Archive of Our Own

Azula is returned to the palace two years and a half to the day that she left it. The Sages escort her to the steps as if she’s a child in need of hand-holding, and then leave her there as if an idiot has told them that she can be trusted alone.

She’s left waiting only a moment before the doors open, and there’s the idiot himself.

“Azula,” says Zuzu. Ridiculously, he’s smiling.

More ridiculously, she feels her mouth nearly pull into its mirror. It doesn’t, of course. She has far too much self-control for such a display.

But it is an almost-thing.

**

Zuko has, for reasons unfathomable to her, shirked the Fire Lord’s palace in favor of returning to the family villa they lived in once, before their Uncle broke and broke the rest of them in turn. He shows her his room first, and she gives the decor a critical glance. His dual dao have pride of place above a wardrobe that has a scattering of trinkets strewn across its surface: pink-hued seashells and a jet-black lump of rock that’s clearly been manipulated by earthbending into a crude hand gesture and the remnants of a rather haphazard flower crown. In a frame at his bedside, there is an incredibly poor doodled rendition of what she assumes to be her brother and his friends.

She doesn’t allow her gaze to linger long. It isn’t as if there’s much to see; it really is an awful drawing.

“The artist captured your hair’s likeness quite well,” she says to Zuko, whose mouth, predictably, drops open in affront. Not giving him a chance to defend himself, she continues: “Are we ever going to make it to the second stop of this tour? Unless, of course, you expect me to sleep on the floor.”

“Why would I make you sleep on the floor,” says Zuko, but Azula is already swanning from the room.

He’s given her the chambers directly across from his, because he may be many things but above all else her brother is soft as bruised fruit and as predictable as its rot. The bed is crisply made, silken red sheets and pillows arranged just so, and the windows have been opened to let in the late autumn breeze. It’s sparse, the bare bones of a place to call her own.

“…and I found an unabridged copy of Love Amongst the Dragons,” Zuko is saying when Azula deigns to listen to him again, as enthusiastic as she would expect him to be about something so plebeian. “You could, uh. Borrow it, if you want? This one has the whole Dragon Empress soliloquy from act three, and. The sunset metaphor is a little overdone, but it helps explain her motivations from the—”

As easily as she has always been able to, Azula interrupts him. “We’re nearer to the gardens.”

“—second scene, and — what?”

“We’re nearer to the gardens,” she repeats.

“Oh,” he says, quieter. His eyes flicker to meet hers, and then fall away. “Yeah. We, uh. Is that...okay?”

Azula settles herself on top of that pristine bedspread, taking pleasure in how little the mattress gives beneath her. Firm enough to keep her sharp. “I was only making a statement of fact, Zuzu. There’s no need to act all soppy.”

“Oh,” he says again. “Right.” She cannot discern why, but he sounds disappointed about this, as if she has failed a test.

She bristles. “You may leave now.”

“I — are you sure? I can, um.” His hands twist together in the precise manner that a Fire Lord’s should not. “Are you hungry? I think there was roast duck for lunch, I could go—”

“Zuzu,” says Azula, “I have been traveling all morning, and I am tired.”

“Right, of course. Sorry. I’ll. I’ll go, then?”

“If it isn’t too much trouble,” Azula says, dry.

He gives her a final parting glance, already hovering on the threshold of the room. His eyes, always a purer gold than hers, are round and sad beneath the fringe of his hair. There is an expectant pause, as if the world itself is waiting.

Azula turns away first. The door shuts behind him, and his footsteps are a ghost’s as he leaves.

**

She will notice, later, that a seashell has been placed on her wardrobe. It is ivory, with an interior of rosy flesh. She will trace her fingers across its sharp edge, and recognize it as twin to those she saw in Zuko’s chambers.

**

Being in the palace again is an exercise in composure. More light streams in through the high windows than it once did, yet shadows still linger around corners, and the servants bow their heads to her in deferential fear even as they gently chide her brother into eating more. Sometimes, they go so far as to tease him. When he smiles and ducks his head, she can find no trace at all of their father in his face.

During her stay at the High Temple, the Sages scheduled her days to the minute. Routine breeds discipline, and Azula had knelt at the altar of both her whole life, before she shattered beneath the weight of a crown that never touched her head. It was integral to her healing, the Sages claimed, to provide her with familiar patterns in an unfamiliar environment. She ate breakfast at dawn; she offered blessings to Agni and observed the Sages in court; for an hour each afternoon, she was brought to the library and permitted to read whatever text caught her interest. Meditation was mandatory; the dining room still bears scorch marks from an ill-tempered outburst of lightning in her first month.

At the palace, there is endless freedom. A guard is assigned to her: two Kyoshi warriors, who rib Zuko as though he is their brother and not hers when he comes by. No matter how she turns it over, Azula cannot determine whether the warriors have been instructed to defend her, or to defend against her. But despite their constant, steady presence, they do not restrict her movement. She is permitted to walk where she wishes to, and eat when she wishes to, and speak to whom she wishes. Meditation is not mandatory.

She finds herself falling into the practice anyway. The candle flames wax and wane in tandem with her inhales, her exhales, and the dark behind her closed eyes is one of her own choosing.

Zuko is busy — busier than her, which she studiously pretends does not rankle — and therefore it is easy to ignore him. He seeks her out often, but when his visits yield only clipped responses and pointed silences, he will at last take the hint and retreat. He may be a slow learner, but any animal struck enough times will eventually tuck its tail.

Too, he now has friends, which is another thing that she must pretend does not rankle. She is forced to practice a mere two weeks into her stay, when she enters the dining room for a late lunch and discovers that the brazen Water Tribe boy has beaten her to the last of the hippo-oxtail skewers.

