Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Maybe I was just terrified that I might be the closest thing she had to leaving a piece of herself behind.” 

— Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

It was the beginning of Zuko’s second year at Yonsei University, and he was a far cry from the angry, grieving wreck he had been at sixteen. He didn’t want to burn the world down anymore. He wasn't alone; he would even say he was loved now. He had his uncle Iroh who had been more of a father to him than his biological father ever had been, he had his mother, Ursa, back from the grave his sister had put her in with her lies, and he had his friends, Sokka and Suki, who he’d met in his first journalism lecture. 

He was moving forward. He was not swept up by life, dragged against his will. He was happy to go on now. He had not looked back in some time. 

Not until his cell phone rang, the screen lit up with a name he had not so much as thought in the last six months: Nakatomi Mai. 

“Dude, are you gonna answer that? It’s killing my focus,” Sokka said. 

“It’s Mai…” Zuko said. Sokka did a double take. 

“Like your ex?” Suki asked. 

“That Mai, yeah,” Zuko said. He couldn’t shake the feeling of disbelief as he read the kanji over again. 

The phone was still ringing. 

Suki hit decline. 

“What’d you do that for?” Sokka asked.

“He’s moved on, and he’s gay. There’s no point talking to her,” Suki said. She made it sound so final. Like there was no room to disagree.

Zuko accepted her decision and turned the page in his notebook. Suki was hard to argue with even when he wanted to. 

The phone rang again. Mai’s name was lit up once more. 

“She’s persistent,” Sokka said. 

Suki groaned. “Is she gonna keep calling?”

Zuko hit accept, and he raised the phone to his ear instead of answering Suki. “Mai?” he asked. He couldn’t imagine why she would call him after all this time, after the collapse of their relationship, and after he’d moved a sea away for university without so much as a goodbye. 

“She’s dead, Zuko,” Mai said. She sounded strange as she said it. He couldn’t tell if she was crying or not. For as long as he’d known Mai, he had never quite gotten a handle on reading her. It had been a point of resentment for them both when they were together. “Azula is dead.” 

That was a fucking lie. 

Seventeen-year-olds didn’t drop dead like that. Especially not when they were his sister—shiny and golden, high up on the pedestal their father had placed her upon, completely untouchable. As many times as Zuko had wished it were true, Azula couldn’t be dead. 

“… That’s not funny. Look, I don’t have time for this.” 

“It’s my fault,” Mai said, disjointed and dazed. 

Zuko almost hung up on her for that. What the actual fuck? This was a sick joke, that was certain. “What? What are you—why would you even be the one to contact me about that?” He listened to her breathing, heavier than normal, and he waited for a response. 

Finally, she said, “No one else knows yet. Just me and the paramedics. Your dad isn’t answering his cell. I know you hate Azula, and I don’t blame you for that, but I don’t know what to do, Zuko. Ty would cry if I told her. Even now, this would break her.” 

He was silent. 

“What do I do?” Mai asked. She sounded so far away. 

He didn’t have an answer for her. He didn’t have anything for her at all. He didn’t even know what she could possibly want from him. 

Sokka poked him in the rib. “Hey, are you okay?” 

Zuko stayed silent and unmoving. He felt like stone. He thought that, just once, he might understand Mai and her blankness. 

“I let her drown,” Mai said, more to herself than to him. 

It did the trick, though. It moved him to speak, to say, “You're—no. Azula can swim. She's seventeen, and she’s grown up on an island. Of course, she can fucking swim. She couldn't possibly just drown.” 

“What? No, she couldn’t swim. I was teaching her—” 

Zuko hung up. He had had enough. He wouldn’t continue to subject himself to this bullshit. Mai was a liar just like Azula. Azula had probably convinced her to pull some awful prank on him. They were probably laughing about it now. 

“What’s wrong, Zuko?” Suki asked. “What did she want?” 

Zuko let out a sound torn between laughter and anguish. “Azula is playing some shitty joke on me.” 

“Uh, are you sure? That seems like a cruel joke even for her,” Sokka said. 

“There’s no other reason Mai would call me like that,” Zuko said. It felt simple when he said it like that. He hated it for feeling simple. He hated his sister for making him feel this way. 

Sokka and Suki both swore. 

“That’s fucked up,” Sokka said. 

“Are you… are you sure it was a joke?” Suki asked. 

Zuko stared at her in disbelief. “Azula always lies.” 

“Yeah, but was it her? Or was it just Nakatomi?” Suki asked. 

Zuko found himself hating her too for asking. “It was just Mai,” he said, “but, seriously, Azula wouldn’t just die. Not like this.” 

Sokka and Suki exchanged a glance. 

Sokka reached out, his palm pressing warmly upon Zuko’s shoulder. “I know you weren’t close with her, but you should call her, Zuko. Just in case,” he said. 

Zuko flinched out of Sokka’s grasp. “You should go. Both of you.” 

“But—” Sokka started. 

“It’s okay, Sokka. We’ll go, but if you need anything, you know where to find us,” Suki said. 

He waited until the door was closed and both his friends were long gone. 

Alone, he opened up Twitter to check Azula’s. She had blocked him. He checked her other social media only to find he’d been blocked on every account. It wasn’t even like she used them. He didn’t think she even understand how they were meant to be used, really, but she’d blocked him on everything. 

She hated him more than he knew. 

It wasn’t like the feeling went unreciprocated.

The night sky was starless. It always was. 

Zuko didn’t know why he bothered staring out his dorm window anymore. He had been ignoring his phone ever since he’d discovered Azula had blocked him on everything. It had rung until he’d put it on vibrate, and then it had buzzed until it had fallen off of his bedside table.

Mai really was persistent.

It was buzzing again from the floor, actually. He thought Mai had given up by now. It had been hours since it had last buzzed.

Curiosity got the better of him, and he bent over to pick it up. When he saw the screen, he froze. It wasn’t Mai at all.

It was his biological father, Ozai.

The last time he had spoken to Zuko of his own accord had been years prior, when Zuko had finally realized that in their relationship, he was Sisyphus, forever pushing boulders in hope of the impossible. Zuko had given up on mending their relationship when he had been days away from turning seventeen. He had looked back many times in hopes of seeing Ozai staring back at him, but it had never come to fruition. Zuko had accepted now that it never would.

But here he was, staring at his father’s name lit up on his phone.

Was it an olive branch? There was no reason for Ozai to have changed his mind about disowning Zuko now. Nothing had changed. Nothing would ever change. Zuko knew that.

Still, his heart raced at the possibility of reconciliation, however faint.

He sat down on his bed and accepted the call. “Hello, Zuko speaking.”

“I’m aware,” Ozai said from the other line. His voice had not changed; it was still as smooth and cold as silk. There was something wrong with the way that he spoke, though. “I… Azula is dead.”

Zuko went rigid. “What?”

“Your sister,” Ozai hissed, “has died.”

Mai hadn’t been lying.

“You and your mother are… welcome to attend the funeral. Iroh as well. I have made the arrangements for it to be held next Sunday. I will not cover your travel expenses. You made your choice,” Ozai said. His voice was still too slow, too distant. It was strange how like the father Zuko had known he sounded when his words did not cut to the bone.

“I’ll figure something out,” Zuko said automatically. “I’ll let Mom know.”

“Good,” Ozai said.

They were silent for a long moment with nothing but the formality of blood between them.

“I should go now. I have… much to attend to,” Ozai said at last.

“I’ll see you,” Zuko said. The words felt hollow in his throat. I’ll see you. He was going to see his father again. He was never going to see his sister again.

The call ended, but Zuko made no move to click his phone off or set it down. He merely held it limply to his ear, listening to the sound of silence. Wondering if he should feel something, anything.

It was strange to think that his sister was dead for she had outlived his love for her years ago. Their relationship had withered away in a dark room until it was a mangled, ugly thing, and he could not recall who between them had locked it there. 

How meaningless mourning would be now. 

Zuko had outgrown his grief for her years ago with the clothes of his past.

That didn’t mean his mother would feel the same way, though. He shook his head. He had to get up. He had to keep moving as he had been all this time.

It was just like Azula to drag him back to his old habits even in death.

He sighed and moved to his desk. He had to write his mother a letter now. They’d been in touch regularly since he’d been taken in by Iroh at sixteen and even more so since he had moved to Seoul for university, but she was still reluctant to have a cell phone again. She was still terrified of her ex-husband tracking her down and bringing her back to Tokyo.

Zuko couldn’t blame her.

“Dear Mom,” he wrote. He didn’t know how to continue. He wasn’t sure there was a good way, a gentle way to tell her that her only daughter was dead. “I have bad news,” he continued.

No.

That was terrible. Azula dying wasn’t just “bad news” for their mother. It was a nightmare for a mother to outlive her child, even if the child was Azula. It was unfathomable. Especially considering she hadn’t spoken to Azula in almost a decade.

He started over. “Dear Mom, I’m sorry to tell you, but,” he wrote.

Except he wasn’t sorry in the way she would want him to be.

Why did he have to do this? It was probably all over the news by now that the daughter of the CEO of Phoenix Oil was dead. His mother was, in all likelihood, already grieving.

“Dear Mom,” he wrote, “Azula is dead. I know you probably already saw, but the funeral is next Sunday in Tokyo. Father invited us, but I thought I should tell you. I’m sorry.”

He wasn’t sorry that Azula was dead. He wasn’t sure what else he could be apologizing for. He sent the letter overnight anyway.

It was only as he walked back to his dorm that it occurred to him that Ozai might not have told Iroh yet, that Ozai might not be planning on telling Iroh at all. Such a responsibility might be left to him now.

Would Iroh even care? It wasn’t as if they had been close ever. Azula had pushed their uncle away at every turn, and eventually, he had given up on the relationship altogether.

Surely Iroh had seen a news report on it by now or been alerted by a friend that his niece was dead. Surely he would call Zuko any minute now to check on him.

But what was there to check on? Zuko couldn’t be sure that he cared that Azula had died. They hadn’t been siblings in years.

A stray cat meowed, startling him.

“Hi there,” he said, breathlessly.

The cat meowed again, darting up to him.

Zuko bent down to pet the cat only for it to hiss at him. He retreated. Animals had never really liked him all that much.

He’d always blamed Azula for it as a child. He could still remember her, carelessly, almost spitefully throwing whole loaves of bread at ducks in ponds and laughing when their mothers chased after Zuko for doing the same.

Had he loved his sister then? Or had she already become a nuisance to him, always lying and hurting and ruining?

They used to play together as children. Games that Azula had invented, usually, but games nonetheless. It had been fun sometimes, and other times, Zuko had stomped away with tears in his eyes as Azula taunted him.

And then Ozai had decided Azula was the golden child. Azula was untouchable and shiny and perfect, and Zuko should apologize for not being like her. But even before then, Azula had always been tainted with cruelty.

Zuko could remember how dangerous her boredom could get, even in childhood. She had been unaware of it then, but it had been present, the cold glint in her eyes when she zeroed in on a new target. When she had become aware of it, everything had gotten so much worse.

If Zuko was Sisyphus, Azula was Zeus, rolling his boulder back down every time it got to the top of the hill, acting as the obstacle between Zuko and their father’s love.

He squeezed his eyes shut so hard that it hurt. He was an idiot. All it took was one phone call, and he was back to wagging his tail like a beaten dog hoping its owner had changed, praying for his father’s love. Even now, when he had come so far, Azula could set him back.

“I’m not sad for you, Azula. I just wish you’d stuck around long enough to let me have some fucking closure,” he whispered. She would never have given it to him by choice, but he thought that if he’d tried hard enough, he could have wrung it out of her.

He was pathetic.

It was dawn when Zuko was awoken by knocking at his door. It was Iroh, of course, checking up on him as he knew his uncle would.

“Have you heard the news, Nephew?” Iroh asked. His voice was tired, and Zuko wondered if he’d slept at all.

“Yes, Father called me to tell me,” Zuko said. “I’m going to the funeral next weekend.”

“Will my brother be paying for your flight?

“No.”

Iroh sighed. It made the shadows under his eyes seem more pronounced somehow. “Well, I can more than cover one person’s travel expenses,” he said.

Zuko blinked at him. “One? Aren’t you going to come too, Uncle?”

For a long moment, Iroh was quiet. He shuffled slightly. Then: “I believe that Azula’s soul would rest easier if I did not bother her with my presence. She never did think much of me as her uncle.”

“Then… do you think it would be better if I didn’t attend either?” Zuko asked, challenging Iroh’s notion.

Iroh chuckled softly, but there was no humor to it. His eyes looked very dull. “I do not know. It’s not my place to tell you what your relationship with your sister was, Nephew. However estranged the two of you were, however difficult she could be, she was your sister. Only you can decide what would be best for you to do.”

It was not the answer Zuko wanted. It was not an answer at all.

Zuko couldn’t fathom what he could gain from attending. He was half-sure that if Azula could see him at her funeral, she would laugh at him for playing the role of the grieving brother. There was no love lost between the two of them.

The thought made his blood boil. He wanted to tell Azula she was a horrid sister, that she was a monster, that he didn’t miss her at all.

He couldn’t do that.

Dead girls couldn’t even mock him for his anger, let alone receive it.

“Could you make me some calming tea?” Zuko asked.

Iroh smiled. “Of course.”

They passed the morning that way, enjoying each other’s company and drinking tea. Zuko wondered if maybe they should have pretended to miss Azula or reminisced or mourned or anything but what they did. But the truth was that Azula had been so disconnected from their lives that Zuko wasn’t sure they had anything to mourn or reminisce about in the first place.

There was one thing that was bothering him, though. He still hadn’t spoken with Mai since he’d hung up on her. He had been ignoring messages altogether since the news had broken that Azula was dead, but he thought he owed Mai an apology.

He told Iroh as much.

“Oh? I didn’t know the two of you were speaking again,” he said.

Zuko shook his head. “No, we aren’t. But she called me to tell me before Father did, and I didn’t believe her. I hung up on her even.”

“Ah, that is unfortunate. It’s not as if it was her fault. I’m sure she will understand your reaction if you simply apologize to her, though,” Iroh said.

Something burned, and it wasn’t his tea. Mai had said that it was her fault. He knew, though, what Iroh would say if he told him what Mai had said. It was only her guilt speaking, and it was natural to blame herself in a situation like this.

In the end, the words died before they even reached his throat.

Instead, Zuko said, “You’re right. I’ll apologize when I see her for the funeral.”

There was no point in bringing it up. All anyone could do was move forward.

His mother called him that night.

“Zuko,” she said. His name was disguised in a short breath. He almost missed the sound.

“You got my letter, Mom?” he asked.

There was a sniffle on her end of the line. Confirmation both that she was heartbroken and that she knew. He’d known it would be like this, with her crying and him feeling stonehearted.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Where are you now?”

“Matsuyama… I’m using a payphone again,” she said. “I heard it on the news, and I didn’t want to believe it. But then I got your letter…”

Zuko was quiet for a moment. “I’m sorry.” It sounded so futile from his lips. He didn’t know how to fix it.

“It’s not your fault.”

He’d wished for this, though. And now it was a reality. “Are you—do you want to come to the funeral?”

“Of course, I want to attend,” she said harshly. “Why would you even ask? My daughter is dead. Your sister is dead. Of course, I have to go.”

“I know, Mom. I’m sorry. It’s just… what about Father? Are you okay with seeing him? He’s dangerous.”

“I’d wear a wig, go by a fake name, I’d even face Ozai as myself—whatever I have to do, I’ll do it. I will not be stopped from putting my daughter to rest, Zuko. Nothing can stop a mother’s love. Not even death.”

Zuko shifted uncomfortably. He didn’t know what to say or do with himself. He had never heard his mother speak so passionately about Azula. “I know you wanted to reconcile with her…” he said, thinking of the time his mother had shared with him that she hoped that when Azula went away for university and there was even a sliver of hope that it could be kept from Ozai, she wanted to try. It had only come up once, but she had looked so serious about it. Zuko hadn’t had the heart to tell her how he was sure that even now, especially now, Azula would have ratted her out in a heartbeat. “I’m sorry you can’t now.” 

“Zuko, my love, it’s not your fault that Ozai kept my children from me. Or that I chose to leave him, knowing he would keep you both as long as he could. The only people to blame for my relationship with Azula are myself and your father,” she said. He could feel the heartbreak, jagged and sharp, in her every word. He knew she believed she had failed her daughter.

At that moment, Zuko made up his mind to attend the funeral. Not for himself or Azula, but for their mother.

“I love you, Mom.”

“I love you too.”

“I’ll see you before the funeral, okay? I’ve got to make some travel arrangements now.”

“I understand. I’ll see you then.”

