Chapter Text
“Azula, please. Come in.”
Father’s voice is light and amused, as it should be. The Day of Black Sun’s ended in triumph. The pitiful invasion was crushed. Azula personally defended the Fire Lord and held the Avatar off, even without fire. Most importantly, Zuko’s committed treason and eliminated himself from the line of succession.
(An unexpected kindness on his part. It saves her and Father the trouble.)
Azula does not smirk at the Imperial Firebenders as she enters the throne room, because she hasn’t been named the heir just yet and she has no interest in accusations of overconfidence. Still, she lets herself picture herself on the dais for one moment. She pictures herself on top of the world, above even the Fire Nation’s finest ministers, reigning over the world from behind her unbreakable wall of blue flame...
The throne room doors slam shut behind her, and Azula falls to a proper kneel. For a moment, there’s only silence.
For no reason, she shivers.
“I had the most fascinating conversation with Zuko, before he deprived us of his presence,” Father remarks, and now the humor turns sharp like a blade. “He drew his swords on me…”
Azula can’t help the giggle. During the eclipse she felt traces of sparks at her fingertips- a cold, lazy red, but sparks nonetheless. They were the backup plan for if her Dai Li agents failed her. And that meant Father would’ve easily been able to defend himself, especially with his guards a yell away, so Zuko only survived his transgression because Father allowed him to.
“He informed me that he already knew the Avatar was alive, even before I received news of his attack,” Father says, words smooth, every syllable clear as his lightning. “You might be surprised that Zuko would achieve that insight, of all people, but he is the world expert on the Avatar’s affairs.”
Azula chuckles again. Though Father doesn’t seem to notice, the sound comes less easily. For a moment, she counts her breaths, which threaten to speed up without permission.
“I suppose he suspected the death was a sham even in Ba Sing Se,” Father continues. “From the second you failed to strike the Avatar down.”
Azula stops breathing.
But Father’s breaths carry on. She can track each grand inhale as the red wall dividing them leaps, and leaps higher, until his face is entirely obscured by fire. Until she can see nothing of him but the pronged golden headpiece that marks him as Fire Lord.
“I’m sure you suspected too,” he remarks, voice cold as ice.
“I made a calculation to strengthen the royal family-“
“You failed, and then you lied.” Father silences her with precise, ferocious enunciation. “To me.”
He falls silent, and Azula is suddenly very aware that she’s standing where Zuko was, when he challenged that general.
“Out.”
Azula rises and walks out. If she was even a shred freer in her manners, she’d run.
/
At the Boiling Rock, Mai sides with Zuko. Somehow, between his dropped ice cream and fireside tantrums, Zuko won her heart. She’s his now.
Azula shows her no mercy. There’s no such thing, at least for her. For her mercy is another word for foolishness, for allowing your declared enemies a second chance to let you down, and so Mai’s left her no choice but to sharpen her will and clear her mind. Azula has no choice but to extend two fingers, to fire a volley of tiny, precise flame jets that’ll outmatch Mai’s precious shuriken-
She waits a heartbeat too long. She’s made the mistake of demanding an explanation, as if any explanation could justify treachery, and she pays for it, falling chi-blocked to the ground. It’s a pathetic, undignified position for a princess, crashing face-first into the floor, and though the guards prop her up soon enough she keeps floundering, limbs still weak and wobbly.
Despite the warmth from the boiling lake, she’s never felt so cold in her life.
/
It takes a long while to return to the palace- longer than it should, but in a rare moment of common sense her brother ran off with her war balloon. She doesn’t like to admit it, but Zuko’s danced closer and closer to common sense since his exile.
(Of course, not even the thickest-skulled fool could undergo that Agni Kai without learning some lesson.)
Her fire returns. She makes sure of it, kindles flames in both hands as soon as the slightest control returns. The fire is cold and flimsy, a dull red with mere flickers of orange. It’s an embarrassment. And there’s absolutely no reason for it-
(Not that there’s any reason for her fire to be hot anymore, is there, not when everyone leaves, not when she can’t even win a fight against two non-benders she’s studied all her life or keep Zuko from running away again?)
- until she realizes her chi might still be half-blocked, thanks to Ty Lee’s machinations.
She stretches her fingers, gritting her teeth as they buzz and twinge. She ignores the pain, willing strength and purpose back into them.
/
“It is difficult to lose the support of a confidante,” Li says.
(Or maybe that’s Lo. Even Father can’t reliably tell them apart. Only Uncle’s ever learned the trick, but it’s not like he’d share.)
“Don’t exaggerate,” Azula snaps at whichever one of them had the misfortune to address her. “This is a minor inconvenience at the most. It has no real impact on the fate of the Fire Nation, and that means it has no real impact on me, either.”
