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Azula to her is an infant newly born, then three years old with her first touch of flame, then nine in the Fire Lord's throne room, then a pale corpse of fourteen lying on a bed of red lilies. There is no in-between, no childhood years, nothing of adolescence nor beyond—just sparks across time she neglected and left to wink that feel like that of a dream where scenes do not flow smoothly but instead jump erratically.
(What did we lose and hide?)
Ursa dimly remembers bits and pieces: embers straying from the consuming fire that she and Ozai and Azulon and Sozin and so many others fanned and chose to burn freely even if it meant burning their lives to charred husks. She just—
She just wanted to be free and was blind to how it immolated her own children: Zuko with his angry scar and desperate worldwide chase for misplaced honor and love from a father who had none to give; Azula with her dwindling psyche and golden chains of shadowed promises of love from that same father. She left them to that monster, nonsensically believed him to keep his word, even became a monster to her daughter; a role sealed with a quiet kiss to the forehead in the dead of the night because I love you, Azula. I do.
And now she's dead, burning to ashes in a funeral pyre as per Fire Nation culture. Ursa doesn't quite understand, how her daughter is no longer alive despite her son's trembling but sure explanation of how everything happened.
"Azula is dead," she says and tastes the words on her tongue by each syllable. It rolls off like the wind: the silent, sifting souls of the Air Nomads who died to flame as her daughter did. Both of them aren't ever coming back, no matter how much the Avatar yearns for his people whom he loves and Ursa for the daughter she scorned.
Ursa supposes there's a silver lining to it—she did, after all, according to Zuko's account, strike Ozai right in the heart with a well-aimed lightning arc. She pushed it in his chest, the heart that so desperately beat for the legacy he fought and tore for, and felt it stop and felt her father who stayed for her (a lie, but Azula always had been a gifted liar, so much so she could fool herself into cold eyes filled with warmth) die and grow cold.
The Fire Lord may have been stopped, but was it worth the cost of her daughter, who in rapid regret put up her index and middle finger to her head then burned after him? Ursa thinks not, even after speaking ill of her own child when depression put its hands around her head and squeezed. She wants to grab the Avatar, the last of his people whom her extended family murdered, and shake him—wasn't it his duty, to end the Fire Lord, after Avatar Roku failed to do Sozin? But guilt wracks her just as quickly, for when has clamoring for bloodstained children become a norm?
("You've said enough, Mother," Azula icily spits out after her after she calls her daughter a monster in the heat of frustration and tries to take it back.)
(Nothing isn't ever coming back, no matter how much she yearns for it.)
(What did we—)
Ursa lets the fire lily in her hand drift away from the high balcony of the Royal Palace. Yes, she remembers, watching it flutter down to the streets that seem alive for the very first time in a while, Azula once loved to play in the garden with the flowers before we had her touch the sun.