Chapter Text
Azula spends the early dawning hours to the late waning rays of dusk on Ember Island going over lightning kata. Over and over again until her hands shake barely with the leftover shock. Li and Lo had been more ecstatic to meet her than she remembers the first time around and would curse it if it didn’t mean it left no time for firebending practice. She hasn’t touched her flames once since the day Father came to watch her that day and she’s not willing to admit that she might know what she’ll see if she does.
The grueling sets are nothing new to her, most of her life, especially the years after Zuko was banished were spent from sunrise to sunset doing such. It was almost calming, as calming as holding millions of volts in the palm of one’s hand could be. It wouldn’t bother her if it were another summer spent with Li and Lo and their stupid mocktails and house parties and smelly herby incense if it meant Mother and Zuko weren’t here. Their summers here as a family were more distant to her than the summers she came here alone for training. It was foolish to think it’d be like any other time.
Father wasn’t here, sure. Mother probably wishes she wasn’t either, seeing her only when Zuko came to ‘sneak’ a peek at her training looking shifting and distant. Azula wonders why Father bothered to send either of them, though he probably wanted to deal with them less than she did. But she was certainly getting there, especially since Zuko, even after their squabble, was ever so persistent.
“-they said to come back later because they were getting ready for the fireworks so we went to get mochi from Old Man Hidan on the street off north shore-”
Azula rolls her eyes as she runs through the set again, cold. In her mind, she follows the way she’d done it in her last life, but her younger body rebelled. Her arm strikes without flame and her hair gets in her face. She huffs to repeat it again and Zuko keeps babbling from the engawa of their family’s beach house. She sinks her feet into the sand and strikes once more, straightening her stance.
“-and then I said, ‘Well, that’s not how much sparklers were last summer-‘ and then she chased me out of her store but I swear I wasn’t lying-“
This time, Azula flows through her kata with the barest amount of static sparking around her fingers. Zuko’s voice nearby makes it feel like a bad memory and she restarts the kata cold again before she throws up. She wouldn’t be doing that anytime soon.
“-but Mom want to get those gross herby smelling incense that Li and Lo like even though I said their probably too old to even tell the difference and should just get fire lily like literally everyone else-“
Azula actually nods in agreement at that before scowling. She knows if Father were here he’d tell him to not disturb her… Azula just dives into the next set as Zuko starts ranting about the jellyfish that almost stung him yesterday. Father wasn’t here. She knows that Zuko’s presence makes the sparks in her hands fizzle out through pure instinct, she knows she should tell him to get lost and focus on her independent studies before Li and Lo run her ragged in the morning-
But obviously it wouldn’t do any good, she tells herself. Because Zuko is a dog and Azula kicks and kicks and kicks and all he does is bite right back. Ignore him and he talks at her for days on end. Kick him to the riptide and he pulls her in after. For as many conversations they held, there were just as many fights as well.
“Mom!”
Mother stands in the doorway watching them silently. Stepping onto the engawa she gives a sort of half smile. “I hear the Ember Island Players are putting on Love Amongst the Dragons-“
Azula rolls her eyes and tunes their chattering out. She was too old and too busy to go to such things.
“No, thanks.”
She trudges onto the engawa herself sliding open one of the doors to go inside when her mother’s voice rings out.
“Young lady, I know you’re not walking all that sand in the house.”
Zuko sticks his tongue out at her and Azula backs away from the door to sit at the edge of the engawa shaking her legs off. If she shakes that sand off into Zuko’s face, well, who’s to tell her it wasn’t an accident? She was just doing what she was told, of course.
Mother sighs as Zuko spits out sand and Azula retreats into the house triumphant.
Azula ambles over to the kitchen table spreading out the various readings Li and Lo had piled onto her at the beginning of the trip. She squints at one she has been reading for the last couple of days. Ugh. Battle Tactics of Chin the Conqueror.
She sits there reading long enough for Zuko to appear in finer clothes. He stares at her before pulling that dumb Dark Water Spirit mask over his face. He slings two wooden dual dao over his shoulder before sitting at the table as well to wait for Mother. He looks so distinctly like his wanted posters in the Earth Kingdom that she laughs.
Zuko takes this at her laughing at him, and he’s right. Azula still giggles as he tries to kick her shin. He can barely see through the damn thing and falls off his chair. Azula laughs harder at that.
