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Chapter Text

Azula’s ghost infrequently watches her firebending training. Instead, when she finishes practice and her instructor returns her bow and make his departure, he hops down from the tiled roofs and shows her the latest secret tunnel he found. He’s obviously memorized the patterns and habits of the palace guards and servants, because each time he exposes a new secret to her, he always leads her along winding paths free of watching eyes and listening ears. Then, personally satisfied she’s learned her new lesson, Azula leads every time they return to a dusty stone corridor or drop into a dark hidey-hole in the palace rafters.

Without a single hair out of place, Azula swings into what used to be a pygmy puma nest tucked into the second floor of the main hall’s west wing. Her ghost’s already in the crevice’s cramped space. He twitches an errant sleeve out of the way of her feet.

“Hey Azula,” he says. “When’s your next lesson with Imura?”

“In half an hour,” she replies and flicks a ball of dust through his arm.

An annoyed hand swats the dust away. He hums and tells her, “I’m heading into the city for a couple days. Anything specific you want to hear about?”

“Linying’s been gossiping about the new minister to the Hu Xin Provinces,” says Azula. “Your hair’s a mess.”

“No, it’s not,” he snaps. “Alright. Hu Xin, I’ll see what I can find. You should talk to Cousin Lu Ten more. Figure out how to get through officer training even faster than Uncle and Father.”

She frowns at his dim gold eyes and tells him, “I don’t need you telling me how to do anything.”

He laughs, something rough and dusty with cremation ash.

Azula tracks down Lu Ten on one of his rare leaves from the officer academy out of her own volition and choice, not because some ghost who spends his free time giving second-rate theatre actors paranoia during their rehearsals tells her to.

Her cousin’s thankfully alone, sitting in the shadows of a pear tree on the grass of a garden in the eastern wing of the main palace, reading the contents of a thin book.

“Cousin Lu Ten,” she calls, and his head raises with a grin. The book quickly drops to the grass.

He waves and pats the ground, cheerfully saying, “Azula! How’s my favorite little cousin!”

“I’m your only cousin.” Azula rolls her eyes, but she sits because she does have questions.

They’re both respectively the sole heirs of their fathers, a quality that makes them about as priceless and well-guarded as national treasures. Aunt Zuyou died ages ago and the possibility of Uncle Iroh having more kids at this stage doesn’t bear thinking about. In Azula’s branch, besides the occasional murmured gossip among the servants, there hasn’t been any talk about further children.

If Lu Ten ever dies and Azula doesn’t, one way or the other, the throne will eventually land in her hands.

Azula refuses to die, and hence, “What are you learning at the academy now?”

That elicits a deep groan and Lu Ten thumping his head back against the tree’s trunk. He picks his book back up from the ground and flips it over for her inspection. “Naval and land strategies from over three hundred years ago. And not just the interesting ones like the fleet chained together into a floating battleground. We have to memorize all of them.”

She takes the book and tucks away the author and title for a future moment. “Wasn’t the chained fleet set on fire?”

Lu Ten makes a face, like his father does and like her father would never tolerate from her. “Yes, which is why it only happened once. But it’s still more interesting than the skirmish between our Ninth Fleet and the Water Tribe in the Earth Kingdom’s southeastern sea in year 16 of Fire Lord Tsuhana’s reign which no one won anyways.”

Reasonably sure that her ghost can help her locate a copy of Lu Ten’s reading homework, Azula hands the book back. She’ll have to work in some time for reading his homework materials around her classes at the Royal Academy and her training and her father’s nightly harsh interrogations over her progress. Prince Ozai’s been regularly pressuring the Academy for Girls’ headmistress to fast-track Azula’s education towards an early graduation. Without her brother reciting passages he memorized out of boredom in the middle of the night when everyone else is asleep, Azula might – well, of course she can always keep up with her father’s expectations.

“What else are you learning? If you’re going to help Granddad and your father, you must be learning more than the failures of dead people,” Azula asks.

“Hmm.” Lu Ten runs a hand against the back of his neck, then he eyes alight. “Hey, have your instructors taught you any pair and group variants to firebending forms? I bet they haven’t, let me teach you some cool ones.”

Through the western palace library’s windows opening towards a courtyard of willow trees and lotus blossoms, Azula watches as storm clouds roil across the sky in heavy, dark gray anger. A wind whistles through the stone and metal work. The candles illuminating the room flicker in the air’s wake.

Her mother runs a hand over the curve of her skull in broad, smooth strokes. Despite the history of the Fire Nation laid out on the table before them, all the tales of their might and their victories, instead of reading from the scroll, Ursa says, “You have an older brother.”

“Had,” Azula corrects.

Her mother sighs. “Had,” she accepts. “Your brother, Zuko, he was so happy to have a younger sister. If only …” Ursa trails off, as she always does in the rare instances when she breathes her son’s name. Azula blinks silently up, waiting for the soonest moment she can put her hair back up after her mother finishes combing it.

“You live long and well for us,” Ursa says with a trace of a smile and presses a light kiss against Azula’s crown.

He comes back too soon from the city with what he’s learned, and it’ll be hours yet before Azula’s done with her day and back in the privacy of her bedroom. The hawks in the message tower can’t quite confirm his existence, but his nearby presence unnerves them as much as he unnerves the various cats slinking through the servant quarters hunting vermin. Usually, he keeps away from the message tower for the birds’ sake, but there’s this one path along the palace’s lower roofs that the guards occasionally seem to miss that goes right past the tower and to a window at the upper floors. If he glances to his left while crouching on the sloped tiles, he can catch a hint of the coronation grounds.

With a bored grumble, Zuko tips off the roof and hurtles towards the paved ground below. There’s no jolt of an impact when he hits the stone, only a touch of will that sends him tumbling instead of gliding to a halt. Rain splatters through him.

It turns out the gossip about the newly appointed Minister Dong to the Hu Xin Provinces is just that: meaningless gossip. Azula will still do the best she can to wheedle every detail she can out of him, probably so she can find the sharpest knife to stab her classmate with, but Zuko honestly cares even less about what she does at school than he does about the Minister’s maybe mistress. One scattered week dragged along to his sister’s school and pacing up and down the classroom’s rows of desk while the students recited textbook passages was enough for him. Though the sheer desperation to get out of another hour of lecture did help them discover he could teleport to Ember Island at a hard enough thought.

Zuko stares unblinking at the storm clouds above, then finally rolls back to his feet. Patting nonexistent dust from his lightly wrinkled clothing, he sets out for the Fire Sages’ temple. He still isn’t done exploring all their secret rooms.

When Azula closes the door to her room, she finds Zuko laying on her bed with his eyes closed. She takes a running leap and jumps straight through him.

Instantly, his eyes snap open and he shouts, “Seriously?”

“It’s my bed and it’s useless to you anyways. Pretending to sleep isn’t going to make you any less dead,” she retorts and sits down where she landed.

Grumbling, Zuko rolls out of her space and sits up. He shakes his loose hair into a more orderly state and asks, “Do any of your classmates know someone called Ayame from Donghua District of the capital? In her twenties, owner of a shop selling general goods and processing mail for soldiers sent to the northeastern war fronts? I think she has either a sister or a cousin in your school. Their family uses an iris wren seal.”

He’s gotten better at not giving her useless information. Azula considers his words. “An iris wren seal? Not in my class, but maybe one of Ty Lee’s sisters has seen it. Sounds like new nobility,” she says dismissively.

“They are,” Zuko confirms. “When I broke into their house, I couldn’t find anything to confirm what Linying was probably talking about, but they could have destroyed the evidence already since the rumors have spread so far. Allegedly Minister Dong took on this Ayame lady as a mistress and her mother found out through a servant. She was furious, especially when it turned out that he’d been seeing other women too and maybe stealing stuff? Or bribing someone? Anyways, I heard that Dong’s wife got fed up and got him transferred to the colonies.”

He shrugs and flops back, head and arms hanging over the side of Azula’s bed. “It’s stupid. Did you talk to Lu Ten?”

“Lu Ten’s stupid. He tried showing me a firebending form I already learned ages ago. I’m not surprised you can’t figure out why this information’s important, you never could see the bigger picture,” Azula says.

Zuko’s head tips up momentarily to look at her, then he snorts and lets his head hang back down. “Linying’s not worth it, she’s barely a threat to you. Her family can’t afford to keep sending her to the Royal Academy for long, they’re too busy paying off the debts on that new house they bought. Everyone’s going to forget about her. It’s stupid.”

The worst part about her older brother being dead is that Azula can’t kick him off her bed.

Ursa reads poetry to Azula, who doesn’t sprawl on the ground – Zuko – but leans a bare degree towards her mother’s side. It’s all useless words about quail feathers and autumn leaves, but Ursa once cut off Azula’s pouting with, “Fire Lords understand the power of great speech writers and only educated Fire Lords know which speech writers would make them into fools.” So fine, bamboo forests and mountain vistas away.

On Ursa’s other side, Zuko lays on his stomach, chin propped up in his hands and feet slowly kicking in the air. Neither Azula nor Ursa glance a single time in his direction, as he listens enraptured to the words. Though Azula does note a mused edge to his hair with a few loose strands escaping from their tied back brethren. He refuses to answer any of Azula’s questions about where he’s been routinely disappearing to lately and he hasn’t batted a single eye at jabs of fire to his face in years. Something athletic, she guesses, because she caught him yesterday swinging a fist in a sweeping curve through the air.

“Ask her to read the story about the bakeneko at the harbor,” Zuko requests.

The one with the medicine seller that Ursa always censors about half of its contents because it’s really a story about bloody revenge spanning generations and really bad marriage decisions? Azula hates that story. She ignores him.

His head drops to the floor in a baleful pique.

“It’s not fair,” he’d almost said once when Azula was four. She watched the words crawl through his lungs and how the pinch of his frown drew the words up through his throat, as he stared down at the adoration in Ursa’s hands trailing over Azula’s hair and straightening the folds of her shirt. His chin slowly raised as Ursa said, “Aren’t you the prettiest daughter in the world?”

But ultimately, he swallowed the words back down, turning away and walking out of the room, straight through a servant in his preoccupation.

“You are dead,” Azula reminded him that evening. “She has better things to do than kneel at a stone tablet every day.”

With his arms wrapped around his knees and his face pressed into the white fabric of his pants, she could barely make out his muffled words. “She didn’t spend this much time with me when I was alive either.”

“Then you weren’t perfect enough,” she said and shrugged in a useless gesture since he couldn’t see it anyways. “And besides, Father’s attention is more important. If Mother suddenly disappeared, no one would say anything. I wouldn’t care at all.”

That finally got Zuko to lift his head and squint at her direction.

“You’re lying,” he said decisively.

Azula may repeatedly claim to his face that Zuko needs her more than she needs him, but she can’t teach him anything about fighting with swords. Firebending is a foregone conclusion for him; he barely started learning before he died, and ghosts can’t bend. But he accidentally startled a servant in one of the narrow passages snaking beneath the palace the other day when he went hurtling down the hall too fast and slammed his palm against the metal wall. There’s also the time he knocked a whole bowl of plums onto Azula’s foot. And another time, well –

“Come on hilt, work with me,” Zuko growls.

The hilt, stubbornly made of wood and leather over the metal core inside, continues refusing to work with him. It slips through his fingers and catches against his scrambling nails. Hissing, he snatches the sword by the blade before it can hit the ground and alert the mansion’s guards. The moonlight pouring across floor laughs at him.

Not that one either then. With a sigh, he guides the blade back into its sheath and fumbles it all back onto its mount. Satisfied that he returned everything to the way it should look, Zuko goes off in search for swords in progress of assembly. If he concentrates, he can hold onto wood, but then he has barely any attention to spare on the environment or against an enemy. Hypothetically.

Master Piandao specializes in jian, particularly single-handed swords, with a few hand-and-a-half variations. They’re works of art, typically bought by nobility rather than the rank and file of the armies. Each blade, unique and balanced, is worth admiration and a point of pride for its owner. And Zuko’s spending his sleepless nights riffling through all of Piandao’s swords like a thief.

He’ll find some way to compensate the master after Zuko inevitable makes off with a blade that fits him, and also as thanks for the lessons he spies on during the day. Azula could probably commission a sword for him that doesn’t use any wood so Zuko can actually hold it properly, but there’s no easy explaining to their parents for why she would.

The two of them never formally agreed out loud to keep Zuko’s continued existence a secret: it just happened. She never knew better when she was tiny that the brother she played with was a ghost. Which is his fault – he wasn’t unaware of what he was. But he spent most of the first month after … after, trailing behind his mother, fruitlessly tugging on her silk sleeves, begging her to look at him. He was fine now, the fever broke, he pleaded to her deaf ears while she cried alone in an alcove with no one around expect her closest handmaidens demurely but forcefully chasing off anyone who came near. Please, mother, he said in the face of his father’s silence and his uncle’s shuddering sympathy. It was a relief to sit besides Azula’s bed and make silly faces at her.

She caught on quickly, quickly enough that no one suspected she even had an invisible friend. And then they just carried on without saying anything. To her memories, her brother was always dead and that’s just the status quo.

Being a ghost and no one knowing he’s a ghost has its advantages. Closed doors can’t keep him out of anywhere. Metal ones give him a bit more trouble, but Zuko can usually find another path into a room before putting any effort into intangibility. When his family visits Ember Island and there are fewer guards they can bring with them, Zuko helps patrol the grounds leading to his sister’s room. He once knocked out a would-be thief with a metal pot that way. Fun times.

Most importantly, he throws everything he can into supporting Azula’s climb to greatness. She’s smart enough that she could probably figure out and do everything Zuko helps her with on her own, but it’s faster with him at her side. Father certainly has no trouble believing that all of Azula’s achievements are purely from her own merit and they make no moves to correct his assumptions. Zuko memorizes Lu Ten’s curriculum, she memorizes the textbooks he brings her, and their father praises her prodigious intellect. The cycle repeats.

And Zuko will do everything he can to keep his sister alive, hence the surreptitious lessons he’s stealing from Piandao’s students, but if, Agni forbid, she does die before their father… Well maybe then Ozai would shed a single tear at his child’s funeral pyre.

Two days before he’s due to ship out towards the arid dust of the Earth Kingdom once again, Crown Prince Iroh secures permission for a visit to Lady Ursa.

Azula’s classes at the Royal Academy wrap up in time for her to dodge three guards, evade a few handmaidens, and shimmy down the thin gap between the walls of her mother’s room for greeting guests. A strip of wood digs into her shoulder blade once she finds a spot the voices are clearest. Zuko nods absently to her.

On the other side of the wall, Ursa’s voice says, worried, “Your son will be joining you so soon after graduating from the officer academy?”

“I trust in Headmaster Yun’s guidance and I’ve tested Lu Ten myself. He’ll be as ready for the front as a new officer can be. At least Father allowed me to soothe my concerns by having him at my side. His first deployment could have been worse,” Iroh says. There’s a soft click of porcelain set on the lacquered surface of a table.

Zuko shoves his face through the wall for a moment, then draws it back so he can whisper to Azula, “Uncle’s pouring the tea himself again.”

She makes a silent face. That’s what servants are for.

“But a siege, Brother Iroh? And so far east into the Earth Kingdom? Protecting your supplies will be half your problems,” says their mother.

“So it will be,” their uncle agrees. “But the Ministry of War promises they’re building me new catapults and bombs for taking down Ba Sing Se’s great walls. The city’s perimeter may be long, but there are only a few key entrances in and out for their supplies. I’ll have enough resources to choke those off and soon this war will be over. The blow of losing Ba Sing Se will be too great.”

And what would that look like? Eccentric Uncle Iroh ushering in the final decisive blow against the Earth Kingdom? Azula will still have use for all her training regardless if he succeeds or not; ruling an empire requires troops monitoring the colonies and putting down anyone foolish enough to rebel against the Fire Nation’s might. She’s still have her role with the military, just as everyone else of noble blood in her family has.

“A siege on Ba Sing Se’s going to pull away troops from the southeast. Is he going to use the navy to bring supplies to his army?” Zuko asks.

Azula shakes her head and writes on his sleeve, “Not with new artillery. Land supply through west.”

He lets out a grumpy hum and mutters, “Fair enough.” He always did like scaring navy troops more than the army soldiers. “Do you want to listen to their whole talk? Mother saw that new production the other day, they’re going to be talking about the theatre for hours. And I found a new hole in the guards’ patrols that I want to show you.”

She swings an arm for him to lead the way and slides out from their hiding place.

Technically, unauthorized obtainment and possession of highly classified documents like the personal correspondence for the Fire Lord’s eyes only, tracking the progress of the frontlines through the Earth Gu Dong districts and the Kingdom’s debt towards colonial contractors, are grounds for execution.

“I’m already dead,” Zuko says with a shrug, all his royal pious thrown away. “And there’s nothing to connect to you.”

He smacks a hand out and before Azula can stop this unfolding disaster, Zuko fumbles a grip on her brush. With an expression of intense concentration, he copies down the salient points of his espionage. His characters struggle down the page in crooked lines. He doesn’t even hold his sleeve out of the way either, just lets it drag against the surface of her desk and the paper. Halfway through he gives up and drops her brush back against its porcelain rest. Ink splatters on her desk and Azula makes a small noise of outrage.

“Whoops,” Zuko blandly says.

Azula wipes away the droplets with a small sheet of paper, then crumples it and hurls it through his face. He doesn’t even have the decency to blink as it goes sailing through his nose. Instead he waves a hand at his atrocious calligraphy and says, “Well?”

She looks down and reads over what he wrote. “How can anyone read your writing, Zuzu,” Azula says. “It’s a code all in itself.”

He puffs up in folds of white outrage. “Well, if people would stop using only bamboo and animal hair for brushes, I could actually hold something to write with.”

“Charcoal,” she points out, despite refusing to let something so prone to dirtying and smudging in her room.

Peevish, he says, “Do you want to hear about Grandfather’s personal letters or not?”

“Alright, fine, go on,” she allows. She begins poking flaming holes through his handwriting.

Given how much time Azula spends in the company of Mai and Ty Lee, it’s unfortunate that Zuko doesn’t so much as give them the time of day. “You should play with us,” Azula said once. He silently stared at her. Then with a single, “No,” he pointedly disappeared to wherever.

She got back at him for that by sticking her hand or her foot into him every time he reappeared for a week afterwards, to his squawking and shouting dismay.

Meanwhile, Ty Lee shows Azula the quickest way to swing herself up a tree and Mai discovers the wonders of knives. In fact, she smuggled in a set of said knives today, somehow getting them past her parents and the palace guards, and is demonstrating her throwing skills to Azula. So far every one of her throws hits its target.

Zuko materializes on the other side of the courtyard.

“Here, let’s see how far you can really throw,” Azula immediately says. She points at the pole behind Zuko’s head. “Think you can hit that?”

Mai shrugs. The knife goes whistling.

“Hey,” Zuko howls.

“Great job!” Ty Lee cheers.

Zuko’s making faces at Azula’s cartwheels when Ursa walks over, face pale and scroll hanging slack between her hands. She says with a waver in her voice, “Azula,” and pulls her in for a quick embrace, as if assuring herself that her daughter is safe.

Ursa draws back and says with tears in her eyes, “Your cousin, Lu Ten, died in battle. They’re bringing his body back soon.”

Oh. Well, there goes dumb Lu Ten and kooky Iroh.

And there goes any semblance of privacy for Azula. In the wake of the news, Ursa keeps Azula at her side whenever there isn’t classes or training. Azula studies her history textbooks in the library with her mother next to her, wearing a guarded expression daring the world to lay a single hair on her child. She’s there after a training session with Imura, she’s there to see Azula off to the Academy despite the rain, she’s there at night to check on Azula one last time before snuffing the candles out. The riled protective instinct is blatant enough that when Father says over dinner a few days later, “Azula doesn’t need handholding,” Ursa immediately strikes back with the snap of a whip, “Have some actual sympathy for your brother.”

Too bad Zuko’s not there to see that exchange.

Azula’s not her brother’s keeper, so when she doesn’t see him trailing after her for several days, she doesn’t say anything. He comes back by the end of the week regardless.

“Lu Ten’s moved on,” he simply says and falls back in line.

