Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“The most beautiful part of your body / is where it's headed.”

— Ocean Vuong, Night Sky With Exit Wounds

Azula has barely spoken to Mai in almost two years. It shouldn’t matter as she ties her hair in a topknot, but somehow it does. She supposes she’ll give it another two years. The feeling will fade. It has had no right to stay as long as it has to begin with. Mai is nothing more than her disgraced brother’s pathetic girlfriend these days, and Azula is moving on to bigger and better things. They’re in different years at school, and Zuko is rarely tolerated in their father’s presence anymore, so he can’t bring Mai around to drag Azula down often. The world is better this way. Azula is better this way.

Alone, she smiles in the mirror. It looks more like a threat than anything else. 

Azula walks down to the car where the driver does not look at her. He never looks at her. None of the staff do. She wonders, sometimes, if they would have looked at Zuko if he had stayed, burned and scarred. Azula has never had trouble looking at him. Not even in the hospital. Not even after he left. But Azula’s not like other people. She’s better, her father always says. Crueler, her uncle used to whisper with her pathetic excuse of a mother.

Azula doesn’t care about that. She doesn’t care at all.

She clicks her lighter on and watches it burn blue.

At lunch, Azula’s nose starts to bleed. Ty Lee tells her she should go to the nurse. Azula hums agreeably, but she goes to the bathroom instead to watch the blood drip down her face. She’s always been like this. Or at least, she’s been like this as long as she can remember. Bruises and blood and burns do not fascinate her, have never fascinated her, but she watches them with her golden eyes cold and focused. As diligently as she used to watch her father beat her brother until he burned half the boy’s face off. She is nothing if not dutiful.

The bathroom door opens. Mai walks in. She knows better than to try to have any kind of real conversation with Azula at this point. She made her choice just like Ozai and Ursa and Iroh; no one has ever loved both Zuko and Azula. It’s unthinkable. That doesn’t mean Mai doesn’t stare at Azula’s reflection in the mirror though.

Vaguely, Azula wonders if she agrees the blood is the same shade as her lipstick. She dismisses the thought when Mai does not stop staring. “Bleeding is a private affair,” she sneers. She will not voice Mai’s name, family or given. She will not give her the relief of distance nor the brunt of intimacy.

“You’re supposed to tilt your head back and pinch it,” Mai says.

Azula doesn’t know what game they are playing, but she will not play on Mai’s terms. She does not dignify the older girl with a response. She ignores Mai’s presence until Mai is gone. Then, Azula ignores her absence until the blood has ceased its flow. She cleans herself as she cleans between her legs when her father is particularly rough, out of passion or anger—she has stopped distinguishing which; it does not ease the pain to know its root. She makes herself presentable once more, and then she leaves for class.

When she arrives, Ty Lee smiles at her. Concern is etched in that smile, but Azula will not acknowledge it. She resents it as she resents all of Ty Lee’s weakness. She cannot, however, avoid her friend when school is over. They have to walk to practice, and so Azula waits outside the classroom for her to finish packing her school bag.

“The nurse’s office took a long time,” Ty Lee says. Her voice is nervous. She knows Azula’s mood has been foul since she left her lunch behind, and she knows the foulness does not stem from hunger; Azula eats in fractions, and she has long stopped biting worse for it.

“I didn’t go,” Azula says. She is in no mood to lie, however easy it would be, however compliantly Ty Lee would accept the lie. “I went to the bathroom instead.”

Ty Lee glances at the taller girl out of the corner of her eye. It’s an anxious gesture. As though she thinks she’s done something wrong to upset Azula. She hasn’t. Not really. Not today, at least.

“Father still hasn’t told me what’s happening with the charges,” Azula supplements, so Ty Lee will stop that. She will not comment further, and both girls know that. They’re silent as they change for kuai ball practice.

“I’m sure everything will be fine,” Ty Lee says. She's got the kind of smile that splits her face like a blade on.

Nothing in Azula’s life has ever been fine.

Summer break starts. Her fifteenth birthday comes. They’re going out for dinner with her worthless brother, and so her father sets out a dress for her. It’s silk. Red, of course; he loves her best in red. She puts it on without fuss, and it is only when she catches sight of herself in the mirror, her hair loose and straight, that she recognizes the dress. This was her mother’s. Azula has never seen the resemblance so terrifyingly clearly.

She ties her hair into an elegant ponytail, her chest rising in panic. She is being childish. Weak. She didn’t even see anything this time. Anyway, the point of making her wear the dress is to hurt Zuko by reminding him of the mother who didn’t take him with her.

(If she let herself think ill of her father when they’re playing these games, she’d acknowledge that the point is also to hurt her by reminding her of the mother who didn’t protect her.)

Reluctantly, Azula lets her hair down. This is just another punishment that she will suffer silently.

He smiles when he sees her and puts a diamond and ruby-encrusted necklace around her throat. Her mother hadn’t liked jewelry because she knew it would mean Ozai owned her. Azula is not afforded this ability to slight her father with rejection.

“It’s beautiful,” she says automatically.

“You’re beautiful,” he says before he leads her to the car. His hand stays firmly, almost bruisingly on her thigh until it stops in front of a residence Azula should be familiar with, but she has never cared to know.

The car door opens to reveal her brother and uncle standing uncomfortably.

“You didn’t mention that Uncle was coming,” she says, careful not to sound accusatory. “Couldn’t we have taken the SUV?”

Ozai feigns an apologetic smile. “It slipped my mind. In my lap, Azula.”

She wishes she felt like a child, sitting in her father’s lap with his arms around her waist to trap her in place. She wishes she didn’t feel so painfully ashamed of herself for playing the game that’s dominated her life until the girl she was before was swallowed whole. She wishes Zuko wouldn’t glare at her like she’s done something wrong by virtue of existing. She wishes she hadn’t fucked up so completely in the first place.

Azula asks the driver to play the radio. A silent car ride would not bother her normally, but she cannot stand the way her gilded cage feels tonight.

It takes four songs for them to arrive at the restaurant, and she can’t help but think how fitting it is: the death number for a death march. She might as well be going to the gallows. She might feel less sick if she was.

When she gets off her father’s lap and out of the car, she turns her gaze to her brother, cold and mocking. His anger has shifted to distress at how much she looks like their mother tonight.

(His mother. Never hers.)

“Zuzu,” she says, and it comes out like a coo, “you’re growing into your scar.” If anything, she thinks this is a rare mercy on her part. A reminder that she might look like the woman who birthed them, but that is where the similarities end. They are superficial and forgettable. Even Ozai knows this.

Iroh’s eyes narrow at her as he places a hand on Zuko’s shoulder as if to say Azula is not worth his anger; Zuko clearly disagrees, but he’s always been desperate for approval.

Her father’s hand finds the small of her back. They enter the restaurant and are seated with an air of urgency. Azula takes the seat next to her father. It’s not a choice. It’s never a choice. Azula pretends it is, though. She’s an excellent liar. What was it Zuko used to say? Azula always lies. Always. But he never could actually tell when she was lying to him. He still can’t. Sometimes, she wonders what he would do if he could, though. If at these little soirees he saw through the painted-on smile. Would he even care at all? She hadn’t particularly cared when their father beat and burned him. Blood spilled is all they’ve ever shared; not tears or kindness after the fact.

They order,—her father ordering for her—and then he excuses himself to answer a phone call.

“Why are you wearing that?” Zuko croaks.

Azula almost sneers before she twists her mouth into something crueler. “Civilized people wear clothes in public, Zuzu. Besides, I thought it was pretty. Don’t you think I look nice?”

“It’s not your dress,” he says as if it matters. It is not her dress, and Azula is not her mother, but that will never stop Ozai from pretending until she stumbles and ruins the charade. It is not her dress, but these are her genes and that is her reflection, so here she is. Sitting with her estranged brother and uncle, pretending her father will not rape her when they forsake her once more.

Azula can’t help but laugh at how horribly fucked up her life has gotten and how horribly unprepared for the truth she won’t tell everyone around her always seems to be. True to form, it’s a cruel thing. She rarely laughs any other way these days. She supposes there are people—Mai and Ty Lee—who might have fonder memories of her laughter from childhood, but she’s sure that Zuko and Iroh only know the sound in its mocking. Good. She doesn’t want them to have any part of her that is not sharpened to kill.

“Did your father give it to you?” Iroh asks once her laughter subsides.

She composes her mouth into a smirk and says, “Yes. It was a birthday present.” Another lie. This is all part of an elaborate punishment. Azula does not want to think about what Ozai will get her for her birthday present this year.

“You hate Mom.” Zuko sounds torn between tears and fists. 

The accusation lingers and weighs bitter in Azula’s chest. On some level, she thinks Zuko has always blamed her for Ursa’s abandonment. Maybe if her daughter was less of a menace, Ursa could have stomached staying to protect her son. Maybe if she didn't hate her daughter enough to abandon her, she would have loved her son enough to take him with her.

“I hated Ursa when I was eleven,” Azula says, “but Father loved her. I don’t particularly care about her anymore.” She watches as Zuko’s grip on the table tightens, his knuckles turning porcelain, and she smiles. “Honestly, I don’t even remember her at this point. It’s been just us for so long now.”

Zuko’s knuckles turn whiter still. It’s been almost four years since he was burned and dismissed. It’s been almost six years since their mother left, and their father stopped pretending to love him between the bouts of violence.

Her uncle’s stupid face twists into something between anger and grief. For all his proverbs and preaching, Iroh has never thought there was anything salvageable in Azula. It’s the only thing they agree on.

“You know, neither of you wished me a happy birthday,” she says. She loves to chastise her brother. She's always had the upper ground in all the ways he can see.

“Fuck you,” Zuko spits out.

She smirks, unforgiving as always. “I don’t think brothers and sisters are supposed to do that, Zuzu.”

“Azula.” To Iroh, she is always Azula—cruel, awful Azula, just as foul as her namesake, and Zuko is always Nephew—beloved, adored Nephew, just as tenderhearted as his mother. He cannot unshare her blood, but he is more than happy to spit at it. If she didn’t know better, she would think he was her mother’s brother instead of her father’s.

Azula is growing tired of toying with her brother’s fragile feelings, though. She drops the subject, and she falls into obedient silence as she waits for her father to return. Iroh and Zuko do not share her restraint as they discuss trivial matters with each other such as Zuko’s day and what kind of tea Iroh should get. Finally, Ozai returns, stone-faced as ever. Their food arrives shortly after.

As much as she resents it, she drinks both glasses of namazake her father pours for her. It makes her cheeks flush how he likes them and her stomach burn like she might be sick. Her uncle asks if it is wise to let her drink at all.

“She’s fifteen, Iroh. She’s hardly a child anymore,” her father says.

(If she was a lesser woman, Azula might laugh at that. She has not been a child since her mother left. Maybe even before then. What had she said when Azula pushed Zuko off the roof in a fit of rage? Monster. Azula isn’t sure she was ever a child. She burst forth from her mother’s womb malleable, waiting for her father to tell her what she was and willing to comply with each demand of brutality.)

The topic is dropped, but Azula does not drink another glass. She chews each bite of her food fifty times before swallowing. It is a labor that will not go unpunished. She cannot finish her meal in a timely manner at this rate, and, though Ozai can more than afford to waste money like that, he will not appreciate doing so.

“As inconvenient as these charges are, Zhao is finalizing the best plea deal he can for me. Three years in a minimum-security prison. I’ll most likely be released early for good behavior,” her father says.

She hasn’t finished chewing this bite yet. She’s not sure she will. Somehow, this is infinitely worse than she had imagined.

“This changes nothing in the long run. Azula will continue attending the Royal Academy for Girls. She’s at the top of her class,” he continues, making Zuko flinch at his own failures, “Chan Sr. will oversee the company in my absence.”

“… But you would like for Azula to live with me?” Iroh asks in a tone Azula has never heard from him.

She doesn’t even give Zuko a chance to object before she’s bursting at the seams, saying, “I won’t do it. There has to be someone else. Anyone else.”

Ozai doesn’t hit her for her insolence. He wouldn’t do that in public; he always says he barely likes striking her in private. He wants her pristine and unscarred like a doll on display. Instead, he rests his hand on her shoulder, and his nails bite into her flesh. 

She smiles reflexively.

(“What have you done? You horrible little girl. Why would you tell such filthy lies? It’s bad enough you’re losing your mind, now you want to lose my love? I should have known you would disappoint me like your brother. Failures, both of you.”

“You can’t treat me like this! You can’t treat me like Zuko!”)

“You will stay with your uncle. I want you safe while I’m gone, Azula.”

She’s supposed to say here that she’ll miss him too much, but the lie tastes bitter on the tip of her tongue, and she chokes on it instead. She barely utters another word as Ozai and Iroh discuss the details of such an arrangement. Zuko barely eats another bite, his eyes glinting with something boringly volatile.

Dinner does not end fast enough, but when it does, her father’s hand finds her the small of her back once more. She does not let herself stumble as he guides her to the car, and she does not say goodbye when her uncle and brother depart, opting to look disinterestedly at her nails instead.

Her disinterest is ripped away and discarded when he pushes her in through the front door of the estate. The staff has gone home for the night, but she knows they wouldn’t help her if they were here.

Tonight, she is drunk enough that she thinks of when he read her stories in her bedroom and kissed her forehead before he left. He’s been kissing her lips since she was nine, but she will take his affection however it is handed to her. This is what separates her from her brother; Azula is smart enough to know when she has lost.

“That’s my good girl, just like that.” He’s hurting her on purpose. She thinks he likes her best when she bleeds for him. “Say it, Princess.” It’s a command, not a request. Never a request. He is not the kind of man who asks for things; he takes, and he conquers. He might have raised her to do the same, but he also raised her to always bow before him.

“I love you, Daddy.”

He doesn’t say it back. He hasn’t said it back since she—

“I love you, Azula. You’ll be free soon.”

Azula has never hated her mother more.

Last winter, Ty Lee was drunk, and Azula was pretending to be when Ty Lee confessed to some pathetic infatuation. As if anything good could ever come from handing Azula a weakness like that. As if anything about Azula has ever been worth loving. She had kissed Azula, and Azula had been unmoving and silent the whole time. It made Ty Lee cry, so Azula had hugged her, awkward and unsure. The tears had smudged the concealer away and left her mottled throat on display. That just made Ty Lee cry harder.

Azula avoided her for a week after that, and Ty Lee learned to stop sniffling about suffering that wasn’t hers.

(Somehow, Azula doubts the suffering is hers. The trauma between her legs belongs to him. Every part of her is his, conquered and taxed. He is all she’s ever known. Some nights, she thinks he is all she will ever know. Who else could ever want her if they knew her? Who would he ever let have her when he's through with her?)

Today, she sits prim and proper next to Ty Lee in a cafe like it never happened. They don’t talk about it. They’ll never talk about it if Azula has any say. It's a weakness she doesn't even bother to exploit. It's a weakness that will fade if Ty Lee ever learns the truth. The thought makes her insides burn, but it might just be that she hasn’t smoked in twelve hours. She can feel herself rotting for it. 

Her father likes her rotten, though. He didn’t even care when he found the cigarettes. He had laughed in her face at her so-called rebellion and told her not to make her body an ashtray. He hates the idea of her ruining what’s his.

(Once, when she was seven, she broke a vase. It was a family heirloom. When he asked what had happened, she lied and blamed Zuko for it even though she was old enough to know he’d be hit for it. At the time, she had flinched at the sound of her brother whimpering on the floor as their mother tended to him, wanted to apologize and cry for him. Their father had pulled her onto his lap roughly, his arm curled around her stomach, shackling her to him, and told her to never disappoint him like Zuko did. Azula wouldn’t dream of it. She doesn’t dream of anything these days.)

Azula takes her coffee black even though she hates the taste of bitter things. Ty Lee has learned to stop questioning these things.

(A withered female doctor smiles flimsily, her mouth moving wordlessly.

Azula stares past her where her disgraced mother is smiling and saying words she knows better than to believe: “I love you, Azula, I do. I’m sorry this is happening to you. I wish I could protect you.”

“You could have, you stupid bitch!” Azula snarls like a rabid dog. “You should have aborted me or—or killed him! Don’t cry! You don’t get to cry!”)

It’s her last day with her father until she’s eighteen. Or seventeen. She can’t rule out the possibility of good behavior. Her father is not a good man, but he is more than capable of pretending to be. She learned that lesson eons ago.

She wasn’t allowed to sleep last night—they had to say goodbye in private because he’s going to miss her so much these next three years. She covers the dark circles sitting beneath golden eyes and the hickeys lining her throat dutifully, and she dresses nicely, and she hugs her father like she’ll miss him too. 

Azula doesn’t feel much of anything right now. Faintly, she thinks she registers the physical ache of her body, but even that feels dull. She watches her father kiss her cheek once his plea deal is accepted. She obeys as he tilts her head up, and, for a sickening moment, she wonders if he’s going to kiss her on the lips in front of all of these people. 

He doesn’t. He wouldn’t. What a stupid fear to have. Ozai is many things; a fool is not one of them.

“Princess,” he murmurs quietly enough for only her to hear, “say it.”

He’s never made her say it in public before. She thinks she’d rather he kiss her. Somehow, that would be less of a violation.

“I love you, Daddy,” she says faithfully. She’s never called him that of her own volition,—not as a child and especially not at fifteen—but if it sounds strange to Iroh and Zuko’s ears, they don’t comment on it.

“That’s my good girl.” He says it clearly. Everyone can hear him. His lips twist up into a mockery of a smile at her humiliation. One final punishment before he leaves. Even now, he has all the power. He always will.

Iroh puts a tentative hand on her shoulder; it’s the first act of physical affection she’s received from him in almost a decade. He guides her out of the courtroom. She’s too tired to pull away from him right now.

“… Do you really love him?” Zuko asks in the faux privacy of the car.

Iroh glances at her in the rearview mirror. Nosy old man.

“He’s my father.” It’s not an answer, but, for once, it is the truth. Even Zuko can't accuse her of lying right now.

“He’s my father, too.” There’s a sharp bitterness to him now. She can’t say she doesn’t understand it; Ozai took everything from Zuko when he was done beating the boy. She can say, however, that she doesn’t respect it. Zuko has suffered, sure, but it’s his own fault that he never learned to play the game. It’s not like the rules were hard to figure out even if Ozai never explained them.

(What is his suffering when compared to the love he has always been gifted by Ursa and Iroh and Lu Ten before he died a coward’s death? Sometimes, Azula thinks it is Zuko who has everything and her who has nothing. She thinks telling him that is the one thing that could compel him to finally hit her like she knows he secretly wants to.)

“You used to say you were his loyal son,” she taunts, but it’s only got half her usual bite. She’s not really in the mood to play mind games with Zuko. Nothing can restore her false sense of control today.

“Are you his loyal daughter?” Iroh asks. There’s a warning in there somewhere.

Azula snorts. She wants to ask if Iroh has ever known her to be loyal, but she knows better than that. All he and Zuko see when they look at her is the blindly obedient daughter of a monster. They don’t know that it is fear and not loyalty that has kept her compliant and silent all this time, taking each punishment and following each order without question.

They don’t know that this is all happening because she was stupid enough to betray her father.

“Turn the radio on. I don’t care what station.”

Neither of them tries to talk to her again until the car stops, and they have to help Azula with her luggage. Azula has never been particularly sentimental. She has no use for worthless trinkets or irrelevant photographs, so she’s only taken the essentials: hygiene products, skin, nail, and hair care products, her electronics, and a fraction of her wardrobe that she had some nameless staff pack for her since she knows her living quarters will be infinitely smaller here, but it’s still a big fraction.

“This is your room, Azula,” Iroh says once they’ve heaved the last of her luggage in. She’s getting her own room: a mostly unused guest room she’s half-surprised Iroh has. She supposes he must have had a more than substantial amount of money saved before he abandoned the family business he was set to inherit, but she hadn’t realized it would be enough for him to own a three-bedroom house. “You’re to keep the door open if you have any boyfriends over.”

Azula blinks at him. “I’m not allowed to talk to men I’m not related to, Uncle. I go to an all-girls school for a reason.” And even then, she’s barely allowed to speak to Zuko and Iroh.

His mouth opens with his lips curled up as if he’s going to laugh. He stops before the sound comes out. She’s not sure if he realized she wasn’t joking or if he hates her too much to let her make him laugh. “Your father mentioned his… no dating rule, but you’re a teenager. I don’t expect you to abide by it.”

“He’d kill me if I had a boy in my room, and he’d kill you if you let me,” she says simply. It's the absolute truth of the matter.

Zuko eyes her warily. His mouth moves as if he wants to speak but can’t find the words. Finally, he asks, “Azula… has he been violent with you?” as if he can’t fathom the idea of their father ever hurting his beloved daughter, but part of him wishes it were true. As if they could lick their wounds together and anything between them would be better for it.

Azula sees flashes—split lips for saying something idiotic and bleeding so much she thought she was dying and her vision blurring as he strangled her and the sound of bones breaking without remorse—but gives nothing away. She’s always been fonder of taking. “I’m not you, Zuzu. It’s just a figure of speech.”

He glares at her before stomping away to his room.

She rolls her eyes. “It’s good to see Zuko is as dramatic as ever.” There’s no fondness to her voice. She is all jagged edges and no apologies ever. Her father has taught her well.

“Your brother has made a lot of progress since he came to live with me. If you… disrupt that progress, Azula, I will not hesitate to make other arrangements for you, regardless of what your father wants,” Iroh says calmly, but the sharpness of his eyes gives him away. 

For the first time in her life, Azula feels a grain of something akin to respect for her uncle. Meaningful threats and razor-bladed doublespeak and coldhearted manipulations are languages that Azula understands intimately. She grew up in a household that demanded her fluency in them, and she has always known that her uncle and father did too, even if her uncle has been reluctant to show it for whatever sorrowful reason.

“That’s fine with me, Uncle. Do you care if I smoke in here?” She’s already pulling out a cigarette and her lighter.

It’s his turn to blink at her. “You’re fifteen,” he says.

“I’m aware. We just had a soiree about it,” she hums. “Father doesn’t care as long as it doesn’t interfere with school or kuai ball. He won’t be mad if you let me, and even if you don’t, I’ll just smoke somewhere else.”

It is with something like pity that Iroh confiscates her cigarettes and lighter. That’s fine. Azula can play with matches for a while. She has a whole repertoire of parlor tricks involving them anyway.

The staff packed lingerie. 

Azula wants to scream, but, instead, she smiles and changes into the familiar lace. She knew that they knew. Her secret has never really been her own. No one has ever wanted to protect Azula. Not even her own mother would’ve stopped him if she knew.

She waits for sleep to come. She waits for her father to come. Neither do.

She comes out of her room for breakfast with lipstick on, and without changing. She doesn’t have anything to wear to laze about in. All her clothes are made for going out or taking off. 

Zuko flushes in embarrassment or contempt and averts his gaze, and Iroh drops the tray of tea he was carrying.

“It’s not even that revealing. Surely you’ve both seen lingerie before. I mean, maybe Zuzu hasn’t, but you must have at some point, Uncle,” she waves them off.

“It doesn’t matter if I’ve seen it before! I don’t want to see my sister in—in—just change!” He sounds so whiny that Azula can’t help but laugh.

“Would you rather see me without it?” She smiles, wide and cruel, relishing his and Iroh’s growing discomfort. Her body has been weaponized against her for so long now, and it feels good to hurt someone else with it. It feels good to be reminded how much stronger she is than the two of them. They can’t even stomach looking at her half-clothed form, but she’s survived the last six years of her life like nothing has changed since her mother abandoned her.

Zuko’s face scrunches up in disgust as he shouts, “No! Stop being gross!”

She laughs once more. He doesn’t get the joke, will never get the joke. He wasn’t the one who heard their father’s jealous whispers every time she played nice with him in childhood. He wasn’t the one who was told she’d already been claimed by her own blood and anything else was cheating.

“Didn’t your mother teach you the perils of immodesty, Azula?” Iroh asks, his voice schooled into calmness.

(His mother used to scold her about her immodesty. The first time he came into her room at night, her father told her that was why he was doing this. He said that he couldn’t help himself. She made him feel this way. She brought this upon herself. She had to take responsibility for what she did to him. Everything wrong in her life is her own fault.)

“The only thing that woman taught me was how to abandon your family.” She forces herself to roll her eyes even when she can’t bring herself to enjoy the aching in Zuko’s eyes. “If you must know, most of my clothes sacrifice comfort for aesthetics, and the idiots who packed my things didn’t provide any leisurewear. I suppose I don’t really own anything of the sort, and this is more or less what I sleep in any way, but they’re still incompetent, and I’ll see them fired for it when Father gets out.”

“If you need clothes, I can take you shopping,” Iroh says slowly.

She rolls her eyes once more. “Ty Lee and I are going to the mall today. I’ll get something to make you both more comfortable then.”

Zuko storms off to his room and returns with a too-large hoodie that he forces onto her.

“Mother used to bathe us together. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before,” she says as she fixes her hair.

“When you were three,” he hisses.

She smiles coldly in return, and the conversation ends there. She doesn’t touch the food before her. She doesn’t even pull her phone out to text Ty Lee or scroll absentmindedly through social media. She just sits there, quiet and unmoving. She watches judgmentally as her brother drops grains of rice from his chopsticks, but she refrains from commenting on it with the cruelty she did when they were children.

“Are you not hungry?” Iroh asks once he is halfway through his meal.

Azula narrows her eyes a fraction and takes the bowl of miso soup to her lips, silent. Both men shift uncomfortably across from her rudeness.

They’re halfway through their shopping spree when Mai joins Azula and Ty Lee in the dressing room of a department store as if the last two years of their lives haven’t happened.

“Mai!” Ty Lee hugs the older girl. She’s always been too trusting for her own good, and Azula feels her own trust in Ty Lee waning at the knowledge that Ty Lee must have told Mai where they would be.

“Hey, Ty,” Mai says, forever unsmiling despite the borderline affection coating her voice. She does not look at Ty Lee as she says the next part: “Zuko told me you’re staying with him.” It’s an accusation of wrongdoing that is, for once in Azula’s life, unwarranted. It’s not like she wants to stay with Iroh and Zuzu. She’d rather stay with her father. At least there she knows what the enemy is capable of.

Ty Lee looks confused as ever. “You didn’t tell me that, Azula. Is everything okay?” she asks, forgetting their unspoken rules.

A smile twists its way onto Azula’s face. “Father is going to be away for a while, so I have to stay with my uncle. Zuzu just so happens to live there too,” she says lazily.

“He’s in prison,” Mai corrects. She would deny deriving pleasure from it, but Azula knows better. Mai has hated Ozai since she saw Zuko in the hospital. Maybe even before then. It makes Azula’s blood boil; Mai has no right to that hatred. She’s not the one who was ripped open for her tenth birthday.

“It’s all quite boring. He got away scot-free with burning half of Zuko’s face off, but he gets three years for tax evasion? The only thing Zhao’s good for is leering at underage girls if you ask me,” she smiles. This time, it looks less like a threat and more like the smiles from their shared childhood.

The image is not lost on Mai. “What’s wrong with you?” she asks, struggling now to keep her voice even. She sounds like Azula’s mother. Like her uncle. Like her brother. Traitor. Mai used to be Azula’s, and now she openly fraternizes with the enemy. “Just leave Zuko alone.”

“Or what?”

“Guys…” Ty Lee pleads. Her voice is quivering like she’s going to start crying. She’s never been subtle in her micro manipulations, but Azula rolls her eyes and gives her this much. She doesn’t want to stand there uncomfortably while one girl sobs and the other glares at her.

(Her father hates crying. He looks at her so coldly when she can’t stop herself from crying. Azula has never seen eyes that cold anywhere else. Not even in the mirror.)

“Fine. A mutual ceasefire,” Azula concedes. Before anyone can respond, she turns away to examine a pair of jeans with disdain. Ty Lee had said that it was weird that Azula didn’t yet own a pair of jeans, but Azula doesn’t think these look any more comfortable than the clothes she already owns. “Make yourself useful.” She glares at Mai. “Go find something casual but cute for me to wear. I’m down two sizes since you abandoned us.” She sing-songs the last part, but her nails bite into her palms. She’s not over it. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever be over it. She had thought—

“That’s the only thing about you that’s changed,” Mai mutters. It’s not particularly cruel-sounding in her mouth, but there’s nothing fond there either.

Azula tries to smile; she can’t.

The room Iroh is letting Azula stay in has a lock. Azula hasn’t had a lock on her bedroom in years. She considers it for a long moment when she enters, but she does not lock it even as she begins to change into leisurewear. She barricaded her door once. She came out of it bruised and bloody. She would not feel safe locking this door. Azula wonders sometimes if she will feel safe when it ends.

(Azula wonders sometimes if it will ever end. She used to think he would stop when she went to university, and then she made the mistake of telling him she wanted to go to school overseas with Mai and Ty Lee. The leash he keeps her on has only gotten shorter since then, and it will only get shorter still when he is released.)

When someone knocks as though the door is locked, as though Azula has ever been allowed to lock herself away from prying hands, she jumps and hates herself for it. Weakness is intolerable. Azula is not weak.

“It’s unlocked,” she says, clear and dutiful and not moving from the bed.

Zuko enters. “Hey…”

She narrows her eyes in suspicion. “What do you want? You already set your girlfriend on me, and I’m sure she told you I agreed to leave you alone if you returned the favor.”

He sighs. “I wanted to check on you. She said you… mentioned losing weight. And… you don’t really—eat. I don’t know.”

Azula can feel her nails biting into her palms again. None of this is any of Zuko’s business, and Mai had no right to tell him anything. She’s fine. She’s always been fine, and it’s not like anyone has ever given a damn either way. Even Ty Lee is too afraid of her to be concerned. Azula is more monster than girl. She’s made everyone in her life intimately aware of that.

“I know you said he doesn’t hurt you, but… I’ve been going to therapy since Uncle took me in, and—and even if he hasn’t hit you, you still… witnessed all that violence growing up.” She can tell this is hard for him. She can tell he doesn’t really want to say this. She’s sure Iroh didn’t put him up to this either. Neither of them has ever had any sympathy for Azula, and even if they did, she wouldn’t want it. There’s nothing about Azula to pity. “My therapist said it would make sense if it still hurt you, and you were seeking control by—”

“Did I ever cry about it?” she asks, her voice steady, free of anything to betray her racing heart.

“Uh, no.”

“Did I ever seem upset about it?”

“No,” Zuko scowls.

“Have I ever liked you or our mother?”

“No.” His teeth are grit now. She’s getting under his skin, and he’s forgetting whatever lies his shrink told him about her psyche.

She smiles like a predator about to go for the kill. “So why, dear brother, would I be hurt by the fact that the two of you got beat? It’s not like I’ve ever been particularly empathetic.”

“Damn it, Azula! Don’t you at least know it was wrong?!” The outburst is not unexpected. Zuko never had very good control of his temper. In that sense, she thinks he’s just like Ozai. Even Azula’s not cruel enough to tell him that, though.

She laughs, cold and callous. “How little do you think of me?” she asks, her head spinning as he relaxes ever so slightly. As if she’s reassured him now that his little sister isn’t a complete monster. As if he can rest easy knowing there’s enough humanity in her to recognize that their father isn’t a very nice person. She’s never hated him this much before. “Right and wrong don’t matter when you have enough money, though. There’s a reason he’s not in jail for screwing up your face.” Or for screwing his own daughter.

Zuko opens his mouth to speak. He never did learn to bite his tongue like Azula. Till it spilled blood that would grow absolutely nothing. Till it might finally sever from the effort and rot like fruit. Till that pain was more prominent than whatever pain you were fool enough to want to verbalize.

She speaks first, razor-edged and perfectly controlled, “You’re dismissed.”

He doesn’t leave, though. Instead, she watches from the corner of her eye as he inhales sharply and his nostrils flare. “Why are you like this?” he demands. She supposes he wants to be able to tell his shrink that he tried, but Azula was just too difficult. Too far gone. Too fucked up. She can’t see why he would want a real answer. Her psychology isn’t worth unpacking. It won’t bring him any answers she could see him wanting; it would just leave them both miserable.

Her eyes flash dangerously in warning. “I’ve always been like this, Zuzu. Weren’t you paying attention?”

There was a little girl once who walked four steps behind her big brother and his mother in the park. There was also a little girl who watched silently as her father beat them both. Azula knows by now that Zuko has never liked either of those girls. He’s just never been able to be honest with himself about it.

“Just because he’s a monster doesn’t mean you have to be one too.” 

She can’t tell if he wants to scream or cry. She doesn’t care either way. She just finds herself wishing, not for the first time, that she was an only child. It would be kinder to him, she thinks, if he’d never drawn breath. She thinks Ozai might even feel some semblance of love for him if he had died years ago; loving a memory is so much easier than loving something in its flesh with all its flaws.

(Sometimes, Azula lets herself wonder if her mother can love the memory of the daughter she held in contempt. If Ursa might regret abandoning Azula even a fraction as much as she must regret abandoning Zuko.)

“This is why Father never loved you,” she sing-songs.

He grabs her by the chin, rough and unforgiving, and drags her up to face him. 

Azula goes limp in his hold. She can see the scar covering half his face. She knows this is Zuko and not her father, but she still feels her eyes glossing over into emptiness. She still feels the reflexive need to recite the major battles of a war, any war, in her head until she doesn’t remember why she had to stop existing in the first place. She still feels half-formed apologies lodged in her throat, waiting to be strangled out of her until she’s biting back tears with each blink of her lashes.

He lets go. “Azula…?”

This isn’t Father. This isn’t Father. “Get out,” she murmurs, low and deadly.

He doesn’t leave. Father wouldn’t leave either, but she’s never said anything like that to Father. There's no point fighting wars she can't win. She knows Father would only laugh and hurt her worse if she tried.

“I said get out!”

This time, the door slams shut, and Azula is alone. Painfully alone. She strikes a match to watch it burn. It occurs to her that she could burn herself if she wanted, and her father could do nothing to stop her. He could only split her open after the fact.

(When Azula was seven, she broke the vase on purpose. Zuko’s broken arm was just collateral damage from a girl too scared to take her own beatings.)

She pinches the flame out of existence. Azula is not Zuko. She will not burn for their father. Not when she’s spent so much of her life bleeding for him.

Chapter Text

She's not even trying to eavesdrop when it happens. Zuko's room is next to the bathroom, and Azula has to brush her teeth. He's just dumb enough to call his girlfriend to talk about her while she's in earshot.

“She froze. I’ve never seen her… if it’s a tactic, it’s new. I mean, she can cry on command, but she didn’t even… she just went limp, Mai. I… no, I know. I know… it’s just something my therapist said when I was talking about her. Just because he didn’t hit her doesn’t mean she wasn’t scared he would. I know it sounds insane. Azula’s not scared of anything, but…”

For a long moment, her brain buzzes. She thought she’d convinced him she was fine with her cruelty. She has to convince him she’s fine. No one else can know. She started a forest fire, and now she has to put it out before it consumes her.

“She’s—difficult, yeah. She makes me so mad I’m scared I’ll hit her sometimes. I just think… I don’t know. She doesn’t really have any friends except for Ty Lee anymore… yeah, it’s her fault, but maybe she’ll get… I don’t know, less Azula the longer she’s away from him. She wasn’t always like this… she said what he did to me was wrong… let’s just… try.”

She spits her toothpaste out with disdain, and she begins to formulate her next plan of attack. She has no one to conspire with, but she’s never needed anyone either. She has her mother’s form but her father’s essence. She always has.

The mirror speaks. “You’re not a monster, Azula. I never should have said that.” It takes more self-control than Azula cares to admit not to break it like the woman in it broke her.

It’s a week and a half of forcing herself to eat as much as she can in public and spilling it from her stomach in private before Ty Lee calls to invite her to a party. Tonight. Azula has never been allowed to go to parties. Azula has never been allowed to go to sleepovers. Azula has never been allowed to have fun at all, really. Ozai has never tolerated her seeking out anything he can provide for her, and the things he can’t provide for her have always been taboo to talk about less she earns new bruises blossoming over her ribs.

She knows that accepting the invitation is her first move to placate her enemies which now seem to include her best—only friend.

“Who’s going?” she asks. Ursa used to scold her for playing with her food, but Ozai never seemed to care so long as she abstained when it mattered.

A hesitant pause. Good. Ty Lee should feel guilty about this, the little traitor. “Mai and I are going together. Zuko’s gonna drive. Is that—”

“It’s fine. Zuzu only ever tattled to Mother anyway. A party sounds fun,” Azula says, careful to keep the shape of Mai’s name out of her mouth. They might be speaking again,—because of Zuko, not because either of them want to speak to the other—but the wound is still fresh.

(All of Azula’s wounds feel fresh. The way her mother would look at her when she would try out the weight of her father’s words in her mouth. The way her brother wouldn’t look at her when all she had done was spit out the truth like poison from her tongue. She’ll never admit it, but she’s spent too much time having fingers twisted into the caverns of her hurting for them to heal. She doesn’t want them to heal. She wouldn’t recognize herself without them.)

“Oh!” Ty Lee sounds excited now. “That’s great! I’ll see you tonight!”

“Wait. Before you go, um…” This part is going to be painful. “Will you… teach me to flirt?” The admission that there’s something she can’t do—something she hasn’t been allowed to learn to do—feels more vulnerable than nudity ever could, but this is crucial. Ty Lee is a traitor now, and she’ll be reporting these kinds of details back to Mai and Zuko to conspire against her. Details like this won’t support Zuko’s narrative about her being afraid of Ozai.

“You… you wanna learn to flirt?” She can hear the way Ty Lee is furrowing her brow. Azula has never talked about boys before. She should amend that later.

“It’s embarrassing, but I don’t really know how to, Ty. I’m not like you. I’ve never really had a boyfriend. You know how protective my father is,” she says. She knows Ty Lee won’t bring up the bruises on her throat. Azula likes to tell herself Ty Lee doesn’t even remember. It's not out of the question. She was born lucky, after all.

Ty Lee is quiet for a moment, and Azula wonders briefly if it’s because her friend still harbors feelings for her. Then: “okay! You’re the prettiest, smartest, most perfect girl in the world, so you should definitely learn to flirt!”

The whole affair is shallow and stupid, but Azula listens attentively despite herself: when he says something, giggle. Yes, even if it’s not funny. Smile and bat your eyes—you have a super cute smile, Azula! Compliment him. Show interest in what he likes. If he’s not respectful, don’t be afraid to knock him out. Etcetera.

It’s not at all how Azula has learned to handle male attention, but she didn’t expect it to be. The way she handles male attention has never been normal. The male attention she’s given has never been normal either. She doesn’t know if she finds this to be worse, though. She doesn’t think she wants to consider it for too long.

She focuses instead on preparing for the party. This is war, after all. She won’t go into battle blindly. By the time Zuko knocks on her door, she almost feels good about this. She certainly looks good. This is going to work. This has to work. Failure is not permissible.

They pick up Mai first, and she takes shotgun. She glances at Azula once and only once. She doesn’t say hello. Azula doesn’t either.

Ty Lee bursts into the backseat and latches onto Azula with a hug. “Hi, everyone! You guys all look so cute!”

Zuko grumbles, and Mai rolls her eyes. Azula was always the only one of them who could take a compliment. The four of them haven’t been a unit in years, but she’s not surprised that nothing has changed. People never change. Not really. They just get better at lying.

(Her mother taught her that.)

“Do you want the radio on?” Zuko asks, glancing at Azula in the rearview mirror.

