Chapter Text
“You’re scamming me.” Azula narrows her eyes and her fingers twitch beneath her cloak.
The vendor shrugs easily. He spreads his hands. “It’s not scamming, my friend. It’s just business.”
He looks around then leans in furtively. Azula watches him impassively and refuses to match the motion.
“This is the part where you bargain me down,” he whispers, then winks.
Azula looks away and purses her lips. She doesn’t understand these people. Why not just say the price you want? Why do you have to change your mind a dozen times? Why mark the prices up when you don’t expect that much?
On any other occasion, Azula would bestow him with a verbal tongue lashing. Now is not the right time. This is a day where anything could happen.
“I would rather pay now,” Azula responds stiffly. She can’t stop herself from looking over her shoulder. The man follows her eyes.
“Expecting trouble?” he jokes, but his voice has hardened like sugar in the sun. His fingers drum on the stall’s small table. “Tell you what. I’ll cut you a deal – half price. Take it or leave it.”
“I just want to pay,” Azula repeats. She places her coin pouch on the table silently and waits for him to count out the coin under her watchful eyes.
She has ants running through her veins. She scratches absentmindedly with her nails but feels no relief. The vendor is slow while counting and Azula has the idle suspicion that he could be trying to scam her again. She digs a nail into the flesh of her elbow and tries burrowing to release the ants. The man looks up as he finally finishes his count, sliding the pouch back across. He frowns.
“Are you okay?” he gestures between them. “I don’t mean to pry, but-“
Azula follows his gesture. Her cloak slipped and exposed her arm. It takes her a moment to realise what he is thinking of. It’s her arm – the raw, red marks scratched across the skin.
“I’m fine,” Azula snaps, and takes the supply of rice from him. She draws her hood up as she turns away.
The market is crowded today. Swelling like a mosquito-fly feeding on blood, gorging until it explodes. People sense the danger. When the soldiers come down from the mountain, no one is safe. Everyone is scrambling to buy what they can before the soldiers take everything.
The first day they came down from the mountain, the dirt ran red. The rain washed away the remains. Azula stopped by a puddle and couldn’t discern whether the vibrant red was from the earth or someone since dragged away.
There is tension floating through the air. Sinking heavily into people’s skin. Azula thinks she is the most anxious of them all. She never used to be anxious. She never used to be afraid. Not like this. The only person she had to fear was her father, and she knew ways to stave off his anger when it counted.
Azula has no experience with this type of fear. The cold sludge moving slowly around her chest cavity. She picks up her past, slipping through the spaces in the crowd. She doesn’t want to be around people when the tension finally bursts.
She is no friend of the Fire Nation these days. Not with the Crown after her. She isn’t a friend of these villagers either – Earth, all of them, with their muddy brown eyes. When the soldiers come down, they will go for the villagers, but if they see the former Firelord they will go after her too.
Azula’s eyes are amber. They appear brown from afar, but you need only look closer to realise their true colour. All it takes is one person. One person, and Azula is finished.
She is Fire, but not in the right way. She is a double target here. Azula’s knuckles whiten around her bag of rice.
When the air swells like this, people make enemies of each other for any reason they can.
No one wants to be targeted by the soldiers. Humans are human. They will always throw someone else into the fire if it means saving themselves from being burned. Azula saw it the first time – people cowering with terror then, in the midst of the chaos, something in their brains switching off. Reaching through the crowd and pushing an old acquaintance into the path of the soldiers.
Maybe that acquaintance chewed too loudly. Stole your goat. Always hovered too close to your wife. You push them before they can push you.
Azula is nearly to the edge of the market. Just another few paces and she is free, away from the chaos before it can begin.
The crowd suddenly falls still. Azula closes her eyes. She is too late. The soldiers will not allow anyone to leave. An old policy she listened to War Minister Chin develop – when you suspect a rebel, keep everyone in place and make a demonstration out of the process. It doesn’t matter if there is actually a rebel. You only need the idea of one.
The soldiers come down for supplies, but every time, they somehow manage to catch a dissident. They reek of seafood. Fish-mongers, all of them. If you had told Azula just two years ago that she would grow to hate the soldiers of her own nation, she would have leaned in close and assessed your mental state.
But that was a long time ago. Azula feels as though she has lived three lifetimes. Her life refuses to stabilise. It keeps shifting and changing. She had her mother, then her mother left. She had her brother, then he was banished. She had her father, then he abandoned her. She was a princess far down the line of succession who managed to become Firelord.
