Chapter Text
There’s plush carpeting beneath Zuko’s knees where he’s tripped on the stupid-long hem of the robes he doesn’t remember putting on, and why is the floor so soft, he’s told Uncle a hundred times to stop buying useless things and this goes so far beyond useless it’s embarrassing. They’re both well aware of their circumstances, there’s absolutely no need to pour salt in the wound by pretending their creaky, leaky lower ring flat is anything at all like the palace—
Zuko freezes, right there on the strangely plush carpeting. The strangely plush red carpeting. And not just any red, but deep, rich crimson, the kind you can’t get anywhere in the Earth Kingdom. The kind you can’t get anywhere in the world, except for—
A breath seizes in his throat, and he topples back onto his tailbone as his hands fly frantically to the heavy robes, gathering the bunched-up fabric around his legs into tight fistfuls. Precise, neat stitching. Gold embroidery. Sleeves that pool past his fingers in the loose, flowy style favored by nobles in the summer months. A flame-shaped icon at the center of his chest that he recognizes, even though he’s not supposed to be wearing it, he’s seen it countless times from below but never from above because he’s not supposed to be wearing it.
He flinches, and then pretends he hasn’t, and then tries to squirm out of the entire ensemble but can’t because his legs keep getting tangled in fabric because everything is ridiculously oversized, who on earth could possibly fit into this. He compromises by wrenching the flame-shaped icon and the dumb shoulder spikes it’s attached to off and over his head, hurling it into the far corner of the room. It makes a very satisfying thunking sound.
“Sir?” he hears from the other side of the door he’s just noticing, and why is there a door, why is it closed, it must be locked from the outside so he can’t escape, he’ll have to— “Sir, are you alright?”
…If he’s in the palace, why are they calling him sir?
(If he’s in the palace, why isn’t he in chains, why hasn’t he already been dragged before Father’s mercy to beg forgiveness and hope the other side of his face doesn’t learn what happened the last time he was on his knees before a Fire Lord, why is he still alive—)
Zuko scrambles to his feet. Ignores, very determinedly, how his robes are dragging lengths of fabric behind him. Slams the door open—
And freezes.
The two guards on the other side blink at him, as startled as if they’ve seen a ghost.
**
Neither Guardsman Ikeda nor Guardsman Afuku dislike the night shift; aside from the occasional assassination attempt, they tend to require less movement than the day shift, for which their knees are grateful. It is for this reason that they didn’t protest the last-minute schedule change yesterday, when Guardsman Zhou called in sick.
Had they known their night would involve being fist-fought by a teenager, they might have reconsidered this.
“Sir!” Ikeda wheezes, as the boy dressed in their Fire Lord’s robes — and bearing their Fire Lord’s scar — rams an elbow into her stomach hard enough that it will surely bruise. “Sir, please—”
“Get off of me!” he snarls in response, despite neither of them being on him. They are in fact trying very hard to avoid that exact situation, considering it is not often recommended to put one’s hands on one’s Fire Lord, but they are both rather tall and Fire Lord Zu— the teenager is rather…not, and they can see where it might appear as though they’re attacking him when in reality they are only attempting to evade his flailing limbs. “I’m leaving, let me go—”
“Sir,” says Afuku, and makes the grave error of extending his arm in consolation.
The baby Fire Lord bites.
**
“You knock,” says Afuku.
“You knock,” says Ikeda. “You’re the one who let him slip away.”
Afuku takes a deep, bracing breath, and raises his knuckles to Ambassador Sokka’s chamber doors.
**
“Sixteen,” Sokka says, hollow.
“He might have been fifteen, sir,” says Afuku, whose hand looks distinctly and suspiciously gnawed-upon. “Ow.”
Ikeda removes the heel of her boot from his foot. “That isn’t helping, you fool.”
“…He might have been seventeen?”
“Please stop talking.”
Perched on the edge of his bed, Sokka buries his head in his hands. This is not the sort of conversation he wants to be having with no shirt on and his mind still half in dreamland. “Okay,” he says, muffled into his palms. “Well, I’m sure he was just…confused. He’ll realize what’s happening and come straight back.”
