Chapter Text
Aang and Azula were married.
He carried her back to their room the way tradition demanded — his wife, his bride — and managed to open the door without putting her down, though it took some creative footwork. He was the Avatar, after all. Surely that counted for something.
He set her down gently and kissed her.
She shoved him onto the bed and climbed on top of him.
"Shall I perform my marital duties?" she asked, one brow arched.
"No," he said, "because you called them marital duties."
She made an deeply annoyed sound.
He pulled her into a hug instead.
She made a small, involuntary happy sound — the kind she still pretended she hadn't made.
"Honestly," he murmured into her hair, "I'm so exhausted and strung out from all the wedding chaos that I don't want anything more than talking, kissing, and lying here with you."
She lifted her head. "There were eleven people at the ceremony."
"Still."
She made several more annoyed sounds, but hugged him tighter anyway.
"Besides," she said after a moment, her voice shifting into the dry, practical tone he secretly loved, "it wouldn't carry any magical weight now. We did it long before the wedding, so Agni certainly isn't going to grant us any special blessing just for doing it again tonight."
"Maybe," Aang said, and kissed her cheek.
"You think I'm being funny, but I'm serious." She settled her chin on his chest and looked up at him. "Consider the evidence. Zuko and Katara waited — properly waited — and they received Agni's blessing. Their pregnancy lasted seven months."
That was the moment Aang started laughing — really laughing, shaking beneath her.
"You — you genuinely believe that? I always assumed everyone was just... pretending to believe it —"
"What else am I supposed to believe? I saw it. Seven months."
He pressed his lips together, failing to stop smiling. "Or... she was already pregnant before the wedding, and the two of them quietly agreed to frame it as a miraculous short pregnancy so the child would be considered legitimate?"
Azula blinked slowly. "Let me guess. They told you that themselves."
"We are friends." A pause. The warmth in his voice dimmed slightly. "Even if we barely talk anymore. Adulthood is terrible."
She was quiet for a moment. She found herself trying to calculate the last time she'd had real contact with anyone she might once have called a friend. The answer settled over her like cold water. Almost ten years. A decade swallowed by the particular magic of being classified as National Danger Number One — shuffled between prisons and institutions... and then by becoming a mother.
"Shut up," she said, and kissed him.
"Sorry." He drew her closer, arms wrapping around her properly.
They lay there in the quiet.
"So," Azula said. "We're married now."
"We are."
"It changes everything."
He almost said something. The words were right there — we've been living together for years, we already have two toddlers, the only thing that's technically changed is that our future children will be legitimate and the general public might finally stop referring to you as the Avatar's concubine. He thought about how the headlines would probably still frame it as him conquering her. Some ancient, tired narrative about the last Airbender taming the Fire Nation princess.
He knew the truth. He hadn't conquered anything. He had simply been open minded enough to love her — to walk beside her, hand in hand, through everything that came after.
"I love you," he said instead.
"I love you too." She kissed him, then hugged him fiercely, arms locked around him like she was afraid he might drift away.
The candles burned low.
"Though..." he said after a while, his fingers tracing idle patterns across her waist. "Do you remember — during one of our more interesting conversations — you mentioned you might want to... be with another woman someday?"
"Yes."
"Did you mean it? Honestly?"
"You know i'm attracted to both." A pause. "Why?"
"Would you want to... explore that? Together?"
A long silence.
"...What."