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In every iteration, she is the villain. In every iteration, she is the sister who chose her father over her brother, who chose power over decency. She is a liar, she’s the girl who was betrayed by her two closest and only friends, the girl who never trusted anyone but herself. The girl that even her mother feared. And at some point, she stops being a teenage girl and becomes a monster. No one gives her the benefit of the doubt. She doesn’t deserve it.
She is fourteen when her father makes her his poster child, when her brother decides to chase a glorified toddler around the world. She is so hopelessly alone, but her lies protect her. They weave a cloak of apathetic eye rolls and forced smirks, a wall no one dares breakthrough. She has no uncle to keep her balanced, no mentor to guide her steps. She has no one.
She isn’t slipping, because to do that she’d have to be steady to begin with. She has never been grounded, she’s built herself up on concealed emotions and aggressive distractions, all done so much better than her brother. She is superior in every way. A better leader, a better daughter, a bigger disaster. How the mighty fall. How her father must despise her — the daughter born lucky — for crumbling under the pressure.
It hits her quite suddenly that she loves the circus freak. That her piercing grey eyes and immense power lay idle in her mind for hours on end. That for all her burying of her feelings, for all the time her father reminded her of the line that could never be crossed, she’s learning how to be honest with herself.
She misses Ty Lee. Her easy joy, unfailing optimism. Every bit her opposite. She misses the sunrises in the palace, the only peace she ever had. She yearns for a childhood she never got to live, memories tainted by her own desire for power.
She watches from afar as her brother grows up, marries the one she fought that day beside the prison. Sokka. She isn’t surprised. He and Zuko had fought together like it was something they’d done all their lives. You can’t deny a connection like that. Not even oblivious Zuzu.
She watches as Mai and Ty Lee find their own paths, happy to be free of her. She watches her father waste away.
No one loves her. The fact would be self-pitying if it wasn’t so true. The world moves on and she remains stuck, frozen. Watching the people she once took such pride in manipulating flourish in her absence. Remove the tumour, cut off the corrupted limb, and the body thrives.
“I love Zuko more than I fear you.” That’s what Mai had said. An echo of a concept she is already too familiar with. Her mother made sure of that. She was never a child to her. She was ruthless, unhinged. The spitting image of her father before she even had a chance to figure herself out.
It’s years before she’s even allowed out of the asylum, a completely idiotic precaution for someone like her, someone so fundamentally broken. When Ozai dies, when the pressure is finally off her chest, it doesn’t matter like it should.
Zuko shouldn’t be Fire Lord. Politics were never his strong suit, they were always hers. But a mentally unstable monster can’t be a nation’s head, can she?
She broke out of the asylum for a night, once. The security is really quite poor. She just wanted to see Ty Lee. She just wanted one moment of being ordinary. One moment where she wasn’t the dictator’s daughter, one moment where she wasn’t the princess everyone was so eager to forget. One fucking moment where she wasn’t herself.
She remembers sitting on the cliffs outside Ba Sing Se, watching the Kyoshi warriors train. She remembers seeing a girl with a long braid, with grey eyes she’s never been able to forget. She remembers trying to call out, and seeing those big grey eyes flash with recognition, then harden in a way she’s never seen before. The words die in her throat, and the smallest part of her, the part where she kept a desperate hope, something that persisted despite everything, that part shatters.
She remembers starting the walk back to the asylum. Trying not to look back. Failing.
She remembers Ty Lee not even acknowledging that she was there at all.
Then Zuko lets her out. Says he’s made their idiotic uncle the appointed head of Fire Nation, that right now he’s too young to put the nation back together, too reckless. That maybe one day they can rule together. She thinks, maybe, that no one gives Zuzu enough credit. Because her brother is smart enough to know there’s no need to waste money on a lost cause, to try to fix a person so fundamentally broken.
The first day out in the real world is surprisingly enjoyable. Sokka tries to talk to her, says something about how he doesn’t blame her for all that she’s done (a fool move, to be sure.), that he hopes one day they’ll be friends. She’s surprised. She didn’t think her brother would marry someone so effortlessly deceptive. Obviously what he’s saying is a lie, but he has no tells. In fact, if she didn’t know any better, she’d think he was sincere. But she knows better than that.
Ty Lee doesn’t visit. Mai writes, in elegant scrawl, says that she wants nothing to do with her. She prepares herself for an uncontrollable outburst, for the feeling she had that day at Boiling Rock. It never comes. She’s never really had friends, but she always had companions.
Now she has neither.
She doesn’t have much to do now besides think. There’s no plan, no plotting to get the throne. She doesn’t want it anymore. She wants Ty Lee to look at her and not see a monster. She wants Iroh to regret leaving her to be raised with an abuser who destroyed any goodness she had left in her. She wants her mother to be haunted for never seeing her as a child, she wants Ursa to know that she is equally guilty in her and Zuko’s trauma. She wants to not hate herself so much, but there are too many reasons to.
“Did you kill him?” She asks Zuko one day, as they sit in the gardens. She dimly remembers play dates with Mai, acrobatics with Ty Lee.
Childhood memories are hard for her. They bring up too much that she’s trained herself so well not to think about.
“No,” Zuko says.
“Who, then?”
“He did it himself. Stopped eating altogether.”
That’s not entirely surprising. “Did he suffer?”