**
Zuko has no idea what’s going on, and he can’t think around the thick taste of blood in his mouth, and he shouldn’t have bitten that guard but he was tall and blocking him and now he’s in this tiny crawlspace in the walls that was a lot bigger when he was ten hiding from Father’s wrath and he needs to get out of here—
**
Ikeda and Afuku give him near-identical eyebrow raises of doubt.
Sokka has to concede the point.
“He managed to wriggle into the walls,” Ikeda offers, at length. “We couldn’t follow him in there, but he’ll have to come out eventually.”
“Sixteen,” Sokka says again, barely listening. He remembers sixteen. Vaguely. He remembers it mostly as being a time of perpetual pimples and never knowing how to hold his limbs so as not to appear freakish and trying not to become another casualty in a war that had been going on long before he was born. “He — I’m sorry, did you just say into the walls?”
Whatever Sokka’s sixteen was, he’s fairly certain it was not nearly as troublesome as Zuko’s is shaping up to be.
**
Royal Corporal Sasaki, overseer of the Fire Nation Royal Guard, protector of Agni’s eternal flame, His Majesty Fire Lord Zuko, is not amused to discover that his charge has, over the course of a single night, turned into a wriggly, bitey menace of a child. In his office, he brutally reorganizes his meticulously-maintained schedule to include ‘hunt down the Fire Lord’ before giving Sokka a long, calculating look, his amber eyes molten in the flickering lamplight.
For all of Sokka’s thirty-one years, he has the strangest urge to duck his head like a scolded schoolchild.
“The peace anniversary celebrations begin at the end of this week, Ambassador Sokka,” Sasaki says at length, a strain to his voice that Sokka suspects is an outward manifestation of a pulsing headache. “Delegations from the Earth Kingdom and the Northern Water Tribes are set to arrive by midday today.”
Sokka knows this. Sokka does not want to know this. Sokka would like to be back in his bed, blissfully unaware that he lives in a world where best friends can suddenly become feral sixteen year olds in the wee hours of predawn, while you sleep on, unable to do anything to stop it.
Sokka has had a long time to learn that the world he lives in is not a fair one.
He nods, allowing his mouth to slide into a well-worn grin. “I got you. Find him, find him fast, find him before a tiny tot Fire Lord has us backsliding into complete and total anarchy, we all go for a drink at the end of this?”
In lieu of a response, Sasaki unearths a sealed bottle of whiskey from a drawer, and sets it at the edge of his desk. Sokka suspects that this is both a dare, and a promise.
**
The crawlspace wends around the corner of one hall, and opens to a vent that’s bolted shut. Zuko presses his palm flat against it, and ignores the way his breath control is slipping, and shoves. The metal grating doesn’t budge; he shoves again, harder, and then rams his shoulder into it. It rattles this time, but remains tauntingly shut.
Zuko growls. The only other option is to go back the way he came, and he can’t do that, he can’t, those guards might be waiting for him with the restraints they must have forgotten the first time, and by now Father will have been alerted that he’s escaped so he needs to find Uncle and get them both out of here before judgement can be passed on exactly what stage of treason it is they’re guilty of.
(But could it be possible that Father has changed his mind? That he’s decided Zuko deserves another chance, even though he hasn’t captured the Avatar, even though he’s done nothing to earn it? He’s been dressed in proper robes and he woke up in royal chambers, he’s in the family villa instead of the upper palace holding cells, the guards called him sir not the prisoner and they didn’t look at him as if he’s a blight to their nation and a disgrace to his blood—)
Thinking is a lot harder to do when blunt force dislodges your shoulder from its socket. A yelp of pain catches behind Zuko’s teeth as the grate finally goes the way of his arm and gives out, sending him tumbling into the corridor with a lack of grace that the Blue Spirit would scoff at. …Not that Zuko knows anything about what the Blue Spirit would or would not scoff at.
