Chapter Text
The plan did not include Zuko nor the Avatar. In the moment, she had felt that if she never had to see either of them again, she would be content. Her current stance was a little less dramatic, but she was still committed to taking a break from chasing the two of them. Perhaps this way, they’d come to her.
Preferably, it would be another few months before she had to return to her chase, but that was more of a personal wish.
She peered through her periscope, watching her drill crank its way through the wall. Huge clouds of dust and debris billowing up from the dry ground and falling from the wall obscured much of her vision, but there didn’t seem to be anymore earth benders hammering away at the sides of the great metal machine. It was odd, considering that the Earth Kingdom was known for their grit and determination and all that.
She didn’t have the chance to let that thought coagulate, because a tinny voice was announcing through the intercom that a mechanist had been knocked out, his schematics missing. By the time she made piercing eye contact with her war minister, another voice was announcing that a brace had been cut through.
With a sigh, she got to her feet, “Let’s go, ladies.”
The war minister was squirming a little, waiting for her punishment, but he would have to wait.
She had an Avatar to capture.
~ ~ ~
Unfortunately, that’s not how it turned out. Still covered in a, now drying, layer of sludge, Azula marched around the perimeter of her ruined drill. Clearly, there would be absolutely no fixing it, and according to the war minister, the inside was just as dilapidated. Mai and Ty Lee, one of which was just as sludge-covered as her, trailed behind her quietly, examining the wreckage. Not only was this disappointing, it was humiliating. Now she shared a failure with Uncle, and it took her only a day and a half to be defeated, while it had taken him three hundred.
She stopped abruptly, scuffing her toe in the dirt. But no, she wasn’t going to do the same thing as Uncle. She wasn’t giving up entirely. She would table the issue of getting past the great walls of Ba Sing Se.
“Come on, girls.” She abruptly turned around and walked right in between her companions. “We need to get our basilisk lizards back.”
“Oh,” Mai muttered, “Great.”
~ ~ ~
The animals were procured in record time, and they were on the road, zipping through the Earth Kingdom. The tank was gone, but the giant lizards were surprisingly enduring, so long as you didn’t push them to move too fast.
For the first couple of days, Ty Lee repeatedly asked what they were doing, in increasingly poorly camouflaged ways. And then, Azula would respond with increasingly flimsy excuses. Honestly, she was regrouping; trying to find away to come back to any of the three challenges she had battling. The three challenges she was currently failing at. It wasn’t as though she wasn’t resilient, she was determined to keep trying, but she didn’t think anything had been this difficult before.
She wanted to be excited by the challenges like she had been at the beginning, but it seemed she was running out of steam.
What was most disconcerting was that neither Zuko nor her mother had showed up during the drilling attempt. At first, that had boosted her confidence; it would certainly be easier to break into the Earth Kingdom’s capital without her family members hovering over her, trying to instill doubt in her mind. But when it was all over, and the Avatar and his stupid little gang had disappeared, she realized she had no excuse for this failure. This was her own fault, and no one else’s.
And so, regrouping. Not giving up, not even taking a break really, just planning.
However, after eight days of traveling across the vast Earth Kingdom, it seemed her luck had come back to her.
~ ~ ~
The three young women were camping out in the middle of a pine forest when it happened. It was huge; they had been among the great evergreens for almost three days now, only stopping to rest when absolutely necessary.
Azula assumed that the other girls were asleep in their tent, but she was sitting upright on her pallet. There were only two tents, but that was a new development as of last night. When they had been setting up camp, Mai had turned to Azula and said abruptly, “Something happened to the third tent,” and then stared at Azula, waiting for her to respond.
Perhaps Mai was concerned she would be angry about the loss of the tent, but Azula had just shrugged. “I’m not sharing with you, so you’ll have to work it out with Ty Lee,” and then turned back to the stack of kindling she was arranging, deftly setting it aflame.
“Oh,” Mai replied, shoulders slumping, apparently in relief as the fight leaked out of her. “Alright, then.”
