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And if she’s being honest with herself, which she rarely is, Azula thinks that maybe deep down she’s jealous.
Love comes so easily to Ty Lee. With her long lashes and lovely curves, it’s no wonder boys throw themselves at her. Azula isn’t surprised, but she has pretty eyes and nice hair too. She’s beautiful too, everyone says so.
Even if they’re only saying it out of fear, they still say it.
But when she spots Ty Lee hiding behind a curtain to avoid her gaggle of gooey-eyed admirers, Azula can feel annoyance and anger burning blue in her chest. It’s not a new feeling, in fact it’s become a reliable fall back for her.
A comfort.
She takes comfort in her anger and smiles mischievously, taking Ty Lee’s advice to heart as she hunts down her latest prospect. The kiss is gentle, maybe a little sweet, and Azula’s heart picks up a little with the ideas of what else she could accomplish if she only had somebody competent by her side. When Chad doesn’t agree and her anger returns, she decides the party is over. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
Burning bridges is so much more fun than building them, anyways.
Azula leaves that night feeling vindicated and powerful, like a true Fire Lord. Something isn’t right in her chest, but it was probably just the fire flakes. They had tasted a little stale. She glances over at her friends giddy with what they had done, their youth displayed across their laughing faces. For one night, maybe she can indulge herself too and enjoy it.
She sees Ty Lee’s wide smile. Her innocent eyes and cutesy little braid. She remembers the way boys flocked to the little circus freak on the beach, and Azula falls back into the familiarity of her own discomfort.
She’s jealous, but she pretends she’s not.
Everyone chooses Zuko.
Her mother, her uncle, her best friend.
Even Zuko eventally chooses Zuko. Azula was losing control of the tightly woven net she had weaved using her friends and family’s loyalty. Sure, it was a web of lies and deceit and fear, but was there really any other way?
Of course not.
Except that Zuko had gone and started to pick at the ends of the rope, fraying and splitting the knots Azula has so expertly tied together. She had always known he would end up either a traitor or dead. After today, he would be a both.
A dead traitor for a brother, and a banished fool of a mother.
A heart so full of fondness for others was one that Azula could use to her advantage, and Zuko wore his heart on full display, just waiting for somebody to come and claim it for their own. Father had taken it first, but Azula was the one who had to twist the knife. It was an easy job.
Zuko was easily exploited.
Mai however, had proven to be a little more tricky.
She was bored and rich and powerful, which made her especially convenient as an ally, but dangerous if she began to think for herself. Azula tiptoed around her a little bit more carefully than Ty Lee, showing her that the only release from her repetitive and prestigious life full of baby spit up and noblemen talk, was to go with her.
It was like the good old days, running around with her childhood friends and her weakling of a brother. But something about the four of them being together again weighed heavily on Azula. The good old days hadn’t always been so good, even for her. She would grit and bear it though. There was a war to be won. Besides, none of that mattered now.
What mattered was that Mai had spotted Zuko throwing himself in front of that Water Tribe peasant, shielding him from harm as they tried to escape the Boiling Rock. Mai had seen how Zuko had pushed the boy out of the way, determination to protect written all over his traitorous face. Mai had seen how that…that other boy had looked over in awe and shock and something disgustingly soft as Zuko fought to keep them all alive. How they fought together seamlessly with no words and barely even a glance. A valiant, but futile effort.
Azula knew Mai saw it, because she saw it too.
She smiled to herself. Mai wasn’t usually the type to use anger as a motivator. Boredom sure, but anger? This would be fun and interesting.
But Mai wasn’t moving to attack.
Her betrayal came quick and sharp, so fast and unexpected that for the first time in years, Azula was truly, truly surprised. She had worked so hard to make sure that Mai’s happiness depended solely on her, but Mai’s words were as sharp as the knives she threw as she held her ground and said;
“I love Zuko more than I fear you.”
The anger was back, but this time it wasn’t comforting. Losing Zuko was a blow to her war, but losing Mai was a blow to her heart.
If only she had one.
She raised her arm, poised to strike, intent to maim. Azula wasn’t going to hold back just because they had shared a past- and Mai knew that. She raised her knives to protect herself. Futile, like Zuko. Futile, like her mother trying to protect what she thought she could. Futile, like this entire war.
Three quick jabs across her arms and back, and Azula was face down on the filthy prison floor as Zuko and his gondola sped off towards safety. Through her confusion she heard Ty Lee tugging on Mai’s sleeve.
“Come on, let's get out of here!”