Amidst the growing preparations for the funeral and Uncle Iroh’s return, Father requests an audience with Fire Lord Azulon. With an edge in her eye that exactly conveys her opinion about this turn of events, Ursa helps Azula prepare her outfit for the meeting. In a low voice so the servants can’t hear, Ursa says to Azula, “Don’t let your father use you as a pawn in his games, love.”

Azula blinks innocently at her.

When they arrive at the throne room, Zuko’s already there, anxiously pacing. He immediately jogs over to Azula’s kneeling side and hisses, “Grandfather’s really not happy about this.”

He still allowed the audience, didn’t he?

The flames before the throne flicker at an even height, partially obscuring the aged lines and folds of the Fire Lord’s face. Besides her, Zuko sits with his arms crossed tight, his hands clenching at the fabric at his sides. Father sits on her other side and there’s no way to see Mother’s face like this.

When Ozai displays Azula’s skills, she obliges. It’s what she trained for. She recites her facts, she shows her moves.

The flames remain level and unimpressed. The Fire Lord demands, “The rest of you, go.”

“Azula, Mom’s going to turn around and instantly see you’re not behind her,” Zuko warns, chasing after her into the heavy curtains lining the walls. She shoves her hand through his face to silence him. He ducks his head out of the way and wipes his palms against his pants again in nervous agitation.

“You want me to betray Iroh?” the Fire Lord questions. “You want me to revoke his birthright?” the Fire Lord thunders. “Your arrogance exceeds you, Prince Ozai,” Fire Lord Azulon yells with towering flame. “You are right that your daughter is alive and the only remaining heir of her generation. But to ask me something like this during the period of mourning, you must be punished, Prince Ozai. You and your bloodline are hereby banned from the palace!”

Chapter Text

Zuko blinks at the rising sun, feels the wind passing through him and the way his hair doesn’t move a twitch. Another ray of shadow strikes across the city, scratched off from the ragged peaks circling the capital. The shade of a cloud cuts across the roof he stands on.

With a conscious command, he breathes in a single deep breath, his first breath since climbing onto the roof. The wind rips at his sleeves and his hair, flinging strands of black in his eyes. The city’s eastern lake gleams before him. The cloud passes on.

They could have been pushed out of the capital completely, forced to set up their household at Ember Island or at a different estate under the royal family’s ownership. There’s a house to the west, he thinks. But somehow, the adults come to an agreement: Ozai’s family may not step foot into the central palace without Fire Lord Azulon’s say so, but for Azula and Ursa’s sake, they’re relegated to one of the old western estates.

Prince Ozai left for the northeastern war front yesterday.

Zuko belatedly releases his breath and scrubs a tired hand over his face. He misses being able to sleep. This last week has been a mess to process. His hair tangles with his fingers.

Azula’s going to be Fire Lord one day.

Agni’s golden face raises fully into the increasingly blue sky, gazing down serenely at the empty rooftops of the Fire Nation’s capital city. Their unblinking light observes the far more awake city of Ba Sing Se step trancelike through its movements, oblivious to the boy staggering through a cracked and stained wall, taking in his new surroundings with alarm.

Stumbling out of the way of a teenager in ragged clothing with a pole bearing two giant pots of water balanced across her shoulders, Zuko crashes into a tree and almost sinks into it. He pulls himself forward enough so that his back is no longer embedded into the rough bark and woozily collapses into a seated sprawl on the ground. Speckled shadows dance across his vision, closing off his peripheral sight. Groaning, he drags his knees up against his chest and he rests his forehead on them. Zuko would rather leap into an active, erupting volcano before he figures out if ghosts can faint or throw up.

Birds avoid the tree he leans against, the absence of their sound above him testimony to his presence. Voices with an unfamiliar lilt layer over him in thin washes and slowly, Zuko lifts his head enough to prop his chin upon his knees. The long shadows of afternoon spill over the stone and dirt walkways, touching hues of blue to the tattered and ragged clothing on the work-worn people. It’s later than he expected, having left dawn not that long ago, and Zuko frowns as he slowly climbs to his feet.

Where is he? This can’t be Ba Sing Se. The great city is home to the Earth King and its people cannot possible all live in poverty. It makes no sense to put the great walls around common people like this, to repel the siege laid by the Fire Nation military’s best for two years over peasants. He must have missed, Zuko decides, frustrated. He never traveled so far from the Fire Nation before. That must be what happened.

Because even though the capital city of the Fire Nation had its poorer sections, those districts didn’t amount to nearly this many streets and this many people. Zuko climbs onto a roof for a better vantage point. The cracked and sun-beaten shingles, the scraggly trees and the flapping rags roll on and on around him in all directions, unending except for –

Except for an elevated bridge-like structure, with something shuttling around its path to and from walls that dwarf the one- and two-story buildings. He blinks and rubs his eyes, before staring with his mouth parting in surprised awe at the giant looming shadow of the colossal construction. It’s high, higher than the palace, high as a small mountain. When it rains, the top of the wall must be lost in the clouds. He sits down heavily.

This is Ba Sing Se?

Putting this many people together, with no sight of fields, of forests, of coastlines to feed all their mouths, should be impossible. How could they possibly live like this, penned in without the glimmer of the distant sea? What lays before Zuko is an impossibility by Fire Nation standards. The cheap houses around him aren’t all made from brick work. With all the buildings crowded so close together, trash piling up against the wood and plaster walls, a fire started would quickly rip through the whole district.

This is Ba Sing Se?

Zuko weaves his unnerved way towards one of the elevated tracks and crosses paths with a crowd of figures in pure white and black. Unbidden, he slows at the sight of the coffin laid in their midst. At the head of the cheap wood box railed roughly together from thin planks, a man says, “—gave his life to defend our kingdom and our city.”

The dry words blur together, of the siege and heroism. A life remembered in the shadows of a few minds, but easily forgotten in the swift current of history. The box fills Zuko’s vision and his hands twitch – to yank it apart, to throw the lid off, to expose it innards to the air and the sunlight so he can see what is in it: a soldier being sent to the grave.

The crowd shivers with the name in his throat.

“Lu Ten.”

What wound struck him down? The crush of stone? The bleeding gash of a starving blade? A pole pushed all the way through organs and lungs, spilling blood and refilling the body with sickness?

A golden eye flicks over at him, standing as an interloper among the mourning crowd. “Come along now, young man,” the woman’s voice says. “Your day is still busy. You understand what you’ve seen here, haven’t you?”

Slowly, Zuko nods. The eye on the woman’s neck blinks and the mouth below it smiles. Her voice says, “What a nice young man. If you hurry, you won’t miss much of the Earth generals’ meeting.”

Bringing his hands together, he bows and makes himself scarce.

The spirit sighs. “That child.”

Zuko slinks back into Azula’s new room with a perturbed silence clinging upon his back. In the orange light of the setting sun, the edges of his form flicker and blur, like a heat mirage. She narrows her eyes at him.

“What’s with you? You look like an animal chewed you up, then spat you back out,” she says. “Don’t tell me you’re still disappointed that you don’t have a dead relative to play with?”

“Just … give me a moment,” he says, oddly exhausted. A hand runs through his messy hair, then, “I went to Ba Sing Se.”

He can travel that far?

“Who knows why, but the Earth Kingdom generals aren’t planning on taking advantage of the withdrawal. They’re staying put. Looked like Uncle managed to put a large dent in their army and the civilians refuse to let them leave. So, the war might–” he abruptly yawns “—might quiet down for a little. Since Grandfather’s war council is also planning on reconsolidating our resources over a couple months.”

Zuko sways, then he sits down against her bed, blinking lethargically. “Just gonna … close my eyes. For a bit.”

Curious, she crouches down beside him and pokes him in one of his legs, eliciting only a vague grumble. Through one arm, she can faintly see the polished, carved wood of her bedframe, more than normally through Zuko. He doesn’t react with more than an annoyed grimace when she waves her hand within his chest. How interesting.

“Zuko,” Azula marvels. “Have you been sneaking into war councils?”

Her older brother frowns and mumbles without lifting his drooping head, “Sooner or later you’re going to be crown princess and Fire Lord. More you know, the better you’ll be.”

And then, for the first time since he died, her brother drifts off into a nap. Azula stands up and bemusedly observes the slumped over, intangible lump he makes in the middle of the room.

In the absence of her father, Azula’s routine stays mostly the same. She goes to the academy and she has her further training as a royal princess. She masters firebending forms in record time. Her mother brushes her hair. Zuko continues viewing locks and secrets as charming trinkets. And Azula pushes herself harder and better, always climbing higher. She refuses to be the cause for Prince Ozai to lose even a sliver of good face.

On one of the rare occasions Zuko watches her practice, a gout of blue flickers at the core of a punch. Azula completes her form uninterrupted, though she smiles in the corner of her mouth at the enthusiastic, whooping cheering for her ears only on the sidelines.

“Princess, it is truly an honor and a privilege to watch your grace,” Instructor Imura says with a deep bow.

“Unlocking my potential is only thanks to your guidance,” Azula says to the old master with a bow of her own.

In the privacy of the highest roofs, Zuko applauds, “Azula, you’re amazing.”

“This isn’t anything yet,” she says as she rubs a thumb over her smooth nails.

Zuko sprawls upon the tiles, soaking up Agni’s warmth like a juvenile saber hawk. “Father and Mother are going to be proud. Grandfather’s going to be proud. He can’t keep us out of the main palace forever.”

Of course the old Fire Lord can’t. Dear Uncle Iroh is in no state to replace his dead son yet, and there are no suitable candidates for adoption anyways. Unless Azula suddenly gains siblings, she’s the sole remaining heir. The old man can’t hold onto his anger forever.

That supper, Azula tells her mother while seated at the new, smaller table of this estate, “I’ve unlocked blue flames.”

Ursa’s eyes immediately widen and she says, “Is that so? I’d love to see at tomorrow’s training session.”

But Azula can feel that pure blue focus in her lungs and pooling in her palms. She sets her chopsticks down and says with a tinge of eagerness, “But I can show you now, Mother.” She cups her hands and holds them above the table laden with fish and finely cut, fresh vegetables. “See?”

The flames spark and shimmer with proud glee. In awe, Ursa smiles. “It’s beautiful.”

Two days later, as lunch ends and they leave the dining room together, Ursa explains, “I asked your uncle to help us get a pass into the palace so we could see the Fire Lord. He even helped convince your grandfather to let your father return early to see your progress.” She gathers Azula’s hands in hers.

“We both know you are a talented and intelligent girl. But more than that, I’ll always love you and be proud of you. All I ask, my dear Azula, is that you always safely come home.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Azula tells her, because seriously, what’s with all this talking like she’s about to die or disappear. She reminds her mother, “I’m going to be Fire Lord one day.”

Smiling, Ursa releases Azula’s hands in exchange for a brief embrace. “I know, but it’s still a mother’s nature to worry.”

Sounds terrible.

While Azula’s at school, Uncle Iroh visits their mother. Zuko scoots out of the way of Iroh’s entrance and winces at his uncle’s appearance. Grief lays its claim on the set of his mouth and the muted light of his eyes, for all that Iroh still bears himself with perfect posture, well groomed hair, and smooth robes. At Ursa’s gentle gesture, a servant sets down a tray of tea and tiny pastries between their seats.

“Oh, Brother Iroh,” Ursa sighs. “Have you been resting?”

Iroh stiffly accepts the cup of tea she pours for him and doesn’t relax until his first sip. He wearily admits, “As best as I can. The palace is too empty now with only Father for company.”

He sets his cup back upon the table, a plain piece of porcelain Ursa selected for its simplistic elegance in its complete dedication to practically, unlike the flashier pieces given to her in the main palace. The whole estate her family moved into follows the same stylistic vein of clean functionality, thanks to her remodeling upon arrival.

Ursa asks, “Has the Fire Lord returned you to your duties?”

“Some,” Iroh answers. “It’s been more than fifty days now. I need to get back to work, but … not the frontlines. Not yet.”

And how long until “not yet” becomes “never,” Zuko reflects.

The smooth posture of Iroh’s shoulders and back slumps by a slight degree that howls. His voice struggles under its own heavy weight. “Sister. How did you do it? How did you manage losing a child?”

In the silence, Zuko sees every nightmare chasing his mother through the night and the dark bags under her eyes she hides come morning. He hears the desperate gasp that tore itself out of Ursa’s bones the first time she saw her toddler daughter in a week when she finally managed to raise her head over the dark waters of her grief and heave for breath before the current dragged her back under. He feels the cracked skin of his mother washing her hands too many times and smells the sharp incense set up to ward off illness each wet season.

The silence swells, and then:

“Badly.”

Zuko slips away. This isn’t a conversation Azula will want to hear the details of.

Ursa has fangs, she just rarely bares them.

Azula had been five and flagging, at the edge of her stamina, when her father commanded, “All sets as one.” She reached the end, at the forms she learned that morning, when a misplaced foot sent her stumbling. On the second attempt, her trembling arms collapsed under her. A blade of fire snapped down at her.

Three hours later, finally released to the infirmary, a stranger crashed through the doors, volcanic with anger. The physicians scrambled out of the way as Ursa raced to Azula’s side. Gentle fingers examined the burns along Azula’s shoulders and with flashing eyes, her mother hissed, “How dare he. How dare he.”

Her anger proved useless, of course. Ursa disappeared that night. No one saw hide nor hair of the royal lady until three days later, Zuko dragged Azula to the turtle duck pond where their mother silently sat, wane and pale. She still lifted an arm though, inviting Azula to sit beside her, and carefully avoided pressing painfully on where bandages hid under robes.

After the Fire Lord sends him back to his estate with a terse dismissal and he changes out of his sea-spray crusted outfit, the first thing Prince Ozai says to Azula is, “Show me.”

In the training courtyard, Azula moves through a full dragon set, her perfectly summoned blue flames snapping out in sweeps and plumes. She puts on no flourishes – there’s no point in those, with complete mastery. The power behind her blows speak for themselves.

She reaches the end and kneels before her father’s impassive expression. He asks, “And your lightning?”

The cold flame? Azula swallows a curl of – not disappointment, not nerves – something unworthy of examination and admits, “I have not begun learning yet, Father.”

“You begin immediately. I expect you to summon lightning within two weeks.” He turns to leave.

“Yes, Father.” She has ten days then.

When she tells her brother this, laying in her bed under the dark veil of night, Zuko lets out a disgruntled hum. Displeased with his reaction, Azula demands, “And where have you been lately? I haven’t seen you around much.”

He fidgets and evasively says, “Earth Kingdom.”

“Doing what?”

More fidgeting. “Training.”

She squints at his translucent form in the darkness. “Blindly swinging around a sword is not training. And why do you need to go to the Earth Kingdom for that? Haven’t you been haunting that Bian guy’s house?”

“I am training,” Zuko protests. “I’ve even won fights.”

What? “You’ve gone delusional.”

“No, I just borrow some armor and then I can find people to practice against. There are a lot of criminals in the Earth Kingdom.”

He – Azula actually sits up because obviously she isn’t getting sleep immediately. “You’ve been stealing armor and weapons. To beat up common thugs. As training.”

“Yeah,” Zuko confirms far too casually.

“My brother is a criminal,” Azula observes, then commands, “Get out of my room.”

Azula doesn’t have to call Zuko a criminal. That’s taking things more extremely than she normally would. Zuko always returns the equipment he uses, mostly in the same condition it was when he took it.

Bigger problems crowd for Zuko’s attention. Point the most important: The Earth Kingdom insists on challenging his conceptions at every turn. The less he thinks about the mess that is Ba Sing Se, the happier he’ll be. Omashu is one heavy rainstorm away from bludgeoning all its inhabitants with deadly heavy stone carts that fill the city at all daytime hours with a teeth-gritting scraping sound heaping abuse upon the ears. And all of the kingdom’s people are stubbornly resistant to good ideas.

Like, the Fire Nation keeps track of all its heavy artillery and technology with an intensity bordering on paranoia. All it would take is one catapult left behind in a disorderly retreat and some enterprising officer in the enemy ranks could unleash the horrifyingly large number of nonbenders on their side upon the Fire Nation with aplomb. But no, the Earth army never does. As thankful as it makes Zuko that no one in the kingdom has figured out how to use the experimental projectile launchers given to Fire Nation nonbenders, it makes Zuko want to scream. Are they even trying? Is the only thing keeping the Fire Nation from completely overrunning the continent cussed stubbornness and superior numbers?

Zuko didn’t even know the Earth Kingdom technically has a navy until the twelfth war meeting he snuck into when one of the Earth generals’ aide mentioned it as an aside.

Don’t even get Zuko started on the common people. It’s a relief to beat up criminals for practice.

Don’t get him started on the burned down fields. Don’t get him started on the unnervingly hollow eyes. Don’t get him started on the arms thinned by hunger and the limp hair and the ragged clothing hanging loose.

Or a scream in the middle of the night and caved in skulled and executions of whole families of all several dozen members, young to old, under the swing of a sharpened blade. The smell of rot from amputated limbs heaped into a pile and the wild dogs investigating and not chased away fast enough. A pregnant woman losing her child and able-bodied children younger than Azula kidnapped into militias and sent through the fray of an active skirmish. The prison camps, on both sides.

Zuko travels and clenches his jaw in tight anger.

Azula bows. “Honorable madams.”

“Rise, Princess Azula,” the elder on the right, Li, says.

Azula rises, hands at proper rest and posture perfect.

“Lightning requires command of yourself and the world around you. There is no emotion, only precise control,” Lo begins.

“Only the truth—”

“—of your will.”

“By splitting the energies between positive and negative, yin and yang, create an imbalance that your bending guides and resolves,” they say together.

Okay, so this is in Azula’s life from now on.

Zuko peaks over her shoulder at the book laying open on the desk before her. The candlelight in the study room flickers in the wake of a thin breeze slipping in through the sole open window. There shouldn’t be any eavesdroppers and all the servants make a tiny murmur of noise as they move. Still, she won’t initiate conversation. She flips the page.

Eventually, Zuko grows bored of hovering and asks, “How did lightning training go?”

She writes out her answer to him on a piece of scrap paper. “I had some sparks.”

In the corner of her eye, she catches the wry glance he sends her. “I heard a couple explosions too.”

Only in the very beginning. There won’t be any more explosions in tomorrow’s training. The motions are slow, too slow still. It’s hair raising, literally, the crackle that writhes as she grips the unemotional, objective truth that she is partitioning positive from negative with her hands. Normal firebending doesn’t pull at a distance like this. Unlike the other bending forms, most traditional firebending comes from within, not an outside source. Loath as Azula is to admit it, she’s not used to controlling her bending at the distance required for lightning. Her top knot may have horrifyingly come undone once.

Cautious of lurking ears, she forcefully whispers, “I’ll get it in a week.”

“If I shoot lightning through you, do you think you’d feel anything?” Azula idly asks.

Zuko shrugs and kicks a foot against the windowsill again. If Azula overheard correctly from one of the less scrupulous, newer maids that aren’t going to last another two weeks before they’re sent packing in a mortally mortifying disgrace, Zuko hasn’t been as careful about his outdoor activities as he used to. She once caught him wrapping foil around the handles of a pair of swords he surely stole; he’s not being that subtle anymore.

“Considering fire does nothing to me,” he says, “probably not.”

“Probably is not good enough. We should check,” Azula declares. It would be simple. All he had to do was stand at a suitable part of the practice yard, like around the lightning rods Li and Lo set up to catch the electricity, and they could observe the effects of lightning on Zuko and she could get practice hitting a moving target. She needs more sparring partners. The ones brought to her lately are getting boring.

Her brother treats her to a deeply dubious expression.

She goads him, “What are you scared of? You’re dead.”

“I’m not scared,” he immediately heats up.

“Then we should practice.”

“No.”

“Zuzu.”

“Lala.”

“If it doesn’t affect you, then it doesn’t affect you. If it does, then it won’t matter anyways,” she firmly says. “Lightning isn’t all or nothing. I can aim for stunning instead of killing.”

He still watches her with narrowed eyes. The wind passing by the window ruffles the tip of his ponytail by just a few millimeters. “This is like the time you wanted to practice using deadly force.”

“Of course I can’t aim to kill with the sparring partners given to me,” Azula says with half-fake affront. “That’s a terrible waste of resources. You have a choice Zuko. Either you do this with dignity at the training yard, or I’ll hit you when you’re not expecting it outside of training hours.”

He rolls his eyes and groans as he tips backwards through the window until only his legs hooked over the sill hold him up. Petulantly, he whines, “Fine. I’ll go with you tomorrow.”