The phone call ended as all things must, and Zuko messaged Iroh as he knew he must. I want to attend the funeral. Can you pay for my flight? I don’t need to observe the mourning period in Japan. I can come back the day after the funeral and everything have been completed, he wrote.

He set his phone down and wondered what he should say to Suki and Sokka. He still hadn’t spoken with them since his father had called him, and he was dreading the conversation they would have. As much as they said they understood the void that was his relationship with his sister, the fact of the matter was, they both had siblings they loved more than life itself. There was no way they could truly understand the complete absence of grief Zuko felt at that moment. They cared about him, and they would want to talk about his feelings, and he didn’t know how to tell them he had none.

Everything was numb. 

He wasn’t even relieved that his sister was dead like he’d thought he would be over and over again.

His phone buzzed. Iroh had responded. Your flight is booked.

It didn’t make Zuko feel any better.

He made up with Sokka and Suki in the end. It was Friday, and they were even driving him to the airport. They’d offered condolences, but Zuko didn’t want them. The drive had become awkward after that with neither Sokka nor Suki quite knowing what to say to him.

It was his own fault. 

He had denied their condolences too angrily. He was regressing into the angry boy he’d been all those years ago. The one who would’ve burned himself down if it meant burning everyone else too.

The burn scar over his left eye itched. He hated when this happened. It was one thing to accept his new face; it was another to be reminded of what his father had done to him, of how that hadn’t been enough to shake Zuko’s faith in the man.

“When I get back, can we just… can we do something to take my mind off it?” he asked.

Sokka stared at him, wide-eyed and unsure. “Uh, don’t you want to observe the grieving period?”

“Yeah, isn’t that really important?” Suki asked.

Zuko shook his head. “Azula would have laughed at me for trying,” he said. “Anyway, I’m not going to the funeral for her. I’m going for my mom. The truth is I have no grief for Azula to take from me.”

“I know you two had a difficult relationship, but you seriously don’t feel anything?” Sokka asked.

Zuko’s knuckles turned white around his luggage handle. “That’s because you love your sister! Azula is nothing like Katara! Katara wouldn’t have smiled if your father beat you!”

That shut them both up. 

It didn’t alleviate any of the anger swelling in Zuko’s belly, though. It only made him angrier. The sight of Suki’s own knuckles turned to porcelain around the steering wheel worsened the feeling. He could burn this whole car down, himself included, and it still wouldn’t be enough.

The car finally stopped at the terminal.

Sokka got out to help Zuko with his luggage. “Hey, man, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to dredge up old wounds,” he said, “and you’re right. I don’t understand what your sister dying is like for you.”

“I’m sorry for snapping,” Zuko said, although he wasn’t sorry at all. It was the kind of thing his uncle would want him to say, and it was the right way to leave things until he got back.

Sokka’s lips split into a smile. The sight was blinding. “I’ll make sure I get you good notes for anything you miss, okay?”

“Thanks, Sokka.”

“Anytime.”

“Tell Suki I’m sorry for being so rough too, please?” Zuko asked.

Sokka nodded. “She’ll understand. All right, text if you need anything, Zuko. I’ll see you Monday?”

“Yeah, Monday,” Zuko said. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Suki would never understand it, that nobody could ever understand it.

Who could ever understand the way he felt about his sister after all? It was strange that he had to think of her in the past tense now. It was strange that she was dead. It was strange how little he felt about the fact.

Resentment bubbled up inside him whenever he remembered her smug face or her cruel laughter. It made him so mad he was dizzy when he remembered that he could never tell her how much she had hurt him by the virtue of existing or that, even if he could, she likely wouldn’t care at all. Azula was cut to kill from the moment their father had gotten his hands on her. Maybe even sooner than that.

She had hated Zuko more than anything. She had wished he’d never been born.

He had wished the same.

It would be so much easier if his mother could just forsake her already, if he didn’t have to attend the funeral.

He was an awful person for thinking that. Azula always made him awful.

It was only in the comfort of the hotel Iroh had booked for him that Zuko remembered he had yet to apologize to Mai. He called her, unsure of if she would answer a text message from him.

She picked up on the second ring. He hadn’t expected that.

“Hello, Zuko,” she said simply.

They were both quiet for a moment.

“Hi,” he said at last, “I’m sorry for being a jerk before.”

“You’re always a jerk. I’m used to it,” she said.

He tried not to laugh at that. Her voice sounded scratchier than he’d ever heard it. He thought she might have been crying earlier, but he couldn’t be sure. “I’m going to the funeral.”

Her breath hitched slightly.

“Is there any chance we can meet up before? I’m in Tokyo now, but I’m only staying as long as it takes to do the kotsuage,” he said.

“Are you sure you’d want to see me?” she asked.

Despite himself, he flinched. “I am,” he lied.

“We can meet tomorrow morning then. At that cafe we used to go to,” she said.

“Okay,” he said.

“Nothing is okay.” Mai hung up on him before he could even process what she’d said.

The cafe was smaller than Zuko remembered, and it was certainly emptier. It made him feel claustrophobic to be trapped with Mai like that. Neither of them had even brought up their reason for meeting up yet. They had been polite with pleasantries, catching up on each other’s lives and hiding from their true purpose.

Mai was attending Ochanomizu University now, and she hated it. She’d been as well as could be expected since they’d stopped talking completely, though. Her parents were the same as ever, and her little brother, Tom-Tom, had grown on her in recent years. She was still best friends with Ty Lee who had dropped out of school after junior high and was working odd jobs now.

They had run out of things to talk about.

There had been a time when their silences had been a comfortable shape to fill; this was not that time.

There was only Azula left now.

Zuko inhaled sharply, and Mai seemed to brace herself at the sight. “Why did you say it was your fault?”

Mai went completely still. She could do that when she wanted, or when she didn’t want to. She could imitate stone better than anyone Zuko had ever met.

He waited quietly, somehow feeling more patient than he had ever been with her when she was like this.

“What did your dad tell you?” Mai asked slowly.

“That Azula was dead. When the funeral was. That’s all,” he said.

She seemed to shrink at that. She was folding over herself, making herself something impossibly small. Bending but never breaking. “What do you know about the last few years?”

Zuko blinked. “I’ve had absolutely no contact with Azula since I left for university and very little contact with her before that,” he said bluntly. “I only know what she shared on social media before she blocked me. She was practically a stranger in the end.”

Mai sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that. We had a falling out, Azula, Ty Lee, and I. Azula finally pushed too far. I pushed back. Azula didn’t take it well. Our friend group collapsed after that. Ty and I are still close, but even then… it’s not like it was before.”

“How could it be your fault that she died then? How were you even with her that day?” he asked.

“Azula called me. She wanted to reconcile. She asked me to teach her to swim. It was sudden, but I agreed. I told myself it was for Ty Lee, but it was for me. For whatever reason, I missed Azula,” she confessed. It sounded painful. “I wanted to find out if her trying to reconcile was real or not. If she was changing somehow. Instead, I killed her.”

Zuko didn’t so much as flinch. It wasn’t making sense. “Did you drown her?” he asked.

Mai’s nostrils flared. It was the first glimmer of emotion across her blank face that he’d seen in years. “Don’t be an asshole,” she said. “I would never have done that.”

“Then how did you kill her?” he asked.

“I left her alone. My mom called, and I thought it would be less painful to answer it than it would be to talk to Azula, so I left her alone in the fucking pool. And she drowned. It’s my fault.”

Zuko was quiet. He couldn’t fathom why, if Azula truly couldn’t swim, she would pick now of all times to try to learn, or why she would pick Mai to teach her.

It was futile, though. Trying to decipher Azula’s motives was like trying to read hieroglyphs. He stood no chance.

“It’s not your fault,” Zuko said at last. “You warned her right?”

Mai nodded.

“Then it’s not your fault. You told her to be careful, and she didn’t listen. She wasn’t a child. She knew it was dangerous to try alone, and she did it anyway.”

Mai said nothing at all.

Zuko couldn’t help but feel he’d said the wrong thing, but he had no idea what the right thing could have been. He couldn’t imagine that there was a right thing to say.

Nightfall came, and so did Azula’s wake.

He attended, of course, and so did his mother. It was the first time the Japanese public had seen her as an ex-wife, and Zuko knew that many people thought her a bad mother for her lack of involvement in Azula’s life over the last eight years, but they couldn’t possibly understand how hard it had been for her to leave, how much she had wanted to come back even when Azula couldn’t have deserved it less.

Zuko felt fiercely protective of his mother as a result.

He stood by her side, especially when his father approached them. Thus far, he had avoided private interactions with either of them, only using them as props when the guests wanted the spectacle of a grieving family unit, however torn apart they were.

That did not make Zuko trust the man. 

That did not make Zuko stop wishing he would apologize tonight, that Azula’s death had made him see the error of his ways and the value of blood.

He knew he was a fool. He knew it was pointless to hope. He could not stop the rising hope in his chest, though.

“Thank you both for attending,” his father said simply, whispering from the corner of his mouth to them.

“Of course,” his mother said, trying to brave the face of her abuser, “I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.”

His father stared at her for a long moment, and Zuko could see the slight waiting behind his lips. It never came, though. In the end, he only nodded. “Where is Iroh?” he asked Zuko.

“Uncle couldn’t make it,” Zuko lied. “He tried, but it was too short notice for him to make the arrangements for himself. He sends his deepest condolences, Father.”

His father shook his head. “The old fool,” he said quietly. It was the last thing he said to Zuko that night.

Zuko hated himself for wishing it wasn’t.

The black suit that he had packed was uncomfortable. It was brand new and itchy. The sleeves had not been tailored, and it showed slightly. Zuko was only a university student, and despite his inheritance, his uncle only ran a tea shop chain, but perhaps he should have shelled out more money on the suit he had bought for the funeral.

“You look handsome,” his mother said suddenly, brushing lint off of his shoulders. “All grown up like that…”

The last time he’d worn a suit had been to his grandfather’s funeral, shortly after that of his cousin, Lu Ten. He didn’t feel handsome or grown up in it at all.

“Do you need help with your obi?” he asked.

“Isn’t it my job to dote on you?” she asked, trying to find a smile with her mouth and failing horribly.

“Sorry,” he said.

She shook her head. “It’s fine, Zuko. You’re a good son.”

Had he been a good brother? Had he been a brother at all? In recent years, there had been more times than he could count wherein he’d felt like he had no sister. Even before he’d left, he had felt so alone in that house.

They were only ever playing at being a family in the end. Even now.

Azula would have hated the sight of them all like this. She would have hated him attending her funeral at all.

But there wasn’t time to change his mind, and he found he didn’t want to anyway.

It was better, even, if he spited his sister by attending, by consoling their mother at the funeral. Perhaps he should feel guilty about that line of thought. There was no way for him to do so, though. Not when the thought of Azula’s cruel face entered his mind, her eyes horribly bright, her every word mocking, her every smile disdainful.

She had poked and prodded at his every wound. Now, he could return the favor in the face of her death.

“Are you ready?” his mother asked.

“Huh? You’re not putting on makeup?” Zuko asked. He didn’t think his mother needed it, but he knew that she liked to wear a light amount.

She shook her head. “I would only cry it off.”

He reached out to take her hand. “It’s going to be okay,” he said. He was sure it would, even as they were off to face his father, her estranged ex-husband, and Azula’s corpse. They could face anything so long as they had each other.

Zuko was carrying two envelopes full of cash for the funeral: one was from him and the other was from his uncle, ¥12,000 and ¥15,000 respectively. His mother was giving ¥30,000. He didn’t know where the money had come from, and he was reluctant to ask. It wasn’t as if she had been living in excess all these years.

More than he anything, he suspected the sum of money reflected a guilt she did not deserve to feel. The thought broke his heart more than Azula ever could.

The way he saw it, he had no grief to set down and no sister to mourn. 

For the last two years, there had been nothing but the Sea of Japan stretching out between them, adding distance upon distance. For the two years preceding that, there had been cities and all the lives held within, constructing walls more impenetrable than China’s between them. Every text he never thought to send, every favorite thing he had not remembered in years, every memory he had let slip through his fingers—all any of it amounted to was a sister he had not wanted to know.

A sister who had not wanted to know him. 

He almost felt perverse attending her funeral like this.

He wasn’t a mere spectator, though. Whether he had been there these last few years or not, whether Azula had wanted a brother or not, Zuko was bound to her by blood.

“You look beautiful, Ursa,” his father said in lieu of a greeting, “Azula always looked so much like you…”

“Thank you, Ozai,” she said stiffly.

“Hello, Father,” Zuko said. He was clutching his prayer beads too tightly now, he knew.

“Zuko, you look well,” his father said. “Too well. Are you not grieving?”

Zuko paled. “Of course, I am, Father.”

His father tutted and shook his head. “I would hope so. Our family has suffered a horrible loss, after all.”

“It has,” his mother agreed. “It feels so surreal to have to say goodbye to her.”

“Does it now? You seemed to have no issues when you left before.”

She looked horribly uncomfortable now. The burden of her leaving weighed heavily on her soul. Zuko knew that too well. He still wasn’t brave enough to stand up to his father.

He had done so before, and each time, he had been met with cruelty.

He stayed silent this time.

His father smiled for it. “I should go speak with the other guests,” he said. “It’s good to see you again, Ursa.”

Zuko squeezed his mother’s hand, an attempt at reassurance.

She didn’t even notice.

Mai and Ty Lee were in attendance despite their falling out with Azula. Zuko supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised. They had both been close with Azula once, and Mai had admitted to missing Azula, even if neither of them could understand why that was.

Zuko didn’t speak with either of them. He was sure that talking to them would only exacerbate his mother’s discomfort right now since they had both been colored by Azula’s less-than-flattering view of the woman.

He merely nodded at Mai in acknowledgment and prayed that Ty Lee would not approach him or his mother.

By the time that Ozai started to deliver a eulogy, she hadn’t even acknowledged their presence.

“Words cannot describe my heartbreak. To outlive your child is every parent’s nightmare, and for me, it is my reality. My daughter is gone. It is as simple and as complicated as that.

“While Azula may be gone, though, her memory lives on. My daughter was a bright girl with an even brighter future ahead of her; I thought that perhaps one day, she would be prime minister. Whatever she would have set her mind to, Azula could have achieved. She’s special like that. Was…

“It’s strange to speak of her in the past tense. It’s strange to wake up every day and not be greeted by her. To not revel in her charm, her wit, and her hard-working nature. I could not have asked for a better daughter.

“However, it is not her qualities that I will miss most but her company. The late nights we would spend working together long past the hour at which most people would have given up, the comfort she provided by dragging me out of my own head and into the real world when I was over-stressed, getting to watch her spirit shine through as she played volleyball, the traditions we had for holidays and birthdays spent together, cooking together to celebrate her academic successes… I will never stop missing my daughter.”

Zuko had never seen his father so somber and soft. He had always known that the man favored Azula, loved her more than he could ever love Zuko, but it was something awful to see it so clearly. Maybe that was selfish to think at Azula’s funeral, but it was the truth. It made something monstrous in Zuko ache to see the proof of his father’s heart like this.

It wasn’t only that, though. Zuko had never seen this side of Azula that his father spoke of. He had never known a girl who was capable of comforting another or who was even sensitive to the feelings of other people in the slightest.

Azula was a stranger to him, and so was their father.

Had she been a stranger to all of these people? Were they only voyeurs, prying into another man’s tragedy?

Zuko couldn’t imagine that all of them were grieving Azula the way his father was. Azula was beloved, but only because people hadn’t known her. Not really.

Perhaps it wasn’t a tragedy at all then if the only man who was capable of honest, pure grief at her death was her father, if even Iroh, the wisest and most forgiving man Zuko had ever known, could not produce grief at her death.

Zuko thought that loss and tragedy were not one and the same in the end.

There was one last meal to part with the dead before the kotsuage. His father had made a toast, but Zuko couldn’t bring himself to eat or drink a damn thing. He was supposed to, had been encouraged vigorously by everyone else and even underage attendees seemed to be doing so, but his stomach curled at the mere thought of food, and he was a lightweight. 

If he got inebriated, he thought he might say something unbecoming about Azula.

He couldn’t imagine what the fallout of that would be at a celebration of her life when everyone else was laughing and sharing stories about her, even Mai and Ty Lee.

Zuko pulled his gaze away from them and to his mother. 

She had tears in her eyes.

The sight made him want to cry too.

Zuko’s hand trembled as he passed a bone from his chopsticks to his mother’s. Nobody had said a word the whole time they’d been doing the kotsuage. It was worse than Lu Ten and his grandfather’s kotsuages had been.

Finally, his father broke their veil of silence. “Did Iroh really hate his niece so much that he wouldn’t attend her funeral?”

