Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The phone rings once. Twice. Three times.

“Iroh Sozin?” the woman at the desk asks into the static phone.

Azula’s notional scowl deepens, unmoving from her rigid posture in the pliant, sinking red chair. She curls her fingers ever so slightly into its patchy fidget-trounced fabric, flat; never too far, a precise motion that betrays no hint of the sweeping sort of affront lurking at the edges of red chipped nails.

Iroh abandoned — left them five years ago, and only looked back on her brother once.

That’s once more than he did for her.

Azula doesn’t want to listen to whatever pointless proverbs the old man’s got spewed up his wet tea bags, and she doesn’t want to be in his custody, either.

She can’t hear the response on the other end of the phone, and in spite of herself, she doesn’t want to hear it. She doesn’t want to hear from him at all — after all, it’s not like he’d ever wanted to hear from her, and returning the sentiment is all too easy. Iroh had been all slow and rumbly and indirect in the daft kind of way, the kind of way that’s been steeped for hours in wilted guava mush and stirred into drippy pink pudding.

“Your brother’s been arrested,” the standing receptionist says carefully, voice punctured tire-flat, deflated tight and rubbery.

Azula scrutinizes her demeanor — tautly wound shoulders, unfocused brown eyes fixated on the systematic ticking of the maneki-neko clock pinned against the wall, left hand gripping the black pen a little too tight for a minuscule tremble to quake its lonely presence in her limbs. Ironed out white collar, crisp and sharp against cuffed-back sleeves and cuffed-back indifference that doesn’t quite do its job.

Father would never allow that. ( She would never allow that.)

Tongue swiping across the bottom of cherry rose lips; a practiced nervous habit, and a distinct, outwardly visible one as well. “Your niece requires guardianship,” she says.

Now, Azula’s scowl nearly edges itself onto her face, which she subconsciously plasters away with consummate ease. Requires guardianship.

She listens to the rest of their arid conversation; stores their grainy swathes of sandy words into filed boxes in her sifted office of mind drawers. It’s about as insipid as she remembers her uncle to be, and she can’t even hear him.

☲☲☲

[You always did say Azula was born lucky, and I was lucky to be born. I tried being in denial for a long time, like doing something right enough times would change your mind, but at this point I guess you kind of were right all along — you did a pretty good job of establishing what a massive failure I am, and I’ve always been too good at listening.

I’ve got no fucking clue why you spent so long trying to tear me down, but honestly? I don’t need to hear it again, and I’m not going to hear it again. Az isn’t going to, either.]

☲☲☲

Iroh hasn’t heard from the Caldera since he left the city five years ago.

(Afterwards, Lu Ten’s shuttered off door had been too empty, all packaged up and lifeless, undrawn curtains and unswept floors. The wind never blew in that room.)

He misses the first two calls, trays of slow-dried jasmine leaves winding a familiar scent in the backroom, until Jin bursts in through the parted half curtains and presses his cellphone into his hand shakily. “It’s from the Caldera,” she gasps out.

The jasmine leaves whisk away abruptly, shattering calm against the polished wood floor.

Five years.

Iroh gestures for Jin to return to managing the shift a little numbly, looks down at the persistent number for a few moments, before accepting the call and holding its unscratched screen up to his ear.

“Iroh Sozin?” the receiver says monotonously, dripping with an impressive dosage of lifelessness.

Iroh wants to wince. “Yes, that is me,” he affirms, abandoning all pretense of unbothered facade. “What’s the issue?”

There’s a brief lull, as if the caller leaned away to swallow on her own. “Your brother’s been arrested,” she says.

Iroh stiffens. What? he nearly blurts out loud.

(It wasn’t just Lu Ten that made him leave. In part, it’d been Ozai himself, who’d been virulent cutting words and sketchy business practices. A few too many stakes that drove the knife in deeper and too few a condolence in exchange for scathing conceit — two stiflingly bright kids and their recently deceased mother wasn’t enough to keep him back, even if he holds some regrets now.)

“I see,” he says instead. He doesn’t say what he wants to say — that being, Good riddance.

(Ozai had always been that inevitable sort.)

“What of my niece and nephew?” he asks.

Again, there’s a pause, one that audibly pitches a bit longer. “Your niece requires guardianship.” 

She doesn’t say anything about Zuko.

She doesn’t say anything about Zuko, and doesn’t say anything about Ozai’s arrest, and doesn’t say anything about the legal proceedings with the horrid emptiness in her intonation. She says the words that slide gentle tea down honey funnels and intones numbers and buzzing white noise, an eddy of toxic jade flowers sprouting in the midst of an oncoming grey storm.

Iroh attains the station, name, and the soonest flight out.

For the first time in five years, he wonders if it was a mistake to come here.

☲☲☲

[I’m not writing this for you. I’m writing this for me, and for the people who will find it, and unfortunately, you’re never going to read this if they arrest you properly. I compiled your dirty shit — have you ever even calculated how much cumulative tax evasion you’ve pulled off? You might’ve tried to get me to forget after what you did, but clearly I’m such a bad liar that I can't even keep those scraps. Maybe Azula would’ve been better for the job.

You really should’ve known after you burned half my face off for being and looking too much like Mother, because that’s the other half of what it was about, wasn’t it? I’m really not as stupid as you think I am.]

☲☲☲

Azula looks like her father.

That’s the first thing that comes to his mind when Iroh sees her unrelenting, poised bearing, tiger eyes boring holes into the ceramic cat clock propped on the far end of the white fluorescent office. She holds herself that way, has that same easy, cunning bearing, even without her features visible to him, hardly reminiscent of the last time he’d seen her.

The second thing he remembers is that she’s fourteen and just had her father arrested.

With the soft mechanical bell that subsequently rings at the push-pull door’s opening comes Azula’s pinning gaze flicking to settle on his standing. Iroh forces himself to not look away, the way he might’ve years ago; uncomfortably, he sees how old she looks, yet simultaneously younger than her age.

(Zuko had always been easier.)

“Uncle Iroh,” she greets pleasantly, unflinching as Ozai had been. “It’s good to see you.” A mirror of the languid drawl from the man he once knew, but unnaturally chilled in her blade-fringed voice.

“Azula,” he says. “I am glad to see that you are alright.”

She lets out a biting laugh, sounding so wrong splaying across swept tile floor and a windowless bright room. “After you vanished all those years ago, I’m quite alright,” Azula agrees sharply.

It’s a sort of stab in the gut — the remembrance that he never tried to contact his niece, not even once, because she’d always been a little too pronged at the wrong crown and quick to chew down leaves. 

He wants to say something, but he doesn’t quite know what yet, even after the years he’s spent bettering and wisening himself. He manages to plaster a kind of smile on his worn features, even though all he wants to do is grimace at this prickly girl. “Where’s your brother?” he questions.

It’s the first sign of expression he’s seen on her face — a flash skipping across impassive brown eyes, twined fingers twitching ever so slightly, before they go as still as the curtains in Lu Ten’s uncombed room.

“Did they not tell you? He’s dead,” she says.

☲☲☲

[If I didn’t throw you into the fire, this would be such a tragedy. Your failure of a son, finally out of the way. Dead, an urn of ashes and bone beneath the grave. Killed himself for the family tradition, and maybe because he was just that awful at life that he couldn’t even make it halfway to the end of fucking high school.

The police haven’t listened before. Maybe, if it comes with a dead body, they’ll finally try.]

☲☲☲

Iroh’s hesitant half-smile slips off of his face as his stomach plummets, cold as unsteeped tea leaves sinking below simmering waters. “He’s dead,” he repeats numbly.

Azula looks horrifyingly nonchalant about it. “That’s what I just said, didn’t I? He killed himself.”

Iroh doesn’t know what happened in the five years while he was gone, and suddenly, he regrets leaving the Caldera very, very much.

Zuko had been doggedly bubbly, a whirlwind of flashing smiles and tugging soft young hands on trailing tea-stained sleeves; a streak of vibrant paint flaring on the desolate canvas that made up the practically depraved Sozin family. That stubborn, innocent insistence for his sister’s participation in waving plastic swords and reading the oversized books of theatrical techniques and prose. He’d crouched by the stray kittens and fed the beady green ducks in the pond scraps of airy bread loaves and loved so hard, in a way that Iroh envied of a sort, with that flurry of predispositional need for feelings.

He used those to care for life a lot more than anyone else with their blood ever did.

Iroh doesn’t know what made his nephew follow in Lu Ten’s footsteps, and he might be selfish, but he finds that he doesn’t want to know.

Instead, he takes Azula’s half-dozen neatly packaged baggages and hauls them into the hollow grey trunk of the generic yellow taxi, and can’t bring himself to ask her any more questions.

☲☲☲

[I didn’t do this so you could revel in my death. Even after what you’ve done and what you’ve made us do to each other, I did this for her.

So once again, fuck you.

- Zuko

P.S. I hope you don’t come to my funeral.]

The funeral isn’t much, not for the eldest son of the mastermind behind the one of the most influential businesses residing in the stark, rich city streets of the Caldera. It’s pretty traditional, for a sixteen year old with no living relatives beyond an uncle and a sister and a jailed father. Iroh throws it together with haste, the wake and following cremation; only a dozen people attend, and Azula doesn’t know what any of the guests’ names are even though she’s studied her finite family tree extensively.

It’s discomforting — odd to see Zuko’s body wiped a clean slate of the constant scars and bruising that’s always manifesting on his limbs, laid out on the casket with the right crossed over the left. He’s dead, and he looks more intact, more alive than he usually does.

Azula is offered a chance to speak. It goes unspoken that she’s expected to speak.

(Ozai isn’t there.)

What is there to say?

Zuko hyperfixated on swords, knives, and the Internet. He was impressively bad at math. He cussed like there was no tomorrow, because it was the only outlet his pugnacious mind could come up with.

Nothing sits on her tongue, even though things don’t need to sit for her to grasp them in her fingertips and pry them apart easier than boiled miyagi shells.

Mother always liked Zuzu more. He pretended I didn’t exist for months on end because he was bitter that I was always going to be better than him. My friends cared for him more than they cared for me, and said farewell only to him when they left.

He made up lies to distract Father from my imprecisions, and paid for them —

Azula doesn’t have any words, but she is Ozai’s daughter, and so she fabricates a few paltry tragedies in a vocal loom and walks up when it’s her turn. 

(It’s her turn first, because she’s the closest relative to him, and because everyone else in their perfect cast family is gone. )

“Zuko was loved by many.” 

Mother’s love ended with her dead. Father didn’t love him; he doesn’t love anyone. Everyone who might’ve loved a failure like him left.

(Did she love him?) 

“On behalf of my family, we are deeply devastated by his unexpected premature death.” 

She wonders how unexpected this really was — he’d always been bleeding down the drain behind the locked bathroom door, straying to smokey streets in the middle of the night and returning sleepless. Pretty ceramic words, painted over soft sunset sakura branches sliding hazy spirals across white tea cups.

“I hope he finds peace, now.”

Is death the only thing he ever asked for?

She considers summoning crocodile tears to her eyes, but doesn’t want to deal with the ensuing eyelid problem that comes post-tearduct usage. She puts the mic down soundlessly, and walks evenly back to her designated front-row seat in a front-row funeral.

Iroh speaks next, and he has a lot of words to say, even though he hasn’t been in the Caldera for five years; hasn’t seen his nephew for five years until the makeup’s plastered on and the black kimono’s crossed backwards. 

He talks about the life sparking in Zuko’s eyes, the childish joy he treated living with, the unending love he had for the world. Such a bright light her uncle shines, with anecdotes of childhood stories of tea and springy ukuleles, ducks and rippling lakes, theatrical performances and devotion to his sister.

Azula’s pretty sure they’ve got their terminology in mutual disagreement over years of lacking lingual communication. She nearly scoffs at the colorful descriptors at such contrast from Zuzu’s unpenetrable haze of mopey grey depression; positively doubts the likelihood that her uncle’s not got a severe case of attributing hallucinatory character traits to dead children.

He talks long enough to make up for the absence of words from the other attendees. Idly, she wonders if they’re hired.

No one knows what Zuko’s favorite flower is, let alone his favorite color. The funeral services unobtrusively offer white chrysanthemums that smell kind of like they’ve been diluted in heavy backstreet air for a few hours.

Azula doesn’t mention it, and drops their dripping blooms into the casket.

☲☲☲

Zuko turns the drive over in his hands a few times, digs around in his scrappy black backpack. Considers throwing his whole damned phone in the unlit fireplace, and decides that he doesn’t know how extensive its flammable properties are, and doesn’t want to waste time (stave it off further) to search it up, either.

It’s Thursday night. There’s a construction site abandoned for the sunless hours out in the midst of darkness, secluded from the endless stream of flashing headlights and midnight excursions; far, far away from the pristine, unveined streets Ozai never wanders past.

☲☲☲

She eyes the coffin sitting on the sliding tray, the orange-cast glow radiating from the chamber it angles towards, and almost wants to laugh at the irony of Zuko’s ineluctable cremation when he’d already had half his face fried off.

Cinders are different from ashes, she reminds herself.

The ash-dusted bones are hard to pick up with clunky metal chopsticks, for all the fine motor skills she’s got. Feet to head. (If their roles were reversed, she can already hear the clatter of bone bouncing hollowly against tile floor.) The crypt is unremarkable, a rough stone crater beneath cut polished blocks forming a pyramid-like structure, the water shallow empty and pickets unadorned. 

It hasn’t even been carved yet.

She doesn’t have any last words to the deconstructed corpse of her brother. It’s not like he even left her any last words.

☲☲☲

He checks the two notes — one promising evidence, and one promising forgiveness, and scrambles out the window. It’s not really much different than a usual night for him, except this time, leaving isn’t an aimless expedition.

The emerald-bladed knife says 非戰不屈 — Never give up without a fight, though the vestiges of dried ruby scrapes away at the bottom two characters. His own blood’s telling him to forget the fight, drawn in its own vicious ink. 

(Azula would probably find that funny, he thinks distantly, maybe laughing a little morbidly on the inside because he doesn’t really know how else to feel.)

Zuko supposes he’s fought enough, and that it’s about time the ceaseless war found an end.

☲☲☲

captain-boomerang - 2 weeks ago

[don’t do anything stupid ok?]

[hellooooo]

[zuko?]

Chapter Text

Traditionally, the memorial’s supposed to stretch forty-nine days after.

Iroh brings her to Ba Sing Se eight days in.

☲☲☲

captain-boomerang - 5 months ago

[lowkey wtf was that about]

[did smthn happen?]

[cmon dude ur allowed to say shit]

captain-boomerang - 5 months ago

[the soap was v tasty]

[tastier than ur lame ass tea jokes]

[come defend ur honor]

captain-boomerang - 5 months ago

[so ur pulling the vanishing act again??]

[fine b that way]

[i can deal with this]

[ill see u in two months. intact]

[loser]

☲☲☲

Azula’s fifteen birthday passes in the sweltering heat of the summer, an event of two containedly bitter people seated around a honey-colored kotatsu. Two bowls of salty udon filled to the brim with jaggedly chopped katsu and unrolled yarn of spilled egg drop straight from The Jasmine Dragon’s menu between them as a buffer for rigid birthday wishes; a melange of tasteless dishes from home presented before her, maybe placed in an effort to pretend there’s any love between them.

(She knows why her uncle tries — because he’s still attached to this idea of her brother, whom he’d attached to this idea of Lu Ten; because he blames himself for both their deaths, a concentrated culpability Azula can’t quite objectively oppose, and because he feels like assigning his affection for them towards the girl he never cared about will improve his devastatingly self-destructive outlook on himself.

She knows why, probably better than he knows why himself.)

Iroh doesn’t try giving her a doll this year. He gives her pastel pink-violet-cut otoshidama bukuro with a written blue check, even though it’s not New Year’s, and a tray of red bean mochi dusted with plasticky flour flavored like children’s strawberry toothpaste. Gives her a birthday wish that doesn’t sound right on his tea-scalded tongue, and a cake of tilted candles burning drippy red wax on its frosted surface.

It’s not really anything like the massive parading she’s always had for her birthday, where dozens of people showed up at their big shiny house and left a mess for Zuko to clean up, telling her words she already knows and thinking it’s all praise. Azula doesn’t really know if she cares, or if she ever cared at all. She’s always been good at thanking them and saying the words that Zuko never could.

Azula does that this time, too — thanks him, saying the words that Zuko never could, for infantilizing envelope shades and toothpaste mochi, for bland fortune and unsaid misgivings.

☲☲☲

captain-boomerang - 3 months ago

[zucchini i know ur trying to learn how to tell a joke]

[and as the prof comedian around here i hate to break it u]

[but u kinda suck ass at it buddy]

[u remain to be unfunny]

[get back here]

captain-boomerang - 2 months ago

[is this abt the soap?]

[i never acc ate the soap]

[it was a joke i swear]

[ive laid myself bear]

[bare]

[i am exposed rn]

[come get ur blackmail]

captain-boomerang - 1 week ago

[heyyyy]

[hey loser]

[quit ignoring me u asshole]

☲☲☲

There’s a new girl at their sole, consistently half-attended, infamously slouchy summer school of Ba Sing Se.

She has striking dark firefly eyes, raven hair half knotted up in an immaculate bun and framing the sides of her face, and cutting red nail polish dripping blood down the tips of her fingers. She struts around dirty scuffed yards like a flared, self-important lion, the type that makes you want to haul ass out of her way under the presence of her gaze alone. She doesn’t talk to anyone, and whether it’s due to an incredible amount of social ineptness or just a general disgust for humanity and its schoolchildren remains unclear to the eyes, but she answers questions flawlessly with a sort of arrogance to her tone that doesn’t feel entirely grounded with all its precision.

She’s kind of terrifying, all sharp words and nails and hair. Sokka isn’t so prideful as to refuse to admit that she scares the shit out of him — and not just because she’s just scary in general.

“She looks like Zuko,” Sokka confesses to Toph, stopping by the final period of her goopy-hand ceramic class and setting himself in her still warm seat. “Like, scary-similar, except maybe even more socially constipated, and a girl.”

Toph snorts, scraping her hands beneath the running sink and fumbling its faucet off. “You sure about that?” she says, foot prodding the tiled ground abrasively. 

“Not to be assuming, but I’m, like, ninety-eight percent sure she’s a girl —”

“You seem to think everyone looks the same.”

“Because they do!” Sokka yelps, affronted by her skepticism and general lack of faith in his competence at facial memory. “Have you ever even seen —” He cuts himself off and sighs out loud. 

Even after two years of knowing the younger girl, he definitely walked right into that gaping pit like a cat off the diving board.

“Tell that to me,” Toph encourages gleefully, being the blindest fucking kid on the block and incredibly swankerous of it.

Sokka is retortless.

He takes her finger molded badger-like creature between his palms as they exit the class, setting it beside the array of other squashy grey creations, and pushes the cheap blue door open for his friend as she snaps out her triple-segmented cane. Though Sokka’s not technically allowed to drive Toph around, he does anyway out of friendship on one end and a desire to escape stuffy cars filled with too many snotty perfumed tissues and rich parental units on the other. He's nice like that.

There’s comfortable silence as he lets Toph take the lead, her grimace visible when they reach the crunching asphalt, and slows incrementally to let her match his pace.

“Speaking of him, have you ever heard back from Sparky?” Toph abruptly asks in the middle of the parking lot. She doesn’t look nervous — Toph never looks nervous; it's not in her countenance's vocabulary — but the way her words stumble ever so slightly over one another says enough.

Sokka cringes inwardly. “No,” he admits, quieter.

“It’s been five months,” Toph states shortly.

“He does this sometimes,” Sokka insists, not trying to convince himself of the fact, because it’s true.

Once for a month, when they were thirteen and fucking around on a sword forum across the internet, and once for two months, when they were fifteen and falling a bit deeper to the wolves of life.

It’s never been five.

Five months is a long time to wait for a text.

Sokka still pesters the responseless user on a daily basis. Daily basis turned tri-weekly basis, turned bi-weekly basis, turned weekly basis as of late — mostly just pointless spam without much meaning behind it, out of unstated desperation to hear something back from his friend.

This has been a really shitty prank.

(Zuko can’t set up a joke, let alone deliver one. He doesn’t do pranks.)

“Maybe he got caught up on finally shitting on his dad,” Toph suggests after their silence stretches a little too long, but she doesn’t really sound like she believes it. “When he’s back, I’ll get on his ass for not inviting us to the dance-party funeral.”

Sokka’s not an optimist, but sometimes he wishes he were. Sending an asshole to jail doesn’t take five months, he doesn’t say. Instead, he swallows down his audible swallow, and tries to answer with the most conviction he can summon into his too-crackly voice. “Yeah, and then we’ll get on his ass for ignoring us like an asshole. ”

Sokka doesn’t want to think about what might’ve happened.

He doesn’t want to think about what might’ve happened, because he thought too much about whatever would happen to Yue until it did. The universe’s got a knack for materializing projectingly loud thoughts and slam-dunking him into the tangled basketball hoop of “fuck you”, and he doesn’t want to be idle bait for it again.

Toph stops walking in his silence, tilts her head towards him, then switches her cane to her left to grab at his arm. Pushes her thumb in, so gently it’s hard to believe that she’s the kind of person who likes spending her spare time arm wrestling (and winning against) older teenage boys. “He’s okay,” she says, sharp voice softer at the edges, sounding a little fragile in that high pitch. “It’s not going to be like that. Zuko’s too spiteful.”

Spite isn’t the same thing as never giving up. Yue didn’t give up on anything, ever, with her loyalty and love for life.

So why did you give up now? he’d wanted to ask then, on the grey funeral, canopies in a downpouring rain that she wouldn’t’ve liked, people standing beneath black umbrellas and draped in black clothes clinging with raindrops. To the closed casket, put on a lowering machine that’d looked so out of place in rows and rows of flat gravestones engraved with names he didn’t know, and to the waterfall slate of rocky dirt skipping a sporadic heartbeat rhythm with the sky.

Sokka’s not stupid; he knows Zuko’s not exactly the epitome of emotional stability, with all those words about death and getting up and off the floor, even if he’s a spiteful, dramatic, expert-deflector shithead.

But Toph is thirteen, almost fourteen, and hasn’t had death shoved in her face time and time again to the people she’d loved too easily. She’s not an optimist nor stupid, either, but she doesn’t get it.

“Way too spiteful,” he agrees. He disengages his arm from her hand, keeps walking loudly as if they’d never stopped, and yanks the door open for her. Slides into his own seat, starts the loud-loud engine, and begins driving down slowly emptying summer school parking lots.

If his voice cracks a bit at that, Toph doesn’t mention it.

☲☲☲

bluespirit122502 - Today at 6:02 PM

[Hey, is everything okay?]

Sokka scowls at the screen. The expression feels sort of forgein on his face, like it’s not used to what should be a familiar irritation.

Suki's asked that question far too many times, accompanied by twisty smiles that look like burning candy. He hates it, but gives her back his own burnt-lollipop smile, and saves the emptiness for later.

He doesn’t have the emotional capacity in him right now to say shit.

captain-boomerang - Today at 6:07 PM

[yes everythings great. a blast]

[im doing just fine]

[y do u want to know]

bluespirit122502 - Today at 6:08 PM

[I just haven’t heard from you for a while. Wanted to check in]

[I get the distinct feeling that that was sarcasm right there]

captain-boomerang - Today at 6:09 PM

[ur right that was sarcasm]

[im going to go stew in my misery now]

[gbye]

Sokka turns his phone off, plants it facedown on his dusty bedside drawer, and plants himself facedown on his bed for the third hour straight since returning home from school. He doesn’t really know why he’s doing this, when he rationally knows there isn’t any point to it. Maybe that’s the point.

Maybe he’s being petty right now. Fucking sue him.

A friendly ping interrupts his very eventful plans of returning to a listless state of sleeplessness, and because he’s absolutely, abysmally horrible about ignoring texts, he reopens the app.

bluespirit122502 - Today at 6:11 PM

[That doesn’t sound healthy?]

[Misery doesn’t make a very good stew.]

captain-boomerang - Today at 6:12 PM

[prbly not. idc]

bluespirit122502 - Today at 6:14 PM

[Do you want to tell me about stuff?]

[I mean you don’t have to if you don’t want to, but I don’t mind]

Yes. No.

He wants to talk about the moon. Nights escaping to star-watered rooftops at Jet’s irresponsible one a.m. partying, tales of glimmering constellations. 

About how the hospital was white, the kind of metallic white that’d been so different from Yue’s moonlight locks, all beeping machines and tubes and screens, and about blue bedsheets, the color of baby blankets and muted ocean skies. When he spent so much time visiting her, leaving his schoolwork to deal with the aftermath on its own and not regretting anything, because he’d still wanted to believe she could pull through and that his presence would help, or something.  

(It didn’t.) 

About the entourage of stars that’d followed her procession to her namesake, a scattered spray of dewdrops curling from the stomatas of the umbrella-leaf sky, and how devastatingly small he feels standing beneath its lonely colorless rainstorm.

captain-boomerang - Today at 6:18 PM

[yue died.]

Zuko types out a few things, text bubbling disappearing repeatedly. Sokka swallows, eyes fixed on the screen.

bluespirit122502 - Today at 6:20 PM

[Can I call you?]

Sokka doesn’t want to put it into speech, because if he does, the painful stinging in his eyes are going to become so much more than just that, and the conforming white mattress he’s been laying on is going to seem so much more solid and suffocating against his skin.

captain-boomerang - Today at 6:21 PM

[just text me]

[please]

bluespirit122502 - Today at 6:21 PM

[Okay.]

[Have you cried yet?]

What kind of question is that?

[ofc i have], he starts to type out, before he stops and really thinks.

Sokka hadn’t let himself cry as Katara held onto his arm, sniffling helplessly into the folds of his sleeve. Hadn’t let himself cry when his dad called him and said words he couldn’t’ve possibly known, when Arnook stood at the broken music stand and mic and talked about his daughter for what might’ve been hours. Doesn’t cry now, even though his eyes hurt a lot and he doesn’t even know when the last time he helped Katara around the house was.

He considers lying, with all of Zuko’s half-solicited pushiness and emotions.

Thinks about death again.

[no], he types out honestly, and presses send.

bluespirit122502 - Today at 6:25 PM

[You should probably do that]

[You’re allowed to be sad I promise. And you’re allowed to stew in your misery for a while and be a dick to people and have a shit time for a while too]

[I mean don’t be a massive dick but you’re allowed to be salty]

[But you’ve got to cry first, otherwise you’re never going to let that shit out]

[Crying isn’t going to fail to commemorate Yue. You don’t need to hold onto that image to remember her even if it feels that way]

[And then after that, get out of bed]

[I know you’re in bed Sokka]

The bastard’s right. Sokka turns over again and squashes the phone into the folds of dry blankets, except it continues lighting up like it could care infinitely less about his ignorance.

bluespirit122502 - Today at 6:31 PM

[Bed doesn’t get you places]

[Crying’s usually more effective]

[Sorry for rambling, I know it fucking sucks.]

Sokka reads the series of messy texts. Rereads them, something inside him dropping to the floor and hitting arrays of needles that jab into his flesh, rawly splitting everything open.

It feels awful.

“Maybe,” he says, aloud, voice thick.

It’s not okay. Crying’s not going to make it okay. Getting out of bed doesn’t, either. His head’s still stuffed with cotton, maybe more than before, and the swaying lull of motion is a fucking nightmare.

But it feels awful, and he thinks it’s something.

☲☲☲

Azula does not want to be in Ba Sing Se.

She doesn’t want to be in a tea shop, wearing a stained green apron and serving hot leaf juice to dozens of rowdy teenaged customers dressed in mortifying color combinations, standing next to a wild-haired girl who closely resembles a wind tousled dead leaf. 

This is where Zuko’s landed her, then.

(Maybe he’d have liked to have switched places with me, she thinks almost hysterically, not entirely sure where it comes from, but feeling oddly undisturbed by the thought.)

Azula learns to listen to people’s speech patterns — emphasized second syllables, toneless, sounding convoluted. Learns to speak like them with an ease poor incompetent Zuzu would never haven been able to produce, and no one looks twice at her.

Iroh tries to haul her to therapy, saying that she “needs it” and that it’ll “help her cope”, with a case she can’t quite identify and otherwise useless.

She doesn’t need therapy, and she doesn’t need dozens of adults trying to prod feelings out of a monster. You can’t pry a jewel out of a rock, after all.

Eventually, he gives up on her, too. If Azula were a different person, it’d hurt.

(It doesn’t hurt. She doesn’t want his love, especially if it comes with… this.)

“So,” Dead Leaf Girl starts, perching awkwardly on a knee-length, tacky emerald stool that looks just about as ancient as her uncle. “You’re Iroh’s niece?”

Azula spares a look at her, reading the loopy letters scrawled across the nametag: Jin. She doesn’t scowl, because those expressions are how Zuzu ended up dead in a ditch(?).  “Unfortunately,” she agrees amicably.

She thinks about fists and blood, and plugged irons, and late night phone calls with frantically blinking red sirens. Thinks about closed closet doors, and smoldering tea leaves, and smoldering flesh worked by a pyromaniac, and silence.

Iroh never wanted her. (He’d always wanted her brother — and that had never changed, judging that the first question he’d asked her in five years had been about him. She can see it in the way he looks at her, the way he says all these squishy useless words to her, and how it never quite reaches his eyes when he looks too long at her matching brown set.)

Jin blinks dimly, slowly. “‘Unfortunately’?” she echoes, as if bad luck’s something of a forgein concept to her. She flattens the back of her unkempt ponytail, tilts her head expectantly with something edging the bounds of genuine curiosity softening the motion — like she actually cares about Azula’s response.

(Perhaps it’s a misfortune for them both. She’s not so opposed to the idea of their mutual wish to be elsewhere.)

Azula doesn’t answer.

☲☲☲

Sokka knocks loudly on the door, gives it a solid three seconds of ringing silence, then knocks again. “ Ka — ”

Katara yanks the door open, and looks him up and down with an awfully judgemental look in her eyes.

“What? ” he sputters, slinging his backpack off his shoulder and wedging himself past her and into the doorway. He kicks off his shoes haphazardly, both of which Katara promptly straighten out, and makes a beeline for the kitchen.

“Not going to greet your little sister?” she quips, like a little sister.

Sokka groans. “I see you everyday, Kat,” he emphasizes. “Everyday."

Katara shrugs. “Doesn’t hurt to show your appreciation for me on a regular basis, you know.” She follows him in as he shuffles through the cabinet, setting herself at the table, and pulling out her phone like she’s got nothing better to do with her time, and the worst part is that she actually doesn’t have anything better to do with her time.

She’s damned lucky no one tried forcing her to attend summer school this year, and doesn’t have three binders spilling sheafs with math, calculus, other iterations of math, and far too many handwritten essays for what can possibly be an approved requirement in the curriculum.

Sokka shoves his hand into crinkly plastic yellow packaging, rummaging around in its cavity, and fishes out a greasy bag filled with little clear silica orbs. He scowls at the inedible contents and explicitly dissuading label, and drops it back in, though not without consideration of just taste-testing it.

“Dad’s coming home,” Katara blurts out, abruptly jerking her eyes away from the screen.

Sokka, though not moving, somehow stumbles and nearly trips onto his face. Steadies himself against the granite counter for a moment, ignoring Katara’s now piercing concern pinned on him in the edges of his vision.

Dad’s coming home.

Gran Gran hasn’t been able to take care of them, not for a long time; not since he left, and Sokka doesn’t have it in him to tell that to his dad’s distant digital presence.

Fuck, it’s unfair how much Katara’s been forced to take up since Dad left.

Sokka doesn’t have it in him for his father to come back home for a fleeting week of boats and ruffled hair before vanishing for another half year, for a small myriad of hope towards love to float a dinghy lifeboat before it shatters its rusted anchor into the dust.

“Dad’s coming home?” he finally echoes.

“Yeah.” Katara’s voice is kind of hard now, in a way that doesn’t sound right in his baby sister’s tone.

Sometimes, Sokka thinks Katara might be kind of mad at Dad for leaving them again and again, and he doesn’t really blame her with how he’d been after Yue’s death.

(Maybe Dad would’ve been able to assess the property damage inflicted on his heart properly.)

Of all the things he’d fucked up in the year where he sank, letting thirteen-year-old Katara take care of the whole damned household on her own while he couldn’t find it in him to move is on the top of his list of regrets. Maybe the very top of his list in his life, if he’s being honest.

“Yeah, he said he’s coming home to stay this time.”

Sokka’s heart catches in his throat.

He misses his dad.

“Oh,” he says. “Oh. ”

Katara’s lips press into a thin line that he can’t quite discern, before she suddenly springs forward out of her chair and tackles him into a hug. He barely catches her mass, lurching backwards and almost back into the open cabinet. “He’s coming home,” Katara whispers into his shoulder, face buried where he can’t see it.

It’s been a long three years, of them trying clinging to one another as rocks in a tumultuous storm. Of Katara trying so desperately to cook dinner after dinner and force the laundry to get done and glue their bleeding hearts together. Taking up so much responsibility that was never supposed to be delegated to her, and never complaining when her brother tried to help her and failed miserably, and being the mother she lost and lost so much with. Of Sokka trying so desperately to protect his sister from herself and talk to his ailing grandmother he can’t quite understand anymore and hold himself together, trying to figure out how to fix an internal wound he couldn’t locate with nothing but a failed engineering manuscript and wireless lightning.

His shoulder’s getting wet. Sokka doesn’t draw in a loud sniffly-sounding noise.

“You’re getting my shirt wet,” he finally squeaks out, and she shoves her face in further like the harried action’s going to dry it.

“You want me to actually get your shirt wet?” she mumbles, the rawness in her voice mixing wetly with compulsory sisterly impudence.

When she pulls away, he good-naturedly shares the last bag of assorted ricecrackers with her as they sit unsupervised on the countertop, and proceeds to pester the shit out of her like everything his life’s been about for years hasn’t just casually flipped its bare organs out. (He isn’t ready to think too hard about it.) Takes all five of the soy-drenched circles at her protest because that’s his job, and starts asking the real questions, like,

“Have you finally asked Aang’s opinion on eating soap?”

“What! No!”

“What about breaking its healthy properties to him?”

“No —”

“Offer to kiss his freshly soaped lips?”

“Sokka, I swear if you don’t shut up right now, I’m going to wring you through the washing machine and give you a taste of soap yourself.”

☲☲☲

Later, he’ll flop on his cornered blue bed with his back against the comforter and stare up at the puckered white ceiling in a darkened room. He really wants to text Zuko, because that’s what they do — bother each other at their respective three-a.m.’s when no one else of sanity is up, and shit on the mysteries of life together. Or help drag each other’s asses out of their crippling depression; who knows.

(Not that Zuko’d ever admit to that on his end of things. They’re both pretty tactful about calling each another losers instead of prying real human feelings out of each other, like real friends do.)

He even opens the app without thinking, fingers already hovering over the keyboard, before he remembers.

He considers just forgetting altogether. Never hearing back always hurts more, or maybe it hurts less, but indifference? Indifference’s something Sokka’s been good at — maybe for too long.

Still, he types it out anyway, and presses send to join hundreds of other unanswered messages.

captain-boomerang - Today at 5:53 PM

[dude]

[my dad’s coming home]

[its been so fucking long. idk how im supposed to feel abt this]

[like the last time i saw him was longer than the last time u actually texted me]

[i miss him a lot]

[kat said hes gonna stay fr and i want to be happy w this]

[bc maybe we wont have to do everything on our own and be lonely and]

[but he just]

[i dunno]

captain-boomerang - Today at 6:02 PM

[im just rly excited u know?]

captain-boomerang - Today at 6:17 PM

[i know its been a while but i just wanted to tell u :P]

[i hope ur doing ok]

☲☲☲

Calculus is dull.

The boy with a half-shaved ponytail sitting next to her won’t stop stealing glances at her, deliberately cutting away the moment she gives him a pointed stare, though his eyes still roll around in spite of his turned head.

For all that Azula’s a people person, she can’t discern why he stares.

“Do I have something on my face?” she demands as he begins the repetitive motion of looking away for the third time within the two-hour class, freezing him midway through the action.

“Um, what?” Ponytail Boy scoffs, leaning back in his chair. “Absolutely not, what — why would I ever do that, I — no.” He determinedly bores laser-eyes into the blank whiteboard and goes back to scribbling intensely at his paper in what looks to be scrawling hieroglyphics, like a hyperfocused owl.

Azula stares suspiciously at the back of his partially shaven head, then returns to finishing off the pre-handed out worksheet the class hasn’t yet begun.

The people here are incredibly incompetent at math, if she’s taking a summer class averaging at three years ahead of her grade. Maybe even Zuko would’ve stood a chance in this city, if he’d ever made it.

(That’s a funny thought — Zuko, being ahead of people, and in math of all the things.)

“Soooo,” he suddenly says, a mirror of Jin from the day prior, “you got any siblings?”

Azula raises one of her two eyebrows. “A dead one,” she answers shortly.

His brown eyes widen near-imperceptibly; if she weren’t raised to read features easier than an open magazine, she wouldn’t have noticed. He coughs, in the way someone who doesn’t expect a blunt arrow jabbed to the head does, and crosses his legs. “Oh,” he says, dumbly. “I’ve got a younger sister,” he offers in lieu of response. “She managed to escape from these classes.” Swallows, and doesn’t look away. “I’m — I’m sorry for your loss.”

Something uncomfortable twists inside her, a sort of nauseating dissonance that shouldn’t unwind in her stomach so heavily the way it’s doing.

Azula is the one to break the eye-contact, and wrenches her focus back onto the last lingering question on the bottom of the sheet. The rest of the class is already halfway caught up.

☲☲☲

Summer reaches its end, and stitched-up backpacks begin to refill.

Dad comes home.

Sokka opens the door at the ring-a-ding bell Katara hates the rhythm of, and sees his dad standing there, and throws himself into his arms like he does every time. (Except this time, it’s here to stay.) “Dad!”

Fuck.

Sokka gets emotions, he does, but right now, his ability to articulate them have kind of flooded out of his brain into a puddle on the floor, and he’s not even particularly mad about it. He doesn’t really have any words, either, just lets himself get folded into strong arms and melt into a kind of warm, liquidy soup of relief.