Now she is hiding out in an Earth Kingdom village two li from the eastern ocean. She wants to hate everyone involved in bringing her down. She wants to hate the palace guards who watched her scream, and she wants to hate her father for being weak and letting himself be defeated, and she wants to hate Zuko for challenging her and Katara for intervening and Zuko again for sending her away.
There is no hate left in her heart. She has burned through. Once she broke herself free of the remote care home Zuko sent her to without a thought, she wandered the mountains. Foraging from the land using old techniques she studied in class. She drank water from streams and spent weeks laying in the dirt while she tried to think of something to do.
In the end, she went to Caldera. Killing Zuko was the only option left for her. He would never accept her in court or elsewhere. He would never release Ozai and he wouldn’t grant the honour of a death duel. Ozai was trapped, and so was Azula.
She couldn’t see when she set the palace on fire. Azula depleted her energy while walking to Caldera. She had nothing left. No friends, no family. No one. She could hear Zuko around the corner discussing peace negotiations with her ministers – now his. Azula allowed herself to slide to the floor.
Azula set the drapery on fire because she didn’t have the energy for anything else. While the servants scurried around trying to eliminate the fire, Azula closed her eyes. She wanted to go with the fire. Taking everything and everyone out at once.
But the fire didn’t burn her. It never would. Azula opened her eyes in a hallway turned to charcoal and Firelord Zuko yelling commands from the courtyard. No one knew she was there. No one knew she escaped.
No one even cared.
Azula climbed to her feet and walked back out of Caldera. She kept walking until she reached a ferry that took her to Twin Peaks Island. From there, she found a smuggler willing to take her across to the Earth Kingdom.
“Take me to the western coast,” she said. “I’ll find my way from there.”
Except he didn’t drop her off at the western coast. He took her all the way to Zuihou.
Azula frowns at the soldiers pushing their way through the crowd. They are moving forcefully in one direction, presenting a solid, united front against the crowd. They are approaching as though confronting an enemy. Azula wonders who trained them to move like that around civilians.
Who knows? It could have been her, in one of her lifetimes.
Azula turns her face to the side and inconspicuously fiddles with her cloak. The soldiers will latch onto the first person they see who seems to be hiding their face, but she cannot risk them recognising her. She doesn’t know if Zuko has forgotten about his runaway sister. She doesn’t care. She has bested Zuko hundreds of times and trusts that she can fight whomever he sends.
What worries her is the general behind the soldiers. The man hiding in the undergrowth who returned the soldiers to Zuihou despite his Firelord ordering a full retreat. A man with enough conviction to disobey his leader is a man that Azula does not wish to cross. People are capable of anything with sufficient motivation.
The crowd ripples as the soldiers forge their way through. They haul an old man out for inspection, then dismiss him just as quickly. Next is a woman with a defiant tilt to her chin. They keep her under guard.
One soldier peels away from the group and advances directly towards a young girl crouching in the dirt. Azula tracks the movement. The girl looks up as the soldier nears and tries slipping away, but the soldier seizes her by the upper arm.
“What are you holding?” the soldier barks, and the terrified girl parts her hands to reveal the dried pit of a peach.
“I was eating,” the girl cries. She drops the pit and flinches away from the soldier’s grip. “I swear! I was only eating.”
“I’ll decide that,” the soldier snarls. He nods to another soldier and drags the girl down a path that Azula recognises as leading all the way behind the market, well into the deserted back streets.
Azula can’t move her eyes. The girl begins fighting for real as soon as she realises where he is taking her.
“Please!” she begs. The girl drops to the ground in an attempt at slowing the soldier, but he only hauls her with him.
Terror thrums in her voice like a livewire. The air smells of oncoming rain. Azula's hands twist around her cloak. She sees the girl and the soldier but she hears something else entirely. Lo and Li murmuring. Again. Again. Again. Until Azula dropped to the ground screaming with frustration, still just a child even after her mother and brother left.
Azula laid on the cold stone of the courtyard and refused to practice lightning bending for a single moment longer. Lo and Li stood over her without comment. They only watched, their hands neatly concealed by their sleeves in the same manner as the ladies of the court, only austere. Azula ignored them to stare into the stone. For that brief, faltering moment, Azula wasn't sure if she could bend lightning. She wasn't sure if she was as good as they told her. What sort of prodigy gives up after a matter of hours?