“He didn’t hate Azula!” Zuko said. “He just respected her wishes enough to not attend!”

“And yet the two of you attended?”

“I don’t believe that my daughter hated either of us enough to not want us to grieve her,” his mother said thinly.

His father smiled. “You didn’t know Azula at all. You never did.”

Zuko grit his teeth. “What Azula wanted doesn’t matter anymore; funerals are for the living.”

His father laughed mirthlessly. “That is true.” He placed the bone in the urn. “How about the two of you come over? You can go through Azula’s things for any keepsakes you’d like.”

Zuko hadn’t expected that. It was almost kind to his mother. His father hadn’t been kind in years. Zuko was sure it was some kind of awful ploy to hurt her even worse. It had to be.

“That would be wonderful, Ozai. Thank you.”

“Yes, thank you, Father,” Zuko said reluctantly. He would have to delay his flight back to Seoul, but it was worth it to protect his mother.

It had to be.

Chapter Text

Zuko had nine new messages when the kotsuage was over with and done. Six were from his group chat with Sokka and Suki, two were from Iroh, and one was from Mai. All of them were asking if he was all right.

He was exhausted and had no desire to respond to a single one of them. Selfishly, he wanted to hide away until this was over and Azula was forgotten, until it was as if he had never had a sister at all. It had felt like that to him for years anyway. With her dead, it was only a matter of time before everyone felt that way.

Reluctantly, he messaged them back. I’m okay. Thanks for asking. I have to extend my stay in Japan, though. He apologized profoundly to Iroh for the inconvenience

Iroh was understanding and kind about it. He always was.

Zuko thanked him for it. His phone buzzed, but it wasn’t Sokka or Suki or Iroh. It was Mai again.

Staying to mourn? He could hear the twinge of sarcasm to it, or maybe he could only hear the bluntness of Mai’s words.

Not really. Father invited Mom and me to the estate. He’s letting her go through Azula’s old things.

Her response was fast. That sounds unpleasant.

Yeah, but it’s for my mom, so I’ll bear it. He would do anything for his mother. Mai knew that.

Zuko stared at the three dots that appeared on his screen for what felt like years before it disappeared. He frowned. Finally, a new message appeared: I understand.

Did she? He knew that Mai’s relationship with her mother was strained, but he knew there was love there too.

His fingers moved before he could think through what he wanted to say back to her. It came out all wrong. Do you want to come with us? That was idiotic. If it was uncomfortable for him, he couldn’t imagine how it would feel for someone who wasn’t even bound by blood to Azula.

But Mai didn’t say no.

He stared at the words on his screen for a long time, but they did not change. Mai had agreed to come.

It was horribly selfish of him to invite her. It was almost something Azula would have done. Selfish to the bone. She was like a siren, pulling them down with her to the depths, not caring that they couldn’t breathe.

She hadn’t been able to breathe either.

Drowning, what a horrible death. It made Zuko sick to his stomach to even think about. He wasn’t like Azula. She had been selfish to die like this, leaving him forced to talk to their father and go to that awful house, and he was allowed to need someone to help him through it.

Clearly, Mai understood that.

Zuko was not his sister, not even if she haunted him.

The train ride was as uncomfortable as Zuko had expected. Maybe even worse.

He loved his mother. His love for her was disentangled from any resentment or grief he felt about her leaving, was larger than life, enveloping him in its warmth at every turn. But this was needling him. Azula’s ability to ruin, even from beyond the grave, might even be larger than his love for his mother.

The thought prickled beneath a layer of flesh. It was not so deep in his veins that he thought he could never extract it, but it was still too present to ignore entirely or even at all.

His mother was trying to talk about Azula. He shouldn’t have been surprised to hear her try to mine memories from him like fool’s gold. It was worse, though, that he had involved Mai.

“Do you remember that little mantra you had?” his mother was asking. “Azula always lies.”

“… I do,” Zuko said, unsure as to how this could possibly be a happy memory of his sister.

She smiled, and it looked hazy and disconnected from her mouth. “She was always pulling pranks on you, wasn’t she? They weren’t always nice, but…”

“She’s not a nice person,” Zuko said.

“Wasn’t,” Mai corrected.

There was nothing else to say. 

His mother ignored that, though. “She could be cruel,” she said, a concession, “but she loved you so much. Her first word was Zuzu. Not mama or papa. It really hurt my feelings at the time.”

Zuko couldn’t fathom a world where his little sister had ever loved him. He smiled, flimsy like paper, anyway. For his mother.

“You know, she always drank her coffee black. She didn’t even like it like that. She just smiled and took it every time,” Mai said.

Zuko watched his mother’s eyes go shiny with unshed tears. He wasn’t sure why Azula taking her coffee black did that to her. “She got that from her father,” she said quietly.

Mai’s eyes sharpened like knives. “Azula got a lot of things from him.”

The idea of Ozai hung over them all for a long moment. It was like a haunting, cold and oppressive and terrible. Zuko wanted to skin it alive. Exorcism wasn’t enough. Love wasn’t enough, but neither was hatred. He would never be rid of his father.

“Ty Lee made her volunteer to star in a play during a junior high cultural festival,” Mai said suddenly. “She was so mad about it the whole time, but everyone thought she was really good. She came alive during that performance. It was kind of amazing. I think she got that from you, Aunt Ursa.”

His mother’s mouth slipped out of the hard line it had worn like a snake shedding skin. Beneath that layer, there was a smile. “She did always love to play Love Amongst the Dragons, didn’t she?”

“I guess,” Zuko said. He was trying not to frown at Mai. Her voice had been almost fond when she was talking about the play. He hadn’t known she’d had good memories of Azula. He hadn’t wanted her to have good memories of Azula.

He could only remember the cruelties of their childhood, the balmy summer days that slipped away with him fuming about whatever Azula had done to him now, whatever lie she’d told or prank she’d pulled or taunt she’d crowed. Even if he hadn’t remembered those so starkly, he had always assumed Ty Lee had been closer to Azula anyway. They’d been the same age and shared many homerooms over the years, and Ty Lee had always been so soft for Azula. He’d even heard Azula apologize to her before. He’d never heard her apologize to anyone else.

In his head, Mai had chosen him over Azula. It had been a clean choice. For the first time, he wondered if maybe the reality was messier than he had allowed it to be.

“Ah, you’re here. You brought a guest, I see,” his father said. He eyed Mai warily. 

“Yes, Father, I hope that’s all right,” Zuko said.

His father clicked his tongue impatiently but said nothing further on the matter. “I have to leave for a meeting, but stay as long as you’d like. I take it you remember where your own daughter’s bedroom is?” His smile was thin-lipped, and something in the brightness of his eyes eerily resembled that predatory look Azula would get in her eyes, stolen from her mother’s face, before she went for the kill.

His mother opened her mouth helplessly.

“I remember where Azula’s room is,” Mai said quickly.

“Very well. I hope you find something… comforting to you, Ursa. You as well, Zuko.” With that, he left, taking all of the poise that Zuko had never inherited from him.

Azula’s bedroom was blank. She had no pictures up, framed or loose. There were no awards or accolades out despite Zuko knowing she possessed many. She had left no proof of residence even. There was only Azula’s furniture—a desk, a dresser, a bookshelf, a bed, made as if she would return to sleep on it that night. As if she was not ash and bones already.

“Is this how she left it…” Mai asked.

“Or did Father clean?” Zuko finished. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that his father was truly grieving, that he could have cried as he went through Azula’s things, remembering some anecdote or fact about her, remembering that he would never so much as hug his daughter again, if Azula had ever been a hugger.

Worse than the thought of his grieving father, though, was the reality of his grieving mother who burst into tears at his words. They’d been insensitive, he realized.

Zuko embraced her, her bony frame pressing into his lean one. She fit like a memory. He wanted to keep her there, calm and consoled and protected forever. He knew he had to let go eventually, though.

“I’m sorry,” Mai said, “I spoke improperly.”

His mother shook her head. “No, no. It’s okay, Mai. You didn’t do anything wrong. Neither of you did. I just—I didn’t expect this.”

Zuko couldn't blame her. He had not been inside Azula’s bedroom in many years, and he had expected something different based on the half-formed memories of the room from his childhood. He had expected something, anything. Not this nothingness, standing there as if Azula had never been there at all.

He wondered how his father thought of it before he shook the thought clear from his head.

“Mai, do you know if there are any keepsakes we should be looking for?” he asked.

“It’s the first time I’ve been in here since we had our falling out,” she said. “Azula liked to hide things, though. From your father. She hid things. I’ll show you.”

That suited Azula, Zuko thought. Any sentimentality that she might have had, she had learned to bury years ago. He wasn’t sure there’d been anything kind to her in the end, but he remembered the girl who had kept her secrets lining the cavity of her chest, kept so close to herself that he’d never discover them.

Searching her room seemed to be a daunting task.

Zuko took the drawers of her desk and dresser to distance himself from the job at hand. It was easier this way. He didn’t know that he wanted to see anything Azula deemed personal enough to hide from their father. 

He found almost unnervingly normal things—pens, notebooks for classes, planners. Nothing that indicated anything of who Azula had been. It was as suffocating as it was relieving.

Mai, though, was showing his mother the hiding places she remembered.

There was a false bottom to a dresser drawer, a hollowed-out book, a loose floorboard that came up.

In these places, Mai fished out Azula’s private treasures: a half-smoked pack of cigarettes; poorly burned photographs featuring herself, Mai, and Ty Lee; a well-loved copy of the Love Amongst Dragons script, the engraved knife she’d stolen from Zuko, the one she had denied taking over and over again after he’d been disowned; a fake ID with a little square picture of her unsmiling face and bright eyes glaring out at them; a blue metallic lighter; and, most surprising of all, an almost used-up tin of birth control pills. Mai had unearthed a girl that Zuko wanted nothing more than to forget, a girl that he had clearly never known at all.

Azula had been a smoker. While Mai seemed unsurprised by this, he would never have guessed that. She had been something of an arsonist if the photographs were anything to judge by. He would never have thought that of her. She had been sentimental enough to remember Love Amongst Dragons even well into her teenage years. He would have laughed if someone had suggested something so preposterous to him. She was on birth control. He would never have been able to imagine his sister being close enough to anyone to need that.

“What a bad habit,” his mother said, turning the cigarette pack in her hands, “and the—the pills… at least she was being safe.” Zuko couldn’t tell if they were the words of a mother trying to convince herself that this was fine or if she was being sincere.

“I didn’t even know she had a boyfriend,” Mai said quietly.

“Maybe he wasn’t a boyfriend,” he said. 

“Maybe. Azula wasn’t really one for emotional intimacy,” Mai said. She didn’t sound like she fully believed the idea. 

Zuko didn’t care.

Mai shook her head, and she pocketed the photographs. “Want your knife back?” she asked Zuko.

“Sure,” he said. It had been a present from his uncle, after all.

“Can I—can I keep the script?” his mother asked.

“Of course. She was your daughter,” Mai said. The words sounded sour in her mouth as if she didn’t believe that really gave the woman ownership over any part of Azula.

Zuko wanted to defend her, but he didn’t know what to say to do so. Selfishly, he didn’t want his mother to want ownership of her daughter.

“Maybe your father will find her contraband,” Mai said. Her mouth took on the shape of a smile, but it looked all wrong. She was trying to make a joke out of something none of them found particularly funny.

His mother looked outright distraught at the idea. She swept it all up—the fake ID, the cigarettes, the birth control pills—and said, “This will stay between us.”

“Of course,” he said.

“Right,” Mai said.

They got up. They put everything back into place, neat and tidy and as if Azula had never lived there at all. They left the room.

He paused, though. At the end of this hall, there was another room. It had been his once. Before he had been disowned and evicted from the premises.

Zuko could not help but wonder if it looked as unlived in as Azula’s room did. Perhaps all proof of the unfavored child had been erased. Perhaps it wasn’t even his old bedroom any longer. It could be a guest room or an office or a library or anything but his room.

He would never find out.

It was only natural that in the aftermath of picking through Azula’s old things, Zuko should want to comfort his mother. She wouldn’t have it, though. She insisted that she would be all right alone, that it was good for her even, and she insisted that he should spend more time with Mai. Catching up was important. 

He had loved Mai once, even if it hadn’t been in the ways she’d wanted him to. He could love her again. So Zuko walked with Mai, heading to her neighborhood. It was nice to know they were going the same direction now; the bad timing and different wanting and arguments that stemmed from both of their past were little more than memories now. Being on the same page for once was a comfort that was rarer and rarer outside of Sokka and Suki these days.

Better yet, they had returned to the comfortable silences of their past. At least, Zuko found them comforting.

When they arrived at the Nakatomi household, Mai’s parents, Michi and Ukano, immediately gave Zuko their condolences for his loss. They kept it short and simple, and for that, Zuko was thankful. He had never been fond of Mai’s parents, but at least they could provide him with this.

“What are condolences? Everyone was giving them to Mr. Minamoto yesterday too,” Mai’s little brother, Tom-Tom, said. He couldn’t have been older than five or six now. Zuko had lost count of his birthdays.

Michi paled. Even Ukano had the decency to go wide in the eyes.

“Sweetheart, you can’t ask that,” Michi said, her voice uncharacteristically gentle.

“It’s inappropriate,” Ukano supplemented.

Zuko shook his head, though. “It’s all right,” he said. “Can I explain it to him?”

Ukano nodded slowly.

“Tom-Tom, do you remember my sister, Azula?” Zuko asked.

“Yeah! My big sister’s been sad about her a lot lately,” Tom-Tom said. “Why’s that? Did Azula hurt her feelings?”

Zuko paused. He wasn’t sure what to say to that. 

“Not on purpose. She didn’t do anything to hurt me, at least. It’s just… something happened to Azula,” Mai said.

“Azula is gone, and she’s not coming back. That’s why people keep offering my family their condolences. They’re sorry that she’s gone,” Zuko said.

Tom-Tom’s eyes saddened. “I’m sorry your sister went away. I don’t really remember her, but she was kind of mean, wasn’t she?” he asked.

Zuko hesitated before saying, “Yeah, she was.”

“Still. She was your sister. It’s sad that she’s gone,” Tom-Tom said, hugging Zuko around the legs.

“It is sad,” Zuko said. He wasn’t sure if he believed himself.

They piled into Mai’s room, leaving the door open for her parents’ sake, and silence soaked over them. This was not the peaceful silence of the walk over here. This was something cold and ill-sized.

Zuko sat in Mai’s desk chair. He stared down at the wood beneath him, desperate for something to come to mind to say to her. “I’m sorry” is what he settled on eventually. “For everything.”

Mai raised an eyebrow at him. “Including for explaining death to my little brother?” she asked.

“Yes. And for not trying harder to understand you, for how our relationship ended, for leaving without a goodbye, for dragging you into my family drama now. All of it,” he said.

She let out a little breath like a laugh. It caught in her throat and broke. “It’s fine. Azula did way worse anyway.”

“I don’t want to be better than Azula. That’s a really low bar, Mai,” he said. “I just—I’m sorry.”

“So I hear.”

Zuko buried his face in his hands as if that might shield him from what he was about to ask Mai. “Do you think she deserves it?”

“What, dying?” Mai asked. “That’s kind of fucked up to ask. No, Zuko, I don’t think Azula deserved to drown to death.”

He groaned in frustration. “No, the grieving period,” he said.

Silence ensued.

When Zuko pried his face away from his hands to look at Mai, he saw her mouth half-open and her eyebrows twisted up in pain. She looked horribly deep in thought.

The watch on his wrist ticked by patiently. The sound hurt his head worse than any migraine. A minute passed. Then another. And another. And another.

Finally, Mai said, “Even if she didn’t, Azula would have demanded it anyway.” It was a simple answer. It was a safe answer.

And it wasn’t what Zuko had wanted at all. He sighed and looked back down. “You’re right.” What a horrible confession to make.

His watch kept ticking. It wouldn’t stop until it was broken or dead. The realization was one that he didn’t want to have.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever stop grieving her,” she whispered over the constant, unending sound of the ticking.

Zuko glanced at her, his palms folded in silent prayer. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Mai was silent.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he repeated.

“Azula would blame me,” she said.

His nails bit into the flesh of his knuckles. “Azula was an awful person. It wasn’t your fault.”

Zuko didn’t know who could be knocking on his hotel room door this late, but whoever it was, he hated them. All he wanted to do was sleep until his mother needed him. He wanted to bury himself in the endless black of the backs of his eyelids, watch them turn to shapes and colors that were not real, faces that were not anyone’s really.

More than anything else, Zuko wanted to be alone. He had cocooned himself in the duvet of the hotel bed. White was twisted into dark edges all around him. Stupidly, childishly, it made him feel safe.