“Hi, Sokka,” Hakoda says, voice kind of strangled, and mutually contently motionless for a long moment. Carefully uncoils himself from his son and holds him appraisingly at arm’s length. “You got — uh — you got kind of tall.”

Sokka bursts into startled laughter, because of course that’s the first thing his dad’s got to say about him seeing him for the first time in six months. “Maybe it’s because you’re basically a nugget at this point,” he offers, brain still melting through his skull and unable to think quite right in its molten state. “You’re, like…” He mock-measures his dad’s (unfairly) tall height, squints exaggeratedly, then claps his hands down together. “A shrinking giraffe.”

“A giraffe?” Hakoda echoes, amused.

Sokka nods vigorously. “You see, —”

“Dad!” Katara hurdles down the stairs, tearing past the kitchen branch off and flinging herself at their dad, Sokka scrambling to get out of the way of her plight and nearly getting decapitated in the process.

Hakoda catches her, reeling backwards with the impact, and then catches another armful of teenager shoved beneath his other arm.

“You got kind of tall, too,” he squawks out at his daughter, who lets out a stifled noise maybe-resembling a sob, though if you asked her, she’d deny it.

Sokka isn’t the one who’s spent months (years) away from home, but the gentle hand pressing against his back and the scratchy fabric disheveling his hair feels like he’s the one who’s coming home.

☲☲☲

bluespirit122502 - 1 year ago

[Do you ever feel like you’re going to pass out from dehydration?]

captain-boomerang - 1 year ago

[ummmm no]

[dude]

[how tf r u not dead]

[pls drink some water]

[contrary to popular belief its actually good for u]

bluespirit122502 - 1 year ago

[Contrary to popular belief, the state of being watered is a falsehood and I’m actually transcending right now.]

captain-boomerang - 1 year ago

[i want to commit an act of violence]

bluespirit122502 - 1 year ago

[Do it, I fucking dare you]

[Meet you behind the soap store let’s fight]

captain-boomerang - 1 year ago

[oh dont u worry im ready]

bluespirit122502 - 1 year ago

[What’ve you got up your sleeve? Three milliliters of water?]

[I don’t even need a knife to beat the shit out of you]

captain-boomerang - 1 year ago

[excuse me its sparkling water]

[and ur wrong. i have the power of Katara up my sleeve]

bluespirit122502 - 1 year ago

[You’re right, sisters are scary as shit]

[If I brought mine to the fight, you’d be pummeled into the ground two seconds flat]

captain-boomerang - 1 year ago

[wow thanks for the vote of confidence]

[love you to]

bluespirit122502 - 1 year ago

[I mean she would.]

captain-boomerang - 1 year ago

[hows she gonna do that?]

[ill knock her upside down w boomerang]

bluespirit122502 - 1 year ago

[She’s showy af but she’s got some insane acrobatics with it. Extremely offensive, and the only defense she’d have to put up from you would probably be that fucking boomerang]

[In essence, she’d beat the shit out of you]

captain-boomerang - 1 year ago

[geez i did not need to know that]

[she probably eats avocados and water for breakfast doesnt she]

[like u should be drinking RIGHT NOW]

[also r u ever going to tell me more abt her or do i have to guess everything?]

bluespirit122502 - 1 year ago

[Shut the fuck up before I turn you into an erodible soap bar]

[No, she doesn’t eat avocados and water for breakfast.]

[You happy now?]

captain-boomerang - 1 year ago

[... im never happy]

bluespirit122502 - 1 year ago

[I hate you.]

☲☲☲

The summer passes, and Azula is fifteen.

One year before she can get her driver’s license. 

Two years before she’ll be older than Zuko will ever reach. 

Three years before she can get out of this pitiable town and never look back.

Chapter Text

A shoeless girl with a long dirt-streaked cane sporting two scraggly space buns and a scraped kneecap enters the teashop, entry bell tingling gently in her wake, and makes a beeline for the employee’s-only partitioner.

Azula wasn’t hired to deal with random children entering the back area; however, as far as she’s concerned, Iroh hasn’t told her non-employees aren’t allowed to break all the proper hygiene codes and go into the backroom — even though that typically passes as an unstated regulation —, so she lets the girl swipe with fumbly motions at the parted willow curtains and vanish from sight without comment, shifting away in dismissal.

Dirt Girl suddenly stops, pivoting ever so slightly with her hair still beneath the wheeling part, and tilts her head in Azula’s general direction. “You’re new,” she remarks.

Azula raises an eyebrow. Dirt Girl doesn’t so much as twitch, rigidly staring a few degrees off, and Azula knows her eyebrow-raise is about as effective as it gets, if Zuzu’s evident reactions to it had been an indication of anything — and then she looks more intensely, and sees her brown eyes washed in a light milky sheen.

Cataracts, she realizes. Probably blindness, if the folded cane was indicating of anything.

Azula’s not unobservant, she’s simply prioritizing reaction over functionality.

Blind Girl stands silently for a few moments, head cocked in anticipation, before snorting and vanishing the rest of the way through the division.

Azula goes back to taking hot leaf juice orders.

Eventually, Iroh emerges from wherever he resides when not lamenting her so-called “atrocious” tea making (atrocities are for Zuko, not her), with the blind kid in tow. “How is your shift going, my niece?” he asks.

She doesn’t deign a response. It’s going about as well as you can expect a tea shift to be going.

Iroh’s smile only widens, as if the presence of the stocky child beside him makes his reactions to his despicable niece all the brighter and more positive. “Toph, this is my niece, Azula,” he rumbles.

(It doesn’t go unnoticed that he introduces her to Toph, and not the other way around.)

Again, Azula doesn’t deign a response.

Blind Toph’s face splits into a sort of feral grin, and she flings a wildly offputting jaunty wave in Azula’s general vicinity. “Do you ever speak? I’m blind. ” She puts a particular, flattering emphasis on the statement, like her pride for her disability is unparalleled by its obvious inconveniences.

“Contrary to your unfound belief, I speak more often than you see,” Azula bites out, refraining from a Zuko-like meltdown of slamming the sharpie into the sealing machine and storming off despite her steadily increasing compulsion to do so.

Iroh looks like he’s either about to chastise her or swallow his own tongue whole, until Toph breaks out in a fit of laughter. “Oh, you’re a fun one, Spicey!” she declares, walking with none of that fatuous inaccuracy she’d feigned prior. Suddenly, her fist is swinging at her shoulder. She unsubtly edges away from the younger girl, and stands a little taller.

Toph doesn’t leave. Between Iroh returning to his desk occupation and Azula taking orders with a newfound dogged determination that hadn’t been there initially, the little girl exudes her bratty behaviour through crude, decidedly unnecessary remarks in regards to the various customers she serves, and about her service of itself.

“Woah, try not to scare them off. You’re a little sharp there.”

Azula stares intensely across the cafe at a group seated by the window, deliberately not at the orderers in front of her, and doesn’t react at their departure.

“Are you sure that’s the right amount of change?”

Persistence doesn’t stop her from looking down at the credit card in her hand. She carefully avoids decking the kid right then and there as she lets out a cackle.

“You’re — oh fuck, you’re so socially incompetent. This is amazing.”

“... Socially incompetent?”

“Yeah. You’re like my friend, except sharper.”

(Azula knows what good customer service looks like — after all, she’s been trained with it in mind for half her life. Maybe she’s being like Zuko, reacting with barely pushed-down emotions, being contrary and spiteful, but at least she does it with grace. 

Or maybe she’s finally losing her mind.)

“Oh, me? I’m just her assistant manager. I handle the register and receipts.”

Azula doesn’t say fuck, because that’s (was ) Zuko’s job, but — “Shut the fuck up,” she snipes out venomously.

The blind girl goes so utterly still Azula might’ve assumed she just died by proxy right then and there, then erupts into wheezes. Like the only form of entertainment she’s got in her life is harassing employees and getting insulted right back.

Azula wouldn’t even doubt it.

Toph doesn’t leave until Azula rips off her apron and near storms out the front door, stomping up the stairs in all the eerie silence caving around the upstairs apartment, dark staircase and leaf-shadowed walls a swaying kaleidoscope through the glass shuttered windows. Cold air brushing against the back of her neck, residue clinging to the pinned-up hair crawling against her skin. 

Her room’s uncontaminated (empty) and white carpet, unadorned white walls and spotless white curtains. A bed shoved into the far corner, solid sheets flat against its surface, and an unpainted wood desk with rusting bronze handles opposing it. The patchy cardboard boxes of transferred possessions are unpacked, folded neatly in the closet out of sight, alongside dozens of crisp pressed clothes; the dresser’s got nothing but a generic grey digital clock, and an inactive charger hanging limply across its polished surface.

There aren’t any pictures.

She swings her door shut, locking it and half of mind to push the geriatric desk against it as well, and collapses down in an undignified heap on her closeted bed to stare up at the unremarkable ceiling.

Father would call her unhinged. 

Father isn’t here.

It’s only been five months since she’s lost all authorial supervision. How far will this go, if she doesn’t get up and reclaim her dignity?

She wants to laugh. Wants to laugh at how she’s come undone from fourteen years of polishing flawless facades of methodically cut diamond, how she’s stomping around and biting at empty air like her failure of a dead brother, then wants to laugh at her need to do so.

(Unhinged.)

She laughs anyway. It feels cold in the muffled air of her empty room.

☲☲☲

Toph waits behind when Azula audibly leaves, steps somehow simultaneously aggressive yet dignified in the sort of important-rich-kid way traversing through the tip of her cane, standing in the middle of the shuttered down shop of floaty oolong drifting in the corners. It’s silent in a way that it never is during its opening hours, oppressive soundlessness cutting through her ears, until Iroh suddenly lets out a sigh and drops into a scraping chair, table creaking beneath the weight of pressing his elbows on its surface.

“I didn’t know you had a niece,” she admits to the older man, folding the vibration detector fumbling around for a chair. Unprompted, he pulls it out for her, and she joins him, tucking her legs up in opposition to her typical presumptuous foot throw-out.

Again, Iroh lets out another sigh, though this one’s laced with a regret that’s all too familiar. “I lost contact with her and her brother when my son passed.”

Oh. Toph’s brash, but she’s not insensitive. Iroh never talks much about the time before he moved to Ba Sing Se and opened up The Jasmine Dragon, partially because she knows it still hurts him to think about his dead son, and for whatever other unsavory memories he’d been desperately trying to drown down the drain. “Oh,” she echoes, aloud, then what he said suddenly pitches an unsettling pit in the bottom of her mind.

There’s something missing here.

“Where’s her brother?”

She can almost hear Iroh stilling beside her, the potency of the lacking motion that tangible. “He passed away, too.”

Toph wonders how old he was. Wonders if he was Lu Ten’s awful nineteen.

“I’m sorry.”

Toph is blind, but she can feel his head drop down further, hands coming up to meet them; the hot shame she doesn’t know the origins of clogging his throat, hoarse and raw as if it’s been coated in bitter lemon leaves. “I am, too.”

☲☲☲

The Beifong’s mansion resides at the top of a big-big, tall, winding hill.

For all the days and weeks and months she’s spent training with her cane, learning to guide herself near effortlessly without her parents’ expectant eyes trained on her, Toph’s never walked up it.

She’s confident that she can. Toph is blind, not weak ; she’s got plenty the endurance for all its steep length, and navigation comes naturally to her. The sidewalk’s gritty and dry, dull against the straightened cane leg, yet it feels more right than the smooth gliding, unoccupied echoey marble at the house, or even the rumbly wood panels forming the floor of The Jasmine Dragon.

She wants to walk home, but her parents would never let her.

Honestly, she’s surprised they’re okay with her spending afterschool hours at a tea shop. Maybe it’s because they think she’s incapable of doing homework (— screen readers are a thing, and so are speech-to-text processors, and so are all the accommodations her teachers are willing to provide for her —), so spending time in a discrete teashop they’ll never visit is a better use of it. But they always send down a smooth-walled car that rolls so bumpily against the lumpy roads, and never give her the opportunity to walk on her own.

They didn’t even know she could walk precisely on her own. Never wanted her to, probably.

“You’ve never had an instructor?” Aang, a boy in her seventh grade class, asks with such genuine surprise that she kind of wants to punch him.

She doesn’t. She contorts her face into a scowl, crosses her arms, and glares hard in the direction of his lilting voice. “Yeah, and? Doesn’t mean I’m incapable. Fuck off.”

Aang doesn’t fuck off. Aang scooches a little closer to her sitting defiantly on the trash-strewn concrete of the schoolgrounds, and scrabbles around in his backpack, crinkly paper in plastic binders and shirt rustling loosely against his skin.

“I don’t think you’re incapable at all! You’re really good at moving on your own,” he says heartfeltly.

No one’s ever acknowledged everything she’s learned on her own. He doesn’t even have that distinct pitter-patter stutter people take up in their speech pattern when they lie. Toph swallows.

“My guardian knows a lot about finding further guidance, especially for blind people. I even know someone who teaches at the closest school for blind,” he says in lieu of… whatever he’s holding. He coughs sheepishly at her complete nonreaction, tugs the paper impressively loudly. “Sorry. This is the form that’ll explain how they can help improve your orientation and mobility even further than it already is. All you need is a guardian’s signature. If you want, I’ll read this for you —”

“My parents aren’t going to sign that,” Toph cuts in curtly, bitterly. “They don’t think I can do shit. I don’t think they even want me to know how to navigate the world properly.”

This was an option? There’s an overwhelming anger scraping at her insides, which she carefully tries to push down, but fuck. There are schools for the blind?

(She wonders if her parents even knew this, if they ever even tried to learn to accommodate for her the best they could, or if they just assumed she’d be fine with being a useless jewelry stand. She knows she’s not enough for them, with the utter blindness she’s been birthed with that can never be cured, but — did they never try? )

She hears a faint scratchy rustling of fabric, as if he’s brushed his head against the collar of his shirt. “Oh,” he says, quieter.

They sit in silence for a long moment, rough concrete pressing bumpy constellations into her palms.

Aang’s not described too much of this school, and she cut him off before he could. Toph wants to get better, to learn to feel the world through more than ears and smells and fingers and words that don’t make abstract sense. She hates feeling like… like this all the time, as if she’s nothing more than a pitiful blind girl who can’t walk on her own, can’t do things with her life. She might as well be a shiny dead doll sitting on display in her parents’ antique, rickety-rocking glass cabinets.

“Isn’t forging signatures a thing kids do a lot?” Toph finally ventures.

“Well —” Aang squawks, a mortified sound that so closely resembles a crow she nearly laughs. “I mean, yeah, but not for — not for this. For, like, P.E. passes. This is kind of a big thing.”

“It’s a big thing that I’m getting denied,” Toph argues lowly. Clenches her fist.

She didn’t know. Her parents would’ve kept her in the dark forever, if they could; if they even knew.

Aang is silent, contemplating. Toph’s not nervous; she doesn’t get nervous.

The kid beside her isn’t going to help her. He doesn’t owe her anything — they’ve barely even met. Worst case worst, he’ll go out of his way to tell on her. She swallows, again, at the plunging thought.

Then — “Do you have anything that has their signatures?”

Toph exhales and grins, slowly, cold air hitting her lips and bared edged teeth. She knows it’s a terrifying thing to look at because of the delightful squawks her parents let out at parties. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I do.”

So Aang forged Lao Beifong’s apparently elaborate signature, got her linked with a crackly old man named Bumi he supposedly had prior connections with, and a proper triple-divvied cane that snaps in a keen way that she likes to her ears. And helped her come up with an appropriately elaborate lie, and might’ve turned around her thoughts on friends in the process.

Toph can walk up the big-big, tall, winding hill.

But she doesn’t, and might never, because by the time she doesn’t have to give two shits about her parents, she’s not going to.

☲☲☲

It turns out that Iroh didn’t give up on therapy.

It turns out Iroh’s spent the past month searching for a therapist who would take bribery and refuse to relent at Azula’s deconstructing faculty.

For the life of her, Azula can’t figure out why he tried so hard — it’s such stubbornness that gets people killed, after all. She perches in the plastic blue-lined chair pressed up against the wall, a sole placement in a long row of framed letters, and also wonders why she had to end up with this woman.

Therapist Wu insists she call her Aunt Wu, as if she’s her father’s sister. Azula viscerally hopes her uncle isn’t dating the woman, because the mental image of itself is already bad enough, and the relative association is… discomforting, to say the least.

“Alright, dear,” ‘Aunt’ Wu says, too gently. She’s got dark hair swept up and pinned in a traditional style, streaked with fraying grey bits, and at least two scarfs draped around her canary yellow clothes; a dumb lavender notepad on her lap, and a green ink pen gripped lightly in her right hand. She doesn’t sound like Zhao.

It doesn’t sound right.

“Don’t call me dear,” Azula tells her condescendingly.

Wu looks at her appraisingly, without much reservation in her eyes.

Hook, line, sinker, Azula reminds herself. Just say the right discomfiting words to paint the right psychotic picture, and refuse to cooperate, and they’ll give up like the undedicated imbeciles they are.

Iroh’d claimed Wu wouldn’t give up on her, because she’s “not a hopeless case”, even if his treatment of her seems to contradict that belief. (He likes lying to himself. He already knows she’s a monster.) Azula’s curious to see how far she can push, a game Ozai’d been all too fond of — dangling the puppet by the thread of the strings, testing its fraying limbs’ limits, and getting the show he wants out of its slow, slow mutilating deconstruction.

“Your uncle’s already told me some of your history, from what he knows of,” Wu says kindly. “If it’s okay with you, how about we begin with the environment you were raised in?”

Azula wonders if she can scare her off by plunging right into the worst fray of Zuko’s angst with her father’s favorite standardized sardonic vocalization; after all, Ozai’s already in jail — perhaps not charged with child abuse, but in jail regardless — and thus it doesn’t really matter if she spills what went on behind closed doors. She knows people are afraid of a little blood and a little fire — Zuko’d had a lot of both up his sleeve.

(She thinks about a hazy memory of being four and scared hands pressing her against a warm body, locked doors and smashed telephones. Being nine, and waking up with a newly vanished (dead) mother and crying brother and blood on big knuckles. Eleven, and scrabbling at the replacing wireless phone and the horrible scent of charred flesh wafting in the kitchen all the way from the fireplace, and lying through her teeth with a horrible shaking that shouldn’t’ve existed in the first place if she’d been as good a liar as she could’ve been. Twelve, and hearing the screams learn to dwindle down into nothing more than thuds against marble floor, and hearing running water in the bathroom all night. Thirteen, listening through closed doors at a white office, an unwashable nightmarish keen piercing at her ears.

Fourteen, and experiencing a strike against the jaw for the first time.)

“I was raised the greater child,” Azula monologues. “Always better than my dear brother Zuzu, who’s always been the family failure.

“Father held a grudge against him for his incompetency, and I don’t blame him — if you’d known Zuko, you’d see exactly why. Always screwing up, with his impressive implementation of stupidity and useless empathy.” She looks expectantly at Wu, voice still on its track of unquestionable confidence of its one-minded progression, because she does believe this printed page of the book. “He’s dead, now.”

( She’s not a fool.)

Wu nods solemnly, pen jotting lightly against the paper. “And how old was your brother, Azula?”

Azula knows she knows — she can see it in the grey-haired elder’s posture, the way her tone lifts at the syllables, in the particular anticipatory gleam shining in her brown eyes.

She says so.

Wu laughs, as if it’s funny. Maybe it is, to those who don’t have much to live for in their worthless lives. “You are correct, Azula. What an intelligent young lady you are! Do continue when you’re ready.”

Intelligent young lady. The only thing anyone’s ever got to say about her; the prodigal daughter, guaranteed to inherit a company that no longer exists.

Azula inhales through her nose; braces her hands together, grounding herself into the cold plastic chair pressing into her elbows, though slow enough to not draw attention to it. She’s out of practice.

“As long as Zuzu was around, there was entertainment to get beat around all day.” She shrugs offhandedly, a perfect picture of detached carelessness. “I think he made a pretty passive ragdoll, if you ask me.”

Wu’s eyes narrow ever so slightly, fingers not quite tightening on the pen (Father would almost be impressed), and she hides a smile of satisfaction. This is where she stares acquiescently into the distance like the dispassionate protagonist of a fourth-wall film, and doesn’t speak further.

Stubbornness, for all its futile motivation on Zuko, is a surprisingly effective trait when implemented in competence.

“Do you believe your father would’ve taken it out on you had he not been put under apprehension?” Wu questions mildly.

(Fourteen, and experiencing a strike against the jaw for the first time.)

“Of course not,” Azula says a bit too sharply, automatically. Realizes what she’s done, and narrows her eyes right back.

Azula drew the line, and failed to stay behind it.

☲☲☲

Toph attains Azula’s shift schedule from Iroh.

What can she say? Spicey’s fucking hilarious, and far too easy to provoke for all the canine bite she’s got. Toph loves her friends, but she doesn’t want to spend all day with them, and is probably the only one willing to abduct children into their group.

The wood’s smooth beneath her cane, a slight scuff of smudged footprints dragging against its tip. She snaps it shut once the rest of her senses dampen to the chillier interior, and makes her way with practiced ease to the partitioner.

Hygienically speaking, Toph shouldn’t be going to the back as she’s not a worker, but blindly speaking, Toph can’t see.

She hears a faint but irritated scuff of shoes against the floor, and fixes a semi-diabolical grin on her face. “So.” She sets herself down on the stool, orients herself at the cool metal stool by the keyboard-tap cash register. “How’s your shift going?”

“Why are you here?”

“Why should I not be here?”

☲☲☲

“Can you make me a strawberry-honeydew smoothie, with extra sugar and grass jelly?”

“I’m not your tea servant.”

“Yeah, but you work here.”

“... Disgusting. I’m not making that for you.”

“Why? Because you care about my wellbeing?”

“No, because it’s an iniquitous combination of fruits and jelly that looks like it was regurgitated by a rabid dog.”

“... What does iniquitous mean?”

☲☲☲

“Have you ever told a joke in your whole life?”

“Of course I have. I’m not a farm animal. It’s none of your business.”

“You should tell me a joke.”

“Why?”

“To prove that you’ve ever told a joke, duh.”

“Perhaps you’ll like the joke you’ll be when I —”

☲☲☲

“Would you rather lose your eyeballs, or lose your ears?”

“I don’t know, why don’t you tell me?”

“...”

“... Ears, so I don’t have to deal with your aggravating presence.”

“You think I’m aggravating?”

“It’s your innate complex as a blind child. Someone never gave you enough attention — probably your parents, judging from your continued lack of adult supervision — and it translated into your incessant need for attention, and in the most obnoxious exudation you can manage as well because that’s the only way you’re able to be noticed in key environments.”

“... Well, ouch.”

☲☲☲

Aang’s a good liar.

Toph’s surprised to find that out — but then again, this is the kid who was willingly on board with her to forge signatures and fake parent permission after knowing her for three minutes, so maybe it’s not that big of a surprise.

Connections and suggestions lead to Bumi, who pretty comfortably falls into the category of kind of eccentric.

He’s got a crackly, snorty voice, one that shifts in weight at the wrong syllables, and smells kind of like chopped logs of spruce trees mixed into ripped-up fern leaves. Scrapes loudly on the floor, like he could give two fewer shits about indoor-acceptable volume, and has incredibly veiny, bone jarring hands.

Toph kind of loves him on first impression, amplified particularly because her parents would hate him on first impression. He’s interesting, so different from all the people she’s grown up around, with the strange way he talks and creaky limbs that don’t grate on her ears.

He doesn’t ask questions about her parents. As far as she’s concerned, he doesn’t know anything about the shit she and Aang pulled with getting her here, and she plans to keep it that way.

It does take time and space, though — mid to post-school hours. Aang helps her craft a surprisingly effective excuse — Pai Sho club with her best friend and favorite person, designated for one and a half hours after school. (The ‘best friend and favorite person’ was a tag attributed by him himself, only after she’d assured him she didn’t mind, because for all that Toph doesn’t do friends, Aang’s been an awfully good one to her.)

He comes with her as she runs her palms over canes’ rubbery, smooth handles, testing the textures, feeling them ripple under the side of her thumb and gripping them gently. Testing their heavy to light weight — aluminum, fibreglass, graphite.

She doesn’t know when she last had the opportunity to just… touch, and decide for herself. It’s different, from the fine-woven silk blanket covering her bed, the achingly soft to mesh clothes she shoves her hands against. Different from learning to trust in Aang’s guidance to his face, and different from soaking her fingertips into the thick fuzzy fur of his dog, Appa, and different from pleated cafeteria tables she’s finally found reason to sit at. This is something for her.

Toph holds the cane up to her shoulder, hefts it into the air; swipes it on the lightly vibrating ground with its holding rolling marshmallow tip. It’s heavy, in a way she thinks could make good use for bashing people’s heads in (hypothetically), but not clunky.

It feels right in her hands.

And yet, for all Aang’s a good liar, her parents find out.

It might’ve been the fact that for all its folding properties, her cane’s still kind of long. It might barely stick out of her backpack, hardly larger than a collapsed umbrella shoved in the shoddy cup holder, but her mother catches sight of it and makes a loud gasping noise that resonates in the big echoey halls of the house.

She’s grounded.

They take her cane away, as if it’s a perpetuator of reckless misbehaviour, or a criminal possession, when she hasn’t even done anything with it beyond learning to see the world better. It feels like ripping a limb off her body with her mom’s silky fingers all over its worn handle and father’s grunt of disapproval at the fine coat of dirt layered at the pencil tip, and she grits her teeth and lets them take it because if she blows up, she doesn’t know how she’s ever going to live another day in this house.

(It’s worse than ripping off a limb. It feels like a violation.)

Her friends don’t really get the concept of shitty parents, and she’s glad they don’t — happy for them, really —, but sometimes it’s lonely.

Still, she invites herself onto their oversized shitfest of a server (she still can’t believe Aang invited Jet and never kicked him out even after he shamelessly dumped Katara), and dictates, 

toph, professionally blind - Today at 7:02 PM

[I’m fucking pissed. Anyone want to join me in shitting on parents]

Blu-espir-it-1-2-2-5-0-2 responds, and oh right, Toph kind of forgot he existed. He’s apparently the reason Sokka’s distracted on his phone in the middle of lunch break half the time, and Toph’s walked in on a few enough of their soap-centered conversations to know he bullies Sokka enough to be a cool dude. (To be fair, Sokka calls him Zucchini, so maybe they’re both losers.) “Parents fucking suck,” the reader says monotonously, with zero venom in its rendering at all. “What’s up?”

Toph can do speech dictation. She also hates how long it takes for the screen reader to speak responses to her — that’s one of the few inconveniences Toph truly hates about being blind, trying to keep up with a society that likes to gloss over words and type with the grammar of a northern giraffe and to keysmash. Instead, without saying anything else, she sits herself into the voice chat and stares hard in the direction that feels about right to glare at.

There’s a high-pitched run, indicating a joining speaker, and Toph shoves her face into a silky pillow to stifle her screaming.

“... Are you okay?”

“Parents fucking suck,” she grumbles into the pillow, before sitting up abruptly and letting the blankets tumble loosely to the floor. “Zucchini —”

Can she even talk to someone who uses the nickname Zucchini?

There’s a moment of silence on the other end of the speaker, then the guy coughs. “Um,” he says, voice strangled. “Did Sokka seriously tell you that’s my name?”

Toph kind of wants to drown right here and now.

“It’s — um — it’s Zuko, here,” Zuko blurts out. “Do you… do you need to scream for a while?”

Toph responds by groaning. “I already screamed.”

“Doesn’t hurt to scream more,” the guy points out, and okay, that’s a good point.

“Where did Sokka even find you?” she wonders after screaming again.

“The dumpster,” Zuko answers without skipping a beat, which she can respect for the unhesitancy of it all even if it’s the most hilariously teenager-esque response she’s ever heard.  

“... Actually, wait no, I see it.” See being a deliberate choice of word, because she’s a proud little shit like that.

“Were you saying something about shitty parents?” he asks instead, completely blind (ha) to the joke.

Toph slumps down hard against the squishy mattress with pooling blankets, and grits her teeth. “My parents took my cane away,” she grinds out, anger bleeding through her veins.

“Oh.” That’s enough, for him to get it. “That’s… that’s bad.”

Toph makes a face. “Yeah, no shit.” Thinks a little harder. “It feels like — I just, hearing the stickiness of their fingers all over it and being unable to say anything. They don’t think I can do anything at all, and they wouldn’t if they’d only looked at me twice in my whole fucking life, but they don’t, and they even have functioning eyeballs!”

“Sounds like the exact opposite of my problem,” Zuko mutters, then coughs.

“It feels like a violation,” Toph admits. “They don’t want me to be able to navigate the world at all, because if it were up to them, all I’d be were a useless shiny doll. And when I’ve finally got something, they just… rip it away from me.”

(If it were up to them, she wouldn’t be blind at all.)

There’s silence on the other side of the call.

“Yeah I uh — I get what you mean.” His voice is all strangled over the line. “Listen — it’s the worst. I get it. I’m pretty sure that’s, like, all sorts of violations right there. But blowing up always turns out worse.”

Zuko sounds like he’s on the verge of tears. Toph doesn’t ask, swallows down the need to say that she doesn’t know how much longer she can last, because she knows he’s right.

She gets her cane back, eventually. Aang is guilty, in a horrible, thick way she never wants to hear in his voice again, and somehow managed to get Bumi in on it. Her parents offer her a stilted speech that sounds rehearsed, like they’ve searched up the best way to apologize for something they don’t give two shits about, and don’t force her to stop lessons.

Toph doesn’t forget it, though.

☲☲☲

Toph looks frazzled today, eyes rimmed with a touch of red and anger radiating from her petulant posture, shoes shoved haphazardly her feet for once and fists clenched. She slams the door open, bells clanging violently against each other in their crest, and catches herself on a chair in her way — like she’s lost all restraint, walking blindly for the first time. Glares hard in the direction of nowhere.

Azula sighs, and because she’s not socially incompetent like Zuzu, sets herself down on the secondary stool and calls out, “What’s the matter?”

Toph’s head snaps around with a disconcerting precision to her voice, cane nowhere in sight, and storms over, nearly crashing into the elbow-high counter with all her shaking vigor. “My parents,” she seethes, “are shitheads.”

Azula raises her eyebrow, then remembers the tiny fuming child is blind. “Sounds like a shame,” she offers.

“They think I’m absolutely incompetent because I can’t see shit.” (Seeing is for the weak, remains unsaid.)

“You are unable to see,” Azula points out helpfully, scathing remarks vaporizing on her tongue.

Toph cocks her head left, hair swinging with the force of it. Normally, that kind of retort would provoke an over-intensive guffaw from her, but not today it seems. “My blindness doesn’t mean I’m incompetent,” she repeats, stressing. “I —” She huffs out loudly, a lengthy exhale that conveys audibly through the air. “Doesn’t mean that I’m not good enough to — good enough to beat the shit out of buff dudes, or that they need to protect me from them.”

Azula can’t help herself and scoffs; this is now Zuko-level ridiculous, except even he wasn’t foolish enough to follow that kind of mindset. “Protect you? What kind of parent protects their children from imbeciles at school, or restrains them from learning proper self-defense? That’s just stupid.”

“Um.” Toph doesn’t squint, but her posture radiates that action with all the subtle translations Azula’s learned to interpret. “That’s… that sounds a little extreme?”

She waves a hand dismissively. “Oh, get on with it. Monologue, or whatever else you do.”

Toph, while not looking particularly like she buys it, monologues, and monologues with steadily increasing fervor that nearly translates into full-blown arm gesticulations. She goes on and on about the horrible life of being a pretty porcelain doll (how unobservant can these Beifongs possibly be?), and canes, and some old man named Bumi who sounds awfully like a person her uncle would love to play Pai Sho with. Every word that comes out of the blind girl’s mouth paints an increasingly puzzling picture as Azula tries to shift their oddly shaped pieces around into a comprehensive image, but it looks all skewed and wrong.

And then she finishes, and looks upset, in a shattering way Azula’s never really seen on anyone. “I just wanted to join the wrestling team,” she mumbles. “I mean, normally I’d get — um — I’d have one of my friends forge a signature for me, but they want actual parental approval. Especially because I’m blind.”

Azula hasn’t quite found the right labeled boxes for everything Toph’s just dropped, but she snags onto the last part. Considers the teary-eyed spikeball in front of her, and has an idea that she already hates on instinct.

“I’ll spar with you,” she says before she can bite on her tongue. "It's not the same as buff guys, but I'm better. "

Because I need to stay in practice, she tells herself — she hasn’t even seen a dojo around this town at any sole event. (Stay in practice with her fists, unlike everything else.)

Toph’s face lights up, practically a sunbeam hitting the corners of an agelessly damp cave. “Really?”

Hopeless. “Yes, that’s what I just said. Are you acquiring an ear problem in addition to your sight problems?”

Toph doesn’t respond to the jab beyond cracking her knuckles resonantly and grinning toothily across the counter, kicking her open-toed shoes into the ground. Softening a little all around, sinking into the hard stool. “Thanks, Spicey.”

It’s so mushy. Azula debates taking her words back, just to crush pudding into dust, but doesn’t, and instead wrings out an orange-striped rag to clean up the spilled tea dripping steadily to the floor.

She’s getting attached to this feral dirt burr.

“Now, speaking of shitty parents —” Toph flings her now bare feet onto Azula’s unoccupied stool, and laces her fingers together in opposition to her prior fists. “What were you saying about yours?”

“I don’t have anything to say about my father,” Azula says sharply, going back to wiping at the spotless counter with almost aggressive concentration.

(I don't have anything to say about Mother, either.)

Toph makes a face that’s quickly smoothed down. “That’s what y’all say before accidentally revealing what massive fuckheads they are,” she agrees amicably. Leans forward to pick at her toes. “No matter, we’ll un-brainwash you in no time.”

… “We?”

“We.” Toph nods assertively, with the confidence of a determined chihuahua.

“Are you threatening me?” Azula demands.

☲☲☲

“Do you want to start from where we left off last session?” Wu asks.

Technically, their last session hadn’t really ended anywhere, not in a traditional sense. Azula drew the line firmer, and didn’t sway over it even with all of Wu’s increasingly passive-aggressive, indirectly derogatory remarks about Ozai.

(Everything Azula’s been raised with for her whole life are at a contrast — is she supposed to defend her father, who’s already fallen low enough, or remain in control of the situation?

She’d stayed in control of the situation. She’s already fallen low enough as is.)

“Actually, I don’t,” Azula informs her.

Again, like last session, Wu doesn’t react beyond smiling a little wider at her, except without that achingly obvious disingenuity Iroh utilizes. At least she’s a decent actor. Hums. “Do you believe your father would’ve taken it out on you had he not been put under apprehension?” she repeats.

The tactic of insufficient answers and utter silence hadn’t worked on the woman last time, even if it ultimately ended. Pursuing that track would eventually wear the rails down, but from observing Wu’s rather effortlessly persistent behaviour, she knows it’d take a long, long time.

“Father only beats those who deserve it,” she says instead.

(She doesn’t know where she’s going with this. Planning seven steps ahead in evasion isn’t something she’s had to do for months. Everything crumbles to dust before she can reach it, nowadays.)

Wu scrabbles something on her stupid notepad. “And do you believe your brother deserved it, Azula?”

She doesn’t know. Did he deserve it? Was Zuko’s natural inability to do life properly a justification for ever shaking walls and tearless bleeding faces, every scar that never stopped growing? For burned off hair, and for burned off flesh?

She wants to say yes, because she’s a monster and that’s all she’ll ever be. Wants to say yes, because she laughs behind closed doors at the mirror over her brother’s stifled screams; because she only offers her makeup to paint away his fucked-up face from the people who pry too much at slowly peeling canvases; because she’s tired of being a liar for everything everyone wants from her.

Azula wants to say yes.

Suddenly, something at those words makes Azula snap. She doesn’t care that her emotions are strong-strong-strong, everything her father would hate, because he isn’t here.

Father isn’t here, and she can say what she wants to say.

“Isn’t therapy supposed to be about me? ” she counters, and doesn’t say what she wants to say. “Everything’s Zuzu this, Zuzu that. He’s already dead.”

Wu looks at her sadly, in a fair approximation of a drooping farm animal. “We don’t have to talk about him, if you don’t want to. It’s up to you. But your uncle mentioned that he passed recently, and you’re fifteen. From what you’ve said about your home life, it sounds like there’s more than just your brother I can help you with, and your brother seems to be the starting point.”

Azula glares, and finds that she doesn’t care if she looks unhinged, or sounds unhinged. “I know what Father did to Zuzu was illegal. That doesn’t mean I was a victim. Quit treating me like one. My uncle’s wasting his money, and you’re wasting your time.” This is a mutual dissatisfaction, ‘Aunt’ Wu. “Just give up on me — tell him your mentally incompetent dimwittedness couldn’t handle the likes of a monster like me, and we won’t have to cross paths again.”

To her credit, she doesn’t even flinch. “Do you think you’re a monster, Azula?”

(Azula, don’t say that.

What is wrong with that child?)

Wu looks like Mother, expression downturned like all the life’s been snuffed out of it and all it’s got left to do is drip into a still hourglass mold.

(No, you’re lying!

Azula always lies, always lies, always lies —)

She looks like she pities her, like Ty Lee hugging her carefully after Mother’s departure; like Mai listening to her facile deconstruction of her apathetic personality; like Zuko standing in the bathroom door, scrawled all over his face.

(I love you, Azula. I do.)

“Don’t pretend you care. You think I’m a monster. It’s okay, I don’t blame you.”

“You think you’re a monster because your father’s ingrained that into you,” Wu insists. “I don’t think you’re a monster. You’re confused.”

(Toph would say it’s the other way around without knowing a thing, with focused glazed eyes and an angry clenched fist that would unhesitatingly pummel into the parent figure.)

Azula crosses her arms, feeling the cold smooth limbs of the chair chilling all the more present against her rigid body, and glares a little harder. “Believe what you want to believe, then. It’s your loss.”

She doesn’t correct that to her father, she’s the prodigy, and to her mother, she’s a monster.

(It’s your loss, Azula.

You should’ve done better.)

She doesn’t want to fight, anymore.