She blinks. “What?”

“You’ve asked for the radio every time we’ve been in a car together,” he says. He looks embarrassed at having noticed.

“Oh. That was just because I didn’t want to talk to you or Uncle Fatso,” she says. She hesitates, then adds, “or Father.”

“You hate everyone but Ty Lee,” Mai says tonelessly.

Azula’s not sure if it’s true anymore since Ty Lee is actively betraying her, but she hums agreeably anyway. She’d be an idiot to let them know she’s onto them. She’d also rather chew glass than watch Ty Lee cry right now. Maybe she’ll be in the mood for that later.

“Whose party is it anyway? Ty forgot to tell me.”

“Only ‘cause you distracted me!”

“It’s some guy from our brother school’s party. His name is Chan something,” Mai says. 

“He’s older! And cute!” Ty Lee beams. “His friend seemed to really like Mai. I feel bad for Zuko; he’s got competition now!”

Azula laughs with all the cruelty of her childhood games and lets Ty Lee intertwine their hands. It’s eerily reminiscent of the behavior surrounding their playground pranks on and grade school jeers at Mai and Zuko. All the better for her line of attack, of course. Let them think nothing has changed in Azula’s life since they were too small to know better.

They continue on like that for the rest of the car ride, and then Zuko is being glared at by some guy named Ruon-Jian, and Ty Lee is talking to five boys at once, and Mai is brooding over a red solo cup after Zuko said something particularly stupid. Azula chews the inside of her cheek before joining Mai and grabbing her own red solo cup. She rarely drinks on her own,—losing control is not something she’s interested in, and most of her experience with alcohol has been at her father’s insistence—but Ty Lee had said that a drink might help her loosen up.

“I thought you didn’t like drinking,” Mai says.

Azula looks at her. Mai looks back. It feels faintly like when they were pre-teens, judging everyone around them with unspoken barbs and secret glances only they understood. “I don’t,” she says, her voice clipped. “But I might as well try out this teenage rebellion thing while I can.”

Mai doesn’t smile. She hasn’t smiled at Azula in years. Her eyes do soften, though. The sight makes Azula’s skin crawl. She used to love to draw things out of Mai—guilt, fear, anger, sorrow, affection. It was always so much harder than making Ty Lee squirm. It was always so much more rewarding.

She’s stepping away from Mai, trying to wrench herself out of this miserable feeling of pitiful nostalgia, when she bumps into someone and her drink splashes over her top. She hears a familiar laugh, but before she can hiss at Mai to shut up, there’s a hand on her waist.

“Shit, my bad. Let me take you to the laundry room and clean you up,” a boy says. He seems cute enough, and she really does want to wash this top before it stains. She’s always been fond of it.

Decisively, Azula nods and lets him guide her away, ignoring Mai asking if she’s okay. Traitors have no right to feign concern for her. Least of all traitors who picked Zuko.

“I’m Azula,” she says.

The older boy grins. “I’m Chan. Your friends had a lot to say about you when I invited them.”

Azula bats her eyelashes like Ty Lee told her to. “All good things, hopefully.” Ty Lee has never said anything bad about Azula in her life, but Mai’s tongue is sharper than the knife Azula gifted her for her thirteenth birthday. Zuko has never been Azula’s friend, and she can’t imagine him saying anything about her to a boy. Least of all anything that wouldn’t convince the boy she was going to do something awful to him.

“One of them said you were the hottest girl in the world.” That’s not an accurate quote. Ty Lee always says prettiest. She thinks she’d be objectifying Azula if she said hottest. It still soothes Azula’s ego. “I have to agree.”

“You’re not so bad yourself,” she says, forcing herself to giggle.

Azula barely registers half of what is said between them as he guides her to the laundry room. She does, however, register just how nice his house is. Not nearly as nice as the estate she grew up in, but it certainly shows off some fairly significant degree of status. It’s almost worth giggling at nothing over.

When he closes the door behind them, they’re alone. Azula pulls her soaked top off without prompting, and Chan lights up at the sight. He reaches out to touch her, flesh against flesh, but she pulls away quickly.

“You said you’d wash it,” she reminds him, offering the top to him.

“Then we can do stuff?” he asks hopefully.

Azula forces another giggle. She wonders if it will ever stop feeling unnatural in her throat. She wonders if that will ever stop her. Lying with your body is still just lying at the end of the day, and Zuko was right. Azula always lies.

“You have a nice house,” she says as he loads her top into the washing machine.

“Yeah? My dad is overseeing Minamoto Oil for the next three years,” Chan says with a grin. “We’re loaded.”

Azula giggles at that. He takes it as an invitation to kiss her.

(Her father has taken her screaming as an invitation to kiss her. This is far from the worst thing that's ever happened to Azula. It's fine. It's perfectly fine. She doesn't even feel anything this time.)

He licks at her mouth like a dog, but she doesn’t even grimace. She lets him lift her up and sit her down on the washing machine, and she responds to each motion of his mouth, hesitant and soft but never passive. His hands reach for the clasps of her bra, and his mouth moves to her throat. It feels like being strangled.

Her eyes burst open, and she sees her father looming over her, asking if she’s been cheating on him like the slut that she is. It's not real. She knows he's in prison. Azula still pushes Chan away.

For the first time, her reluctance is not met with violence.

“Do you have a shirt I can borrow?” she asks before he can speak.

He deflates, but he hands her a clean shirt that’s several sizes too big for her. She slips it on and gets down from the washing machine. She counts to five, and he still hasn’t hurt her.

“Give me your phone,” she commands.

“My phone?”

“So I can give you my number. You have to give me my top back eventually,” she says. She forces another giggle, and he complies happily. “Call instead of texting.”

She tries not to think about how she still doesn’t know what it’s like to want to kiss someone.

Ty Lee is surrounded by boys she doesn’t seem to like when Azula re-enters the party. Azula rolls her eyes at the sight, and sharpens her tongue to voice a familiar command, “Ty Lee! Get over here now!” Suddenly, Ty Lee finds it absurdly easy to push past the crowd of boys.

She frowns for just a second at Azula, and then she schools her expression into one of excitement. “Whose shirt is that?” she asks, her voice a touch too bubbly to be natural.

“Hm? Oh, it’s Chan’s. Your advice worked perfectly. Um…” Azula glances around to make sure no one important is in earshot. “Thank you,” she whispers.

Ty Lee lunges forward to hug Azula at that. No one else ever hugs Azula. It’s less pleasant than it would have been before Ty Lee’s betrayal, but it still feels impossibly warm to be held like this. Despite herself, Azula hugs Ty Lee back.

(If she closes her eyes, she can almost imagine that there is someone in the world who loves her.)

Mai marches up to them with Zuko and Ruon-Jian, who did not have a black eye the last time Azula saw him, in tow. She glares at Azula. “Your jerk brother got us kicked out.”

“This asshole is your brother?” Ruon-Jian scoffs at Azula as if her Zuko and his anger issues are somehow her responsibility.

“I like to think he was adopted.”

“Maybe you can make it up to me for him,” Ruon-Jian suggests, drawing closer to her.

Azula doesn’t even get to scowl before Zuko’s given him a second bruise for that. “We’re leaving.” His grip on her wrist is so tight it aches as he drags her out of the party.

She feels like she’s nine years old and being punished for asking why Ursa didn’t say goodbye to her all over again. Before that, she’d been dumb enough to think Ozai would never strike her. There’s nothing stopping Zuko from doing the same. She would deserve it if he did. She’s always provoking him.

“Zuko, you’re hurting her,” Mai sighs.

He stops and glances at where his hand is bruising her wrist. He lets go. “Sorry. I just—you’re fifteen.”

Azula wants to laugh at that. She wants to cry too. Ozai didn’t care when she was ten years old with the proof of his violation red between her thighs as she broke everything she could reach. Zuko didn’t care then either. She still remembers the sound of him whining that she was being too loud from the other side of her bedroom door.

(Azula knows she’s gravely inconveniencing him and Ozai and Iroh and Mai and Ty Lee by being here at all lately. She should’ve ignored her mother in the mirror and in corners of white rooms. She should’ve been a coward like Lu Ten so nobody ever had to see the cracks in her façade. She should’ve refused to speak to anyone, not doctors or ghosts or whoever landed her here. She should’ve done a lot of things. She didn’t do any of them.)

“I’m not a child, Zuzu,” she snaps. “I can take care of myself. You’ve never had a problem with that before.”

It doesn’t make him flinch away as she’d hoped. It just makes him look at her like she’s the saddest thing he’s ever seen. Even Mai is looking at Azula like she feels bad for her. Azula isn’t something to be pitied. Azula has never been something to be pitied. She is vicious words and unrestrained cruelty and everything her father has molded her to be.

“Ty Lee, let’s have a sleepover.” It’s not a request. She needs everyone to think about something other than whatever ugly scars or pathetic display of humanity they think they saw.

“Oh, okay, Azula.” Ty Lee smiles half-heartedly.

“We can do it at my house. You still haven’t met Tom-Tom,” Mai says. There’s something uncharacteristically assertive about it that Azula almost respects. 

More than anything else, Azula wants to be as far as possible from Zuko tonight. Whatever Mai and Ty Lee might surprise her with at a sleepover is survivable; having to deal with Zuko telling Iroh about this isn’t. “Very well then,” she yields.

“Yay! It’ll be just like old times!”

“We never had sleepovers back then, Ty,” Mai points out.

“Still!”

Azula’s stomach clenches. She thinks she’d give anything for it to be the way it used to again, but she knows they can never go back. And even if they could, Mai would never want to.

(Her hand is bleeding. Her hand is bleeding, and she can’t even bring herself to look at it this time. She’s supposed to watch these kinds of things. He hates when she can’t bring herself to look.

Those stupid old crones, Lo and Li, are telling her everything will be okay, but she doesn’t believe them. Her father will be furious with her—she’s such a disappointment; she feels like Zuko. Her mother keeps saying she loves the daughter she never wanted to begin with. Everyone keeps lying to her, and she just wants it all to stop.

She’s screaming. She doesn’t know what she’s screaming, but her throat hurts from the effort.

“Ms. Minamoto, please, you need to stay still so we can get the glass out of your hand,” someone is saying to her in a pathetic rendition of a calming voice. It only makes Azula’s head spin even more.

“It’s going to be okay, Azula. Just breathe.”

At that, she thrashes around wildly. “Shut up, Mother!”

“She’s hallucinating. Get Hama!”)

From the safety of Mai’s bedroom, Azula sneers. “Have I ever told you how much I adore your mother’s lack of a spine? I could spit on that woman, and she’d thank Agni for blessing her with my saliva.”

Predictably, Ty Lee giggles and tells Azula she’s the funniest girl in the world.

“You’d be my hero.” Mai’s lips curve ever so slightly. Not a smile but something rarer still. Something Mai doesn’t want Azula to see.

It makes her chest tighten. Azula has familiarized herself with every one of Mai’s tells; her brother has not done the same. She still remembers the fights they used to have about that. Zuko has always wanted Mai to be someone she’s not, but Azula had always liked exactly what Mai was.

Had. Past tense. Not anymore.

Their shared hatred of Mai’s parents might be strong enough to unite the three of them even in the wake of their friendship, but stolen moments under false pretenses like this will only slip away if she tries to hold them close. She wonders if expressing contempt for her father would unite them too. As soon as the idea has entered her head, she squashes it beneath her heel like a cigarette. It would be pointless.

Nothing will ever be enough to give them back what they had before Mai said that she loved Zuko more than she feared Azula. Nothing will ever be enough for Azula to forgive Mai for saying it in the first place. It had been worse than treasonous. It had been personal.

“Tom-Tom is so cute, Mai! I wish I had a little brother,” Ty Lee pouts.

“You’d think six sisters would be enough,” Mai says.

It’s Azula’s turn to hide the flicker of her lips. “I could’ve sworn you thought six sisters were too much. Brothers are overrated, anyway,” she hums, “I’ll give you mine. He’s really annoying, though.” She covers half her face with her hand and lowers her voice into her best Zuko impression, “Azula, I’m going to ignore you for fourteen years then decide I can’t let boys so much as look at you just like Father.” She smiles at their silence and goads in her own voice, “It’s okay. You can laugh. It’s funny.”

Mai tenses like she’s going to say something she knows Azula will bite back for, but Ty Lee interjects before she can, “Talking about brothers is so not as fun as talking about boys. Tell us about Chan!”

“Only if we make a blood oath,” Azula says.

“Mom confiscated my knives last year. No more blood oaths for us,” Mai shrugs.

Ty Lee sighs in relief. “We can just pinky swear not to tell anyone what you say!” She’s too pleased about this suggestion.

Azula tilts her head and considers. After a long moment of silence, she settles on a threat. “You know, the yakuza cut off traitors’ pinkys.”

Mai rolls her eyes. “We get it. You’ll seriously maim us if we tell Zuko you fucked Chan. Just tell Ty Lee how it was. I couldn’t care less what you do.”

“I didn’t—” Azula stops herself. Is it better if she lets them think she did? That would certainly shatter the idea that she lives in fear of her father. But if either of them ever let it slip and Ozai found out… “I did not have sex with Chan. Don’t be vulgar.” She sniffs haughtily. “We kissed. I gave him my number. That’s all.”

“But… why are you wearing his shirt then?” Ty Lee frowns.

“Because he spilled beer all over my top. He took me to the laundry room to wash it for me.” Azula rolls her eyes. As much as Azula knows she’s not actually dumb, Ty Lee can be so slow.

Uncharacteristically, Mai snorts at that. The sound catches Azula off guard. She's only heard Mai snort a handful of times, and none of them have been in the last five years. “He took you to the laundry room because he wanted to fuck you.”

“A laundry room would so not be a good place to have your first time in,” Ty Lee notes. “You’d get blood all over the washing machine. Or the clean clothes! It’s a good thing you said no, Azula.”

“What would be a good place?” Azula asks. She wants it to sound sharp and annoyed; it doesn't. She’s not sure if she’s imagining her voice sounding strained or not.

(There’s a picture frame on Mai’s dresser of the three of them from five years ago. They aren’t at the Minamoto estate, and they aren’t in Azula’s childhood bedroom, but she still wants to break it. The ten-year-old girl in the middle of that picture is a filthy little liar, and Azula hates her like she’s never hated anyone before.)

“I think a hotel room would be kind of romantic!” Ty Lee says. She's blushing in a way that makes Azula uncomfortable.

“My first time was in my bedroom,” Mai admits. “My parents were out, and Zuko snuck in through the window. It was… nice.”

Azula stares at her in silence. She knows Mai is sixteen now, and her brother will be seventeen in November, but it hadn’t occurred to her that they might have consummated their relationship. It’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to do that. It’s harder still to imagine it being nice. Her mouth moves before she knows what’s happening. “My first time was in my bedroom too.” Her ears are ringing, and she doesn’t know what Ty Lee is saying, but Mai is staring at her like she’s grown a second head. “I’m going to the bathroom,” she announces, getting up and leaving the room before anyone can stop her.

The mirror is empty except for her own gold eyes and red lips. She looks pale. Like she might be sick. She feels sick. Why did she say that? Why would she ever say that? They’re going to ask questions now, and she has no choice but to lie. Maybe they’ll assume she was lying anyway. They’ve known her almost as long as Zuko has. They know by now that she's a liar.

She breathes. In and out. In and out. If they assume she’s lying, she’ll say yes. She'll smile and laugh in their faces like she always does. It’s not like anyone ever believes her when she tells the truth. It’s not like anyone would ever want to believe this truth. Azula didn't even want to believe it at first. She had told herself it was a nightmare and the blood on her sheets wasn't real. She had lied to herself until she couldn't lie anymore. Doing the same to those around her is easy.

Azula returns to the bedroom with every hair in place and her lipstick perfectly applied. Ty Lee and Mai both have the distinctive look of two girls who were just talking about her behind her back. It’s nothing new to her.

Mai goes first. “When did you—”

“Last winter,” Azula says. Her smile threatens to split her face in two. “It was right before Ty Lee kissed me. You remember that, right, Ty?” She’s being cruel. She knows telling Mai that Ty Lee kissed her is kind of awful even by her standards, but she needs to assert control over the situation. For Azula to have control, someone else has to lose it. Better you than me, she used to taunt Zuko.

Ty Lee’s eyes are watering. Azula sighs in annoyance.

“Don’t be a bitch,” Mai says, glaring. “Are you okay, Ty?”

Azula speaks first. “What? It’s when it happened.” Mai doesn’t back down. She never does these days. When she took a stand, she rarely did back then either. “Fine. I’m sorry.” It’s a lie. Azula thinks she might mean it tomorrow, but she can’t bring herself to care tonight. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

Ty Lee sniffles. “You got mad at me then, too,” she says. Her voice is small and so is she. “Because I cried when I saw the bruises. And you didn’t talk to me for a week.

“Bruises?” Mai asks warily.

“It looked like someone strangled her.”

Azula rolls her eyes again. “Hm? Erotic asphyxiation. I was fine. It was just annoying that you cried about it. Can I smoke in here, or will Michi throw a fit?”

Mai doesn’t answer her question. “Who was it?” she asks instead.

“You don’t know him,” Azula says with a laugh. “Can I smoke or not?”

“I thought we knew everyone you knew,” Ty Lee says. There's something awful to her voice. Like she knows she should shut up. Like she knows that something awful is happening in the confines of this room.

Azula’s eyes gleam dangerously. “Do you want to know the man I had sex with?” There’s a warning woven into each syllable. The smoking gun is in Azula’s waistband, and she’ll only show them it to pull the trigger. Ty Lee and Mai are smart enough to understand that. They know the politics of Azula’s mind better than almost anyone. They know exactly how deep her barbed tongue can cut by now.

“You can stop lying now. You never had sex, and Ty never kissed you. This is just one of your stupid games.” Mai keeps her voice neutral and bored. It’s not her natural flatness, though. It’s forced now. Practiced and deceptive. Mai is pretending because it’s always been easier to refuse to believe Azula’s honesty when it rears its ugly head.

Azula smiles slowly, poisonously. It comes out all wrong, but neither Mai nor Ty Lee calls her bluff. “Azula always lies,” she agrees. “So, what do normal girls do at sleepovers?”

“Since when are we normal girls?” Mai mutters.

Iroh picks Azula up dangerously close to lunchtime. Zuko isn’t with him today. Mai must have warned him that Azula was in one of her moods. All for the best, of course. Azula wants nothing to do with her pathetic brother. Iroh, for his part, does little to attempt conversation with Azula. Zuko must have relayed Mai’s message to him. Azula wants nothing to do with her pathetic uncle either.

Her phone rings. It’s not a saved number.

She answers. “Who is this?”

“Hey, this is Chan. You said to call not text, so…”

Azula feigns a giggle. She can feel Iroh’s bewildered gaze on her, and, suddenly, this performance is humiliating. As if she’s debasing herself somehow. She swallows the feeling whole. “Hi, Chan. I’m glad you called.” She thinks she sees Iroh’s face morphing into relief. She remembers eavesdropping on his conversation with Ursa after she burned the doll he bought her for her eighth birthday—what is wrong with that child? She doesn’t like the things girls are supposed to like.

“I was kinda worried you wouldn’t answer after what happened with Ruon-Jian and your brother.”

“I’m really sorry about that,” she says immediately. It tastes bitter on her tongue. “I had no idea Zuko would do that. He was seriously out of line. It won't happen again.”

Chan laughs. “Don’t worry too much, babe. Ruon-Jian was out of line, too. He shouldn’t have said that to you. Shit wasn’t cool.”

“It’s not like he was being serious, though.”

He takes a second too long to agree with her. She files away her disgust for later. “Do you wanna go out or something? Friday, maybe? We can see a movie.”

Azula hates the movies. “Sure,” she giggles anyway. “I’ll add you on Snapchat, so we can talk about the details.” Azula hates Snapchat too. Downloading it was Ty Lee’s idea, and it had taken a broken arm and a black eye for her father to calm down and believe that she wasn’t going to send pictures to boys with it.

“Snapchat,” he says, and he’s definitely grinning now. “Sounds good.”

“I’ll talk to you later. Bye.” She doesn’t wait for him to say it back before hanging up.

Iroh allows her a moment of silence. It doesn’t last. Ozai used to say he was a nosy bastard. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you apologize without your mother coercing you.”

She glares at him. “I was apologizing for Zuko, not myself. He almost beat someone up last night, or is that the kind of behavior you tolerate from him?”

“Violence is never the answer,” he sighs, “but your brother told me he was only defending your honor.”

She snorts at the idea. Zuko is about five years too late to defend Azula’s honor. “All he did was embarrass us both. Ruon-Jian barely even made a pass at me. My ‘honor’ was fine.”

“He also said that you did not appreciate the gesture, yes. A pity.”

Azula’s nails bite into her palms, but they do not draw blood. She picks her next words carefully. “Should I appreciate it, then, when Father goes through my phone to make sure I’m not talking to any boys? I mean, if he’s only worried about my ‘honor’ as you and Zuzu seem to like calling my virginity… really, what’s the difference?”

Iroh is quiet for a long minute, and Azula is sure he’s given up. Then, slowly but surely, he says, “The difference is that your father does that to control you, Azula. Your brother punched a boy who wanted to extort you into having sex with him because he cares about you.” Even though you don’t deserve it, goes unspoken.

Azula laughs, acidic and cold, and Iroh does not try to speak to her again. She’s always been a lost cause.

Friday comes, and Azula thinks she wants to die.

Her antipsychotics are almost out. So is her birth control. She needs to pick up her refills soon, but the thought of actually doing it makes her jealous of Lu Ten. She wants to scream at someone until they hit her like she deserves. She wants to bleed and break and ask for more like she always does. Azula has spent so much of her life inciting violence, forcing her father’s hand. 

It’s humiliating how badly she misses it and the semblance of normalcy it provides.

If her father hadn’t paid off the psychiatrist, she thinks it would be the kind of thing she was supposed to talk about in the therapy sessions she was supposed to attend. She doesn't think she would ever actually verbalize it, though.

Azula opens her bedroom window to smoke out of it. Her hands shake until she flicks the cigarette butt out into the driveway. She lights a second one.

She’ll have to shower before her date to get rid of the smell. She’ll douse herself in perfume too. She’s used to doing that now. As little as the smell of nicotine and smoke bother her now, people seem to take issue with it when they get too close. People always take issue with her when they get too close.

(Even her father doesn’t like her half the time. He just likes her genes. He used to call her the perfect blend of himself and Ursa. The memory still makes Azula sick, even after everything he’s done to her. It was the way he’d smiled when he said it. Like Azula was perfect because he made her. Like that was why he made her.)

When she showers, the water is scalding. She wonders if she lied when she said she wouldn’t burn for him.

She’s on autopilot for the entirety of her date. She laughs at Chan’s jokes, she leans into his touch, and she parts her lips for his tongue when he kisses her. Her head is clearer than it’s been in a while as she goes through the motions of dating. All she has to do is not think, and she can get through this.

This is a business transaction. Nothing more, nothing less. Azula kisses Chan, and he gets to tell his friends he made out with a pretty girl. Chan takes Azula out, and she gets to tell her friend she’s not scared of her father. It’s clean cut. She’s not even hurting anyone by doing this.

It’s one of her nicer strategies in war.

(So why does she feel so awful when it’s over and her body feels real again?)

She walks into Iroh’s house, switches from her heels to her slippers, and doesn’t even bother announcing that she’s home. This isn’t her home, and she doesn’t want to speak to any of its occupants today.

That doesn’t stop Zuko from exiting the kitchen to stare at her.

“How was it?” he asks, awkwardly. “Your date, I mean.”

She glares at him. “Ty Lee and I need to talk about what the purpose of a blood oath is. My love life is none of your business.”

He glares back at her. “Fine. Be that way.”

She wants to throw something at him. There’s nothing to throw at him. She goes to her room instead. Azula considers locking the door. She can’t bring herself to do it. Not even when she wants to break down and cry for the first time in—well. Not years. Not anymore. She broke that streak when she had her stupid little tantrum.

“What’s wrong with me?” She doesn’t know who she’s asking. She doesn’t know if she expects her mother to appear and tell her exactly what’s wrong with her. She doesn’t know if she expects that awful old crone to appear and finally give her whatever diagnosis it was Ozai hadn’t wanted her to hear.

No one appears.

Maybe her antipsychotics are finally fully effective. She should want them to be working. She hates seeing Ursa, and she hates being lied to, and she hates feeling crazy.

(Part of her wants to hear her mother say she loves her one more time. She can’t remember ever hearing it when her mother was here. She can’t remember ever being loved by anyone. Ty Lee might have said she loved Azula, but that didn’t make it true. Azula knows better than anyone how convincing a good lie can be.)

Azula is convinced she is crazy when she finds herself outside Zuko’s bedroom door ten minutes later.

He opens it before she can knock. “What do you want?”

She opens her mouth. Nothing comes out.

“Azula, I’m supposed to help Uncle make dinner, and he only waited this long since you weren’t home.”

“Take me to the pharmacy tomorrow, Zuzu.” It comes out as an order. She’s never had to ask her brother for anything before. “The one by the estate. I need to refill my birth control.”

“You’re on birth control?” Zuko frowns. She can sense another lecture about how young she is coming.

“It’s to regulate my period. Are you taking me or what?”

“Uh, all right. I’m going that way tomorrow anyway. Do you… do you care if we hang out with my friends afterward?” He scratches the back of his head.

“Since when do you have friends?”

“It’s been four years, Azula. I made friends that weren’t yours first. You can meet them if you promise to be nice to them,” he sighs.

She should say no. She should spit in his face and take a cab tomorrow. It’s what her father would want her to do. She can’t explain why she doesn’t. “Whatever. Just go make dinner with Uncle Fuddy-Duddy.” 

She pretends to be asleep when Iroh knocks at her door to tell her dinner is ready. The door doesn’t burst open. It doesn’t make Azula feel any safer in this bedroom. She wonders if anything will ever make the rooms she inhabits feel safe again. She wonders why her childhood bedroom ever felt safe to begin with.

Chapter Text

Zuko comes into the pharmacy with her. He says he’s going to get a drink, but Azula can’t shake the feeling that he’s trying to spy on her. There’s nothing he’d like more than to see his perfect little sister crumble. She hates him for it, and she takes it out by being as rude as humanly possible to the pharmacist.

(If you aren’t suffering under someone else’s anger, they should be suffering under yours, Ozai used to say. Sometimes, Azula wonders if she would be angry like this if he hadn’t taught her to build herself from the ashes of someone else’s fire.)

“Hurry up, Zuzu,” she snaps at him as she marches out of the pharmacy. “I’m waiting in the car.”

She shoves the white bag with her prescriptions deep into her purse. It’s only an illusion of privacy; anyone who goes through her things can still see what’s wrong with her, but it’s better than being on display for the world to gape at. 

She doesn’t think Iroh has gone through her things since she moved in. It makes her tenser than if he would just get it over with already. Azula has spent most of her life waiting for the other shoe to drop. It doesn’t matter how hard she works; she always comes home to cruelty eventually. Whether it’s directed at her or Zuko or Ursa, it’s always waiting for her.

The car doors click unlocked, and Zuko gets into the driver’s seat. He reaches around to pass her a strawberry soft drink, the kind she used to steal from him. She hasn’t been allowed to drink it since Zuko’s face was still intact.

Azula blinks at him a second too long.

He rolls his eyes at her. “You used to always steal them from me. So this time I got you your own,” he says. “Just take it. You can pay me back later.”

She doesn’t thank him before uncapping it and gulping down too much, too fast. It’s always easier to drink than it is to eat. Even before she started halving her calorie intake. She still gags a little when she’s done drinking.

“You really should eat more,” Zuko says quietly.

She ignores him. “Where are we meeting your friends?”

“The mall. We’re getting lunch. And dessert. There’s a new mochi place, you know. Do you—um, do you still like mochi?” He glances at her, uncertainty hanging in the air. She used to steal boxes of mochi from him until Ursa reprimanded her for it. She used to smile, honest and free, when Mai bought her her own boxes in her favorite flavors. Now, Zuko doesn’t even know if she still likes mochi.

Azula hasn’t had any since she started eating in fractions. She’s not sure if she could stomach it now.

“You’re not a very good brother,” she hums instead of admitting her weakness.

“You’re not a very good sister either,” he snaps. He takes a breath, then mumbles, “At least I’m trying.”

“Because your shrink told you to. Turn the radio on. I’m done talking to you.”

Azula catches a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror. Ursa is sitting next to her, frowning. She doesn’t say anything today, but Azula knows she’s angry with her. Ursa always takes Zuko’s side. Even in Azula’s hallucinations.

Azula has only ever had two friends and one of them hates her now; Zuko has more friends than she ever has. The thought makes her dizzy. He used to have to follow her around like a kicked puppy to even have a chance at socialization. She’s supposed to be the superior sibling. She’s supposed to be better at everything.

Why is she such a fucking failure lately?

“It’s nice to meet you,” a bald child, and he really is an honest-to-Agni child, says, “I’m Aang! This is Katara,—” he gestures to a tan, blue-eyed girl who waves “—her brother, Sokka,—” a boy about Zuko’s age with obvious family resemblance “—Toph,—” a girl with milky, sightless eyes and no shoes “—and Suki!” Finally, he gestures to a short-haired brunette with a big smile.

“Charmed, I’m sure,” she drawls, making a point of looking disinterestedly at her manicure. “How did you meet my brother anyway? You two look about ten,—” she points lazily at Aang and Toph “—so I don’t imagine you met at whatever pathetic public school he goes to now.”

“I’m twelve!” Aang grins idiotically.

Zuko sighs. “Sokka, Suki, and I are in the same class. I met Katara through them, and Aang and Toph through her. They’re both in junior high.” Quieter now, he mumbles, “You said you’d be nice, Azula.”

“I always lie,” she sing-songs back. “You know that, Zuzu.”

Aang and Sokka both laugh at the nickname. Zuko flushes hard.

“How many times do I have to tell you to stop calling me that? It wasn’t cute when you were a kid, and it’s definitely not cute now.”

(Azula has been told that she started calling her brother Zuzu when she was too young for malice, and they were part of a happy little family who loved each other. Azula can’t remember ever loving her family. She thinks it’s the only time Zuko has ever outright lied to her.)

She scoffs; he should know better. “I was never a child, and it was never meant to be cute.”

“What? Aren’t you like fourteen? You’re still a child,” Sokka says stupidly.

“No, I get it,” Suki says, nodding solemnly. “Azula was born in the know.”

The idiots laugh for some reason. She stares them down until they stop and have the decency to look uncomfortable under her gaze. Good. It’s always important to be the scariest person in the room.

“Zuko hasn’t told us much about you,” Katara says warily. “What school do you go to? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you around before, not even at cram school.”

Azula clicks her tongue impatiently. “I go to the Royal Academy for Girls. I don’t go to cram school because I have private tutors. Father thinks I’ll lose brain cells if I mingle with the lower class too much. He’d have an aneurysm if he could see me right now.”

Katara makes a particularly foul face, Sokka and Suki both scowl deeply, and even Aang looks upset. Toph, however, laughs. It’s loud and crude and the kind of sound Azula would be hit with a ruler for making.

“What’s so funny?” Azula raises a brow.

“I’m a Beifong,” Toph says. “I’m high society, and my parents are real dunderheads too, princess.”

Lots of people have called her a princess. Like Mai and Ty Lee. Like Zhao and her father. She shoves the thought down, swallows it whole, and composes herself in a single blink. “You’re blind, so I’ll be nice and tell you that I’m rolling my eyes.”

“I get the feeling she’s never nice,” Sokka says in a pathetic rendition of a whisper to Suki and Katara.

“Definitely,” Katara mutters as Suki nods in agreement.

Zuko just sighs. “I’m choosing to believe you’re just being a bitch because you haven’t eaten—” 

“A horrible decision. I’m usually worse,” Azula says. He should know this already. She’s sure he has nightmares about Azula at her most awful, the Azula of his childhood. The Azula who burned his favorite book when he wouldn't play with her anymore. The Azula who pushed him off a roof and laughed when he cried to bury the feeling of guilt in her stomach. The Azula who wanted to kill the injured turtle duck they found in the park to put it out of its misery.

It's not like those things are easy to forget.

He hasn't forgotten. He still closes his eyes, counts to three, and says, “Let’s just get lunch.”

Azula stays silent as the group discusses what to eat.

“Nothing spicy, guys. You know Sokka and I can’t do spice,” Katara says with a laugh.

When it was her, Mai, and Ty Lee, Azula would always decide what they were going to do, where they were going to eat, who they were going to talk to, etcetera. It was never really a discussion. She’s out of her element here, a bystander to a friend group she knows nothing about. She hates the feeling. She’s sacrificing her control to be here, and that makes her a fool.

“They don’t have vegetarian options,” Aang tells Suki.

“Shoot, you’re right.”

Azula tunes back out of the conversation until she hears her name.

“—Azula loves udon, right?” Zuko looks at her. The rest of the group follows suit, silent now.

Udon was her favorite food growing up. She hasn’t eaten it properly since her arm healed from the break, but she’s more than willing to slurp down the broth until her stomach is full and warm like she has no reason to abstain from nourishment. She would never tell Zuko any of that. “I don’t care either way,” she says haughtily.

Despite her feigned indifference, she ends up sitting across from Toph with a bowl of kamatama udon. She eats silently so as not to give herself away, ignoring Toph and Aang’s attempts at conversation and Katara’s barely concealed glares.

“Hey, Sparky, is your sister always like this?” Toph asks loudly.

Zuko glances at her and her half-eaten udon. He looks hesitant to answer. Azula smiles gracefully, and he winces at the sight. They both know what she’s going to say before her mouth even opens or the words hum in her throat.

“Zuzu ignored me for four years. He has no idea what I’m like.”

His friends go quiet at that.

“You ignored me too,” he accuses.

“Only because you stole Mai.” It’s the first time Azula has said her name out loud since she chose Zuko. She wonders if the significance is lost on her brother. He always thought she only valued her friends for what she could wring out of them, after all.

(Azula doesn’t know what it’s like to want to kiss someone, but she knows exactly what it’s like to want someone to stay.)

“Zuko’s girlfriend?” Katara says, frowning. “Were the two of you… together?”

Azula scoffs at that. “Do I look like a dyke? We weren’t dating, but she was mine until my dear brother decided he hadn’t taken enough from me already.” Privately, she wonders if Zuko will ever be satisfied with all the love he has stolen from her or if he’ll take Ty Lee next.

She watches her brother’s chopsticks splinter. He takes a deep breath before he speaks. “People aren’t toys, Azula. You can’t own them. And Mai wouldn’t have left you if you hadn’t made her choose between us and threatened her. She loved you too.”

No one could ever love both of us, Azula wants to scream, but she knows Zuko understands that. She knows he’s just being as cruel to her as she is to him for once. “I believe her exact words were that she loved you more than she feared me. It’s a shame Mother didn’t feel the same way. Maybe she wouldn’t have abandoned you then.” She leaves before anyone can tell her to apologize. She knows no one would tell her to stay.

She’s striking matches and flicking them away when he approaches her. She doesn’t react at all when she hears his footsteps getting too close to her. Talking to people couldn’t be less appealing right now, even if she was stupid enough to think it was her brother behind her.

“Didn’t anyone teach you not to play with matches?” he asks, sounding amused.

Azula turns to face him with an eyebrow raised and a match in hand. She doesn’t look away from his eyes as she strikes it and places the open flame between her crimson lips. She pulls the match out, extinguished, after a long moment. She blows smoke at him to emphasize her point: no one ever cared to teach her not to play with matches.

It hurts, of course, but Azula is used to pain. It’s not a trick she’s shown off in a while. It always made Mai and Ty Lee shut up, though. They said it wasn’t pleasant to watch her burn the pink of her mouth no matter how much she insisted it didn't burn her.

(She’s not burning for her father. She’s not burning at all. She’s nothing like Zuko. She never has been. She never will be. It doesn’t matter what was said when she couldn’t think straight.)

The older boy laughs at that. “Okay, that was hot. I’m Jet.”

“Azula,” she says simply. “You look poor.”

“You look like a bitch. We could still have a good time.”

Golden eyes narrow. “I’m seeing someone.” It’s a half-lie. She has another date with Chan in a week, and her father would call that cheating, but Azula has never agreed to be anyone’s girlfriend. She thinks she'll have to eventually, but she can't see herself ever caring about her own monogamy or loyalty.

“Okay. Wanna smoke with me?” He offers her a cigarette.

She takes it. “I’m out of matches.”

Jet pulls out a disposable lighter with “1312” scratched onto it shoddily. He lights both their cigarettes and takes a long, satisfied drag. “You look familiar, you know,” he says.

“That’s a terrible line. We definitely don’t frequent the same places,” she shoots back, blowing another puff of smoke at him.

“Here you are, though,” he says. His grin is lopsided.

“Here I am,” she agrees. “Do you always smoke with upper-echelon girls you don’t know, or am I special?” She bats her eyes sarcastically. Jet is not the kind of boy she would waste her time even pretending to like. She just doesn’t have anything better to do before she calls a cab.

(She thinks she might have pushed Zuko far enough that he’ll stop trying now. She doesn’t know why the thought makes her chest tighten. She doesn’t want anyone’s help. Nobody can help her. There’s nothing good in her left to salvage. There was never anything good in her at all.)

“This is a first,” Jet admits. “I kind of regret it. You really are a bitch.”

“I know.”

They’re silent as they’re both reaching the ends of their cigarettes. Azula’s chest feels warm, and her familiar hunger is absent. She should leave soon.

Jet offers her a second cigarette.

She doesn’t leave.

“What are you doing back here anyway?” he asks. “You don’t seem like the kind of girl who does this often.”

She raises a brow at that. “What kind of girl do I seem like?” she retorts.

“The kind with daddy issues,” he says. He's too amused with that for her taste.

Azula scowls and crushes her barely touched cigarette under her Mary Janes. “I don’t have daddy issues. My brother does. I’m just avoiding him.”

“Is he hot?”

“He’s disfigured. And straight.” If he was gay, then Mai wouldn’t have chosen him. If he was gay, maybe she would’ve spoken to her brother of her own accord the last four years. She wishes he was gay, no matter how much worse it would’ve made his life. She's always been selfish like that.

“He can’t be that bad if he’s got the same genes as you,” Jet hums. “But I’ll drop it if you’re jealous.”

She rolls her eyes. “I told you. I’m seeing someone.”

“We can be friends then. Just give me your number,” he offers. “It’ll piss your dad off.” He sounds so confident. He’s done this kind of thing a thousand times. She’s kind of offended he thinks she’d fall for it.

“I don’t have daddy issues,” she says.

“You owe me two cigarettes then,” he says back.

Azula doesn’t say anything at all. She just holds out her hand for his shitty cell phone and inputs her number.

“I could give you a ride home. Dads always hate me,” he offers. She’s about to leave when he adds, “Brothers hate me too.”

Zuko is sitting in the living room with Mai when Azula enters, silent as ever. If they catch a glimpse of Jet or his beat-up car before Azula closes the door, neither of them says anything. Her lipstick is smeared, and she reeks of cigarettes, but they don’t acknowledge her at all. 

Azula doesn’t acknowledge them either.

She goes to her room, and she glares at the lock she’s scared to touch until Ty Lee texts her, happy as ever. 

(Not for the first time, Azula wonders what it would be like to be anyone else. Not for the first time, she tells herself it would be worse. Azula has never been very good at lying to herself.)

