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Chapter Text

She always imagined the Avatar’s hands would be spindly, childlike, and chilling in more ways than one. It surprises her when the fingers gently brushing against her brow are the sturdy hands of a tall lean man who has grown into the weight of the title thrust upon him when he was but a mere boy. Whatever swirling emotions she had experienced when he first approached had nearly overtaken her when the warm, rough worn palm of his other hand cupped her cheek. 

“You’re hurt.” He says with a look of concern on his face so believable she can’t help the sudden intake of air into her lungs.

“Hardly a scratch.” She whispers, vocal chords scraping together after years of disuse. Those first few months at the institution she had screamed until her throat was raw and bloody. And then one day she had simply stopped speaking all together. She found that when she was quiet it became easier to distinguish the difference between the sounds she had simply imagined and the drone of the brushcrickets and the constant beating of the rain on the roof. Of course, by the time the delusions had run their course, she was thoroughly convinced of the merits of not speaking. It certainly made the one-sided sparring sessions with the nurses more interesting. It always seemed to suck the fun out of the room when they couldn’t even get a sound out of her. Not to mention the fact that she never cried. She’d happily drive a stake into her own heart before she would allow them the pleasure. 

The searching fingers of the last airbender bring the world back to focus around her. She’s alive. Bruised but not anymore broken than she was when she first entered the place. She’s a woman now, no longer a child hanging on to the words of her father. She’s not even sure she has a father anymore, if she ever even had one at all. And now the Avatar is crouched before her, playing nursemaid before he whisks her away for her final judgement. How fitting that the boy she once killed would be the man who would take her to her death. 

“Can you stand?” He asks hesitantly. Azula doesn’t bother to answer, choosing to pull herself up against the wall for support. The stabbing pain in her side confirms what she had assumed all along. Her ribs are broken. If the Avatar doesn’t kill her before the day is over, riding on the back of that insufferable skybison will. 

Her executioner remains ever the gentleman. In almost the blink of an eye he’s beside her, supporting the right side of her body as gently as possible. She hates it, hates him, but finds she’s too weak to do anything but sneer at him. She finds herself slightly disappointed when he doesn’t flinch. She can’t tell if she’s lost her edge after all these years or if he’s finally gained one. 

He leads her down a winding hallway and helps her up a flight of stairs until they’re standing in a nondescript room she’s never had the pleasure of seeing before. The guards preferred to keep her underground or in rooms without windows and with very little light. Whether to break her spirit or cool her bending, she couldn’t say, though she suspected both reasons had their merits. 

The room is suffused with sun and when her eyes adjusted to the assault of light she could make out the spare furnishings. A vanity and chair, a wooden tub, a changing screen and a folded bundle of cloth. How magnanimous, she thought drily. Perhaps she'd be afforded a last meal before the excitement of the day was over. 

“Sit.” Her captor and savior commands softly. 

She tries to lower herself gracefully but fails miserably, slamming into the chair below. The accompanying low hiss is the only sign she’ll allow the airbender that her descent hurt half as much as it looked. 

With a furrowed brow, the Avatar kneels before her again and gestures towards her ribs. 

“May I?” 

Azula contemplates ignoring him but supposes her silence could just as easily be mistaken for consent. The girl he knew before would have cleaved the skin from his bones for even daring to touch her. Now she only nods imperceptibly, deeply aware of the fact  that as the Avatar’s prisoner consent is merely a mirage meant to comfort the weaker of the two benders. But as she feels his grey eyes peer into her golden ones, she’s not sure who is who. 

When he reaches for the hem of her shift, she goes rigid. This she never expected. Would he have his fun with her before—

“I’m sorry.” He says peeling the cloth away from her side to look down at the purpling bruise on her torso. 

She imagines asking him exactly what he’s sorry for . Sorry for coming? Sorry for leaving her with a hoard of indifferent doctors and petty spiteful nurses? Sorry for committing her in the first place? Sorry for turning her into a child soldier? For depriving her of a mother’s love?

Maybe in this scenario she too can kneel and list the myriad things she’s sorry for if only she could remember them all in the first place. I’m sorry for killing you. I’m sorry for chasing you to the furthest reaches of the earth. For hurting your friends. For nearly killing your girlfriend. For shooting blue sparks from my hands as though they were so many fireworks sailing through the night sky. 

If the Avatar notices the odd look in her eyes, he’s wise enough not to mention it. “I’m sorry I’m not any better than this.” He says, hands stretching out to draw the molecules of water from the room. “For some reason I’ve never been able to master more than the basics. But this should help a little.”

His hands glow a soft blue green as they hover just above the tender skin at her waist. The pain relief is almost immediately identifiable. It’s as though the small pressure valve in her chest is being leaked ever so slowly. And when it seems he’s done all he can do for her side, his hands arc up to the cuts and bruises on her face, soothing the worst of them with a wisp of water. His movements felt clumsy yet diligent. He makes quicker work of her than she expects and draws away when his knowledge reaches its limits.

“I’m afraid this will have to do.” He murmurs before introducing her to one of his aides and backing solemnly out of the room. 

Azula hardly has time to contemplate his odd departure before being efficiently stripped of her tattered uniform and guided into the waiting water. The girl, Shiwa, seems only a few years younger than Azula. Her features are unremarkable in a way that makes it difficult to know what nation she might be from, but her name and clothing are unmistakably associated with the Air Nomads. During her time locked away in “treatment,” the crown princess had heard of the steadily growing group of people who had rallied around the last Airbender’s mission to retain Air Nomad sacred knowledge and culture. She supposes this slip of a girl, fastidiously washing away the blood and sweat from her body, has joined the righteous cause. Perhaps the girl has even joined the Avatar in his bed, tasked as the future mother of the airbending race. 

Before long, the girl is guiding her out of the tub and into the chair by the vanity. She carefully runs a comb through the mess of tangles on Azula’s head, subduing the knots and running a mixture of oil that smells vaguely familiar through the strands of her hair. Without knowing why, Azula avoids her own gaze and focuses on Shiwa’s nimble hands. The monotony is soothing, almost so much so that she finds herself drifting off until Shiwa steps away to find the finishing touch. A Fire Nation hair piece, a royal relic that has belonged to generations of Fire Lady’s before her. 

When Shiwa pins the hairpiece into place, Azula sees it for the first time. What she once shattered every mirror in the palace to avoid knocks her over with a feather. Even in a simple slip, with her hair elegantly tied half up and half down, she knows who she resembles. All her life she has only looked at her reflection and seen her father staring back at her or worse, a gaunt ghost of a girl chasing after the promise of his glory. But today, for the first time since she was born, she gazes into the mirror and sees Ursa where her own face should be.

The feeling only intensifies when Shiwa flits around the room pulling fabric together and draping it across the Fire Nation Princess’s body. The other woman tucks and pulls on the folds of fabric, saving the final tie of sash until satisfied that everything is in its rightful place. 

“Your Grace.” Shiwa says demurely bending at the final sight in the mirror. 

Azula looks every bit the Fire Nation queen her mother would have been. The touches of rouge and kohl only intensify this odd yearning she feels for a mother who never loved her. For a mother whom she never loved. Today she looks so much like the painting of Ursa on her coronation day that the blood runs cold through her veins. The hairpiece, the ceremonial robes. The pomp and circumstance. Suddenly, all of it seems an excessive lead up to her being murdered and left in a ditch. The realization that, despite her temporary exile, she is still next in line for the throne catches like bile in her throat. The extreme circumstances necessary for Azula to ascend—

“My brother?” She croaks, a strange feeling swirling within her. Shiwa reaches forward as if to rest a hand on Azula’s shoulder but hesitates as they all do.

“Your brother is well, Your Grace. In fact, he should be arriving any moment.” 

Her insides should begin to settle but the moment still feels off somehow, as though something of great importance is happening and Azula is inevitably the last to know. 

“Then why?” 

A grim look passes over Shiwa’s face. 

“It is customary for the Fire Lord to be present at the impending nuptials of a member of the royal family.” Azula’s stomach plummets. “I believe he intends to give you away.” 

In the past Azula would have set fire to her surroundings had someone like Shiwa dared to look at her with such pity. Today she curls her hands into fists and squeezes until she feels her nails break through the skin of her palms. 

“And who?” Azula asks with a slight tremor in her voice. Who? Who? Who?

Shiwa hasn’t time to answer when a quiet knock on the door interrupts the moment between them. 

“I know this isn’t very traditional but I wanted—”

Azula need not turn her head to spot the sight of the man who haunted her dreams for nearly a decade, standing before her with a freshly shaved head adorned with perfumed oil and ceremonial robes of his own. The style of his robes match her own, but the colors are in the orange and yellows of his people. How complementary. Standing side by side they’d be the perfect picture of a cool flame.

“I wanted to make sure you were alright.” He says softly “Your ribs—”

“I’m fine.” She rasps.

“If there’s anything I can do, anything at all...” He trails off. She can’t help but think of a million and one things instantly, one of them is leaving her to rot beneath the rubble of this establishment instead of leading her to this horrifying and certain death. 

She says nothing.

“Really, how are you feeling?” He tries again. 

The rigid muscles of her face collect into a parody of a demure smile. She turns slowly and lifts her head to meet his gaze head on. “Why, I don’t feel anything at all.” 

The corners of his lips twitch downward but the rest of him looks strangely relieved. She can tell it’s the first thing she’s said all day that he believes. 

“I’ll be nearby should you need me.” He murmurs. 

Need him? She balks at the absurdity of the idea, feels the mad laughter bubbling up her throat, threatening to leak out of her mouth. Should she need him? As if she’s ever needed anyone at all, least of all him. The rictus smile freezes on her face. Shiwa‘s steadying hand takes hold of her shoulder and squeezes discreetly. The other woman nods summarily for the both of them and they watch quietly as the Avatar turns on his heel and strides from the room. 

Something inside Azula topples.

Chapter Text

They’re married in a small ceremony on a hillside just out of range of the old hospital. 

She is the spitting image of her mother—at least that’s what the Fire Sage who had officiated her parent’s wedding all those years ago insists. Perhaps it is the jasmine braided up into her hair, or the overly long sleeves of her robes that work to hide the nervous tremor of her hands. 

Everything about the day feels unreal; the colors too bright, the sounds too loud. The almost touches from the few souls in attendance make her skin itch. Contrary to her last words to the Avatar, she feels. She feels all too much. 

It’s a mild summer day. The hillside is dotted in wild flowers and the breeze blows in such a way that even the trees are fragrant. It has been so long since she was last above ground. The charming walks in the facility’s garden were primarily for show. She was only paraded around the edge of the small pond on days when she had been permitted a visitor. Those days were fewer and farther between than even Azula would have liked. And when she was drugged, each day melted into the next like the soft meandering edges of watercolor brush strokes, blurring together until she had little knowledge of what day of the week it was, let alone what month. 

Today, Zuko’s body beside her is grounding. If she closes her eyes and breathes deeply enough she can almost imagine that they are strolling along the hospital pond or the pool in the imperial gardens full of turtleducks and the other creatures she had gleefully tormented when she was a child.

“I’m sorry.” Zuko murmurs as they approach the small dais. 

“Whatever for?” 

The look on Zuko’s face is strange. For the first time in years it isn’t tinged with pity or disappointment. He seems thoughtful. She can’t help the aching tenderness that wells up inside her chest, the urge to reach out and graze her fingers against the red ridges of puckered skin on his face. She hears the faint gasps of her brother’s attachés as though they were a hundred miles away. In this moment she can only make out the face of her brother who shuts his eyes and leans slightly into her touch. She cradles his face in her hands, marvels at how delicate the human head and neck are. She can’t remember the last time she practiced one of her katas, but she knows that even in her weakened state it wouldn’t take much to snap the Fire Lord’s neck before anyone could intervene. To twist til she could twist no more. In her waking life she hasn’t raised a hand against someone since the initial weeks following the comet. In her dreams, Ozai screams for mercy.

She smiles. This, she thinks, is what trust must feel like. The feeling is so foreign, so alien. She’s not sure she’ll ever feel it again. Her big brother. So beautiful, even more so with the scar he’s learned to bear like a badge of honor rather than a mark of failure. How stupid she had been, how prideful to think that he had nothing left to teach her when she had so much left to learn.

I’m sorry, she thinks. I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m sorry I let him hurt you. I’m sorry I made her leave. She wonders how words so full of meaning can feel so hollow. She steps onto the tips of her toes and brushes her lips against his forehead. 

He never shrinks away from her touch. He blossoms. It’s the benediction she never knew she needed. 

The sun is setting on the hillside when the Fire Sage is binding their hands together. He chants about the unbreakable bonds of marriage, family, and devotion, pulling more resolutely on their bindings with each go around. She’s seen a hundred of these ceremonies before, more than enough to know this was coming. It still makes her jumpy. Memories of being bound in the palace courtyard, howling like a dog assault her. Blue flames flooding her mouth. She remembers growing tired of trying to hurt everyone around her and wondering what would happen if she finally turned the flames in on herself. Her chest tightens and the aching ribs on the right side of her body make themselves known. She wants to run but she feels sluggish and her hands, where are her hands? Her heart hammers and hammers and hammers but she can’t calm it down, she can’t—

Firm hands grasp her own before deftly freeing her from her bonds. 

“My Lord,” The Fire Sage huffs. “It is customary—”

“Lucky for us,” She hears rather than sees the grin on the Avatar’s face, “nothing about this is customary.”

The crowd seems charmed by his words. The Fire Sage is a particularly dour one but he knows better than to pick a petty fight with the Avatar. Though,the preservation of a thousand year old tradition is exactly the kind of thing a sage would start a fight over. 

The limp ribbon in her hands is deceptively strong. Woven from thin fibrous strands of a plant with metallic properties, the embroidered plant withstands most fire bending temperatures without being singed. This, Lo and Li once explained, was meant to represent the unbreakable bonds of connection between two lovers who have pledged their lives to one another. The officiant would light a fire beneath the newlyweds’ bindings in a demonstration of the auspicious nature of their union. On the rare occasion that the bindings unraveled into flames the match was considered ill-fated and families were encouraged to dissolve the bond as soon as possible. When she was younger, she used to wonder why she never saw her parent’s riaka displayed in their rooms the way her uncle had proudly displayed his within the large sitting room inside his apartment. 

Now she understands.

Azula finds herself looking, really looking at the Avatar for the first time since this disaster began. The planes of his face have hardened but his smile is still easy and unstrained. His face, like his head, is cleanly shaved. The blue of his tattoos seem richer somehow in the waning light. He stands nearly two heads above her now. It fails to surprise her. When she was several inches taller than him, he always managed to effortlessly tower above her.

The Avatar’s gaze is unnervingly complex. She finds herself contemplating, for the first time, what exactly it means for him to contain multitudes of people and voices within himself. How queer, she thinks, that they should have that in common. She remembers straining to hear herself over the cacophony of voices in her head. 

“Princess?” The Sage prompts anxiously. “Your vow?”

Without thinking, she wraps the discarded riaka tightly around the fingers of her left hand, fascinated with how quickly the blood in her veins slows to a dull thud. Her vow? Is it possible to give away something you don’t possess? Will she give him her word if it means he’ll exchange this prison for a gilded cage? It is possible to give away a life that was never hers to begin with? Her grandfather, her father, her nation, her husband. What real differences are there between these things she never once got to choose?  

Her vow.

She speaks the words into the wind and the Avatar once again covers her small hands with his much bigger ones. It does not escape her that their hastily spun thread crushed between them would have burst into flames if they had let it.

“By the power invested in me by the United Republic Council,” the Sage bellows, “I declare you husband and wife.”

The second it’s acceptable, she pulls her hands back into her sleeves, careful to tuck the mocking ribbon into the modest chest bindings Shiwa had managed to find for the occasion. When she wakes tomorrow in a haze, unsure of whether she had dreamed, the riaka will remind her.

Turning to face the crowd she sees there is no smiling. 

No clapping. No well wishes.

There will be no dinner, no toasts, no rousing readings from the ancient texts.

The guests take their leave. 

In the dying light, the Avatar prepares her meager belongings for departure, strapping them to the side of his flying familiar. Zuko is the first to speak after he settles her into the saddle. The sound of rushing water and the cry of cicadas is so compelling she finds herself momentarily distracted from his words.

Promise me you’ll write? He says. Or was it Promise me you’re alright ?

The lumbering beast pushes off of the ground. 

She’ll do no such thing.

Chapter Text

“Prince Siddhartha please, tell me why you grieve?”

She’s sailing through the air, weightless, unbound. 

“Outside the palace walls and fields of green”

It’s her mother’s least favorite game, which automatically makes it Azula’s favorite. Father calls it chasing sunlight. Down on earth he always cries, how much higher can you go my little ilanga?  

“Prince Siddhartha please, tell me why you grieve?”

Higher, higher, higher. She chants. Until she’s blue in the face. Until her cries of excitement give way to cries of horror. 

“Outside the palace walls and fields of green”

Her mother’s shouting drowns out her own tears. Ozai, please! You’ve gone too far. 

“The lives of your people whom you have not seen?”

Pay her no mind Azula. Just a little higher this time. He shouts. She’s hurtling away from the ground, suspended in a beam of light. She stretches her fingers out towards the sun trying to capture it in her hand, but it alludes her. She touches back down in father’s arms. 

One more time. He cheers. One more time for Otōsan! She slingshots out of his arms, this time she knows she’ll touch it, she’ll touch the sun. 

The blue flames that sail from her hands startle her and she kicks and screams as she goes crashing to the ground. In her mother and father’s shock no one moves to catch her. 

The bones in her left arm fold in on themselves. But father just crows in delight, swooping her up and spinning her around like his own little rag doll.   

I knew it. He coos, laughing madly. I knew she was a fire bender.

“Prince Siddhartha please, tell me why you grieve?” 

Her arm swings lifelessly by her side. She’s three years old and it’s the first time anyone has called her a prodigy. 

The baritone voice hushes into a hum and Azula feels herself slipping in and out of consciousness. The song is an old one, she knows. It’s an airbender folk song. She’s never heard it before, only ever come across it in her studies at the library at Ba Sing Se. It finally occurs to her that for years now, there hasn’t been anyone left who could sing them. The thought of all that devastation and loss being so empty  and meaningless, weighs heavy against her chest. 

What have I become? She wonders, thinking of her father, thinking of her namesake, What have they made me?

She closes her eyes again and lets The warm yawning black behind her eyes take her.

“Wake up Princess Azula!”

Thunder rolls overhead. She wakes suddenly, gasping for air, unsure of where or what she is. A child in the palace, a madwoman trapped underground, the Avatar’s wife. She’d laugh hysterically if she weren’t so exhausted. She sighs and sinks further against the solid warmth before her. The thunder rails again and finds herself instinctively counting the seconds between crashes. The worst of the storm is three miles and getting closer. The hairs on her arms raise to attention in response to the electric charge in the air. 

Her hands slip clumsily past her robes and into her bindings searching for a sign. Her fingers tighten around the embroidered riaka from the afternoon. She’s not dreaming. He’s planning on steering them right into the eye of a storm. A bold move. An unbelievably stupid move.  

Would it even be possible for her to bend lightning? Does she want to know? How inauspicious would a union like theirs need to be in order to go down in literal flames less than twenty-four hours in? She smirks into the Avatar’s back. 

His back?

She startles and pulls herself away. She’s not sure how she ended up pressed against him. She can’t recall the last time she was pressed against another person at all. 

“What are you doing?” she rasps. She feels his lithe body lean forward in the saddle. She wonders if he misses being at the head of his familiar, riding the way he did when he was a boy.

“I thought that much was pretty obvious! Trying to navigate around this storm.” He’s doing a pisspoor job of it but somehow she doesn’t think it’s her place to say. Her next words surprise her. 

“What can I do to help?” 

The Avatar cranes his neck back to look at her askance. Apparently her words have surprised him as well. Their differences may be inumerable, but their mutual survival depends on how well he’ll be able to pull this off. She’s been known to be difficult and even foolhardy with the safety of herself and others, but she’s no fool. She’d like to have an idea of just what her new cell will be like before she lets him plunge them into the Ilyesi sea.

The Avatar hesitates for a moment before his eyes narrow in determination. She’s not surprised he doesn’t trust her. Zuko—just like his uncle—is a sentimental idiot for thinking she can still change. And yet, that doesn’t mean she’s particularly inclined to let either of her remaining family members down. 

“Are you any good at flying?” The airbender yells over the mounting wind. 

“Why do you ask?” She says wryly. He grins at her like a child. She’s not going to like this. 

She supposes it doesn’t hurt to have the last airbender on board. He moves her to the head of the saddle and hands her the reigns.The beast— Appa— he assures her, can practically fly itself. And yet, it must be better to have someone like her at the helm than no one at all.

On the whole, the plan sounds much simpler than it really is. The airbender will use his bending to fly a little higher and a little further out into the storm to get a sense of where they’re positioned. All she has to do is keep a good grip on the reins and steer in the direction of the Avatar’s voice. He sets her up at the front of the saddle with ease and hands her reins with a few hurried instructions about how to keep a tight grip and follow through with basic signals. When he takes off his last look isn’t for her but the bison. Maybe the Avatar isn’t as daft as he looks after all. He trusts the old beast more than he trusts her to default to her old forms. Of course, he doesn’t know how long ago the ugliest and proudest parts of herself were forcibly excised from her person. 

Just like her fire, when she reaches for them, they aren’t there anymore. 

When all is said and done, she doesn’t end up liking the plan, she ends up loving it…more than she’d ever let herself admit. While she wasn’t sure she’d be the type to appreciate a flying bison, it is incredibly thrilling to ride with such a powerful beast between her knees. Whatever thrill she thought possible riding a komodo-rhino, this undoubtedly exceeds it. The creature is incredibly intuitive and more than familiar with the Avatar’s less than meticulous plans. She also finds it striking how much the two entities seem to move and operate like one. A guaranteed familiar must be the upside to being part of a powerful, unbroken line of reincarnation.

After all these years, as much as she’s changed, nothing quite cuts through the thick fog in her brain like the slight adrenaline rush of a life or death situation. The doctors insisted this was a behavior specific to her “condition” but seeing the veiled glee of the man flying overhead, she wonders if this is a result of being a child born and raised in war. Is it possible that the Avatar was just as dissatisfied to have been made a post-war figurehead as she was? Being paraded around the world as a hero and diplomat was hardly comparable to being involuntarily institutionalized. But for a boy who had hid in an iceberg for a century to escape the spotlight associated with being the Avatar, maybe there was little difference to be had. There was a time when Azula had once deluded herself into thinking that palace politics held a kind of intrigue for her. Naturally, she had excelled at them. For someone who had been used to wearing a mask her whole life, it took very little effort to become adept at switching between them. The mask of a perfect daughter, a perfect, a perfect pupil, a perfect bender, a perfect politician, a perfect heir. 

What will the Avatar require from the perfect wife?

Her good mood sours. 

“We’re nearly there.” The Avatar shouts as he floats down onto the saddle. “It should be a straight shot once we clear this ridge here.” 

She nods, thankful for the distraction, and tugs firmly on the bison’s reins to indicate a higher flying altitude. 

“What will you do now?” She asks, focused on the task ahead.

“I think I’ll watch you lead him in from here. It seems like you two have an understanding, and that way I’m available to run interference if necessary.” 

Is that what he thinks he’s doing? 

“Charming.”

The island is just beyond the ridge, exactly how he described it. If she squints, she can make out the shape of a volcano in the distance. It feels dormant more than it looks, but it’s impossible to know what kind of threat the volcano could pose from here. The rest of the island seems dark and empty, if not abandoned, except for the structure in the distance beyond the shore. Following the man’s vague gestures she begins to lower them near the shore, listening as he mutters softly to the beast beneath them.

“You’re a natural.” The airbender says yawning. She chances a quick look at him and sees why he’s not so keen on taking the reins back. What she couldn’t make out in the light of the day suddenly looks obvious in the soft illumination of the half moon. There are heavy shadows around his eyes. He’s exhausted and looks how she feels. What could he possibly have been doing in the days before he would come flying  to completely uproot what was left of her life? 

They set down on the ground none too gently but they make it in one piece. The Avatar seems unfazed, if not a little impressed.

“I mean it. You were actually pretty great at that.” He hums, floating down from the saddle and offering her a hand. She'd rather not take it but the way down is further than she imagined and would be difficult to navigate in her formal robes.

She accepts his offer but makes it a point to push away from him as soon as physically possible.

“I suppose I got plenty of practice hunting you down.” She says flatly. But he just grins.

“I suppose you did.”

Standing back on solid ground, she feels her exhaustion noticeably set in. Her sleep on the trip over was filled with cryptic dreams and nightmarish memories. In some parody of a consummate gentleman, the air nomad directs her to sit on a nearby rock while he unties their belongings balanced around the saddle. 

She tries to get a sense of the terrain to ground herself and see if there is any flora or fauna that might point to where they are. She has no idea how long they were in the air or what direction they could have flown in after being turned around by the storm. 

“What is this place?” She asks when she feels a faint gust of air that tells her that he’s resting beside her. 

“Zaj Laug. The old dragon.”

“Roku’s island?” She says surprised. 

“A wedding gift from the Fire Lord himself.”

“Oh, my.”

He sighs, rubs a hand over his face. 

“It’s a reclamation project, of a sort.”

Well.

Is this what they have in mind for her? Not punishment, not penitence, but redemption? 

“I know it doesn’t look like much…” he says staring openly “but I hope—“

“—I’ve never been one to hope.” She interrupts. Hope, she knew, was little more than a weapon that lies in wait inside your own breast, ready to strike against you at a moment’s notice. Hope . She’d seen what it looked like in her father’s hands. A flightless bird, wings rent from its body. As father and as Fire Lord, Ozai was nothing if not instructive. 

“Right then, let me show you the house.” The veneer of easy camaraderie has fully dissipated and the Avatar has grown more cautious. She hasn’t stomped the usual unbearable attitude out of him yet. But every once and awhile he regards her as though he’s dealing with a caged animal. And in a sense, he is.

And yet,  it’s not just dealing with a caged animal if he’s locked himself inside the cage.

It’s too dark to explore now though he apologizes as if he’s responsible for the movements of the moon and sun. She waves him off, more than fine to get the night over with. The sooner they could begin, the sooner the rest of it would be finished and she could be left to her bedroll in peace.

The house isn’t as ornate as she’d come to expect from a Fire Lord, but Zuko has never been just any Fire Lord. It wasn’t unlike the old house on Ember Island with plenty of bamboo and sliding screen doors, but some of the specific Fire Nation elements seemed far more subdued. The roof didn’t come to severe points and even in the darkness the tiles and accent colors seemed more subdued than usual. The walls were a plain white with natural wood and bamboo accents. The house is more than modest but it isn’t very impressive either. Still, as far as she knows it’s the only structure around for miles and miles.