Chapter Text

“This is Azula,” Toph announces, gesturing in the vague direction of a sullen-faced girl trailing after her who manages to draw herself up in a self-important posture while looking so wretchedly sulky. Possibly in her sophomore year, with painfully sharp features and tight-pressed lips, and dressed in a dark coat and pair of black pants that exemplify the spending of money. She’s got half her raven hair pinned up in a perfect bun and nails that look too pointy for anything but pinching scuttling hermit crabs out of aquarium touch-pools, and is also incredibly — well, short.

Katara kind of hates her on instinct.

“Oh, hey!” Sokka says cheerfully, mouth still half stuffed with boiled dumplings and their following chopsticks. “Nice to see you again.”

Katara can see Azula holding back a biting remark at Sokka, and resists the urge herself to throttle the girl because she radiates bitch energy.

Finally, Azula nods stiffly. “You, too.” She’s got a faint accent, hardly even detectable to the ear, like she’s spent hours learning to repress it properly, because her emphasis is a bit too strong and her slurs a little too detached. It sounds like a vaguely warped music file, like rough autotune — too rigid, too forced; not quite right, but melding into the instrumental track unsuspectingly.

“Wait a minute,” Toph interrupts gleefully, voice laced with utter delight. “ Azula’s the scary, ‘socially constipated’ girl from summer school?”

Sokka cringes, and gives Azula the wary eye, swallowing the entirety of the lunch occupying his mouth abruptly. “Ummm,” he says. “No. No, I — I did not say that.”

Azula’s eye twitches.

Katara jumps in to defuse the situation effectively before Suki, let alone Aang, can do so because that’s her idiot of a big brother. “Sokka, shut up. You’re welcome to sit here,” she addresses towards the somewhat intimidating girl standing a notable distance away from their designated ground-area.

(She carefully keeps her opinions out of her voice; she’s been practicing extensively for the last couple months in her own house, after all. She can handle a few more hours at school.)

Aang doesn’t have such misgivings, apparently. “Hi, Azula!” he chirps, waving cheerfully at the decidedly not cheerful teenager. “I’m Aang. This is Katara, Sokka, and Suki.

“What’s your favorite color?”

“Ooh, I know this one!” Toph butts in, like an active participant in a trivia on Azula’s Visual Preferences. “It’s purple.”

“... Yes, it’s purple. ”

Azula is… awkward, in the shortest summation possible. She’s kind of prickly and rude and outright hostile at times, but it seems to stem from an innate inability to socially interact (— socially constipated, as Sokka so gracefully put it), and Katara isn’t going to fault her for it.

That doesn’t mean she likes the other girl. There’s something off about her, in the way she surveys their group with this eerily dissonant detachedness; the way she looks down at her own nails and the way she speaks when not stumbling hilariously; the forcedly relaxed posture she maintains on the wiry green bench above them. The weirdly shrewd way she regards her and Sokka whenever they exchange words.

The bell rings. Toph yanks Katara aside as Sokka and Suki wander off to physics together, Aang shoves his lunch back into his rolling backpack, and Azula stalks off judgmentally without a single word to any of the people who’d been her company for the past half-hour.

“What?” Katara hisses.

“Listen,” Toph says. “Azula’s a bitch, but she’s not a bad person. She’s — Iroh told me her brother died recently. That’d fuck anyone up.”

Oh.

“Oh,” Katara echoes aloud, voice very small to her own ears.

Don’t give her your death stare, goes unsaid, though Katara gets the distinct feeling that it wouldn’t affect her at all whatsoever.

“Yeah.” Toph lingers for a moment, before reaching out to sock Katara in the arm. “I know it’s hard for you to like people, but give her a chance? She’s my sparring buddy.”

Give her a chance. That’s all anyone ever asks of her.

That’s fine. Katara’s good at giving chances. “Fine.”

She goes to algebra, and doesn’t think twice about it.

☲☲☲

The reservation began to settle in the night after Dad came home.

Katara doesn’t know how everyone’s so okay with it all.

She remembers all the lonely nights by a flickering yellow lamp at the setting red sun, flipping through the veined pages of the recipe book her mother used to write in, and not knowing what to make of everything in it, turning to a ghost that never stood beside her at the scraped cutting board. Hopelessly begging Suki to force Sokka to go out with her, because if she spends one more minute in the kitchen knowing he’s upstairs and (not being here) drowning in his own head, she doesn’t think she can ever get anything done. Not knowing how to help her grandmother, even though all she’s tried to do is help and help and help.

(She was never hopeless. It’s not who she is, but sometimes the weight collapses in and she doesn’t know how to mitigate the deep, pitchless cave-in.)

It’d kept her busy. Kept her from taking it out on herself, the way she wanted to sometimes.

Dad spends a lot of time with Gran Gran (the way Katara’s been doing for years on end —), and a lot of time with Sokka, and tries to spend a lot of time with her.

She doesn’t want to spend a lot of time with him.

Sokka and Aang are playing a tacky green platformer game in the living room, and her father’s also there, giving dad-quality commentary. Sokka bursts into laughter, silhouette outlined against the glowing television, and Aang turns around to give her dad a high-five, and Katara tries to not feel bitter because she’s not.

She can’t study here.

Without another world, she shovels her books into her backpack, and heads to the door. She hasn’t needed adult permission since she was eleven and her grandmother still knew how to take care of them.

(The closest she’s had to adult supervision has been Sokka, and that label might be equally laughable and somber a notion, but it’s not the same.)

Her dad notices her as she sweeps past the hall, a slight frown touching his features. “Katara, won’t you come join us?”

“No,” she responds stiffly, unlocking the door and pulling the doorknob open.

Hakoda stands up, walks over to join her at the door frame. “Katara, sweetie,” he says, reaching out to place a hand on her shoulder. “At least tell me where you’re going? It’s raining.”

It is raining.

“To study. ”  Katara pushes his hand off her shoulder, cold droplets and air hitting empty space, and wrenches her bike out of the garage into the damp grey skies.

She doesn’t really know where she’s going yet, but she can’t stand in the house where everyone’s pretending nothing’s wrong and focus. Fall’s barely begun, but the fiery red-yellow autumn leaves are already flattening wetly against the concrete as she rolls over with muddy wheels, a light squelch resonating soundly in contrast to the season it decors for, and the slow pedaling doesn’t take away the biting ache of wintry breeze.

Her head hurts, and maybe her heart does a bit too.

Katara’s spent so much time trying to take care of everyone and everything, and now her dad’s home, but he doesn’t have anything to say about what she’s done beyond a punctuation of pride. Sokka’s done his best to help, and she loves him for it, but remembering to be responsible isn’t something that comes to him without prompting, and he doesn’t know how to talk when it comes to Gran Gran. She barely knows how to talk when it comes to Gran Gran.

(Mom never got to teach her enough, either, before everything was lost. Sometimes, she sits by her grandmother’s bedside in the dark and wishes she knew more, that the figure beside her could teach her, but now it’s too late and everything’s too late and there isn’t any space left to cry for the things she could’ve had.)

Dad comes home, and he doesn’t know how to cook either, but does take out… a lot. Enough that it makes Katara angry for an unspeakable reason. He lets Katara cook most days, even as he stands in the kitchen and clumsily slices carrots into large chunks and offers stilted remarks that burn fumes in her ears, and she cooks angry, the scent of charred tofu filling the kitchen more often than not.

And he’s not like he isn’t responsible, or doesn’t know how to take care of Gran Gran, but at the same time, seeing everything she’s always done being reversed and flipped upside down, seeing her routine fall apart — it’s impossibly frustrating.

He still hasn’t tried bridging the slowly collapsing gap, even though that’s what he’s supposed to do, and Katara wonders if he’s just… forgotten.

She finds herself standing at the entrance of The Jasmine Dragon, rain steadily striking the glass panes outlined by strung up lights, in front of a hazy watering rendition of her reflection.

Jin’s always good company, even when she’s working full shift. Katara goes in.

Azula’s standing at the cash register.

“Oh — um —” Katara did not come here to deal with her emotional misgivings about Toph’s apparent sparring buddy, but she’s already here, and Jin’s no where in sight. “Hey, Azula,” she finally settles on. “I. Didn’t expect to see you here.”

Azula raises her eyebrows, so precisely it’s almost funny. “I didn’t expect to see you here, either.”

Katara shrugs, and pretends to scan the menu, even though she already knows her order. The other girl’s dark eyes follow her forced gaze, and she suppresses an uncomfortable twitch at the slithery feeling scraping her skin.

“I’ll get a regular wintermelon, with lychee jelly and half sugar and ice,” she says, shuffling around in her pockets for her wallet. She reaches over the counter to pass the money into the hold of glossy red nails for pinching hermit crabs, and heads over to the small table shoved into the corner against the racing drops sliding across scratched glass to unpack her bag.

She’s idly twirling the wrapped straw between her hands, staring blankly at the slowly spinning language arts textbook laying open on the polished wood surface, when Azula calls her name out. Katara stands up and snatches her drink off the counter, determined to ignore the other girl for the rest of her (uneventful) study session, but is stopped by a hasty, “I need to talk to you.”

Might as well get it over with. Katara shrugs noncommittally, not necessarily a positive nor negative indication, but Azula follows her back to her two-person desk and seats herself on the other end of the table.

“Look,” Azula says after she’s settled down, as if she’s not Toph’s apparent post-school company, “Toph wants us to be friends. I’m tolerating this because our partnership is beneficial to me, and thus extends to you now that she has certain expectations for related relationships.”

Katara stares, uncertain if she’s trying for comedy, but she looks completely, totally deadpan about every word coming out of her mouth. “Um,” she begins, as politely as she can.

“It’s nothing personal,” the other girl adds, voice quieter to the ears, though it might just be her imagination speaking.

Katara tries for a smile, even though all she wants to do is bury her head beneath schoolwork and lay facedown in an overly squishy bed and not get back up. “Sure,” she coughs out. She doesn’t mention that she doesn’t do… alliances? Is that what Azula’s proposing? “We can be — we can be not-friends.”

Azula doesn’t move from her seat, and now that she’s said her piece, some of the rigidness seems to have seeped out of her, leaving nothing but a somewhat awkward space between them. Coughs.

“So,” she starts, like she hadn’t just offered the weirdest semi-proposition Katara’s heard in weeks; like all that practiced vernacular had just flooded down the drain from her vocabulary after being said. “What do you…. do in your spare time?”

And just like that, Katara is pissed again.

(Spare time? she wants to utter bitterly, even though she knows it isn’t fair.)

“Nothing,” she bites out, and maybe it’s horrible that it’s the truth. “Don’t you have a tea shift to return to?”

Azula shrugs. “My uncle can handle his own teashop,” she says, then leans backwards flat against her chair, some indecipherable expression flickering across her polished features. “Do you not have things to do, aside from accomplishing nothing in your schoolwork?” She gestures at the pages strewn about, and Katara flushes angrily.

(She does have better things to do. She could be checking on her grandmother’s pulse, she could be cooking, she could be… helping around the house, because homework can always be done later and she doesn’t need a drink. She could be useful, unlike her dad.)

“I was accomplishing my schoolwork, until you came along.” Katara aggressively throws open her unrelated binder for math, sending sheets splaying across the table. Grasps at them bad-temperedly, effectively evading eye contact, and scratching her cuticles against the rim with a hiss of pain.

“Doesn’t seem like it to me.” Azula wrinkles her nose, not making any move to assist in collecting the scattered work. “Maybe you should reconsider how you’re managing your time.”

And okay, the bitch energy is real.

Katara finishes scraping her papers back together, shoves them into her backpack, stands up, and glares. “Thank you for serving me.”

Something shifts in the other girl’s eyes, something softer, lighter, but Katara doesn’t wait to see the expression morph any longer as she storms out the door and pedals back into the rain.

It’s not until she’s home when she realizes she left her drink behind.

☲☲☲

Azula stares after Katara storming out of the shop, bells ringing angrily in her wake.

This is going to interfere with her and Toph’s partnership, because Toph explicitly wanted her to be “friends” with her “friends”. She needs this, and now a failed effort to be civil in social interaction has ruined their arrangement.

Ignoring her uncle’s concerned (as if) gaze on her, she rips off her apron and makes her way below the apartment where they’d scheduled their first sparring session.

“Toph?”

The basement’s light flicks on, illuminating the cleared area and punching stand perched in the center. Toph doesn’t move her head from her position against the wall, legs splayed crookedly like a propped-up rag doll and eyes closed contently. “Yo. What gives, Spicey?”

Azula scowls at the nickname, because she still doesn’t know why Toph decided on ‘Spicey’ of all the names. (At least it’s not some other variation of her actual name. She doesn’t think she can deal with anything that sounds remotely like what Zuko called her.) She walks down the rest of the stairs and over to the shorter girl, and instinctively waits for eye contact before remembering the whole blindness problem. 

“Katara hates me,” she states bluntly.

She can tell; it’s not even hard. She’s seen the look in the other girl’s dark eyes, the way she’d eyeballed her the moment she’d walked up to their semi-circle of otherwise dull children, the simmering frustration at the sight of the cash register in The Jasmine Dragon. Azula knows people, and Katara is about as easy to read as Zuko — maybe even more so, considering that she doesn’t even try to hide the emotions that unfold on her features quicker than a wind-bent brochure.

For the record, it’s not the idea of the other girl disliking her that poses an issue. She doesn’t care what other people think of her. It’s the problem insinuated by the dissent.

Toph cranks an eyelid open, plants a hand on the ground. “ C’mon. Sweetness doesn’t hate anyone but, like, socioeconomically corrupted politicians and child abusers. And everyone who pisses her off, though that’s usually temporary.”

“I told her to reconsider her time management skills.”

“... Yeah, she’s probably pissed. Don’t worry too much about it.”

She doesn’t say anything else beyond that, and Azula shifts on her feet. She’s not uncomfortable, just… considering. Calculating. Hesitates for a moment, then folds her legs to sit across from Toph on the cold wood floor of the basement. “I understand if this conflict… complicates our relationship.”

Toph looks nonplussed for a second, before snorting and returning to a more neutral expression. “Spicey, if you’re trying to sign your resignation to escape from being friends, I’m going to punt you into next week this session. Not that I wasn’t already going to do that.”

Azula blinks. “You want to start sparring right now?” Then, processing ‘punt you into next week’, scowls at the implication that she could even get beaten.

The blind girl rolls her eyes, probably a skill taught to her by Katara, and reaches out to sock her in the arm. Azula sways back to the minimal degree. “You fucking idiot. Listen, Azula. I want to be your friend because I like you for you, and if Sugar Queen’s got a problem with it, then that’s her problem. She’s not getting the way of me acquiring a punching bag.” A pause, then — “What, have you never had a friend in your whole life?”

Azula thinks back to Mai and Ty Lee. How they’d moved out of the city without so much as a word to her, while they’d taken their sweet, sweet time offering their inutile goodbyes to Zuko. (He hadn’t even told her until after they left. She stopped caring.)

You can’t trust people to just be your friends, to offer their company with no strings or ulterior motives hitched on. Trust, love, friendship — all the same foolish ideologies that always hurt more once you grow attached to their beckoning softness, because they’re too easy to whip around and forge into knives.

(Trust is for fools. Yes, Azula would know.)

“I don’t need friends,” she says, and it’s the truth.

She doesn’t need friends. She’s a prodigy — she’s good enough for herself, and good enough for the world to see, and was good enough for her father.

(You should’ve done better.)

And Toph has the audacity to roll her cloudy brown eyes again. “Quit being a snobby business kid. Everyone needs friends. Aang — he’s the diabolically cheerful bald kid — hauled me ass-first into his friend group, which is a million times better than stuffy adults. So I’m going to haul you ass-first into our friend group, and if you keep trying to resist, I’m going to have to pummel basic friendship lessons into your thick head.”

Azula glares, prepared to pummel Toph first.

“And,” she goes on, swinging her left arm around to point at Azula’s nose, “if Katara decides to hold her grudge and you try to use it as an excuse, I’ll be forced to lock you two in a room and hope you both return intact.”

“I’d win,” Azula says confidently. After all, even if she looks like she’d be excellent at rage-driven scuffles, Katara also doesn’t look like she’s thrown a proper punch a day in her life.

“That’s actually not the point, but I knew we’re friends for a reason. Ready to throw each other around?”

☲☲☲

Katara storms into the house, slams the door shut, and throws her shoes into the ground, sending plumes of dust into the air that don’t quite resettle.

Aang’s already gone. It’s just Sokka and Dad in the living room, and they turn around to stare at her as she stomps by the partition, carefully restraining the need to glower at them. They’re watching a movie, one she can’t bring herself to care about as the vivid reds and yellows flash brilliantly on the screen, not a distraction from the anger churning in her mind but lurking loudly in the edges of her vision.

“Katara,” Dad calls, rising to his feet, and he sounds so genuinely upset in a way that kind of makes her want to throw something. “Are you okay?”

She doesn’t offer a response, instead making her way up the stairs. A hand grasps her shoulder firmly, and she whips her head around. “You don’t need to ask me,” Katara bites out bitterly to her dad’s concerned face, even though her head is pounding and she knows she’s being unreasonable about that question alone but she’s mad.  

Her dad looks at her gently, expression verging on puzzled. “Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best question,” he acknowledges. “Do you want to talk about what’s on your mind?”

“What does it mean to you? You haven’t been here! You don’t even know me! ”

Silence; a hand drawing away.

(He doesn’t really know her. Her dad doesn’t know her, because while he was gone, she’s become a different person. She isn’t a little girl who needs to be coddled by her father anymore, and he doesn’t know that.)

The pictures hanging on the paint-peeling walls seem to rattle with every step, even though the stairs are solid carpet and should absorb the angry blows falling against them. They’re full of dead people — two smiling, bright-eyed children who haven’t been kids for a long time, and a mother and father who haven’t been in this household for too long; a ghost of a grandmother who doesn’t always remember her son’s name, and a branch of nameless people left behind.

Dead people adorn their walls. Katara almost wonders why she and Sokka haven’t thrown them out yet because all they ever do is drive more knives into already bleeding hearts, like an ewe on the butchering table subject to pointless shredding of the hooves, then feels awful because that’s her family, even if it’s missing a lot of pieces. Flings herself onto her bed, and covers her head with a pillow.

There’s a knock at the door.

“Kat,” Sokka’s voice filters through. “Can I come in?”

She doesn’t want to talk to him. “Go away.”

“Come on, ” he practically wheedles.

(They promised they wouldn’t shut each other out.)

“… Fine,” she grumbles.

The door creaks open, and there’s a dipping shift of weight in the mattress as Sokka throws himself on his back beside her, sending its blankets billowing in his wake. 

Katara makes a face. “You’re going to get my sheets dirty.”

Sokka scoffs dismissively, gesturing hand nearly hitting his sister’s face in the process. “You’re already getting your own sheets dirty. I’m not anywhere near as disgusting as you, sis. If anything, I’m freshening them up.”

Katara snorts, but doesn’t move her head from under the pillow. It’s awkward, having Sokka laying on her bed in silence for the first time in ages. Maybe it’s because they’ve grown older and she doesn’t (often) wake up with red in her vision, or maybe because they don’t have enough time for each other anymore because there’s returning people to spend their time with. The latter thought twists an ugly gaping hole in her gut.

They go silent, before she feels him roll over. “You know, Dad’s just worried about you.”

“Well, he shouldn’t be.”

There’s a pause as her brother considers that. “He doesn’t know how to talk to you, yet,” he says, softer, and she feels him shift again, like he’s looking away. “He loves you a lot, you know.” (She does know.) “I know he hasn’t been home for a long time, and we’ve — and we’ve grown up on our own. But he’s back now, and you don’t have to take everything up anymore.”

Katara swallows. That’s exactly it.

“I —” Her throat is kind of dry. Tries again, but nothing comes out. Sokka waits patiently, but she doesn’t know what to say, so she doesn’t.

“I know you like taking care of everyone —” (It wasn’t a choice, but now she doesn’t know what else to do except help help help) “— but it’s okay to let him take care of you. To let us take care of you. What’s wrong right now?”

A bubble of frustration rises up in her. “I’m not upset! ” she snaps, before flaring down. “It’s just —” She still doesn’t know how to put it into words.

“It was so hard when Dad left us all on our own, and then he just waltzes home one day and tries to take over, but he doesn’t even know how to. He takes over everything I’ve been doing for years, and I just — I —” Katara gasps on a sob, tightening the soft fabric against the nape of her neck, and Sokka lets out a soft noise. “I feel useless,” she admits. “And he doesn’t know how to cook, so I end up doing it anyway, and he takes care of Gran Gran but in the wrong way, and it feels like everything but nothing’s changed. He’s home, and trying to take responsibility for the things he left behind, but he doesn’t make sure — he doesn’t make sure I’m okay with it.”

It doesn’t even make sense, but the words keep tumbling out as she sits up, like tipping the perfectly balanced scale a little too far and sending off a chain of dominoes to collapse against each other down years of careful, steady plantation set in a slurry of grey, bitter-drawn glue.

“I want to blame him for everything he never did, okay?” Katara chokes out. “And I can’t, because I get that he had to go, and I don’t get to blame him. But it doesn’t — it doesn’t feel okay yet, and I don’t know if it ever will, and I’m just… so mad.”

Do I get to blame him for not trying to fix it? For just giving up on me?

Eventually, Sokka reaches over, and yanks the pillow out of her hands, and squishes his arms around her. Katara leans forward, and collapses into them like she’s done ever since their house became a family of ghosts, and hasn’t ever since their father came home. It hurts, and she lets out a small sniffle.

Sokka draws back immediately. “Sorry, did I hurt you?”

“No.” Katara punches him in the arm with the influence of Toph’s ever-present behaviour, then squashes her face back against him, effectively hiding the fact that she’s not sniffing.

“... Are you going to talk to Dad, then?”

“I don’t know.” She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know if she can even talk to him at all, anymore.

Sokka pokes her in the back. “You should. Talk to him, that is.”

☲☲☲

“So,” Toph says, flopping heavily onto the ground and pinning her sightless eyes up onto the ceiling. It’s patchy and filled with holes, the lights flickering rapidly like incessant fluttery moths around a lamp, which kind of makes Azula want to punch them.

She’s flushed but grinning like her life depends on it, hair falling out of their twin space buns and plastered against the back of her neck. Azula lets herself grin back, mostly because Toph can’t see it, but also because it feels good to get back into the swing of things. To strain and throw — no ducking or evasion, for sightless wrestling — even if it’s not the martial arts she usually implements.

“Want to talk about your shitheads of parents?”

“My father is not an imbecile,” Azula defends automatically, narrowing her eyes. It’s like the other girl’s trying to figure out how to grate on her nerves. “Where would you even draw that conclusion from?”

Toph shrugs. “Dunno. It’s like with Sparky — you say a concerning thing, my ‘Shitty Parents Radar’ goes off. It’s a whole thing.”

Her father is right. Her father is the precise example of how to control, how to hold oneself; simply, he got too caught up in the illegal sides of the business, and he allowed Zuko too much information, and Zuko was just too bitter to let himself die without dragging everyone down with him. 

She wouldn’t have made that one, fatal mistake.

(Because if he wasn’t right, then it means that everything she’s been raised to believe in is wrong. And if she doesn’t think clinically about everything she’s ever been, then she can’t consider the possibility that maybe Wu was right about her questions, and that maybe the way Father treated Zuko wasn’t only illegal but also unfair, and that maybe she’s not the prodigal daughter everyone saw in her eyes from the moment she was born.

Because it might mean that her mother was wrong to call her a monster, a title that offers a righteous justification for every word she copies from cold lips.

She doesn’t like thinking about it.)

“Shut up,” Azula says, and Toph does.

☲☲☲

Katara talks to her dad.

Well, as far as talking goes, that is.

“You left us!” Katara yells, though it comes out all hoarse and cracked, mingled with the scratchy rawness that’s been festering in her throat for months. “I… I know you had to leave, but it’s been so much and — and Gran Gran couldn’t take care of us the way she was supposed to when you left us with her, and I’ve been doing everything.”

“Katara —” Dad begins, but she cuts him off before he can say anything else.

“No! Stop it!” She whirls around and collapses into the mesh blue chair, drawing her knees up to her chest and pressing her face down. “You don’t get to say anything. Do you even realize how much I’ve had to do? I’m fourteen — you were gone for three years —” She can’t look him in the eye, even though all she wants to do is see his face as she yells out all the bloody pain sitting like spidery residue in the caverns of her ribs; she wants to scream, wants to punch something or to punch somebody even though it goes against everything she likes to think she believes in, because she’s been hurting too. “Sokka was fucked up for months after Yue died, Dad. You don’t know what it was like. You weren’t there, and you should’ve been! It’s not — It’s not my job to be a mom.”

(But Mom was gone, and there was no one else who could fill the gap.)

“No, it isn’t,” Dad agrees. Walks around to crouch beside her, steps creaking heavily on the carpeted floorboards through the messy hair tangled around her ears. “Katara — I am so sorry.”

“You should’ve known!” Katara’s eyes are blurring with salt now, and everything’s all hazy and red and it stings like nothing else. “You’ve been home before, you’ve seen how bad Gran Gran is, and just because Sokka and I hadn’t said anything doesn’t mean you get to assume that we’re fucking okay with this!”

He doesn’t tell her to calm down. He doesn’t offer an excuse, either, even though deep down she knows that there are a million excuses that he’s allowed to say, that she doesn’t think she could shoot down even if she tried.

Dad takes a deep breath. “You’re right. I should have realized that you guys needed me, and tried harder to return home sooner, and I’m sorry that I didn’t.”

“Sorry isn’t enough!”

Sorry isn’t enough for the years she’s spent managing a whole household. Sorry isn’t enough for the late night homework and broken memories left to tide over. Sorry isn’t enough for Sokka falling apart and not having anyone but his thirteen year old sister and the friends he’d kept pushing away.

Sorry isn’t enough for the time she’s lost with her dad.

She tries to stop the tears from flowing all over her face, but can’t. It’s sticky and wet and awful and she keeps crying because it feels awful, and she feels awful, and she shouldn’t be yelling at her dad now that he’s home, but he’s here and she doesn’t know how else to let go of the grossness coalescing around her heart.

Arms come around her. Katara almost wants to push them off, but her traitorous body melts into their hold like pudding into a jar, still shaking with tears? Anger?

She doesn’t even know.

“Katara, sweetie. Katara, I know sorry isn’t enough, but I can’t give the time you’ve lost back to you. You’re right that this isn’t fair.” Dad’s arms are a little bony, but she turns her head around and buries her whole face into them. “And I wish I could, but I can’t replace it.”

She clutches her hands around his shirt and curls in a little smaller, and feels the anger drain out of her to leave her sagging and boneless around her dad, even though the detritus of bitterness still kind of pools and lingers in the bottom of her stomach.

“I love you so much, Katara. I can’t fix everything I didn’t do for you, but I want to be here for you now. Is… is that okay?” He sounds uncertain, in a way that he isn’t supposed to, and Katara nearly punches him with Toph-like reflexes.

“Okay,” she mumbles. “I just — I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”

“No, it’s okay, penguin. You shouldn’t have to keep it bottled up.” He smooths down her hair, and more of the acid in her gut dissolves until there’s nothing but an aching, empty hollow.

Katara clings to a lifeline in a sinking raft, and stifles her tears the best she can. Dad doesn’t shush her.

☲☲☲

“You know, Katara told me there’s something she needs to say to you, at lunch,” Toph says smugly the next morning, knocking her free arm against Azula’s.

Azula raises her eyebrow on instinct. “Does she, now?”

Toph grins, wicked and sharp. “Bet you ten cents it’s an apology over you being a dick.”

“You can’t possibly expect me to pay you ten cents.”

Katara’s the kind of person who doesn’t cling to bitterness, like Toph had said. She flares up and gets angry, feels her emotions all strong because she doesn’t know how else to process them, and then lets them drip off her like soap bubbles on polished granite after she’s punched a few pillows. Azula’s dealt with people like her before, and can play them like a game, but isn’t going to this time.

(Because there’s nothing that Katara has that she doesn’t.)

Toph cackles, swings her cane around. “You’re right. That’s an unfair bet, because there’s really no bet.” She pauses, then in that softer voice, adds, “Don’t be an ass about it, okay? She’s my friend, too.”

Azula feels an uncomfortable bubble in the back of her throat at the show of care. A part of her files that away in her mind’s sifted office of drawers, while another part of her asks why she cares that Toph cares.

There isn’t anything to say.

Class passes. Katara doesn’t appear during the passing period, and Azula pretends she’s not looking for her, either.

Eventually, it’s lunch, and she doesn’t wait around for Toph to forcefully coerce her into joining their group.

Katara’s sitting on the concrete with her knees up, looking miserable as her fingers steadily pick apart an already-shredded napkin. Sokka shoots Azula a glare, crouched beside his sister, and she carefully resists the urge to return the heated expression. Making enemies has never been her goal, even if antagonizing them is a method that comes — well, naturally.

She just enjoys it.

But even if Toph insists that their partnership wouldn’t be affected by the not-friendship, maybe-quarrel between her and Katara, Azula can’t entirely trust that. Toph cares about Katara. And she needs to maintain this ground, because it’s the only shadow left of her former life that she can still see around her.

“Hey, Azula,” Katara starts, standing up abruptly and meeting her eyes. “I’m… sorry I lashed out at you, yesterday. It was unprompted and I shouldn’t have taken out my bad mood on you.”

Toph unsubtly nudges her with the back of her wrist. Azula unsubtly kicks her in the shin.

“It’s… fine.”

The relief that spreads across the other girl’s face is so oddly visceral, like Azula’s response means the world to her. There isn’t a trace of that petty strive at The Jasmine Dragon in her open countenance, almost from an entirely different person. “If you’ve got time after school, I’d like to take you to get a drink,” Katara offers lightly.

Toph unsubtly gives her another nudge, shark-grin reappearing on her face. “Sugar Queen’s offering to buy you a drink.”

Azula rolls her eyes. Rich kid. “I’ll come,” she tells the expectant girl.

Katara’s brown eyes light up. “Great! I’ll meet you at the gate behind the track after the bell.”

“Great,” Sokka cuts in loudly, linking his elbow back around his sister’s to drag her hard onto the concrete, sending her landing on top of him and drawing simultaneous yelps from the siblings. “Kat and Math Girl are no longer at each other's throats! What a great development. Mushy-feelings girl-bonding time is over. I came here to eat meat, not to watch a whole-ass soap opera.”

“... Did you just call me Math Girl? ” Azula echoes incredulously.

“Absolutely not,” Sokka deadpans, pushing a sputtering Katara off of him. “You, a nerd? Pfft.”

Aang starts to laugh, high and bright, and Suki joins in. “As if you’re not a nerd, nerd, ” she quips at the boy, crossing her arms.

“I can’t believe this,” Sokka grumbles. “This is treachery.”

They’re easy around each other, the way Toph joins them to sit in their semi-circle and knocks her shoulders against Aang’s, the way Sokka repeatedly shoves his chopsticks into Katara’s thermos despite her gentle attempts to bat them aside; the way Suki rolls her eyes at the horrible puns thrown at each other, the slumped, relaxed posture they carry in each other’s presence.

Maybe these children don’t hold strings against each other. Doesn’t mean it’s something Azula wants.

Azula goes to the gate behind the track after the bell. Katara’s waiting there for her.

“Hey,” Katara says in greeting, allowing Azula to match her steps as they exit the school. “Glad you’re joining me. I was planning to go to Pao’s Family Tea Shop?” (That’s Uncle’s least favorite teashop, exceedingly.)

“Pao’s actual tea is kind of awful,” she continues to confess, shifting her backpack across her shoulders, “but his beef noodle soup is the best. And his gua bao isn’t bad, either.”

Azula hums nonchalantly, feeling a slight amusement roiling at the statement. “I thought we were getting drinks,” she remarks sarcastically, and the accompanying steps cease.

“Oh, sorry! I — did you want to go somewhere else?”

“That was… a joke.”

“Oh.”

Most of their walk is in a kind of awkward silence, where Katara keeps looking at her sideways — not dissimilar to Sokka’s behaviour at summer school, though without that same… assessment? Like she’s checking if she’s magically changed appearances within the last five seconds, or if she’s an unsolvable enigma of an animal.

“And we’re here,” Katara announces, stopping in front of a somewhat decrepit-looking, grey building stacked between dozens of other equally decrepit-looking, grey buildings. Its OPEN sign hangs slightly crooked in the display, several discolored digits entirely shut off, and the glass door’s hinges look a little unstable. The girl shoves at the handle, and gestures for Azula to enter.

Katara talks to the scraggly man behind the counter, waving at the menu, then at Azula standing in the doorway. After an exasperating exchange between customer and manager, the customer pulls out her patchy wallet.

Suddenly, something inside Azula makes her whip out her own wallet and shove the other girl aside before she can think it through. 

“Wait,” she says. “I’ll pay for it.”

Katara gives her a bewildered look, opens her mouth to protest. Pao snatches Azula’s credit card from her fingers, swipes it in a smooth, abrupt motion, and hands it back, leaving the open-mouthed girl sputtering again.

“I was trying to make up for my unfair behaviour,” Katara insists as she cradles the white plastic bag from Pao. That odd look on her face has returned, though some of its plain observance has melted into something akin to curiosity — maybe even affection.

I don’t want to owe you any favors, Azula wants to say, because owing favors is a dangerous position to be in.

“It wasn’t all you. I just encouraged your bad mood,” Azula says instead. “You pay next time.”

The words implying that this would happen again slide out of her mouth before she can take it back, but Katara’s expression has already gone into that grateful-squishy look that Toph wore after she promised to give a good spar, and Azula doesn’t try to take it back at all.

She can give this a shot for her own benefit. She’ll never trust in it, though.

Chapter Text

“Hey, Fangirl.”

Toph plops down beside Suki cheerfully, that gleeful “I-did-a-Thing” expression written all over her features.

“What did you do?” Suki asks in lieu of greeting, because that expression never means good things.

Toph feigns shock. “What? Why would you assume I did something just because I’m talking to you? I thought we were friends.”

“We are friends,” Suki grumbles exasperatedly, “but that expression tends to indicate that you pulled some bullshit that I probably don’t even want to know about, but probably should know about to make sure you don’t end up dead in a ditch before eighteen.” Which is true, because Toph’s showed up on many occasions after having done a Thing, and in stubborn need of someone with functioning sight to haul her ass out of it — that someone tending to be Suki, the sole (mostly, or almost) responsible person in their friend group. With a sudden horror sinking in her stomach, she adds, “Please don’t tell me it involves Azula.”

Suki’s barely even talked to Azula, but she knows that the prickly girl would not take well to Toph’s inherent ability to deliberately piss the shit out of people.

The blind girl shrugs innocently, kicking her bare feet up. “I was just wondering if you wanted to join Spicey and I in throwing each other across the floor. It’s fun. Maybe you two could take some proper jabs at each other, because I can literally feel how bored Her Superiority is of getting manhandled.”

“You got Azula… to… spar with you,” Suki echoes, slowly, because what the fuck. She tries to imagine the dignified, not-a-hair-out-of-place Azula throwing it down with Toph Dirty-Feet-Galore Beifong, of all the people and activities.

Toph shrugs again, as if she hadn’t just named the most absurd hobby she could possibly affiliate with Azula. “Yeah. She really knows how to beat up people in a fighting ring. I’d love to hear her trash all those muscle-y boys from school with three punches and a kick.”

Suki raises an eyebrow at that. Azula knows other martial arts? She’d kind of automatically assumed the girl was conveniently limited to Toph’s shared interest in wrestling, but apparently not.

She says as much, and Toph lets out a cackle. “Oh, I’m pretty sure wrestling’s her weak point. I think she just offered to fight me because she wants to fight somebody. Don’t tell her oversized ego this, but it’s actually pretty impressive.” She tilts her head expectantly. “Well? You gonna join us, or keep moping in your preference for individualism?”

At Suki’s continued silence, she goes on — “I bet she’s better than you.”

And okay, there’s no way Suki’s letting Toph get away with this. The little bastard knows how to get entertainment, which she’s fully aware of and utilizes with scandalizing shamelessness, and the worst part is that it actually works every damned time.

“Invite her to fight me, then.”

“That’s what I just said.”

“... Oh, right.”

Instead of acknowledging that, Suki cracks her knuckles soundly and rolls her neck. “I’m in. Where are we meeting up?”

☲☲☲

“Is there anything you want to talk about today, dear?” Aunt Wu asks.

Azula hasn’t left. At this point, she doesn’t even want to fight this old lady anymore, because if her uncle’s just going to shove her at someone else, then there isn’t even any point.

(Never give up without a fight, Zuko’s bloodied knife had said. It was a gift from Iroh. She starts to think that it might’ve been nothing more than a curse.

Well, she’d fought enough to move on from Miyuki. Miyuki had been… something.)

“No,” Azula says lamely.

Wu smiles encouragingly, that infuriating sticky-sweet smile printed all over her face. “You look like there is something distressing your mind. I won’t pressure you, but I will be here when you are ready to begin; otherwise, we can move the conversation to other topics.”

No wonder Uncle decided on her. She speaks exactly like him.

But the therapist isn’t wrong. There is something nagging, tugging at her head, in an uncomfortable, gross sort of way that feels kind of like a full plunge into a jar of spoiled pudding, in the way she doesn’t like thinking about. And therapists are meant to fix people, and Azula’s never needed fixing before, and she knows that Wu wouldn’t tell her the things she needs to hear because she’s weak; but at the same time, Azula needs to hear something before she slides all the way into the sinking, foamy pool of purposeless futility.

“I’ve been… thinking. About siblings.”

Katara and Sokka don’t act how she and Zuko had. They goad each other on like it’s their life’s sole hobby, but they goad each other into the competition without the pooling rains of burning acid that used to seep the veins of Azula’s relationships. She doesn’t think Sokka would turn away and tune out his sister’s very existence because he didn’t like looking at a mirror of the toxin they were both steeped in; doesn’t think Katara would would laugh as her brother locked himself in his own room and cried into nothing even though crying is for the weak and the pitied.

She knows she and Zuko weren’t normal — she’s been in society before. But maybe it’s the way her stupid heart is softening alongside her stupid schedules and her stupid fists, as she strays further and further from the standards her father set for her fifteen years ago on a daily basis. Maybe it’s the way she wrestles Toph into the ground and the way Toph builds the idea of wrongness up into her mind, the way she pointlessly walks with Katara to shoddy tea shops and she constantly talks about her brother and her father without an ounce of bitterness. It’s different from tolerance.

