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The market of Caldera is earning its name tonight. Alight with glowing red lanterns and the flickering flames of vendor's street grills, the heart of the city pulses in the night. Surrounded by the dark outlying neighborhoods of mainly family homes that have already snuffed their candles and tucked their children to bed. The market's light floods between alley ways and the revelry is sharp like rain water screeching as it plunges into the mouth of a volcano.
Azula watches it from the wall. Perched with her feet hanging off the ledge. It is not the outermost wall, but it is the highest. The Royal Palace was built on a plateau and as such the inner walls actually sit at a higher elevation. On a clear night, you can look into the capital city and by starlight in rudimentary fashion map it's roads. On nights like tonight, when the city is roaring and pulling like the tides before a monsoon you can almost even make out the movement of many bodies all going in the same circuitous directions. Mindlessly it seems from here. Like ants burrowing and scavenging through their dirt hills. A scholar had shown her once just how complex the simple incect's tunnels can become by pouring a small vat of melted lead down the hole. When he had unearthed it days later, Azula had ran her fingers over the entombed bodies of the fire ants that had not long ago bitten at her ankles and called her home theirs as well.
"I wish we could go to the festival," Ty Lee sighed. Her foot propped up on the ledge so that she might rest her cheek against her knee as she lamented.
"Why?" Mai replied from Azula's other side. "It's not like we could do anything with a retinue of guards breathing down our necks."
"I know," The words were drawn out in a whining note as Ty Lee threw her body backwards, her back thumping against the stone. "It would just be nice, ya know, see the performers, dance, have fun?"
Azula cannot imagine herself doing something so ghastly as dancing in the city square. Rubbing elbows with the unwashed masses. Skin within reach of their fingers slicked with grease from pork skewers and sticky from syrups sold on the street. She can only catch the briefest pass of smoke on the wind at this distance but she shudders at the thought of the sweat that must soak in the humid night time air. And even if she wanted to, how would she? She knows how to dance it is only proper for her position, but those are traditional cultural dances or all formal affairs. The idea of Mai dancing as well is even more comical. With her heron-like stature and stern face even at the age of only eleven.
She can imagine Ty Lee, however. Azula has never seen Ty Lee dance as her family is rarely invited to the sorts of events that would necessitate those sorts of things. Not that they happen all that often either. The last one very well may have been before she was born. Though despite all this Azula knows that Ty Lee would fit right in in the streets of the market. Twirling and shimmering between bodies like a spark caught on the wind. This she knows instinctually in the same way that she knows that she would hate Ty Lee for it.
Azula sniffs indifferent, "If you wish to go catch something from the common folk, by all means. Just don't bother bringing it back to the palace."
Ty Lee pouts. Azula doesn't need to look at her to know this. It's told to her in the silence that follows.
"What's the point of being here exactly, Azula?" Mai drones after a moment. Her patience is wearing thin, and Azula is told this by Mai's lack of silence.
"Observing my future subjects," She replies.
And it is honest. Despite whatever the half-hearted glare she gets for the answer may imply. There is something gnawing at the edge of her gut as she looks out across the city. Something parasitic and even more ravenous than she herself has become in recent years. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Zuko has just been banished only a week prior and down below the ants cheer and gorge themselves. Her father has already begun arrangements for Mai's father to take up position in Omashu. And Ty Lee-
"Do-" Ty Lee hesitates, sits back up properly to look again her gaze anchored ahead, "Do you ever wonder what it would be like if we were common girls? Sometimes I think it would be nice."
And Ty Lee's head is filled with fancy and flight that will inevitably take her far from here. Azula knows this without being told, and this too she knows she will hate the other girl for. It is a query of pure stupidity, one of what would the ants do if they had known that they would soon meet their end? They are ants, they wouldn't have done anything because they couldn't have.
Azula laughs, cruel and loud, she almost wonders if the echoes of it will travel all the way to the market like the dull cacophony of their revelry makes its journey to her. Ty Lee draws her knees up to her chest next to her.
"It would suck." Mai said. "You'd be poor, hungry, and forced to work by now." Her father has done more hands-on work. Azula has heard his stories at the banquet table as well. Beggars lining the streets in the colonies. Fights crashing into storefronts over pocket change. Killing without honor, without glory of war and service.
"But I could go to the festival if I wanted," Ty Lee said, her voice having gone small, "It's just the freedom, I guess."
"You have all the freedom in the world, Ty Lee," Azula said. "It's not like anyone in your family is keeping particularly close tabs on you. How could they with the whole litter of girls you have? No one cares what you do."