Her arms burned. Azula didn't move quickly enough in those days. She couldn't force the lightning out of its receptacle before it began tearing through her. Azula laid on the ground, and Lo and Li observed, and she couldn't stop herself from shaking with exhaustion and repressed emotion and the nagging feeling that she would never be as good as she was supposed to be. The pungent smell of sulphur invaded the training grounds and her hairs still stood at end on her arms.
None of that compared to the fear of realising that her father was watching her from the upper storey.
Azula opens her eyes. She hears her own screams and the screams of the girl. Buried within each other. Azula finds herself weaving around the back of the crowd before her mind has processed what she is doing. Her hands skim along the surface of a weaponry stall as she passes, the owner too distracted by the presence of soldiers to notice. Metal jumps into her hands.
The soldier rounds the corner. The girl disappears with him. No one is looking at the soldier and no one will follow him to intervene. Not even his superiors. Everyone has their eyes locked firmly onto the centre of the market, where the other soldiers are making a show of hauling random citizens to the centre and inspecting them for potential weapons.
Azula slips away unnoticed because no one cares enough to notice. Crossing the market takes mere moments. She blinks and finds herself standing before the soldier, the girl screaming on the floor and attempting to bite the hand holding her.
“Who are you?” the soldier demands, his grip tightening on the girl even as he raises his arms to bend at Azula. “Step back or I’ll-“
Azula never learns what he plans to do with her. She moves forward and stabs him.
Basic anatomy: there are two kidneys in the human body. Each are stored in the lower portion of your torso, just below the ribcage. Count down the twelve rungs of rib-bones and press your fingers to the spongy flesh beneath. There lies the kidney. Azula once participated in a dissection. Her tutors wanted her to understand the human body. She pulled the left kidney from its cavity and held it in her hands.
Azula cocks her head. She feels strangely detached. She could comfortably lay back and float over the cobblestones, far away from this town.
The soldier is screaming but he will not die. Kidney wounds are hardly fatal. His face twists and whitens. He paws helplessly at the knife, knowing he cannot remove it but his primal instincts begging for him to remove the source of his pain.
Azula saves him the dilemma. She gently grips the knife once more and removes it from his body. The soldier drops to his knees then keels over. Azula watches him with distaste. He should have fought. Azula was never allowed to give up. She was taught to keep going until you physically cannot. When you are too weak to fight, you are too weak to be of use.
Then you die.
Azula absentmindedly wipes the knife on her pants and turns to the girl, who is staring upwards at her with mixed fear and horror.
“You’ll be okay,” Azula says. She doesn’t wait for the girl to respond. Instead, she reaches forward and pulls the girl back to her feet by her tunic.
The girl stumbles once Azula finishes pulling her. Azula doesn’t wait for praise or admonishment. She doesn’t care for either.
Azula drags her hood back over her face and leaves the girl alone. She has already faced one monster today. The girl doesn’t deserve to see a second one.
She is the stranger in the cloak. The monster with the knife. Azula wipes her brow with her forearm, keeping her stained hands away from her face.
Azula has listened to dozens of people try and explain how lightning feels and smells. Unnatural, they say, like Agni himself is reaching from the Heavens. They are all wrong. The building ozone smells pungently sweet. Once the lightning begins growing between her hands, the sulphur invades and wipes away any sweetness, leaving only the distinct warning of danger. Azula can smell that now - the sulphur. The lightning.
She shakes her head to clear her vision. The cobblestones keep splitting and moving. She presses one hand to her head and her pace slows. Her breath rattles in her chest and she can feel every beat of her heart.
Has she been poisoned? Is that the source of her lethargy? Azula has attacked a soldier from her own nation in front of a witness. Her mind is clear but her body shudders.
A soldier wanders into the alleyway already whistling to himself. He freezes when he spots Azula. The second after, his eyes drift behind her and locate the other soldier bleeding on the ground.
“STOP!” the soldier thunders, already moving to combat Azula.
She doesn’t give him the opportunity. Azula darts down an adjacent lane and uses one hand as leverage to throw her body sideways and jump clean over the various gates and boxes the villagers used to block the lane. The soldier simply blasts his way through the first few obstacles, then realises that he cannot continue chasing Azula through the lane. His armour is too bulky and creates obstacles with every step. Azula estimates it to be twenty years out of date.