He is the picture of wide-eyed surprise for only a glancing moment, and then he swallows with more drama than she believes necessary. “Y’know, I was starting to think Zuko was pulling my leg about you being back,” he says once he has regained control of his mouth. “You’re looking...non-murderous.”

Azula gives him a smile that shows all of her teeth.

“Not-as-murderous-as-you-could-be,” he amends, and tears off another bite of meat. “The hair’s a nice touch. Go at it with a pair of scissors yourself, did you?”

She had, in fact. Not the way that she’d gone at it two and a half years ago, on the day that she — that Mother — well. It doesn’t matter.

This time, she’d gone at it in the quiet solitude of the High Temple’s washrooms, entirely alone, not a single voice to disrupt the silence. Her hair had grown long at the Temple, reaching to nearly her mid-spine, in a perfect, unbroken sheet that made her itch to look at. Now, it is cropped to her jaw and jagged with it. She hasn’t yet decided how it makes her feel.

Without meaning to, she touches a hand to the shaggy ends. Her reply is softer than it should be. “Yes.”

The Water Tribe boy tilts his head at her. He doesn’t wear his emotions so openly, the way her brother does. There is something incalculable in the blue depths of his steady eyes. “Huh,” he finally says, returning to his lunch. “I don’t know if it suits you, Princess.”

Azula blinks. It takes a floundering, humiliating moment to find her footing. “Excuse me?”

“It’s kind of...messy,” he says. “Aren’t you supposed to be—” He waves his hand lazily, as though to encompass her entire being. “Proper and put together? That was, like. Your whole thing.”

“That is the point,” Azula says, seething. “And I did not come here for my haircut to be insulted by a peasant.”

He looks up at that. She expects him to be offended, but instead his mouth slants, amused. He says, “There you are.”

Azula walks away from that conversation distinctly more confused than she entered it.

**

Zuzu is telling her that she can’t call his friends peasants.

“And anyway, it’s not even true,” he says, his arms folded across his chest. Azula suspects that his advisors have insisted that this makes him appear older than his eighteen years, but his advisors are doddering fools. It only emphasizes his youth, like a child playing dress-up in their parent’s clothes. “Sokka and Katara are Hakoda’s kids, and Hakoda is Chief of the Southern Water Tribe, so they’re basically royalty—”

“Do not presume to place us in the same category as those peasants,” Azula says, lightly, solely to watch him struggle with wrangling his temper.

“They’re not—”

“I cannot believe he tattled on me,” she continues.

“He didn’t,” says Zuko, still scowling. “Aika did.”

Azula lifts her brow to indicate that she hasn’t the faintest idea who that is.

“One of your guards,” Zuko says, and points with much vehemence at the Kyoshi warrior to Azula’s left and several paces back. “Hello, Aika.”

“Hello, Fire Lord Zuko,” says Aika. There’s a touch of laughter in her tone.

Zuko gives Azula a look. Azula sighs. “Hello, Aika. Why, pray tell, did you tattle on me to our dear Zuzu?”

“Sokka is a friend,” says Aika, “and I look out for my friends, Princess Azula.”

**

The High Temple taught Azula a great deal. It taught her to seek calm within herself, a calm unattached from what is earned and what is deserved. It taught her to sit with nothing but her own mind for company, and not fall prey to the voices inside of it. It taught her to stumble in the middle of a firebending kata without worrying what the punishment for such a mistake might be.

It did not, however, teach her the complex intricacies of interacting with people her age. All of the Sages at the Temple were many years her senior; her only contact with children was when Zuko would visit, and those would often be few and far-between, for she loathed to let him look at her in such a state. Most of their conversations would end with bickering just this side of too cruel, or an emptiness that neither of them could fill.

All of this to say: she attempts to apologize to the Water Tribe boy, and it goes in a rather different direction entirely.

“Don’t do that,” he says, as the first syllables of ‘sorry’ leave her mouth. “That’s...eugh. Stop.”

Azula stops. Not because she is listening to him, but because she didn’t want to speak the words in the first place. They have such a terrible aftertaste. “You would like me to continue calling you a peasant, then,” she says.

“Well, no,” he says. “It’s rude. And, by the way, not true.”

“Yes, I’ve heard,” says Azula, rolling her eyes.

“But you don’t need to apologize,” he continues. “It’s fine. Water under the bridge, or whatever.”

“Water under the bridge,” Azula repeats, flatly.

“My people are historically pretty good with water-related things. Including metaphors.”

“It’s an idiom,” says Azula, “and you, if I’m not mistaken, are a non-bender.”

This, at last, claws a reaction from him. His mouth puckers as if he has bitten into an underripe plum, and he shuts the heavy tome he’d been poring over when she found him here, in a tucked-away nook of the library’s second level. Yet whatever wound it is she’s scratched, it is an old one. His expression passes from displeased to closed-off in the span of a moment, and Azula wonders at how he can possibly stand her brother and his constant, mercurial moods, which he flaunts for all to bear witness to.

He says, after a pause, “Play Pai Sho with me.”

“Why should I?”

“Because I’m bored, and Zuko hates it,” he says. “And you, Princess, still owe me an apology.”

The High Temple did not teach her whether Pai Sho is an acceptable olive branch by which a friendship might be extended. But she is not at the High Temple, and this is not a friendship.

Azula smiles, with less of her teeth than the last, and proceeds to beat Sokka of the Southern Water Tribe quite handily at their first game of Pai Sho. She then permits him to win their second.

It is, as she understands it, apology enough.

