Chapter Text
Azula couldn’t remember the day when she’d first bent water. It took eight years for her to realise it was the worst day of her life.
She was just shy of her sixth birthday when it had happened, and the chattering classes of the court were already casting aspersions. A mediocrity of a son, and a daughter who had yet to produce a flame at the age of six? Thank Agni, they said, that Crown Prince Iroh’s son was strong and wise, or else the line would be deeply threatened. Still, how embarrassing for Prince Ozai.
He took his frustrations out on his wife, Ursa, and she spent ever more time in the labyrinthine palace gardens to avoid him, children in tow whenever they could be freed from their tutors.
On that day - the day, Azula would come to realise with swiftness, the one which changed everything - Azula and Ursa were at a turtle-duck pond, attempting to feed the birds. Ursa was, anyway. Azula alternated throwing large hunks of bread at them, more projectiles than foodstuff, and splashing back and forth in the warm water of the shallows - the petty violences and exploration of childhood.
Then she bent water.
At the very first, she thought she had just flicked up some droplets from hands still pudgy with baby fat. But there was a tingling in her fingertips, so she did it again, skipping her hand across the surface of the water and throwing it up into the sky. A spout of water followed her motion upwards. Again, and again, giggling with delight. She turned to Ursa. “Mama,” she cried, “mama, look!”
Ursa looked, and near fainted to see her daughter, knee-deep in the pond, heralded the panicked quacking of turtle-ducks, waterbending. Azula did not remember it. Ursa did, for the rest of her life, a smiling face with splashes of pond water pattering down around it.
The pair had the poor luck to be happened upon at that moment by a palace servant, and news swiftly reached Prince Ozai, and thence to Fire Lord Azulon. Action had to be taken. Azula did not realise the specifics, but by evening, as she was ushered back from afternoon lessons to her quarters, without the evening meal or her mother in sight, she knew something was wrong. In later life, she had only fragments, impressions of emotions, and even those she thought might have been conjured from her imagination.
Azulon and Ozai’s decision with regard to Ursa was swift. Clearly, Azula was the product of some kind of dalliance, perhaps with a merchant or colonial soldier of Water Tribe birth. She had shamed her husband and the Fire Lord beyond insult and beyond repair. Only that she was of Roku’s blood saved her from execution. Happily, the Fire Nation had oubliettes to spare. A sudden illness, a tragic death with conspicuous mourning, and after an appropriate interval, Ozai to remarry, while Ursa rotted in the dark.
Azula presented a different challenge, and a potential opportunity. She could not be retained within the palace, that much was certain - a living embodiment of Ursa’s misdeeds and Ozai’s misfortune. Ozai’s initial suggestion was that she be put to death. A royal bastard with Roku’s blood and waterbending was a threat, and no familial affection; for he had loved her in some instrumental sense; changed that fact. But Azulon conceived of a different fate. The Fire Nation was in the process of negotiating a peace agreement with the Northern Water Tribe, a treaty of non-interference while the Fire Navy wrapped its tendrils around the Earth Kingdom’s northern seaboard.
How much more could be gained if a daughter of a prince was offered as a hostage to guarantee the Fire Lord’s committment?
Both concurred - a great deal.
Plans were put into effect.
—
Azula didn’t like the North Pole, but she wasn’t going to cry about it. Crying was not something a Fire Nation princess did, not ever, and father had told her to be on her best behaviour at all times. So she was, because father was always right.
Besides, when she had maybe cried just the once, a sniffle on the inside of her parka where no one could see, her tears had frozen painfully on her cheeks.
The great wall and gate to the Northern Water Tribe reared out of the icebergs with an almost terrifying speed. The flat, low-bottomed boats of the water sav - the Northern Water Tribe - were so different from the Fire Navy’s steel and steam ships, and she did not like them very much either. Much too close to the water. Even if she could feel her chi singing in response to the bending of the tribesmen standing around her, pushing the boat onwards.