The two of them give each other an inscrutable look. Then the one on the left offers another creaky bit of advice: “Perhaps you might seek comfort from a different source-“
“I don’t need comfort,” she squawks. It’s an uncouth outburst. For a moment she reminds herself uncomfortably of-
(She takes several deep breaths to calm herself.)
(She is far better than Zuko.)
“Of course you do not,” the other one simpers.
Azula’s being placated, like a baby. Though she resents the attempt to handle her, she keeps her composure and an open mind.
“We simply mean,” says the first, “that you may be strengthened by aid from an unusual ally. It was the ancient tradition of Fire Lords to commune with the sun spirit and ask his assistance.”
She’s not wrong. It was an ancient tradition, and it went the way of the Fire Nation’s dancing festivals and similarly outdated relics. The royal family is descended from Agni himself, and according to legend he used to visit them regularly. Of course he hasn’t spoken with a Fire Lord in the past five generations, but that’s the greatest sign of his approval. Recent Fire Lords have been so well-attuned to his will that he could provide no possible correction.
(One Fire Sage whispered there might be another reason for Agni’s silence, and his heresy got him sent to Crescent Island. The last she heard, he got himself executed for some Avatar treachery.)
Azula’s tempted to brush off the suggestion. She has better things to do than kneel in a shrine and utter prayers no one’s listening to.
(But she discreetly kindles a flame in one hand behind her back, and she finds it still weak and guttering.)
“Very well.” She smiles at them both. “What harm could it do?”
/
The Head Sage raises an eyebrow, when she issues her request to visit the old royal shrine to Agni.
“It does still exist,” he informs her. “Fire Lord Sozin tore down the main temple of the time and rebuilt one far grander, quite literally elevated. Though Agni’s shrine once stood on open ground, directly under the sun, it is now below the main temple, preserved underground in what’s become the Dragonbone Catacombs.”
“I assume it’s been properly maintained?”
He pauses. “It is cleaned regularly, Your Highness.” He pauses again. “We would be truly honored to have you visit.”
“Of course.” She sniffs. “Show me the way.”
It’s not what one might call a pleasant tour. Though the main temple is showy and glorious, an appropriate reflection of a magnificent country, the underground level is drafty and more than a little grim, even if it’s just as well-guarded against trespassers. Noting the cobwebs clinging to tarnished silver sculptures and dusty bones, Azula tsks. The Head Sage squirms appropriately at her displeasure, assuring her he’ll double the cleanings.
He leads her down a particularly poorly-lit hallway and stops several feet from the end. “Through here, Your Highness. As I am no child of Agni and lack the Fire Lord’s permission, I will not go a step further.”
Azula squares her shoulders and resists the urge to double-check her top-knot. Stepping forth, she unlocks the door with a blast of fire; it’s red, but the Sage doesn’t remark on it. After all, it’s safer to use cooler fire on old doors like this, since cutting-edge blue like hers might overheat the old locking mechanisms.
The door slides open, and she strides into the tiny shrine with a little red flame in her palm to light the place. There are paintings on the walls, but they’re old and weathered from long-ago days in the sun. Azula squints for a moment, bringing her light close, and she makes out a circle cut into quadrants. The bottom half shows a boxy, simplified form of the Earth Kingdom’s symbol, next to a circle with squiggles inside. Up top though, the circumference of the circle is broken, and whatever was inscribed within it has faded, long since gone.
She spends a moment wondering what the meaning might be and then gives it up. Instead she bends down and lights a stick of incense. She’s pleased to see several sticks ready and waiting- even if the sages can’t enter to worship here it’s their job to keep it clean and ready- and she places one in its proper dish. She glances over her shoulder to verify that the metal door’s slid entirely shut, granting her privacy. Then she kneels, falling into proper seiza, and opens her mouth to make her grand address-
Only to realize she has no words.
What is it she wants? To be Fire Lord, yes, but that’ll surely come in its time; she has no intent of wishing a faster death on her father just to get her crown. She could ask for her friends back, but what use would that be, when she knows now that they’d just leave her at the next opportunity? She could ask for her mother back, but Agni would laugh in her face.
(She’d laugh in her own face.)
She’s overthinking this, surely. There’s no reason to choose her words carefully when no one will care, when she’s addressing a god who hasn’t heard a Fire Lord’s prayer in over a century.
“Lord Agni,” Azula says, before she has to stop and swallow a laugh. It’s suddenly hilarious that she’s down here in the dark, down on her knees, praying like she can rely on any force but herself. When she resumes, she doesn’t even bother with the pretense of piety. “I have power, but I’d like some more if you’d be so obliging. Power to get the things I want. Power so grand, it’ll shock everyone on earth- even me, if you can manage that.” She snorts before adding on her last ridiculous, meaningless request. “Power to match the Avatar’s. Or outdo him, if you’d like!”