**

Most days, Fire Lord Zuko might be found at one hour or another by the turtleduck ponds. He goes there to think, Aika explains, though Azula hasn’t asked. Think or nap. No one is quite certain which, except for the groundskeeper, but the groundskeeper has a particular soft spot for their young Fire Lord and refuses to break his trust.

Azula runs her comb through the layers of her hair. They’re growing longer, the longest of them nearing her shoulders. She meets Aika’s gaze in the mirror. “How sweet,” she says, dry, and watches Aika’s lips curve.

“You could find out yourself,” Aika says later, as she trails Azula to breakfast. “You have leave to visit the gardens, Princess Azula.”

“It’s true!” says Emi. She is peppier than Aika, and somehow manages to make everything sound delightful. If what Azula has picked up from scattered bits of gossip is true, Emi and Ty Lee have become fast friends, although Ty Lee is still in training on Kyoshi Island. “They’re lovely this time of year. And all times of year. We could go there this afternoon?”

“I have no desire to watch Fire Lord Dum-Dum splash in the water with turtleducklings,” says Azula, sharply.

Her guards do not mention the gardens again.

**

“You know,” Sokka says, while Azula contemplates what moves she has available to her with what tiles he has not yet captured, “I have the weirdest feeling that I’ve seen more of you in the last couple of weeks than I’ve seen Zuko. Isn’t that weird? I find it pretty weird.”

Such an asinine statement does not deserve a response; Azula does not offer one.

“I mean, I guess it’s not that weird,” Sokka amends, because he does strange things sometimes, such as admitting when he is wrong. “He’s always either in meetings or passed out in the rafters.”

This statement is vaguely intriguing rather than asinine, so Azula glances up. The moment she does, she realizes that he was not admitting that he was wrong at all. He was luring her, and she allowed herself to be baited. Smugness radiates off of him.

“Surely you share meals together,” she says, refusing to let him provoke her. “You seem to have made the dining hall your second home.”

Sokka refuses to let her provoke him either. “Honestly, I kind of have,” he says, “which actually makes it double weird that I basically never see him.” He places a sky bison tile and leans back in his seat, fingers laced behind his head, posture that of someone with not a care in the world. It’s a valiant attempt, but Azula sees right through it, just as she sees right through what he won’t speak out loud.

“He has an entire palace staff,” she replies, in answer to a question he hasn’t posed. “Swaths of people whose sole job it is to ensure that he remains alive and upright.”

There’s one fire flake left on the plate between them. Sokka takes it and says, through his mouthful, “Yeah, but you’re forgetting one crucial thing, Princess. The palace staff have an entire Zuko, whose sole job it is to ensure that their lives are made as difficult as possible.”

It is an unfortunately salient point. And now that Sokka has brought it to her attention, she cannot help but catalogue the shape of these past few weeks, her mind catching on pieces that she did not notice before. That first day she arrived, Zuzu only thought there had been roast duck for lunch, though it had been late afternoon by that point and he should have already eaten. He is often in the gardens, and while the rumor that he naps there remains a rumor, the fact that it spread in the first place indicates some degree of truth to it. Azula does not typically return to her chambers for sleep until very late in the night, yet she cannot recall a single time that her brother’s door was shut before she arrived.

“Hmm,” she says. “Is that why you are always here, then, taking up space in our family home? To make sure my brother doesn’t fall victim to his own negligence?”

To her surprise, Sokka laughs — loud and obnoxious, the line of his throat bared. Zuzu would do the same, she imagines; expose a vulnerable part of himself to her, not considering that she might exploit it. “Princess,” he says, “I’m going to be Ambassador for the South. I’m here because I’m doing a job. Or, well. I’m shadowing the person whose job I’m going to be taking over, someday.”

This, too, is a surprise. She carefully stifles her reaction. “I see.”

“But, I mean, getting to hang out with Zuko doesn’t hurt,” he goes on, those sea storm eyes tracking her fingers as they displace his sky bison tile, replace it with a lotus. “Would be better if I could actually, y’know. Hang out with him.”

Azula sinks into a contemplative silence. It burns, a bit, to accept that she has failed. She has always prided herself on noticing a person’s weak spots, their tells, the soft spaces where a blade can slide through to draw blood. And naive, poor Zuko has never been able to hide any of his from her. That she’s had to have her attention drawn to them by an outsider stings.

Though, she supposes Sokka is not so much an outsider as she would have believed. Once, this might have worsened the sting. Now it does something very strange, and seems to almost lessen it.

“It’s both, by the way,” he says, apropos of nothing.

“...What.”

“Water under the bridge,” he says, absently, as he transfers a tile to its square. “It’s both. An idiom, and a metaphor.”

He beams at her, satisfied. Azula gazes down at the board for the first time in minutes to discover that in her distraction, he has somehow managed to corner her, and she has no moves left.

**

Her brother is not a child. If he is not eating, if he is not sleeping, that is his business, and his alone. It is not Azula’s responsibility to coax him into basic self-care. She can nearly hear the distant, far-away echo of Mother’s voice, imploring her to reconsider. But if Mother had not wished for her precious eldest child to die in a grave of his own making, perhaps she should have brought him with her when she fled for a brighter future.

**

Azula hears about the first assassination attempt from Aika and Emi whispering about it as though she is not a skilled eavesdropper. It is absolutely unnacceptable.

**

“It’s not the first,” Zuzu says, as if she won’t smack him upside the head for it. “Ow!”

“I am afraid you aren’t appreciating the gravity of this, brother,” Azula says, neatly bringing her offending hand behind her back so that Zuko can’t glare at it. “Where was your guard? Are they as incompetent as their charge?”

Zuko mumbles something inaudible. Then, when Azula threatens him with her palm again, he says, sullenly, “Gave them the night off.”