His father’s reach ended in this room. His sister’s death could not invade this space.

The knocking did not stop.

Begrudgingly, Zuko rose.

“I’m coming,” he called out hoarsely.

Still, the knocking continued. Maybe whoever was bothering him hadn’t heard him over the sound of their own knuckles wrapping at his door.

He opened the door and was greeted with the sight of Ty Lee.

He scowled at her. “What do you want?”

She puffed her cheeks. It looked angrier than it did look childish. “Mai told me.”

There were a lot of things Mai could have told Ty Lee. Zuko couldn’t pin down which thing she could be referring to, what could have sparked this anger. He had never gotten along well with Ty Lee. She had always been Azula’s friend first. Even though when he knew that they hadn’t been close in the two years leading up to Azula’s death, he still thought of her as Azula’s friend.

“You went through Azula’s things,” Ty Lee continued, “and you didn’t even invite me. Why?”

“I don’t like you,” he said. He wasn’t sure that that was why he hadn’t invited Ty Lee,—truthfully, she hadn’t even crossed his mind when he’d invited Mai—but it wasn’t untrue.

“But Azula did!” Ty Lee said. “You don’t think she’d want me to have something to remember her by?”

His scowl deepened. “She didn’t even like you at the end. Why are you here anyway? What’s yelling at me going to do? It’s too late for you to go now, Ty Lee.”

“I don’t expect you to get it, but some of us miss Azula,” she said. Her eyes pressed close. Her whole face was pinched. “I’m sorry. That was too mean. Even to say to you. I get that she was… not a great person, and I understand why you wouldn’t miss her.”

Zuko stared at her. He didn’t know what to say here.

She continued on, confessing, “I was too scared to even talk to Azula in the end. I shouldn’t take that out on you. Even if you do suck.”

“You were right to stop talking to her. She treated you and Mai like shit too. She treated everyone like shit,” he said.

“You’re not wrong, but Azula’s life wasn’t always so easy, you know. It wasn’t simple for her. She treated people badly for a reason,” Ty Lee said. Her lips were curled into a frown.

He laughed. It was a stupid notion, Azula’s life not being easy. Azula had had no reason to treat anyone the way she treated them, and she hadn’t wanted an excuse either, would never have dug one up if you’d asked. Ty Lee was delusional for making one up to defend a dead girl.

“Azula was born lucky,” he said. “She got everything she ever wanted, including Father’s love. Everyone adored her.”

It was Ty Lee’s turn to laugh as if he’d told a joke, but her face quickly straightened out as she realized he was serious. “You’re kidding, right? Azula had, like, two friends. Your mom hated her, and so did your uncle. The only person Azula even had when she died was your dad, and we both know he’s not exactly winning Father of the Year any time soon.”

Beneath his skin, he could feel his blood boiling. It was a horrible feeling. He wanted to peel back the fleshy layer, to let the blood boil and boil until there was nothing left of him but bone and organ. “Mom and Iroh don’t hate Azula, and even if they did, they’d be right to! She’s awful to everyone! Especially my mom! And how dare you even imply my father would ever do this,” he gestured to his scarred face, “to Azula!”

“Maybe Azula was right; you are self-centered and self-pitying,” Ty Lee mumbled.

“Get out,” Zuko said. It was almost a snarl.

Ty Lee had no qualms about leaving Zuko behind to pick up the scarred fragments. She never had. Taking Azula’s side had always been her thing. That was why Zuko hated her in childhood. That was why he couldn’t forgive her now.

He didn’t want to talk to Suki after Ty Lee was gone and his temper had simmered until all the ripples and bubbles had left the blood under his skin. Truthfully, the only person who would make Zuko feel better at that moment was Sokka.

We found weird stuff in Azula’s room. Cigarettes and birth control. And a knife of mine she stole, he wrote. My father was there for just a minute, but it was enough to make me want to cry.

Sokka’s response was almost immediate. It made Zuko imagine him curled under his covers, watching his phone for Zuko’s message, which in turn made Zuko feel better. I’m sorry. I wish he would leave you alone.

It’s fine. The worst part was actually after it was all over when I got back. Azula’s old friend, Ty Lee, came over to yell at me. She wouldn’t stop defending Azula when I said she was born lucky. She told me Azula had no friends and all our relatives hated her, and she said I was selfish and self-pitying. It felt good to push the weight of his anger off of his chest like this.

Sokka typed for a while before replying. She shouldn’t have yelled at you, but was she maybe right about Azula not having friends or anything? I know your sister kind of sucked, but I don’t think anyone is born lucky, Zuko,

Zuko’s eyes slammed shut. Not Sokka too. He couldn’t lose Sokka to a girl he’d never even met. If Azula didn’t have anyone, it’s because she was shitty to everyone, he wrote.

Hey, man. I would never call your psycho sister a good person. I’m just saying I don’t think your argument about her being born lucky and adored and all that stands if she had no friends. Sokka’s argument wasn’t that unreasonable, Zuko supposed. Maybe he had been wrong about Azula being adored by everyone. He could concede that without conceding that Azula was a bad person.

Right?

Maybe. But Father still adored her, and that’s more than I ever had. It had been all he ever wanted as a kid, he didn’t say. Sometimes, it was still all he ever wanted, he could never say.

Your dad is a piece of shit through and through. Say the word, and I’ll kill the dude. Pew pew, Sokka responded.

Zuko smiled as he imagined Sokka with a finger gun, blowing imaginary smoke off the trigger of his fingertip. Thanks. That means a lot, Sokka. I’m sorry I got mad at you. Azula always did bring out the worst in me.

Don’t even worry about it, dude. I might not fully understand, but I know you. You would never act like that for no reason.

His heart skipped a beat. Sokka knew him. He was seen, and that was enough.

When sleep came, it did not bring with it dreams of soothing nothing. It did not wash him over with faces that were not anyone really. Instead, with sleep came his sister.

He could see Azula at eight, laughing innocently at something he had said. With him or at him, he couldn’t be sure. The nagging feeling that Azula’s laughter was not good persisted in his ribs as he touched his unscarred face.

There was only Azula’s laughter, infinite in its sound, growing larger and larger with each passing second. Overtaking him until it was a warped, cruel thing.

They were in an empty hallway, all the doors closed, locked even. Azula was laughing, and she was older now. Eleven, and then fourteen, and then seventeen, and then with her waxy skin melted off her face and her eyeballs like the yolk of an egg, running down her cheeks, prying the skin loose from her bones.

She was talking to him now. It was their last real conversation when he had been sixteen and she had been fourteen, but she stayed the odd, incinerated corpse. He could see her bones protruding, could remember holding them between chopsticks and passing them to his mother.

“I guess I should celebrate,” she was saying. “I mean, if I’m going to become an only child.”

“Fuck you!” Zuko said back to her. His arms were dripping blood. There were incisions, open and bleeding freely, that had closed and scarred years and years ago all down them. The blade was still in his hand, biting into the meat of his palms.

“Brothers and sisters shouldn’t do that, Zuzu. Aren’t you civilized at all?” she asked.

Even as Azula spoke, Zuko could hear her laughter echoing off the walls of the empty hallway.

He wanted to gouge her yolk eyes out of their sockets as they dripped to the floor beneath her. He wanted to rip the jutted-out bones out of her throat. He wanted anything to shut her up at long last.

Zuko woke with a strangled sob. He was cold and covered in sweat, and he could not blink away the melted vision of his dead sister no matter how furiously his eyes closed and opened, closed and opened, over and over on an endless loop as her laughter had been.

He reached out in the darkness to find his phone. He ripped it from its charging cable. He needed to see what she had said to him last, the last text message, the last reminder that his sister was a monster.

He wanted proof that maybe he had hurt her too.

There was no proof in his phone, though. There was nothing of any substance, cruel or otherwise, that either of them had said to each other in years. There was the occasional gloating message from her to remind him of how pathetic he was and how wonderful she was, and that was it.

There was nothing else to hold onto. There was no point in keeping her anchored within his phone.

It was time to let go.

Zuko’s thumb hovered over the delete all messages button. He might as well do this. He might as well throw her away, dispose of her as his father had disposed of him all those years ago. What would he gain from keeping the messages? There was nothing to cherish in them. There wasn’t even enough of her to hold in contempt in the messages.

He should just let go. Hit delete. Wash his hands of her at long last.

He couldn’t do it.

Azula was already dead. Zuko could not cut her out of his life even further. The tumor was benign now. It need not be removed.

Laughter bubbled up in his throat and poured out of his mouth. He had no idea where it was coming from. It wasn’t funny that Azula was dead. No matter how much he hated her, this wasn’t what he wanted. It couldn’t even provide him with the closure he so needed.

But it did mean that Azula had been wrong. She did not outlive her brother. She was not an only child.

Zuko was.

The other half of the equation was gone. Zuko’s brotherhood had been taken from him at long last. He was free from the chains of it.

The laughter was hysterical. It made his stomach ache.

He wasn’t only laughing, though. There were salt tracks down his cheeks. He was crying too. Was he sad about his sister’s death? Was it not a weight off his chest, the world off his shoulders to no longer be her big brother?

No.

No, it was only that he was miserable about how horrible she could make him feel even now that she was gone.

Zuko crawled to his bag at the foot of his bed. He rummaged through it, digging out clothes until he found it: The knife Iroh had gifted him in his boyhood, the knife Azula had stolen when he had been disowned.

The weight of a blade in his hands was achingly familiar.

He could slice his flesh open as he had done time and time again in his adolescence. He was two years clean, but he didn’t have to be.

The inscription stared back up at him: Never give up without a fight. For many years, he had considered cutting a way of survival. That had been him fighting to not give up.

But Iroh would cry if he knew what Zuko was thinking at that moment. Inconsolable, tremor-ridden sobs. The thought was enough to make Zuko return the knife to his bag. He would not relapse. Not now. Not with that knife.

Zuko buried his face in his hands, and he let himself cry.

When he was done, when there was not another tear he could expel from his eyes, he let himself lie down. His eyes were heavy now. Swollen too. He had never been a pretty crier.

His father and sister had both shamed him for his tears for so many years. Stop sniffling, you pathetic boy. Are you a man or not? Get up, Zuzu, get up, Dum-Dum.

He exhaled slowly.

The handle of the knife glinted from his bag. It occurred to him at that moment that he had never known why Azula had taken it from him to begin with.

Iroh had given her a gift too that Christmas, though she had hated it. Even now, he could recall the smell of smoke as she burned her doll to a crisp.

It had smelled so similar yet so different to the stench of his flesh burning.

Still, Azula had stolen his present.

It was too late to call Mai, so he texted her instead. Can we meet up when you get out of cram school tomorrow?

In all the time that stretched out before his phone vibrated, in the dark silence of nightfall, in the static hush of dawn, Zuko didn’t sleep at all.

It was morning when Mai responded, informing him that she could not meet up after cram school because she was watching Tom-Tom, but she could see him over the weekend.

For the second time, Zuko requested that Iroh delay his flight. He felt terrible doing so, but Iroh only told him to take all the time he needed. Iroh was always kind to him in that way. He would always be kind to Zuko in that way, Zuko was learning to accept. His uncle’s love was not conditional in the way his father’s love was.

Still, Zuko stared down at his uncle’s response: Money is no issue, Nephew. You may stay as long as you need to. However, I must warn you that spending too much time grieving your sister may be detrimental to both your well-being and your studies. Stay safe. I love you.

At last, Zuko found the ability to move his hands again so that he could reply. You’re right, Uncle. I’m not staying for her, though. I love you too.

He didn’t know how to elaborate any further.

His mother was in good health physically if nothing else.

“Has he been leaving you alone?” he asked her over their coffee.

She smiled, and the lines in her face deepened. “He has. What about you?” There was genuine concern etched into her voice. He loved her for that, even if it was a needless concern.

He laughed as bitter as his coffee. He hadn’t added enough cream to it for his tastes and was too embarrassed to ask for more. “There’s no reason Father would want anything to do with me anymore. I’ve been the discarded child for a while now,” he said. It wasn’t as if his father had spoken to him much before he’d been disowned either.

“I will never discard you that way, Zuko. I’m sorry if I’ve ever made you feel even a fraction of the way Ozai has,” she said.

Zuko covered her hand with his. “You would never hurt me like Father.”

Her eyes grew distant and cloudy. “Azula would disagree.”

“Forget about her! She was an ungrateful daughter who never wanted to see how much you loved us both!” Zuko said, forgetting himself.

A few of their fellow patrons stared at him.

Cheeks flushed, he sat back down.

A flimsy smile broke across his mother’s mouth. “I wish that were true, but I never could bring myself to love Azula as much as I loved you, my dear. You were always so much easier to love.”

It was a horrible confession. Zuko wanted to pretend he hadn’t heard her, but his mouth was already hung open in horror.

He couldn’t believe it, though. Wouldn’t accept it. His mother was perfect. He knew that. She had suffered so much, done the best that she could in a situation harder than most people could fathom. She had loved them both so much, even when Azula hadn’t deserved her love.

Even when she had left both her children, Zuko had known that his mother wanted to take them with her. But she hadn’t been able to. His father had made that impossible.

Azula had just been too angry to see the truth. She hadn’t wanted their mother to be good, but Zuko had always known better.

Hadn’t he?

“I just wish I’d been a better mother to you both,” she said with a sigh. “I’m sorry for unloading this onto you, Zuko. You deserve better from me.”

Zuko opened his mouth and closed it a few times, struggling to find the right words to say. “I forgive you. I’ll always forgive you,” he managed after a moment.

Later, when he was walking back to the hotel, Zuko saw that cherry blossom season had already passed.

Chapter Text

Azula thought she was rather funny as she threw the kickboard and inflatable tube she’d brought with her into the water. They splashed horribly, wetting her ankles. She didn’t blink.

And Mai, well Mai only stared at her with her face smooth and eyes bright. She looked positively electric under that calm façade. It was like watching the first ripple of a storm across a body of water.

The sight made Azula smile as she snapped the fabric of the school swimsuit she had never needed to wear before against her skin. The pain was soothing.

This time, the sound made Mai flinch. It was how Azula liked her best.

“Sorry,” Azula said without anything remotely apologetic coloring her voice. “It’s good to see you, Mai.”

Instantly, Mai’s hands curled into fists. She uncurled them as if she were reprimanding herself for letting Azula get to her so quickly. She must have been. She was so predictable to Azula, even with two years of estrangement between them. Azula loved it. It meant that she knew exactly what buttons to push to trigger the reactions she wanted from Mai. Over the years, the girl had become the perfect game.

“You too, Azula,” Mai said. Azula thought her name sounded bitter in Mai’s pretty mouth. She liked the sound of it.

“How have you been?” It was a loaded question. That was why Azula asked it.

Mai dodged it, but her throat bobbed first. It made her look like prey. “Do you want to learn to swim or not?” she asked to redirect.

“I wanted to see you,” Azula said.

Mai glared at her. She entertained Azula so much less now than she had when things had been good. It was almost insulting. But Azula knew better. She enjoyed toying with the other girl more than she should have, and Mai made it all too easy with the boundaries she was trying to draw.

“And to learn to swim,” Azula conceded with an eye roll. “Is it so awful of me to miss you?”

“Yes,” Mai said.

She hadn’t expected something so honest from Mai. Not this soon. Dazed, she blinked a bit, and then she smiled. It was red. She knew it wouldn’t stay that way in the chlorinated water. “I guess I’m a monster then. Where do you want me, Mai?”

There was a flush to Mai’s cheeks at that. “Just get in the pool,” she said.

For once, Azula obeyed.

“Hold the ledge,” Mai said. “We’re gonna start with just kicking.”

“You’re not going to try to drown me?” Azula asked.

Mai held steady and said nothing.

“You’ll never have an opportunity like this again.”

“Contrary to popular belief, I don’t want to kill you, Azula.”

Azula wasn’t soothed by this. If anything, it was boring to hear Mai veiled by this veneer of politeness, tamed like a beaten dog. What Azula had always liked about Mai was her willingness to bite the hand that fed her and slapped her too. This was a shadow of that girl.

She thought she knew where to strike to best provoke that girl out of hiding again, though. She waited until Mai was standing beside her in the water, adjusting her form and instructing her to kick. Then, she spoke lazily. “Don’t you find the cherry blossoms romantic, Mai?”

Mai’s hands flexed sharply, and her fingers left Azula’s waist for a brief but real moment. She took a second to inhale slowly, almost silently. “Not in the slightest.”

“Don’t tell me Zuzu never kissed you under them.”

“I don’t see what Zuko has to do with the fact that you can’t swim,” Mai said. Always deflecting, always hiding, always on the defensive. It angered Azula as much as it pleased her.

She bit her mouth into a smile and hummed.