“Please, make yourself comfortable.” He says setting their things into a room in the back of the house. “There should be a few candles stored away in one of those bags there.” Her breath quickens. Candles? “I’ve just got to grab a few more things and get Appa settled in for the evening. I’ll be back soon.”

He slips out of the room and the message seems clear enough. He wants her to prepare the Asawa Siga, the fire marriage ritual. It surprises her that he would want this. It surprises her that he would even know what this is. But he is a man and it is their wedding night. And whatever she might have been before, years in the institution have reduced her to a strange pawn in a secret game between the remaining nations. She hopes that Zuko’s winning. Choice, she knows, is an illusion. If the Avatar is expecting to indulge in old Fire Nation customs, then who is she to deny him? How could she possibly deny him?

She sets to organizing the bags until she finds what she’s looking for. The room offers no frills nor special effects, but she tidies efficiently as she can. One by one, she pulls the candles out of a nearby bag and begins to stand them around the room in a circle surrounding  her body. Azula has always appreciated ritual, the way it grounds her and directs her. She’s unlike Zuko in that way, more first-born in her thinking and her orientation to tradition. This, she can admit to herself now, is what makes him the better candidate for Fire Lord, his ability to imagine outside the four walls of filial piety and a suffocating sense of nationalism. Years later she can feel the vice grip loosening, but the small wonders of lighting lanterns at winter solstice and honoring the first spirits who had brought fire to her people on the longest day of summer still hold her fervent interest. 

Of all the rituals she had performed or imagined she someday would take part in, however, she never once imagined herself taking part in Asawa Siga. When she was younger it was customary for other aristocratic Fire Nation girls to titter amongst themselves about their future husbands and all the different ways they would impress them when the time came. Mai and Ty Lee were, blissfully, unlike any of the other girls she had ever met. They were always far more interested in throwing punches than throwing parties. 

In retrospect she knows their friendship undoubtedly made her life far more bearable. 

It didn’t take Azula long to encounter the spark stones tucked away with the candles. She lit a single candle and used it to make her way around the circle, softening the wax on the bottom of each stick and pressing them into the wood floor until they were able to support themselves. 

Her mother had once explained to her the finer points of the ceremony. It was one of the few moments they had spent alone and uninterrupted after she had encountered her inner flame. Her father had dedicated most of her free time to training with great fire masters and, on special occasions, moving through her different forms under her father’s instruction. Still, Lady Ursa was a force to be reckoned with when it came to her children that even Ozai had to make concessions to. 

The point of the ritual, her mother explained, was dual. First, it was to honor the origins of their people, the sanctity of fire, and the sanctity of the bonds of marriage. In the upper caste of the fire nation, marriages had little to do with love or companionship but everything to do with intertwining the ancestral and economic bonds of two separate families and cementing them as one. The second aim was a more lofty endeavor meant to spiritually cleanse husband and wife, dissolving all of their attachments from their previous lives. Looking across the flames, they were meant to see each other with new eyes, to see each other fully and completely transformed as husband and wife without the presence of an audience. 

Azula had never been keen on the idea of presenting herself like a prize to a man, no matter how well-bred he was. Ursa had quickly assured her, however, that for a woman to be surrounded by flames was nothing short of an honor and a position of power. "When he looks at you Azula, he should be reminded of the ways in which a wife can be the flames that stoke the fire of hearth and home just as easily as she can be the blaze that destroys him. The true teachings of Agni tell us that fire can heal just as much as it can hurt. Never forget that.”

On her wedding night the words return to her and motivate her economical but precise actions. One by one, she lights each of the little candles and repeats Ursa’s mantra over and over again to keep her most self-destructive thoughts at bay. By the time she had stripped herself of the inner layers of her garments, leaving only her outermost ceremonial sash and robe, she felt comforted by the light from the ring of fire around her. It was easy to imagine she was surrounded by an impenetrable wall of fire that no one could breach, not even the Avatar. For the first time in nearly a decade, she could revel in something akin to the majestic feeling of wielding fire with one's fingertips.

Breathing deeply, she remembered it was common for women undergoing Asawa Siga to decorate the spaces in between the candles with little tokens and symbols meant to reflect their desires for the intended outcome of their marriage. Great wealth, many children, grandiose residences. Not knowing what she would find when she rose with the sun this morning, Azula had neither the time nor inclination to prepare such an effigy for the ritual. Instead she reaches into her hair and begins to loosen the elaborate updo Shiwa had pinned to her head. Diligently she unbraids the jasmine blossoms from her hair and spills them on the ground. The decoration is sparse but striking in the clean empty room. It’s a small way to honor her beginnings, her mother, whatever new phase of life she has entered without the older woman’s guidance. 

The flickering lights from the candles steel her against the coming storm, remind her that she has lived her whole life making her own way.

She won’t stop now. 

Chapter Text

He enters the room and she drops the robe from her shoulders. The silk cherminin hits the ground without a sound, but the house rocks and sways as though she’s dropped an anvil in the room. Looking at the widening of his eyes, she realizes that he’s cracked one of the stone support pillars in the house. 

“Avatar?” She says with a ‘demure’ smile. She finds herself perversely pleased with his reaction. It is possible her mother was right about a few things after all. The corners of his lips turn downwards momentarily but his face quickly becomes impassive and the stone pillar moves back into place with a resounding snap. 

It’s nice to know that she can have this effect on a man. Whatever his reasons, Zuko could have picked worse. Her short lived relationship with Chan had revealed her inherent distaste for most men. If her time traveling across the world with two beautiful women at her side had taught her anything, it was that she generally preferred a lighter touch. It was no secret that the crown princess had a proclivity for domination. 

But the Avatar was a riddle. From the glimpses she had gotten of his body, he remained hairless. Gender among the Air Nomads was, like everything else air benders had their hands in, fluid. Many Air Masters were known to shave most of their body hair to reduce friction while bending. Air Nomad men were also known to be unapologetically effeminate in their presentation. It wasn’t uncommon for Air Nomads to lay with people of all genders. And it was well known that the male monks of the Southern Air Temple, where the Avatar had been raised, laid with each other very enthusiastically. 

She couldn’t be sure before this moment, but she can now confidently say the airbender desires her. 

He takes a step closer to her, as if propelled by the flames. 

If, after all those years, her mother was right, then perhaps there was something to the Asawa Siga. Perhaps there was a power she could yield within the four walls of this house, without ever having to raise a smoking finger. 

“Princess.” He says, and she finds she likes the sound.

She wakes with the Avatar‘s face floating over hers.

“Azula?” He says worriedly. “How are you feeling?”

She feels as though she’s been flung from the back of a dragon. She aches all over and shakes with a bone deep exertion she never could have managed in her sleep. She tries to take a steadying breath but it’s too deep. Her stomach clenches and turns. She turns her head and vomits onto the Avatar’s lap. 

She feels vaguely embarrassed.

“It’s alright,” he says softly, “it wouldn’t be the first time a Fire Nation royal threw up all over me.” She frowns, upset that she’s the least bit tempted by his set up but can’t concentrate enough to insult him properly with the overwhelming pounding in her head.

She falls back into the pillow beneath her, exhausted. The Avatar wipes a well worn cloth against the damp corners of her mouth and she suspects it’s the overgrown sleeve of one of his garish Air Nomad robes. 

“You need to drink some water.” He says smoothing the hair away from her forehead. “I’ll be right back.”

She nods weakly and blinks, eyes heavy with sleep.

When her eyes open again he’s standing above her in a familiar manner, this time he’s clothed in a simple light yellow sheath tied over the shoulder. 

“You’re back.” She says.

“I am.” 

“You’re wearing a dress.” 

“It’s not a dress, it’s an Air Nomad—” she looks at him skeptically. “Alright,” he says deflating, “it’s a dress.”

She’d laugh but the pounding has yet to subside. 

“Where’s the water?” The Avatar looks at her askance. “You said you were bringing back water.” She clarifies.

“Is that the last thing you remember?” He says softly. She says nothing. “That was yesterday Azula. You’ve been in and out of consciousness. I’m not sure what’s wrong. I’m beginning to get concerned.” She’s not a stranger to losing time, but she’s usually conscious when it’s happening.

“Help me up.” She croaks and he does exactly as he’s told, reaching behind her to lift gently until she’s sitting propped against the wall.

He passes a cup her way but her hands are shaking too much to hold it. Water sloshes over the rim and on to his robes. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, aware that it is rude to keep waking up like this. The pain is too consuming for her to even enjoy the irony of a man she once slayed by her own hand, nursing her back to health.

He kneels beside her and siphons the water from his robe and uses it to rest a cooling hand against the back of her neck. “Don’t be.” He says absentmindedly, guiding what’s left of the cup to her mouth. She takes a greedy sip. 

“Azula darling? What are you doing in bed still? It’s nearly breakfast and we’re having your favorite.” 

In the throes of what can only be the beginnings of a fever dream, she smiles. 

The next time she returns to herself, she feels like she’s on fire or dying or both. Oh Agni, she hopes she’s dying. Still, her eyes flutter open at the sound of her name.

“I called for a healer.” The Avatar says with a conflicted look on his face. Azula understands what that look means immediately. So strange that her merest gesture once brought hundreds of men to their feet. Now news of her impending death can’t make even the most virtuous of healers move a muscle.

“They won’t come.” 

“No. They won’t.” He smooths a hand over his face and sighs. “Everyone within reach returned my letters without response. I’ve called for an old friend of mine. She’s a healer but it will take eight days for her to reach us from Omashu.”

The realization breaks over her like a wave. 

“You don’t think I’ll make it.”

“I’ve tried a few times myself. But nothing I’ve done seems to work. Your fever is getting steadily worse and you haven’t been conscious enough to eat or drink much. Whenever you do you can’t seem to keep any of it down.” 

“Not much of a nurse then are you?” She croaks. The Avatar laughs half-heartedly.

“I told you I was a shit healer Princess.” Azula has heard worse language but somehow it sounds unexpected yet oddly fitting coming out of his mouth. He never lacked for interesting companions during his journeys. With that Bei Fong girl following him around, it’s a wonder he isn’t more crass.

“What are you feeling?” He asks, switching tactics. 

“How am I feeling?” She asks wryly.

“No. What are you feeling? Maybe if I had a clearer image of what was going on I could, I don’t know...” his hands fall to his side listlessly and she gets the distinct feeling he struggles with feeling useless.

“I feel-” Azula searches for the words. “hot.”

“Hot.” He says exasperated. 

“Not just hot. Extremely hot. On fire. I feel like I’m burning up from the outside.”

“That’s not good Azula. That’s not good at all.” She feels the slightest bit guilty that she wasn’t able to uphold her end of the deal for more than a few days. There’s a part of her that thinks she could come to be unfazed by his company and even learn to enjoy it after a few loveless decades. 

“Quite the auspicious marriage, isn’t it?” 

The Avatar fixes her with an impressive, withering look.

“I don’t think luck has anything to do with it.” He says darkly. 

She’s never seen him so upset, not even when they were teenaged soldiers fighting over a touch of world domination. He seemed unfazed by everything, a characteristic she assumed was due to his Air Temple upbringing. Now she isn’t so sure.

“You’re angry.” She’s surprised to find the thought unsettles her, reminds her of her mother’s voice in her ear, as clear as a bell, saying “There’s something wrong with that child.”

There’s something wrong with her still.

“I am angry, but not with you. Never with you.” He emphasizes. “You didn’t deserve this. I expressly forbade them from doing this.” She thinks of Mai and Ty Lee on Boiling Rock. The things we forbid have a funny way of happening anyway. 

She considers the many questions she could ask him but decides it’s best to keep quiet. What exactly is this? What have the mind healers done to her that she wouldn’t know? She was there every agonizing second, just too sane not to be awake and alert. What could they possibly have been capable of other than the mundane cruelty that everyone was capable of. The Avatar brushes the back of his fingers against her forehead. 

“I can—I think I have an idea of what’s going on now.” No matter the anger bubbling away beneath the surface, the outermost parts of him settle into an effective calm. For a moment she really believes he is what he says he is, one man to balance all four elements, a bridge between this world and the next. If he can’t catch her proverbial fall, maybe he’ll be sanctimonious enough to believe he can soften it.  

“This is going to...it’s an unpleasant feeling Azula.” His voice is raw with unnamed emotion. “The last person I attempted anything like this with, well, let’s just say they almost didn’t survive it. I almost didn’t survive it. But it’s the only way I know how.”

So this is what he means to do. To reach into the darkest parts of her and find the thread that holds her together? Will she stop him if he pulls?

“Will you let me do this? I’ll do my best to pull out if anything starts to go wrong. You have my word.”

“Alright.” she concedes, leaning against him as he sits her up against the wall. When she’s settled,  instead of moving away, he moves in even closer and puts a hand on her chest and on her head. His large hand molds against the front of her skull and she knows that even without his bending he could kill her. There’s something deeply intimate about the fingers on his hand searching for the source of her energy. She tenses with anticipation. The fear mixes with so much delight. She remembers the last thing anyone had said to her before she had been thrown into the Asylum. The bare room with her father who kneeled upon a dirty mattress on the floor. The disgraced former Fire Lord’s eyes alight with the memory. 

The Avatar finds what he’s looking for, his tattooed arm locks into place and he lets go.

“Energybending.” She whispers, Just before her head cracks open. 

“ You couldn’t understand, child.” Ozai said looking off into the distance imperiously. 

“Help me father.” She said, eerily cognizant of all the different ways she had begged him to intervene before or all the different ways she had begged him to drop his weapon--word or fire--and let her go. “Help me, help me understand.”

Ozai didn’t dare turn towards her, but his posture relaxed infinitesimally, as he leaned ever so slightly in her direction. 

“Everything I ever was, everything I am was laid bare before Agni, and for a moment I could feel what he felt. All those hundreds of reincarnations before him, the line of gods standing behind his back. I was there and I was amplified.”

“You don’t mean—”

“I WAS THE AVATAR.” He shrieked, throwing the metal tray of meager provisions across the room. “For a moment I reached inside him as he reached inside me and held his lifeforce in my hand…” His cold eyes met hers. “I was invincible. The prophecy of the Phoenix King had finally come to pass.” 

“But suddenly i was surrounded. All of them, encroaching upon me and I felt something vital inside me snap. The marrow from my bones, the blood in my veins. The air in my lungs. It was empty and stripped. The fire was gone and all I could think of—”

“All you could think of was what, father?” She said, enraptured and terrified all at once.

Tears streamed down his usually stoic face. 

“All I could think of was you.” Somehow, even unarmed he manages to twist the knife in her chest. She had been right to be terrified, of course. He manages to close his hands around the hollow of her throat for over a minute before the guards charge in, pulling her away.

“It should have been you!” He raged. “It should have been you!” 

As she was dragged from the room kicking and clawing, she spit on the shell of a man who was her father. Not for all the millions of ways he had failed her as a father and a sovereign, but because she wished it had been her as well.

A mortal instrument, brutally disarmed.

The Avatar is there for all of it, every moment re experienced, every pain replicated. He stands like a silent watcher in the edges of each memory-blurred room until there’s no difference between the two of them. For a horrifying moment they are one. An endless loop of pure, white, energy. She screams and he screams and the jets that shoot out of their mouths are a spectacular array of colors she’s never seen before. 

The feeling is reality shattering; unreal, unrelenting, unrepentant.

He pushes further into her, his chi rushing against her neural pathway, until it pulls up short against a blocked pathway in her root. 

The white electric energy shifts and the color that seeps out of her is a sickly grey that looks like a smothered, smoldering fire. A voice resonates so deeply within her that her bones knock against each other. 

“Your chi is being actively blocked.” His focus is unflinching, but he’s right. She can see inside herself something knotted and rotting. “All those years at the institution, did they have you on a soporific?” 

She shrinks away from his question, but her answer echoes in the space between her ears. To help me sleep. To help keep me quiet. To make me complacent.

Numb .

He shows her the knotted grey matter at her center and the jagged tungsten pin that cuts across it all. 

“Pull,” he says.

So she does.

The pain is utterly blinding. She’s been ripped apart from the inside out. She is on fire. She is on fire. She is on—

The Avatar carries her out of the threshold of the room, back out over the threshold of the house like a witless groom. He rushes down the steps and out as far away from the house as his air bending will take him without ever touching the ground. Far from the bison, far from the wooden frame of their home, far down the shore. 

He sits her in a field of wildflowers where she crumples into herself before imploding. 

The last time she had done this, shot fire from her nose and mouth and hands, she was chained and barking like a mad dog, crying and screaming. If there had been anything in that stone courtyard she would have leveled it, razed it to the ground just are surely as she blackened the earth around her now. 

Blue flames streak across the sky and she heaves and heaves until she collapses into the snow-like ash falling all around her. She sobs, tears steaming against her cheeks. Everything is raw and bloody and burned. She is a supernova spinning out of control, a catastrophic explosion. 

But he is with her. His arms wrapped around her middle. This time, she isn’t alone. She doesn’t want to die. For the first time, she wants to live. Just, not like this. 

“Please,” she cries, down on her hands and knees. Her eyes are wild. She rocks back and forth, his hands firm against her back. “Please take it from me. I don’t want it anymore. I don’t want it. I don’t. Not like this. Please. Please. Please! Please take it from me .” Her heart breaks.

His body covers hers and she cries until the sun sinks low in the sky and the stars stretch against the horizon.

When she wakes in the morning, the Avatar has left her a tall glass of water by the bed and a vial of tincture that smells faintly like the halls of the old asylum. There’s a note in his delicate script. 

It reads:  A compromise. 

She rests the note back against the low table and reaches for the vial. A compromise. It’s not nearly as much as she was accustomed to in her past life. But it could be just enough for now.

She weighs the small bottle in her hand and holds it against her chest before dropping half the contents in her water. 

She wishes they saw what she saw. A wild animal needing to be put down. A threat to others, a threat to herself, a scalding hot flame that has only ever burned to the ground everything she’s ever loved, anything she’s ever touched.

When she takes her first sip, she thinks of Ozai’s crumpled form, how vacant his eyes had been when the Avatar first brought him back. She craves that even now. To know unequivocally what it would mean to be a threat to no one. To be blissfully unaware of the flames bubbling beneath her skin. 

To be at peace with the universe. To be at peace with herself.

She takes a small gulp, then a bigger and bigger one until she drains every last drop from the glass. Her senses dull and the fire inside crackles and pops before sputtering out beneath the weight of the water.

Chapter Text

As soon as she’s able to stand without getting winded, he drags her along the terrain on a meandering ‘tour.’ She'd be lying if she said the island wasn’t beautiful. There are deep, verdant greens, flaming flowers, trees full of fragrant frangipani. Beyond the shore and the seagrass of the low-country, the green thickens with a skyline of vines and towering trees that climb up the mountain. There’s life everywhere, the island is teeming with it. 

In hindsight, she should have suspected that the Avatar was incapable of existing without proselytizing. What had begun as a simple tour with a few quiet, and dare she say comfortable exchanges between them, had ended at the site of the blackened field from her nightmares. She hesitates, temporarily immobilized by the visual reminder of the utter destruction she carries deep within her diaphragm. For the first time since beginning her new life, she realizes her shameful missteps cannot be hidden with Fire Nation frippery or dressed up in royal ceremony. Here, under the sun, there is no shade nor shadow that will conceal her.

The Avatar stands on the hill a little ways above her with his arms akimbo and a golden halo of light shining behind his head. Decked in clothing the color of marigold and orange blossoms, the hard planes of his body glitter and glow as though he were an Apsara, a spirit of the clouds and waters. The thought embarrasses her, bringing a faint glow to her cheeks. More like the self-righteous parody of a monk, she corrects herself. For the first time in as long as she can remember, she longs for the days when she could have quite literally banished him from her sight. 

“You need to talk about this,”  he says plainly.

She crosses her arms over her chest and digs in her feet, cringing at the faint awareness of how much she looks like a child at this exact moment. The Avatar stands patiently, face unmoving, awaiting her response. Azula, however, has too much self-respect to bring herself to say no. She does, however, consider stomping her foot. 

Watching her foot twitch, he smiles and reaches out a hand in her direction. 

“Come on, join me up here.” With a firm tug and what she suspects is more than a little airbending, Azula stumbles up next to him. 

Despite her intentions, her gaze is drawn to the ruin with the sobering realization that this is the first time she has ever seen something outside of herself that so devastatingly matches her insides. She presses her blunt nails into the palms of her hands and squeezes. 

“When I was being raised in the Southern Air Temple, each spring we would get to travel with the monks for the annual Calving Season Festival in the West. One spring, I wandered away from the other boys and into a small farming town.” His arm bumps casually against one of her own and Azula finds her ire slightly disarmed by surprise. She’s never heard him speak so openly about his youth.

“I was following a small wood mouse because I had never seen one before, and it led me into the middle of a farm where I came across a group of three or four men torching the field.”

“Were they involved in a dispute with the farmer?” She found herself asking involuntarily. 

“I thought so. I ran all the way back to the rest of the group until I was completely out of breath and tripping over my own feet. When I explained to the elders what I had found, Gyatso took my hand and led me all the way back to the farm despite my fears. 

“When we got there, I was so afraid I covered my face with my hands and started to cry but Gyatso placed his hand on my shoulder and said ‘My child, open your eyes and tell me what you see.’ When I did, I was suddenly confronted with how vibrant and beautiful the rest of the land was. But right in the middle of it all was that smoldering field. It didn’t make sense to me why someone would burn something so beautiful.” The Avatar crouches into a squat as he surveys the land before him. “Of course, I had never lived on a farm before and didn’t know that it was common practice for farmers to burn their own fields. Gyatso explained that when a growing season was over it was common for the leftover weeds and detritus to choke the field making it almost fallow. To rebalance the land, make way for the new crops, and send the nutrients of the old plant matter back into the ground, it was necessary to initiate a controlled burn.” He digs a bare hand into the ground and pulls out a scoop of darkened soil. He offers it in her direction. 

“Sometimes we have to burn away the old to make way for the new, Azula.” He lets the dirt fall from his cupped hand and back into the earth. Standing, he wipes his hands against the front of his pants and sighs. 

“So,” he says airily, “what do you think?”

She thinks this is a truce between them. She thinks that she is not quite ready to admit she understands what he means, what he is really offering. She wonders how many fields she’ll have to burn before something will finally root and take hold inside herself. Some nights she fears that there is still something inside of her capable of blooming, more than she fears that her mother was right about her all along. 

There’s something wrong with that child.

“I thought it was the Water Tribe girl in your little group who was famous for her propensity for hope speeches.” She’s struck a nerve from the way his jaw squared and something flashes across the airbender’s face. 

It’s gone in an instant, however, and softened with an almost wistful smile. 

“People change.”

She wonders at the multivariate meanings behind his words. 

“I’m not going to force you to talk to me,” He says, “but I’m not going to let you hide away either.” The Avatar reaches into the basket conveniently set up next to him and pulls out a pair of gloves he tosses her way. 

“What is this?” She asks confusedly. 

“The monks at the Eastern Air Temple used to have a little saying.” He grabs a pair of his own gloves and pulls them on. Then, he reaches back into the basket, first for a hat which he secures on his bald head and second, for a hand shovel.

 “Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.” Azula frowns, unimpressed with the impish look on his face. 

“And after enlightenment?” She huffs. He tosses the shovel into the air in a perfect arc and catches it without missing a beat.

“Chop wood and carry water. Now grab a hat and a shovel. These tomato plants won’t plant themselves, Princess .” The cheeky bastard’s grin stretches ear-to-ear and for a moment she almost doesn’t mind it when she gets the chance to hit him square in the face with her left glove.  

Two months into their stay he gets pulled away for a small diplomatic issue, half a day away. Though she’s loath to admit it, she’s not looking forward to being alone for more than a few hours, the average duration of his supply trips to the nearest town over. She’s found the Avatar’s company to be much more preferable to the devastating loneliness and silence that she had grown accustomed to long before the council had forced her underground. She never would have chosen him, she’s not sure she would choose him even now, but his nauseating sense of duty and commitment to maintaining balance and doing the right thing—whatever that may mean—have kept Azula from drowning in a sea of politics and self-pity. Azula understands that starting a new life on an island with the incarnation of everything that is right in the world does not make her reformed. No matter how many nights she awakens in a cold sweat wishing she could undo the things she’s done, she’s still a monster. She isn’t worthy of redemption any more than she is worthy of forgiveness, kindness, or a little beach house with a front door that opens onto the shore. But here she is anyway and it seems useless to dwell on the past in the light of day where anyone could see her. She saves the worst and most tortured of her queries for the cover of night. 

On the second day of his absence, she spends the whole morning in bed, watching the sun crest on the sleepy volcano and imagines what a life alone would be like. At first, she welcomes the silence, the clarity of her thoughts without the squawking of an air nomad to drown them out. But when the sun sinks low in the sky, the stale smell of loneliness chases her out of the house and nips at her heels until she finds herself wandering along the seashore. The sound of the crashing waves resonates through her body. In the asylum, she could never hear the sound of running water. Not a bumbling stream or a babbling brook from her room under the stone. Only the inconsistent drip of a leaking faucet, a story above her head. 

The loneliness had never been crushing before. She was most at peace when left to her own devices. In those early years, she feared the moments Zuko would come requesting a walk or the few times Ty Lee would smile brokenly at her as the other woman skipped stones across the fetid pond on the ground. In those early years, she could never be sure, always afraid that the switch would flip, rigid with the fear that something else wearing her skin would walk around as her body, terrorizing the few people in this world she had left to love. Being alone felt safe then and Azula slept sounder knowing that the only ugly casualty of her inner-war would be herself.

Now she watches the water roll away from the beach, the tide pulling her thoughts further out to sea under the waxing gibbous of the moon. She breathes in and out with the lull of the tide, marveling at how she ever survived those years with such poor company. She falls into bed hours later and slips into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.

On the third day of his absence, she wakes early. The sun is barely climbing in the sky when she sets off from the house on foot, a wide brim straw hat planted firmly on her head and a basket in her hand. There are no mirrors on the island but she can imagine easily enough that she looks like a common peasant. She thinks of Zuko and Uncle and the weeks she spent trailing them in the comfortably middle-class ring of Ba Sing Se. How she ridiculed their simple existence, their plain unadorned clothing, the monotony of their daily lives. How she craved it. Yearned for it until her dreams were filled with clouds of jasmine, ginseng, and oolong that followed her as she swished from table to table, pouring bottomless cups of Iroh’s special brew, laughing with the faceless customers and tucking proffered tips into her waistband. The thrill she felt in inviting them to Kuei’s palace and destroying their humble slice of life was short-lived and empty. 