Somehow, knowing that the two of them, together, were running across the prison to leave here there to rot by herself, hurt the most. Azula was angry, angrier than she had ever been, so angry that she almost didn’t feel the budding seeds of hurt and self doubt planting their roots deep in her chest, whispering to her to fall into her own despair, as if she were some petulant child. As if she were Zuko.
Azula wouldn’t forget this betrayal. She wouldn’t forget, and she most certainly wouldn’t forgive.
Her mother appeared to her in her mirror, and even though her mind told her it was a trick of the light, Azula couldn’t shake the way Ursa looked at her. Even when the mirror was shattered and her mother was gone, the light in her eyes once again vanished as she left behind her daughter, Azula felt like she was being watched. Like she was going crazy.
Like she was alone.
Azula bent her head, ignoring the way her choppy bangs itched the tips of her eyelids. She bent her head, heard her mother's words over and over and over again in her mind, and she wept.
I love you, Azula.
When Zuko landed, softly, with the horrific bison on the walk of the Fire Palace and that horrific Water Tribe girl, Azula almost didn’t even notice. She was still reeling from the thrill of banishing her entire court- the people who were supposed to keep her safe and listen to her every word and bend over backwards to perform her every wish. They couldn’t be trusted, though.
Collateral damage was to be expected in a war.
Zuko landed softly and jumped off the bison, prattling on about how he was going to be the Fire Lord and how he was going to do this and blah blah blah, enough talking. Azula had had enough talking. She had had enough banishing and enough traitors and enough of this war.
It was funny, really, how her idiot brother and this stupid water girl really thought that they were going to overthrow her. Her? Azula smirked and threw off her cloak, ready to finish this once and for all, no matter the outcome.
“I’m sorry it had to end this way, brother.”
“No you’re not.”
He almost sounded sad, and for a moment Azula saw her mother's face in her mirror, her warm eyes and sweet voice as she told her daughter that she had always had such beautiful hair…
She threw the first blast.
For a moment, when her father had told her that she would become the Fire Lord that day, Azula had been slightly put out that she wouldn’t be able to feel the power of the comet. Watching her blue flames surge towards the sky with more umph than she had ever seen had momentarily distracted her from her opponent, her brother, but only for a second.
Zuko jumped into action, dancing with his own flames. They crashed together in a fiery wall, as they always had, the heat near unbearable. This was easy, this was familiar. Fighting fire with fire, the way her father had taught her to, the way she had perfected over the years until there was nothing left but a smoldering crisp of the girl she could have been.
Azula felt the power of the comet surging within her very blood, so strong that she almost forgot that she was fighting her brother for the throne. She gave it her all, throwing herself into every blast, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow, someway, this would be taken from her, too.
It should have been easy, fighting Zuko always was, but the comet gave him strength too.
And Zuko had changed.
He was ferocious as always, overcompensating for his lack of natural talent, but he was grounded and thoughtful. With every breath he drew, his fists blasted out fire tenfold. Unwavering and resilient. His expression was hard and solid and he seemed calmer than she had ever thought possible for the little firecracker.
It was almost as if…
It was almost as if Zuko’s fire was coming from deep inside his body, inside of his very soul. The fire sounded sad, but maybe that was just Azula’s mind finally breaking.
One stupid sweep of his stupid legs in that supid move of his, and Azula found herself taken off guard and spiraling through the air back towards the palace. She landed with a hard thud on the ground while Zuko stood over her, taunting.
“No lightning today? Afraid I’ll redirect it?”
The reassuring presence of anger washed over her again as she struggled her way up to stand. How dare he? Who did he think he was?
“Oh,” she sneered, breathing in deeply and sporadically simultaneously, “I’ll show you lightning!”
She registered his stance, the calming breaths he took as he prepared for her worst; and she wondered how she could catch him off of his guard. Then she saw the Water Tribe peasant, and remembered how Zuko had thrown himself in front of flames to protect the Water Tribe boy.
Zuko had always been easy to manipulate.
His eyes wide in horror, Zuko jumped in front of her blast just in time, just as she had planned. He went down hard, his eyes rolling in the back of his head as the other girl looked on in horror. Azula’s finger was smoking, but she had done it.
She had done it.
She had finally, finally beaten him. She knew she had always been the better bender, father had always told her so, but seeing Zuko flat on his back with the life fading away from him…
Well it was terrifying, and validating. Her own emotions were swirling around inside of her, but she pushed them aside, knowing that there wasn’t any time to think about that. She fought her remaining opponent, that bratty Water Tribe girl with the silly hair, with lightning fueled by the terror she felt deep, deep down, but it didn’t work.
The Water Tribe girl outsmarted her, and somehow, Zuko won.