“You what,” Sokka squawks, because he is here in Zuko’s chambers as well, for some ridiculous reason. He’d entered practically on Azula’s heels, which she is firmly electing to ignore. While she has been at the High Temple, this Water Tribesman has apparently squirmed his way into their family tree, at some strange, jutting angle. She will dissect that at a later date; right now, she is merely grateful that he is expressing a level of frustration equivalent to the situation. “Zuko. Buddy. Why in the name of Tui’s big toe would you do that.”

“Look, it’s fine,” Zuko says. “There’s assassination attempts all the time. I can’t just not give them a night off.”

“Uh, yeah, you can, because that’s literally what they’re here for.”

“But I—”

“Fire Lord Zuko,” says Healer Jiyuu, in a long-suffering tone, as her fingers lapse in their gentle probing of Zuko’s abdomen, “please refrain from squirming. You’ll tear the stitches.”

Zuko obeys. Azula regards Healer Jiyuu with a renewed sense of admiration; it is not anybody who can get her brother to cease his relentless fidgeting. “Sorry,” he says, shame-faced. “But you two are making a bigger deal out of this than it is. And — since when are you guys friends, anyway?”

“We’re not friends,” they say simultaneously, identically scathing.

“...I don’t like this,” Zuko decides.

“That’s interesting, brother,” says Azula. “For what I do not like is the thought of the Fire Nation leaderless, abandoned by a ruler who chose to throw his life away rather than protect it. Are you such a Dum-Dum that you cannot recognize what chaos our country would be flung into, should you die?”

“That’s not — it wouldn’t—”

“Our dearest Uncle has already made it rather clear that he refuses the position, and you, fortunately, have no tiny spawn running underfoot. Have you considered any of this, Zuzu?”

She is expecting a frustrated fit of temper. She is not expecting Zuko to go very still, and blink up at her with eyes the size of whole moons. “But I have,” he says, with a solemnity that does not suit him. “Azula, I made you my heir months ago.” There is a pause while he watches her the same way he used to watch their father during dinner, waiting for the lurking viper to show his fangs. “...Didn’t I tell you?”

There’s a dull sound of flesh to flesh as Sokka slaps a hand to his face. It registers dimly through the pulse pounding in Azula’s ears, the high, whining rush of blood that separates her from her body, that makes her no longer of this world.

“Azula?”

She forces her gaze to meet Zuko’s, and does not allow herself to cave to the tender-bellied fear pooling in his expression. “You absolute fucking fool,” she snarls, and sweeps from the room before he has a chance to do something stupid, such as call her back, or she has a chance to do something equally stupid, such as listen.

**

There is an inexplicably tiny earthbender in the training courtyard when Azula arrives. It is the same inexplicably tiny earthbender who, at twelve, managed to hold her own quite well against Azula and her temporarily appropriated Dai Li agents, though not well enough. Now, at fourteen, she does not seem to harbor a grudge for past slights.

“Crazy Blue!” she greets cheerfully as Azula lingers at the courtyard’s border. “Yeesh, your heart’s going haywire. You here to punch something?”

“Do all of my idiot brother’s friends live in the walls of this palace?” Azula says, for lack of anything else to offer. The skittering, furious panic from Zuko’s chambers has guttered into a coiled anger that she must grudgingly admit may indeed be best resolved through punching something, but she does not wish to confess that she has been perceived so thoroughly.

The little earthbender — Toph, she thinks — seems to know it anyway, if the widening of her smirk is any indication. This is the sole warning that Azula gets before the ground beneath her is being yanked away, and she is fighting as she has not fought in nearly three years.

**

After, they collapse sweat-soaked and bruised on the courtyard steps. If Azula were asked, she would insist that she won; she suspects that if Toph were asked, she would insist the same.

“Y’know, when you’re not trying to kill us, you’re a great sparring partner,” says Toph, her eyes closed to the sun, legs sprawled so that the soles of her feet do not touch the ground. “Can I ask what got you all worked up in the first place? It’s Zuko, isn’t it? What’d he do this time?”

Azula absorbs this rapid-fire interrogation with the stoicism her torture endurance training bestowed upon her, a lifetime ago. “He has made me his heir,” she says at length, drawing a water-cooled towel across her brow.

She is not certain what reaction she is anticipating from Toph. She is not certain what reaction she is wanting from Toph. But all Toph does is snort incredulously and say, “That’s it?”

“...I only found out this morning,” says Azula, trying not to bristle at the realization that apparently all of Zuko’s friends knew about this before she did. That is insignificant. What matters is that he did it in the first place.

“Huh,” Toph says. She has started picking her nose. Azula can’t decide whether she admires her callousness or is aggravated by it, and she is just beginning to lean towards aggravated when Toph speaks again. “We weren’t exactly happy about it either, if it makes you feel better.”

Azula isn’t sure what it makes her feel. “At least Zuzu doesn’t surround himself with friends as moronic as he is.”

“Word of advice,” says Toph, “steer clear of Sugar Queen. She holds a grudge like nobody’s business and she definitely has it out for you.”

It takes very little effort to draw the line from ‘Sugar Queen’ to the waterbender who shackled Azula to the stone floor, whose face was the last clear thing she saw before the searing tears fractured everything to pieces and she was hauled away to be judged beneath Agni’s eye. Azula’s hatred for that girl dulls slightly against the knowledge that she is, apparently, the only one of Zuzu’s gaggle of loud-mouthed companions smart enough to understand what poison runs through Azula’s veins.

It is not a poison that can be let. All it can do is ruin.

“Also,” Toph says, as if she has just had the thought. “He’s not moronic.” A beat, and she amends: “Well, he is, but — not about this.”