Even deep within the walls of the asylum, Azula had been moved to know that Uncle had returned to Ba Sing Se and resumed his life as a quaint shop keeper, happy to retire his title of Dragon of the West for neighborhood pai sho champion. Though he had never visited her, he did write to her on occasion. In the last letter he sent her at the institution, the one she had read so many times that the folds of the paper were in tatters, he had recounted with painstaking detail the daily milieu of the shop. And just when he had wrapped her in the innocuous retelling of his day he had brought her to his knees with his uncomplicated wisdom. 

“Who knew that the place of my greatest defeat would be the site of my greatest victory? Here, I am more myself than I ever was behind my father’s palace walls. My only regret is that you, Lu Ten, and Zuko cannot be here to pass the days away with me in my old age. 

“I hope they are treating you well Azula. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of you. Every night that passes, I light a lantern for you and pray you’ll find your way home. 

Forever your Uncle,

Iroh”

What would Uncle think if he could see her now, living out the term of her imprisonment as though she were a poor farmer’s wife? 

She kneels in the dirt, feels the hard-packed earth beneath her, grounding her. All around her are signs of life, She sits back in the dirt and takes in her precious tomato stalks, the purple of the holy basil, the light sweet smell of lemongrass. This is what she cultivates in the wake of her fire and failure. 

A few hours into her work, a playful gust of wind blows the hat from her head and she helplessly watches it tumble down the hill. Above her the Avatar lets out a joyous whoop from the back of his flying bison, steering them over the field and back down by the house. 

It must be rejuvenating to escape her, however momentarily. Even from this distance, she can see he’s enjoyed his trip by the silly way he dismounts, swinging a bag of goods in his hands. But, a coy voice murmurs in her ears, he’s returned a whole day early. 

“Firelily, I’m home!” His voice rings from the house, amplified by one of his boyish tricks and an odd thrill fills her. “There’s a letter for you all the way from Ba Sing Se and I’ve brought rasmalai, your favorite!”

She affectionately rolls her eyes knowing the spongy cheese dessert is his favorite, not hers. Even so, if she doesn’t hurry back her portion will be gone before she knows it. She pulls off her gloves and tucks them into the side of the basket.

Later in the evening, she’ll send the Avatar back to get her gardening hat. For now, she’ll let him enjoy himself before gleefully guilting him into completing his mounting list of chores.

She hoists the basket over her head and carefully picks her way down the hillock. Perhaps they’ll have pumpkin curry for dinner. 

Chapter Text

She awakens suddenly in the cold dark of the morning, gasping for air. Her dream was particularly unpleasant. For years after the battle of Sozin's comet, Azula dreamed of striking everyone she loved with lightning and blue flame. The most disturbing dreams were usually watching Zuko throw himself before a rotating cast of characters: Mai, Ty Lee, Uncle. Even worse was watching Uncle throw himself in front of Zuko, crashing to the ground only for her brother to rush to his side, holding the older man’s head in his lap as he cried in anguish. On those nights she would wake up with bloodshot eyes and huddle in a corner under her sheets, willing herself to stay awake until the guards arrived with her morning mixture. 

But in the most haunting of her dreams, Zuko is replaced with the willowy shadowed figure of a woman. In this dream, teenaged Azula is dressed in her finest set of Fire Lord robes. Unlike the day of her defeat, her hair is perfectly coiffed and the tips of her kohl sharp as though she had lined her eyes with the edge of her favorite blade. She steps out into the courtyard for the final Agni Kai and she draws the lightning from the sky with commendable focus, sending it flying across the courtyard with deadly accuracy.

But, as always, her triumph is short lived. In these dreams, moments after she hits her target, an indescribable pain wracks her body. As her knees strike the cobblestone below she watches her equally immobilized opponent fall over in peals of maniacal laughter, blood trickling from ashen lips.

It's been some years since she last dreamt this dream. When she was younger she always knew the woman in the flowing florid robes to be revealed as her long lost mother, returned to mock Azula’s imminent demise.

Now a full grown woman herself, Azula knows that the woman across the courtyard is not Ursa’s doppelgänger, but her own. 

She rips the covers off of her with the force of her realization and presses her fist against her mouth in an attempt to mute the strangled cry from her throat. 

All these years, the difficult to place style of dress, the unusually ornate hairstyle, she thought it had to have been Ursa. Azula had assumed it was an old memory of her mother returning to their apartments after a state dinner. A reminder of those days when Azula was still painfully young and attached to Ursa, trailing after her, watching the older woman be prepared for an evening dining with dignitaries at Fire Lord  Azulon’s request. Waiting up on special nights for her return, Azula would hide behind the heavy velvet curtains in her mother’s suite, watching as the woman dismissed the servants and removed the worst of the make up in the mirror. Engrossed by her mother's grace, Azula would somehow inevitably reveal herself and Ursa would smile indulgently at Azula’s open stare through the reflection in the mirror.

“When I was your age Azula, I watched my own mother just like you’re doing now. One day you’ll be old enough to attend these dull political affairs and your own daughter will watch you from that same place.” 

Generations of tiny daughters forever trapped within that mirror. No wonder she had shattered it the day of her coronation. But in the shattered pieces the dutiful daughters ceaselessly multiply. 

Azula screams in earnest.

When she wakes again, the sound of a faint snore pulls at the edges of her consciousness. Azula tentatively rolls over to find the Avatar sitting beside her, with his body propped up against the wall and his head tipped back and lolling off to the side. In a moment of panic she runs her hands over her body to find herself untouched by the tendrils of her vision. Neither does she seem disturbed by the Avatar’s presence. Ever the gentleman, there remains a respectable distance between them and his body is draped over the covers. 

She can’t help but watch him with an odd fascination. It occurs to her that she’s never seen the Avatar asleep before. He’s always been careful to be conscious in close proximity to her. Even in his exhaustion the first day they arrived at the beach house, he’s never dared to close his eyes for more than a moment. The idea that the Avatar might fear her after all these years doesn’t fill her with the same thrill it might have when she was a girl. 

Looking at his body in repose, she can understand the advantage in catching flies with honey rather than vinegar. Why rule with fear when she could simply hold him in her thrall? She contemplates what it would look like, what it would feel like to have him utterly consumed and at her disposal. At war there was never any time for her to be fully versed in the finer arts of seduction. Power was seductive. Or so she had thought. And yet somehow, the more she had, the progressively worse her life had become. 

Then there were those who weren’t swayed by the ominous promise of considerable power or riches. She’s not sure she’s ever met a person other than he Avatar who wouldn’t be easily swayed by power. 

Of course, for Azula it wasn’t ever so much about power as it was control. The ability to control her circumstances, the circle of people who surrounded her, her day to day movements, what she ate for breakfast, who would join her for lunch and dinner. Life as a Fire Nation princess afforded her little to no control over any conceivable aspect of her life. Not her tutoring, not her ‘friends,’ and certainly not her own opinions. 

Ah, to be an airbender, an Air Nomad, unbound by the cultural moorings of Fire Nation life. The complete freedom of movement. What was it like to feel weightless, to never know what a crushing blow gravity could be, to live without ever having to worry that what goes up, must come down. Curious, that the blue of the Avatar’s tattoos, peeking out from under his simple shift, would be the mark of exactly that kind of untethered ethos, that kind of immunity to the world’s most effective blight.  

She reaches out with the mind to run a solitary finger down the blue of his arm and see where it will take her. She stops short, however, when she remembers they’re the last tattoos of their kind anywhere in the world. If airbenders were truly so ethereal and free then they wouldn’t have been wiped off the face of the Earth a hundred years ago. How strange and sad to think that if she hadn’t seen the destruction herself, the mountains of hollow bones at the far reaches of each air temple, it would have been easy to imagine the nomads had simply transformed into beautiful birds and flown away.    

She studies him, for the first time not as prey or adversary, but as a man. She takes in the Avatar’s willowy and aquiline features. The cognitive dissonance is jarring. The man beside her, bound to her by oath and law, remains a stranger to her in so many ways. Azula’s always had a thirst for knowledge and there’s so much she doesn’t know about him. There’s so much she’s sure she doesn’t want to know. 

But as infuriating as it is to admit, she wants to know him. There’s already so much he knows about her. Azula has never been one to wear her heart on her sleeve but since leaving the institution, she hasn’t been able to keep her emotions under lock and key. She isn’t sure she would even want to. Here, on this island, there is nowhere to hide. 

How she was tired of hiding. 

Just for a moment, she lets herself imagine a different world where she could love the man she calls her husband and he could love her, without question. She presses her damp cheek against the lap of the dozing Avatar. He hums contentedly and reaches a blue arm around her. 

Wide awake, she dreams.

She must have dozed off. The sun is setting behind the crest of the volcano. The sky beyond the window is a brilliant blazing array of pinks and golds, clouds streaking the sky like puffs of smoke. She stretches in the light and reaches beside her to find the otherside of the bed empty but warm. She blushes with the realization that she did not imagine the night before. 

A languid smile stretches across her face and everything about the moment is perfect--that is until it hits her. 

The house is on fire. 

The wooden frame of the house is burning, smoke billowing into the night sky. The angry red of the flames propels her out of bed. Never has she been surrounded in so many flames that weren’t her own. Despite the heat, blood freezes in her veins. Where is he?

She tears through the house looking for him, calling his name until her throat feels bloody and raw but after a while, it’s impossible to move through the house faster than at a slow crawl. The ceiling is alight and the support beams are falling from the sky. The smoke is too thick to walk at her full height, she has to crouch to breathe, trusting her instincts to lead her from room to room.

When she finally finds him, he’s standing in the front entrance of the house, dressed in the finest Air Temple Monk robes he owns with the antique beaded necklace around his neck. He’s safe and stately looking even. He’s invincible, he’s the Avatar.

Thank Agni he’s safe, she thinks. Then, how could he? Would he have left her to burn? But she can’t hold it against him, not now, not when she’s got to get them both out of the house. There’ll be time for that on the other side of all this. She calls to him, willing him to her side, but he won’t budge. Not an inch.

She tries to grab hold of his arm but he evades her, floating in and out of her grasp as though they were playing a complex game.

The house rumbles ominously. She’s losing. 

She begs and pleads.He won’t hear her. She tries to beat her small balled fists against the plane of his chest but he breezily captures her hands in his own and tugs her close.

“Dance with me Princess!” His smile is manic.

It would be contagious any other day, any other moment but she can’t dance. She won’t. She has to get out of the house. She needs to get him out of the house. theyneedtogetoutofthe-

He spins her around him in a wide circle and she can feel the flames nipping at her robes, threatening to consume her. She tries to pull him away, but he plays the tension of her limbs against her and snaps her back into his arms until she is dizzy and choking on ash. 

His placid grey eyes glimmer in the light of the flames. He gazes down at her adoringly and folds her into his arms. She feels small and safe in his embrace. She can’t resist it, can’t resist him anymore. She melts into him, falls into sync with him, and lets the rest of the world fall away.

“Dance with me Princess,” He husks, turning them in slow, tight circles until the house caves in around them.

“Azula,” The faint voice of the airbender whispers. “Azula, come back to me.” His breath tickles the shell of her ear. 

She allows herself to slowly come to awareness, afraid that opening her eyes will reveal the flaming house from her nightmare was more than just a dream. She takes stock of her body again, wiggling the toes on her foot to check for burn damage. Everything seems to be in its rightful order. She turns over beneath the sheets to find the Avatar perfectly unharmed and leaning over her. She sighs and lets the tension drain out of her body.

It was just a dream. 

“What happened?” She asks in a slightly slurred voice, unsure if she’s asking how he ended up in her bed or why he felt it necessary to pull her from her sleep.

“You were snoring.” He says tenderly brushing a tendril of hair from her face.

“Snoring?” she asks doubtfully, vaguely aware that if she had all her wits about her she would have slapped his hands away for such an absurd accusation. 

“Princesses don’t snore.” She pouts blinking against the sleep in her eyes. 

“Hmm, maybe not. You’ve got a little drool on your cheek though. Right—” he stokes a thumb against her cheek, “—here.”

She shoves at his legs but he seems undeterred. He closes his eyes and relaxes back into the bed. 

“Maybe you were the one snoring.” She snipes. 

“Not likely.” He sings.

“And why not?” She grouses. He cracks an eye open playfully.

“Because if a princess doesn’t snore, then the Avatar sure as hell doesn’t!” The pillow flies into his face before he finishes his sentence. “Monkeyfeathers, Azula! What is it with you and hitting me in the face?”

Her cheeks redden in embarrassment and the impulse to try a second time flares up in her, but he catches the offending hand before she can launch an attack. His grip is gentle but firm and in her confusion he changes his tactics.

“Are the dreams always this bad?” 

“Usually worse,” she whispers before she can stop herself, “this one was just... different.” He nods with understanding.

“Do you want to talk about it?” The empathy behind his words far surpasses that of any of the many ‘talented’ healers at the asylum. There, talking had not been a choice. Failing to respond had put her on the wrong side of a guard’s temper enough times to get the message. But mother always said Azula was a stubborn one. 

“No.” She says testily, daring him to push her, to snap. He releases her hand.

“It’s alright,” he says with a kindness she’s not sure she deserves, “you don’t have to say anything. Not until you’re ready.” Ready, he says. As though there will be sometime in the future where either of them will be ready to talk about the everything and nothing that’s passed between them. 

“I’m sorry.” She says ashamed. Ashamed to hear herself utter the words aloud for the first time in over a decade, ashamed that she hadn’t spoken them sooner. The airbender’s only response is to brush his foot against hers with the barest of touches. 

“Sometimes,” she says quietly, “it’s difficult for me to tell the difference between dream and reality.” It’s a fact that she’s certainly never uttered aloud to herself or anyone else. She’s not sure why she’s doing it now. What is it about him that makes it so hard for her to keep her mouth shut? 

She moves to pull away but he reaches over and draws her in close to his body. She can’t remember the last time she let someone embrace her, the last time she hasn’t been such a pariah that the mere thought of touching her hadn’t made someone’s blood curdle in their veins. She buries her head into his chest and bites back a sob.

He wraps his arms around her with no agenda and she lets go, grows boneless against his side, allows the heat of his body to surround her. Suddenly the smell of sea breeze, sunlight, and honey fill her nostrils and she thinks, for the first time, this is what he smells like. 

“What can I do?” His voice sounds genuine and clear.

“What do you need?”

She needs so much. She wants even more. It’s greedy how much she feels these days, even when the world could have been more cruel with her. She should feel content with her garden, with the lazy breeze that moves the leaves of the trees in the wind, the sound of the sea that lulls her to sleep each evening. and she does, Agni she does, but when she looks at him—

When she looks at him she needs.

She closes her eyes and lets the warmth of his body comfort her. She remembers those rare evenings in the beach house on Ember Island where her mother would rock her to sleep after a particularly bad dream. 

“Sometimes, Azula, the only way to chase away a sad thought is with a happy one.”

Whatever lay between her and her mother, Azula could not begrudge Ursa this simple truth. The woman was a gifted storyteller. She had to have been, to stay with Ozai so long before she finally cracked under the weight of his thumb. As the Avatar had already experienced, dealing with Ozai demanded an endless supply of creativity.

But on those nights when even Father’s mood had been buoyed by the fresh sea air, everyone would gather round the fire to hear Mother spin a grandiose tale. It was the first thing Azula had permitted herself to miss about Ursa in those initial months after it was apparent the woman was never coming back. 

Now, a grown woman herself, it’s the only thing she misses about Ursa at all.

Azula leans in closer, listening for the steady heartbeat of the man beneath her and considers—for the first time—letting herself grieve.

When she finally speaks, her voice is small and childlike.

“Tell me a story.”

If the Air Nomad finds her request incredulous, he doesn’t show it. He settles them into a more comfortable position and moves to frame the back of her head with his hand.

“Have I ever told you the story about the first time I saw Appa?” He hardly tells her any stories and when he does, they’re usually about the silly little antics he and his friends had gotten up to during the war. This feels tender, personal, real. Like an olive branch of sorts. 

“No,” she breathes shakily, “never.”

“Never?” He says in a slightly exaggerated voice. “Well then, we’ll have to rectify that won’t we?” She nods sleepy against his chest.

They will.

Chapter Text

“Come on firelily! You better start picking up those knees if you want to make it to the top of the hill before sunset.” Her new drill sergeant grins so widely she’s afraid his face might stick that way if he moves too suddenly.  

Truth be told, she isn’t sure why she ever agreed to this hair brained idea of his. It wasn’t as if she didn’t already have a list of things to do at the house. Keeping the Avatar fed alone was nearly a full time job, not to mention feeding herself, mucking Appa’s stall, pruning and debugging in the garden, and digging irrigation trenches for some top secret project she apparently doesn’t have high enough clearance to ask about. Apparently being the Avatar’s wife can only get you so far.

She had plenty to keep her busy, almost too much, so why had she allowed him to talk her into this ?

She needs a water break. 

It was pointless to keep pushing in the extreme heat. The view from the top of the hill was beautiful, but not worth dying for. She stops halfway up the hill, panting and desperate for her waterskin.

“Tired already?” He asks, as though she hasn’t been jogging across the island for nearly an hour. She considers telling him she isn’t sixteen anymore and that spending a shocking majority of the last decade underground didn’t do her any favors in the muscle mass department, but the day hasn’t been a total loss. No need to bring down the mood. She could, however, stand to knock the airbender down a peg, literally .

“You know,” she says wiping the sweat from her brow imperiously, “your little jibes would be much more effective if you actually deigned to join us mere mortals on the ground.” She had tired of his spinning ball of air trick the first five minutes into their trek. She was surprised he hadn’t tired of it yet either. It was a testament to her immense growth that it had taken her so long to say something about it.

“You seem a little testy,” he smirks. 

“No, I’m just unsure why you’ve insisted on leading me around the island on a little goose chase while you can hardly be bothered to touch the ground.” He maintains his lofty sukhasana pose but the slight pursing of his lips tells her she’s struck the tiniest of nerves. Good.

“You couldn’t possibly understand the vast amount of concentration and focus it takes to maintain this form for so long.” He bristles. 

She can imagine alright. When he doesn’t think she can see him, he tilts his head back in pure boyish ecstasy. Air bending comes to him as easy as breathing. There used to be a time when she could bend fire out of her fingertips without thinking. There were even brief moments where she was able to take flight. 

Now she’s lucky if she can get all the way up Bodhi Hill without stopping. 

While she could be impressed that he’s extended his ‘run’ time, she’d rather not encourage his tendency towards egotism. And certainly, not at the expense of her own ego.

“You can’t possibly expect me to believe that spinning around on that thing like a thirteen year old boy requires any genuine effort?”

“I resent that implication!” 

“Which one?”

“All of them!” He sputters. “I’ll have you know that this airbending form is incredibly unique—so much so that it was invented by yours truly.”

“Oh really?” She says drily, arching an eyebrow.

“Yes really! In fact, it was that sole invention that led me to being initiated as an Airbending Master at the tender age of twelve.”  

“Is that so? And how old were you again when you innovated this airbending technique?” His brow furrows in thought, unaware of the trap she’s inevitably set for him.

“Ten years old, I think.” 

“And what pray tell did you name this glorious new form of airbending?” On anyone else his resulting glare would be impressive. On him, however, it’s very nearly adorable. She’s sure he’ll never tell her now, but she can’t resist goading him. 

“Please enlighten me , great guru.” He closes his eyes in frustration.

“I am not a guru, I’m an Airbending Master—” He opens his eyes again to find her smirking up at him. “You’re just baiting me.” He sighs tiredly. 

“And you’re just evading my question.” She takes another greedy gulp from the waterskin then magnanimously offers it in his direction. Moodily, he declines. “At any rate,” she continues “it isn’t so enjoyable when you’re not the one having all the fun.”

“Oh, and I’m the juvenile one?” His pout is so pronounced, she can’t help but smile up at him in earnest. 

“If the shoe fits dear .” He glowers at her but it does little to hide the healthy blush that spreads across his cheeks. Tempted, she leans in coquettishly and says “You know what, why don’t we make a deal…if I can knock you down off of that thing then you have to run all the way back down to the house on foot.”

“Azula, it’s clear to me that you are purposefully and continually misinterpreting my words. We’re training not playing a childish game.”

“My apologies Guru.”

“I told you! I am not—“ He rubs the side of his temples as though to ward off an oncoming headache. “You’re still baiting me.” She hums affirmatively.  

“And this is precisely why I won’t enter into a wager with you.” He sniffs. “You haven’t even mentioned what I will be entitled to when I inevitably win.” His haughtiness is impressive and easily reminiscent of her time at court those years before Ozai had ascended to the throne and everything changed. She finds it oddly refreshing.

Her laugh is rich and throaty as she lifts her arms above her head reveling in the sweet release of tension the stretch brings her.

“I know exactly what would make this a fair wager.” His hawkish gaze travels up the line of her body then circles back down to her face. If she feels the Avatar’s stare linger on her lips, she doesn’t say so.  

“And what’s that?” His tongue swipes over his lips, telegraphing his thoughts. 

“Well I’m not going to just tell you.” She says leaning in daringly. “Where’s the fun in that?” 

“I can’t believe I almost seriously considered your offer.” He spins way resolutely. 

“Did you? I’m touched.”

“But our training is far too important to be distracted by a childish game. After all we have to start taking our workouts more seriously if we're going to reach the next stage of our project—” Agni, bless him, but when he got like this it was impossible for her to find the will to follow along. His behavior was amusing but his speeches were not. 

“You sound like that Water Tribe girl you were always so fond of.” The words leave her mouth before she considers that they might inevitably be too close to home. He’s never spoken of her, aside from the odd comment, but even she had heard word that they seemed destined for each other. It was quite the shock that they hadn’t married at sixteen and rode off into the sun together like a bad romance novel.

She felt slightly guilty, aware that every minute he spent here, he wasn’t off in the world somewhere having dull children with an incredibly dull woman. If it had been the kind of life that would have made him happy, she would have preferred it for him over whatever this was—the placid life she couldn’t give him.

A dark cloud passes over his face and for the first time since she’s arrived on this strange island, Azula fears she has welly and truly offended him.

“That was completely out of line.” His words are harsh and cutting. Azula fights the urge to flinch away, instead choosing to stand her ground and do her best not to damage the only working relationship she had left behind repair.

“My apologies,” she grounds out, aware of how unnatural the words still feel in her mouth.

“Apology unaccepted.” He says in an imperious tone. “I have been a great many things in my life but never have I been as uptight as Katara. It’s literally impossible!” His eyes twinkle teasingly and she knows she’s been had. She's not sure if she’s more shocked that he has a slippery bone in his body or that he’s managed to play her. Ultimately it fails to matter as Azula happily punches him square in the arm.

As much as she’s changed over these last few years and even more so their months on this island, a part of herself feels gleeful at his howl of pain.

“Stop that!” he yelps, spinning out of her grasp as though he recognizes her urge to hit him again. “I’m trying to beat my longest record yet. If I lose even an iota of concentration on what I’m doing—”

With a smirk Azula figures she’d rather see what would happen than hear him repeat himself. If he isn’t as uptight as he claims to be, whatever happens next should be fun. She throws an elbow into his stomach and he flies off balance, twisting helplessly in a semicircle before falling flat on his face.

She had heard the sweet sound of victory and it was the Avatar groaning somewhere pitifully on the ground. The feeling was so immense that the yelps of laughter that fell from her lips surprised even her. Tears fell down her face as she doubled over in ecstatic pain. 

“Oh,” she exclaims, chest heaving with laughter. “You should have seen your face.” For the first time in as long as she can remember, the joy bubbling in her chest is far from manufactured. She can hardly regain her breath but she realizes, with a hint of panic, that she had better try. At some point the airbender had picked himself off the ground and was headed in her direction. 

To say he looked angry would be an understatement. To say it looked as though steam were shooting from his ears would not be a total exaggeration.

There is, she knows, only one way back down the hill.

She takes off running

She’s flying through verdant underbrush when she realizes that the terror at being chased halfway across the island has given away to some kind of glee. There’s something in the thrill of the hunt for Azula, the fortitude it takes to hunt one’s prey, no matter the circumstances, no matter the cost. She remembers the great lengths she went to, every stop she pulled out in her attempts to capture the great Avatar. She had come close plenty of times, but her catch was always compromised at the last minute, usually by sheer luck—or worse—Zuko. This is the first time, however, that she’s ever been on the other side of that equation. In all her years of being a hunter, she’s never been the hunted.

Somehow, it’s still exhilarating. 

She ducks underneath a low hanging vine, aware that her shorter height and smaller body gives her an advantage in this terrain. Over a head taller than her, it will be much more difficult for the airbender to clear the long hanging branches that make Azula’s getaway that much easier, regardless of how strong and fast he is. 

She’s running out of brush. Soon she’ll be in an open field which will only be to his advantage. There is a shortcut through her prized tomatoes but there are few things in this world she takes more pride in than her little garden. She’ll have to go another way to get back to the house, assuming the structure passes for neutral territory. They hadn’t time to discuss specifics. 

He’s gaining on her, she can feel it. She can’t see him but she can hear his muted curses behind her as he fights to detangle himself from whatever’s ensnared him. A few times she even smells faint whiffs of smoke, meaning he had resorted to blasting the worst hanging offenders out of his way rather than deftly avoid them. 

Still angry then.

Though she could go the expected path and let him overtake her before putting up a big show, she pushes herself to think harder and faster. As much Azula has always loved a demonstration, she was more accustomed to negative jing than people noticed. Unlike the airbenders, however, she wasn’t interested in avoiding a fight so much as evading any fights she couldn’t win. That was, until she could shift the tide in her favor. To do so now would require some of her finest thinking but seemingly defenseless without her fire bending, she’d have to try her best. 

He expects her to cut to the right and down the hill that leads back to the house so she feints right but hangs left at the last possible moment choosing to move deeper into the green cover, aware that she can take this ridge all the way down to the edge of the island. 

Predictably, he miscalculates and tumbles out of the brush in his haste to make up for lost time. He’s back on his feet quickly but by then she’s confident that she’s disappeared back into the thick of the jungle enough to regain her head start. 

Ducking and dodging her way down the slope, it occurs to her that the island really is beautiful. For so long she had resigned herself to thinking of it as a gilded prison, another way meant to entrap her, no different from the white washed stone walls of the asylum or the vivid monstera covered walls of the palace. But now, nearly half a year later, the island is alive to her. The neon sunsets, the electric storms that blow across the open fields in the monsoon season, the calm pools of the salt water inlets, the choppy eastward waters of the sea, the nightly twinkling of fire beetles that collect on Bodhi Hill.

What does it mean that this island is more a home to her now than any place has ever been before? What does it mean that the Avatar is becoming family to her more swiftly than the mother and father that bore her?

Suspended in a moment, she comes the closest to flying on her own, tearing down the slope, full control of her body, the blood singing in her veins. She can hear his gait behind her again, picking up speed, but she realizes she isn’t afraid so much as she’s alive.

