragons, and a porcelain tea set. One of the set’s cups has a small crack.

Zuko runs into his open arms. Ozai watches from beyond the flames. Azula sits at his feet, legs crossed, and smirks.

Ursa is a ghost no one acknowledges.

In his new room, Iroh hangs the fire lily painting. He wraps the rest of Lu Ten’s things in white silk and burns them. He smells ashes for days.

oooooooooo

Prince Zuko is candlelight and Princess Azula is lightning.

The young boy has always been quick but rash. His servants all remember when he insisted on wearing the princely royal armor set gifted to him for his tenth birthday but fell into the river and almost drowned. Dedicated, Zuko tries hard in his lessons, but he fails to outshine his prodigy sister.

The princess grows, basking in the light of her father’s attention. Zuko withers, wallowing in the darkness of his mother’s shadow.

He begs Iroh to teach him firebending, and so Iroh forces the boy to wake at sunrise to train. From the corner of his eye, Iroh often catches Azula watching them. When he looks close enough, he sees the calculating look in her eye—a familiar sight, because the princess is always calculating. Each move is a study in the art of premeditation.

For all her genius, the princess struggles with pai-sho. Azula fails to grasp the theory of harmonies, though she excels at disrupting his own strategies. She sneers, bored, even as Iroh frowns over the board.

Disharmony. Chaos. Madness. It is a fine line that she walks.

Zuko feeds the turtle-ducks with bits of bread hidden in his robes. Azula shoots blasts of fire at the creatures, laughing when their tails smolder. Zuko’s eyes water, but he locks eyes with Iroh and refuses to let the tears fall.

It’s obvious that Azula is different. She is not a traditional Fire Nation princess.

Whereas Zuko wears his grief and loneliness like a shroud about his shoulders, Azula walks unadorned and unashamed through the ashes of all she has burned. Nothing is sacred to her. When a seamstress pricks her skin with a needle during a fitting, Azula forces her to taste the blood and asks if she likes it. Or so the servant tells Iroh later as she kneels and presses her face into his robes while begging for protection.

Her façade rarely fails. Iroh sees it once when they pose for a new portrait. Fire Lord Ozai adjusts her posture. His hand lingers on her shoulder for a moment too long and Azula stiffens.

Iroh says nothing. There is nothing to say.

The next day, he catches Azula burning characters into a servant’s arm with admirable precision. A-zu-la in sharp-edged burns. “It makes them prettier, doesn’t it?” she asks when Iroh rebukes her, a challenge in her eyes.

The princess hungers for chattel while the prince thirsts for power: two sides of the same coin.

Iroh knows this all too well.

oooooooooo

Just before Ozai’s blow scorches Zuko’s face, Iroh looks away.

Next to him, Azula smirks. Standing behind them, Zhao evaluates her expression with something like interest.

Then it’s over. Zuko’s scream ends prematurely as he passes out from the pain. He lies prone on the mat.

Azula sighs. “Foolish brother.”

oooooooooo

When they leave the Fire Nation on a ship heading due east, his nephew refuses to leave his room, preferring to sit in a darkness lit only by four flickering candles.

Iroh watches the Fire Nation harbor disappear into the distance. Azula hadn’t come to the harbor to see them off. Iroh doesn’t miss her presence; she makes him nervous, that beautiful and cruel girl in the grasp of even crueler masters.

oooooooooo

Zuko bends lightning.

Iroh feels both pride and fear.

It is the end and it is the beginning.

oooooooooo

After the war, Iroh visits Azula in her prison once. Zuko does not accompany him.

Wrapped in white, she sits in an iron cage and laughs at him with madness in her eyes. “Dragon of the West,” she mocks. “A title unearned, I say. What have you done to deserve such respect?”

She flinches away from his soft touch on her pale cheek.

As he leaves, he ponders whether Azula is the child of war and Zuko the inheritor of peace.

oooooooooo

It isn’t as easy as that, though. The world does not settle easily into balance, but rather sits uncomfortably somewhere between the tension of the Hundred Years War and the long-ago forgotten peace.

But what is war? What is peace? Not for the first (or last) time, Iroh considers these questions.

He settles in Ba Sing Se, in the teahouse that he once named the Jasmine Dragon. Lu Ten always liked jasmine tea. Zuko does as well. Azula. . . well, Iroh does not know what type of tea the princess likes. He has never asked, and she has never offered.

oooooooooo

Fire Lord Zuko comes many times to Iroh for advice, and each time he takes a cup of tea from his old uncle gratefully.

When Zuko is twenty-two, he finds himself drinking a cup of black pu’er, a variety grown in the southern Fire Nation islands, and sitting on a green cushion embroidered with lotus flowers.

“I just don’t think I’m ready to be a father,” he says, voice hoarse. “I mean, I’m still young, and there are still rebellions popping up every other month in the former colonies, and just last week there was another assassination attempt—”

He stops speaking when Iroh lays a hand on his shoulder and smiles. “Do not worry, Fire Lord Zuko. You will not be your father.”

After spending the night in his guest room, the Fire Lord leaves. Iroh flatters himself in thinking that his nephew’s heart seems lighter.

When Zuko is twenty-six, he again sits before his uncle, deep bags beneath his eyes. The cup of oolong tea in his hands remains untouched. This time the cushion is black, decorated with golden phoenixes.

Zuko’s visit comes after a series of letters sent to Iroh, letters bearing dire news: They found Azula six months ago, hiding in the northern Earth Kingdom, holed up near the desert and working in a mercenary company. The job is a dirty one, but she did it well. When the mixed group of Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom agents discovered the princess, it took ten of them to capture her. Four of them suffered severe burns, and one of them died three days after the encounter.

Drugged and bound, they transported Azula to the Fire Nation, where Zuko kept her in a cell not unlike the one where she had been years ago. Zuko’s letters have told Iroh bits and pieces: she talked today and spoke of mother and I’m beginning to agree with Sokka and Aang and maybe we should take her bending. . . the rebels are rallying.

It is the last proposition that Zuko wants to discuss today.

“They see her as a proponent of their cause,” he says. “Last week Lord Taku declared independence in the name of Fire Lord Azula, and all of his lands rose up in rebellion.” Pinching his nose, he sighs. “My soldiers are still putting out the fires running wild in the countryside. Half of the villagers perished in the fighting.”

Iroh looks at the tea leaves at the bottom of his teacup. “Such things are a delicate balance, nephew. Perhaps, this time, you should listen to the counsel of the Avatar. It is his duty to ensure this balance persists.”

Zuko glances away. “Maybe.”

“But,” Iroh continues, “she may need time to heal, away from the Fire Nation.” Away from the palace, full of intrigue, and the seductive whispers in her ear. Away from the bloodstained halls.

“Where could I possibly send a half-psychotic ex-firebending princess?” Zuko asks, with no small amount of frustration.

Iroh pours himself another cup of tea and smiles. “Why, here, of course.”

oooooooooo

Such is it that Azula comes to live with Iroh soon after her twenty-fifth birthday.

By the way that her hands are left unbound, hanging at her sides limply, he knows that firebending is beyond her now. Envisioning Avatar Aang’s blazing-white touch at her forehead and throat, Iroh holds back the shiver of trepidation that snakes down his spine.

Zuko hadn’t warned him.

“Azula,” Iroh greets, voice warm but tentative.

She chooses not to respond, instead gazing at the sign behind him. Iroh knows what she sees. Pretty characters in stem-style calligraphy—taught exclusively in the Earth Kingdom—that proclaim Jasmine Dragon.

Behind the princess is arrayed an escort of armored guards, all standing still as statues. Disciplined and vigilant. No doubt they are all benders. Iroh opens the door and waves them in. “Please, enter. Have a cup of tea.”

Azula hesitates before stepping inside behind two of the soldiers.

Once he is sitting at a low table with his niece, a pot of steaming and fragrant northern green between them, Iroh examines her. The guards have all refused his entreaties to take a cup of tea, and they instead line the walls in the otherwise empty room. Azula sits cross-legged and stares at the patterns on the porcelain teapot as if they are the most interesting things in all the world.

Before, when Ozai still smiled upon the princess, her hair was immaculately groomed and kept in a traditional style. After the war, it was a long and disheveled mess of tangled waves. Now it has been cut short, curling under her chin. Plain nails top long fingers, the digits scarred in places and calloused in others. Azula’s forearms also boast multiple scars; one about three inches above her wrist is still an angry red. Modest black and gold robes hang on her frame, a frame that is lither than he remembers.

When she glances up at him from beneath lowered lashes, Iroh sees that the spark in her eyes is gone.

Gone? Iroh wonders. Or just hiding?

Perhaps he will find out.

oooooooooo

In preparation for her arrival, Iroh has cleaned and organized the guest room. It is a plain area, with only a bedroll, table, and bookshelf for furniture. The blanket on the thin mattress is old and worn, but very warm. White lilies sewn onto a faded green background. He absently places a couple of books on the shelves, one a compilation of Fire Nation poetry and the other a treatise on the military history of the southern Earth Kingdom.

When he leads Azula into the room she pauses for a moment and runs her hand over the polished wood bookshelf. Her eyes catch on the two books as she reads the titles. Without looking back at Iroh, she sits on the bed and stares out the open, circular window.

“Thank you,” she says quietly, sounding rather unlike the Azula he remembers.

It is the first time that she speaks after her arrival.

oooooooooo

The guards leave after the first week, and then they are alone.

Two very different fish swimming in the same sea.

oooooooooo

The process of settling in is a gradual one.

For three weeks, she barely leaves her room, except to take meals with him, and even then, only at Iroh’s insistence.

“You can’t possibly enjoy being cooped up in there all day, Princess,” he says with a smile, and Azula reluctantly joins him for dinner.

The food is simple, compared to what is consumed in the Fire Nation. This far north in the Earth Kingdom, wheat is the main crop, and vegetables are pickled more often than not. There are restaurants in the city that serve sumptuous meals, but what Iroh eats in his home reflects his age and lack of refined tastes—or so his nephew tells him.

Iroh picks his menu carefully. On the first night that they eat plain rice and steamed fish with pickled cabbage, Azula says nothing. On the fifth night, she pauses before picking up her chopsticks. But it isn’t until the twenty-third night that Azula frowns. “This is getting rather tiresome, Uncle Iroh. Can’t we eat something else tomorrow? I am sure that the great city of Ba Sing Se offers other, more appetizing fares.” Her voice is raspy from disuse, but the sarcasm ringing in her voice is a familiar welcome.

Hiding his grin with a small cup of sencha (imported from the western Earth Kingdom and dreadfully expensive), Iroh shrugs. “This simple cuisine is good for the spirit as well as the body, Princess Azula.”

She sends a sharp and suspicious glance his way, yet still eats the meal.

On the thirty-sixth night, she ignites.