Azula scoffs. “You must be kidding. This is the worst offender.”

“Nah. I think this is just love.”

Not giving Azula a moment to process that unfathomably baffling sentiment, Toph hauls back and lands a knuckle-sharp blow to her bicep. The impact lances down her muscle, rendering the tips of her fingers a bit numb.

“Agni,” Azula swears, impressed despite herself. “Dare I ask what that was for?”

Toph’s answering smile is sharkish. “I win.”

**

Curled under the bent boughs of the barren mango tree, Zuko appears small and young, round-cheeked like a little boy and peaceful like he has lived a life other than the one he was given. Azula can understand why the groundskeeper keeps this secret; lying here, Zuzu is almost insultingly vulnerable. She could draw a knife from her belt and plunge it between his shoulder blades, until he choked on the blood. She could bring a palm to his temple and shoot him bright with lightning, provide his face with some symmetry in the moments before flesh blistered to bone.

She gathers her robes around her, and settles into the grass at his side.

**

(Long ago, when they were little enough to be held in Mother’s lap and deserve it, they played out here in the verdant green. The birdsong was clear. There were terrible things festering below an endless blue sky, and the monsters had already bared their teeth, but they were innocent enough to believe it was all only pretend.)

(Perhaps in another world, their shadows still chase each other. Perhaps they are still laughing.)

**

Zuko wakes with a nose scrunch and a languid stretch that freezes when his fingers brush against Azula’s knee. “Zula?” he mumbles, though he has yet to open his eyes. “S’that you?”

“There are no less than seventy-four ways I could incapacitate you and claim your throne for myself in this moment,” says Azula by way of answer. “Honestly, Zuzu. It’s a wonder you’ve survived this long.”

To this, Zuko responds most irrationally, and simply rolls over so that he is turned towards her, tucking his face into the bend of his arm. His eyes remain shut, and there’s a grin tugging at his mouth. She would chalk this up to his sleep deprivation being more severe than she realized, but she fears that her brother was possibly dropped on his head too many times as a child and therefore his behavior is both chronic and incurable.

“M’surprised as you,” he says, sleepily.

“I cannot fathom the appeal,” Azula says after a minute of observing him. He has dried leaves tangled in his hair. “There is a perfectly lovely bed waiting for you, and yet you choose to wriggle about in the dirt like a worm. Is that what you are, Zuzu? A worm?”

The half of his face that is visible to her seems to be stifling a giggle. “Mm. Maybe. Fire Lord Worm.”

“How far the mighty fall,” she says, sardonic.

The empty branches rattle above them in the whistling breeze. It is the waning of autumn, now, and everything has begun to die, but it does not feel sad. There are already enough ghosts here, Azula supposes. A graveyard can only ever be just that.

“My bed’s too soft,” Zuko says abruptly. She glances down at him, at the dark arc of his lashes against his unburned cheek. His chest is rising and falling with deep, slow breaths, and there’s a hush to his voice that makes her think he is on the verge of drifting off again, but he does not. He seems content to lie there, unable to see, a hair’s breadth from her, and trust that she will not harm him. “So it’s...it’s easier. To be outside.”

“Ah,” says Azula. “I forgot you were once a peasant.”

Zuko makes a grumbly sound. “Refugee.”

“Call it what you will. That must be why you became so close with all of your little peasant friends. Shared experience.”

“They’re not — that’s not — Toph’s a Beifong,” he sputters. “You’re so — ugh.”

Azula permits a slight smile to pull at her lips. The light has coaxed a deep auburn tint from his ebony hair, and dressed down in his casual robes he looks like any other teenager, loose-limbed and at ease, burdened by nothing except a universe laid before their feet. She can’t imagine where his royal headpiece has gone, but she suspects that some harried servant is currently combing through the palace for it.

He is something distinctly undignified, her brother. Even two years after his coronation, he remains closer in temperament and decorum to a feral rat scooped off the street than a prince raised to the crown; she has heard the stories from Sokka, of how Zuko has been caught sneaking in through the windows with his beloved dao strapped to his back, how he can never remember to let the servants pour him his tea.

It is not how they were taught. But they were not taught this, either: to sit side by side in the honeyed afternoon sun, scars bared without fear of how they may be opened.

“You have a great deal of audacity, Zuzu,” she comments, after a while.

He manages some sort of preening shoulder shuffle that he must have learned from Sokka. “Thanks.”

“To steal the throne that was given to me,” she continues, “and then mark me down as your heir. It’s all rather ostentatious. Nearly like something out of your precious Love Amongst the Dragons.”

At last, Zuko slits one of his eyes to half-mast. They are a brilliant gold; a clean, pure gold, the sort of gold that hers are not. The sort of gold that beckons a new, better day. “I knew you liked it,” he says, and now he truly is grinning.

“Of course I do,” she sniffs. “But I refuse to discuss it with you, for your opinions are abysmal.”

“They are not!”

“You are an incorrigible idealist. If it were up to you, the little brother would never die, and they’d all go soaring off together on a grand adventure to demonstrate the power of friendship, or something equally nauseating.”

“The little brother shouldn’t have died,” Zuko says. “It completely ruined Princess Erisa’s narrative arc in the third act!”

“She had to lose him,” says Azula. “Her grief is what guided her back from the edge of absolute corruption. Had he lived, she would have lost herself instead.”

Zuko is quiet for a long time. “Maybe,” he finally says, and he is looking up at her with a softness that she cannot bear. “But if he’d lived, maybe love could have saved her, instead of grief.”