Still, he wasn’t that loud. The vent covering barely clattered as it hit the tiles; probably no one heard him.
**
Over the course of the thirteen years that she has been employed at the palace, Ryu has learned that there are many things far beyond a servant’s purview. Yet as someone who has been a mother for more than twice that time, she has also learned that propriety is a fool’s errand when it comes to wrangling teenagers — particularly those that, without so much as a warning, come crashing out of the walls dressed in robes that nigh swallow them whole — and so she does not pause in calling out, “Are you alright?” to the tangled pile of limbs and fabric down the hall.
Said tangled pile of limbs and fabric launches itself upright, wobbling in a way that she narrows her eyes at with the attuned senses of a parent who raised three walking trouble magnets, and immediately turns tail and sprints in the opposite direction.
Ryu stands there a moment longer, bemused, before she adjusts the freshly-washed linens in her hold and changes course.
It is not her job to question why there is a teenager with the Fire Lord’s scar loose in the palace; it is, however, well within her rights to inform Healer Jiyuu when their Fire Lord is in need of medical attention.
**
“It is possible,” Royal Corporal Sasaki is saying, in tones of utmost gravity, “that Fire Lord Zuko may be hiding in the walls.”
Junior Recruit Kenji does not laugh, because junior recruits are not supposed to laugh; junior recruits are supposed to remain staid and stone-faced even when confronted with statements of utter bullpig-shit, such as, for example, ‘your Fire Lord has shrunk into a sixteen year old and it is now your duty to extract him from the bowels of the palace’. You know. As an example.
He should have listened to his mother when she suggested he attend university instead. University students, he suspects morosely, don’t get dragged out of bed at the asscrack of dawn to play hide-and-seek with teenaged rulers of nations.
**
“And you’re sure he was going that way?”
The look that Ryu gives Sokka is more of A Look: arch-browed and unamused and eerily similar to the one Hakoda would use to quell his and Katara’s bickering as kids. For unrelated reasons, Sokka is abruptly reminded that Ryu has three grown children of her own. “Yes, Ambassador. I’m quite sure. I am also quite sure that his shoulder is dislocated.”
Very valiantly, Sokka does not pinch the bridge of his nose. That would not be professional, and he figures that while Zuko is busy scampering about the palace like a particularly exasperating stoatweasel, he should double down on that for the both of them. Maintain some semblance of put-togetherness, or whatever.
“Dislocated?” he echoes, with what is absolutely not a voice crack. He stopped being physically capable of those about a decade ago, and, oh, Spirits, Zuko’s little condition better not be contagious, Sokka will strangle him. “How on earth — okay, no, you know what? That’s fine. We’ll just, uh—”
“I was going to pay Healer Jiyuu a visit,” Ryu says. “I’ll let her know that Fire Lord Zuko is, ah…feeling poorly.”
Sokka’s eyes dart to her, panicked. “Fire Lord Zuko? What? That — that wasn’t him, that was. A different kid. An actual kid! Because Fire Lord Zuko is, as we both are aware, not a kid. This is just some general’s son. He snuck in and — well, you know how these noble brats can be, ha.”
As if on cue, Emi turns the corner, already dressed in her full Kyoshi uniform. “Sokka!” she calls, waving her snapped-shut fan at him. “I heard about Zuko. Do you want me to round up the girls, have them help out with the search?”
Sokka’s head is in his hands before he can recall any promises about professionalism. His whole world is on fire around him anyway; what does it matter if he looks like he knows what he’s doing?
**
“Guardsman Kenji,” Royal Corporal Sasaki is saying, “Guardsman Syou. I am assigning you to Ambassador Sokka. Pray you listen to him.”
Junior Recruit Kenji does not squeal, because junior recruits are not supposed to squeal; junior recruits are supposed to remain steady and unaffected even when in the imminent presence of one of their childhood heroes. He does nod with greater enthusiasm than strictly necessary, but that is purely due to his dedication to the job. Nothing else.