She was six and a half. Her mother had died a little over seven months ago. A sudden fever, father had said. He didn’t mince words or try to lie to her, and she had liked that. She was sad about mother dying. Or, rather, she knew she ought to feel sad, and so resolved to be sad. Not like Zuzu. He’d wept buckets, enough for her to bend ten times over. He’d been less upset when she was sent north. It didn’t sting. It didn’t. She shoved her hands harder into the pockets of the parka.
Not that there was anything to be sad about. That was what father had said. She was doing a good thing for the Fire Nation, an important thing. And maybe they would teach her how to waterbend, he’d said with the voice he only used for her, like he was telling her a secret. She just had to go and be on her best behaviour and when she was older she could come back home. Maybe Zuzu would be less annoying by then. She didn’t think that was likely, though.
The wall gave way to a vast tunnel, and the boat skimmed on, through canals and under bridges, carved - no, she realised, bent - from ice, which sparkled and glinted as the sun caught it.
At length, they arrived at a jetty, itself made of ice, and a small group of men was standing to meet them. She could tell from the ornate designs that they must be nobles, or kings, or chiefs - or whatever else self-important people called themselves to get over the fact that they weren’t from the Fire Nation.
She drew herself to her full, diminutive, height, and stepped off the boat as it made contact.
One of the men crouched down to look at her on an even footing. “Princess Azula, my name is Chief Arnook. On behalf of the whole tribe, welcome to the North Pole.” He didn’t sound much like grandfather or father, didn’t sound much like a leader, but that was not surprising, and she knew it would be rude to say anything about it, so she didn’t.
Instead, she simply bowed in the way her protocol tutors had drilled into her, fist clasped to palm. The wind bit at the exposed flesh, and she hurriedly hid her hands in her pockets again. The gesture made Arnook smile. “I’d like you to meet my daughter, Princess Yue,” he said, and at the words, a girl of Azula’s age - no, older, perhaps a year or more - emerged from behind the crowd of people. Azula looked at her and blinked.
“Why is your hair white?” she asked. That was the sort of thing which would get her a telling off from the protocol tutors and punishment from father if she ever did it in real life but Arnook didn’t seem to have that strength, she thought. Besides, she was very curious.
Nobody yelled at her. In fact, there was a little laughter. She misliked that more than punishment. But all the better if they thought she was just a stupid little girl who asked silly questions. Because she wasn’t. She was here for a reason. Father had said so.
“A spirit gave it to me,” replied Yue, smiling widely.
“Really?” Azula said, her eyebrows knotting together. That didn’t seem very fair at all, to her.
“Really!” Yue nodded enthusiastically, sending her braids bouncing. “I’ll - “ she paused, and turned to Arnook. “Father, may I - “
“Of course, sweetie,” Arnook said, in answer to some unasked question. “Run along, now.”
Yue took Azula by the hand, an indignity to which Azula assented without - she thought, anyway - outward sign of reluctance, and they did.
—
When Azula learnt that she wouldn’t be allowed to learn how to waterbend, not properly, on the fourth day of her stay, she didn’t have a tantrum. Instead, she began to study. She had always excelled in her classes in the palace. Going away to the pole didn’t mean that changed. Besides, father would expect her to improve. He’d practically told her.
Yue wasn’t a bender and she didn’t have any books about waterbending, but she did have access to the palace library. As Azula was staying across the corridor from her within the palace - only obvious given Azula’s rank, of course - it was of no matter to sneak away in the evening to read. The first time they’d done it, Yue smiled the whole way down at the sheer audacity of it all. It was like some of the games she’d played with Mai and Ty Lee. She wondered if they missed her. Father had said she shouldn’t write them letters because she had to make new friends in the northern tribe, so she never would know, she supposed.
The characters swam and danced in front of her. She knew she was only six and a half and most books were written for people older than her - she wasn’t stupid, after all. But some of it was useful. Especially the bloodcurdling stories Yue enjoyed - and learning that that was the sort of thing Yue read, pirates and benders and assassins, had been a very pleasant surprise. Avatar Kyoshi, Yue had told her one evening in a hushed voice, had even frozen a man’s heart with just a touch. That, in particular, gave Azula ideas. Ideas she kept very hidden indeed.