Laughter overcomes her and she lets it carry her away, reveling in the sound of the man close at her heels joining in with her. She wonders what it would have been like had they met as children, if she had known what it meant to live in a nation not at war. What does it mean that the very thing that made her was the very thing that broke her? What does it mean that her companion can say the same?

She laughs and she runs until the tears stream down her face, blurring the landscape around her. She doesn’t need to see to feel the ground beneath her feet. If she listens closely enough the trees speak to her, the wind blowing through them telegraphing her path down the ridge  

She should see it coming, but she doesn’t. She misses the tell tale signs of the thinning vegetation, the crashing of the sea against the cliffs, the looming approach of an outcropping of rocks that will send her tumbling off the edge of the island if she isn’t careful. 

She barely has time to stop her herself. To pull back from the crumbling ledge.

She only has a few seconds until he reaches her. She knows from her travels across the world that a few seconds is more than enough time to plan her next great escape. The water is far below her, but not so many mǐ that she couldn’t make it if she tried. Arms tight against her ears, palms joined at a point above her head, she could pierce the water at just the right angle to dive deeply beneath the surface and rise in enough time to catch a ragged breath. It’s risky, but Azula has never been one to shy away from a challenge.

She could jump, she should jump, it’s the way she’s always been wired. Jump to live another day. But it isn’t the Avatar she’s so afraid of. 

Balancing on the edge of the cliff, she finds she doesn’t want to get away. It’s been twenty six years and she is finally tired of running. She turns away from the water, away from the edge of the cliff, and turns towards the Avatar’s advancing body. Her breath hitches when she realizes, more than anything, that she is ready to be caught. For an instant, their eyes connect so intensely that his steps falter and he comes to a halt an arm’s length from her body

His eyes rake over her and she invites it, invites the inevitable magnetism between their bodies, invites the anticipation of her body pressed against his.

“Say the word.” He murmurs, his eyes heavily lidded, his hands twitching with want at his sides.

Her eyes flutter closed at the sound of his voice, full of the promise that it will be his hands moving in and against her body in lieu of the dancing phantom fingers that she imagines long after he has fallen asleep in the other room. 

“Say the word.”

Her eyes flutter open. She's ready.

“Please.”

He pulls her away from the ledge and into his embrace where he wraps his arms around her and drags his searing mouth over hers. His hands are everywhere and nowhere like a summer’s breeze, his mouth tastes of salt and smoke, his body feels like solid earth against her heaving chest. She doesn’t need to breathe. He’s sure, he’s feeling, he’s enough. She’s enough. 

She gasps into his mouth and moves her hands over the broad expanse of his back, up the patrician slope of his neck, and to rest against the crown of his head. The strangled moan in the back of his throat shakes her to her core. She’s never wanted something so badly that she could so easily have. 

She wants him.

His teeth sink into the sinew of her neck nestled beside her shoulder.  

Agni, she needs him.

His tongue laves against the purpling bruise and she keens into his ear, scraping her blunt nails down the blue of his tattoo. She needs more of him, needs him everywhere, but being the Avatar didn’t give him more than two hands and one mouth as much as she wishes it had.

Still, he makes do with what he has, brings a hand to her breast and palms roughly at it. When she can take no more, he brings the tips of his thumb and forefinger together to squeeze and pinch her nipple into a stiff peak.

Her hips jerk against his and her cry rings out before he covers her mouth with his once more in a frenzy.

She needs. She needs. She needs.

His hips pump against hers and she wants to rent the clothes from their bodies.

She wants. She wants. She wants.

It doesn’t take him long to divest her of her clothes, the simple linen under wrappings. He is not inexperienced and she finds herself grateful. Any apprehension she had about her time away from the world, is silenced under the weight of his appreciative stare. 

He lays her in the tall grass. She reaches up for his body but his larger hands close over her much smaller ones and pin them to the dirt below. Her naked body shivers against the Air Nomad robe dragging lightly against her skin. She wants to pout, to cry indignantly, but she can’t bring herself to rush him. 

This moment with the dappled sunlight streaming down on them, the cicadas singing in the trees, the seahawks swooping overhead, the lean length of his body pressed against hers. This moment, they will never forget. He squeezes her fingers as though he can hear her thoughts, as though he can hear her worries. He takes her in like a drowning man takes in the sight of dry land and releases one of her hands to bring the backs of his knuckles against her reddening cheek. 

“When we do this,” he husks, “you’ll have to call me by my name.” She nods furiously, aware that she would promise to do anything as long as he pulls the hem of his robes up and over his body so she can see him.

“I want to see you.” She frowns, but he smiles crookedly at her and makes a show of languidly disrobing from his knees. He’s soft and smooth all over, just like she had imagined. His chest is broad but he narrows at his waist. Still his legs are strong, the feeling of his thighs pinning her to the ground can attest to that.

She shoots up to bring her lips to his and he allows her impudence, bending halfway to meet her. His tongue lazily swipes the inside of her mouth once then twice before finally breaking away. Sitting back on his haunches he tilts his head coquettishly and regards her with a haunting stare.

“You’re perfect,” he whispers. She whimpers, a dam inside her breaks. He sinks into her and she lets go.

Chapter Text

He’s gone when she wakes. The bed is empty but not cold. She doesn’t worry about where he’s gone or if he’s coming back. She can sense that he’s near. She stretches languidly and takes in the scent of the pillow beside her. It smells like him. She smells like him. She opens her eyes and takes in the sight of the bedroom where the room that was once her own has evolved into a tidy mess of both their signs of life. The window sill on his side of the bed spills with wooden beads and other air nation trinkets, an almost altar to the life that he had lived before the war. The bedside table beside her is full of the fresh flowers he brings to her some twilights after his exploratory flights around the leeward side of the island. There are even a few crude carvings of the island’s local game rendered by the great Air Master himself surrounded by a collection of notable rocks and interesting shells. They’re a pitiful attempt at what the Avatar remembers of Air Nomad courting culture. 

She adores them.

Swinging her legs out of bed, she savors the feeling of the cool wood beneath her feet and wiggles her toes experimentally before standing.The muscles in her body twinge but pleasantly so. In the past few weeks she has had to work hard to be light on her toes, The Avatar does not tire easily and nor does her husband. 

She considers working her way through the wardrobe in search of something to wear but she’s hungry and embarrassingly finds herself missing his company. Even still, she’s a Fire Nation Princess and a little more refined so she’ll have to at least begin her morning with a spot of tea before she tries to entice him back to bed.

Glancing at the floor, however, she finds she can make quick work of both things if she gathers his discarded robe from the floor and throws it over her very naked and lithe body. If there’s anything being a Fire Nation Princess has taught her, it’s that there isn’t a man alive who can resist staking a claim to something, regardless of his national origin. She thinks Aang will quite like her in the yellows and oranges of his traditional dress. With a smirk she haphazardly ties the sash around her body, counting on her poor workmanship to give way and expose more than a little skin when the time is right. 

She doesn’t bother with anything else. Not a single underthing, only a simple leather strap to fasten the end of a no-frills braid. When she’s done she opts to sweep the woven strands over her left shoulder and charge into the living room in search of some sustenance.

There's already a cup of half drunken tea cooling in the front room next to her new favorite set of cups on the table. The pot nearby is still hot as though he had been expecting her. She pours the golden brew into the delicate jade colored cup and sighs at the smell of white tea leaves, jasmine, and rosebud rising into the air. The tea is the perfect temperature, warm enough to be comforting but just cool enough to take her first sip. Of course, the Avatar is a consummate mate and deferential or even masochistic enough that Zuko must have known what he was doing when he struck the deal. Her lips curl into a secret smile.

Uncle, who evidently approved of the match, had sent an artfully arranged package teeming with his finest blends and even a special satchel of herbs to be brewed into a tisane intended to bless young newlyweds. The “modest” package—as Iroh had called it—was easily enough tea to serve a small army, but Azula found herself especially grateful for the gesture. Even more dear to her was the ceremonial matcha set he sent especially for her, with an absurdly expensive looking tea bowl resplendent with veins of liquid gold running through the delicate pottery like spidery cracks. From its place of honor on the only shelf in their otherwise bare kitchen, the beautiful ceramic reminds her of the better days of a childhood spent at the palace, watching her mother assiduously whisk the bamboo chasen around the delicate bone china chawan, returning the errant clumps of green powder to the center of the bowl until she had stirred up a fine froth. Quiet afternoons when Zuko was with the palace tutor and Father away on palace business, Ursa would rouse a young Azula from bed and tenderly scrub her face clean, change her out of yesterday’s wear, and carry her small charge to the eastern gardens. There she had learned to make tea in the style of her mother’s people, long displaced from the island that she now calls home. With only an oversized boy as Avatar and a failed Fire Princess on this island, Zaj Laug is hardly imposing. Roku’s legacy had given way to the ashes of war more than anything else worth remembering, and still she can’t help but shake the feeling that there is something more to their union, to the meeting of their souls and bodies on the scorched land of her ancestors. 

She scoffs between her habitual blows sending ripples across the surface of the golden liquid. She’s never been one to care much about karma. She knows now that it has less to do with what she believes and more to do with the once debilitating fear that everything she ever did would come back to haunt her. She’s not even thirty and yet she knows there is nothing a reincarnated spirit can do to her that she hasn’t already done to herself in the cozy comfort of her illustrious prison cell—or hospital room . It’s not death she fears, but the quiet corners of her own mind.

She takes a deep breath and drains the contents of her cup until only a few leaves remain, dancing along the bottom of the cup until they settle into some arcane message that only her great-aunts Lo and Li could have deciphered. She would, as they often warned her, leave her morose and maudlin thoughts for the dead, lest she become one of them too soon. The sun was climbing toward its noonday perch and for the first time in so many years Azula felt she had something worth living for. There’s no more of her father’s futures, no more of her mother’s pasts. Only Azula.

She gazes out the window to see the signs of bright orange and yellow fabric billowing in the wind and doesn’t fight the brilliant, unbidden smile that creeps onto her face.

“ Husband .” She says breezily.

“ Wife.” He says smirking down at whatever trouble he’s gotten into today. His tone is warm but distracted, and understandably so, judging by the detritus scattered across the front porch. His tongue pokes out from the corner of his mouth in concentration as he lines a tiny nail up on what looks like two unremarkable pieces of scrap wood and hammers it resolutely until all but the flat metal head disappears into the wood. He lines up three more in quick succession and drives each one home neatly. 

“How did you sleep?” He asks without looking up once from his project. 

“ Wonderfully.” Azula says in earnest, blood rushing to her cheeks as she remembers why she slept so soundly in the first place, how the Avatar had taken her swiftly across the bed and in as many different ways as he could think of until she had begged him to stop for just a moment until she could catch her breath, let alone a sense of decorum. Her breath, she finally caught tucked against his chest, but decorum had been impossible when she had drooled—just a little—on her willing pillow. 

“And you?” She asks prettily, partly because it’s polite and almost entirely because she’s out to seek her revenge. That is, if she could get him to look above her demure ankles. 

“Oh, you know,” He says coyly, setting down the hammer and reaching for some other insipid tool, “not too shabby.” 

She’d be offended, she thinks, if it weren’t for the charming way he sits back and admires his progress. She figures a change in tactics might be more rewarding. Ty Lee had tried to impress upon Azula the importance of capitulating to make suitors whims every once and again. 

“They’re not like us,” Ty Lee had said beside her in bed, panting between sessions. “They’re—”

“Obtuse?” Azula had drawled, pulling herself from bed to root around the rented room for something that would pass as a glass of water. Living on the road, chasing the Avatar, wasn’t always as fun as Zuko had made it out to be.

“Well yeah,” Ty Lee said with her nose wrinkling humorously, “but I was going to say...delicate.”

“Delicate?” Azula wondered, her quest forgotten and her fists imperiously testing on her hips.

“Oh yes,” Ty Lee murmured, “delicate. Their little male egos are quite fragile.” At this Azula laughed earnestly. “It helps to be a little gentle with them, feign a little interest in what they’re doing from time to time. Trust me,” Ty Lee said tugging at Azula’s arm, willing her back to bed, “it goes a long way.” 

“Maybe I’ll try that next time with Chan.” Azula hummed then, allowing herself to settle into Ty Lee’s arms.

“Maybe not so much with Chan,” Ty Lee rolled her eyes exasperatedly, “but maybe someday there’ll be a boy worth trying for.”

“Maybe. But I’m quite happy here.” Azula eyes glinted as her hands slid through the acrobat’s hair.

“Me too.” Ty Lee said rising up to meet her lips.

Thinking about those days doesn't hurt to remember nearly as much as they did when she had finally forbidden her old friend from visiting her at the asylum. Instead, she remembers those three girls on their endless roving field trip across the world and presses her finger tips to her lips in a fond farewell. 

She wonders what Ty Lee would make of her now, and how the other woman would counsel her through this latest development. If she could write, what would she say? She shakes her head as though to lead it and focuses her attention back on the man before her.

“What are you making?” She says experimentally. 

“What am I making?” He asks in mock incredulity. “Only the single greatest Air Nomad invention to ever fly the skies.”

Azula squints dubiously at the thin cross of glorified wooden sticks with the recycled brown paper wrapping from Uncle’s generous gift and is hard pressed to see anything inventive or great in the messy pile of materials below. Still, she thinks of Ty Lee’s reminder. However she found herself in this predicament, the Avatar appears to be her ‘boy worth trying for’. 

“You’ll have to explain it to me of course.” Azula murmurs. Ty Lee’s voice echoes in her ears.

“If you remember anything, remember this important fact. Men love explaining things to women, Azula, almost more than they love sex.”

The Avatar shoots her a quick grin and lifts his new toy into his hands, taking great care to blow away the sawdust and bits of dried paste from the paper surface. 

“It’s not my best work,” he says ruefully, “but it’s something we used to do as children. It’s been over a hundred years since I last made one, but I think I’m getting back into the swing of things.”

“So it’s quite literally a child’s toy?” She can’t help but rib him the teeniest bit, but there’s no rancor in her voice. She’s not surprised she’s never seen something like this before, but it has less to do with the disappearance of the Air Nomad’s than the early disappearance of her childhood that Ozai had seen to. 

“May I?” She asks before curiously plucking the thing out of his hands, wondering at the mechanics of it. 

“I guess it is a child’s toy,” he lets out a low chuckle and starts to stand, “but I thought we could—”

She knows the exact moment he finally realizes she’s leaning against the door frame dressed only in one of his robes. He turns to her, eyes wide, whole body rigid. He opens his mouth to speak but no words come out.

“Should I be worried?” She says, not without a touch of concern when she reaches out to brush a hand against his forehead. 

“No.” He manages shakily when the words finally return to him. His eyes are glazed over, his hóujié bobbing tremulously as he swallows furiously. “But I should.”

He pulls her into his arms and in her surprise, she lets the toy fall to the ground. 

“Oh.” She says realizing that her original intention of seduction had been successful after all. She had only meant to distract him, not derail his late morning project. 

“You braided your hair,” he exhales softly. She’s not sure why he’s so surprised. She braids her hair every so often, but it’s never moved him before. 

“You like it?” She asks with a strangled voice that makes her sound suspiciously like an insipid school girl, or worse, Ty Lee.

“I love it.” He breathes against her neck. “You look like—like.” She pulls back and takes a long look at his face, the endless emotion crashing over him. It isn’t just lust she sees in his eyes, but a sense of boyish wonder and adoration. This, she knows, she’s never seen before.

“You look like an Air Temple Nun.” He blurts. The only women he would have seen in abundance between his stay in a temple full of masculine of center Air Nomads. Dressed in the colors of his defunct nation, her shameless attempt at getting his attention had unwittingly transformed her into the visions that had populated his adolescent wet dreams.

“Oh,” she begins to fully grasp the meaning beneath his words, “ oh!”  He nods impatiently and now she’s the one laughing gleefully as he scoops her over his shoulders and begins towards the door. 

“But your invention,” she says genuinely perplexed, though enlivened. She really had tried to be supportive.  

“It’s called a kite,” he grunts. “and it can wait. This can’t.” The hand he slaps against her ass, she takes it, is meant as a form of punctuation. She yelps and struggles half heartedly against his hold.

“I’d like to take you to bed.” He growls and she melts a little in his hands. 

“On one condition.” He’d agree to anything she asks, she’s sure, but it’s far more fun to keep up the illusion that he has a choice in the matter. 

“What?” He whines like a boy but she just smirks, scanning her thoughts for what she remembers about the Air Nomad people. While she adores the incredibly comfortable and terribly expensive feather bed Zuko had sent a few months into their stay, she remembers that the ascetic monks weren’t given to flights of luxurious fancy. In fact, as she recalls, they much preferred a firmer touch. She slides out of his arms and leads him to a group of threadbare pillows on the floor where they sometimes relax in the afternoons. 

“Fuck me here.” She slowly enunciates and he nearly explodes on the spot. He tries to lay her down softly yet swiftly but she pushes back, flipping them in an instant.

“Now, now Master Aang.” She says tauntingly, scrunching up the sides of her robe to swing a leg over his until she’s straddling his hips. “I believe I’m the one in charge here, wouldn’t you agree?”

His hands tighten around her hips and she knows from the labored breathing sounds he’s making that the poor man is nearly hyperventilating now. She reaches a hand down to grab a hold of the hem of his robes and inch them up his lithe body. She notes, with satisfaction, that he is once again pantless, confirming her theory that most of his traditional robes are just ungendered dresses. 

“Now I remember what I preferred about this nation’s style of dress.” She purrs. With another yank, his cock springs free and she shivers when she feels his hard length rest against her stomach. She reaches down and takes him into her hand briefly, grazing a thumb over his weeping head.

The unholy sound that leaves his mouth when she releases him from her grasp almost induces a feeling of sympathy in her. 

Almost. 

She leans forward and moves her hands into his and lifts them above his head, pinning them to the ground with a delicious parity that invokes their first time on the bluffs, rutting in the dirt like a bunch of commoners. 

“What do you want?” She asks, trailing her lips over the shell of his right ear. He vibrates with want but his brain hasn’t quite caught up with the rest of him. After a new seconds she takes pity on him and takes his ear lobe between her teeth.

“Would you like to taste me?” She asks in a parody of equanimity. He must consider what that would mean, the fabric tenting over them, the feeling of ecstasy doused in orange and yellow light. His cock twitches solicitously. 

She climbs higher, shimmying until her aching clit is hovering right above his watering mouth. He tries to reach up and grab her but she bruisingly slams his hands back against the ground. 

“Be a good boy won't you?” He bucks against her but acquiesces. “No hands, but I still expect to be impressed.” She cups his cheek in a nearly motherly way and pats it rhythmically. ”I want to be screaming your name when you’re done. And if you’re really, really good,” she rolls her hips against him, “I’ll let you do whatever you want to me after.”

She feels the warm exhale of his breath against her inner thigh. She wants him so badly in that moment that she has to close her eyes to steel herself for the moments to come.

“Anything I want?” He says with childlike awe before leaning up to tentatively dart his tongue against her. 

“Absolutely anything.” She promises. He delves in deeper and she arches into the air. “ Anything.” She pants wantonly.

It occurs to her much later in the evening that those were the last cohesive words she’d say all day. He’d won her bet and would take his prize early next morning after he finished his design. 

Tomorrow they’ll go kite flying.

Chapter Text

“The summer’s ending.” He says draped along the front stairs of their home, chewing happily on a pear.

“Summer’s ending?” She huffs behind him, knowing that the winter season in the far reaches of the fire nation is hardly comparable to winters in most of the Earth kingdom, let alone the north and south poles.

He turns back to smile indulgently at her.

“We might not need to bundle up in a parka to survive,“ Aang starts, “but before we know it, the temperatures will start dropping at night—” whatever dreadful sarcastic quip she intended to say dies on her lips when he quickly presses a kiss to the corner of her mouth. “We might have to start lighting fires to keep warm.” He whispers, eyes dancing with mirth. 

He tastes like pear and moonlight, she thinks. 

how nauseating . Her dreamy sigh betrays her true feelings. 

She carefully considers the image of being tangled up in his lithe limbs as they curl around a dying fire. She finds it pleases her.

Nauseating, indeed.

“I’m sure that can be arranged.” She murmurs imperiously. Perhaps her brother had once said it best when he said that while it was possible to remove the crowned prince or princess from the throne, it was impossible to remove the imprint of the throne from Ozai’s children. 

“I tried to make a life of it as Lee,” he’d confided in the cheerfully dilapidated asylum courtyard, “but even if you hadn’t found us, I would have been—”

“Incomplete?” Azula offered in what was, then, an uncharacteristic display of something that felt suspiciously like solidarity, respect, or even remorse. Zuko’s lips formed a smile halfway between broken and bitter.

“Though it pains me to say it, I'm not sure we were ever meant to lead normal lives.” He sighs and reaches over and covers her hand with his, squeezing gently. Miraculously, she doesn’t pull away. 

When she was sixteen, she’d rather die than live a normal life. For so long she had wanted nothing more than to lord over everything within her reach. And back then, so very little had been beyond reach of the empire. It seemed there wasn’t a thing she couldn’t will into existence by snapping her fingers. At sixteen, wanting anything else, anything less than everything, had been unthinkable. At twenty-two it was all she could dream of. 

With each new day her hunger for a small cottage and a little quiet sharpened itself against the dull white washed walls of the asylum like a knife. 

For a moment, she allowed herself to relish the weight of her brother’s hand atop her own and considered that perhaps both Zuko and Azula were more like uncle than she had ever cared to realize.

“Is that what you still want?” She rasped, “to be nothing, no one?” Her eyes stung as she looked stubbornly ahead. There was no accusation in her voice, only the faint hint of desperation. 

“No,” he says, his voice cracking with surprise, as though the thought has only just occurred to him so clearly. “No,” he says again, the awe still present in his voice. “I’ve only ever wanted to be happy, I’ve only ever wanted for us to be happy.”

She is happy. The thought sails through her like an arrow. Somehow she is no one and nothing but commands all there is within her reach. Nothing and everything bends to her will. 

She’s a princess and yet she’s a farmer’s wife. She doesn’t so much coax the growth of her crops as she decrees it. 

It works. For her. For them. 

She’s happy. And it doesn’t escape her that the man lounging at her feet is at least partially responsible. Her  absent minded hand traces the blue markings on the crown of the airbender’s head and wonders where Zuko is sitting right now, whether or not he’s engaged in a similar conversation, watching the sunset from a couch from the extravagance of his apartment, some warm and willing body in his arms. She wonders if he’s blissfully happy, as happy as any child of Ozai and Ursa can be, imagining spending his life wrapped up in the bubble of a single, never ending moment.

“Azula?” Aang calls softly

“Hmmm?” She returns, grounding herself in the feeling of her fingers running over the soft fuzz growing from his head. Soon it would be time for her to shave it for him again.

“What are you thinking about?” His hand reaches for hers and for the first time since he’s asked the question she finds there is only one answer.

“Nothing,” she whispers contentedly, “nothing at all.”

She brings his hands to her lips and prays he feels the smile he cannot see. 

The weeks pass and when the season finally begins to change from summer to autumn, Azula finds herself uncharacteristically aching for home. Soon the full harvest moon will be high in the sky and it will be time for the annual Bon Om Tuk festival, her very favorite time of year. She hasn’t felt particularly sentimental about her homeland since her de facto banishment. Even on the best of days there is no love lost between the nation and their former crown princess. And still, something about the shortening of the days and the cooling of the nights has transformed her into a young girl again in a way that makes her feel unsteady and unsure of herself. Sometimes, when she blinks, her eyes burn with the image of a thousand lanterns dotting the night sky like man made stars. Other times, when she slides a grain of rice into her mouth, it is not the simple staple she tastes, but rather the custard and salted egg yolk filling of the old cook’s best mooncakes. The worst is when she’s made her own ginger and turmeric tea to settle her stomach after a large meal and she takes a sip only to feel the strange sweet taste of Cassia wine—the very kind she and Zuko would sneak from the distracted party guests—against her tongue. 

The longer it goes on, the more she fears she balances on the razor thin line between nostalgia and madness.

Out of necessity, her husband doubles as the island’s spiritual sage, courier, and doctor. With his help and the sheer will of force, Azula has nearly weaned herself off of her medicine.Through their morning sessions Azula has almost perfected her basic katas again, though she doesn’t dare to bend fire from her fingertips. With his help, she learns to channel all the energy into the earth, discreetly and with little trouble. What once razed an entire field hardly raises the ambient temperature more than a few degrees. It is almost second nature now and she no longer wakes screaming from dreams where she has combusted  from the inside out. She’s learning to bank her fire instead of suppressing it. 

She meditates, she gardens, she cooks, she cleans, she toils, and she trains, running through the jungle at full tilt or swimming up and down the coast only to stop for water, turn it around, and do it again. When she is not running herself ragged, it’s the Avatar that she works to the bone, using her mouth and hands and sex to leave him boneless and shivering for hours while she rolls out of bed only to begin her circuit again. 

It’s exhausting. At least, it should be , but the visions build behind her eyes in such a way that makes it impossible to sleep, to rest for even a second, without fear that she could wake the next day in a brand new world of her own making where running children dodge between her legs chasing after the last piece of dragonbeard candy and old women who bicker about the hypothetical wealth of their sons wave at her from their porches as she passes. She sleeps very little now, and though her body aches from exhaustion, she keeps pushing and pushing herself until she’s so taut she’s ready to snap. 

“Again,” she murmurs, her face buried in the crook of his neck, “let’s go again.” She takes his ear between her teeth and reaches down to feel him slowly, but surely, beginning to harden in her hand again before pulling ever so slightly away. 

“It’s too soon,” he huffs from exhaustion, “and it’s been hours,” he whines, falling onto his back. 

“You can’t possibly be whining,” she says exasperated.

“Don’t get me wrong, I am completely grateful, so grateful. But, I’d like to just lay here with my wife for awhile if that isn’t too much to ask?” He grins and holds out an arm, encouraging her to rest her head against his chest but she only evades his grasp, throwing back the tangled sheets before throwing a slip over head and  sliding her feet into the slippers beside the bed.

“I shouldn’t,” her voice is appeasing, fragile, forcibly light. She sounds like some other man’s wife, some other woman. “There’s still so much left to do.”

“Am I another chore you have to check off your list?” He laughs, “clean the dishes, weed the garden, fuck the Avatar?” Her shoulders drop and she doesn’t know whether she should fight or run so she just freezes. It’s been so long since the impulse to hurt another has ripped through her body so quickly. In the span of a second she has thought of half a dozen scathing retorts that would pull his bleeding heart right out of his chest, if she wanted to. But she doesn’t want to. The urge to protect him is so strong it’s shocking. His lo— feeling for her is so rare it must be finite. If he knew what she was seeing when her mind wandered, if he knew what she was running from, would he who handled her with such a precious attention to detail suddenly drop her? Would he grow bored, grow tired? And what if she were to get angry? What if she were to dissolve into a fit of tears? Would he grow angry? And if she were to lay her hands on him, to howl and scream, to curse his mother and his mother’s mother, to call his father a bastard, to call his people a pitiful gathering of ghosts? 