She leaves her room when Iroh gets home with takeout, and she eats more than she has in months even though Mai stays for dinner. She’s reapplied her lipstick, but she still smells like ash and nicotine under a layer of perfume.

“I thought I confiscated your cigarettes,” Iroh says disapprovingly once dinner is over and Mai has gone home.

“I told you I’d smoke somewhere else,” she says. There’s no malice to it. There’s nothing at all to it. It’s just the truth as bare and crude as it can be.

Iroh sighs and looks at Zuko. “Did you know about this, Nephew?”

“I didn’t even know she smoked,” Zuko frowns.

“I do not wish to go through your things, Azula, but if it is for your health, I will.” He gets up, and he walks over to Azula’s room. He glances back at her, waiting.

She follows him with dread in her heart. She had known this would happen. She just didn’t expect him to do it in front of her. She doesn’t look back, but she hears Zuko’s footsteps behind her. Of course he would want to watch her punishment. She always did the same to him. Even when Ozai burned him, she had stood by and watched, a smile on her face.

Iroh starts by searching the drawers of her desk and dresser. He finds nothing, so he lifts up the mattress of her bed. Nothing again.

Azula could tell him the cigarettes weren’t hers, but her father never believed her once he decided she was guilty. There’s no point arguing with a punishment once it begins. Azula learned that lesson from watching her brother try and fail time and time again.

Iroh picks up the purse she used today, and Azula feels her stomach lurch. She wants to scream at him to stop, but screaming has never gotten her anywhere. She takes her humiliation quietly as he pours out the contents onto her bed.

An empty book of matches, some hair ties, her wallet, and both her prescriptions lie there for everyone to see.

Her nails bite into her palms. This time, she feels the skin break and bleed into her nails. It doesn't make her feel better like she thought it would.

“What is this?” Iroh asks. “Birth control?”

“It’s for my period. I told Zuko already. He took me to pick it up today,” she answers automatically.

“And the… Saphris? Why do you have this, Azula? Is it recreational?” He’s frowning now. It makes him look like her father when he’s disappointed. Azula used to only know the expression from when her father looked at Zuko, but it’s gotten horrifyingly familiar since May. On her father, it makes her want to shrivel up and die. On her uncle, it makes her want to shatter something until he cannot look at her any longer.

“When have you ever known me to do anything recreationally, Uncle?” she snaps. "It's none of your business."

“I’ll look it up, Uncle,” Zuko says. He was always so eager to watch her crash and burn. He’s always delighted in Ursa scolding her or her only scoring a ninety-eight on a test. She wishes he was dead for it. “… It—it says it’s an antipsychotic. Azula, why the hell are you on an antipsychotic?”

Azula’s mouth twitches. She wants to compose herself into stone, and she wants to laugh until she chokes. She settles on a smile, all red lips and sharp teeth. Elegant and poised to kill.

“It’s like Mother always said,” she hums. She takes her hair out of its ponytail and does her best impression of Ursa, “There’s something wrong with that child.”

Iroh stares at her, silent and pale. No one speaks.

Azula rolls her eyes, tying her hair back up. “Honestly, it’s not that serious. I had a mild nervous breakdown, so Lo and Li took me to the hospital. What was it we used to call our family trips there, Zuzu? Family bonding time? Think of it like that. Except those stupid hags got me stuck in the psych ward for seventy-two hours all because I stopped sleeping for a few days to study,” she says with forced casualty.

“And they put you on antipsychotics?” Iroh asks slowly.

She sighs in exasperation as if she’s explained this a million times and the concept bores her now. “I was confused from the sleep deprivation, and I thought I saw Mother,” she drawls. “It was just an orderly that looked like her, but they overreacted. The whole ordeal was irritating and unnecessary. If Lo and Li had just told me to breathe instead of coddling me, I would have been perfectly fine. Still, those idiotic doctors wouldn’t listen and insisted on prescribing me Saphris. I don’t even take it; I just get it refilled because I have to go to the pharmacy anyway. I’m fine. You can ask Father. He knew it was a mistake, and he would’ve gotten me out sooner if he hadn’t been on a business trip.”

“You thought you saw Mom…” Zuko says.

Another eye roll. “I told you. The orderly looked like her. I was exhausted and confused, so I called her Mother, and they decided I was crazy. They were wrong, of course.” She sounds irritated but not irrational. They’re not going to put her back in the hospital. She’s in control this time. The hospital wouldn’t take her again. She’ll never have to go back. She’d rather die.

“You’re sure?” Iroh asks. He sounds concerned. It’s strange to have it directed at her. She thinks she hates it. “Your grandfather was—erratic and—”

Azula glares sharply. “Do I seem erratic? Do I seem like I’m seeing things?”

“No,” Zuko says. She can tell he doesn’t fully believe her, but he doesn’t want to press the issue any further. It might be the smartest thing he’s ever done. It might be the best lesson Ozai ever taught him.

She nods affirmatively. “Exactly. I’m perfectly fine. Now leave me alone. I want to shower.”

Neither of them argues as they exit her room.

(Neither of them cares enough to. It’s exactly what she wanted, but it still hurts.)

Azula nicks herself while shaving. She watches the blood swirl down the drain with glazed-over eyes.

(Azula has never needed to sleep more or wanted to sleep less when she’s sedated in the hospital.

She was so sure she was going to die if she slept. 

Azula can’t explain why she wakes up alive. Alive and with stitches not glass in her hand.

Her miserable excuse of a mother is still there. In the corner of the room now. Ursa knows that Azula will hurt her if she comes near enough. The stitches in her hand are proof of that. Azula laughs at the memory of smashing the mirror. It comes out strangled and crueler than she’s ever heard herself.

“Ms. Minamoto, it’s good to see you awake. Do you know where you are?” some pathetic doctor asks.

Azula turns to look at the doctor slowly. She narrows her eyes and says nothing. 

This crone is going to hurt her. She should’ve done it while Azula was sedated. It would’ve gone a lot better for her.

“Can you understand me?” the doctor asks.

“Azula, please answer. She’s trying to help you. I promise.”

Azula snarls, and, like a cornered animal, she attacks.)

Jet calls, and Azula answers. He doesn’t greet her before he jumps into what he wants. “So your brother has daddy issues. Why?”

“You’re not stupid. There aren’t a lot of girls named Azula. You know who my father is. That’s why you were so persistent. I don’t mind. Lots of people try to befriend me because of him. Some of them even succeed.”

Jet chuckles. “You caught me. Did he really burn half your brother’s face off?”

“Did you know burning flesh smells like barbeque? It's kind of funny, honestly. All I could think was how we'd just had barbeque the night before.”

He’s quiet for a long moment. He’s disgusted with her or afraid of her now. She can work with either. Those kinds of unpleasant feelings are what Azula thrives on.

Sighing, she elaborates, “Zuko offered some unwanted advice about counsel that angered Father, and then he made it worse by begging for forgiveness. My father is not a forgiving man.”

“Does he forgive you?”

Azula laughs. “Everyone wants me to be some sad little victim, but it couldn’t be farther from the truth. I’ve always been the golden child, Jet. That’s why my brother and I don’t get along. He’s always been pathetic, and I’ve always been better than him, so he hates me. I don't really have an opinion of him.”

“You’re cold.”

“I thought I was hot.”

“You can be both.”

She decides she hates Jet, and he hates her back. She still saves his contact information when they hang up.

She goes out with Chan again. And again. And again. He asks her to be his girlfriend. She agrees, but she asks to take things slow. He assumes she’s never been with anyone before and lights up as if her body hasn’t already been tainted in every way imaginable.

It’s not her fault he’s stupid. It's not her fault he doesn't give her a chance to correct him either.

(It's nice to pretend. It's nice to imagine being untouched and unharmed. It's so nice it makes Azula wish it was true, and she was a normal fifteen-year-old girl with a normal father and a normal life. She's not, though, and nothing will ever change that.)

Guiltlessly, she calls Ty Lee to tell her, and Ty Lee says they have to celebrate the good news.

They meet up at the new mochi shop in the mall. Azula takes a cab this time. She doesn’t feel like being told to go fuck herself by Zuko, after all. When Azula arrives, Ty Lee has already bought her her favorite mochi and a can of Diet Coke.

Azula knows she just feels bad because her act of treason blew up in her face and now Mai and Zuko both hate Azula even more.

“Tell me everything!” Ty Lee beams and offers the mochi to Azula. Her smile is strained again. Azula thought she was over her infatuation by now. Especially after the sleepover incident. “How’d he ask? Did he give you flowers? If he didn’t give you flowers, you should dump him. You deserve flowers.”

“There were no flowers. He gave me his jacket, and he kissed me. Then he asked me to be his girlfriend. I said yes, obviously,” she says.

Ty Lee frowns at her. “You make it sound so… business-y. Wasn’t it romantic?”

“We kissed, didn’t we?” Azula says dismissively. “Of course it was romantic.”

“But… that’s all?”

“We also talked about sex and how I don’t want to have it right away. He was very understanding.”

Azula can’t read Ty Lee’s expression now. Ty Lee is usually an open book, more or less, but Azula can’t remember ever seeing her look like this. She doesn't like it. Azula is supposed to always know what Ty Lee is thinking. She's a people person, after all.

“I hear Chan made it official,” a familiar voice says before Azula can demand Ty Lee explain herself. “Congratulations, I guess.”

Azula inhales sharply. “What is she doing here? I thought you said we would be celebrating alone.”

“I just want us to all be friends again—” Ty Lee starts, but Mai cuts her off.

“I’m not here to fight with you, Azula.” Her name sounds heavy on Mai’s tongue. It used to sound so light and safe in the older girl’s mouth. “You’re the worst person I’ve ever really known and, half the time, I hate you more than anything else.”

“But?” Ty Lee prompts, ever hopeful.

Mai’s mouth curls upwards just a fraction. It’s slight enough that if Azula was not watching her face so intently, she might not have noticed, even with her lifetime of learning Mai inside and out. “There’s no but. I’m here because Azula makes me so mad I want to cry.”

Any other day, Azula might consider that admission a victory. Today, it’s nothing but a nuisance. “I don’t need you here. I’m perfectly fine. It's like you said: Chan made it official.”

For some unthinkable reason, Mai takes this as an invitation to sit next to her. “Zuko told me about Iroh searching your room. I know Ozai used to do that too.”

Azula won’t take the bait. Instead, she asks, “Did Zuko tell you what I said about his mother?”

“He did. He also told me what he said to you.” 

Golden eyes narrow. “Why do you care?” It’s an accusation. Mai made her choice. She left. She loves Zuko, so she can’t love Azula. She doesn’t get to change her mind now.

“We were friends once,” she says simply. Mai, of all people, knows why it isn’t simple. Why it’s never been simple. Why it will never be simple.

“We were,” Azula says, cracking her Diet Coke open. The admission stirs something in her bones. “Not anymore, though.” She dumps the can over Mai’s head. She smiles with satisfaction as the older girl closes her eyes and tries not to tremble. Azula does not move to go. She just takes a bite of her mochi and, for the first time in months, she swallows long before the fiftieth chew. She does not need hunger to feel in control right now.

Mai gets up wordlessly, and Azula does not so much as look at her.

“I’m… I’m gonna help her clean off. I’m sorry. I’ll be right back. Promise!” Ty Lee leaves the shop with her tail between her legs like the coward she’s always been.

There are other people here, staring at her, but Azula is alone again. 

(Mai chose Zuko, and Ty Lee chose Mai. It hurts more than she wants it to.)

Azula doesn’t bother waiting to see if Ty Lee comes back. There's no point in putting herself at risk of any more betrayals today.

Ursa is back again. This time, she’s following Azula around the mall. Azula can’t stop catching glimpses of her in reflections on glass. Azula can’t stop hearing how disappointed she is in her daughter.

“You shouldn’t have done that to Mai. It was wrong.”

Azula says nothing. She knows she’s seeing things. She knows Ursa isn’t real, can’t be real. She doesn’t want to go back to the psych ward. She’s not crazy. She’s not. It doesn't matter if her grandfather was erratic or whatever sugar-coated language Iroh wants to use. Azula is better than her namesake.

(Azula has never been very good at lying to herself.)

“She was being genuine. She misses you.”

She bites back the laugh itching in her throat. Mai does not miss Azula. Mai is the happiest she’s ever been now that Azula is out of her life. That attempt at reconciliation was about finding proof that Azula is some crazed, pathetic victim of her father.

“Ty Lee didn’t mean to upset you either. She loves you. She wants you to be happy. You know that, Azula.”

No one wants her to be happy.

“They’re looking for you now. You pushed them away, and they still worry for you.”

Azula sighs. She never likes seeing Ursa, but this feels worse than usual. When Ursa says that she loves Azula, that she misses her, that she never meant to call her a monster, Azula knows with every fiber of her being that she’s being lied to. Ursa has never loved her daughter. But Mai and Ty Lee were hers once. They cared about her once. Or at least, Azula believed they had. Trust is for fools, but Azula was a fool for both of them.

She hates herself for it.

Her father would ask her what those girls could have done to convince her to trust them. Fear is the only reliable way, she knows that. It’s not as if she hadn’t wielded fear over them when necessary.

(Wasn’t that why Mai chose Zuko? Love over fear. If Azula had trusted her more… it’s not worth entertaining. It’s not worth regretting.)

“Azula?” That’s not Ursa’s voice, but it’s not Mai or Ty Lee’s either.

Azula turns around anyway. It’s the Water Tribe girl Zuko is friends with. 

“I don’t remember your name,” she says sharply.

“I’m Katara.”

“And you hate me.”

Katara winces. “Um, I don’t… hate you. I—I mean, what you said was kind of awful, but you probably just miss your mom, and I can understand that even if you're mean about it—”

Azula glares. “I don’t have mommy issues. I just never liked my mother very much. What do you want anyway?”

“Well, you’re alone—”

“I’m aware.”

“No, I mean… do you wanna hang out with me and my brother?” Katara gestures behind her where her brother—what was his name? Sokka?—is standing with a shiny, new boomerang and a thing of blubbered seal jerky.

Azula stares at Katara in silence, trying to figure out what kind of weird strategy this is. It clicks into place. It’s the same thing Mai was trying. How pathetic. “Whatever Zuzu said, he’s mistaken. Leave me alone now.” She walks away as Katara splutters something about how this isn’t about Zuko. She doesn’t look back.

“That wasn’t very nice, Azula.”

Azula glances at Ursa in the reflection of the store window. “I’ve never been nice,” she murmurs. Ursa always hated that about her.

Mai and Ty Lee have left her a total of twenty-two texts she won’t read, eight missed calls, and three voicemails she won’t listen to by the time she gets home. She blocks them both so they can’t bother her any further.

(She blocks them both so she won’t be disappointed when they give up.)

There is no ambush waiting for her in Iroh’s house today. She goes to her room in silence, and she pulls out her laptop. She has nothing now. She has no one. She knows she did this to herself like she always does. She knows that every bad thing that happens to her is earned.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.

She sits on her bed with her knees tucked in and her hair loose, and she feels tears dislodging from her eyes. She breathes steadily, and she makes no sound, but her face is damp with tears and snot. She does not bother blinking them back today. There is no one to see. There is no one to tell her how disgusting and pathetic she is for her weakness.

She loved them. She still loves them. Mai and Ty Lee were hers, and she used to think they would always be hers, and now neither of them will ever be hers again.

Monsters aren’t supposed to love people, but Azula loves them. She knows she doesn’t love them in the way normal people love their friends,—Zuko has told her as much—but she still loves them. She doesn’t love anyone but them. 

And now they’re gone.

No one knocks on her bedroom door. No one asks if she’s all right. No one wants to know.

Azula doesn’t blame Iroh or Zuko for it. She can’t blame them when she pushes everyone who gets close away. She’s too tired to feel anything other than empty anyway.

She’s not all right. She’s not okay. She’s not fine.

She wants to die.

“I love you, Azula. I do.”

“Stop lying,” she hisses. “Please.” Azula never says please.

For the first time, Ursa listens. In the silence, Azula’s whole body starts to ache. She’s never wanted a cigarette more in her life. She wants her mother too. She settles for a cigarette.

Chapter Text

School starts, and all of Azula’s friends are her boyfriend’s. She doesn’t even follow Mai or Ty Lee on social media anymore. She knows they still ask Zuko about her; she hears him on the phone with them, but she won’t speak to him either. Jet still calls, and she still answers. Sometimes they smoke together, but Chan doesn’t like Jet, and Azula doesn’t either. So Jet’s not her friend. No one is her friend, and she spends half her time playing the pipa and practicing kuai ball until the world spins.

She tells herself she’s happy anyway. She’s gotten better at lying to herself, at least, even if it's not by much.

The worst part, though, is that she still hasn’t gone to visit her father. She’s had two opportunities now, and she’s passed on both of them. She’s been declining calls from unknown numbers. She thinks she’s about a week off of Zhao coming to Iroh’s house to talk to her.

She thinks her uncle wouldn’t let him in, at least.

Not after whatever happened with Zuzu. Azula has never actually been told what Zhao did to make her brother so painfully uncomfortable that he would ruin any chance he had of inheriting Minamoto Oil and his father’s love, but Azula thinks she can guess. She’s met Zhao, after all.

Still. Iroh refusing to let Zhao see her will only make things worse. She doesn’t know why she keeps finding ways to make everything in her life so much worse than it needs to be.

She should just answer her phone.

(She’ll have to lie to her father if she sees him. Her father is one of the only people who knows when she’s lying. She told Zuko once that her father was going to kill him. She told her father once that he couldn’t treat her like Zuko. Only one of those things was true.)

It rings again while she’s on the train to school.

Azula doesn’t answer. She doesn’t listen to the voicemail either.

She’s leaving school when she realizes she miscalculated.

Zhao is waiting for her outside a black car in a well-pressed suit. The sight doesn’t make her stumble,—Azula has walked with grace and her head held high through much, much worse—but she does forget to take the next step for too long a moment.

“Are you okay, Azula?” the second to last girl Azula wants to talk to asks.

She brushes imaginary dust off her skirt and walks to Zhao as if she didn’t hear Ty Lee at all. As if she hasn’t dreaded this every second she’s put off talking to her father in prison.

For all her posturing, Ty Lee doesn’t follow after her.

“Zhao,” she drawls, refusing to give her fear away up close.

“Princess,” he smiles that too-familiar smile. He never used to be brave enough to say it like that. She wonders if this is part of her punishment: the disrespect of her inferiors.

(The scariest thing about Zhao has never been his infatuation with her or her brother; it is the fear that her father will share her with him even if she cries. Her crying deters Ozai, ruins his fantasy, but Zhao would only welcome the sight of her fear.)

“I’ll see him next time,” she says. It comes out more pleading than she ever wants to hear her own voice.

Zhao’s smile grows. “Your father is concerned about you. He says it’s not like you to refuse his calls or miss a chance to see him. I suggested, of course, that you might not like the idea of visiting as family.”

He can’t make her. He’s bluffing, she knows he has to be. Her father might have the mayor in his pocket, but even he isn’t powerful enough for the warden to allow him to have conjugal visits with his own daughter. No one is that powerful.

Azula still wants to knock that ugly smile off Zhao’s face. “He has no reason to be concerned,” she says haughtily. “I was merely occupied during the visitation periods allotted. There’s no need to make other arrangements.”

“And what were you occupied with, Princess? Not boyfriends, I hope,” he says, still smiling. He can’t know. Ozai is paranoid and jealous, but Azula has been careful. She hasn’t gone anywhere with Chan or Jet that would get back to her father unless he has people spying on her now. He's never respected her privacy, but he's never gone that far before.

The threat lingers anyway.

“People were being nosy. They didn’t suspect anything serious, but I still had to assure them everything was fine. I have now, so I’ll be free to visit him going forward,” she says dismissively.

“What people?” It’s an accusation now.

“Uncle, my brother, his girlfriend, and Ty Lee.” She sounds calmer than she is. “I told you. I took care of it. Your presence isn’t helping, though.”

Zhao feigns hurt at that. “Your father wants me to make sure you’re safe.”

Azula rolls her eyes. “You can’t drive me home. Uncle won’t approve of you coming near me or Zuko without an adult present.”

“I am an adult.”

“And he thinks me a child.”

He smiles, and his eyes flash dangerously. “You haven’t been a child in a very long time, Princess.” It's so like him to dig his thumb into bruises that aren't his that she almost laughs, but she can't find the humor in this. For all she's laughed at Zuko's wounds, her own feel nauseating to even examine.

Azula gets in the car. 

Thanks to a tip from her former friend, Iroh is waiting outside when Zhao pulls up before his residence. Azula would rather curl up and die than be lectured by him, but she’s already surrendered once today. She won’t make it twice.

She gets out of the car and moves to brush past her uncle without so much as a second glance.

He lets her, and, as she closes the front door behind her, she catches a glimpse of him approaching Zhao’s car. She doesn’t loiter in the entrance or make the mistake of lingering in the living room once she’s inside. Azula heads straight to her room and listens to her father’s voicemails.

“I’m disappointed in you,” he says in one. “It’s almost like you’re afraid of me.” In another. “Do you want to make me angry? Do you like the attention?” He keeps going. On and on.

Azula keeps listening until Iroh knocks at her bedroom door.

“It’s unlocked,” she says mechanically, setting her phone down.

She doesn’t know why Iroh and Zuko bother knocking at this point. Every time they ask, it’s unlocked. It’s always going to be unlocked. She knows Zuko was never a quick learner, but she thought Iroh was supposed to have been smart before he disgraced himself and exited the family business.

He looks at her, his eyes dull and sad. The fire in them has gone out once more. He sighs, and asks a question she never expected to hear from him again: “Are you all right?”

“Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

“Your father is in prison. He is a… difficult man, but he is still your father. It would make sense for you to not be all right, Azula. I should have asked you this months ago, and it is my failure that I did not. However, I hope that it is enough that I am asking you now,” Iroh says.

She looks up from her phone to glare at him. “I’m perfectly fine. Why are you asking now, Uncle? Like you said, my father went to prison months ago.”

“And not only have you not visited him, but you have been acting out and are now spending time with his… associate.”

“He picked me up from school because Father asked him to. He’s been worried because I haven’t gotten to visit him yet. I already told Zhao I’d go see Father as soon as possible,” she says automatically.

“I see.” Iroh frowns. 

She scowls back at him. “Enough beating around the bush. This is about Zhao, right? I know Zuko hates him.”

He sighs sadly. “Did he do anything to make you uncomfortable?”

“He knows Father would kill him if he looked at me wrong. You can relax now.”

Iroh does not relax. He walks to her bedside, and he sits on the mattress. “Azula, your father never told you why he disinherited your brother, did he?”

“It was because Zuzu said something stupid about what a creep Zhao is,” she says dismissively. “He should have just kept quiet and tolerated whatever gross comments Zhao was making about him. Then he could have inherited Father’s shares and taken over the company. Oh, well. His loss is my gain.”

“It is true that Zuko did speak out about Zhao’s… tendencies. However, he did not inform your father that Zhao was being inappropriate with him as you seem to believe. Zuko did not think that your father would care if Zhao made him uncomfortable. He did, however, believe that your father would care if Zhao said something inappropriate about you,” he says. “Unfortunately, he was wrong. Your father saw it as a slight against him that Zuko would question the men he let around you. This is why he hurt your brother and dismissed him from the estate.”

This can’t be the story. Her father can’t know what Zhao is like when he’s not around. He would have accused her of an affair by now if he did. He would have killed Zhao and covered her in bruises to prove she was his even if she had bothered denying it. Zuko couldn’t have told Ozai. He lied to Iroh. Or Iroh is lying to her.

(Zuko never lies. Her brother couldn’t lie to save his life. Could her uncle? Of all the pathetic traits she’s heard her father criticize Iroh for over the years, lying has never been one of them.)

“I don’t believe you. My father would never tolerate Zhao’s behavior if he even suspected it.”

“Then why have you not told him yourself?”

She wishes she could say anything back to that. Instead, she throws her phone at Iroh as hard as she can.

He dodges with grace. Her phone screen shatters against the wall. “The water flows, Azula.”

She narrows her eyes. “Not in a drought.” Azula has never been interested in her uncle’s forgiveness. Not for anything she’s done. Least of all something as childish as this.

Azula goes to see her father as she has done everything worth doing in her life: alone.

She hugs him until he’s ready to let her go, then apologizes. “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner. I hope that Zhao explained why I couldn’t. It won’t happen again, Father.”

“He did. He did not, however, explain why you would not answer my calls, Azula,” he says. His tone is even and his face is blank, but his golden eyes burn.

“I… I was afraid. I thought you would be upset with me for not visiting,” she confesses.

His eyes narrow a fraction. “I was. I’m sure you will make it up to me in the future, though.”

She nods obediently. When her father gets like this, it’s important that she submit. Her dignity is easily sacrificed to the altar of her father. All she ever has to do is survive this moment and the one after that. Survival means she will inherit. Survival means she will reap the rewards of the blood he has spilled.

(Spilling blood is pointless; nothing will grow from it. Her suffering is pointless, and it will not end when she inherits. It will not end when she holds his bones in the ashes and passes them to her brother. It will outlive him, and it will never stop haunting her.)

“Say it, Princess,” he commands.

“I love you, Daddy.”

He smiles, mocking and cold, and Azula feels her mind leave her body. She responds automatically and instinctively to his every word for the remainder of the visit. His cruelty does not lessen. He has not forgiven her.

Azula knew he wouldn’t. She meant it when she told Jet that her father is not a forgiving man. Not even when it’s her. Not even when she’s always been his favorite child. Sometimes, she thinks he might be even less forgiving when it’s her. He expects failure from Zuko. He has never expected anything less than perfection from her.

She debases herself before him in hopes that he might forgive her this time anyway.

A month passes. Azula is doing perfectly fine on her own as always. She excels in school and kuai ball and her pida lessons, spends time with her boyfriend and his friends, doesn’t hallucinate the mother who never wanted her, ignores her pathetic brother and traitorous former friends, and visits her father again.

(A month passes. Azula has never been lonelier. She’s never struggled more with school and kuai ball and her pida lessons. She hates her boyfriend and his friends and the gross things they say. She sees her mother in every mirror. She wishes she was nine and didn’t know how much worse her life could get. She doesn’t want to see her father when he’s like this.)

Azula is supposed to spend tonight with Chan after an utterly humiliating visit with her father. She’s tying half her hair up and ignoring her mother’s presence in the mirror when someone knocks on the bathroom door.

“I have to use the restroom, Azula,” Zuko says. It’s the first time he’s spoken to her this week for more than asking her to pass the soy sauce. She thinks his shrink has finally cleared his conscience about helping her.

“And I have to do my hair. Which is more important, Zuzu? Spoiler alert: it’s not your bladder.” It’s the most she’s said to him in two weeks.

“Come on. You can’t hog the bathroom.”

“Go cry to Uncle Fatso about it. You used to love doing that with Mother.”

That shuts him up. All she has to do is mention Ursa, and he behaves like a beaten dog. On some level, she supposes that’s what he is. She dismisses the thought as soon as it crosses her mind. There’s no point in thinking about the past.

There is only the future.

Azula finishes her hair, and she stares at herself and not her mother. It doesn’t shut Ursa up.

“I wish you would be nicer to your brother. He’s trying his best.”

She sneers. “You’re in my head. Shouldn’t you be on my side or is that too unrealistic even for my hallucinations?”

“You’re my daughter. Of course, I’m on your side, Azula.”

“Stop lying,” Azula hisses. She snaps her eyes shut. This is in her head. Ursa isn’t there. Arguing with a hallucination is pointless. She knows all of these things. She still has to leave the room to stop herself from screaming.

She gets to the front door before Iroh clears his throat.

“Where are you going, Azula?” he asks, patient and calm.

“Chan is picking me up,” she says simply. It’s not that she trusts her uncle not to tell; it’s that her father has given away to her that Iroh is actively lying to him about her every time they speak. She does not know what Iroh gains from such foolishness, but she will not ask him to stop. “We’re going on a date.”

He almost smiles at her. She knows he’s disappointed with her ignoring her brother, and she’s sure Zuko has told him what happened with Mai and Ty Lee, but he loves it when she does things that make her seem like a normal girl. Going out with her boyfriend more than qualifies as what Iroh considers normal girl behavior.

“Ah, I’ve been meaning to ask you when I would get to meet the young man who has been courting you,” he says cheerfully.

Azula turns to glare at him. “You’re not going to be meeting him. You aren’t my father, and we aren’t close. Besides, Chan and I aren’t serious or anything. There's no need to scare him off.”

His expression falters, but he recovers quickly. “I see. You’re embarrassed by your—how do you always put it…? Oh, yes, your ‘fuddy-duddy uncle.’ That’s all right. Even your brother wasn’t eager for me to spend time with Mai once they started going out.”

She slams the door shut behind her in response. The last thing she wants is to be reminded of Mai’s betrayal right now. 

(If Azula ever dreamt, the look in Mai’s eyes when Azula told her to choose would haunt her nightmares. It had been something like anguish. It had been something Azula will never be ready to name.)

Outside, Chan is sitting shotgun in his two-seater sports car with Ruon-Jian driving. Her chest tightens at the implication.

“Hey, babe,” Chan grins up at her as she makes her way to him.

“You brought Ruon-Jian. We didn’t discuss that.”

“I thought you liked my friends,” he says.

“She loves me,” Ruon-Jian laughs. “She just wanted to be alone with you.”

Azula rolls her eyes, and she sits on Chan’s lap. It feels like her fifteenth birthday all over again. The thought comes with a tsunami of shame. Azula is bone-dry, and she is drowning. Distantly, she wishes she had never had the misfortune of being born at all.

Her father used to say she was born lucky while Zuko was lucky to be born. With her boyfriend’s arms heavy around her waist, Azula doesn’t believe him anymore.

Chan kisses her exposed shoulders. “You know, if you’re cold, I can warm you up,” he says.

“I don’t get cold.” Her body temperature runs high. It always has. Ty Lee used to call her a furnace and beg to cuddle. In hindsight, though, that might not have been about the other girl being cold.

The thought taints their friendship even further. In the end, Ty Lee was just like Ozai.

In the side-view mirror, Ursa frowns at her. 

“That’s not fair, Azula. Ty Lee loves you. She never wanted to hurt you like Ozai does.”

Azula looks away from her and prays she’ll shut up for the night. She doesn’t need her hallucination of her mother following her on a date. Or whatever this outing has become. Azula isn’t really sure what to make of Ruon-Jian’s presence. He hasn’t said anything too disgusting since he tried to proposition her at the party, and he did apologize, however unconvincingly. She can’t fathom why Chan would want him present on what was supposed to be a date, though. Especially not when Chan has been asking about when Azula thinks she’ll be ready to have sex.

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, Azula. If he doesn’t respect that you’re not ready, he doesn’t deserve you at all. You’re allowed to say no.”

She wants to scoff, but she bites down the urge. She knows that she can tell Chan no. She’s done it before. She’ll have no problem doing it again. Azula doesn’t do things she doesn’t want to.

(Except when her father tells her to. Except when her options are to comply or be forced.)

“Where are we going?” she asks. “I thought we were getting dinner.”

Ruon-Jian grins at her. “We’re going to Chan’s place. His dad’s on a business trip, so we’ve got the place to ourselves for the night.”

Azula feels sick to her stomach. “No. He didn’t mention that.”

Chan rests his chin on her shoulder and says, “Sorry, babe, I could’ve sworn I told you.” 

She doesn’t think he sounds sorry at all. She still grits her teeth and bears it because she would rather die than go back to Iroh with her tail between her legs. There are a lot of things Azula would rather die than do these days. Maybe she should be concerned. Maybe she should bite the bullet already.

It’s a stupid thought. She’s already too late to play at being Lu Ten. It won’t help her now. For the first time in her life, Azula doesn’t know how to help herself. If she’d stop lying to everyone including herself for a minute, she could admit that she hasn’t known how to help herself since Ozai picked her up from the hospital.

(She’s pale and disgusting and in need of a hot shower where she’s allowed to use a razor to shave. Her lip is bleeding from her own teeth's hold, and she's smeared the blood as if it were lipstick in some pathetic attempt at feeling normal. She’s only grateful that Lo and Li stopped her before she could cut her bangs to make her appearance even worse today.

Even dressed in her own clothes again, Azula has never felt more out of place and uncomfortable as she waits for her father. Being discharged from the hospital has her even more terrified than when she was checked in.

She still saw her mother when she looked in the bathroom mirror last night, but her father insisted on having her released, and it’s not like she ever should have been here to begin with. It was a mistake of Lo and Li to take her here, and they’ll be dealt with for that mistake. It’s good she’s going home. It’s better she’s going home.

What else could she do? Where else could she go? Who else would take her? Especially now.

“Azula.” Her father doesn’t smile as he walks in. He doesn’t smile as he signs the paperwork. He doesn’t smile as he takes her by the wrist and drags her out of the glass double doors.

Her mother frowns in their reflection.

“He’s not a good man, Azula. You need to get out of here.”

Azula has no way out. Not now. Not ever.)

Chan’s house looks smaller, somehow, without all the people filling it. It makes her feel uncharacteristically claustrophobic. Azula is used to taking up space; she is supposed to be bigger and better than the people surrounding her. Azula is not used to feeling trapped outside her father’s presence; she is supposed to be smaller and smaller still when he draws near, but no one else would dare ask the same of her.

Not even these stupid, arrogant boys who don’t know her family name and the damage she can do with or without it.

(Azula hasn’t gotten good enough at lying to herself to fully believe that.)

“Ruon-Jian is gonna order us some Air Nomad takeout,” Chan informs her as they sit down on the couch. “And we’re gonna have a good time, right, babe?” He kisses her neck. She remembers how it feels to be strangled again.

She says nothing as he tries to mark her throat. She wants to object. She wants to tell him he can’t brand her like property. She wants to tell him she isn’t something to own or to hold unless he wants to get burned. She also wants him to stay because she needs someone to talk to, no matter how shallow and stupid he is.

“Don’t you want to talk or something?” she asks after a few minutes of his assault on her throat. “I mean, isn’t this weird? With Ruon-Jian here?”

“I don’t mind the show,” Ruon-Jian says from the doorway. He's smiling, and Azula wishes she could hit him. “Don’t stop on my behalf, bro.”

Azula narrows her eyes. “Chan, stop. I’m not comfortable.”

Chan backs off. “Sorry, babe,” he says before offering her a chaste kiss on the cheek. “We can watch a movie if you want.”

“Very well.”

He puts on the kind of movie Azula thinks she should have seen at the sleepovers she wasn’t allowed to have growing up, and Azula wonders if she should be happy or not. He’s doing this because it’s what he thinks normal girls are supposed to like, and Azula has never been a normal girl, but sometimes, she wants to be. Would a normal girl be happy with her boyfriend’s arm wrapped around her, and his best friend sitting too close to her?

The closest thing to a normal girl that Azula knows is Ty Lee, and Azula doesn’t think she knows Ty Lee at all anymore.

Chan’s playing with her hair when the doorbell rings, and Ruon-Jian gets up to answer it. “Food’s here,” he calls from the doorway, holding a plastic bag.

Azula eats fourteen bites before she feels the food rotting in her stomach. One short of how many birthdays she’s suffered. She’s not sure if that counts as irony or not. She doesn’t care to want to be sure either.

“Are you gonna finish that?” Chan asks.

“You can have it,” she says, handing the container to him.

“Sweet.”

Azula can’t help but wonder if Mai and Ty Lee would have let her get away with that. She thinks that, if she hadn’t dumped the soda on Mai, they wouldn’t have. Oh, well. Azula’s never regretted anything before. It’s too late to start now.

“You regret a lot of things, Azula. It’s not weak to admit that.”

Azula closes her eyes, and she counts to five, cursing herself for thinking that just because she avoided reflections, Ursa disappeared.

“I’m not going to leave you. Not again.”

Azula pushes Chan’s takeout container off his lap and straddles him. She kisses him, slotting her mouth open for his tongue, and wrapping her arms around the back of his neck. It feels like absolutely nothing and the most degrading thing she’s ever done all at once, but Azula needs the hallucination to leave. She can’t take more of Ursa’s half-baked motherly advice or bouts of fake affection tonight. Surely, even the hallucination of her mother doesn’t want to see her kiss her boyfriend like this.

The voice stops, and Azula moves to get off of Chan’s lap.

Ruon-Jian stops her, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and kissing the skin where her neck and shoulder meet.

Azula elbows him. Hard. “Don’t ever touch me again,” she snarls at him.

“No need to be a bitch,” he scoffs. “Agni, you’re just as prude as your friend.”

She almost lets herself ask what he did to Mai before she steels herself to glare at Chan. “Are you going to let him talk to me that way?” she demands instead.

Chan shakes his head quickly. “No, no way. Not cool, dude. You can’t talk to my girlfriend like that. You gotta leave.” He doesn’t sound nearly as afraid of her as he should be, but he’s doing as she says.

Ruon-Jian leaves, mumbling something about how he hopes Azula is worth the trouble. 

(She never does seem to be worth the trouble these days. Her father would certainly think as much. Her brother and uncle and former friends too. She wonders if it’s always been like this, and she just didn’t see it until now.)

“I’m sorry about him,” Chan says once it’s just them. He kisses Azula as if that will help anything.

“It’s fine.” She rolls her eyes.

“Let me make it up to you,” he says. “I’ll make you feel good, okay?” His hands wander too far south for Azula’s already crumbled comfort.

“What are you doing?” she demands. “I said no, Chan.”

“Come on,” he whines. “You always do this. You tease me, and you get upset when I want you to follow through. I kicked out my best friend for you. We’ve been dating for like four months now. We’ve taken things slow. What’s the problem?”

“Chan, I can promise you something right now. It’s a really bad idea to ask me something twice. And you, darling, have made the mistake of asking a lot more than that.” She grabs her bag, and fishes out her latest matchbox.

His eyes widen in fear. “What are you doing?”

Azula strikes the first match. She flicks it away, still lit, and the curtains catch flame. “Playing with fire,” she drawls as she strikes the second match.

“Stop it!” He jumps up and tries to grab her.

She burns him for that mistake. Then, she lights her third match.

Hissing in pain, Chan dials 112 for the cops and runs to get water for the flames licking his living room walls. Azula just laughs as the curtains burn. He dated her for four months, and in all that time, he never even asked her for her family name. It’s not her fault if Chan is an idiot.

It’s not her fault if she’s alone now. He should have known better than to keep asking. Nobody but Mai has ever been safe to ask her something twice before. Chan should have known. He should have paid any degree of attention to the kind of person he was dating, and he should have known.

“He should have listened when you said no, Azula.”

For the first time, she agrees with Ursa’s assessment. People should always listen when Azula says no. Especially entitled men who think they’re more important than they are.

(Is it her fault, then, that she never says no to her father?)

“Your father should never put you in the position where you have to say no at all.”

The police arrive, and Chan tells them his version of events—they were making out when she freaked out for no reason and started lighting matches. Azula doesn’t tell them her version. She just smiles and asks them if they know who she is.

When they say no, Azula asks Chan if he ever cared to learn her family name.

When he says no, she laughs in his face.

“It’s Minamoto. I’m Ozai’s daughter.”

After that, Azula has a police escort home and a complete lack of a criminal record. Chan, on the other hand, has one hell of a story to tell his father.

Iroh and Zuko look horrified to see the police car outside their residence and strangely relieved to see an unscathed Azula.