At his side, Syou snorts. “You might want to close your eyes; they can see those hearts over in Omashu.”
Junior Recruit Kenji does not respond to that, because junior recruits are supposed to understand when to pick their battles.
**
Apparently Sasaki has decided that Sokka isn’t suffering enough, and has seen fit to saddle him with two new recruits still wet behind the ears. Kenji and Syou are, if he had to hazard a guess, scarcely into their twenties, plucked from the lower ranks of guardsmen to, presumably, put Zuko at ease once they finally manage to drag him out of whatever tiny cranny he’s squirmed his way into.
In Sokka’s opinion, this exhibits a dangerous optimism regarding a teenaged Zuko’s capacity to be put at ease.
“He isn’t that bad,” Emi says to Kenji and Syou, which would be a kinder sentiment if she wasn’t lying through her teeth about it. She blithely ignores the dagger-eyes that Sokka is shooting in her direction and smiles at the both of them, before sliding that smile right on over to Ryu. “But could you have Healer Jiyuu prepare an extra strong mug of herbal sedative tea, please? With extra honey.”
“…Are we drugging the Fire Lord?” asks Syou, displaying a natural curiosity that Sokka, under literally any other circumstances, would deeply appreciate.
“No!” he says, because current circumstances demand as little curiosity as possible. For sanity’s sake. “No, we’re not drugging him. He’s a child. This is just…an in-case-of-emergency type of deal. You know, like a life vest. If we get thrown overboard, we want to have it, but we’re not going to get thrown overboard, so it doesn’t actually matter.”
Syou frowns. “Is Fire Lord Zuko the ‘thrown overboard’ in this hypothetical?”
“What? No, ‘thrown overboard’ is a concept, he can’t be a concept. His pointy little elbows are the ‘thrown overboard’.”
“How can his—”
“We will be drugging the Fire Lord,” Emi interrupts, “but only if absolutely necessary. Which is why—” She reaches out to settle her palm high on Ryu’s back, in a subtle leading gesture “—we are going to inform Healer Jiyuu of the situation. Ambassador Sokka, I’ll have the girls up in a half hour, okay? We’ll find him.”
And off she hustles, leaving Sokka to fend for himself against one recruit who appears personally aggravated by his choice in hypothetical scenarios and another who appears to not be having many opinions at all. Or thoughts. The kid’s been staring a little slack-jawed in the general direction of Sokka’s bare arms for the entirety of this conversation, a fact which, again, Sokka would appreciate a whole lot more under literally any other circumstances.
“So,” Syou says, staring at Sokka in an abjectly different manner, “our plan is to apprehend and drug a sixteen year old?”
“That is our backup plan, yes,” Sokka allows. “Our plan plan is to be diplomatic, and tactful, and hope that the sixteen year old doesn’t fireball us all in the face.”
Judging by Syou’s expression, she is operating under a dangerous optimism of her own: this one regarding a teenaged Zuko’s capacity for the type of violence more commonly associated with cornered polar bear-dog pups.
**
“Uncle?” Zuko hisses, poking his head into another empty room. He knows that this villa hasn’t had any inhabitants since — a cousin’s funeral whispers in dark corners shadows creeping beyond drawn curtains Mother going going going gone — since, but this is ridiculous.
No matter how many doors he desperately pulls open, none of them have revealed anything more than pristinely-kept chambers dappled in the pale rose of encroaching dawn and sitting rooms with no one sitting in them, everything polished to a shine like they’re waiting for people except there are no people. His fingers are beginning to go numb with the cold, slippery terror that maybe Uncle isn’t here. Maybe Father already took him away. Or—
The thought catches in Zuko’s throat. It — no. Uncle must be here. And he must be alive, he must be.
His eyes sting as he fumbles blindly for the next door, gnawing on the inner corner of his cheek to keep the threatening sob from spilling off his lips. This is one of the last. If Uncle isn’t — and this stupid thing isn’t opening, why isn’t it opening — they have to have locked it — this has to be Uncle’s—
Zuko’s shoulder gets further dislocated by degrees when he throws it against the door but it’s worth it because the wood gives way from the frame and the knob twists in his sweat-slick grip and he stumbles through in a flurry of robes and—
And there is a person waiting for him inside.