She waits for her words to quit echoing, rattling around the empty darkness. There’s no whirlwind of flame, no sudden golden glow to shower light on her face, no sign that Agni heard an Agni-damned syllable she said.
With a huff, she shoves herself back to her feet, mentally castigating herself for her own folly. It’ll be embarrassing, if Father hears of this little escapade- he’s long held that begging spirits for personal attention is a waste of time. According to Lo it’s a major point of contention between him and Uncle Iroh. Or it was, until the treason overshadowed it.
She hurls fire back into the locking mechanism. It burns hot, some careless tinges of blue bleeding through. The door slides open obediently, and she marches back out and ignores the Sage’s curious glances. She has nothing to tell him. Like generations of royals before her she felt nothing, no sign of Agni’s favor.
(Nothing but a breeze ruffling her hair before she blasted the lock, a playful current in what should’ve been an airless room. She dismisses that as wishful thinking.)
/
A few nights later, a breeze wakes Azula from sleep, ghosting over her face. She shoots upright, hands extended and ready to throw fire, but there’s no movement. Nothing but the ripple of a red curtain.
She pulls herself from bed to inspect the window and verify that it’s closed. Around it, the heavy fabric of the curtain slows its movements. Of course, it shouldn’t have been moving in the first place.
(A sign of treachery. Treachery from the guards outside her door, or maybe the guards outside who ought to be watching this window. It was stupid to fall sleep, pretending she could trust anyone.)
Azula whirls around. Then she raises her hands to shoot fire at the light fixture above her, illuminating the room and flushing out any intruders still remaining-
No fire comes out.
She inhales. She doesn’t panic. She dismisses the fear that dares to make her weak and stupid, and she summons another focused stream of flame.
Nothing.
She tries again, and again, punching and kicking and even throwing in some of those savage cries that Zuko can’t bend without, but she just winds up breathless and exhausted in the darkness. When she finally stops, she raises her hands. She inspects them, and wonders if they were the traitors all along.
The curtains are rippling again, though she hasn’t touched them.
“Your Highness.” There’s a knock on her door. “I heard a noise, are you alright?”
That’s a servant, the same one who’s washed her hair for the better part of a decade, and for a moment, Azula thinks of letting her in. For a moment, she thinks of summoning the palace, the entire country, to her aid.
“I’m fabulous,” she snaps back. Then she stays still, listening to the mousy patter of footsteps in retreat.
Azula doesn’t trust anyone. She can’t. Not when her first thought is poison, because Mother told her of toxins that could suppress bending like this, and if someone managed to poison her they couldn’t do it without the help of the guards. There are tasters for this kind of thing. She knows because she’s watched them fall, loyal servants of the Fire Nation, writhing on the floor after one bad bite.
(She may be fourteen. That doesn’t mean this court wouldn’t rather see her dead.)
She reins her breathing in a second time and reviews the other options. Perhaps this is Ty Lee’s handiwork, a variant of chi blocking that worsens over time. But she whips through a kata, a complicated one with a spin and flip at the end, and her limbs work as well as ever. It’s only her bending that’s broken, and Azula read every book ever written about chi blocking before she asked Ty Lee to join her, and she knows this isn’t how the method works.
Just in case, she tries breathing a tongue of fire, a move that won’t tax any of the limbs Ty Lee attacked. She doesn’t get a single spark. She does feel a pleasant warmth in her exhale, but anyone’s breath would feel warm in such a cold room.
Oh. The room’s cold.
Azula hasn’t properly noticed ambient cold since she was four or five. Not since she was in novice firebending lessons, still dependent on clothes and her mother’s embraces to keep from shivering in the draftier parts of the palace. She hasn’t entirely forgotten the sensation though, not when her hands turn cold sometimes as some sort of misplaced reaction to stress.
Her hands are cold now, and her entire chest too. There’s nothing but a chill where her inner flame ought to be.
She remembers another bit of research, too, that she thought relevant to Zuko but never to herself. When her teachers bored her at the Royal Fire Academy for Girls, she’d taken to slipping in scrolls from the library and reading them instead of listening. Her teachers could hardly call her out for it, and she’d gotten through an unusual amount of recreational reading for someone her age. Somewhere in there, there’d been a text on firebending psychology. She’d chuckled at the outdated assumptions, and the absurd insistence that firebending came from “the heart” as opposed to, say, the lungs and the muscles. But there was one passage that stuck in her head, entirely without permission.
“If struck by a sudden twist of fate, a firebender may lose their purpose and their bending with it. In cold darkness will they wander, as if trapped under a perpetual eclipse.”
Azula nearly laughs at the absurdity of her losing her “purpose.” She’s lost Mai and Ty Lee, but they’re irrelevant, aren’t they? Valuable weapons but nothing more? She never did anything for them. She did it all for the Fire Nation, and for Father and for herself, and she hasn’t lost any of her devotion to those three entities.