She wants to scream about how screwed up everything is, about how wrong everyone around her is acting; about how she just wants to go back to how things used to be but doesn’t know if she’d ever be able to because she’s been ruined by nothing more than time.

“Zuzu said he loved me, but I don’t think he ever did.”

Oh.

Azula did not mean to say that.

“Not that I care,” she tacks on, scuffling backwards almost hastily if she were any other person, but the footprint’s already set in the melting concrete, and she doesn’t know how to retract an inch-deep imprint set in already kindled clay.

He lied to me. He lied to me better than I ever have to him, is what she wants to say. How do I know everything I’ve ever been isn’t a lie, if Zuko could lie like that?

She’s never believed in the idea of love in the first place, growing up in the Sozin household’s discipline, but Zuko always so thoroughly believed in everything he’d ever said, yet now she knows that he shamelessly lied to her face and probably laughed at her as much as she laughed at him.

Wu looks at her with this horribly pitiful expression that makes Azula want to throw something, even if it’s a time bomb at the flawless diamond walls she’s spent years building up around herself. “I think you do care,” she says, softly.

(I think you do care, Ty Lee says.)

“I don’t,” Azula repeats, but it catches in the back of her throat and comes out wrong.

☲☲☲

Iroh opens the apartment’s inner door and smiles welcomingly at her, leaving her hand still half-raised to the knob. Suki abruptly drops her raised fist, flushing.

“Miss Akai!” he says warmly, unlatching the screen and gesturing her in with his unoccupied hand. “It is good to see my niece has been making friends. She and Toph are currently in the basement. They are enjoying themselves, taking advantage of their shared skillset,” he adds, taking a drink from the steaming teacup in his other hand.

With a small nod of acknowledgement, she hefts her bag across her shoulders and follows him further into the building. It’s… surprisingly modest, for the way Azula dresses and carries herself, with little potted plants and cacti set in the small white kitchen’s windowsill, stained glass suncatchers dangling above them. A low, honey-colored kotatsu is set within a perpendicular wedge of pillows, only one side looking leaned against, the other rearranged to the left in a perfect stack. The walls are hung with unfurled brush paintings, and pictures of people Suki doesn’t recognize.

Azula doesn’t sit among them. There’s a toddler who might’ve been her brother pressed up against a grinning, unidentifiable teenager in one frame, a woman with heavy black tresses and down-tilted brown eyes in another frame.

Her eyes look so sorrowful.

Suki wonders who they are; she knows the girl’s moved in as of late, but doesn’t know the circumstances. Doesn’t ask, as she begins her descent down the straight, carpeted staircase, mulling over Iroh’s statement of Azula making friends.

People look at Suki, and assume she’s a natural at… people-ing, but she isn’t. For most of her life, she’s shoved aside the people who might’ve been her friends, but now, she thinks she’s learning how to let people in.

Sometimes, it kind of hits her how much she’s missed these years.

The stairs creak quietly beneath her feet as she walks into the darkness, hand skimming lightly against the railing. There’s loud thuds emerging from the faint limelight peeking out the bottom, and a victorious whoop resonating up to her ears after a particularly violent-sounding thud.

Definitely… reeking of Toph.

Toph whips her head around the moment Suki touches the ground floor, a delighted grin plastered all over her face, Azula’s reaction a split second behind hers. “Fangirl! You showed up!”

Azula turns to glare at Toph, even though the girl definitely can’t see it. “You didn’t tell me she was coming,” she accuses snippily.

Toph shrugs brazenly, tugging at the crosses on her head. “You don’t like inviting people to talk to, so I took the liberty of doing it for you.”

“Oh no,” Azula breathes out, the first resemblance of horror dripping from her voice. “Uncle — fuck. He’s going to think I’ve got… friends. ”

“Did you just say ‘fuck’?” Suki asks curiously, instead of affirming that yes, her uncle noticed that she’s acquiring friends like leeches, and no, said friends do not intend to deny their friendship-status if asked.

Wheezing laughter. Both Suki and Azula — the latter already wearing a royally pissed look — turn their gazes over to Toph, who’s doubled over and laughing. “Oh, man,” Toph wheezes out. “I forgot how hard it is for most people to get you to say fuck. I’m really, really good at being aggravating, aren’t I?”

And the most puzzling thing should be how proud she sounds of the accomplishment, except Suki’s fully aware of Toph’s spiteful pride in the oddest of traits, so she leans against the doorframe and tries to resist the urge to wrinkle her sleeve as Azula’s judgemental gaze turns onto her.

“Well?” Toph demands, waving a hand around. “Come on in.” In a side voice, she adds to her irritable companion, “I invited her so you could have a proper fight with someone other than me.”

Azula yanks off the half-gloves, combs her fingers through her slightly miffed hair to frame her scowl all the further. She heads over to the far wall of the basement and begins hauling guards across her forearms, wrapping them tightly, and reaching over to pick up a helmet.

Suki walks over to join her, casting an eye around appreciatively. It’s well lit, airy, and stuffed with an abnormal amount of gear for varying martial arts, including a too-tall bamboo staff propped in the corner beside a pair of wooden broadswords. Idly, she wonders what purpose Iroh, tea-loving owner of The Jasmine Dragon, would have for this selection — but at the same time, she now recognizes why Azula would completely be into beating up other children (or adults) with whatever mixture of fighting she’s familiar with.

After finishing prep, Suki’s stance drops slightly and she allows herself to cock an eyebrow at the other girl. She’s never actually been cocky, but — well, Toph’s good at creating competition wherever she wants to see it. Or hear it.

“Well?” she says, allowing a slight edge to lilt her voice. “Toph says you’re good. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Azula’s neutral body position doesn’t even shift, aside from a slight inclination of her head.

Suki inhales, and surges into motion.

☲☲☲

Suki used to be notorious for getting into fights.

Kyoshi and Rangi hadn’t minded, really — if anything, she gets the distinct feeling they’d secretly made bets behind her back. Maybe they hadn’t minded enough, Suki thinks to herself dully as she sits in the office after breaking her three-week streak, trying to press an icepack against Sokka’s nose.

She’d reflexively punched him, in her defense, but it doesn’t change the fact that her first friend ever is sitting on a plastic stool with blood dripping out of his nostril due to her own knuckles, giving her a dopey grin that’s got to stem from worrying blood loss. He’d just poked her wrist a bit too abruptly, and she was startled, and her fist-happy moms have been her only friends for too long, so she’d punched him.

It might be that she still doesn’t know how to sit across from another kid and talk like a normal person, because the other lesson her moms drilled into her head was independence, and all the societal-avoidance that comes with it. That was, until she suddenly realized just how incapable she was of interacting with other human beings, and forced herself to go out and… acquire friends.

And now she’s ruined her best efforts by punching her first actual friend in the nose. Reflexively.

“I’m so sorry, ” Suki rambles. The icepack starts to slide from her fingers, and she barely catches it to shove back into the boy’s face.

“‘S okay,” Sokka mumbles, sounding majorly congested as he waves it off, nearly hitting her face in the process. Sniffs loudly, reaches up to scratch at the corner of his eye. “Girls have punched me harder in the past, believe me. Like, Katara.”

Katara’s your sister, she nearly retorts, but bites back, and tries giving him a smile though it feels vaguely like swallowing a burnt lollipop. This isn’t how it was supposed to go.

She was supposed to find some people to talk to, and maybe learn how to start conversations through observing their conversations, and not develop actual… attachments? To keep the boundaries that would protect her from getting stabbed the way her parents have been, and to avoid trust; except, now that she trusts someone, she fucked it up and made it so he can’t trust her.

She meticulously avoids him for the rest of the day (she’s well-versed in avoiding people), and refuses to ask for advice from anyone.

Which is why she’s currently folded in her bed like a crumpled deck of cards with the blinds folded and the lights off, desperately texting Sokka’s soap-buddy (— whatever the fuck that means —), maybe-mutual, since she’s too much of a coward to talk to a real human person who will absolutely judge her and laugh in her face.

There’s a difference between casually jumping into fistfights and using actual words.

bladedfans - Today at 3:23 PM

[hey uh zuko?]

[please help]

bluespirit122502 - Today at 3:36 PM

[You good there?]

bladedfans - Today at 3:37 PM

[i punched sokka in the nose]

She really, really hopes the text conveys her utter misery, and embarrassment, and overall other not-good-feelings.

bluespirit122502 - Today at 3:39 PM

[Dude, Sokka probably deserved it, and if not, then he probably asked for it?]

[Wait a minute is this blackmail material you’re giving me right now]

bladedfans - Today at 3:39 PM

[it was an accident]

[what are the chances of him forgiving me? from a scale of 1 to 69]

bluespirit122502 - Today at 3:42 PM

[Oh wait you’re serious]

[I dunno, have you considered just saying sorry?]

bladedfans - Today at 3:43 PM

[i DID but he had a Look on his face]

Soap-Buddy Zuko takes his sweet, sweet time typing a response, and Suki throws her phone across the dresser while counting the holes in the ceiling. What a stupid fucking idea, Suki thinks to herself. Friends. People. Ugh. Why would you go through all those mental gymnastics when you could just do physical gymnastics?

Ping! her phone squeaks out.

bluespirit122502 - Today at 3:49 PM

[You’d be surprised. People are usually a lot nicer than I give them credit for. Except for my sister, but she doesn’t count. Point is, Sokka probably doesn’t mind that much; it was an accident.]

[I once stabbed my friend’s finger with a knife. It happens. We’re still cool because abandoning people over a bit of shed blood is a shitty decision, and if Sokka can’t see past that then that’s where I’d actually be worried about him]

[If anything, you just established the superiority of women further.]

Suki snorts at the statement. She kind of believes it — maybe, almost — yet the cynical part of her who doesn’t want to believe in people edges its way back in.

It’s funny, that she knows reason over emotion, and recognizes when emotions fall over reason. She’s completely, entirely aware of it all, yet she can never shake it off because letting go of that would be too much to ask of nothing more than a human girl.

bluespirit122502 - Today at 3:50 PM

[If you’re worried, just go apologize again. Maybe talk about your insecurities or something, I dunno. 

[Is that what people do?]

bladedfans - Today at 3:51 PM

[i thought you were the one giving me people advice]

bluespirit122502 - Today at 3:52 PM

[Haha, very funny. I bullshit everything that comes out of my mouth.]

… She can bullshit everything that comes out of her mouth, too. And if she loses whatever “friendship” thing she’s grown too fond of?

Suki’s been on her own before, and always has been. It doesn’t matter.

She swipes away, hovers her thumb over the call button on Sokka’s contact. Stares at the icon for a long moment.

And she presses it.

“Hey, uh. Sokka?”

☲☲☲

Suki isn’t bad, Azula concedes in her head, halting a fist directly before her nose.

She’s been out of practice. She should’ve topped this faster, shouldn’t have let any of those punches land — but then again, she shouldn’t’ve even been backed into the therapy corner by Wu, shouldn’t be interacting with these children like she cares for their company. At least this is something that comes back faster than unknotting the melanging strings of people-puppets to grasp and dangle across the cardboard box stage, something left in her for her father to consider acceptable if he were to see her now.

(It still isn’t enough. She still wants to scream her throat bloody and laugh at empty air the same way she had that night two months ago, and she still doesn’t know why.)

Suki looks mildly startled for a moment before breaking out into a… grin?

Toph starts a low clap, cracking her neck. “Sounds like someone won,” she offers. “Anyone willing to tell the blind girl who?”

“Azula,” Suki says at the same time that Azula says, “Me”, and she shoots the lighter haired girl a surprised glance.

Zuko would never unabashedly admit to his little sister besting him.

“Like, shit, did you see that kick?” Suki goes on earnestly. “That was so cool. Azula is so fucking cool, Toph.” With a fully enchanted look on her face, she turns to her object of lionization. “Can you show me how you did that flip-jump-kick?”

“Skipping roundhouse kick,” Azula provides sharply, but her mind isn’t in the right place, because what game is Suki trying to play in complimenting her like that? Trying to shovel herself beneath already crumbling walls because she thinks she can break up what’s left of them?

What’s there to gain?

“Sounds professional,” Suki is saying. Hesitantly, she repeats, “Can you show me?”

Azula tries to shrug nonchalantly, and shoves the wariness to the back of her thoughts to pick apart later. “I could,” she agrees, and dammit, the girl’s going to wilt like a Sad Toph if she doesn’t, isn’t she.

Suki narrows her eyes, watching Azula’s incremental movements with a sort of scrutiny that she can almost respect. Shifts on her own feet and lifts her hands, then executes its simultaneous aerial-snapping motion nearly perfectly.

Impressive. Not that Azula would remark on that.

“Almost correct,” Azula allows, reluctantly moving forward to correct her angle. “Go again.”

☲☲☲

“Hey,” Suki says, unconsciously reaching forward to touch Azula’s arm before letting it drop slack at her side. “I wanted to ask if you’d want to come over to my house for a night sometime? My moms will be out of town next week, and I was hoping for some company.”

Toph had left earlier, stating something about avoiding pissing her parents off for “spending too much time around foul-mouthed heathens” — which Suki doubts the exact wording of —, leaving Suki with a handful of the cactus-like Azula. And Suki now has a brilliant, maybe incredibly stupid idea, but she’s in too deep now and there’s no way she’s backing out.

Because Suki thinks she understands Azula now, in a way that Toph and Katara and her other friends never will. That the idea of friends doesn’t come easy to her — albeit, not in the same way that’s difficult for herself — and that she doesn’t know how to trust them, or how to handle their very presence. Now that Katara’s all Azula-happy, Aang’s going to be all over her, and the only way Azula knows how to respond is to bite with those carefully tapered canine teeth with the aim to draw blood.

Azula gives her a somewhat mortified look, and Iroh suddenly sidles up behind her. “She’d love to,” he says for his niece.

Suki makes a face that she hopes conveys an apology at Azula, and looks over to Iroh. “It’s good to know you’re okay with it, but I was actually asking Azula, not you,” she informs him politely, maybe pointedly. “I’m cool if she doesn’t want to hang out; we’ve barely even talked, anyway.”

Something shifts in Azula’s expression, and at the same moment, Iroh’s morphs into something slightly taken-aback before he smiles even warmer than before.

“You’re right,” he agrees. “Niece?”

Azula looks between them, indecipherable. Hard.

Then she actually shrugs. “Whatever. Sure.”

Suki grins. “Here’s my number,” she says, thrusting a pre-written note at the carefully composed girl. “I’ll text you later.”

Shit, I just initiated an entire hangout.

☲☲☲

“Why do you refuse to care that your brother might not have loved you?” Wu is asking, placing her stupid lavender notepad facedown on the desk. “It’s okay to feel conflicted, dear. There’s no one else here.”

She drones on, but Azula isn’t listening.

There’s no one else here. There’s no one else here. There’s no one else —

“It’s this simple: I don’t care about him, and I never have,” Azula finally snaps. She shoves her hands off her lap. Because I don’t care that Father used him as nothing more than a ragdoll. Because I don’t care that my friends cared about him more than they cared about me. Because I don’t care that the only thing we’ve ever been to each other are rivals, not siblings, or whatever it is that Katara and Sokka are.

She nearly says the rest of it, too; it’s the closest she’s been to yelling in this little white office, and she suddenly wonders if this is the point of unhinging. The point where she tips over the perpetual edge of sanity and can never look back, seeing that she’s lost control of the situation, and lost control of her thoughts, and lost control of herself.

Azula hadn’t known the idea of control could disintegrate so thoroughly over the course of half a year. Considers that this might be what Zuko’s life was like on a regular basis, and can almost see why he straight up killed himself if everything he ever reached for was nothing more than a hazing desert mirage over the course of sixteen years.

“Is it because you’re afraid you’ll get hurt, if you did care?”

(And Azula almost says yes for the fact that Zuko spreads his misfortune like a crow does its feathers; almost says yes for the fact that the small, human part of her whispers yes from its debilitated shroudings of the monster.)

“No,” she answers, even though such a suggestion doesn’t deserve an answer. “I suspect he’s the one who would’ve gotten hurt more, if I’d cared.”

It’s what happens when you have feelings left to take advantage of.

She shoves the plastic chair back, and stands up. “I’m done,” she tells Aunt Wu harshly.

☲☲☲

Suki flips through her phone, feet shoved up on the couch’s armrest. “What kind of music do you hate?” she asks casually.

“Aren’t you supposed to ask ‘What kind of music do you like ’?” Azula points out, though without any malice.

She’d packed her bags, told Iroh she didn’t need a ride, and walked here herself. It’d been a forty minute walk, and she’d received a few odd looks from strangers on the street, but she was not about to let the old man drive her to Suki’s house when she’s perfectly capable of traveling on her own two legs.

(Is this her trying to cling to the last vestiges of her failing independence?)

“Nope,” the older girl responds cheerily, plugging her phone into the floppy charger hanging off the desk. “Basically, if you hate emo-rock, then I’m not going to play emo-rock, otherwise I’m going to play emo-rock.”

“Then I hate emo-rock,” Azula says, glowering, because there’s no way she’s going to listen to Zuko’s shitty music taste all night — which, she doesn’t actually know what he’d listened to, but ‘emo-rock’ seems to align with him as a person, so she wouldn’t be surprised. “And while we’re at it, let’s exclude saxophone jazz-solos and lollipop songs.”

Suki hums, tapping at the screen. “Will do.”

It’s acoustic guitar, is the first thing Azula notices. “What kind of music are we listening to?” she grumbles as Suki starts shuffling around her bag, leaning against the front of the couch seat and folding her arms.

“It’s not emo-rock, if you’re worried about it,” Suki replies. She shifts around to Azula’s right, pokes her in the spine until she reluctantly moves forward, and wedges herself into position to access the back of her head. A bristly-edged brush starts combing through her already knotless hair, bun pried apart and undone by calloused fingers, collapsing to join the rest of the raven tresses. “You have nice hair,” she adds nonchalantly.

For some reason, Azula flushes at that, then edges a scowl back on. It seems like scowling’s the default expression her face strives to, lately. 

She wonders if she looks like Zuko, now.

“Thanks,” she says flatly, the voice bouncing back in her ears not sounding very thankful.

Suki winds her fingers around the locks, nails scraping gently against her scalp. Azula swallows, reflexive objection dying on her lips. She doesn’t know when she’d last let someone else touch her hair; not since Mother went and died on them; maybe not since she was four, and her mother didn’t fear her. They sit in the music of the soft lyrics floating out of Suki’s phone, the sensation of ghostly fingers twined in her hair filling the permeating wordlessness between them.

“There,” Suki says quietly, sliding a pin around the end of the braid as the electric guitar picks up. Passes a small red hand mirror around, the back adorned with faded white cherry blossoms. “What do you think?”

Azula looks into the perfect reflection. The braid is standard, three loops winding around each other in a rope-like pattern, the bangs that usually frame the sides of her face tugged awkwardly into it. It’s not perfect — in fact, one might call it ugly, because there are bits and pieces sticking out of the crosses like broken shards of glass out of skin, the hair on the top of her skull ridged unevenly at the line and slightly fuzzed. But she doesn’t sport a bleeding bruise on her cheekbone or a deepening grey bag beneath her other eye, and the mirror isn’t cracked, and she doesn’t look deranged, or damaged, or broken.

“It’s… nice,” Azula tries, the word rolling beneath her tongue. Coughs. “It’s nice.”

Suki beams through the reflection, practically lighting up. “No problem,” she says, sweeping the brush and unused clips back into their hand-sewn pink bag.

The song finishes. It’s barely been five minutes.

☲☲☲

“Why are your parents not supervising you?” Azula asks as Suki eagerly leads her up to her parents’ bedroom, skipping the steps two at a time.

(You could get in trouble. I don’t want to see you get hurt.

I don’t care if you get hurt. This is on you.)

Suki wilts, slightly. “They’re off on a business trip. They… do that a lot.” She shoves her hands into her pockets. “My moms haven’t always had the best cards of life dealt to them, so when they’ve got opportunities, they take them, even if they’re — well, a bit at my expense, I guess, in the sense that I’m alone a lot. I do know they’d haul ass back home if I needed them, though.”

“Oh.” Ozai’d left her and Zuko alone on occasion, though she can’t imagine him actually returning for any reason beyond business situations calling for his presence.

“But they still text the shit out of me to make sure I haven’t forgotten how to throw a proper punch. Man, they’re going to be so disappointed when they learn I got knocked flat in a fist — leg? — fight by Toph’s new wrestling buddy,” Suki says, laughing lightly, though she doesn’t sound ashamed. Doesn’t even sound resigned about it.

(Father only beats those who deserve it, she’d said, only two months ago. Now, she doesn’t even know how much she believes that statement, or how much she believes in anything at all, anymore.)

Suki shoves the door open, flicking the light on to reveal a bed pushed in the far corner and a pair of dressers across from it. It’s fairly small, mostly draped in nothing but pictures — two women holding hands, a young girl whose expression looks more radiant than Azula thinks she’s ever seen anyone in her family be, like she’s been handed a globe of the world made of gold melted from her mothers’ hearts. The closet door’s shut, but Suki ignores it and heads into the bathroom.

“I know Rangi keeps her makeup in here, somewhere,” she mumbles, shoveling recklessly through the sink drawer.

“Are you seriously rifling through your mother’s makeup?”

She still remembers what happened the last time Zuko rifled through Father’s folders.

“ Duh. I mean, I’ve got some myself, but I ain’t got that bloody lipstick. ” Triumphantly, Suki holds up a green-capped twister, plastic and unlabeled. Rummaging in the box, she starts pulling out brushes and egg-shaped foams, placing them hastily beside the lavender soap bottle and nearly knocking over the toothbrush cup.

(Azula’s reminded of shoving her own makeup bag at Zuko, telling him to “cover up, or someone will get suspicious”; of standing outside the closed bathroom door and pretending she can’t hear his frustrated cursing as he desperately tries to replicate unmarred skin he hasn’t seen for ages, because Father’d gone too far that day and he couldn’t get it to swell down and it looked horrible.)

“Sit down. I’m a professional. ”

☲☲☲

Suki is not a professional.

Azula doesn’t say it, and lets the girl have her fun.

It’s easier than it should be.

☲☲☲

It’s three a.m., in the dead of the night after binging the extra scenes of a shitty TV show and microwaving absurd amounts of salty yellow popcorn that only one of them ate. And attempting to bake a box of cheap brownie mix that ended up burnt, but still tasted pretty decent, and pulling up karaoke that Azula adamantly refused to participate in, and the silent undoing of the makeup plastered messily all over their faces and the imperfect braids imbedded in their hair. The fishtank-nightlight hums steadily in the corner, single fish swimming in an infinite loop of lifeless circles. 

Around, and around, and around.

“I want to ask you something.”

Suki blinks, unconsciously shifting over in the darkness to the detached voice. “Shoot,” she offers.

“Why are you being like this to me? It’s — This isn’t how people work.”

“Well, how do people work, then?” Suki retorts, genuinely.

Azula lets out a noise of frustration, almost like she wants to reach out into the void and strangle her for asking too many questions, like grinding her teeth against a lodged-in razor that ground her teeth right back at her.

“They’re… they aren’t supposed to care about each other like this! This isn’t how caring about people works, and I don’t understand how you just go with it. I don’t know why you and Toph and your whole gang throw insults at each other incessantly and not mean it, and share food and drive each other around and don’t expect debts, and don’t just leave each other behind!”

The carpet swallows the hollows of her angry, cracking voice into its uneven yarn-threaded depths, taking away any of the echoing ovation it might’ve had in any other circumstance. Suki shifts over again, letting the blanket on top of her sleeping bag pool onto the floor. Turns her eyes onto the iridescent turquoise and purples of the trickling fishtank, watching the muffled silence getting filled by the percolation of the artificial stream of bubbles. 

“This is about people you knew from the Caldera, isn’t it.”

It’s a statement, not a question. Azula is silent and considering. Then — “How do you know if you’ve treated people the right way?” she finally whispers. “How do you know if your — if your life is right?”

The sleeping bag’s suddenly too scratchy, too hot against her skin. “Who are you talking about?”

“... Someone who passed. People who left. My father. I don’t know.”

Suki shrugs, half to herself, half to the other girl in the room. “Well, it’s a little too late to apologize now, isn’t it?

“But you can still say sorry. And if the people who left want to hear it, then you can say sorry to them, too.”

“I never said I treated them wrong,” Azula snaps, but her voice falters, wavers betrayingly, and Suki can hear right through it.

Because Azula is brash and intelligent and twisted by people who cause pain, and likes to push in needles as far as they go, because they’re the only way she’s been taught to protect herself from getting hurt more. Getting hurt by exactly what, she doesn’t know, but she wouldn’t be surprised if Toph’s right that it’s got something to do with parents. She doesn’t know how to have friends, how to people, in a way that Suki understands — they almost always hurt more, after all.

“I think we both already know.”

She says this, because she can see how the younger girl’s been wired all her life, and that it doesn’t look like anyone else wants to touch the unbridling, sparking snarl of man-harnessed lightning.

Azula doesn’t offer a response. Suki doesn’t fall asleep for a long time.

Chapter Text

Azula is not the kindest person.

Aang knows that, from the way she talks and walks and acts, but he also knows that she’s not a bad person. He doesn’t need Toph to tell him that, because the same way she talks and walks and acts — he knows it’s a defense mechanism. It’s not like he’s never been there before. And he doesn’t mind too much, because people deserve to get treated as if they’re worth a chance to learn, especially when they’re fifteen.

So he goes to The Jasmine Dragon for the first time in a fourth-month (a one-week), in his third attempt at making proper conversation with the older girl after her seven other blatant social dissuasions, and stands in the warm end of the teashop’s glass doorway until Azula catches sight of him.

He grins at her amicably, lifting his hand to wave, and her eyes only narrow. Lips creasing into a frown, she shoves past the counter and jerkily walks up to him, energy feeling very much like the human personification of irritation.

“What are you doing here?” she demands, glaring him up and down.

Okay, so maybe this wasn’t the best day or idea, but it’s the middle of winter break, and Aang was possessed by the sudden urge to down an iced lychee tea ridden with excessive amounts of sugar, and petting two birds with one hand has never been an opportunity he’d pass up.

Aang can… work with this. “Hi Azula!”

“Fuck off,” Azula says, already turning back around.

Aang blinks, a little taken aback by the unprompted harshness of her response at his very presence and maybe kind of indignant. Sure, she usually refuses to have a normal human conversation with him, but this is just outright rude — even odd, because cursing doesn’t frequent her vocabulary too often. In an attempt to defuse the situation, he puts his hands up placatingly and stops moving. “Um,” he says politely, “I just —”

“Don’t want to hear it. Order something from Jin, or fuck off.”

“I’m just greeting you,” Aang protests, borderline exasperated. Do not start a fight. We are not starting a fight today, Aang. “I’ll just, uh, leave you alone now. And order something from Jin. And not from you.”

“Good.” Azula physically pushes him aside, and storms out the front door. The customers (Jet is here, staring judgmentally at Azula —) glance at her openly, then glance at each other in bewilderment, then slowly ease back into their muted conversations with a certain repression to their tones.

… Is she even allowed to do that?

Probably, Aang reflects glumly, watching the distorted shadow of her figure move beyond the glass pane and vanish around the left corner, considering that her uncle owns the shop.

Jin waves over at him, enthusiasm dimmed like the rest of the shop’s mood and wild hair practically drooping from its high ponytail. Aang glances out the door, looks over to the other girl, then walks over to join her.

“Hey, Aang,” she says, strained. “Sorry about her blowing up at you like that. She’s been in a, uh, questionable mood all day.”

Aang plasters a smile on his face, tries to shrug nonchalantly. “It’s alright,” he says, brushing it off. “I get it. Just a bad time, and a bad day.”

“Yeah,” Jin mumbles, cutting her eyes away. “Listen —”

Iroh suddenly emerges from the back, setting down a tea kettle and making a beeline for their direction. Jin abruptly shuts up, which definitely doesn’t shut down Aang’s curiosity, but he follows suit and snaps to attention.

“Please forgive my niece,” he rumbles. “Tomorrow is a day she would rather not think about. It is… a difficult time for me as well, so I must ask that you allow some lenience for her crude behaviour.” He says this, but he doesn’t quite look like he believes it himself, face worn and heavy and old.

Aang swallows, suddenly wondering what tomorrow means to the Sozin family. “It’s alright,” he repeats. Doesn’t let himself ask about it, because it doesn’t look like the old man wants to hear anything at all as he stares out the front for a long moment.

Iroh smiles sadly at him, the somber expression somewhat unsettling on his features. Jin tilts her head quietly in acknowledgement, and moves over to the cash register.

“Well, Aang? Do you want your regular order?” she prompts.

“Yeah,” Aang answers distantly. “Okay.” He pauses, then adds, “Maybe put less sugar.”

☲☲☲

Azula wakes up on a Wednesday morning in the middle of winter’s break, and knows what day it is.

For some reason, she wants to lay in bed all day and stare up at the ceiling, counting the leaf-like shadows moving across the lumps in the white plaster of her roof, in her pajamas with the blinds folded closed. Maybe wants to sing a wretched, twisted birthday song for the dead, and cry madly about it.

Wu’s told her that laughter’s about a loss of control, about being traumatized and being uncertain as how to respond other than holding oneself at a distance and pretending it’s nothing more than a glass orb filled with an abstraction of perceived troubles. It’s probably about losing her mind, is was Wu was probably trying to indirectly tell her out of a fear of insult; and oddly enough, the thought doesn’t even bother her that much anymore.

After all, you can’t hold a crazy person to standards.

But she hauls herself out of bed, and hauls a crisp plaid over a white undershirt, and hauls herself into the living room where Iroh is seated at the kotatsu. Two steaming teacups are set across its wooden surface, their pot’s lid cracked at an angle. Azula leans against the doorframe and looks in.

Uncle turns around and offers her a wan smile. “Good morning, niece. Tea?” he rumbles, voice dripping with exhaustion, the single syllable almost roiling off his tongue. She doesn’t respond, and he shifts ever so slightly in his placid position. “At the least, come join me?”

Azula should leave.

She walks over, and sits beside him. Doesn’t tuck her legs beneath the comforter, and doesn’t lean against the inconspicuously unstacked pillows.

“I… know your brother is not with us anymore, but I hoped we could celebrate his birthday regardless. Just the two of us.”

Azula stares at him for an indecipherable amount of time. Her head hurts.

“You weren’t there.”

She doesn’t know why she says it. She doesn’t know why he’s trying to celebrate a dead child’s birthday, when he hadn’t been there for any of the previous ones, and certainly hadn’t made the effort for it.

(Because it’s Zuko’s birthday, and he’s still sixteen, and she wonders if he’d be seventeen if Uncle was there.)

Iroh doesn’t respond for a long moment. “You are correct,” he concedes, eventually. “I wasn’t there, and I should’ve been. I should’ve been there for you, and I should’ve been there for Zuko. It is too late for me to help him, but please — let me be here for you, now.”

And Azula nearly laughs with disbelief at that, an unhinged hysteria coursing through her veins like splinters of electricity down a malfunctioning wire. “You shoved me into a therapist’s arms because you were too cowardly to fight a monster yourself,” she accuses incredulously. “For ‘wanting to be here for me’, you sure as fuck aren’t doing a good job at it.”

“Niece —”

“This is about Lu Ten, isn’t it?” Azula plants her hands against the kotatsu, half-aware of the way the teacup rattle with the force of the pressure, barely aware of the words spewing out of her mouth. “This is about Lu Ten. How he killed himself because you weren’t a good enough of a father to him, and how Zuko killed himself while you left us behind in the wake of your self-absorbency; and now, you’re drowning in your own guilt, so you took me in and told yourself it was to help your poor, poor niece whom you love very much. But in reality, it’s about your conscience, and your crippling guilt, and it always has been.”

You let him die. You let them all die because you ran off, and now you can’t stop lying to yourself while you hide behind the curtains of my custody.

Do you regret it at all? 

“Well, then? Was it worth it?”

The silence is thick in the air, cutting like knives in a fistfight. Iroh’s face goes still, almost like shutting the windows of a breeze-ridden room shut, wide brown eyes staring at her without a glimpse of the infuriating kindness they typically contain. 

Then, ever so slowly, it drops into displeasure, or fury, or…

(She’s seen that expression before. She hasn’t seen it for almost a year, when Zuko’d said one too many words and blood is tipping towards the scales. When she’d failed.)

Azula swallows, a sudden horror of what she’d just said plunging into her stomach.

And she staggers to her feet, and turns, and runs.

☲☲☲

Blood rushes into her ears as she retreats (flees), head spinning on its own axis as her legs carry her however far away from that look as they can.

Zuko would be dead, even though he’s already dead.

Fuck. Fuck.

Logically, Azula knows that Iroh is not Ozai, but at the same time — she’s seen that face a million times, followed by echoing thuds against a marble floor and running water, an expression she’s only been on the receiving end of once. The receiving end that she’s been so irrationally and foolishly cowed by, but if she hasn’t felt a single sane emotion since her brother died, then she can barely process it at all anymore.

And logically, she’d thought Father would never hurt her, yet he had, and now she wonders if it’s really just her face and wrist that got bruised through those fourteen years. She’d thought she was better than Zuko, good enough to stay safe, and she wasn’t. Maybe this has been Uncle’s goal all along — to lull her into a false perception of complacency, until he finds the right excuse to hit back.

Her head hurts so, so much, and her feet are pounding against flat concrete, and she can barely feel her heart at all anymore. Her whole brain feels like it’s stuck in a consecutive loop of fear and mirrors.

Eventually, the adrenaline fades off, and her surroundings come into focus again. Azula slows to a walk, inhaling through her nose. Gazes up at the nearest street sign down rows of identical white houses.

She’s never been here.

Automatically, her hand slides towards her pocket, but grasps at nothing but ironed black fabric; and she stares at her empty hand, stupefied, for what feels like hours but can only be seconds.

That’s the moment the situation sets in.

Azula is in the middle of no where, after she’d lock-picked out the objectively worst things she could possibly say to her uncle, without an article on her person.

She’s not useless like Zuzu; she’ll find a way out of this mess so she can last until eighteen, until she can legally get out of this pitiable town and never look back. She can lie and cheat, she can produce crocodile tears and apologize if need be — she’s been told she’s a good liar before, after all.

(Before.)

“Azula?”

Azula does not flinch like Zuko. Aang’s standing behind her, a leash containing a massively fluffy white dog panting slobber all over her shoe, wearing an absurdly bright orange hoodie and a pair of tacky lavender shoes. With an inconvenient pang of guilt, she recalls the unwarranted curtness she’d directed at him yesterday.

“What are you doing out here?” Aang goes on, face painfully open and concerned. Big Dog slobbers even more insistently on her shoe; she unsubtly moves her foot aside, drawing Aang’s gaze to the movement. “Oh! Appa, this is Azula. Azula, Appa.”

… Did he seriously just introduce her to the dog first?

Appa tries giving her pants a lick. Disgusting.

“Please tell your… creature… to lay it off,” Azula grinds out, then in an attempt to summon the residual vestiges of politeness left in her body, tries, “Please tell the dog to quit its slobbering. And to get off of me.”

Aang laughs, entirely unbothered, and bends down to scratch the dog under the chin. “Hey, buddy! Get up here, over here — get up! ” Appa nearly knocks the small boy over with the force he uses to turn around, Azula unimpressed witness to the fruitless wrestling match.

“So, Azula —” Aang strangles with the leash “— What are you doing out here? Do you need a ride back to Iroh’s or something?”

“No, thank you,” Azula says stiffly. “I’m on my way back, now.”

Now it’s Aang’s turn to look unimpressed as he looks her ruffled appearance over. Overcome with a sudden self-consciousness, she flattens her hair, and tries to adapt her typical unbothered air, but finds her features unwilling to cooperate. “You don’t… look so good,” Aang offers.

Azula restrains rolling her wind-stung eyes. “What an astute observation,” she remarks mildly.

“Are you sure you don’t need a ride?” Aang careens forward, unacknowledging of her response. “Gyatso doesn’t mind driving my friends around when they need it. He’s cool like that.”

Friends.

“Why are you here?”

“Fuck off.”

“I provoked Uncle,” she blurts out. “Iroh. I said… things to him. Things that insulted his state of being, and implied that he’s been a horrible… relative.”

(And it’s not like she really takes the words back, either — certainly not the accusation of refusing to face her himself; but at the same time, he’s her custodial figure.)

Aang regards her for a long moment, brow furrowed. “Do you — uh — do you need to get away from him for a while?”

Yes, her horrible, betraying mind whispers.

“I’ll be fine,” she insists, brushing him aside in a near mirror of the previous day and starting down a random direction of the block. “I’ll just go to a place. For some time.”

Aang’s fists tighten minisculy.

“Will you stop that?” Aang explodes. “I can tell you have no idea where you’re going, Azula. Just let me help you out, and we can part and be on our merry ways, and you won’t owe me anything for it. I promise.”

Azula doesn’t want help from this tiny, bald kid with an oversized dog standing in front of her looking like the sun and rain have aligned. She doesn’t want help from people who look at her and assume they can sum her up in three words, and doesn't want help from an uncle who doesn’t actually want to give it.

Aang studies her expression, looks down at her empty hands. “You won’t owe me anything,” he repeats, softer. “C’mon. You can stay the night with Gyatso and I, and we don’t ever have to talk about it again. Or I could call Suki for you. Even Katara and Sokka wouldn’t mind, really.”

Azula doesn’t want to be seen like this.

Looking at it from a realistic standpoint, Aang’s offering her an opportunity on a silver platter: It’s sparing her the indignity of having to call someone for help, and she’s being offered a place to stay while she determines her next move.

“Alright.” Hesitates, then adds, “Thank you.”

The words still feel as weird on her tongue as they had a month ago, but at the same time, it’s not as difficult to say. Aang gives her a bright smile, and starts down the street.

☲☲☲

Aang is cold, and wet, and miserable, and vaguely wants to cry.

Scratch that, he definitely wants to cry.

It’s not like he’s never spent the night hiding in the middle of the nearest town’s streets, considering the less-than-desirable conditions his last foster family’s household was constantly buried ten feet in; with a pair of screaming adults and a forgotten toddler who’d — dump by dump — taught him that he’d be an abysmal babysitter, the routine of leaving at night wasn’t uncommon. They hadn’t hurt him, but at the same time — they’d kind of forgotten he existed in the majority situation, and that sometimes hurt more than he thinks fists might.