“There’s a good brother. You know, if you keep being so uncooperative, I’ll tell the Fire Sages to exorcise you.”

From the window, there’s a loudly incredulous and ugly snort and Zuko swings himself back upright. “You’d exorcise me? I just told you all about Admiral Sato’s half-cooked schemes in the Great Ocean and I’ve been delivering you all of the Earth Kingdom’s military secrets. You can’t afford to exorcise me.”

“When I’m Fire Lord, I’ll have my own ministry staff and intelligence officers reporting to me. I won’t need you anymore,” Azula threatens.

Bristling and with a hard edge along the lines of his arms, he grins with teeth and asks, “Where are you going to find intelligence officers that can give you your enemies’ plans in real time detail?”

There’s a brittle light in his eyes though, at the reminder of his need. Azula has friends, Azula has servants. Azula has a whole life in front of her that doesn’t revolve around her brother. None of that can be said of Zuko.

For reasons that don’t bear revisiting, Azula once spent three months completely ignoring Zuko’s existence. He crashed around in her wake, shouting and yelling for Azula to look at him, Azula come on, this is stupid, Azula, please.

“By the time I’m Fire Lord, the whole world will be under the Fire Nation’s rule. All the Earth Kingdom generals will be locked away or dead,” she says.

Zuko counters, “Rebels. There’s always someone.”

“Fine,” she finally allows with a lazy shrug. “You need someone keeping you on your toes. I’m doing you a favor.”

Nine days after she begins, Azula reliably summons lightning at an acceptable speed.

Acceptable isn’t good enough.

Chapter Text

At the eve of the new year, the palanquins bear Azula’s immediate family back into the great halls of the palace. Last year, when she took part of the rites and festivities, she demonstrated her blue fire for the crowd of revenant nobles and begrudgingly respectful upper military ranks. The Fire Lord cut off the display before she called out her lightning, but the crowd all knew; the echoing boom of crackling electricity during a clear sunny day and the light arching into the sky towards the sun said enough.

Red and gold lanterns fill the streets. During the second night Azula spends in her almost completely stripped empty childhood bedroom, Zuko awkwardly climbs through the window and hands her a small metal tin of fresh sesame coated rice balls and ginger candy.

The thin, smooth layers of her blankets collect around her waist as she sits up and plucks a strip of ginger out and gestures for his debrief. It's the usual, of nobles trading favors and jockeying around. Zuko lets slip a single slightly interesting comment about the iron refineries on the eastern islands, about some trouble arising over pay or compensation. If the workers put up a heavier fight, Home Guards troops will need to be directed over there to squash the insolence. Someone's daughter recently won a medal for a sea battle. Someone else's son is getting married. Usual gossip. 

Setting the lid back on, she hands the tin to Zuko and tells him, “I got you something too.” She shoves her hand under the pillow, which had been far too uncomfortable to rest her head on thanks to what she hid there, and pulls out two scrolls. Plucking the knot loose from the green ribbon holding closed the thinner scroll, she says, “Since Mom hasn’t gone to the Golden Theatre this year. And I know you haven’t gone to see it either since I hadn’t told you to shut up about it yet.”

Azula holds the scroll in the thin moonlight so the title card hanging off its bottom end is readable.

“Kanjincho,” he reads, shock flashing across his eyes and swiftly chased out by a slower, heavier pleasure lifting his mouth into a smile.

She unrolls it enough to show him: “Script and illustrations.”

A translucent, thin finger traces over the fine characters, a masterwork of calligraphy. Zuko nudges the card on the other scroll until its in the light too.

“Thank you, Azula,” he says, and with an expression of severe concentration, one that could split mountains and part oceans, that could grab the sun and moon in his grasp, Zuko carefully lifts his gifts from her hands. He slips over the side of her bed to the floor, cleaned that morning by the servants, and cradles the Kanjincho scroll in his hands. Azula lays back down, to sleep for real.

“Good night, Zuzu.”

A slightly distracted delay, then, still warmed with gentle heat from his smile, he answers, “Good night, Lala.”

The week of festivities and rites passes quickly.

Fire Lord Azulon holds long grudges, but even he must let his son back home for remembrance of the dead during the height of summer. Ursa stands beside Azula and they welcome Ozai back home. Together they stand through the ceremony with the Fire Sages and sweep the stone markers of the dead.

Zuko always makes himself scarce on this day. “It’s awkward,” is his eternal excuse. But as frustrating as it to admit even in the privacy of her own mind, Zuko reads the silent currents of their mother’s thoughts better than Azula can. And sneaking a glance over at Ursa’s pressed together hands and the curve of her back with her bowed head, there’s something churning in the depths of the lady’s mind.

Azula pulls her attention back to Zuko’s stone and remains silent in her father’s wake. When he rises, so does she, and so does Ursa after a slim, lingering moment. With one last glance at her mother’s closed off face, Azula sets aside the curiosity for another day.

There’s a more important conversation she’s looking forward to the next day.

After a brief training session where Ozai guides her through how to strike quicker with her flame whips, she requests, “Father, allow me to enroll in the officers’ academy. I’ll graduate in a year.”

“It won’t do for you to overestimate yourself and fall far short of your expectations,” Ursa warns and hands Azula a piece of the slightly stale bread. She takes it and under the confines of her mother’s watching eye, throws small chunks of the bread into the water instead of hurling it at the turtle ducks themselves.

“I can do it,” Azula tells her. “Cousin Lu Ten lent me his textbooks while he was there, and I understood the content then.”

Softly, Ursa says, “Did he now.” The turtle ducks come all the way up to her hands, completely domesticated and spoiled. The dumb birds won’t last a day in the wild. “Well, we definitely have nothing to fear in terms of your bending. I imagine you’d be at the top of those ranks with no problem.”

Azula smiles because credit where credit’s due, in no world is Azula going to be in second place for even a moment in the officers’ academy. And she’s been practicing strategy for years via predicting the outcome of battles and dissecting military failures based on Zuko’s extensive information gathering.

“Don’t worry Mother,” Azula reassures again. “I’m certain of what I can do.”

Zuko grows familiar with the eccentricities and inefficiencies of the great Earth Kingdom cities still standing under their own flags. He follows the barefoot generals to their barracks and their homes. He listens to gossiping servants and reads their books. In Omashu, he coaxes a sparrow cat to approach him.

He watches mothers dyeing newly woven cloth green and surveys farmers tilling the land their families lived on for hundreds of years. He walks through the healing halls for the injured with their broken bones and cut open flesh and angry burns. The children in Ba Sing Se’s slums play different games from the children in Fire Nation slums.

Azula scoffs at him when he says, “There’s more to this world than the war. Isn’t it better to live for something than die?”

“How ironic, listening to the ghost talk about living.” Her eyes flash, sharp as knives. “Are you saying you want the war to end, Zuzu? Then the solution is simple.

“Steal a knife while you’re spying on the Earth Kingdom generals and kill every one of them. With all their leaders dead, the enemy forces will collapse in an instant. The Earth Kingdom will be ours. The war will be won.”

And how painfully easy that would be. The many methods of assassination lay before him – poison slipped into a meal, a critical message about an ambush stolen away, a knocked over oil lamp, the bludgeoning force of those stone statues everywhere in Ba Sing Se. No blade nor earth nor fire nor lightning can touch him. It would be so simple.

“No,” Zuko scrapes out, his shoulders almost painful with the tension in his neck.

A rare burst of pure and genuine anger seizes Azula and she spits out, “Coward. Murderer. Then all the deaths of our soldiers and their soldiers and all your precious civilians will be due to your cowardice.”

Furious, she spins away from her stricken brother and storms her way out of the room. Mulish frustration snaps through Zuko in an instant and he screams through the slammed shut door, “It takes two to fight. The Fire Nation’s done enough, we’ve done enough, Azula. You’ve never starved a day in your life because an army burned your home and town completely to cinders. You have no idea what this war is really like.”

So, it’s a relief when Ty Lee and Mai visit to celebrate their graduation from the Girls’ Academy.

Azula’s friends bow in respectful greeting to her parents sitting together in a courtyard, a rare occurrence. “We’ll be in the study,” Azula tells Lady Ursa and Prince Ozai. Her father nods and Ursa smiles and says she’ll send a servant with sweets and tea. Azula gives her thanks and leaves.

“Now that we’re finally done with that stuffy headmistress, what are your plans?” Azula asks once they’re all situated with refreshments and sitting comfortably.

Instantly, Mai groans and sets down the fruit tart she just picked up. “My parents are already looking at suitors. It’s so boring, Princess Azula. At least your parents won’t keep looking at idiots when it’s time for you to get engaged.”

“Want me to help screen the morons with you?” Azula teases. Mai rolls her eyes but smiles gratefully too.

From where she’s balanced on her elbows, Ty Lee says, “I think I’m going to join the circus.” When Mai and Azula turn in unison with varying expressions of bemusement, Ty Lee shrugs. “I’ll be good at it. And I’ll still be practicing my chi blocking. It’ll be great for my aura.”

“And none of your sisters would be joining you in a place like that,” Azula flatly says more than asks.

Cheerfully, Ty Lee chirps, “Nope!”

“What about you, princess?” Mai asks.

Azula savors her tea and takes in Mai’s faint, sincere interest and Ty Lee’s persistent grin bracketed by her feet. Setting her cup down by her still untouched pastry, Azula tells them, “I’m enrolling in the officers’ academy. It shouldn’t take me longer than a year to sweep through that place. Then I suppose it’s time for me to finally prove my worth in the war.”

Ty Lee swings herself upright and beams in awe. “A year? That’s amazing, Azula.”

“No Avatar hunt for you?” Mai asks, sardonic.

Azula laughs lightly. “Definitely not. Lu Ten didn’t and I’m too valuable to waste on something like that.”

The first time Zuko kills a man, has someone die in front of his eyes from a blade in his hands, he hadn’t meant to.

In the dim light of the set sun’s lingering rays, people don’t notice the limp bodies shifting over the ground that easily. The medics don’t question how unconscious men end up tucked into protective nooks and crannies of the battlefield, waiting for the stretchers to arrive and bear them away. And normally the enemy is too busy collecting their own injured and dead to pay attention to Zuko either.

He’d practiced, Azula challenging him to braid her a crown of flowers, and not a messy one either. Touching living flesh, human or animal, will always be beyond him, but Zuko can scramble a hold onto armor and cloth and yank a body towards safety in fits and starts.

This system of Zuko swooping in on the battlefields among the smoke and churned mud to give the wounded in red armor a slim margin towards surviving – it’s not perfect, nor is it what Zuko initially thought he’d be doing. He’s not going to stop, but it’s really not what he stole a set of slightly too big armor for.

Though he isn’t wearing the armor when the man suddenly appears, looming over Zuko and the unconscious soldier with a couple snapped arrow shafts in his shoulder and side. Zuko freezes. He remains crouching, pinned by a cold and sharp poison in the Earth Kingdom soldier’s eyes, a hard anger and hatred keeping him moving in the rapidly darkening blue light despite the wound bleeding all over his left arm and the exhaustion in his legs. In the single suspended moment while the sword still hangs loosely in the soldier’s relaxed fingers, Zuko –

It comes in flashes.

The clenched jaw. The surety of the tightened grip on the hilt. The frantic flash of understanding and then –

Zuko feels the warm liquid splattering through his face. The pure white of his robes remain untouched.

The soldier has a single moment of uncomprehending fear, then he crumples to the ground, blood spilling crimson from his neck. The blade in Zuko’s hand drips black in the night, still raised unshaking in perfect follow through from his strike.

Zuko is no longer an adult in name only.

Azula stands out in the officers’ academy, in the barracks with men and women at least several years older than her. When she glances out the single window of her small room, she sees the same willow tree Lu Ten always described scraping against the walls when it rained. The bed isn’t lumpy, but Azula questions if the school changed the mattress since her cousin’s time as a student in these halls.

Neither the speed of her progress nor her royal status grants her much more than the bare minimum level of respect from the instructors. They don’t call her a rat the way they call all the other students, noble and commoner background alike. And her food tastes slightly more palpable than the normal mess hall fare. But that’s it.

“It’s the Fire Lord’s policy,” her single guard explains redundantly.

Lu Ten must have been an even bigger ditz than she thought, if he could be so cheerful and casual about his three years at the academy. Even without her swear to conquer the school in one year, she would have graduated early just to escape the sorry place.

Zuko prods the chest at the foot of her bed again with a slightly perplexed expression. Azula gives serious contemplation to staging an accident for the student down the hall who keeps burning that horrid and cheap incense at odd hours of the night. Silently, he tucks his hands in his sleeves and leans over to glance at the essay still open on her desk. He makes a faint noise of consideration as he reads. Instead of engaging with his opinion about her homework, Azula pulls one of his blades out of its sheath, only enough for the light to catch against exposed steel. Definitely taken from the academy armory.

“Are we going or not?” she asks. “We’re wasting daylight.”

“I think you miswrote a character,” mutters her brother. Before she can try lopping his head off with his stolen goods, he straightens and says, “Sure. Leave a note for your guard. There’s a field not far to the south we can use.”

Twenty minutes later, Zuko pulls to a stop in the shade of a lone maple tree. He catches the swords Azula tosses to him and lets the sheaths drop to the ground among the sparse grass.

“Alright. Come on.”

He looks a bit ridiculous, swords flashing through a style he clearly doesn’t prefer, too heavy and stuck to the ground. When she gets past his guard and strikes his shoulder with an almost white burst of flame, he obligingly drops the sword from his hand and otherwise ignores the blow. The other blade whistles for her outstretched arm.

“So, what are you going to do about sand traps? The better earthbenders burry people alive,” Zuko asks blithely and tries stabbing her leg.

In demonstration, Azula launches herself into the air with concentrated flames propelling from her feet. “Got it,” Zuko says and rolls out of the way from her wave of fire.

She’ll never tell him, but his progress in skill over the last half-year almost unnerves her. He came back one day, while the weather was still more winter than spring, with a blank expression and his hands carefully tucked away. Stuck as she was with servants and her guards in the room with her, Azula wasn’t able to react in any way to his long silence. Then he nodded once and disappeared for the rest of the night. Whatever happened, the light in his eyes was never again the same as it had been before that day.

The flat of his sword raps smartly against Azula’s left arm and she kicks her leg through his. Toppling back a second too slow for a true reaction, Zuko smiles shallowly.

Laying spread out on the singed grass, Zuko pushes stray strands of hair out of his face and comments, “The academy’s doing nothing to prepare you for a bunch of enemies targeting you at once. And no amount of conceptual lessons are going to make you ready for the ground shifting under your feet while boulders come down from above.”

“I’ll be spending a year and a half with General Ni Shu instead of completing the academy’s final year of curriculum,” Azula tells him.

He wrenches upright into sitting. “What?”

“The headmaster wrote to Grandfather. They decided it would be better suited for my skill level,” she says.

“But—” Zuko sputters.

But it’s the Fire Lord’s decision at the end of the day and Azula’s not so stupid that she’d turn down this opportunity gifted to her. Zuko stands and collects his wayward swords, somber. He grudgingly allows, “Ni Shu’s the best choice. Her forces are elite for a reason.”

“The best in the whole army, now that Uncle’s less serious.”

He hums in agreement, walking back towards the maple tree’s dark red leaves. The swords return to their sheaths with a quiet click. Turned away from Azula, he says to the sword hilts, “She’ll let you onto the battlefield.”

“It’s a test,” she says to Zuko’s bowed head. The bit of his hair that escaped his top knot does nothing to hide his hard expression.

“It’s more than that.”

Oh spirits, he’s still angry about this. Half a year spent part-time on the increasingly active battlefields of the north-eastern front with their father and he’s somehow still railing against the war. “It’s a test of my capabilities and commitment as heir,” she says to her slow brother. “Grandfather needs to know the war is in good hands.”

Zuko turns enough to half face her. The shadows from the leaves pass through him in heavy strokes. “What this war needs isn’t good hands. It needs an end. This isn’t like Fire Lord Sozin’s day where the war paid for itself and made a profit. The cost of life and resources keeps piling up each month.”

“The empire will be able to pay off its debts,” says Azula, cross at the reminder of the royal treasury’s current state.

He scoffs. “Not if we kill the whole world first. Colonies are also expensive to set up.”

Azula narrows her eyes at Zuko. It was a mistake, she decides, letting him fight at the war front.

Ursa sends her twelve-year-old daughter off to war with a tight embrace, two boxes of sweets for the long road to the east, and a too emotional plea, “Please come back home, Azula.”

“I’m shadowing the general,” she says to her mother, still trapped in a hug. “She’ll keep me safe.”

Ursa pulls back enough to see Azula’s stern face. “It’s a battlefront. It won’t be safe.”

As the ship pulls away from the harbor, Azula spares one last glance at the islands she won’t see again for eighteen months.

The tall, severe woman with graying hair pinned back harshly in her top knot and observing the approaching royal procession with a textbook blank expression can only be General Ni Shu. Even if she isn’t wearing the cape that should accompany her armor.

After greeting Azula, herself clad in the armor she broke in on the way to the eastern front, the general leads her to the large tent set up in the middle of the camp. Azula turns her attention away from the smell clinging in the air and sits in the offered seat.

“Leave us,” General Ni Shu orders the soldiers and aids that followed them. The tent empties in seconds.

Pouring a cup of tea for them both, the general says, “You came at a good time, Princess Azula. The fighting is always slowest during the winter months.”

Azula knew that already, but she focuses on instead saying, “Then I look forward to a strong start of my training with you.” She takes a sip of the surprisingly sharp and fiery tea.

Ni Shu’s smile tugs at the thin scar curled around her right eye. “Then I’ll get straight to the point.

“The Fire Lord is losing faith in his sons. Given how the next five years progress, there’s a significant probability he will transfer the title of crown heir directly to you, Princess Azula. Repeatedly prove yourself, and the title will be yours by the time you turn fifteen.

“That’s where your time with me comes into play. You’ll accompany me everyday on my duties. If you have any recommendations, I will listen. But on this front, especially during battle, my word is final.”

She refills Azula’s cup. “Do we have an agreement, your highness?”

So this is the confidence and straightforwardness afforded to one of Fire Lord Azulon’s most trusted subjects.

“We do, general.”

He doesn’t physically tire. Not easily, not from exercise like this. No blade, no earth, can stop him; all attacks pass through him. His blade here, then there, dealing this wound, then that one, as long as it strikes true and unbroken, is unstoppable.

If he assassinates all the Earth Kingdom generals, then what? They’ll be replaced. And the replacements replaced. Will they ever stop, already committed to throwing millions into the killing fields?

No, they won’t. Then what would Zuko do? The motions of the act would be so easy.

He knows now with his blood-soaked hands, that ending the lives of fifteen-year-old sons, of twenty-year-old husbands, of nineteen-year-old sisters comes so easily.

Can he do it? Peace, it would be for peace. Azula and her friends safe. His remaining family alive. His country no longer bleeding out for its aggression. Why can’t he do it?

Wouldn’t peace be worth it? Even a peace through massacre?

Wouldn’t it?

And then –

Zuko comes crashing into her room, slamming a knee and then his shoulder into her bedframe. Wide-eyed and deaf to her indignant hiss of “Zuko!” he slaps a hand through her desk repeatedly, and babbles, “He’s back. There never was another one, he’s back.”

She shoves her currently dry and empty inkstone against his forehead. “What are you talking about, Zuzu?”

The inkstone in his face, he flails briefly then says, “The Avatar. The Avatar’s active again.”

“You’re certain?”

He knocks the inkstone aside and clearly in a state of incredulous mania, shouts, “I can feel the whole spirit world going crazy. Yes, I am certain.”

“Calm yourself,” snaps Azula. “Where?”

“South, for now.” Zuko paces in pure agitation. “As soon as news reaches Grandfather—”

“—I’ll request command of the Avatar’s capture,” she finishes smoothly. It’ll be a welcome change of pace from the last few months she spent in the stifling quiet of the capital. Maneuvering through the court with the advice and introductions from Ni Shu only occupies so much of her free time. And training in the courtyards of the western estate fall inadequate now that she’s plunged into the chaos of a true fight at her mentor’s side.

Zuko asks, “Do you have a map of the southern waters? I’ll start hunting him down.”

She digs a roll of paper out, though it focuses more on the Earth Kingdom than the islands further south from the large continent.

