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Getting chi-blocked doesn’t hurt . Her muscles tense uncomfortably and yet she feels like melting at the same time, and it is more humiliating than painful to be slumped on the ground with her face pressed against the concrete floor. It doesn’t hurt, not even when she hits the ground and not when two of the guards loop their arms around her to pull her to her feet.
What hurts is hearing Mai’s words, sharper than her knives and just as cutting, telling her what she’s always known as true but refuses to acknowledge. The painful, unappealing truth that Azula has had ingrained into her from the time she was old enough to understand the meaning of love and its absence.
“I love Zuko more than I fear you.”
It fills her with rage to hear those words. Mai speaks them clearly, but for a moment Azula sees double.
Long, dark hair. A sad, mournful look with lips downturned and eyebrows drawn together. She loves Zuko, just Zuko, and she doesn’t fear Azula enough to even pretend to love her because what is fear but love tinged with horror?
It’s not love, nor fear that she sees when she looks at the figure that isn’t Mai, in long robes that fall to the ground and melt into it, like she is a specter grown from the shadows.
It’s not love, it’s not fear, it’s pity.
Poor, sad Azula—
When she blinks, the woman in Fire Nation robes is gone. Only Mai remains, in her cold and stonefaced manner standing before Azula. Mai isn’t the first person to feel that way, but she is the first person to say it outright.
What hurts more than being chi-blocked is being chi-blocked by Ty Lee, feeling small fingers prodding into the weak spots of her armor—because Ty Lee has always been able to find the weak spots in her, to open the crustacean shell in her chest and poke at the fleshy meat of her heart, as easily as she does backflips and cartwheels—and going down because of it. It hurts to have Ty Lee betray her, and it surprises her more than Mai.
Ty Lee doesn’t say what Mai does, but she doesn’t have to.
I don’t fear you , Azula hears anyway as two fingers dig into the soft parts of her skin that are exposed by the places her armor meets. I don’t love you either .
It hurts more than any physical pain to be betrayed, and it is not the distant and dull ache of a broken bone or a sprained ankle. It stings , like an open wound exposed to the air, the kind of pain that drowns out all other feeling until the only thing left is pain and burning and the smell of acrid black smoke because she is a wildfire and burns down all in her path without discretion—
Venom bursts from her mouth, accusing and digging and striking out so they hurt just as much as she does in the moment. The pain on Ty Lee’s face provides a momentary balm to the hurt she feels, and what’s left in its place when that feeling fades is nothing more than ugliness, filling her up and making her feel wrong for the hurt she causes Ty Lee. Her stomach suddenly feels full of stones, heavy and churning almost painfully at the tears that well up in Ty Lee’s eyes.
She shuts her eyes against it, so she doesn’t have to watch the guards drag Ty Lee and Mai out of her life.
Away as always. Alone again, naturally, standing as she watches everyone she might’ve loved once and everyone she never got the chance to love leave her life without second thoughts.
Somehow, prison isn’t as bad as she expected. The conditions are bad, of course, and the bed she had slept in when she stayed in the palace is more comfortable, but she isn’t alone. Mai is there, and they share their cell block with a group of similarly aged teenage girls. The food is surprisingly palatable, and both she and Mai receive three square meals a day.
Ty Lee is inconsolable anyway, her days spent bawling until all her tears are spent and the rest of her time numbly staring into space.
She missed Azula when she left for the circus, but back then the absence felt like the pull of a magnet leading her thoughts back to the Fire Nation every time they drifted away. Now, when the knife’s edge of Azula’s rage has turned on her, white-hot and angry, the hole Azula has left in her life feels like negative space. Blackness that seeps in at the edges, eating away at her and replacing it all with empty guilt. If only she hadn’t chi-blocked Azula, if only she had tried to reason with her or work with her or anything at all…
“Thinking like that isn’t helpful, you know,” Mai says, and for a moment Ty Lee is afraid she’s been thinking out loud. “You’ve looked dead behind the eyes for ten minutes now. I know what you’re thinking.”
It’s comforting, in a way, to know that Mai knows her and understands her in the way that few others do. All those little things that make her tick, the intricacies and mannerisms that would of course her best friend would pick up on. At least, Ty Lee thinks she should find it more comforting that Mai knows and understands her. Instead, when Mai lays an arm around her frame, sharp nails poking unintentionally into her shoulder blade, it somehow makes her want to cry harder. Mai, stoic and cold Mai, whom Ty Lee has only seen smile when she’s around Zuko, reaches out to comfort her. The gravity of this is not lost on her. When she starts to cry harder, shoulders shaking and tears dripping down her cheeks in rapid rivers, Mai tightens her grip around her, and Ty Lee realizes the gravity is not lost on Mai, either.
The gardens of the Fire Nation palace exist as a frivolity, never a necessity least of all in wartime. It is the domain of ladies, proper women with their topknots and fragrant teas and chittering laughter and gossip and it reminds Azula of Mother .
So really, it doesn’t make her feel particularly bad to burn them all down.
When she returns from the Boiling Rock, alone and without even the triumph of victory to keep her head high, she sits quietly and patiently and perfectly while Father berates her. She prides herself on her armor, so thick and impenetrable that his words don’t even hurt her, that words like failure and loss don’t sink in, only bounce like arrows off of metal. He doesn’t love her, she knows, and he doesn’t fear her, either.
But he doesn’t love Zuko, he doesn’t love Zuko more , and it gives her a sick satisfaction, it helps her cope, to repeat that over and over in her mind.
Excused to her room, she takes the shortcut through the gardens. It will return her to her chambers more quickly, and the cold princess-soldier does not cry and does not rage and needs to be alone and is so perfect, perfect, perfect
Perfect
Perfect.