“Aren’t you going to ask me how my date went?” she asks as she takes her shoes off.

“How was your date?” Zuko asks stupidly.

“I set his curtains on fire, and I burned him. Not as bad as Father burned you, of course, but it’ll leave a mark.” She gestures to the mess of hickies on her throat. “The difference is mine will heal.”

It feels good to terrify them. It feels good to be in control. Even when Iroh starts asking her stupid questions—“Azula, what did he do to you?”

She rolls her eyes. “He asked me something twice. You know how impatient I can be.”

Iroh pales. Zuko does too. 

“Did he hurt you?” her brother whispers as if he might startle her if he says the word he’s really thinking.

Another eye roll. “No. He was just pushy. It’s fine. There's no need to get your panties in a twist. Clearly, I took care of matters.”

“I want to speak with his parents immediately,” Iroh announces. “Azula, if we need to press charges—”

“Shut up, you stupid old man. No one is pressing any charges. He didn’t even touch me. He merely tried to guilt-trip me, as if I didn’t get enough of that from Mother,” she says disdainfully. “I’m perfectly fine. There’s no need to speak with his parents. I’m sure Father will be more than happy to fire Chan Sr. if my feelings were that hurt by the whole affair.” The last part is a half-truth. Father will be more than happy to fire Chan Sr. for his son’s indiscretions, but he won’t do so because of Azula’s hurt feelings. She knows now that her father doesn’t care if her feelings are hurt; he only cares if what’s his is sullied. 

He proved that when he refused to sink Ukano’s re-election for her.

Iroh’s mouth closes stupidly. “If that is what you wish,” he sighs. “But if you change your mind, just know that I would full-heartedly support you in pressing charges.”

“Me too,” Zuko says.

They’re both about half a decade too late for their words to mean anything to Azula.

Come Monday, everyone at the Royal Academy for Girls and its brother school seems to have heard about her little demonstration with Chan. Except for the motive, which seems to change with each version of the story that Azula hears when no one thinks she can find out what they’ve said. Even when she has no friends, she has eyes everywhere.

People have never been scared of her like this before, but people have also never called her crazy like this before.

It’s not a trade-off she finds herself very fond of, especially not when it doesn’t even deter a traitor from finding her on the rooftop at lunch.

“I dumped soda on you, Mai,” Azula drawls, cracking open her coffee in warning.

“I know. I was there.” She walks over to Azula anyway. “I got you something. You can call it a belated birthday gift if you want. I do owe you a few of those now, princess.”

Azula tenses.

“All right. Too soon for nicknames. Just take this, okay?” Mai hands a small box over.

Despite herself, Azula opens it tentatively. She blinks in surprise at the contents. “You got me a stun gun,” she observes.

“In blue. I know it’s your favorite color, so…” she says.

“Why would you get me a stun gun? I thought you were worried about Zuzu’s well-being.” Azula clicks it on to see. Sure enough, it functions. “Haven’t you heard about my proclivity for violence? And arson?”

Mai rolls her eyes. “Yeah, and I also heard that the jerk deserved it. Anyway, you wouldn’t use it on Zuko.”

Azula stares at her, eyebrow raised.

“At least, I don’t think you’d use it on Zuko. Not unless you were really pissed off, and he’s barely spoken to you all month. I don’t think he’s going to make you mad enough that you want to tase him. And we both know what I’ll do to you if you do,” Mai says, that once-rare inflection of warning creeping into her voice.

“Right,” Azula says. “You love Zuko more than you fear me.”

Mai groans. “This again? Come on, Azula. Get over it. You threatened to ruin my father’s political career if I went on a date with your brother. We were kids. We were both being dramatic, and you were out of line, anyway. We both know it was you who almost got me expelled when your dad wouldn’t follow through. Of course, I didn’t want to talk to you after that.”

Not for the first time, Azula bites her tongue.

Not for the first time, Mai stays to eat lunch with her anyway.

Ty Lee finds them after twelve minutes of complete and total silence, and she stays too. Azula only stays because eating lunch with her treasonous ex-friends is ever so slightly better than eating in a bathroom stall and eavesdropping on girls who think she’s insane.

At the end of the day, she still hates them both for what they did to her.

(She also still loves them both. That might never change.)

She gets a full week of peace before Katara hunts her down again. This time without her brother or the rest of their motley crew. “Hey there, Azula,” Katara grins with faux bravado. “Fancy running into you here.”

“At my house,” Azula drawls. “Where I live. Zuzu’s not home, but I’m sure you knew that. Did Uncle let you in?”

“Yes,” Katara says. “For good reason! I heard about what happened with your boyfriend.”

“Ex-boyfriend,” she says. “Good to hear my exploits are being talked about at public schools. They might as well teach you something worth learning.”

“We didn’t learn about it in school.” Katara frowns.

Azula sighs in exasperation. “I’m being sarcastic, obviously. I know Zuzu must have told you.”

“He did. But if it makes you feel any better, I don’t think you’re crazy. I mean, if he tried to pressure you into having sex with him, it’s good you stood up to him! Jerks like that deserve to be scared. I mean, arson is a little much, but what matters is you’re safe.”

“What is it you want, Katara?” It comes out almost tired. 

She’s more than sick of people doing this to her. All she wanted was to continue on pretending her life was normal for three years. She didn’t ask for any of this confrontation or faux concern, and she doesn’t know what she’s done for it to keep happening over and over. She’s been scary, she’s been cruel, she’s been everything her father raised her to be, and none of it is working anymore.

“I just… did you know Zuko committed arson too? Not for the same reason as you. He was just angry. But when he was fourteen, he started a lot of fires,” she rambles. “That’s how he became friends with Sokka and Suki, actually. He burned Suki’s gym bag, and she got detention to confront him, and Sokka had detention for passing notes trying to convince her not to get detention, and they ended up talking things out and becoming friends.”

Azula blinks slowly. “I don’t care. I’m going back to my room. You can let yourself out.”

If Katara calls after her, Azula doesn’t care to hear it.

She’s bumming yet another cigarette off of Jet in the aftermath of Katara invading her house. He’s still asking about what kind of man her father is and if her brother is single. She’s still telling him in gruesome detail the things her father did to her brother.

She doesn’t feel bad as she describes the atrocities of her home life. She doesn’t feel anything at all.

Jet asks what’s wrong with her. Azula doesn’t have an answer. Instead, she laughs and blows another puff of smoke at him.

“You’re fucked up, you know,” he says.

“You sound like my mother, you know,” she hums.

“So you have mommy issues.” It’s an accusation. Unlike his daddy issues accusation, Azula thinks this one might be warranted. She resents the idea, but she can't make the hallucination of her mother go away.

She smirks and takes a drag in place of an answer.

“What was she like? You don’t talk about her,” Jet says, pushing more than he should. She could burn him too.

“You don’t ask about her,” she says, but he doesn’t back down. She sighs. “Ursa adored Zuzu, and she never hit either of us. There’s nothing to tell, really. I just didn’t like her very much.”

“Did she like you?”

Azula puts her cigarette out on Jet’s arm. “Not at all,” she smiles, wide and horribly screwed up. “But I’m sure her ghost would love to tell you otherwise.”

Chapter Text

In the aftermath of almost burning Chan’s house down, Azula feels sick to her shrinking stomach.

Chan hasn’t contacted her since, and neither have any of his friends. The officers have been sworn to secrecy through methods even more effective than blood oaths, so it’s still possible that her father will never have to know what she’s done. However, something Azula never could have accounted for has happened.

Something completely unprecedented and even more unwanted.

Her outburst has somehow softened the edges to Iroh’s gaze when he looks at her. The initial fear has seeped from his and Zuko’s bones, and it has been replaced by pity. She resents it more than she’s ever resented anything her uncle has given her before. Every pathetic gift, every awful lecture, she’d live through it all again if it meant never bearing the brunt of his pity.

It’s dinner when she confronts them over it. Azula can be patient, and she can wait to strike, but she refuses to be pitied a second longer than absolutely necessary for her to formulate a plan of attack.

“You two should be afraid of me, you know,” she says as she crosses her chopsticks over her bowl of rice in disgust.

Zuko chokes on his roast duck.

Iroh just looks up from his tea. “Oh? And why is this, Azula?”

She glares at him. “I tried to burn my ex-boyfriend’s house down for asking me a question, and I got away with it. I know you’re very slow in your old age, but even you must realize that that’s not normal behavior for a fifteen-year-old girl,” she says, each word bitten to the bone.

He smiles sadly at her. “While what you did was extreme, it was an act of self-defense. You may not see it that way,—I doubt you would ever like to be a victim of anything—but whether or not he used physical force, he was trying to force you to do something you did not want to, something you did not have to do, and he had no right to expect of you.”

Azula rolls her eyes. Of course her fuddy-duddy uncle would find some way to victimize her in her relationship with Chan. As if she wasn’t in complete control of it the entire time. It started on her terms, and it ended on her terms, whether Iroh chooses to see it that way or not.

“It’s not a bad thing to be a victim,” Zuko says, quiet and pathetic.

“You would say that. You have to think that way or you’ll be confronted with the truth of how disgraceful you are.” She doesn’t feel bad as she says it, but she doesn’t feel powerful either. Somehow, Azula feels backed into a corner, spitting venom to protect herself. “Anyway, I’m going to bed. You’re both agitating me beyond belief.”

“Azula.” Iroh is displeased with her in a way that makes him somehow sound like Ursa and not the parent he shares blood with.

(What is wrong with that child? She had whispered as Azula walked past her, not even hiding her disdain for her second-born. She was always so pleased with herself for having mothered Zuko and so disgusted with Ozai for having fathered Azula. The knowledge had once sat wrong between Azula’s ribs, flooding her with shame where she should have held pride. She was her father’s daughter—she had cried in her mother’s arms in her infancy, only dozing peacefully for her father. How unsafe his hold had become over the years. How unfamiliar her mother’s had been as far back as she can remember. All Azula remembers of her mother is the scoldings and the way she had looked at her daughter as if she could not believe such a cruel thing had been birthed from her own womb.)

She sits back down automatically, ready to be lectured and have her arm twisted into apologizing for her brother’s failures.

He blinks in surprise at her following his instruction, but he recovers quickly. “It is not okay to talk to your brother that way. The only thing disgraceful about his being a victim of abuse was the fact that your father could do that to his own son,” he says, his voice calm and faux-wise once more.

Her nails bite her palms. “The weak are meat; the strong do eat,” she says simply. It is one of the only two proverbs her father has ever cared to tell her, and one of the only two proverbs her uncle has ever shown disdain for.

As she leaves the dinner table, she hears Zuko sigh in defeat, and Iroh begins to console him. She still cannot find her familiar sense of pride for her triumph.

“My mother’s not really dead, Jet,” she says exasperatedly. She’s so bored of going over this with him on the phone. He’s barely even upset she burned him. “Well, she’s dead to me, but she left my father and brother alive and of her own volition. Father didn’t kill her or anything like that. This isn’t a soap.”

“She left you too.” For all the time he spends saying she’s awful, that’s just cold. It’s like digging his fingers into an open wound just to remind Azula it’s there to begin with.

Azula forces herself to laugh anyway, her cheeks bone-dry. She will not spill tears for a woman who never loved her. At least her father has been consistent in her life. “She was never there for me to begin with,” Azula says, her voice flat and bored enough to make Mai jealous.

“You really do have mommy issues.”

She glares at the wall. “If you’re going to insult me—”

Jet swears under his breath. “No. No. Don’t hang up,” he says. “Sorry. Maybe I’m still sore about you burning me.”

Azula rolls her eyes and says nothing. She knows he’s full of shit. Jet’s arm was littered with burns before she ever touched him, and she doubts he cares about one more. Even if it was a gift from a Minamoto.

“How’d your dad treat her?” he asks finally.

“About as well as he treated Zuzu. I don’t exactly think I was conceived willingly, really. I mean, what kind of woman would want to bring another child into that home? Maybe that’s why she never liked me.” It’s not a theory Azula has ever put a voice to, but it’s something she’s always thought possible. She thinks that if it were true, it would dull some kind of aching that she’s grown accustomed to. If it weren’t her fault that her mother hated her. If she wasn’t the only one who’d been forced to lie with her father. It’s easier to pose it as the twisted musings of a malevolent girl. “It’s my turn to ask a question, Jet: why are you so interested in all of this? You’re definitely not a reporter, so do you just enjoy hearing about how powerful men beat their sons and wives? Is it some kind of a fetish?” She stares at her manicure—she needs to go to the salon soon—as she asks. She knows Jet can’t see her, but it feels wrong to not busy herself with looking disinterested while discussing something so morbid.

He sounds self-righteous when he responds. “No, Azula, it’s not some kind of fetish. I just wanted to know about the burning half of your brother’s face off rumor, and then you decided to open up about watching your brother get beat while doing nothing to stop it your whole childhood.”

Azula laughs. She’s not sure why. It’s not funny. If anything, she thinks she’s angry. “What would you have had me do? I’m two years younger than my brother, and it’s not like I wanted to be beaten either.”

“Not wanting to get beaten is one thing,” Jet says. “But you always sided with your dad and threw your brother under the bus to get beaten in your place. You laughed when his face got burned off.”

This time, he hangs up on her. 

For the life of her, she can’t imagine what his problem with her could be this time. Sure, he hates her, and she hates him, but it’s not like he likes Zuko. Jet’s never even met him. Does he honestly like her brother more than her just because Zuzu got beaten when they were kids and she didn’t?

Maybe that’s why Ursa and Iroh and Mai all chose Zuko over Azula. Azula thinks she hates that idea, but she knows she hates the idea of telling anyone the price of her father’s favoritism. She made up her mind to go to the grave with the childhood she didn’t have years ago.

Mai and Ty Lee try to eat lunch with Azula again. She takes to smoking at school to deter their presence. Neither of them wants to be around her when she’s like that, and neither of them is willing to subject her to her room being searched again either. So Azula smokes where she could get caught, and she douses herself in perfume before going back to class. She knows she’s jeopardizing her academic career for the sake of her pride now, but she can’t bring herself to care.

Not when everything else has been taken from her already.

(Her sanity, her social life, her reputation, her home, her life. All she has left is school and her secret, and she only really cares about holding onto her secret these days. As long as she has that, who cares if she gets suspended for smoking? Her father will just make it go away if she asks nicely from down on her knees.)

A week passes, and Azula has never been a sentimental person.

She has very few fond memories of her family or friends, and she’s sure there’s some kind of cruel twist on each memory that she does hold dear, whether she knows it or not. She only ever reminisces with her tongue poised for the killing strike. However, Azula knows that she wasn’t always this way. This is something her father trained into her.

The difference between her and Zuko is that Azula was always a quick learner. She’s never needed her lessons to come with a beating, and so her father would say jump, and Azula would jump.

Her father told her sentimentality was weakness, so Azula cut it out of her soul like an infection. Like its rot would take hold of her whole body if she didn’t eradicate the disease. She thinks it would have. 

She has to think that.

Still, Azula wakes, and she inhales sharply with the memory of each October nineteenth of her past. Today is Ty Lee’s birthday, and, for the first time since they met, Azula has nothing to show for it. There is no proof she has remembered, except for the razor-bladed words she spews all day to anyone who gives her the chance.

Come lunchtime, she’s smoking again when Mai and Ty Lee uselessly venture up to the roof to see her as if today’s date should matter to her any longer.

(It will always matter. Azula will always wake on October nineteenth with the searing memories of each birthday gift she ever handed Ty Lee and each flame she ever watched flicker out. The same way she will wake every May ninth with the knowledge that Mai only ever smiled in private on her birthday, when the adults were gone, and it was just the three of them. The same way they will wake every summer solstice remembering how Azula hasn’t laughed the same way since she turned ten and nothing in her life could ever be the same again.)

“We know you know what day it is,” Mai says with a sigh. “And you know we always share a slice of cake today. It’s tradition. You hate breaking those.”

Azula takes a long drag and says nothing.

“Zula, please,” Ty Lee says, sounding small.

Golden eyes narrow a fraction before her expression is schooled into boredom. “You haven’t called me that since we were children,” Azula says. The disinterest in her voice is muddled by a layer of anger-coated pain. Ty Lee’s manipulations have always relied on Azula’s weak points, but they don’t usually stoop this low.

Ty Lee has the decency to look ashamed of herself.

Mai doesn’t. “You’re being an unreasonable bitch. We’ve both apologized way more than you deserve, and you haven’t said sorry once for everything you did, but we’re here anyway. We’re trying no matter how hard you make it to want to.”

“If it’s so hard to try, then don’t. I’m not forcing you to. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Fine. Be that way,” Mai scoffs. “Come on, Ty. You deserve better than this. We both do.”

“Okay…” Ty Lee looks back sadly as Mai takes her by the hand and guides her away from Azula. “We can try again later.”

Azula wishes she had something to throw at them as the door closes. Instead, she breaks a ten-year tradition in silence.

She skips the rest of school. She doesn’t even care that she has to walk home in the middle of the day, smelling of perfume and cigarettes. She can’t go back to class and see Ty Lee again. Her father wouldn’t even look at her if he knew the depth of her weakness.

She doesn’t know why, but the worst days have always been when he can’t bring himself to look at her at all.

(As much as Azula hates when he parts her legs like the red sea, she can’t help but feel disgusting when he refuses to touch her. He has called it a punishment so many times, and she has learned the cruelty of being left alone to rot as intimately as she has learned the violence of flesh against flesh, blood against blood. It is her failures that leave him not wanting to bed her. It is her ruination that leaves her needing to be devoured to feel whole.)

In the privacy of her bedroom, she curls in on herself. She doesn’t cry. Azula has embarrassed herself enough today. Instead, she sits, and she waits to feel any other way.

She doesn’t come out for dinner when Iroh calls for her. He doesn’t leave her meal outside her door for her. Instead, Zuko knocks on her bedroom door with a tray.

“I’m not hungry,” she says automatically.

“I figured. Mai said you wouldn’t even eat birthday cake with her and Ty Lee at lunch. I thought that was kind of your thing.”

Azula glares at him. Of course he would have an ulterior motive to bring her dinner. No one ever does something just to be nice. “It’s just a stupid cake.”

“Mai ate the stupid cake after you basically excommunicated her,” he says. “She really hated you during that, but she always said making Ty Lee feel special on her birthday was more important than if she liked you or not. Ty Lee is the only person I’ve ever seen you apologize to on your own. I know you care about her, so why couldn’t you just suck it up? You know she’s got six identical sisters her own parents mix her up with and your stupid cake tradition is the one part of her birthday that makes her feel like she matters.”

She wants to tell him that he’s never even liked Ty Lee. She wants to tell him that he doesn’t know the first thing about her or her relationship with Mai and Ty Lee. She wants to tell him she hopes he breaks his neck falling off his high horse. She wants to tell him a lot of things. But Azula has always been careful when using her words as a weapon, only mincing them when they will cut deeper that way. So, with much practice, she wraps her mouth around the cruelest thing she can say right now: “I don’t have to explain myself to a pathetic waste of space like you.”

That’s what Ozai called him in the hospital. A pathetic waste of space not even worth the effort of trying to beat some value into. Azula had thought it a bit cruel at the time, but she had bit her tongue like the obedient daughter she was. Is.

“Did you get that line from Father?” he asks hotly. “Do you run the shit you say past him when you’re visiting him in prison?”

“Believe it or not, Zuzu, we don’t talk about you at all. If you weren’t even worth beating, why would you be worth any of his time?” she jeers.

“That’s it. I’m done, Azula! I’ve tried so hard with you, but all you’ve ever been is his daughter! I’m glad Mai and Ty Lee are free of you now! You’re a shitty sister and an even shittier friend!” Zuko drops the tray of food on her bedroom floor and storms out.

Azula smiles in his absence. There are no mirrors in her room for her mother to frown at her from. There is only Iroh’s sadness as he cleans her bedroom floor twelve minutes later. 

She would have it no other way.

(Azula always lies.)

(They won’t turn the television off. Azula doesn’t know what it’s playing other than that it’s alarmingly violent for a psych ward. She only caught a glimpse of blood as they took her into a secluded room, but it was enough that even she flinched. 

She’s not allowed to interact with the other patients yet—Azula has been told she’s a danger to herself and others.

If they want danger, she’ll show them danger.

Azula has already attacked one doctor and torn her stitches doing so. She has no qualms about doing it again if they’ll get close enough again. She can’t do much more than kick and bite as is, but she thinks she can do more than a bit of damage that way.

“Azula, you know you shouldn’t attack them. Things will only get worse if you do.”

“How can things be worse?” she snarls back.

That shuts Ursa up.)

It’s November, and it turns out Zuko and Mai both meant it when they said they were done with her, or whatever bullshit Mai said about deserving better. That’s perfectly fine with Azula. She spends more time than ever before reading and scrolling through social media, but as much as she’s a people person, she’s always been an introvert.

Anyway, she’s never liked her brother, and she hates Mai. She hates Ty Lee, too. Azula thinks she hates everyone in her life, really. None of them are on her side, not even her father.

Azula thinks Agni must be smiling upon her when she gets sick in time for her next visit. She calls her father to inform him she can’t come to see him since she’s been throwing up for the past two days, and he tells her to get well soon. He means it as an order. Azula has always had to recover from her illnesses with efficiency. Like with everyone else, the longer she takes to get better, the more displeased her father becomes.

Three years without touching her will upset her father beyond belief regardless of if he sees her once a month during those three years. She can do very little to incur any more of his wrath these days, and being ill at a time that inconveniences him does not make the list.

Agni stops smiling upon her a week later.

She’s at the mall to buy stationery when she sees the problem: Chan and Ruon-Jian are walking over to her. They don’t run away with their tails between their legs. They were never smart enough to do that.

“Azula,” Ruon-Jian glares down at her. “I didn’t know they let psycho bitches into malls.”

She rolls her eyes and turns to Chan. “Hello, Chan. It’s good to see your burn healed. It’s unfortunate, however, to see you still associate with the lower class.”

“Just because your daddy is the CEO of—”

“Baby, are these two jackasses bothering you?” Azula almost winces at the sound of Jet’s voice. He was a self-identified mall rat, and the mall had been where she’d met him, but it still felt more like stalking than coincidence that he would be here today. She wouldn’t put stalking past him. She already knows he had more or less looked for her when he heard her father was being sentenced to prison.

“Baby? Don’t tell me you’re dating this loser,” Chan laughs. “Dude, good luck. She’s totally crazy and a complete prude.”

Jet’s lips twitch into a smile. “Is that how it was when you two dated? Azula’s only crazy in bed with me.”

She feels her face burn with humiliation as Jet wraps an arm around her waist, resting his hand on her hip. She wants to burn him for touching her. She wants to make him bleed for saying that. She wants him gone for even coming near her in public, especially in front of people who are even remotely close to her social and economic stature.

“You tried to burn my fucking house down when I wanted to sleep with you, but you put out for some burnout foster kid?” Chan demands. “I knew you had issues, but they’re way worse than I thought if you gave it up to this asshole with no future.”

Azula doesn’t even get to deny it when Ruon-Jian’s fist connects with Jet’s face, leaving him bloodied and bruising. The familiar sight of injury subdues her sharpened tongue, and she finds herself watching with diligence as Jet throws a punch back and Chan joins the fight. They look like absolute fools, hitting each other over a girl in public where they can most certainly be arrested for assault and battery, but Azula feels like she’s nine years old, watching her brother get his bones splintered for telling their father he was being too rough with their mother all over again.

(Zuzu was a fool then too. But at least he was a noble fool, believing he could save his mother from her father’s cruelty when he would only get them both hurt worse. Jet is just as much an asshole as Chan and Ruon-Jian are as far as Azula is concerned. That doesn’t mean she can fight the urge to stand there and watch.)

There’s a crowd around them, she registers. There’s a crowd watching two boys struggle more than they should to beat up the closest thing Azula has to a friend—and that’s a loose word at best—right now because he was stupid enough to not let her fight her own battles. People always underestimate Azula’s penchant for cruelty until she demonstrates to them why they shouldn’t; no one ever wants to believe a young girl could be so heartless, such a monster at first, but Azula has always gotten them to come around to accept the truth. 

She thought she’d shown Jet enough of her hand already for him to know better. She can’t fathom why he’d do this.

They don’t even like each other. Last she had checked, they actively disliked each other.

She thinks that’s why she refuses to intervene even verbally. She doesn’t like Jet, and he doesn’t like her, so they do not owe each other such kindnesses. It’s not like he was kind either when he came to her alleged defense.

Someone else does intervene, though. Three someone elses. Three irritatingly familiar someone elses: Zuzu, his particularly grating friend’s brother, and a girl Azula only recognizes by her bold makeup—Sumi, Azula thinks her name is. Zuzu restrains Jet, Sumi knocks Chan out with efficiency, and the annoying Water Tribe girl’s brother grapples with Ruon-Jian.

“Do you want to get banned from the mall?” Sumi asks the Fire Nation boys.

They shake their heads no.

“Then get out of here before I call security,” she says. Then, to the crowd, “And you all should be ashamed of yourselves, watching Jet fight two other guys.”

Out of fear or stupidity, they listen to her, and the crowd begins to disperse.

Azula doesn’t miss the fact that Sumi knows Jet. He’d told her he just barely attended a public school in the lower ring, and Sumi seemed like a clean-cut girl who would have minimal opportunities outside the mall to ever meet a loser like Jet. Before she can ask, though, Sumi is looking at her.

“Are you okay, Azula?” she asks.

“Fine,” Azula says crisply. “Except for the blood on my sweater. Thank you for that, Jet.”

He grins at her, but the movement of his facial muscles hurts, and he winces immediately after. “Any time, baby,” he says. His face looks a lot worse when he’s trying to laugh. His right eye is swelling, his bottom lip is split, and his cheeks and jaw are decorated with more blossoming bruises than she had expected given how surprisingly evasive he had been in the fight.

She rolls her eyes instead of taking inventory of each of his injuries.

Sumi and what's-her-face’s brother look curious at the pet name, and Zuko looks furious.

“So, what was the fight about?” The boy—Sokka, his name is Sokka—asks, poorly feigning an air of casualty.

“Oh, that? Well, for whatever reason, Jet thought it would be smart to tell my ex-boyfriend that we’re copulating, which is a bit of a sore spot for Chan since I refused to do so with him.”

Azula doesn’t think she’s ever seen her brother look angrier. The sight makes her uncomfortable,—he doesn’t resemble their father much these days with the scar, but when golden eyes burn like that, she wants to submit in fear—so she looks at his friends instead. They don’t look amused either, but they don’t look nearly as angry as Zuko.

Her nails bite into her palms. “We’re not, of course,—I’d never debase myself like that—but Chan didn’t realize that, so Jet got beat up over sex he’s not even having. It’s embarrassing, really.”

“You know, some people would thank me,” Jet says.

“Not Azula,” an all too familiar voice rasps. “Azula would rather choke than admit someone helped her, especially someone like you. No offense.”

“Oh, none taken,” he laughs then winces again.

Azula thinks Agni might hate her, actually. Why else would Mai be here with her brother and some of his pathetic friends? Is Ty Lee going to jump out at her next? Her uncle? Even better, is her mother somehow here? The world might as well unload everyone Azula hates onto her today.

“Okay, well next time, don’t tell people you’re having sex with my little sister because I hate that. A lot,” Zuko snaps at Jet. “We should get you cleaned up. Come on.” He takes Jet by the hand to drag him to the men’s room.

“Are you okay, Suki?” Mai asks the girl Azula had thought was named Sumi.

Suki nods. “Yeah. I just bruised my knuckles a bit knocking that jerk down.”

“And I’m good too, Mai. Thanks for asking,” Sokka interjects sarcastically.

Mai shrugs, apathetic as ever.

Azula hates her for it. She shouldn’t be here, and she shouldn’t be so calm while Azula is so agitated. “Is anyone going to explain why you’re all so friendly with Jet?”

“Wait, Zuko didn’t tell you?” Sokka asks, frowning.

“I told you: he pretended I didn’t exist for the better part of four years.”

“But—”

“They only saw each other on holidays and birthdays. It wouldn’t have come up,” Mai cuts him off. “And if it had, she would’ve been a bitch about it.”

Suki exchanges a glance with Mai that Azula doesn’t understand. It ignites something ugly in her chest. She used to exchange those glances with Mai where nothing was said but everything was understood. If Mai hadn’t chosen Zuko, they would still be exchanging those glances.

(It makes her every bone ache to think that she doesn’t understand a girl she once knew everything about. To think that she let Mai in only for her to leave the first chance she got. To think she was fool enough to need to be taught the same lesson thrice over.)

“Jet is Katara’s ex,” Suki explains.

Azula blinks. “Who?”

“My sister? She’s like trying to hunt you down and befriend you? Your age? About yay tall?” Sokka offers. “Come on, you know Katara.”

“Sure… well, why would Zuzu have mentioned that to me? And why would I care enough to be a bitch about it?” she asks.

Mai’s expression shifts ever so slightly, her eyes widening a fraction. “We all make fun of him for being an extremist loser a lot. That’s all,” she says. 

“Yeah, he kind of sucks. Zuko is usually way too nice to him. How do you know him?” Suki asks.

“He harasses me and buys me things to apologize for it,” Azula says. She doesn’t suppose it really matters what she tells them about her relationship with Jet, but she doesn’t want them thinking that they’re friends. “I hate him. He hates me back. It’s almost fun.”

Sokka huffs at that. “He harasses you? I knew that guy was bad news, I’ll—”

Azula rolls her eyes. “Not like that. If he tried to sexually harass me, well Mai gave me something useful for that kind of thing. He just asks a lot of questions, and when I feel like it, I answer them.”

“What kind of questions?” Suki asks warily.

“Why do you care?” Azula’s voice is sharp, and her eyes are burning an accusation into Suki’s skull.

“Do you have to be a bitch about this? She’s just worried about you—Agni forbid anyone ever care about you,” Mai says, her usual apathy fracturing.

Azula feels her chest tightening. Mai doesn’t care about her. Mai has never cared about her. It’s always been Zuko for her. It was never even a choice when it came down to it. She hadn’t even hesitated before telling Azula to go fuck herself. “Don’t pretend like any of you care about me,” she snarls. 

“You’re right, Azula. You’re always right. I don’t care about you, and neither should Sokka or Suki or Zuko or anyone.”

“I’m leaving. Unlike you, I know when I’m not wanted.” It hurts more than it should to walk away.

(In the distance, she hears Sokka tell Mai she didn’t have to be that harsh. She also hears Mai tell Sokka that he doesn’t know Azula like she does. Azula agrees; he didn’t grow up with the monster of a girl. He's never even shared his blood with her or watched her draw it, eyes fixed like it's the only thing in the world. Someone like Sokka has no business telling someone like Mai how to treat someone as awful as Azula.)

When she gets to the men’s room, Jet and Zuko are on the verge of leaving.

“You know, you’re cute when you’re mad."

“Shut up. You’re still an idiot.”

“Maybe. Your sister is a cunt.”

“I know.”

“I shouldn’t have helped her.”

“Probably not.”

Azula thinks she’d rather walk home after all. Just because someone would get their knuckles bloody for her doesn’t mean they actually love her. She knows that. Her father taught her that.

She doesn’t sleep at all that night. Or the next.

It feels different this time. She isn’t convinced she’ll die if she sleeps, and she isn’t shaking in her skin, but she still feels the walls closing around her. She still feels the sense of inevitable dread. She still knows that if she stops going, she’ll collapse.

She still sees her mother in every corner of every room and in anything that shows her her reflection.

Azula won’t go back. Azula can’t go back. Ozai will kill her if she does.

(She deserves to die. She’s ruining everyone around her, and she’s miserable, and she wants to curl up and die already. She’s too scared to do it to herself. She thinks her only way out is with her father’s hands wrapped around her throat. She thinks she wants to die that way more than she’s ever wanted anything.)

She doesn’t know what to do, so she calls Lo or Li or both of them—she’s not sure anymore. She was never sure.

“It’s happening again,” she hisses. “Help me. I can’t do this again.”

“We have been forbidden from taking you back,” one of them says.

“However, there are other ways for us to help you,” the other adds.

Together, they say, “We will get your prescription fixed, Azula.”

She tells Iroh she can’t go to school because she’s sick. He believes her because Azula has never wanted to skip school, and she looks pale and shaky and terrible today. He serves her soup and crackers, telling her it will be good for her. He may coddle her out of faux concern, but he’s finally accepted that she hates tea, at least.

That doesn’t stop her from letting the soup go cold.

He still asks if there’s anything she needs when he comes home to check on her and finds her under her blankets, trying to hide from her mother.

“No,” she rasps. “Leave.”

“If that is what you need,” he says before abiding by her word.

When she is sure he’s gone, Azula crawls out of her bed, and she makes her way to the bathroom, her eyes frantic and her jaw set, trapping her tongue. In front of the mirror, her chest heaves as she stares at the mess of her face. Her hair is a wreck, and her cheeks look sunken. Today, she is alone in the mirror.

She screams herself hoarse, demanding her mother come out to face what she’s done.

Ursa does not come. Ursa has never listened to Azula.

Furious, Azula grabs the scissors, and she takes to hacking at her bangs. She wants to hurt herself, cut her own flesh, but her father’s voice still rings in her ears, warning her against ruining what is his. She still remembers Zuko, broken on the living room floor because she lied and said the shattered vase was his doing. She still remembers herself, bloodied and shaking in the aftermath of her father's love, the only thing that has ever been allowed to ruin her.

“It’s a shame. You always had such beautiful hair.”

Azula stills.

“There you are,” she snaps. “I was looking for you, you evil bitch. Why did you leave?” It comes out needier than she wants. It comes out more honest than she knew it could.

“I didn’t leave, Azula. I would never leave you.”

“Liar!” Azula accuses. “You left me with him! You always leave me with him!”

Ursa looks ashamed of herself today. It only makes Azula’s whole body tremble with anger. With pain.

(A counselor her mother insisted she talk to told her once that anger was a secondary emotion. “Anger was only ever a defensive response to how you really felt,” he had said. “How do you really feel, Azula?”)

Azula stares at herself in the mirror. She’s ruined her bangs. She looks awful and crazed. Zuko will laugh when he sees her; Ozai will be furious when he sees her. She knows which result is worse.

Stupid girl.

Why would she do something so reckless? Why would she do anything to worsen her father’s wrath? Hasn’t she learned yet? This is the kind of thing he would hate. He wouldn’t even look at her if he was here now.

“You don’t have to be afraid of him, Azula. He can’t hurt you anymore.”

Azula snarls at her mother. Ursa never did understand her husband or her daughter. Ursa never understood anything at all. No wonder she had been allowed to leave. Ozai couldn’t have loved her in the end, not if he left her cage open.

Will he leave Azula’s cage open too? No. No. She’s too valuable for that.

He expects more from her. He’s willing to take the time to beat things into her still.

(Her father told her once that feelings were a weakness she could not afford. She had to have a clear head at all times, less she made impulsive choices—bad choices, the kind Zuko would make. She had been thinking of this utmost important lesson when she responded to the counselor and said, “I don’t feel anything at all.”)

“I don’t want to talk to you any longer,” Azula says. “Leave me alone, Mother.”

Ursa doesn’t leave, and Azula wants to laugh at what a huge fucking joke her hallucinations are. What a poor imitation of the truth they are. The real Ursa would never stay with Azula if she had the choice.

Her phone rings. Lo and Li have procured a higher dosage for her, and all Azula has to do is pick up a prescription she’s already gotten this month.

She calls the only person she can think of to take her.

“I thought you were mad at me.”

“I am. That’s why you’re going to do me a favor.”

Chapter Text

“When you said I was doing you a favor, I didn’t think you meant taking you to a pharmacy,” Jet says. “What do you need here anyway?”

“I told you. I’m picking up a prescription,” she snaps.

He squints at her suspiciously. “Why didn’t you just ask your uncle to take you? He doesn’t know you’re crazy?”

She stops dead in her tracks. “I’m not crazy.”

“Then why’d you do that to your hair?”

“I got startled while I was trimming it.” The lie isn’t rehearsed, and Azula had barely even considered what she would tell him if he asked, but she’s an excellent liar. Even when she’s stressed out and losing her mind for the second time.

Jet seems to believe her, but he takes too long to accept the lie. She must be slipping. 

Azula narrows her eyes, and she takes a deep breath. “I’m not crazy,” she says. “I’m not.”

He blinks at her. “Okay. You’re not crazy. Sorry I said you were. When we leave, we can smoke if you want.” He’s being nice to her. Jet is never nice to her. Not since he found out what kind of person Azula is.

She wants to strangle him for it. Kindness is not something she wants from him, especially not if it’s pity disguised as kindness. Pity is reserved for the weak, and Azula is not weak. Azula has always been strong.

(Maybe she should start eating again then.)

“Whatever,” she spits out the word like venom.

He doesn’t take the hint that he should back off today. He doesn’t leave her side at all as she makes her way to the pharmacy counter.

Azula tells the pharmacist her name and birth date, and Jet stays at her side like he’s developed stockholm syndrome somehow.

“It’s nice of your boyfriend to support you like this,” the pharmacist says absentmindedly. “It’s important to have a support system when you’re struggling.”

“He’s not my boyfriend, and I don’t need a support system,” she snaps. “There’s nothing wrong with me.” Her voice cracks on the word wrong. She feels like a helpless, pathetic child. She feels like Zuko.

“Excuse her. She’s not having a bad day, but she never learned how to not be an asshole,” Jet says as she takes her prescription in hand.

On the way out, Azula turns to him, her eyes a forest fire. “If you tell anyone about this, you can’t begin to imagine what I’ll do to you and your foster family. That includes your foster siblings,” she says dangerously.

He glares back at her. “Threat noted. I won’t tell anyone, Azula. Scout’s honor.”

“Somehow, I doubt you were ever a scout.”

“I guess you’ll just have to trust me then.” Jet knows Azula has never trusted anyone a day in her life.

(Her father, Mai, and Ty Lee had been her only exceptions, and look where that got her. Trust really is for fools. There’s no point putting faith in anyone. Not even herself)

She smiles at him, red lips curling cruelly. “I’ll trust that you’re smart enough to fear me.”

(Fear is the only reliable way.)

Azula goes back to school, and she speaks to no one, no matter how much people ask her what happened to her hair. She wears her makeup as if nothing is wrong, and she forces herself to sleep at night until she doesn’t have to cover bags under her eyes.

She has still never looked worse.

Every morning for two weeks, Iroh asks her if she’s sure she feels well enough to go to school. Every morning for two weeks, Zuko looks at her as if he can’t decide whether he pities or fears her.

Azula would burn the world down if it meant they both stopped. Azula would do a lot of things if it meant they both stopped. She hates being treated like something fragile and pathetic. She cannot stand how familiar it has become in her time out of the Minamoto estate, as though she is not still the heir to the largest personal fortune and the most lucrative oil company in the world. As though she is no longer more monster than girl.

She hasn’t stopped biting to draw blood; it’s just that people have started treating her bites like that of a cornered prey and not the brilliant predator she has always been. People think her weak, people think her scared, people think a lot of things. No one thinks she’s seeing the mother who did not want her in the mirror.

But then, at the end of the second week, Azula can count the number of times she has hallucinated Ursa on one hand.

She waits until Zuko and Iroh are asleep, and she walks into the bathroom and flicks on the light switch. Azula stands before the mirror, and she waits. She does not scream or cry or cut her hair, but she waits there for an hour. No one else appears in the mirror.