But it isn’t Uncle.
**
Were it anybody else, Azula would have shot them straight through with lightning for daring to interrupt her sleep. Fortunately for the irritatingly noisy intruder, they look rather similar to her—
**
“Brother?” says the woman sitting up in bed, wearing Mother’s face.
**
On the other side of the palace, Sokka has the sudden sinking sense that diplomacy and tact have taken a sharp dive off of a tall, tall cliff.
**
The boy staring at her has the exact wide-eyed, soft-mouthed expression of confusion that Azula has so often had to elbow Zuko to put away before it lands him in trouble. The boy is also, for some asinine reason, about half the age that Zuko was last she saw him.
“You — I — why are you—”
He stammers like her brother, too.
“Zuzu,” she says, not permitting any of the sleep still tugging at her to bleed into her voice, “what in Agni’s name have you done now?”
Unfortunately, the stubborn scowl is familiar as well. “I didn’t do anything.”
**
Zuko should really learn to keep his mouth shut, he’s realizing, as the woman who isn’t-Azula-can’t-be-Azula arches one brow just as perfectly and as sharply as his sister has always been able to. The sight of it triggers an instinctive defensiveness, and,
“I didn’t,” he says, without stopping to think about whether that’s the best course of action. The brow remains raised. “I — I — you’re not supposed to be—” Old, he bites off, recognizing that out of all the stupid things he could do right now that might be the worst. He takes a step away, nearer to the threshold of the room. “You can’t be—”
There’s an abrupt, pale flash of movement as Az— the woman raises a hand, and Zuko—
(There’d been so much dust in that town, most of it kicked up in the fighting, and he hadn’t been able to see anything but he’d heard it, the brittle electric shock of lightning being flung through dry air, the white-hot impact of it striking Uncle straight through the heart, and she didn’t care, she didn’t care, she would have bled them both out and laughed over their last breaths—)
—he reels backward, terror rising wound-sharp in his chest as he grapples again for the knob to slam the door shut between them, and then he turns on his heel and flees.
**
Azula gathers her loose hair into a prim topknot, pulls on an outer robe over her pajamas, and sweeps from her chambers with the precise degree of poise that her brother lacks.
**
Zuko isn’t hiding. He — he isn’t. It’s only that there are guards in the next hallway, and there happened to be a convenient vase stand right here for him to dart behind at the sound of deep voices, and now he’s just. Waiting. For them to leave. Casually, and not in a hiding way at all. And his heart is going at a completely normal rate, Uncle-in-the-back-of-his-mind can shut up, thanks.
To be safe, he presses the heel of his palm to his teeth and bites until the pain distracts from the rest of it.
Clarity comes with the swell of blood on his tongue: he needs to get rid of these robes. They’re too big, too cumbersome, too…too obvious. If he leaves them behind, he’ll be able to focus, he’ll be able to fix this. Azula has always been stronger than him, smarter, but he’s faster. Sneakier. He can evade her, if he tries.
And. That woman wasn’t Azula. She. She wasn’t. But. But it would probably be best for him to pretend as if she was, just in case. Getting ahead of Azula means getting ahead of anybody else. So really, this is just him being pragmatic.
**
“Hang on,” says Sokka, in the tone of a man who knows his fate has already been sealed. “Has anyone woken up Azula yet?”
**
Her Dum-Dum of a brother is approximately as subtle in his scurrying about as a rampaging saber-toothed moose-lion cub, but Azula will permit his nonsense to carry on for a little while longer. She takes the long way around to the infirmary, so that her path won’t interrupt whatever bout of panic he’s in the midst of having behind that ugly vase, and manages to intercept Emi just as she’s leaving Healer Jiyuu’s office.