When Mother comes out of her room in fine robes, a Dragon Emperor mask slung at her hip, Azula goes back to her scroll on Chin the Conqueror. She’d rather fall off a cliff as well than be caught and dragged to their thousandth viewing of Love Amongst the Dragons. Even with the epic battle at the end of the play wouldn’t be able to drag her there this time.
“You sure you don’t wanna come, ‘Zula? Mom has your Dragon Emperor mask!”
Azula doesn’t know what her mother is thinking as she stands by the doorway looking over shoulders at her. She makes the easy decision for both of them and scoffs.
“Watch your plays, dumdum. I’m busy doing useful things.”
Zuko scowls and huffs to walk out the door. Mother doesn’t hesitate and follows him out, smoothing back his hair.
She doesn’t know why it makes her feel other. Like looking at an old portrait frozen in a happier moment. Separate, distant. Something she didn’t belong in anymore. If she had to hear Mother and Zuko and their ignorant talks about mochi and plays and how great the weather is- Azula was going to burn something. She flipped through her calendar, running her fingers over the date of Zuko’s first Agni Kai.
So much to do. This trip couldn’t end sooner.
Azula is woken in the middle of the night by their unsubtle giggles. She mindlessly stumbles from her desk where she’d fallen asleep to the bottom of the stairs, half caught in a sleep dazed annoyance. When she turns her head around the doorway, she finds them at the kitchen counter, covered in spiced sugar and applepear peels. Their play masks are strewed across the wood as Mother stands over a corner carefully cutting away at the fruit skins until they resemble little kangaroo rabbits. For every one made, Zuko shoves another in his mouth grossly. Azula rolls her eyes and makes to walk back up the stairs and try to fall asleep.
Mother uses the sleeves of her favorite dress to wipe the corners of his sugared mouth. Azula chooses this moment to look away.
Azula tucks herself under the thin summer sheets and listens to Mother and Zuko’s footsteps patter up the stairs into their respective rooms. The house settles into a quiet and Azula curls up in her room for barely half an hour before she decides she can’t sleep. She’s hungry of course.
Marching down to the kitchen, lighting the fixtures with a well placed spark, she rummages around until she finds a half full basket of applepears.
Holding a kitchen knife aloft, she eyes the edge and pokes the applepear. It rolled around menacingly. Azula huffed and straightened the blade, holding it still. Well, how hard could it be to-
“Damn it-” Azula nicks the knuckle of her pointer finger on one of her passes through cutting the applepears.
A noise from behind her has Azula half leaping from her own skin, almost cutting off the rest of her finger. When she turns around, bloody knife in hand she can see the way Zuko, the nosy bastard, stands petrified at the foot of the stairs.
Azula debates murder for a humorous second before lifting up her bloodied finger and the mangled form of one applepear like a sacrifice she had just bloodied across some altar. Riveting stuff, surely out of one of Zuko’s plays. She thinks about laughing because it is sort funny in a way but then she might be end up having to explain to her Mother why her brother passed out cold at the bottom of the stairs while she holds a bloody knife. Implying fratricide isn’t something she wants to confess- not that she ever would.
When Zuko stops taking an astoundingly long time putting the scene together (knife, hand, fruit- how hard is that really), he holds his hand to his chest like a maiden and leans on the wall. See, this is why Azula was staunchly against plays. She was sure Zuko wasn’t so dramatic before that whole obsession.
“Um, are you okay? Do you need help bandaging-”
Azula shoves her finger in her mouth petulantly and ties the nearest kitchen cloth around it once the blood is gone.
It makes Zuko do this weird twitching thing with his face and Azula smiles pleasantly at his attempts not to combust. After a moment he just sighs look at the fruit massacre in front of him.
Azula looks back to see the Dark Water Spirit mask on the table as well and assumes its why Zuko came back down here to witness her murder. Instead Zuko point blank half whispers and half shouts.
“Uhhh, I actually came down to grab more fruit! I’m feeling really hungry right now! So um, the knife?”
Still can’t lie for shit. Lucky him, Azula will take advantage his chronic helping people condition. She really wants a fruit dragon. How cool would a fruit dragon be?
Azula drapes over the table watching Zuko deftly slice the fruit skin off in coiled springs very unimpressed. Very. She shoves a bunch of red koala-sheep in her mouth unimpressed as well.
