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The first thing Zuko feels for Azula is pity.
"She's so tiny," he observes, kneeling beside his sweaty and glowing mother. Father could crush her in his fist. He doesn't say that second part.
Ursa smiles at him. "Hold out your arms."
Zuko does, and she eases little Azula into them. "Here."
She's so helpless, he thinks to himself, bouncing her gently. She's weak. Zuko feels bad for her. You can't be weak in his family. You can't survive that way.
Azula doesn't stay weak. She grows quickly, and she doesn't need protection, but Zuko gives it anyway.
They're taught together. Azula isn't old enough for lessons, but Zuko begs and his mother gives in, so Azula learns at the rate of someone years older. She excels in classes--she's better than him. The tutors say she is the smartest pupil they've had.
Zuko is proud of her. His sister is a prodigy, all the people in the court say so. She shot her first sparks at the age of three and set the dining hall on fire. Their father wasn't even mad because she was so good. She's perfect.
Zuko isn't.
He watches her doing katas in the courtyard. He's supposed to be studying, but he snuck out to watch. Their father, observing her practice, hasn't noticed yet.
Azula oversteps and falls hard on her elbow. She cradles it to her chest, watching the blood drip to the ground. Zuko wants to help, but Ozai gets to her first. He pulls her up by her hair.
"How could you make a mistake like that?" Ozai screams. "You are not Zuko!"
Still hiding, Zuko flinches.
He thinks of his father's endless yelling, of burn scars, being forced to practice until he's delirious from exhaustion. He thinks of threats in his ear and big hands twitching like they want to lock around his neck.
He's glad she isn't him.
When Azula turns seven she tells him to stop trying so hard to protect her. "You're treating me like I'm a baby," she complains. "I'm a big girl now."
She is. She plays with her own friends. She has mastered everything their tutors throw at her. When she walks she holds her head high like their mother.
"Silly," Zuko says. "Of course you are."
He rolls over and pokes her nose. She crept in his bed sometime after midnight, shaking from nightmares of failure.
Azula shoves his arm away, then burrows under the covers. "Good," she says. "So you'll leave me alone?"
"Silly," Zuko says again. "Of course not."
They don't play together anymore. By the time Zuko's voice starts to crack so has her patience with him. She tells him to get his act together or be left in the dust and against his wishes he ends up doing the second.
Ozai screams at him and smiles at her. Ursa smiles at him and ignores her completely, until one day she doesn't appear at breakfast anymore.
They never do learn why. Zuko emerges from his room the day after she disappears, his eyes red from crying again, and sees Azula humming as she skips down the hall.
"Suffering will be your teacher."
His face is on fire.
There is red covering his eyes. The crowd around them is screaming with him, either with horror or with bloodlust. He's begging, pleas that do nothing, and he wishes he could just shut up, but his mouth refuses to obey his brain.
He thinks, in the corner of his mind, Azula would fight, Azula wouldn't just sit here and die.
He thinks, Azula's too good to die.
Zuko wakes up and he's been banished. He wishes he had died up on that stage, because even that would hurt less than this.
"Suffering will be your teacher."
They shave his head and Iroh helps him walk drunkenly to the ship they'll call home. He gives the order to power up the engines and watches the Fire Nation fade away.
A lone figure in a red nightgown stands at the docks, black hair blowing around her face as she watches them go.
Everybody forgets his fifteenth birthday except Iroh. Zuko goes to breakfast and sees a hotcake on his plate. He remembers a cake his sister baked him once, burnt and covered with so much sauce that she spilled when she carried it into his room.
He has to remind himself, as he scoffs dismissively at his uncle, that Azula probably doesn't miss him at all. There's a lump in his throat that makes it hard to swallow.
The Avatar is alive.
The Avatar is alive, and he's a half-grown Airbender, annoying and green with obviously no idea what he's doing, and he escapes. Zuko fights back the urge to scream.
"I'll capture him!" he raves, as the crew works to dig them out of the snow. "I'll bring him to my father and regain my honor."
He breathes in, hopeful. "My father will take me back."