It starts with her eyes narrowing, followed by her chopsticks clanking against the porcelain bowl, and then her voice escalates in volume. Not much later, she is yelling at him with clenched fists, things like “foolish uncle” and “bastard Fire Lord of a brother” and “why in the name of all spirits don’t you just buy some fireflakes?”

In a fit of anger Azula begins to move her hand in a circular motion, three fingers folded on her palm. Iroh realizes with a start that she is trying to bend, but he does not try to stop her. After a moment clarity returns, and a horrified look emerges on her face. Azula stares at her empty hand, her hand with perfectly trimmed nails and translucent scars. Without saying a word, she flees. The door to her room slams and soft cries echo down the stairs.

Iroh settles back into his cushion. It has begun. He finishes his own meal in contemplative silence.

Her plate sits untouched.

oooooooooo

Iroh thinks it a good idea to have Azula work in his teahouse’s kitchen.

She disagrees.

When he introduces her to Zhi Xing and Ning An, the two tea masters who work in his kitchen, she meets their respectful bows with a stony glare. Glancing over at him, she raises a brow. “Are you sure this is a good idea, Uncle?” she asks, her voice light but her face tight with tension.

Iroh thinks of the small, whimpering sounds that emerge from her room after midnight, and the tortured screams that sometimes wake him before dawn. “I think the work will do you some good, Princess Azula.”

Then he places a plain apron on the counter and escapes into the main room, leaving her in the capable hands of the tea masters.

oooooooooo

The first cup of tea that she prepares is so horrible that Iroh nearly spits it out.

He tries, unsuccessfully, to ignore the smug glint in her usually veiled eyes.

oooooooooo

With a choked scream, Azula sits up on the mattress, breathing heavily. The summer night is suffocating, the scent of blooming flowers cloying. Her window is open. As her heart calms and her eyes adjust, she remembers that she is at her Uncle Iroh’s home in Ba Sing Se. Far away from the flame-lit throne room, far away from her family’s private apartments decorated in shades of betrayal and blood, far away from her mother’s new home, far away from the scrublands where she’d worked in a mercenary company.

Her mouth twists. Azula is cursed. She can never escape her memories, not even in sleep.

Her shaking hands light the lantern next to her bed and the candle flickers to life, illuminating the small and impersonal room.

Peering out the window, the princess can see that even though the sun set long ago, the city is still awake. Lights litter the lower tiers and people still roam the streets, some admittedly stumbling around and looking rather inebriated.

On the nights when Azula doesn’t wake, she still dreams. Some dreams are good, and some dreams are bad. This is true for everyone. But Azula’s dreams are rarely good.

(Ozai’s smirk as he looms above her, scalding hand resting at her waist; the Avatar’s apologies while she sobs and his fingers reach for her forehead; Ursa cuddling her new daughter and brushing her hair, not recognizing Azula’s face when she turns around; Zuko’s hands around her throat, tightening.)

Instead of sleeping, she reads poetry until Iroh knocks on her door hours later. “Time for the teahouse, Princess,” he says, tone too jovial for this early in the morning.

Azula traces the characters etched onto the page one last time before dressing and leaving.

I raise my head and look at the bright moon. . .

I lower my head and think of home.

oooooooooo

Behind his modest house hides a garden, neither too large nor too small. Iroh maintains it with the help of a gardener from the lower city who he employs—a man he found singing songs in the market for copper pennies, and who is, funnily enough, named Lee.

Dogwood trees hug the stone wall surrounding the garden, providing shade for the delicate roses beneath them. Irises and bluebells intersperse the rolling grass in patches, while bunches of blueberry bushes ring the porch. Myriads of other types of flowers he grows in pots and planters: newly planted pines, yellow potentilles, pure white edelweiss, cerise geraniums, violet delphiniums, red rhododendrons, blue asters. During the spring and summer, they bloom, embuing the garden with their fragrance .

This is where Iroh goes when he cannot sleep. As he ages, he finds sleep less and less necessary, and he often finds himself awake late at night. And it is also here that, on an early autumn night, Iroh finds Azula sitting on the porch and staring into the garden wistfully. When Iroh slides the door closed, she glances over at him, but says nothing. She drums her fingers on the table.

The Dragon of the West still possesses a hazy memory of a young girl with a wicked gaze who couldn’t play pai-sho. He thinks of the plain wooden set that he has stored in a small box beneath the table and wonders if it is time for a lesson.

But it is late. Another time, perhaps.

He sits next to her and neither of them talk. As the rays of the sun alight on the horizon, she slips back into the house silently.

The next day she brews a delicious cup of tea at the teahouse. Iroh’s brows jump in surprise at the familiar taste on his tongue: ginseng.

oooooooooo

Azula writes a thousand letters to the Fire Lord and burns them all.

She remembers the way that he pleaded with her, eyes serious and tired, but still standing tall with pride. She remembers the taste of sleeping drugs on her tongue. She remembers the chill that swept through her when the Avatar stole her fire; it has yet to leave.

She remembers Zuko’s young daughter, a toddler whose mother coddles her, a little girl who looks so much like Ursa that it hurts to even catch a glimpse of her.

On nights when Azula burns letters by moonlight, she dreams of the sun.

oooooooooo

Iroh writes terse status reports to the Fire Lord on a regular basis.

She seems to be doing better. Hasn’t had a tantrum in two weeks.

Found my pai-sho set but didn't ask me about it.

Felt her watching me firebend this morning but could not find her later.

I’m having her work as a tea server this week while one of mine is sick. It isn’t going well.

More sarcastic now, like what we used to know. But still quiet. Maybe that’s just how she is now.

She bought a book of poetry at the market. Unusual?

Found her sharpening a set of small knives. Never seen them before.

Something strange happened. Yesterday we received a letter addressed to a Feng Li. She took it and went upstairs immediately.

Her hair is growing longer. She looks like Ursa.

On the mornings she doesn’t work, she brings down a katana from her room and goes through the katas in the garden.

She makes better tea than you, Zuko.

oooooooooo

The pack that she brought with her to Ba Sing Se contained very few things: an old letter that she never reads, a few sets of black robes, a sharpened set of shuriken, and a long katana that she laced with lightning during rough fights in the Si Wong Desert.

In her wide sleeves, Azula hides the shuriken. In the drawers, she places her carefully folded clothing. The katana she hangs on the wall over her small bed.

She hides the letter in the military history book in her room and attempts to forget about it.

oooooooooo

Eventually, inevitably, the two of them fall into a routine.

He knows that Azula wakes early in the mornings, even though she no longer is forced awake with the rising of the sun. She takes her katana into the garden, where she practices strokes and techniques with grim resolve among the flowers.

Sometimes Iroh joins her, moving his aching joints through gentle motions reminiscent of waterbending. She watches him from the corner of her eye with quiet curiosity. One day he begins to describe what he is doing, and the following week she mimics his movements.

When the princess goes to the market now, she often comes back with the expected—sacks of jasmine rice, packs of flour, roasted duck—but also brings curious delicacies, like imported peppers or picked starfruit. “You need some spice in your life,” she tells him with an impish chuckle. “How embarrassing that the Dragon of the West has become so boring in his old age.”

Azula’s room has gained a few additions over the years: a small plain vase beneath her window in which she places seasonal blooms; tomes of poetry and novels with dog-eared pages; bundles of lemongrass incense that she burns while meditating late at night; and a journal with pages upon pages of pressed flowers—vivid blue azaleas, pale pink orchids, fragrant purple columbines.

The scars on her arms have faded into her pale skin, now nothing more than memories.

Every few months Azula receives a letter addressed to Feng Li and Iroh never questions her. A woman needs some secrets, after all.

She no longer flinches away when his arm accidentally brushes hers when washing dishes or clearing the table.

Iroh teaches Azula calligraphy, and she paints a stunning rendition of a phoenix that he surreptitiously hangs in his room next to an old scroll with a detailed depiction of a fire lily.

The teahouse profits. Azula makes tea and Iroh serves it, chatting with the customers. “I enjoy the quiet and solitude,” she says when he asks if she ever considers serving the tea, and he respects her wishes.

In due course, they play pai-sho, the tiles on the board familiar to his old eyes. Rose against jade, rhododendron next to white lotus. As a girl, the idea of harmony was foreign to Azula; what could a child wreathed in death and born to war understand of peace? Blood and flames were her lifeblood. She lived for war, for chaos, for disunion. But now, as a woman who spends most of her time alone and in silence, she looks at Iroh over the table with a familiar glint in her eye and a small smirk tugging at her lips. Her harmonies litter across the board, outnumbering his own.

Victory to Princess Azula.

oooooooooo

Almost four years after she has come to live with him, her acrobat friend visits. Ty Lee shows up at the door unexpectedly, a small pack slung over her shoulder and an uncertain grin on her face. “My act is in town this week,” she explains to a pensive Iroh over a pot of jasmine tea. “Fire Lord Zuko and his wife told me Azula was here after. . . well, I thought I would stop in and say hello.”

Iroh idly chats with her, ignoring her eyes as they keep darting toward the door.

When Azula arrives, a bag of food in her arms and her hair in a tumbling bun, she pauses just inside the doorway, staring at the two of them. After a tense moment, she drops the food and embraces Ty Lee. Something like tears glistens on their cheeks, and Iroh busies himself with making a new pot of tea.

Like old friends—which they are—the two women talk for hours as Iroh makes a simple meal. When Iroh first suggests that she stay for dinner, Ty Lee looks torn. She looks at Azula’s turned-away face for a long moment before accepting graciously. The three of them eat together.

During dinner, when Azula laughs at Ty Lee’s sneeze-filled reaction to fire flakes, Iroh feels as if he is twenty years in the past, like they are just two girls in the gardens, tumbling in the grass with dimpled smiles. He knows, abstractly, that was long ago. Things have changed. But at the same time, they haven’t.

The acrobat leaves later that night, surprising Iroh with a hug as she says her farewells. “Thank you,” she whispers in his ear. “Whatever you’ve done, her aura is bluer and calmer than ever.”

oooooooooo

He learns, after all this time, that Azula prefers ginseng as well.

“What?” she asks when he smiles. “It’s good for the constitution.”

Laughing, Iroh shakes his head. “It’s nothing, Princess. Just a funny coincidence.”

oooooooooo

The two women who work with Azula as tea masters are kind and demure, and they remind her rather painfully of the other children who attended the Royal Fire Academy for Girls so long ago, even though they are just a few years younger than her. They have dark hair in delicate buns and soft brown eyes. In her own thoughts, Azula calls Zhi Xing and Ning An Mouse–Squirrel and Fawn–Hawk respectively, because those are more accurate names for the soft-spoken and shy women.

The way that Iroh tells the story, the two tea masters were just market girls selling flowers when he first found them, but he could tell they knew tea well. So, he hired and taught them.