Some of Mai’s tension crept out of her form as she pressed her palm to Azula’s knees to align them better with her shoulders. “Try kicking again,” she said.

Azula obeyed. It was certainly a change to their dynamic. She wondered if Mai liked it.

“Thank you for teaching me.” It was innocent enough. Kind even.

Mai still knew her well enough to hesitate. Azula was far from innocent. She was far from kind. She was far from anything remotely human, really. She knew that, and Mai knew it too.

“Really, I mean it. Otherwise, I could have drowned. Zuko and Mother might like that, but Father wouldn’t,” Azula said. She watched from the corner of her eye as Mai’s eyes blew wide and her jaw tensed considerably. Then, she watched as Mai smoothed her face into that awful blankness. More stone than girl.

“You need new material,” Mai said calmly. “The mommy issues are getting old.”

Azula smiled. She could see in the reflection of the water that the red had smeared like blood over her chin. “I missed this.”

“That makes one of us.” But Mai’s eyes, bright and sharp and angry as ever, gave her away.

Azula was acutely aware that her mother had been concerned about her starting school. She wasn’t stupid, and her mother wasn’t as quiet as she thought. As her mother had whispered, Azula had one friend, and she wasn’t the most social girl. She played too rough, all nails and skin and teeth.

Ty Lee was the opposite of her. She was a nice girl. At least, Azula thought that when she first saw Ty Lee. And then the nastiness came out when, the second a girl she had been playing with left, her smile flickered out of existence, replaced by a sneer of disgust.

Azula had looked past Ty Lee before that. But now her interest was piqued. 

“You hate her,” she said instead of introducing herself. “I thought she was your friend, but you hate her.”

Ty Lee flushed pink. “No, I don’t! That’s mean!”

Azula shook her head. “Don’t lie. I think it’s funny. She deserves it, certainly.”

“You do?” Ty Lee asked.

“Yeah. I’m Minamoto Azula, and you’re my friend now,” Azula said.

Ty Lee glanced around, and she pulled a flower she’d clipped from her pencil case. She tucked it into Azula’s palm. “Okay. I’m Hata Ty Lee.”

Azula closed her hand around the flower, squashing it with her fist.

Her mother had been wrong to worry. It was like her father had said, dismissive and annoyed with her mother’s misplaced concern: there was nothing wrong with her.

People died, and they never came back, and life moved on. She knew that; her father had explained as much to her. But knowing that wasn’t like knowing the bend of her grandmother’s wrist when she made tea or the stroke order of the latest series of kanji she had learned in school or the lines in her father’s face when he frowned at her brother. It wasn’t like anything Azula had ever known, so concrete for her to stand on. The ground beneath Azula felt unsteady with the knowledge her father had given her. With the knowledge that her grandmother had died, and she would never come back, and life would move.

She found it strange to hold the language of grief in her mouth. The words did not fit under her tongue, did not fold neatly between her teeth. It was the clumsiest she had ever felt in her speech. She wondered, briefly, if this was how Zuko felt; he was always saying the wrong words in the wrong order with the wrong rounding of his vowels.

“Why can’t we keep her eyes, too?” she asked.

Her mother, who had been smoothing out the imaginary creases of her black kimono, paused. “Azula, don’t say that,” she said, sounding breathless.

Azula frowned. “Why not?”

Her mother kneeled down before her, looked quite serious, and said, “I raised you better than that. It’s… we don’t say things like that. It sounds—it sounds wrong. Like something I know you can’t mean. All right, Azula?”

Azula didn’t understand. But she nodded her head and smiled cloyingly, in that way that always appeased the woman.

It didn’t. Not this time. Her mother’s face only crinkled into a deeper concern.

Even at his clumsiest, their mother never looked at Zuko like that. Distantly, Azula hated him for it. The feeling was followed by a sting of remorse.

Azula was eight when she confirmed that her uncle hated her. She never did ask him or anything of the sort. She never had to.

“For Azula, a doll,” his note said, “dressed in the best fashion and ready to be her friend.”

Zuko had been gifted an engraved knife he didn’t so much as know how to play with. He was clumsily waving it around, his wrist slackened as he slashed through the air and mimed war.

She had never ever been so jealous of him outside of their mother’s affections. Her doll sat uselessly on the table, untouched and unwanted. Just like Azula. It was exactly how their uncle saw her. She could feel it humming under her skin, pressed to her skeleton.

“Azula, play with the doll. I want to take a picture for your uncle Iroh,” her mother said.

She plucked it up by its hair and smiled her best smile. Pleased with that, her mother shuffled her closer to Zuko until they were shoulder to shoulder.

“On the count of three, okay? One, two, three! Say cheese!”

“Cheese,” Zuko said. His teeth, including the gaps between them, were on full display in Azula’s peripheral vision. It was the most sincere she’d seen him smile in the months since Iroh had been gone.

With a swift curl of her wrist, she decapitated the doll.

“Azula!” her mother said.

She only stuck her tongue out. “Send that to Uncle.” Her arm burned where her mother grabbed her to better lecture her. She felt no inkling of remorse. She never would. Not for this.

If Iroh hated her, then she hated him back.

“Azula, knock it off,” Mai said.

But Azula had no desire to stop. It only made her angrier that Ty Lee was verging on salt-track tears and that Mai had found her backbone and slotted it into place. They were both such cowards half of the time. If they thought she was all wrong, like her mother, like her brother, like her uncle, then they should just say that instead of looking at her with those eyes.

She sneered at Mai, and she gave Ty Lee and her pretty braided hair and her perfectly feminine being a roll of her eyes. “I didn’t do anything. Ty Lee is always like this,” she said.

“You told her her grandparents are going to die,” Mai said.

Azula snorted derisively at that. “It’s true.”

“Take it back!” Ty Lee said. “I don’t want them to die!”

“Well, they’re going to,” Azula said. Her lips were curling in disgust. “Everyone dies, Ty Lee. Your grandparents will die, and then your parents, and then your sisters, and then you and me and Mai—people die, and they don’t come back, and life moves on.”

Mai wrapped her arms around Ty Lee. “She’s just being a jerk, Ty. They—they aren’t going to die. Not yet.”

“Not yet!?” Ty Lee wailed.

Mai grimaced.

“Everyone dies,” Azula said. It was important to know. It was better to see it coming. Death came for everyone in the end. There was no outrunning it. It was the law of the world.

“Eventually,” Mai said. “It’s okay… it’s okay.”

“No, it’s not!” Ty Lee said. “I don’t want them to die…”

“No one does. Not even Azula. Isn’t that right?” Mai asked, shooting Azula a sharp glare. Like that, with disappointment and righteousness lining her face, she looked more like Azula’s mother than Azula herself did.

Azula steeled her face. “Right.”

It wasn’t until Ty Lee had cried herself to sleep that Mai untangled herself from her and really looked at Azula.

“I know… I know Lu Ten… died,” Mai said.

Azula flexed her hand. “He killed himself,” she said conversationally. It was the truth. She’d heard her father say so, however much her mother tried to pretend that sadness could kill someone; her cousin had committed suicide.

Mai didn’t flinch, but her lips curled downward. “I know. I’m sorry, Azula.”

“We weren’t close or anything,” she said.

“Still.”

Azula shrugged as if it meant nothing. Maybe it did. She couldn’t be sure at that moment. Everything in her burned to the point of numbness. “People die, Mai. You’ll die one day. Ty Lee will die. I’ll die.”

“Not like Lu Ten did,” Mai said.

“You don’t know that.”

This time, Mai flinched.

In the span of one night, Azula’s mother left, and her grandfather died. She didn’t know what had propelled the woman— Ursa, that was her name—to finally leave, couldn’t fathom why she would leave her son, too. She never once wondered why Ursa had left her.

People didn’t keep the things they didn’t love.

But she had thought that Ursa loved Zuko. She had been so sure of it. Maybe—

Of course, she had said goodbye to Zuko. Of course.

Azula was an idiot for ever doubting what she knew: Ursa loved Zuko, and she hated Azula.

The hospital existed in shades of white. Azula had read once that before western influence had seeped in, white had been the color of death. She let herself wonder if Zuko might be dead. They would tell her, though. They had to. Legally speaking, Azula was Zuko’s sister. She was to be informed of these things. Especially now that she was older.

Her father wouldn’t have hidden it from her if Zuko was dead when she was seven or eight, and he wouldn’t hide it from her now that she was eleven. He respected her enough to tell her. She knew that.

So she stayed diligently between the egg-white walls, sitting straight-spined and staring directly ahead. She stayed that way until her neck felt stiff, her eyelids heavy. Until her father returned.

“Azula, you can go in to say your goodbyes now,” he said. He looked bored. His suit was immaculate still. There was not a thread out of place.

“Yes, Father,” she said, trying to emulate his stone-faced indifference.

“It’s room 502,” he said.

Azula rose, and she walked into the room as if there was a purpose to Zuko’s suffering. As if any of this meant anything more than that her father had lost his temper for the last time, and Zuko’s face had been half-devoured by flames, and he would not be coming home with them.

Iroh was on his way, coming in from Uji at the last minute.

Her nails bit crescents into her palms at the thought, but they withdrew in a matter of seconds when she opened the door to see her brother, sedated and heavily bandaged. Her eyes glazed over the medical equipment at his bedside. She fixated on the monitor that proved his heart was beating steadily.

Her brother wasn’t dead. There was nothing to mourn. Only the end of their siblinghood.

“Father will expect me to be back soon, so I’ll make this quick. Goodbye, Zuzu,” she said. She turned on her heel to leave.

Zuko said nothing.

Her heart clenched.

She left.

Azula stole the knife when she got home from the hospital. It was the most sentimental she would let herself be. It was the cruelest thing she could think to do.

Buried in those two statements, there was some version of the truth she could tell. She wouldn’t, though.

“Zuzu never did tell me why he picked South Korea for university,” Azula was saying. “I don’t suppose he would’ve told you either, though—did he?”

Mai wanted to hit Azula. She furled and unfurled her fists, her nails biting into the pruned meat of her palms. And then her phone started to ring. It was like a life raft in the midst of a shipwreck.

Azula’s mouth flattened into a line. Her nostrils flared slightly. Her eyes were bright and sharp. She was awful to look at. “Are you going to answer that?”

Mai swore sharply. “It’s probably my mom.” Ty Lee was the only other person who called her, and she knew that Mai was otherwise occupied today. 

“Go ahead. Take it,” Azula said.

Mai contemplated Azula for a moment as the phone rang. Talking to Azula about Zuko made her skin prickle, but was it worse than talking to her mother about school once more?

Azula blinked at her, and then closed the space between them. Her lips were cold and wet. She tasted like chlorine and lightning. She was gone before Mai could push her away or kiss her back. It left Mai dizzy with anger. 

“What was that?” she demanded. Though the kiss had been uncharacteristically soft, her mouth ached where Azula had been. She pushed down the idea that this was a wanting. Azula was nothing more than dead ends everywhere.

“You shouldn’t keep Michi waiting,” Azula said. She was the last person who should give Mai advice. 

But with her skin burning, Mai ascended the pool ladder and made her way over to where her phone sat on top of her bag. Indeed, the kanji and kana for mother lit up the screen.

“Stay in the shallow end,” Mai said coldly. She needed distance between them like cavities, like canyons.

Azula’s lips stretched into a plastic smile. Mai wanted to watch it shatter. Instead, she watched as Azula, with her face unmoving, slipped under the surface of the water and garbled bubbles from beneath it. 

The phone stopped ringing. 

Azula let herself float in the pool, her breath held and her body still outside of the water’s manipulations.

Mai didn’t laugh. “Just choke already.” She turned away from the younger girl before she could catch Azula’s reply. She didn’t look back. Maybe she should have, but she couldn’t stomach it. She was trying to be someone who looked forward.

Once she was securely away from the pool and Azula alike, she called her mother back. “Hello, Mom.”

“Oh, now you have time for me,” Michi said. So it was going to be like this. Maybe Mai would have fared better staying in the pool with Azula.

“I’m sorry. I was in the bathroom,” Mai said. It was an easy lie to tell even if it earned her less approval than the truth would have. The truth was rotten to its core in Mai’s eyes.

There was a sigh, distorted through the filter of the phone. Mai imagined her mother shaking her head slightly, a familiar expression of the apparatus of her constant disappointment. “It can’t be helped. How is school?”

“Fine,” Mai said. She kept her voice steady. “The school year’s barely started. There’s hardly anything for me to report.”

Michi clicked her tongue. The sound was harsh against Mai’s eardrums. “Is that how you see this? I ask because I care, Mai. I’m just trying to keep you on the right path,” Michi said.

It was funny, Mai thought, how the right path in her mother’s eyes was a death march in hers. Michi only wanted her daughter to march onto a good career until she could march onto a good marriage and a good family pulled out of her body and a good death bed. A life of security, as if she hadn’t been born to wealth. Michi always said that you could never have too much of a good thing.

Mai didn’t care if her mother was right. She was sick of folding herself into pretty shapes to please the woman. “I know, Mom. I’m sorry,” she said anyway. Rebellion was in the details. The severing of her relationships with Azula and Zuko both had been more than enough of a statement to her parents about her life. Everything else was an afterthought.

“Well, have you given any more thought to which internship you’d like to take? Your father can talk to some friends, call in some favors. You just have to make up your mind about which one would be best. You have time, but the early bird—”

“Gets the worm,” Mai said. She was sick of hearing that expression.

Michi almost surely preened at that. Mai could tell from her pleased little hum. “Exactly. So think about that some more, okay?”

“Okay, I will,” Mai said. It was a lie. She could think of very little that she wanted to think about less than the suffocating internship her parents wanted her to work throughout her first year of university. Azula was up there, though. Zuko, too.

“Good,” Michi said. “And what about your career prospects? I don’t know how I feel about your major, but do you know what you’ll be able to do when you graduate yet? I can’t believe your father let you go in not knowing…”

Mai’s grip on her phone tightened. Her knuckles turned pale. This had been a particularly rough series of arguments for her. It would be some time before Michi let it go, she supposed. Until Mai knew what career she wanted. “I’m still thinking it over, Mom,” she said.

Michi tsked.

Mai’s eyes slipped closed, and she imagined what it would be like to strangle her mother. The thought soothed her. She spoke, “I’m sorry. I’ll figure it out by the end of the term.”

“You’d better.”

“I know.”

“I want you to be someone we can be proud of. All of us. Not just me and your dad—Tom-Tom, too.” The reminder of her little brother stung more than it should have.

“I will be,” Mai said. She didn’t know if she wanted to be telling the truth. “I should go, though. I’ll think about it some more like you said.”

“Yes, please do. I’ll talk to you later,” Michi said.

“You too, Mom.”

Was it just Mai, or was Azula proving to be something of a cunt now that they were all in junior high? She had thought Azula had gotten meaner after Lu Ten’s suicide, and again after Ursa left, and again after Zuko had been swept up and taken away by Iroh. But she had been willing to excuse those cruelties as just the byproduct of a grief Azula would never admit to.

This was different. The way Azula was eyeing Ty Lee’s lunch with disdain felt just plain rude in a way Azula hadn’t been in any of those wakes. She was tactless, yes, and brutally honest, but this was petty.

“What’s wrong, Azu?” Ty Lee asked.

Mai wished she hadn’t. She was certain that now Ty Lee would face whatever wrath Azula held within her.

“Nothing. I was just wondering if you were going to eat all that,” Azula said.

Ty Lee’s face fell for only a moment. “Oh! Do you want some?” she asked, pulling every ounce of optimism she could back together. She was determined to not be steamrolled by Azula. She always was.

“No,” Azula said flatly.

“Knock it off, Azula. You’re being a bitch,” Mai said.

Azula’s lips split slightly, but she put her hands up in surrender. “Fine. Sorry, Ty.” She didn’t sound like she meant it in the slightest,—she rarely did—but it was an apology nonetheless.

“It’s fine!” Ty Lee said.

And that was that.

Zuko had asked her out, and Mai had agreed to it.

Azula hadn’t.

Mai called it a rebellion.

Azula lit up on the rooftop where they weren’t allowed to be anyway, let alone allowed to be smoking. She had just turned fourteen, and she had a whole athletic career to think about or what-the-fuck-ever, and she wouldn’t stop smoking no matter how many times Mai told her she was going to get lung cancer and keel over at practice.

So Mai was giving up. She knew when she’d lost with Azula, and it was often.

Ty Lee wasn’t, though. She was always pushing beyond the boundaries of how Azula would bend. It never really worked out for her, but she never stopped trying either.

Mai almost admired it.

“Azu, you’re gonna get sick smoking those things, seriously,” Ty Lee said, frowning quite deeply. It was strange to see her face all twisted up like that.