She might’ve been betrayed by two of her friends- her only two friends- but that’s no excuse for her bending to abandon her too.
“Your Highness?”
“What?” she barks, glaring at the door.
Whoever’s on the other side has the sense not to come in. Through the door they declare, “Prince Zuko and the Avatar have been traced to the Western Air Temple. Your father requests that you lead the forces against them.”
Azula ought to rejoice. Instead, she thinks of feigning sickness and suggesting someone else- there are more than enough generals and admirals on hand, given all the planning for the comet. She can’t take on the Avatar, not without her fire.
“Princess Azula?”
But this is a second chance, an opportunity to redeem herself for her failure at Ba Sing Se and all the lies that backfired. She can’t waste it. She can’t turn it down.
Father isn’t known for showing mercy.
“Prepare the airships,” she says, throwing the door open. “I’m going to kill him this time.”
(A second later, she realizes she doesn’t know which of the boys she means. As the adrenaline floods her, filling her chest with purpose and what had better be fire, she doesn’t particularly care.)
/
Azula stations herself in the grandest of the airships. Marching about the cockpit, she plots out strategy and barks orders and looks down her nose at the soldiers scurrying to carry them out. The ships are outfitted with vaguely draconian cannons that belch fire and explosives to rival any firebender, and as they hone in on the temple and begin lobbing bombs, there’s obviously no need for her to engage personally in combat. The Avatar is doomed. So are all his allies, surely reduced to ash by the explosions-
Until Zuko charges out of the smoking wreckage and lands with an ominous clang, somewhere on her ship. It’s followed by an even more ominous boom, rattling the entire structure.
In synchrony, the entire crew turns to look at her, expecting her to fix it.
She smiles at them. The smirk feels fragile on her face, but she strides out like a Princess of the Fire Nation ought to, utterly undaunted. Perhaps her fire’s taking an unapproved vacation, but stopping her brother from blowing up her ship ought to count as “purpose” by any definition.
She climbs out to the top of the ship and finds him there, throwing fire at every delicate bit of machinery in sight. With surprise, she notes they’re strong yet quiet blasts, without his characteristic hollering. He gets in a particularly precise shot at a neighboring ship’s engine, and it starts to veer off course, smoking. Azula makes a mental note to fire an engineer.
He doesn’t notice her at first. Really, it’s unacceptable.
“Looking for something?” she calls, mockingly pleasant.
He twists around and immediately kicks flame at her. She dodges it easily.
“I’d fight back,” she says, dancing towards him and weaving through his blasts. As at their first battle against each other, she doesn’t attack him with her own fire. She can’t attack him, because she’s still cold, cold and so jittery one strong gust could blow her away. “But Father wants you intact. He’s got something special planned for you. Maybe he’ll finally even out that face of yours!”
She means to destabilize him, goad him into tripping up. He doesn’t. His firebending doesn’t waver for a moment, as if he’s stolen her power for herself, but still she manages to lunge close and sweep one leg out from under him with an ordinary non-bending kick. One shove to his chest, and he goes sprawling backwards with fire still in his hands. His body slides right off the side of the ship, without nothing to catch him.
One down.
Then an inhuman bellow echoes behind Azula, and she spins to see that bison charging through the chaos, shielded by a mask of stone. There’s a flash of orange on his back- the Avatar. The Avatar’s flying straight towards her. With a wordless yell Azula throws her full body into a single attack, willing two massive cones of fire from her palms. Nothing comes out, not even a hint of light.
Oddly enough, the bison’s shield disintegrates anyway, crumbling to rubble. It zooms past her, and Azula squints at it, wondering if the earthbenders purposely destroyed their shield for some reason. The bison loops downwards and then zooms back up. Now Zuko’s sitting pretty on its back, because the Avatar and his friends must’ve decided he was worth saving, though she doesn’t understand it, she can’t understand it-
Crash!
The damaged airship collides with her own. There’s no grand explosion- the velocities are too low to break the shielding- but the impact still throws Azula off-balance. Though she struggles for balance, she too slips off the edge of her ship, into the clouds. The ships disappear from sight, swallowed by the fog. She tries and tries, but she can’t manage a single spark in the damp chill, and no one’s coming to catch her. Steadily, she plummets into the abyss.
“Agni,” she pleads as she breaks out of the clouds on the other side, as the unforgiving rock below comes into sight. She has no hope of being heard. “Agni, please, no.“
She doesn’t panic. No, she takes one last gasping breath and forces fire out of her hands. Nothing comes out. She can see there’s nothing.
And yet she slows. She slows, propelled upwards by nothing. She wafts to the ground like a feather. Once she scrambles to her feet, not even slightly bruised by the landing, she places her palms together, and tries to push fire out of her right hand.
She feels her left hand get shoved away by nothing.
By nothing but air.
That’s when she panics.