The frantic vibrations buzzing Zuko’s frame finally tamper down slightly. He says, “I’ll check in every twenty-four hours,” then blips out of the room.

Two weeks later, the fastest messenger bird from Crescent Island arrives, confirming the Avatar’s status, along with the near total destruction of the island. Azula awaits the Fire Lord’s response to her request for a pass into the palace.

“Princess Azula, speak. Why have you requested audience?”

“Fire Lord Azulon, Honorable Grandfather, I humbly ask for your permission to capture the Avatar,” Azula announces.

Perfectly controlled fire flickers between them.

“Are the men and women in my armed forces not enough for the task of containing one errant airbender?” the Fire Lord asks.

Azula maintains her respectful kneeling. “I have no doubts in the capacity of our soldiers and I accept your great wisdom should you deny my request. I am a loyal servant to your will. But I ask for this task so our armies can focus on the collapsing forts and cities of the Earth Kingdom. Your granddaughter has mastered cold fire and the blue flame. That should prove a match for one airbender.”

Fire Lord Azulon’s flames regard her for a long minute.

“Very well, Princess Azula. In two days’ time, you will depart on a mission to capture the Avatar. Under my orders, all must assist you as you see fit,” he declares.

Azula clasps her hands together and bows in thanks. “I will not fail you, my Lord.”

Later, the only response she gets from her brother after she tells him the travel itinerary is, “I’ll make sure Commander Zhao doesn’t get all the credit.”

“Don’t get too carried away,” she warns.

But he shrugs, casual and mildly dismissive, and replies, “If he brings the Avatar back, then you can’t use him to let our family back into the palace.”

Somehow, without the door opening, there’s someone in the room with Aang, staring at the chains on his wrists and ankles with a determined frown, his hands tucked into the long folds of almost completely white robes.

“Woah, who are you?” Aang asks. And he almost adds, “Are you a spirit?” except at Aang’s question, the boy startles backwards in shock and yelps.

Aang winces and says, “Sorry.”

The boy immediately goes back to frowning and crouches down to yank at the chains. Curious, Aang watches – and so much for Zhao’s claim that no one would help him.

The still unnamed teenager in white – who’s a little transparent? Aang isn’t sure, the flames on the two columns aren’t actually lighting the room that well, it could just be a trick of the shadows – gives one more yank at the metal then stands up and tells Aang, “Stay still.”

Aang has just a moment to take in the even more determined scowl than before and then a foot lashes out and the chain on his left ankle snaps, just like that. The manacle also almost scrapes his shin raw, but that isn’t here or there as the remaining chains rapidly shatter too and the door into the room slams open with four shocked and confused soldiers blocking the way to the hallways beyond.

“Go, go, go,” his savor yells and bodily hurls himself at one of the guards, slamming his shoulder into chest armor and knocking the man down, who screams in surprised fear as his head suddenly collides with the floor. Aang blows the other three out of the way and sprints after the flash of white darting around a corner.

One of the cold patches under his shirt squirms. Uh oh. “Frogs, come on, no,” he whines as yelling rises in his wake.

A frog hops away to freedom and narrowly avoids a jet of flame. Aang whines again, leaving it behind.

“Can you fly?” Mr. White asks up ahead, really demanding.

“Not without my glider.” It doesn’t escape Aang’s notice that they’re rapidly approaching a window, despite being at nearly the top of the tower.

With an angry hiss, the probably-not-a-spirit skids to a halt and glares past Aang’s shoulder. Testy and pissed, he grits out, “I don’t know where the stairs are.”

Aang ducks another plume of fire and doesn’t slow down at all. “No, no, it’s fine, help me open the window.”

The – Aang should really get his name – immediately leaps over to the window and throws it open. Sweeping a hand out, grabbing for cloth, Aang flings himself into the open night air. His hand closes on nothing.

Uh.

The fall to the ground is long enough for Aang to cast a panicked glance upwards, but all he sees at the window is a single shouting soldier looking down at him. Horns bellowing alarms echo through the fortress. Red and gray surround Aang in the dim, not a single glimpse of white. Monkey feathers.

A ball of air cushions his landing and Aang rockets himself forward towards the outer walls. He knocks spears and swords aside, left and right. Where did –

“Over here!”

Aang redirects his path towards the shout and the white clad arms waving before the huge front gates. Weirdly, no one reacts at all to the yelling teenager. The gates are rumbling shut, but they’re too slow. Aang shoots past the long spikes and three layers and dodges the raining arrows at the other side and escapes in a kicked-up cloud of dust for the trees.

Good news: Aang loses his pursuit. Bad news: all the frogs thawed out and now he needs new ones. Weird news: his savor in white manages to find him elbow deep in the swamp, watching Aang root around with a bemused expression.

Aang shakes some excess water off his last frog and stuffs it up a sleeve. “By the way, I didn’t catch your name earlier. I’m Aang.”

“I know.” Yellow eyes narrow as the guy folds his arm in spotlessly white sleeves. There’s a moment where he stares at Aang for another silent moment, then he says, “I’m Zuko.”

Aang grins and begins wading in the direction he thinks heads back towards where Katara and Sokka are. It’s hard to tell in the dark night. “Thanks for helping me out, Zuko. Zhao actually had me worried there for a moment.”

“No problem,” Zuko gruffly says and slips back into silence.

Shaking the mud out of his clothing, Aang sneaks another glance at his unexpected companion. When he steps out of the water, the cold surface remains glassy smooth, undisturbed by white boots. Taking in the utter lack of dirty and smelly water staining white cloth, Aang says, “I don’t know any spirits named Zuko.”

That gets a light scoff. “The spirits don’t bother with the affairs of the material world. They don’t care about your capture.”

“Then, are you … uh …” Aang stalls out. He’s never heard of something like this actually happening before. Not outside of stories. Zuko raises an eyebrow at his awkwardness. He really wears an unavoidable and unignorable amount of white. “A ghost?” Aang weakly finishes. Sokka’s going to freak out.

“Yes.” The ghost frowns. “I wasn’t expecting you to see me, but I guess it makes sense,” he grumbles.

Aang pats himself down one more time, frozen frogs all accounted for. “Well, really, thanks. I owe you. Though I gotta go right now.”

“In a hurry?”

“Yeah, my friends are sick and need to suck on these frogs while they’re still frozen.” He begins trotting towards the ruins.

The ghost makes a contemplative noise and says, “Guess I better go with you, so you don’t get caught by Zhao, again.”

A laugh bursts out of Aang. “Race you then.”

Zuko squawks in surprise when Aang kicks up his speed into a full tilt sprint.

Unsurprisingly, Aang makes it back to the others first, though Zuko phases into view swiftly after he arrives. Katara and Sokka are both feverish and solidly asleep. Aang shakes Katara awake first and as she begins stirring, he asks Zuko, “Are you sticking around for a bit?”

There’s silence and Aang glances over his shoulder while Katara blinks tiredly. Gold eyes watch him with a faint frown. Zuko’s pinched lips tug to the side in displeasure and his white sleeves hide his hands. In appearance, Zuko can’t be that much older than Aang. Maybe around Sokka’s age. Though what do appearances and age mean for a ghost?

But those eyes – Zuko must be someone far older than Sokka.

“You trust too easily,” Zuko says.

“Aang? What are you looking at?” Katara rasps weakly.

He blinks at the empty air. “Nothing.”

As promised, when Azula arrives at the abbey, her back up flanking her, she finds a bald child and several members of the Water Tribes. Though Zuko seems to have miscounted how many blue-clad prisoners she’s supposed to take back home with her.

They try putting up a fight. How quaint.

The waterbender doesn’t protect her legs enough, unsteady about her defenses. The Water Tribe boy has nothing on Ni Shu’s soldiers Azula trained with. The man creates more of a problem, but he favors his wounded arm and still flinches instinctually from her strikes that harry him too close to his bad side.

And the Avatar’s laughably easy to subdue.

“Surrender, or we’re going to see what happens when all the alcohol in these lovely vats of perfume catch on fire,” she tells him. Weighted down, heavy shackles take care of the rest.

“Princess, what should we do about the beast?” one of her men asks, tugging the wire rope trap tighter.

“Leave it,” she commands. “The ship doesn’t have enough feed for it. Put the prisoners in the hold. We have three weeks to return to the capital.”

The soldiers salute smartly. “Yes sir.”

Chapter Text

“It’s not that you deserve to fail, it’s just that Azula deserves this victory more than you do,” Zuko says from his perch on the side panel of the frazzled helmsman’s crowded navigation controls. He pokes his finger through a lever and watches Zhao staring out the window into the dark night. Frowning at the silent admiral, Zuko mutters, “Though what are you doing, still sailing north?”

Earlier in the week, on Azula’s own dragon-helmed ship, Zuko warned her, “Admiral Zhao seems oddly less disappointed about his loss at Pohuai than I expected.”

“Well, it’s not like he could have foreseen the chains snapping on their own,” she drawled and Zuko let out a single smirk.

He trails after Zhao’s ships as they travel northward, then finally dock for good at the most northern harbor of the old western colonies.

The ships amass over the course of the next two weeks. First one vessel, then another, then Zuko walks between the crowds of sailors preparing for the launch of over two dozen ships. He reads the orders disseminated among the ranks and passed back and forth between the officers: A preemptive strike on the Northern Water Tribe.

While Zhao’s fleet begins departing from harbor on a course for the North Pole, Azula arrives back at the capital onboard her own ship with her key prisoner ready for presentation to the Fire Lord. Well, not exactly. Azula’s not about to place the Avatar in the same room as her grandfather when the boy has already shone a propensity for giving her soldiers concussions with the strength of a well-timed sneeze. It really would be a fine state of affairs if she brought him straight to the Fire Lord and gave the Avatar the perfect opportunity to knock his majesty off his throne and have Azulon die from the impact of hitting the floor.

She heads straight for the main palace and waits at attention at the gates while the staff runs the announcement of her arrival into the throne room. Restraints and a muzzle, she thinks. With those in place, it might be safe enough for her grandfather to see the boy Avatar in person. Azulon will want confirmation with his own two eyes eventually. He had such a personal involvement with the destruction of the Air Temples after all.

“Presenting Princess Azula!” the crier announces.

A full audience lines the throne room as she enters, rows of nobles and generals and admirals all watching with keen interest at the favored heir’s triumphant return. Azula keeps her eyes on Fire Lord Azulon only, instead on her father and mother to the side, or Uncle Iroh with them. She bows and declares for everyone to hear, “Honorable Fire Lord Azulon, I have captured the Avatar and brought him back to the Fire Nation in chains. At your word, he will be transferred to imprisonment.”

“Rise, Princess Azula,” he commands. She stands.

Through the red flames he says, “You have done well, Princess Azula. Let this mission stand as a commendation to your ability and skill. As a reward for your performance on the field these last two years, I declare that you and your parents are allowed back into the main palace.”

The audience knows better than to murmur.

“Dismissed.”

Ozai and Ursa quickly catch up to Azula outside the throne room. She greets them as a daughter should greet her parents, “Father. Mother.”

Without anyone to see them, having gone deeper into the palace where only the royal family and their loyal staff are allowed access, Ursa quickly sweeps Azula into a hug. Ozai regards Azula with perfect poise and he says, “Welcome home, Azula. We are proud of you.”

Azula gives Ursa one last gentle squeeze so she’ll let go and replies to her father, “Thank you. He’s inexperienced, a child. Him and his two Water Tribe friends.”

“How would you like to celebrate?” Ursa asks. She smiles and if Azula looks carefully, she thinks she can pick out a faint line here and there marring her face that hadn’t been there before Azula began her tours on the battlefields.

“I must first secure the Avatar’s transfer from my ship, along with the other prisoners. Then I’d like to spend a night with us as a family,” replies Azula.

Her mother hums, pleased, and her father gives his agreement. Azula watches him carefully without letting him know she’s watching him.

Prince Ozai must not come to see her as the threat Fire Lord Azulon insists on shaping her into.

Finally, on the day before the fleet will catch sight of the Northern Water Tribe’s stronghold, Zhao pulls out a yellow and aged roll of paper he kept locked in a safe Zuko couldn’t figure out how to open without leaving behind evidence of tampering. He stuck his head into the metal box along with his hands to subtly paw through the contents, but the interior space had been too small to comfortably unroll anything. Zhao lays the flattened paper onto a table surrounded by all his captains.

Pointing his finger to a line drawn across the evident map, Zhao says, “This map is old and if the rumors are true, their waterbenders can easily rearrange the streets. However, major features should remain unchanged, such as the sea-facing wall.” He slides his finger across the map features. Zuko leans harder through the table for a clear view. “And here is an oasis, which is critical to our fight. I’ll be taking an elite team of soldiers with me once the walls are breached. The success of this mission depends on a successful infiltration as quickly as possible.”

An oasis? Zuko ponders this oddity while the captains compete for who’s men and women are best suited for the task.

Yue almost doesn’t notice the boy sprinting down the walkways. If it wasn’t for the glinting gold accents along his sleeves, his otherwise pure white outfit would have perfectly blended in with the ice. She watches wide-eyed as he runs headlong into a wall and smoothly disappears without slowing down an iota.

She blinks in his wake and glances over the serene, unaware faces of her people traversing the canals. No one reacts in shock to a sudden foreigner’s appearance or his ability to walk through walls. No one notices him at all. Leaning slightly in her seat, Yue tries making out where he may reappear.

Try as she might, she doesn’t see the mysterious interloper ever again.

The Northern Tribe does not understand what the dark snow abruptly falling from the sky means until it’s almost too late. Zuko doesn’t pay too fine attention to the city defenders’ scrambling or the scout ships heading out to intercept the approaching fleet as best they can. He’s been running around the whole city all day and he still hasn’t found Zhao’s oasis. Given the man’s supreme confidence, this strikes Zuko as distinctly inconceivable. The map is old, but it must have a hint of some truth to it.

Thwarted from all sides, Zuko blips himself back to where Zhao prepares his strike team for the rapidly setting sun. They move out with the tanks through the crumbled walls and down the narrow paths between the lock system the Northern Water Tribe seems to use.

Zhao swerves smoothly through the loud chaos of water and ice slicing through the air, the bangs of fire flaring into existence, the grinding vibration of machinery, and the snorts and grunts of armored komodo rhinos. Trailing suspiciously after him, Zuko tries guessing his path so he can run ahead.

Sound abruptly drops into quiet when Zhao winds his way into empty streets and pulls out a talisman before approaching – that is definitely more than a wood door. How did Zuko not notice it before?

Except, Zuko abruptly realizes when he forces his way through to the other side just a few seconds before Zhao and his accompanying soldiers, there’s a force screaming, don’t notice me, don’t notice me, unwanted, unwanted, don’t come here. Hissing sizzles on the other side of the door. Zuko flashes across the bridges towards the heavy nexus of spiritual energy in the center of the grass-filled oasis.

Two fish swim in the water.

The door slams open.

Oh.

Oh.

It’s too warm; there’s no jagged ice he can hurl. The Water Tribe doesn’t use metal blades, so there are no swords for him to steal. With gritted teeth, Zuko sprints back over to the soldiers and yanks one of their helmets off. The men shout in shock and even Zhao’s confidence cracks into wide-eyed surprise, for just a moment before Zuko hits him in the face with the sharp edge of the helmet’s flares. Cursing, Zhao goes stumbling back over the short grass while his men call out in alarm, “Admiral Zhao!”

“Who—” Zhao begins to say, and Zuko hits him again with the helmet.

Bleeding from his face and roaring with anger, Zhao hurls useless fire at the floating piece of leather and metal. Undeterred and making a point, Zuko clobbers him again.

Zuko screams uselessly at him, “Do you not think? Over half our nation eats fish! We have people who live completely at the sea and tides’ mercy. And you want to kill the moon? So you can neutralize waterbenders who don’t even fight us? You’re an admiral of the navy.” He punctuates each word with a cutting smack, “DO. YOU. NOT. THINK?”

The soldiers intervene. One slices his palms open on the helmet when Zuko yanks it viciously out of his brief grip. Another sends fire through Zuko’s arm. A foot passes through his chest. Zuko hurls the helmet at Zhao’s unprotected head, but the admiral blocks its impact with a raised arm and a snarl on his face.

“You have no sense,” Zuko bellows and yanks on Zhao’s stupid cape.

One soldier’s discipline breaks and he yelps, “Admiral, what is going on?”

“I don’t know,” Zhao says and yanks himself out of Zuko’s grip. “Keep whatever this is occupied, I have a mission to fulfill.”

The soldiers flail at empty air and Zhao runs across the bridge with Zuko at his heels, seizing on everything he can to slow the stupid man down.

Call him weak, but it’s been almost three years of Zuko throwing himself onto the frontlines to give Azula every advantage she can get. Call him cowardly, but he’s beyond glad his sister now knows how to protect herself on the field and that high command no longer charges into a fight alongside the rank and file like in days of old. She’s learned every lesson he can teach her about the Earth Kingdom’s fighting styles.

Call him a traitor, but he hates this fucking war.

Never has a war devastated the world like this war has. Never has a war crafted an entire population that cannot understand peace. Never has a war killed so many soldiers and civilians.

He’s seen the conscription posters; he’s listened to snatches of recruitment speeches. For the glory of throne and nation, they say. More soldiers die from sickness and malnutrition than from battle wounds. What glory? What might?

From his toes through his limbs and up his throat and saturated through his whole skull, Zuko detests this vile war with its myopic greed and seas of ash.

Uselessly, one last time, Zuko grabs at Zhao’s armor, wrenching at arms and grappling with legs, screaming, “Don’t you dare, don’t you do it. I’ll kill you Zhao, I’ll really kill you. Don’t, don’t you dare!”

And he slaps a useless hand over the admiral’s mouth and the enraged roar of flames pass through the intangible palm, completely unimpeded, and the orange is so loud, is so large, is so fueled with angry frustration and hate and what is several inches of blessed water to that, to the revolting ambitions of a spirit killer who forgot his duty to his people, that only sees his own progression to glory, crowing his might from atop a pile of charred corpses –

“NO!”

And everything goes
            red.

then black.

a tacky bed of shuddering white and crimson
warm copper in his mouth, in his nose, in his lungs
something soft and warm, something soon to be cold, under his hands

let them go, let them go,
don’t kill all of them,
my people, please, let—

LITTLE PRINCE, KNOW YOUR PLACE.

“—any of you lay a hand on the hostage, I’ll execute the offender.”

“—the white-haired girl? She’s—”

“What’s so special with—”

“—joke, savages having royalty.”

The ocean angrily allows the warship to reach its destination. It whispers in a girl’s ear: when you meet the bridge

the ocean retreats from the shore; fish glint in the sunlight; seaweed lay slumped on the exposed beach:

Taka runs as fast as he can, but the high ground never comes any closer.

the crush
            of water

Hakoda delayed long enough. Bato isn’t coming to the rendezvous site.

He and his men are always one bad storm away from losing all their lives to the unfamiliar waters and stars, far away from the artic currents of their home. For safety, they stay close to the shores and move frequently, sailing ahead of any pursuit or Fire Nation retaliation.

They need to leave camp immediately.

In the approaching darkness of night, Hakoda calls out for everyone to hear, “We head inland along the rivers at dawn. Get packing.”

His aren’t the only eyes that glance warily at the moonless sky and the unseasonably gray and churning waves. It’s been two days since the full moon, since the moon somehow vanished during the day.

Since the ocean became a killing sea.

sea birds drop dead from the sky. their corpses join the snaking train of marching spirits.

Azula lies awake in her bed. How long does it take to subjugate the North Pole? Surely by now Zuko figured out whatever little mystery piqued his interest. Maybe he swung by the palace and she missed her chance to talk with him today while she spent all her hours shadowing their father as he met with his most obvious, but not his most important nor most powerful, political supporters. But that makes no sense.

She frowns at the darkness outside her window. Azula doesn’t recall any cloud cover this evening. For such thick layers to form that could blot out the nearly full moon and roll in so quickly over the city seems unlikely.

In the night’s total darkness, she frowns slightly, then dismisses her concern. Faintly annoyed, she rolls to a more comfortable position and falls asleep. She’ll chew Zuko out tomorrow.

vents in the heavy black of the ocean depth, uncaring of the never seen moon
            volcanic heat shimmering under pressure, pressure, pressure
a blind crab skittering, eavesdropping on arguments

            fine,
the vents will send a message through the molten rock beneath the fragile layer of dirt and stone.