He sends a fire blast after her while yelling in frustration and Azula smirks as the heat glances off her back.
Azula was calm when she held the knife. She looked at the soldier’s face, at his disgusting sneer and brutal grip on the girl’s arm, and gladly drove the knife into his body. Her anger was glacial, emanating from her chest and reaching down into her fingertips. The shocking warmth of the blood woke her up.
Her breathing is absurdly loud to her ears. She shakes her head to clear it and spots an approaching crossroads in the alley. The back streets of the town are maze-like, originally designed to allow dozens of workers and servants to hide themselves from the vain upper-class residents who didn’t want to see the dirty work involved with labour.
The upper-class of the town didn’t last long. When the Fire Nation took over, they took everything. Azula heard whispers that it was slowly bouncing back when the occupation ended, but the Fire Nation has returned once more.
Azula reaches the crossroads and has only moments to make her decision. The soldier cannot pursue her any further, but she can hear him calling for backup and she is still clearly within sight. Azula inches behind a flowerpot to try and obscure his vision.
She can continue ahead. She can backtrack and take down the soldier before he calls anymore soldiers. She can run to the right, back to the market and the relative safety of the crowd, or she can go left into the darkness of an unknown alley.
Something clatters behind her and she instantly makes her decision: turning left into the unknown alley.
Azula throws herself into the dark and presses herself against the wall. Her chest heaves as she tries regaining her breath. She cannot hear any sounds of her pursuer but that is no guarantee of safety. Azula used to play tricks during her chases. Giving her opponents a moment to think that they had successfully escaped from her before appearing with a wicked smile and burning hands. Their failure became twice as humiliating – thinking they could outrun the princess of the Fire Nation, only to realise that she had them in her palms the whole time.
She doesn’t think these soldiers have studied her old tactics. No one did. Even War Minister Chin saw her ideas as quaint, rather than thoughtfully conceived.
Azula’s heart slowly returns to her chest and she sags against the wall.
“You’re inviting trouble like that, you know,” a woman’s voice muses, clucking her tongue.
Azula looks up through half-shaded eyes, still braced against the wall. The woman’s face is woven with stress lines. Her makeup is smudged around her eyes and her hands are closed around a worn tablecloth, watching Azula from the back entrance of her house.
“Leave me alone, Yoon-Hye.” Azula pushes away from the wall and tries her best to scowl. She doesn’t have the energy to be polite. She doesn’t have the energy to be intimidating, either.
Yoon-Hye is a middle-aged woman from the south-east. When the Fire Nation ravaged through her village, she wasted precious time forging documents for strangers to try and get everyone passports of refuge.
Fire carries uphill. Yoon-Hye should have run when she first smelled smoke, but she thought she could reason with the soldiers. There were no men in her household and she had never carried nor trained in weaponry. She was harmless.
None of that mattered to the Fire Nation. When they came, they came for blood.
Yoon-Hye sighs. The movement of her throat makes the shadows shift, revealing the livid scars spiralling up the flesh and climbing the side of her face to curl around her ear. Under different circumstances, the scarring could pass for an elaborately embroidered sleeve.
Azula averts her eyes. Yoon-Hye doesn’t like Azula. She has nothing but criticism for Azula whenever the two cross paths. Yoon-Hye calls her the mountain child – a free spirit that breezes in and out of town as she pleases, never stopping to engage with anyone and never caring about the damage she leaves behind.
“Come inside,” Yoon-Hye says impassively. “I’m not going to let you sit in that alley like you are dispossessed.”
Despite the scarring, Yoon-Hye’s posture remains regal. The slight upturn of her chin reminds Azula of her mother. Azula always feels like she has been drinking over-steeped tea when she is around Yoon-Hye. Every word leaves her mouth bitter.
“I am fine.” Azula fights to remain upright. It becomes easier the longer she stands. She steps further away from the fall to prove herself. “Look at me. I don’t need your help.”
Yoon-Hye’s mouth thins. “You should take a look at yourself first, child.”
Azula doesn’t look down. She holds Yoon-Hye’s gaze defiantly. She is aware of the way that her cloak dwarfs her and the tangled state of her hair and the way her cheekbones are just this side of too sharp. She feels wild and brimming with something untamed.
“I killed a soldier,” Azula says. The remnants of bitter tea on her tongue. “I could kill you too.”