Azula takes a deep breath, and she does not believe it. Not yet.

She takes her matchbook, she strikes a match, and she pinches the flame. She wills herself not to let go as it burns into her flesh. It does not smell like barbeque this time. It smells like smoke, and it makes her eyes water, and she can’t remember why she laughed when Zuko screamed.

That doesn’t mean she regrets it. She was playing her part as he played his by burning and their father played his by turning his son to kindling and their mother played hers by not being there to tell her husband to stop.

Ursa does not appear to tell Azula to stop either.

Azula stops anyway. The flame is long dead, and the match will only stay hot so much longer. There is no point to burning more than this. There was no point, as it turns out, to burning at all.

(Zuko burned for her father. She burned for his mother. They’re still not even. They will never be even. Not when he cannot bleed the way she does. Not when his mother would never want him to bleed the way she does.)

The outline of the scars left by the match is yellowed like parchment paper. Azula thinks it looks disgusting, and she cannot remember what Zuko looked like in the moments after he was torched. She can only remember the way she had watched him so engulfed by flames she thought they might swallow him whole and the way he had looked in the hospital, wrapped in bandages and trying not to cry as his father disowned him.

She runs hers under cold water the way she doesn’t think Ozai would have cared to do for Zuko’s, but she does not bother bandaging either of them. She thinks it’s better if she doesn’t draw any attention to the stinging flesh.

In the end, Azula leaves the bathroom satisfied with her medication. When she is back in the faux privacy of her room, she calls Lo and Li, not to thank them, but to tell them they have done their job well.

“Of course, Azula,” they say together. “We are at your service.”

(They are the only people employed by her father Azula might believe those words from. She doesn't think they know what he does to her in the dark. She cannot understand why they would have ever taken her to the hospital if they knew.)

“Aren’t you always?” she bites back. She’s still bitter about the psych ward. She’ll always be bitter about the psych ward.

Azula finally allows Iroh to take her to get her bangs evened out. He doesn’t take her to a nice salon like she’s used to even though she knows he can afford it. Instead, he takes her to some family-owned place, or whatever nonsense he spouts at her on the car ride over.

Azula does not bother responding, and it tires him out quickly. She thinks he’ll stop trying altogether soon enough.

She says nothing, as well, to the woman who cuts her hair, save for that she wants her bangs evened and her ends trimmed.

It takes all of fifteen minutes. She hates how short her bangs are now, but she can pin them back while they grow out. She tells herself this seven times before she believes it, and in that time, Iroh tips the hairdresser more than what the haircut cost.

Azula feels a surge of contempt for him, and she does not thank him for this.

She can’t miss visiting her father today. She has no excuse he would accept or believe, and so she sits in the back of Iroh’s car and goes through her timeline on Twitter until he parks outside the minimum security prison her father resides in.

As always, she doesn’t say goodbye to her uncle before she enters, and he doesn’t say anything to her either. She thinks he doesn’t know how to talk to her about her father. Azula is not Zuko, who has denounced the man who brought him into this world. As much as she resents her father, she will not listen to the ramblings of a foolish old man about how Ozai is a cruel man. She has all the proof of his cruelty she could ever need.

What has Iroh ever suffered to deserve to whine of Ozai’s wrath? As much as she loathes to admit it, the only person who could ever even dream of understanding her here is Ursa. Only someone who has been forced to lie with Ozai carnally, blood and sweat not the only bodily fluids between their thighs, could know anything of Azula’s suffering.

(Would Ursa even call it that? Would she agree that Azula had provoked her father into this? Would she think her daughter hated her because she loved her father too much? The thought makes Azula want to laugh until her ribs break under the weight of it in her throat. She doesn’t laugh at all.)

“Hello, Father,” she says.

“Azula.” His face is unsmiling. “You’ve recovered. Good. I see you changed your hair… very well.” His voice sounds all wrong. There is a silken venom beneath his tongue; there is a violence waiting outside her bedroom door.

She bites back a flinch. “What’s wrong?”

“I heard a rumor,” he says.

Azula pales. “What kind of rumor?”

Her father inspects his hand in false boredom. This is the viper before he strikes. This is where Azula learned the worst of herself. “I’m sure it was simply gossip. However, Zhao seems to be under the impression that you were… involved with Chan Sr.’s son. He said it ended with you trying to burn the boy’s house down. I told Zhao, of course, that my daughter would never do such a thing. That my daughter was smarter than that.”

He doesn’t want a denial. He wants a confession. He wants her to bend and bow and break as she admits to her affair and admits that she is meant to be faithful to him. He wants her to admit she is a fool for not remaining solely his.

Azula doesn’t know what she wants, only knows that it is not this. She indulges his desires anyway.

She always does.

“I’m sorry, Father. I was… disobedient, but I only went out with Chan so that Zuko would stop believing I was afraid of you, and I started a small fire because he tried—he was inappropriate with me. It was stupid. I won’t do anything like that again. I swear it to you.” She bows her head and keeps her voice low and controlled.

He considers her for a long moment. Too long a moment. 

(She feels dread building in her stomach, reminds herself he can’t hurt her here. He can’t hurt her now. He has to wait to do it. He doesn’t have to wait forever—)

“You should have asked me before doing something like that. It is inexcusable that you went behind my back, Azula, and there will be consequences for your actions,” he says, and Azula wants to die because she cannot imagine whatever consequences her father will think of that are worse than what she’s suffering as they speak. “However,” he begins, and she feels some of the tension in her bones ease, “it is good that you did not let him force you into doing anything inappropriate. I am pleased that you knew better than to degrade yourself in that way.”

“Thank you, Father. I will make up for my insolence,” she promises.

“I know you will.” He smiles.

Azula’s lungs stop working. She recognizes that tone of voice. She’s heard it only once before, and it was not directed at her. She knows now what her punishment will be if she fails to please him going forward.

He will not disown her, but she will wish he had.

Azula chews her rice mechanically tonight. She chews fifty times and then swallows without even thinking about it. She’s been playing this game too long. It’s been a year since she started restricting food at all, and it’s only been six months since eating became kind of painful, but she still gets enough food down to rot within her stomach that she doesn’t think she’s horribly skinny yet.

She likes to think of her hunger as an economy, and she likes to think that she controls the flow of currency within it. She tries not to think too much about if she has the power to stop doing this altogether.

“And how about you, Azula?” Iroh asks.

“What?” She blinks.

“He’s asking how your day was,” Zuko says flatly. He’s been irritable every time they speak lately. “You’re supposed to listen to your elders.” There’s no malice to his words. He really has given up on her this time.

Azula ignores him. “It was fine. I did my homework, and I visited Father.”

“And how did that go?” Iroh asks.

She freezes. Iroh has driven her without complaint to see her father so far, but he has never asked her how her visit was. She doesn’t know what his game is, but she will not play it.

“Why do you care? You hate my father.”

“But I do not hate you—”

She barks out a laugh.

He frowns at her. “I do not hate you, Azula,” he repeats. He does not waiver in his lie, and Azula is finally convinced he had been lying about why Ozai disowned her brother. “We are family.”

Family is a lie. Family means nothing. Being family doesn’t stop Ozai from raping his daughter, and being family didn’t stop Ursa from leaving them. Azula could say any of this, but she smiles and says, “When have you ever cared that we share blood before?”

“Don’t talk to him that way!” Zuko snaps. “Uncle has been more of a father to me these last few years than Ozai ever was! Of course he cares that we share blood!”

She sighs at his outburst. “I know he cares that you share blood with him, Zuzu. I’m saying he’s never cared that I share blood with him. I mean, really, he used to buy me dolls when even Mother knew I hated them. He gave up on that, of course, when Mother finally told him what I did with them. Then I saw him maybe twice over the four years between you being disowned and Father going to prison. If you don’t hate me, Uncle, you certainly do have a funny way of showing it.”

Iroh and Zuko both sit in silence as Azula, for the first time in months, finishes her rice.

She’s about to excuse herself when Iroh finally speaks. “You are right, Azula. I have been distant with you, and I have failed to act as I feel. However, you have made it difficult these past few years. It was hard for me, you see, to look at you after I lost my son, and you began to say… that Lu Ten was a coward. The way you treat your brother, and the pleasure you take in it has not helped. I did not know how to talk to you for many years, and I still do not. But despite how cruel you can be, I am trying. I hope that one day, that will be enough for you.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” she tells him. “Or do.”

“Fuck off,” Zuko spits out at her.

For once, Azula listens to her big brother. She’s never been interested in a heart-to-heart with her uncle, and she’s even less interested in hearing her brother console him.

(“Hama, you didn’t say you put a straitjacket on a fourteen-year-old patient when you called me,” a man—not a doctor, not a nurse, not anyone who works here—says, sounding particularly disgusted.

“A necessary precaution. She’s attacked three doctors. Two since we put it on her,” Hama says dismissively.

“Necessary precaution or an attempt to get back at a horrible man through his innocent daughter?” the man asks. “I know she’s said some… things in defense of her father before, but we both know what he did to my wife. What he did to his own son’s face. If I were in her shoes, I’d say just about anything he asked me to.”

Azula has always hated being talked about as if she weren’t there. She especially hates it now, when her whole body is tense with fear and all she can do is hide it beneath her belligerence. “I can hear you, you know,” she snaps. It’s more petulant than she wants her voice to sound here.

“I know. Azula, My name is Hakoda. I’m here to help you,” the man says. “First, we’re going to get you out of that straitjacket. Right, Hama?”

Hama agrees with a razor-edged bitterness to her voice.

“I’m glad someone is finally going to treat you well here, Azula. Please let him.”

Azula is too busy staring at her newly freed arms to respond to her mother.

“Does that feel better?” Hakoda asks.

“If I say yes, what do I owe you?” she asks.

His face softens considerably. “You don’t owe me anything, but I’d like to talk to you while you’re lucid if that’s okay with you.”

Her eyes narrow in suspicion, but Azula agrees to his conditions. She doesn’t see what choice she has unless she wants to lose control of her arms again, and Azula has never liked losing.)

Zhao’s law firm is almost sterile looking in its professionalism. The walls are scrubbed clean of any personality, and the sparse decor is impossibly univiniting. Even the Minamoto estate is more welcoming to outsiders than this white and black lobby.

Still, Azula needs to see Zhao. She needs to know how he knew what she had made those police officers swear to secrecy. She needs to know who told him about Chan. She needs to get control of her life before it spirals completely out of control.

(She’s too late. She has nothing now. She didn’t get full marks on her latest exam. She’s slipping to second in her class. She’s playing worse and worse in kuai ball. Is all she has left her skill with the fucking pipa? Is she even a prodigy anymore? Azula has never felt so entirely out of control—not even lying in her father’s bed.)

Azula cannot explain why she so desperately has to do this today except that after practice, Ty Lee told her she looked pale and her aura looked gray, and she had wanted to throttle the girl, but she hadn’t had the strength to do it. So she’ll bare her teeth at Zhao instead.

She’s in the process of biting the head off of the front desk secretary asking for him when the Beifongs enter the lobby from the elevator.

Toph looks different with her parents. She wears shoes, for one. Shoes and clothes as nice as Azula’s usual, post-school attire. She’s also smiling, but not in that almost feral way Azula had seen at the mall. She looks clean and proper in a way Azula knows she doesn’t in her school uniform, smelling of the cigarette she burned through on her way here and the expensive perfume she doused herself in to hide that acrid scent.

It’s not that Azula looks bad by any means; she just doesn’t look how she would want to present herself to an upper echelon family. She doesn’t look how she would want to present herself to anyone these days.

The Beifongs are prepared to walk by Azula completely when Toph sniffs and whips around. “Azula?” she asks, staring blankly in Azula’s direction.

Azula blinks. “Hello, Toph”

“I thought I recognized your perfume. What are you doing here?”

“Zhao is a family friend,” she answers automatically.

Toph’s parents exchange a glance before smiling brightly at Azula. “Toph never mentioned that the two of you were acquainted,” her father, Lao, says.

Her mother, Poppy, looks positively strained by her smile as she adds, “We’re very sorry about your father’s situation, of course. How is Ozai?”

“Thank you for your condolences,” Azula says. “Father is well.”

“That’s good to hear,” Poppy says. “How did you and our little Toph meet? We would’ve sent her to the Royal Academy for Girls’ junior high, but she’s so frail… we’ve had no choice but to homeschool her with private tutors.”

She’s only met Toph the once, but in that time, she would not have described the younger girl as frail. Toph had been loud, crude, and thick-skinned during the duration of their interaction, and she had seemed to have taken Azula’s cruelty in stride at the time. She certainly didn’t seem to be holding it against Azula now.

Still, Toph makes no move to correct her parents’ assessment of her. Instead, she opts to blindly look around as if she were helpless.

Azula gets the distinct impression that there’s a lot they don’t know about their daughter. That, at least, is something she can understand. For all her father did to mold her, there was so much he has never known about her. Will never know about her. “We met through a mutual friend,” she says simply. “It was brief, but your daughter is very memorable.” There’s an underlying callousness to her words that the Beifongs do not miss.

“Azula was really nice to me,” Toph lies cheerily to her parents.

Red lips force themselves into a smile when all they want to do is frown. Azula hates not understanding someone else’s game. What could Toph possibly get from lying to her parents about this? Azula needs to get away from these people as fast as she can.

“Yes, I’m sure she was. Ozai has always spoken so highly of you, Azula,” Lao says.

The elevator dings once more. Zhao steps out in a well-pressed suit. He makes his way to them and places a burning hand on Azula’s shoulder.

“Princess, you’re late,” he says, not low enough to not be heard. “Lao, Poppy, as always it’s good to see you here, but I’m afraid I must interrupt to steal Azula away.”

“Of course,” Lao says, looking uncomfortable as Zhao’s hand slides down from Azula’s shoulder to the small of her back.

“It was lovely meeting you, Azula,” Poppy says, her smile stretching thin and painfully.

“You as well. It was good to see you, Toph,” she says as Zhao guides her away helplessly. Her head is spinning. He’s never been brave enough to do more than touch her shoulder before. He’s never been bold enough to treat her like Ozai does before: more ragdoll than girl.

She rips his hand off of her as soon as the elevator doors close.

He laughs as if she were a child.

“You told my father of some heinous rumors,” she accuses. “Where did you hear them?”

“If you want to lie to your father, you’ll have to do a better job of hiding the truth,” he says.

“Who told you?” she demands. “Answer quickly. I’m in a bad mood today.” She pulls the taser that Mai gifted her out of her school bag and turns it on in warning. The humming of electricity is like music to her ears as Zhao pales.

“You should know by now that the police are in your father’s pocket, not yours,” he says, trying to maintain an air of indifference.

“And whose pocket are you in, Zhao?”

“What are you implying, Princess?”

“My father would not be pleased if he knew of your… fondness for me.”

Zhao smiles. It is a predator’s grin. Azula has seen one much more impressive on her own face in the mirror, and so she smiles back. They’re playing a game of chicken now.

“Perhaps. But you know, I would make a much better asset to you if you utilized this alleged fondness.”

“How so?” She feels sick.

“All it would cost you was one night, and you could have my silence whenever you so desired.”

Her response is reflexive. Her response is what she wishes she could tell her father. “You’re disgusting.”

“Not more so than a brat with an Electra complex.”

The elevator doors open. Azula does not move as Zhao leaves. Eventually, the doors close on her.

It’s the winter solstice, and Azula rises with the sun as she always has.

She doesn’t wish Zuko a happy seventeenth birthday the same way he didn’t wish her a happy fifteenth birthday. They haven’t wished each other a happy birthday in years, really. She doesn’t care to remember the last time either of them did, but she thinks he must have gone last before she stopped bothering. He’s always been horribly weak like that, even if he’s always hated her.

For the most part, Azula stays in her room reading all day. She doesn’t come out when Iroh tells her breakfast is ready. She doesn’t come out when she hears Zuko’s friends and her former friends arrive. She doesn’t come out when Ty Lee knocks on her bedroom door to ask if she wants to join them.

She stays silent and drowning in her bed, red lipstick and lingerie on for no one at all.

She hears Zuko laughing at Sokka’s bad jokes. She hears all their other friends making fun of them both for it. She hears every word of conversation overlapping. She hears every second of Mai and Ty Lee forgetting she exists. She hopes they all choke on their laughter as they sing happy birthday off-key.

(She can’t remember the last time she was that happy on her birthday. She only remembers hands all over her body and the way the blood marred her sheets until he replaced white with red entirely.)

It gets late eventually, and his friends leave one by one. He doesn’t knock on her bedroom door to offer her a slice of the cake she doesn’t want. He doesn’t wait to see if she’ll say happy birthday this year. He just goes to bed after wishing Iroh a goodnight.

Azula lies in bed, and she has no excuse for destroying the book her father gifted her tonight.

Winter solstice ends, and Azula sneaks out of her bedroom and into the kitchen. She sits on the cold floor in the fridge light and eats leftovers and instant meals until her stomach feels ready to burst with the two shelves of food she’s eaten.

She rushes to the bathroom, crumbs on her face and disgust in her heart, and she throws everything up.

She doesn’t even have control over her appetite anymore.

Pathetic.

Iroh does not ask her about the food missing from the fridge in the morning. He just smiles as if pleased. As if he didn’t hear the retching that came after. As if he doesn’t know the fallout of her lapse in strength.

She says nothing in response, but she doesn’t miss the way Zuko stares at her like she’s a wounded turtle duck he doesn’t know how to help.

(“We should put it out of its misery,” she’d said when they were small. “It can’t keep up with the rest of its siblings, so its parents will reject it. It’d be better off dead.”

“That’s cruel, Lala! You can’t say things like that!” he’d cried back. “We… we have to help it!”

She had rolled her eyes and called him stupid for not understanding her mercy, but she hadn’t killed the turtle duck. Sometimes, she still wonders what happened to it.)

Azula always hated turtle ducks. She still remembers throwing loaves of bread at them when their mother would take them to feed the stupid things.

It’s been three days without seeing her mother where she isn’t now. She thought it would get worse again after what Zhao said. 

In some ways, it has. She’s dreaming for the first time in two years. Nightmares of her mother and father. Electra killed her mother, and Azula wanted to once. Only once. She’s been dreaming of succeeding and being consumed by her father in the wake. She’s been dreaming of failing and rotting away somewhere, untouched and uncorrupted. She doesn’t know which is worse.

The aftermath is that Azula doesn’t know if she wishes her mother were dead anymore. She thinks it might be easier if she were. If Ursa had been killed instead of abandoning her children and husband. If Ursa had withered away naturally instead of choosing herself over her children and husband.

Azula would’ve hated Ursa either way. Azula has hated Ursa since she was seven, and she pushed Zuko off that roof, and Ursa couldn’t recognize that she was scared of herself for it. Azula was scared of monsters too.

She’s been waiting for Jet to call her so she can burn everything there is of her mother left in her to ash. She hasn’t smoked with him since they got her new prescription. She’s gotten cigarettes through other means, but she’s almost missed the barbed exchanges they’d shared. The way he’d flinched under the weight of her words, and the way she’d felt raw and exposed when he pried them out of her. It had hurt them both, and that was equilibrium.

It’s not until it’s been a full month and her delusions have been squashed like cigarette butts that she calls him.

He doesn’t answer.

She calls again.

No answer.

She gives it until the new year before she tries again.

Still no answer.

Eventually, she thinks he blocks her number entirely. She wonders what it is she could have done to have pushed him over the edge when she’s pushed past so many of his pathetic moralities already.

She half expects her mother to appear and tell her it’s because she’s crazy. She’s alone in her living room while Zuko and Iroh visit a shrine to ring in the new year without her because they are not family and never will be, and no one appears to tell her it’s because she’s crazy. She thinks she might finally be cured, but she still feels like gouging her own eyes out every time she passes a mirror.

If she told Iroh, he would tell her that no man is an island, and that she has to look inside her heart to identify the root of her unhappiness before she can rip it out at the source, or something miserable like that.

She would sooner gut herself than she would tell her uncle about her feelings.

With a sigh, Azula pulls out the taser again. She watches it spark alive, humming pleasantly the whole time. It’s strange to think Mai would gift her this. Though, Mai never did buy Azula anything traditional for her birthday; there used to always be two gifts from her on the summer solstice. The first was what her parents had picked out in an attempt to win Azula’s favor so as to keep on her father’s good side. The second was what Mai thought Azula would want. If there was any part of Azula’s birthday she looked forward to, it was the second gift.

Over the years, Mai had given her presents including a lighter necklace which Iroh had confiscated, a dulled replica of the sword wielded by Azula’s favorite general, and a solid gold tarot card charm for The Sun. Each gift had been given with Azula and only Azula in mind, but none before the taser had been practical for Azula to inflict pain onto others with, save for maybe the lighter.

Azula had seen the gifts Ty Lee had received from Mai over the years, and while they were nice, Azula had always thought, and occasionally outright said, that Mai had saved the best for her.

She’s never seen any of the presents Mai has given to Zuko, though.

Not even when they were children.

This is what she’s thinking when she enters Zuko’s bedroom. The last time she had come into one of her brother’s rooms had been when he still lived in the Minamoto estate, to taunt him about the fact that she heard her father say he was going to kill poor Zuzu. This time, somehow, feels much worse.

She swallows the feeling whole, and she begins searching through his things.

(Azula thinks briefly of Ozai’s room searches. She remembers him screaming at her for any sign of wrongdoing, any symptom of infidelity, any sin against the relationship she never consented to be in. Zuko was right. Azula has always been her father’s daughter.)

She doesn’t tear his room apart like her father would; Azula puts things back where she found them when she finds no trace of Mai on them.

She’s a quarter of the way through searching his room when she finds a small box buried in his dresser. She opens it and finds envelopes and holiday and birthday cards. 

Cards from Ursa.

“Dear Zuko, Congratulations on the New Year. I know this year will be good for you. I’m so proud of you. I miss you every day. I love you more than anything. Love, Mom.”

“Dear Zuko, Happy birthday, my sweet boy. I can’t believe how old you’re getting. You’re almost a man now. I promise that when it’s safe, I’ll come see you and make up for all these lost years. I love you so much. Love, Mom.”

“Dear Zuko, I saw the news. Is it true? Is it really safe for me to see you now? Love, Mom.”

There are no mentions of Azula. It’s like Zuko doesn’t even have a sister. It’s like Ursa doesn’t even have a daughter.

Except, they both do. Zuko has a sister, and Ursa has a daughter, that girl is just not Azula.

She’s staring at the photograph at the bottom of the box, glaring at Zuko’s smiling, scarred face and Ursa’s loving, aged form, and there is a girl that Azula has never seen with them. A girl who looks like Ursa but not Ozai.

This little girl is Zuko’s sister and Ursa’s daughter. This little girl is Azula’s replacement.

She puts the box back how she found it, and she wonders if her father would’ve loved this girl the way he loved her. She wonders if her mother loves her the way she didn’t love Azula. She thinks she knows the answer.

Azula has never hated a child more.

Chapter Text

Azula has blocked a lot of phone numbers in the past few months: Mai and Ty Lee’s, Zuko’s even though he really has given up on her, Katara’s, and Sokka’s when Katara had tried to contact her through him. It’s not anything new; she’s never been hesitant about cutting people out of her life. Azula has always been all or nothing like that, no remorse and no reluctance. She was made to be final.

This is the daughter her father has raised from the ashes of a family that he burned to the bone.

Maybe that’s why she’s surprised when her phone rings. She was almost convinced she’d blocked anyone who would ever call her. It’s not a saved contact, but it’s the right area code, and it’s not flagged as a scam caller.

“Who is this?” Azula answers the phone.

“That’s a rude way to answer the phone. What if I was someone important, Minamoto?”

She isn’t sure when they got on a family-name basis, but she plays along. “Beifong. It’s a good thing you aren’t someone important, I suppose.”

Toph laughs, loud and kind of mean-sounding.

“What is it you want? If it’s not good, I’m hanging up.”

Toph hesitates instead of going for the throat. “Zhao is your dad’s lawyer, right?”

Azula blinks. “Yes? Why do you ask?”

“You called him a family friend the other day,” Toph says. There’s an underlying accusation there that makes Azula feel acidic.

“Yes, he works for my father, and he’s my father’s friend,” Azula says, her voice even. She hates talking about Zhao, and she really hates the way she senses this conversation going. She should really hang up soon.

“Zuko’s told me stories about him,” Toph says abruptly. “When I told him his firm represents my parents. He told me to be careful around Zhao if I was ever alone with him.”

Azula yawns. “Is that so? Zuzu can be so paranoid. He’s right that Zhao can be a creep, but he’s not the kind of creep who would ever do anything. I’d have his head if he tried it.”

Toph exhales. “You’re sure? My parents seemed to think he was kind of handsy with you, and you got weird when he showed up.”

“Is my word not good enough?” Azula snaps. “I don’t see how this is any of your business anyway.” With that, she hangs up and throws her phone again.

This time, the screen shatters.

It’s lunch break, and Azula is pulling a bill out of her wallet when she hears a familiar sigh. She pauses to glance up at the older girl from the corner of her eye. Not today, she decides as she slides the bill into the vending machine.

“It’s rude to ignore people,” Mai says flatly.

Azula hums in agreement.

Mai sighs once more. “I take it you’re not ready to apologize to me or Ty Lee?”

Azula straightens up, ignoring her dispensed Diet Coke, and she glares sharply. “There are two kinds of people in the world, Mai: people who are weak and wrong and have to apologize for it, like you and Ty Lee,” she says, “and people who are strong and right and above the need to apologize, like me.”

“You’re such an asshole,” Mai says.

Golden eyes roll, and then manicured hands are pulling out another bill and hitting another button on the vending machine. Azula hasn’t forgotten how much Mai likes canned coffee. She still sees Mai drinking it sometimes. Azula hands it to her, taking the other can in her hand.

“You’re breaking Ty Lee’s heart.”

“Hm? I thought I did that after she kissed me.”

Mai looks taken aback. “You agreed it was a lie, Azula,” she accuses. “Was it a lie or wasn’t it?”

Azula’s lips stretch into a smile. “I thought I always lied, Mai.”

(They’re throwing each other’s names around now. Azula hopes the weight of her name in Mai’s mouth hurts as much as Mai’s name hurts in hers. She hopes it feels sacred to Mai too; low in their throats like an oath, scraping them both raw.)

“No.” There’s no hesitation and no resistance to her now. “You don’t.”

Azula leans in, going to her toes to almost completely close the gap between them. “Are you sure about that?” she asks, low and in warning as she plucks the can of coffee from Mai’s grasp and leaves her with the Diet Coke instead.

Mai has always hated Diet Coke, and Azula has never liked canned coffee either.

Sometimes, in war, no one gets what they want. Ozai taught her that.

Jet still hasn’t called her, and she hasn’t tried calling him since January. It’s February now, but she’s not desperate enough to drop by his place to find him. She can accept that he hates her easily enough; she’s only annoyed she doesn’t know why. And that the last time she saw him he was so uncharacteristically kind to her.

She’s not worried about him, at least. She’s seen his social media updated in the time that’s passed. Not that she’s checking.

Not that she’s bothered.

Azula thought Jet was irritating and needlessly political on a good day. The only redeeming thing about him had been his ability to supply her with cigarettes. She’s fine without him. They weren’t friends, and Azula doesn’t need friends anyway.

Not after Mai and Ty Lee.

(She just wants to know why no one ever chooses her. Because even if Jet didn’t choose Zuko, he still didn’t choose her.)

She’s trending on Twitter. Her father is too.

There’s a sense of deep dread in her stomach when she clicks on her own name to see why. She knows. The only other times she’s ever trended on social media have been when she’s spoken out in defense of her father, and she hasn’t done anything of the sort since he was sentenced.

It’s not like anyone who knows would say anything, though. It’s not like she’s been stupid enough to tell anyone. It’s not like anyone knows why her father took the plea deal.

Except, everyone is saying how disgusting it is that Ozai could lay hands on his own daughter. Everyone is saying how awful they feel for her. Everyone is saying that you shouldn’t share the video without tagging it for its triggering content—how is there a video?

He never filmed them, did he? He would have told her. He would have said something. She would have known.

Azula wants to die as she scrolls to find it, her eyes wide and desperate. This can’t be her life. This can’t be real. No one can know. There can’t be proof.

Those psych ward doctors hadn’t believed her when she recanted, but they would lose their licenses if they broke doctor-patient confidentiality. They would be fired and arrested if they leaked security footage from the psych ward, and it’s not like her father was eager to document himself sleeping with his own daughter. How can there be a video?

She stops scrolling. The video is right there, playing inaudibly, and Azula remembers this. Azula remembers this clearer than she thinks she ought to. She knows exactly what she saw that day, and she doesn’t know how to reconcile that with what she sees today.

(There’s a man standing over her. She can’t see his face. She doesn’t want to see his face. Azula bows her head and makes herself as small as she can. Her lip is split and bleeding still. She doesn’t remember when or how that happened, but she feels like she’s ten years old again, and she would rather die than be ten years old again.

The man reaches out to touch her.

She thrashes as much as she can without the use of her arms, and she starts screaming. Not for help. Azula knows better than to scream for help. Azula has always known better than to scream for help. “Don’t touch me!” she snarls. “Get out of my room! Leave me alone, Dad!”

The man flinches back at that.

“I hate you, I hate you, I hate you! Daddy, please! You’re hurting me! Why don’t you care that you’re hurting me?” She’s not sure when her screams turned to sobs, and she’s not sure why her throat feels so raw from the exertion. Has she been screaming this whole time?

“I’m so sorry I didn’t protect you, Azula.”

Azula jerks her head up and looks to the corner of the room where Ursa stands, pathetic and sad and grieving like she has anything left to grieve. Like she didn’t choose this when she abandoned her daughter. “Why didn’t you stay, Mother?” She wants to sound demanding, but her voice comes out hoarse. Then, smaller, she asks, “Why did you leave me with him?”

No one answers her. There is no justification to give. There is nothing that will take away Azula’s suffering. There is no reason for Ursa to ever care about the monster she gave birth to.)

She’s not seeing things today. She hasn’t seen anything since December. Azula’s world has never been clearer. There is only one explanation: this is real. This is her reality. Someone got the security footage, and someone leaked that security footage, and now anyone in the world can see her ugliest secret. Anyone in the world can look at her and imagine her bent over and bleeding. Maybe they think no child could ever deserve this. Maybe they think she was ruined by this. Maybe they think this is the backbone of who she is.

Azula knows better. 

Azula is better. 

Even now.

She doesn’t leave her room for what must be hours. She doesn’t want to see anyone, but that doesn't mean people don’t want to see her. For the first time since she left the estate, the door bursts open without warning.

She doesn’t flinch at the sound. She doesn’t even turn to face either of them. She doesn’t do anything at all as she waits for them to say what it is they saw. What it is they must think of her and her secret.

“What did he do to you?” Zuko’s voice comes out mangled and ugly.

Azula stares at him for a long moment. Her brother is a fucking idiot, and it’s the funniest thing in the world. So she laughs. It sounds heinous in her mouth. It feels wrong in her throat. It wrecks through her stomach, her ribs almost grating her lungs from the strain. She cannot stop herself from laughing, though.

“Niece—” Iroh says, and that is the last straw. He’s never called her that before. He always calls her Azula. Cruel Azula, fucked up Azula, psychotic Azula.

She stops laughing. It’s not funny anymore. “Isn’t it obvious?” she asks, her voice barbed and cutting up her own throat too. “He fucked me, Zuzu. Almost every night for five years, our father took me to bed. He would have his way with me however many times he felt like, and then, if you can believe it, we’d cuddle. It was almost nice sometimes.” She feels hysterical, but she sounds controlled. She has no strategy here. She has no target here. She has nothing to accomplish by telling anyone this, least of all her family.

(Her family who left her to be fucked. Her family who left her to be told she was consummate, destined for greatness if she just let him between her thighs. It was a small price to pay, except when it was done, and she knew it could never be undone.)

Family has never meant much to Azula. There was only ever her father who stayed—who chose Azula. Everyone else wanted her soft and weak. He wanted her malleable for his greedy hands, but he wanted her with all her jagged edges. That is the only Azula there has ever been. Everything else has been a lie.

“Sometimes, if I closed my eyes, being caged by him felt like being loved. Isn’t that funny?” she spits the venom out, her words calm despite all their calamity. “I always thought it was funny. Well, not always. But once I got used to it happening, it got funny. I used to think how Daddy dearest might’ve loved you, my foolish brother, if you’d just learned to spread your legs for him too. What do you think, Uncle?” She’s weaponizing her own blood now. She’s wielding it like a flame, hoping against hope her brother might still be afraid of fire despite everything she knows is true.

“… do you believe my brother loves you, Azula?” Iroh asks, his voice whisper-quiet.

She laughs at that. “He loves that I look like her, and he loves that I’m strong like him. What else is there to me, Uncle?” She’s mocking them both now. It’s so much worse for them, she thinks, if she lies.

Would they believe the truth?

Azula has known her father doesn’t love her since she was twelve, and he bruised her face over the holidays. Azula regrets that it took her that long to catch on to his sweetest con, his cruelest promise. Azula has never thought it normal for a father to lie with his daughter as Ozai does with her. Azula has always known how utterly, reprehensibly fucked up her life has become in the years since she was nine.

She thinks that’s a much worse truth than her falling for her father’s lies would be. She could forgive her own compliance easier if she had believed him when he said he fucked her out of love, out of tenderness.

Iroh is at a loss for words. He doesn’t know a thing about Azula when it comes down to it. He knows her cruelty—so like her father’s—and her face—so like her mother’s. All he knows of Azula is all Ozai cares to love about her.

Zuko speaks instead. “It’s not love. Forcing you to do that… Azula, it’s not love,” he pleads. He sounds so desperate she almost feels guilty for toying with him in the wake of everything he knew about his childhood and her lack of one.

A smile flickers onto her red lips like lightning. “Maybe lust is a better word to describe it then. Our father lusts after me because he says I’m his perfect creation. Is that phrasing more to your liking, Zuzu?”

“It should never have happened to begin with…” Iroh murmurs. “I have failed you. I’m so sorry, Azula. I never should have let this happen to you.” As far as Azula is concerned, he’s just being maudlin now.

Like a flame, her smile flickers out of existence. “Don’t be boring, Uncle. This isn’t about you. I’m the one who has to fuck him.”

Zuko winces before he bursts. “You don’t have to do anything! We can—we can stop him from taking you back when he gets out! You’ll be eighteen then; you can just stay here over breaks, and on campus during the school year! He can’t do this! He can’t—it’s too fucked up, okay?! You have to see that, Azula!” He’s hitting the wall for emphasis. He’s gritting his teeth, and his face is so screwed up his scar looks even uglier than usual.

It’s fascinating. Azula has never seen her brother like this. Not even when he’d punched Ruon-Jian had he been overflowing with anything at all resembling this. She wonders if this is what older brothers are supposed to be like, and she tries to picture Katara and her brother in this situation. She tries to imagine what it would be like if her brother loved her.

The concept is too foreign. She can’t do it. Her imagination isn’t that strong.

“You don’t have to pretend to care,” she tells him, calm and even and liberating him from his need to play a role. She feels uncomfortable with the idea of her brother as anything but the distant, moody boy she’s seen for over half her life. “Neither of you do. It’s fine. It doesn’t change anything about who we all are. It’s just another lie I told.”

He gapes at her, and Iroh looks physically pained.

“I’m not pretending,” Zuko says, slow and unsure like maybe he doesn’t believe himself or like maybe Azula just doesn’t understand something fundamental. “Uncle wouldn’t do that either. I know we don’t have a good relationship, Azula, but I’ve never wanted this to hurt you.”

Azula smiles, and it hurts this time. “You’ve never been a good liar. Both of you, out. Now. I don’t want to see either of your pathetic faces today.”

There’s no more recalculating her plans. Her back is against the wall now.

All she can do is find out who did this to her.

(Her father did this to her. No matter who told, her father is the one who did this to her. Who took her and gave her this horrible secret like jagged rocks in her stomach and told her to swim when all she could do was drown with it.)

She starts digging for the source until she finds something called the Freedom Fighters, a group that seems to particularly hate Sozin Oil.

She starts digging so that she can have an excuse to ignore the ringing of her phone as her father no doubt screams at her voicemail for daring to have done this to him in the first place, let alone daring to let it be leaked to the public. Azula’s life has never been normal, but this is so much worse than she ever imagined it.

Dinner cuts her search short, and as he serves her rice, Iroh tells her that she’ll be attending therapy with some shrink soon as if that will fix her life or give her back the inheritance she knows she’s lost now. He says it so desperately that she doesn’t bother responding at all. He can barely look at her anymore, but it’s not in the way he couldn’t look at her in childhood when she crowed with laughter about how pathetic he was for grieving; he can’t look at her in the way he couldn’t look at pictures of Lu Ten after his suicide.

Zuko, on the other hand, can’t stop looking at her. He looks like he’s swallowing everything he wants to say to her with every bite of food he doesn’t touch. She hasn’t let him speak to her since she kicked him out of her room, but he hasn’t tried nearly as hard as she expected him to.

He had lingered outside her room, but he hadn’t even knocked once. As far as she can tell, he seems to have sat there in silence with his back to her door until she came out for dinner.

She ignores them both as much as she can, and she doesn’t even touch her chopsticks tonight. She drinks miso soup down silently and says nothing when she leaves for her bedroom.

“Azula, a minute, please,” Iroh pleads before she turns the corner. “I want you to know that when you are ready to… I will be here. We will both be here for you if you need us. Even if you do not need a useless old man like me, I will be here for you.” His voice breaks off with the apology she feels he’s beaten to death.

“I won’t need either of you. I never have,” Azula promises, her voice cold and flat. She leaves without a second thought for either of the firstborn sons who have plagued her life these past months.

Like she has so many times before, she chooses not to notice the sound of her brother’s tears. He should have just learned to cry in silence. He should have just learned to bite back his tears entirely.

Azula did.

She doesn’t go to school the next day. She stays home instead of facing the whispers and stares. She’ll face it wherever she goes next, and maybe it makes her a coward, but she’s not ready yet.

(Maybe she’s exactly as weak as her father feared after all. Maybe there was no other way this ever could have ended but in blood, just as it began. Maybe Azula was the sun, and, as brilliant and bright as she was, even she could only burn out in the end.)

She doesn’t bother opening the window when she smokes in her room today. Iroh is too frightened of her secret to tell her not to smoke today, even though he’s stayed home from his pathetic tea shop to look after her, leaving her meals by her door to go untouched instead of calling her out to eat. He is too cowardly to face her after she spat in his two-faced attempt at kindness.

It’s almost five when Azula hears a loud, hurried series of knocks at the front door. Typical Zuzu. Of course he would forget his keys and embarrass himself by making a scene over it.

“Iroh, I need to see her!”

Azula freezes. Her hallucinations have never spoken to anyone else before, and they’ve been gone for months now. She hasn’t missed a day with her antipsychotic medication either. There’s no reason for her to hear that voice today. There’s no reason that the owner of that voice would ever want to see her—need, she had said need. Ursa doesn’t want to see her. Azula’s pathetic excuse for a mother just needs to alleviate her guilt by having tried something she knows will never succeed. Ursa doesn’t actually want anything to do with Azula; she knows she’s bound to fail at this attempt at reconciliation. She’s banking on it.

“Thank Agni you answered, Iroh. Is it true? Can I see her?”