HEAR ME, the world howls in Aang’s ears.

HEAR ME, the world roars uncaring for his splitting headache he’s been nursing for the last several days nor for his gasping breath.

ENOUGH.

When the Fire Nation princess sets down a large bowl of clear water on the floor with a look of cold calculation in her eyes, Katara immediately flings her right hand forward as hard as she can against the chains holding her back. The water shoots upwards in a knife of ice – or it’s supposed to. She wrenches her left hand too – a water whip.

The water’s surface ripples serenely with faint footsteps further down the hall and in the building. As Katara desperately flicks her fingers, the princess smiles, sharp, and says, “As I thought.”

“What did you do?” Katara demands, a panicked frustration boiling up through her veins. Her bending – what happened to her bending. She screams – Sokka, Aang, where are they, please let them hear her, Bato, Bato, please, DAD – as loud as her dry throat can. “What did you do to me?”

“Nothing,” the princess says, unaffected. “I’m just as curious as you are.”

Her eyes first, Katara swears through a rising haze of red and numb thoughts and her heavy heartbeat she can feel thundering under every inch of her flushing skin. These unnumbered days gave Katara plenty of times to desperately think about everywhere and everyway she can get her hands on water. When she gets out, she’s going to grab the boys, find Bato, and then she’s going to stab the princess’s yellow eyes out. Katara’s going to smear that red lipstick all over this cold-eyed killer’s face with her fist and then she’s going to pluck her eyes out of her skull by the fluids in her eyeballs and then she’s going to –

Katara screams again, wordless at the bowl of water set outside of her kicking feet’s range.

The princess says conversationally, “You really are an untrained child, aren’t you? How old are you? Thirteen? Your face isn’t right for twelve or younger.”

“Fourteen,” Katara hisses and contemplates how to make the princess choke to death on her spit.

This garners a slight frown out of her captor. “Surely not.”

“I am.”

Letting out a single huff of disbelief, the princess nudges forward the bowl, just enough that Katara’s feet can reach it. Then she turns away and lets the cell door slam shut behind her, the sharp headpiece in her hair glinting in the hallway’s torchlight.

Katara’s breaths heave through her lungs and scrape her throat raw. She stares at the water. How, how, how?

Unsteadily, she pulls the bowl closer to her body. Water splashes over the sides onto the cold floor and her legs. Her hands shake as she grabs at the rough clay. More water splashes over the sides. She shivers, acutely aware of her increasingly dirty and knotted hair, the harsh smell in her cell.

She brings the bowl to her lips and drinks the clear, clear liquid. Tears trail down her face as she cries, angry and lost.

Katara sleeps and wakes and sleeps and wakes up in an unfamiliar room. Someone changed her clothing while she was asleep and she’s already balancing on such a fine wire high above the pit of her nerves that the impact of this fact doesn’t fully hit her mind. Her fingers fly towards her neck and she chokes on her relief that her necklace remains. Then, she tugs at the ragged and thin, dirty, burgundy cloth. The bottom hems of the pants are a mass of fraying threads. It’s…it’s absolutely nothing like the clothing Gran Gran helped her sew out of sturdy, warm, blue fabric.

The cell door slams open some indefinitely time later. When the two guards crowd in and undo her chains from her limbs, she immediately thrashes out with her shaking fists and feet, nailing arms and legs and nearly clipping an exposed neck, all while cursing the weakness hunger undermines her blows with. Swearing, the guards wrest her arms back so hard they nearly dislocate something and force her into handcuffs.

It’s very bright outside.

Involuntary tears wet her eyes and she stumbles, purposefully, between the guards, making herself as uncooperative as she can. She keeps blinking for what feels like too long against the merciless sunlight.

“Katara!” she hears.

The black dots in her vision finally clear enough for her to lift her head and squint a few yards before her, where in the middle of a courtyard Sokka and Bato stand similarly restrained. There’s an ugly mess of red fabric and what looks like an overlarge bucket a bit further beyond them.

Her brother’s hair is growing out at the sides. Both he and Bato are missing their hair ties. Sokka’s hair sticks up in uneven tufts amid the longer strands; the guards must have also hosed him down like they did to Katara.

She almost falls flat on her face when she’s shoved forward. Equally enraged noises growl out of Sokka and Bato. Her thankfully free feet catch her before she can get intimately acquainted with the brick-covered ground.

She clears her throat several times, then can finally manage a hoarse, “Where’s Aang?”

Sokka grimaces and glares at all the Fire Nation people busy milling about. He admits, “Don’t know. I haven’t seen him since the abbey.” There’s a strained quality to his pallor like he hasn’t been sleeping well. Lowly, he warns, “Wherever we’re going, it’s not going to be like with Haru.”

“I know,” Katara says. If anyone tries taking away her necklace too along with everything else already stolen from her, she’s going to bite their fingers off, she vows as she watches a pair of firebenders wrangle the mass of red into slowly inflating.

And – she has to warn them. “Sokka. Bato,” she hisses for their attention. “I can’t bend.”

Their eyes widen in shocked horror. Immediately, they shift so they bracket her, like they can protect her from what’s already happened. She sucks in a deep breath and leaks a grateful tension all over the pale bricks of the courtyard because she needs this, she needs this solidarity. She needs this reminder that her father is still free, that her brother is still alive, that as long as she breathes, Katara will find a path out of this horror show. She says, because if she doesn’t engrave a goal into the very marrow of her bones she will not survive this trial, “We’re going to get out of here. Then we’re going to find Aang. Then we’re going to make everything right.”

“Yes,” Bato says and Katara begins counting down the seconds until she can get out of these handcuffs and hug him and Sokka.

It’s been a week without a single glimpse, a single peep, a single obnoxious, white chrysanthemum from Zuko. Azula sits patiently before the desk in her bedroom, her hands folded over each other on the surface polished so smooth she can see a faint reflection of her impassive face. A single sharp nail runs against the wood of the new piece of furniture brought in to replace her too small desk from childhood. It even still smells new.

It’s been over a week since Zuko stood before her and said, “Zhao’s looking for something in the North Pole. I have no idea what it is. I’ll let you know when the fighting’s over.”

“Why can’t you check right now?” she asked.

A disturbed expression had passed over his too honest face and he said, “There’s something preventing me from figuring out yet.”

It’s days past Zuko’s deadline to report. She waited, one day more, one day more, she told herself, ignoring the fact: Zuko never missed a report before. Where is he?

Grandfather entrusted her a copy of the debrief on Zhao’s successful assault on the North Pole directly from his majesty’s office. The reports and numbers are detestably lacking in accuracy and certainty. She needs her brother’s first-hand corroboration of accounts. Because if Zhao really did lose almost all his ships in an attack against a city largely comprised of civilians and certainly no one with actual largescale combat experience nor military technology, then the admiral better stay missing.

The Avatar is in chains. The rest of the airbenders are long dead. Both poles lie in crushed ruins under the might of the Fire Nation’s navy. The army controls over half the main continent. Nationalist forces in the southeast are causing problems as always with their guerrilla tactics against the stretched thin Fire Nation garrisons stationed there, but the Earth Kingdom is just as dedicated in stamping out the persistent secessionist insurrection causing the problems. With a couple more weeks, as spring arrives in the northern hemisphere in full force, Azula will rejoin General Ni Shu for the definitive assault against Ba Sing Se.

At this pivotal moment in history, as Sozin’s Comet charts its course ever closer, now is not the time for Zuko to suddenly disappear.

So where is he?

Where is her brother?

Aang’s pretty sure he’s not the first Avatar to spend time in a cell, but he’s just as certain that it’s been a long, long time since an Avatar’s spent this long imprisoned. He stares at the wall at the other side of the small room and counts for the millionth time all seventy-eight scratches and rust sports on the metal panels. There are over two hundred links total among his chains. He’s accidentally pinched his fingers and increasingly grimy clothing between said links too many times. He keeps very careful track of the stale air in the cell.

He does not think about the metal caging him in, about Zhao’s words, what feels like a lifetime ago, “alive, but just barely.” About more miracle savors, about Appa left behind, unable to get past aggressive streams of fire. About too-old gold eyes staring him down from two different faces, eyes that Aang never saw in a teenager before while he traveled the world with the Air Nomads, before he woke up in this new, alien world.

Instead, he thinks, where’s Katara and Sokka? Instead, he thinks about why did he feel so faint and then so woozy a while back? Instead, he ignores the chains on his wrists and sets his hands against each other, crosses his legs, and meditates. Instead, he pulls deep as he can despite the windless air in the room and the itch of his unshaven hair coming in as scratchy stubble.

Aang opens his eyes to Avatar Roku standing grave before him.

Aang asks: “Avatar Roku, what’s going on?”

And Roku says: “Tui is dead.”

Roku says: “Your Water Tribe friends and their tribe members are imprisoned at Boiling Rock, the great Fire Nation prison.”

Roku says: “The Great Spirits, who have ignored this war for all one hundred years, will tear the world apart if a solution is not quickly found.”

the fish rot in the sea.

a red death spreads across the waves’ surface.

the stars bereft of their nightly companion turn their faces away, accusatory.

another ship sinks and green fire gathers at the call to arms.

Where is he? Where is he?

Where is he?

Two and a half weeks now of silence.

Two and a half weeks of Prince Ozai speaking to her distantly, with his servants following her to every meeting and him treating her as an equal rather than a daughter and an heir, in all its implications, during discussions with Fire Lord Azulon and the military brass. Two and a half weeks of Ursa slipping in tea sessions and small talks with Prince Iroh – did they think Azula wouldn’t notice – and speaking in veiled terms.

Two and a half weeks of inspecting military drills and ignoring murmured gossip about the Fire Lord’s health. Of putting on a calm and humble face while neatly sidestepping out of every trap someone tries ensnaring her in about the unspoken succession fight.

Of sitting by the Fire Lord’s side as they listen to reports of freak tsunamis, of missing ships likely swallowed by rouge waves, of whining pleas from fishing villages for assistance.

She lies awake at night, in the deep, unchanging darkness, for longer and longer each day. Waiting with impatience, with annoyance, with –

Where is he?

The War Minister sees Azula’s look of skepticism at the large airship with its steel ribs and swollen cover protecting the highly flammable gas in giant bags within and rushes to assure her, “We’ve already checked with prototypes. This will be able to carry your highness and your entourage to Ba Sing Se in a fraction of the time land travel would.” The gondola, with soldiers scurrying in and out of below the rounded mass, looks laughably small.

“This will be able to carry us uninterrupted all the way across the sea and to Ba Sing Se?” she questions.

The War Minister at least knows better than to openly wince. Delicately, he says, “Ocean travel is…highly unadvisable at the present moment, your highness.”

To Azula’s right, Mai says, “This looks like a death trap.”

“Ships are a guaranteed death trap,” Azula says with a faint sigh. “The only reason why we know air travel is still safe is because the messenger birds are still able to cross the waters.” The Fire Nation has lost far too many lives and supplies these last several weeks.

“Just think about the view,” Ty Lee says, dazzling with excitement. “I’ve never been that high before. And we’ve never been to the Earth Kingdom before, it’s going to be great, Mai.”

Completely uninterested in continuing this discussion, Azula says, “Come on. We have a meeting to get to with General Ni Shu’s lieutenant.”

They all immediately fall into line after her and together enter the airship’s gondola.

It’s been a month of silence, of moonless nights, and of a vengeful ocean drowning all its enemies.

Chapter Text

The problem with seeking answers in the spirit world is that Aang doesn’t have the first clue where to start and it’s a big place – it’s a whole world.

By his side, Roku stands contemplative. Eventually, he says with an air of faint misgiving, “I myself do not know the full details of Tui’s murder. But there is a young man that can help you find a solution to the world’s predicament.”

“Who? Where can I find him?”

Smiling thinly – this whole lack of a moon business must be stressing him out at least as much as it’s stressing Aang out – Roku begins walking forward through the silent mist and replies, “You’ve met him before, in fact. I will accompany you along part of the way.”

Aang follows the older Avatar, Fang nowhere in sight. The atmosphere of the spirit world presses in heavier and more stagnant than in Aang’s admittedly scant previous visits. They pass through endless fields of tall, purple grass that shivers away from their presences. A diffuse light permeates through the air and the sky above, a solid sheet of flat gray, without the dimples and churning curves of cloud cover. Aang and Roku cast no shadows.

As Aang pushes a scraggly shrub to the side so the wayward branches won’t catch on his clothing, he says, “Katara and Sokka tried explaining to me, but I still don’t completely understand why this war began. I think the monks and nuns were sometimes talking about some stuff they were worried about away from all the kids, but I don’t get how the world I saw back then became…” He waves his hands through the dark plants. “…all this.”

“Why this war began,” Roku repeats, tired. “Fire Lord Sozin’s ambition was always well known and in his late reign, he surrounded himself with men and women willing to support his vision of Fire Nation prosperity and might. Have you been to the colonies, Aang?”

Aang shakes his head no. “Not really. Well, we started passing through them on the way north, but Sokka didn’t really want to sightsee too much.”

“They are one piece of many contributing to the start of the war. Land, metal, food, pride, and glory; these have inspired conflict many times before and will continue to incite conflict in the future. The Fire Nation’s pride in itself regularly chafes against the kingdoms of the continent, especially whenever Ba Sing Se stands posed to unite the warring states into one. The land the colonies now claim have long been rich in resources and cheap food. And to achieve ever greater glory, the Fire Nation pressed it dominion further,” explains Roku, not quite meeting Aang’s eyes. This isn’t a full explanation, but the thought nags Aang that no explanation can ever be a full explanation.

Despite his age when he finally died, the age he bears now before Aang despite the flexibility of the spirit world to assume any form, Roku stands straight with a spine of steel. His expression hardens in the sharp manner of adult drawing serious, almost furiously so. He says with a voice of honed iron, of numbingly cold winds and sheering hot flames, “But for all his ambitions and all the Fire Nation’s goading, no one ever imagined he would contemplate so heinous an act as the complete annihilation of one of the four great nations. That is why the war began when it did.”

The grass shivers, louder and louder. Aang’s fingers skim against the prickly and rough stems of the meadow’s offerings towards the sunless sky and he looks up towards Roku and the heartbroken frustration splashed across his frame.

Before the war, before the revelation of Aang’s status as the Avatar, he accompanied a small group of monks to the Fire Nation a handful of times. They always landed at the same port town, talked to the same people, and Aang never thought it odd. He had been happy enough making friends with Kuzon and his local friends and sprinting through the streets and outlying fields with them. As one of the few ports open to the whole world, Aang always saw Earth Kingdom merchants and Water Tribe trading ships in the harbor.

But never warships, the warships the Fire Nation must have had already by then, hidden away in some other harbor, away from prying eyes and the currents in the sky the Air Nomads traveled upon.

Aang runs his tongue over his slightly chapped lips and asks, feeling as brittle as parched grass and as liable to combust from a stray spark, “It’s my fault that the war lasted a hundred years, isn’t it.”

“No,” says Roku, definitive. “The war you see now is only the latest chapter in the conflicts. Several times, the nations laid down arms and ceased fighting. Their decisions to pick up their weapons again and again are not your responsibility.”

“But if the Avatar was around since the start, then balance in the world wouldn’t have been out of line for so long,” Aang argues.

“We do not know, Aang. We will never know.”

They reach a forest.

Through the lingering whisps of their conversation shut closed, Roku glances down at Aang and kindly says, “Here is as far as I can escort you. Within the forest, there is a clearing. In the clearing, you will find the young man that helped you at Pohuai –”

“Zuko!” Aang realizes.

Roku smiles. “Yes, Zuko. He will help you learn what happened and what you can do. Follow the rabbit tracks. They will take you to your destination.”

“Thank Roku,” says Aang. And after Roku sends him off with one last, “We’ll see each other again,” Aang plunges into the thick shadows of the dense bamboo.

The rabbit tracks are surprisingly easy to follow, by sheer virtue of how many there are steadily converging together. Aang steps along the bare dirt exposed by years and hordes of bounding paws. The bright green leaves of the bamboo stalks murmur with each other above his head. Like a river pouring into the ocean, the tracks widen and the bamboo begins to the thin, until the mist-shrouded way before him lightens considerably.

The smell of blood hits Aang like a wall the instant he steps out of the bamboo forest’s anxious shelter.

Lurching backwards, Aang claps a hand over his mouth as he gags, wide-eyed and shocked. Horror completely flushes out his excitement at meeting Zuko again in a wave that crashes through him, total and terrible. He doesn’t register when his knees hit the ground and a desperate corner of his mind wishes the mist would come back. When he passed the forest’s boundaries, it had torn away.

Through the thick red, he sees flashes of white fur from the countless dead rabbits piled into the clearing so fully that no patch of ground remains visible.

“Oh spirits,” he whispers involuntarily, then immediately clenches his jaw because –

That’s exactly what’s in the clearing. Dead spirits.

He shuffles forward on his knees. With shaking hands, he carefully lifts the limp body of a dead white rabbit, its eyes closed and its soft fur matted with the blood. It’s cold. He’s … he’s not certain what to do with this. With it and the others. The rabbit tracks converge here, and he doesn’t see – wait. There.

Setting the rabbit’s heavy weight back down to the side, Aang thinks while getting back onto his feet, a little warning would have been nice, Roku. But maybe the older man hadn’t known.

Making his way through the clearing is slow going.

Aang doesn’t want to step on the bodies and there’s no airbending in the spirit world. In repetitive motions, he picks up limp fur and bones from his path and sets them aside. Nervous, without really thinking, he wipes his hands against his pants. All he succeeds in doing is spreading even more blood everywhere. Breathing solely through his mouth, Aang approaches the hint of black he spied from the clearing’s edge.

Aang focuses first on the inane observation that Zuko’s hair is loose. It fans out messily around his head, in stark contrast to the white fur it lies upon. Red-stained cloth pins a few strands here and there.

The second thing Aang notices is that with his eyes closed and utterly still, Zuko looks the closest to actually being dead that Aang’s seen from the ghost. Does Zuko normally breath? Aang racks his mind for all the details from the escape out of Pohuai, but he honestly can’t recall one way or the other. He stifles a habitual urge to bring his hands to his face or neck.

Crouching down by the asleep – or completely unconscious – ghost, Aang pats Zuko a few times on the shoulder. “Hey, Zuko.”

No response.

With both hands now, Aang shakes harder and says louder, “Hey, Zuko. Zuko, come on. Wake up.”

In a sudden burst of sound and movement, the ghost draws in an unsteady breath. His eyebrows pinch and as he begins to stir, Aang draws away his hands. With an abrupt full-body twitch, Zuko lurches up into sitting and immediately leans over, coughing up mouthfuls of blood.

Deeply alarmed, Aang flails briefly, then starts pounding Zuko on the back for lack of any better idea of what to do. “Woah, hey, what’s going on? What happened?”

Zuko coughs once more, then spits out one last wad of blood. His hair hanging loose everywhere obscures his face. Abruptly, Aang realizes he’s still hitting Zuko on the back and awkwardly screeches to a halt. Aside for the sounds of Aang’s shallow breaths and Zuko’s slight rasps, silence descends upon the clearing. Blood soaks nearly all of Aang’s pants. Zuko’s pants aren’t much better.

Slowly, Zuko lifts his head, squints at Aang, and says with a deep and marked confusion, “This isn’t the North Pole.”

“Uh, no,” Aang concurs. “This is the spirit world. We’re in the spirit world. Not the North Pole. Is there a north pole in the spirit world?”

Zuko blinks once. “No. Not really.”

Peering at the general disheveled state of the ghost – hair a wet, tangled mess and clothing that probably can’t be salvaged from the blood and a sort of punched expression characteristic of the exhausted – Aang asks, “Were you at the North Pole?”

Blinking again, Zuko moves to rub his eye, but blanches when he finally notices all the wet crimson on his nearly everything. Obviously thrown for a loop and not completely awake, he shuffles through a moment of stilted silence, then finally admits, “I was just now. How did I get…” He trails off and frowns at Aang intently staring at his face.

Aang would really like to not look at all the inanimate dead spirits if he can help it.

Zuko apparently has no such problem.

“Oh,” he says after a minute.

“This is, uh,” he says after another moment.

“Wow, no wonder Zhao died like that,” Zuko says finally with a wince.