"He may," Iroh contemplates. "But will he love you?"
Zuko scoffs. "Love is for fools," he says.
Iroh nods like this is some deep revelation on his part. "Perhaps we are all fools, then," he suggests.
Zuko remembers a time, long ago, when he thought he loved his family, before they hated him. "No," he lies, finally. "I never was."
When he sees her again he has trouble recognizing her. She's different–taller, longer hair, makeup. Her eyes smolder like the fire she's always been better than him at producing.
"Hello, brother," she says, the word an insult on her blood red lips.
His heart curls in on itself, and for a second he cannot speak. This girl with sharp nails and teeth and a voice that cuts-is this same girl he left behind? Is there anything of his baby sister left inside of her?
He wonders, as he snaps back at her on reflex, if she's happy to see him at all.
She shoots Uncle Iroh.
It was an accident, he thinks. She didn't mean to–Azula would never–
But she would, and that's what makes his head pound, makes his eyes burn with something foreign and salty. His heart beats like the drums that play in the palace and he rushes to his uncle, panicked and scared.
There's only a faint heartbeat.
Zuko howls. The Avatar's crew stand behind him, horrified, and Azula laughs and laughs as they all watch Iroh and wait for him to die.
He joins her eventually, so sick of being alone that he'll take Ozai's awful stare in place of Iroh's trusting gaze. Zuko's not sure what he believes anymore. He kisses Mai because it's easier than thinking about it.
He returns to his old chambers in the palace and forces the window open, breathes in air that smells of sulfur instead of sea salt. The Fire Nation is foreign to him now.
He thinks of the Water Tribe girl in the tunnels, thinks of Uncle Iroh pleading for him to not give up, and wonders if it's not too late to change his mind.
"I don't have a sob story like the rest of you," she lies, that night when they sit by the fire on the beach.
Zuko remembers when they were kids and they cried in the dark, remembers their mother applying makeup to their burns before appearances. He remembers her marching up to him when she was five and telling him they had to stop screaming every time, because it doesn’t make a difference. He remembers the first time their father made them fight, and the tears in her eyes as she knocked him down.
She calls herself a monster, in the tone of a girl who doesn’t care, and he lets her.
He says goodbye to Ozai during the eclipse.
"Uncle Iroh's the one who's been a real father to me," he says, and he swallows regret. Ozai is cruel, abusive and demanding and manipulative, but he's still Zuko's father and it hurts.
"Maybe he'll teach you the ways of tea and failure," Ozai scoffs at him.
Zuko thinks, like you taught me I was worthless? Like you taught Azula to kill? Is that what you mean?
Instead he says that being banished was the best thing that Ozai could have done for him. He wonders, as he leaves the Fire Nation behind an hour later, if that's true.
Mai and then Ty Lee leave Azula for him. He tries not to gloat, tries to focus on escaping, but he feels victorious anyway.
Finally, he thinks, the vindictive streak he shares with Azula coming out, I have friends and she doesn't.
Finally, she will feel like me.
For some reason this isn’t as satisfying as he thought it would be, back when he was ten years old.
Azula's being crowned Firelord when he and Katara arrive at the palace. She stares up at him in disgust and he remembers the way she looked up at him when they were children, full of trust and wonder.
"I'm sorry it has to end this way, brother, " Azula says.
Zuko's heart hurts.
"No you're not," he whispers, his apologies and tears caught in his throat. I don't want to kill you. I never did.
The sky burns orange and blue.
When he visits her, afterward, she's clawing at the walls and wailing. Tears stream down her face, her mad laugh echoing in the tiny room, and he thinks, this is what I did to you.
Ozai messed her up from the day she was born, Zuko knows. They never really had a chance.
But he should have loved her. He could have given her that, at least.
"Azula," he whispers tentatively.
She stares. Her body is emaciated. He wonders if she remembered to eat at all in the days before the coronation.
"Zuzu," she says, in a sing-song voice. "Zuzu."
"Azula, I'm sorry," he tells her.
"Zuko," she says, her face clearing, and screams.