Zuko snorts, a sound she hasn’t heard in a long time. “Is it bad that I wish he did?”
She looks at him, at the scar she watched him be branded with when he was barely thirteen. “No. I’m sure he would have wanted us to suffer. Perhaps we’d have been burnt alive.”
“Hmm… Roasted.”
“Barbecued.”
“Boiled?”
She doesn’t think about it, she doesn’t process what she’s doing, she just throws her arms around Zuko. He flinches, then relaxes into her grip. She isn’t ever sure this is how hugs work (she’s been hugged like…. twice in her entire life) but she—
She’s so lonely.
Maybe that’s why she says what she says next. “You know,” her voice is muffled into Zuko’s shoulder, “I wasn’t going to be on the throne for very long, even if I’d won our Agni Kai.”
Zuko goes stiff. “What?”
“I was going to—“ She swallows a sob, “I was going to attend my coronation, and then I was going to jump off the palace roof.”
Zuko’s breathing stops. She braces herself for the punishment, for the reminder that she is weak that she is broken that—
“Why?” Zuko’s voice is tiny, and she is taken back to when they were children, when he was the only person who didn’t look at her like she was already the spitting image of Ozai.
“Because I’m not stupid, Zuzu. I was a liability to Father at that point, and he would have killed me anyway. There was no real power in the Fire Lord position. If there had been, he wouldn’t have given it to me.”
Zuko tightens the hug. She doesn’t know how long they’ve been there.
“Azula…”
“I don’t have anyone. I never did, but when I had Ty Lee—when I had Mai and Ty Lee, I could pretend that there were people who cared at least a little bit.”
She knows she’s crying, and she knows she is weak. “I never would have—“Zuko starts, but she detangles herself from the hug, looks at the tear-soaked face of her brother.
“Don’t lie, Zuko. You’ve never been good at it.” It’s my skill, her mind supplies. She tries to ignore it. “You wanted me dead as much as I wanted me dead.”
Zuko goes to say something, but she can’t handle revealing any more of herself.
So she does something she has become increasingly more familiar with now that the war is over. She flees.
Zuko gives her space after that. He doesn’t avoid her, but he doesn’t press. She suspects he’s dealing with just as much shit as she is. They drink tea in the mornings, walk in the evenings. It's probably the happiest she's ever been.
Still, she doesn’t allow herself to cry in the palace, which gives her a reason to go out. Mostly, she cries in the ruins they’ve yet to rebuild, walks monasteries her family is likely responsible for destroying. She’s trying. She really is.
“Azula?” She stops dead in her tracks. She knows that voice. She will never be able to forget that voice.
“Ty Lee.” She knows her eyes are bloodshot and her eyeliner is smudged, but she makes an attempt at neutrality anyways.
“You look good,” Ty Lee says. She knows she does not. “I didn’t think I’d see you again.”
“Whose fault is that? You made it clear you wanted nothing to do with me.”
“I never said that.”
She can feel her mask of neutrality cracking. She wills it to stay on just a little longer. “I assumed it was implied,” she drawls, “back in Ba Sing Se.”
Ty Lee’s eyes go wide. “Azula—”
“I don’t blame you,” she blames herself, obviously. “Good-bye, Ty Lee.” She tries to say it with finality. Like it’s truly the last time she’ll ever think of Ty Lee and her beautiful grey eyes.
She wills herself to walk away, to not look back.
Ty Lee grabs her wrist.
Back in wartime, back when she was fifteen and in love with a girl who had never loved her at all, this would have been a terrible mistake on the part of Ty Lee. But now she’s tired. She wants this over with. She doesn’t even bother trying to summon a flame or don a fighting stance.
“Go ahead.”
“Huh?”
“However you want to do it, go ahead. You can tell Zuko I attacked you. That it was self-defence.”
“What? I...I don’t want to hurt you, Azula.”
“You don’t?” She doesn’t?
“ I hate you.” She flinches. There’s only so far that faked neutrality can go. “But I miss you, Azula. I miss how you can’t flirt and how you let yourself be soft when no one is looking and the way your nose crinkles when you’re frustrated. I miss you.”
“Please,” she’s trying not to beg, “don’t say things like that. Please, Ty Lee.”
“Why? It’s the truth.”
“No,” she says. “No, the truth is that I am the daughter of a monster, and I became a monster myself. The truth is that you and Mai shouldn’t want anything to do with me. The truth is that when I broke out to see you, you made it clear that any sort of relationship between the two of us would never be possible.”
Ty Lee’s voice is soft. “You broke out of the hospital just to see me?”
“Yes,” she breathes. “Of course I did. I missed you so much that I could barely breathe.”
“Azula,” Ty Lee’s expression is unreadable. “Can I kiss you?”
“Yes.” She says it before her mind recognizes the implication, before she understands that this is a sick joke, one she truly deserves. That her father was right when he said there were lines she should never think about crossing.
Then Ty Lee kisses her, gentle and soft. Ty Lee kisses her. TY LEE KISSES HER.
She is no longer thinking. She kisses back, maybe more urgently than she should. When they break apart, they’re both breathless. Ty Lee beams, and she’s brought back to when they were kids, playing in the palace gardens. When things were so much more simple.
“Oh, Azula,” Ty Lee sighs, “what took us such a long time?”