Frankly, Aang’s day had been terrible enough without that new knowledge. He blurts out in an uncontrolled wave, “Avatar Roku said you knew what happened because the moon is gone because apparently Tui is dead and that’s really bad, like super, really bad. So much weird stuff is happening because, uh, the moon is gone? How is the moon gone? I really, really need to know because I’m the Avatar and apparently I can fix this, but I have no idea how and have I mentioned I go captured by the Fire Nation again? So—”

Looking faintly walloped by the rush of words, Zuko holds up a hand for Aang to pause. With effort, Aang does.

“I can … I can tell you what happened to Tui. And I have no idea why, but I might know how you can fix this.” Zuko speaks slowly, like he’s testing his thoughts. A faint grimace passes over his expression and he kneads at his temples. Blood transfers. He mutters something too quietly for Aang to completely pick up, something about spirits and excessive force. The steel gray sky above roils with discontent. There is so, so much blood everywhere.

“Can we relocate first?” Aang squeaks.

Zuko takes in their surroundings one more time. There’s blood all over his tongue and staining his lips. A thin trail of red mars his chin. He says, “Yeah, let’s get out of here.”

Colonel Araki of General Ni Shu’s army greets them when Azula’s entourage finally arrives at camp. On the horizon, if she cares to look, she can pick out the faint white strip of Ba Sing Se’s outmost walls. The sounds of industry fill the camp to an almost deafening level. Teams of engineers haul massive sheets of metal through a crowd of shouting and yelling. Rapid blasts of the nail guns cut across all conversations.

“Colonel Araki, is the general in?” Azula asks.

“Yes, your highness. This way.”

He leads them to a solidly built, one-story building – a testament to how long delays hobbled the army’s progress – and takes them inside, then opens a door into an office after a perfunctory knock.

Stepping away from the desk dominating the center of the room, General Ni Shu says, “Princess Azula, welcome back. How was the journey?”

“Pleasant,” Azula replies. “Thank you.” She indicates besides her. “This is Mai and Ty Lee. They’ll be assisting me.”

Introduced, Mai and Ty Lee bow.

“Your school friends?” the general says with a thread of amusement. “They must be of fine quality. Sit, sit. Colonel Araki, thank you for escorting our guests. Go make sure no one blunders the supply delivery again.”

“Sir.” His heavy footsteps withdraw down the hall and a burst of sound rattles through the briefly opened door to outside.

“How extensive are the interruptions?” asks Azula. They all saw the massive curve curling half-completed beside the camp, the great machine’s internals of pipes and walkways exposed to the air.

“Substantive. We’d been relying on the cargo ships delivering almost all our supplies and heavy machinery. We managed to divert what hasn’t already sunk to land travel, but that’s far less reliable and much slower. My engineers are telling me it’ll still be a couple weeks until we can attack Ba Sing Se.”

Weeks. That won’t do. “We’ll lose the element of surprise.”

Ni Shu nods. “All the various military plans from the Fire Nation are in complete disarray now. The assault on Omashu must be in shambles.”

Azula glances over at Mai, who sighs and says, “They are, general. The mountain ranges around the city have been particularly hostile. Army divisions keep getting lost or attacked.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Ty Lee worries, the least connected to the military of everyone in the room.

Humming an agreement, the general pulls out a large map of what reveals to be Ba Sing Se. Small pieces of paper are pasted onto the underlying image. In the corner of each modification, Azula notices a date penned in, the most recent being two days ago. The army must be taking advantage of the air ships and war balloons to reconnaissance the lay of the land within the walls.

With a hint of a smirk, Ni Shu asks, “How do you ladies feel about helping me defeat Prince Iroh’s claim to fame?”

Copying Azula, Mai and Ty Lee lean in closer as General Ni Shu lays out the current state of the planned all-out assault.

yellow beaks open
            crying
demanding
            bones and succor and the
sweet salt of the red-green sea

Zuko examines the comically thick chains, nudging at the links with one questioning, pointed finger. The metal clinks and rattles. Aang sits patiently, for now. Give it a few more minutes and the boy will be buzzing with too much pent-up energy again.

“Looks like they learned from Pohuai,” says Zuko. He shifts his weight back into a more comfortable squat. “I can’t break these chains like I did then.”

He desperately squashes every indication of relief from his voice and expression.

Aang groans and flops over. Pouting, he says, “Yeah, I thought so too. Bummer.” He kicks one leg to coax blood circulation back into the limb. “How about keys? Would you be able to find any?”

“Probably,” Zuko says, instead of definitely. But until he figures out where Azula went, Zuko’s delaying Aang’s escape for as long as he can.

It’s jarring to see the Avatar’s far scruffier and ragged appearance in the material world. Dark hair grows quickly over the young monk’s scalp, a testament to how long he’s been locked away. Spirits, Zuko slept for way too long.

Aang hums and folds his arms as best he can with his restraints. He blows a thin stream of air that churns through the tiny room, tugging at cloth. Footsteps pass down the hall on the other side of the steel door and they both fall silent in the cell.

The chains clatter when Aang pushes himself over to the wall so he can rest more comfortably in a slouching sitting position. He licks his chapped lips again. “So, the ocean drowned Zhao, huh.”

Zuko frowns. “You’re still stuck on this? Idiot had it coming.”

“No.”

Scoffing, Zuko leans back incredulously. “What? No?”

“You can’t say anyone deserves death, not so easily. And, well, he wasn’t just drowned, was he? The ocean ate him.” Aang looks ridiculous, still slouched over. He must realize because he pulls himself more upright.

Exasperation curdles through Zuko and then Aang lays down the most ridiculous, the most damning blow: “You don’t believe he deserved to die either.”

Zuko goes utterly still. Sound travels unevenly through the prison. There are no windows to let in fresh air or bright light, to make Aang’s confinement anything besides a dark hole that the Fire Nation would have him rot away in.

Blood drips from his still loose hair.

“There are some crimes that cannot be forgiven,” says Zuko, slowly, lowly, ignorant of a buzzing reverberation building in his voice. “Save your compassion for those without power or a choice in their actions. Don’t spend it on the likes of him.”

“No,” says Aang, says the Avatar with all the weight of his dead world. “It’s not that simple. It can’t be that simple. This isn’t about Zhao either, is it? This is about something more.”

The voice that speaks isn’t a child’s.

“Hate, revenge, and condemnation disguised as justice won’t end this war. What are you really angry about, Zuko? Who are you really angry at?”

Azula walks through the dark night towards the command center at the general’s request. Clouds obscure the stars rolled out in a dense carpet across the black sky. The tiny flame cupped in her hand flickers.

The door into the building swings open while Azula approaches. Colonel Araki bows to her as he departs, holding the door open for her as she steps over the entrance’s tall plank of wood. “Down the hall,” he points, then bids good night.

Inside her office, General Ni Shu nurses a cup of plain hot water. Speeding past pleasantries, she asks, “While you were at the capital, what did the Fire Lord say about the situation with the moon and oceans? In detail.”

“Beyond the obvious? There isn’t much to say yet. Our entire navy’s useless. They’re as good as grounded. Every ship that goes out to open waters disappears. It’s why supplies and reinforcements are slow coming. The airships can’t compare to true ships,” replies Azula. “The villages and towns that depend on the sea are beginning to starve.”

Ni Shu scowls into her cup. Sheets of paper tower in thick stacks upon her desk. The crackling light from torches emphasize the lines upon her face. She explains, “I’m giving an address to the troops tomorrow. I allowed rumors to travel unchecked for too long. All the soldiers know the broad strokes of what happened at the North Pole by now. They’re distracted worrying about their families and comrades, instead of worrying about the battle in front of them.”

“Fire Lord Azulon is coordinating with the Fire Sages,” Azula says. “This obstacle won’t last long.”

Ni Shu’s eye pierces through the night like a great owlcat striking true. “Only the Fire Sages? Despite the Avatar held close in spitting distance?”

“He’s twelve and hardly deserving of his title. He’ll do more good remaining in prison than outside of it,” Azula dismisses derisively.

Humming, Ni Shu sips from her cup. Assessing.

Azula whirls toward the flash of white and jerks to a halt. In incredulous shock, she asks, “What happened to you?”

Covered in tacky, freshly spilled blood, Zuko grimaces and has the gall to be sheepish as he rubs a dripping red hand against the back of his neck. “The spirit world.”

He quickly pulls his hand away and makes a face at the smears all over his palm. Very little of his outfit actually remains white. His sleeves drip onto the floor. Azula stares briefly at the pooling blood by his feet, but it seems to rapidly fade, leaving the wood clean of bodily fluids.

No one has ever struck her so off-balance before.

“You’re late,” Azula says, like these few words can remotely compensate for lying awake, for pacing, for waiting.

The blood keeps dripping. It shimmers.

Azula’s seen blood before. Of course she has; she’s spent significant portions of her life on the battlefield by now. And General Ni Shu’s command style is a carefully balanced mix of gruff demanding and empathic caring. She visits the infirmaries and brings Azula along to see the surgery survivors and the amputees regularly enough.

But Azula’s never seen Zuko in red before.

“You’re late,” she repeats at the lack of verbal response – glowering doesn’t count as anything. “Tardiness is unacceptable, especially not for weeks. What were you frolicking in the spirit world for? Who cares about the spirits, there’s a war going on here.”

“I was unconscious in the spirit world for weeks, as you so helpfully pointed out, because I got caught up in the ocean murdering Zhao for killing the moon spirit,” Zuko spits out with a snap of fury.

Reflexively, Azula scoffs. “Seriously? You expect me to—”

“The moon is gone. The ocean is on a rampage. Spirits residing in the material world are lashing out,” Zuko interrupts. “Don’t play obtuse.” His posture slumps. Blood stains his cheek, his hands, his neck. Flecks cling to his eyebrows. The anger sloughs off him, discarded upon the floor. “Azula, I’m tired. Let’s not fight.”

She’s not so weak that she needs the protection or comfort of crossing her arms. “Fine,” she magnanimously acquiesces. “Surely you must have learned something useful despite being unconscious, apparently.”

Zuko barks out a single harsh laugh. “I did, actually. One way or the other, the Avatar is going to escape—”

“Zuko.”

“—we can’t stop it. It’s going to happen without caring that you don’t like it,” her brother plows on. “The spirits have a plan for bringing the moon back and the Avatar’s essential.”

“The Avatar is not escaping until the war is over,” she says, vexed.

He laughs again, that grating, idiotic laugh.

“If you want to wait that long, Azula, the spirits will kill the entire Fire Nation through tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and other disasters. The war will be over by default when everyone’s dead.”

Soaked in blood, he keeps laughing hysterically.

deep in the abyssal darkness, a beak cuts through the waters

(Earlier: Ursa says, I found him.

The wind shakes through the tall bamboo, filling the air with harsh whispers from the leaves rubbing abrasively against each other. Hollow sounds are beaten out from hollow stems. A bird alights upon the swaying branch of a willow tree.

Where? asks Iroh.

Nasakyo. Ursa folds her hands in her silken lap. Her left thumb rests against the curve of an embroidered cloud set in a subtle shade that just barely glimmers in the light when struck from a precise angle. My girl who found him fled deadly pursuit to make it back to the palace.

Then—

Yes.

The bird bursts away from its perch with the beating of wings. Deeper in the palace, the cooks toil away, plucking feathers and sinking heavy cleavers into bones, knives chopping dense vegetables into even slices. There are eyes on the bird from a hawk in the sky; there are eyes on the cooks from guards in the corners; there are eyes on the lady from every direction.

Iroh’s hand tightens around the hot porcelain cup and he does not bow his head in disbelief, he does not shift in denial. His eyes meet the unwavering flame in Ursa’s eyes and her thinned lips and he says, It doesn’t matter how many years it’s been, my brother will not get away with this crime.

She smiles with fangs – how like her daughter, Iroh muses – and says, How convenient that the good doctor wrote all his purchases down.

So, when will we…?

The wind blows again, hard, pushing against the flames lighting the way.

Not now, Ursa says. Not until Azula is safer.)

Sokka’s not glad that one of the main reasons why the prison guards don’t keep Katara in solitary confinement is because she can’t waterbend. Nothing is fully worth the gut punching sight of the first time he saw his little sister in what felt like at least a month plus an eternity. Her hair was a loose mess, and someone had taken away her clothing at some point too, like for Sokka and Bato. Worst of all was the expression of deep loss on her face and the way she stared transfixed and heartbroken at the glinting waves they flew over.

But with their current arrangement, Sokka can attach himself to her side every second they’re not locked in their cells. Katara clings back just as stubbornly.

One day in the too warm yard, he asks her, “Do you know what those Fire Nation bastards did to cut you off?”

An annoyed noise rumbles in her throat and she replies, “No.”

Bato quickly resolves that mystery when the next day he manages to sneak into Sokka and Katara’s open yard timeslot, dragging a tribesman Sokka has never seen before with him. By way of introduction, Bato says, “This is Runi from the Northern Water Tribe. Runi, this is Sokka and Katara.” Runi offers his hand out and they shake in greeting. “He was captured by the navy five weeks ago.”

“I think. It’s been hard to keep track of the days,” Runi hedges. His height looms over Katara, but he says to her with a protective sympathy, “So you’re also a waterbender.”

She nods. “Can you—”

He shakes his head, and his eyes go hard with the anger of a riptide current. “When the Fire Nation attacked the North Pole, they not only destroyed my home, but committed the most heinous sin. There’s a spirit oasis where—” He swallows and unclenches his tense jaw. Thick and low, he says, “I don’t know how, but they got into the oasis. They killed Tui, who resided there in mortal form for generations.”

Runi’s head slumps and his shoulders shake. “We failed them. We failed the moon and ocean spirits, and now, who knows what will happen to the world.”

Okay, that’s – that’s really bad. Sokka and Katara exchange alarmed glances. The moon is dead? How does that make sense, it’s the moon. Seeing the clear incredulous disbelief that must be in Sokka’s expression, Katara shrugs one shoulder and says, “Spirits.”

He kinda hates how well that works as an explanation.

“Well, I can tell you what’s going to happen to the world,” Sokka decides. “First, we need to get the hell out of here and find Aang. Once we find Aang and probably break him out of his jail, then we’re going to help him do his Avatar thing. He can probably fix the moon.” Right? Sokka frowns at the blue sky stretched above their heads.

Runi gawks in stunned surprise. “The – the Avatar? You can’t be serious.”

“We are,” Katara says, prickling slightly.

Bato sets his hand on Runi’s shoulder. “Aang was captured by the Fire Nation together with the rest of us. Katara and Sokka traveled with him from the Southern Water Tribe.”

From the corner of his eye, Sokka watches the guards patrol atop the walls. A couple inmates run laps along the small perimeter of the yard. The air is so humid, Sokka sweats so much it’s ridiculous. He wasn’t aware it was physically possible to sweat this much while not in the grips of a deep fever.

Katara bites her lower lip. She explains for Runi, “We were traveling to the North Pole so Aang and I can learn how to waterbend. All the – all the other waterbenders from the South are gone.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Runi says heavily, with a slightly dazed and clobbered look.

Katara accepts his condolences with a tight nod. Her right hand clutches protectively at her necklace.

“Sooo,” Sokka drags out and glances around for any attentive ears. “Escape plans? Any ideas?”

“Without bending, our greatest obstacle is the lake. Either we manage to float across or we take the gondolas above,” says Bato.

Sokka heaves in a deep breath and starts thinking as hard as he can. They’re getting out of this. No Fire Nation jerks are keeping him contained.

The door to Aang’s cell opens with a bang. He jolts out of his meditative quiet to a woman cupping a small flame in her hand, looking at him from scruffy head to wriggling toes. She glances back into the hallway and hisses, “Brother Iroh, I found him.”

Without waiting for her brother to respond, she steps into the tiny room and pulls a ring of keys from her silken sleeve. She immediately starts jamming keys into the locks on his manacles. Aang feels a little bad for Zuko. It was just a day or two ago that the ghost came back from the spirit world. He said he’d look into how Aang could escape, but now it’s rapidly looking like his efforts will become redundant.

A man appears in the doorway as the last of Aang’s chains fall away. Standing up faster than he anticipated, Aang nearly collides with the nice lady. The unidentified man holds out a thin, hooded cloak and requests, “Avatar Aang, please put this on.”

The ring disappears back up the woman’s sleeves and her small fire snuffs out. “Come along,” she says gently as Aang swings the cloak on and fastens it at his neck. She turns back to the man. “Lead the way.”

Out of his cell and the tiny stretch of hallway he’d been allowed in so he can use the bathroom, Aang finally gets a decent handle on where he is. The adults lead him through twists and turns of natural and man-made caves and catacombs. Occasionally, they pass by walls of heat wafting up from open pits of lava, which, wow.

Aang aches in every inch of his lungs and with every beat of his heart to reach open air, to see the sky, to fly. Hurt stabs him viciously because he’d been dreaming of Appa, and he has no idea where his companion is. The princess left Appa and Momo behind like so much dead weight. Where are they now?

Aang’s savors walk silently, tense with vigilance and anticipation.

The smell of the ocean slowly grows until they finally step out of the tunnels’ dimness onto a hillside rolling down towards churning waters. The woman begins to relax, but the man – probably that Brother Iroh – shakes his head. He whispers, “We aren’t entirely in the clear yet.”

In the clear or not, Aang breathes in a deep, grateful lungful of the night air. Unable to stop himself, he stares unblinkingly up at the stars stretching on and on through the heavens. He bounces lightly on his feet, which brings a small smile to the lady’s face.

“There’s the signal,” the man says and leads them to the surf. The ocean rumbles at Aang as they step along the rocky beach. Foam churns and drags its chilled fingers over small pebbles and rocks. The water’s black surface swallows the stars, one by one.

“You trust too easily,” Zuko said to Aang once. That may be so, but Aang hasn’t been wrong in his trust yet. Because there, in a small sailing boat that melts out of the night, is someone Aang never expected to see in the Fire Nation.

Standing between two men Aang doesn’t recognize in blue, Bumi cackles and says when they’re close enough that their voice won’t travel to unfriendly ears, “Aang! We heard you could use a little help.”

Chapter Text

Zuko drags his fingers through the tacky blood in his hair, frowning in distaste at the red smeared all over his hands and soaking into his clothing. It’s impossible to put his hair into anything resembling neatness like this.

“This is not what I had in mind when I said that the Avatar would escape us,” Zuko tells Azula.

“Shut up,” she snaps.

Rolling his eyes, Zuko raises his hands – whatever. Fuming, she scans the memorized missive one last time. With a clench of her fist, she sets it on fire.

“He’s a traitor,” she declares. “They’re both traitors.”

Zuko tucks his hands into damp sleeves. Any trace of wry teasing fades away. A drop of blood drips from his loose hair. Despite the late hour, he hears the muffled noise of construction; a few more night shifts and the war machine will be done. Even further in the distance, Zuko can convince himself he hears a faint whine and concussive booms.

Serious, he asks her, “What are our plans?”

With plain distaste, Azula shakes white flakes of ash off her hand. She answers while wiping her palm, “That depends on Father. For now, we remain here at General Ni Shu’s side. I can’t return to the capital and the Fire Lord until Ba Sing Se is conquered and garrisoned.”

“Father’s already at the capital and pressing every advantage he can get,” Zuko tells her with a frown. “I’ve been following him around. A lot of ministers already switched sides or threw their loyalties behind his claim to the throne.”

And not discretely. The meetings, declarations, and money exchanging hands had all been vocal, open, and showy enough that Fire Lord Azulon couldn’t possibly ignore it. Not all of the performances were for the benefit of warding off the gallows or the executioner’s blade either. Despite the political allure and favor Azula will gain through her role in bringing Ba Sing Se to its knees, staying half a world away from the palace and court will cost her.

“I’m Father’s heir,” Azula says. “Neither Father nor Grandfather can ignore that.” She stands amid battle plans drawn and verified over and again. Another rumble rolls through the air and the thin wooden panels nailed together into the barely clean officers’ barracks. Another bead of blood trickles down Zuko’s neck and into his collar.

He leans against a cabinet welded together out of metal and pure military utilitarianism and glances into the small mirror propped up before Azula. Despite the dirt and the late hours and the aggressive smell of hundreds of thousands of men and women pressed together in an army camp, her face remains clean of blemishes and scrapes. The room behind her reflection is empty of all other life. The ground reverberates with the passage of a heavy vehicle.