So he’d taken the initiative and ran off on his newest-assigned foster parent after the last couple gave up on his incessant hyperactivity, before the man could realize what a useless kid he is, and now he’s squashed up underneath a dripping, green-cast overhang with the tinny scent of wet metal in his nose and nothing in his head except, Why am I the one?

And he hates running so much, and he hates hating the world like this, because he used to love it more than anything before he’d realized that no one was going to save him from this endless cycle where children are recycled like plastic bottles and rarely end up in the right garbage bin.

Maybe Gyatso reminds him of someone he wishes he had, maybe he has the same cultural origins as Aang (which is convoluted for a reason to want to lull into the feeling of trust). Maybe Aang himself is just tired and trying to give himself excuses to fall back.

Ugh. Everything is awful. The rain is the worst part of it all, yet it’s too late to turn back and admit he ran off out of nothing more than a mistrust for indoor households and generally human adults. Aang thinks he might’ve forgotten how else the night is supposed to feel. If he’s lucky, he supposes it’ll stop raining and the clouds will part, and the moon will reemerge.

Aang squints up at the sky, and thinks very hard that he wishes the galaxy would stop looking like a blanket of reddened steam above the polluted tears it pours down.

The smoke doesn’t change its color, and the obnoxious pitter-patter doesn’t cease.

With a sigh, Aang collapses backwards against the concrete and stares at the chip-like wrinkles shielding the undergrove, feeling dimly hollow.

Abruptly, the next door’s building’s lamplights go off, and Aang blinks in surprise because he hadn’t even noticed he was sitting beside the back end of a still-occupied warehouse. Scrambling to his feet, he starts to slide around the right corner, feeling the uneven brick scrape against his soaked backpack, until a beaming phone light sweeps over his figure and he instinctively freezes in place.

Well, now he’s been seen. Time to start bluffing.

Forcing a laugh up his throat, he drops the rigid stance and waves with an awkward cheeriness, slacking his backpack off his shoulders and shoving it behind his legs. “Hey, uh —” He looks at the building’s back sign “— Mr. Jasmine Dragon Man. I was just on my way home — to a place, indoors, at home —”

Jasmine Dragon Man peers at him for an uncomfortably long time, expression painted with an equally discomforting concern, where Aang squirms uncomfortably and hopes his bluster is as good as his best Bonzu Pippinpaddleopsicopolis III impression. Please believe me, I’m just going home to a place indoors at home for the night, just walking around in the dead of the night on my own because I’m definitely older than ten, therefore I am perfectly capable of walking home in the rain all alone, I —

“You’re Gyatso’s latest foster, are you not?” he asks gently.

Aang’s brain short circuits at ‘Gyatso’ and ‘foster’. “Who, me? You must be talking to, uh… that cat?” He backs up, slowly, keeping his eyes locked on the older man, and careful to not startle the scruffy grey cat hiding behind the irritatingly clean garbage bin. “Of course you’re not talking about me, pffft, that’s ridiculous.”

One step.

Two steps.

Three.

He turns heel and bolts for it.

“Wait!”

The words are lost in the rain yanking against Aang’s beanie as he dashes down the open street, feet sliding against the slippery concrete, water pouring into his already squelching soles, but he’s hardly aware of it as his heart rate hitches up half a notch. He’s not going back, he’s not going to be shoved back into a dollhouse of dead people who’ve never seen the sun in their lives, and he’s not going to spend the rest of his life in their unstated expectancy for repayment.

Sparks of red and green light glimmer through the midnight rain, almost like a spray of glowing confetti. Aang wishes they’d stop, even if he’d be left in the still death of city ink.

In a half-aware haze of consciousness and a flattened shoe sole, he’s hurtling through the air and sprawling across the crosswalk with a sharp pop! in his ankle and rocks digging into his palm, flaring up like too many nights spent staring at lit matches. He barely bites in a yell at the unexpected sharpness and cold, hauls himself onto his right foot, stumbling like a one-legged chicken in the limelight. Refuses to turn when heavy steps grow louder behind him.

Aang can’t run.

“Gyatso is very worried about you; he’s been searching all night. He even sent out a message to our very venerable Pai Sho group, which is a feat I’m rather impressed by. Come, I’ll reopen the shop and put a pot of tea on the stove while I call him so he can pick you up,” the accented voice coaxes, but those are exactly the wrong suggestions.

“Please don’t,” Aang blurts out frantically, scrabbling for reasons as his ankle twists a painful shard of glass up his leg; barely conscious of the way the pooling rain soaks into his pants, past his sleeves. “I — Don’t call him. Please, I’ll… I’ll give you my future dog’s newborn puppies, if you don’t.”

Aang loves puppies, but if blindly bargaining their trivial existence like plastic poker chips is going to get him out of this situation, then he’ll do it.

Jasmine Dragon Man looks his silhouette up and down with something that might be akin to sorrow, contemplating. Aang swallows, inching onto the other side of the road and half praying a car would swoop by and let him execute a back-flipping, aerial movie-escape scene. 

The car never comes.

“I won’t have him come pick you up tonight,” he finally allows by the time Aang’s meticulously contorting his face into his best saddened-puppy impression. “But I must let him know you are safe, Aang.”

“How did you know my name?”

The old man chuckles genially, the hallucination of a sad tinge flickering in his shadowed eyes. “Didn’t you know? All old people tell each other about their kids over Pai Sho.”

I’m not his kid, dies on Aang’s lips.

“My name is Iroh. Would you come join me for a cup of tea?” he goes on, gesturing back at the bobbing white streetlights they’d left behind.

And it might be drenching bitterness of the tinny rain, or the smokey lights that cover the stars making him kind of loopy, or probably the sharp pain in his ankle and the realization that he doesn’t have anywhere to go, that makes him limp forward and follow Iroh back to The Jasmine Dragon, one hand scraping against the brick walls and the other slipped beneath his wet backpack strap.

He ignores the sharp intake of breath as he stumbles into proper light. 

Worry’s always been too much a burden.

☲☲☲

Azula looks down at the cramped rose-shaped tingmo, deliberately ignoring the bright smile Aang’s shooting at her, and Uncle’s apparent-Pai-Sho-acquaintance, Gyatso, seated patiently across the low table. And most certainly, the still drooling dog trying to shove its head into the cross of her lap despite her intense urge to shove it out of the room.

She feels vaguely like an imposter.

At that unsolicited thought, she draws herself up taller and determinedly stares Aang in the eye as she bites into the malformed bao, effectively allowing the dog’s ears to drop into the unoccupied space as she brings her chopsticks up. Aang loudly stifles a laugh, practically reversing the effects of stifling it, his guardian holding his straight face half a moment longer before he breaks the facade as well.

Azula flushes, putting the tingmo down to push the dog off of her, but all he does is nuzzle his head in more persistently, stretch his hind legs out, and let out a growl of contentment.

This is mortifying.

Aang starts openly laughing at this point, making grabby hands at the massive paws until he sees how ineffective they are and makes a physical effort to haul Appa off of her. “Appa! Over here, bud.” Dropping his voice into a bemoaning stage-whisper, he adds, “Azula doesn’t like your shedding or your kisses. I know; it’s so sad.”

She scowls. It’s not her fault that Aang’s best friend is an unhygienic slobber-monster.

“Appa likes you a lot,” Gyatso informs her, studiously not laughing.

Azula eyeballs the dog. The dog stares back at her with giant liquid eyes, tongue jutting out of his mouth, and she lets out a sigh.

“How do you like them?” Aang interjects anxiously. “I helped make this batch!”

“... They’re nice.” They are kind of flat and airless and tasteless. “You did, um. You did an exemplary job.”

(Katara keeps telling her that saying nice things isn’t that hard, and won’t stop giving painfully artificial examples, and Azula’s trying — from time to time, that is. This seems like one of those situations where it’d be a good idea, considering that their accomodation hinges on her ability to hold her tongue.)

She looks over at Gyatso, curious as to whether or not he would remark on the questionable effort dedicated to their creation, but he chews around the compressed bao with complete tolerance for their imperfections.

“Did you knead the dough long enough?” he serenely asks Aang, eyes closed.

Aang mimics a mock-offended face, crossing his eyes to look down at the roll stuffed in his own mouth. “Ipth lookefh a’outh righth enuff,” he defends.

She supposes most families don’t care.

(It’s what makes them weak.

But is it really that weak? a voice that sounds annoyingly like Katara whispers.)

Gyatso smiles over at her, puts more dumplings on her cleared plate, and pours her more butter tea. Azula accepts the cup with two hands and takes a half sip before placing it back on the table, because it’s actually no where near as redundant as Uncle’s incessant variants of hot leaf juice. “Thank you,” she tells the monk(?), which is easier than telling such to people like Toph because he’s an adult. “I should find a way to repay you for your courtesy.”

Aang’s eyes bulge. “Hey —”

Gyatso waves it aside, not in any sort of contrast to Aang’s earlier proclamation at hospitality. “It’s no mind,” he assures. “Our arms are always open for any one of Aang’s friends.”

That inconvenient pang of guilt rings hollowly in her gut again.

But Aang beams at his guardian, and beams at Azula, and Azula doesn’t correct that she’s nothing more than a schoolmate, because that would be counter-beneficial to her presence.

(She doesn’t think she has it in her to say it, either.)

For the rest of the meal, they eat in silence, Aang occasionally unobtrusively passing small torn scraps to Appa. It’s easy, in a way dissimilar to Ozai and Zuko over the tall dinner table, dissimilar to her and Iroh over the sturdy honey-colored kotatsu. Gyatso isn’t all slow and rumbly and indirect in the daft kind of way, and for all Azula’s determined to barricade herself in, she’s comfortable.

(She wants to hate it, but doesn’t.)

☲☲☲

Aang sits at the table closest to the exit, the cold wood of its surface pressing into his scraped elbows.

His left leg’s propped up on the chair opposite to him, his dripping grey jacket draped haphazardly over the other chair to his right, and his butt perched flightily on the edge of the wet metal seat. Iroh is somewhere in the half-lit backroom, the faint whistle of a boiling tea kettle echoing through the otherwise harrowingly soundless teashop. A white lamp hangs above his head, lighting up the residence in a way that leaves Aang feeling weirdly exposed to the obsidian-backed running raindrops.

Aside from musty fabric, it smells like burnt oolong.

Iroh emerges with a steaming pot, procuring a pair of painted clay cups as he settles beside Aang and pours a too-loud trickle of its dark contents. Aang accepts it wordlessly, cradling the unfamiliar warmth between his fingers because he’s got nothing else to cling to, looking down the sinking residue of steeped tea leaves.

Tentatively, he brings the cup to his lips, side-eyeing the old man as he allows their silence to stew on longer. Feels the liquid sliding down his throat, encapsulating his mind in an unfairly secure semblance of safety; lets himself slide into an unreality for a moment, and pretend life’s fine.

“So, young Aang. What are you doing out in the rain tonight?”

And Iroh’s got enough tact to not mention Foster-Parent-Gyatso, but just like that, the cultivation of the temporary havening bubble fractures in the wake of sea-pebbled words, and his legs want to run.

Aang’s breath hitches on an instinctive sob, as he ducks his head over the full teacup and desperately tries not to cry into the obscuring bowl. “I — I’m sorry, Mr. Iroh.”

Iroh looks over him nonjudgmentally, and lets out a low sigh that doesn’t contain an ounce of regret. “It’s alright, Aang. Let it out, and let it go.”

“I can’t,” Aang mumbles into the dampened fabric of his soggy sweatpants, drawing his right leg up to his chest. “I can’t just let it go. I — I want to let it go, more than anything, okay? But I can’t, and I can’t go back, because —” His voice has risen past moon-drawn tidal waves, trembling at the brink of breaking down to the colorless shores. Because I’m afraid. Because I hate being a child who can’t ever live up to anyone’s expectations. Because I don’t want to get my hopes up again, and watch them hit the water even harder than the last time.

“It is good to look at life with a positive light,” Iroh says. “You can always let things go, if you are willing to give them up.”

Maybe Aang used to run on that, but he hasn’t for a long time.

“Well, how do I do that, oh Wise Tea Man? Do you have a magic potion? The, I don’t know — the ‘Fixes Everything Wrong With My Life’ potion?” Aang tries to stand up, buckles and collapses heavily into the pushed out chair, heat crawling in spider-like bounds up his throat. “Because I’d need a massive overdose to fix everything wrong with my life, Iroh.”

(He sounds so, so broken in his own ears. Raw and hurt and verging on desperation, because maybe he’s been looking for a solution all this time, but this is really all those who claim its secrets have to say.)

Iroh simply curves his hands around the untouched tea and hums. “There is no simple antidote to the misfortunes of life,” he states, unwavering, as if he can sum up the unfair whims of the world in three words. “But what you can do is take all the hardship that the world has hurt you with, and find the lessons in their pain.”

What do you think I’m going to find? Aang wants to ask. What do you think I can get from the pointlessness of this all?

“You might be surprised,” Iroh is saying, “by the things you can discover from loss.”

☲☲☲

blind-bandit - Today at 6:52 PM

[Hey iroh wants to know if any of y’all have seen azula lately.]

[Apparently she ran off on him. I haven’t seen her myself.]

captain-boomerang - Today at 6:52 PM

[why tf do u have his number]

[i thought u hated old people]

[also no]

[me and kat havent seen her]

[whatd she do, say fuck to loud?]

bladedfans - Today at 6:54 PM

[negatory, no azula]

aang! - Today at 6:55 PM

[she’s at my house but don’t tell her i said that]

[i basically sealed myself in a blood bind to keep her location undisclosed and i don’t want to know what happens if i Broke It. which i absolutely didn’t]

[let iroh know she’s probably having a crisis]

[but she’s not dying! she is safe! don’t forget to mention that]

bladedfans - Today at 6:56 PM

[i mean, good to know she's alive...?]

aang! - Today at 6:56 PM

[:D]

moonwatered - Today at 6:59 PM

[I am perfectly capable of texting for myself, you know.]

captain-boomerang - Today at 6:59 PM

[but u never show up until ages after ive responded]

[sucks to suck]

blind-bandit - Today at 7:00 PM

[Will do aang.]

[Also sucks to suck katara.]

moonwatered - Today at 7:01 PM

[You suck too, Toph]

☲☲☲

“I’ll do the dishes,” Aang volunteers, nails lingering in the scruff of Appa’s neck before he stands up.

“You don’t have to worry yourself with the dishes, Aang. You should spend time with Azula,” Gyatso objects, not unkindly.

“But —”

“Don’t concern yourself. It’s not your duty,” the guardian responds.

Aang’s smile slips for a moment, before he turns to Azula and shrugs. “Okay,” he says agreeably. “Hey Azula, wanna make a blanket fort?”

Azula does not want to make a blanket fort.

And now he’s making a face like droopy caneless Toph —

… “Fine.”

He’d better be at least decent at building those damned forts, otherwise she’s not participating at all.

Azula wrinkles her nose at the spiraling yellows and turquoises splattered across the blankets. Aang’s oddly quiet throughout the tedious process, barely speaking the minimum as he drapes the throws across the walls and beneath equally bright pillows. Appa nudges at the boy’s leg, letting out a low whine before curling into the finished portion.

By the time Azula’s satisfied with the inevitably flimsy framework, it’s dark outside.

There’s a thick silence between them, as Aang sinks down into Appa’s exposed belly, and then he asks, “So, what’d you say to Iroh?”

Azula glares. She supposes it was too much to hope he wouldn’t want to know more, even if he hadn’t intended to disclose her state of dishevelment to the universe. “Why do you want to know?” she demands.

“I mean, I think he’d forgive you no matter what, but I also thought I’d just let you talk about your feelings.”

“You are not. My. Therapist,” Azula grinds out, teeth practically pulverizing each other with the controlled force.

This is why she’d refused to associate with him. At least Katara isn’t… perpetually touchy-feely.

Aang shrugs. “I’m not,” he agrees placidly. Then, brightening up, goes on, “Do you think I’d make a good one, though? I’ve always thought being one would be a great way to spend my adult-ing time.”

Azula stares, because is this fourteen year old child seriously asking for her opinion on his fitness for future job occupations when she’s not even voluntarily talking to him? Aang, seeming to realize this, deflates slightly and rolls over to splay across Appa’s body like a sunlit cat on a yarn-threaded pillow.

“I basically told him he’s a piece of shit,” Azula summarizes succinctly, and Aang winces.

“Oh.”

The silence stretches between them, harvesting grains and stilted stalks of uncertainty. Azula doesn’t look down at her nails as Aang looks down at his own. (Doing so is a sign of discomfort, and reduces one’s credibility towards confidence.)

And then he breaks it, looking up with open grey eyes.

“Why?”

Aang isn’t her therapist, but she wants to say something to him more than she ever has wanted to talk to Wu. It might be because she’s reached her snapping point, because she’s exhausted and tired and misses when she knew what she wanted, when she could define herself and could define her life; might be because it’s Zuko’s birthday and he’s still sixteen.

“... Because I blame him. For letting my idiot brother die like that.”

And in a way, it’s true — she hates Uncle so, so much for not being there for her stupid brother, even more than she hates him; and Zuko was an incompetent fool, but he was her brother even if they hated each other and would’ve never, ever have had what Sokka and Katara have. She hates Uncle for not being there at all, for running off like a coward because he couldn’t face the children who resembled his dead son too much. She hates Uncle for lying to her again and again and again, even if she can see right through them, because lately it seems like buildings are as much an illusion as they are words.

She isn’t supposed to feel things, wasn’t supposed to let them control her the way she’s supposed to control them.

This is what happens when you succumb to those foolish dirt-bag paperweights. You just drop lower and lower beneath the ants and the grime, watching the sun switch off and the mire sink into your eyes, and then it’s too late to stand back up as the melting goo clings to the ground and pulls.

Aang assesses her with a gaze that feels uncomfortably like Aunt Wu, except instead of a scrawling lavender notepad, he’s got a sloppy white dog that he’s poured his magma bones all over. “Do you really blame him, though?” he asks quietly, wrangling his fingers into Appa’s stringy ears.

“Yes,” Azula snaps. “If he — If he was around, then Zuzu wouldn’t’ve reached that state of miserable depression, and he wouldn’t have left. ” 

(Maybe he would’ve taken Zuko in after he got burned, if he’d been there. Maybe she just wishes Zuko had said something to her, something more than Mother had, before he went and died on her wordlessly like everyone always does.)

“Are you sure you’re not, like, blaming yourself and projecting it onto your uncle?” Aang suggests, like he can climb into her mind and unbox all the neat folders that make up her veracious perception of the world.

(Maybe she could’ve stopped him, if she’d been there, and everything would still be normal and she wouldn’t be stuck here in this town of the weak and the pitied.)

“I’m not projecting anything onto Uncle. Quit pretending you know me,” she growls, deliberately unclenching her fists from where they’ve involuntarily curled up. “He’s a piece of shit, and deserved to be called out on it.”

Aang raises his eyebrows at that, props himself off Appa. “And you meant it.”

“Yes. And you’re not my therapist, and you never will be,” Azula hisses, feeling cornered all over again, grasping at wire straws to send flickering dregs of dying yellow bitter sparks down. “Pretending you’re more than you’re worth will never secure your status in this household, so just drop it. ”

And Aang physically flinches at that, staring at her with eyes that so lucidly remind her of Zuko that for a split second, Azula half expects him to crumble into bone and ash. For a moment, her mind blanks out, devoid of anything but rushing blood and buzzing white noise.

This time, she hadn’t even meant to say it. It’d just slipped out, the way Father used to encourage her to slide them off her tongue — the way she’s wanted them to for months now; but now that she’s finally rediscovered the granular trickle of that bitter, ashy concoction, she hates it more than she hates kind words at a cracked dinner table.

Once, Azula might’ve reveled in being the perpetuator so alike to Father.

Now, she wonders what it takes.

“I’m sorry, ” comes out, stumbling over itself. “I — I didn’t mean that. I mean, I didn’t mean to say that. Aggravating you was not on my schedule.”

Aang gives her a sad smile, and lifts his shoulders. “It’s okay,” he says, but Azula is a good liar, and can tell other good liars apart. “It’s been a long day. I shouldn’t have pushed. Let’s just… brush our teeth, or something.”

Why is everyone trying to lie to me?

“You weren’t pushing,” Azula argues. “It was me. Just…”

(Just what, exactly?)

“Hey, now,” Aang butts in, concern written in his eyes. “Are you… You look like you need a hug. If the general consensus is, like, group hug, then I’ll give you a hug, okay?”

“I don’t need a hug, ” she begins indignantly, but the nauseatingly colorful little flea has already latched himself to her arm without waiting for a ‘ No, I most definitely do not want a hug’, and now the drool-hindered dog is squashed against her other arm in sync. 

After an unbudging shove, Azula sighs and resigns herself to the smothering creatures attached to her sides.

“See? Aren’t group hugs great?” Aang babbles.

Absolutely hopeless.

Azula promptly drops him.

☲☲☲

captain-boomerang - Today at 10:07 PM

[hey zucchini]

[happy birthday jerk]

[i miss ur perpetual state of grumpiness. like a lot]

[please come back so i can give u a year 17 birthday slap]

Chapter Text

The first time Zuko regrets being born, he’s six.

He doesn’t remember it all too well. Azula remembers it far better, even though she was four years old and locked upstairs with their mother, but she doesn’t tell that to him, and he doesn’t ask her.

Father doesn’t beat around the bush. He beats the bush, and beats his son, and doesn’t really explain why.

The telephone receiver smashes into his head repeatedly. It crashes and crashes and sends his ears ringing until it turns into knuckle, blood trickling out of his temple and skull feeling like it’s splintering apart, as he covers his head and presses his spine up against the cold metal pole of the shaking lamp. He’s so, so afraid, and he screams and screams until his throat goes raw and he can’t get any sounds up any longer.

Zuko’s six, and he cowers beneath too-small hands until they’re blown aside harshly. Something inside his rapidly retreating brain is wondering if it might crack, but for some absurd reason, it doesn’t.

After what feels like hours, the lamp’s bowl trembles off its stand and shatters in a splatter of plastic shards against the back of his shoulders, and the sticky red, destroyed receiver falls from Father’s fingers, and the man storms up the stairs in search of Mom.

Zuko cries a lot, and curls up into the smallest fetal position he can manage, and the moment Father’s shadow disappears from his hazing vision, he scrabbles at the pristine white closet door across the room and shuts himself and his lugging limbs inside. It’s dark, scratchy coats scraping against the purpling bruises forming at the back of his neck, dark enough that some of the whiteness blurring his vision goes away. He tries to stifle his mortifying sniffles, but he doesn’t have it in him to stop because it hurts and he still doesn’t know what he did.

(That was, in fact, before he knew that Being Born was exactly what he did.)

He doesn’t know how long he’s in there, in the thick, oppressively silent pitch-black, listening to the broken audio file of his hitched breathing and feeling like he might crumble into an urn of dust. His nails dig crescents into his palms, and he half-floats away from his own body until a permeating knock draws him back into existence and yanks an ugly sob out of him.

When he’s older, he’ll learn to listen for footsteps, learn to recognize who they’re from. Right now, he’s terrified and tries to cover his eyes with numb fingers.

“Zuzu?” The voice is hesitant, softened by the underlying waver that runs through the syllables.

Zuko shoves his head further into the jacket and shuts his eyes even though he can’t see anything. “Go away, ‘Zula,” he mumbles into the fabric, heavy tongue protesting.

Azula doesn’t go away. “I’m not leaving,” she says with an indignant huff. There’s a scuffling noise as her nails seek out the too-tall knob, and yellow-hued light streams past the blindfold feeling like a headache. Piles of halfheartedly-barriered clothing collapse with the unadulterated action.

“What do you want?”

Azula sets herself behind him, toes a few centimeters from his trailing sleeve, and thrusts something at his back. “It’s your turn to read, Dum-Dum,” she orders pettily, because for some worldly-vindicative reason, even though she’s two years younger than him, she’s also far more literate.

“I’m not reading today.” He pushes at the book — Love Amongst the Dragons’ picture book, nonetheless — nudging insistently into dull pain, still not willing to move his head from its protective position. Azula doesn’t give up, the butthead; and usually, Zuko finds it more admirable, but right now, it’s just incredibly annoying.

Azula shifts, and he gets the distinct feeling that she’s giving him an awfully judgemental stare for a four year old.

“Tomorrow,” he vows, just to make her leave.

His little sister stands up, blocking the faint trickle of light that’s leaked into his vision, and stomps out. The slamming door sends his head ringing all over again, and he’s dangerously close to starting to cry yet again.

Crying’s for babies.

Zuko’s years older than a baby, even though he’s hiding in a stuffy closet like one.

Eventually, Mom shows up from wherever she’s been, slipping into the darkened wardrobe and prying his face out of scratchy material and into her soft lap. She holds him close and holds him tight in complete silence, somehow not aggravating any of the burning patches of his skin like she knows how they are, and strokes his hair into a scrappish ponytail.

“I’m sorry, my love,” she whispers into the back of his neck as she pulls him against her chest. Her arms are so soft and warm. “I’m sorry.”

Her voice sounds all watery and sad, maybe a bit like him.

Zuko wants to tell her that it’s okay, and that it just hurts a little bit even though that’d be a lie, but he’s too dizzy to get any words out of his mouth and feels kind of like how a crushed snail in the open rain must.

Mom lets out a really sad sounding noise. Zuko wants to comfort her, wants to tell her to not be sad, but she doesn’t do anything but curl her fingers around his, and he can’t find any words in him as they squeeze.

Lu Ten worries about Zuko’s head when they go over to Uncle Iroh’s with a bandage wrapped around it, and Uncle places a hand on his son’s shoulder and shushes him.

Zuko wonders if Uncle doesn’t like it when Lu Ten talks too loud, too.

Father smiles a tight-lipped smile that he gets whenever Zuko talks too loud, and tells his cousin that he ran into the staircase. Clumsy boy, he says, lightly shaking his head down at his son, but the lightness doesn’t translate into his fathomless eyes.

Zuko swallows, and tries to ignore the way Father’s eyes trace him as he swings a foam sword around at Lu Ten’s kneecaps.

☲☲☲

"Oh no!" Zuko collapses backwards, throwing his arms out as he hits the pre-positioned stack of velvet-red pillows backfirst. "The Dragon Emperor has killed me. Blehhhhhh."

Azula giggles, withdrawing Lu Ten's foam sword from his sweaty armpit and turning to bow before the imaginary curtain call. Zuko would bow too, except he's supposed to be dead, so he lays on the cold wood floor and cranks his eyelids open to dizzily look at their numerous spectators.

Mom looks delighted; Love Amongst the Dragons is her favorite play, after all. Uncle puts his hands together and claps with his big soft hands, but smiles only at Zuko. Lu Ten looks tired — he always does, now — but gives them a grin and a double thumbs-up.

Father doesn't look impressed, let alone happy.

(He never does, when it comes to Zuko.)

Azula sees Father's expression, droops ever so slightly, before dropping the sword entirely.

She doesn't play the script with him, after. She doesn't even ask him to read the picture book to her. She still keeps the old bound pages in her room, though, and Zuko doesn't ask for it back. 

Sometimes, he wonders if she reads it at night and wishes he was there.

☲☲☲

“Azula was born lucky,” Father hisses into Zuko’s face. “You were lucky to be born.”

Zuko’s seven.

Azula looks over at him from the other end of the dusted wooden desk with the corner of her eye, brow furrowing ever so slightly like she’s contemplating the words coming out of their father’s mouth, before she wordlessly turns back to writing with the large, neat printing of a six year old. Her right hand scrawls deliberately across the paper in clean strokes, perfect characters proportioned perfectly in their perfect little squares, marks unsmudged.

Father grabs Zuko’s left hand, large fingers circling his own wrist too easily, and squeezes the bones in a way so different to Mom’s intertwined fingers. Zuko bites back a whimper and bites back the urge to yank it away, as the man plucks the pencil out of his grip and slams it beside his other hand. “Write it right, with the correct hand.”

But Zuko doesn’t know how to use his right hand. Ms. Ming doesn’t mind too much when his characters get smudged, instead gently correcting their balance, but he shifts the utensil into his uncrushed hand and with a trembling grip, tries to recreate the impeccable strokes his baby sister is producing across from him with ease.

Father roughly fixes the way his fingers rest against the pencil. They slip anyway.

“Do you want me to make you use the damned hand?” he demands. “Because I can do that.”

“Please don’t,” Zuko whispers, hyperaware of the way his wrist rests at the mercy of Father’s too-tight grasp. He glances over at Azula, who’s watching them with open curiosity, and wishes she’d say something.

She doesn’t.

Ms. Ming asks about the cast around Zuko’s left wrist, once, when the bell rings and Azula stands at the door with the impatience of a little girl waiting for her older brother to hurry up.

“Oh, um… I —” Zuko glances over at his sister desperately. “My —”

“He tripped and landed on his wrist like the Dum-Dum he is,” Azula cuts in, voice high and sharp and unhesitating. “Mai and Ty Lee are waiting. Come on, Zuzu, or I'm eating your lunch."

Azula lies.

☲☲☲

"Grandfather will probably die soon," Azula says when she's seven, six hours after receiving a phone call that their grandfather was in the hospital for unprompted heart failure, and two hours after Father left the house. "Father will have to take over the business by himself, because Uncle Tea-Loving Kookiness isn't competent enough to handle the task."

"Uncle's perfectly capable," Zuko objects. "He's just not interested. He prefers living life. "

And it's true — all Uncle really does nowadays is fly out to places with Lu Ten, because it's the final summer before his college years, and there's apparently a certain importance to getting away from everything and everyone during that year. Zuko kind of wishes he could go with them, so Father wouldn't have to look at him with such disdain at every waking moment; but here he is now, sitting with his sister and his mother in the living room, and waiting for his grandfather to die.

Mom turns over from where she sits, and stares Azula down. "Young lady, do not say such things in this household," she snaps, voice harsher than it's ever been towards her son.

Azula looks at her brother, looks at the fireplace. Then she shrugs, jumping to her feet and skipping up the stairs without another word. If Zuko listens hard enough, he thinks he can hear her warble a cheery girlish tune through the roof, before it goes silent.

Mom gazes at the empty stairwell, before dropping her head in her hands. "What is wrong with that child?" she asks to herself, though it's loud enough for Zuko to hear.

There's nothing wrong with her, falls off his lips.

("I'm just worried about Ozai's influence on her," Ursa tells Iroh. "That monster just keeps feeding her words to say, and when she realizes just how much she can use them to exploit Zuko — I'm just… afraid, of what might happen."

Azula presses her ear against the muffled wood door, but the voices go silent. Probably taking a draft from the steaming teacups that are ever-present whenever Uncle's around.

Her own mother thinks she's a monster.

It hurts more than she'd like. Hurts more than Father would like.)

☲☲☲

Uncle and Lu Ten fly out to Ba Sing Se at the end of the summer, and bring back gifts.

Zuko gets an emerald-bladed knife. Azula gets a doll.

Azula looks at the polished wooden doll in the polished wooden box with something akin to disgust, and if Zuko’s being honest with himself, he’s secretly equally unimpressed by Uncle’s selection as well. But before he can dwell on it any longer, his mind flies back to the super cool sharp thing in his hands, and his sister is forgotten.

It says, ‘Never give up without a fight’, Uncle tells him, closing his small fingers around the dark pearl handle.

Lu Ten brings them red bean mochi dusted with plasticky flour flavored like children’s strawberry toothpaste. Azula takes to them better than she does the doll, though she confesses that they’re the worst mochi she’s ever had when they brush their sugar-laden teeth three hours later.

(The next morning, Zuko wakes to the acrid scent of the wrong things catching flame.

Uncle’s gift burns in the fireplace.)

☲☲☲

This is how Zuko’s tenth year of failure goes: Lu Ten dies, Mom dies, and Uncle leaves.

Luck continues to evade him.

The news first comes when Zuko least expects it, except nothing really could’ve prepared him for it.

Mom wakes him and Azula up at four a.m. on a winter’s Wednesday morning, bringing them out into the empty living room beside the replaced lamp head. Father isn’t there.

“Your cousin Lu Ten has passed on,” Mom says quietly, sorrow written all over her face.

Your cousin Lu Ten has passed on.

Lu Ten has passed on.

Passed on —

“What?” finally comes out of Zuko’s mouth. He instinctively looks over at Azula, seeking out her typical air of amusement at uncovering the gazes of white lies, but she looks stunned in a way that he doesn’t think he’s ever seen; like someone took her soul out and crushed it into a million pieces before her eyes, until her expression shutters off into an almost terrifying indifference.

“Mom, what do — what do you mean?” Zuko whispers. Azula’s so, so still, that he might be worried that time’s frozen in the plane of space, except Mom’s eyes are watering and the firefly lamplight flickers and Zuko’s own hands won’t stop trembling in his lap.

Mom’s inhale hitches on a sob, before she lurches forward and tugs Zuko into a fierce hug. “He was tired,” she says into his uncombed hair. “He was really, really tired.”

She detangles herself, gazing at Azula’s motionless form as well, and with a voice that quakes the way Zuko’s hands do, asks them to make her a promise.

Promise me that even if you’re tired, you won’t leave like Lu Ten. I’d miss you too much.

When Zuko sees the crumpled sail of Uncle’s face the next Sunday night, he thinks he might understand, and vows to himself that he will never leave the way Lu Ten had.

Azula isn’t the same after that.

☲☲☲

A month later, he wakes up to a gloved hand shaking his shoulder.

“Whad’ya want, ‘Zula?” Zuko mumbles, burrowing further into the blankets and absolutely refusing to look at the horrible peeks of the vented sun in the beam.

“Kid, wake up,” an unfamiliar voice says roughly.

Zuko shoots up at the scratchy sound, clambering against the headboard and blinking rapidly. A concerned looking woman stands in front of him, dark hair pinned up in a sweeping bun, dressed in dark blue, hand hesitantly reaching for his shoulder again.

Automatically, he shoves the gesture aside and scrambles out of bed, whipping past the startled woman and straight into Azula’s room down the hall. The door is flung open, the curtains fluttering in the wake of the open window, an eerie stillness fallen over the rest of the room.

The bed isn’t made.

Azula’s bed is never rumpled like that.

Zuko hurls towards the window and shoves his face against the mesh screen. There’s yellow tape and a scatter of people standing across the lawn, and an ambulance whirling a hollow red light spinning in hypnotizing circles. Father stands outside, Azula beside him and looking almost hilariously short beside the crowd, and he can’t see her features, but he knows that she doesn’t look right.

The woman’s still standing in the hallway when Zuko emerges again, but he pushes past her and down the stairs and out into the yard. Silence falls over the crowd as they turn over to the sound of the door slamming open, bodies tensing in anticipation for something he’s unsure of, until their faces start to fall into sympathy like boulders down earth-shaken canyons.

“Where’s Mom?” he asks desperately, even though Father’s going to be so embarrassed by his behaviour, even though Azula is standing right there and shaking her head at him. His stomach feels cold, in its flurried snowglobe. “Wh — Where’s Mom?”

Father stares him down. “She passed away last night,” he says.

The people from the ambulance look at the Sozin family in commiseration, but to Zuko’s ears, it sounds like the winter.

☲☲☲

And half a month after Mom dies, Uncle leaves.

“Please don’t go,” Zuko begs pathetically, squished against Uncle’s barrel chest. “Please don’t leave me all alone.”

Uncle smiles down at him, though it’s tinged with a finite sadness.

It’s not enough of a sadness to make him stay.

(It never is.)

“Father hates me,” Zuko babbles before he can hear himself, words tumbling over each other like meandering water bowling over protruding glass in a weedy riverbed. “Father hates me, Uncle, please take me with you.”

But Uncle only places his big soft hand against Zuko’s scraggly ponytail, and says, “Your father doesn’t hate you, Nephew. He only has different ways of showing his love. He might not say it, but he loves you.” His eyes gaze into the distance as he says it, almost like he doesn’t believe it himself.

But why would he smash my head with the telephone if he loves me? Zuko wants to ask. But why does he yell when I can’t use my right hand and why does he hold my wrist until it bruises and why does he tell me I was lucky to be born?

Uncle is so, so wrong.

He doesn’t take Zuko with him when he leaves. 

Zuko is alone.

It’s the first time Zuko discovers that people really don’t actually care about him when they’ve got themselves on the line. It’s not the last, either.

☲☲☲

There’s a point in time, where Azula realizes what putting herself in front of her older brother means for her, and leaves him in the dust.

Zuko can’t pinpoint the exact moment it clicks in her head. Maybe it’s been steadily broiling in the back of her mind, or maybe the epiphany happened quicker than the deaths of ten years. Father’s been pushing them in academics, signing his motherless children up for half a dozen post-school curriculums and martial arts the moment forty-nine days of memorial have passed.

Zuko looks at Azula after Uncle leaves, and wonders what happened to his little sister. She’s quiet and glazed, been that way since Lu Ten died, until she understands that Father will always love her the way he doesn’t love Zuko, and refuses to be his friend any longer. It’s like a spark lit up inside her, and she vanishes into her shell of a room and reemerges with the grades Father likes, and with the mask Father likes.

She kind of scares him, with the way she walks and talks and laughs without smiling, never with a smile. It’s too much like waiting for Grandfather to die all over again, except it seems like she’s waiting for him to die.

“You’ll never catch up,” is what she tells him when she’s ten and soaring seven steps ahead of his lagging steps and lagging heart — and the truth is that she’s right. But she’s mean , not in the bratty way of It’s my turn to play the Dragon Emperor, or I’ll tell on you, but more like someone took her soul and crushed it into bitterness for nothing more than pulverizing the powder of imperfection.

(Probably Father.)

Zuko tries to fix it, the way that Mom or Uncle or Lu Ten is supposed to, but Azula doesn’t want to listen to him. He barely even wants to listen to himself.

“Let me go,” Zuko begs pathetically, pressing his hands in futile against Father’s. “Why —”

Why do you hate me so much? he wants to ask. Why do you have to hurt me?

He just wants to know what he did — why he’s here.

Father looks at him for a long moment. Zuko tries to wriggle out of the hard grasp, but it tightens around his shoulder ground into the wall.

