Work Text:
Azula is laughing as she sings “ Dad’s going to kill you, dad’s going to kill you. ” She laughs at Zuko’s scared face, she laughs at the fact her father thought he could steal the throne from grandfather’s favorite child, and she laughs at grandfather for setting a high price for the throne, one he knows Ozai can’t pay.
So she laughs because it's ridiculous and impossible and Zuko should know this. It’s like being scared that a ten foot tall purple platypus bear with wings will fly through the window and eat him. But he’s still scared because he’s a dum-dum. She knows this is something Ty Lee’s sisters do, the yell “Mom is going to kill you!” with everything from spilling nail polish on their best shirts to poor grades. This is normal.
When their mother finally comes and drags her out of the room she’s still laughing because her mother believes that dad is going to kill Zuko. That must be where he gets it from, the inability to see the joke. Still, the way her mother’s face looks in the candle light, like this is the first time she’s seen Azula and it's something that she hates.
She wakes up the next morning and her grandfather is dead, her mother is gone, and father is Fire Lord.
Which, she will concede is strange. But a coincidence nothing more. (There are implications, if she thinks about it too much. So she doesn’t think about it.)
She wants to point out to Zuko, See? You were never in any danger. You're safe. You will always be safe. But she is a kind sister and respects that he’s as soft as a turtleduck's feathers and mother’s absence hurts him. She doesn't care, that woman never cared about Azula, and the feeling was mutual. (She didn’t think about the way her mother’s face twisted into something between a cross of fear and disgust, and how that made her stomach plummet.)
Because she’s a good sister, she doesn’t rub it in that she’s the favorite child of the only parent left.
#
Father is standing over Zuko on the Agni Kai mat and Azula is laughing because Zuko is blubbering on and making a fool out of himself. Dad just might revoke Zuko’s status as heir for this! Then down the line when she’s the Fire Lord, Azula and Zuko will sit down together for dinner, and laugh about how Zuko once made dad so mad that he challenged him to Agni Kai. And Zuko will admit that he never really wanted to be Fire Lord in the first place, and is happy to just be a spare and spend his days playing pai sho, feeding the turtleducks and raising children with Mai. He will gently concede that she makes a better Fire Lord than he ever would. (She doesn't know where her father fits in these daydreams. He’s not dead in them, of course not that would be treason, he’s simply absent. A black hole where a father should be.)
She’s laughing at Zuko's snot and tears and how funny this will be, sometime down the line. At how Zuko never understood that dad was just making empty threats, that it was all just to scare him, that he was never actually serious. That this was all just one big joke.
Azula is mid-laugh when there is a bright flash of yellow, the sobs turning into screams, and the smell of seared flesh reaches her nose. When she realizes that maybe she was always just lying to herself.