“Apparently, you could have seen me whenever you wanted these last few years. You just chose not to,” Azula says from the hallway.

Ursa and Iroh both freeze under Azula’s cold stare. “Azula—” her name sounds infinitely heavier in her mother’s mouth than it ever could in someone else’s “—you have to know I wanted to—”

“You wanted to see your darling Zuko, so you did. You didn’t want to see your monster of a daughter, so you didn’t. It’s simple, really. No need to pretend it’s complicated,” Azula says. She’s staring indifferently at her manicure and not even willing her eyes to stay bone-dry. It turns out that hallucinating the mother who abandoned you does more to prepare you for seeing her in the flesh for the first time since you were nine than Azula expected. She hardly feels a thing right now.

“Azula,” Iroh says softer than he would have two days before. Her name still sounds sharp and acidic in his mouth. She hopes he chokes on it like her mother doesn’t have the decency to do.

“No. She doesn’t get to love me now that it's easy for her. Now that she thinks I’m some kind of pathetic victim like her,” she tells Iroh. Then, Azula fixes her golden eyes upon the woman in the doorway. “You’re fifteen years too late to be my mother now, Ursa. Leave.”

Ursa doesn’t fight her. She just hangs her head in shame when Iroh won’t meet her gaze.

“You should leave,” Iroh says quietly. “It’s important that we respect Azula’s wishes. If she is not ready to see you…”

“I don’t want to see her. I’m never going to want to see her, Uncle.”

The last time that Ursa left, she hadn’t even said goodbye to Azula. She had said it to Zuko. He never told Azula that, but she could see it on his face the next day. He’s always been an awful liar. Even when all he had to do to lie was omit the truth. Ursa, on the other hand, has always been a wonderful liar. It’s just another thing Azula has inherited that Zuko hasn’t.

(She's running out of those. The price of Minamoto Oil and their father's love was always her compliance. Compliance meant secrecy, compliance meant never ruining the fantasy or telling anyone. What she's done is not compliance.)

There was even a time when Azula believed Ursa loved her. She was too small to know better at the time. Too stupid to understand when she was being lied to. Now, Azula is violently acquainted with the truth.

Ursa leaves without goodbye once more. She leaves without an apology either.

Azula knew it, but it hurts more than she expected to see it confirmed.

Her mother has never loved her enough to stay. Her mother has never loved her at all.

A week passes, and Azula blocks her father’s number and Zhao’s too. They’ve both left her enough voicemails she’d rather die than listen to. A week passes, and Zuko asks if she really hates their mother as if he doesn’t know the answer. Azula tells him the truth and tells him to leave her alone, and he looks upset, but he listens with minimal protesting. A week passes, and she goes back to school on a Tuesday.

The other girls whisper and stare, but no one is brave enough to say anything to her face after Azula bites the head off of the one girl who tried to ask if she was okay. Ty Lee is absent,—sick from Ty Woo, no doubt; Ty Woo has always been the weakest link of Ty Lee’s sisters when it comes to everything, especially her immune system—and Azula hasn’t seen Mai yet, so she thinks she’s as safe as she can be right now. It’s not nearly safe enough.

Her life is a fucking trainwreck now, and there’s nothing she can do to fix it. She can’t unleak the video or unrape her body, and she can’t tear the disconnect between the girl everyone knows her to be and the girl in the video from people’s minds.

She goes to the bathroom during her lunch break, and she stares at herself in the mirror. She wishes she was bleeding again. She wishes she was ash now with no room left for her father to build a girl from her bones.

Azula’s cheeks and eyes are no longer bone-dry. She blinks, trying to bite each tear back, but all that happens is more spill out. She has never hated herself so much.

The door opens.

“Get the fuck out,” she spits.

“Azula?” Mai breathes out.

Mai has only seen Azula cry once before when they were small and Azula’s eyes had still produced tears too readily. She had landed wrong while playing kuai ball, and the snap of her ankle had been sickening. Her father had told her that crying was a weakness, but she hadn’t been able to stop the flow of her tears as Mai and Ty Lee both surrounded her, reaching out to hold her before she snapped at them, all vicious words and burning eyes.

This is a humiliation Azula was not prepared for.

“Save your pity,” she hisses.

“I don’t pity you,” Mai says stiffly. “I don’t know how to pity you. I just… I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Azula. About all of it.”

Azula wipes at her eyes furiously. “Right. Well—goodbye. You’ve relinquished your guilt; you’re dismissed now.”

Mai scowls at her in the mirror before wincing. “I’m not trying to relinquish my guilt. Is it so hard to believe someone cares about you?” Her voice breaks, and her eyes water.

Azula doesn’t answer, and Mai softens. Of all the ways Mai has looked at her over the years,—in contempt, admiration, amusement, bitterness—Azula has never seen that look on Mai’s face before.

“I’m sorry,” she says again. “I should have believed you at the sleepover.”

Azula laughs, but the sound is mangled in her throat. “I wasn’t trying to tell you. I was being cruel as always. You know that, Mai.”

“You don’t have to lie just because people expect you to,” Mai says, and, to Azula, it sounds like being begged. It doesn’t make her feel good.

“I tell the truth, and no one believes me,” Azula murmurs to herself. “I smile, and I agree that I always lie, and everyone accepts that. There’s no point to anything else.”

Mai says nothing this time. Instead, she steps forward and embraces Azula, all at once engulfing her in a stiltedness that Azula has not felt in years. They have not hugged since they were very small, and they weren’t good at it then either. Neither of them had physically affectionate parents,—until Azula did—and Ty Lee was the only person who frequently hugged them growing up, no matter how many times Mai insisted she hated being hugged.

Yet here Mai was, hugging Azula of her own volition.

It’s not warm and comforting. It’s not cold and painful either. Azula supposes she shouldn’t expect Mai to hold her the way Ozai does. She supposes she shouldn’t expect Mai to hold her ever.

She pushes Mai off of her as suddenly as Mai had embraced her.

Mai stumbles back. “I shouldn’t have—”

“Don’t,” Azula orders.

“Is there anything I can do?” Mai asks, and it’s half sarcastic and half genuine.

“Go back in time and stop the Freedom Fighters from posting the footage.”

(Azula used to wish someone would stop her father from taking her body from her. Azula has grown up since then. She knows now that it would be futile to ask anyone to have stopped him from ever touching his daughter.)

“And don’t tell anyone about this,” Azula adds after a moment. Her tears have stopped flowing. Her blood has stopped boiling.

“Okay,” Mai says. “I’ll go now.”

Azula goes to nod and finds she can’t. She opens her mouth to thank Mai, but nothing comes out.

“You’re welcome, Azula,” Mai says anyway.

She can’t remember ever thanking Mai for anything before. She can’t remember Mai ever saying she was welcome either. She doesn’t know if she hates it or not.

Azula has therapy today. Her shrink’s name is Wu, but she asks Azula to call her Aunt Wu like some kind of sycophant. Azula refuses because she has some dignity left, but it leaves her humiliated. She thinks she’s never been more like her pathetic brother in her entire life, not even when her flesh was aflame or her father couldn’t look at her in her shame.

She sits in Wu’s office, silent and staring at the jasmine tea that had been poured for her despite her contempt for the beverage.

Wu examines her closely but silently, having seemingly given up on speaking after it became apparent Azula had no intention of cooperating with this awful charade. She writes something down as if she’s learned anything from Azula’s refusal to comply.

(Azula wonders if she would be here today if she had refused to comply with her father’s lust. She doesn’t want to think too much about whether he knew his daughter never wanted to lie with him carnally. She doesn’t want to think too much about what he would have done to her if she had told him so. She thinks it would have been worse than when he wouldn’t touch her at all.)

There are fifteen minutes left in their hour-long session, and Azula has said all of four words. She doesn’t plan on saying anything further either. If this is a game of will, Azula’s will has almost always been the greatest in any given room, second only to her father’s.

“You know, Azula,” Wu says once fifteen minutes have dwindled to twelve, “to recover from anything, especially something as traumatic as what your father did to you, you have to want to get better. Do you want that?”

Azula tilts her head at Wu as if sizing up her prey. Red lips curl into a smile in place of a response.

Wu writes something down once more. “When you’re ready, I will be more than happy to listen to whatever you have to say. Whether it’s about your father or your time in the psych ward or anything else you want to discuss. Until then, do you want to cut this session short?”

Azula is not stupid enough to answer that. Instead, she waits out the remaining twelve minutes in absolute silence before leaving to see her uncle in the waiting room.

Iroh looks hopefully at Wu until she shakes her head quietly.

“We will try again next week,” he says.

“Of course. However long it takes, Iroh.”

No one asks what Azula wants. Azula wouldn’t tell them even if they did.

When it’s time to refill her prescription, Zuko offers to drive her. He says she can stay in the car while he gets it from the pharmacy, and she only agrees to stop people from staring at her like they can see her molded to the contours of her father’s body with blood between her thighs and manicured nails biting into her palms to remedy pain with more pain.

She sits in the car, running her fingers across the cracks in her phone screen and willing a shard to come loose and make her feel anything other than this awful state of dread she’s been living in. Zuko isn’t very fast, or the line must be very long, but either way, she hates him right now.

She always hates him, but she’s never hated him more than she does now that her hatred is not reciprocated.

Azula has never seen her brother so timid around her. He’s terrified of scaring her now, she thinks. He swallows every outburst he would have had before he knew, and his fists twitch defensively when he sees people come near her. He’s been standing guard outside her bedroom door as if that will undo their father’s touch on her flesh, too. Azula hates that most of all.

He’s not allowed to care now—even if it’s fake. He should have cared when she was ten, and there was still a part of her that loved her brother buried under her loathing.

She’s just found a loose shard of glass in her phone screen when she sees him— Jet. He’s walking with a lit cigarette between his lips, and he looks worse than she’s ever seen him, and it’s not as if he looked particularly good, to begin with.

Azula is getting out of the car before she’s registered how angry she is to see him.

He tenses when he sees her.

“I take it you saw the video,” she says.

His brow furrows. “I did,” he says. “Don’t you—”

“I thought I told you to stay away from my family, Jet,” Zuko half-shouts from the entrance to the pharmacy. “Especially my little sister.”

Jet lights up. “Zuko,” he grins. “I’ve missed you.”

“The feeling’s not mutual. Why the hell did you do it? Don’t you know how fucked up it is?”

Azula glances between them as Zuko draws nearer to Jet. Zuzu can’t be this mad about the cigarettes, and he can’t be this mad at Jet that she told him about how Ozai used to beat him, so what is he this mad about?

“I did the right thing. Come on, you have to know that. People need to know what kind of man your dad is,” Jet says. “And you weren’t ready to tell them about what he did to you.”

“What did you just say?” Azula asks, her voice colder than ever.

Jet doesn’t have the decency to look apologetic as he turns to her. “Look, you wouldn’t have said it at all if you didn’t want someone to know,” he says.

Before Azula can hit him, Zuko does.

Azula doesn’t pull him away from Jet; she almost tells him to hit Jet again, but he’s getting in the car before she can.

“Fuck,” Jet says blearily from the pavement, his lit cigarette displaced on the ground next to him.

Azula grabs the cigarette and holds it out to him as if in offering. Jet knows her better than that, though, and glares at her as she digs it into his arm. “Fuck you,” she spits out before leaving him twice branded and alone in the parking lot.

“How long have you known Jet is a Freedom Fighter, Zuko?” she asks hours later.

“… A while. But I didn’t know they were the ones who—who posted that video. Not until Mai told me,” he says, sounding ashamed of himself. “I’m so sorry, Azula. I shouldn’t have let him anywhere near you. I should have told you he was like that. I should have known. I—”

“Shut up.” She can’t listen to Zuko’s whining any longer.

She’s never felt more like a fool in her life. She should have never told Jet anything at all. She should have never let Lo and Li check her into the psych ward. She should have never opened her mouth about her father.

She should have never been born, to begin with. Stupid girl.

Chapter Text

It takes a full week for Zuzu to try to talk to her about Ursa again. Azula thinks he’s a coward for waiting so long, but she also thinks he’s intolerable for trying at all.

“She loves you,” he blurts out as she does her homework in the living room.

Azula knows who he’s talking about, but she makes him say it to see him flinch anyway. She has never been a merciful girl. “Who loves me?” she asks, not looking up from the kotatsu. It doesn’t stop her from seeing the exact moment he regrets saying anything at all. 

Zuko persists anyway. “Mom,” he says. “Mom loves you.” It sounds truer than it should in his mouth, but stacked against the weight of her memories and the beige box in his room, it still doesn’t sound true at all.

“Oh?”

“She does,” he says, a little more convincing now. A touch more earnest. He might even be naïve enough to believe what he’s saying.

Azula continues to not look at him as she writes down the answer to question number nine. “Did she tell you to say that?”

“No,” he says.

“So she doesn’t want you to tell me she loves me,” Azula says back. “Ursa never liked when I lied either.”

“No, that’s not what I meant.” Zuzu sounds frustrated now. Azula has always had that effect on him. Even when he tries not to be, even when it makes him feel guilty, Zuko is always going to be the boy who hates his little sister. Azula wouldn’t have him any other way.

“What did you mean then?” she hums, the motions of her pencil stalling but her attention still fixed on the paper before her.

“Stop talking like that—no, I’m sorry. I just mean she’s not trying to manipulate you. She’s giving you space like you asked. She wants to be there for you so badly, Azula, but she’s giving you space.”

Azula’s knuckles turn a sickly shade of white. “Our darling mother has never had a problem ‘giving me space’ before.”

“She didn’t want to,” he says. “She just—”

“I don’t care,” Azula snaps. She finally looks up, her cheeks bone-dry and her eyes bright with something awful. 

Zuko is red in the face with watering eyes. His fists are trembling at his side.

Azula gets up, abandoning her homework, and she heads to her bedroom. She can’t do this right now. She can’t listen to her brother lie to her, and she can’t entertain the idea that her mother might have ever loved her, even if it was only slightly. Even if it was only out of obligation.

(Filial piety doesn’t apply here anymore. Ursa has not been Azula’s mother, so Azula will not be Ursa’s daughter. She will not give that stranger an inch.)

Zuko follows her anyway. “Azula—”

“No,” she bites, cold and flat and devoid of anything human.

She tries to slam her door shut behind her, but Zuko slips in before she can.

“Please just listen to me. I promise she had a good reason for staying away,” he says, desperate and angry and everything bone-crushingly pathetic that makes him Zuko. 

For a moment, she wishes his face was in flames again. The moment passes. She should feel guilty for it; she doesn’t. She can’t. Azula was not raised up to wallow in useless feelings like remorse and shame.

(She still scrubbed the blood away from between her legs as if it would make a difference. She still sank into beds with lead in her stomach and bullets in her mouth. She still can’t look at her own reflection without hearing the way her mother said that there was something wrong with her.)

“I don’t care, Zuzu,” she says. “Get out before I kill you.” She’s done a lot of awful things to her brother, but she’s never threatened his life. The closest she’d come was when she’d run into his room singing that Ozai was going to kill him.

He flinches backward for a moment before steadying himself. “You’re not going to hurt me,” he says like he wants to believe it. “You’re just upset, and I’m sorry—”

Azula pulls the taser out of her school bag, and it buzzes alive.

Zuko stares at the electricity she wields, his eyes wide and his whole body dangerously still. It’s been years since she saw him like this. She had been eleven the last time. Eleven and watching her father draw closer to her brother, the flame flickering behind him.

She doesn’t know if she likes the feeling of being looked at like that.

(She hates it. She hates it so much because she looked at Ozai like that the first time he came into her room at night. The first time he told her to pose for him. The first time he asked her what she knew about anal sex. She remembers wishing she could vanish, wanting to stop taking up the same space as him. She remembers being afraid. Azula has wanted to hold power as her own many times before, and she has lashed out at every turn to obtain it, but she has never wanted this.)

Zuko isn’t thirteen anymore; he’s smart enough to run now.

Azula isn’t eleven anymore; she’s fucked up enough to cry now.

This is the last thing she should be doing today. This is the last thing she should be doing at all, and if Iroh knew, he’d never take her. No one would, so Azula takes the train, and she doesn’t tell a soul.

She doesn’t have anyone to tell anyway. 

He’s all she’s ever had, and she’s not sure she has him now that everyone knows.

Ever the diligent daughter, even in her ruin, Azula goes to her father like a lamb to the slaughter. People stare at her on the train. People stare at her even more in the minimum security prison. People pity her. No. People are disgusted that she would go to him even now. Azula knows how to be something that disgusts people, awakens their self-righteousness. This is fine. This is manageable.

“Hello, Father,” she says when she’s sat before him.

He refuses to take her in, his eyes cold, and she feels impossibly small and terrified. “You insolent bitch,” he says, his voice calm and flat and so like her own. “How dare you show your face after what you’ve done.”

“I never wanted this to happen,” she says, trying to keep the trembling out of her voice.

“Don’t be pathetic, Azula. What you wanted doesn’t matter.”

He’s right. Regardless of what she wants, this is what has happened. This is what she has sown and reaped for her failures. She’s pathetic for pretending otherwise, and she’s pathetic for wanting to bury her secret deep in her chest once more.

(It’s funny how he can pry her apart into something that better suits his liking so effectively without laying a hand on her. She wonders if Zuko knows now that this is why he never hit her in her childhood. He just never needed to.)

“I’m sorry,” she says. It comes out like a prayer.

“Your apologies mean nothing to me now,” he says, still looking past her. “You mean nothing to me.”

Azula’s whole body goes cold. “No, Father, please—”

“Begging does not suit you,” he sighs, his face blank and bored. “You have ruined the family name, you have disgraced me personally with these lies, and you have humiliated yourself entirely. You are no daughter of mine.”

She doesn’t know why she comes undone, but she does. “They weren’t lies! You did it! Almost every night for five years, you fucked me like an animal!” Other inmates are gaping openly now. The guards are disgusted. Azula doesn’t care. Azula just wants her father to admit what he’s done to her.

“Silence, Azula!” he demands, finally looking at her. He looks at her like he looked at Zuzu, cold and unforgiving.

“… I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m sorry. I just—I wasn’t lying.”

(Azula always lies, Azula always lies, Azula always lies. Even with blood and semen down her thighs, that never changes.)

“Ah, that’s right. How could I have forgotten? You were delusional that day, hallucinating and going on about your mother. Of course. You weren’t lying. You’re just insane. All you are is a psychotic little girl; how could I have forgotten? I have no idea how I produced something as worthless as you.”

She doesn’t want her father to see her cry, but he does. He doesn’t relish in the sight; he never has. Instead, he looks away in disgust.

She wishes he would look at her with golden eyes that match her own. She wishes he would touch her, a hand caressing her cheek or something worse even. She wishes he would tell her how much he loves her, how perfect she is. She hates herself for wanting any of it.

Azula leaves with her cheeks bone-dry, but her eyes are still watering. She fumbles with her phone outside the prison. She needs to talk to Mai. She needs to be held again by someone who doesn’t want to know her carnally, even if Mai is lying about caring about Azula. She’s willing to pretend. Today, Azula needs that.

She unblocks Mai’s number and begins to ask Mai to drop everything for her.

She’s halfway done when she realizes just how pathetic she is. Azula deletes the message.

(She’s almost lucid right now. She sees her mother, smiling sadly at her, but she’s so tired of screaming that instead, she sits for them, still and limp and not at all like herself. They still won’t take the straitjacket off.

“Has your father ever touched you?”

Her face remains unchanged. “He’s my father,” she drawls, “he would have to touch me at some point.”

“Azula, has he ever touched you inappropriately?”

“Isn’t that a sick thought?” she laughs, her stomach aching from the effort.

“Please answer the question,” the doctor—Hama, she thinks she hears the others call her—says. “What you said earlier—”

Azula’s mouth curls upward into a smile. “I’m his daughter. What do you think?” She’s not sure if she sounds bored or disgusted. She’s not sure if she feels either. She’s not sure if she feels anything right now. Before they can say anything further, she yawns, “Anyway, it’s like you said, I’m psychotic. Delusional. I don’t know what I’m saying half the time.”

Ursa finally speaks. “I love you, Azula. I want you to tell them the truth about what he does to you.”

“Go away, Mother!”)

Toph turns thirteen on a Sunday, and she comes over with the rest of Zuko’s friends. Azula is fine with this—or she doesn’t care at all, at least—until Katara knocks on her bedroom door, aggressively insisting she come out to play One Card with them.

“I absolutely do not want to be here and will not be wishing Beifong a happy birthday,” Azula says immediately upon sitting down with the group.

“Good to see you too, princess!” Toph laughs. 

“Hi, Azula!” Aang grins, but it’s half-hearted, and he sounds unsure of how to speak to her as if she were a scared animal. The rest of the group follows his lead and gives Toph looks ranging from outright scornful to as close to “subtly” concerned as any of Zuko’s friends can be expected to be.

Azula hates them all.

She doesn’t want to speak to them at all, so she doesn’t. Not until Sokka says something stupid to include her in their conversation about a story Azula wasn’t there for and a joke Azula doesn’t get—“no, you guys are crazy. Azula, you agree with me, right?” It wouldn’t be so bad, except he looks so wide-eyed and nervous just asking her a question, and not out because he’s afraid Azula will incinerate him.

“Why would I agree with you? Any of you? We’re not friends, and you’re essentially holding me hostage right now.”

Katara bites her lip. “… I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I just—I felt bad that at Zuko’s birthday we didn’t—”

“I was happier alone in my room. I didn’t want to celebrate my dear brother’s birthday any more than I want to celebrate Beifong’s,” Azula says coldly.

“If you want to go back, you can,” Suki offers. “We shouldn’t have forced you to come hang out with us. We just… we thought you could use a friend. Or six.”

“Eight if you count my dogs, Momo and Appa,” Aang laughs nervously.

“Fuck you and your dogs.”

Zuko flinches at that. Like their father, Azula finds vulgarity crude, so she rarely lets expletives out of her throat. Like their father, when Azula does wrap her mouth around them, it sounds like thunder. Zuko used to be afraid of electric storms, but Azula always liked them. Azula is half-convinced her brother thinks she is one.

“You kiss your mother with that mouth?” Toph laughs, full and loud.

“My mother thought I was a monster until she found out my father was fucking me. Now, all of a sudden, I’m her daughter again,” Azula says, sneering and half-glad they’ve forgotten their card game.

Toph’s grin slips, but she doesn’t falter as she says, “Your mother sounds like a real bitch. No offense, Sparky.”

“It’s—it’s fine,” Zuko says. He’s still an awful liar, but Azula almost appreciates the effort. Almost.

(She remembers being a little girl following her brother and mother in the park as they walked to the turtle duck pond. She remembers staying four steps behind and wishing one of them would notice. She remembers wishing her mother would choose her over her brother, but she also remembers wishing her brother would choose her over their mother.)

“What are you doing, Toph?” Katara asks, her eyes wild.

“What you dunderheads are too cowardly to do.”

“How are we being cowardly?” Sokka asks. “Just because we recognize that this is a sensitive subject, and we should be kind to Azula right now—”

“You’re not being kind. You’re treating her the way my parents treat me. Like she’s gonna break if you startle her. That’s why you’re all just sitting there and taking her shit condescendingly instead of standing up for yourselves. Do none of you remember how it was when Sparky joined us? He was an asshole too at first, and you guys hated him, but we went blow for blow until he was one of us. Then we found out what a sack of shit his dad was to him, and you all treated him like glass, and he hated it! No one wants to be pitied! Azula, you’re not a different person just because we found out something awful about you, right?” Toph says.

Azula’s knuckles whiten. She doesn’t like feeling raw and exposed like this. She’s not used to being understood, and she doesn’t know how to adjust to the feeling when its roots are in someone she doesn’t understand too. She knows how her father works and how Mai thinks and how Ty Lee feels, but she doesn’t know the first thing about Toph Beifong.

“No, I’m not,” she says. “I still think Zuzu is pathetic, I still don’t know most of your names, and I still hate all of you.” Azula leaves with a sneer and stones in her stomach.

Katara knocks at her door for a second time that day. “I come in peace,” she says when Azula opens the door. “And to apologize.”

“Get on with it,” Azula says, staring at her manicure. She needs to get cuticle oil; hers are starting to look dry.

“I’m sorry I pitied you. I shouldn’t have treated you so condescendingly just because… just because your father is a monster,” Katara says.

“Do you get it now?” Azula asks. “I’m not suddenly a good person because Daddy liked to sneak into my room,—” she doesn’t smile when Katara flinches this time “—and I don’t suddenly feel bad for being so cruel. His actions don’t absolve mine no matter how much you want them to.”

Katara lets out a breathy laugh. “You’re right. You are kind of awful, but, if it’s okay, I do want to be friends. Not because I feel bad that you’re alone.”

Azula stares at her, gold eyes sharp.

“Well, not just because I feel bad that you’re alone. Ty Lee still speaks highly of you. Mai… well, she doesn’t, but I can tell there was a reason she was your friend for so long,” Katara says. “She wouldn’t have put up with you if you weren’t worth it to her.”

It makes Azula’s stomach tense. She knows Mai stayed as long as she did for a reason, but Mai still left in the end. “I don’t associate with the lower class,” Azula says. She’s not a nice person, and Katara seems to think she understands that, but she doesn’t. She can’t if she’s still trying. If she thinks Mai and Ty Lee ever had a choice in Azula loving them.

(Zuko wasn’t wrong when he said Azula treated them like toys. He wasn’t right either, though. Azula used to burn her dolls, and she never would’ve burned Mai and Ty Lee. She only would’ve broken them down into nothing.)

Katara sighs exasperatedly. “I know, and we need to work on that attitude, but you know my dad’s an attorney, right?”

Azula blinks. She hadn’t known that.

“Well, he’s an indigenous rights attorney, so I’m sure that’s not very impressive to you, but still. He went to a tier-two law school and graduated top of his class.”

“And my father went to a tier-one law school and did the same thing. I’ll unblock your number, but we aren’t friends, Katara.”

“You know my name!” Katara smiles, but she looks exhausted from the conversation. “Well, this is a start.”

Azula disagrees, but she keeps her word for once anyway.

Ty Lee is back in school after a month of absences, and Azula wishes she’d died of mono instead. Azula spends a whole school day avoiding her until kuai ball practice. In the locker room, Azula doesn’t linger, but Ty Lee asks to speak with her after practice anyway.

Azula tells her to drop dead.

Everything would be well and fine, except for how dizzy Azula feels during practice lately, but Iroh has been insisting on picking Azula up from school ever since he found out. He doesn’t force her to talk to him, but it doesn’t make the experience any less excruciating.

Especially when he’s running late, and all of Azula’s teammates but Ty Lee have left already.

“Hey, Azula,” Ty Lee says shakily. “I know you don’t want to talk to me, and I know you hate pity, but—”

“But nothing, Ty Lee. I’m not going to apologize to you any sooner than I’ll listen to you tell me how sorry you are that my father spent my childhood grooming me for a lot more than just inheriting the family business,” Azula says, refusing to look in Ty Lee’s direction.

“That’s not it. I mean, I am sorry that he hurt you like that—I’m so sorry I didn’t notice and tell someone, and I’m sorry it went on for so long, but that’s not what I’m here to apologize for.”

Azula sighs and blows a strand of her hair out of her eyes. “And yet you just apologized for all of that.” Sometimes, she really hates Ty Lee. Even when they were friends, even when Ty Lee had yet to betray her, there were times Azula wished more than anything she would shut up.

Ty Lee winces. “I’m sorry. I just… I’m sorry I kissed you without asking first.”

“What?” Of all the things Azula expected Ty Lee to say, that was not one of them.

“That night when I told you—when I… I kissed you. And I didn’t ask if that was okay. I’m sorry I did that. It was wrong, and I shouldn’t have.”

Azula blinks. “You were drunk. Who cares?”

“I do! And—and you’re allowed to care too. You’re allowed to be mad at me for not considering what you wanted. I should’ve asked for your consent first,” Ty Lee says. She looks so determined now it makes Azula uncomfortable.

“I don’t need your permission to be mad at you, Ty Lee,” Azula snarls. “And believe it or not, I have no qualms being mad at you right now.”

Iroh doesn’t pull up, but Azula walks away anyway.

Azula has therapy again.

“Is there anything at all on your mind today?” Wu asks. “It doesn’t have to be about your father. Even if you just want to vent about school, that’s okay. I’m here to listen.”

Azula contemplates for a moment. If she talks about her father, she loses. If she talks about Ty Lee, Wu could twist it to be about her father. She makes up her mind to say nothing.

“It looks like there is something troubling you, Azula. I won’t force you to talk, but I’d like it if you knew that you could without being forced to talk about anything you’re uncomfortable with,” Wu says.

“Is that so?” Azula drawls.

Wu looks excited that Azula said anything. “It is,” she says.

“Interesting,” Azula says.

She says nothing for the rest of the session.

It’s Thursday when Mai shows up at Iroh’s while Zuko is at work.

“Zuzu’s not here,” Azula says.

“I know. I have to run an errand, and you’re coming with me,” Mai says.

Azula could argue, but she doesn’t have anything better to do, so she doesn’t. She just grabs her bag and follows Mai off Iroh’s property. 

Mai offers her an earbud. Azula has never liked Mai’s music, but she accepts it anyway. Mai lets her pick the playlist. It’s nicer than Mai would normally be, but it’s not intolerably pitiable. Other than that, they don’t talk much on the way to the store. They’ve always been good at comfortable silences, communicating with just their eyes.

Even now.

“What are you getting?” Azula asks when they get to Target.

“Eggs, milk, baby food, and nicotine gum,” Mai says.

“You don’t smoke,” Azula says. “Michi would be so disappointed if you did.”

Mai rolls her eyes, but Azula can see her heart’s not in it. She supposes it’s too much to ask Mai to treat her like before. She supposes it’s nice that Mai is trying at all.

“The gum is for you, Azula. It’s gross that you smoke, and you should quit before you get cancer.”

Azula’s eyes sharpen into a glare. “Whatever.”

Mai almost smiles at her, but it’s slight and shaky. Azula still wants to cling to it like it’s hers. It’s not hers; Mai’s smiles and her almost smiles have never been Azula’s, and they never will be.

“I’m not promising I’ll chew it,” Azula says quickly to quash the flickering feeling inside her. “I’m not saying I’ll stop smoking either or that we're friends again, but you can buy it for me.”

Mai sighs. “I should’ve seen that coming.”

“You really should have,” Azula agrees.

(She almost wants to stop smoking just to see Mai smile at her. She almost wants to be someone else entirely just to make Mai feel something other than frustration. She doesn’t want either of those things, though. Not really. That’s not the kind of person Azula is.)

Azula lets Mai drag her to the nicotine gum anyway. She’s always been a liar like that.

Chapter Text

Azula isn’t sure what possessed her to invite Katara to smoke with her, but she wants it bloodied and buried as she watches Katara cough like she’s never so much as touched a pack. “I shouldn’t have invited you,” Azula says, blowing smoke in Katara’s face just to see the other girl’s eyes water.

Katara takes another drag, holding it in her throat for a beat before her lungs reject the concept again, and she’s hacking up the smoke. “I’ll get it eventually,” she says, but Azula doesn’t believe her in the slightest. “Really, I will.”

No one can say Katara isn’t persistent as she tries again. This time, she just barely manages to hold back her cough.

Azula exhales her next drag through her nose. “Maybe there’s hope for you yet,” she says. It’s supposed to be cruel, but Katara looks proud of herself, so it must not have come out right.

They smoke in silence with Katara’s coughing decreasing until she’s halfway through her cigarette and Azula is on her second. It makes Azula feel almost guilty, and she can’t place why. Except, of course she can.

(Azula has always likened herself a people person, but, truthfully, she’s only ever been good at reading the only people who’ve ever mattered: her father, her former friends, and her brother, once upon a time. The worst part of reading them, however, has always been reading how they make her feel. Azula is supposed to be a monster, and monsters aren’t supposed to have things like guilt and shame pried out of them.)

“Mai wants me to stop smoking,” she says conversationally. “I haven’t spoken to Ty Lee, but I think she agrees. I don’t particularly care what either of them thinks anymore, though. They’re both traitors.”

Katara stares at the cigarette in Azula’s hand, and her eyes soften. “For whatever it’s worth, Azula, I think you should stop too. It’s awful for you. What if you get lung cancer?”

Azula smiles, but her lips thin too much for it, and it looks horribly plastic on her face. “Everything is bad for me, Katara. Anything could kill me,” she says. “A month ago I would’ve burned you for being such a bore.” Her eyes are sharp as she says it, but she can’t tell if Katara believes her. People never have, especially not when she tells the truth.

“I’m glad this isn’t a month ago, then,” Katara says. “And I’m not a bore. You’re just an asshole.” It’s tentative, but it’s there.

Red lips flicker like lightning.

Azula thinks she understands now why she invited Katara.

Iroh picks her up from the park, and he couldn’t look more somber if he tried. He doesn’t even comment on the acrid stench of nicotine and smoke surrounding her. It’s pathetic. Just because her father is a rapist doesn’t mean he gets to look at her like that. Especially not when he’s had so much time to get used to the idea. It had only taken Azula a month to compartmentalize and accept that detail about her life; anything longer is laughable.

Azula makes a face of disinterest and asks, “Who died?” so he’ll stop making that face.

He looks at her slowly and painfully. “Niece—”

“No. You don’t get to call me that,” she says with disdain. She hates this little charade of him pretending to be her uncle. The blood they share has meant nothing to him, and he doesn’t get to change his mind now.

“My apologies, Azula,” he says. “It’s your father.”

She tenses. There is nothing good she can take from that man now. There is nothing good that man would give to her now.

“There’s been… an accident. In the prison. He’s dead.”

“You’re mistaken,” she says reflexively. Her father is infallible. No one can touch him, and no one can kill him. Azula knows he’s a mortal man, but he can’t be dead. Not even now.

“I identified the body. I—I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not. You hated him.”

He says nothing to defend himself, and Azula says nothing to persecute him.

(For the first time in her life, Azula is safe. Her father cannot touch her. Not if he’s dead. Not if Iroh is sure it was him in that morgue. Somehow, she doesn’t feel relieved. Somehow, she doesn’t feel safe at all. She doesn’t feel anything at all.)

Azula locks herself in her room. Zuko sits with his back to the door all night. He doesn’t say anything, but Azula hears him breathing as she sits on the opposite side of the door, too afraid to sink into her bed. Ozai is dead, and he cannot touch her, but she will never shake the feeling of his hands all over her if she lies in her bed. She will never shake the feeling of breaking everything in sight and hoping her brother will ask if she’s okay. She will never shake the reality that he told her she was too loud.

(Part of Azula hopes that this is his way of apologizing. Part of Azula hopes that her brother cares more than she knows how to.)

Azula feels like the little girl clinging to her big brother for protection that she never was in childhood.

She’ll never tell Zuko that.

She could never tell Zuko that.

Azula doesn’t sleep that night, and neither does Zuko. It’s the closest thing to siblings they’ve been in years.

Azula goes to therapy for a second time this week, and Wu asks if there’s anything on her mind.

(Her father who spent a good fraction of her life raping her is dead now, her hair’s been coming out in clumps in the shower, and she has so few friends she’s resorted to smoking with the likes of her brother who hates her’s friends.)

“Nothing at all,” Azula hums.

“That’s all right. Do you want to hear about my week instead?” Wu asks.

“Whatever.”

Azula half-listens as Wu recounts the events of her week, starting with a truly awful first date. She talks about her niece, Meng, and her sick cat and every mundane thing Azula does not care about until she feels herself bursting at the seams.

“My father is dead,” Azula says suddenly. “It’s been a day. We don’t even have a shrine for him yet. And I don’t feel anything about it.”

Wu looks surprised that Azula said anything at all. She recovers quickly. “It’s possible you’re in shock. It’s a common response to loss,” she says. “You might find yourself entering the stages of grief soon.”

Azula shakes her head. “Father was a monster. He doesn’t deserve my grief.” She doesn’t know if she believes herself. She doesn’t know if she cares either way. Her father is dead, and whether or not she grieves him makes no difference. Her father is dead, and whether or not she believed he was a monster makes no difference.

“You think your father was a monster. Because of his abuse?” Wu asks.

“No,” Azula smiles, her lips stretched thin. “My father was a monster for the same reason I am.”

Wu’s eyes widen. “And what do you think makes you a monster, Azula?” she asks.

Azula glances at the clock. “It seems our time is up, Wu,” she says haughtily. “I’ll be going now.”

“Azula—”

She slams the door shut, and she tells Iroh she’s going to wait in the car while he pays. She sits in silence, and she thinks of how she has always been her father’s daughter. She will always be her father’s daughter.

Mai texts Azula her condolences. Azula doesn’t respond; Mai doesn’t mean it anyway.

No one means their condolences. Iroh still hasn’t even set up a shrine as he makes the preparations for Ozai’s funeral as his oldest living male relative. Technically, it should be Zuzu’s responsibility, but Azula guesses he’s too thin-skinned to bear it.

(It’s not like Azula wants to bear that burden either.)

They skip the first six steps as far as Azula knows. She thinks maybe they did wash Ozai’s lips, but she thinks Zuko would have mentioned it if they’d washed the corpse without her. There’s still no shrine, and they still haven’t announced his death to the spirit world. Azula cannot imagine they did the pillow decorations either. She doesn’t even consider asking about food offerings. She cannot cook, and she cannot imagine Iroh would want to cook for the deceased if he won’t even set up a shrine for his brother.

Azula leaves the room when she thinks Iroh is about to call the nearest shrine. She doesn’t know why. She just can’t bear to stand there and listen to it.

When it comes time for the service, Azula wears her best, and she watches silently and obediently as Ozai would have wanted her to. She says nothing, and no one but their family attends the service anyway. Not even Zhao dares to mourn Ozai.

Azula thinks she’s the only person left who ever could. She doesn’t know if she will. She still feels nothing at all.

She doesn’t even register how much time has passed until it’s time to gather the bones. She stares at the ashes and bones of her father, holding wooden chopsticks and wondering how it will feel to pass her father’s bones to her brother with them. She hasn’t done this since she was eight, and Grandfather Azulon had died the same night Ursa abandoned the family.

Her first kotsuage had been Lu Ten’s earlier that same year. She had gasped when she watched her uncle and father pass the bones to each other like that. Her father had struck Zuko for trying to pass her something with his chopsticks before, and she had never been allowed to pass anything with them herself either.

(“It is because of the association with death,” Ursa had explained. “It’s like how we don’t stick our chopsticks upright in our food. It would be disrespectful.” Ursa bit her tongue and said nothing of the disrespect with which Azula spoke of death. She knew better than to handle her chopsticks poorly, but she was callous and cold when she spoke to her poor, grieving uncle. Ursa had asked what could ever compel her to speak that way, and Azula had suggested she was just a monster. Azula doesn’t remember what happened next.)

Zuko drops the thyroid bone. He’s never been skilled with his chopsticks, letting grains of rice slip from his hold, but even he couldn’t fuck this up on accident. Not when her father has already been so dishonored at every step of the funeral rites.

Iroh starts to laugh, and a red-faced Zuko’s lips curve upwards, but Azula just picks the bone up in silence.

Her cheeks are damp as she does.

Azula would grieve a monster after all.

The forty-nine-day grieving period begins with a storm in the middle of March.

“You dropped it on purpose,” Azula accuses in the living room.

“It was an accident! It was just kind of funny, that’s all!” Zuko says.