“You sound like Mai,” Azula said. “It doesn’t suit you.” She blew out a thin plume of smoke in Ty Lee’s face. It made her look like a complete asshole.

But Mai supposed Azula must have called it a rebellion.

In a second, Ty Lee had decided not to go to high school. Mai had blinked and accepted it when Ty Lee told her, unsure of what other option she had, but then Ty Lee had asked her to help with telling Azula. They’d all agreed the year prior, when Mai had been looking at high schools, that they’d go to the same one, all of them together like always.

Here Ty Lee went breaking that promise.

She wanted to work odd jobs, apparently, experience life outside of Azula. Outside of Mai, too, but that hardly hurt Mai’s feelings.

Azula would be a different story.

Mai could already hear Azula’s voice in her ears, ringing out about how Ty Lee was a traitor and a two-faced bitch and every awful thing she could think of, delivered in the cruelest way, too. The worst part was that she could understand it, too.

Azula was going to be alone. Mai would be there, but she wasn’t in Azula’s year; there was no way for her to be there for Azula the way Ty Lee was supposed to be, by her side at every minute possible in the school day.

It was bad enough that she was alone at home.

In the end, Mai shoved any sympathy she had for Azula down when she started spewing the most awful shit Mai had ever heard and wouldn’t take any of it back.

Gakushūin was the worst place Mai had ever been. It was worse now that Azula was there, too, though. The two of them hadn’t spoken since Mai had hit Azula, and Azula had hit her back. Mai wouldn’t surrender, and neither would Azula.

Not this time. Not ever again.

But Mai was too sullen for their peers, Azula too haughty. As far as Mai knew, no one spoke to either of them, and neither of them would speak to anyone either. They were an immovable object and an unstoppable force. They always had been.

So they were alone, but they weren’t even alone together.

Zuko didn’t understand why so much of Mai’s life was defined by Azula. He didn’t understand a lot of things about Mai.

It was strange to text Ty Lee outside of the group chat they’d had with Azula. It was stranger still to make plans with her, to see her, to know her outside of Azula. It wasn’t that Mai didn’t love Ty Lee. Her heart swelled with it, and she knew the other girl inside and out. No matter how she’d felt about Ty Lee when they’d first met, she had come to love her. She couldn’t imagine ever not loving Ty Lee now.

But how did you hold someone close when all you had in common was your love for each other?

When Mai had told Zuko that she wanted to take a break, she hadn’t meant that she wanted to break up. She’d thought he understood that.

But here Azula was, telling her that Zuko had left without saying goodbye to either of them.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Mai asked.

Azula smiled. “Language.”

“Azula, seriously. Why would you lie about that?” Mai demanded, shoving Azula by the shoulders.

“I’m not lying. He left for school in South Korea last night. I only found out because Father told me. I know you two broke up, but—”

“We didn’t break up,” Mai said. “We didn’t—I didn’t—”

Azula’s smile grew. “We’re the same,” she said.

“Don’t ever say that again,” Mai said harshly. She was all glaring teeth and sharp eyes.

“Why not? It’s true. Zuko doesn’t love either of us,” Azula said.

Mai hated her more than she had ever hated anyone. Even Zuko.

Azula was fucking with her again. She was hiding or had left entirely. It was hard to say. Her things were still poolside, but Azula wasn’t normal. Mai couldn’t count on that as proof that she had just gone to use the restroom or something. Knowing Azula, she had only invited Mai here to ditch her in the end.

She could hear Azula now, in her head. A chorus of, “You thought I wanted to see you again? You believed I missed you? Don’t you know by now, Mai? Azula always lies.” It was exactly what she deserved for falling for such an obvious ploy. Even if she’d only taken the bait for Ty Lee’s sake, it was always going to end like this.

Now Mai had to break the news to Ty Lee. Azula had, as always, left Mai to watch after the wounds she’d reopened, left someone else to clean up the mess she’d made. She was a spoiled little rich girl like that.

Still, it couldn’t hurt to make sure she wasn’t hiding, waiting to try to scare Mai. It would be odd, certainly, and childish, but Azula could be eccentric. “Azula, this isn’t funny,” she called out.

There was no response.

“You’re an asshole,” Mai said, taking a step closer to the edge of the pool. I hate you, she didn’t say. It wasn’t that Mai didn’t hate Azula or that she was afraid to tell her so.

There was something sunken under the surface of the water.

It was like this: Mai hated Azula beyond words, and Mai had loved her for so long that she couldn’t remember ever not loving Azula, except when Azula spoke or laughed or smiled.

She broke the water. She pulled Azula’s body back up, broke it again. She didn’t think of the adrenaline rush that gave her the strength to pull Azula out of the pool and lay her out on the concrete. She didn’t question it at all when she did it, or when she knew the rhythm to try to beat back into Azula’s chest, or when she lowered her mouth to Azula’s—colder still than it had been just minutes before—and tried to breathe air back into her lungs. It was love. It was hate. Azula could not spite her in death. Mai could not let her die.

She heard a slap. It sounded like it could have been Azula, striking Mai for crying all over her. But Azula did not move, and Mai’s arm was outstretched.

“Get up, you jerk,” Mai said. Her voice was harsh to her own ears. “You’re not funny!”

Azula was still, her mouth unmoving, unsmiling. The red had smeared into pink. She wasn’t playing dead this time.

Mai fumbled with her phone, her hands still wet. She tried to slide the screen open. It wouldn’t respond to her touch. “Fuck,” she hissed. She needed to dial 119. She couldn’t stop beating life into Azula’s chest.

Azula wouldn’t respond to her touch either.

The phone opened up to emergency services. Mai swore in relief. “I need an ambulance. My—Azula, she drowned. I left for a few minutes, and she fucking drowned. I’m trying—she won’t wake up,” she said.

“Ma’am, what’s the address?” the operator asked.

It spilled out of Mai’s mouth.

The minutes blurred. Mai didn’t leave Azula’s side. Not until the paramedics arrived. And only then when they forced her away.

Mai watched, though. She watched as they gave up, declared Azula dead, apologized for her loss, asked who they should call. Like it was simple. Like Azula was just another patient, and not Mai’s best friend and worst enemy—what was the difference? Knowing someone like Mai knew Azula, it always ended in blood, spilled or shared.

“We can’t get a hold of her father yet. Is there anyone else who needs to be contacted? Any other family?” the paramedic was asking.

The world was hazy. Mai shook her head to clear it, thought of Ursa who had left Azula nothing but her face over Azula’s, thought of Iroh who had taken Zuko and left without so much as a second glance, then said, “Her brother. I have his number.” Her voice did not shake, but her hands did.

One truth echoed in her head endlessly as she dialed Zuko’s number: it was always supposed to be her blood in the end.

Chapter Text

The weekend came. Zuko stood in the park, waiting for Mai. He had arrived early. He had never done that for any of their dates when they’d been a couple. Mai had hated that about him. He hadn’t had the decency to hate it about himself.

But this was different. This was more important than any of the dates they’d gone on. After what his mother had confessed to him, he needed this to take his mind away. He needed to finally settle the way Azula was hanging over him, a haunting in her own right. To do so, he needed answers. If anyone who’d give them would have those answers, it was Mai.

So he stood, and he waited as a minute stretched into two into three into four into five. And at long last, Mai appeared in the distance, walking over to him through the newly barren cherry blossom trees.

“Hi,” she said.

Zuko nodded in lieu of a greeting, and the two of them were off together, strolling the park with the illusion of couplehood but none of the intimacy.

“So,” Mai said, “you wanted to know about the knife?”

“Did you know she stole it from me?” he asked, cutting straight to the point. They were far past the point of beating around the bush at that point.

She grimaced. “I did. She—uh, she liked to play with it… but she always said it was hers.”

“She’s a liar,” Zuko said, too forceful. He was always charging into things guns blazing. It didn’t matter how many times Mai showed a flag of surrender.

“… Yeah, she really was.”

Past tense. Right. Azula was dead.

He shrunk. “Why would Azula steal my knife? I mean, she was spiteful, and she hated the present Uncle got her that year, but…”

A sigh slipped out through Mai’s lips. “I don’t know. She never told me. But… I think Azula did it because she could, and because your dad and uncle both would’ve hated it.”

“What?” He blinked at her cluelessly. “Why would she want to spite Father?”

Mai’s eyebrows bunched together, her face contorting out of its somber stone with the effort. “You really didn’t know her at all, did you, Zuko?”

He opened his mouth to defend himself, but she stuck out a hand to silence him.

“Azula… resented Ozai. She never said a word to defend him if Ty or I insulted him. Sometimes, she’d even laugh about it. She lied to him every chance she got, every time she thought she could get away with it,” she said.

“You’re lying,” he said. It was a sort of hopeless prayer for normalcy. For the image of Azula he had built up to not come crashing down. 

The Azula that Zuko had known had worshipped the ground their father walked on, had loved him blindly and without so much as a second thought for the way he treated anyone else. Zuko wasn’t ready to let go of that. He didn’t know if he ever would be.

Mai smiled flintily. It looked sharp enough to cut himself on. “You said it yourself, Zuko. She was a stranger to you.”

“Maybe she was a stranger to you, too,” he accused.

“I knew her well enough to love her. I knew her well enough to hate her, too.”

Zuko felt dizzy. “What the hell was there to Azula worth loving, Mai?” he asked. He wanted it to come out as a demand, but it came out a quiet, broken thing instead. He was pleading with her now. If there was some part of Azula that had been worthy of love, of anything even resembling it, he wanted to know. Had he been wrong?

Had she been a sister worth knowing?

Mai let out a shaky breath. She shook her head, not meeting Zuko’s eye.

He grabbed her by the shoulders, begging her to look at him. To tell him the truth.

“There was no part of Azula that deserved to be loved; there was just part of her that demanded to be and wasn’t afraid to take it from you.”

It didn’t make him feel better to hear.

Zuko was getting out of the bath when he heard an incessant knocking at his door. “I’m coming,” he called out slowly. The knocking didn’t let up. “Didn’t you hear me? I’m coming!” He yanked the door open.

Mai was standing there, ready to knock again. Her eyes were out of focus, bleary. Her hair was askew. It was the messiest he’d seen her in years. “Why was Azula on birth control?” she asked.

He blinked at her. What could he say to that? They both knew that he hadn’t known a damn thing about his sister at the end of her life. Azula hadn’t wanted to know him, and she hadn’t wanted him to know her either. Blaming her for the distance that had grown between them like weeds was easy. 

His mouth fluttered open and shut uselessly. “I—why are you asking me?”

Mai squeezed her eyes tight. Her face crumpled then smoothed out in a heartbeat. She rephrased: “Do you think she was having sex with anyone?”

He flinched back. He didn’t want to think of his sister like that. It was uncouth. “I didn’t know her, Mai, but… I can’t imagine her ever being close enough with anyone for that. Can you?”

She shook her head.

“Did she ever have any boyfriends?” Zuko asked.

“I’m not sure she even liked boys,” Mai confessed.

It was strange to imagine his sister being like that. Like him. Perfect little Azula being anything other than straight was almost unfathomable. But Mai would know better than he ever could, he supposed. “What makes you think that?” he asked.

She gripped her wrist so tight the flesh of her knuckles turned white. “She never talked about any boys. No crushes, no interest, nothing… The most she ever did was kiss a boy once, and she scared him away immediately after that.” Mai swallowed. “She kissed me. We were drinking and being awful to each other, and Ty Lee joked that we should kiss and make up, but Azula went through with it. We never talked about it, but I always… I mean, I wondered what it meant. And then she kissed me again. Before she drowned.”

He didn’t know what he could say to that. He didn’t know that there was anything he could say to that. He held his jaw tight and harsh, straining the muscles as he ground his teeth in silence.

Mai sighed. “Maybe she was just on birth control to regulate her period. I’m probably making something out of nothing.” She didn’t sound convinced at all.

“What else could it have been for?” he asked.

There was something horrible to the bright of Mai’s eyes as she looked up at him. “I don’t think I want to know,” she said. And then she left. Like the earth hadn’t shifted beneath their feet. Like Azula hadn’t left them with a million questions they could never ask.

Zuko didn’t know how to sleep in the aftermath. Exhaustion wouldn’t come to him. His eyes wouldn’t stay closed. He tossed and turned hopelessly on his mattress until he finally flexed his wrists and gave up on sleep.

He grabbed his phone to message Ty Lee. As much as he hated the girl, she might have something akin to answers. She’d always had a nose for gossip that Mai hadn’t. If Azula had liked boys, if she had been involved with anyone, Ty Lee would know.

Did Azula have any reason to take birth control? he wrote.

Ty Lee responded too quickly to have been asleep. That’s a really weird question, Zuko. But no? Azula really hated that stuff. I think your parents gave her a real bad view on the whole love thing. She thought love was a lie and sex was something men wanted to use to control women.

He stared at her words for a long moment. He didn’t know what to make of any of this.

I’m going to bed now. You should do the same, Ty Lee wrote.

And that was that. She didn’t respond to any of Zuko’s other messages that night.

He couldn’t go to his mother about this. He didn’t want to disturb her with whatever this was. Not until he knew what it was, and even then he couldn’t be sure that it would be something he could stomach telling her.

It was noon, and he couldn’t eat a thing when he decided to video call Sokka and Suki to fill them in. It took all of nine minutes to get through the gruesome tale, all the way to the birth control pills. By the end of it, Sokka and Suki both made a face. It was a similar face. Like one they’d perfected sharing in the months since they’d met.

Suki spoke first. “She might’ve just been seeing someone in secret, Zuko. There doesn’t have to be some… some conspiracy.”

“Even if not for what Ty Lee said, Azula was intolerable. Father’s the only one who’s ever been able to stomach her up close like that,” Zuko said, almost defensive for reasons he couldn’t pinpoint.

Sokka’s face softened a fraction. He was always doing that around Zuko.

But Suki’s only grew grimmer. “Then… if she was really that bad, is it possible she was being abused?”

“That’s sick, ” Zuko said. Even the thought made him dizzy with an anger he hadn’t known Azula could provoke in him. It was a protective thing, coating his ribs thick like honey; as much as he had hated Azula, there was some part of him that had looked at her and thought, “That was my little sister once.”

Sokka was frowning now. “I mean… it is, but it’d make sense, Zuko. With how she died and everything.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“She couldn’t swim, right? That makes drowning kind of suspicious. I mean… that could’ve been a suicide,” Sokka said.

Zuko felt nauseated. “You guys have no idea what you’re talking about. Azula wasn’t depressed, and she wasn’t some—some victim. ” He spat the word out the way Azula would have. Like it was venomous. Like it was painful on his very tongue.

“Okay, well, I fucking hate speculating about this, and I hope to God it’s not true, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t make sense,” Suki said.

That was the last straw. Zuko couldn’t fucking be there a second longer, listening to their conspiracies about how his sister—perfect, shiny, terrible Azula—had been some kind of fucking victim in the end. The idea that she had been anything like him was painful enough from Mai’s lips, let alone Suki and Sokka’s.

He hung up. He ignored their texts for the rest of the day. It didn’t make him feel at all better. Nothing would.

Azula had never been beaten once in her entire life. Not as far as Zuko had ever seen, and he’d seen enough to know. Even when she had screwed up as a kid, she’d always just pin the blame on Zuko, throw him under the bus. And so she never saw the consequences of her mistakes. Not unless you counted her watching when their father had hit Zuko.

Zuko could hardly even remember a time when their father had been truly angry with Azula or even the tiniest bit upset with her. There were so many gaps in his memory, but not one of them could be plugged with a memory of an abused Azula.

He squeezed his eyes shut, and he tried to imagine it. Azula afraid, Azula hurt, Azula alone with absolutely no one she could tell about the abuse.

The idea made him feel physically ill. It made his blood boil beneath his skin, deep in his veins. It went so strongly against everything he knew about his sister, even if she was a stranger in the end. Who could have hurt her like that anyway? A teacher or a tutor, maybe. Someone with assigned authority over her and forced proximity to her. But her tutors had been two elderly women, had they not? They’d been the same from the time she was a girl to the time she died. Zuko had seen them at her funeral, withered as they were.

So if someone had hurt her, it had to have been a teacher. He had no idea who had been her homeroom teacher at Gakushūin or the names of any of her other teachers. He could always ask around, though.

He texted Ty Lee once more, hoping that she hadn’t blocked him yet.

She responded, Our teachers were all women. And before you ask, no, Zuko, Azula didn’t talk to any of the boys at our brother school Why are you asking me all this?

He didn’t respond. Instead, he rolled the information over in his head: Azula hid her birth control like it was a secret, and she liked no boys her age or of her own volition, but there seemed to be no men in her life who could have been abusing her.