Zuko won and he left and Azula was left chained to a sewer grate breathing blue fire and sobbing her eyes out and hearing her mother's words over and over and over again…
“I love you, Azula.”
Zuko left.
She was alone in her prison cell, wrapped in an old blanket that somebody had brought from her bedroom, staring mindlessly at the metal bars keeping her locked away from the world and her old friends and the remaining crumbs of her broken family.
It wouldn’t take much to firebend her way out of this mess, The Avatar hadn’t taken away her bending, but her spirit was long gone. She had nothing left to fight for, except revenge, and forming a plan to execute that would take time and energy that she simply didn’t have. She had lost track of the time she had spent here in her cell, wondering what Ty Lee and Mai were up to…
If they were happier without her. If Ty Lee smiled at Mai with her wide eyes and sweet lips. If Mai blushed back. If either of them ever thought about her, rotting away here in her own palace.
She thought about Zuko, a boy parading around as a leader, with no family left except the greatest shame of Fire Nation history and his mentally unstable daughter.
The thought made her sick.
She cursed Zuko and Ty Lee and Mai a thousand times over until she couldn’t feel the tears that ran down her cheeks, leaving salty tracks in their wake. Maybe it was because she had been thinking of him, that the universe decided to hand deliver her older brother to her. She looked up, quickly wiping the tears off of herself as her face hardened into the well practiced scowl she had grown used to wearing.
Zuko stood before her; quiet, thoughtful. The power radiating off of him strong enough to make Azula’s breath hitch. He was still just a boy, but he was also the Fire Lord. For a moment, though, he was just her brother.
“What do you want?” She sneered, and Zuko’s good eye narrowed. He was clutching something in his hand, an old piece of paper, yellow and frayed around the edges. He sat down outside of the cell, crossing his legs and resting his face in his calloused hands. He looked tired and stressed, but mostly, he looked young. The scowl on her face was immediately replaced with shock as she wondered if anyone had ever looked at her and saw her own youth looking back at them. Who on earth thought it had been okay to let a fourteen year old girl fight in such a horrible war?
Azula pushed that thought out of her mind as Zuko sighed into his palm. That’s an Uncle thought and those make you weak, she desperately told herself, wondering, not for the first time, if maybe that wasn’t really the truth.
Zuko breathed out again and a little swirl of colorful smoke breathed with him. It came second nature to him, and Azula could tell that he hadn’t even noticed when it had happened. He had changed so much, and left her to rot in a prison cell.
He would pay eventually. They all would.
“You know,” he started, his gold eyes never once leaving hers, “I don’t want to leave you in here forever.”
Azula huffed, but no smoke came out. She thought about trying to breathe fire in Zuko’s face, blue and hot and rage filled and revenge worthy. But he was the first contact with the outside world she had had in days, and she wasn’t going to give that up so easily.
“Could have fooled me, ZuZu,” she sang sweetly at him, delighting in the way his face reddened into a scowl. “What kind of Fire Lord leaves his little sister locked up in prison? What kind of brother?”
Zuko had always been easy to manipulate.
His grip tightened on the old piece of paper in his hands, and he stared her down, his ugly scarred eye never once looking away.
Azula had thought about his scar quite a few times in her life. It was hard to miss. When it had happened, she had thought he had deserved it. When he was banished she knew he had deserved it, and when he turned up at her coronation insistent that he would become the Fire Lord instead of her, she wished she had been the one to cause it herself.
But now, as he sat in front of her, barely seventeen with the weight of the entire world on his shoulders and nothing to guide him but the ramblings of an old lunatic and the goody-goody feel good teachings of a twelve year old monk, Azula wondered if maybe... just maybe, Zuko hadn’t deserved the treatment he had gotten from their father, either.
“You’re in here because you made your own choices. Not father or mother or me, you.” His words were harsh. Azula was used to harsh words, she had grown up with Ozai too, after all, but somehow the sting of Zuko’s sharp tongue cut deeper than she had been prepared for. Zuko sighed and ran his hands through his messy hair, his Fire Lord crown sticking up at an odd angle that, under other circumstances, would have made her laugh with mirth.
“I’m sorry,” Zuko continued, and he even had the audacity to look it, “It’s just that...I can’t help you if you don’t want to first help yourself.”
Azula was shocked at the apology, but rolled her eyes and resisted the urge to vomit into her own mouth. He sounded like Uncle. Full of good feelings and self-help and spiritual enlightenment wisdom that got nobody anywhere in life. Spiritual Enlightenment hadn’t won a war.
