Chapter Text
Fire Nation Royal Palace, 88AG
A deafening crack of thunder rattles the palace windows, jolting Zuko awake. It’s not that scary , he tells himself as lightning shatters the sky outside, throwing long shadows across his room. 1… 2… 3… 4… he counts before another earth-shaking boom, like his mother showed him to do last time there was a storm. Four miles away. The lightning cracks again, even brighter, and in the silver-blue light he sees his door is now open a few inches. Before he can gasp, his eyes land on a small pale face illumined in the doorway.
“Zula?” he asks, rubbing his eyes. “What are you doing here?”
She hesitates, but the thunder crashes again, and she darts over to his bed and hops up onto it, hiding under the covers. “Mom told me to go back to bed. But I can’t.”
“Oh,” he says, “it’s okay, Azula, you can stay here with me. I’ll show you how I stopped being scared of storms. The lightning gets to us before the thunder, so if you count the seconds between them, that’s how many miles away the storm is. Then it’s kinda like a game!”
Another slash of lightning and boom of thunder shake the palace, right on top of each other. Azula huddles deeper under the blankets, and Zuko pats her shoulder comfortingly. He is her big brother, after all. It’s his job to protect her.
When the crashes start drifting further apart, and further away, she pokes her head out from under the covers. “I’m not scared,” she insists. “I just… don’t like how loud it is.”
“Me neither. But Mom said thunderstorms are so loud in the Fire Nation because they’re how the dragon spirits talk to us. The lightning is their fire-breathing and the thunder is their roar.”
Azula considers this. “That’s kinda cool, I guess.” Then, her face turning eager, “do the dragon spirits talk so loud to us because they like us best?”
“Yeah, I guess so!” Zuko smiles. “I guess the other nations have their own spirits. But I think the dragons are the coolest ones.”
Lightning flashes outside again, and fear flits back into Azula’s amber eyes. Zuko reaches out for her little shoulder again. “Do you want me to braid your hair into a dragon tail for you? Mom showed me how yesterday.” She nods. He thinks about it for a second, then hands her a pillow. “Here, lay on your stomach and I can sit next to you. That way I can reach.”
She curls up around the pillow and he tries to remember how Mom showed him, starting at the top and adding more hair from the sides as you go. When he gets to the ends there’s pieces sticking out everywhere though, so he undoes the braid, combing gently through her hair with his fingers, and starts over. By the time he finishes it the second time, his little sister is asleep, the sounds of her soft little snores punctuated by the rain still pounding against the window.
Fire Nation Royal Palace, 90AG
Thunder rumbles closer in the night. 1… 2… 3… 4… 5… 6… Only six miles away? Zuko thinks. The rain hadn’t hit yet, but the air was damp and heavy, thick with the ominous calm that precedes a storm. Usually Azula would be here by now - even before the storms started, she seemed to sense them coming, as if she could feel the static electricity in the air buzzing under her skin. But then again, she has been acting... different lately, ever since she started firebending training. She had only just started a few months ago, and he had been so proud of how fast she caught up to him. But then she started nailing katas he’s still struggling with, and showing off all the time, and now Dad doesn’t even seem to notice when he masters one if she had gotten it first.
But then the thunder peals again, close and deafening, rattling deep into his ribs, and the smug little smirk on the Azula in his mind is gone. In the lightning’s guttering glow, all he can picture is his little sister, usually so strong and independent, trying to be brave, but scared out of her skin by the exploding storm.
He slides out of bed and grabs his robe. Careful to shut his huge, creaking door silently behind him, he sneaks down the hallway, pulling on his robe-sleeves as he goes.
The driving rain drowns out any sound her door makes when he pushes it open. She’s curled up in a tiny ball when he reaches her bed.
“Pssst! Azula!” he whispers, and she jolts upright.
“Zuzu! What are you-” she’s cut off by bellowing thunder, and she involuntarily burrows back down into the bed a few inches, but her eyes flare in defiance of her automatic response. “I’m not scared.”
“I know! Me neither! I, uh… just thought you might want me to braid your hair again,” he offers. Big brothers can do that, at least.