"I can't believe this is where all your blade skills go. How do you even figure dumb stuff like this out?"
“Mom cuts ‘em up all the time, duh.” Zuko shrugs.
For you, maybe.
“Well, I’m doing perfectly fine by myself.” Azula makes to take the knife back and Zuko clutches onto it for dear life. Agni, it wasn’t like she was going stab him. Again.
“You can stop pretending to be a stuck up for an hour, Lala. I’m hungry and you’re wasting all the fruits.”
It would be convincing excuse if he didn’t look like a shaking turtleduck in the sights of a dragon. “Fine.”
Zuko drones on and on about blade technique as he cuts away the skin of the applepear. As he starts to relax, more assured she won’t spontaneously murder him and divest him of his fruit animals (obviously, she wouldn’t kill her supplier, tactics 101), he starts to babble about Love Amongst the Dragons like they both haven’t seen it a billion times. Azula slowly eats her way through his animal kingdom when he’s not looking. Applepear kangaroo-rabbits were surprisingly better than the rest.
“Look! You can even make them look like dragons. See? It’s us!”
He holds up a perfectly cut red and blue fruit dragon sprinkled with spice and sugar. It’s actually sort of cool.
Azula uses her left hand to unsubtly reach for the other fruit animals and Zuko turns towards the movement. When he’s distracted, her other hand shoves the fruit dragons in her mouth. Idiot.
“‘Zula! I made that for both of us!”
“Then just make more, dummy.”
When Zuko decides these are grounds for Azula to get spiced sugar in her eyes she can’t help but think this is revenge for all the sand she’s thrown at Zuko during this trip as he laughs. She’ll reach for the knife when she regains her vision. We’ll see who’s laughing then.
It’s almost enough to forget she started cutting fruit alone in the first place.
It all comes to a head when Mother finally decides that she has two children instead of one.
It’s really only due to the rare clouds over Ember Island that she agrees to board the Fire Lily. Out in the glaring sun of the open sea offers more focus to the more forbidden lightning sets and Azula doesn’t know if she’s willing to risk conducting much with all that coverage above her. So her mother’s favorite ship it was.
While Zuko pretends to play pirates with that stupid blue play mask and his wooden dual dao, Azula perches on the deck meditating in the sun. In her lap, she reads snippets from scrolls in between her meditation. Today, Li and Lo had some business on a neighboring island and Mother took it as a chance to shove Azula and her brother on a wooden ship in the middle of nowhere. Probably hoping it would force them to get along. It was kind of a stupid decision: two firebenders who hated each other, a wooden boat, and a single witness.
Mother hovers nearby, eyeing out her breathing exercises like she wants to say something but Azula doesn't rise to the bait. As much as she hated the salty sea air drying out her hair, being out in the open like this offered a lot more room to breathe. Even if she was confined to this wooden plank. Azula unraveled another paper as her feet dangled off the edge of the ship.
“What are you reading?”
Azula ruminates on ignoring her but the way the sun is high in the sky, the fact that she’s almost completed the last sets for the lightning blade- she’s in an ambivalent mood.
“Tactics reports from the Southern Raiders.”
“As in… the siege in the South Pole?”
Azula shrugs. She basically had her last sets down to an art form. Done cold that is. A few days in pure sunlight would do good for the chi needed for something so potentially explosive. It was moments like this that she missed being in her old body. Then she would remember that body was dead. Annoying boat day with Mother and Zuko it was. Little mercies.
“Father will want me on the front one day, Mother. You can only hope Zuzu doesn’t slip on ice before he even comes face to face with a waterbender. I don’t take chances.”
Her mother frowns but doesn’t say anything to that. Instead Mother looks down to Azula’s hands where she fiddles as she reads.
“You’ve always loved those.”
Azula looks to her hands where she runs her thumb over a smooth piece of sea glass as she reads. She always had a mindless habit of finding them whenever they went to the beach. She never took any home and always left them in piles for the tide to take back when they left. Azula doesn’t really know why, but it always felt wrong to take any with her. She never could really remember the reason.
Azula barely looks at her. “I guess.”
Mother wants to talk. Azula doesn't. Her tolerance for idle chit chat with her Mother was starting to weigh on her. She was going to have to try harder than that.