“If you weren’t such a natural failure, I wouldn’t have to beat it into you,” Father finally states.

(If you weren’t such a natural failure, Uncle wouldn’t have left you, and Azula wouldn’t have to hide from you, and you wouldn’t be here right now.)

And it never leaves his head.

So he doesn’t ask why, and focuses on his studies, and drives himself until his head hurts so much that he can’t think, because it’s the only way Father says he might (might) ever love him. He learns to stay quiet when the bruises keep blooming and learns to take care of himself without a word; learns to stop crying and learns to stop wondering. 

Now, he sees why Azula is the way she is. She was just naturally smart enough to catch on before it had to be beaten into her.

She doesn’t look at him, anymore.

☲☲☲

When Zuko turns thirteen, Uncle sends him a gift without a return address.

It’s the first they’ve heard from him since he packed it up and left, two years ago.

(He hasn’t celebrated his birthday with anything more than cold eyes and quiet feet for these years.)

Zuko opens the bulky package and finds a laptop and the neat print of a handwritten card, alongside a pair of dark red otoshidama-bukuro. Azula is eleven and full of detached curiosity, watching over his shoulder as he carefully picks up the silver object between the bubbly foam and cardboard boxes, and not quite keeping her feelings to herself in the undeniable interest.

[Dearest Nephew,

I hope life has found you well since I last saw you. I am sorry I cannot be here for your thirteenth birthday, though I hope you make good use of the gift I’ve attached in congratulations! I do not intend to return to the Caldera, for I have found that there are so many more beautiful places out in the world for my weary heart, but I would be delighted should you choose to visit a lonely old man once I've settled.

Best wishes,

Your Uncle Iroh.]

Zuko skims through the short letter, heart plummeting too many times for the first kind birthday wishing he's got these past years. Has the urge to crumple it up and throw it in the garbage can along with every used bandage he keeps in the bathroom, but simply folds it and puts it in his pocket, where it'll eventually join the dusty emerald knife on the top shelf and never see the drafty sunlight again.

Father tells him that Uncle is weak for failure children (him), but allows him to set it up and use it (because the money's already been wasted, so put it to use so I'll not have to spend mine on you) .

(The entire note doesn't mention Azula in name or even reference, because she isn't a failure. Zuko tries to ignore the way she scrutinizes the letter and box; she'd be embarrassed to be seen, after all.) 

For three weeks, he edges around the internet, and edges around Father.

Somehow, the shoe never drops.

Two months later, Zuko decides to venture into that one neat sword forum because swords, and Father’s not monitoring his daily activity and if he clears out his history on a regular basis, then he can’t get caught and banned. It’s where he meets a user named captain-boomerang, who’s fixated solely on the concept of meteorite swords and the practicality behind their hypothetical design, which wasn’t supposed to be interesting until it accidentally turned interesting.

Sokka texts a lot, and never seems to know when to stop. He uses a ridiculous amount of emojis and types in a ludicrously ungrammatical way that Father would never find acceptable, yet Zuko can’t find it in him to be annoyed by its frequency and unrefined style. Sokka doesn’t ask the questions that kids at school do (because he can’t see him), and doesn’t question his excuses of absence (because he can’t hear him).

Sometimes, he almost wishes he knew the other boy, but he always looks up at cold brown eyes and takes ten steps back.

☲☲☲

captain-boomerang - Today at 1:05 AM

[hehyeehy zukk check out my lunch]

[(Attached File: IMG_160329_153735329)]

bluespirit122502 - Today at 1:06 AM

[That’s disgusting]

[Why would you put cooked zucchini and mayo? on a piece of wheat bread]

captain-boomerang - Today at 1:06 AM

[well its u :D]

[cuz yknow zuchini]

[zuko zucchini theyre almost interchangable]

[also thats not mayo its butter]

bluespirit122502 - Today at 1:07 AM

[Just because it’s a zucchini doesn’t make it any less of an abomination. Or funny]

captain-boomerang - Today at 1:08 AM

[idk man i think its p funny]

[have u ever tried it?]

bluespirit122502 - Today at 1:09 AM

[Of course not. Who do you think I am, an asshole with no patience or tastebuds?]

captain-boomerang - Today at 1:09 AM

[i mean probably but fair]

captain-boomerang - Today at 1:13 AM

[oh shit its disgusting how do i get the taste out]

[isnt milk like a rememdy for poisons]

bluespirit122502 - Today at 1:14 AM

[This is literally your own fault you fool. Clown. Jester]

captain-boomerang - Today at 1:14 AM

[thats what my sister told me]

[i cant believe shes laughing at me]

[SHE TOOK THE MILK]

bluespirit122502 - Today at 1:15 AM

[Sucks to suck]

captain-boomerang - Today at 1:17 AM

[i slapped her]

[nicely.]

bluespirit122502 - Today at 1:17AM

[And you’re not dead?]

captain-boomerang - Today at 1:17 AM

[ofc not]

[what do u think sisters r, professional homocidal manics?]

bluespirit122502 - Today at 1:18 AM

[I mean]

[No]

[I just think you’re stupid for doing that]

captain-boomerang - Today at 1:18 AM

[ok zucchini]

[u think im stupid for everything i do anyway]

bluespirit122502 - Today at 1:19 AM

[Please don’t ever call me that again or I’ll strangle you with my sister’s hairtie]

captain-boomerang - Today at 1:19 AM

[sure thing zuko(ini)]

☲☲☲

Azula dares him to go into Father’s office when it’s empty.

It’s not empty for long. The man will be back sooner or later, which is what makes Azula’s dare more than an amusing task for her to watch her brother carry out. While Zuko normally wouldn’t even want to touch the pristine, sun-less room, he’s definitely not a coward, so he slips inside and ends up distracted for too long.

And now he’s holding a folder filled with a rundown of illicit activities his father partakes in and funds on a regular basis, because it was just sitting in its lonesome on the desk, and he’s not really sure what to do with it. Father is a role-model, yet how can he take such a position when he endorses such loss in the stark, rich city streets of the Caldera? Zuko leans against the wall, clipping the sheafs back into their places, a certain dizziness rushing to his head.

Father’s going to a meeting, Zuko thinks dazedly to himself as he stares at the iron plugged into the wall, distant. He doesn’t leave the iron plugged in unless he’s planning to iron his clothes. 

Azula is long gone, having gotten bored when Zuko refused to divulge to her his findings. How long does he have?

The door opens, effectively answering the question.

Inscrutable dark eyes land on the folder quietly slipping out of Zuko’s fingers. 

Zuko swallows, edging towards the desk. Back against the leg, fingers flat against the wood floor, heart injected with a fast-moving paralyzing toxin.

One.

Two.

Three.

Father lets out a silent breath.

(For a moment, he almost thinks he’ll be let go — and when he looks back at that moment, he’ll laugh and laugh and laugh until he cries and Mai will look over at him with concern etched over her typically impassive features; but right now, he’s just so desperately wishing into the stupid, absurd likelihood that he’ll be let go.)

“Azula said you’d be in here,” he says. Zuko grits his teeth and shifts his hands out of their degree of contortion. That traitor told on him.

He should’ve known. Azula always lies.

“Boy,” he hisses, “hasn’t anyone ever taught you about respect?”

Zuko’s now pressed up so tightly against the office desk, shoulders scrunched against each other in a way that would be excruciating in any conscious situation. “You — You have,” he manages to let out, because he’s heard that lesson enough times.

Father snarls, the rumbling sound actually sending a physical reflexive jerk down Zuko’s spine, then he’s slammed against the left hand wall with a violent twist that goes straight to his bones. “Clearly, I haven’t taught it well enough.”

When Zuko remembers that the iron is plugged in, he finds himself wishing that the new telephone receiver was kept in this room.

It probably wouldn’t have sufficed, is the last risible thought on his mind before he burns.

(Azula shoots up at the sound of a scream tearing through the veins of echoey marble floors.

Zuko hasn’t screamed like that for nearly a year. He’s gotten a lot better at silence ever since Father beat the urge out of him.

She shouldn’t go looking. There’s math homework to be done, assignments to record, tutors to await and rooms to rearrange. There are a million things she should do, instead of checking up on her idiot brother who she’d dared to go into Father’s office while sending him right after him.

Azula opens her door to the acrid scent of the wrong things catching flame.

Zuko burns in the fireplace.

She calls the ambulance and drags her brother out of the hearth before she can think of what she’s doing, before she can lie to herself, before she can recognize how she’s betraying Father. She lies to the medics who arrive — because that’s all she’s ever been, a liar, to the people who ask and the people who don’t dare — and something in her voice must follow her lead and flinch, as dark eyes linger on her at the hastily woven words collapsing through the loom of her lips.

Somewhere deep inside her, beneath the tangles of shameless vines and the beds of guilted pyrite, Azula wonders if the same could ever happen to her.)

☲☲☲

Zuko wakes up to hazy white lights and the murmur of too-many unrehearsed people whispering amongst themselves. It smells like hand sanitizer’s been dropped down his clogged nose, uncomfortably sharp and sterilized and too much . His left eye is searingly numb, his right barely processing the shadow of what might be a broken fence link beside him; his whole body feeling stung and sand-whipped like it’s been set on fire and left in the dumpster to rot for a few days, weeks.

“Father?” he hears someone mumble in an underwater fog.

A human-shaped figure hovers over him, blocking the light. “Your father isn’t here,” he thinks it says to him.

Zuko tries to blink, then tries to laugh, except finds that he can’t contort his face. He can’t really feel anything at all. “Wha d’ya mean?” he slurs instead through thick lips. “He doesn’t want to see what he’s done?” Coughs. “That’s — That’s really fuckin’ stupid.”

(What did he do? Zuko can’t remember.)

The hush of incessant noise ceases at what he says, and he might want to let out a groan of relief at the waking emptiness the silence leaves his sinking soul in.

(Katsuko glances over at her partner across the unit, then the closed white door, then at the file: Zuko Sozin.

The boy is out of it. He won’t scar, aside from the concentrated path where the wood must’ve pressed too directly against the skin for too long. His sister had explained the fireplace, which had really explained itself.

(Wood doesn’t burn like that. Iron does.)

No one’s father would burn their child like that.)

The people are too loud. Zuko wishes they’d shut up, and wishes the white lights would shut up, and wishes his body would shut up, but wishes are always too much when you’re lucky to be born.

He always goes back to sleep sooner than he wants to.

Azula visits once. She could’ve been an illusion or a hallucination, but her voice sounds bladed in a way that his imagination can never encapsulate properly, even if it’s detached from a fuzzy grey body. He doesn’t know what the foggy girl said, or if she even said anything at all.

Zuko drifts in and out of consciousness, and every time he wakes up, he’s never sure how long it’s been. An icicle clock is pinned against the white wall, or at least he thinks that’s what the reflective glass circle of artificial light must be, yet he can never see it clearly enough to know if it’s spinning forward or backwards or if it’s stopped altogether. Maybe it’s only been half a minute since he last slipped into the dreamless death of embers; maybe it’s been half a month.

Foolish boy, treading too close to the hearth. Doesn’t he know he can get burned? the whispers of the milling rill of people sound like.

Don’t they ever wonder?

☲☲☲

Zuko’s released from the hospital a month later, grimacing at the way his hypersensitive stinging skin pulls against his bones and half-wishing he could lay facedown in that stupid, generic white hospital bed that smells like new paint for forever, where he wouldn’t have to face Father, and wouldn’t have to face the world.

(It’s too high for a wish. It’s a wish — it’s always too high.)

Zuko comes home and sees the way Azula steadily avoids his half-sided gaze, and is vividly reminded of the fact that she was the one who’d dared him. She knew Father would come back, she sent him back herself — “Azula said you’d be here” —, and she’d egged him to go ahead anyway and left him scarred . Azula did this to him, and she knows it, and Zuko knows it too.

She’s always been the perpetuator for everything bad, hasn’t she? She was born lucky, you were lucky to be born.

Why can’t you be more like your younger sister?

It’s not difficult for Azula, so why are you such a failure?

Everything’s Azula this, Azula that. Maybe, if she had never been born, he wouldn’t be left as the smoke-drawn stairs she uses to run towards her obsession of the stars; and maybe, Father wouldn’t burn from the fallen cinders of his comparative incompetence; and maybe, Uncle wouldn’t have left him as kindling for the cold blue flame.

Maybe, if she had never been born, he wouldn’t be this way, and all the endless things wrong with his life wouldn’t even be a problem.

(It’s unfair to blame her for the things Father hates you for, something in his heart whispers, but he doesn’t want to hear it.)

So at fourteen, he resolves to shut her out.

☲☲☲

Azula opens his lockless door, and leans against its frame.

“Mai and Ty Lee are visiting today,” she says, languidly inspecting her nails. 

Zuko grits his teeth and reaches forward, cranking the computer’s volume up into his earbud. The small speakers already dig into his earlobe and the increased sound makes him want to pull his hair off, but so does Azula, and he’d pick painfully loud electric guitar to drown out his sister’s presence any day. Maybe it’ll leave him with an all-around deafening headache, something to focus on beyond the dull linger of Father’s latest piece of art.

Azula goes silent, and for a moment, he thinks she’s given up on her pointless drive to have any sort of communication with him.

Unfortunately, the earbud doesn’t block out her voice.

“Mai was looking forward to seeing you,” she goes on as the drums pick up speed. “You should say something to her.”

Zuko grits his teeth, and kicks the chair back on its heels, yanking the wire down onto the keyboard. “What, so you can cling to the last vestiges of her interest in our family, after you forced her to be your arm-candy friend?” he bites out. “What about Ty Lee?”

Azula glares at him. “So now you’re talking to me?”

You make it kind of hard to not when you’re talking to me, almost comes out, before he realizes that he’s playing exactly into her game. What game, he’s not entirely sure, but — there’s always an ulterior motive when it comes to Azula, who lies and lies and lies until the halo is too thick for anyone to see through.

Going silent is his new way of telling her to leave him alone.

It's lonely, but the loneliness is always better than the pain.

(“You’re being ridiculous,” Mai tells him as she lays on her back on his unmade bed, voice flat, but not careless.

Zuko huffs a bitter laugh and turns back to rewriting the math problem scrawled across the torn graph notebook. “Don’t fuckin’ care,” he answers. “She’s the one who started it.”

“Started what, exactly?”

My face getting scorched off, and Father’s burning hatred for me, probably, he thinks sourly, but doesn’t say.

Mai takes his silence as an inability to come up with a response. “You aren’t going to accomplish anything by ignoring your perceived origin of problems.”

“Well, you aren’t going to accomplish anything by letting Azula treat you two like shit.”

“You’re deflecting. Listen to my damned point, or shut up.”

He does the latter.)

☲☲☲

It’s three a.m., and Zuko’s so fucking tired when he lets it slip to his best friend.

captain-boomerang - Today at 3:14 AM

[my dads finally coming home!]

[he hasnt been home for almost a year. i miss him]

bluespirit122502 - Today at 3:14 AM

[Shit, what I’d give to have my father gone for a whole ass year]

[Imagine missing your dad haha]

captain-boomerang - Today at 3:15 AM

[that doesnt sound like the typical response but i mean]

[i can respect that]

[geez whatd he ever do to u?]

Zuko nearly rolls his eyes at the rhetorical question, before he remembers that Sokka’s never seen his fucked-up face or even his general physical body, and that it’s not like he would’ve said anything, either.

He doesn’t mean to say it this time, either, but his fingers are typing of their own sluggish volition, and the send button is pressed.

bluespirit122502 - Today at 3:16 AM

[He tried to break my head when I was like 6 lmao]

[He also burned off approximately half of my fucking face], is being typed until he stops himself at the sudden horror growing in his stomach.

Oh, fuck.

Sokka types for a minute, then vanishes for another two minutes, then types again. Zuko’s pressed his thumb over the text with the full intent to delete it, heart thudding unusually loudly in his ears, blood twitching in their too-thin veins and threatening to burn.

captain-boomerang - Today at 3:19 AM

[is this like one of ur regularly scheduled shitty jokes or do u need actual help? bc that was not funny buddy]

Zuko bites his lip. He should lie like Azula always does. It’s not like Sokka should even care, if the teachers and the nurses and the people who were supposed to care about him hadn’t — not if even he barely cares about himself anymore. But it’s three a.m., and he’s so tired of everything, and something deep inside him desperately wants someone to tell him ‘ Your father was wrong to do that’, because even though reason is made of hard bruises that grow like spinning pink cherry blossoms, he wants to hear something like its progression again.

bluespirit122502 - Today at 3:21 AM

[I mean not really, but it’s still kind of funny.]

It’s fine, it’s always fine. It’s just Azula. And maybe it’s kind of funny, that he was so scared when he was six and getting his head smashed with a telephone — because now he’s had his face branded by a clothing iron and his body used as kindle for the lit fireplace, and saying it sounds so hilariously painless in comparison. 

Everything does, nowadays.

captain-boomerang - Today at 3:21 AM

[dude thats literally like 10 different ways of fucked up]

[what does your sister think of this shit? she cant possibly be like]

[“hahaha oh yeah my brothers fine he only got his brain SMASHED IN by our DAD’]

[“]

[haha NO]

[pls dont tell me u think this is fine wtf]

Well, yeah — Azula probably laughed when she learned she’d landed him in the hospital. It’s fine.

captain-boomerang - Today at 3:23 AM

[is this why ur always so weird whenever i bring up kat]

[oh shit]

[please dont tell me u and ur sister despise each other]

(I’ve shut her out for the past half year. I haven’t directly talked to her for over a month.)

bluespirit122502 - Today at 3:24 AM

[I don’t hate her.]

(It’s the truth. He doesn’t really hate her, even though he wants to so badly. He wants to hate her for Father’s hatred of him, wants to hate her for her perfect words and perfect life and perfect lie, and he wants to hate her for everything they haven’t been to each other. 

Some things are just more tangible to blame than others.)

Zuko doesn't want to think about it any longer, because if he does, then the only person left to hate is himself.

(He misses her.)

bluespirit122502 - Today at 3:24 AM

[Look it’s 3 am and I need to go to school. Can we just forget I said anything?]

captain-boomerang - Today at 3:25 AM

[just]

[are u sure u dont need help?]

[like are you safe]

[i dont know what i can do but ill figure smthn out]

[im serious zuko]

bluespirit122502 - Today at 3:26 AM

[Yeah, I’m safe.]

[I’ll be alright, I promise.]

☲☲☲

Azula is out at Ty Lee’s house tonight.

She’s not there to study for a hypothetical test, or to have a fistfight. She goes over because she wants to spend time with the “less-than-respectable” girl (by Father's definition), doing who-knows-what, and definitely not anything remotely “useful” (— again, by Father’s definition).

The only reason Zuko knows this is because Azula showed up at Ty Lee’s, who told Mai, who told him, who is currently staring at the plastery roof with no one else to pass the message onto. Aside from the last person in the house, that is.

Father would lose his shit if he knew.

His phone’s unplugged and blasting the bridge into the second verse, when his doorknob is wrenched open. Zuko sits up rapidly, scrambling to his feet as he abruptly turns the music off, and Father steps in.

The universe sure loves fucking him over.

“Where is your sister?” the taller man demands.

She’s with Ty Lee, is on the tip of his tongue before he can think about it. She’s with Ty Lee, and she’s there because she wants to be there.

Your daughter isn’t as disciplined as you raised her to be, is on the tip of his tongue before he can think about it.

Why am I the only one who gets burned? is on the tip of his tongue before he can think about it.

“She went to Mai’s to study for their upcoming test,” is what comes out. “I told her to go, because I figured you wouldn’t care if she left.”

(He hasn’t talked to her at all for a week, let alone told her something. She’s never listened to a word he says, after all.)

Father’s always angry at Zuko, for some reason or another, yet this time, there’s something off about it. It’s an expression that’s supposed to be reserved for his son, and seeing it for the wrong person in the wrong place impales a molten blade down his gut.

He swallows thickly, backs up against the hard wood chair shoved into his desk.

“You have no. Authority. In this household,” Father tells him. “You do not get to tell your sister what she can and cannot do. You do not get to make decisions for her.”

I lied, Zuko wants to blurt out, but his smokey throat is more closed up than the day he’d screamed it bloody, and breathing to speak feels like swallowing pieces of broken glass, and his heart hurts so, so much .

Fists really haven’t hurt as much since spending a month in the burn unit at the hospital.

(When Azula comes home at midnight, hair unfurled and face in an almost half-smile, Zuko hears repressed yelling downstairs. No thuds.

The next morning, Azula gives him an indecipherable look, then looks away the same way he’s done to her this past half-year. If they had a functional sibling relationship, the way Sokka and his sister do, she might’ve said something.)

☲☲☲

“Mai,” Zuko groans, collapsing beside her on the curved wood bench, leaving his legs hanging over the armrest and his eyes fixed on the grey-blue sky. There’s a cloud that looks like a pig and another that looks like a melted butter knife, and Zuko wishes he could punch them both out of the sky.

Mai grunts noncommittally.

“Mai, I think I fucked up.”

“That isn’t news, Zuko.” Her shadows shifts around him as she nudges his short hair with her knee. “You’re going to have to specify where.”

Zuko really doesn’t want to put it into words, because that’s be verbally acknowledging, admitting to himself, out loud, that he fucked up.

“I don’t think ignoring Azula was the situation to fixing my life.”

Because that’s all Father ever really wanted, wasn’t it? To drive them apart and use them as the trophy and the punching bag that he uses to win it, for them to never be friends the way they might’ve been before. 

He did a good fucking job at it. Zuko did a good fucking job at helping him along.

The tall girl actually snorts at that. “Is that the news? Because no shit,” she drawls. Zuko doesn’t respond, and she peers over at him, blocking out the sun. “Well? Are you going to sit around and mope about your grand realization like a depressed emo kid, or are you going to do something about it?”

☲☲☲

Zuko stands in front of Azula’s closed door, feeling empty.

He wonders if she seems as lonely as him.

After what might be an hour, he raises his fist and knocks. “Hey, Az?”

She doesn’t answer. Zuko knows she’s in there, because the light under the door’s crack casts a sliver over his toes, and Azula never leaves the light on when she’s not inside.

Zuko sighs, and slides down the wall, tilts his head against the bumpy plaster. The blank picture frame hanging above him sways. “It’s Zuko, here. But I guess you probably already knew that, sort of. Uh, so the thing is, I kind of realized that I’ve been a massive asshole to you…? Yeah, I guess I should apologize for that.” Fuck, this is not how the speech was supposed to go. “Right. Well, uh… anyway… what I wanted to tell you about is that I thought about it, and uhhh… I mean, sorry for being a dick, I don’t know what I was hoping to accomplish. And I wouldn’t mind having an actual conversation with you sometime before we die. That’s all.”

The other side of the door is still silent. Zuko’s full of tenacity and spite and never gives up, for the most part, but Azula might exceed it when it comes to him. (Like she does everything else, to be fair; it shouldn’t even be a surprise at this point.)

“Just — know I’m sorry.”

“Go away.”

Her voice is low and almost hoarse, in a way that he doesn’t think he’s ever heard her sound, but it’s steeped with venom and a limpid coat of cyanide.

Zuko leaves her alone.

☲☲☲

Mai and Ty Lee leave on his fifteenth birthday.

Their parents have always had some intertwined connection, so of course they move out together when the opportunity arises. Zuko’s not entirely sure where they’re going — Mai never looks like she wants to say it, but Ty Lee’s mentioned Omashu and something about the circus a few times. Somehow, it’s even further than Ba Sing Se.

I’ll miss you, Mai tells him, the most blunt she’s ever been with the emotions she wields with further precision than a knife. Take care of yourself.

You too, he’d said to her, and said to Ty Lee as well.

He hadn’t realized they’d never said goodbye to Azula until they’re gone. Some nights, he stays up and wonders if she deserved being left behind without a word.

☲☲☲

Most of the time, any of Zuko’s questionable ideas are actually shit ideas, but for once, he actually has a decent one.

It comes while walking by Father’s closed office door. He’s avoided it entirely for this past year, because the last time he’d walked by, it had smelled like smoke, but seeing it again strikes something in him that he hasn’t thought about since hyperfixating on deleting Azula from his life — why he’d stayed in there in the first place, when he should've left.

The folders. Father’d reacted so violently, because they could get him in trouble.

They could put him in jail.

(They’d put him in jail better than anything he’s done to me ever would, at least, Zuko thinks a little hysterically to himself.)

Zuko could turn eighteen, and send his father to jail, and get out of this foul white city and never have to look back, if he’s got enough overwhelming, undeniable documentation for the crime. He could buy a plane ticket across the ocean to Omashu, or across the continent to Ba Sing Se, or he could fly out to the middle of the Wulong Forest, and never have to think about the man who’s got his arms tangled in weaves of red strings again. All he needs to do is to locate the evidence, scrape it together because only idiots leave it all at once, and outlast three damned years.

He’s already lived through fifteen. Three years is one fifth of fifteen; one thousand ninety-five days; one hundred fifty-six weeks, until he can run .

bluespirit122502 - Today at 12:42 PM

[If I were to hypothetically put my father in jail in a few years, would you be open to me showing up in Ba Sing Se?]

captain-boomerang - Today at 12:54 PM

[OF COURSE DUDE]

[i mean yes. completely totally u should definitely move here we eat soap and tea on a regular basis]

[but like yeah id love to see u around]

bluespirit122502 - Today at 12:55 PM

[:)]

When Zuko picks the lock of Father’s empty office and goes inside for the first time in a year and a half, it’s cold.

The windows are open for once, the colorless curtains stirring lightly in the wake of the tinted gales. Quiet piles of paper scattered across the polished wood desk, not a sign of the fire that’d taken place it in hardly five-hundred fifty days ago.

It’s so… normal. It’s not scorched or scoured by fire, not upturned and ripped into shreds. Nothing dramatic or out of the ordinary behind a successful businessman’s closed office doors.

Zuko walks towards the shut cabinet, reaches his fingers forward to shuffle through the files looking for something, anything. They brush over crinkled corners and perfectly stamped staples, linger over the wordless white sheets that shouldn’t be blurry edged and empty, why are they empty , it’s — the room is too bright, and it’s too icy and too smokey, like someone poured oil into the wooden floorboards and set it aflame with killing blue fire around his corpse and he’s laying in the middle of it all, watching himself burn burn burn.

Zuko scrambles to his feet — since when was he on the floor? — and turns, and runs through the open door, barely remembering to slam it shut by the time he’s crying in his room.

But it’s not enough.

Zuko’ll get better at it, and he’ll walk through the illusion of smoke until there’s nothing left but his ashes, and a sparking match to show for it.

☲☲☲

Eventually, Azula talks to him again.

She doesn’t speak without bite. Doesn’t say words of pretty ceramic words, painted over soft sunset sakura branches sliding hazy spirals across white tea cups — her teeth are sharp and canine, jagged at the tips where they snag the hardest, the way Father loves her for.

It’s not because she loves him. She’ll never love him, and he doesn’t think he’ll ever learn to love her again.

They’re just so, so lonely.

☲☲☲

He doesn’t really know why he does it.

The knife balances on the edge of his shelf, flat side presented up, catching the sunlight through the dust on its untouched surface. It seems like so much longer than five years since Uncle gave it to him.

Zuko picks it up, and turns it over. Reads 非戰不屈, and finds it oddly funny, because Uncle was the one who packed it up and left without looking back when Lu Ten gave up. He almost laughs out loud, too, because it’s just so stupidly funny.

(Maybe he shouldn’t be thinking so carelessly about his dead cousin and his vanished uncle, but how could they leave when there were children who’d loved them, who’d needed them? It’s just — nonsensical.)

Whatever. Flipping it into his palm with an ease that reminds him of nights spent staring into its beautifully sharp edge, he slides out his room and into the bathroom down the hall, shuts the door with a quiet click and stands before the dark granite sink. Presses the emerald-bladed knife against the quiet purples of his bruised wrist. The pressure doesn’t feel like anything on his skin; he doesn’t even know how hard or light it’s resting on the arm.

Maybe it’ll stop the way Father has control over everything Zuko’s ever been. Maybe — Maybe it’ll make him feel in control again; like even if he’s bleeding, he’s bleeding of his own volition.

The way the blood drips into the sink is intoxicating.

Zuko watches the slightest red slip around the watery white bowl, into the drain like a snake into the sewer, and doesn’t think he could stop if he wanted.

☲☲☲

Zuko and Azula aren't exactly on… good terms. Haven't been since he went and pretended she didn't exist for half a year; maybe haven't been since Mom went and died on them, and they were all alone to Father. But their mutual friends are long gone, and for all Azula's an excellent liar and manipulator, something in her died after they left, and all she's done this passing school year is sit in silence beside her older brother at lunch. Zuko won't complain, because it's better than nothing, but sometimes he wishes she'd say something.

She never does.

That is, until Mr. Jeong Jeong walks up to them one raining day, as wet raindrops curl around the wooden bench's cold handles and drip onto the ground. It might be that he approaches them both because he thinks a certain solidarity may lie between them, but clearly, the old man's never kept up with school news.

They aren't friends.

He asks about the handprint marring Zuko's forearm from the rolled-sleeves lab (but not the scars, never the scars). Azula is deadly silent for such a long time Zuko wonders if the teacher will just give in. (They never actually care that much, anyway — it's just the typical school protocol: pretending to care. Most of the time, Zuko wishes they'd just drop the damned act.)

But Jeong Jeong doesn't leave. His brain hurts, trying to scramble out a reason that doesn't involve Oh, this? Yeah, it's my father's favorite way of showing his undying love for his least favorite offspring, isn't it nice?  

Zuko's never a good liar for the things he wishes he was.

Azula's eyes narrow. "The fool got in a wrestling match with Ruon-Jian and didn't consider donning gear," she says smoothly.

(You could say I get in wrestling matches all the time, probably.)

So Zuko shrugs and doesn't object, and Jeong Jeong moves on without another word, the way they always do.

They aren't friends, but Azula lies for his scars, and he keeps taking the blow for her losses.

☲☲☲

Zuko sits on the bathroom floor at five in the morning, staring at his reflection in the mirror.

Father hadn’t had a good day yesterday, therefore neither had Zuko. His face is a mess of yellowing bruises, his right eye swelled up, his left trickling with a sting of blood. He’d wiped it away last night and applied some of the tube of rapidly vanishing antibiotic, but it’s still bleeding, and even after two years he still hates the feeling of gauze over the scarred skin, over his face in any way at all.

Suddenly, the doorknob handle rattles. “Let me in,” Azula’s voice orders.

“Let me finish,” Zuko tells her, even though there isn’t anything he needs to finish.

Maybe he needs to finish getting over himself.

He can almost hear her scowl. “I’m trying to help you,” she growls. “Let me in, or I’m picking the lock with the hopes that you have your pants on."

Zuko scrambles to his feet and unlocks the door at that, half-bowing and sweeping a hand inward as it swings in. “Welcome to my favorite shithole, Az,” he drawls sarcastically. “Do you like it?”

Azula’s eyes catch on Uncle’s knife now stashed on the top drawer, slides over the garbage can. She walks over, tapping it open to look in at the overflow of red-splattered tissues, and rolls her eyes. “I can’t believe you’ve fallen this low, Zuzu,” she says. “Stabbing yourself for entertainment? If your goal is to be dead before eighteen, then you’re doing an exceptional job at assisting Father in the process.”

Zuko glares, leaning against the counter, and refusing to rise to the bait. “Whatever,” he snaps. “Well? You said you were trying to ‘help’ me.”

(He doubts she actually wants to help him.)

She lingers on the garbage can, before letting it drop shut with a light click, and placing a bag down beside his arm. “Make-up,” she announces shortly. “Fix your face before we leave.”

“Little too late for that,” Zuko mutters bitterly, but she’s already left the bathroom, leaving him with a number of products that he has no idea how to use.

… What the fuck is this brush for?

(“I can’t believe you’re still doing this, Dum-Dum,” Azula says. 

“You’re ridiculous,” Azula says.

“Are you trying to kill yourself?” Azula says.

Each time, it sounds like she’s amused.

Zuko ignores her, and doesn’t stop. She doesn’t know what it’s like to lose all sense of control, until the only option left for sanity is to control herself. Tie the rope, tap the brake, cause a scene — whatever keeps him in control.

He thinks about death a lot, nowadays. It's easy to. Mom had gone and died on him herself, after all, so why should he keep his promise to her?)

☲☲☲

The first time Azula gets hit, Zuko is sixteen.

(It’s also the last. He’ll never really know it, though.)

"Where'd you get that?" Zuko asks, though it sounds distant to his own ears.

Azula scowls, wringing out the damp washcloth. "It doesn't matter," she says, leaning forward to stare into the cracked mirror. "I'll never be a failure like you."

And there’s something inside Zuko that wants to just turn and run — to go back to his room, and pretend he never saw anything, and let himself live in the fantasy where Azula gets everything that he never would.

But the other part of him knows that he’ll never be able to erase the image of his sister hunched over a bleeding bruise splintered all over her otherwise flawless cheek, holding a scratchy damp washcloth up to it, standing in the bathroom he leaves his own blood all over, and telling him he’s a failure. 

(Like he didn’t already know that.)

“Here,” he says, walking forward and taking the cloth from her limp fingers. “You’re doing it wrong.”

Azula glares at him, but… doesn’t pull away.

It’s almost like she trusts him.

Which is a silly thought. She’s seen him in the bathroom countless times before, with bruises and cuts and knives — even shamelessly mocked him — and knows that he knows how to take care of a blow.

(But he almost likes to imagine that she does, in some deep, twisted way.)

Zuko gently turns her face with his other hand, trying to ignore the burning amber gaze scorching into his skin. Wipes the dried blood coalescing around the purpling shape without spreading it, rinses the cloth, dries it out.

“What’d you do?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

Even after living together for fourteen years, Zuko still doesn’t know when she’s lying. He sighs and pulls down a half-used tube from the upper shelf, taps some along the worst of it. “Better?” he asks, turning off the faucet.

Azula inspects her reflection in the cracked mirror again, symmetrical eyes fractured apart by its veined silver surface, then grunts. Doesn’t thank him.

It’s okay. He didn’t expect her to.

As he turns to leave, he glances back one more time and has the sudden urge to say something, anything . “I love you, Azula. I do.”

Her eyes narrow, tighten. Zuko doesn’t wait to see it as he shuts the door with a soft click.

☲☲☲

bluespirit122502 - Today at 9:36 PM

[Hey, can I ask you something?]

captain-boomerang - Today at 9:37 PM

[u just did]

[shoot]

bluespirit122502 - Today at 9:38 PM

[What would you do for your sister?]

[Like, how far would you go if you thought she could be in a bad position?]

captain-boomerang - Today at 9:39 PM

[umm why are you asking this]

[do u need to call the police or smthn? cuz id totally recommend that]

bluespirit122502 - Today at 9:41 PM

[Just answer the question. please]

captain-boomerang - Today at 9:42 PM

[i mean probably mostly anything. shes my baby sister even if shed kill me for saying that. i like to think she would do the same for me yknow?]

bluespirit122502 - Today at 9:42 PM

[Thanks.]

captain-boomerang - Today at 9:43 PM

[quite frankly u sound like ur gonna do dumb shit]

[dont do anything stupid ok?]

[helloooo?]

[zuko?]

[please dont do dumb shit i dont want to have to waste my time to go find ur grave and yell at ghost u for being dumb]

captain-boomerang - Today at 9:45 PM

[ur already cosplaying well for GHOSTING ME]

[ha see the pun?]

[…]

[fine, be a mopey emo who doesnt appreciate comedy]

And Zuko wants to answer, he does, but if he lingers around and texts the one person who might still give two shits about him for one more minute, he doesn’t think he’ll have the resolve to do it. He wants to text that he’s about to do dumb shit, and he desperately needs someone to drag him out of it before he does it himself, but another part of him still doesn’t trust that Sokka would ever care.

He’s been waiting on this for over a year, but it wasn’t supposed to be until he was eighteen and could legally get out of the city and far, far away from everything. It wasn’t even supposed to be this way.

(He hadn’t thought about Azula, back then. He doesn’t hate her. He’ll never be able to hate her.)

But now? If there’s any chance he can get Azula out of here, he needs to take it, because if he doesn’t, he doesn’t think he’ll be able to live with himself — he doesn’t think Azula can live like him, losing all control, explicitly turning into nothing more than a glorified, passive ragdoll for Father.

(He doesn’t want him to happen to her. She’s still his little sister. It’s probably been too late for him for too long, anyway.)

The hard drive finishes its long, long export. Zuko snaps the computer shut, and snaps Sokka’s text messages shut, lays out a pencil and sheet of paper for himself. Writes the notes with his left hand, out of sheer spite even if the lead smears on his skin.

Zuko doesn’t write for Father. He writes for himself, and for the people who are going to find it.

And he writes for Azula anyway. He doesn’t think she’ll ever read it, but — maybe it’s just one last attempt at convincing himself that they were something. It’s longer than Father’s and has tears on the edges and is far messier, things that Azula would probably laugh at him for, but to care about it? He's just past that point in his life.

Zuko turns the drive over in his hands a few times, digs around in his scrappy black backpack. Considers throwing his whole damned phone in the unlit fireplace, and decides that he doesn’t know how extensive its flammable properties are, and doesn’t want to waste time (stave it off further) to search it up, either.

It’s Thursday night. There’s a construction site abandoned for the sunless hours out in the midst of darkness, secluded from the endless stream of flashing headlights and midnight excursions; far, far away from the pristine, unveined streets Ozai never wanders past.

He checks the two notes — one promising evidence, and one promising forgiveness, and scrambles out the window. It’s not really much different than a usual night for him, except this time, leaving isn’t an aimless expedition.

The emerald-bladed knife says 非戰不屈 — Never give up without a fight , though the vestiges of dried ruby scrapes away at the bottom two characters. His own blood’s telling him to forget the fight, drawn in its own vicious ink. 

(Azula would probably find that funny, he thinks distantly, maybe laughing a little morbidly on the inside because he doesn’t really know how else to feel.)

Zuko supposes he’s fought enough, and that it’s about time the ceaseless war found an end.

☲☲☲

[Hey, Azula.

I don’t know if you’re ever going to bother to read this. I don’t even know where to start this, but I guess I’ll just start by letting you know that I love you (I know, emotions; gross), and I hope you don’t think too much about me.