Zuko closes his eyes, feeling the deep vibrations, and says, “Not exactly. Grandfather…Fire Lord Azulon, he’s just one declaration away from renaming you his daughter and adopting you straight into the line of succession. He wouldn’t have placed you with General Ni Shu so early if he had any intention of letting Father or Uncle sit on the throne for long.” Zuko’s voice trails. “The people Father is collecting aren’t…going to be very friendly to you.”

In the small silence, he opens his eyes. Azula turns away from her narrow table squeezed against the wall. The torchlight flickers. Hydraulics groan. She says nothing. The hour is late.

Zuko does not plead. “Survive the assault.”

She scoffs. “Of course.”

Aang wakes up at about mid-morning. He hadn’t realized it in his captivity, but his hours of sleep had steadily shifted off course. With the rhythm and noise of the ships, Aang pulls himself back into order. Shrugging on the too large blue shirt lent to him, he clambers out of his bunk and clatters onto the ship’s deck. Bright sunlight breaks through the scattered, but thick clouds, in glinting, dappled patches.

When he isn’t too busy, Master Pakku puts Aang through drills and exercises that double as preparatory work for learning how to waterbend and to get Aang back into shape after couped up for so long.

Today though, Mater Pakku has other ideas. He immediately intercepts Aang, blocking the way to raucous laughter and movement towards the bow of the ship. “Avatar Aang, we need to talk.”

“Okay,” Aang agrees genially. “But what’s going on there?” He attempts peering around the ship masts.

Sighing, Pakku says, “Just King Bumi.”

A thorough explanation in and of itself. The morning after Aang’s jailbreak, while he yawned and blinked at an overcast sky, he asked why his friend wasn’t at Omashu. In answer, Bumi cackled about something involving a spot of light exercise.

Though also according to Bumi, it won’t be long before he and Aang split ways again. The woman and man – a lady and prince of the Fire Nation, of all people apparently – already peeled off from the main group of Northern Tribe sailors and warriors on a couple tasks of their own.

Pakku leads Aang towards the boat’s stern. The voices quiet. Bright sunlight glints off the waves in dappled triangles, hints of yellow-white flashes among cloudy green and blue. Pakku’s gaze returns to the wide, flat sea surrounding them and his knees accommodate the sway of the currents with easy instinct.

 “I doubt you had a chance to learn what happened at the North Pole,” Pakku says.

“Actually, I know a little bit.” Aang watches the trail of foam churning in the ship’s wake. Truly fascinating. He totally isn’t avoiding looking at Master Pakku. “But, uh, not a lot. So…”

A pause, then Pakku says, “The attack on the North Pole scattered us. We never anticipated the Fire Nation would be so bold or so arrogant.” Looking at Aang and his freshly shaven head, he says, “We should have.”

The wind pushes against Aang’s sleeves and presses against the sails. A massive attacking force, Master Pakku says. Zhao, Aang remembers. The tribe holding steady despite being outnumbered, Pakku explains with crossed arms and an age-lined, impassive face. Then the flash of red light, then the suffocation of no light.

“The ocean rose through the canals.”

(The water bursts from the pool, blue and silver and enraged. Zuko squawks in surprise. Zhao doesn’t even get that far.)

“Not at the command of any benders. It moved of its own accord and under its own might. The black night turned blue. What was already chaos became more so.

“La is not like Agni of the two faces.” Gulls scream. Pakku speaks on as if there is silence. “We are not like the Fire Nation that prays to the mother sun during peace and sacrifices to the father inferno during conflict as if these aspects are separate and exclusive. We understand that the ocean that brings life takes us to our deaths with the same current. Without the moon, us humans are inhibited, unable to confer with the water and ice. Not so for spirits.”

(The water snatches Zhao with savage roughness and snaps him through the air like a killer whale breaking the spine of an otter penguin. The crack slices through the soldiers’ screams and fire. The terrified noises abruptly cut off. Gulping for breath, Zuko stares at the limp body.)

“For a military that prizes the offensive, the invaders understood how and when to retreat.” Pakku grins a sardonic smirk. “They pulled back swiftly, but not before laying waste to most of the city. Homes melted and destroyed. Lives stolen. The ocean was hardly kinder, ripping through our foundations and obliterating our canal locks in its haste to crush the metal fleet. With bending, it would have taken us weeks to recover. Without bending, the damages could not be repaired and our injured remained burned and wounded.

“The season of great snowstorms fast approaches. With so much devastation and no waterbending, the tribe would not survive. Even a ship like this is rare, so dependent had we become on bending. Without more ships to trade with the Earth Kingdom, we’d starve.”

“So you left,” Aang says.

With wounded pride, Pakku says, “So we left. Over a thousand people dislocated, Avatar Aang, each of us with someone close to us a casualty.”

(In his inattention, Zuko doesn’t realize the danger of the glowing water until it shifts into unnatural shapes. Its touch hurts worse than the searing burn of ice and it drags them all into the black deep.)

“And they took the princess,” Aang says.

“Princess Yue, yes,” Master Pakku says with ice in his voice. “Along with other prisoners and hostages.”

Aang hunches in slightly. After they left the blood-soaked clearing, the bamboo forests he and Zuko walked through quickly gave way to tall trees like those in the Earth Kingdom. Unlike the woods Aang traveled through with Katara and Sokka and Appa and Momo at his side, the air was devoid of insects buzzing or small animals ruffling. Giving up on wiping his hands dry, let alone clean, Zuko pressed his fingers against his forehead, evidently nursing a vile headache.

“The spirits normally aren’t this assertive, and frankly shoving information straight into my head is obnoxious,” Zuko said. “Didn’t even give a good explanation for why. Just, ‘The bridge must meet the northern princess.’” He muttered angrily, “Geez, thanks a lot.”

To Pakku, Aang says while pressing his hands nervously against his legs, “The spirits say she’s important for fixing the moon.”

A swift undercurrent passes through the master waterbender’s eyes. “Is that so.”

Aang latches onto the hint of answers and asks, “Do you know how?”

For a long while, Pakku holds his silence. Waves slap against the boat’s hull. Then, finally, he says, “Only speculations. This is a matter best discussed with the chief present.”

“Okay,” Aang accepts for now. “And then, when the moon’s back, then waterbending should be back too?” His heart lurches. Oh, Katara. Spirits, Aang misses her, Sokka, Appa, Momo, and – and everyone. He misses so many people. So much has happened since that flushed pink dawn when Aang and Katara promised each other they’ll journey to the Northern Tribe together to learn waterbending at each other’s side. So much has happened since the day the monks revealed Aang’s identity as the Avatar to him.

“Yes, waterbending should be back,” Pakku says. “Then we can immediately begin your training.”

“And my friend Katara,” says Aang. “She and Sokka are at Boiling Rock. When the other group does the prison break, they have to grab my friends too.”

“A girl?” Pakku mutters. “We’ll see.”

The bombs fall upon the earth below with a low whine. Explosive booms smash through the air, a thin shake Azula feels occasionally through her feet. The airship flies on, keeping ahead of the wind pushing the rising plumes of smoke.

Between all the officers and engineers bustling about in the lookout cabin and the polite breadth around Azula, General Ni Shu, Mai, and Ty Lee, there’s standing room only by the windows. “Group Four, approaching target,” Azula hears among the din behind her. Gently, the airship curves.

Ni Shu pulls the looking glass away from her eye. With a small quirk at the corner of her mouth, a sign as good as any of her snide satisfaction at the expense of the city below, she says, “They aren’t repairing the train stations. Guess those weren’t constructed thanks to earthbending.”

The rail system isn’t, if what Zuko told her is correct. Master earthbending teams that can erect precise architecture like the above-ground lines don’t come easily. And the lines are old. The original builders are long retired or dead.

Without the lines, the city’s inhabitants won’t be able to coordinate an organized resistance so easily. The Fire Nation will have flame and smoke signals and the airships to direct actions. Just a few days left.

“Target reached, release payload.”

Azula steps closer to the window. Silently, Ni Shu offers the spyglass, but Azula shakes her head. Just barely along the bottom edge, she watches the bombs drop through the air. Given the unusable seas, the general’s supply line of armaments is a work of nothing less than genius. As the bomb nears the ground, a chunk of street dislodges and hurtles into the air. The explosion goes off early, high above the houses.

Drawing back from the window, Azula observes, “They’re getting better at defending.”

“Not well enough,” says the general.

it will become myth
it will become legend
the fifty-nine days
of the widower sea

Aang finds her, as Zuko tersely informed him he would while they walked through the sunless spirit world, on one of the few remaining Fire Nation boats still sailing intact at sea. The metal battleship towers far above the cloth sails and smooth wood of the Water Tribe’s vessel. Great columns of smoke rise from the central tower in plumes that drag against the overcast sky. The ship moves fast enough that Aang says, “We’re not going to catch up.”

“No,” Pakku says while foam churns around their rudder. “We will.”

The ocean propels them forward.

Alarms ring out above on the Fire Nation ship and Aang hears more than he sees the throng of soldiers amassing on the deck. The sound of metal grinding against metal bounces over the surface of the water. Aang hears, “Fire!” and great balls of fire launch into the air.

Just as Aang bends his knees to leap in an intercept, Pakku cuts him off. “Don’t waste energy on shots that will miss.”

To prove his point, their ship shoots forward, easily evading the projectiles. Water slams against the side of the Fire Nation ship in a wave that surges to almost the deck’s height. Shouts of alarm mingle with rivets groaning as the ship lurches to the side. Finally close enough to their target, the Water Tribe men fling grappling hooks up for boarding.

“Avatar Aang,” calls out Pakku. A burst of flame bangs over their heads. “Find Princes Yue. Bring her back safe.”

Nodding once, Aang says, “Got it,” and jumps.

Without his glider or Appa, Aang only has his bending to see himself onboard. There’s a yell, “It’s the Avatar!” Aang waves in its direction and immediately flings himself out of the line of fire. Now, if Aang was holding a princess hostage on a military ship, where would he keep her?

…Okay, Aang wouldn’t keep a princess hostage in the first place, so he has no idea. Wracking his brain for what he can remember of the old Fire Nation ship he and Katara wandered around in so long ago, Aang dodges around men in blue fighting against masked soldiers in red. The door into the ship’s tower opens. He sprints inside, looping above the startled sailor’s head.

“Princess Yue?” He slams a door open. No Princess Yue. He slams the door back shut.

“Princess Yue?”

“Princess Yue!”

“Princess – woah!” Aang drops to the ground. The fireball roars down the hall, its heat ruffling the fabric of his borrowed outfit.

“It really is a kid,” the soldier who attacked says incredulously. “You gotta be joking.”

Aang flips back onto his feet. “Do you know where Princess Yue is?”

Without missing a beat, the soldier instantly lies, “No.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.” A ball of air slings Aang forward at top speed, smashing into and knocking over the alarmed guard. Aang snatches a set of keys from their left hand and he says, “I’m taking this anyways.”

“Hey.”

With a gust of air, Aang flings the sputtering and coughing soldier as far down the hallway he can and then takes off in the opposite direction.

Twenty-some doors and many flights of stairs later, along with several more key rings he snagged just in case, Aang finally arrives at the right place.

The ship creaks to the side. Loudly. He’s honestly intimidated.

“Princess Yue?” Aang asks, even though who else could it be.

“That’s me,” she confirms. “And you are?”

Princess Yue weathered her imprisonment far better than Aang had. They didn’t even put her in chains; she sits primly in her cell, blinking blue eyes a shade closer to silver than Katara’s. Loose white hair drapes over her shoulders, surprisingly unruffled despite the navy ship’s intense rocking.

It takes him a few tries, but finally a solid thwap gets the key into the door’s lock and he cheerfully says, “I’m Aang. Let’s getcha out of here.”

“Who else is with you?” She stands without stumbling as the ocean bashes itself against the hull again. Aang doesn’t quite have the balance or the knack for it yet, and he stumbles to the side.

Yanking the door open, Aang answers, “A bunch of warriors from the North Pole. Master Pakku said he’ll help me train my waterbending.” Under his breath, he adds, “Once waterbending is back.” He glances back up at her taller form. “Can you run?”

“Yes.”

They run.

Thankfully, the corridors of the ship are straightforward. They stumble and sprint onto the deck with less trouble than Aang expected.

A riot of blue and red clashes across the soaked deck. Besides Aang, Princess Yue instinctively flinches back from the cacophony of sound. But Aang barely notices because –

“What is that?” he shrieks, pointing at a massive, a massive – a tentacle? It’s as thick as his body. Further down the deck, another tentacle slaps against a trio of navy men in red. Screaming, they go overboard and plummet into the churning sea. Yet another tentacle shoves at the ship. Aang yelps, and nearly collides his elbow into the doorframe.

“A kraken,” Princess Yue breathes in awe, perfectly balanced.

“Where did it come from?” Aang wonders aloud, not unfairly. Then, ah, there. He yells, “Master Pakku!” and knocks aside a bunch of Fire Nation sailors like so many stray pins. Suddenly bereft of his opponents, the old master glances over.

Had Yue been Sokka or Katara, she would have waved, but, well, she isn’t. Instead, she yells over the din, “Where’s the ship?”

An unholy screech pierces the air. Ears ringing, Aang winces while the kraken slams its mass against the hull of the Fire Nation ship again. The abused metal creaks, distressingly. A couple bodies too close to the wrong edge go tumbling off. Something in the metal ship that absolutely shouldn’t let out a giant bang, crashes and does.

Hastily, Aang scopes up Princess Yue, ducks a stray shot of fire, and hustles for the port side of the deeply injured boat. “This way.”

“No, wait, Avatar Aang, this way,” one of the Water Tribe warriors calls out in alarm.

Aang banks hard, dodges a stray bit of kraken, and course corrects. Across the deck, fighters disengage from each other, either rushing to deboard or deeper into the ship. Still clutching the princess who has an arm wrapped tight around his shoulders, Aang leaps overboard. A puff of air softens his landing on a deck of wooden boards.

“Princess Yue!”

“Welcome back!”

Aang sets her on her feet and she smiles gratefully at him and the shifting crowd of men that rotate between reading for departure and greeting her. With heavy thumps, the rest of the tribesmen land on the deck, some assisting wounded comrades, some soaking wet from a dip in the ocean.

Master Pakku lands and sets a hand on Aang’s shoulder. “Thank you for seeing our princess back to safety. Now, if you could help with the sails?”

“Is my father well?” Princess Yue asks once the Fire Nation ship still harried by the honest to goodness kraken disappears over the horizon. Or into the angry waters.

In a deferential tone Aang hasn’t heard him use with anyone else, Master Pakku replies, “He is, princess. He’s accompanying the main group of our people seeking shelter in the Earth Kingdom until we can safely return to our home. We’ll reunite with them soon.”

“I’m glad,” she says. “Thank you all for helping me reach freedom.”

“Of course, princess.”

Then she glances over at Aang and says, “I’d like to speak to Avatar Aang in private.”

“Uh, sure.”

The amassed people make way as she moves towards the boat’s stern. Slowly, the men return to the work of sailing. The ocean current cradles the boat and pushes it forward.

If forced to make an estimate, Aang pins Yue’s age at around Sokka’s, if a bit older. The salty wind runs its fingers through her long white hair spilling over her shoulders and down her back. Despite the fact she must want a bath as desperately as Aang wanted one immediately into his freedom, her entire countenance is one of patience.

Aang hops up to sit on the planks of wood forming the ship’s hull. Blue-green waves roil behind his back. As casually as he can, he asks, “So what did you want to talk about?”

Her piercing blue eyes weigh him. She says, “While I was held captive on that ship, the ocean spirit spoke to me. In all their currents and all their depths, they told me that once I meet the bridge between worlds, I had a choice to make.

“Since I was an infant, I owed a life debt to the moon. I was born sickly and quiet, but by the moon spirit’s grace, I healed and recovered. And now,” her eyes tip briefly towards the empty sky, “I can choose to repay my debt.”

The ship shifts in the water. Aang’s hands clench on the wood at his sides. He opens his mouth, but nothing wants to come out. He wets his lips and with shuddering breath asks, “What do you mean?”

“The moon granted me life. I can grant it back.”

“And what will happen to you?” A plead enters his voice. This isn’t what he expected at all when she said she wanted to talk with him. He thought, he thought she wanted to talk about – something else. Getting to know each other as friends, perhaps. About Aang’s experience with her people so far, or about the current state of the war, which frankly he can barely answer either. Not this. How can she stand there so calmly, so unbendingly strong? How did Aang wake up in this incomprehensibly strange world of war, of decimated homes, of ash and bone?

How do her hands not shake as she says, “It will likely take my life.”

How does her voice not waver as she says, “I’m sorry, but when the time comes, I will need you to be there to help.”

“The ocean spirit gave you a choice. What if you say no? Choose no, please. Yue, you’re just a teenager,” says Aang anxiously. A vice squeezes around him. He just saved her from the Fire Nation. Is this what he saved her for? Sacrifice?

She softens and a gentle hand reaches out to his knee. She has slim fingers, untouched by daily hard labor, unlike Katara. She has hands bare from callouses, unlike Sokka. In a voice trying to comfort him, Yue says, “Then countless more innocent lives will die before their time, Aang. Eventually, the moon spirit will recover, but it will be many years too late.”

Weakly, Aang lets go of the wood and curls his hands over hers. A memory suddenly strikes him, of the last time he saw Zuko, gold eyes glaring as he spits out how Zhao deserved to die. And removed from the act, Aang had disagreed with Zuko’s loathing, hadn’t he? But now, staring at Yue’s calm determination, he can only shakily ask, “Why?”

Yue’s hand shifts and her other hand joins it to squeeze his numb fingers. The wind and the sea bear ancient witness. She says, “Because it is my duty, Aang.”

His shoulders hunch up high. His head bows.

“This isn’t fair.”

“I’m sorry, Aang.”

“This isn’t fair. You don’t have to…”

“I do. Aang, can I ask just one favor?”

Slowly, he looks up.

The ocean stretches out so far around them, a flat blue haze in all directions as the water grasps at the sky along the distant horizon. The air feels huge and so, so heavy against his tiny lungs and his tiny might. He feels as significant as a bug, squashed without notice, without care, under the world.

Slowly, he looks up and she looks back.

And oh, her calm is only the surface, only a thin layer of ice forming a fragile skin over the deep depth below. I’m scared, I miss my home, why, why, cries out her dark waters. I’m sorry.

“Before…before I choose. May I see my father?”

“Of course,” Aang swears. “Of course.”

Out of what Azula would derisively call self-loathing and an inadequate attempt to assuage his misplaced and misspent guilt – poor Zuzu, what do you think you could possibly achieve – Zuko transports himself to the slums of Ba Sing Se, rather than continue his hunt for where his mother and uncle disappeared into the night to. The smell of charred dust and – and something else slams into him like a hammer. Shouting. The grind of stone against stone. A child calling out names. A ragged man calling out names. Plaster choked coughing.

A stretcher passes through Zuko and he glances down at a teenage boy, about Azula’s age and far scrawnier. His left arm, what remains of it, is a mangled mess of red streaks stark against thick smears of gray.

Stone grinds against stone. “We found another one!”

The stretcher carries the half-conscious boy into the dense press of the crowd.

“I need water over here!”

“The pipes are busted, we’re out of water.”

“Anyone got bandages? Oi – you – where the hell are the doctors?”

“Hit this morning.”

“Sh—”

“Mama? Mama? Brother, where are you?”

Zuko climbs over a pile of shingles, slid off from a toppled over roof that looks cracked and squashed like a giant kicked it over, then stamped on it. Wooden splinters litter the muddy street. In the light of the setting sun, an orange glow exposes the cratered ruins marching deeper into the city from the outside walls. The tight alleys and streets that twist in an organic sprawl, the calling card of the great city, as uniquely theirs as the canals of the smashed North Pole, are obliterated. The new roads, if they can be called such, blasted into existence from the sky above, are wide enough for the large tanks of steel.

He walks. Around two more corners, the cries dampen and fade out. A cart of soft bags filled with sand rattles past. A thick, black trail of smoke smears across the sky. All the animals have disappeared from the streets. Food stalls sit shuttered and empty. On a roof, a man in a uniform and a conical hat stands.

With the tram system destroyed, the inhabitants of the different rings are largely trapped from each other. The shadow of a ship passes across his path. All action around him silences, tense. It moves on.