Apparently they had worked it out, because that was the last that Azula heard on the matter.
Now, it was the early hours of the morning, and Azula had yet to get a wink of sleep. Zuko was sitting cross-legged at the foot of her pallet, mirroring Azula’s position where she was perched on her pillow. He had been doing this every night since the drill, and their routine was getting tedious. They never spoke, and Azula tried to avoid eye contact, even as her stared right at her face. She didn’t know what he wanted, and she didn’t dare ask. If he tried to get her to talk about her mission to hunt him down, she thought she might explode. Normally, she would have left the tent by now to get some fresh air and practice her bending because he never left the tent. (Azula wasn’t sure how he slipped out before Ty Lee took the tents down without her noticing.) Tonight, though, she sat perfectly still and tried to meet his eyes. His eye? She still didn’t know if he could see out of the thin line of his left eye. She could see the irises moving together, but maybe his vision was blurred, or it was a reflex to move his eyes at the same time. She couldn’t imagine that his sight would have survived intact, not with the awful wound surrounding the eye that still hadn’t healed. Well, it had scarred over for one of the Zukos. But not for this one.
The wound wasn’t even the worst part of looking at him. It was his unblinking focus. Azula supposed that he must blink, but she never caught him. Whenever he looked at her, it felt like he was really looking at her; looking straight down into her soul.
She supposed that he couldn’t have been, not really. She tried to make her eyes sharpen and focus like that, but she wasn’t looking into anybody’s soul.
Her hypnotism by his bright gold eyes were interrupted by a roar that struck her to the bone. She jumped, then froze. It sounded like it had come from miles away, but it was still loud. She glanced at Zuko, but he didn’t seem to have heard it.
Before she could open her mouth to mention it, another roar burst through the night’s silence. It wasn’t as loud, or at least it wasn’t as jarring, but it was the same animal. It must have been enormous to be able to make a sound like that.
“Zuko,” She hissed before there could be a third roar. “Do you hear that?”
At first, he didn’t even seem to have heard her speak, but then he squinted at her, intensifying his glare. “No,” He scowled, irritated by her question.
She huffed and got to her feet. “Sorry I asked,” She spat out as she edged around him and ducked outside. She could feel his eyes following her as she picked her way across the tiny enclosure. When the cool night air hit her face, a third roar, much louder than the first two, reverberated through the forest.
Moments later, Ty Lee was sticking her head out of the other tent’s flap, her brown hair out of its braid and falling around her eyes. “What was that?” Even though she clearly had just been jolted awake, her voice was already clear and crisp. And weirdly, almost chipper.
“Get Mai out here,” Azula said in leu of an answer.
“She’s asleep,” Ty Lee replied, but then quickly ducked back into the tent to wake her, as if it took her a moment to remember that Azula didn’t mind interrupting their sleep schedule.
Azula crossed her arms and peered between the trees. She could see the sky near the horizon lightening with soft yellows and blues. Already dawn. So, they wouldn’t be leaving much earlier than they were planning to, anyway. Not that any of them would have complained at the early hour, not even Mai, who hated mornings and was the most apt to complain. She had been keeping rather quiet the past week. Well, quieter than usual. It was almost as if she was in a good mood, which, with Mai, was practically impossible.
Now though, even with her halfway pleasant attitude of the past week, she was clearly pissed off. When she stumbled out of the tent after Ty Lee, she wore only the black base of her outfit, the red sashes left inside. Her hair was a tangled mess, her bangs plastered at an unnatural angle, and she had smudges of black makeup under her eyes. They had had a difficult time finding a campsite last night, so Azula mused that she hadn’t taken the time to wash her face.
“What?” Mai grumbled, though Azula could tell she was trying really hard to keep her cool.
Azula cocked an eyebrow and pursed her lips, still stained with yesterday’s lipstick. She hadn’t even attempted to get some sleep last night, so her make up was just a bit stale, rather than smeared.