And although they are forever tittering behind their hands about this patron or that customer (“Haven’t you heard that Lord Shu’s daughter is dallying with that young boy there—yes, that one—and oh, how dreadful!” or “But everyone knows that Lady Ming’s husband keeps his mistress in the second ring, along with his natural children. . . ”), Azula has grown fond of them.

When Ning An runs a soft and perfumed hand over Azula’s hair, the princess stills. “Your hair has grown so long, Azula,” Ning An exclaims.

Zhi Xing, standing nearby and rolling green camellia leaves, agrees. “You look more and more beautiful every day, like a princess.”

Neither Iroh nor Azula has ever told them of her origin, though they have vague ideas about “Lord Iroh’s past” and guests sometimes view him with sly eyes. Azula does not tell them that an unmarried woman of thirty would rarely qualify as a beautiful princess. Ning An is right, though, about her hair: it hangs past her shoulders down to her waist.

After a pause, Azula turns to Fawn–Hawk with an unsteady smile. “Will you teach me how to braid it?” she asks.

The two tea masters show her, with deft hands and hesitant grins, and Azula begins wearing her hair in a long plait.

oooooooooo

Iroh at last receives a letter from Fire Lord Zuko proposing that Iroh and Azula visit the Fire Nation for the Crown Princess’s twelfth birthday.

She’s becoming more and more a woman, he writes. I am told she looks just like Ursa when she was this age. The difference between Ursa and the girl, Iroh knows, is that the Fire Lord’s daughter Izumi is a firebender.

In letters and reports, Iroh has told his nephew of Azula. Of her growth and their pai-sho matches, of harmony and disharmony, of pressed flowers and tea leaves, of the immortal battle between war and peace. (And on that note: This is an idea Iroh has been toying with—war is constant and ongoing within oneself. Peace is the endgame and war the method. Only when contrasted against disharmony is harmony distinguishable; light is nothing without darkness.)

While Azula is still prone to outbursts of rage at the most unusual things, like a misplaced book or a dead peony, she is hardly the same woman that came to Ba Sing Se nearly seven years ago.

Perhaps Zuko has at last realized this, Iroh muses as he reads over the letter.

Later that night, flanking the low table on the porch overlooking the garden, Iroh and Azula watch the fireflies. “Next month we will be leaving for the Fire Nation,” he says, breaking the silence. Azula raises a brow, but says nothing. “We’ll go by land past the Serpent’s Pass, and then take a ship down the river to the capital,” he continues, waiting for a reaction.

She shrugs. “Very well, we can visit Zuko.” And then, with a faint smirk: “In fact, I’m looking forward to it.”

oooooooooo

Years have passed since Azula was last on a ship.

This one is a rickety old thing that Iroh has contracted to take them to the Fire Nation. Azula lets her fingers trail along the wooden railing, feeling small grains of salt beneath her fingertips. Her uncle is on the deck as well, playing a game of cards with a retired Earth Kingdom soldier. Both are laughing.

Azula leans against the rail, robes flapping in the wind. Not even out of the Earth Kingdom, and the air is heavy and hot. The Fire Nation will be even more uncomfortable. Summer in the islands can be unbearable for the untried.

Long ago, she remembers, when she chased down a scarred boy and her uncle, when she hunted a tattooed boy and his gang, she hated the ocean and longed for the land, for stable ground beneath her feet. On boats, she chafed as if she was being restrained. Land, to her, was liberty.

Now, watching bear–dolphins dance around the prow of the boat, Azula smiles.

Perhaps the sea offers more freedom than she remembers.

oooooooooo

Iroh finds it an odd quirk of fate that the day they arrive is an Audience Day.

A tradition discontinued under Azulon—and practically forgotten by Ozai—the day was one on which the Fire Lord would open the doors to all citizens and invite them to bring their matters before him. An ancient custom that Iroh is glad to hear Fire Lord Zuko has reinstated, though it doubtless causes his security detail no small amount of worrying.

They shuffle into the throne room with a group of supplicants complaining about the price of cabbages in the capital. Azula grabs his sleeve and gestures to the left. He views the burgeoning crowd and nods before they move into a corner to watch the proceedings.

The throne room is unrecognizable to his eyes. It was once a room of darkness and flames, but now windows on the eastern and western walls allow in enough sunlight to illuminate each corner. The elaborate throne setup that Sozin installed so long ago has disappeared, replaced with a simple podium and seat. The back of the chair is gilded and inlaid with colored marble: a blue dragon intertwined with a red counterpart, their mouths aimed toward the sky as they let loose a colorful blast of fire.

Ran and Shao. Yin and yang. Emptiness and color. Space and void. Iroh recognizes them immediately.

The hours pass and Azula and Iroh occasionally chat, eating small pastries tucked into his sleeves and watching as Zuko speaks with his citizens. They whisper humorous commentary, Azula’s sarcastic tone familiar and welcome.

Finally, the last of the visitors leave. Iroh and Azula watch, standing in the shadow of a column as Zuko descends, taking off the ceremonial crown. A guard approaches, and Zuko leaves the ornament in their hands with subdued gratitude.

His nephew has grown older. Zuko’s face has lost all semblance of youth, and light wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and lips mark his maturity. His steps are sure and confident, albeit weary.

The Dragon of the West steps out to meet the Fire Lord with a smile. “Ah, do not forget us, Fire Lord Zuko. We are still technically your citizens as well, even if we rarely come calling.”

At the familiar voice, Zuko straightens slowly and a smile breaks across his face. He waves away his guards and walks toward Iroh with outstretched arms. But when he looks over Iroh’s shoulder, Zuko slows and his happy expression falters.

Iroh glances back.

Azula has emerged from the shadows. Different as well, Iroh thinks. With her long hair in a plain braid and curling bangs framing her cheeks, her face appears softer than when she was younger, though the angles are sharp as ever. Her plain black robes and leather sandals pale in comparison to the military adornments she once wore. And the light, teasing smile on her face would be shocking if Iroh hadn’t seen it many times in the past few years.

“Fire Lord,” she says, reaching Iroh’s side and bowing deeply with her hands in a fist in front of her chest. “Thank you for inviting us here. It is a great honor.” When she looks up, her little smirk is back, familiar and haunting and so perfectly Azula.

Hesitantly, Zuko smiles and envelops them both in a hug. “It’s wonderful to see you,” he says, voice barely more than a whisper.

His sister laughs lightly. “When’s the party I’ve heard so much about?”

If anyone’s shoulder feels wet when they part, they do not speak of it.

oooooooooo

The first night she sleeps in the guest quarters, she wakes up crying.

She hates the color red.

oooooooooo

Zuko’s daughter is everything Azula wasn’t.

In the morning, Izumi studies diligently, listening to her instructors with rapt attention and smiling when she produces the correct answers. At lunchtime, she sits with her mother and feeds the turtle-ducks, giggling when they nibble at her fingers. And in the afternoons Izumi practices her firebending, brows furrowed with concentration she tries to perfect her movements.

She doesn’t do things like burn the servants because she likes blood and control and the little pained noises they make.

The first time that Izumi meets Azula, the little girl looks up at her shyly. “You’re Princess Azula?” she asks, face serious.

“Izumi, say hello,” her mother chides, looking at Azula with an exasperated expression that the princess instantly recognizes. She and Mai have known each other for a long time, after all. Mai is different now, of course. She is a mother whose daughter’s punches breathe fire.

“Hello,” that daughter says with a gap-toothed smile.

Azula smiles back. “Yes, I’m Azula.”

A fast friendship grows between them, the thirty-something year old woman and her niece.

In a room lit only by a flickering lantern, Azula tells Izumi spirit stories. (Zuko lectures her later when Izumi has nightmares, but Azula shrugs and waves him away. “The world is a much scarier place than my stories, brother.” As she expects, he quiets.) After dinner, when they all relax on cushions, Izumi sits next to her aunt and hangs on every word she says. The Fire Lord rolls his eyes. Then, on warm days, Azula finally learns how to feed the turtle–ducks. Iroh joins them, handing them bits of dough while telling humorous stories about Zuko’s youth. The word “honor” is a frequent feature of these stories, to the delight of both Azula and her niece.

When Izumi’s instructor is sick one day, she asks Azula for assistance with her firebending drills, and Azuma helps Izumi adjust her stance. “Fire comes from the breath,” Azula says. “Fire is life.”

And at Izumi’s birthday party, Azula’s gift is the first one opened, after her parents’ heap of presents. Azula has gifted Izumi a beautiful knife, made of dark, rippling steel, engraved with a line of characters that read with the rising sun. With an elated grin, Izumi hugs Azula and praises the gift while Zuko glares at her. Mai, though, lays a hand on her husband’s arm and nods approvingly at Azula. “A girl needs to know how to protect herself,” Azula says later, when asked in his office over tea.

Zuko rolls his eyes, but predictably lets it go. He himself had a similar knife, once, and Azula wonders if he still has it stored away somewhere. Gesturing to a desk full of paperwork, the Fire Lord raises an eyebrow at Azula. “As part of your punishment, want to help me with some paperwork?”

Azula laughs, standing and backing out of the room. “No, no—you aren’t roping me into any of this. It’s your throne—I don’t want it.”

For the first time, she means it.

oooooooooo

Eventually the nightmares fade and she spends her nights half-awake, half-asleep, wishing that she could look out the window and see the lantern-lit streets of Ba Sing Se.

Azula instead mediates in the garden until the sun creeps over the horizon.

oooooooooo

Things between her and Zuko reach an uneasy compromise. They don’t talk about the past. She can prove she’s different now. She has proven she’s different. Azula is stable and calm and considerate where before she was the opposite; a flame is dangerous when uncontrolled, and this she knows well.

He tries to apologize to her once.

Azula offers to brew tea one morning—Iroh has warned her of the Fire Lord’s paltry tea-brewing abilities. When she asks for flint, his eyes widen before he snaps his fingers. A fire bursts to life in the sunken sand pit. Without saying anything, Azula prepares the leaves. And after she pours the jasmine into two pretty gilded cups, she lets her hands soak in the warmth for a moment. A small comfort.

She looks up to see Zuko watching her, a strange expression on his face. “Azula, I’m sorry—”

Ah. “Don’t apologize,” she interjects. To hear it is too much.

“For—wait, what?” His brows furrow. Azula almost wants to smooth out the premature wrinkles lining his forehead.

“Don’t apologize. I understand.” She holds his gaze.

And she does: Zuko is the Fire Lord. He must worry about his nation, and she was undoubtedly a threat to his security when he dragged her out of the northern scrublands with a sword sheathed in crackling lightning and a cruel smirk on her face, promising to anyone who would listen that she would avenge her mother and her childhood. Even today, her dreams remind her of the scent of flesh burnt beyond recognition, how much she reveled in the taste of blood.

But Zuko is still hesitant. “You aren’t angry?”