It is not a conscious choice to stand, but Azula suddenly finds herself upright, Zuko staring up at her with his mouth gone slack, his brow furrowed. She clears her throat, feeling the hammer of her heart in the soft of her jaw. “You’ve proven me right,” she says. “Your opinions are abysmal, and I refuse to hear any more of them.”

“Azula—”

She abandons him there, beneath the mango tree. She does not look back; Mother did not. She could not have. If she had, Azula can’t imagine that she would have been able to keep going.

Or perhaps that is merely another story she must tell herself.

**

The girl in the mirror is not a girl Azula recognizes. Her face has grown sharper, older; the roundness that once clung to her has been whittled away, a carver paring wood to its core, and the person beneath is a stranger. She has higher cheekbones, and a mouth that does not know how to properly smile, and her hair is a shaggy, jagged mess that lands past her shoulders.

Mother’s hair had been long, Azula remembers. Long and soft, a dark waterfall cascading to the middle of her back. When she’d pulled them into her lap, it would fall around them, enclosing them in warmth, guarding them from what lay beyond. But it had been nothing more than an illusion.

The girl in the mirror brings her palm to the uneven lengths of her hair, the asymmetrical slashes where she hacked at it without caring what the end result would be. At the High Temple, she did not allow the Sages to meddle with it; hers are the only hands she has trusted to touch it, and even then only reluctantly.

Mother used to do their hair, hers and Zuko’s, the two of them settled together on the edge of the bath, elbowing the other for space. She would draw oils through their fluffy, half-dried tresses, smooth them with a fine-toothed comb. Her fingers were always calm and steady, practiced. The memory of it is hazy and ephemeral, smoke curling into thin air, and Azula shivers at the ghost of a touch to the nape of her neck. Perhaps there will always be a ghost there.

She meets the eyes of the girl in the mirror, and turns away.

**

She slips into Zuko’s chambers that evening and forcibly wrenches the proposed trade agreements he’s been bent over out of his clutching fingers, tossing them across the room so that they flutter carelessly to the carpet. “You,” she says, “are making Ponytail sad. And I haven’t the time nor the energy to deal with his mopey sighing, so you are going to have dinner with him. Now.”

“Ponytail?” Zuko’s face is an exercise in complication. Azula cannot understand how he doesn’t exhaust himself, with his vast myriad of emotions. “Wait, I thought you were mad at me.”

Azula rolls her eyes. “I am always mad at you, brother. Do keep up.”

“...Oh,” says Zuko, and now his face is doing something infinitely more annoying than before, and sliding into a dopey smile. “Okay. We can, uh — I guess I could eat. But I do need to finish reading those agreements, they’re expecting me to have an answer by tomorrow and—”

“Zuzu.”

“—I’ve barely gotten through a page, there’s so much math, why is there so much math—”

“Dum-Dum,” Azula snaps.

“—it’s just trade, not science, I don’t — what?”

“Leave your trade agreements in the care of those with enough intelligence to handle them,” she says, “and go have dinner with your dumb friend.”

“Sokka isn’t dumb,” says Zuko, because of course this is what he has latched onto.

“He chooses to spend time with you,” says Azula. “That constitutes a critical lack of brain activity.”

“And I can handle them! I just — they. Take a while. To read.”

“Yes,” Azula says, slowly, “which is why it would be conducive to pass them on to somebody for whom it doesn’t take a while.”

“You...” His gaze darts to her, and she sees the precise moment that he realizes what she is telling him. “You’d do that?”

“My patience is wearing thin, Zuzu.”

He gets his act together then, scrambling out from behind his desk as she knows he has been itching to do for hours. At the door, he gracelessly spins on his heel to thank her, and he won’t be long, and she really doesn’t have to, and—

“If you do not leave this instant,” says Azula, “I will give you a scar to match the one on your chest.”

Never let it be said that her brother is completely reckless. He can recognize a true threat when he hears one.

**

She walks by the two of them later, visible through the propped open doors that lead into the dining room. Their heads are bent together, and in a senseless fit of poetry, Azula cannot help but think that they look rather like Zuko’s dual dao: two halves of the same whole. She lingers a beat longer than necessary, marveling at the sound of their giddy laughter, before continuing on.

Somehow, she is not quick enough.

“You!” Sokka announces from behind, just before she is able to turn the corner and escape. “See, Zuko, I was right. There was somebody there.”

“You already finished the agreements?” Zuko says, a hint of a whine in his voice. “How’d you do that so fast?”

Azula pivots to quell them both with a raised brow, only to find that they are easily distractable and not to be quelled. There’d been a half emptied bottle on the table between them in the dining room, and they wobble a bit as they stand there, Sokka reaching over to flick Zuko on the forehead, Zuko almost overbalancing onto the floor as he squirms away from the touch.

“She’s not operating on — on like half an hour of sleep,” Sokka says. “Silly.”

Zuko pouts. “Not silly,” he says, looking rather silly.

“I am...going to bed,” Azula says archly, though she feels somewhat awkward with it, for she cannot be certain they are even listening to her anymore, or that they remember she is here at all. “Good night.”

She must admit to being startled when they simultaneously cry “No!”

“It’s not that late yet,” Sokka says, once they have hurried to reach her and are nipping along at her heels as she begins making her way back to her chambers. “There’s like, ages left in the day. C’mon, live a little!”

“We could do sword bending,” Zuko suggests eagerly, from her other side.

Sokka leans around Azula to give him an unimpressed side-eye. “You’ll die.”

“I won’t!”

“You’ll literally fall over and impale yourself, I can already picture it—”

“That is not true!”