Yoon-Hye snorts and folds her arms, even though tension lingers around her eyes. She has not looked away from Azula even once during their conversation. Yoon-Hye is brave but she is not stupid.
“You wouldn't kill me,” Yoon-Hye derides. She makes a dismissive gesture. “You are a child. I truly doubt that you killed a soldier.”
Azula gnaws at her lip. She shuffles her weight onto the opposite foot. That strange, cold sludge has reformed in her body and she can't shake it away. She can't get rid of it. She wants to rest against the wall again to clear her furiously spinning head but she can't appear weak in front of Yoon-Hye.
“…. I didn’t kill him,” Azula admits finally. “But I did stab him.”
Yoon-Hye’s head swivels sharply towards the entrance of the alley.
“Get inside,” she hisses, already taking a fistful of Azula’s cloak and pulling her forcefully to the door. “You stood around arguing when there were soldiers after you? Silly girl.
Yoon-Hye clucks her tongue again and Azula feels like a chastened kitten being dragged by her mother. She fights against Yoon-Hye, trying to bat her away with her hands. Yoon-Hye ignores the attempts. She manhandles Azula into the house and bolts three separate locks on the door. Yoon-Hye finally deposits Azula on the floor and immediately sets about filling a basin with water.
“Wash your hands.” Yoon-Hye sets the basin on the floor and watches Azula expectantly. “I will not have you staining my furniture with blood.”
Azula forgot that she still carried blood stains. She looks at her reflection in the surface of the water. Tired. Bedraggled. Face both sharper and more angular than in her previous court portraits. Azula doesn’t recognise herself anymore. She hasn’t in years.
She sits with her hands in her lap as she stares at the water. Azula never used to care about her appearance. She manicured it to perfection so that there would be no flaws for prying ministers to comment upon, but she had never considered whether her appearance was perceived beyond professionalism.
Azula dislikes her appearance. She hates the stupid girl in the reflection. The girl with the dark under-eyes and thin lips. If she had been smarter or stronger, then Azula could have had everything. Her father. Her nation. The throne.
She tried too hard. She thought she could have everything. Now she has nothing.
“Wash,” Yoon-Hye repeats slowly, then mimes washing her hands. Azula looks up to scowl.
Eventually, she stirs herself into motion and dips her hands in the water. The blood is encrusted beneath her nails and takes determined scrubbing.
Outside the door, there is the sound of thudding boots and loud, barking commands. Yoon-Hye seems unconcerned. Her eyes flicker twice to the door, but she makes no move to secure it further or inspect the source. Seeing her confidence subconsciously helps Azula relax. She focuses on removing the blood, leaving them raw from forceful scrubbing.
Yoon-Hye silently removes the basin without having to be told that Azula is finished. Azula watches her go through the motions. She wonders idly if Yoon-Hye was a servant in her previous village. She certainly seems accustomed to the role.
“I need to leave,” Azula says. Yoon-Hye fails to react. Azula tries again. “I need to leave. I can’t stay.”
Yoon-Hye exhales loudly, straightening from where she had begun rolling out a sleeping matt.
“Leave and go where, exactly? You told me that those soldiers are looking for you. Do you really expect me to turn you out onto the street for those eel-vultures to tear you to pieces?”
“They wouldn’t tear me apart.” Azula’s eyes are too-bright when she looks at Yoon-Hye. She spots the other woman’s flinch. “I would tear them apart.”
“Be that as it may,” Yoon-Hye recovers coolly. “You are my guest. I do not know where you were raised, but here it is polite to stay the night once invited.”
Azula frowns. Someone bashes on the door. Yoon-Hye’s expression never wavers. She raises one hand to her lips and whispers hush, sweeping with her other hand to gesture that Azula should cram herself into the small blanket cupboard. Azula wants to argue. She wants to scream at Yoon-Hye and force her to stop helping Azula when she clearly hates her. But the door-bashing continues and Azula feels the blood drain from her face.
The soldier must have seen which path she took. There are few houses in the alley. The entire lane used to be filled with stores, leading to a more spacious design than usual. The stores were converted to homes under the Fire Nation. Cramming multiple families under the same roof. Yoon-Hye lives with her entire family, but Azula can see no traces around her.
Azula looks at Yoon-Hye. It doesn’t matter how the soldiers found her. They did. Azula led them right to Yoon-Hye and trapped herself in the process, because she was stupid enough to think that she had found refuge.