She smiles, and it isn’t unkind. “Angry. . . angry isn’t the right word for it. Things change. That’s the way of things, Zuzu.”

After that, they don’t speak of it again, and Azula hides her longing when Zuko easily heats teacups with his bare hands.

Mai and Azula speak, but not often, and usually only in the presence of others. The princess is aware that Ty Lee has written Mai, probably describing her visit and the letters they sporadically share. There is caution, yet no fear. But it is hard to forgive, and oftentimes harder to forget, and since she does not know to explain how—like a tiger–shark—she once circled at the smell of blood, Azula remains silent and does not push.

Their family is in the capital when the fire lilies bloom, and when a bashful Zuko brings his Fire Lady a vase full of the fragrant flowers, Iroh smiles and Izumi claps, giggling.

Zuko and Mai share a kiss. Azula looks away, toying with the pages of a book in her hands.

oooooooooo

Zuko finds his sister sitting in the gardens late at night after leaving his office, which is still full of reports to read and memos to write and half-baked strategies to develop. Her back half-faces him, hair falling around her shoulders like a dark halo, shadows hiding her face.

“Nephew.” Zuko turns to see Iroh, moving slower than he once did. Together they observe the fire princess as the wind rustles her locks.

“She looks peaceful,” Zuko says.

“Peaceful enough. It is a long journey.”

oooooooooo

Perhaps he was wrong, Iroh muses while watching Azula correct Izumi’s stance, when he described Zuko and Azula so long ago.

Zuko is more than candlelight. Rather, he is a bastion of sanity in a Fire Nation obsessed with supremacy and domination. And Azula—she is no longer lightning, but akin to a slow-burning and controlled brushfire. For her, sparks still smolder beneath the surface, little spots of chaos that could spiral out of control at any moment. Or that could go out forever.

But what is light without darkness?

Nothing. Nothing at all.

And now, as he watches Izumi smile up at her aunt—who imparts her firebending techniques with selflessness—Iroh wonders about fate. When his niece and nephew had been younger, it had been so easy for him to determine their paths. Yet he had been wrong, both for the better and for the worse, which, even after everything, surprised him. Perhaps it shouldn’t have. Hadn’t his own journey meandered across similar roads?

“I am content,” he tells Zuko late one night when they are sorting through scrolls in the Fire Lord’s office. “I feel as if we have made great strides, all of us. The world has come so far. The White Lotus is certainly proud.”

Zuko smiles, and Iroh’s gaze traces the shadows beneath his eyes. “If it wasn’t for you, Uncle, we wouldn’t have gotten very far at all.”

The Dragon of the West decries the honor, waving his hands dismissively, but Zuko’s smile fails to fade.

oooooooooo

The boat pulls away from the dock and then they are riding the waves. On the shore, the rest of the Fire Nation family bids them farewell: exuberant shouts from Izumi, a shallow bow from solemn Mai, and Zuko’s steady gaze.

Salt sprays her cheeks as Azula’s lips quirk. “Uncle,” she says, “do you think that Zhi Xing and Ning An have been doing okay at the Jasmine Dragon? It’s a busy shop, after all.” She imagines the two women bustling about without them, dealing with all the impatient and picky customers who Iroh usually soothes.

Iroh pats her shoulder and chuckles. “I am sure they are fine, Azula. They are both competent tea masters, after all.”

The crew moves around her, and Iroh descends below deck to eat the hearty lunch that Izumi had presented to them before their departure. Azula stays and watches while the land disappears on the horizon.

They’re okay, she thinks. He’s probably right. Uncle Iroh usually is.

oooooooooo

Back at home—and that is how she thinks of the abode in Ba Sing Se now, as home, rather than the sprawling palace complex that overshadowed her early years—things progress.

They brew tea in the Jasmine Dragon’s kitchen. Azula’s customers compliment her methods, the taste, the fragrance. The two tea masters tell her daily that it’s a lifelong pursuit, the mastery of tea. Azula just rolls her eyes behind their backs and lights the stove fire with fire-sticks.

In the early morning, they roll leaves and measure perfect servings of eastern sencha and southern chai, even dabbling in regional favorites like a brew infused with lychee berries. Before breakfast they heat the water to the exact temperature, letting the leaves soak for the perfect amount of time, and then Iroh tests it. He rarely sends tea back. When he does, it’s usually the jasmine.

Iroh is a social man and remarkably spry for his age. He walks around the teahouse during the busy hours, speaking with as many of his visitors as possible, grinning and joking with serving maids and rich merchants alike. “They all have a story,” he says. “It’s all part of the rich tapestry of our lives.”

By the time that night begins to fall, the teahouse winds down, and Azula and Iroh usually leave after blowing out all the lanterns. They walk the busy streets together, chatting quietly and enjoying the city sounds, carrying home bags of leftover food.

Not long after they visit the Fire Nation, Azula begins to receive more letters. At first they are only from Izumi, who has her father send her drawings and scribbles with his dispatches to Iroh. But then Zuko writes to Azula himself. Then, some time after, a sealed letter from Mai arrives by falcon–hawk.

“You’re a popular girl,” Iroh says, winking, as if she is still a chit of fourteen rather than a woman of thirty-five.

With careful calligraphy, Azula writes back to all of them.

Every few months a parcel makes its way to their modest home, marked with the name Feng Li. One time, she receives a small, sharp knife, the steel folded upon itself intricately.

Another package contains a pai-sho set carved from rosewood, a rare variety from the southernmost Fire Nation islets. When Azula shows it Iroh, he admires the pieces with a contemplative look.

“Zuzu would be jealous, no doubt?” she asks.

Iroh shakes his head, rubbing a piece between his fingers. “Prince—I mean, Fire Lord Zuko never played pai-sho as well as you, Azula.”

Hiding her surprise at the words, Azula laughs and asks for his help in stashing the set away.

The house becomes more like a home. They paint the walls shades of pale green and gold. On those walls, they hang innumerable paintings and pieces of calligraphy. And in the dining area, they hang a portrait of the Fire Nation Royal Family that Izumi painted herself. Both find themselves amused at the Fire Lord’s grumpy smile, Mai’s knowing smirk, Iroh’s comically large belly, Azula’s rolling eyes, and Izumi’s innocently clasped hands. The young princess, they decide, will make an astute politician.

They still play pai-sho, and drink tea, and exercise in the mornings—when Iroh’s bones do not ache so much, that is. But some days, when Azula is in a rare black mood, Iroh leaves her to her own devices. Instead, he watches the sunrise alone and thinks of war and peace and how much blood has painted the earth and this kingdom and his hands. Azula, on the other hand, reads by flickering candlelight and tries to ignore how she still misses the searing kiss of flames on her pale skin.

oooooooooo

Zuko’s daughter likes rose tea, Azula discovers in a letter from Izumi, whose sixteenth birthday is just around the corner. Just like her father, she thinks wryly. Sweet things have always been brother dearest’s downfall.

When the princess tells Iroh, he smiles and fingers his sideburns. “I should have known,” the man says with a reminiscent cast to his features before placing a red chrysanthemum pai-sho tile on the board.

oooooooooo

Not long after they hang the portrait, a man comes to the teahouse.

This by itself isn’t an unusual occurrence; Iroh has many male customers, of course. At first, this man appears to be like any one of them. He’s in his thirties with a handsome but forgettable face and an easy smile that emerges as he discusses his travels with the Dragon of the West. Both have visited a smattering of small villages in the southern Earth Kingdom and they discuss the changes that have occurred there since Iroh last visited.

When the man finishes his second cup of tea, he glances up at Iroh. “This tea is really quite delicious,” he says. “Is the tea master available? I would like to speak with her—or him.”

Guests often like to thank or compliment the tea master who serves them, it’s true. Iroh knows, however, that this batch of osmanthus black tea is Azula-brewed. Like always, she’ll likely refuse the request with her usual lack of enthusiasm.

“Of course,” Iroh says, rising. “I will let her know.” He bows shallowly and with a twinkle in his eye.

“Please. . . tell her my name.” The guest says his name. Iroh pauses and listens, examining the fidgeting man, before nodding and heading to the kitchens.

Azula is sniffing at a teapot and preparing to pour it into a small cup. The other two women are working on their own brews, chatting quietly while soaking leaves. “Azula, one of the guests would like to speak with you,” Iroh says, watching as she finishes pouring and lifts the small cup to examine it from a better vantage point.

Her reply is curt: “Not today.”

He tells her the man’s name. Iroh expected little response; others have tried the same gambit. But the cup in her hands falls from her limp fingers and breaks, silencing the other two tea masters and splattering tea over her dark pants.

Iroh startles. “Azula?” he asks while the other two tea masters move closer.

Eyes wide, Azula stands frozen in the middle of the kitchen. “Are you sure?” she asks at last, fluttering into action, untying her apron and smoothing her robes. “Are you absolutely sure that is the name he gave?”

“Yes,” he tells her, watching as she nervously smoothes her hair.

Zhi Xing and Ning An share a look. “An old friend?” Zhi Xing asks, moving a pot off the stove as it begins to boil over.

Azula blushes, a pale pink flush that covers her cheeks and neck, reminding Iroh that she is mortal too. “Something like that. Do I. . . do I look okay?”

Ning An smiles and pulls a stray tea leaf out of Azula’s long braid. “You look beautiful,” she says. “As always.”

The two women offer to take over the brewing and Azula reluctantly shuffles out of the kitchen, Iroh in tow. He pauses outside the door and watches as she sits across from the mysterious man, whose face is split with a bright smile. Iroh makes a circuit of the tables, one eye always on Azula and the man.

They begin to talk, haltingly at first. But then the dam breaks and the words all come flooding out. Then they’re laughing. Azula’s smile outshines the sun, and the way that the man looks at her makes Iroh doubt everything that he knows about his niece. There is something there, something unexpected and entirely wholesome, something that makes him think about secretive missives stowed away in an ornate box on the bookshelf in her room.

The first time that the man’s hand reaches out to touch her arm, he hesitates and lets it fall away.

What is war?

The second time, the man’s fingers trace the scars on her arm. Azula watches, silent.

What is peace?

The way Azula covers his hand with her own speaks more than words.

Iroh has his answer.

oooooooooo

His newest letter is short and yet it fills Azula’s heart with longing.

The desert is cold without your warmth.

oooooooooo

When Iroh was a boy, he dreamed of dying heroically fighting the last dragons, slaying them as he perished, flames enveloping his body.

oooooooooo

The chirping of birds wakes her one morning.

Strange. Usually Iroh rouses her long before this and the house is so quiet—

Azula finds him in the bedroom, his face peaceful. Thin lips sit in a flat line. Deep wrinkles dimple his skin. He should have died smiling, she thinks. That would have been easier than looking at this—than seeing his empty body on a worn mat beneath a painting of a fire lily and her woefully inadequate phoenix rendition—than tracing with her eyes the blue veins on his forearms with something like reverence—than resting her ear in the air above his still heart as if hoping for a miracle, that it’s all a misunderstanding.