“It was the thyroid bone. That’s the most important bone in the ritual,” she says coldly. “I know you’re a pathetic fool, Zuzu, but even you know that.”

“Azula, your brother meant no disrespect. I know that you are mourning right now, but please. Do not fight with each other,” Iroh says.

“He never did have any respect,” Azula says. “Father was right. You can’t even respect him in death, Zuzu.”

“Don’t call me that! Don’t tell me I don’t have any respect! Fa—Ozai didn’t even have enough respect in him not to beat his son and wife or rape his daughter!” Zuko goes pale as soon as he’s said it. “Azula, I’m so sorry—I shouldn’t have—”

“You should never have been born at all.”

Azula closes her bedroom door quietly, and she sinks into her bed and waits. She doesn’t know what she’s waiting for.

Iroh comes to her door first. “I am sorry that your brother would say something so cruel to you, but that does not make it okay to be cruel back,” he says. “I am not mad at you, however. I will leave your dinner in the hall for you until you are ready to see him at the dining table again. For whatever it is worth, though, the water flows, Azula. It flows both ways.”

She says nothing at all.

Sokka has been sleeping over almost every night since then, and Zuko only talks to Azula to tell her he’s sorry until he stops doing that too. She hears Sokka tell him that it’s okay if he’s not sure how to talk to Azula right now as long as he doesn’t use her abuse against her again; this is a hard time for both of them, and all Zuko has to do is try to be there for her however he can, even if that means just delivering meals she won’t touch to her room. Azula thinks it’s bullshit.

Azula also thinks Zuko has been breaking the rule about not engaging in any form of celebration or entertainment during the grieving period. She hears her brother crying or screaming sometimes, but mostly, she hears him talking to Sokka, and she hears Sokka trying to make him laugh.

It’s not until April on day thirty-two of the grieving period, that Azula’s resolve to mourn appropriately finally breaks as she watches Sokka and Zuko laughing quietly in the kitchen over some awful joke Sokka told that Zuko doesn’t even get.

Azula doesn’t know why she invites Mai over. She’s seen glimpses of the older girl at school and in Iroh’s residence during the grieving period. Azula has avoided her as much as she can. She can’t place what would compel her to want to see the older girl now.

(She doesn’t want to be alone anymore. She’s shut both Zuko and Iroh out in the grieving period. She’s refusing to see Wu until the forty-nine days are up. She hasn’t responded to Katara’s attempts to make sure she’s all right. She told Ty Lee to go fuck herself when she had tried to offer her condolences after practice. She has no friends. She doesn’t even have her hallucinations. All she has left are cigarettes and the burning against her finger pads.)

Mai calls when she arrives instead of knocking or ringing the bell. She did that when they were kids too.

Azula hits the decline call button, and she hurries to the door before anyone else can realize Mai is waiting outside. She did that when they were kids too.

It always felt criminal to have friends over, even when she had permission.

“Hi, Azula,” Mai says, unsmiling. Her eyes look darker in this light, or maybe it’s the exhaustion in them.

“Mai,” Azula says. “Come in.”

Mai obliges, and she follows Azula to her room in silence. Their hands brush at the doorway, and Azula retracts hers immediately. There was never a time when she wouldn’t have. Even at their closest, Azula had always kept Mai an arm’s length away. Physical intimacy was never really their thing.

Azula wonders if Mai thinks that’s because of Ozai now.

She almost regrets every centimeter of distance between them. Almost, but Azula was not built to regret. Remorse is as unfamiliar as a mother’s nurture to her. She does not care to learn its presence now. She doubts she will ever care to.

They sit in Azula’s bedroom with straight spines and closed palms.

“So, you wanted to have a slumber party,” Mai says.

“It’s not a party,” Azula snaps. “I don’t know what Zuzu has told you, but some of us are still grieving.”

Mai’s mouth twitches. It looks unpleasant. “Noted,” she says. “He’s had Sokka over a lot, right?” There’s something strange to her voice. Something Azula has never heard from Mai. It’s fond, but it’s impatient in a way Mai rarely ever gets. It sounds foreign in her throat. Azula doesn’t know what to make of it.

“He has. They’re quite noisy,” Azula says.

“I see.”

“I can hear half the things they say from here most of the time. It’s… I knew Zuko hated our father, but he keeps laughing. He’s not allowed to be happy right now.” Azula hasn’t admitted this to anyone. She still has plausible deniability.

Mai looks at Azula with bright eyes. Her mouth twitches again—open then closed. “What about you? Did you hate him?” she asks after a moment.

Azula blinks. “He was my father,” she says simply. It’s not simple. It was never simple, will never be simple. Azula knows that more intimately than anyone else ever could. It still feels simple when she crushes into nothing more than words in her throat, minimizing it into absolutely nothing.

“That’s the problem, isn’t it,” Mai says, and it’s not a question at all.

Azula laughs for the first time in months. It’s a humorless, ugly thing, but Mai doesn’t flinch at its sound. She just stares at Azula, her eyes brighter than Azula has ever seen them.

“I brought your favorite mochi,” Mai says when Azula has quieted herself. She produces it from her bag, and Azula accepts it even though she can’t imagine eating it. “Zuko said there wasn’t a shrine or I would have brought an offering too.”

“You hated my father,” Azula accuses.

“I did,” Mai says flatly.

“You wouldn’t have brought an offering.”

“I would have.”

“Why?”

“It’s like you said: he was your father.”

Azula eats one of the mochis after all. It feels like poison in her stomach, and it tastes like nothing by the time she’s done chewing, but she eats every bite dutifully in spite of that.

Azula doesn’t kick Mai out into the bathroom when it comes time to change for bed. She’s numb to her own body at this point, and it’s been seen and touched and devoured in its entirety. There would be no point hiding it from a girl who knows what has been done to it.

Mai doesn’t look as she changes into her pajamas anyway. The whole process is mechanical for Azula as the older girl seems to fixate on the wall before her. There’s no flush of red on her cheeks or neck, but Mai is almost strangely determined to not look at Azula.

“I wouldn’t care if you looked,” Azula says. “You don’t have to stare at the wall. We’re both girls, and it’s nothing that hasn’t been looked at before.”

Mai winces, but she looks out the corner of her eye at a half-dressed Azula. Her gaze flickers down to a scar on Azula’s sternum and lingers there. “… You’re definitely too skinny now,” Mai says instead of asking.

Azula smiles. “He fractured my sternum once. They had to do surgery to fix it. The scar never faded. He said it was disappointing that I was marred like Zuzu.”

Mahogany eyes water, or maybe it’s a trick of the light. “I remember that. You said you fractured it during training.”

“Azula always lies. You know that.”

“I told you to stop saying that already,” Mai says, her voice breaking its usual flatness. “You don’t have to play these games every time you feel vulnerable.”

Azula says nothing and finishes dressing.

“You’re allowed to hate him,” Mai says. “And you’re allowed to mourn him too. He was abusive and awful, but he was also your father. If you have complicated feelings about him, that’s fine.”

“Thank you for your permission,” Azula says flatly and forcefully all at once.

Mai pushes her waistband down. “Look at me,” she says. “Look at my legs.”

Azula doesn’t know what compels her to obey the command, but something does, and so golden eyes take in the raised scars lining the tops of Mai’s thighs. She does not reach out to touch. She does not ask how Mai got them. She does not do anything but swallow the dryness of her throat.

Some of the scars look new, but most of them seem old, worn in and fading to the best of their ability. Azula can’t help but wonder if she’s ever known Mai. She’d always known, of course, that Mai spends most days miserably numb and bored when Azula isn’t clawing that feeling of being alive out of her, but she’d never imagined this. The desire for pain is not unfamiliar to Azula, but the actuality of it so self-inflicted and raw is a stranger in her home. She can’t help but feel ever so slightly envious of Mai’s control over her body, even as she understands that these scars are the product of Mai’s complete lack of control over her life.

“My parents caused these,” Mai says. “I may have been the one to draw blood, but they’re still from my parents. They’re still from my mom telling me to be quiet and polite and docile all the time. They’re still from my dad not ever trying to know me at all. They’re still from the pressure of having to be their perfect daughter all the time. I know it’s not the same, but my parents gave me these scars, and I might still love them, but it doesn’t make it okay. It doesn’t mean I owe them my forgiveness. They raised me, but they don’t treat me how parents should. Filial piety says that if the relationship is not mutual, we are not at fault if we abandon it. I’m allowed to hate them as much as I love them, Azula. It’s the same for you.” She pulls her waistband up over the scars, but Azula’s gaze does not move.

“I’m sorry,” she says finally. “For everything. Especially for threatening your father’s career.” It’s the first apology she’s ever given because she wanted to.

“It’s not all right,” Mai says. “I’ll forgive you one day, though.”

(Azula is eleven-years-old, and her mother is gone, but Mai’s is still ever-present. Azula wishes Michi would leave too. She’s never liked Mai’s mother, least of all now that Mai is “becoming a lady.” There are always more rules for Mai to follow now, and Azula can see the way Mai sinks in upon herself as each new rule is introduced.

Azula thinks she hates Michi in a way she can’t hate Ursa. 

Ursa is not a mother at all as far as Azula is concerned; Michi is too much of a mother.

She’s always there, lurking in wait to reprimand Mai and then concaving into nothing when Azula spits flames from her petulant tongue. Azula supposes she should use that ability to Mai’s advantage, but more than anything else, Azula just wants to make Michi submit like a dog.

Azula wants her best friend back, not this pathetic shadow of a girl.)

The grieving period ends, and Azula attends a final service. She doesn’t apologize to Zuko, but she does offer him some of the mochi Mai gifted her. He accepts. Azula didn’t think he would accept.

The next day, Mai invites Azula and Zuko both to her seventeenth birthday soiree. Zuko was already going to go. Azula saying yes seems to catch them both off guard.

Mai doesn’t quite smile at Azula, but her lips do twitch. It doesn’t look unpleasant this time.

Azula’s day is ruined when Chan shows up at her house while Iroh and Zuko are both out. Worse still, Chan brings Ruon-Jian with him.

“Please don’t slam the door in my face,” Chan says. “I mean, you totally have the right to, but please don’t.”

“What do you want, Chan?” Azula asks.

“To apologize,” he says.

“Me too,” Ruon-Jian says.

Azula doesn’t want their apologies. She tells them as much. “You can both die,” she says, going to shut the door.

Chan’s foot slides between the doorframe and the door before she can close it all the way. “Wait, Azula, seriously,” he says. “I’m so sorry I tried to pressure you about sex.”

“I’m sorry I kissed you without asking,” Ruon-Jian blurts out.

“I don’t forgive either of you. Now get off of my property,” Azula says flatly. “Before I tase you both.”

They run away with their tails between their legs. It doesn’t make Azula feel better.

Zuko’s friends are Mai’s friends now, and Ty Lee is Mai’s friend too. Azula knows this, but she still feels her nails bite into her palms when she sees them as she enters.

“Happy birthday,” she says, clutching a small parcel tightly in one hand.

“Thanks,” Mai says. “I didn’t think you’d really come. I didn’t think you’d get me anything either.”

Azula’s skin doesn’t flush, but discomfort rises in her chest. “Gifts are customary,” she says stiffly.

Mai’s eyes soften a fraction. Not much. “Right. I’ll open it later. Put it in my room for now.” She doesn’t remind Azula which room is hers. She doesn’t have to. Azula remembers every inch of this house.

She leaves the present in Mai’s room and tries not to think about the last time she was there. It looks the same as it did then. Azula is out in a minute, but she still feels claustrophobic having been in there at all.

“Hey, Azula,” Suki says in the hallway.

“Suki,” Azula nods.

They don’t pretend it’s good to see each other. Azula thinks the last time they spoke is still fresh in Suki’s memory. She hopes it is, at least. Suki should remember Azula with all her most jagged edges, and she should remember that Azula will go for the throat if she’s treated like glass again.

Suki ducks into the bathroom, and Azula goes back to the living room.

Ty Lee, Zuko, Toph, and Sokka are laughing together while Katara, Aang, and Mai converse. Azula takes the opportunity to slip out onto the balcony. She pulls a cigarette from the case in her bag and places it between her lips. She fumbles around in her bag, trying to locate her matchbook.

“I thought you were going to chew the gum,” Mai says.

“Isn’t it rude to abandon your guests?” Azula asks.

Mai settles beside Azula and says, “They’ll get over it. Chew the gum. It was expensive.”

“Well, it is your birthday,” Azula sighs. She fishes the nicotine gum from her purse. “Chew it with me, though. The taste is awful, and I won’t suffer alone.” Azula’s never been the type. She’s always liked for others to suffer with her. Even when they were kids.

“I’ve never even smoked,” Mai says.

Azula plucks the cigarette from between her lips and offers it to Mai. Mai accepts with a sigh and inhales as Azula strikes a match and brings its flame to the tip of the cigarette. It’s not a bad first drag. Mai doesn’t even cough.

“You’re much better at this than Katara. Maybe you should pick it up,” Azula says.

Mai pulls the cigarette out from between her lips to exhale. “No way in hell,” she says.

Azula stares at the space both their mouths have occupied. “We’ve never shared an indirect kiss before,” she says absentmindedly. “Not even when we were kids.” She doesn’t know what to make of it.

Mai’s cheeks and neck both flush red as she drops the still-lit cigarette from the balcony—a fire hazard if Azula ever saw one. Still, nothing catches flame. “Shut up, and give me the gum already.”

Azula pops one piece into her mouth and places another in Mai’s open palm. Her brittle nails drag over the flesh as she pulls away like she’s been burnt.

They stand there chewing for a minute as the muscles of Mai’s face twitch, trying not to grimace at the unpleasant taste of the gum. “Let’s go back,” Mai says finally, swallowing the gum even though she knows better.

“Wait,” Azula says. She pulls out a travel spray bottle and spritzes the skin of Mai’s neck on either side. It’s her signature perfume. “Hands,” she orders. When Mai obliges, she pulls out her hand sanitizer and places a drop on Mai’s palm. “You’ll still smell like cigarettes but only if people get too close.”

“Thanks.”

Azula has been keeping secrets her whole life. This time feels different. 

(This is not telling the police her father would never hurt her mother. This is not swearing on her grandfather’s grave that Zuko broke his arm climbing a tree. This is not cleaning the blood between her legs and on her sheets before anyone else can see. This is not guilt and shame and fear she pretends not to feel. This is something so much lighter and kinder than any of that.)

“It’s only because it’s your birthday.”

Mai smiles, and Azula blinks at the sight as if she’s looked directly into the sun. It’s been years since Mai smiled at her like that. Azula’s missed it more than she realized.

“Azula always lies,” Mai says.

Azula doesn’t correct her. She doesn’t smile back either. It’s not progress. Not really.

Not when Azula spends the whole dinner avoiding conversation wherever she can and pointedly not looking at Ty Lee/

Zuko extends an olive branch.

“Do you wanna go to that stationery store you like?” he asks.

Azula says yes because she’s done with schoolwork for the day and needs something to do to distract from how badly her head hurts from not smoking and how badly her mouth tastes from the nicotine gum and how dizzy she is from not eating. It’s still a yes, and Zuko still manages a smile that looks less and less like a grimace for it.

They still don’t discuss their father’s death or their most recent fight. Or the fight before that one, where Azula wielded electricity like the heat that swallowed half her brother’s face. Or the childhoods filled with resentment and cruelty and absolutely no love for each other. Or the fact that Azula’s childhood was not at all what Zuko thought it was. Or anything at all real.

Azula can’t imagine ever discussing any of it. She doubts Zuko can either.

“If you want anything, I can pay for it,” he says, trying to sound like the big brother Azula has never known him to be. “I make a lot in tips.”

“What is it exactly that you do, Zuzu?” Azula asks. She’s seen Zuko leave for work, and she’s listened to him ramble about his day at dinner, but she’s never asked what it is her brother is employed to do.

He scratches the back of his head nervously. “I, uh, work at Uncle’s tea shop. The one he owns, you know, The Jasmine Dragon.”

Azula didn’t know any of that. She’s ignored her brother and her uncle as much as humanly possible the whole time she’s lived here, and they were never discussed in the faux sanctuary of the Minamoto estate before then.

Azula says nothing in response. She just picks up a weighted pencil and balances it between her fingers. She doesn’t like the way it feels so she puts it back.

In the end, Azula buys absolutely nothing. She doesn’t let Zuko buy it for her either. She can’t stand the idea.

On the sixtieth day following her father’s death, Azula misses school to hear about his will. This is the bullet she’s been waiting to bite since she last saw the man, and it’s worse than she expected.

Zhao is the executor. It’s not something he does much of nor is it within the realm of his specialty, but Ozai appointed him to the role in his will. 

In the news, he said that he couldn’t believe such a cruel man was someone he represented and saw so frequently.

He doesn’t bother lying like that to Azula.

“Princess, it’s good to see you. My condolences about your father,” he says. “Though, perhaps you’re happy about that. I wouldn’t blame you. What he did to you was… unspeakably cruel.”

Azula does not flinch. As her legal guardian, Iroh is here with her. Zuko is too. Neither of them will be inheriting anything. Azula doesn’t think she will either.

(All of her blood, all of her shame, all of her compliance, it was all for nothing.)

Not after her father all but disowned her the last time they spoke.

“That is enough, Zhao,” Iroh says. “Do not speak to Azula more than you must.”

“Very well, Iroh,” Zhao smiles. It makes Azula’s stomach curl. “I’ll make this quick. The will has been probated, and you will be seeing your inheritance once you come of age.” He hands her her copy of the will.

Her eyes flit over it, taking it in.

It hasn’t changed since she last saw it the day Zuko was dismissed and disowned. Nothing was taken from her in the end, but it’s all blood money.

Azula might still be set to inherit everything she was promised, but she still remembers being told she deserved nothing, and she was not Ozai’s daughter. That inheritance is tainted by more than just what she suffered for it.

“Your father loved you too much,” Zhao says, “but he still loved you.”

Zuko punches him, and Iroh makes no move to stop him. “Leave her alone, you freak,” he says.

“Don’t be jealous that your father never loved you,” Zhao spits out.

“If you continue to speak such foul words, I will have no choice but to believe you were complicit in my brother’s abuse of his daughter and see you taken care of. Do not test me, Zhao. Prisoners do not take kindly to pedophiles,” Iroh says, his bright teeth glaring at the man before him, and his eyes burning coldly. The family resemblance between him and Ozai is rarely this clear.

Azula flinches at the sight.

Kuai ball practice has been hard on her lately. Kuai ball games have been harder still. Azula is hissing to her teammates which side to target in this game, which weak spot to take advantage of, but her head is spinning.

She serves with perfect form despite the trembling in her legs.

She hasn’t eaten anything but a mint in three days. She’s tried to eat the mochi Mai bought her, but it hurts to chew, and it hurts worse to swallow it. Nothing wants to stay down lately.

She should have tried harder, she realizes as the dizziness worsens with each dive and return. She’s not playing anywhere close to her usual level. Her skill on the court was once a point of pride; now, she just feels like a failure as she can barely keep up with her teammates.

“Are you okay, Azula?” Ty Lee asks between sets. “You don’t look too good.”

Azula swats at Ty Lee’s hand. “I’m fine,” she snaps.

Ty Lee bites her lip, but she doesn’t push her luck any further.

Everything goes black on Azula’s next serve, and Ty Lee screams.

The next part is a blur. 

All Azula knows is people keep throwing around words that make it all sound too fucking clinical and her uncle keeps apologizing for letting it get this bad and thinking she was just losing weight because she was depressed and all this disgustingly pathetic bullshit that makes her want to gouge his eyes out.

And then Zuko is crying and apologizing like any of this was his doing as they check her into an eating disorder treatment center as if Azula did this because she was stupid enough to think she wasn’t pretty.

As if Azula has some kind of problem she doesn’t see.

There’s nothing at all wrong with her. Not since the antipsychotics started working, at least.

(Nothing except that she’s a few kilograms underweight, and her stomach rejects the notion of food, and she wants to die at the thought of losing the control over her body that hunger gives her.)

“Azula, my name is Dr. Yagoda. Let’s start by discussing how you got here.”

“My uncle is a fool, that’s how,” Azula drawls. She doesn’t know if she sounds convincing or not. She doesn’t know if she cares.

Chapter Text

The first thing Azula learns about the eating disorder center—the first thing that matters, at least—is that she isn’t allowed to flush the toilet. Not before someone comes through to check that she isn’t throwing up in there. Purging, they call it. 

Azula has suffered silently through humiliation after humiliation in the last few years at the hands of her father, but she can’t help the rush of blood and heat to her cheeks at this. This is a new kind of misery for her, a new shame to carry in her stomach like lead. She can’t even be trusted to use the bathroom without raking her throat till her stomach has nothing left to vomit up. Someone will see her every excretion that passes into the toilet bowl now.

She hates her uncle for sending her here, and she hates her brother for crying like it’s his to cry about, and she hates Ty Lee for screaming when she fainted, and she hates her father for dying and leaving her to this miserable fate to begin with.

Most of all, Azula hates herself. She’s killed any chance at control over her body now. She’s not even allowed control over her bedroom door here. She feels like she’s back in the Minamoto estate.

“I understand that you have not been afforded safety and privacy in your room in the past,” Dr. Yagoda had said. “I’m sorry, but while we can offer you safety here, we cannot offer you privacy. Your bedroom door has to stay open until we know we can trust you not to hurt yourself, but I promise you that no one here will lay a hand on you, Azula. Your well-being is our priority.”

Azula hates Dr. Yagoda too.

She wants to smoke, and she wants to burn, but she’s not allowed to do either of those things. They let her keep the nicotine gum, but it still tastes awful on her tongue, and it only feels a fraction as good as an actual cigarette between her lips. It doesn’t come anywhere close to the feeling of an open flame smothered between her fingertips until the flesh starts to burn.

Azula chews the Agni-damned gum anyway.

It’s what Mai would tell her to do.

Mai wasn’t at the kuai ball game Azula passed out at, but Azula is sure that Ty Lee is going to tell the older girl soon if she hasn’t already. 

She didn’t have to surrender her phone, but she had left it powered down with her uncle anyway. The experience will be unpleasant enough without Katara texting her to ask how she’s doing every half hour, let alone Mai’s reserved concern.

She’s chewing the gum and doing push-ups because she can’t get even weaker when one of the nurses reprimands her.

“You’re not allowed to exercise unless it’s part of your treatment plan,” he tells her.

Azula spits in his face and smiles when all he does is take it. She doesn’t feel strong, though. She doesn’t know if she ever will again.

Dinner is awful. It’s even worse than dinner with Zuko and Iroh. Azula is assigned a babysitter the whole meal to make sure she forces down every bite of food on her plate and to make sure she sits in place for a half-hour following finishing every bite, and she’s told that this will be a recurring event until she proves that she can be trusted to eat her meals and keep them down. She’s never hated eating more.

“I’m not a child,” she snarls.

“No one is saying you are,” the nurse says.

“Then leave me alone.”

The nurse does not leave. Azula eats every bite of food before her, and she does not throw up.

She doesn’t cry when she gets to her room either. She isn’t afforded the privacy that would allow her to do such a thing.

Azula never thought she would miss her brother and uncle. She never thought she would miss her father. She misses them all. She misses everything that isn’t this horrible place and its noose around her throat.

She’d even take her wretched mother over this.

She’d even take her tenth birthday on loop. The pain of being split open, pried apart like an oyster, having something ripped out of her over and over again. If she survived it once, survived it looming over her every day after, it would be less humiliating than this.

(Beauty infects men with weakness; immodesty rots their control into nothing. Azula has always had both in spades. It was her fault her father touched her like he touched her mother. She was the root of what was wrong with him.)

At least she would understand what she had done wrong to deserve it.

Azula rises with the sun as she always has, and she takes her medication with the rest of the girls. It tastes worse somehow, bitter on her tongue and melting too quickly. Technically, she’s allowed to go back to sleep now that she’s medicated for the day, but she sees no point in futilely chasing a few more hours of sleep before being ripped awake and forced to swallow and sit with breakfast.

She can’t run, and she can’t smoke, and she can’t do anything that would take the edge off, so she does nothing. She sits, straight-spined and close-palmed, in the bed with the door open, and she waits for two hours to turn to dust and breakfast to be force fed down her throat. She feels, somehow, like she is waiting for her father. This is not her bed, and this not her room, and he is nothing more than ash in an urn, but she thinks she will never truly outlive him.

When breakfast comes, Azula imagines she is chewing glass or spiders or anything that would feel like something more than mush. She’s not allowed to chew each bite into nothingness anymore; the nurses dislike these tactics that she thought of as her own but has never really owned because every other girl here has thought the same thing.

Azula’s mind is not her own, and Azula’s body is not her own. Nothing of Azula’s is her own.

She’s dragged through the motions of the day until she finds herself sitting in a plastic chair arranged into a circle with other plastic chairs and other girls whose bodies aren’t their own sitting in them. Then, Azula sits, and she listens to the whining complaints of her fellow inpatients as Dr. Yagoda leads what she dubs “group therapy.”

Azula has only been to therapy with Wu, and she’s taken an almost violent delight in her silence there, but she doesn’t think that therapy should ever be whatever this is as she listens to yet another girl cry about her body and how displaced she feels within it.

She bites down a snort as another girl rubs the pathetic girl’s back and Dr. Yagoda says something soothing and weak and meaningless.

The girl next to Azula brushes their knees together.

Azula glances up out of the corner of her eye.

The freckled girl offers an amused smirk; Azula trades her a sneer.

“Zirin, Azula, do either of you have anything you’d like to share?” Dr. Yagoda asks, eyeing the two of them carefully. She has been around a long time—longer than she would probably like to admit. Azula has no doubt she has seen girls like both of them before. Azula has no doubt, however, that she has never seen a girl as cruel as herself before.

Nothing of Azula’s is her own, but that only means that she is her father’s daughter, and her father did not raise her up to be anything less than his image mirrored.

She smiles, her lips stretching thin from the effort, and she says, “Not a thing.”

“I’m all good, Yagoda,” the girl, Zirin, agrees.

Azula doesn’t look at her, but she can hear the laughter in Zirin’s voice. She almost thinks she likes this girl.

“Very well,” Dr. Yagoda says with the slightest hint of disapproval swallowed whole. “Anyone else?”

Azula straightens her spine, and she exchanges a second glance with Zirin. She’s almost rude enough to laugh as the next girl whimpers about how much she wants to hurry up and be better already. Something in the curve of Zirin’s mouth tells her she shouldn’t, though—not yet. Not until they’re free from the prying eyes of doctors who think they know anything about them just because their sickness aligns with someone else’s.

After being asked one last time if Azula is sure she wouldn’t like to share since she’s new, they escape at last. Azula says no again, and she digs her manicure which is sure to chip the longer she’s here into the flesh of Zirin’s wrist, and she tugs Zirin with her out the door.

For her part, Zirin offers no resistance but the click of her tongue.

“Azula, right?” she asks as soon as they’re out of sight of the other girls.

Gold eyes sharpen. “Right.” She’s never liked when people pretend not to know who she is. “Minamoto,” she adds.

“Minamoto… your father—”

“Yes, that’s the one.”

Zirin winces for a moment, then composes herself. “So first you landed yourself in the psych ward, and now you’re here,” she says.

Azula smiles. “So are you.”

“So am I,” Zirin agrees. “It’s my third time, too, so maybe I’m worse off than you.”

“Lucky try number three,” Azula laughs.

Zirin laughs too. “At least this time I’m not under 24/7 surveillance.”

Azula considers Zirin for a moment and says, “At least. Tell me, Zirin, how do I get out of here?”

Zirin’s smile crumples like a paper doll. “You have to get better.”

(She thinks of her uncle asking Wu if she’d spoken this time. She thinks of her brother with his back to her bedroom door in silence. She thinks of Katara smoking just to talk to her so she wouldn’t be alone. She thinks of Mai chewing the nicotine gum with her as if it would help at all.)

Azula wishes Zirin would drop dead.

When Zirin invites Azula to play cards with some of the other girls, the ones she crosses her heart and swears aren’t whiny crybabies, Azula declines with a smile.

When Zirin invites Azula to eat with her at meals as if the thought of watching someone else eat isn’t nauseating, as if it doesn’t feel like burning alive to be watched as you eat, Azula declines with a smile.

When Zirin invites Azula to smoke contraband cigarettes with her, Azula accepts, and she knows Mai is frowning somewhere, her lips curled down a few centimeters, her brows knitted closer together but only barely, her midnight eyes bright with disappointment. It doesn’t stop her from following Zirin down the corridor and holding the cigarette between her lips as Zirin lights it for her. It just makes the cigarette burn worse in the back of her throat as she takes her first drag in weeks.

“So,” Zirin says between drags, “do you think you’re fat?”

Azula exhales smoke through her nose and ignores the sting. She hasn’t smoked in a while, and it hurts as much as it satiates her. “No.”

“Ugly?” Zirin asks.

“Not at all.”

“Oh, then it’s control, isn’t it?”

Azula contemplates prematurely smothering her cigarette against Zirin’s wrist, but she remembers Jet and how well that ended, and she stops herself. Control is a virtue. Her father taught her that. “You’re not very thin for someone who’s been here so many times,” she says, the casualness of her cruelty sharpened to the bone.

Zirin snorts instead of flinching. “Right? I gained seven kilograms after my last visit. They thought I was finally cured.” She takes another drag, and Azula breathes in the putrid stench and relishes in the film it casts over their flesh and clothing. “It makes me wanna kill myself, sometimes.” She says it weightlessly, but she’s not kidding.

“You shouldn’t. It’d be disgraceful. Pathetic.” The words hurry out of her mouth as harsh as she can make them at a moment’s notice. She feels her hands tremble for just a moment before she smooths herself out again, makes herself cold, but she cannot help but briefly wonder if Lu Ten talked of suicide like this before he took the coward’s way out.

There’s a crookedness to the way Zirin almost smiles at her and a glinting in her eyes. “You’re such a cunt,” she accuses bluntly, honestly. There’s no fondness but no malice either.

Azula cannot help but be reminded of Mai even though Zirin is nothing like the stoic girl. It makes her want to stomp her cigarette out immediately. Out of spite or misery or something else awful like that, she doesn’t.

They have group again. Azula and Zirin sit next to each other once more, and they brush knees and catch each other’s gaze in place of crowing laughter at every sob story.

The subject today is something Azula has never thought about or wanted to think about: sources. At the beginning of the session, Dr. Yagoda had insisted that they must identify the root of their sickness if they ever want to eradicate it. Azula had smiled flintily in response.

She started eating in halves because she gained too much weight when her father snapped her arm, and it slowed her down in kuai ball. It was about practicality. There was no self-loathing involved in the decision. Her source is not something to be weeded out of her stomach to make room for fullness once more; it is just another sacrifice made for her father.

Azula would rather spend the day with her mother and her replacement daughter than talk about any of that, least of all with strangers greedy to know what’s wrong with her beyond what her father did to her in the dark.

“I’d like to share,” Zirin says.

Azula’s knees feel cold without Zirin’s brushing against them, and she feels a cascade of judgment and cruelty wash over her at the sound of the other girl’s voice.

“Go ahead,” Dr. Yagoda says, her eyes crinkling with a smile.

“For me, it’s my relationship with my mom,” Zirin says.

Azula wants to catch someone’s eye to share a glimmer of silent laughter, but she can’t. There’s no one else here whose name she even knows.

“She used to send me to bed without dinner. Food was a reward, and starvation was a punishment. I internalized that, and I would skip meals when I’d been bad. Eventually, it felt good to skip meals. Like I finally had control over my life, especially when I got older and our relationship got worse.” Zirin’s voice is not trembling, but her eyes look glossy with unshed tears as Azula tries to avert her gaze. “I hate her, sometimes. I just don’t understand why she raised me to hate myself.”

(Ursa never starved Azula to punish her and never rewarded her with her favorite foods. Ursa would have had to be her mother at any point to have done any of those things. No, it was Ozai who called Azula greedy and told her she wasn’t allowed seconds. Ozai who pinched at the skin around her hips, the fat stored beneath it. Ozai who wouldn’t touch her in disgust after her arm healed and the layer of baby fat she had lost settled back in. Everything comes back to her father.)

Azula snorts in disgust; Zirin laughs at the noise, but it sounds hysterical and unlike the laughter they’ve shared before. It almost makes Azula uncomfortable.

Dr. Yagoda’s eyes sharpen. “Azula, that was inappropriate. Zirin, thank you for sharing with us. I know it’s hard for you to come back and try again.”

She tunes the rest of Dr. Yagoda’s bullshit out, and she decides she was wrong to like Zirin. She should have recognized the pathetic misery spilling out of her seams sooner.

Dr. Yagoda asks to speak with her, and Azula knows she cannot refuse.

“Is therapy hard for you?” Dr. Yagoda asks. “A lot of girls struggle with group at first, but you haven’t said much of anything in your one-on-one therapy sessions either. I understand that this is new, and it can be overwhelming, but, Azula, if there is anything I can do to make you feel safer or more comfortable, you have to tell me.”

Azula smiles, and she imagines punching Yagoda between her eyes as she says, “I don’t belong here.”

Dr. Yagoda smiles back, sad and heavy. “You don’t believe you’re sick?”

“I don’t believe I’m weak.”

“Letting me help you wouldn’t make you weak, Azula.”

Azula’s smile hardens. “Needing help at all would make me weak.”

“Say I don’t help you. Say I let you check out of here right now. What do you think would happen?” Dr. Yagoda asks.

Azula considers the question for a long moment, but Dr. Yagoda doesn’t let her answer.

“You would become even more malnourished. Your fatigue would worsen. You’d lose hair. Your stomach would become bloated. Your eyes would glass over and sink in. Your muscles would be broken down for energy. Your skin would loosen and turn sickly as it began to flake. Do you know how you would die, though? Infection, most likely, as your body became unable to fight off bacteria. Tissue breakdown, if you were unlucky,” Dr. Yagoda says coldly. “That’s what would happen if I let you check out without first treating you. Without helping you. Not because you are weak, Azula, but because you are sick, and like with any sickness, you need treatment.”

There is just the sound of their breathing now, of two heartbeats, of silence.

Azula blinks, and she swallows absolutely nothing.

“The strongest thing you can do right now is accept my help. Choose to live, Azula. Choose to fight this.”

Azula hears her blood rushing through her body, and she hears her heartbeat lodged in her throat, and she hears everyone she has ever wanted to stay telling her that they cannot stay if she is gone, if she is dead.

“Fine.”

(Azula’s arm has never been broken. Her baby fat is diminishing, and, aside from the scarring between her legs and in her mind, she is perfectly healthy. She’s thirteen, almost fourteen, and she’s too busy studying, too busy molding herself into something perfect to remember to eat her lunch today.

It’s almost dinnertime when she finally feels the pangs of her hunger.

She stops what she’s doing, and she thinks back. She remembers she skipped lunch. She remembers how simple it was to do. She feels foolish for a moment, and then she feels the emptiness of her stomach. It’s not painless, and it’s not pleasant, but it is empty, and it is not his.

She didn’t miss lunch because her father told her to; she missed lunch of her own accord. Her hunger is her own and not the invention of her father.

In this way, in this sense, her body is hers.

She wonders how much harm it could do if she forgot to eat lunch tomorrow as well.)

Azula has fear foods, and she has safe foods now. Or, rather, Azula has always had fear foods and safe foods, but now she can name them. Junk foods make her skin crawl and her stomach rot, but liquids are safe: broths and soups are easy to slurp down into nothing and beverages can be swallowed with little to no remorse.

After their session, Dr. Yagoda asked Azula if it would be easier to drink her meals, and Azula agreed. So she sits now, at lunch, finally free of her babysitter detail, and she sips at the can with an amused sneer as Zirin grumbles about how much she hates chewing.

“Stop whining. You should ask for the meal replacement if you hate it so much,” Azula says.

Zirin makes a face. “Fuck off.”

“Just making a suggestion,” Azula sing-songs.

“I don’t know why I talk to you,” Zirin says irritably. “I don’t even like you. Especially not after you laughed at me in group.”

“We laugh at everyone in group,” Azula says. “You’d laugh at me too if I shared something like that for the vultures.”

“Like you’d have something real to share,” Zirin snorts.

“Do you want to hear about my father then?” Azula asks, her voice sharpened to a point. “I could tell you about how he started in on me when I was ten or how he fried my brother’s face off or—”

“Is he why you do it, Azula?” Zirin cuts her off, her voice just as harsh and twice as bored.

Azula drains the rest of her meal replacement and feels more uncomfortable and out of place than she ever has before. She doesn’t say anything at all, doesn’t know what she could possibly say to that. The truth is, she doesn’t know if her father is why she does this. She’s been built in his image as the perfect marriage of her father and mother, and she was exactly the daughter he wanted until she lost her mind. She told herself that this was not about him, that this was hers and only hers, but she doesn’t know that she was right.

Zirin chews another bite of her meal. She swallows quickly, not lingering on the sensation. “It’s like I said then; you don’t have anything real to share in group.”

Azula is going home. She’s not checking out, but she’s being allowed a homestay. They search her things on her way out, and they find nothing unusual or contraband, but Azula almost wishes they had. Anything to delay her reunion with her uncle and brother.

She has nothing she isn’t supposed to, though, so she’s allowed to leave to see them.

Zuko’s eyes are watering, and Iroh is trying his best to smile at her like he loves her, like they have ever had a relationship that wasn’t broken. It is so unlike the day her father took her out of the psych ward, cold-faced and dry-eyed as he dragged her out with a hiss of what a failure she was.

“You look awful,” Azula says in lieu of a greeting.

Neither of them moves to hold her, but Iroh grabs her things, and Zuko opens the door. Azula wonders if this qualifies as an olive branch, but she doesn’t let herself linger on their pity.

It’s better, at least, than when they found out she knew her father carnally.

Dr. Yagoda tells her not to think of it in this way, though. Dr. Yagoda is insisting that Azula should accept gestures like this as something more meaningful than simple pity. Love, Dr. Yagoda calls it. Compassion. Care. Something far more tender than Azula feels comfortable with.

It’s not that she isn’t trying. She agreed to fight. She agreed to accept—tolerate help. She still hates the way it feels to be left weak like this and vulnerable too. Azula has never enjoyed being pried open and examined like a lab rat or a whore; she never liked trips to the doctor’s office or to her father’s bedroom.

They file into the car, but Zuko doesn’t take shotgun. He sits in the backseat, leaving a gap between them, and he steals glances at her as if she might disappear otherwise.

“How are you, Azula?” Iroh asks.

Azula smiles, and she swishes the words in her mouth before she spits them out. “I’m currently in an eating disorder treatment center for anorexia nervosa. How are you, Uncle?”

“I’ve been worrying about my niece in an eating disorder treatment center for anorexia nervosa,” he says, trying to force a chuckle out.

Azula hums curiously, but she does not ask for the radio.

Zuko spends the car ride too scared to speak and too scared to close the gap between them. Iroh spends it trying to make idle conversation where he can, filling the silence with his fuddy-duddy proverbs and adages. Azula spends it chewing every childhood memory to a point; she will not forget the way her uncle chose her brother, the way everyone believes him to be the easier sibling to love.

(Azula knows they’re right.)

She’s only here for a week, and then it’s back to the treatment center. That’s what Azula reminds herself as she eats dinner with Zuko and Iroh, and she swallows down the soup before her without blowing on it first. It burns her throat, but she does not complain. She just wants to be done so she can excuse herself.

Zuko still doesn’t know how to talk to her. Iroh is still pretending to know what to say.