What would he do then? 

The burst of energy leaves her and she sways on her feet. He’s at her side in an instant, guiding her to the edge of their bed before crouching between her legs 

“Azula?” He questions softly, but her eyes dart away from his searching look.

“Nyingdu-la, please, look at me.” His large hands are warm and dry against her face. She wonders, not for the first time since she came here, what she would do without him? Who she would be?

What was it Iroh had said? The site of my greatest defeat…

He grounds and anchors her, more than anyone or anything but her thirst for Ozai’s acknowledgement ever had. Even that had come and gone like a flash in the pan. But everything Aang is, everything he is to her, is steady like the sun. Every morning it rises and every evening it sets, never less brilliant than the day it was before.

Her feeling for him wells in her throat, pools in her eyes, aches in her fingers. 

It is unmistakable. In truth, the real difference in her feelings is imperceptible but the first acknowledgment of it—this altered state of being—throws her world off its axis. 

“Nyingdu-la, what’s wrong?” 

Now that she knows, she cannot return. There is no going back from this excoriating illumination, there will be nowhere left for her to turn. She must open herself to him completely like a flower or close herself to him forever, like a shriveled bud deprived of water, light, or air. 

“Nyingdu-la…” he chants, his forehead drawn against hers, “ beloved .”

She takes in a deep breath, breathes out, and unfurls.

Could you love me even if I were mad? She asked a million different ways without ever saying the words. She told him about the children and the lanterns shaped like winsome animals, she told him about the ghostly flavor of mooncakes and cassia wine on her tongue, the old ladies waving from porches, the old men playing pai sho. The night sky dotted with the flames from the wicks of a thousand candles she wishes he could see beside her. 

When her voice is hoarse from whispering and the beds of her fingernails raw and red from worrying, he bends cooling water over her fingers and tells her about his days after The War, wandering the old Air Temples searching for signs of life. 

“They were gone,” his voice cracks slightly, “but I looked anyway.”

When his heart had grown heavy and tired of the grief and destruction, tired of the waste of human life and the hundreds of empty bodies that would never speak back, he would slip away into the nearest village. There he would walk in anonymity, wearing muted and nondescript colors among the throngs of wild children and imagine that they were his friends. Sometimes he would take work as a field hand and work and work and work until his body was so tired that all he could do was collapse upon his bedroll and sleep without dreaming. 

“Still they were everywhere,” he smiles sadly. They were in the younger children playing luksong-baka in the school yard, in the older children tearing through the streets shouting kabaddi-kabaddi in the dying afternoon light and in the old shopkeepers who tsk’ed and tutted as they swept and re-swept the front steps to into their businesses. They were everywhere he went.

“Sometimes I still hear them,” he says, twining their fingers together. 

She stills against him, still painfully aware of the earnest echoes of his voice that float around the room. Her people are not gone. Every Autumn full moon they will gather and sing the ceremonial songs, and drink the ceremonial wines, and dance the ceremonial dances. Full moon or new moon, autumn or spring, they live. She is banished but they are not. And still, there is an ocean between them that sometimes feels like a hundred year wall.  

How will she finally mourn the loss of nation? How will she mourn the loss of the only thing she has ever loved more than herself, the only thing she had ever been willing to give her own life for, the only thing she had ever been allowed to live for? How does she mourn the loss of home and it’s traditions even if it’s quite possible, all the time she spent like a doll shelved among the rest of her father's pretty possessions, that she never had one? 

“What should I do?” She whispers and he laughs balefully. 

“I don’t know,” he presses a kiss to her hair and hums. “I don’t know.” 

But hours later, long after she curls into his side and waits for the waves of sleep to take her, she feels him carefully slip from bed and creep toward the window. In the low hum of dawn, she opens her eyes to find him crouched in the window, a set of weathered beads in his hands as he murmurs, “I remember.”

For the first time ever, he leaves early in the morning for his usual trip into town and has yet to return by midday.

Azula begins her day shortly after he leaves, running up the hill, through her katas, and back down again to a simple breakfast of rice with egg. As the sun climbs in the sky she finds herself at work weeding the garden beds, contemplating what it will make most sense to grow in the cooling temperatures. The earth here will never know frost, but even so, there is a season for everything. She picks the last eggplants of the season and digs a tumeric root out of the ground. She’s sure there’s something she’ll be able to scrounge up with what’s left of the tamarind paste and the dried chili hanging from the kitchen doorway. 

She walks home holding her basket in one hand and her hat in the other, waiting for Appa’s tell tale roar and Aang’s delighted whoops only for nothing to happen. Uninspired without someone home to cook for, she eats trails around the house picking fruit from a bowl as she tidies the house, first sweeping out the back room, then moving to the front. She neatens their bed coverings, rearranges her collection of trinkets, and opens all the windows to allow the sea air into the house. 

She mixes vinegar with water and washes the windows down with old packing paper, she beats their charming yet threadbare rug in the front yard, draping it over the stair railing and going at it until her arms ache and her fingers threaten to blister. 

She sits at the small table in the front room and tries to put ink pen to paper to respond to Zuko’s latest missive but she can’t find the words. 

The sun begins its descent from the sky and still the Avatar has not returned home. 

Determined not to dwell on it, Azula busies herself with preparations for the evening meal. He must be on his way home soon, she thinks, and after such a long day he should be hungry. 

She puts on the rice and cuts the eggplant into thin slices and fries them in batches until adding them into a wok with shallots, crushed chili, mustard seeds, and curry leaves. She adds the last of the tamarind paste and the fresh tumeric and stirs until it’s just the right consistency.

The potato and egg curry is next, she decides, peeling and boiling the potatoes and diligently mixing in the right spices until the color is a nice creamy yellow.

By the time she’s finished everything and prettily arranged it on the table, the sun is hanging dangerously low in the sky and there is still no sign of her husband. 

But she will not fret. Fretting is for school girls and simple women who gossip and titter away in family tea rooms about the latest fashions from Caldera or Mrs. Siahaan’s most eligible sons. Azula is most assuredly not one of those women. And her husband is a grown man and the Agni forsaken Avatar at that. So she sets the table using their best, if not only, set of plates, and rearranges the floor pillows just to her liking before lighting a set of the tapered candles she keeps stashed away in a cupboard for days when it rains or nights when Aang insists on sitting up long after midnight attending to diplomatic and spiritual affairs. 

Then, she does the one thing she had never quite successfully managed to do before, she waits.

The food grows cold and the candles are nearly down to their ends before despair sets in. She shoves away from the table spinning out of her seat caught in a mixture of feelings that oscillate between anger, despair, isolation, and worry. 

What if he never comes back? The thought gnaws at her, embeds itself in her and festers like a sore. 

What if this was their grand plan all along? To make a mockery of her? To defang and declaw her and have her enjoy it? To make her an eager if not willing party to her own demise?

And if he never came back, if she had been permanently left to her own devices, could she manage? Would the skills she picked up over the course of the last year be enough to sustain her?

Head spinning, she runs out of the house and into a front porch full of floating lanterns. Her eyes fill with tears and she blinks, realizing that this time of all times is not the most auspicious time to be losing her mind. With a bitter laugh she wipes her hand over her face and tries to gain her composure. She thinks of her time in the asylum, thinks of counting to ten, taking a deep breath, and clearing her mind until the line between fantasy and reality becomes more distinct. 

One. 

Two. 

Three.

Four.

“Sampeah Peah Preah Khae Princess!” 

She pauses, dares to open her eyes the smallest of cracks, to find the floating paper lanterns dancing around her more beautifully than they ever had before in her memories and dreams. In an unexpected way, the vision seems stranger than fiction. 

“I wanted to surprise you.” A voice says from just behind her right shoulder and Azula turns just in time to see Aang surrounded by a soft halo of light as he floats down to the ground in a warm draft of air. 

Feelings of hurt, abandonment, fury, and relief threaten to rush to the surface all at once. Her fingers close into clenched fists, her teeth set on edge, and her whole body goes rigid. She could strike like a snake, she doesn’t need fire to make a man hurt. There is, as Ozai had always reminded her, more than one way to skin to badgermole. 

She pitches forward in a manic fury only to be caught by the Avatar who spins her into his arms and looks down at her with an amused smile. 

“Dance with me Princess,” he whispers against the shell of her ear before spinning her away again into the field of lanterns. 

For a brief moment in time, Azula is suspended in the soft unfocused light of the blazing lanterns. The full moon shines down upon her and she thinks of the small girl she was, running the streets of Caldera on Bon Om Tuk with all the other children. She thinks of marveling at the older girls who danced with complete abandon in the arms of their sweethearts, not caring what the older men and women would whisper in the market stalls the following morning. She remembers the aching consuming feeling of never knowing if or when she would be so free to dance or love someone more than she loved her pride. She remembers wondering if she would ever be so beautiful, if she would ever feel so beautiful . 

For a brief moment in time, Azula sees herself outside of her own body, her hair long and wild as it whips in the wind, her simple dress billowing out behind her. She sees the look of wonder and awe on her own face.

For a brief moment in time, Azula is free, spinning in and out of the arms of her lover, not caring what talk at tomorrow’s market will bring, what lies in wait beyond the horizon.

In a deft move, Aang snaps her back to his side and twirls them around in circle after circle until her head is so light she feels they barely touch the ground. She remembers her dream from a few months ago, remembers the heat of a thousand suns consuming her while the charming Airbender spun her around like a rag doll. How she had protested then, insisted he let her ago, insisted they run from it all, get out of the burning house while they still could.

“Dance with me Princess,” He’d said. 

And now, surrounded by a hundred little twinkling fires, Azula can’t find it in herself to care. 

“Dance with me Princess!” He crows as a gust of wind propels them just off of the ground. 

The fear and anger drains from her body, evaporates into the night air and she finds herself awash with a feeling she can no longer deny.

She loves him, she loves him, she loves him.

The laughter bubbles out of her, giddy and mad and to her delight—he joins in. 

Chapter Text

An unusually chilling breeze blows across the island one morning and Azula and Aang spring out of bed, rushing around the house to close the windows as quickly as possible to keep the cold air out. From their bedroom window, Azula can see that the sky out over the water looks bleak and the early morning light is weak and grey. She waits to feel the foreboding feeling the heavy mist low on the horizon can only signal, but instead she feels a strong arm sling around her waist and pull her back into a warm embrace. 

“It’s almost monsoon season,” she says to no one in particular. They’ll have to prepare the garden and secure the house and even be sure that Appa’s stable is ready to withstand the coming storms. There’s so much to be done she’s nearly dizzy with it. “We’re nowhere near ready.”

A hand deftly sweeps a section of hair over Azula’s opposite shoulder and swoops in to press a kiss against the side of her neck. 

“You think too much,” Aang husks before stopping to kiss her once more. “Come back to bed.”  

“I am a little cold.” Azula admits with a small smile on her face.

“I could warm you right up.” He wiggles his eyebrows in a way that attempts but fails miserably at being alluring. And yet, she finds the gesture the slightest hint endearing anyway.

“I’m sure you could,” she says slyly before pressing her cold nose into the crook of his neck and the mighty Avatar yelps, causing Azula to burst into joyous laughter. He pulls her in even tighter and begins to sway in the cold morning air.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to the monsoon season. Leaves far more time to slow down and spend some time inside traveling far more spiritual pursuits.” The impish look on his face was telling. Spiritual pursuits indeed. 

She closes her eyes and relaxes fully into his hold until she feels boneless and knows it is only his solidness holding them both up.

“Is that so?” She murmurs.

“Mmhmm” he hums, “ very much so.” Cracking a single eye open, she trails a lone, teasing finger down the airbender’s neck.

“I don’t suppose you’d want to tell me what, exactly, it is you have in mind?” She tries to sound coquettish but comes off sounding more sleepy than anything.

“No, I think it’s far better if I show you what I mean.” The sound of his voice is impish but contrasts with the gentle way he reaches up to cradle the back of her head in his hands. “But first, I think someone might need a little rest before I hazard another demonstration.” She thinks to protest but her limbs feel heavy. Whatever storms might be brewing over the horizon, today she feels perfectly safe and sound in her husband’s arms.

“I do feel awfully tired lately.” Aang smiles crookedly and lovingly smooths the hair back from her face.

“I did keep you up half the night last night,” he says sighing.

“And the night before,” she tries to hide just how tired she is by yawning into his chest but he catches her red handed.

“How dare you!” He gasps exaggeratedly “The night before was all you Princess!” She chuckles sleepily before giving herself over to another yawn.

“Whatever you say Husband .” 

Without a word, Aang carefully lifts Azula into bed and situates her in a nest of blankets and pillows. When she’s sure she’s never been more comfortable in her life, she feels his body settle next to hers as he sits on the edge of the bed. 

“Stay with me until I fall asleep?” She murmurs curling around his side 

“Of course.” He replies, eyes unmistakably full of love. “Of course.”

When she awakens, the bedroom is dark but the air is much warmer than she remembered it being when she first drifted off. She rises from the bed and walks towards the front room of the house to find a fire crackling in the hearth and the Avatar hard at work at his wooden desk with a pair of spectacles low on his nose, reading by candlelight. 

Azula can’t help the smile that comes unbidden to her lips, watching Aang flipping through pages of letters and even taking down some notes of his own with an occasional flourish. Somehow, for the first time in such a long time, her husband looks very stately and befitting his station. He’s quite handsome in the soft lighting, the square of his jaw strong yet refined. His plump lower lip juts out the tiniest bit when he’s perplexed, the bad habit of a boy who must have chewed on all his writing implements when he was younger. For a moment she sees him not as the twenty-six year old man that sits before her, but as the fifteen year old boy she once chased across the far reaches of the Earth Kingdom all those years ago. There’s so much of this boy in the man she’s come to love and she’s grateful for it, grateful that she can think of that boy and smile knowing that he has helped her learn to find and accept the girl inside of her too. She had lost so many years to detesting the monster she’d become that she’d forgotten the child she had been once upon a time.

This man. The Avatar. Her companion. Her husband. Her savior. 

He has saved her life no doubt. Any life she had left to live in the asylum, or released to play nursemaid to her building self hatred, was no life at all. Where complete and utter control had once offered the only opportunity to feel alive, she now felt heady at the thought of a dance or a game, a race in the water, a run up the hill, a night in his arms. In some ways she understands that he returned to her something she had lost long before she was ever aware who or what the Avatar was.

“Azula…” The sound of his soft voice brings an easy smile to her lips. He looks her over, eyes glancing over the tops of the wire rimmed lenses. “How did you sleep?”

“Well, thank you.” she replies leaning her weight against the pillar he had cracked so long ago. “How long was I out?” His smile is brief but she finds it warmer than the fire he’s conjured in the hearth.

“Not as long as you’d think.” For a moment he pauses to look back down at the page before him then out the window as though he’s taking stock of his surroundings in a way he hasn’t since he first sat down to write. She follows his gaze out the window and she sees the darkness outside has less to say about the hour and more about what the horizon will bring. The sky is growing darker but it’s the electric feeling in the atmosphere that she notices most of all. “It’s just shy of noon, but it seems you were right. There’s a storm coming.” He tears his eyes away and lifts his pen again but just stops short of dipping it in the inkwell. “I’m sorry I’m so distracted…” 

“It’s alright. You are, after all, a very busy man.” She says teasingly, but his response is an awkward grimace he cannot hide.

“I do not wish to be.”

The exhaustion in his face is softened by the flickering light of the flame, but it is far from invisible. The mantle of his shoulders is tense and strained in a way that suggests he is carrying each and every one of his a hundred and twenty six years. What a funny contradiction to have the heart of a small child and a spirit nearly five thousand years old.

There are some wounds she cannot heal, like the angry starburst found in the middle of his back. The first time they had made love she had scraped her fingers over it. She’s not sure she would want to undo that fateful day she took his life, not when he has given her so much life in return. She is sorry that she hurt him. She never wonders how many years here on this island it would take her to repent for her teenaged crimes against humanity. She only wonders how many years it will take her to repent for her crimes against the man she calls her husband, the man that she loves. If there is a burden to carry, a load she can lift, a life she can give in his stead, she will. She will not leave him to shoulder the world alone. 

She emerges from the shadows and approaches him languidly, bringing her hands up to his shoulders and pressing down on them firmly, encouraging him to release the tension there. 

“What can I do?” She asks softly.

“I don’t suppose you could undo a hundred and eighty years of war?” His joke falls flat in its sincerity.

“Probably not.” She murmurs, but for him, she would be willing to try. “Is there something else I can do?” 

Aang looks down at the materials on his desk and sighs wearily. 

“I think you had the right idea about sleeping the day away.” He gathers the papers as orderly as possible and slips them into a compartment in the desk before locking it with a resolute click. 

“That’s easy enough, you just leave that in my very capable hands.” She whispers, pressing a kiss to his temple and sliding his glasses off the bridge of his nose. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you wear these before, they’re delectable.”  

He chuckles. 

“Well, if you can believe it, these old eyes just aren’t what they used to be a hundred years ago.”

“Oh, I’m sure.” Azula says peeling herself off Aang’s back, a plan forming in her head as to how she can be of service. She’s fluent in multiple languages, well studied in the military and cultural histories of the world and her eyes work just perfectly. She hadn’t planned to be some dignitary’s secretary but she hadn't planned to be a farmer’s wife either and she has adapted so far. She’ll adapt again and she’ll start by whittling away at the stack of letters in the drawer.

But first she will quiet his mind the best way she knows how. 

“Come to bed Avatar,” she says, untying her robe and letting it fall to the floor, “you’ve earned it.”

Soon his work is forgotten, the simple wooden chair falls to the floor, and her body is lifted into his strong arms with a laugh that echoes through the house long after they reach the bedroom.

It’s worse than she ever could have imagined. There are letters everywhere, unanswered requests, piles of entreaties, dignitary missives, threats of war—both paltry and concerning. She need not have the training befitting a crown princess to know what this mess makes painfully clear. 

The world runs unbalanced and unchecked by the power of the Avatar. As much as she needs him, the world needs him more. His simple day trips and occasional overnights will not be enough to set the world back on its axis. She wonders now if it has ever been righted since the day her great-grandfather first knocked it off balance. With very little news entering the asylum and even less reaching the island, there is much she doesn’t know about the world that went on turning around her. 

What she sees on the scrolls before her distresses her, not because she lacks the constitution to handle the truth but because she has never been able to run from it. Try as she might, Azula has never been able to outrun fate or destiny and the sainted Airbender and the dethroned Fire Princess can run from who and what they are no longer. The Avatar and the woman who killed him. The Light of the World and the wretched woman who would trap him in shadow, shackling him to a life he never should have known.  

Once, wrapped in the arms of her love lying before the dying embers of a fire, Aang asked her if she had ever given thought to the fancy of being someone else. She knew from his stories that he had dreamed of being a great many other things. When tired and overwhelmed he retreated into other worlds where he lived as a shepherd in the western reaches of the Earth Kingdom or a baker in the northern rocky crags of the Fire Nation. In many of his dreams he is a boy with a childhood and a full future stretched out before him like a smooth and winding road that rises up to meet his feet on his journey. 

In a lover’s embrace, she did not know how to tell him that dreaming was the only luxury life in the palace could never afford her. There was a brief time when she allowed herself to imagine a world where her mother returned to them early one evening, another where Zuko would be welcomed back into the arms of their father, an even more fragile dream where Lu-Ten’s broad shoulders and smiling face had never been struck down at Ba Sing Se.

These dreams became something like a vice around her neck, a noose that squeezed and squeezed until she had to choose between letting them consume her or cutting herself down from a great height.

If anything remains of the woman that was her mother, she can never return. If anything remains of her father in the shell that sits deep inside that prison cellar, he will never love them. The next time she sees Lu-Ten it will be on the occasion of her death, if Agni ever deigns her worthy of entering the realm of his most ardent and committed believers. 

Dreams are beautiful golden gossamer things, yes, but in the end only the truth remains. She is but a demon and he, a god. 

And nothing she can say or do will make it not so. 

With a brilliant clarity, she gently reorders the papers and tucks them away in the desk drawer and locks them with the key the Avatar has taken to wearing tied at his waist. It was easy enough to slip it out from around him when his mind was occupied with more worldly pursuits. He thought not for the key or the dreaded drawer when her fingertips flitted across the dip of his left hip. Now, deep in the throes of sleep he thinks not of the secrets he has tucked away in their home, only of tracing the curve of the backs of her thighs in the moonlight.

For now, she is happy to leave him to his dreams.   

Standing from the chair and extinguishing the lone reading candle with her fingers, she pushes away from the desk with a sigh and faces her fate.

You cannot unknow that which you already know. You cannot undo that which has already been done. Regret is a road that leads nowhere. Hoping to change the past is an exercise that is as fruitless as it is futile. Azula, daughter of Ursa and Ozai, granddaughter of Azulon, and great-great daughter of Sozin will be what she has always been. A woman of action.

She cranes her neck to stare at the tricks of light that play at the far end of the room like the faint memories of the shadow puppet shows that played at her earliest of name days and smiles serenely. Tonight, she will fall into bed with the man she loves just one more time. While he sleeps she will snake her arms around him and place her wet cheek upon his cheek and breathe with him until time slows and the sky is suspended in the place between night and day. 

What happens next will feel small and far away, a glimpse of a thing that lives in her bones before it even happens. Their last conversation is a puppet show thrown up on the wall of their bedroom for her to watch again and again. 

The story is a simple one. In the early twilight she will pack him up and send him away to play the hero once more, but they both know she won’t be going with him.

He will stoop as if he is a willow under a great weight and she will stand tall and unyielding like a heightening flame. 

His hands will shake and clench and unclench as though he is losing something dear to him. He will be searching her eyes, looking for something or someone he thought he knew, but her flinty eyes will show him no pity. No comfort. No rest.  

The more deeply wounded his voice, the shriller hers will be. 

This life will be another dream of his, floating on the back of a dragonfly’s broken wing. The tale of the poor farmer and his wife and their house built upon the shore. 

And no matter the impulse, no matter the feel of the heart beneath her breast straining until it shatters, the lungs in her chest squeezing until they strangle, she will not cry. She will not cry. She will not cry. 

And she will not reach into the sky to pull lightning down with her hands. 

This time she won’t need it to fell him.

Chapter Text

Their fingers meet over the flames. She’s never felt something so alarmingly intimate. The mere touch of his fingers are electrifying and unlike any kind of elemental bending she’s ever experienced. This must be what it is like to bend a man, to mold him to her will. The next words out of her mouth will be crucial. Any words she speaks to him now will impact the viability of a potential relationship between them. She cannot explain how she knows what she knows, she can only know it.

She could command him to do anything and he would do it. This is the power of the Asawa Siga, and he is but a moth to a flame.  

Together, they could rise to great power, overthrow her brother and take the throne if she truly wanted. And she had already breached the gates of the impenetrable Ba Sing Se when she was a girl. With a fully realized Avatar behind her, she could take the Earth Kingdom as her prize and with it the North and South Poles for fun. She could be queen of the world. 

It’s a pity it took her family this long to realize the easiest way to defeat the Avatar was to wed him. 

She laughs lowly and revels in the aftershocks it sends through his body. He’d be flush against her now if it weren’t for the thin barrier of flame between them.

She’s tempted. How could she not be?

Before her stands a manifestation of the absolute power of the elements on earth, a bridge between the spirit world and the waking world. 

She’s tempted.

He’s filled out over the years. His chest is broader and the rope of muscles in his back are more defined.  His figure is still streamlined, a consequence of his Air Nomad origins, she supposes, but much more mature. 

He’s simply a god. 

And he’s handsome enough. Beautiful even. His features have sharpened but appear delicate somehow. 

He’s quite the specimen. And he’s her husband.

Her husband.

The thought sobers her. Suddenly she is reminded that this is more than a play for power, that she is no longer the girl who had no compunctions about setting the world ablaze if it would return to her the father she had always dreamed of but never had. 

She is a woman of her word. Her oath. Her vow. She is the Avatar’s wife and will be until one of them dies of old age or breaks and kills the other first. 

If the next words that fall from her lips will define the future parameters of their relationship, then she must choose carefully.

But looking at him across the flames, feeling the palm of his hand against hers, there’s only one thing she wants that no one else has ever given her—

the truth 

The most basic building block of any genuine human relationship...not that she would really know. There wasn’t anything the staid air of the palace didn’t poison. Not her relationship with her brother, her few friends, her own mother. 

A world where she could build a relationship upon mutual trust with the Avatar should be beyond the scope of the possible. 

His eyes meet hers.

It should be. 

She runs her fingers across the edge of the silk sash draped across his body and pulls until the garment gives away and his robe loosens under her touch. 

She wants it off of him, wants no barriers between them. 

She wants, for once, to be on equal ground with someone, for someone to see her not as she sees herself but as she really is.

If she is going to bare herself open, then it’s only fair he be just as vulnerable.

She slips her hands inside his robe, over the marble of his shoulders and pushes the outer robe off until it falls to the ground in a rustle of fabric. 

He stands before her unclothed save for the soft buttery yellow of his oversized hadajuban. 

That too will have to be removed, but  before she can work out the ties he stills her hands. Eyes glittering, he smiles crookedly and undoes the ties himself. 

The offending item falls to the ground and for a single, blissful moment, they are undefined by the world around them. 

Equally yoked in every sense of the world.

She lays a hand against his chest, feels the steady rhythm of his heartbeat.

“Truth,” she breathes, “tell me the truth, tell me why we’re really here. What have you and Zuko done?”

He lifts her trembling hand to his mouth and brushes his lips against them.

“Is that all?” He asks, smiling against the warmth of her fingers. She nods 

“It’s everything.” 

She wakes up in a cold sweat, a feeling of nausea and dread knotted low and deep in her belly. The thought of what she said to him, what she was willing to do to send him away, makes her sick to her stomach. 

What was she to do? He had told her himself the bargain they had made for her life. She was to live as the Avatar’s prisoner forever. A mad, pretty little trinket meant to be worn around his neck like an anvil. A reminder of the cost that comes when the Avatar busies himself with political matters that aren’t his concern. Whether she lives or dies, she’s meant to be his punishment. 

And for once in her short but eternally long feeling existence, Azula had been a gift. He’d muttered it in her ear on the edge of desire, turning her slowly in his arms. A weapon that would not prosper against him. A sign of spring after a long cold winter. Together they had taken their piece of scorched earth and built something wondrous on it. 