“Princess Azula,” Emi says, beaming as she always does. She does not give Azula a hug, for Kyoshi warriors do not hug their charges, and the servant trailing in her wake has no bearing on that matter whatsoever. “Your brother, he—”
“Yes,” says Azula, “I am well aware of my brother.”
Emi nods. “Ambassador Sokka told you?”
“…Yes,” says Azula, narrowing her eyes. “Of course he did.”
**
There’s a set of double doors directly across the hall from Zuko’s not-a-hiding-spot. It’s a set of double doors that leads out to an upper floor balcony, he knows that for certain after all the hours he and Azula spent trying to balance on the railings, and after all the times he spent trying to clamber back up onto the balcony when she would push him off. If he can get there, he can scale down the outer wall and into the gardens and then he’s practically home free.
The guards around the corner start moving. In the wrong direction, no, they’re supposed to go away from him not towards—
**
After the events of the last hour, Ikeda and Afuku are rather familiar with the sound that is Fire Lord Zuko’s inexplicably tiny body ramming into various obstructions. Ikeda does not hesitate in rounding the corner to assess the situation; Afuku takes a moment to massage his shin as it throbs with a sympathetically acute pang.
**
…The doors didn’t lead out to an upper floor balcony. They didn’t lead out to any kind of balcony at all.
**
Fire Lord Zuko is standing in the middle of a cavernously vacant meeting room, looking wholly and completely lost. The effect is only enhanced by the overlarge robes he’s drowning in, and the scruffy haircut that isn’t quite long enough to fall into his wide eyes, and the terrible truth that, when he stands still for more than thirty consecutive seconds, he really is unavoidably sixteen.
“Sir,” says Ikeda, as calmly as she can, for fear that anything else may spook him. Her training prepared her for dealing with a vast array of situations; somehow, the event of ‘your boss gets turned into a kid younger than your youngest daughter’ never came up. “Do you know where you are?”
The kid Fire Lord glowers at her. It’s tricky to tell, what with the clothing swallowing his frame, but there’s a braced tension to his stance that she expects is operating on triggerhairs. One wrong move, one wrong word, and he’ll lunge — either towards her or away from her, and she’s not certain which would be worse. She prays Afuku returns quickly. She prays that he returns with Ambassador Sokka, and not Princess Azula. She prays that preferring a dignitary from the Southern tribes over a member of her own nation’s royal family is not treasonous, and rather merely a logical choice by virtue of their comparative diplomatic skills.
**
Sokka nudges the half-cracked door to Azula’s chambers open with his boot, and peers in with trepidation.
It’s empty; her slippers sit forgotten at the foot of her bed.
“Oh,” he says. “That’s not good.”
On a different level of the palace entirely, Afuku runs into Princess Azula.
**
“Obviously I know where I am,” Zuko snaps at Ikeda, with such vitriol that it momentarily gives her flashbacks to a teenage daughter stomping moodily up the stairs. “What I want to know is where my Uncle is.”
“…Your uncle.”
“Yes,” he growls, “my Uncle. What have you done with him?”
But Ikeda is barely listening; her attention has fallen to the awkward jut of the kid’s shoulder, the way he’s leaning his weight onto his right side instead of his left. She can’t fathom how he’s managed to dislocate a shoulder in the short stretch of time since he darted out of his chambers, but it poses a more pragmatic problem: they’ll have to grab him without exacerbating the injury. Considering he likely won’t let them near him under pain of death, Ikeda is at something of a loss.
“Sir,” she says, on the off chance that reason might prevail, “you’re hurt.”
Zuko’s glare manages to darken, in a distinctly unreasonable way. “I am not.”
“Sir—”
“Where is my Uncle?”
**
Ah, Zuzu’s pubescent yelling. Azula had not missed hearing that.
**
This stupid room is too big and too closed-off and Zuko doesn’t understand where the balcony went but he does understand that he’s cornered himself, he’s cornered himself like an idiot and now this guard won’t tell him where Uncle is and that either means that Uncle was never here in the first place or it means that Uncle was here and now he isn’t, and there’s a dizzying, grey-at-the-edges-of-his-vision panic starting to make his ears ring and he has to get out of here he has to he has to—
And then, like she always does, Azula shows up and ruins everything.