I know it always seems kind of like I’m dying, so the news of me killing myself probably isn’t really much of a surprise to you. You’re probably laughing, actually, which — fair, I’m kind of laughing myself. It’s just so stupid, because your favorite joke was always about me being on the verge of death, and how you really don’t care. It’s okay that you don’t care, since it’s really my fault that we turned out this way, after Father.

Look, I know I’m fucked up, and you never listen to anything I say, but if you’ve ever heard a word I’ve said in my life, I just want you to get out of there, okay? You know I’ve lied for you before, and you know what’s going to happen once I’m gone, and I don’t want you to get hurt like me that. And since I’m going down, I did my best to drag Father down with me, but if my shitty impulse decision didn’t work, that’s all I’m going to ask of you. You’ll find a way, because you always do. People listen to you, unlike me.

It’s kind of too late for embarrassment, so I guess I’ll just lay it all out because I owe you that much. I was bitter and jealous of you since you’re everything I’d never be, and I took it personally, and I fucked us over because of shit that was never your fault. And I got caught up in the things that we’re not, which is also really stupid, but I guess we both know I’ve always been that stupid. Behind the coward I am, I’m sorry for being a real shitty brother to you, and I hope you won’t have to be as lonely as me since you’ll find better people in your life once I’m gone.

I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore.

I just hope you know that while I did this for you, I also did this for myself. I was always going to end up this way even if I tried harder. So if for some miracle, you don’t consider my death to be an early birthday present, don’t get too caught up on it, alright? Don’t waste your time on that shit, it’s not worth it. It never is.

Fuck, you’re probably never even going to open this. I just didn’t want to leave you without a word.

Anyway, if you ever see Uncle again, tell him hi for me? And if you happen to stumble across my friend Sokka I’d

- Zuko]

Chapter Text

“Send me a message if it — well, if it doesn’t turn out too well. Or if you need to, like, talk about your feelings. I’m all down for it.”

“I don’t have your contact,” Azula points out. And I don’t need to talk about my feelings, she adds in her head, though it would be useful to have calling access.

Aang blinks, then shakes his head. “Wait, did I never invite you to my server? I’m so sorry! Let me — um —” He pulls out his phone, rapid-fire typing something into it, before copying the contents of its screen into a neat scrawl on a pale yellow sticky note to give to Azula.

“Do I even want to be in this?” Azula asks doubtfully, eyeing the abnormally high number of members in the listing that he’d chosen to add for some reason. “Who’s even in here, anyway?”

Aang shrugs. “Well, there’s me, Katara, Sokka, Toph, and Suki, obviously, and then there’s Teo and Haru and Jin and Song, and Jet, and Jet’s friends, and… well, I don’t actually know who else is in it. I just gave the invite to a few people, who gave it to a few more people, who gave it to a few more people, who — you get the idea. Oh yeah, and one of Sokka’s friends! I think he’s called Sparky. He’s — uh, was — pretty neat.”

Azula glances up in curiosity at the stumble, but Aang doesn’t elaborate, so she accepts the note and shoves it into her pocket.

“And remember, we’ve got you if there’s a problem,” Aang promises. “Any problem. Or if you need emotional support, or want a hug, or —”

“I get it,” Azula interrupts, because this is the third time Aang’s gone off on that spiel about mushy feelings and backup since she got into their car, excluding the three times prior to setting off in said car.

Aang beams at her. “Sure thing!”

“Are you two done?” Gyatso asks from the front seat.

Azula yanks her hands out of her pockets and nods jerkily, opening the car door. Walks up the apartment’s echoey-loud staircase, the absolutely unnecessary feeling of dread transferring through each continually noisy step. Glances back, and sees Aang’s bald head pressed up against the raised car window, giving her an encouraging smile and a pair of double thumbs-up.

Azula shrugs (not weakly, never weakly), not returning the gesture, and turns back towards the entirely unimposing, scratchy door. She slowly puts her knuckles against it, yet hesitates as her mind goes back to Zuko would be dead.

She doesn’t really know that Iroh isn’t going to react in all the wrong ways. She’d thought she’d known Father — thought she’d known Zuko; yet here she is now, an only child standing before what would be the Caldera’s most underwhelming door, and hesitating like someone who’s lost everything and can’t remember how to be a functional person in a functional society.

(You are to control fear, not to be controlled by fear. Your uncle is not strong enough to do what must be done to those who deserve it, Father says.

Was Father ever wholly right, though?

She’s a prodigy, better than Zuko.

Yet people are always Zuzu this, Zuzu that, in a way of those who pity those who run that way beneath the shadows. It’s never mattered.)

So she knocks on the door and scrapes her skin and drops her hand, and does her best to feel anything but broke down. It’s just — It’s just Uncle. Uncle, who drinks too much tea and talks too slow and gives too much meaningless advice; who is absolutely infuriating, but never infuriated.

Azula will be fine.

Iroh opens the door, and goes still at the sight of his niece standing before him. Azula swallows, and doesn’t look away.

“I —”

All seven steps of planned advancement dissipate like clouds in the tempest. Uncle’s looking down, away, eye contact is confidence — she can see his eyes, but can he see hers? — and then he looks up, for once.

“It wasn’t worth it,” he tells her.

What? Azula thinks, but bites her tongue, and merely raises her eyebrow.

Uncle’s exuding discomfort, but he goes on anyway, which is certainly a newfound behaviour from the past twenty-three hours. “Was it worth it to leave you two in Ozai’s care, and to not look back because it kept me from seeing my lesser-desired life I so wished to leave behind? No.”

And Azula wants to laugh, she does, because he’s approximately six years too late and refused to say anything about it in the past eight months she’s been in his ‘care’, and now he’s seeing it because she perforated too deep? Now, that Azula’s said the words that splintered the nail in the coffin, that lower the urn into the crypt, said the words that bite in the places she’s cultivated through observation and her own festering bitterness, he’s finally looking?

He’s not even apologizing. He’s saying he’s got regrets. She doesn’t think she’s ever heard him say ‘ sorry’, not even once — not to his son; not to Azula; not to Zuko’s lone grave. Iroh always wallows in his self-pity, and drops his face into the right expressions, but never means it.

(Sorry doesn’t mean anything. Azula could say sorry all she likes, and no one would hear it, the way Zuko said sorry to her closed door and her covered ears.)

She tells that to him. “Your favorite nephew is dead because you left.” His shoulders drop, but his eyes still don’t leave her face — such an interesting development.

(He’s dead because of me, too, her head whispers too loudly, the way Aang told her half a day ago, but she hates listening to the warped void so, so much. That stupid, soft human part of her keeps saying it knows, the part that Katara and Suki and Aang and even Toph keep harvesting.)

Iroh opens the door wider without another word. Azula contemplates his posture — downcast, slumped, insensate — and doubts he has anything up his sleeve the way Father always had. He never has anything up his sleeves — not underhanded intention, not responsibility, not apologies.

She goes inside.

The room looks the same as it always does, except the tea isn’t on, and the curtains are shut. Uncle begins opening them, the opposite way of what he does with his lacking intentions, and heads over to the sink to fill a kettle. Turns the stove on, fetches two ceramic teacups from the high cabinet.

“Lu Ten always liked ginger,” he says out of the blue. Azula watches him as he picks through various jars and settles on a leafless one, shaking the odd collection of herbs out. “Zuko was always more of a jasmine person.”

Azula doesn’t know why he’s telling this to her. “Zuzu never drank tea after you left,” she informs him.

Uncle’s hands still, before he continues, back still turned on her. “You never liked tea very much,” he says. “When you were younger, you would pick the leaves out of the pot before they could steep and you would chew on them, because you thought the flavor should taste better that way. You did not see the point in letting them sit in the water and color, for it is a long process; and the one time you tried yourself, they ended up burnt, and so you threw a fit.

“I see that you are not so shortsighted nor impatient, anymore.”

“I will be, if you don’t get on with whatever you’re attempting to tell me of,” Azula interjects, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. “Go on. Is this yet another anecdote about your dead nephew? Your dead son? Oh, or are you finally directly stating your justifications for never trying for me? ”

(She doesn’t care, she doesn’t. )

But Uncle stubbornly doesn’t rise to the bait. “I have looked at you and the ease you do not come with, and been reminded of my failings as a man. Instead of letting you steep with the care and guidance you deserve, I have picked out what I wish to taste and left the rest of the burnt leaves for therapists you did not want, and your newfound friends.” He covers the kettle, fingers lingering on the pot’s clay lid, lets out a sigh. “You were right,” he admits. “I was — am a coward. And should you be so willing to give this foolish old man another chance, I would like to be better to you.”

“That doesn’t change anything.”

She doesn’t know why she’s still talking. Uncle’s let her back in, and he’s not going to throw her out due to nothing more than his self-imposed guilt, so there’s absolutely no obligation for her to listen to his ramblings for being ‘better’ to her. Doesn’t know why she hasn’t straight up told him No, I don’t care ; hasn’t told him that she’ll be everything she needs to be until she never needs to look back.

“I know,” Uncle says, finally turning around. “I will not ask you to forgive me.” (And I cannot ask Zuko to forgive me.)

“And I don’t owe you another chance,” Azula adds on, angry, but deep down, she knows she selfishly needs this. 

Because if she doesn’t take it, she doesn’t know how she’ll ever live through these next three years.

Uncle doesn’t deny it, but waits imploringly for what feels like hours without the kitchen counter’s blurry maneki-neko clock, because he knows it, too.

He’s backed her into a corner. Perhaps he does contain an ounce of perspicacity in him.

Azula exhales when the clock strikes three, stands up and swipes the pot off the stove to pour into the pair of white sakura-painted teacups. Shoves one into the soft hands of her motionless uncle, before walking back to the kotatsu and crossing her legs beneath its too-soft blanket.

The tea is oversteeped. Azula doesn’t mention it, and drinks through the bitterness anyway.

☲☲☲

aang! - Today at 2:36 PM

[how’d it go? :D]

Azula eyeballs the text idly, scrolls to the side to look at the other group members Aang had so indiscreetly added, and finds that she doesn’t have it in her to care that her situation’s been laid out for them all to see.

4zu1a - Today at 3:07 PM

[It went fine.]

She doesn’t elaborate, because she doesn’t need these children who care too much on her back as she forces herself to identify how to obtain a functional relationship with her uncle so she doesn’t end up like Zuko before sixteen.

She throws her phone back onto the slowly dust-ridden dresser, staring up at the sun-cast ceiling, and wonders how it came to this — having to adhere to other people for her own existence in a household she never asked to be in.

(She knows she’s been here before, been here countless times. She knows it’s what it was like with Father.)

☲☲☲

Uncle’s idea of ‘being better to her’ apparently corresponds solely to playing nightly Pai Sho.

Azula looks at the circular board, considers the fact that she hasn’t played since she was eight and still Zuko’s friend, and cracks her knuckles. Loudly. Like Toph would.

“Why are we playing this ancient game for decrepits?” she asks, keeping like you to herself.

Uncle chuckles, rattling twenty-eights tiles out of a soft leather pouch and giving her half to set up on her side. “There is more to Pai Sho than the fact that old people often find the greatest gain out of it, Niece.” 

Azula unobtrusively copies her uncle’s layout, though her fingers linger in all the right places by themselves like they still remember how to play the game, folds them together, like they’d cared about these clacky wood tiles at some point in their muscle memory. She doesn’t remember why.

“The guest has the first move,” Uncle says.

And there’s no way Azula is admitting that she can’t remember how to play Pai Sho, so she selects a random flower-painted chip, and deliberately nudges it a space forward. The illusion is everything, after all.

“The orchid tile,” he remarks. “Interesting.” Makes his own move.

They play together in silence for ten calculative minutes, until Uncle wipes the curved board clean in a single-move maneuver, effectively ending the bluffed game. Azula’s enough a prodigy to pry the game’s function apart like boiled miyagi shells over the course of few moves, alongside the white lotus’ run, but juts her bottom lip out and narrows her eyebrows the way Zuko would at his inevitable loss.

☲☲☲

Unfortunately, due to Aang’s little group chat, the rest of said child’s gang have caught onto the situation between Azula and Uncle, and treat it something akin to watching an ongoing summer drama/game show in the midst of the long winter, with their own ideas of advice for a program that they don’t run.

Toph tells her to give Iroh a chance. She adores Uncle; always has.

Azula retorts, Would you like me to expect your immediate forgiveness of your parents should they ever decide you aren’t a pretty piece of glass?, and Toph glares hard in her direction and doesn’t try giving her advice again.

(She knows she wants to, though. She doesn’t get it. She’ll never get it, because Iroh loves her the way he’ll never love Azula.

Not that she cares.)

Three nights later, their next game is played in uncomfortable silence.

Azula looks at the tiles and makes three wrong moves — “The camellia tile does not move that way, and putting tsutsuji horizontally to another neutralizes its use” — and doesn’t make them again. She nearly wins, half a pattern away from the ideal turning point, but Uncle takes the board again with his stupid white lotus tile, and by the time they’re done, Azula doubts he’s made any progress in his goal to improve their relationship.

“You are very talented, my niece,” he says by the time the board is cleared and his fingers are folded pointlessly across his lap. “I am sure that with time, you will overcome my renowned skills in the art. Perhaps you could join our old-man Pai Sho group!” He laughs heartily at himself and gives her a wide smile, and in contrast to all the months before, Azula isn’t entirely sure if it’s a white lie or not.

(It should be. It’s always been.)

Instead, she says, “I know” — because the only thing anyone’s ever got to say about her; the prodigal daughter, guaranteed to inherit a company that no longer exists — and stands up.

Whatever. She doesn’t need this.

☲☲☲

Katara tells her that she’s heaped too much bitterness onto the man, but that regardless, she doesn’t owe him another chance, though her voice says everything she thinks. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t.

Azula looks at the half-occupied Pai Sho board that moonless night, and declines for the next half month.

☲☲☲

Suki tells her to give it a chance.

Sometimes, it’s not all his fault that he wasn’t a good uncle to you, she claims. And there’s a lot you can gain from having a good relationship with people, you know.

Azula thinks about listening to Zuko beg Uncle to take him away from Father, and how he’d looked away, and thinks to herself that he had every chance and didn’t take a single one of them; so she turns to Suki and tells her that her uncle’s never cared.

“Your father never taught you the intricacies of Pai Sho, has he?”

Azula tries to imagine her father playing the game of flowery, delicate deliberation, cross-legged on the floor while straight-backed and the impeccable definition of dignity, and almost wants to laugh at the thought. “Of course not,” she says. “Father would never contest in such trivial activity.”

“He used to enjoy the careful timing and strategy behind each and every move, before he gave into the easier, rasher side of himself.” Uncle’s skipping tiles, but only half-present as he stares off into the distance at a different place and time.

Azula doesn’t like it.

“Well, he made better use of his time than wasting it on worthless games.”

Uncle looks down at the tile his index finger lays over, uncovers it. “I suppose he did.” Sighs heavily. “It might’ve been my fault, for letting him forget the roots of thought and cultivation, which led to his treatment of, well… you and Zuko.”

Azula waits for him to elaborate, but he doesn’t — not exactly. Bites back her rash frustration.

“Ozai was never the sort to provide the world with the kindness his life never showed him,” he continues, still lingering on the piece. It’s the jade flower, speckled and worn and flecking with ancient paint that will never be restored. “And I hope that one day, you will fully understand that.”

“Why are you telling me this now?” she asks instead of You don’t know what’s in my head, because perhaps she’s become predictable — because here she is now with words on the ground and a bucket of liquid loneliness in her gasoline heart.

“I should not have left you to learn these lessons on your own.”

“But you have,” Azula responds. “And I’m doing just fine.”

Azula plays Uncle’s favorite white lotus tile in his favorite pattern, and is met by the orchid. She doesn’t win.

When she stands up to leave, Uncle tries to say one more thing to her. “I know I have not been there for you the way I liked to imagine I was, but I am trying now, and if there is anything on your mind, I will be here.”

“Well, it isn’t enough,” she tells him scathingly. “Pai Sho doesn’t actually change anything between us.”

☲☲☲

Aang tells her that forgiving Uncle is the first step to forgiving herself.

Azula thinks about fists and blood, and plugged irons, and late night phone calls with frantically blinking red sirens. Thinks about closed closet doors, and smoldering tea leaves, and smoldering flesh worked by a pyromaniac, and death. 

(She doesn’t want to forgive herself, for the things she might regret.)

Sixty-nine days after their first Pai Sho game, Azula says, “I let Zuko die.”

Azula doesn’t mean to say it, but she does, and Uncle looks so horrified that for a moment, she thinks to herself that this is where it all ends — that this is where, even after everything he’d said, he’ll see her for the monster Mother always said she was, and find a way to dispose of her because she’d let her brother die. His favorite nephew.

“Oh, Azula,” Uncle says. “You cannot blame yourself for what you could not have known.”

“But I knew,” Azula argues futilely, even though she doesn’t know why. Why she’s so determined to put the guilting culpability on herself, when Father’s gone and Zuko’s dead and the only thing left for her is her uncle who never cares. Maybe something in her leans towards the notion that Aang is right, and that if she moves death from Uncle to herself, then she’ll be fine in this languid household of cold nights. She hates it so much, the factor of never knowing what she wants anymore. “I knew he was going to end up this way, all along.”

Because she had known, really; she’d just never expected it to happen this way, leaving her here with an uncle who should’ve known.

Uncle goes silent for a long, long time, until he lets out a sigh, and suggests for them to continue the game.

Deflection. Azula scoffs to herself. (It’s always a lie. People love lying to the liar, after all.)

Azula wins this time, without a rulebook and without an instruction. If she’d watched closer, she would have noticed that his mind is anywhere else, but she’s barely in her own mind as she places the final harmony and knocks his stupid white lotus chord off the board.

He’s quiet for a long time after his loss. Azula might’ve laughed, if she cared.

Pai Sho is a game for fools.

“You are not at fault for his own decisions, no matter how it may feel,” Uncle finally says as she sweeps the tiles into their small leather pouch. “It is never your fault. And I know that Zuko would not want you to feel this way.”

You didn’t know him, she could say. We weren’t friends. He lied to me, too.

Is Lu Ten not dead because you couldn’t stop him?

She could say all these things, but she doesn’t. They don’t talk about Zuko on the first anniversary of his time in the grave, aside from an exchange that feels like bleeding ears and words.

☲☲☲

Sokka tells her that things slip away faster than she’ll ever know, and that she should give him a chance before it’s too late.

That night, one year, one week, and one day after Zuko’s funeral, an envelope arrives in the mail.

☲☲☲

Iroh receives an envelope in the mail from the Caldera one year, one week, and one day after Zuko’s funeral.

It’s an official looking envelope addressed for Azula Sozin, but the contents inside are anything but. Iroh opens the envelope to verify that it’s not from Ozai, which it isn’t, and finds a fold-creased scrappy piece of word cramped paper that looks like it’s been through the bottom of the ocean and dumped back through its sweeping tides.

So he folds the soft paper back into the envelope, careful to not crumble the thin sheet between his fingers, and goes to knock on Azula’s closed door, placing it lightly on the ground after she doesn’t open it, and leaving her be.

He’s certain that whatever it is, if Azula feels the need to share it with him, she will do so. They aren’t the way Iroh had hoped they would be by now — they aren’t anywhere close, and she still never speaks to him outside the long-lasting routine of geild Pai Sho — but she’s here, and it’s something.

Half an hour later, Azula storms down the stairs, clutching the letter tightly in her left hand. She looks… off. Her hair’s disheveled and down, brows narrowed in something in an entire contrast to concentration.

She looks the furthest from Ozai Iroh’s ever seen.

“Where did you get this?” she demands, voice harsh and angry and young, breaking at the end.

Iroh eyes her complacently, raises an eyebrow. “The mailman, I would presume. I happened to not have checked for its sender.”

“Is this a joke?”

He blinks slowly, puzzled by her behaviour; a tinge of worry or dread coating his veins. “I would assume not, no. What is causing you such distress?”

Azula stares at him openly for an excruciatingly long moment, jaw working like she herself doesn’t quite know the answer to the question. Then, with an expression that looks like swallowing down a choked-up bout of nausea, she shoves the fragile paper out and into his hands and gestures for him to open and read it.

Iroh looks at the sender, and his stomach drops.

Oh.

It’s a death note from Zuko. But it feels like reading Lu Ten’s all over again, even if it’s for Azula and everything he never loved. And he hinges on the final sentence, because it’s the final confirmation of what he’s known since he arrived in a deathly silent station in the Caldera to pick up his niece.

“I told you I let him die.”

He could say the same for himself, probably.

Azula doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t take the note back from between his still fingers as she opens the door to the darkness of the setting sun and walks out. Iroh doesn’t stop her.

☲☲☲

Azula grits her teeth and steps into the cooling dusk air. The skies are lavender purple and gold, like backyard koi ponds in the spring, whipped with the evaporating shadows of broken-up clouds that ripple the sinking sun the way surfaces of oceans filter seashine.

She wants to throw something. Throw a rock, or throw a temper tantrum, like Zuko; she doesn’t care. She walks and walks and walks until the sky falls to a complete darkness, and her lips are numb in the night air, and her hair’s falling out of its perfectly combed strands like pooling in waterfalls, and her eyes sting in a wind that doesn’t blow past. The people are gone from the porcelain-cracked streets of Ba Sing Se, leaving her to the dancing orange streetlights on a block by the school she never walks down.

She doesn’t know what she wants.

She wants to cry like a small, pathetic child who’s been burned too bad. (Like her thirteen year old brother, who she’d left smoldering, who she’d never looked back on. Like when she was eight, and cared too much about people, at Lu Ten’s and then Mother’s funeral, and feeling so wretchedly alone on the black coals of death.)

And there’s no one around.

Azula crouches to the slanted ground beneath a rippling, unfeeling light, plants her feet into the crumbly concrete of the empty street, and doesn’t cry.

You’re probably laughing.

Your favorite joke was always about me being on the verge of death, and how you really don’t care. It’s okay that you don’t care.

I just want you to get out of there, okay? You know what’s going to happen once I’m gone, and I don’t want you to get hurt like me that.

I hope you won’t have to be as lonely as me since you’ll find better people in your life once I’m gone.

And Sokka. Sokka, and probably all his friends, who she talks to and doesn’t hate, who don’t hate her for all they should.

The feeling of guilt is so, so weak, but Azula’s been weak from the moment she steadily picked up her dead brother’s bones with a pair of chopsticks, and doesn’t have it in her to care about it the way she already cares too much about ghosts.

Azula sits on the midnight pavement, and doesn’t cry.

She and Zuko haven’t been friends for six years, and they’re never going to be friends because one of them’s in a cold urn of cold ashes, and the other is sitting by herself in a false limelight. But she misses him, even though he ruined her again and again and she ruined him again and again; and he didn’t lie that he loved her when she didn’t love him.

But he lied that he didn’t blame her.

How could he not?

Because Mother was always right — that she’s a monster; and everything the people around her say keep telling her it’s the truth. They say everything but the fact, but they show it through the soft touches and soft words and soft eyes they give to one another, and maybe they’d say it now if they all knew from inked paper.

It’s all collapsed the way she’s been set up all her life, by herself and by Father and Mother and Uncle, with a few hundred words from a scrappy note a year after flying from everything she was.

Azula isn’t going to cry, because she doesn’t cry for miserable words over a fire.

☲☲☲

“You know I’m a monster.”

Azula states it matter-of-factly. Iroh doesn’t know how to respond to a statement filled with such convinced self-loathing, or what to say at all.

“I am unsure of what you mean, Niece,” he finally settles on.

It’s like navigating a minefield with this girl. Iroh’s been passive most of his time around her, for his own faults, and sometimes he’s not so sure of his own goal to go out and try to grab her from drowning when she wants to sink.

A multitude of expressions flicker across her eyes, before it settles on a sharp glare. “You called me one. You, and Mother. Don’t pretend you can’t remember seven years ago.”

For all Iroh tries to remember a time where he might’ve referred to her as such, he cannot.

Azula’s gaze doesn’t change, until it practically crumbles into what seems like a water-sanded glass dust. “You don’t remember,” she says flatly, voice deflated and punctured tight. “You don’t — You don’t even remember. After Grandfather died, and you finally came back from your endless trip with Lu Ten.”

Monster.

(Wu mentioned it, and Iroh never listened, has never listened.)

His niece isn’t his brother, because here she is now with her hair rumpled and down and eyes red but not teary. And she’s not Lu Ten or Zuko or anyone he’s ever loved right in the Sozin family, but here she is now, and she needs someone who isn’t going to tell her to drink tea and play Pai Sho the way he’s done for her this past year.

Pai Sho changes the mind and the soul, but not the right things.

“I do not remember,” he confesses, for she deserves the truth. “But I have known your mother, and I know she did not think of you so low.”

Azula goes still, and Iroh is suddenly so vividly reminded of the fact that she is only fifteen once again.

She should say, How do you know that? because he doesn’t, and she knows that. Azula loves to exploit the questions that are anything but what she needs to say, as they always keep her from getting hurt.

“What about Zuko?” she asks lowly, rather than all the questions she would ask in another time. “You haven’t known him since he was ten.”

Iroh hasn’t.

“Tell me about him, then,” he says, and she does.

☲☲☲

Azula doesn’t break down. She doesn’t do breakdowns.

(Breakdowns are for Zuko. He’d had enough of those for the both of them.)

What she does do is avoid Sokka and his crew within inches and falling, to the point where she spends all her afterschool hours in the backrooms of The Jasmine Dragon, learning about the leaves and the finer points of careful, precise steeping over the course of three hours; balancing her time the way she would a leaf blade on a knife, of treading too close to the things that tear a scalpel of loss through her skin.

She reads the note too many times, until she can speak it from the tip of her tongue without thinking about the words she says.

Azula hates that a few hundred words can do this to her.

Maybe it’s always been an illusion. Maybe Father was right, that she should’ve been better, otherwise she wouldn’t be in this stupid town with words of a ghost that hang over her head the way mobiles do over babies, and she wouldn’t be so fucking miserable.

Sometimes, she’ll log into Aang’s server and thumb through its users, and hover over a familiar blue mask from the times when she and Zuko were friends, and wonder if he chose it for a lack of creativity, or because he missed it all.

(Sentimental.

She could be the sentimental one for remembering.)

She tells Uncle more about Zuko in the quiet boils of the curtained teashop, probably more than she’d ever talked to him, about the things he hated (the sound of laughter, the texture of wet clay) and the things he cared about (imaginary dragons, various types of swords, Mai and Ty Lee and probably Sokka) and the things he did (pet all the cats that slunk around the back of their house, write letters to a girl who never responded; sit in the bathroom and cry too loud at two a.m., lie to Father so Azula wouldn’t be on the receiving end of her own mistakes), and Uncle doesn’t do much but sit next to her and nod quietly.

(It doesn’t make her mad, though.)

And so she’ll sit in the company of her wordless uncle and won’t tell Sokka, because it would be like handing him all the weakness that’s been festering in her for over a year — because she’s a liar, and it’s all she has left to be.

☲☲☲

“Why have you been moping so much lately, Spicey?”

Toph bumps her shoulder roughly against Azula, wedging herself beside the older girl on the green-wired bench and letting the long white cane angle around into the grass. Azula grunts, but has courtesy enough to move aside for the blind girl, even though she doesn’t want to talk to her.

She really hasn’t been a good liar since Zuko went and died, dripped off its leaking toxin and killed all the words on her tongue. But she lies and does what Uncle does best — avoid everyone and everything, after losing everything.

Especially Sokka.

“I don’t mope,” she answers shortly, because moping is pathetic. “How did you find me?”

(She’s pathetic.)

Toph rolls her sightless eyes, jerking a thumb behind her at Aang standing a few meters back, who sheepishly waves before dipping behind a tree. “Twinkletoes and Sugar Queen are going out for a band competition or some shit like that, this weekend. Suki’s driving them, because some people are incompetent drivers. You should come hang with us.”

If this were a year ago, Azula would have seven unquestionable excuses as to why she’s unavailable to interact with them. But when she opens her mouth, the words float to the ground and turn to concrete-percolating soap, seeping through the cracks and vanishing beneath her feet.

“Hey.” Toph looks worried over nothing. “If you hate us so much, it’s — it’s okay. You’re not like, legally obligated to come, even if I’ve threatened you with my very threatening threats in the past.”

“I don’t hate you,” comes out impulsively, and for once, she doesn’t want to take it back. She doesn’t hate Toph, and she doesn’t hate Toph’s friends.

“Delightful.” The short girl grins up at her with a sharky edge, pummels her fist against the closest point of contact that happens to be Azula’s shoulder. Azula automatically kicks her in the shin. “Meet at Snoozles’?”

“Sure.” Azula looks away from the blind girl. “I’ll be there.”

Maybe she owes it to them, even though to lay out the vulnerabilities would to be subject to everything Father’s taught her to (avoid) be above. 

Well, there’s always a reason, she supposes. It’s how life always goes.

☲☲☲

When Azula arrives, Toph is sitting at a desk picking her nose, legs dangling over the armrest and half-melted over the computer keyboard beside the dark spinning chair. Sokka’s draped backwards against a collapsing beanbag-couch, ponytail (wolftail, as he so insists) touching the carpet floor, phone held over his face like it holds all the answers to the universe.

“Sup,” Toph says casually, not moving from her position. Azula wrinkles her nose at the distinguishably identifiable dark smudge on her finger, which the girl flicks to dry at the wall behind her, and carefully avoids the range.

It’s quiet.

“What… What are you doing?” Azula finally asks.

Toph snorts. “Picking my nose. I thought you were the one with eyes, Spicey. Snoozles, what’s the forecast?”

“Looking at garbage.”

The younger kid’s nose wrinkles. “Imagine having functioning eyes. Disgusting,” she declares. “You don’t even need to tell me what they’re for.”

“Toph — It’s not — I’m not looking at porn, ” Sokka sputters frantically, defensively appalled. “I would never, you horrible gremlin.” 

And Azula can’t help it, she laughs; and it’s not for the fact that they’re everything she’ll never be or that something deep inside her wants that for herself. It’s not for anything more than the fact that it’s funny — not in the way of Zuzu miserably failing at everything he tries, or in the way of Mai exploding when her reservation is all that keeps her afloat at home, or in the ironic way of Azula becoming the wreck she’s always mocked. It’s funny, until she remembers the people around her, and freezes up to draw back into herself when the giggling teenagers glance at the audible interruption.

“Shit, Socks,” Toph says, awe lacing her voice. “You made Azula… laugh. At something other than like, the world.”

Sokka cackles at that. “Didn’t know you had it in you, buddy,” he tells her, amused.

Azula glares hard in both of their directions, hoping Toph can feel the force of the expression through her sightlessness, though she grins back toothily, entirely unfazed. “So, Spicey,” she says, “wanna confess why you’ve been tiptoeing around us like Sokka’s sneaker rats?”

“I don’t have rats in my shoes,” said boy protests.

“Sure you don’t,” Toph agrees breezily, easing back into the banter like she would a fistfight. “And I’m deaf.”

Toph and Sokka proceed to turn like hivemind owls in her direction and gaze unrepentantly (or in Toph’s case, uncannily) at Azula, brown eyes of different kilns waiting expectantly for an answer that she can’t provide.

“It’s simply… something someone sent me after a year.”

I’ve been wishing it would come, for ages now.

I wish I could take it back.

I wish I could pretend I’d never read it.

Sokka perks up at that. “Oh, really? That’s neat. I’ve been waiting for a text message for a year.” Glances at Toph, seeming to droop slightly like a refurling sunflower beneath the shade, quietly adds, “I miss him. A lot.”

Yet Toph doesn’t answer with a crude remark or a laugh at the show of sentimentality — she simply stops picking her nose and folds herself into a human sitting position. “I know. I… guess I was wrong.”

Azula starts to get the suspicion that the phone screen is blank, that he’s just holding it to watch his own reflection. Toph gets up to squash herself against her friend, who appears to unconsciously lean a little closer into her, and Azula watches the tape roll out for a film she can’t remember.

Maybe she shouldn’t be here, but she is, and maybe she knows why.

“Wrong about what?” Azula asks anyway.

Sokka doesn’t answer, so Toph answers for him. “His friend, Sparky. He popped off the Internet a little over a year ago, and we haven’t heard from him since.”

“Oh. That’s… rough,” she tries.

Both the teenagers cough out a stifled laugh at that. “Oh man, Zuko used to say that all the time,” Sokka throws out, twisting around to look at her. “He’d be like, ‘That’s rough, buddy’ at anything even remotely sad, it’s just so stupid.”

And Azula’s known who Sokka is, has known from the moment she read Zuko’s note and reached the bottom (the note she’s been too cowardly to acknowledge to the people who deserve it, let alone herself; is she the only person he wrote to when he apparently had real friends who would actually miss him?), but she cringes, and her eyes cut away.

The biggest sign of guilt.

Sokka’s eyes catch on that small, critical movement, narrow. “Wait, do you know him? I mean, Zuko?”

Azula stills her shoulders, for she’s always been the liar, and says, “Of course not”; except it doesn’t come out right, and Sokka’s eyes don’t stop staring into her, and Azula never gets uncomfortable — but —

“Did you know?”

“What?” Toph asks, voice slipping slightly. “Sokka, what — huh? What did Azula know?”

Azula should say something. Silence is always the teller.

“You knew,” Sokka whispers, and Azula can’t handle the crumpling expression on his face that looks so much like Zuko the day she saw him back from the hospital, looks so much like seeing him leave the marble bathroom after claiming that he loved her. “It’s why you’ve been so distant lately.”

“You don’t get it,” Azula halfheartedly manages. Wonders where all her self-assertion went.

Sokka’s eyes narrow even further, then he suddenly shoves himself to his feet, sending Toph careening backwards into the dipping pit of his weight. The blind girl opens her mouth to snip out at the unconveyed motion, except something in the air must stop her as she shuts it and drops her head instead, dark bangs swinging as she turns to the side.

“Please leave,” Sokka tells Azula, coldly.

Azula knows why.

She leaves.

☲☲☲

Toph frowns hard in the direction of Azula’s too-heavy footsteps. Sokka doesn’t get up to follow her.

“Alright, what the fuck is your deal?” she demands harshly, jerking a thumb at Azula’s exit. The older boy doesn’t answer, and Toph rolls her eyes, though something like acid lemongrass settles in the bottom of her stomach. Softens a little, because something isn’t right. “You’re thinking too hard. Stop it.”

“She knew,” Sokka suddenly says, breaking his silence.

“What?” Toph finally asks, letting the word spill out of the hot frustration boiling over her plastic curiosity. “What did she know?”

And Sokka starts laughing, bitter and cold in a way Toph never wants to hear from her friend again. “Zuko’s her brother. She knew he was my friend, and she didn’t tell me, because — ‘cause —”

Her hands go cold, even though it’s the middle of spring.

“... Iroh told me her brother died.”

“Yeah. Because of her. ”

His voice is thick and hoarse, yet for all the years Toph’s known Sokka, she doesn’t know if he’s on the verge of tears, or if he’s about to start laughing again.

Chapter Text

“Woah, woah, wait,” Toph interrupts, Sokka’s words catching up to her behind the hysteria coughing up his throat. “Back up. How do you know this?”

“It was in her eyes,” Sokka breaks in, voice almost oddly desperate. “Didn’t you see — oh.”

But for once, it’s not him tripping headfirst into the perfect self-setup of a blind joke. It’s not even funny at all, and Toph can’t find the urge to poke some semblance of lightness out of the slip, because it’s not funny. Sokka’s laughing, and Toph isn’t, for all the wrong things she wants to hear being taken back, except there’s no one to swallow the tincture down but the two of them because Azula already left.

Sokka stops laughing, and his voice goes flat, and somehow it’s almost worse than the acid that had dripped from its vomitted bitter slew of unknowing half a minute ago. “I should’ve known,” he says. “I told you myself, the first day I met her. ‘She looks like Zuko’. I should’ve known.”

“You couldn’t have known,” Toph protests halfheartedly. “That’s a really fucking stupid assumption to make, just because two people apparently look similar.”

“But I was right,” Sokka plows on. “I was right, and I… I should’ve known. ”

I can’t believe she would keep it from me, isn’t said, because for all that Toph loves Azula, she can believe it.

And Toph doesn’t completely know that Azula knew, she really doesn’t — she doesn’t even know what Sokka’s talking about, in death and fault, which she’ll pry out of the boy’s head later when he stops sounding so fucking broken —, but something in her heart tells her that Sokka’s right. That Zuko’s dead because of Azula, and Azula knew it all, and elected not to tell them for all the lies she tells and the choices that she keeps too close.

☲☲☲

bluespirit122502 - Today at 8:36 AM

[Hey, can I ask you something?]

It all starts from a text message that Sokka had thought to be kind of funny at the time.

It arrives in the middle of Mr. Jerkku’s (Pakku’s ) horrible, awful, terrible ongoing presentation during the too-long hours of Chem Honors class. Sokka squints down at the phone shoved unsubtly under his desk, a bit confused considering the fact that Zuko is perfectly aware of their timezone overlap and usually sticks to texting him during breaks, and vice versa — but he can’t resist sniping off a snarky response, because who is he to not?

captain-boomerang - Today at 8:37 AM

[u just did]

After second thought, he adds [shoot], just in case it’s about like, asking for dating advice for a girlfriend or boyfriend or something; and there’s no fucking way Sokka’s missing a good time at the expense of Pakku’s purposefully mind-numbing lecture. Even if Zuko adamantly protests the very idea of dating a real human person.

bluespirit122502 - Today at 8:38 AM

[What would you do for your sister?]

[Like, how far would you go if you thought she could be in a bad position?]

Sokka frowns down at the awfully sketchy message, because that’s never a good leadup to literally anything ever. How far would you go for truth or dare? Toph had once asked at one a.m. during a decidedly unsupervised sleepover, before proceeding to dare him to down an entire flask of undiluted cactus juice in spite of Katara’s objections. 

(Thankfully, Gran Gran hadn’t been awake to witness his verbally warbled hallucinations, and Dad definitely wasn’t home to witness the massive sickness that had followed the dare — and hopefully, it stays that way until Sokka’s six feet underground.)

So yeah. Sokka doesn’t trust that kind of awfully sketchy question.