But that was before Azula had realized that the foundation of their relationship, no matter how strong, had been built on slippery ground. It was only a matter of time until their palace on the shore tumbled into the sea. Whatever pleasure the Avatar derived from their island that stands in waters of the Fire Nation like a manifestation of their shared dream, would always be at odds with the truth of his calling. The Avatar cannot belong to a wife anymore than he can belong to a single nation or governing body. The Avatar belongs to the people, all of them, to a world that is much bigger than the topography of her desire. 

Somewhere along the way she had taught him how to be more selfish with his time and his desire. She has taught him the significance of slaking his thirst first before allowing himself to be consumed with the needs of other people. She had taught him the only way she knew how, with her body as his guide, leading him with her hips, until he understood the rhythm of push and pull and give and take from the perspective of someone who was much more comfortable with taking than she ever was with giving. 

Once, between her legs, he had called her Sifu in jest. If she could not be Lord of her own nation, she would be king of taking her own pleasure first, of drawing it out between their lips, be it his peak or hers. How beautiful it felt to corrupt this tiny piece of him, to teach him the simple pleasure one could take in his own selfishness, how enjoyable it could be for both of them. She never stopped to realize that, all the while she had been teaching him how to put himself first, she was learning what it meant to make a noble sacrifice, the mechanics of which had eluded her for her entire life. 

In each other they had found balance. It would have been laughable if it hadn’t been so ruinous, if it hadn’t felt like being forced to bloom over and over again only to have the pedals plucked from her pistil. 

Of course she sent him away. To have allowed him to stay would be tantamount to farce, of ordering a second, quieter genocide from the from the comfort of his arms, watching safe and sound on the island as the world around them burned.

This, Azula knows, is the dream she had all those months ago, the house in flames while he spun her around the room in dizzying circles. These days, the world is always just on the brink of the next skirmish that will lead to war and the Avatar, the only one who seems to be able to stop it. 

However badly she may have wanted to see the world set aflame a decade ago, she can no longer muster the strength to imagine it now. 

Aang, in his infinite wisdom might suggest it was precisely because of her strength, not in spite of it that she had changed. 

Aang.  

Aang was hers, and now he’s gone.

Her face and stomach twist in grief. She leans over the railing and retches. 

There’s no time for malaise. No time for melancholy. no time to wallow in the taste and smell of her final defeat. No longer a princess and no longer a farmer’s wife, there is no one else to prepare the fields for the rains, no one else to stock the storage room, no one else to prepare for the storm, no great beast she can fly to gather provisions. 

Azula is a survivor. Ursa saw to that. She wakes every morning and dresses in silence, braids her hair back from her face, and digs her claws into this new life that is not so new anymore so much as it is absent something that she loved. 

Every morning she rises with the sun and learns to move like it, move with it. Her qi is getting stronger with each passing day, but she still digs her fingers into the ground like an earth bender and sends the energy there back into the soil, afraid of the light that might leave her fingertips if she is not careful and her grief boils the slightest bit over.

In the afternoon, when she is done with her katas, when she is done planting and seeding and pruning and weeding and crying into the flower beds like a schoolgirl, or worse Ty Lee, Azula strips and disappears into the ocean to cool her blazing body. 

Floating on her back, she sometimes imagines that the waves might carry her out to sea. She doesn’t dare imagine distant shores. What good is a shore without someone sitting there waiting for her to rise from the water? Even when the sky opens up, Azula floats with the tide, watching the lightning streak across the sky with grim fascination, recalling stories her mother told them when they were children about angry gods and their careless tossing of thunderbolts so bright and brilliant they had consumed their own children and families in their rage. 

The nothingness she feels now makes her wonder how many more times she can expect the punishment meant for her in the afterlife to materialize on this plane of existence? How many prisons will she know the inside of before she shuffles off this mortal coil? How many more are waiting for her even then? 

She loved Aang. 

Loves him still. 

The words feel heavy and strange in her mouth. Not that she ever says them aloud. If she was too much of a coward to say them when he laid beside her as the sky hovered between light and dark, why should she speak them now? 

She may never speak aloud again.

She’s standing on the beach late one evening watching Tài Yáng Shǒu shine bright and high in the sky when the delusions overtake her again. It’s been weeks since the Avatar’s departure and she thought herself over the worst of them, the visions where just out of the corner of her eye she sees the fluttering of an orange robe alighting to the sky, the hallucinations where she lets sleep wash over her in the bed that they made together and feels haunted by the weight of him settling down next to her on the mattress as though he is watching her sleep. In her most ardent dreams, he whispers her name and gathers her fingers into his hands and presses featherweight kisses to her fingertips before fading into the blurry blue horizon.

It’s not her longing that is curtailed by the time or distance between them, but her newfound penchant for hope. He will never return. She’d seen to that, hadn’t she? The things she’d said are a ledge she can never come back from. She knows that. Oh, how she knows it. It torments her every waking moment, it’s taken up residence as a presence inside her head, a constant thrum of anxiety that never abates, only swells with memories of hands and teeth and lips and the refrain of his laugh skimming the surface of her mind.

She’d once thought she had everything in her world just so, then it had toppled over in a courtyard full of ice and blue flame. So this time, when she thought she had everything in her world just so , she knew better than to trust it. She knows better to hope that this time will be different from the last. There are only so many times that she can be rescued from herself.

The Avatar will not be returning to save her. The message had been clear the first time she had woken to the sound of another living soul on the island. Longing for Aang, she rose from bed and dressed as quickly as she could, rushing down the stairs of their home to the shore where she had been greeted by the sight of a faceless boatman disappearing into the morning fog after leaving a neat pack of provisions by her door. 

Aang might leave her but he’d never leave her for dead. In the last delivery there had even been a small package of rasmalai that had nearly broken her. 

Somehow his kindness is worse than his ire. 

It would be easier if he hated her, easier if she hated him, but she doesn’t. She’s not sure she ever could. Not when each week, like the well oiled gears of a clock, the boatman returns with more than she could possibly need. Not when Aang has made sure there is enough for her to ferret away for when the worst of the rains come and travel to the island will be impossible for such a small boat. Not when Aang has found a way to see to her without ever seeing her. 

And no one ever comes to see her, no one but the boatman. And the boatman only comes in the wake of dawn and not when the velvet black of starry midnight covers the island. So why is there a golekan that is sluicing through the water and parting the waves in the distance? She blinks into the darkness and braces herself against the prickly feeling that raises the hair at the back of her neck. 

When she was a child, Lo and Li would warn her that this sensation could mean only one thing, that someone, somewhere was walking on her grave. The thought seemed ludicrous to her then, humorous even, but now she’s not so sure. 

Naturally, she turns cold with dread when a ship as old as she is crashes into the shallows. From here, it’s tattered sails make it look like a barge for the dead, something she’s only ever heard of in fairytales and the odd story Lu Ten would tell to terrify them when their fathers were away on military offensives and their mothers kept vigil, waiting for news to reach them from over the palace gates. 

A lone passenger, a long and tall woman with waist length hair appears at the ship’s bow, robes billowing around her in the choppy waters and wind. Even at a distance, her willowy shape is aristocratic and imposing. When the moonlight hits her face and glances off the slope of her nose and the high apples of her cheeks, Azula cannot help the strangled gasp that escapes her mouth and leaves her weak in the knees. Across the low crewing waves a pair of golden eyes find hers and glint mysteriously. 

“Azula.” A voice says melodious but commanding, carried over the distance by an almost supernatural wind. 

She hasn’t heard that voice in years. She never expected to hear it again so soon, but she recognizes it immediately. She’d know it anywhere, as surely as she knows her own.

“Mother.” Azula breathes, breaking her month-long vow of silence. The woman turns and smiles and it’s the last thing she sees before her legs give out from under her in an instant. 

Chapter Text

“Bǎo bǎo, you must eat something.” The soothing voice washes over her like a balm. A sure hand moves against her forehead and then rests against her cheek. She feels like a child again, a baby awash in the glow of her mother’s smile. Or a creature that is still becoming, something safe and warm and dark. Protected. 

She doesn’t want to wake. 

“Sleeping.” She murmurs, hands tucked under her head, torn between leaning into the touch and pulling away from it so she will be left to rest. 

A patient laugh sounds from somewhere above her. 

“You’ve been sleeping long enough. Wake up Azula and greet the day.”

The phrase sounds familiar but her mind still feels like the Bay of Guanyin just before sunset, filled with a dense and creeping fog. 

“Where am I?” Azula asks, reaching into her memory and coming up empty. She can’t say what happened before this moment or what is supposed to happen after.  

“You’re on the isle of your grandmother’s birth.” the voice says softly, stroking the hair on her head.

“Zaj Laug.” She breathes. It’s coming back to her, slowly but surely, the pieces beginning to fall into place. “Where is my husband?”

The voice above laughs melodiously. 

“I don’t think I could ever get used to hearing you say that.” Azula is lying in a lap. The lap of a woman. It’s warm and she doesn’t want to move. “And your husband is wherever you sent him.” 

“I sent him away.” Azula says faintly aware that there was some kind of rift between them but what exactly it was about she cannot put her finger on. 

“You set him free, Azula. There’s a difference. Your father never understood that.” Azula’s father didn’t understand many things about the way the world really worked or the people in it. He only saw what he chose to. Azula is different. Or, at the very least, she longs to be. 

“I wanted him to stay.” Azula didn’t want to be alone but she felt she had little other choice. How could she make him choose between his happiness and the world? And could he really have been happy making any other choice? 

Could she?

“Of course you wanted him to stay, treasure.” Sure fingers tuck a strand of hair behind her ear and trace the line of her jaw reverently, soothingly, as though trying to memorize the features of her face, as though it is something too precious to ever be forgotten again. 

She thinks of Aang, wonders if it’s possible that he’ll forget her in time. She doesn’t think she could ever forget him. 

“I love him.” The revelation is still relatively new. Being honest with herself like this is new most of all. It has always been easy to be unflinchingly honest about the affairs of others, but never the affairs of her own heart. She supposes this is the next path she must walk on her journey to healing for a man and a marriage she cannot have anymore.  Or, perhaps it is time to think of healing for the sake of healing, even if she shouldn’t ever meet another living soul on this island again.

“Love is a powerful thing.” The woman says wistfully, as though moving back through the memories of her own youth. “Let us hope that, in your case, it is a good one.” 

Azula swallows back the sour taste in her mouth as she hopes the same thing. 

“You really must eat.” The voice says again, this time with a compassion Azula has not known in the time since Aang went away, a compassion she has not known since her mother went away when she was a small girl. “I made bubur ayam.”

Her mother’s favorite whenever she and Zuko were sick.

She takes a deep breath and opens her eyes and finds a familiar face peering down into hers. She remembers last night’s arrival, the way the ship on the horizon had blown into the coast. The familiar face isn’t just any familiar face. It’s her mother. Her mother who, by all accounts, should be dead in any way that matters. 

Her mother is here on this island, here in this house.

Under the edict of the old laws in the time before Zuko’s reign, it would have been Azula’s right and duty to strike Ursa down where she stood. And, in the time before, it might have been her pleasure. But now, cradled in her mother’s lap like the small child she was before Ursa disappeared out of her life forever, she isn’t so sure. 

“How?” How did she escape Ozai, escape the fire kingdom, escape her responsibility to her family and her two children? And how did she find Azula on this island, how did she know to look, and how did she know Azula would need her? 

She lurches out of her mother’s lap and pulls back in fear and surprise at the revelation. 

“So many questions, child.” Ursa says with eyes that are still sharp but kinder than she’d expect given the history between them. “Let’s start with one.” 

So many years without her, and yet Azula has never wanted her mother more. 

Her mother’s answers are as vague as they are captivating. 

From what Azula can piece together, Ursa lived for a time in the outskirts of the Fire Nation, in the forgotten colonies with little contact with the rest of the world. She cut her long beautiful hair, a vanity that she had never lived without, and learned how to work with her hands, pulling a living from the land, and tending to the young and the infirm as the other men and women did their work. 

Azula wouldn’t have noticed it at first, the physical changes in her mother, but she sees them now. The woman’s hair is long and healthy again and she is clothed just as finely as Azula remembered, but  her limbs are corded with muscle and she can see the spray of freckles across her nose and cheeks, and on the skin of her shoulders that peeks through her robes. 

Her mother’s skin is no longer pale and unblemished like an ivory doll. Her fingers are still beautiful but they look strong and there are signs of a life worked for and earned in ways they never would have looked in the palace.

Azula should know. 

And as Ursa ladles the rich rice porridge into a large bowl for her daughter, all Azula can think is that once again, looking at her mother is like looking into a well and seeing her reflection staring back at her from the bottom. 

It seems their lives have evolved to be not so different from each other after all. 

Azula lifts a spoon into her mouth and sighs at the first bite. It’s been so long since she’s had food cooked by hands that weren’t her own. She thinks it would be delicious even if it were terrible, but it’s far from terrible. It’s amazing.

She turns to her mother with a suspicious air. The words tumble from her mouth before she can stop them.

“You can’t cook.” 

When she was younger, Lo and Li would have slapped her mouth for such insolence or worse for it to be aimed at a Fire Lady no less. But her aunts are dead, her mother stripped of her crown, and Azula’s title seems to be little more than a pretty bauble meant to ensure the stability of the kingdom until her brother produces a worthy heir. 

“There are a lot of things you don’t know about me, daughter of Ozai.” Ursa says, ladling a second helping into her bowl. 

“And is that who I am?” Azula asks, genuinely interested in the answer. “Ozai’s daughter?” Despite the striking similarities between them, and the part of her that once hoped some of her mother’s mercy and love might be buried deep within her bones. 

“Only when you’re too much like me.” Ursa says dryly. “Eat, before it gets cold. You need your strength. The heartiness will help with the shock.”

Unsure of what else to say, Azula puts her spoon in her mouth to avoid filling it with her own foot. 

“You know,” Ursa lets the corners to her mouth lift with a faint smile, “you’re not as light as you used to be.” 

She imagines twenty years will do that to a person. 

“You could have left me on the beach.” Azula’s forced cheerfulness sounds mulish.

“I made do. You were so tired you wouldn’t wake. And despite what you may think of me, I’m still your mother.” 

Azula doesn’t know what she thinks of her mother anymore. 

“Thank you.” Surprisingly, her throat doesn’t close at the words. 

“You’re welcome. I was happy to do it. Besides, what would you have done when the tide rolled back in?” 

Azula hides her smile in the cloth napkin Ursa had handed over with her bowl. 

“How are you feeling?” Ursa’s gaze is familiar and searching, looking at Azula for signs of potential illness or weakness. 

“Tired, but alright.” And better than she’s felt in awhile. The food sits in her stomach without the unease she’s felt with every other meal she’s managed in the last week, that is, when she’s managed at all. “The bubur’s helped.” 

Ursa hums and the hearth-like color of her irises glows with a warmth Azula seldom remembers seeing after Ozai declared the young princess had outgrown her mother’s love. 

That particular memory reopens an old wound, one that is more tender than she realized. 

Suddenly, she doesn’t feel like answering Ursa’s questions but asking one of her own. 

“How long do you plan on staying?” An important question since she’s seen neither hide nor hair of her brother since he bid her goodbye at her wedding, nor her uncle who could not bring himself to do more than to write the occasional letter. Not that they’d be permitted to visit.

And Ozai, well, she doesn’t even know if he still lives.

It seems that without her husband, Ursa may very well be the last person left to her in all the four corners of the world. 

Ursa’s face is a curious terrain, just as mysterious to her as it once was when she was much younger and desired to know her mother’s deepest secrets as though being able to unlock them would be the key to unlocking her own. 

How long do you plan on staying, is yet another question as loaded as any other question she's asked this morning, and as any other question she’s ever asked the woman before her. 

But all she gets is a cryptic smile and a demurely raised eyebrow as a hand reaches out to cup her cheek. 

“That remains to be seen.”

Chapter Text

She’d write to Zuko if she could but there is no sky bison to carry her letters, and no husband who can whisk them away to the local post some thirty miles over the sea. 

Even if there was, she isn’t sure what she would say. Her imagined letter is nothing but a collection of disjointed lines. 

Mother is here.

Mother is alive. 

Mother is still mother.

The tension between them is still palpable. The past week has been a maelstrom of thinly veiled insults and longing on Azula’s part, and judgemental kindness and loving overbearing direction on Ursa’s part.

This must be what it feels like to have an adult relationship with one’s mother. 

In the early mornings, Azula wakes to watch Ursa from the balcony of the house. She never eats, never sleeps, never even stops to ask for anything like Azula's quiet absolution. Ursa is constantly moving, continuing the work Azula began in the weeks earlier but had been too tired to carry out as of late. With Ursa’s help, she’ll be ready for the rest of the rainy season and for what passes for winter on the island. And, from her last check of the stores, there should be enough for the both of them to make it. Soon the water will be too rough and too much for Ursa to travel back, not that Azula has ever seen the boat that brought Ursa here again. 

She wonders about the boat but never asks. Azula has no interest in getting off this island that is her curse just as much as it is her blessing. Besides, however sad it may be, where would she go? There isn’t a soul that would take her back if they could, save for maybe her brother who can’t afford the threat her mere complicated existence poses to ten tenuous years of peace. 

If there’s still such a thing as peace. 

It didn’t seem so from the letters locked away in the Avatar’s desk. Somewhere, there was always someone standing on the back of someone smaller, someone who had power and someone who didn’t, someone whose great greed could not be satisfied with ruining a single life. 

And it wasn’t only governments, not only soldiers, or princesses and kings. The rest of the world didn’t need Azula to carry on in turmoil. There were plenty of husbands with loose fists, mothers with sharp tongues, employers with enough tricks to keep you from taking home a fair and decent pay. 

Evil rested less than good, and though the Avatar was a god, even he couldn’t be everywhere.

“What’s gotten into you, Azula? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Her mother says, startling her from her own thoughts. 

How long had Ursa been watching her when she thought she’d been doing the same?

Azula sighs deeply and lets her eyes drift out to sea. 

“I’ve been thinking.” 

“Ah, about your Avatar?”

“He’s not my Avatar.” Azula was always clear about that much, maybe more than Aang was. 

“Your husband then.” Ursa corrects, stepping up to take the railing with her hands. 

“He was hardly my husband, either.” Not for long anyway, not as long as she would have liked, and yet somehow, she knows she’ll always be his wife. 

“Doesn’t take long, I’m afraid.” Ursa’s smile is knowing and wistful, as though remembering a marriage of her own.

“Did you ever imagine things would end the way they did with father?”

“No.” Ursa’s voice is resigned. “But I suppose I always knew they would end.” 

Azula thinks of the rika ceremony and the sacred ribbon her parents held between their hands during their ceremony, the one that had burned into a million ashes. 

She’d never set fire to the one that she and Aang held. She doesn’t know what that means. 

“What was it like when it was over?” The relationship that had been destined to fail since the start. 

“It meant leaving everything I ever knew. I’d never lived out on my own before and certainly not under threat of death. But there was a certain relief at finally being free from the oppressive watch of the crown, and I can’t say I didn’t feel relief at being free from the worst of Ozai’s wrath.” 

“Relief.” The word is heavy in her mouth, ashen. She’d felt relief too, but she’d felt sorrow also. And even with his hands around her neck, she’d loved her father. She’ll love him until the bitter end. 

He will never have her devotion, but the child inside of her still longs to freely give him her heart.

Ozai may not have been capable of love, and Azula may only be capable of its fringes, but was Ursa capable of love? Where had Zuko learned what he learned? Was it uncle who taught him? Lu Ten? Did their mother foster the seedling of such love, deep in their hearts, or had the little they learned been picked up by an errant wind, wild and feral weeds that fought to grow even in the rocky terrain within them?

For reasons she refuses to name, it feels imperative to know. Ursa felt relief, but was that all she felt?

“And us, did you feel relieved to leave us?” 

Ursa’s eyes grow dark and the older woman’s face becomes completely open and passive all at once. 

“Relieved?” She chews on her bottom lip with her teeth, the least royal thing the woman has done since arriving. At least now Azula knows where she gets it from. “No. I didn’t feel relieved.”

“Then what did you feel, mother?” A word as loaded as the look in Ursa’s eyes.

“The words you’re looking for daughter, I fear you’ll never find.” 

“You don’t regret leaving.” 

Regret, that’s what she’s longed to hear all week, maybe all her life. And yet, not even in her dreams would the shadow of her mother lower herself to such depths. 

And now she’ll never hear the words.

“No, Azula. I don’t regret leaving.” 

The confirmation shouldn’t sting as much as it does. 

“What about me, what about Zuko?” A childish voice wells up from inside of her.

“Oh, bǎo bǎo.” Ursa reaches out to brush her fingers against Azula's cheek. For a brief, fleeting second, she welcomes the warmth before she jerks away.

“Were you sad to leave us?” She wonders, tears threatening to fall from her eyes. “Were you sad to leave me?” 

Ursa’s laugh is as heart-felt as it is cheerless. 

“I was empty. I had lost the two souls I had devoted myself to, built my life around. There was no one else I had loved more in the world. No one else I would sacrifice more for. And then suddenly you were gone. My beautiful, darling children, and I could never see you again, not without risking my life and the lives of anyone who had ever given me shelter or done me any kindness. Your father and his father before him were ruthless creatures. They wouldn’t have stopped until they ruined everything I loved. So, was I sad?” Ursa shrugs. “As sad as I had any right to be.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that in ways I will spend the rest of time unraveling, I’m as guilty in all this as I am a victim. That’s what it means to be a woman and sit the golden throne. But I suppose you would know, wouldn’t you?” 

For a moment she’s back in the palace, seated in front of a mirror, the ceremonial knife in her hands. 

Yes. She knows better than anyone. 

The silence stretches on until Ursa finally turns to her to fill it.

“These are all old stories, Azula. Fates and destinies we’ll never be able to change, even if we wanted to. But there are other stories, stories where you’ve lived a whole life in my absence, married a kind man, become a farmer’s wife. Tell me a story about your husband.” 

If only it were that simple. 

What story would she tell, the one where he had rescued her from the asylum like a prince saving her from a sorcerer’s tower? Or perhaps the one where he had flown her to a volcanic rock in the sea, hoping to start over? She could tell Ursa about how they fell in love so quickly and so thoroughly that she hadn't even realized what he’d done before it was too late. 

But in the wake of the latest fatal wound she had dealt out to the old enemy that had become her closest ally, the only story she can think to tell is about the very first time she felled him.

The light that emanated from his body, the white shock of his eyes, the scorching heat of an arrow running down the crown of his head.

He was a child, but he was beautiful, rising up above the crowd, shooting into the air like a fated flare in the glowing crystal cavern.

The real truth was that he had caused such a visceral reaction in her body that she could feel her own qi awakening in response to his, alighting at the most important parts of her, drawing in all the static electricity in the room. 

Aang was so electric, even when he didn’t mean to be. The energy just gathered around him. He drew things to him, people to him, movements to him.

He had drawn her in, eyes alight with  his ascendance, and in all the excitement, the pure feeling had discharged from her fingers and thrown him from his perch. 

There’d been no time for horror. Her teeth and her hair were standing on edge and the Avatar was dead. 

She and her brother were finally successful and her family could be reunited again. She had expected to feel triumphant, to feel smug. Instead, she felt gripped with indescribable grief at having ended something so beautiful.

The relief at finding out he was still alive had far outweighed her self-punishing doubt that she would ever be worthy of her father’s favor.

“It would be a long time until I realized what I’d done. The path I’d set both our lives on.”

And still, running her hand across the expanse of his back, feeling him shiver as her fingers brushed against his scar, regret was the last thing on her mind.      she could never regret what she had done, even as it made her ache for who they both had been.

Ursa’s lips lift at Azula’s admission.

“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”

As happened all too often with the Avatar, her plans were so dark and impenetrable they were opaque even to her.

“Sun Tzu?” 

“It might surprise you to know that I read, Princess Azula.” 

“However did you find the time?”

“I don’t know. You and your brother were quite the handful. But it may also surprise you to know that I had a life before the two of you.” 

Azula shudders. She can’t imagine it.

“Children.” Ursa says fondly. “You’ll understand one day.”

No. If there ever was a ship, it’s certainly sailed. 

“I’ll never be a mother.”

“You’ll be one sooner than you know.”

Before Azula can open her mouth to respond, a sharp crack can be heard in the distance.

“Would you look at that, lightning.” Ursa brushes her hair over a slender shoulder and pushes away from the railing. “Go inside before it starts to rain. The last thing we need is for you to catch your death.” 

The older woman sweeps down the stairs and begins preparing the house for the storm.

Exhausted, Azula does as she is told.

She dreams her body is trying to tell her something. There’s something changing inside of her everyday, something bigger than her longing for a love she never deserved but got to experience nonetheless. There’s a pulsing thing, a tangle of cells and limbs that isn’t her own that is threatening to grow and grow and burst out of her. She sees a plant that grows and grows until it has aerial roots that thicken into vines seeking other sources of sun and water, other soils to root in. 

She wakes in a cold sweat and scrambles from bed. Try as she might, she can’t breathe inside. The air feels too stifling. She runs out of the house as fast as she can and stumbles down the steps and into the sand where she falls to her knees and begins to heave. 

Instantly, Ursa is beside her, a hand on her back and another on her forehead as she pants in the misty rain. 

“Get back.” She rasps. “I’m dangerous.”

She thinks of the last time the Avatar carried her out of the house at inhuman speeds only to lay her down into a field of flames. She thinks she might explode again, thinks she might spit blue lightning and blue flame if she isn’t careful. 

And so close to the house, the results could be devastating.

“Please.” She moans at Ursa, afraid her mother won’t be able to withstand the heat, but Ursa stays firm. 

“I’m here.” She whispers against the shell of Azula’s ear, grounding her. “Breathe with me.” 

Azula tries to catch her breath, tries to feel her qi moving through her body, but it’s been so sluggish since Ursa arrived, so much slower to respond. Some moments she feels like she can scale the side of the volcano and others like she can’t get out of bed at all.

But more and more that feeling from her dream permeates, the searching roots, looking for more sun, more water, more air. 

There isn’t enough of it all in her soil. 

“What’s wrong with me?” Azula asks gulping for air.

“Too much to explain now, bǎo bǎo.” Ursa soothes.

Brow furrowed, Azula tries to still her mind enough to see her body the way Aang showed her the day he cracked her open. Energybending may require great focus and concentration beyond her in this moment, but not the ability to see herself and visualize her own qi. He taught her that. 

She pushes through the haze until she can see herself from the inside, see the lines of her body, see the energy moving from point to point. She’s stronger than she was the last time she did this, but there is a sickly leeching feeling eating away at a new thread of energy stored deep in her root.

“I don’t understand.” 

“You do.” Her mother’s palms hold her steady. 