But he is dead. He will never return.

His skin is cold.

The princess waits until after she has sent the missive to her brother before crying, shutting the windows and curling into herself on the wooden floor of the dining room.

His body Azula leaves untouched.

It is pure and she cannot bring herself to taint it.

oooooooooo

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

There is so much she hasn’t told him.

Azula never told Iroh about the first few lonely years she spent wandering the southern Earth Kingdom, hiring out her talents to those who wanted them. Few knew who she was, and even fewer ever survived to tell the tale. She kept her knives sharpened and tipped with poison, never bothering to carry an antidote with her. If Azula pricked herself, she would die. She welcomed death, wanted the darkness to take her, to fade into the night and forget like Ursa did so long ago.

Azula never told Iroh about how she avoided her reflection for years, allowing her hair to grow out for fear of looking at her own appearance. Who knew what she would find there, anyway? So, she ran. The only memento she took with her was a letter from her mother—words about love and loss and blood—and every night as she fell asleep she questioned when she should burn it.

Azula never told Iroh about the time she spent at an eastern Earth temple learning martial arts. After an unfortunate incident with a priest and a kusarigama, the head priest counseled her that the katana better suited her style. Longer, thinner, and straighter than the dao swords Zuko once used as the Blue Spirit, the katana became an extension of her body. She would set it sparkling with lightning. The best way to cauterize a wound, to keep the informants alive while she poked and prodded and tore.

Azula never told Iroh about the first time she met him, on the border between desert and scrublands. With her back against a sand dune and an irascible ostrich horse as her only company, the night was bleak and cold. Her campfire barely kept her hands warm. Between one moment and the next a thin knife appeared at her throat and the sand beneath her feet began shifting. Her uncle didn’t know that she liked the kiss of the blade, that she craved the way that warm blood dribbled down her collarbone, that her manic laughter echoed over the dunes like a prophecy.

Azula never told Iroh about the man at all. He never asked, even after he came to the teahouse. She never told him that he was a Sandbender, born and bred in the Si Wong Desert, who escaped as a mercenary in his rebellious teens. A commoner, a peasant. Alone, just like Azula, and both like—liked—it that way. He likes spicy food and, when he drinks tea, he likes it sweet. Rose and jasmine and osmanthus for him, sometimes even lotus when he wants to splurge. He’s a genius with the naginata, and Azula must dance like a courtesan to avoid being filleted.

Azula never told Iroh that she and the man met and parted a hundred times over the period of her self-imposed exile. Even when the unsigned letters showed up in Ba Sing Se, written in coarse characters, she never told him. Even when she began to think of visiting him outside the city, she never told him. There would always be time. When she was ready. When Iroh’s back was better.

Later. There is always later.

But then there isn’t.

oooooooooo

When Azula asks to oversee the ceremonial death rites, Zuko acquiesces. He sits alongside her, watching as the robed priests carry the body away for washing. They return Iroh dressed in unstained white robes.

Brother and sister meditate for an entire day and night without food and water; this is the traditional fasting at the death of a family member, a ritual with which both are familiar, though neither has ever performed it. (Not for Lu Ten, the weak son of a traitorous father; not for Ursa, a ghost of childhood memory; not for Ozai, the fleeting Phoenix King.)

Fire Lord Zuko was with Avatar Aang when the letter from Azula arrived—He is gone. With Appa, it took less than a day to reach Ba Sing Se, where the empty body of his dead uncle waited. Azula could barely say a word and eschewed eye contact. Aang and Zuko had shared a sharp look before carefully wrapping Iroh in sheets and securing him on Appa. Azula watched, arms wrapped around her middle.

The day and night of fasting end peacefully and Azula slinks back into the dark corridors.

“Do you think she’ll be all right?” Izumi asks, golden spectacles perched upon her nose, her hair a mess and tear tracks still on her cheeks. Mai told Zuko she cried all night for the Dragon of the West.

Zuko watches Azula retreat into herself, into the Fire Palace, into the red silk sheets that adorn her bed. “She’ll be fine,” he says. “My sister knows how to heal.” She’s done it before. This time it feels different. They are older, and perhaps wiser. But Iroh has been Azula’s rock.

Without him. . .

Iroh wished to be mourned in the Fire Nation, his birthplace, where his heart ultimately resided. People come from near and far to grieve for the man who towered above all others, their nationalities displayed in shades of orange, blue, green, and red. His remaining friends and the Avatar fly a flag with an embroidered white lotus and finally wrap his body in it as a burial shroud. Izumi weeps behind Zuko but does not look away. To his left, Azula watches, eyes dry.

The flame that burns Iroh’s body comes from Zuko. That night, he wakes from a nightmare, smelling scorched flesh.

oooooooooo

Half of Iroh’s ashes are stored in a golden urn that Zuko places with the rest of their ancestors’ remains.

The other half goes to Azula, who spreads a handful over the soft waves of the western ocean and keeps the rest in a small pot.

oooooooooo

In the Spirit World, Iroh builds a small home with the help of some local friendly spirits.

“Why do you need a home here?” they ask. “This isn’t the human realm, and you can wander as you like.” But still he persists.

It’s tiny, Iroh’s home, little more than a cottage. A low table, a traditional sandpit hearth for brewing tea, and a familiar porcelain tea set. In one corner, he sets up a calligraphy station. Iroh paints all the spirits that he sees.

There are only three humans who he paints. He spends days collecting the right materials to render the exact shades of gold of their eyes. He spends weeks capturing war and peace and fire in the lines of their faces. He hangs the portraits on the wall and gazes upon them.

Outside Iroh has a taller table, one with many mismatched chairs and perfect for the tea parties that he hosts.

“Mmm,” one of the toad-like spirits says, eyes closed. His long tongue catches the last drop of liquid in his cup. “You make the most wonderful tea.”

Iroh’s laugh is as loud as thunder here, where your inner spirit is all that matters and all that remains.

oooooooooo

“Uncle has left you the Jasmine Dragon and the house,” Zuko says. He sits across from his sister in the Fire Lord’s office. Aang flanks him, dressed in his ceremonial robes, a heavy prayer necklace hanging around his neck. It looks too big on the slender man.

Azula’s brows furrow. “So?”

The two men share a glance. “We thought you might want to know.” The Fire Lord unrolls a short scroll, which she takes to be Iroh’s will. “He says that they are both yours, to deal with as you like.”

When she doesn’t speak, the Avatar shifts, his arrows a luminescent blue in the twilight. “If you want to sell it,” he begins, “we could help you—”

Azula cuts him off. “I don’t want to sell it. They are as much my home as anything, and I’ll return to them next week when all of the rites have ended and everything has settled.” When Izumi stops unexpectedly crying in the middle of dinner, or when she can firebend again. Or maybe when the bags under Zuko’s eyes shrink, or when Mai can make him eat more than a few paltry bites at each meal.

Azula looks around. Zuko’s office lacks adornment. Even the cushion on which she sits lacks any embroidery. Zuko himself wears plain red robes. And, of course, the golden hair piece from their mother. It glints in the dull light.

Zuko sighs. “If that is how you feel, that is fine, Azula. But we called you here about something else. . . ”

Azula frowns. “What?”

“We have an offer for you,” the Avatar says, eyes dark and serious.

“I don’t want anything from either of you.”

Zuko’s soft voice catches her attention. “It’s something that you’ve wanted for a while, sister.”

The room feels far too small now, with these two powerful men in front of her, the Avatar watching her like a hawk and Zuko’s gaze more intense than she remembers. “Fifteen years is a long time to live without your bending,” Aang says, gentle voice belying his tense shoulders. “You have spent those years peacefully, and we all trust you to firebend again.”

And Azula moves.

Before she realizes it, two small knives rest between her fingers. She bares her teeth in a snarl. Because they don’t talk about it. They don’t have the right to talk about it. These two leaders, these two heroes, they don’t know what it’s like to be the antagonist in everyone’s story, including your own.

Aang startles at the sudden motion, but Zuko steadies him. “Give her a moment,” he says quietly, “she just needs a moment. Calm down, Azula.”

By now the knives have disappeared and she is under control, at least on the surface. And that’s all that matters. “I’m calm, Zuzu.” Azula watches them, her mouth curling in revulsion. “I’m calmer than I’ve ever been.”

Then she stands, turns, and leaves.

oooooooooo

Fire is a tool and fire is a weapon and fire is in her soul.

Azula has always known this.

oooooooooo

Izumi finds her aunt in one of the abandoned corridors of the palace’s western wing. It is a dark place, murky with red and black, untouched by the years of Fire Lord Zuko’s reign. This is a place of the past, not of the present or future, and Azula oddly belongs here. Her black robes blend in well with the shadows.

“Aunt Azula,” she says, sidling up next to the older woman, who barely spares Izumi a glance.

On the wall is the center of Azula’s attention: three portraits, all masterfully done, of the Fire Nation Royal Family. The first is the oldest, with Ozai and Ursa standing above their children. Ozai’s face is serious, Ursa’s solemn, Zuko’s sullen, and Azula’s smug. The second lacks Ursa, but Ozai towers above Zuko and Azula, his lips slightly curved. Azula is less smug in this one and Izumi’s father looks afraid. The last portrait is the newest, though it is now decades old. It is only Ozai and the fire princess in this portrait, Zuko probably banished by this point. Fire Lord Ozai’s hand rests on his daughter’s shoulder. Azula’s mouth is pinched.

The portraits are haunting and Izumi looks away. “You don’t have to be alone,” she says to Azula. “We miss Uncle Iroh too, you know.” Her voice projects kindness; Izumi just wants Azula to sit and laugh with them once again. Azula says nothing for some time. Maybe sometimes you can’t go back to the past, Izumi thinks.

Finally, Azula turns to Izumi with a piercing gaze. “Tell your father that I’ll accept his offer,” she says.

Offer? Schooling her face into a polite mask, Izumi nods. “Of course, Aunt Azula. I will let him know.”

Pausing on her way out, Izumi looks at the grandmother she never met. “She really is beautiful.” Her voice is barely a whisper in the corridor.

Azula chuckles, a dark sound. She gifts Izumi a sad smile. “Mother would have liked you,” she says.

Even years later, when she is Fire Lord, Izumi will remember the haunted look in her aunt’s eyes and the words Azula did not say. At night, she will dream of wicked golden eyes and smoldering embers and monsters that hide in plain sight. In the day, she will wonder how such beasts are tamed—if such beasts are tamed.

But now, she nervously smiles. “Thank you, Aunt Azula.”

oooooooooo

Rough waves rock the small ship as a storm assaults the sea, rain pouring onto the steel hull. Azula watches from under her hood as the crew runs around the deck, trying to ensure that they do not all go under on their way back to the Earth Kingdom from the Fire Nation. This time of year, when the leaves are just beginning to return to once-empty branches, these thralls are common.