Yoon-Hye motions again, this time with an accompanying tremor to her hands.
Azula is no longer the brave princess or the determined warrior. She is a coward, and cowards obediently climb inside the blanket cupboard to hide. Azula closes her eyes so that it doesn’t feel dark. Like this, she can almost imagine that she is young again and playing a game. She wraps her arms around her knees and pulls them close to her chest. Azula is small but the cupboard is cramped. There is hardly enough space for her.
Azula hears Yoon-Hye pad quietly to the door. The bolts scrape through the locks. Yoon-Hye’s voice is a mere murmur, but the answering voice is alarmingly loud. Azula presses her face to the door to try and hear more clearly.
“You can’t enter my home!” Yoon-Hye’s voice abruptly rises in volume. There are scuffling sounds as she fights to keep the soldier out. “Leave at once!”
Yoon-Hye cries out as the soldier finally enters the house, followed by a dull thud. Azula is instantly alert. She can’t hear either voice. Only heavy breathing.
“Come out,” the soldier calls, kicking something that rattles against the wall. “Hiding will only get you in deeper.”
The soldier sounds like a woman. Azula narrows her eyes. Some of the most ruthless people she has ever met were women. They are the ones with everything to prove.
Azula forces the door open and rolls out in one breath, jumping to her feet and immediately swinging her knife at the soldier. The soldier steps back blindly then recovers, grabbing onto Azula’s shoulders with burning-hot hands. Azula refuses to flinch. She looks the soldier directly in the eye and lets her flesh sizzle.
She didn’t spend ten years training from dusk to dawn just for some two-bit firebender to get the better of her. Azula can handle pain. She can handle anything.
Azula flips the knife over her knuckles and drives it into the soldier’s bicep. The soldier yells and her grip slackens momentarily, which is all Azula needs to duck underneath her arms and kick the soldier in her stomach.
For the second time that day, Azula stands over a soldier, deliberating on whether they deserve mercy.
The door blows open. Azula looks up instinctively. Another soldier forces himself through the narrow frame and instantly starts blasting with fire.
“Hey!” Azula shouts, managing to dispel the first blast. “You’re going to bring the whole house down!”
The soldier doesn’t listen. He makes a complicated series of movements then slides his foot back and punches another fireball through the house. The blanket cupboard where Azula was hiding catches fire. Azula looks back to her opponent in time for him to send a solid wall of fire directly at Azula and the other soldier.
Azula grits her teeth and makes the split-second decision to push the soldier out of the way. Azula brings her hands from the floor upwards in a scooping motion and parts the fire just enough to avoid further burns.
She can’t bend the way she used to. She hasn’t had anywhere to practice, even in secret. Her year in the care home hardly helped. Azula cannot use her fire in this fight, but the motions of deflection were ingrained into her body. Azula could avoid the fireballs in her sleep.
Bending an enemy’s fire is easy. Producing her own is more difficult. Her inner flame has weakened, miniscule sparks fighting for life as her supply of chi depletes. You need stability to grow your inner flame. Azula has had none of that for the past two years. She can latch onto the soldier’s fire and twist it against him, but the fire doesn’t want to move. Azula is battling with the fire and the soldier, and the other soldier still slumped at her feet but staring upwards in wonder.
Azula loses her patience and pushes the female soldier by the shoulders. She forces her back to the floor and out of the path of the male soldier’s idiot plan of attack.
“You’re going to kill everyone!” Azula screams in frustration. She swats another fireball to the side. Rage courses through her; providing her enough energy to leap forward and throw the knife at his torso.
Ty Lee tried teaching Azula acrobatics before they both realised that Azula had no talent for it and was only growing frustrated. It wasn’t Azula began bending that she could finally use a few of Ty Lee’s teachings for her mid-air tuck and rolls.
Mai was different. No matter how many times Azula tried giving up, Mai would return the next day with a new set of knives. She never said anything. Only placed them on the end of Azula’s bed and waited, bored, until Azula finally caved.
They used to practice in the gardens. Ty Lee was their cheerleader. Mai demonstrated the forms to Azula and she would copy each line, from fingers to shoulders to the stance of her hips. Azula mocked Zuko for playing with his knives. But that was different – he wasn’t any good. The longer Azula practiced with Mai, the more they realised that Azula held reasonable talent.