He had no solution to this riddle. No idea what could have been happening to his sister. Only a memory, worn and useless to him.

Zuko had been thirteen, and Azula had been eleven. Their mother had been gone for years at that point. And Azula had been playing with one of his old toys. He hadn’t even had the energy to tell her off for that. She hadn’t looked at him when she’d said it, “I think I was the product of rape.”

He’d stared at her in horror. “Why would you say that?”

All Azula had done was shrug like she’d merely commented on the weather. She said, “Mother really hated me.”

“She didn’t—she didn’t hate you,” Zuko had said, even though he’d wanted her to have hated Azula. He’d wanted their mother’s love to have been his and his alone, as guilty as that made him feel to admit then and now and always. “How do you even know what that is, Azula?”

She’d rolled her eyes in boredom and said, “You’re being dramatic, Zuzu.”

He had forgotten at the time, moved on to bigger and more pressing issues like their father’s anger, a warped, ugly thing hanging around his throat like a noose. But looking back, Azula had said it with such conviction. Like she knew without question that their father was capable of something so horrible. Like she never would have put that kind of violence beyond him.

Zuko vomited.

He was sitting in front of his mother in her hotel room, wringing his hands like it was the end of the world. It might have been. It really, truly might have been. It was hard for him to say. There was no going back from here. He had reached the point of no return.

He’d arrived, and the first thing to tumble out of his mouth was: “Is Father—is he capable of rape?”

His mother looked horribly dizzy. She had needed to sit down after he’d asked that, her face twisted up in the kind of pain that answered his question for him. But minutes had crept by, and neither of them had said another word.

He needed for her to say another word. Even if it was a yes, he needed to hear it.

After a long, long time, she opened her mouth and made the tiniest sound.

Zuko stared up at her.

“Yes,” she said, sounding delicate, “he is. But, Zuko, why would you bring this up? Why now?”

“Azula told me once that she thought she was the product of rape. And I can’t stop thinking about the birth control pills, Mom. I think—I think he hurt her.”

Her eyes slipped close. Her face looked so old and so tired and so pained that Zuko wanted to break down and wrap her up in his arms. He wanted to hold his mother until this pain died, until all memory of Azula died with it, until they could both move on with their lives like nothing bad had ever happened to them. He wanted to lie to her.

Salt tracked down her face, painting her cheeks iridescent.

It fell from his lips before he could stop it. “Did you know? Did you—did you suspect, Mom?”

She looked like she’d been burned. “No. If I had even thought… I never would have let him near her. But if anyone would be capable of that, it’s Ozai.”

He had to leave. He couldn’t stomach being in this room with her, hearing these awful truths. No matter how selfish it made him, Zuko left.

It was easy to send out the email blast that he would be spending the full grieving period in Japan after that. It was easy to think of Azula and think that that had been his sister once after that. That had been his sister, and maybe she could have stayed that way if she’d been left the fuck alone.

It wasn’t something he’d never considered before. But it had never felt so possible before. There had always been a sense of wish fulfillment to thinking that; there had been no proof whatsoever to back it up.

There still wasn’t proof, but there were enough red flags that Zuko couldn’t think of Azula any other way all of a sudden. There were still gaps in the love he’d held for her once, still too many pieces missing to say that she had been anyone he had wanted to know, but there was something he could look at and wonder, What if? about now.

He pulled open his text thread with Suki and Sokka to message them his apologies for yet another Azula-related outburst. To tell them he was terrified they’d been right.

Sokka wrote, It’s okay, Zuko. I mean, it’s not okay, but you’re grieving. We understand.

Was this grief? Was that the pain in his chest? He hadn’t grieved Azula in years. He hadn’t known how to.

Still, he wrote back, Thank you for being so understanding. I promise I’ll make this up to you both when I get back.

He had no evidence, no closure, which only meant that he had to hunt it down himself. And Zuko had always been persistent if nothing else. He did the only thing he could think of. On his way to Mai’s house, he called the medical examiner, asking to see his sister’s autopsy report. He had to leave a message, but he felt better somehow, knowing he was taking action. Azula was dead, and nothing could be done for her now, but he needed to know one way or the other. He hoped Azula’s autopsy report could give him that much; it would have to do with her body having been cremated already.

Before he knew it, he was at Mai’s front door, knocking with too much energy in his bones.

Michi opened the door. “Zuko, it’s lovely to see you,” she said.

But he forgot his manners, opened his mouth, and out came the words, “I need to speak to Mai.”

Michi looked taken aback by his rudeness, but she moved to let him into the genkan to take his shoes off. “I’ll go fetch her.” And then she was gone, and Zuko was waiting in the entrance of the house all alone in the Nakatomi family’s guest slippers.

Mai came out with her mother after a minute. She looked concerned to see him. “Uh, hey,” she said.

“Can we speak in private?” Zuko asked.

She nodded and led him to her room after excusing them of her mother’s presence.

“Door open, Mai,” Michi said.

“I know,” Mai responded.

Zuko waited until they reached the privacy of Mai’s room to burst, trying his best to whisper. “Did Azula ever say anything? Did she ask for help?” he asked.

Mai looked at him like he was an idiot. “I know you two were estranged, but we both know that she would never have asked for help.” It wasn’t untrue in the slightest. Azula had never been the kind of person who relied on others. She didn’t know how to be anything other than self-sufficient.

“What about the swimming lesson?” he asked.

She flinched. “I don’t want to think about how I killed your sister.”

“You’re wrong,” he said. The words jerked out of his mouth; he could do nothing to stop them. “Ozai did that when he started raping her.”

She went dead silent. She was grim-faced instead of stone. It was the darkest he’d ever seen her eyes. Slowly, she found the strength to ask, “How do you know? I mean… are you sure?”

So he broke down. Told her everything. Cried salt-streaks as he did.

Mai cried, too.

They sat like that for what must have been an hour, at least. Probably longer. They didn’t say a word more than Zuko’s story as they waited together for the medical examiner to call Zuko back already. For the first time, he found himself hoping against hope that it wasn’t true. That his sister hadn’t been hurting, so his heart could stop aching for her now. 

He thought that Mai felt the same. Neither of them had had a good relationship with Azula, but they hadn’t wanted this for her either. No one could have wanted this for her.

Awkwardly, he wrapped an arm around her like that could console either of them. She didn’t reject it, but she didn’t lean into his touch either. It was hard to say if he was making the right decision. It always was. Most of all when it came to Azula.

After what seemed like lifetimes, his phone rang. It wasn’t the number he had dialed. He still answered it immediately. “Hello, this is Zuko speaking,” he said.

“Minamoto?” the caller asked. It was a man.

“Yes, that’s me,” Zuko said. “Who is this?”

The caller grew silent for a moment. Then: “You can call me Shyu. Don’t worry about my family name or anything, though. I’m with the medical examiner’s office.”

“Is this about my sister?” Zuko asked, his grip tightening on his phone.

“Yes… I can get you a copy of her autopsy report, but I’m risking my career here, Minamoto. I need you to keep my name out of this, okay? Your father’s connections paid us off to look the other way after they finished the autopsy on your sister’s corpse,” Shyu said. His voice was low and serious as he spoke.

Zuko should have known, though. Of course, Ozai had tried to shut them up about anything that had been wrong with Azula’s autopsy. Even if he hadn’t hurt her, he wouldn’t have wanted word getting out that his daughter was anything other than perfect.

“Of course. Thank you for taking this risk,” Zuko said.

“It’s the right thing to do,” Shyu said. “I’ll send the report as soon as I can. Do you have a safe address for it to go to?”

“I can meet with you,” Zuko tried.

He could almost hear Shyu’s head shake as he said, “No. No, that could tip off your father’s connections to meet with you, Minamoto.”

Mai slapped Zuko’s side. “I’ll do it instead,” she said.

“Good idea,” Zuko said. “Would it be okay if my friend, Mai, met up with you? She wasn’t close with Azula or anything when she died.”

Shyu was quiet for a moment. “Yes… yes, that should work,” he said eventually.

Three days came and went. The hours crawled by so slowly it hurt on the third day when Zuko had to wait for Mai to be done with cram school to meet with Shyu at the train station and receive the autopsy report. But eventually, finally, his phone lit up with Mai’s message.

She had it.

All he had to do was go to see her, and he would know one way or the other what Ozai had done to his sister.

What a horrible thought. What an awful possibility.

Still, Zuko got dressed. Still, Zuko almost ran the whole way to Mai’s house. He had come too far to look back. It was time that he got some answers. Some closure. Something to tell his poor mother who had been trying to contact him nonstop to no avail.

Soon enough, he would know the truth.

Chapter Text

There was one truth Zuko felt heavy in his bones: Mai had Azula’s autopsy report. As he stood on Mai’s porch, he was so distanced from before that he couldn’t see how anything else had ever mattered. Azula was terrible, Azula was cruel, Azula was dead, Azula was his sister. She was his sister, and this had ignited something in him that had been doused out years ago. If Azula had been hurt, he should have felt it too. He was going to feel it.

Maybe she didn’t deserve it, but that didn’t matter anymore.

Mai flung the door open. She looked the messiest he’d ever seen her as she ushered him in quickly, ignoring her mother completely. “It’s in my room.”

“Right,” he said.

She couldn’t close the door behind them, but she sat down in the corner of her room, pressed to the wall so she would be hard to be see from the doorway. He followed suit. With a flourish of her wrist, the envelope was opened. Her hands were steady the whole way through. That didn’t stop Zuko from trembling, though.

They read over the report in silence, their eyes darting around it quickly, almost greedily.

Azula had had thin, careful scars dancing across her ribs. She had had burn scars over the padding of her index finger and thumb. Both sets were presumed to be self-inflicted. Bile rose in Zuko’s throat as he read over that thrice to be sure he had read it correctly.

His sister had been like him. They had drawn the same blood from their own veins. They had even burned the same in the end.

Only it wasn’t the same. But it was close enough.

Mai gagged into her hand. The miasma of vomit rose in the air. She rushed into the bathroom to wash herself clean without an explanation.

Zuko read on. The examiner had noted bruising on Azula’s inner thighs and extensive vaginal and anal scarring upon closer inspection. He couldn’t help it. He threw up. Not into his hands like Mai, but crawling to the trashcan in her room. He didn’t make it there. His bile was all over her floor in splatters.

Heaving, he said nothing as Mai re-entered the room. He didn’t look up at her. He didn’t need to see how pale she was when he could see it reflected on the backs of his own hands.

She didn’t say a word either. The only noise he heard was a light thump as she must have fallen against the floor.

Azula had been raped. Repeatedly. Until the end of her life.

There was only one person who could have raped her.

Zuko choked out a sob, and he didn’t know if it was for his sister or himself or the childhood he’d thought they’d shared. When did it start? Had it been the thing that had stolen the sister he could have had from him? The girl Azula could have been?

If he didn’t cry for her, it didn’t have to be real. Only it did. Only it had been real for years before Zuko had stumbled upon it, dug out the truth that he had thought he needed to know. There was dirt under his nails and blood in his mouth and his sister’s ashes in an urn and nothing he could do to undo a second of her life or his.

He let out a pained sound. Like a wounded animal. Guttural and gutted all at once.

“I hope he suffers for it,” Mai said lowly.

“He never does,” Zuko said. And then he started to sob like a child. Into the floor, into his own vomit, in vain.

Mai crawled over to him, her breathing erratic, and she pressed her wet face into his back. Right between his shoulder blades, she cried with him as if it would change a goddamn thing, as if she knew it wouldn’t.

They both cried. Zuko felt it in his throat. He felt it in his spine. He felt it everywhere. It was an aching. He grieved. Mai grieved. And eventually, his eyes did not go dry, but they hurt too much to cry any longer.

Michi did not come to check on them. It was normal that they cried, after all. Azula was dead, after all.

“She would’ve hated us for crying,” he murmured. His voice was hoarse.

Mai made a sound that could’ve been a laugh or a sob. It was the same result in the end.

His throat still ached from all the tears he had shed like shedding them might expel the grief he hadn’t known he could hold. It didn’t matter, though. He still had to call his uncle. He had to get answers that would make no difference because the girl who had needed them was gone from this world.

“Nephew!” Iroh said. “I don’t suppose you’re calling to check up on your uncle, are you?”

But Zuko was in no mood to entertain Iroh’s kindness. His softer side was sickening to Zuko today. “Why did you hate Azula so much?”

There was a moment of stunned silence.

Zuko did not back down. He would not betray his sister. Not now.

“What gives you the idea that I hated her?” Iroh asked. He sounded almost jovial. It was perverse somehow. It made Zuko’s stomach curl and twist horribly.

“You wouldn’t even attend her funeral.”

“Ah… yes, but I explained to you—”

“What did she do? What could she have possibly done to deserve that?” Zuko asked, his voice breaking. Azula had hurt him over and over again, had taunted him and taken joy in his suffering, had bled and burned for their father even more than he had, had been only a girl when she had been made into a monster.

Iroh was quiet another moment. When he spoke, he sounded pained. Like he had any right to hurt when Azula was the one who could never be anything other than what she was. “Azula did not do anything to deserve that, Nephew. She just… I found her difficult, as she found me, and I believed she would rest easier without my interference.”

“But you were the adult. Azula is never going to get to be an adult, but you did—you’re the adult, and you let her down, Uncle. Did you even know what Ozai was doing to her?” Zuko demanded. His cheeks were salt-tracked once more.

He could almost hear his uncle frown at that. “What do you mean? What was my brother doing to her?”

For the first time, Zuko hated his uncle. “Why do you call him that? He’s always your brother or my father, but Azula is never your niece or my sister! But she was, Uncle! She still is!”

Iroh was silent.

“She’s my sister, and she’s dead, and you failed her!” Zuko said. He was screaming now. “You’re a coward! No wonder Lu Ten killed himself!” That was too far, and Zuko knew it. But he couldn’t unsay it any more than he could bring his sister back, the one he could have had, the one he did have. So he didn’t try to unsay it. He just sobbed into the phone.

“I know you don’t mean that, Zuko,” Iroh said quietly.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he said through his tears. Like a prayer.

“I know you are angry with me. I know that I deserve it for how I failed Azula. But is that all you are feeling right now, Nephew? Or are you angry with yourself?” Iroh asked. His voice was a drum, rhythmic and steady and solid. “We all failed Azula. You were only a boy, but… your mother and father and I, we should have protected her.”

“She needed to be protected from him,” Zuko said, shaking his head furiously.

“You both did,” Iroh said, “and I can never take back that I only protected you. For that, I am sorry.”

Zuko trembled. “I wish—I wish I could’ve helped her. Or at least said I was sorry.”

“I know, Nephew. I wish the same. I always will. But Azula… your sister was not faultless. She hurt you so much,” Iroh said.

“That doesn’t make it right.” It came out a shaky exhale, and he didn’t know if he meant what Ozai did to his sister or what Iroh didn’t do to protect her or what he hadn’t done to understand her or what his mother hadn’t done to love her better. Maybe he meant the fact that she had died at all, that she had had to for him to defend her. Maybe he meant all of it. 

He was sitting with his mother in her hotel room, about to tell her the worst news of her life. Even worse than finding out her daughter was dead. He didn’t know a gentle way to tell her this, so he just spat it out. “He was raping her. Before she died. Ozai was…”

She didn’t vomit the way Mai and Zuko had, but she did sob like a child. He went to hold her, to comfort her. She wouldn’t let him.

“No… no, Zuko, it’s not your job to be the adult. You are my son, and I should never have put that kind of responsibility onto you,” she said through her tears. “Just give me a moment. Please.”

He did. He watched as she sniffled and blinked away her tears, willing them to stop so she could carry on. He wondered what it was like to be able to do that. To just push through all her grief, because even if it had been less than she loved Zuko, he knew that his mother had loved his sister, that she still loved Azula. He wondered if that was what being a mother was.

After what must have been fifteen minutes, maybe more, she finished pulling herself together piece by piece. She was still frayed at the edges. Her eyes were still red-rimmed and puffy. “I didn’t think I could hate him more. Not after what he did to you,” she said hoarsely.

“Neither did I,” Zuko said.

She squeezed her eyes shut and her hands together in a silent prayer. “I just… I wish I’d seen. I could have stopped him from ever touching her. I should have. She’s my daughter, Zuko, and I didn’t help her. I didn’t protect her like a mother should.”

Zuko wanted to tell her that she’d done her best, but the words were stuck in his throat.

“I know I was not a good mother. I know that. But I never would have let him touch her if I’d known. I would have stayed with him if I had to,” she said. He had never heard his mother speak with this much force behind her words.

“He would have hurt you more if you’d stayed,” Zuko said.