The shortcut through the gardens is more efficient. It is a simple fact. She prides herself on this efficiency, and to have such an analytical mind (not an emotional mind, because to be emotional like Zuzu would be a fault) is a credit to her and will someday make her a good Fire Lord.
The flowers are doing well this time of year, fragrant and colorful and blooming loudly. Compared to the muted world and the fogginess of her mind these past few days, the colors feel almost explosive, bright and in her face with their reds and greens and blues and pinks and-
Pinks.
The flowers are pink, camellias with buds open wide to Agni’s rays.
She wonders what color her aura might be now, if Ty Lee were here to tell her about it. She imagines what Ty Lee might say, the tone of her voice or the way she would describe the color of her aura, puce or a sickly, pale green, or something else equally as off-putting and disgusting.
There’s a flower in her hand. A pink blossom, its color deeper on the edges of its petals, a thorn that nearly sticks her when she turns the flower in her hand. She imagines plucking the thorns from the stem carefully, discarding them and tucking the stem gently in the curves of Ty Lee’s braid. The pink would suit her beautifully, it would match her outfit well, and Ty Lee would smile at her, give her a real smile and she would feel perfect again.
It takes but a thought, and the flower goes up in blue flames. Azula watches in fascination as the flames fade, first purple and then into the reddish yellow burn of normal fire.
“Azula,” she hears a voice say. Stern, but mournful. Sad, and tired, and yet somehow reprimanding her all the same. “ Azula .” She knows that voice, the one that would speak to Zuko in soft, gentle tones while at the same time admonishing her.
At the other end of the gardens, she sees a flickering, shadowy form and knows rather than sees that it is her mother.
Zuko’s mother.
It’s not really the same thing, is it?
A light breeze passes through, rustling leaves and branches and flower petals and the thin strands of hair that frame her face. Her mother’s robes do not move, looking stiff and starched and too heavy for the summer winds to move. Her hair doesn’t move, not even what hangs down from her topknot, and her face—inescapable, impervious, impassive, perverse.
A blink and she’s gone, not even so much as a shadow that would let Azula know she was there.
It doesn’t give her much satisfaction to toss the burning flower back into its bed and watch the rest of them slowly catch, too, but to destroy something real distracts from the slowly burning embers inside.
She was right. The path through the gardens is more efficient and allows her to get back to her room before she screams, ripping her throat raw with pain and horrible, horrible loss.
She opens her hand, and pink petals tumble out. She can’t quite remember how they got there, and though they are crushed she lays them out on her vanity table.
“Hey, aren’t you and your friends the ones who put us in prison in the first place?”
They have a few hours of recreation at a time, outside in the prison yard. At first, Ty Lee had sat numbly in the shade of the large prison walls with Mai, who wanted nothing more than to protect her porcelain pale skin from the sun. When Ty Lee had worked past her shock and numbness that ruled the first few days she had spent here, she had instead focused on her acrobatics.
Backflips and cartwheels and front walkovers, all of which are second nature to her. They happen mindlessly, and while Ty Lee finds each movement so perfectly effortless it doesn’t help at all to keep her mind from focusing back on Azula like a compass finds North. She can respond to questions easily even doing the cartwheels and backflips, but the suddenness of it catches her off guard and she lands on her feet like a cat before she takes stock of the girl who spoke to her.
“Do I know you?” She asks earnestly. The girl’s face looks only vaguely familiar, but Ty Lee supposes that anyone who isn’t Azula or Mai will remain only vaguely familiar to her because, in the contrast to the razor-sharp lines and angles of her friends, everything else seems fuzzy.
“Fangirls,” Mai says dryly, all without ever looking up from her spot in the shade, and the reference to Azula’s attempt at a joke makes Ty Lee strangle a laugh in her throat and stare at the girls before her in some morbid fascination.
“What did you guys do with Suki?” She makes a fist, fingers clenching, and for a split second Ty Lee wonders if this girl is going to hit her. Defensively, she gets ready to chi-block if necessary, but the girl’s hand relaxes just as Ty Lee asks:
“Who?”
The girl looks positively dumbstruck. “Suki? The leader of the Kyoshi Warriors?”
Realization dawns on Ty Lee's face as she remembers the girl full of vitriol towards her and her friends. She had almost had pity on her then, almost , but winning the war and taking Ba Sing Se had been more important than anything. Azula had been more important than anything. She switches her weight from one foot to the other awkwardly, wondering how much might be too much to give away to this girl whose name she doesn’t even know.
“Boiling Rock. She got sprung out, though. Some Water Tribe guy and my ex-boyfriend did it,” says Mai suddenly, and she only shrugs when Ty Lee gives her a scandalized look. “What? It’s not like they can do anything about it. They’re all stuck here.”
The girl’s face turns pensive, and she casts a look over her shoulder towards the other teenage girls she’s usually with. Something passes between them that Ty Lee doesn’t quite understand, but the girl turns back to her and Mai with more friendliness in her face than she expects. “Say, how’d you take us down? I’ve never seen bending like that.”
“It’s not bending!” Ty Lee says cheerfully, all too eager to show her talents. “It’s chi-blocking! If you know the chi pathways in the body you can hit certain places and cut someone off from their bending or immobilize them altogether!”
“Do you think you could… show us, sometime?” The girl asks, gesturing with her head towards the other girls. “That was really cool, and we think it could really help our fighting style.”
Confused, Ty Lee takes a second to respond, and shares a similarly conspiratorial glance with Mai. “I don’t see why not,” she says after a moment.
“My name’s Kei.”
“I’m Ty Lee! And this is Mai!”
Kei sticks her hand out, and Ty Lee shakes it and smiles. “Then you know what, Ty Lee? I think we could make some pretty good friends.”