“And then the guards are gonna ask me how could I have let the Fire Lord fall over and impale himself on his own swords and I’m gonna have to be like, I tried to stop him, I swear, and they’re not gonna believe me so I’ll go to jail forever—”

“That — that wouldn’t happen, I wouldn’t let you go to jail—”

“You’ll be dead! You won’t be able to stop it!” Sokka nods firmly, as if he has made an incredibly salient point, and says, “We’re playing Pai Sho.”

Zuko comes to a dead halt and stares at them in horror. “No.”

“Yes,” says Sokka.

“Noooooo,” Zuko moans, burying his face in his hands. “I hate Pai Sho.”

“Well I hate being accused of murder because my best friend is an impulsive shithead.”

**

They play Pai Sho.

**

“You should take that tile,” Zuko says, sitting up on his knees to point across the board at a tile that Azula absolutely should not take, unless she wants to give Sokka an immediate and brutal path to total victory.

“I revoked your speaking privileges,” says Azula. “Why are you still speaking?”

“I thought you were on my side,” Sokka complains. “What are you doing, giving pointers to the enemy?”

“They are horrible pointers,” says Azula. “Perhaps he thinks he’s helping you.”

From her position splayed out on the couch, Toph cackles. “Ouch, Sparky. I’m impressed by how bad you are at this. It sounds like even I could do better.”

Zuko launches a pillow at her; she catches it right in the face and immediately hurls herself at him, tackling him to the floor until they are rolling around on the carpet in a tangle of jabby elbows and kicking legs. Blithely, Azula ignores them. It appears they are an identical breed of uncivilized hooligan, and she supposes she can only be glad that they are yanking at each other’s hair instead of hers.

“Watch out, watch out!” Sokka yelps when they knock into the edge of the table and his precariously perched glass of rice wine teeters. “Can’t you two do this outside?”

“I,” Zuko says, as haughty as one can be while caught in a headlock by a fourteen year old, “wanted to do sword bending.”

Toph’s expression lights up. “Sword bending!”

“What — Toph, no, stop it, put that terrifyingly menacing grin away—”

**

“I was so close to beating you,” Sokka says mournfully, slumped on the courtyard steps. The tip of his ear is still pathetically red where Toph had yanked on it until he trudged reluctantly after them. “Why am I friends with a bunch of philistines? I had a whole strategy planned out and everything.”

“You would have lost anyway,” says Azula. When he cracks an eye open to glare at her, she smiles in response, and there are no teeth to it.

In the courtyard, Zuko’s dual dao sing silver below the liquid moonlight. He is a slip of a shadow against the dark, deftly leaping and spinning to evade the chunks of earth that Toph rips from the ground like flesh stripped from a wound. She tracks his movements steadily, taking note of their fluidity, their elegance, brushstrokes painted by a delicate hand. Once, they would have seemed to her a weakness, a physical embodiment of his failure to firebend as a prince of the Fire Nation should.

Sokka, who has followed her gaze, says, “I never would have pegged you for a pushover.”

“Pardon?”

He does not flinch at the steel of her voice. “You heard me,” he says, in what she thinks is a teasing way. “The trade agreements. You didn’t have to do that for him.”

“I didn’t do it for him,” says Azula. “I enjoy reading them. They are fascinating, if you are not a cretin who prefers dirtying their royal robes with sword fighting practice.”

“Sword bending,” Sokka corrects. “And, okay, your strange nerd interests aside—”

“You choose to study complex mathematical equations in your spare time, Ponytail.”

“Listen, I’m not ashamed! One day I’ll get you and Zuko to appreciate how scientific principles can be applied to—” He cuts himself off when her grin goes a little droll, raising his hands. “Yeah, yeah. Whatever. My point is that whether you enjoy it or not, you could have let him suffer alone all night.”

Azula sets her jaw and watches as Toph trips Zuko on a sneaky jut of stone.

“He’s far too skinny,” she finally says, not quite as cutting as she means it to be. “It sets a bad precedent for our country, if its leader won’t even look after himself.”

“...Uh huh.”

“Shut up,” she snaps. Her arms wrap around her bent knees, tugging them closer to her chest. There is an unsettled, torn-loose sensation in her chest, behind her ribs, and she cannot name it. “Agni. You are as irritating as he is.”

Sokka leans back, staring up at the sky. “Must come with the territory.” He gives his boomerang a gentle toss; it arcs upwards and then returns to him, as easy as a parent calling their child home. In the evening dim, the blue of his eyes is ocean-deep. “He likes having you here, in case you were wondering. He missed you when you were gone.”

There is a blunt force to the words that strikes like a rusted blade. “Yes, I’m sure he did,” Azula says. “That spiderleg scar across his chest must have brought back so many fond memories.”

“I mean, probably not,” says Sokka, because he is perpetually immune to her barbed wire sneers. “But — I dunno. Katara could do a lot of things to me, and I’d forgive her for every single one.”

Azula’s lip curls. “Why?”

“She’s my baby sister, or whatever,” says Sokka, and cuts a grin up at her. “For what it’s worth, I don’t mind having you here, either.”

This is such a sickening display of affection that Azula is rendered temporarily speechless, and she glowers out at the courtyard while Toph roundly pummels Zuko into the ground. The sight of his defeat is satisfying, and she permits her grip around her legs to slacken, a knot untangling in her sternum.

“It is not worth nothing,” she offers at length, and is pleased that the truth of it does not make her flinch.

**

The four of them sleep that night beneath the stars. Zuko’s guards attempt to wheedle him out of it, but he is as stubborn as he has always been, and they are forced to relent. Blankets are hauled out from the wardrobe chambers and brought to the turtleduck pond, where all sensible animals have long gone to sleep and are most displeased by the ruckus being kicked up.