“Oh. Yeah, I guess that would be okay,” she concedes, and he clambers up into her bed. “I can do yours too if you want. Ty Lee showed me how. She’s really good at it. I need to practice so she’s not better than me.” Her lower lip pouts a bit.
He starts dividing her hair into sections, combing through them with his hands. “Yeah, you can practice on me if you want. You don’t have to be the best at everything though. You’re already the best at firebending. You’re even better than Dad was when he was your age.”
“But I love being the best at firebending. I know I don’t have to be the best at everything. I want to be.”
He doesn’t know what to say to that, so he just braids her hair in silence. Her words worry him - doesn’t she know different people were good at different things? Everyone is good at something , Mom had told him when he had lamented Azula’s firebending skill surpassing his. Even people who can’t bend at all. Your grandmother on my side was a non-bender, but she was a master herbalist. She could make all kinds of medicines and cordials, even poisons.
He absentmindedly ties off the end of the braid, hands finding the silk hair tie she’d left on her nightstand. Then she turns around to face him, but he doesn’t blink, still lost in thought.
She waves a hand in front of him. “Turn around, dum-dum. Your turn.”
He does. Her tiny hands start sifting through his hair, and he lets his eyes close, listening to the sound of the rain. She braids and unbraids it over and over and over, until the thunder is just a distant rumble.
Ember Island, 91AG
The sun is sunk almost below the Ember Island shoreline, still flushing the sky faintly orange against deep blue as they walk back toward the beach house. Dry summer lightning crackles faintly on the distant horizon, soft as the sea breeze.
“Why do you get a souvenir?” Azula complains, jabbing at the blue-and-white painted mask in Zuko’s hands. “Mom never buys me anything from the Ember Island Theatre!”
“Because you don’t need a mask to be Noren! And you always get to be Noren. Mom said if I have to be the Dark Water Spirit every time we play Love Amongst the Dragons, I should at least have the mask to look the part. You already look like Noren!”
“Noren has his emperor cape! They sell the capes after the play too, I should get to wear one for the final duel. Winning doesn’t look as cool without a cape!”
“Why don’t you ask Dad then? He already bought you, like, ten bags of fire gummies just because you made puppy-rabbit eyes at him,” Zuko snipes back, smacking the paper bag of candy in her fist with the back of his hand. “Dad never buys me snacks.”
“That’s because you never even ask , dum-dum.” She bites into a gummy-dragon and yanks its head off with her teeth.
He looks at the ground, kicking the sand with his bare foot. Does Azula really not see how differently their dad looks at the two of them? “Maybe if you just shared yours once in a while…” he grumbles.
“You never ask me either!” she insists, pointing her decapitated gummy-dragon at him.
“Mom says it’s not polite to eat other people’s food unless they offer it.”
“Oh, please ,” Azula snorts, “Mom has a rule about everything . You’re the prince , Zuko, people are supposed to be polite to us , not the other way around.” She rolls her eyes and pops the rest of the gummy-dragon into her mouth. “Alright. I’ll share my gummies if you practice kuai ball with me tomorrow. We’re so close to nailing the move with the shoulder vault.”
Now it’s Zuko’s turn to roll his eyes. “Let me guess, you’ll be doing all the vaulting and I’ll be doing all the shouldering. As usual.”
“Well yeah, Zuzu, you’re the big brother! You can’t vault off my shoulders, you’d squish me. Dum-dum.” She throws a gummy-dragon at him.
He catches it. “Please. You’re almost as tall as me now.” He chews on the fire-gummy moodily, but all the same, he’ll let her practice the vault tomorrow. He is her big brother, after all.
Fire Nation Royal Palace, 92AG
Azula is seven when silver-blue lightning crackles from her palms the first time, in the late afternoon after the day’s firebending lesson. Zuko watches her conjure the electric sparks, the way they glow off her enraptured eyes as she tosses the arc of lightning from hand to hand, the way her laugh shows every one of her sharp little teeth. Then her eyes flash straight at him, and he knows in that beatific smile that she won’t fear electric storms any longer. She is the electric storm, now, and it’s his turn to be afraid.