After all, she was in the enemy’s city. They were nice to her. But some secrets had to remain. Every so often, she would think about that, and wonder whether if she had hidden her waterbending, she might still be at home.
So if Yagoda mentioned Azula’s progress in the healing lessons to Arnook, it was only ever to praise her newest student’s diligence and attendance. And if the captain of the guards ever commented on how Azula would sit and watch them train for hours, he only said that Fire Nation girls were very strange and left it at that. And when Azula and Yue played pirates and princesses with wooden sticks, no one saw quite how good Azula was with her bludgeon.
So the weeks, and then the months, and then eventually the years rolled by. Azula grew in her understanding of the Northern Water Tribe, made sure to fit in well, always studying, always practising and learning. She hardly ever waited around for letters from home. Father had explained that sending them was difficult and the Northern Water Tribe might read them first. Best to put her head down and do well and that was that.
When she was nine, she learnt that her grandfather and cousin had died, and that her father was now the Fire Lord. Arnook’s wife, Kirri, had made her Fire Nation mochi that evening, and asked if she was upset. She said she was. That was a lie.
With her father on the throne, she’d be called home. He had a new wife, some noble lady, and a new son too. But she was older and smarter and stronger. Besides, the treaty had clearly served its purpose. The Fire Navy had washed over the northern Earth Kingdom. Arnook wasn’t as quiet as he thought he was when he talked with the other chiefs.
It would be a shame to leave Yue behind, but what was that next to duty? So she waited for the letter.
And waited. And waited. After a week, she took to hanging around near the commercial port district, just in case it was coming by courier, instead of messenger hawk. Yue accompanied her on those expeditions, just like she always had, the pair drawing queer looks.
After a month and a half, she gave up and went back to her studies and the life she had pushed together in the swept ice vaults and healing lessons. She just had to be ready.
—
“Chief Arnook,” she asked, just after her eleventh birthday, as the latest dinner was cleared away - not the formal banquets of celebration, but a simple meal of Arnook, Kirri, Yue and herself; a family meal, not that she wanted to think of it like that because this wasn’t her family. “Do you know when my father might send for me?”
He sat back heavily in his chair, the ice creaking. She shivered at the sound. She’d learnt techniques to warm herself with her breath before her seventh birthday - a must in the icy climes - but the Tribe’s insistence on building everything they could from water was a perpetual frustration.
Of course, it also meant that she had a weapon within reach at all times. No bad thing.
“I don’t, Azula,” he said. “Of course, when you are eighteen, you can travel where you will. But there is no definite clause before then about a date of return. And I have not received correspondence from your father on this issue.”
“You’re happy here, though?” Yue broke in. From someone else’s mouth, the words might have sound accusatory, a mousetrap of a question. But that wasn’t how Yue thought and worked, admirable and frustrating in equal measure.
“I am,” she said.
It wasn’t a lie. She led every class she was in, the best healer the Tribe had seen in a generation said Yagoda. Yue was a friend and the other girls, coming into awareness of their position in the social hierarchy, had found new targets for the petty ires of childhood. And her self-taught waterbending and duelling - snatched in moments or cloaked under some more legitimate study or game, for all that she was a little old to be playing with sticks - was progressing well.
Besides, Kirri’s mochi were almost authentic.
So when she heard that Zuko had been banished a month later, she spent less than a week waiting for the letter. Her father wanted her in the north until majority, it seemed. Or else, he had forgotten about her, but she dismissed that thought almost as soon as it had appeared, not really touching it or thinking about it.
After all, she was highly capable, well placed, and well connected. A pai sho piece in a strong position. She just didn’t yet know in which gambit she would be used.
She just hoped that it would be one she could accept with equanimity.
—
Three years later, she realised she couldn’t.