“I know. But I would take that pain if it had meant she felt none. I’m her mother. That’s my job.”

His hands twitched in his lap. “There’s one thing, Mom,” he said.

She looked at him with big, watery eyes.

“I want to do something for Azula. I know it won’t bring her back, but… I want to be her big brother. Just once,” he said.

She pressed her cold palm to his cheek. “You will always be her brother. Even if Azula is gone. Even if you didn’t have the relationship you think you should have. Nothing can ever take that from you, Zuko.”

He inhaled slowly and felt it deep in his chest. “Can you help me get—get some kind of justice for her?”

Without a moment’s hesitation, his mother nodded.

Mai and Ty Lee were seated on either side of Zuko, but Ty Lee kept looking over at Mai like he wasn’t even there. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy to contrast the dark circles like bruises growing under both Mai and Zuko’s eyes. They weren’t here to grieve, though.

Suki forced a smile when she appeared on the computer screen. It was a momentary thing that she seemed to think better of; her face hardened into something serious the second the smile fell from her mouth. Next to her was her journalist mentor, Kyoshi, who was a rock of a woman that Zuko had only met a few times.

“Hi. I’m sorry for your loss. All of you,” Suki said.

“Suki filled me in on the situation at hand including the autopsy report. I hope that I can be of help to you all,” Kyoshi said.

“Thank you for this,” Mai said, bowing her head. “It means a lot to me. To all of us.”

Kyoshi smiled sadly. “Should I get straight into it?” she asked.

“Yes. We want to know what our options are,” Ty Lee said. Her hands were balled up into fists on her lap. Her eyes were burning in a way Zuko had never seen them.

“The good news is: Minamoto is a public figure, and you have a whistleblower who provided evidence of abuse. I would feel comfortable writing something on this as long as I was careful about my wording.

“The bad news is: There’s no evidence that Minamoto was the abuser. You’ll be at risk of a defamation case if you’re too brazen about what the evidence implies. You can’t lead the reader too much here, no matter how badly you want to. Minamoto-san, your father is wealthy, and if he was able to suppress the autopsy report, he must be very connected. I can investigate further, of course, but I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to find exactly what kind of connections we’re up against,” Kyoshi said. “Are you sure that you want to go through with this?”

“I love Azula more than I fear her father,” Mai said.

“Exactly! We don’t care what he throws our way,” Ty Lee said.

They both looked at Zuko. His breath hitched painfully in his throat. It hurt when he spoke. “I always thought my sister was born lucky. But she wasn’t. And… and this is all that I can do for her now. So yeah. Whatever that bastard might do to me for it, I have to do this. For Azula. Even if we can only ruin his reputation, it’s worth it.”

Kyoshi nodded slowly.

“Zuko, did your mom… did she agree—” Suki started.

“She did. She’s going to give her statement,” Zuko said.

“I think we can really take Minamoto down,” Kyoshi said, “and believe me, I’ve wanted to take him down for years. I only wish we could’ve done it sooner. Before…”

His eyes squeezed shut. “Yeah. I wish so, too.”

While Zuko waited for the exposé to be published, the forty-ninth day of the grieving period came. With Ozai, he and his mother moved Azula’s ashes to the family grave. They said next to nothing to the man. Zuko didn’t trust himself to speak to Ozai now that he knew. He didn’t trust himself to open his mouth and do anything but vomit.

He wanted his father dead. He wanted his sister back from the grave.

He couldn’t have either, though. As much as he wished otherwise, he knew that he could only move forward from here, carrying the fragmented pieces of himself that he might never put back together. It was the least just thing he’d ever known to be true.

“You’re both so quiet today,” Ozai said, his voice rough around the edges. “Don’t tell me you’re grieving now?”

“Of course, we’re grieving,” Zuko’s mother said quietly. She did not look at Ozai.

“Right,” Ozai said, smoothing his tie out.

Zuko hated him. He had never hated his father more. He couldn’t have hated Ozai for himself, but he could hate Ozai for Azula. At long last, he couldn’t imagine ever wanting that monster’s love again.

Zuko was on his last weekend in Japan, packing for his flight back to Seoul, when Kyoshi’s exposé was published. It was surreal. Within hours of its publication, news of it was plastered across every screen. After all, Zuko hadn’t been entirely wrong; Azula had been beloved for being a promising young girl.

Kyoshi had toed the line between implication and accusation well, it seemed.

Zuko sat with Mai, Ty Lee, and a celebratory bottle of sake on the bed. They passed it around to drink straight from the mouth as they flipped through news channels.

“Her autopsy report indicated signs of sexual abuse—” one anchor said.

“—a political agenda could be at play given Kyoshi’s personal politics—” another said.

“—implying that the late Azula Minamoto, daughter of Phoenix Oil CEO, Ozai Minamoto, was sexually abused by her own father—”

“—Minamoto-san’s representatives have released their statement. They say that Minamoto-san would never have harmed his daughter and any accusations otherwise are purely slanderous. However, when asked if Minamoto-san would take legal action, they had no response—”

“Fuck that bastard,” Mai spat out, spilling some sake onto Ty Lee’s lap.

“Fuck ’im!” Ty Lee crowed, unbothered by Mai’s red-faced clumsiness. She had always been a lightweight. Zuko remembered that from the pathetic drinking they’d all done together at the Minamoto family beach house the summer before he’d been disowned.

“May he rot in hell,” Zuko said, taking the bottle in hand to take a big swig from it. He polished it off entirely.

“Woo!” Ty Lee cheered. “Oh, no, there’s no more sake.”

“Sorry,” Zuko said with a hiccup.

“‘’S fine,” Ty Lee said. She rested her head on Mai’s shoulder, wrapping her arms around the girl. They looked almost peaceful for a moment. Ty Lee ruptured the moment like a fish eye between her teeth. “Hey, Zuko, d’you like um… that girl, Suki?”

Mai grew stiff under Ty Lee.

Not long ago, Zuko would have lashed out at Ty Lee for asking a question like. He would’ve been angry with himself for the fact that it wasn’t true, angry with Ty Lee for butting her head into his business, angry with the world for putting him into that situation at all. He wasn’t angry, though. Not with Ty Lee.

“Suki’s not the friend I’ve got my eye on,” he said.

Ty Lee pouted. “Okay, well, Mai’s off-limits. You blew that one already.”

Zuko laughed, full-bellied. 

“Would it be okay if I liked boys?” he asked.

Mai blinked at him. “Are you stupid? Didn’t I tell you I kissed your sister?” she asked slowly, flicking him in the forehead.

“Oh, yeah,” Zuko said with a grin. He’d forgotten about that. He’d forgotten that Azula had been like him, and Mai was, too. He wasn’t alone in the world. Azula hadn’t been alone either. Not entirely.

Ty Lee’s lower lip began to wobble. She sniffed loudly. “I wish—I wish Azula was still here. I wish we’d known—we could’ve stopped him… we could’ve saved her.”

Mai wrapped her arms around Ty Lee, and she let the other girl cry into the sharp space of her shoulder. “I know. I know,” she whispered.

Tentatively, Zuko brought a hand to Ty Lee’s back, and he rubbed small circles.

They weren’t alright. Not by a long shot. But maybe they could be one day.

It was Sokka alone who picked him up from the airport. Still, Zuko smiled when he stepped into the beat-up car that Sokka had borrowed from Suki. His heart clenched at the sight of Sokka’s face, soft and open and earnest.

“Sorry it’s just me. Suki had a family emergency. Her dog swallowed a spoon? I think he’s fine, though. I mean Suki acted like he did that all the time, so—” Sokka said.

Zuko placed his hand over Sokka’s shoulder. “It’s okay. I’m just glad you’re picking me up.” He wasn’t used to being the calm one in their friendship.

Sokka grinned as Zuko pulled the door closed behind him. “Oh, yeah? What, you like spending time with me or something?”

“Something like that,” Zuko said. He tried to smile. He couldn’t quite manage it. “I’m sorry for how… difficult I was while I was in Japan.”

“Hey, don’t worry about that, Zuko. When I said you were allowed to be angry with the world, I meant it,” Sokka said. He looked so serious like that.

“Thank you for being so understanding of my… of my grief,” Zuko said. It felt strange in his mouth. He’d decided that was what it had to be when he’d read that report, but he hadn’t named it yet. Not out loud.

“Do you need a hug?” Sokka asked.

“We’re in the pickup zone,” Zuko said.

“What matters to me isn’t all these jerks trying to get picked up; it’s you,” Sokka said.

Zuko couldn’t help it. He fell into Sokka, hugging him tightly. It felt safe to hold Sokka and to be held by him. It felt familiar. When they pulled apart, Zuko let out a shaky breath.

“It’s still not like you and Katara. It’ll never be like that. But Azula was my sister. She’s still my sister,” Zuko said.

“That doesn’t have to be the reason you grieve her. I know you guys had a bad relationship,” Sokka said.

“I think… I think I’m grieving who Azula could have been. Not just to me. Just… the girl she could’ve gotten to be if…”

Sokka reached across the console to take Zuko’s hand in his. “I’m sorry.”

It was enough. It had to be.

Maybe it was rude to ask Sokka to make another stop on their way to his dorm, but Zuko had to do something. He couldn’t feel bad about this. He just wanted to do something else for his sister. Something more personal.

So he unwrapped the strawberry daifuku he’d bought from the market, and he placed it as an offering after adding Azula’s name to his butsudan alongside Lu Ten’s and his aunt Hana’s names. He said a prayer for her, too.

He owed her this much.

Iroh did, too. That was why Zuko had called their uncle and invited him over. They hadn’t spoken since their last phone call; Zuko would be lying if he said he was looking forward to speaking again. They hadn’t left things in a place he knew how to be comfortable with. But he knew that he had to speak with his uncle.

So he did.

“Nephew, I’m truly sorry for how we left things. And I’m sorry that I was not there to grieve Azula with you and your mother,” Iroh said, his face contorted in pain.

Zuko hugged him. He couldn’t do anything but hug the man. “I’m sorry for what I said about Lu Ten.”

“It’s okay. If I had known what you were grappling with… what Azula was suffering… you were right. I failed her. At every turn, I let her down,” Iroh said.

“So did I, Uncle,” Zuko said. His voice was hoarse. He hadn’t let go of Iroh yet. He couldn’t.

“But you are only a boy, Zuko. It should never have been your responsibility to save her,” Iroh reminded him.

After a long minute, they finally parted. Zuko sniffled and took in his uncle. Iroh’s eyes were sunken and dark. He looked as if he hadn’t been sleeping. As if he’d been up late crying.

“I added her name to my butsudan. I set out an offering and everything,” Zuko said suddenly.

Iroh’s expression softened into something fond and tender. “Ah, I did the same. Although, I regret that I didn’t know what food she would like as an offering, so I only put out rice.”

“I, uh, I wasn’t sure either. I had to ask Mai and Ty Lee what her favorite was. It was strawberry daifuku,” Zuko said. He felt uncomfortably useless as he said it. Was this all he could offer? Someone else’s memories of his sister?

Iroh smiled at him. “Ah, I’m sure they remember her better than I could. It had been so long since I’d seen her when she passed. I believe the last time I saw your sister, she was calling me a fat old fool.” Though his eyes grew watery, his smile didn’t wane with his words.

“The last time I saw Azula, the only thing she said to me was that I was a mama’s boy and a failure,” Zuko said quietly. He laughed a little. It felt good to talk about Azula honestly. To remember who his sister was instead of just wondering who she could have been.

He would always long for the girl Azula could have grown into with a little less cruelty toward her, but maybe the girl she had been wasn’t so awful either. She was callous and dismissive and apathetic, but she hadn’t been entirely wrong in her criticisms. And maybe there was something funny about that. Maybe there were things in Azula’s entirety that were worth holding onto.

Maybe the sister he had was someone he could grow to love. Even if she hadn’t died, Zuko wanted to believe he could have loved his sister again. So he spent the rest of his evening talking with his uncle about the girl Azula had been, both the good parts and the bad parts she’d shown them.

And when Iroh went to leave, he cleared his throat. “Thank you for being a good uncle to me,” he said.

Iroh winced at the distinction, but he accepted it as Zuko knew he would. There were so many regrets between them both. There were so many failures. They would keep going, though. They always would.

Somehow, despite the fifty-one days Zuko had missed in his second year, he had graduated from Yonsei University with Sokka and Suki. It was a beautiful spring day, and he couldn’t keep the smile off of his face throughout the entire ceremony no matter how badly it stung his cheeks.

He was posing with Sokka for graduation photos taken by his mother and Sokka’s father, trying to make a good impression on the man. He felt stiff and giddy at the same time, and when Katara prompted for them to take a cuter picture, he swept Sokka up into a kiss.

Katara and her boyfriend, Aang, whooped and hollered along with Suki, her sisters, Mai, and Ty Lee. The adults—Sokka’s father and grandmother, Zuko’s mother and uncle, and Suki’s parents—all laughed kindly at the whole thing.

It was a good day. It wasn’t perfect, though. They wrapped up the photos, and Zuko watched as Ty Lee grabbed Mai’s face to pepper it with kisses as if she was the one graduating. He shook his head affectionately at them, and he turned in time to see how Suki was being teased by her sisters and swatted at them in return. How Sokka grabbed Katara to give her a noogie for something she said. And he couldn’t help but wonder what it would’ve been like to reconcile with Azula and to have her here with him for this day. If he ever would’ve been able to reconcile with her at all, let alone ever have that kind of relationship with her.

Katara freed herself from Sokka and made a beeline for Zuko.

He blinked at her. “Um, hi,” he said. He had spoken to her before, but never one-on-one like this.

“You make my brother happy. Keep doing that or I’ll beat you up,” she said.

“I’ll do my best?” Zuko said. His heart still hurt. He didn’t think Azula ever would have threatened a boy for him. Not as their relationship had been, at least.

“As much as it pains me to say, I don’t think you’ll ever have to worry about this idiot hurting Sokka, Katara. You should’ve seen the way they pined after each other. It was like rom-com-level gross,” Suki said.

Zuko wasn’t sure when she’d sneaked up on them, but he wasn’t sure he could complain about it either. Anything to distract him from the way he missed Azula like a limb he’d neglected to use.

“Hey! I think pining is sweet!” Aang interjected.

Katara laughed. “Of course, you think that. How long was it you were pining for me? Five years?”

Aang flushed. “Something like that.”

Zuko tried to laugh. It wasn’t as hard as it would have been the year before.

It was the anniversary of Azula’s death. That was strange to admit even now. Zuko thought it might always be strange to think of her in the past tense, to think of her as being gone. Still, they were at his family grave, him, his mother, Iroh, Mai, and Ty Lee. Sokka had come along, but he was standing off to the side, waiting. He hadn’t known Azula, and he didn’t want to intrude on their time with her.

His mother and Iroh had both said their pieces to her. It was Zuko’s turn.

He stepped forward as they walked away to give him, Mai, and Ty Lee some privacy. The cherry blossoms were in bloom, but it was windy, and they were being blown about like a pink blizzard.

“I’m sorry you had to die for me to see you, Azula. And that you had to die to get any semblance of justice.

“But you should know that Father—Ozai, he stepped down as CEO. He hasn’t tried to take legal action against anyone about it. Everyone hates him now. I hope… I hope that helps. Even just a little.

“And I hope you know that I could have loved you properly if our parents had been better to us both, but on some level, in some way, part of me loves you the way that I’m supposed to. I am your big brother, after all, Azula. Maybe I don’t love the façade you put up, but I love the girl you were before. I forgive the girl he made you into. And I’m so sorry that you couldn’t see how it could ever get better. You’re my little sister, and I miss you more than I knew I could,” he said. There were tears in his eyes, fat wads of them. If he blinked, they’d roll down his cheeks. He didn’t want to blink. Not even as the tears blurred his vision.

Mai rubbed his back gently. “We all miss you,” she said quietly. “I’ll never stop being sorry that we couldn’t help you sooner… even if you were a real cunt.”

Zuko glanced up toward the sky and the swirl of pink petals around them.

“I know you don’t like to admit it, but if you’re worried about us, you shouldn’t be, Azu. Okay? I promise we’re gonna take care of each other, and it’ll never be okay that you’re gone, but we’ll survive anyway,” Ty Lee said. Her voice shook, but she meant every word.

Zuko knew that because he had thought the same thing over and over again. Maybe things would never be fully okay, but they didn’t always have to be horrible either. He could live, and he could heal for Azula. They all could. Maybe they’d die trying, but that didn’t mean they shouldn’t bother. His chest felt lighter as a gust of wind blew through his hair. In the haze of flowers, he watched as a cherry blossom tree set down petals in the same place he had set down his grief, and he understood now that while life was fleeting, nothing in it was futile.