“Not talent,” Mai said when Azula made the mistake of bragging. Her eyes were curious. “You didn’t pick it up naturally. It took you weeks to learn the first move. More like… you practiced so long that your body started responding.”
Azula's knife flies true. It becomes embedded in the join between the soldier’s shoulder plates and he howls in pain, his final bolt of fire jolting off-course and hitting the ceiling. Azula panics when it looks like the ceiling will catch fire, but the wood is seasoned and doesn’t light.
“You’re a moron,” she tells the bleeding soldier. She kicks him in the back of his knee and he crumples. Azula finally turns her attention back to the first soldier who stepped through the door.
The female soldier has a sour expression that suggests she wants to spit at Azula but is restraining herself. Warring with the sourness is mixed gratitude and resentment – an ugly combination on anyone, but even more so on a Fire Nation soldier. Azula crouches before her.
“You realise your comrade would have killed us both?” she drawls as though bored. "He didn't care about you. Only the mission. It was your enemy who helped you."
Azula rocks on her heels while she waits for the soldier to respond. When it becomes apparent that the soldier wishes to do nothing except glare, Azula knocks her over the head with the hilt of her knife. The soldier slumps. Azula then finds Yoon-Hye still beside the doorway where she fell.
“I’m fine,” Yoon-Hye says weakly, swatting at Azula’s outstretched hand. She pushes herself up with effort. “Don’t worry, you silly child.”
Azula cannot identify any blood, cuts, or bruises on Yoon-Hye. The older woman’s shoulder is tender when she moves but Azula assumes it is from where she fell on the floor. The soldiers did not otherwise harm her.
Good, Azula thinks but does not say aloud. Meanwhile, Yoon-Hye scans her critically.
“You said you attacked a soldier.” Yoon-Hye tilts her head. “That was true?”
“I thought you believed me,” Azula retorts. She brushes off her palms as she stands. “I had the bloody hands to prove it.”
Yoon-Hye shrugs. “You tell many stories, Azula. I gave up on trying to guess if all of them were true.”
Azula rolls her shoulder. She lets Yoon-Hye stand on her own and retreats back to the relative safety of the living area. Azula finds spare ropes of twine and ties both soldiers up. She will have to dispose of them, one way or another. The female soldier struggles against Azula as she is bound but Azula has always been stronger than most. She mockingly pats the soldier’s head once she is finished.
Yoon-Hye inches slowly through the living area. She surveys Azula's work and nods approvingly. Azula looks at her for a long moment, unsure if Yoon-Hye realised that Azula was bending the soldier's fire. The angle was difficult. Yoon-Hye had her back turned at first, then the fight moved around the corner of the entrance. Azula didn't create fire. She only manipulated the soldier's.
"Good thing you had that knife," Yoon-Hye remarks, dropping onto the kneeling cushions by the dining table. She runs her hand over her face. "I wouldn't have expected you to carry one."
Azula turns the blade over in her hands. Covered in blood once more. She frowns as she tries to remember where it came from. Azula's best guess is that she picked it up in the market without realising. She wipes the knife on her already-stained pants and tucks it into her sleeve. Yoon-Hye beckons her closer.
"You need rest," Yoon-Hye says, instead of anything like are you okay, or you must be scared.
Azula hesitates. Yoon-Hye beckons again. Azula creeps forward and slowly lowers herself to the floor across from Yoon-Hye. She isn't scared. She isn't anxious. She is angry that the soldiers threatened a girl in the market, then Yoon-Hye, then Azula and a member of their own team. She is furious that she ran all the way to Zuihou only for it to succumb to the forces of an idiotic former general who couldn't accept that the war is over.
"I should go," Azula ventures. She picks at a loose thread in her tunic so she doesn't have to look at Yoon-Hye. "I have to take the soldiers somewhere."
Yoon-Hye scans them critically. "I suspect that if we leave them in the street, they will find their way back just fine."
Warning: Don't kill them. Azula nearly rolls her eyes but she feels like a marionette doll with its strings cut. Hopelessly lost and lacking direction. She lets Yoon-Hye check the pulse of the unconcious soldiers. Yoon-Hye doesn't say thank you, or how could you lead them here, or you saved me. Yoon-Hye is briskly efficient in her movements.
"Help me move them," Yoon-Hye says. "Then you should rest."
The fire-ants return to Azula's arms. She scratches them absently then stands to help Yoon-Hye.