It takes Toph and Sokka less than seconds to fall asleep, a habit that Azula is mildly horrified by. Even ensconced in the secure walls of the palace, she often has trouble drifting into dreams, her body refusing to accept that it is safe until it is too exhausted to put up a fight, and tonight there is a skittering alertness crawling under her skin that she cannot claw out of.

She ends up at the edge of the pond, boots and socks arranged neatly next to her, pants rolled up to the calf. The water is almost ice in the cold, but she breathes deeply through her nose until it warms enough that feeling returns to her legs.

When Zuko joins her, he is silent, and there is a blistering heartbeat of a moment where Azula is convinced that if she looks, he will be a boy again, round-eyed, all chubby baby fat and clumsy little hands. Unbroken. But that boy does not exist anymore, and neither does the girl he once called sister.

“You’re bleeding,” she notes, as he dips his feet into the water beside her. His legs are a tapestry of bruises, courtesy of Toph. “Jiyuu will have a conniption.”

“Jiyuu worries too much,” he grumbles.

Azula props herself on her elbows and her hair cascades off of her shoulders, the ends brushing the dirt. From here, Zuko’s scar is exposed to her; she can discern the precise borders of it, the palm and its fingers, the places where the fire ate deeper, deeper, as if sating itself on a feast. Their father laughed as it happened. Sometimes, she can hear it. Sometimes, she cannot remember whether it was only in her head.

As if privy to her thoughts, Zuko runs a hand through his shaggy bangs, and they fall forward to shield his scar. “I was thinking,” he begins, and then abruptly stops. His feet won’t cease roving about in the water, setting off ripples that arc across the pond’s surface and break around the resting bodies of the turtleducklings in their shells. “Um. You read the trade agreements.”

“That is an observation, not a thought, Zuzu,” she says.

He gives her a flatly unamused look, but it is smoothed over swiftly and he exhales. “You’re better at all of this than I am.”

It is surrendered with his characteristic honesty, that plain, candid guilelessness that had made him ill-suited to their house of smoke and mirrors. He does not even appear ashamed of it; he says it as though it, too, is an observation and not a thought. His eyes, when they meet hers, are clear and almost sweet. He has Mother’s eyes, Azula realizes at last. She never noticed, because he looks at her with something far fonder than Mother ever did.

She inclines her head in silent acknowledgement.

“And...and I’m trying,” he says. “But I don’t — I don’t get a lot of it, and I feel like I’m killing myself figuring it out. And I just. I don’t want to die.”

“How profound,” Azula says, and is gratified to hear him huff out a faint laugh. “Is this your roundabout way of abdicating the throne to me, brother? Because while I commend you on your superior taste, I’m afraid I must decline.”

“No, no, it’s not — what? You’re declining?”

“You just said you are not abdicating,” says Azula, taken aback by his vehemence.

“I’m not! But it’s the principle of it. You can’t decline my hypothetical abdication, that’s rude.”

“You are spending far too much time with Ponytail.”

Zuko’s answering smile is horribly tender, so Azula kicks her foot, splashing him with glittering droplets of pondwater. He starts with affront before returning the favor, except his aim is egregiously off and she remains utterly dry.

“You’re the worst,” he says, through that same smile. And then, softer, “Hypothetically, though. Would you consider...I mean, it would be. Nice. To have someone on my council who I could really trust. Like, really trust. And who doesn’t treat me like I’m a dumb kid pretending to be Fire Lord.”

“I do treat you like you’re a dumb kid pretending to be Fire Lord,” says Azula. It takes her a prolonged second to realize what she has admitted, and she flicks him with water again for daring to throw her off her rhythm. “Dum-Dum.”

“So you would consider it,” he says, pleased.

“Hypothetically,” she says. Her arms are going numb and she raises herself out of her elbow lean, rotating her wrists in her lap and considering the fact that seated like this, she and her brother are nearly of a height. From behind, with their hair down, the moonlight dulled by clouds, they might even be twins. “There are many who would urge caution in trusting me, Zuzu.”

Zuko shrugs. “I’m sort of notoriously bad at listening to caution.” A lowing wind whips through the gardens and he shudders, drawing his legs from the pond and wrapping his arms around them, resting his cheek on the point of one knee so that he can look at her. “Would it make you happy?”

“What?”

“Would it make you happy?” he repeats. “Being on my council.”

“...I don’t understand you,” Azula says, through the inexplicable ache in her throat. “What does that matter?”

“I want you to be happy,” says Zuzu, Dum-Dum, her brother, her brother, her brother, the only part of her family that still remains, the only part of it that was worth saving, the only part of it that continues holding out a hand to her, despite all the rest of it, despite having every reason not to.

Azula does not answer; she cannot answer. She feels as though the skin stretched over her ribs has been spliced open, pared apart, as though a great god’s palm has reached inside and wrested her heart from its cavity. But it is not a god’s palm. It is Zuko’s, and he is here, and he has an expression on his stupid face like he doesn’t even know what a terrible, wonderful thing it is that he has done.

He is waiting for her, she realizes, patient and ingenuous. She understands then that whatever she tells him, he will accept it without complaint. She could tell him many things, and he would accept them without complaint. It is a truth which would have once filled her with a sense of power, but now she holds it to her chest, cradling it like something precious, something delicate.

Something that may be ruined, if she does not protect it.

“You idiot,” she finally manages, and it is unforgivably fragile.

He shifts nearer to her, the vertical lines of their bodies not quite touching. She does not lean her head on his shoulder, and he does not lean his head on hers, and it is, for this infinite, fleeting moment, enough.

**

“Do you, um. Do you need help with your hair?”

“...Very well. Do your worst.”