Mother turns to Zuko at the bow. “Dear, why don’t you turn us in to the cove. We can watch the fireworks from the beach.”
Zuko beams and turns to walk away and fiddle with the sails. As they start to turn towards the island once more, no clouds in sight. Mother sits next to her and dangles her own feet off the ledge of the boat, watching the way the ship cuts through the glass like water.
“Azula.” Closing her text, she sighs, waiting for the lecture. “I know that things must be difficult, right now.”
Azula finds her mother’s face, eyes wide. Her words refuse to cut.
“And I know you have so many great big things you want to do. There’s this blaze you carry, this marvelous thing you have that shines like sea glass.”
Mother reaches out to tuck a stray hair from her face and Azula freezes. She hadn’t really thought about how sea glass shines the way the eyes she shared with her mother did. Like amber gold. Like the way the sun was being swallowed by the sea at this moment, a dusk sort of gold.
Azula actually leans closer to listen.
“…But this ambition isn't an excuse to sharpen those edges to harm others.”
Oh.
“You only have one brother, Azula. He can be your greatest ally if you stop scaring him-“
Her mother’s soft tone fails to hide what she wants from her. Azula has never felt smaller, stupid than she does at this moment.
Didn’t she know the game Azula played everyday? Things like living were hard in the Dragon’s Den. Living was something you did on purpose. Azula knew her Mother knew- she would have never come to Caldera willingly if she didn’t know living and fighting would become synonymous.
Azula loved power. Adored fire and its destruction- it was molded in her being from the moment Father witnessed her first sparks. She had never needed to comprehend not being his heir because she had never not been his. Mother thought wanted meant safe. Wanted meant alive, wanted meant molded, wanted meant power and security. Azula had never been safe.
You made me want this, Azula anguishes. You made me need this.
Because the truth is this: Father can burn the world to the ground with her in it and Azula would still want. She could sit here in the sand and train and read and waste as a weapon and she would still look at the ocean and her mother’s pretty boats and Zuko’s stupids plays she never understood and want and want. Could itch and loathe in the Throne Room and its meetings and the men and their idiotic battle plans and still want and want because Father was on the dais. And the whole room went quiet to hear him breath and he walked like he had never been struck down. Because he never needed things like Mothers and Zukos and she wanted that. She needed to want that. Because what else was there? Drawing light from someone else other than herself?
Father had no use for a daughter, he needed an heir. And Azula could want all she could- but heir was going to be the only thing she allowed herself.
Azula shoots to her feet as the first firework of the summer bursts in the sky like a wishing star. Nighttime starts to press deep as it burns and burns until there’s nothing left to burn. Azula reels on her mother, something raw and bloody in her teeth.
“Zuko’s not afraid of me. You are.”
Azula pointedly ignores the way her mother’s face crumples and her jaw snaps shut. They finally pull into dock on the shore and she heads towards the gangplank Zuko has just let down. Mother is at her heels following her and she feels the way some string between them burns and burns until-
Zuko walks from the bank to where the Fire Lily is docked. Azula walks down the plank towards him as she and her Mother burn in the light of the comet-bright sparks in the sky. “‘Zula! The fireworks are starting-“
Azula kicks up sand into his eyes and stalks away from his shouting at her back. Azula didn’t even need to look back to know Mother stayed behind to check on Zuko. It was just the way it was. Azula didn’t exist until Zuko was around. Then she was a sister. She was her Father’s true heir until Mother needed something from her. Then she was just her daughter.
Azula walks all the way back up the hill to the beach house before standing at the precipice of the cliff it teeters on. Raising her hand, she takes a moment to stare at the sea glass in her hands before petulantly throwing it as far as she can. Another firework explodes in reds and blues in front of her. If she squints, she can pretend as though it's shattering glass. Azula closes her eyes as the sea glass hovers in the sky for a moment next to wishing stars. She doesn’t watch as it falls and is swallowed by the white water below.
Azula sits on the cliff face shivering. Each crack of light in the sky splits the sky apart and sounds like the world ending. Time seeps by like blood through a shirt. Azula sits frozen, drowning- and no one comes to find her.
The first thing Azula does when she arrives back in Caldera is to conduct enough lightning into the skies above the capital for the palace to shake. Through it all, Father watches her every move intently and smiles in a way she can almost pretend is love.
He burns like a wishing star at the end of the world.