A crackle in the air.

Suddenly she looks up, more feeling than seeing anything, and intuition pushes Azula to stick her hand out into the space above her head, three fingers folded onto her palm.

Electricity connects with her body in a flash of light and power.

Like she has done a hundred times, a thousand times, the princess’s other hand extends and points toward the ocean. A thread of white-hot lightning snakes through her body and exits through her pointed fingers, striking the water and dispelling with a hiss of steam and the scent of salt.

The entire crew is staring at her, even the captain, with shades of horror and awe.

Azula just laughs.

For the first time in forever, she feels alive.

oooooooooo

Upon returning home, she mixes the remaining ashes of Iroh’s with soil when planting a small rosewood sapling in the garden; she hopes that the notoriously fickle variety will grow well in Ba Sing Se.

Iroh would appreciate death for life—the eternal trade, Azula knows.

He always had.

oooooooooo

The Jasmine Dragon sorely misses Iroh’s presence.

Azula knows she is not as good of a conversationalist as the old man was, and the customers who have not heard of his death ask about his whereabouts. They inquire with bright eyes and easy smiles. They do not know, and maybe do not care, that his absence is still an open wound.

They still get along, though, without him. When Azula finds herself frustrated with his old duties, she hires a serving girl—a pretty young thing named Jin, after her mother, who is kind and honest and everything that Azula can never really be.

Customers like Jin.

Zhi Xing and Ning An—who she barely ever calls by their animal nicknames anymore, even in her mind, not since they have been so gracious—make tea with her in the back room, and sometimes she even gossips with them. They smile and laugh and joke and Azula heats the tea with her hands instead of with the open stove.

The women do not mention it, but they watch with wide eyes the first time it happens.

Fire feels warm to the touch, flickering against her pale skin, and sometimes she wakes and ignites the air just to make sure she still can.

It takes time to get used to the sun inside of her again; her orbit has changed. Almost fifteen years have passed since the last time she could firebend and the once-familiar motions are new to her even though she has maintained her fitness. Weeks pass before she can run through the basic exercises and katas without making mistakes, and even longer passes before she can produce her characteristic blue flame.

But it is worth it to Azula, worth the rush as flames explode from her hands to ignite a lantern, to smell ashes on the wind and taste them: the taste of victory.

Letters still arrive at the house, all of them addressed to Feng Li. By the time she has returned from the Fire Nation, a large stack has accumulated, and she responds with a simple missive:

Uncle is gone. But I am fire again. When and where?

oooooooooo

Azula leaves Ba Sing Se sometimes. She travels. She visits the southern deserts and the borderlands, the verdant forests of the west, the tall mountains that shadow a growing Republic City.

She finds him, and that’s half the reason she left in the first place.

In a bar near a desert oasis she finds him, leaning over a pai-sho board with a cup of some fruity-smelling cactus drink in his hands. The dagger Azula throws lands neatly in the center of the wooden tiles, and he looks up while the man across from him chokes on his meal. Azula slaps the unknown man on the back. He spits up the food, gasping, and Azula smirks. “Is this seat taken?” she asks, and he leaves the table quicker than she can snap her fingers.

Sliding into the chair, Azula considers the familiar man across from her. A smile plays about his lips. “Coincidence to see you here,” he says before placing a piece on the board, as if nothing has happened.

A flame appears in her hand, blue as the desert sky. “Don’t play with fire,” Azula warns.

He laughs, the sound harsh with his coarse voice. “You should have told me that years ago.”

“I did.”

“I must not have listened.” He winks.

Suddenly it is like she never left. Azula places a rockweed tile, forming a harmony and winning the game.

oooooooooo

One night, with the stars bright jewels outside their window in some desert tavern, she traces patterns on his skin. There are scars here, some jagged, others faded. All of them are memories. More than one is from her and Azula smiles at that.

“You’re getting old,” she says when she notices the wrinkles on his forehead.

Touching the corners of her eyes tenderly, he smiles. “You’re one to talk.”

“Both of us will die soon, in some knife fight or another, and then who will be talking at all?”

He hums softly. “I don’t think so. You’re made for a peaceful death, princess.” It’s a term of endearment coming from him, rather than a curse or a title. She likes that.

Azula laughs. “As if.” But she still intertwines her fingers with his, reveling in the thick callouses that mark him as a lifelong warrior.

As they drift into sleep, she shifts, looking up at his face. “Promise me something?”

A mumble that Azula takes as assent.

“Promise me that you’ll wait for me. . . that your spirit will wait for mine, in the land of spirits.” Azula winces at the almost-romantic words.

One of his eyes cracks open lazily. “And what makes you think I’ll end up there?”

Not all human spirits end up in the Spirit World. Azula doesn’t know where the others go and, until now, she has never cared. But Iroh told her that it takes an extraordinary amount of willpower to be free and remember your previous identity on the other side.

But she doesn’t tell him this. Instead she presses a kiss to his shoulder. “I believe in you.”

His arm pulls her closer. “That’s a lot of faith you have in me, Feng Li. Are you sure I deserve it?”

“Life,” Azula tells him with mock seriousness, “is never any fun if you don’t take risks.”

oooooooooo

Eventually Fire Lord Zuko abdicates his throne.

Daddy’s finally letting me take the crown, Izumi’s letter reads. The older fire princess smirks when she receives it.

Azula attends the coronation, of course; it’s the biggest event since Iroh’s death ceremony. Eight days of splendid feasts, with parties each night and tea ceremonies in the gardens every morning. Glorious displays of bending filling the air over the royal palace. And on the ninth night, her father and the Avatar will crown Izumi Fire Lord.

Zuko grumbles the whole time. Since Mai passed away a few years ago, he has only become more obstreperous, complaining loudly and often about “youngsters these days” and how his back aches. He reminds her of Iroh when they were both children under his tutelage.

On the other hand, Izumi, at twenty-five, is different from the other members of the Fire Nation Royal Family. When she had been younger, Iroh had compared her to Lu Ten, but Azula has so few memories of her cousin that she can't speak to the truth of his musings. This much is true: Izumi is kind and serious and smart and, above all else, good.

When Izumi rises with the weight of the crown upon her head, long red sleeves embroidered with ethereal dragons, Izumi is no longer a child.

She is the Fire Lord.

Izumi smiles shyly at Azula when she comes to congratulate her. “You were my inspiration, Auntie Azula,” she whispers so her father can’t hear. “Father’s fine and all, but he’s a man. You and mother are—were—women, and you were strong in the face of. . . of everything. I’ve always admired you for that.” Izumi, who is now taller than her, lays a hand on shocked Azula’s shoulder.

Ex-Fire Lord Zuko announces the following morning that he’s coming to stay with Azula in Ba Sing Se for a while. Azula rolls her eyes and shocks him when he tries to settle an arm around her neck.

“Hey!” he protests, and everyone at the table hides their undignified giggles. Except the Avatar, who sees no issue with snorting rice milk out of his nose because he’s laughing so hard. The man is still a prankster at his middling age, and Sokka (who laughs the hardest) is little better.

Less than a week later the Tiger–Hawk pulls away from the docks. Azula looks over at Zuko, who is staring at the shrinking Fire Palace in the distance with a furrow between his brows. The palace is a red blur on the horizon, a mix of shadows and light and cold, hard gold. The center city itself is a splendor in the sheltered bowl of the caldera. But it is always the palace that holds visitors’ attention, because it is both sinister and inviting, and that’s ever been its draw.

“Missing your throne already, Zuzu?” she teases, but her brother just shakes his head “Zuko, she’ll be fine. Izumi is a smart girl, and you’ve prepared her well.” She isn’t you, Azula wants to say. And you aren’t Ozai. And I’m not Ursa. Never Ursa.

After a moment, Zuko nods. “You’re right. You’ve always been the smart one,” he jokes. Azula snorts while Zuko turns and glances over the deck. “It’s been forever since I’ve been on a boat without all of my advisors and paperwork,” he muses, and his eyes go misty. “It makes me remember all that time I spent traveling with Uncle.”

“We all miss him,” Azula says softly, resting a hand on her brother’s shoulder. They stand silently before a smirk creeps onto Azula’s face. “Besides, if you’re feeling nostalgic, we could always do a little bit of dueling.” A flame leaps to life in her hand. “I’m sure that I could help you find your honor, Prince Zuko.”

He just laughs and stares at the blaze nestled in her palm. “I think I found it long ago, Princess Azula.”

Then his feet slide into position and fire meets fire in a deafening explosion.

oooooooooo

Zuko is an interesting houseguest.

Azula doesn’t know where to put him at first. Iroh’s old room is off-limits, both siblings agree. She doesn’t ever go in there and a thin patina of dust covers everything. So, they clean out a room downstairs and buy Zuko some basic furniture. Blankets in shades of blue, decorated with white thread in swirling patterns, to match the sky-colored walls. A chest of drawers carved from light maple, tinged with hints of red.

They drink tea together, though Azula always insists on brewing it—Zuko never learned how to properly brew tea. She makes jasmine tea, usually, with batches of rose and osmanthus. Every once and a while it is ginseng, and Zuko grimaces.

Zuko often visits the Jasmine Dragon during the day, reading some scroll with a frown on his face. Zhi Xing and Ning An are older now, retired, and their apprentices have taken their places. Both apprentices giggle at him as if he is just another oddity of Azula’s, like her mysterious trips and all the weird trinkets littering her house and the Jasmine Dragon. (“Oh, look, Azula! That jade dragon statue is magnificent, isn’t it? What do you mean we don’t need another one? Princess, it’s a good luck charm, and you can never have enough good luck, can you?”)

“Who’s the man with the scar?” her patrons ask, smiling behind their hands as if expecting a tasty morsel of gossip.

So Azula gives it to them. “Ah, him?” she asks. “That’s just the old Fire Lord, the one who stepped down some years back.”

They usually pale. “The Fire Lord?”

“Well, not anymore. His daughter is the Fire Lord now. He was a friend of my uncle’s, you know,” she says with a wink.

Just another piece of salacious gossip to bolster Iroh’s reputation in Ba Sing Se, where he concealed his identity as best as he could. (He wasn’t always successful, but he tried, and that’s what counts in the end.)

Azula finds that Zuko is a better pai-sho player than when they were children, though she can still best him in three out of four games. He rolls his eyes and endures her good-natured ribbing over the dinner table. Both are always up for a spar, and more than one time the princess soundly beats her brother because he has singed the garden flowers.

They get and receive letters from Izumi and visit when appropriate. “I can’t coddle her too much,” Zuko says when Izumi writes him for advice. But when she names her son Iroh, they travel with Avatar Aang to the Fire Nation to see him.