**
“Honestly, Zuzu,” says Azula, coming to a halt in front of the guard who is evidently rather incompetent at wrangling sixteen-year-old Dum-Dums, “you’ll wake what’s left of the palace with this racket. Douse those flamelets, and I will do you the courtesy of treating you like an adult, instead of a toddler throwing a tantrum.”
“I’m not—”
“Your flames, Zuzu. Now.”
Zuko scowls at her, and looks as if he is considering being stubborn purely to spite her, and then he makes a snarly little noise and lets his hands drop to his sides, the sparks that had been simmering in his palms guttering into nothing. The sleeves of his robes, she notes with some amusement, hang far past his fingertips. She focuses on that, instead of how big his eyes are when set in a face still round with baby fat, and how he stares at her as though he can’t trust her not to strike the moment his guard is lowered.
“Oh, you are capable of listening,” she says. “I must admit, I’m impressed.”
He bristles, with as much ferocity as a puffed-up pygmy-puma pup. “What have you done to Uncle?”
Such a one-track mind, her brother. His wilfulness would be endearing, were it not so singularly irritating. “Our precious uncle is perfectly hale and whole,” she says, neglecting to mention that she has not been in the man’s presence for almost a decade. “Last I heard, his quaint tea shop was named in a review of Ba Sing Se’s finest dining establishments; perhaps I’ll send for some jasmine, to ease your nerves.”
“I’m not nervous,” Zuko says, though the dart of his gaze betrays him. “And that’s — you’re lying, Uncle doesn’t have a tea shop, we work at the—” He clamps his mouth shut, and shifts from foot to foot, and finishes, weakly, “I mean. We don’t work anywhere. And Uncle does not have a tea shop.”
Well, well. It appears this spirit-trick has decided to pose as customer service Zuko, from his lowly days spent sweeping floors and pouring tea. Azula has often wondered how well her temperamental brother fared under the demands of having to smile and play nice, and she now finds her answer in the blatant scowl etched across his face and his utter inability to so much as pretend at propriety.
“Perhaps he does not,” Azula acquiesces, “in the time that you are from.”
Zuko goes still as carved stone. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Azula heaves an airy, put-upon sigh. “Must I spell out everything for you? You do have eyes, Zuzu. I encourage you to use them.” She gestures, encompassing the length of her body, and sends him a smile as sharp as cut glass. “Look at that. I’m taller than you now, dear brother.”
The barb, intended to shake Zuko out of whatever startled stupor he’s frozen in, appears to have the opposite effect. His eyes lift to meet hers, pupils blown wide with fright, and whatever he sees in them has him stumbling back, chest hitching on a pattern of inhale-exhales that are quicker and hoarser than they were mere minutes ago. He glances past her to the guardsmen and Emi, hovering on the threshold, and takes another fumbling step away, those baggy sleeves concealing his raised fists but not for lack of trying.
“Don’t,” he says, nearly pleading. “Don’t — don’t take me to Father, I won’t — I won’t go with you, I won’t.”
A knife has not slipped between Azula’s ribs to pierce her heart. It only feels as if one has.
**
There may not be a balcony but there are windows, there are lots of windows, and Zuko was never the best at learning how to not get pushed but he did learn how to land on his feet, and if he doesn’t leave right now he’s going to be—
**
Those frantic gold eyes slide beyond Azula’s shoulder, towards the wall. The rosy flush of sunrise is prodding in through the high glass, and though Azula has to squint against it, she does not miss the ‘I’m about to do something incalculably foolish’ expression that steals across Zuko’s face. Horror claws at her throat.
“Zuko, don’t you dare—”
**
Zuko, seeming determined to demonstrate the very disobedience he was banished for, takes a running leap through the third-story window. Much like his Agni Kai, there is no one there to stop his fall; as before, all any of them can do is watch.