Whatever it is that’s happening, whatever it is that’s growing inside her, if she can’t stop the bottomless drain, it will cannibalize them both.

“I need to—” she folds further into herself as the urgency rises, “I need to—” do something, anything, and the most obvious thing that comes to mind is the very trick that the Avatar had taught her, his hands cool on her burning abdomen, showing her how to reach inside herself and find the foreign object blocking her qi. 

She thinks of Aang, his fortitude, his surety, and takes the deepest breath she can manage, breathing deeper and deeper until she finds it—the jagged tungsten pin. 

It’s different than she remembers. It’s grown in size and shape and it’s still growing. She can feel it mutating and shifting, and she can sense the suckling tethers that shoot off it in spades, the spindly barbed wire like arms taking and taking from the other tiny pulsing qi that is small and struggling to survive. 

If she doesn’t stop it, there won’t be anything left. 

She has to pull the pin free, and this time, for good.

Desperate and fading, she turns to Ursa with understanding dawning over her. Aang had helped her before, had saved her in the beginning when she needed him most, but only her mother can help her now. This block isn’t merely just the heavy metal potion that she takes out of fear and without thinking, and it isn’t just the war or the asylum as a kind of aftermath. 

It’s something that goes back further than she’d ever imagined, to a time before she even knew the words for things like pain and anger and resentment, before she knew the words for a self-resentment that ran so deep it might have fueled the wars between nations if she had let it, razing the world to ashes. 

But now that she’s older, she finally knows what it all means. Eyes filling with salt, she speaks the words she had been afraid to speak for so long. 

“I need you.” Azula says and Ursa nods, reaching down to cover the hand over her abdomen.

“It will hurt.” Ursa warns, and hadn’t Ursa been warning her all this time? But Azula knows no other way forward but through. 

“I know.” 

Opening up usually does. 

Ursa links their fingers together and Azula holds on tight, slows her breathing, and holds on to her mother’s fingers like she did when she was a little girl and afraid of letting go. 

“On my mark.” Ursa says, voice strong but beautiful, the way Azula always remembered it. “One, two—”

Azula doesn’t hear three so much as she senses the snap when they direct all their energy inward. 

They pull. 

“We’re close.” Azula hears as her world gets smaller and the unthinkable pain grows. She can’t hold on much longer. 

“There.” Ursa calls, directing her attention to a single point. “Right there.”

The moment the tethers detach, the pain becomes a searing white light. 

Energy depleted, she fully expects to hit the ground, but the last thing she registers before losing consciousness is Ursa’s warm embrace.

“My brave, brave girl. You’ve done it.” her mother crows, “you’ve done it.”

And the white light fades to black.

She sleeps for nearly twenty hours.

When she wakes she can feel her strength returning, but it is still slow to respond. The process has been difficult and arduous on her body. 

Of course, now she can name exactly what has been going on these last few weeks. Her mind had experienced them as days endlessly blurred into the next, but her body has been diligently at work, marking the time of the Avatar’s absence. 

It seems she is meant to be reminded of his arrival into her life just as much as his departure. Wrapped in a cocoon of blankets, the knowledge sends a shiver through her, but she can’t tell if it is thrill or terror. 

She lays under the layers of warmth, hands resting over the contradiction of lightness and weight that’s settled in her womb. The parasitic pain is gone, but something else foreign grows in its place. Something so foreign it isn’t foreign so much as it is unexpected and wholly hers. 

If it’s thrill that she feels, there’s dread there too, building and building beneath it all. She can’t even bring herself to name what’s happening. But she feels her mother’s eyes on her as she moves around the room, tending to Azula’s every need like she is a small child again and Ursa has let the servants retire on a whim. 

The longer she lays in this bed, the more this thing between her and her mother begets resentment that she hasn’t quite found the words for yet and until she finds them, she’s not sure she’ll speak to Ursa again.

Chapter Text

She sleeps for nearly twenty hours.

When she wakes she can feel her strength returning, but it is still slow to respond. The process has been difficult and arduous on her body. 

Of course, now she can name exactly what has been going on these last few weeks. Her mind had experienced them as days endlessly blurred into the next, but her body has been diligently at work, marking the time of the Avatar’s absence. 

It seems she is meant to be reminded of his arrival into her life just as much as his departure. Wrapped in a cocoon of blankets, the knowledge sends a shiver through her, but she can’t tell if it is thrill or terror. 

She lays under the layers of warmth, hands resting over the contradiction of lightness and weight that’s settled in her womb. The parasitic pain is gone, but something else foreign grows in its place. Something so foreign it isn’t foreign so much as it is unexpected and wholly hers. 

If it’s thrill that she feels, there’s dread there too, building and building beneath it all. She can’t even bring herself to name what’s happening. But she feels her mother’s eyes on her as she moves around the room, tending to Azula’s every need like she is a small child again and Ursa has let the servants retire on a whim. 

The longer she lays in this bed, the more this thing between her and her mother begets resentment that she hasn’t quite found the words for yet and until she finds them, she’s not sure she’ll speak to Ursa again. 

The words find her three days later. 

When she bolts out of bed and scrambles down the stairs, it is not with fear that she will set the house on fire. She sinks to her knees in the sand and throws up what feels like every single thing Ursa has fed her since she arrived on the island. 

She’s so frustrated and exhausted with the limitations of her body she doesn’t notice when Ursa comes to stand behind her, holding her long hair back from her face like a saint, humming an old lullaby about a prince’s fondness for the stars.

When she finishes, Ursa rubs the space between her shoulder blades with motherly concern. 

“Are you alright?” She asks, and Azula longs to bask in the unfamiliar attention until she remembers her anger. 

Before, she’d been too tired for anger, but the threat of fury is rising in her, like a wet log smoking in a cold mist, threatening to spark again. 

“Don’t touch me.” Azula rasps, voice hoarse from vomit and disuse. 

She wants to provoke Ursa into battling with her, but the older woman turns away as if hurt but resigned and gracefully takes her leave from the beach. 

Ursa’s pain is more fuel on the fire. What should selfishly be about Azula’s misfortune and loss has quickly become about generations of disappointment in her family line, and now Azula is no longer just a victim of regret but a potential progenitor.   

And somehow she knows this is Ursa’s fault, just as surely as it is hers and Aang’s. Unfortunately, her husband is absent and will never return to take the blame. 

So it stands that Ursa is the next best outlet for her ire. 

Wiping the bile from her mouth, Azula charges up the stairs and back into the main room to find Ursa lingering over a cup of tea. 

Her mother looks smaller than she remembers, the frown lines on her face more apparent. Ursa looks tired and ashamed and Azula feels her anger begin to shift into genuine heartbreak and dismay. 

“You didn’t prepare me for any of this.” Azula says tearfully, shaking with something like the meeting point of the horizon and land between anger and a grief that is masquerading as betrayal. 

Ursa—her mother—looks down at the floor.

“It would seem you needed no lessons in satisfying a partner, Azula. That much is already apparent.” 

“You think—” Azula fights the urge to clothe her palms in blue flame. She knows how much the sight inspires terror in her mother. She’s seen the fear in her eyes whenever Ozai would call up his flame at the tiniest of irritations, at the slightest infraction he interpreted Ursa as making. She knows it works because she’s done it to her mother too, and it was the first time as a girl that she’d ever made her mother’s face go white in shock, made her hands shake, made the light extinguish from her eyes as though she had pulled her flame directly from Ursa herself. Azula had scared herself so badly she never did it again, but mother was different with her after that and shortly after she had disappeared and things were never the same.

“What am I supposed to do now?” Soon, everything will change, and she'll be responsible for more lives than one.

“What all women have done since the dawn of time.” Ursa says, mouth twisted into a frown. “Survive.” 

“Survive.” 

“Whether or not you’re a royal married to a god, even you aren’t so special.”

No, not special, just woefully unready. 

“You didn’t prepare me to be a woman, to be a wife, to be a mother…” Her voice rises and breaks like waves upon a shore working themselves up into a frenzy but Ursa’s voice comes down on Azula like a wave the height of a mountain. 

“How could I?” Ursa cries. “I didn’t know how!” 

Azula reels back in a daze as if slapped.  

“What would I have offered you? The burning pieces of my marriage with your father? The only kindness I ever did you was to offer myself in your place, to offer my life for yours.”

“Not mine, Zuko’s.” She readily corrects because even after nearly twenty years, it still stings. All of mother’s dominion, her wealth, her riches, all of it for Zuko. It hurts. And not because Zuko was unworthy, but because she was. 

Ursa laughs bitterly. 

“You silly girl! You really think that Ozai would have given his first born son?”

Of course she did. 

“I was a prodigy and Zuko was lame.” Or so it had looked at the time. His fire had come to him so slowly that there seemed to be daily meetings at the palace about the second prince of the second prince whose bending had been shamefully inert. 

“It wouldn’t have mattered, Azula.” Ursa’s voice is like the sharp curve of a blade. “Your father would never have allowed you to carry his legacy then. Your grandfather never saw your genius. He saw you as nothing more than a prized kimono rhino to sell to the highest bidder. I know because it was how he saw me, and even his own sisters Lo and Li weren’t allowed to play more than simple nursemaids to his grandchildren. And I know that your father planned to beg Azulon for mercy and offer you in Zuko’s place. And let me tell you, Azulon gladly would have let him.” 

“You’re lying.” Azula says feeling her knees grow weak, her stomach queasy. 

“Am I?” Ursa’s obsidian eyes bore into hers. Azula swallows hard. “I was the granddaughter of the greatest fire bender the nation had seen in a millennia. Did you really think you got your gift from your father?” Ursa asks, extending her right hand above her head in an arc and pulling down blue flame. 

Azula’s face grows slack. For the first time since she had found the fire inside herself, she fears another’s flame. 

Her mother advances towards her, drawing down her hand until it sits between them, a brilliant cerulean filling the space between them. A bead of sweat appears at Azula’s hairline and she wonders if she could reach her flame if she needed to, wonders if it would come if called, wonders if the lightning still answers.

Will she need it? 

Her body wants to fold under the pressure of the fire, under the singe of it against the skin on her face. Her hands want to fly to her middle, her arms brace themselves around the most tender part of her body, a green shoot finding its way out of the soil, the last thing Aang had left her before she’d chased him out of her life for good. 

But her old training and her pride—her greatest enemy—won’t allow her to yield. She stares straight ahead and doesn’t move. 

Ursa blinks and the preternatural glow in her eyes is gone. She dampens her fire until it is a tiny lick of flame between her fingers.

“It was when I was pregnant with your brother that the treatments started. It was subtle at first. Just something given to me every morning with my breakfast, which I could hardly ever eat, I was so sick all the time.”

Ursa’s hand falls to her side and the light extinguishes all together.

“Blocking qi like that, day in and day out while another being is feeding on that energy…it’s awful. Being pregnant is exhausting enough as it is, but more so when you can’t access the vital energy that keeps you alive.”

Azula thought she was sick. She had to have been sick. Keeping her eyes open was becoming impossible, her stomach was always turning, the energy she had carefully cultivated these last few months had left her without a moment’s notice. She’s considered that it was sadness, considered that Aang’s absence had diminished some part of her, had returned her to the very place he had helped to lift her out of. 

But now her mother’s words make sense. 

“You feel it don't you?” Ursa asks, voice softening a touch, hand reaching out to cradle the side of her daughter’s face. “That medicine that the royal healers gave you for years. Did you think you were the only one they’d ever used it on?”

Azula fights the urge to startle.

“Your brother wasn’t lame, Azula. He was born with his qi blocked.” 

Before Azula can lean into the warm feeling of Ursa’s palm, the older woman releases her and takes a step back. 

“I see now that it was a blessing. His fate even. But all those nights of sleeplessness, all those days of upheaval at the palace, so many fears about Zuko’s condition and they had brought it on themselves, afraid of the threat I might pose even though they had already bound me to Ozai in marriage, bound me to the royal family forever. Where would I have run?” 

Azula sees why they might have feared Ursa, sees where Ozai’s children really get their mettle from. Ursa had done more with less, had fled the palace when it really mattered, had found another way to live, hadn’t she? Perhaps Azulon and the advisors had been right all along. 

But this feeling Azula feels, the constant drain on her energy, how could her mother survive like this and live to bear an otherwise perfectly healthy son? How did she live to bear Azula? 

“Why wasn’t I born with my qi blocked?” 

Ursa laughs humorlessly. 

“With you I was so sick the palace apothecary was hesitant to continue the use of the tincture. Your father thought you might be a son so he ordered the medicine be put to a stop and I had never been so happy as I was when I was pregnant with you. My flame was strong and your father believed you another boy, a second son to be just like him.” Ursa’s smile turns sad. “He loved you. More than he ever loved anyone. Even after you were born a girl. That disappointment was mine to bear, not his. He was determined that you still live up to his unrealistic expectations for you, even if your grandfather had plans of his own. Ozai insisted you be the very best.” 

“Why?”

“Why does Ozai do anything, Azula? Perhaps because it pleased him to see you smiling? Or perhaps because he still resented his own father for the way he was treated when he was a boy. It could have been to spite me, to deny me the chance to keep you close to my breast as long as possible, to have a daughter that looked like me, that wielded fire like me, a girl that loved me.” Ursa breathes out a sigh. “But more likely than not, he did it for the reason he did most things.” 

“And what reason was that?” Azula asks, still hoping to understand Ozai all these years, after all the disappointments, after all the fear. 

“Because he felt like it.” Ursa says, eyes boring into Azula’s. “If there is anything to understand about your father it’s that there is nothing to understand about him at all. He was mercurial, spiteful, unhinged, jealous, and narcissistic. Trying to feel his love was like trying to feel the warmth of the sun on an incredibly cloudy day. You’d never know when it would come and when it came, it came so suddenly and so strongly it was hard not to feel as though you were chosen. But when it was gone, it was even harder not to feel as though you’d been forsaken by the gods. To be loved by Ozai was worse than never having been loved at all. And spirits help me Azula, I loved your father very much. But there was nothing even I could do to change him.” 

Azula’s memories of her mother were hazy and inconsistent. Love, she believed, wasn’t something allowed to royals. Who needed love when there was fame and fortune, why would they need love when they had power, when they could make anyone bow to their will, and make whole nations fall to their feet? 

For years, the only love Azula remembered was her father’s and how could she know how lacking a cloudy day was if she had never experienced a sky so clear you could see the horizon go on for miles and miles? 

Azula would never know how true Ursa’s words were if it weren’t for Aang, someone who had loved her not with the intensity of a conflagration but with the steadiness of a hearth, Aang who had loved her with a warmth that kept the blood moving through her heart.

Has her mother never known a love like that? 

“You’re very lucky.” Ursa says, as though she can read Azula’s mind at this very moment. And still, the look on her mothers face begrudges her nothing. “There isn’t anything more I could have wished for a daughter.” 

Azula swallows back the feeling welling in her throat. 

“So it was something that you never had.” Not with Ozai, and maybe never with another man or woman who walked the earth. 

“Oh, Azula,” Ursa’s hand reaches forward and glide against Azula’s cheek, “that isn’t true at all.”

“No?” Azula asks, trembling.

“No. In the end, there wasn’t a morning I woke in that palace that I didn’t thank Agni for the two of you every day.”

Azula closes her eyes as she takes in the    confirmation she’d been waiting for all these years. 

“The truth is, we’re never ready, bǎo bǎo. But love—it finds a way.” Ursa presses a motherly kiss to her lips and disappears into the kitchen. 

The healers at the hospital said her womb was likely like a fallow field. Her menses had stopped within a year of beginning the tincture and the heavy metals in the medicine were meant to stop the madness, no matter the cost. 

Even if she had come from the hospital saved and sane, Zuko wouldn’t be able to do anything more with her than he had already done. She was a princess, but she’d never beget another. She’d never give birth to sons who’d rule empires. And from what Ty Lee had said whenever she could visit, the royal council seemed split on the matter. Some days they were overjoyed and others they lamented that the barren princess might be the beginning of the end of Azulon’s line for good. 

Their vexation brought a slight smile to her face. If she was to spend the rest of her days behind white washed walls, then it was only fair that they have to deal with what they had done to her. 

Ty Lee, however, wasn’t so easily amused. 

“Aisuru,” Ty Lee would say with serious eyes, “what about you? What about what you want?”  

Azula never knew how to answer. What right did she have to a fantasy where she could somehow raise children completely different from the children that she and Zuko and had been? Azula was accustomed to taking life, not giving it. And the only parents she’d ever known hadn’t been enough.  

But whenever she wouldn’t answer, Ty Lee’s lip would begin to quiver and Azula would swipe her thumb against it and sigh. 

“Tell me what you imagine.” 

Ty Lee had dreams of her own. Less children than the house she had been raised in. Just two or three to dote on and devote all her time to. And she saw a partner who would be happy to come home to them, who would leave but always come back, arms stretched wide open, smile as wide and long as the horizon. 

As a girl, Azula had always assumed she’d die married off to the biggest bidder. As the shortest reigning Firelord in history, she imagined she would voluntarily die alone, making her advisors her spouses, and her subjects her children. In the asylum she imagined dying alone for different reasons. Marrying the Avatar was never part of her plan

And yet, here she was anyway. A peace offering after a century of war, a consolation prize, and a sorry one at that.

But Aang never looks at her that way. 

His eyes twinkle when he looks at her, his brow furrowing in concentration, as he strips the clothes from her body and lays her back against the linen sheets.

“Look at you.” He says, as he draws his fingers through her wetness, letting his fingers slip against her and into her until her breath comes out in little pants, her teeth biting down on her lower lip. 

Sometimes looking at him looking at her is too much. She turns her head to the side and shivers and he withdraws his fingers and draws sigils on her chest in a language no one speaks anymore but him. 

She gasps when he enters her, slowly stretching her with the head of his cock, moving in inch by glorious inch. She wants to feel him, all of him, wants him to bottom out, to push until she can’t push anymore and she can no longer run from the truth she feels coursing in his body, in his veins. 

She doesn’t want him to treat her like she’s precious. She tries to urge him deeper, but he resists. Instead, he brushes the damp hair from her face and smiles. 

“Why the hurry, Princess?” 

Aang likes to take his time, likes to roll his hips into hers as though he’s moving to some distant rhythm that he can hear carried in on the breeze.

Sometimes she tries to hear it too, she quiets her breathing and buries her face in his chest, trying to see if his heartbeat is the key to unlocking the mystery of his movements, the mystery of his hand that wanders down to the joining between their bodies and moves so soft and so sweet she can’t help but come undone on him.    

Though, he’s rarely ever done after that. The music he hears keeps playing and he climbs down her body, lips tracing a map over every knick, every scar, every sliver of a life once lived outside the palace walls, outside the asylum walls. 

His lips are insistent, and the destruction they leave in their wake looks something like the feelings Azula has put off for a long time. When he licks into her, it isn’t only the white glow of pleasure she sees, but memories also, dreams that were once unknown to her but cannot be unknown any longer. His tongue laps to that same unheard rhythm and Azula’s hips move with it, eyes watching a future she will never have unfold before her. 

Somewhere, beneath the mirrored surface of the great water that all souls descend through to enter into the spirit realm, there is a world where she has only ever known a small and quaint life. A world where a boy who is a farmer or a baker pursues her against her mother’s wishes, lays her down on floors of hay, and promises to make an honest woman out of her. 

He has kind eyes like Aang, and he moves just as tall and strong. 

And when he moves inside her, she thinks that he can make the mountains inside of her move too. 

In that world, she bears hims as many children as she can carry, and she always knows what to do with them when they skin a knee after falling from a low branch, and she never hesitates when they grow feverish and cold, when they create their first tiny puff of flame from snapping their fingers together like a pair of sparking rocks. 

In that world, when his tongue caresses her folds, she is not afraid to call it love, not afraid to melt into the feeling of his tongue curling around her bud, not afraid of the way he so easily draws honey from both sets of her lips, not afraid of the way her hand comes to rest on the crown of his head, thanking Agni for sending him. 

She comes seeing stars, long hair hanging off the edge of the bed, face lit by the moonlight that comes through the window and the constellations that reflect in her eyes. 

Out there, somewhere among the trifling stories of the gods, she and Aang are completely different people living completely different lives.

When he crawls back up her body, he wipes his glistening face with the back of his hand and grins. Before settling beside her, letting his head hang off the bed alongside hers, looking up at the spinning stars. 

“What are you thinking of, nyingdu-la?” 

What isn’t she thinking of when their fingers thread together and their legs tangle in the sheets?

“Do you believe in destiny?” 

“In destiny? I don’t think I’ve ever had a choice.” 

No. As Avatar, she supposes he never did. 

“When I was a girl, our tutors taught us that our family ruled because it was Agni’s will.”

“Did you believe them?” 

“I don’t know.” Azula says softly. “I used to lay awake and wonder why, if Agni could choose anyone, Agni would choose me.”

“I used to wonder why the spirits thought a terrified little boy was the answer to the end of the world.” 

And yet, here the both of them are.

Aang turns to her with shining eyes and raises her fingers to his lips. “What if destiny is smaller than that?”  

“Smaller than what?” 

“Smaller than who lives or dies, smaller  than who rules over other men? what if destiny just looks like this?” He nudges her foot with his and draws her eyes down to their bodies wrapped around each other. 

“Do you think—” She closes her eyes. “Do you think we would have found each other in another life?”

Aang’s other hand takes hold of her chin and turns her face back to his, bidding her to open her eyes and see the naked look of adoration she didn’t know she could grow to expect.

“We found each other here didn't we?”

He points to a constellation in the distance, draws its careful loops and jagged edges and says, “Out there lives a baker and his wife with their home and their business and more children than they know what to do with.”

“Are they happy?” She asks with bated breath, but as Aang’s lips brush against her eyelids, she realizes she needn’t have worried.

“Who, them?” Aang breathes, voice like the hush of the outgoing tide. “The happiest.”

Chapter Text

He sends word through his favorite bird. 

She almost doesn’t recognize it at first. But it recognizes her all the same, nipping affectionately at her fingers, coercing her to stroke the small feathers at the top of its head as it chirps like a satisfied little chick. Funny how birds, like men, can be reduced to a shuddering pile of fluff when you apply the right touch.

Carefully, she frees the scroll from its holster and draws her finger across the old tawny bird’s cheek before it leaps up and takes to the skies again with a cry, circling ahead a few times before following the tide out to sea as it returns to its master.

She watches it go, thinks about the last time she felt so free, remembers the last time she had been so high in the air, the times she’d let Aang float her around the island on a whim, the way he’d show her the earth below and declare that the power of airbending had always been perspective. 

“It’s much easier to be enlightened when you finally realize how small you are and how big everything else is.” 

He’d kissed her then, just as the sun was rising over the horizon and looking out at the enormity of the sea surrounding the little home they’d made on the island, she thought she truly understood what he meant. 

Now, Aang is gone, her entire life will be upended in a matter of weeks, and her brother, the sovereign of the Fire Nation, is breaking his self-imposed absence.

She turns the scroll hesitantly over in her hands. He’s been quiet in the year since her arrival on the island, and what little correspondence he did send came straight from the hands of his closest friend. 

She treasured his letters. Of course she did. They were the little bit of light allowed to her when in the white washed building, the empire chose to hide her in when she had failed to be as heedless and headstrong as her father or as forgiving and vulnerable as her brother. 

But his letters were never as much of a balm as his visits, the way he’d sit with her in the weak sun of the courtyard, reciting ancient epics with a few halting words and a heavy hand resting over hers.

With so little contact from Iroh, there was a time when it felt like Zuko was the only real family she had left. Now she has a husband, a mother, and a baby on the way, and each thing seems as improbable as the last.

Her brother returning to her life now seems the least improbable, and yet  he’d taken his distance since she’d last seen him. She hasn’t seen him since he’d sent her off to live with the man who had easily become her oldest enemy, after the enemy she’d made of failure and the haunting reflection of her mother's face in the mirror. 

She wonders if it was shame or regret that stayed his hand. Maybe it’s something else altogether. 

She doesn’t begrudge him the marriage. Nor does she begrudge him the crown, the throne, or the kingdom. 

And now, she certainly has no reason to begrudge him a mother’s love. 

There’s only one thing she’s angry about. One thing that makes her want to knock Zuko flat onto his back and hold a flame over his head. And it was the first thing the Avatar ever told her before taking her to bed. The evening of their marriage, she had asked Aang for one thing and one thing only, the truth of her circumstances, and the true cost of the deal that had exchanged the asylum for what she assumed was her gilded cage. 

She unrolls the short missive to see the sea and sun-damaged parchment promises his arrival by tomorrow’s high tide. Turning towards the sun, she notes the rhythm of the waves, the strong gusts of wind, the rich notes of burnt cinnamon bark and coal. He’s taking the imperial junk. With the wind in a favorable direction, he may make it here even sooner.

She closes her eyes, lets the sun warm her eyelids and savors the feeling of being exactly who she is, where she is, and when she is in this moment before the world is knocking at her door. 

If only Aang were here to see it. 

Frowning, she rolls the scroll back up and tucks it into a pocket hidden in her skirt and sets off back towards the house, the maelstrom of her feelings building as she goes. She loves Zuko, Agni knows she does, but she’s not quite sure she knows how to forgive him. Is she supposed to look him in his eye and thank him, to genuflect at his feet just because others would think him a fabled hero, him, the man who risked empire and reputation for a life as minuscule as hers? She reaches into her pocket, curls her hand around the scroll, and crushes it between her palm and fingers. If only she could burn it up in her hand and watch the wind carry away the ashes. 

She's so upset at Zuko that she almost doesn’t see Ursa, who lounges in the living area with a steaming cup of hot tea cradled in her hands, the perfect picture of the lady of leisure she’d once been before fate had intervened, if one were willing to overlook the sturdy plainness of their accommodations. 

“Something wrong, Princess?” Ursa drawls, and though she hates the reminder of her old title, she knows this is her mother’s unsubtle yet effective way of telling her that she has assumed the old haughty attitude of a teenage royal, though to be fair, her mother never actually suffered her as such. 

But as the entirety of her mother’s visit has reminded her, there is no time like the present. 

“Your son,” Azula complains, crouching down before the hearth to ensure the cooking flame is good and ready to receive what’s in her hands. 

“Your brother?” Ursa corrects with a half smile. “What’s he done now?” 

What hasn’t he already done? Azula wonders, though she hasn’t the time to explain the whole of it to Ursa when she can barely keep her hands from shaking. 

Azula scoffs and tosses the paper into the flame, but Ursa is behind her instantly, almost unnaturally so, her hand reaching into the flame without fear of being burnt. 

“No so fast,” the woman murmurs, blowing out the flames curling the edges of the paper, “and breathe, won’t you? All this stress and excitement isn’t good for the baby.” 

Azula blanches a little, a hand at the base of her throat as she realizes that this will be the first time anyone from her life before has seen her on this island in the year since she said her vows on the crest of a hill, but half a day's ride from here. 