Azula and Zuko are wandering souls. They disappear for weeks at a time. Azula comes back with a small bag slung over her shoulder, returning with less than she took. She visits her lover’s new home, a farm not far from the city, and together they stare at the clouds and stars and laugh at the children who try to climb and dig through Ba Sing Se’s outer walls. Nearly impenetrable, Azula knows.

But Zuko is just like Iroh and he comes back with gaudy souvenirs and frivolous baubles: a statue of Avatar Kyoshi with a bobble head, crystalline glass flowers in a thousand shades of blue, carved green malachite pai-sho pieces, ceramic pots in the shape of lion–turtles painted green and brown, star charts and sea maps of long-lost lands and ancient kingdoms predating the split of spirit and human worlds.

“You barely have enough room to sleep,” Azula says when he lugs in a carved wooden statue of a badger–mole. “Where are you going to put it?”

He smiles slyly. “I’ll find somewhere,” he promises.

Frowning, Azula rubs her aching back. “You aren’t putting it in my room, brother!”

Somehow, though, the statue ends up overhanging her bed until she burns it. When Zuko is upset at its demise, she blames it on a stray flame from a candle. He doesn’t believe her.

One day her brother gets up halfway during breakfast. He marches to the door and slips on a pair of boots. “Going on a mission?” she asks, a chunk of rice halfway to her lips.

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

It’s funny how much like children they get in their old age.

“Going to slay some demon and ride a dragon into the sunset to save the princess?”

His answering laugh is nearly a cackle. “As if, Azula.”

Zuko returns with a spirits-damned dragon, the old coot.

oooooooooo

Azula sees more of herself in Prince Iroh than she ever saw in Izumi, and it worries her.

For the first time in many years, she dreams of a red moon and a black sun and a lingering touch on her shoulder. Her father’s smile and her mother’s sobs.

When she wakes with the stars still bright in the sky, Azula burns a stick of incense and meditates until dawn.

oooooooooo

Prince Iroh grows up with stories of his grandfather and Avatar Aang with his gang (waterbending master Katara, sage soldier Sokka, fierce warrior Suki, and Toph the metalbender), but sprinkled in are stories of other legendary souls: Fire Lord Ozai and Commander Zhao and Grandmother Mai and Aunt Ty Lee the Acrobat and the Dragon of the West and, above all others, Princess Azula.

The last name is often said in a tone caught between a whisper and a whimper. Though she is an old woman by the time Iroh knows her, half the nation fears the merest mention of her name. Some of the older servants flinch away when she raises a hand to pick up the chopsticks next to her plate. Aunt Azula pretends not to notice, but Iroh sees her downturned eyes.

She is a master firebender, and the only person Iroh knows that can produce blue flames. They lick at the air hungrily, as if they want more than just air, more than she can give.

Prince Iroh is a smart boy, and he hears the rumors: she’s a demon and she’ll crack again one day and some families are just unlucky to have a bunch of bad eggs.

When he tells his mother about the servant’s hushed whispers, her face becomes very sad and angry all at once, and after that he never tells her again. Iroh doesn’t like to make his mother sad; she’s very busy and has a million other things to worry about (rebellion and bandits and how someone keeps stealing her chocolates) besides what all the nosy gossips think of Aunt Azula.

More than that, Iroh likes Princess Azula.

On his birthdays, she gives him shuriken and daggers, sneaks him scrolls about advanced firebending techniques, and teaches him how to brew tea. He’s better at that than Grandpa Zuko, she assures him with sly glance at her brother. Pai-sho isn’t Iroh’s strong suit, but they’re working on it, and she’s constantly telling him not to underestimate the white lotus tile.

There are only two times that he fears her.

oooooooooo

The first is when Azula discovers Prince Iroh yelling at one of the servants in a side hallway.

Iroh sits beneath one of the old portraits of the Fire Nation Royal Family in a shadowed corridor. He doesn’t even realize that there’s a portrait above him—he’s not one for pictures. Pictures aren’t like words. Words paint a million pictures, a thousand sunrises in infinite shades of possibilities. He’s reading an old scroll, one that talks about the moon and ocean, and the story is just getting good when he hears the servant speak.

“It’s about time that old woman dies, anyway,” the brown-haired girl says, gossiping with another servant near the doorway. Neither of them notice Iroh. “Princess Azula has always been a rotten apple. I don’t know why the Fire Lord even lets her visit. You can’t ever trust her, my mother says.”

These words catch his attention. Iroh feels his ears turn red and tosses aside his book. “Don’t you dare talk about Aunt Azula that way!” he yells, jumping up. The two servants turn to look at him, faces frozen in terror. The one who hadn’t spoken dropped her basket of laundry and fled. Iroh corners the other girl. “You don’t deserve to talk about her that way! You don’t even know her! You’re just a servant!” It doesn’t stop there. A few minutes later, the servant girl is bowing on the floor, holding back tears, and Iroh is just starting to feel gratified.

Then Azula appears in the doorway. Her face is calm, but Iroh can sense anger. “What, exactly, is this?”

One look is all it takes, and then she knows the whole tale. Iroh’s mother is like that too.

Slowly, as if approaching a nervous fawn–hawk, Azula approaches the kneeling servant. “It’s okay,” she says when the girl startles. “Please, calm down. Go back to your work. Don’t worry. You aren’t in any trouble.” The girl rises and scurries away, gathering the dropped laundry on her way out.

Iroh and Azula are left standing and looking at each other in front of old, faded portraits from some bit of history that Iroh hasn’t learned yet. But Azula’s eyes linger on them before she looks back at him. “That wasn’t very kind, Prince Iroh. Why did you yell at her like that?”

Looking down at his feet, Iroh shrugs. “She was saying some mean stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“I dunno. Stuff about you.”

“Plenty of people have said mean stuff about me, Iroh. This is hardly the first time, and there was no need to treat the girl so cruelly. She was in tears, afraid that a Prince of the Fire Nation was going to banish her. . . or burn her.”

Iroh’s head jerks up, horror filling him. “I would never—“

“And how is she to know that, Iroh? You—a prince—were yelling at her—a servant. And if you did hurt her, who would care? Who could she tell, when she believes that we are all such cruel masters?” Iroh’s chin wobbles as he tries to fight back tears. “You have been lucky enough to be born into a position of power in this world, and you shouldn’t take advantage of it.”

“What would you know? You’re just an old woman!” The hurt look on his aunt’s face stops him from saying more.

“I’m disappointed in you, Prince Iroh. Surely you know that all old women were once young girls, and not all of us were lucky enough to have well-meaning family members who would give them advice.”

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles, unable to meet her gaze.

“I’m hardly the one that needs an apology, am I?” She considers him for a moment. Iroh looks up at her serious face, her white hair pulled back and gleaming in the muted light. Without saying anything else, Azula leaves.

The next day, Iroh apologizes to the servant, bowing more deeply than he has ever bowed in his life. He thinks long and hard about power and fire and peace. And war. He sneaks into the library and reads a history of the Hundred Years War. Always war.

He dreams of young boys and their fathers, young girls and wars, scars both seen and unseen. He promises himself that he’ll preserve the goodness and kindness in the world.

That he’ll fight against war.

oooooooooo

The second time that he fears Azula is less than two years later, when one of the old servants is serving him a plate. She is old—older than Azula, but still limber on her feet. His mother likes her and once mentioned that she had been one of Grandpa Zuko’s personal attendants when he was a child.

(The woman tells a hilarious tale about how his grandfather once received some ceremonial armor and insisted upon wearing it, even though it was too heavy, and he fell into the river he almost drowned. Luckily, three of the guards fished him out while Azula laughed on the bank.)

When the servant sets down the dish, her sleeve falls away and he sees a faint scar—a burn mark?—on the inside of her wrist. Squinting, he can just make out the faded characters.

A-zu-la.

Iroh suddenly feels sick. He cannot bring himself to eat a bite of the delicious-looking meal, no matter how much his mother pleads with him.

oooooooooo

One day in the gardens, Azula sits with Iroh and feeds the turtle-ducks bits of bread.

“They’re very protective,” the young prince says, watching a mother shield her duckling from a splash of water. “It’s nice, isn’t it? To see them so happy and at peace?”

Azula looks at him, pausing in the middle of tearing apart a loaf of bread. “Yes. Yes, it is nice.”

oooooooooo

Days turn into weeks, weeks turn into months, and months turn into years.

Time passes like the shifting of sand across stone in the desert.

When her lover dies, in some far-off place on some far-fetched mission for which he was far too old, Azula laughs instead of crying. He wouldn’t wish her to be sad. Besides, he left her the farm thirty miles south of Ba Sing Se, which she gifts to her late old gardener Lee’s grandchildren. They settle in and till the soil. Every harvest, they bring bags of fresh vegetables to her door with a sack of brown pears.

She misses him, but Azula is old now too. When Zuko stays with her, they reminisce over old times and those that they have lost. And when she sees Izumi at her marriage ceremony, she almost mistakes her for Ursa.

Azula stops counting time in years and begins counting it in tomes of poetry.

At last the five bookcases upstairs are overflowing with bits of rhyme and verse from monks and Fire Nation nobility and even Avatar Yang Chen, and she frowns at the realization that she’ll have to get another bookshelf and find somewhere to put it, somewhere not crawling with Iroh or Zuko’s odd collectables.

Agni, she really is getting old.

oooooooooo

On his twelfth birthday, Fire Lord Izumi gives her son Prince Iroh a beautiful knife, the blue-tinged steel still sharp.

“It’s amazing,” he says, eyes wide and face slack in awe. “Where did you get it, mother?”

Izumi reads the words written down the side, characters etched into the metal long ago, and thinks of Iroh and Azula and sweet rose tea.

“It was a gift,” she says, nostalgia making her smile, before ruffling his hair. “Treat it well.”

Prince Iroh nods.

oooooooooo

Four years before the Avatar comes to Republic City, Azula dies.

It is a quiet, peaceful death. Nothing too extravagant for her, but Zuko knows she may have preferred otherwise in her youth. Or maybe not; for all he knew, maybe she wanted to die from old age as the Fire Lord, surrounded by a bevy of grandchildren.

The more he knew about his sister, the less he understood her.

Zuko is the one that finds her. She is out on the porch of her home in Ba Sing Se. The cushion on which she rests (black and beautiful, covered in little thread dragon–fireflies that glow at night) is old and probably belonged to Uncle Iroh. It was her favorite, and she refused to get rid of it when Zuko wanted new furniture.

He sends a letter to Tenzin, and the Councilman comes the next day, his face impassive. He did not know Azula well, but knew much of her at least. They gather her body and Azula travels for the last time on the back of a flying bison.

When they reach the Fire Nation, Izumi cries. Prince Iroh, on leave from the United Forces, looks on solemnly. And Zuko. . . Zuko thinks of what his Uncle Iroh told him, so long ago: Fire is life.

Her sun has set at last.