“Didn’t you hear the obnoxiously loud roar? It shook the ground, honest to the spirits!” Ty Lee grinned, placing her hand over her heart as if she were swearing an oath.
Azula rolled her eyes, and Mai shook her head. “It couldn’t have been that loud.”
“Well, you are a pretty deep sleeper, Mai,” Ty Lee countered.
“Yesterday you said you are a deep sleeper, Ty Lee,” Mai replied, though she barely sounded annoyed.
“I assure you it was plenty loud,” Azula hastily brought the conversation back on track. “I’ve never heard anything like it.” As she spoke, Azula could feel the cogs turning in her head, approaching a conclusion that she couldn’t quite see, yet.
"Well, there are probably a lot of animals in the Earth Kingdom that we don’t know about.” Ty Lee mused, tapping her cheek in thought. “Ooh! You know, I read about these enormous badger-moles that can Earth bend. I didn’t know there were Earth bending animals, I thought that the people invented the technique themselves, in school they made it sound like-”
“Thank you, Ty Lee,” Azula did her best to calm her irritation, and continued, “I don’t think badger-moles can roar, so that’s out.” She could feel the answer of what that thing was circling just out of her reach. It was important.
“Sounds like something that awful, gigantic flying cow would make,” Mai grumbled, rubbing her eye and smearing her makeup even more. “Big and loud.”
Ty Lee smirked, “So you did hear- wait, Azula? What are you doing?”
Azula was jogging over to her tent, preparing to disassemble it. “You’re quite right Mai, it did sound like something the Avatar’s bison would make.”
~ ~ ~
They packed up their little campsite in record time. Since Ty Lee had taught Mai how to put up and take down tents, and Azula carefully watched, the process was a lot quicker. After rousing the three giant basilisk lizards, they were on their way.
There were no more roars, so it was difficult to tell if they were headed the right way, at least at first. After about an hour of traveling in loops and zig zags, Mai found some of the familiar clumps of white and brown fur clinging to tree bark and fluttering to the ground. Following the trail was a breeze after that.
In fact, within the hour, they found the white, fluffy arrow-headed monster. Azula immediately noticed that the Avatar was nowhere in sight, but the bison wasn’t alone. Five, no, six, young women dressed in green warrior uniforms with painted faces surrounded it. They all seemed to be around Azula’s age.
To their credit, the girls in green noticed Azula’s trio approaching before they could attack, and they leapt into action, their fans framing their faces as they crouched into battle-ready positions.
“My, aren’t you easy to find,” Azula crowed at the now-growling animal, momentarily ignoring the girls who guarded him. “Did the Avatar abandon you to get into Ba Sing Se? What a shame.”
She turned her attention to warriors, who inexplicably had not attacked yet.
A girl with thick brown hair that fell to her chin, apparently the leader, if her position at the front and center was any indication, spoke, “There’s no need to attack the bison. Like you said, the Avatar is not here.”
Azula shrugged, “Oh, that’s alright.” Behind her, she felt more than saw Ty Lee dismount the giant basilisk lizard, and heard the clink of metal as Mai prepared her shuriken. “If you’re friends of the Avatar, then you’ll make fine opponents.”
And before they had a chance to react, she shot fire right at their leader. The warriors’ golden fans transformed into shields to stop the blast, which was both unexpected and ingenious. After Azula’s first shot, Mai and Ty Lee enthusiastically joined the fray. Well, Ty Lee was enthusiastic, but if the four knives that shot out of Mai’s sleeves were any indication, she was excited to be getting in on the action, too.
Azula was locked in battle with the leader, forcing her on the defense even as she strained to aggressively get in her own blows as well. Azula pushed her closer to the bison, which was edging back behind a fallen tree. Its growling got louder and more panicked with each blast from Azula.