And it will be the first time someone who isn’t the woman who birthed her will be able to tell she herself is with child. Though she hasn’t exactly been running from the truth of it, she hasn’t necessarily faced it head-on either.

“Oh no,” Ursa says, looking down at the paper with a curious look in her eye, that Azula might have recognized as fear, excitement, and pain if she hadn’t been caught up in her own feelings at that very moment. 

“Oh no?” Though the quiet exclamation feels appropriate. 

“You’re in no condition to receive a Fire Lord, are you?” Ursa speaks as though she is back at the palace and navigating the unexpected presence of a dignitary for tea. 

“Which condition are you referring to exactly?” Her home, her dress, her body? The fact that she is married and pregnant, yet with seemingly no husband to show for it?

While he may be a divine ruler, he is still her older brother, the one who banished her to this island. Even if his actions had unequivocally saved her, an act for which she is more grateful than she’ll likely ever let on, she refuses to fawn like a simple subject.

She might not be a princess anymore, but being the wife of a glorified farmer hasn’t made her any less proud. 

Calmer than she was a moment ago, she watches Ursa hold the burned paper against her chest as though it is a precious note before folding it and slipping it into her robes, keeping it safe from Azula’s brash impulses for the time being. 

Perhaps she has been too hasty to throw it in the pile, even if she’d had her reasons in the moment. 

Sighing, Azula sits down heavily in a chair and regards her mother with a wary eye. 

Since living on this island, she has grown more accustomed to asking for help, first from Aang and then from her mother. And yet, that doesn’t mean she won’t do it with her own sense of flair.

“What do you suggest, old woman?”

Unmoved by the insult, Ursa smirks and reaches for a nearby broom. 

“Pull your hair back, Azula. We have much to do before the sun goes down.” 

The house is spotless, and Azula’s body aches down to her toes, but the ache feels productive, a reminder of what her body is still capable of when it needs to be. It feels good to lay her body down, but she sleeps in fits and starts, and Ursa is nowhere to be found. It isn’t like the other woman sleeps any, but on occasion, Azula wakes to the sight of her mother watching her from a chair with a softness on her face that is hard to come by in the light of day. 

When Azula throws her legs out of bed and makes her way around the house, Ursa is nowhere to be seen. Slightly—yet absurdly—panicked, Azula fears that her mother has left her like everyone else in her life has, and the simple thought is almost enough to make her lip quiver.

Of course, in the end, her searching brings her out to the porch only to look out in the distance and find Ursa’s lone, thin figure staring out at the horizon. 

Azula feels compelled to watch as Ursa spends the early dawn on the beach, as if keeping vigil for something beyond Azula’s comprehension. Ursa should be ecstatic at the impending arrival. An opportunity for her to reconnect with her long lost son, to reconnect the only parts of her family that really mattered in the end, the same children she’d been asked to sacrifice for her husband’s petty assent. Instead, Ursa looks contemplative and forlorn, wistful as though she’s already lost Zuko again before she’s found him. 

When Azula finally joins Ursa down by the water just as the pink light of the sun begins to chase away the purpling sky, her mother acknowledges her with a glance, turns her gaze back to the sea, and begins a hesitant tale. 

“Once, when you were a baby and just learning how to walk the palace grounds, Zuko insisted on taking you to see the turtleducks underneath the sakura tree your great-grandfather planted when he married your great-grandmother. It was always your brother’s favorite place and he wanted to share it with you. And it didn’t hurt that from the moment you could walk, you had loved toddling after him, anywhere he let you follow.” 

She remembers the tree, the ephemeral yet achingly sweet flowers, and the turtleducks, just as she remembers the time she fought with Zuko beside the pond when they were a little older. 

“I hated that pond,” Azula says quietly, an unexpected sadness creeping up on her as she wonders why she was never capable of a simple childlike wonder when she was younger, why she behaved in a way that made her mother frown in her direction and declare there was something wrong with her once again. 

“You hated that pond,” Ursa confirms, though there isn’t any scorn or judgement in her tone. “I don’t suppose you remember why?”

Azula lets her silence speak for her. 

“It was a spring day, unusually mild. It was perfect, really. We’d had a rash of courtly dinners with different officials and other well-to-do families, and I was exhausted. I could barely keep my eyes open that day, but you and Zuko were so full of energy and sick of being indoors, so I took you out. I was content to let the two of you chase each other around until you tired each other out. I was a young mother, happy that the two of you were finally getting to the age where you might be able to play with one another, and I…”

“You what?” 

“I got careless.” Ursa turns back to her with a wan smile. “It all happened so quickly. One second, you were toddling along the edge while Zuko squaked on and on about all the turtleduck facts he’d learned with his tutor and you listened intently like you knew what he was talking about, so intently that he reached for your hand and pulled you in closer so you could really see what he was talking about, so you could pet a duckling that was nearby and he tugged a little too hard. He was overeager. He didn’t understand how small you were or how unstable, how new the world was for you still…”

“He was a boy.” 

“He was a boy. But I was the adult, and I looked away. Just for a second, but that was all it took. You fell in, and you ended up face down in the water, and Zuko shrieked at the top of his lungs for help. I ran as fast as I could, but I was too slow. You had already gone limp when I pulled you out, and I stood there for almost a full minute, motionless, before your uncle appeared. He was back for a rare moment at home and thank Agni because it was him who began breathing into your little mouth and beating the space between your back and your shoulder blades until you came to again.” 

“I don’t remember any of this.” She says with furrowed brow, reaching as far back into her memory as she can manage, but pulling nothing but empty air and light. 

“You wouldn’t, I doubt Zuko would either, but I never forgot it, and I never forgave myself either. I carried the guilt and shame of it with me for a long time… until I had something new to replace it with.” 

Azula resists the urge to flinch at the casual mention of Ursa’s self-sacrificial abandonment.

“So you’re telling me this now to—what—free yourself of it?” 

Ursa chuckles and wipes discreetly at her cheek, and Azula thinks for a moment that she might just be willing to forgive her mother anything. 

“I’m trying to tell you that being a parent —being a mother— means making choices, making mistakes that you have to live with, even when you wish you didn’t have to. I was lucky enough to get you back once, but getting you back a second time was truly a blessing from the gods…” And that was exactly what these last few months have felt like, even when they haven’t been easy or free of heartbreak. Still, she senses Ursa isn’t finished. 

“What are you saying?” 

“I’m trying to tell you that some things we don’t ever get to come back from. Sometimes, no matter what we do or how hard we wish otherwise, there aren’t any second chances.” 

Tears in her eyes and hair blowing in the wind, Ursa turns her back to the sun and floats away, disappearing into the house and leaving Azula to stand as sentry by the shore, watching the waves roll onto the beach.

The minutes pass into hours, and as the sun rises into the sky and the birds circle in the distance, heralding the impending arrival of the imperial junk, she knows, without Ursa ever having to say it, that the other woman will not be there to greet the young Fire Lord when he arrives. 

Zuko arrives with far less pomp and circumstance than their father ever would have. It suits him, suits this new era that the Fire Nation has entered, even if his advisors likely hate it. And Azula loves it all the more for the rare opportunity to spite the few holdovers from her father’s time on the throne. 

Even still, despite the simplicity of it all, Zuko is still beautiful. With new eyes, she sees how measured and refined her older brother has grown over the years. His robes would be plain if not for the fine stitching and the delicate golden thread designs woven along the hems. It catches in the light when he bends at the waist, greeting her in the old familiar way.

She tries to return the greeting, bending a hair lower than her brother, a show of deference for his position, but it's harder than she expects. The last time she did this, there was much less of her in the way. 

She hisses as she straightens out, and Zuko huffs out a laugh, presenting his arm in an effort to escort her back up to the house. 

“You’re getting old, Sister.” He murmurs, watching the way she rubs at the crick in her lower back. If he notices her ‘condition’ as Ursa had so delicately called it, he doesn’t say.

Though his gaze has lingered just enough for her to know he isn’t daft so much as he is discreet, or completely mortified by the idea of his younger sister being pregnant.  

The thought of antagonizing him about it later makes her smile. 

“Tea?” She asks as she accepts his proffered arm. 

“I thought you’d never ask.” Whatever else about him may have changed over the years, his smile is exactly as she remembered. 

Her mind wanders to the first time Zuko visited, and the healers believed her well enough to sit at a table near the courtyard unaccompanied to have tea with her brother, the sovereign. It might have felt normal, an almost parody of the life they led before their entire childhoods became subsumed in their father’s escalation of the war. But if it were a normal tea, the tea table would be more resplendent than kaya toast and an old teapot with chipped cups. If it were normal, they would have let her pour instead of insisting in hushed tones that it’s too dangerous for someone as delicate and deranged as her, even though she’d spent her life learning to pour tea for important dignitaries and wealthy men, or whoever it was her father meant to barter her off to. 

Zuko, of course, took it in stride and shooed away the servants that had been asked to stand just off stage but close enough to meet the Fire Lord’s every need. Instead, her brother had poured the tea, just as delicately as if he had been the one father had meant to barter, and Azula let a smile play at her lips as she imagined their lives might have been much more enjoyable had they ultimately traded places. 

That tea was altogether different from this tea. It was rife with awkward silences and kind attempts to pretend at normality. It was full of moments of trying and failing to remember the people they had been before everything changed, of the strangeness of relearning someone you had known your entire life. 

This time, Azula knows exactly who her brother is, and more surprisingly she knows who she is too. This time their silences are full and weighty and it is her hand that deftly tilts the teapot, letting the fragrant and colorful water pour out into the delicate sakura blossom teacup.

At least now she can fully appreciate Iroh’s gift.

Zuko stares down at the cup and lets the steam waft before declaring the scent familiar. 

“Uncle’s blend?” 

“He sent enough to sink a small fleet when we first arrived. I believed he called it my dowry.”

Zuko chuckles and blows across the surface of the liquid. She never saw much of the famed Li of the Jade Dragon, but she wonders if there is a Zuko who lives his life just as happy to serve in Uncle’s shop as he is to serve on the throne. 

“I rather thought this island was your dowry.” 

“Not my prison?” Azula asks with the barest hint of steel in her voice. She lacks real poison living in this place that has changed her, in the surroundings of the missing man that had changed her most of all.

“Is that how you really feel, Azula?” Zuko’s brow is suddenly heavy, and his sigh is tired. She knows he has only ever tried to do right by her, even when she wished he wouldn’t. 

“No.” It isn’t. But what is it that she feels, exactly? And how could she ever communicate the depth of her feelings to Zuko when she struggles to articulate them to herself? 

“I take it you’re not happy with the island then, are you?” 

“The island is fine,” it is, perhaps, the most ringing endorsement Azula has ever given anything. “But maybe you should have considered a better gift when you gave me away to a nomad.”

The hint of a smile alights on Zuko’s face again. 

“And Aang?”

“What about him?” She doesn’t appreciate Zuko’s cheek.

Obviously, Zuko knows it. He changes course.

“How is my dear brother-in-law?”  

“I was hoping you could tell me.” She says a little stiffly. If anything, she hoped he had arrived at her husband’s request, a consolation visit to soften the blow of his absence, even if his absence was her doing. But now, she can’t be sure what Zuko’s motives are.

Zuko scans her face, though it’s unclear if he’s found whatever he was looking for when he smiles pleasantly enough.

“Well, I imagine it would be easier for word to reach me from Ramal than you.” He says politely, and Azula threatens to break. “He’s been trying to help the victims of the latest attacks in the northwestern parts of the Earth Kingdom, but his journey has been slow and dangerous.”

It’s good that he’s doing what he loves, doing what he was born to do, even if it pains her. Her discomfort is but a small sacrifice for the wellbeing of hundreds, and more importantly, for the good of Aang’s soul. 

“Attacks in Jixi?” she asks casually as she pours more tea into Zuko’s cup. She imagined Aang would settle there, the temporary headquarters where the Earth Kingdom everyman organized to protect themselves from capitalist incursions from the landed gentry who had favor with the new King.

“Songhua, actually. Jixi fell months ago.”  

Surprised, Azula drops the teapot in her hands with a clatter. She hasn’t heard talk of a city falling in over a decade.

“I thought the war was over.” 

“It is,” Zuko says grimly. If this is the new world at peace, she doubts any of them want to see what it’s like at war. 

“It seems Peacetime is rarely so peaceful after all.” 

“Rebuilding nations has never been an easy feat.”

Her brother, already a wise old man.

“Seems like a job for the Avatar, doesn’t it?”

“Some days, I’m not sure it’s a job for anyone but—”

“Someone has to do it.” Azula looks down at her own cup, the swirling heat, and tries to see the future in her tea leaves.

“You haven’t heard from him,” Zuko says quietly.

“No.” She hasn’t. “Not in months, not since…”

Zuko’s eyes stray to her middle, and his hands tighten into fists, knuckles whitening with quiet fury. 

“Since when?” Zuko's face is drawn; she knows he worries that Aang has become a changed man, a stranger to his old friend, one who would leave his wife at the drop of a dime without any worry or guilt, or worse, one who would force Azula’s hand. “Did he—”

“No.” Not that. Aang would never, he couldn’t. He’d never be anything other than what the gods had made him, insufferably perfect. 

“What happened?”

“What always happens when you abandon a man and a woman on an island as though they were the last two people on Earth?” She tries to say the words airily, but they sink like an anvil. 

Zuko’s look melts from a dismayed fury to a soft pity that would turn her stomach if it weren’t exactly the laughable kindness she craved.

“I’m fine.” She tries.

“You don’t look fine.” How could she when the spark in her eyes grows dull at the reminder that she’s alone? 

“What do you want me to say, Zuko?” That she’d seen the letters? That she knew people were on their knees, begging him for an intervention? She saw what it did to him. He needed to go as much as she needed him to stay. But it doesn’t matter. Only one thing ever did. “I did what I had to.”

“You sent him away.” It’s a euphemism as much as it’s the truth.

“I set him free.” She was never his prisoner as much as he was hers.

Zuko sighs heavily.

“You know about the agreement.”

“Of course I know.” It had been the first bit of knowledge she had wrestled away from the Avatar when they’d landed that fateful day over a year ago. She couldn’t start a new life away from the institution that had been her home for ten years without knowing what it had cost her. And it had cost Aang and Zuko most of all. “How could you be so foolish?”

Zuko rubs at his old scar like a child sheepishly trying to avoid his punishment. 

“What’s done is done, Azula.” 

She can’t help but laugh at his attempt to sound so mature and put upon as though their nation hadn’t been a bargaining chip, hanging in the balance.

Even now, one wrong move with this deal and Zuko could lose it all. 

“Is it? Aside from this island, I can't exist anywhere else without him again.”

“That’s not true.” He says weakly.

“Then take me back with you. I’ll pack tonight. We can leave in the morning.” 

“You know I can’t do that.” 

“Could it be because I can’t step foot off this island?”

“You can step off the island.” She stares at him until he sags under her gaze. “But not without him.” 

“Am I supposed to thank you?” Is she? She doesn’t know.  

“It was the best I could do.” It was better than anyone had ever done for her before, and yet…

“Even if I had no choice, you couldn’t have expected him to live here forever.”

“It wasn’t meant to be permanent.”

“Then what was it meant to be? A rouse? Did you think you could gamble away the throne of the Fire Nation like a token in a children’s game?”

“Azula…”

“Or maybe you just wanted to convince the council that you’d found a way to properly declaw me by properly converting me into a life of domesticity?”

She could finally garden, cook, and keep house like a proper princess. 

“You know that’s not true.” 

It isn’t a fair accusation, or perhaps it is. She doesn’t know how she’s supposed to feel about her brother hinging her entire future on the back of the last air nomad, hinging her entire future on the assumption that he would be righteous and kind enough to give her a real quality of life on this island, a real sense of companionship, or at least something quietly resembling it. And worst of all, she can’t believe he was actually right.

“Forget it, Zuko.” 

But she knows that he can’t.

“Azula…” His voice sounds resigned yet crushed. “You have to know…I couldn’t leave you there. I couldn’t.”

“You left me there before.” She says in a voice far less unaffected than she wants it to be. But sometimes she closes her eyes and sees the scared and broken children they were the first night he’d left her in that glorified cell. 

“I did,” Zuko admits, “They convinced me that it would help you, that it was working—” 

“It was working.” So much so that there were days when it was hard to hold onto who she was, at least the little of herself she had figured out before the war and in its sprawling aftermath. 

Consciousness could be as much a gift as it was a curse.

“It was killing you! You were disappearing, and I couldn’t let them take you from me. You and Uncle, you’re all I have left.” 

Their once grand family has been reduced to nearly nothing. She finds it terribly fitting.

But with so many motherless, fatherless, sisterless, brotherless, and—as she feels with a new ache— childless, how could their little reunion possibly be something to celebrate?

“I was terrible, Zuko. They have every right to fear me.” There’s a part of herself that still fears who she was, but Aang assured her that was only normal, necessary even. 

We can’t ever afford to forget what we’re truly capable of.

Though she conveniently ignores the part where he insists that doesn’t mean they can’t come to embrace the fullness of their futures.

Remember, Azula. Forgiveness is never above or below you.

Zuko shakes his head.

“They’re wrong about you, Azula. You’re wrong about you.”

“Have you considered, even for an instant, that maybe the council is right?” 

“Why would they be right about anything? They’d sooner place a century-long war on your shoulders than admit to generations of greed.”

“I was the enemy. I should be—”

“What? Dead, eternally punished, or worse, where Ozai is?” Zuko laughs humorlessly. “You were a child! Barely sixteen years old! Carrying out the vision of a despotic ruler who convinced himself that the stars were aligning to make him king of the world. You weren’t the enemy, you were one of Ozai’s victims.”

She recoils. The sharp tone of his voice pierces the flimsy shell she’s used to protect herself from these kinds of aching truths. Somehow, being someone else’s weapon is much worse than being everyone’s worst enemy. 

She remembers her father’s unusually cold hands digging into her shoulders as he proclaimed that one day, she'd become the Fire Lord he’d always hoped she would be. Even more painfully, she remembers believing him, remembers thinking he could do no wrong, even as she watched everything fall down around them.

But most of all, when she remembers Ozai, she remembers the endless painful ache that reminded her that she would never be good enough. No matter what she did, she would never be enough.

When she looks up at Zuko, she can see the same ache in his eyes. She can see Zuko laid out at Ozai’s feet, hands holding his melting face as he sobs in agony while the man they call their father gazes down at his son with disinterest. 

Even if they’d conquered the world twice over, no child of Ozai’s would ever be enough. 

“We were his victims,” Zuko says.

Azula, a victim. But how could she be a victim when she’s haunted by the lives she destroyed with war and famine and hunger and poverty? Who is she to deserve a bit of tortured peace on this island, even if it were meant to be her prison? 

“I don’t deserve…” Her voice breaks over the words as her eyes fill with tears, but Zuko’s touch is steady and soft when his thumb reaches up to catch the drops before they fall. The gesture is so kind that her breath begins to hitch as it gets harder and harder to breathe.

“What we deserved was a mother and a father who loved us.” But all they had was Ozai and a mother forced to part from them too soon. Zuko takes her hands in his and squeezes. “It’s too late for us now, but it’s not too late for them.”

He’s right. She knows he is. But with a father revered as a god and a mother feared like a monster, what life could any child of Azula’s hope to have in this strange future?

There’s so much to say, but what could she say that he doesn’t already know?

“More tea?” Zuko offers, and Azula breathes out a laugh as she shakes her head. 

“It’s nearly noon. You must be starving.” Azula will never hear the last of it if she doesn’t feed Ursa’s only son before he goes. 

“Lunch sounds excellent. I’ll jump in wherever you need me.” 

He kisses her knuckles and releases her fingers.

Lunch is simple but pleasant. As much as her mother’s company has been a balm since Aang’s departure, there’s something altogether different about spending the day with her brother. He feels more solid, more real, perhaps because he didn’t run at the first sign of his long-lost son. 

Still, as she and Zuko watch from the top of the steps as his crew offloads the last of her supplies and a fresh crate from the Jasmine Dragon, she wishes she could tell Zuko the truth about the last few months, and most especially, their mother.

Of course, the woman refuses to show, and Azula walks her brother up the beach to the plank that will take him back to the imperial junk alone.

If she waits any longer, it will be too late.

“Wait, Zuko. I need to tell you something.”

“What is it?”

“It’s about mother.”

A soft smile touches his lips as he reaches out to tuck a stray strand of hair behind her ear. 

“Yes. I’ve been thinking about her too. It’s funny how sometimes I'll be in the private gardens or on a walk through our old apartments, and I’ll see her just around a corner or waiting under a tree. When I got here, I nearly thought I saw the same thing.” 

She doesn’t know how to tell him that his mother is here, but she is a coward who hides from her adult son like a recluse hides from the sun. Perhaps it is because he is so much brighter than she is. 

When she looks at Zuko, she feels like she is squinting, like he is warming her from the inside out like a thousand hearths, like a never-ending feeling of thoughtful care and wonder that is so innate to his being that it pulses under his skin like a living organ. 

He’s beautiful, her brother. Maybe he is too beautiful for Ursa to look at. But Azula is a different woman now, a different creature altogether that has been molting and changing since that first electric storm on the way to Zaj Laug, since she first touched down on this holy ground that is made holier by the presence of someone else that she loves. She looks Zuko right in the eye and thinks that if she has a boy, she hopes he is just like his uncle. And, more importantly, should she have a daughter, there would be no greater honor for her to be like him, too.

She looks at Zuko, really looks at him, and finds she is truly looking at him for the first time.

“It’s funny,” Zuko says, face softening and growing impossibly brighter, “I never realized how much you look like her before. And if I didn’t remember what it was like when she was pregnant with you, I might think you sprang out of her head fully formed.” 

He laughs and reaches forward to wipe away the tear falling down her cheek. 

“Maybe you did, Azula. Maybe you were the one thing that was really hers. Even in all the chaos I remember how much she loved you, how much she cherished you. I was always so jealous of you when we were younger.” 

She remembers things so differently, and yet, she finally knows that what he is saying is true. 

“I was jealous of you, " she says, laughing through the tears. Suddenly, he does the same, and their foreheads rest against each other.

For the first time in years, Azula finds that maybe her mirror isn’t some lost and found version of Ursa so much as it is Zuko. 

“Do you think we can start again?” She asks.

“As brother and sister?” 

“As friends.” The words are awkward and strange in her mouth, but she imagines she ought to try.

“Friends.” Zuko murmurs. “I’d like that.”

Azula nods and presses a kiss to her brother’s cheek before pulling away.

“When you hear from Aang…” 

“I’ll write. I promise.” Zuko solemnly vows. “But I have something to tell you.” 

“You can tell me anything.” Though she fears she already knows what it is.

“It's been a long time since anyone has heard from Aang.”

“How long?” 

Zuko weighs his words carefully.

“Long enough to worry. I hoped that when I arrived, maybe you…” He closes his eyes and lets his shoulders drop. “I’m afraid for him.” 

“If you're afraid for him, then I’m afraid for all of us.” 

If the Avatar were truly gone, would those of his comrades who remained after the war be strong enough to pull themselves together to fight the constantly revolving door of common enemies? Could they restore peace in a world without the Avatar when they were barely maintaining peace in a world with him in it? And she could scarcely begin to imagine what his absence would mean for her, just on a logistical level. 

The heartache alone would be too much for her to bear. 

Zuko grimaces. 

“When —if the time arises,” he corrects himself hastily, “I’ll be here as quickly as I can, and if I can't make it myself, I’ll have you brought to the palace as soon as we can get a boat out here.”

She frowns. 

“I can’t leave, Zuko.”

Because that was the unspoken half of Aang and Zuko’s agreement, if Azula ever left without Aang, Zuko’s relationship with the council would be in shambles. It would be tantamount to forfeiting the throne. 

She could never ask him to do that. 

“I'll handle the council.” She has no doubt that he’d do his best, but if they couldn’t come to an agreement, she also has no doubt that he’d probably be too willing to break off all agreements with the counsel even if it meant imminent collapse when they’re already on the edge of war. 

Ten years ago, she would have wanted exactly that, would have wanted him to risk it all for her comfort, for her security, and would have enjoyed helping him build a bigger empire on the ruins of the other kingdoms that could not survive another onslaught. But ten years ago they were children, and now they are old enough to be having their own. 

“Zaj Laug is my home, the home Aang and I made together. This is what little I have left of him. I’m not leaving.” 

“Azula, you can’t be serious.” Though he knows she must be. “You can’t have more than a season left. What will you do here in labor without a midwife, let alone another living soul on this island?” 

“I’m not alone here.” How can she explain Ursa to him? Explain the history here, the spirit of the last Avatar, and the spirits of their ancestors here. Even now, they are surrounded by spirits of her own making, the old versions of herself that wait in the garden, or in the depths of the northern forest, or on the cliffs jutting out against the ocean.

She’s less alone on this island than she’s ever been. 

“Zula,” he implores, his childhood nickname for her spilling from his mouth. “I couldn’t—I can’t survive something happening to you.” 

“I’ll be fine,” she assures him. “Old Yang comes every few days now when the waters are calm.”

“Old Yang ever catch a baby before?”

“They call him Old Yang. I'm sure he’s caught plenty.” 

“Without a flying bison, it could take a while for word to reach the rest of civilization. You need a bird or something to connect you with the rest of the world.”

“The rest of the world?” she says dryly.

“With me. I want you to be able to reach out to me wherever you need to. And I’d like to be notified when my niece or nephew is born.”

“Worried your advisors will know before you do?” 

“I'm always worried that my advisors will know things before I do, but most importantly, I think I’m due a little time off soon. I might enjoy the sea air.” 

A whistle blows in the distance, and Azula knows that the crew is almost prepared for the trip home. They’ll have to leave before the tide changes again and it becomes difficult to navigate the off season current. 

“Burn bright, Zuko.” It’s been a while since she last got to say the traditional goodbye. 

“Burn bright, Azula.” Zuko throws his arms around Azula, and she finds she doesn’t want him to let go. She isn’t the only one, another set of arms comes down to circle them both.

The scent of jasmine and cedar blows in on a breeze, and Azula knows that her mother is standing there with them. But now she finally understands why she didn’t join them sooner, and why Zuko wouldn’t have ever seen her in the first place.

For a moment, they’re set in a tableau, the family they could have been if they could have been a completely different family.

When he heads up the plank, Ursa moves to stand beside Azula, hand on her daughter's shoulder as she waves goodbye to her son.

“You would have been enough,” Ursa says, her mirage shimmering in the sun. “The two of you would have been more than enough.”  

Together, mother and daughter watch as the imperial junk fades into the distance, and Azula lets herself enjoy the quiet company.

She might as well.

Ursa’s ghost will be gone come morning.