He walks. Posters plaster the walls of the Middle Ring. Declarations against those that do not adhere to rations. Instructions for curfews and blackouts. Whispers everywhere in the street. Pockmarks here and there. Entrances to newly constructed underground shelters.

Another pass of an airborne patrol. Rather than silence, the whispers buzz louder. The roads are wide enough here, the military targets scattered enough here, that the bombs are a tragedy for someone else.

In the Upper Ring: glances of trepidation towards the palace, glances of fear towards the palace, glances of anger towards the palace. He watches an arrest on the street.

The untouched walls of the grand palace glimmer in the fading last light of the setting sun. In the distance, to the left, he sees the black dot of an airship, easily bypassing the towering walls of Ba Sing Se, a monument to a dead age. Built from blood, bending, and bones, the walls stand so tall they alter the weather. Their foundations groan under their colossal weight. For six hundred days, the walls withstood stone bombardments and the plague, starvation, and thirst of siege. In six hundred minutes, the bombs and the airships turned the walls into a trap.

Two days before the planned battle, the airships begin dropping flyers urging the city to surrender or evacuate towards the ocean path left purposefully clear of the otherwise total blockade.

So it goes like this: Even though Katara can’t bend, the prison guards never put her on any jobs or chores that involve water. Fine. But if Sokka’s sloppy and maybe a bit clumsy and gets his clothes damp, well that’s just his mess ups. Hey, he’s never mopped a floor before, cut him some slack, yeah?

“No luck?” he asks in the spirits-forsakenly humid yard.

Katara shakes her head. “I’ve been trying to bend my spit and the tears from when I yawn,” she tells him.

He eyes her. “Gross.”

She elbows him in the arm. “The prison guards eye me like a wary polar bear dog every time I take a sip of water.”

“Still gross,” he insists, then waves a damp sleeve her way. “Here, some liquids that aren’t body fluids.”

“Given how much you sweat, it’s at least half body fluids by now,” she quips, deadpan. But Katara lays a hand against his sleeve regardless. Not expecting much, given the dozens of failed attempts already, she wills ice.

A flash of cold spreads over Sokka’s arm. Twin shocked expressions snap up to each other, then immediately search the sky. But it’s the middle of the day, so all Sokka achieves is blinding himself on the sun. Blinking rapidly, he returns his gaze to Katara.

“Holy shit,” he blurts out.

“Stop learning swears from the other prisoners,” she immediately responds, but it’s without her full concentration, purely out of habit.

Sokka ignores her. “We need to find Bato.”

“And Runi. And the others,” she dazedly adds. Clenching her hand, she turns the patch of sparse ice crystals back into water and slips it onto her own sleeve. She can bend again.

With no time to lose, he hisses at her, “The boiling lake. Do you think you can?”

She tips her head and lets her arm swing down from his sleeve to her side as casually as she can. Her eyes go impossibly wider. Nodding vigorously, she says, “Yes, yes, I think I can. Sokka.”

“Bato and the others, now,” he says and starts herding them towards the exit from the yard. Discretely. Totally discretely. “We have to move before tonight or the gig’s up. I have no idea what phase the moon is supposed to be on right now.”

“Right, right.” They stroll a little closer to the exit.

Okay, okay, okay. The moon’s back. Waterbending is back, thank the spirits and the stars. Katara’s bending is probably good enough to get them across the lake. The Northern tribesmen definitely should have good enough bending. Then they skedaddle to freedom and then –

“Katara, we’re on an island, how are we getting off the island?” Sokka hisses. They flew over half a morning’s worth of open sea to reach the prison, with no idea how far the Earth Kingdom is in the other direction.

Concern flashes across Katara’s expression for a moment then she mutters, “The prison definitely isn’t growing its own food.”

Ah, right. Their meals are so disgusting that Sokka honestly tries blocking it all from his memory. He does remember the storm that got him utterly sick though, and so he’s got concerns, because this is a terrible plan, but they could evade capture on, like, an ice raft on sea for a bit if there isn’t immediate transport off the island. He thinks. Oh spirits, they’re going to starve themselves aren’t they. Shoot, shoot, shoot.

They near the exit. Sokka huffs out a breath to steel his nerves and says to Katara, “Okay, here’s the plan—”

“And where are you two going?”

Katara abruptly halts and Sokka, just a step or so behind her, slams into her shoulder. Before them, blocking the doorway, is the warden. Oh boy.

Without really his conscious decision, the first thing that leaps to Sokka’s mind tumbles out of his mouth. “Bathroom! We need to go to the bathroom. Emergency, you know.”

Unimpressed and flanked by a pair of guards, the warden drawls, “Oh? It can’t wait a few moments for the yard shift to be over?”

In a massively bad idea, Katara flexes her right hand and begins swinging her arm up. Sokka smacks it back down, she’s going to give away their one major advantage, and practically shouts, “Can’t wait! Not a single moment to lose!”

“I don’t think so,” the warden says, narrowing his eyes. “In fact, I think we’ve been too lenient towards you two. Guards, separate them.” A cruel glint gleams in his eyes. “And take her to our special accommodations. Absolutely no water and no people. We remember the vile creativity waterbenders can get up to when backed into a corner, don’t we?”

Oh no he doesn’t. If only Sokka had a club, or a boomerang, or even the fan Suki gave him. The guards menacingly step forward and Sokka has to hope his hand-to-hand is enough to hold one off. He steps to the side – spirits, the guards are burly and it’s going to hurt Sokka’s fists more than the padded uniform to punch them – and gives Katara room to do whatever she can do and, yikes, that’s a firebender, that’s a flame whip, how’s Sokka supposed to get close and deal with that and –

And that is when a massive boom rocks through the prison, shocking enough to cut off the warden’s smug smirk. Everyone freezes. Flames sputter out, because even louder than the bang is the immediate roar of thousands of gallons of rushing water.

“Katara, explanation please,” Sokka squawks.

“I don’t know! I can’t see what’s going on,” she yelps back.

Luckily, a guard stationed on the wall can see and with extreme effort, yells down, “Warden, something’s draining the lake!”

“What?”

“Something’s draining the—”

“I heard you the first time. Tell me how.”

The guard gulps – Sokka imagines he’s gulping, Sokka would gulp in this situation – and stammers, “We – we don’t know.”

Not that this admission matters, because the yard, full of prisoners, full of ready to escape prisoners, upon hearing that the boiling lake is draining, instantly goes bug wild. It’s fire and shouting and chaos everywhere. Prisoners mow down the far outnumbered guards with ease. A fireball smacks back the guard renewing his approach towards Sokka as an inmate with an apparent vendetta sprints full tilt at the warden. “Thanks!” Sokka’s haywire brain yells and he grabs his sister by the elbow and bolts for Bato and the Northern Tribesmen’s cell blocks.

“Stop them!”

Some facts.

First, draining or not, the boiling lake makes the entire prison almost unbearably hot. Coupled with the blazing heat of the sun, there’s a reason why once indoors, everyone can instantly smell who just came in from outside.

Second, no amount of misgivings from Sokka kept Katara from borderline obsessively cataloguing all sources of water or any liquid which could give her an edge once opportunity arises. Sweat, she decided six days in, should definitely count.

Third, what Katara lacks in training, she more than makes up through sheer adrenaline and desperation right now.

The lake water draining away outside is just on the edge of Katara’s reach, but that’s fine because she grabs hold of her sweat – eugh – and every drop of spare water she can and she flings ice needles into arms and shoulders. The majority of the liquid she collects she keeps with herself though.

Oh, it feels so good to have her bending back.

She and Sokka dash into the tall halls of cells and he shouts, “This way!”

Faster than she thought she could ever move, they sprint up stairs and barrel through guards caught wrong-footed. The noise outside echoes oddly against the metal panels of the walls. The sound of water fills her to overflowing; everything feels tinted and tilted with her lightheadedness, with her euphoria.

“We need to pull those levers, then all the doors will open,” Sokka says, pointing. Locked doors and staff-only corridors block their way.

“Well, don’t slip,” says Katara and she splits her precious liquids into ice foot and handholds up the wall to their target railing. They scramble up.

From the cells, a few prisoners bang on the doors and bellow through the thin slits of windows, “Hey, what’s going on?”

“Prison break!” Sokka calls out and slams the levers down.

No one needs any further explanation or prompting.

Frantically searching for Bato in the surge of bodies, Katara says, “We need to get onto the walls. I need to see what’s going on and get to the water.”

“Got it. Runi, over here.”

Two levels down, Runi startles and turns around. He catches sight of Katara’s ice still clinging to the walls and his shock magnifies. Once he’s closer and Katara manages to finally locate Bato pushing against the tide of bodies, Runi asks, “What’s that noise?”

“The lake’s draining. We don’t know why yet,” Katara answers. “Wait down there.” Together, she and Sokka swing down.

“I guess we don’t have to worry about dislodging one of the coolers anymore,” Sokka says. “Waterbending’s back.”

Katara recalls her ice into water coating her hands and splits some off to Runi.

“Thanks,” he says. “You’re talented.”

She beams.

Turns out, Katara and Sokka aren’t the only ones with the idea to mount the walls. In the minutes they spent inside releasing everyone from their cells, the chaos surged up and out from the yard. Sidestepping a guard with a missed helmet getting punched in the face, Katara darts through the flow of people grappling and shoving up the stairs.

“Sokka, Katara, keep close,” Bato calls out in warning.

The scene from atop the wall exceeds her imagination. There, to the southern side of the island, a massive hole in the caldera lip guzzles water away, presumably down to the ocean. The roar of water foams and churns as it tears past in an untamable rush. Whirlpools swirl. This can only be the work of an earthbender. Or a massive stockpile of blasting jelly.

Runi pulls up beside Katara and says, “That water’s still going to be rough crossing.”

“But we can, can’t we?” asks Sokka.

“Sure. Katara, help me get Horu and the others’ attention.” And with a grace despite the torn, grimy red outfit forced on him and everything it encompasses and entails, despite the weeks without the moon, Runi yanks a great spout of water out from the lake below and high into the air, marking their position. The weight bobs unevenly and quickly copying his moves, Katara helps stabilize the waterspout. The inmates around them erupt into cheers. In short order, all the captured members of the Water Tribe gather together.

Sharing a grin with each other, Sokka nods and Katara says, saturated with relief, “Let’s get out of here.”

When later, Aang will ask Sokka, in an odd mixture of ecstatic joy and a somber dimness, what happened, Sokka honestly won’t remember much. The entire hour or so of the mass prison break will come in snatches: the way the hot water hisses when it crashes into the much colder ocean; the chill of rough ice below his feet as they slide and run down a ramp from the wall to the thunderous lake surface; Bumi of all people appearing like a cackling spirit vision while the escapees split into different groups.

“It was all, ice! Earth platforms, fire everywhere, chaos!” Sokka will fling his arms out. He will really need to borrow whatever Aang uses to shave his head. “It was a lot, it was crazy. What about you?”

And Aang’s small grin will dissolve. “It was also a lot. I’d rather talk about it with Katara here too.”

“Oh, okay.” Here, Sokka will set careful hands on Aang’s shoulders and think, the kid’s too thin. “Hey. I’m glad to see you again, buddy. Katara and I, we really are. And we’re going to find Appa and we’re going to go back out there and this time we’re kicking Fire Nation butt. We’re with you through thick and thin, Aang.”

At his words, the pressure weighing Aang down will ease slightly. He’ll say, “Thanks Sokka. Come on, let’s go see Katara yell at Master Pakku again.”

But for now, at the other side of a different ocean:

The morning dawns with brilliant bands of color and a pure golden light. Not a single cloud mars the soft purple and pale blue dome above the quiet earth. A tranquil breeze plays through the trees and ruffles the surface of the lake with its whistling laughter. Small animals sing and chatter among the swaying, dew-covered grass.

The small heads of budding flowers shake with the tremoring ground.

Zuko flickers through the long line of soldiers, a thick column of red and tanks and komodo rhinos and glinting weapons and sturdy, mobile shields. They sing to the beat of the marching feet. To arms, to glory, the swell cries. Undefeated, we will triumph.

A blue haze unrolls across the land and sky. The drill’s steam cuts across the crawling dawn with dark shadows. The watchtower, raised for now, gleams like an unblinking red beacon against the lingering night. In a distance, the ground troops follow.

The drill first – how loud it is. Then the tanks, uncaring for the slurry which will quickly dry. Then the soldiers, on foot, on animal transport, on rumbling vehicles holding a dozen bodies at a time. In the full light of day, they will cross the flat farmland and reach the inner wall.

The few troops defending the city brace themselves on the arid plain before the massive outer wall. If the invasion achieves the unthinkable, there are reserves standing tense and at the ready among the dew-wet crops.

Zuko observes the soldiers around him and the difference in these troops from his father’s fighters. General Ni Shu drills her men and women to an almost obsessive degree. Her hardened veterans mingle among her raw recruits. He winces as he recalls the far more lax and untrained forces of Ba Sing Se.

It’s going to be a slaughter.

“What have I done?” he asks the sharp rays of the rising sun. “What am I doing?”

Zuko flickers through the thick dust. A tank launches into the air. The operators inside will be lucky to land with only a few broken bones. The cushioning around the cabin still isn’t good enough.

All attacks bounce off the drill’s metal flanks. Relentless, it eats through the meters of brick and stone.

There is no war in Ba Sing Se, swears the city government. So why train troops? Why create orderly evacuation plans? Why speak of preparing civilian shelters? Why recruit soldiers beyond what’s needed for a skeleton crew at the wall, now that the Dragon of the West’s siege so conclusively amounted to nothing? Raise troops? With who’s taxes? Is this not the famed impenetrable city?

For the first time, every airship under General Ni Shu’s command launches at once, laden with troops.

Zuko flickers through the dense press of fighting. Azula hasn’t joined the battle yet. The sun flashes in his eyes. He knocks aside a sword. The earth heaves up, tearing apart plants, and swings through the ranks like a battering ram. Blood flies off a halberd and through him.

Spirits, the smell.

Earthbenders erect walls, trying to funnel the invaders, trying to bend valleys into the flat land. What the tanks don’t blast apart, they simply crawl and roll over. The flanks of the defensive forces crumple. A squad of earthbenders attempt opening a cavern before the drill for it to tip into.

“General, the drill has cleared the outer wall.”

“Then send the first signal to Colonel Araki to prepare the demolition charges at the inner wall,” Ni Shu commands. The airship clears the last of the farmland. A smoke flare launches.

She turns to Azula and asks, “Well, princess? Are you and your friends ready to enter combat?”

“Certainly,” answers Azula.

To the side, by the windows, Ty Lee says to Mai, “Those burly guys aren’t doing too well, aren’t they.”

“It was too much to hope we could face a challenge,” Mai grumbles.

From the air, the armor and helmets look like so many miniscule, shining spots. The troops easily cross the several hours’ march from the outer wall to the walls surrounding the city proper. The bent earth of the retreating defensive forces leave line like thin scars on the ground. Another ridge that Azula can barely make out as a wall by its thin shadow rises. The darker shadows of trenches and pits carve across the different shades of abandoned crops.

Still, the Fire Nation forces press on.

After a few minutes, the general speaks into the intercom. “Release the second signal.”

Azula watches the fleet of airships fan out along the curve of the walls. “Watch out for the civilians,” Zuko warned her two nights ago. “It’s impossible for most of them to evacuate the city, so in general they’re hunkering down. There’s a whole maze of underground tunnels and bunkers they’ve been making, especially in the Lower Ring. If even one district can organize into a decent resistance, then the army’s going to have trouble.”

The Ba Sing Se forces, comprised of unseasoned soldiers, growing complacent with the illusion of safety from the city’s constructed defenses, break rank.

“Release the final signal.”

With a wave of noise greater than any Azula experienced from the individual bombs dropped on the city so far, the inner wall explodes.

It must be galling to the people of the city, Zuko reflects, how the Fire Nation troops take a moment to catch its breath as it waits for the dust of the demolished wall to settle. The airships continue hanging in the air, ominously lying in wait. Meanwhile, the drill easily chews through the rubble and all buildings unfortunate enough to be in its path. Everyone steers clear of the slurry starting to spill in its wake again.

This break will take a while. Zuko rubs his fingers against his temple, steels himself for the drain, and teleports himself back to the Fire Nation to check on his father and grandfather. Spending even just a few minutes checking in on them is worth it, regardless of the jarring contrast in just about everything between the two settings.

The advance resumes once the sun firmly passes noon. Tanks roll through the paths cleared by the airstrikes. A sea of red pushes through the streets and the traps set up by the inhabitants begin picking their prey.

Azula takes Ty Lee and Mai and makes their way out of the airship’s command center, down to where the divisions kept in reserve wait for the doors to the whistling air to open. She can feel it in her stomach and through her limbs as the airship begins its descent, swooping down as low as it dares towards the ground. A hush sweeps through the crowd.

“Prepare for drop,” comes the call and the doors begin their slow slide open. Wind shoves in, yanking at her bangs. With a kick, the rope ladders and rappel lines unfurl towards the ground below. The roofs that looked as small as toys just minutes ago steadily enlarge.  

“Go, go, go.”

When it’s Azula’s turn, she doesn’t take the lines. Instead, she leaps out the opening, blue flames instantly called to her feet, and rockets through the air, taking stock of the scuffles beginning to spread along the streets and the roofs of the shorter buildings. Shabbily dressed police and a few enterprising civilians attempt to block off intersections and throw barricades between buildings. Well, she can’t have that.

Mai and Ty Lee land on a roof and immediately join the fray. As directed, squadrons of Fire Nation soldiers peel off from each other to push into the city. Blue sears through the air.

The earth groans as the scarred street heaves into another shuddering wall in Zuko’s path. Without pause, he continues sprinting through the dirt, through buildings, through people, through destruction.

If he looks into the distance towards the west, he can watch the hulking mass of the drill towering above the battered buildings of the Lower Ring as the metal behemoth lurches towards the walls enclosing the Middle Ring.

Boulders soar through the air. He can’t see any blue fire. Azula isn’t here. Frustrated, he shoves himself into a different quadrant of the fighting. Is she supposed to be in the Lower Ring or the Middle Ring at the point?

Somehow, Azula finds a still moment among the fighting to catch her breath. Next to her, Ty Lee shakes out her hands and begins inspecting her sluggishly bleeding injuries. Mai yanks a knife out from a paralyzed and unconscious soldier and wipes it as clean as she can against her dirt-stained pants. She mutters while slipping the blade away, “I’m going to burn this entire outfit.”

Princesses don’t snort, but it’s been hours of near nonstop slow combat crawling inch by inch and house by house through enemy urban territory. The late-day sun blazes down from the sky. This is only day one of the planned assault on the city. She’s sticky with sweat and her hair is covered with dust. A sound Azula will forever deny bursts out from her.

Mai gives her a rare smile and Ty Lee laughs.

A shrill horn blares from the airships above. All traces of amusement and joviality disappears from their demeanor. As one, they turn towards the faintly shaking wall surrounding the Middle Ring. The clarion blasts again. And maybe Azula only imagines it, but a lull spreads across the city in anticipation. For a second, despite the rumble of earthbending, despite the crackles of fire, despite the thin screams and shouts coming from all angles, for just a second – there is perfect, absolute silence. It stretches and stretches and –

The giant drill punches through the wall.

“Come on, ladies,” Azula turns away. Sound, the entire world, rushes back into focus. A new squad of defenders round the corner down the street. They yell when they catch sight of Azula, Ty Lee, and Mai. Summoning lightning into her hands, the quicker to deal with the new obstacles uselessly throwing themselves in her way, Azula says, “We have a palace to seize.”

With a bang, her lightning snaps forward and sinks its fangs into the metal armor of the sole earthbender among the opposing group. Seizing, he drops to the ground.

Down another block, down another street. Someone truly doesn’t care about the extent of property damage anymore and sends spears of stone smashing through the wall of a building from inside, trying to catch Azula unaware. She leaps out of the way and takes the invitation to send condensed fire scything through the plaster and wood. It collapses into itself, burning.

And they never do make walls thick enough do they? Grabbing onto a column, she swings herself onto an overhang. Lightning sparks at her hands and with less than a minute’s delay to her advance through the city, she blasts a hole through the attempted obstacle.

Let them try and keep her out. She’s Princess Azula; she can do this all day.