“...Except that it has,” Zuko said, a look of confusion quickly wrapping itself around his face as Azula realized that she had said that last part out loud. Zuko seemed to shrug it off, however, and pushed on.
“Look Azula,” he was avoiding eye contact the way he did whenever he was embarrassed, and Azula found herself once again delighting in her brothers suffering, if only for a moment. “I don’t want you to be in here forever. I want you to have your freedom and your place here in the Fire Nation with the people and the palace and...and...”
With me.
With me. With me. With me.
It hung suspended in the air between them unspoken, thoughts that could never formulate into actual words lest the universe hear them and twist them around until they were ugly and unrecognizable. Azula understood why he stopped himself, but she heard his intention nonetheless. She knew that it would be easy, so easy, to use this. To use and abuse, as only she could do, to get what she wanted.
“That sounds awfully dangerous for you, ZuZu,” she said with a sickly sweet smile and an even nastier tone. Zuko stood his ground though, as he had learned to do, and leaned in closer to the bars. Azula met him there, their faces just inches from each other so that she could feel the heat that spiraled off of him on her own skin.
“You know you are so easily manipulated. So easily used and so foolishly naive to jump at the first mention of a ‘happy ending’. It’s pathetic, ZuZu. Is this how you rule our nation? With a weak heart and even weaker morals?” She relished in the shock that quickly shot across his face, the way he lurched away from the cold metal bars, distancing himself from her and her words.
Good.
Azula had always been the better speaker. She expected him to turn red and run, mumbling something with anger as he fled back to his palace to lick his wounds in private in the company of his new family. But after a solid moment of wide eyed shock, he leaned back into the bars, a mischievous and quite devilish smile lighting up his own face.
“If my heart is so weak, sister, then why are you the one behind bars? You think that fear and control are the only way to live, but you’re wrong. You’ve never truly felt love, at least not in a while, and I feel sorry for you. I really do.”
Head snapping up in disgust, Azula prepared herself to launch into a tirade on Zuko and how she didn’t need his pity party, but his face was so open and earnest that she actually believed him. He really did feel sorry for her.
She choked on her own words, stuck in her throat as she wrestled with the thought of her older brother, the boy she had once thought she had total control over, having pity for her. Her, Azula of the Fire Nation. Pride and joy to Phoenix King Ozai and heir to the throne…
The throne that Zuko now sat upon.
She sucked in a quick breath as Zuko’s face opened even more. He had always been too honest for his own good. She wondered, briefly, how he would drown in his own words this time.
But he said nothing, instead offering her the yellowing piece of paper. She hesitated, but Zuko waited patiently until she reached out and took it.
It wasn’t just a piece of paper, but an old photo.
A photo of her and Zuko and their mother on Ember Island. Zuko must have saved it from their house before they burned it to the ground. The thought brought a gentle smile to her lips against her will. Zuko seemed to have noticed.
“I know that girl in the photo is still here somewhere, Azula.”
Azula stared down at the photo. She was three, maybe four, sitting in Zuko’s lap as he laughed widely, his eyes closed with the euphoria of being young and having no worries other than what they would have for lunch. Their mother Ursa, was sitting next to them, stifling her own laugh behind her hand, ever the lady.
Azula didn’t notice she was crying until the first teardrop landed on the photo, smearing her own childhood face. She heard those four words, over and over again, in the back of her mind, the same way she had every day since that fateful Agni Kai. Over and over and over until her brain was pounding and her heart was hurting.
“I love you, Azula.”
I love you, her mother had said. I love you, her uncle had said. I love you, Zuko was saying now.
She looked up again to meet her brother's eyes. They were as gold as ever, and more determined than she had seen in years.
“I think,” he said, gently reaching through the bars and placing his warm hands over her own cold ones, “I think it’s time we find her again.”
Azula stared down at their intertwined hands, unable to feel the disgust she so desperately wanted to cling to, as those four words the ghost of her mother had whispered to her in her own mirror bounced around in her head again. She tried to ignore the way Zuko was looking at her and how it made her feel as she fought the tears that stung at the corners of her eyes. She tried to tell herself that this was all a lie, that this would only end in flames like everything else. That there was no control in love, only in fear. That she would never be able to let go as Zuko had, as Mai had, as Ty Lee had.
The tears fell anyways, blurring her vision of the photo that she was clinging too so fiercely she was surprised it hadn't yet caught flame. She let them fall and pretended to ignore the way Zuko’s hand felt in hers and the way his eyes never left her face or how he breathed with a steadiness she had been searching for for years on end with no avail. She ignored it all, and she wept into the photo of a younger, happier Azula.
She wept for the girl that never was, and she wept for the girl that maybe, one day, could be.