She smirked. “Afraid of fire, I see.” The leader of the Earth Kingdom fan girls squinted at her, confused for a moment. But then, her eyes widened, and she glanced over her shoulder at the bison behind her. “Good,” Azula continued, “You should be,”
The girl looked back just barely in time to block a particular strong blast of blue fire, pushing her back, her heels digging into the dirt and pulling out grass. Azula shot another round of her, and this time the fire glanced off her fans and caught the branched of the fallen tree. The flames cooled, turning yellow and red as they lost their steady stream of oxygen from their bender.
The bison roared, and Azula glanced away from the girl she was fighting to check on the others. Only one other girl was still standing, and she was clutching her side where one of Mai’s knives had caught her. Ty Lee was already approaching her from behind, her fists raised and a serious expression on her round face.
When Azula looked back, the girl had both her fans folded and grasped in one hand as she swung a flaming tree branch above her head. Right at the bison.
“Mai, Ty Lee!” Azula shouted, and her comrades snapped their attention to her. “Stop the bison!” Azula snapped at the lizards, and her command, they skittered towards the bison and climbed on top of it, stopping it from taking off. Confused and frightened by the fire and the lizards, the bison just stomped his large feet. Mai pinned the girl to a tree right as Azula took a deep breath to put out the fires.
“Ty Lee!” Azula yelled, “Chi block the bison!”
Ty Lee only froze for a moment, cocking her head to squint at Azula, before turning her attention to the flying bison, trying its best to throw off the crawling lizards. Then, she leapt on top of the beast and did her best.
Azula and Mai could really only watch as Ty Lee climbed and flipped over the great furry creature, and tried to chi block it. Before this, Azula was sure Ty Lee only had experience with human beings, but she was doing well. About ten minutes in, the beast was sluggish enough that Azula called off the lizards. The warriors who were still conscious watched the spectacle with growing horror as Azula looked on with delight. The bison stumbled, struggling with the effort of staying upright. Even Mai was watching with stunned, rapt attention. Finally, Ty Lee won out and the creature fell to the side, his legs swinging weakly. With a few more jabs at his underbelly, it was fully paralyzed.
Ty Lee, who Azula had never known to lose her composure, swiped at her sweaty forehead, and swiped at the hair that had unraveled from her braid clinging to her neck, but she was smiling a little. Still, she did a handspring over the fallen tree to join Mai and Azula.
“Well, that was tricky,” She said brightly, “Not sure how long it will hold, though, we should probably tie him down or something.” She put her hands on her narrow waist. “Ah, what do you want to do, Princess?”
~ ~ ~
Five hours later, the warriors had been stripped to their undergarments and were tied together to a tree, still partially limp because Ty Lee kept re-paralyzing them. The bison was secured excessively, so that even though its chi had unblocked itself, it could not move a muscle. Azula had sent a hawk to the nearest colony, and a platoon had just showed up to assist.
“Greetings,” Azula said to their lieutenant as she approached.
The lieutenant bowed, her hands forming the flame at her sternum. “Your highness, we are at your disposal,” She said, speaking towards Azula’s shoes.
Azula placed her hands on her hips and waited for the lieutenant to rise. It took until the count of ten, which was an embarrassingly long time. Mai and Ty Lee glanced at each other awkwardly.
Finally, the lieutenant straightened, flushing when she saw Azula’s disapproving expression. She cleared her throat. “What do you want us to do?”
Azula jerked her chin towards the bison, “Keep that from escaping. He’s strong, and smart for an animal, so be diligent. 24 hour watch.” She pointed to the shivering warriors. “Bring them to a prison. The nearest. Send the one with the short brown hair to the Boiling Rock, she’s the leader.” The girl’s expression hardened when Azula mentioned her, and she lifted her chin in defiance. Inwardly, Azula laughed. We’ll see how long that attitude holds up after a few weeks in the toughest prison in the world.
She turned back to the lieutenant. “Don’t try anything funny. That will be all.”
Azula turned around and walked towards their giant basilisk lizards. Mai and Ty Lee wordlessly followed her.
As she mounted, she turned to her companions. “We’re going back to the Earth Kingdom capital.”