Azula’s face is lined with age, but Zuko can still see the vestiges of both her smile and her smirk. He remembers playing in the garden when they were younger. The way that her remarks slowly became crueler, meaner, harsher—how she bloomed under their father’s attentions. But Zuko also remembers the madness after the war, the crying, pleading with Ursa—how she disappeared into the darkness. He remembers when they found Azula, with her half-feral and cloaked in lightning. He remembers everything since, and wonders about more, because she is more than the sum of his memories.

Azula’s face is serene.

In death, his sister has found finally found the peace she so desperately sought throughout her life.

The funeral is a small and private affair. Izumi, Iroh, and Zuko all meditate during the rites together. On the last day, when the fire sages have finished their prayers and incantations to the spirits, they all step forward and ignite her body in a magnificent display of fire.

With their combined power, the flames are so hot that they turn bright blue.

oooooooooo

Zuko keeps the house in Ba Sing Se and the Jasmine Dragon.

He doesn’t have the heart to change anything, and the little house that Iroh and Azula once shared is as good a place as any other to spend time while recouping from his travels. Every few weeks he will find some fresh pears or yuzu or cabbages leaning up against the side gate, as if someone has left them there for him.

One summer day, while he is exiting through the side door, he finds two young boys depositing sacks of vegetables. They both pause before sharing a glance. “You aren’t the old lady,” one of them says.

“No. She was my. . . sister.”

Suddenly they both look deflated. “Was?” the second one asks.

“She left this world a few months ago.”

“That’s too bad,” the first one says, looking at the ground. “She was really nice. Funny, too.”

“And she made a mean pot of tea,” the younger child adds, wiping at his eyes.

“Are you the ones who keep bringing food here?” Zuko asks.

“Oh, yes. She gave our parents their farm, where our family lives. So, we always bring her some of the harvest, when we can. Gratitude, Papa says. Something about pride and falls.”

He tells them to stop in at the Jasmine Dragon for tea anytime, and even makes them take a few copper coins—they refuse the silver ones outright. Scratching his head, Zuko watches them walk away, talking in low tones.

How in Agni’s name did she come by a farm?

There are rarely any other visitors to the home, and when Zuko is there, he spends most of his time alone. Sometimes he peeks into Iroh’s room and sees the strange trinkets and the two modest wall hangings (a lily and a phoenix, both showing their age) and a simple tea set on a wooden chest of drawers. It looks old and familiar, but he can’t place it.

In Azula’s room he finds piles of books, poetry and history and treatises, and between pages are pressed flowers from the garden. A small box with inlaid moonstone contains years of letters, all addressed to Feng Li; after reading the first one, Zuko puts them back and never opens the box again.

So much unknown. Can you ever really know someone? Perhaps a person’s character matters more than their past.

He likes that thought.

The garden quickly grows out of control. The azaleas sprout under the dogwood and crowd its roots, while the columbines reach toward the sky hungrily, blocking out sunlight from the smaller peonies. Overgrown blueberry and cloudberry bushes prick him with their thorns as he tries to prune them, but it is no use. Gardening was an activity for Iroh, and then Azula, and Zuko is a poor substitute. At the tea shop, he asks the girls for advice, but they remain hesitant. “You shouldn’t tax yourself, Fire Lord Zuko,” the two women say, over his protestations that he’s no longer the Fire Lord.

Then, in the market that fall, he spots a man playing the pipa with a small potted plant next to him. Placing a few small coins in the man’s ceramic pot, Zuko waits until the melody is done.

“Are you any good with plants?” he asks.

The man shrugs. “Maybe. A bit. Grew up on a farm, in the Outer City.”

He wears homespun clothes, plain brown with bright green accents. He has dark hair and a face smudged with dirt. The pipa he plays is polished, though, and looks to be worth at least a few silver coins. He could have sold it long ago. But he didn’t. He kept it for some reason. Zuko understands those kinds of reasons.

“I need a gardener,” Zuko says.

The man accepts a trial period, after Zuko begs and pleads and finally almost forces him. Within three days, the garden is looking better than he can remember. From the porch, Zuko watches as the man plucks the weeds and snips the lower branches of fruit trees. After two weeks, he takes a permanent position and moves into the last free bedroom in the house.

When his new gardener tells him that his name is Lee, Zuko laughs. “It’s really a common name,” the man says, a hint of defensiveness in his tone, but Zuko keeps laughing.

“It’s not that,” he says once he’s calmed down. “It just reminds me of someone I knew, very long ago.”

At dusk Zuko sits at the low table outside, across from where Azula died, and stares at the distant horizon. Around him the city bustles: people moving about, in the market and in the streets, buying things and laughing and celebrating. The sounds of peacetime, of a happier Ba Sing Se.

He thinks of Mai dressed in green and gold, and of their daughter’s pensive amber eyes. He thinks of Azula and the smirk on her face when she sent lightning at the Avatar’s suspended body. He thinks of his grandson and the crisp, clean uniform of the United Forces. Most of all, he thinks of this modest house. So far away from the Fire Nation, from the place that his sister and uncle had called home for their early lives. What happened here, in those years when both lived here together?

While sipping a cup of tea at the Jasmine Dragon, Zuko wonders what history will remember of them all. The Fire Nation Royal Family.

Then he wonders if it even matters.

They knew the truth, as much as the truth can ever be known.

oooooooooo

Iroh is in a green and gold copse when he feels a shiver crawl down his spine.

Then he lets out a wild bark of laughter.

Time always passes so quickly when it doesn’t matter.

oooooooooo

Purple-leafed trees and glowing shells littering the long shore of a beach next to green water; a palace built entirely of juniper and inhabited by large hummingbird–sloths; two large dragon–hawks that circle snow-capped mountains in the distance before landing on a jagged peak; a portal to an eerie world with a faceless baboon and a large wolf; myriad other creatures, big and small, quiet and loud, strange and wonderful—the Spirit World has it all.

Including a small cabin in the middle of a field of flowers, the field’s ankle-high grass dancing in the wind. Azula doesn’t find it right away, because that isn’t how the Spirit World works. Things here are different and are never how or where you left them.

The environment shapes itself around her. When Azula becomes lost and frustrated in a forest, the nearest bird spirits begin to chirp agitatedly. When she is delighted with a bunch of rare panda lilies growing near a jackfruit tree, the spirits surround her with wide eyes and delicate touches. They know her better than Azula knows herself, and she wonders why humans ever made the decision to split from the Spirit World.

But eventually she does find Iroh’s house, because all roads lead to him.

For her, they always have.

When he comes out of the house with a warm smile and a tea set on a tray, she grins.

“You look young,” Iroh says when he stops in front of her.

“Oh?” Azula hadn’t bothered to look at herself. “Really?”

“As if it’s been maybe five years since when you first came to Ba Sing Se.”

Laughing, she accepts a cup from his outstretched hands. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been that young, Uncle.”

“Has it?” Iroh asks, with a twinkle in with his familiar eyes, before taking a sip of tea.

Azula looks down at the green and brown leaves. The teacup is recognizable, and with a pang she realizes it is the one from their home. Perhaps he even had it long before that. Azula follows Iroh’s lead and drinks the tea.

At first, the tea is shockingly unpalatable, sour and bitter like ginseng and still-hard kiwis, but then the taste begins to change. Even as she swallows her first sip it becomes sickeningly sweet, as if it were jasmine or lotus sweetened with sugar and spiced with cinnamon.

Iroh pats her on the back consolingly. “Things here are like that.” Rather than shrinking from his touch, she just drinks again, savoring the unusual flavors.

Later, they sit at a dining table with mismatched chairs in the middle of his field. “Princess, do you think you’ll stay here long?” he finally asks. His knowing tone is so perfectly Uncle Iroh that she almost cries.

For most of her life, Azula has felt out of place. As if she does not quite belong.

She remembers: Ursa wrapping an arm around a pouting Zuko’s shoulders, showing him how to feed the turtle-ducks; Fire Lord Ozai’s eyes, hungry for legacy, and the way they followed her around the world; Commander Zhao’s smirk and his burning gaze on her unscarred skin; Mai and Ty Lee begging and pleading with her, crying, trying to cover the scorch marks on their arms; pale blue arrows on the Avatar’s skin, his body almost crashing into the earth; the look on Iroh’s face when she taunts him about Lu Ten, poor Lu Ten, poor children who die in wars they never understand; Zuzu sitting on the dragon throne and wearing the golden hairpiece—Zuko the Fire Lord; Mai and Zuko sharing a moment, a kiss, in the gardens where they do not realize she can see them; Izumi laughing happily with her friends at her fourteenth birthday party; Prince Iroh carefully studying maps and charts and messing with astrolabes, because he wants to be a soldier of peace, as if there is such a thing; the taste of blood, hot and alive, and the way she revels in lightning crawling across her skin as she drinks it all in.

Azula has often felt as if the world is tilted and she cannot see straight.

But here. . .

Azula looks at the horizon, where the sun hangs low. She looks at the swaying grasses and the funny toad spirits near a pond at the edge of the forest. She looks at a distant mountain and thinks that maybe he is out there somewhere as well. And there is plenty of time for her to search.

Here, Azula sees everything for what it is.

“I think I’ll stay a while,” she says.

“Good.”

It is as if time has not passed, as if they are eating dinner in their old house, just having finished a game of pai-sho.

It is as if they have found peace.

oooooooooo

Twice Iroh goes to the Spirit World. The first time he leaves a broken man and the second time he returns whole.

Only once does Azula go to the Spirit World. She explores many places, ferrets out many secrets, finds the three men for whom she searches, and drinks many cups of unusual tea.

Neither of them ever leave again.

oooooooooo

Once upon a time, not too long after Azula comes to live with Iroh in Ba Sing Se, they drink a pot of oolong tea that he has brewed.

“Uncle,” she says, “do you ever think about death?”

Over the rim of his cup, Iroh observes her for a moment before laughing—it’s a booming sound, both startling and comforting in its intensity. “Sometimes,” he admits. “But it is a fleeting thought.”

“What do you imagine that you’ll do, after you die? What will happen?” Light tension grips her shoulders.

Iroh thinks of a young boy who promised to teach his nephew how to use dao swords and wrote letters in delicate calligraphy. He thinks of the boy’s smile and how beautiful things sometimes have horrible fates.

“I imagine I’ll go to the Spirit World,” he says. “When my business is done here, I would like to return there. I did not get to explore it too much the last time I visited, and it is. . . truly wondrous.”

She quirks a brow. “I thought those were just stories, about you going to the Spirit World. One of the tall tales that they tell children in the Fire Nation. Oh, the Dragon of the West—he killed the last dragons and even crossed into the Spirit World.” Her tone is mocking.

Iroh pours a second cup of tea for them both and stares into the steaming liquid.

“Princess, it is certainly a story. But it is also true. What is life, after all, but a collection of stories?”