This too is honest. Of the three of them Ty Lee is of the least importance in the grand scheme. Dispensable. That is what daughters of her rank and number are. Bargaining chips. Pawns. Something to be sacrificed for greater gain. If not for Azula's own fondness of the girl, she would likely already be betrothed to some other small-landed noble son. It is just the order of things, and this does not feel cruel to say. Because it is honest, and she believes it to be Ty Lee's great privilege that she is so easily misplaced.
Though the other girl must not feel the same way, as she stands to her feet abruptly. Azula looks away from the city for the first time. Ty Lee is red-faced and huffing, "Fine. If no one cares, then I'm going down there-"
"Ty Lee, sit down, don't be absur-"
"No." Ty Lee snaps, and it shocks Azula so thoroughly that she almost doesn't feel Mai stiffen beside her. "I'm going, don't wait up."
Azula still hasn't gotten a grasp on her bearings at hearing the sharp defiance that Ty Lee slips away before she can stop her. Fading into the shadows, and it is not long before Azula can see a lone silhouette scaling the outer walls. She watches the whole time and only realizes that she's lost sight of the other girl when Mai sighs beside her.
"I'm going to tell someone to not kill her if they see her coming back in the night," Mai drawls, "And then I'm going to bed."
The other girl leaves in a much more mundane and less acrobatic fashion. Taking the stairs that they took to get up here in the first place. Azula is left alone on the wall. She stays there for quite some time.
Ty Lee has never been so brash with her before, and Azula can feel it. Like the echo of a lightning strike in her chest, the ever growing realization that Ty Lee wants nothing more than to be a common girl and that means she too will leave. Perhaps sooner than Azula originally expected.
Her fingers dig into the stone beneath her. Knuckles whitening as she watches the festival continue below. She has half a mind to tell the guards to go shut it down. There is an unofficial curfew installed these days due to the war, but it seldom goes thoroughly enforced. Especially not on such holidays. She knows she could do it. She could ever so carefully tip the vat herself and flood the ant-lined streets with lead. Pick out Ty Lee's corpse and keep it on her bedside like a trophy. It would be easy.
Though she stays there, and her throat remains tight as she fortifies herself for the coming days. She draws the line in the dirt between herself and the people below. Starts to nudge Ty Lee in her mind to the other side if that's where she so badly wants to be. She has already chosen them anyways. There is a inane impulse to try and find the girl in the crowds but they are slow moving globs of paint dripping down a canvas in the distance.
At midnight, the paper lanterns take flight. The outsides dyed with a pretty indigo ink that turns the light they omit cold and star-like. They sail far above, forgetting the ants that crafted them, and gifting them to sky. Gifting them to her for the pleasure of living. Not because they love her. Not because they care that it is her birthday and she is sat alone on the wall. It is an excuse for gluttony and a long war has made them aching for indulgences. And what indulgence is she afforded?
At this time, Ty Lee's question disgusts her. To imagine a world in which they are common girls is to imagine herself a rotting corpse in the road. Ty Lee doesn't understand that to be a common girl would mean Azula would never have existed at all. It is cruel of her to think it, and unbearably crueler to have the audacity to ask. She would sooner be a horse with a broken leg. A dog foaming with rabies and slobber snapping between its jaws. A bear hung on a mantle for sport. Sooner any of these things than an ant entombed in lead at the whim of princess.
It is an embarrassing thing to want, she decides ultimately. Not just this particular desire. It is simply an act of prostration, of shame and degradation, to want at all. And this particular fancy, well, it only further proves the differences between the two of them. Perhaps it is a good thing that Ty Lee will likely indulge herself on this fantasy soon, or so at least Azula suspects. Now that she is the heir, she can't be distracted by such lines of thought. They are poisonous to the mind.
Azula takes her leave of the wall and the festival below. Returns to her room, and tries to ignore the phantoms of sound and light she sees behind her eyes.
A world in which they are common girls? What a silly dream. In the years that follow, Azula dreams many times. Dreams of fallen walls. Dreams the smell of ozone and burning flesh. Dreams the weight of a crown on her head that sits not too big so that it might not slip down her head, catch round her throat, and turn collar. She does not have silly dreams.
It is an aching and embarrassing want that day at Boiling Rock. Somewhere between the glint of knives in the glaring sunlight. Between the twitching sinew and inability to stand. Between the sound of shoes scraping as Mai and Ty Lee are dragged away in chains. It lives there, angry like a swarming hive of fire ants trying to eat her from the inside out. To take each small morsel of her flesh they break off to their queen. To ask her just what she would wish for if she too knew the end was near, and there was nothing a small girl could do to jam her body into stalling the gears of a losing war. She tries to fight it, the inevitable fate anyways, but she knows what she would wish for now. A world in which they are common girls.