Especially not when it comes to Zuko’s sister, Sokka admits to himself a little guiltily. Though he rarely ever willingly talks about the girl, Sokka’s picked up enough hints about their relationship through the rare mention of her, and he’s fairly certain that Zuko’s mild (to say the least) dislike of her is mutual.

Sokka reconsiders his past history with Awfully Sketchy Questions + Zuko’s inherent inability to talk about his feelings + sisters, and does the math — because even if Sokka’s solidly terrible at just about everything he tries, he is good at math.

It just adds up to bad things.

[umm why are you asking this], is what he settles for, making sure to follow it up by a suggestion to contact a responsible adult excluding his dad, and the guy answers with the most unnatural text message Sokka’s ever received in the last sixteen years of his life.

bluespirit122502 - Today at 8:41 AM

[Just answer the question. please]

Zuko didn’t even capitalize. Sokka has never seen him not type properly outside of the occasional abbreviation, regardless of the Current State Of Mental Breakdown, for all the three years they’ve known one another.

Bad things, probably. If it’s actually speaking code for planning murder, Sokka will willingly eat his socks without soy sauce.

He regards the question once again, lets out a sigh.

Katara is his sister-shaped lifeline at best, a government-overthrowing, petty brat at worst; yet even for the latter, he wouldn’t trade her for anything. The way she takes care of everyone and everything, takes care of him even when he doesn’t always know how to take care of her, through scolding and cooking and hugging, and the way she’s probably better than mostly everyone on this planet. She’s not always nice to him because she’s a little sister, and little sisters aren’t designed to dote on their older brothers like a devoted puppy to their favorite person — but at the same time, he doesn’t know where he’d be without her constant steadying presence in the tumultuous storm.

(Probably dead in a ditch. Accidentally, or not-so-accidentally.)

If he’s being honest with himself, he’d do everything for her the way she’s always done everything for him.

He tells that to Zuko.

Zuko says [Thanks.], and why does the text, one solitary word, drive such an ugly dread into Sokka’s gut?

So he starts spamming, because it’s the only way he knows how to respond to those nasty instinctive feelings.

Sokka’s spam gets more and more frantic as the continued silence stretches onward, to the point where his forehead touches the cold plastic desk and he knows he must look like severe spine issues have inflicted themselves onto his backbone. Doesn’t care.

He knows something that just transacted between them was a buffer for Very Bad Decisions, but he doesn’t know what. Sokka isn’t an idiot, for all that people might assume if they don’t know what math class he’s in, but that also doesn’t insinuate that he’s capable of transcending mortal boundaries to figure out whatever’s going on on the other end of the line.

captain-boomerang - Today at 8:45 AM

[ur already cosplaying well for GHOSTING ME]

[ha see the pun?]

[…]

[fine, be a mopey emo who doesnt appreciate comedy]

Mr. Pakku then calls on him, asking Which of these are classified as a noble gas?, and Sokka scrambles to hide his phone as he blusters his way through the question (he gets it wrong), but the conversation doesn’t leave his head. Toph pokes him aggressively during lunch, and Katara plays obnoxiously loud heavy-metal while he washes the dishes after dinner. Aang touches his arm with a painfully worried expression, and Suki drags him aside to ask him what’s wrong when the school bell rings.

But he doesn’t have anything to say to any of them.

And so he waits;

and waits;

and waits.

He waits, until it doesn’t say 11 months ago on Zuko’s last text and A year ago instead, and he waits until Azula’s head snaps up at the sound of Zuko’s name and an expression so painfully human flickers across her face. Until the words drain flush out of her, and Sokka puts seven words together and understands.

Sometimes, Sokka scrolls up their chat and rereads the last messages Zuko had sent him before decidedly vanishing off the Internet like an asshat, and considers the possibility that he’s not coming back. He’ll always hurl a brief text off to the user, tap the app shut and lay backwards on his bed, and tell himself that it’s never real — because what he never knows, he can’t get hurt by.

He tells himself it’s easier this way.

But now, he lives in a world where Zuko’s little sister lives in Ba Sing Se and goes to his school, and is basically Toph’s best friend, and is an only child.

You got any siblings?

A dead one.

He knows it’s supposed to be easier, to know that people aren’t going to come back — knowing that his mom would never hold him in her arms again, rather than clinging to the idealistic hope that one day she’d come home and bundle him up beneath her soft blue sleeves; knowing that Yue wouldn’t open her eyes again on that colorless hospital bed to laugh at him for letting Arnook schedule her outdoors funeral-prank on a rainy day; knowing that eventually, Dad would finish taking his time coming home and stay —, but it doesn’t feel easier this time.

(It never really does.)

It’s so much harder than it’s got any fucking right to be. It shouldn’t be any different, because people leave him all the time, so Zuko leaving isn’t a new occurrence in Sokka’s seventeen years of living.

And it’s not like Sokka’s ever been entirely unaware of Zuko’s lacking — probably closer to declining — mental health, because they’ve always just been kids in a world that doesn’t want to hear them, and they’ve never quite known how to love right when no one ever stays to teach it. It’s always been in the little things the other boy would let slip through the swagger and spite he’d ran on, for the phrasing and the fucked up jokes, but Sokka tactfully hadn’t clung to it the way Zuko hadn’t clung to the slippery-ice truths he lets loose. 

Yet he hadn’t expected it to end this way, as he sits in his bed valiantly waiting for a text message to come through, while the sender is dead.

Maybe Sokka had thought an unspoken promise would be enough, of the promise that said one day, Zuko would show up in Ba Sing Se and he’d be okay, and Sokka would be okay, and he’d never have to look back on the shithole his father raised him in. The promise that said one day, Sokka would be able to give his best friend a high-five, and teach him how to live life like a normal human with a functional brain. That said one day, they’d sit together on Gran Gran’s squishy threadbare couch and watch Zuko’s favorite play on the blue lined TV, and pretend they were fine.

He wouldn’t have let himself think about Zuko’s sister, if Zuko wouldn’t think about her himself — because if she’s fucked and alone, let her sink.

It’s selfish. Stupid, really, to think that way of a girl who’s probably about as old as Katara, and has also probably never experienced half an ounce of proper love in her life, judging by what limited pieces he’s heard of her over the course of three years.

And now that he knows her, he wishes that she’d sank even more, because her brother’s dead for nothing more than her carefully uncaring indifference. Only one of them ever planned to come here, yet he never did.

Sokka thinks to himself that he wishes he’d never known Zuko, then hates that he thinks it at all.

☲☲☲

Azula thinks to herself that she wishes she’d never known Zuko, then hates that she thinks it at all.

She’d rather wish Zuzu hadn’t left her those unnecessary, soft words instead of a cold goodbye, the sentimental ones that had no right to go and tear out the remnants of her unthreading sanity; the sort that would justify all his friends’ ticking hatred for an unearthed liar. She should never have expected anything else from those cuddly children.

They smile and laugh and make these outrageous claims for who they care for, and how they’ll never turn — yet the moment Azula fails to satisfy their innate sense of trust for other selfish human beings, they’re going to turn and run.

That’s perfectly fine, if they so wish to. 

(Trusting is how you get burned.)

Azula’s used to being treated as a monster.

She didn’t tell Sokka that she’d figured it out, because she didn’t want to get hurt like Mother and Uncle all over again; because for all Father says she doesn’t care, she does.

There. She’s admitted it to herself, she doesn’t want to get hurt like Zuko was always getting hurt (she doesn’t want to be treated like Zuko, except everyone but Father loved him), through stupid feelings and societal interactions. A single fist to the face is enough to get it — humans don’t like when their pain receptors spike off, yet neither do monsters who are supposed to be better than that. Like her pushover of a brother, she’s bent over backwards above the fire so she doesn’t end up burned, while leaving all the gasoline dripping down into fuel to flare up as she watches the soot rain down.

(Maybe she’s just as much a fool as Zuko was, for she knows how flames burn.)

She hates that Zuzu took the rights of living to put her in such a pathetic position.

Hates that he made her foolishly guilty and angry and lonely, when all the people’s foam hearts can never withstand spaded lies.

Hates that he’s the dead one out of the two of them, fractionally. But this town isn’t big enough for the both of them.

Uncle closes the shop early on the weekends, so when Azula reaches the apartment and dazedly knocks on the door rather than unlocking it herself, he lets her in. His brow furrows at the sight of his niece returning so soon, but he lets her walk (not stumble) in without a word where she makes a beeline for the stairs that lead up to her room.

“Slow down, Niece,” he cautions, reaching out as if to grab her sleeve before retracting as he thinks better of it. Good, Azula thinks to herself, a little viciously. I’m glad at least someone is properly scared of me.

“Slow down what?” she bites out.

Uncle will not kick her out. It does not matter how she behaves in this household.

“I just wish to check that you are doing alright,” he responds softly. “Please, I cannot help you if you will not talk to me.”

It’s like Wu all over again. So pitiful and pitying, and shamelessly inclining for trust.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” Azula lies, but Uncle gazes right through her with stupidly gentle brown eyes and his body angled in a way that resolves all the patience it takes to knock down the walls of her tattered-box mind, and she is so tired of being a liar. She gives in, like a child who actually so desires to talk about her feelings.

(She is so tired of caring for the fact.)

“Sokka found out.” He hates me, she doesn’t say, because she’s known the guarantee the moment she’d elected to silently keep the note to her chest.

It’s not like Uncle hadn’t suggested for her to tell the boy of her newfound acquisition of the knowledge. He’d highly recommended it, in fact, claiming that would be “good for you to lighten yourself of your burdens by sharing them with someone who truly understands”, and that putting it off would only “allow the rabbits to harvest your carrots while you try to repair the broken picket”; however, he hadn’t went and told on her.

(Father would’ve expected her to execute the correct decision. He wouldn’t have cared for her petty excuses for stalling the truth that accomplished nothing further than increasing the potential of negative reaction.)

“Oh, Azula.” Uncle’s body position looks crudely like he wants to give her a hug, which is absolutely disgusting and not the sort of physical contact Azula requires whatsoever, but — he’s holding his arms out now, and Azula is already pathetic and hated, so what’s one more weakness in a year of failure?

She tips forward, slowly, takes a half step for the first time. The old man grabs her and draws her in, and she hates the warm, maybe awkward touch so much, but she doesn’t know how to move away from it anymore.

☲☲☲

blind-bandit - 2 weeks ago

[Azula get the folk back here.]

[We’ll figure it out I swear on your latest victory.]

blind-bandit - 2 weeks ago

[Sokka tried explaining. It didn’t make much sense honestly.]

[I don’t know what happened but I’ll be here for you all right? I’m not going to ditch you over some uninvited grudge sokka holds against you after all the hard work I put into taming you.]

blind-bandit - 1 week ago

[Oh and I’m not going to let him undo all my hard work either.]

[Learn to process your feelings shaking my head.]

blind-bandit - 2 days ago

[You really think you can get out of sparring?]

[I can’t believe you’d do this to me. I’m going to die no one wants to throw punches with me.]

[Everyone else I know is a coward.]

blind-bandit - Yesterday

[Stop ignoring us I promise we don’t hate you.]

[Aang is going to help me find you if you keep it up.]

☲☲☲

Sixteen days after Sokka learns that his best friend is dead, Katara unbiddenly barges into his room.

She doesn’t even knock, which rude as fuck because he could’ve been missing his pants, but she ignores his manly squeak of protests and sets herself down on his bed, sinking down into his mattress beneath his head and rudely flopping on top of his back, all while barely attempting to cushion the fall on his facedown body.

“Look,” she announces, “I don’t know what’s going on between you and Azula, but you can’t ignore her forever.”

“Excuse me, I think I absolutely can,” Sokka objects, voice muffled into his pillow as he swallows the old grey cotton caught around his mouth.

Katara sounds like she’s rolling her eyes. “She’s our friend, Sokka.”

“Never said that.”

(Sokka absolutely did, way back when Suki first declared it so after daring to invite Azula to her house for a sleepover. He absolutely did not flip his shit at the news, either.)

Katara goes silent for a moment — which, good. Sokka desperately hopes she’s going to leave, because he doesn’t want to hear it. He doesn’t care.

“You promised me that you wouldn’t shut me out,” Katara says, softer, and an unfair roil of guilt rolls through his stomach. “It’s just like me and Dad. I just want to help you, okay? Talk to me, or — or talk to Dad. We’re here for you.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Sokka hears himself say.

She wouldn’t.

Siblings don’t introduce each other to their online friends — only weirdos with no semblance of dignity do that —, and so Katara barely even knows Zuko’s name in comparison to Suki and Toph, who have been zero help whatsoever. Talking to Dad would just be weird and horrible, and maybe Sokka doesn’t want to talk to anyone at all, and so what? Sokka will repress his feelings for as long as he fucking wants, and because of that, he sometimes wishes that nobody loved him.

Katara sighs, sits up to alleviate the pressure. “I might not get it, but I’m here, and whether we like it or not, I love you. So say something, or I’m going to physically haul you to The Jasmine Dragon and force you two to confront your feelings like human beings who can have proper discussions.”

Damn his sister. She would, the brat.

“It’s just about dead people,” Sokka finally says, rolling over to stare at the purple shadows racing across the ceiling. “Dead people you don’t know.”

Katara’s gaze softens. “Who?”

“You don’t know them,” he repeats.

“There’s a lot of people I don’t know,” Katara retorts bluntly. “It doesn’t make their deaths any less significant, to those who cared about them.”

Sokka swallows, and looks away. “Azula made my best friend die.”

She goes still. “What?”

Sokka resists the urge to roll his eyes, because Katara’s his little sister, and she doesn’t know. “Just that. She’s his sister, and she hates him, but he — he’s got, had, this shitfest of a guilt complex or something, and decided to kill himself because he thought it’d get Azula out of their fucked up household. Something like that. I don’t know.” I didn’t ask, but I know it worked, he doesn’t bring himself to say.

It’s too much to admit.

Sokka’s own sister is terrifyingly quiet for a long time. He doesn’t know what she’s thinking as her jaw works and her warm brown eyes gaze out the window at blue skies, a liquid reflection of the careless sun, until she lets out a breath, grabs him by the scruff of his shirt, and yanks him into a hug.

Sokka bites back a yelp as her arms snake under his and meet around his back, and she tugs him so close he can practically feel her steady, thrumming heartbeat. She’s somehow positioned herself so his face is buried against her shoulder — or maybe it’s his own puddle-body’s doing, he isn’t sure. Her arms unsubtly tighten when he tries pulling himself together and out of her hold, so he finally lets himself slacken and limp for her to encircle him like a liferaft in anchorless oceans.

“Oh,” she whispers. “Oh. ”

He lets himself be held, because he doesn’t know what else to do as his sister is everything he thinks siblings should be, and it hurts.

☲☲☲

aang! - Today at 9:04 PM

[okay katara did you convince him?]

moonwatered - Today at 9:06 PM

[I think I can in a bit, hopefully. I’ll make sure he actually goes tomorrow.]

blind-bandit - Today at 9:07 PM

[Spicy will be there.]

aang! - Today at 9:07 PM

[wow toph, you’re so impressive! :O how did you convince her so fast?]

bladedfans - Today at 9:07 PM

[yeah i tried contacting her myself, couldn’t get her to say shit.]

blint-bandit - Today at 9:08 PM

[I’ll physically drag her ass to the park if she doesn’t appreciate the efforts of our complicated arrangements. Coming would spare her the indignity.]

☲☲☲

Sokka goes to the park, because Katara forces him to. She puts on her best ‘Please, Sokka, I’ll do the dishes for a week if you agree’ face, which shouldn’t have made him budge in his rightful resolve, but a man’s got to cover his priorities.

It’s not like he’s going to talk to Azula, even if she wants to talk to him. Which would be, quite frankly, a massive turnaround for her character to actually want to interact with him.

Ha. Hilarious.

He parks his bike half a block away from Nongye park, and walks the rest of the way. Azula isn’t looking in his direction as he walks up behind her, and resists the urge to poke her in the back before starting to speak.

“You knew,” Sokka accuses Azula, again.

Azula doesn’t react or deny it, because she can’t without being a liar, the asshole. Sokka is angry in that ugly winter-bite’s way, and wants to yell at her until his voice gives out and he’s expressed all of Zuko’s hurt and rage and all of his hurt and rage, while she wordlessly perches on the unoccupied two-person bench and tilts her head up at the dampening sky. He can see the slight hues of yellows reflecting in her brown eyes, the clouds that break up the watercolor shapes.

“Perhaps I did,” she says candidly, and suddenly, Sokka entirely understands how Katara hated her on first impression. Doesn’t really understand how his sister still sees anything in the girl at this point, though she’s always been better than most of society.

Sokka bites back a frustrated yell and crouches onto the grass opposite to her to sit back on his haunches, even though it’s one of his least favorite sitting positions, because there’s no way he’s sitting next to Azula. “You’re an asshole, you know that?” he tells her. “You’re an asshole. You fucked up your brother —” because there’s no denying it, from every word he’s ever heard from Zuko’s mouth “— and didn’t care that he died.” ( Does she now?) “Zuko died for you. And what for?” Sokka laughs and laughs and knows he’s being an absolute jerk to his best friend’s little sister, but doesn’t have it in him to care the way he still cares about ghosts. “He’s so fucking stupid. Was.”

“You don’t know that I didn’t care,” Azula demurs harshly, but her voice doesn’t sound like she believes it for all the flawless lies it’s already told. Sokka doesn’t really either, because he knows her through calls and texts and through everything Katara is to him.

Why would he give himself up for you? Sokka almost says, but takes back before he says those eight uncaringly denotative words, because he doesn’t want her dead. She’s fifteen.

(Zuko was sixteen.)

He just… doesn’t know, okay?

He’s just so fucking tired of it all.

Azula’s so still Sokka might be worried that time took its leave and left them objects permanently floating in the midst of space, except the spring trees run with a quiet breeze and the people on the far end of the field are walking the dogs; and so time goes on, for clay figurines waiting for someone to rewind their film.

Then, jaw clenched, Azula stands and rips something out of her perfect jacket’s pocket, and roughly shoves it into his hand.

Sokka looks down at the neatly folded sheet of crumpled paper in his palm, considers throwing it away to see how she’d react. The back of his ankles burn.

“He did it because Father hurt me,” Azula says in what might be a quiet voice, looking away. “He didn’t want me to get hurt like him. So — So read the fucking note.”

The paper feels so much heavier than its weight, now. Sokka doesn’t want to open it.

“Zuko was supposed to throw your father in jail when he turned eighteen,” Sokka hears himself say, though he can’t feel his teeth scrape on the syllables. “He wasn’t supposed to die for it.” Azula doesn’t say anything, so he keeps going, even though he’s not sure why. “Two years ago, he asked if he could show up here in Ba Sing Se after he got away, and didn’t even mention you once. And I didn’t bring it up, because I just… wanted my friend.”

(Maybe he’s telling her because he wants to be vindictive of the fact — that Zuko never really cared about her until she went in his face and got hurt.

Sokka isn’t supposed to like hurting people, so why is he now?)

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” Azula sneers.

“It does,” Sokka chokes out. “It does, because he’s dead. And it’s too fucking late to apologize.”

Azula’s nails curl in, short and colorless now. “You think I don’t know that?”

“Yes,” Sokka insists. “I think you’re still hung up on the fact that he committed suicide to save you, when you’ve never given two fucks about him; and now, you’re drowning in your own guilt, so you weren’t even willing to tell the person you know cared about him because you didn’t want the noose to get any tighter.”

And if Sokka was the sort of person who thought less before he spoke, maybe Azula wouldn’t be looking like a kicked puppy trying to repress all the feelings she isn’t supposed to feel as he yells out all the pent-up bitterness his heart’s been made of lately. She’s not supposed to feel because she’s never let herself, and maybe she and Sokka used to almost be friends, but how could he go back to that when this is all she is?

“Well, guess what?” the girl finally hisses. “You don’t know anything about me, aside from what Zuzu told you. And we aren’t friends.”

“Weren’t,” Sokka corrects tersely. At some point, he’d gotten to his feet off those burning ankles, as he stares her in the face to study her carefully plastered features.

Her incorrect tenses just prove how much she’s still hooked in the past.

Azula’s face twitches, like it’s not quite sure what to say to that. “You aren’t any different, you know. You think you care about him, but you never cared about my very existence, because it wasn’t relevant to you.” She laughs, bitterly, and it sounds like Sokka’s own sickness from weeks back as she’d turned to run. “You form all your subjective opinions about me before you have any right to them, and if Zuko had made it here, you would never have thought twice about me.” Smirks, but it looks like pasting a hot glass mask over a girlish porcelain doll as it warps and drips and hurts. “Let me guess: You thought to yourself that it doesn’t matter as long as your dearest friend is fine. You’ve always deliberately ignored the fact that there was a sister in the picture, because it was easier that way. ‘And what for’?”

She echoes the words he’d said to her mockingly, but she isn’t smirking at it.

If she seems as lonely as him, let her sink. He still remembers thinking those words to himself, because Zuko’d always seemed so utterly lonely ; yet some people came and some people left, and none of them loved right.

Sokka likes to think that he’s not the sort of person to treat others like they aren’t worth it before getting to know them, likes to think that he’s rarely a jackass about all the wrong things. (Suki did, after getting to know him, do a pretty good job at kicking much of that out of him.) Sometimes, he’s aware of what a liar he is to himself, for too many wrong things like the faceless girl he’d pieced together through fragments of transferring mirror shards. Azula’s words aren’t kind, but they’re right — they’re always right, there’s a reason she’s two grades advanced in math and still unbelievably bored —, and Sokka doesn’t know what to do about it.

Sokka looks at her, sitting on the two-person bench by herself with her head bent over and her knees pressed together, shadow cast the silhouette of a miserable, lonely girl silently missing someone who left her behind.

He wants to yell at her still, but his head hurts and his heart hurts and he doesn’t have any more space in him for words that he logically knows she doesn’t deserve to hear. He doesn’t like her, not right here and now in this slowly setting park, but she doesn’t deserve it.

He’s so tired. He’s tired of being angry at the little sister of his dead best friend, who’s just as old as his own little sister and looking like she’s verging a breakdown when her put together persona is all Sokka’s ever known of her.

He considers the creased paper that had somehow crumpled up in his hand at some point, swallows. Slowly unfolds it into the neat square Azula had pressed into his palm, and reads it as slowly as he possibly can.

Words are hard.

Zuko doesn’t say he forgives Azula, anywhere. A small part of Sokka wants to feel acquitted, but every word sinks deeper than a snapped arrowhead, the… lack of love, through all the implications, like an apology seeking a response despite knowing it would probably never come. It says everything Sokka’s known from the moment he realized the damned truth, yet it feels a million times worse in words on paper. And it’s all the hate Zuko’s had for himself, and Sokka kind of wants to go shake the boy’s shoulders and yell, How could you believe all this shit about yourself?, but it’s not going to happen.

It won’t ever happen. He can’t judge Azula, for all the things he had, and never will again.

So Sokka sits down on the cold grey pavement, pulls out his phone, and types.

☲☲☲

It’s like something drains out of the boy after he finally reads the condemnatory note, like someone evaporated all the bones that hold his body upright and away from the bench she still sits on, as he sags bonelessly to the ground and pulls up his phone to start typing something. Azula doesn’t know what to say to him.

“I didn’t know until a month ago,” she finally says, to fill the silence. (It should be weak to be discomforted by such an insignificant impact, to give into the pressuring air. She’s not on the verge of a breakdown, she isn’t.) “That he was your friend.”

Sokka’s fingers still for a moment, lingering over the digital keypad, but he doesn’t look up. “I figured out something had changed then. It doesn’t change that you didn’t tell me.”

(Why, of all the things, is that what he’s hung on the most? Is it because it’s personal, for once?

Did he ever really care, then?)

“I know, ” Azula grinds out through her teeth, frustrated.

She’s so frustrated. That he’d cared about Zuko, and still cares about him; that he’d go through all the effort of getting in the way of his own gang in order to be mad at her. A part of her does care what people think of her, and maybe she’s so ludicrously guilty like Sokka said — because being a prodigy had never been enough for anyone but Father, and being Zuko had always been enough for everyone but Father, it turns out.

“Well, then?” She glowers at him, uncurls her nails from their rigid position. “Tell me you think I should’ve told you.”

“You should’ve.” Sokka stops typing to look up and give a bland response to that, of all the things he could’ve. He really does care about himself, more than anything.

(Do you not?)

“Truly, a misfortune, because I didn’t.” Azula means to say it sharper, smugly, to edge the verges of amusement back into her scraped up voice, but it comes out flat and almost soft.

Sokka barks out a short laugh. “You certainly didn’t,” he agrees amicably. “Why?”

He isn’t yelling at her, anymore. For a friend of Zuzu’s, he’s undeniably a lot more like Azula than she’d give him credit for — he knows how to pick apart the stitches holding a person together, and is certainly not incompetent. She should linger on the fact that he was able to pick her apart, able to make her ridiculously close to a bout of unhinged hysteria.

But she doesn’t.

She’s not going to apologize. She doesn’t owe that to him.

(Did she owe him Zuko’s death note the day she received it?)

“I figured you’d experience a freak out,” she says anyway. “I was right, of course. I get it. I’m a monster.”

It’s not a lie.

Sokka blinks at her, then shakes his head. “What? Of course you’re not, Azula. I mean, you’re an ass, but not a monster. A bitch, I would argue at the time being, but teenage girls aren’t monsters.”

Azula blinks back at him, and he looks so oddly earnest after all the anger he’d unleashed a few minutes ago, so she shoves her hands in her pockets and tries to shrug nonchalantly. Her head should be whirring with the need to dispute such an absurd claim against the truths Mother has told since she was seven, or something, but — it’s not.

It just… is. And it feels okay, more than it’s got any right to.

The older boy squints up at her, glances back down at the darkened phone slack in his hand. Angles it back towards his face, and starts up typing again. Azula watches him, and tries not to feel like an intruder when they’re sitting in a public park, even though it feels like someone wrung her out and left her drying above the hearth.

Eventually, Sokka finishes typing, presses the send button, and turns the screen off. Lets out a sigh. “I was texting Zuko,” he confesses, voice low. “One last time, probably before I close our DMs so I won’t have to look at it again.”

Azula looks at him for a long, considering moment.

"Why would you do that to yourself?"

Sokka's eyes are still locked on the black screen of his phone, but he merely shrugs. "It's like, you know when you're driving out in the middle of nowhere with the windows open and the music cranked up? And you know it's fucking up the planet, technically, but the absurd adrenaline feels so good that you never want to stop until the world burns through the product of your doing, and you'd be still happy anyway in the wake of the flames, because it's... something, for once. Like, maybe I should care more, but what’s left to lose?"

"Well actually, no, considering that I'm not an arsonist and that I've yet to obtain my license," Azula objects, "but I can attempt to acknowledge the sentiment."

Sokka huffs a laugh, maybe a little bitterly, drops his shoulders. "I know it's pointless. I — I know he's dead, and I know he'll never read it, but I'm driving down this road anyway because it's the only way I think I should, after all that shit I just dumped on you."

"Ah. I... see."

Azula does not see.

Sokka laughs again, but doesn't sound so bitter. "You should write, too," he tells her. "Doesn't have to be in the form of a shitty text message. But maybe it'll make you feel better."

"There's nothing to feel better about," Azula lies. "And I'm saving myself the embarrassment of writing to a dead person."

Maybe Sokka should be looking at her with something more disgusted, something more angry for saying such a thing about his dead friend, but he doesn't. "Suit yourself," he says, inexplicably nonjudgemental about it. Pauses, seeming a little hesitant, before going forward. “You know — someone once told me that when people you love die, you’re allowed to wallow in your misery and be a dick for a while. Which you absolutely were with all the shit you pulled, by the way, but I — I get it. I was one too, and that wasn’t fair to you.”

(It’s not an apology. Azula doesn’t know if she deserves one, or if she should be giving one, but it feels like enough right now.)

“But anyway, he said that most of all, you need to cry. Otherwise, you’ll never let go of anything. You should try it sometime.”

… So Azula writes.

(And she cries for the first time in what must be a decade, for a person she once loved and is trying to again; when no one’s around to see her setting the paper aflame with a lit match in the darkness of her room, with the windows closed to keep the smoke in and the drifting of the scent lingering the morning after. No company, beyond her own burning tears.

She doesn’t feel pathetic for it, for the first time.)

☲☲☲

captain-boomerang - Today at 6:09 PM

[hey zuko. my favorite asshole, my soap buddy, The Zucchini

i know youre not going to see this, but im sending it anyway bc i dunno, its probably something youd tell me to do?

i got your note, but azula kinda told me what happened a bit. she said you killed yourself for her and im honestly not even surprised bc you were always better then most of society u know? i guess that was what the last convo was about.

i had basically figured it out. stayed in denial for a while cuz i thought itd be easier, but it wasnt. it was so much harder zuko, i think a part of me didnt want to believe that youd leave too. but you did what you thought u had to do, and now i hope youre alright. even if that alright is just like floating around in a lack of consciousness, i hope its better then that shithole you grew up in.

im just sorry i wasnt there for you enough, the way you were for me. or that you never felt safe enough to talk abt feelings and life and your shit plans. i think i kind of knew if im being honest, but i didnt ask cuz i dont think id have known how to deal with it. but i wish i knew that last time the most of all so i couldve told you no.

but for what its worth, u were a really good fucking friend. and brother, okay? fistfight me at the afterlifes gates if you want, but ur gonna lose ;)

i know im texting and that youre never going to read this and that theres really no point to this at all, but i miss u. i miss u alot. im gonna be closing this one for now, but itll forever be immortalized in my account and just know that ill never forget you.

(ps ur sister is a bitch lmao. but i dont hate her, and ill do my best to not even if it might be easier, cuz if theres shit u taught me its that people are worth it. including her and me.)

- sokka]

Chapter Text

The sky ripples with iridescent blues and pinks, streaming the setting sunlight in stray waves of gentle shades; through the fogless glass panes and over the drying wood tables of The Jasmine Dragon, above the empty cars and across the streets in quiet yellow tides. Jin wrings out the damp towel over the sink behind the counter, drapes it over the rack, and unties the sash of her green apron to hang inside the backroom. Azula finishes sweeping the floors and leans the broom beside the other girl’s apron, sliding the OPEN sign around to its backside.

Uncle comes around the other side of the shop, holding his phone upside down and frowning into it, until he looks up and catches sight of his niece, promptly breaking into a concerningly cheerful smile. “Ah, Niece!” he exclaims. “I have a surprise for you.”

Jin pulls out her car keys and jingles them lightly, brushing past Azula. “I’ll leave you two now,” she says quickly. “Happy birthday, Azula.”

The brief contact leaves a warm flutter in Azula’s chest, and she flushes as Jin gives her an unfairly attractive grin before vanishing around the glass corner’s peripheral. Rolls her eyes at herself, because — because feelings are stupid, and —

Uncle’s not laughing at her, yet she gets the distinct feeling that he is. Very silently.

She barely even wants to throttle him. Improvement, Katara’s voice says, while Toph’s shamelessly calls her a wuss.

“Your ‘surprise’. Please don’t tell me you ordered a pony,” Azula says instead. “Or another jade-inlaid teapot. It just so happens to be my birthday.”

Uncle actually laughs this time, and passes the phone over facedown. Azula looks at him suspiciously, but his innocuous smile only widens, and there isn’t really much else to do but look.

Mai’s eyes stare back at her.

Azula’s heart drops.

“Azula!” Ty Lee’s face bounces into the camera, shoving her perpetually-grouchy friend aside and filling the screen with her own bubbly smile. “It’s so good to see you!”

“Yeah,” Mai’s swathy sand-dry voice says, though not necessarily uncordially. “A delight. We missed you. Hasn’t been the same without your… exuberant personality around at all times.”

“Mai!” Ty Lee whacks the girl off-screen, before turning back with a continually bright smile. “Stop that. She’s still like that,” she admits apologetically to the camera. “But that’s not the point, heh. We really did miss you, Azula.”

Azula doesn’t know what to say. She’s thought about them (it’d be a lie to say she hasn’t, and she doesn’t want to be a liar anymore), but she hasn’t truly thought about what she’d say to them. Suki’s suggestion for apologies from months ago floods back into her mind, so she places the phone down with its screen angled at the roof lights, and braces herself to plunge for the right words. Uncle’s looking over at her from across the room with something that might almost be worry etched in his features, but she shakes her head at him, and so he leaves her alone with his phone and two friends(?) she hasn’t talked to for years.

(Because she’d ruined everything she might’ve had with them, the way she ruins everything.)

Finally, she picks the phone back up. Mai and Ty Lee are looking at her with surprisingly matching expressions of what looks kind of like they’re about to swallow their own words, like they’re worried about her reaction, and Azula hates that it stirs such a twist inside of her.

“You… missed me?” is what comes out, instead of Why are you talking to me?, or I’m sorry, or possibly anything else that wouldn’t be the pinnacle of dallying embarrassment.

Mai’s sigh permeates sharply, as she wrestles the camera out of Ty Lee’s grip to address it more directly. “Yes, we missed you.” There’s a moment of silence, then she adds, softer, “I’m sorry about Zuko.”

Azula swallows, thinking back to Mai and her brother’s odd relationship. “Myself as well.”

“I’m sure he would’ve loved to be there with you, though,” Ty Lee butts in, voice more subdued than usual, but somehow still wholly sincere.

“Maybe,” Azula says distantly. “Perhaps he would’ve.”

She looks over to the counter, where Uncle’s vanished from sight entirely — probably finishing up the dishes. Glances back at the screen, then blurts out, “Listen, I’m sorry. For being a shitty friend to you both. You deserved better.”

Zuko was better, she thinks, but doesn’t say.

Ty Lee looks vaguely uncomfortable as the two girls exchange a look, before the taller starts to speak. “You’re right,” Mai says bluntly, never one to dull the blade. “But, well… we understand it better, now. And it doesn’t excuse anything, but we still do care about you, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking to you.” (It’s been years since we last spoke, but you’re better now, right?) A pause, then — “Did you just say ‘shitty’?”

Azula laughs. It isn’t the kind of laughter she used to reserve for the mirror when she’d craved anything but a bitter resentment for life, or the kind she used to make when she’d remembered where she is now. It’s real, genuine amusement for a mention of something she’s come to say more openly, the way she’s working on her brother’s name and her mother’s face.

Ty Lee looks startled, then starts laughing chimes as well. “ Oh, ” she blurts out, eyes crinkling. “Mai, Azula learned how to swear. ”

It’s so inordinately, unreasonably funny. She laughs and laughs in front of her old friends half a world away and doesn’t stop, and doesn’t feel vulnerable or weak.

“Well,” Ty Lee finally manages, fighting back a snort, “we wouldn’t want to distract you from your tea shift.”

“My tea shift is over.”

Mai raises an eyebrow. “Then how about your new friends?”

Azula scowls, pushing down the instinct to deny their status in her life. “Uncle told you, didn’t he.” It’s not even a question.

Ty Lee giggles. “Yep!” It’s so unashamed, the gentle teasing and lightness, and Azula doesn’t know how she once tried to ruin the bubbly girl. “I hope you have a great time.”

“Yeah,” Mai’s voice interjects, though there’s something akin to affection that softens her rough edges. “You deserve it.”

They'll talk more, later, when the sun has risen again and the wind that blows across her room isn't from the colder nights. They'll talk about the past, about how when getting away would be the greatest thing and about everything they could've been; and they'll talk about Zuko and who he used to be for those that get it. About learning to be better to one another, for all the learned hurt that defined them before they could've escaped.

But right now, Azula has candles to light, and people to blow them out with.

☲☲☲

Her friends arrive after sunset, inviting themselves into the apartment with little grace for the most part. Toph’s parents escort her to the door with the most absurdly dyed, oversized birthday cake Azula’s had the privilege of laying her eyes on in her life, plant a kiss in their daughter’s hair. Toph drops the timid girl act and releases her bangs with a brush and scowl the moment they leave, informing Azula, Your actual present is a well and proper fistfight you don’t get to back out of. (Azula doesn’t try to disagree.)

Katara passes her an unevenly handsewn drawstring bag weighing more than empty air, containing a glass jar filled to the brim with kaleidoscopic paper cranes. Suki presents her a metal warfan from an island of her direct ancestors, one that snaps open with a clean flick of the wrist, and promises to show her how to use it traditionally when they hang out again. Aang gives her a sprig of what turns out to be half a dozen homemade, wood beaded friendship bracelets threaded with small braids that dangle off in a gentle fringe, alongside a large-leafed purple calathea with turned over stems he says will open with time and care.

Sokka hasn’t talked to her much over the past month after their discussion at the park, and Azula hasn’t minded keeping it that way. It’s unreasonably weird, merely being in the same room as her dead brother’s best friend  — but he’s here today, and gives her a carefully written card wishing her a good year with Meet me at Pao’s tomorrow? scrawled messily on the back.

Azula thinks to herself that she’ll go. Perhaps it’s about time they talk properly.

The living room’s lights are off and the kitchen curtains drawn shut, leaving the six of them in the darkness around a candle planted amongst the frosted balloons. Azula keeps her knees under the kotatsu, while the rest of her friends collapse in an unrefined pile around her despite the three unoccupied ends of the four-sided table.

“Happy birthday,” Toph says, and the toothy smile in her voice makes it sound like it’s the best day she’s ever heard.

Azula closes her eyes, and inhales the scent of flickering flame. Feels a calm, steady thrum in her veins that doesn’t flare up with molten wax, and sits in a pliant red pillow with her palms pressed lightly against the weave.

She’s as old as her brother will ever be, and has all the things he might’ve had in a different universe, surrounded by the waft of jasmine tea and five kids who sit beside her like this is the best they could’ve been making company with. She’s as old as her brother will ever be, and the brief note folded in a sharp white envelope in her dresser drawer sometimes gets dusty, and its presence doesn’t twist a knife into her stomach each time she sees it anymore. She’s as old as her brother will ever be, and some nights she wishes it weren’t true, but some things might never come to reach if it were.

And she misses him, something she’d never have thought to feel for her older brother. But it doesn’t kill her. She’s here now, and it’s her birthday, and she’s alive.

Exhale.

Azula turns sixteen, and she’s oddly okay with how she’s spending her time on land.

☲☲☲

sometimes, when sailors are sailing, they think twice about where they’re anchoring

and i think, i could make better use of my time on land…

- if work permits, the format