Azula doesn’t think she wants to speak to either of them, but Dr. Yagoda thinks it will be good for her.

Still, Azula says nothing more than “please pass the shoyu.”

It’s a Thursday when it happens. It’s a Thursday when Iroh broaches a topic they have never discussed, a topic that makes Azula want to sever her tongue so that she might choke to death on the blood so that she cannot respond to him.

“Azula, can I ask you something?”

“You just did.”

There is silence for a long moment, and Azula thinks the topic will not be broached after all. She fools herself into thinking she is safe, and they will never have to face each other. 

Iroh breaks the silence. “Who was it that told you my son was a coward?”

Azula thinks for just a moment that she has entered cardiac arrest. The moment ends quickly, and her mouth dries up. She cannot find her voice.

“Was it my brother?” Iroh asks, his voice too soft and too gentle. When Ozai got like this, when he whispered tenderly, Azula always braced herself. Kindness is a prelude to violence in her family. Security is a myth; Iroh has every reason to hate her, and he has only been so shy about that hatred as of late out of pity.

“Yes.”

There is silence once more, and Azula waits to feel the back of his palm against her cheek. She waits for hands around her throat. Blood down her flesh.

None of it comes.

“Did he tell you that I was weak for mourning?”

“Yes.”

Iroh sighs, and he does not move to touch her with violence or kindness. “I am sorry, Azula. I tolerated so much of Zuko’s anger—his grief because I told myself over and over again that it was not his soul that was cruel but the trauma from Ozai’s abuse,” he says. Azula does not know why he is telling her this. She does not know what she can do with this information but take it. “I should have offered you that same patience. I should not have given up on you over childhood cruelties. I should have reminded myself that you too are a child; you too are traumatized from your father’s abuse. I am sorry, Azula. I can never apologize enough.”

It is not until Azula looks at him from the corner of her eye as if she is looking at the harsh rays of the sun that she sees the dampness of his cheeks.

“I know it is selfish to ask, but can you ever forgive me?” he asks. “For believing the worst in you. For not seeing what he was doing to you. For all of it.”

Azula stares at him freely now. She takes in the sight of his grief and his sorrow, and she thinks of the dolls he bought her in childhood, of every failed attempt to connect with her, and she counts them on two hands. He gave up so quickly. He discarded her so easily.

He mourns that failure so openly.

“I never resented you for not protecting me,” she says. “I only ever hated that you chose Zuko instead. Everyone always chose Zuko. Everyone but Father.” She knows it is an awful thing to say, but she cannot help but say it. It is the only truth she has ever known.

Iroh closes his eyes tightly. “It never should have been a choice. For anyone. I could have loved you both. I should have loved you both.”

Azula blinks, her lashes heavy with something worse than the tears she cannot let herself cry.

“If you will have me, I will love you both from now on.”

“I’m sorry I called Lu Ten a coward,” she murmurs. The words feel foreign in her mouth—she has never apologized to her uncle before, not of her own will.

“The water flows, Niece.”

Azula stops holding her breath before she realizes she was holding it at all.

He must have told Zuko about the conversation, Azula thinks, because Zuko knocks on her bedroom door when he gets home from school. Azula’s bedroom door is unlocked as always, and he comes in when she asks what he wants.

“You’ve missed a lot since you went away,” he says, hovering at the entrance of her room as if he might need to retreat.

“I’m aware,” Azula says flatly.

“That’s not what I meant,” he says. He looks flustered, upset. He takes a deep breath. “I just mean, Sokka and Suki broke up.”

Azula raises an eyebrow. “Isn’t that bad?”

Zuko shakes his head for a moment. “Well—I mean, it was amicable. They both like other people.”

“How dramatic,” she drawls.

“It’s not dramatic,” he says. “I told you, it was amicable.”

“What does it have to do with me?” she asks.

He groans. “Nothing. I just thought you’d want to—I don’t know—talk? Isn’t this what you and Ty Lee used to do? Talk about other people behind their backs?”

“We talked about how much we hated people. You don’t hate Sokka or Suki. This is just boring.”

“It’s exciting,” Zuko insists.

“Not unless you’re thinking about dumping Mai for Suki,” Azula hums.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” The words spill out of his mouth like an overflowing sink.

Azula finally turns to look at him. Gold eyes sharpen in suspicion. “You’re a terrible liar,” she accuses, “and you shouldn’t do that to Mai. She’d dissect you, Dum-Dum.”

Zuko winces, but he doesn’t leave. “I would never do that to her.”

“Whatever you say.”

He finally approaches her bed. “That’s not the only thing you missed, you know.” Azula gets the annoying feeling that he’s going to stay.

(She doesn’t want her brother to stay if it’s only temporary. If he only cares when she is something hurt and vulnerable, to be nursed back to health. If he will leave as soon as she is strong again, and he finds that she has not lost her teeth.)

She doesn’t kick him out.

The homestay ends, and Azula has her things searched a second time. Zirin welcomes her back with bared teeth and barbed words; Azula would take her no other way.

“Let’s discuss your source, Azula,” Dr. Yagoda says when she sits down for their session.

She sighs. “We’ve been over this. Father broke my arm, and I gained weight while I had the cast on. I started dieting to fix it, and it snowballed from there.”

“It snowballed for a reason, though. Let’s find that reason. When was the first time you skipped a meal?”

“After he wouldn’t touch me because of the weight I’d gained.”

“Are you sure?” Dr. Yagoda asks. “There wasn’t a time before then?”

Azula closes her eyes, and she remembers when she was thirteen. She feels too guilty to put words to it. “No.”

Dr. Yagoda smiles sadly. “You’re a very skilled liar, Azula, but from everything you have told me, I’m not sure I believe that was the first time. You’ve been hurting yourself for a long time, and I want to help you identify the source of this pain. Was it truly that your father did not abuse you following your weight gain?”

“Why is that so hard to believe?” she demands.

“Because as much as you have told me you feared what he would do when he did not rape you, you have also told me how much you wanted to feel in control of yourself and your body.”

“Because of him!” Azula snarls.

“I know that, but I want you to figure out when you first decided you could have that control if you starved yourself. Even if you don’t tell me, it will help you heal when you admit it to yourself. I promise.”

“… Will it help me be better?”

“More than that, it will help you take real control over your body.”

“I want to be better,” Azula says as they chew the nicotine gum that night.

“That’s the goal,” Zirin snorts, “but it’s not gonna happen overnight.”

Azula rolls her eyes. “I know that. I’m not stupid.”

“It’s like Yagoda says: you have to want to get better. There’s a difference,” Zirin says after blowing a bubble and watching it pop.

“Is that why you’re on your third try?”

“That and my mom’s a huge bitch.”

Azula laughs. Zirin laughs too.

The twenty-first creeps up on her, and, slowly, painfully, Azula turns sixteen.

She tells Zirin while they’re in line for their medication, and Zirin congratulates her on her first birthday in a treatment center. They both hope it will be her last.

It’s after breakfast when Azula’s phone, which she has taken back from Iroh but refused to look at, rings. She has more missed texts than she cares to admit, but it’s the first attempt to call her, so she answers even though she knows it’s Katara.

“Happy birthday!” There’s an echo of the birthday wish, less enthused but not insincere sounding, from two familiar voices—Aang and Sokka, she thinks.

“Katara,” Azula hums, “it’s eight in the morning.”

“And it’s your birthday. Don’t be ungrateful,” Katara huffs.

“Seriously, she dragged me to Aang’s house at seven to make sure we both remembered to wish you a happy birthday,” Sokka says.

Azula almost laughs at that, but she bites her tongue.

“Not that we mind!” Aang says quickly; Azula assumes that Katara glared at Sokka for his honesty. “We’re so glad that Katara cared enough to remind us and make sure we all wished you a happy birthday.”

“How sweet,” Azula sneers.

“You haven’t answered any of our messages,” Katara says suddenly, “but Zuko said you were doing better when he saw you. He wouldn’t let us come over, though. I know none of us have been to visit, but it’s only because the center is so far away. We wanna see you as soon as you check out.”

“I’m not mad at you for not visiting,” Azula says. “I don’t even like seeing you in person.”

Katara makes a sound like she wants to strangle Azula before she takes a deep breath. “You’re being an asshole again, but that’s not why I’m hanging up. Sokka fell back asleep, and I’ve got to wake him up.”

“Whatever you say.”

“I’ll talk to you later, Azula.”

“Goodbye, Katara.”

It’s three hours later that Toph calls her too, and she answers with an impatient sigh.

“What do you want, Beifong?” she demands.

Toph positively cackles at that. “To wish my second favorite Minamoto sibling a happy birthday!”

Azula doesn’t wince at that. She doesn’t care if Toph picks Zuko over her. “You’ve done it. Now hang up.”

“Can’t two friends catch up?” the younger girl asks, and Azula can hear her grin.

“We’re not friends,” Azula says, but she doesn’t hang up for another six minutes.

Azula checks out on the twenty-fifth. Iroh and Zuko pick her up, and neither of them hugs her, but she doesn’t comment on how awful they look. Somehow, this is enough for now.

After almost two hours of driving, they arrive at Iroh and Zuko’s home—Azula’s residence.

Mai and Ty Lee are sitting on the porch with gift-wrapped boxes on their knees.

“Azula,” Mai says coolly as if Azula has not ignored every one of her texts in the last two months. “Happy belated birthday.”

“We missed you a lot,” Ty Lee says. “We’re really sorry we didn’t call or visit.”

Azula blinks at them both, and she silently accepts Ty Lee’s embrace.

“We don’t want to crowd you, but we wanted to see you when you got back,” Mai says. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Me too,” Ty Lee says, nodding furiously.

“Niece, would you like for your friends to have some tea?” Iroh asks.

Azula says yes, but Mai and Ty Lee still don’t stay long enough for her to stop missing them. It’s like phantom pains, she thinks. It’s like missing a limb.

She’s so swept away in the feeling even after they’ve left that she almost doesn’t notice that Zuko and Iroh have covered every mention of calories in the house. Except she does notice, and, like a child, Azula laughs.

Chapter Text

If Azula has learned anything since leaving the treatment facility, it is that summer school is a cesspool. She hates it more than she hated the treatment facility. It makes her stomach curl with shame that she needs to do this at all, be here at all. That she lost anything to... she hesitates to call it sickness, but she knows that hesitation is weakness more than the sickness was. Is.

She hates this like other people hate the idea of having their teeth pulled or their eyes gouged out. She works through it, though. She has to. She will not fall further behind her classmates. She will not drown in her disease.

Azula is getting better now. That’s what they call it when she eats another bite, swallows another morsel, digests another calorie. She’s sure they’re right as, as much as her body hates the feeling of fullness, strength begins to return to her. As powerless as she feels for it, she’s been advised not to check her weight yet. Iroh and Zuko have hidden away the scale that used to reside in the bathroom, but Azula can see it for herself in the mirror when she strips to her underwear. She’s meant to call it recovery.

She wants to call it recovery.

Her body is still all right angles and sharp edges, but since she started eating again, her bones are protruding less and less. She’s been told the sharpness will recede; one day, her body won’t be cut to kill.

For now, it has to be enough that it’s not cut to kill herself anymore.

She’s learning to take things one step at a time like that now instead of running herself sick, conquering everything she can all at once until she breaks. Wu is proud of her even. Or she was in that first session back, when Azula barely said a word because as much as she wants to beat this, she still hates that woman.

Azula wants to hate Wu less now, but she’s not sure she knows how. Everything the woman represents is what Azula was raised up to be better than. Everything Azula was raised up to be better than is so much warmer than she thought. She still resents all of it, try as she might.

She can dull her teeth all she wants; she is still a dragon-hearted girl.

She straightens the pleats of her skirt. She has class today, fucking again, and she won’t show up looking anything short of perfect. She can’t control her body the way she wants to anymore, but she can still control her clothes. She can’t control the way people think of her anymore, but she can still control her response.

Azula smiles, and it looks like a threat. It feels like a warning shot.

It’s the middle of class, the middle of her hand aching from writing notes when she spent so long writing nothing in the treatment facility, when her phone screen lights up in her bag. Azula only catches the glow of it through the fabric of her bag. She resents it for existing. Iroh replaced her phone screen for her ages ago now, it feels, and she has not thanked him for it. She will not thank him for it even now they are rebuilding something that never existed to start with.

She doesn’t know how to thank someone for something they did to be kind. She doesn’t know how to thank someone who took fifteen years and her downfall to be kind to her.

She checks her phone while she waits outside on campus for him to pick her up. It’s Zirin texting to say she’s out now.

Congratulations, Azula writes back. I still beat you, though.

Zirin calls her then. Azula picks up immediately.

“Let’s make a bet,” Zirin says in lieu of a greeting.

“Oh?” Azula asks. “What kind of bet?”

“First one to end up back there again loses. We’ll text each other when we eat, and we’ll call when we don’t. Loser owes the winner cigarettes,” Zirin says.

“I’m trying to quit,” Azula says, surprising herself. The nicotine gum in her bag feels tender under her every touch, a reminder of the girl who cared enough to force it in her hand. Her skin burns, but she doesn’t.

Zirin isn’t fazed. “Loser owes the winner a drink then,” she says.

“Deal.”

It feels almost like friendship. It feels almost like kindness.

Maybe that’s why Azula dulls her teeth when her uncle pulls up.

Iroh smiles when he sees her. She’ll have to get used to those smiles meeting his eyes. She’ll have to get used to having an uncle who is trying to love her.

“Niece,” he says though it still sounds strange on his tongue, “how was school?”

“Terrible,” she says sharply.

“My condolences,” he says with a too-serious look on his face.

“How was work?” she asks. It’s the first time she’s asked him anything like that. Wu told her that rebuilding their relationship would be a two-way street. Maybe she’s trying too now. Maybe she wants to be loved. Maybe it means something that he said he was sorry.

He lights up.

“Work was wonderful today,” he says before diving into a long story about competing teashops and how his tea is made with love while theirs is made with nothing more than leaves.

“Uncle, that’s what tea is,” she says, frowning.

She didn’t realize his smile could get bigger. “Yes, that’s what Zuko said too.”

She’ll have to get used to that too: being like her brother. It’s not a weakness. She keeps telling herself that. 

(Every whisper of your brother is pathetic and weak, and you should never want to be like him or near him at all, Azula. You are so much more than he could ever be still rings in her head like a ghost that has outstayed its haunting or a black eye that won’t heal all the way to match the proof of her brother’s weakness seared over his eye.)

She’s not sure when she’ll believe it.

Azula eats dinner. Then, from her bedroom, she texts Zirin a picture of her middle finger. I ate every grain of rice.

Zirin matches the picture. Me too, cunt.

A smile winds its way onto Azula’s face. The kind of friendship found between blows exchanged has always been her favorite to cherish.

Zuko clears his throat at her open door.

“What do you want?” Azula asks, stowing her phone away, to be polite or to keep this part of herself private, she doesn’t kow.

He grimaces slightly. “It’s Katara’s birthday. We had a party already, but I thought you’d want to know.”

“Why would you think that?” Azula asks. “She’s not my friend.”

“Oh… I thought you were hanging out,” he says. He stands there a little longer, looking stupid. It suits him.

“You can go now, Zuko,” she tells him. She’s been trying not to call him “Zuzu” these days. It feels cruel now that she’s trying. She’s not sure if he’s noticed. He hasn’t said anything, but neither has she. They might never say anything.

“Right. Uh, bye,” he says, and he’s gone.

Despite what she said, Azula pulls her phone out when she’s alone, and she calls Katara.

“Happy birthday,” she says.

“Oh! Thanks?” Katara says. “How’d you know?”

“Zuko told me.”

Immediate panic. “I didn’t ask him to—”

“I know. Don’t tell him this happened.” Already regretting this, she hangs up.

They aren’t friends. She’s getting better, but that doesn’t make them friends. Unblocking Katara on everything was one thing, and the cigarettes were another, but she’s not degrading herself that much.

Especially not when Katara texts her a promise not to tell and a series of emojis in thanks. As if Azula understands emojis. How absurd.

Katara makes good on her word. She doesn’t tell Zuko, or if she does, she’s smart enough to threaten him into not mentioning it to Azula. It hasn’t come up even once in the days following the phone call. He doesn’t even look at her like he’s not sure what to make of her. Azula thinks he genuinely has no idea.

That’s why she agreed to letting him pick her up today. That’s why she’s waiting in the parking lot with a girl from her summer school class, Jin something or another, and she’s chewing the goddamn nicotine gum Mai bought her even though the taste is awful and the sound makes her kind of want to blow her brains out. If it wasn’t the gum, it might be a cigarette. And she is trying —to get better, to survive, to quit, to not be the girl she was taught to be. It curbs her appetite to smoke anyway. She can’t do that anymore.

Jin makes small talk, unfortunately. She’s irritatingly nice, and not in the way Ty Lee is where the niceness is a prelude to a sort of social violence that Azula can at least respect. Jin is just nice. There are no ulterior motivations, and there’s not even any pity to harden it into something Azula can understand and crush. Jin isn’t even overbearingly nice or anything like that as she reacts to Azula’s coldness.

“You’re not very social, are you?” Jin asks.

As rudely as she can, Azula blows a very sticky bubble with her gum until the bubble quivers and bursts. “Aren’t you smart,” she quips dryly.

Jin’s face pinches slightly, but she makes no move to be rude back. “I guess not if we’re both in summer school,” she says, but it sounds light-hearted and teasing.

Azula resents the sound of her voice. “I’m at the top of my class,” she says coolly. “Surely you know that.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen your name at the top of your year’s rankings. I was joking,” Jin says.

Azula wets her lips. “You aren’t very funny either,” she says.

Jin laughs. “You aren’t very nice at all.”

“Not really, no,” Azula says. She imagines punctuating the sentence with smoke. She imagines a burning in her lungs and the taste of ash on her tongue. It doesn’t feel good the way it used to. She thinks that might be a positive thing.

Zuko’s car pulls up, and Azula rises.

The passenger door opens. Mai climbs out of it lazily. “Hey, Azula,” she says.

“Mai,” Azula says. It only knocks the air out of her a little bit. They haven’t seen each other since the day Mai and Ty Lee stayed over for tea and tears and Azula isn’t sure she was ready to change that just yet.

“Oh. Hey, Jin,” Mai says.

Jin’s face burns. “Hi, Mai,” she says. She’s avoiding Mai’s eyes like she’s afraid to turn to stone.

Azula quirks an eyebrow upward. She didn’t know they even knew each other beyond being classmates.

Zuko lowers his window and pokes his head out. “I thought you’d be excited to see Mai,” he says. “I didn’t realize you made a friend.”

“She’s not my friend,” Azula says.

Jin shrugs. “Hello, Zuko.”

He scratches his cheek, looking a little pale. “Hey, Jin,” he says.

“Are we done saying each other’s names?” Azula asks.

“Yeah, sure,” Mai says, opening the passenger-side back door for Azula. “Hurry up, Princess.”

Azula catches the way Jin’s face pinches. She gets in the car slowly and methodically.

“So you know Jin,” she says once Mai is buckling her seatbelt once more.

“She’s in my year,” Mai says like it’s simple. Azula is positive it isn’t. “We’ve crossed paths.”

“And you, brother dearest?”

Zuko taps the steering wheel. It’s what he does, Azula suspects, instead of hitting it or the horn. He’s learning to manage his anger like that. “She’s a regular at Uncle’s teashop. Where I work. Remember?”

“Are you all friends?” Azula asks.

“Not really,” Zuko says. “I mean, she’s nice.”

Mai yawns. “Are we playing 20 questions now?”

“I’m just curious,” Azula says. She’s sure now that her brother is more like her father than she thought.

(Relationships are a lie. That’s what her father taught her. That’s what she knows she can count on. Even someone as pathetic as Zuko was bound to fall for the pit traps of manhood sooner or later.) 

“Jin’s pretty boring,” Mai says, “what is there to be curious about?”

Azula’s eyes sharpen like steel. What is there, indeed.

Wu has started to offer Azula tea. It’s supposed to calm her. Azula has never been calmer in her life. Not even with tar in her lungs. Not even watching blood chase after blood.

“We’ve talked about your time in the facility, Azula. Do you think you have anything more to say on that, or do you want to return to what we were discussing before you had to be checked in?” Wu asks.

Azula sips her tea—warm but not scalding, cooled to perfection before being served, not the way Azula has ever taken it before. “Oh? And what, pray tell, was that?” she asks. She feels her skin prickling around the edges of her bones. She remembers exactly what they’d been speaking of before. She knows she has to talk about it eventually, but she doesn’t want eventually to be now. She’s not ready. She’ll never be ready.

Wu smiles sadly. “We were discussing your belief that you are a monster, Azula,” she says. “If you don’t want to revisit it, I won’t push you, but I think it would help. We’ve been making real progress since you came back. I’d like to continue that if you’re comfortable with it.”

Azula sighs. “I think I’m a monster because I’m a monster. Just like Father was.”

“And who told you your father was a monster?” Wu asks.

“No one told me anything. I figured it out for myself,” Azula says. “This tea is awful.”

“I’m sorry about that. I can get a different blend,” Wu says, playing along. “Who else is a monster?”

“Just Father and me.”

“Did your brother make you feel that way? I know the two of you have a complicated relationship,” Wu says. She speaks so delicately. As if Azula might shatter. Azula wants to hate it more than she actually does.

“No.”

“What about your uncle?” Wu asks. She’s avoiding the real culprit, and Azula is sure they both know it.

“No.”

“Then… your mother?” Wu asks. “Did Ursa ever throw around the word monster?”

Azula smiles, cold and flint-like. “Once,” she admits, “but she was right. I was being a monster.”

“Tell me about it, Azula,” Wu says.

“I pushed Zuko off the roof. He cried; I laughed. It was monstrous. Mother was right to call it so.”

Wu’s face crinkles like parchment. She’s always looking at Azula like that. Like she’s something more tender than she knows how to be. Azula doesn’t know what to do with it.

“How old were you?” Wu asks.

Azula blinks. She has no idea what her age could have to do with anything. “Seven,” she says anyway.

“Did you want to hurt your brother?” Wu asks.

“Yes.” There’s no hesitation to her words.

“But did you want to hurt him severely, or did you just want to hurt him back for upsetting you?” Wu asks.

Azula makes a frustrated noise. “What makes you think he upset me? Just because I don’t want to die doesn’t mean I’m not a monster. Self-preservation is monstrous in its own way.”

“Azula, your mother should never have called you a monster. No mother should speak to her child like that. It’s awful,” Wu says. “You were so young. I highly doubt you understood what pushing your brother off the roof would do to him. I highly doubt you wanted to hurt him badly. Furthermore, I have to wonder how well you do remember this. Is it a story you recall, or is it one that someone else pushed onto you, giving you their account of it? Your father, perhaps.”

Azula feels her eyes sting. She hates it. Hates how weak she’s being. This is her truth. She pushed Zuko because she was mad. She laughed because it was funny that he cried. She was a monster. She’s still a monster.

“Did your father like to tell you this story, Azula? Of you being, as he might have put it, a monster? Did he emphasize your mother’s reaction?” Wu continues.

“I don’t know,” Azula lies, whisper-quiet. “I don’t want to think about it.”

“That’s okay,” Wu says. “We can talk about whatever you want to talk about.”

Azula is quiet for a long moment, nails biting into her knees. She wants to hurt herself the way she can’t anymore. She wants to control her body and its pain and its fears.

“Why would he do that?” she asks.

Wu stares at her, long and hard. “Your father had a vested interest in keeping you othered from your brother and mother. Doing so would make abusing you easier. That’s called grooming, Azula, and it’s very common, unfortunately,” she says. She looks horribly sad. Azula wants to hate her.

“… He told me the story often,” Azula confesses. “He liked to remind me of it. Of how Mother thought I was a monster. Of how he loved me anyway.”

“What your father did to you wasn’t love,” Wu says. “Gaslighting you wasn’t love. Isolating you wasn’t love. Grooming you wasn’t love. Raping you wasn’t love.”

Azula knows all this, has always known it, but hearing it said to her hurts something deep within her that she can’t make right. It’s a broken bone that can’t be set, a bloody wound that won’t clot, a scar that won’t fade.

(All of Azula’s wounds are still wide open, and she wouldn’t recognize herself without them.)

“I did laugh,” Azula says. “He wasn’t—Father wasn’t lying. Not completely. I was like him. I am like him.”

“Why did you laugh?” Wu asks.

“Because I’m a monster.”

Wu shakes her head. “I don’t think that’s it, Azula. I think that sometimes we laugh because we don’t know what else to do or because we don’t understand how serious something is. I think you were just a confused child who didn’t know what to do or how badly your brother was hurt, and so you laughed.”

(Azula is seven years old, and her brother is gloating about being faster than her when she pushes him off a roof. 

She jumps off after him when she hears the thud and the crack. She sees how wrong his arm looks, and she hears how loudly he cries, and she doesn’t know what she thought would happen, but it wasn’t this. She didn’t want to hurt her brother like this. 

She just wanted him to stop teasing her about being smaller and younger and slower and everything their father doesn’t want her to be.

“Azula, what did you do?” their mother cries out.

Azula stares up at her, and her mouth opens, but the sound that comes out isn’t an apology or an excuse. It’s laughter. Nervous, horrible laughter that won’t tame itself in her belly or throat.

Their mother’s eyes grow wide as she hugs Zuko. “Azula, don’t laugh at his pain. What is wrong with you? Only monsters like hurting people.”

Azula’s mouth fixes itself shut, and she shifts uncomfortably.

“Maybe I’m a monster then,” she says.

No matter how much Azula wishes she’d say something, say anything, her mother just stares at her.)

As soon as Azula is safely in Iroh’s car, she starts to push the therapy session out of mind. She doesn’t care if it’s unhealthy or bad for her or whatever other bullshit Wu or Yagoda would say. She can’t do this. Not now. Not ever. She waits until after dinner, when she hasn’t been able to eat a bite no matter how much Iroh or Zuko coax her, and then she calls Zirin.

“I was just about to text you,” Zirin says. “Dinner go badly?”

“Very,” Azula says.

“Ah.”

“I hate my therapist.”

“You may have mentioned that in treatment,” Zirin says. “What’d she do? Make you talk about your feelings? The audacity.”

Azula almost smiles. “Shut up. I need to refocus my energy.”

“Then do that,” Zirin says.

“How?”

“Are you asking me for help having bad coping mechanisms?” Zirin asks with a snort.

Azula laughs too. “I am.”

“I’m gonna help you too, aren’t I?” Azula can practically hear Zirin roll her eyes.

“If you know what’s good for you,” Azula says.

Zirin scoffs at that. “Whatever. Cope badly for all I care. Start drama in your life for no reason, antagonize your loved one’s, whatever. Just stop moping and don’t lose our bet.”

“You don’t want to win?” Azula asks. All she’s ever been taught to do is win.

“I love to kick your ass, Minamoto,” Zirin says, “but that doesn’t mean I want you to lose.”

Azula feels her heart in her throat. She swallows it. For the first time, it occurs to her that she doesn’t want Zirin to lose either.

It’s almost like friendship.

Azula redirects her energy very productively. She goes for her brother, as she often has growing up, but she picks something she’s sure she didn’t make up in her head and that wasn’t planted there by their father either.

“I know you cheated on Mai,” she says to him conversationally as he exits the bathroom they share.

There’s still toothpaste foam surrounding his mouth. “What?” he asks, blinking wildly. He looks frightened by this accusation. He should be.

“You cheated on Mai,” she says, “which even I think is shitty, by the way.”

His face grows redder. “I didn’t—why would you think that?”

“I saw the way Jin acted around you two. Clearly, something happened between you. She wouldn’t look at Mai, and you treated her interestingly,” Azula says.

Zuko’s shoulders slump slightly. “I would never cheat on Mai,” he says. “I definitely didn’t cheat with Jin.”

“Someone else, then? You relaxed when I said Jin’s name.” She’s forcing her voice into something casually cruel when she wants to scream. She thinks of Mai at her angriest—I love Zuko more than I fear you—and she can’t stand the thought of the boy who tore them apart breaking Mai’s heart. She thinks Zuko is selfish—she has for years, but she’s never been more sure that she’s right than in this moment. “How could you do that to Mai?”

For some reason beyond Azula’s comprehension, Zuko smiles. “You care about her, don’t you?” he asks stupidly.

“That’s not the point!”

“But you do, right?” He sounds too pleased with himself for having figured it out.

“You are horrible at social events. This is a confrontation about you having an affair when you have a long term girlfriend. You should be crying,” Azula says.

“You suck at this too!” Zuko says. “You just called it a ‘social event.’ Who talks like that?”

“Me! Stop derailing!”

“Admit you care about Mai,” he says. “It’s fine if you’ve forgiven her. She’s forgiven you too—don’t tell her I said that. She’ll kill me.”

Azula feels her face mantle. She doesn’t want to burn for Mai either. She doesn’t want to burn for anyone. “She’s my best friend. That’s not some grand discovery, dum-dum!” She feels eight years old all over again.

“What about Ty Lee?” Zuko asks.

“That’s different.”

Zuko smiles. Azula wants to slap the expression off of his stupid face. She storms off to her bedroom instead.

Jin is not any less suspicious to her now that she’s accused Zuko, and he’s derailed it horribly, hardly even denying the idea of cheating on Mai. Azula’s idiot brother might have relaxed at the idea of Azula accusing him of cheating with Jin, but Azula can’t be sure he hasn’t gotten better at lying through therapy somehow.

So she watches Jin every day in summer school. So she says hello and goodbye to Jin every day they have classes in each other’s vicinity.

Jin stays irritatingly friendly. Azula hates her for it. Doubly so if she really has been Zuko’s little mistress.

Still, Azula doesn’t show her hand. She won’t deal with what Wu said to her, and she won’t deal with the idea that Zuko has done nothing wrong, and she won’t let Jin know that she’s onto whatever Zuko did wrong.

Azula’s sharp edges are softening. She’s almost free of summer school, almost all the way caught up with her classmates, and she hasn’t gotten anything more out of Zuko or Jin about whatever happened between them.

She’s had two fruitless therapy sessions in that time, and she’s avoided the topic of her father’s abuse and her mother’s distance in both of them. She’s devoted her hour to complaining about school and Zuko and Jin until Wu asks her why she doesn’t try a second confrontation if she’s so worried about protecting Mai.

Confronting Zuko is pointless. He’ll just dodge the topic again, and so Azula ends up on Ty Lee’s doorstep.

“Ty Liu, where is your sister?” Azula says instead of greeting the ill-preferred sister.

“Which one?” Ty Liu asks. A poor attempt at a joke. It comes out more strained than it normally would.

Azula’s face doesn’t so much as budge.

“Sheesh, every time. I’ll go get her. She won’t shut up about you, you know. And, yes, she told us not to bother you about all the, uh, stuff… in your life. So thank her for that, won’t you?” There’s something threatening to that. Ty Liu has always been protective of her younger sisters.

“Whatever,” Azula says. “It can’t have been a very good warning if she asked you to mention it.”

Ty Liu rolls her eyes, but then she’s gone. It’s a matter of minutes before Ty Lee replaces her.

“Hi, Azula!” Ty Lee wraps her up in a hug before Azula can so much as say hello.

“Can I come in?” Azula asks.

“You’re always welcome here,” Ty Lee says. “I’m sorry if Ty Liu was weird, also. You know how she is.”

Azula smiles because she does. She follows Ty Lee to her bedroom and laughs when Ty Lee kicks Ty Lat out of the room. She even lets Ty Lee fill her in on her summer so far, and how much it’s been awful without Azula, and how the last month or so of school was also awful without Azula.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” Azula says finally when Ty Lee lets her get in a word.

“It’s not your fault. You were sick. You needed to get better. And now you’re doing way better! You look so much healthier,” Ty Lee says.

Azula’s heart hurts in her chest. “I know you told your sisters not to treat me differently. Thank you for that.”

Ty Lee’s eyes blow wide open. “They weren’t supposed to tell you that.”

Azula laughs. She knows Ty Lee wanted credit. She knows how Ty Lee’s micromanipulations work even if she does fall for them. “It’s fine, Ty. You’re a good friend.”

“So are you.”

Azula shakes her head. “I’m really not. But I’m trying to be better now. I just… I think Zuko cheated on Mai. Or is cheating on her. And he denied it when I confronted him, but I don’t know. I didn’t believe him.”

“I think we both know you need to tell Mai if you suspect he cheated on her, Azula," Ty Lee says.

“I know.”

“Anything else on your mind?” Ty Lee asks. “You know I give good advice.”

Azula falls back onto Ty Lee’s bed. “I hate summer school,” she says.

Ty Lee laughs. It’s not what she wanted, and it’s not what Azula wanted either, but she’s not ready to talk. She’s not ready to apologize either. She just wants her best friends to be hers again.

She knows she has to learn to be better.

(People aren’t possessions, Azula. You’ll get there eventually.)

“I think Zuko is cheating on you,” Azula says over the phone. She doesn’t bother with greetings. She’s impolite. She knows. She doesn’t care. She had to say it. She has to let it out of her.

“Hello to you too,” Mai says.

“Did you not hear me?” she asks.

“No, I did,” Mai says, laughing slightly.

Azula frowns. “This isn’t funny. I think he cheated on you, Mai.”

Mai’s laughter subsides. “Okay. With who?”

“Jin.”

Mai laughs again, harder this time. It’s the most full-bellied Azula has heard her laughter in years. There’s not a trace of insincerity to it.

“I’m not joking!” Azula says, frustrated.

“I know. You’re funniest when you aren’t trying.”

“Mai—”

“Azula, okay. Let’s drop by the Jasmine Dragon then. We’ll talk to Zuko together,” she says.

Relieved that Mai seems to finally be taking her seriously, Azula huffs. “Let’s go then.”

It’s the first time Azula has ever been to the Jasmine Dragon, and she regrets it immediately. For all she is trying with her uncle, she loathes the decor of this place and how perfectly him it is. The little green apron Zuko sports is the only redeeming quality of the entire shop, due solely to how laughable he looks in it.

“Hello, Zuko,” she says briskly when he asks to take their order. “We aren’t here for tea.”

“I’ll take a medium black tea, and Azula will take a small peach oolong tea, though,” Mai says. “Hi, Zuko.”

“Hi?” he says. His expression is a hopelessly confused one.

“Azula deserves the truth. From both of us,” Mai says. “On your break?”

“It’s in ten,” Zuko says. “And are you crazy, Mai? What the hell?”

Mai shrugs.

“What truth? You’ve both been lying to me?” Azula accuses. She feels knives in her stomach. For all of Mai’s posturing about repairing their friendship, about wanting to try again, she’s a liar too.

“Yes,” Mai says, “but there’s no point in it anymore. Not really. She can’t exactly tell your father anymore, and I doubt she’d tell my parents.” She stares Zuko’s angry face down until he sighs.

“You’re right,” he concedes. “Ten minutes, okay?”

Mai does nothing but sip at her tea for those ten minutes, no matter how volatile Azula is with her. The promise of the truth is the only thing that keeps Azula seated the whole time. That and it turns out her brother makes a mean peach oolong tea, but she would never tell him that. Least of all now that she knows he’s been lying to her, and it wasn’t about cheating on his girlfriend. Certainly not if Mai is lying to her too.

“I’ll tell you when Zuko is on break,” Mai says with finality. “We’ll go somewhere private to discuss it. It’s not my place to tell you alone.”

Azula stops pestering her for answers at the five-minute mark, opting to instead pinch at the skin of her wrist until she feels better.

Mai’s eyes narrow at the action, but she doesn’t do anything to stop Azula. Azula’s body is her own now even if she can’t control every detail of it.

Five more minutes pass, and Zuko jerks his head when he arrives at their table, asking silently to go outside for this.

Whatever this secret is, he expects backlash from Azula. Whatever repairing they’ve done for their relationship now that Zuko’s seen her wounded, he expects it to dissipate.

“What is this big, awful secret you’ve been too cowardly to tell me then?” Azula demands, eyes and words sharp.

“I’m gay,” Zuko says almost too fast for Azula to hear.

“… What?” she asks.

“He’s gay,” Mai says. “Me too. So no, Zuko isn’t cheating on me with Jin.”

“What?" Azula repeats.

“We’ve been bearding for our parents’ sake,” Mai continues. “Well, just mine now that Ozai’s dead.”

“Then why did Jin act so strangely with you two?” Azula splutters. She can’t feel her head. She can’t feel anything.

Zuko is gay, and so is Mai.

“Because she’s my ex-girlfriend,” Mai says. “We dated last year for a few months before calling it off because she wanted to come out to her family and I didn’t.”

“… What?” Azula asks. She feels like a fucking idiot.

“I should also tell you, Jet is my ex-boyfriend. I broke up with him when I found out he’d been hanging around you behind my back, and I had no idea he’d do that to you. I’m sorry, Azula; it was fucked up,” Zuko says.

Azula feels her throat now, and it is cold. It’s as if she’s been drowned in ice water.

“I fucking hate you both,” she says.

“Azula, I didn’t know Jet would do that, and he didn’t do it because we broke up—he’s an asshole, but he wasn’t trying to hurt either of us, he just—”

“I don’t care about that,” Azula snarls. “I care that you’re both liars.”

Mai looks even sicker than normal. “You’re being an asshole then. We thought we were in love until we had sex, that’s not a crime. And you aren’t exactly ally of the year, so of course no one told you.”

“I don’t give a shit!” Azula says. “I care that you loved him more than you loved me even when you didn’t love him at all!”

Mai goes very still, and Zuko averts his gaze. He shouldn’t be here, Azula thinks to herself. He has no business being here any longer.

This is between Azula and Mai now. Zuko can lie about being gay all he wants. This is personal. This cut her open for everyone to see.

“I did love Zuko,” Mai says, “I do love him. Just... platonically. And I never meant that I didn’t love you. I know it was kind of shitty, but so was what you did. I just… I always loved both of you. I still do.”

Azula thinks of her uncle and his promise to love them both. Azula thinks of their parents and their failure to love both their children. Azula thinks of how Ty Lee has never liked Zuko very much at all, and of how everyone has spent their lives picking which sibling to love. Azula sees the look in Mai’s eyes, fierce and loyal and raw, and she forgets all of it.

“I—” she can’t say it back. “Okay.”

She’s on lunch break at summer school when Beifong texts her. Heard you finally found out.

Did everyone else know?

Duh.

Azula forces down another bite. She’ll be damned if she can’t match Zirin’s lunch text.

I mean, no offense, dude, but you’ve been pretty homophobic, as far as they knew, you’d rat Sparky out to your dad (rest in piss), and you weren’t exactly speaking with Emo or Sparky.  

Azula pauses. She hadn’t considered that at all.

It’s a pretty big deal that they told you. It’s not like Sparky was pro-coming out to you either. He still feels pretty shaken by it to be honest, so stop being a little bitch about it already. Tell your brother you support him or whatever gay shit he needs to hear. I don’t know. This is so much texting for a blind person by the way.

With a snort, Azula sends back, I know you use Siri to text or whatever stupid accessibility app the blind use. Anyway. Thanks or whatever.

That’s not very pro-disabled people of you, Psycho.

You just called me a slur.

Sure did. We’re like friends or whatever now. Katara’s request.

Azula hates giving Katara anything, but she supposes that Beifong is at least tolerable.

Her phone vibrates again as she takes a bite out of her potato salad. It’s not Beifong.

It’s Jet.

Azula, what I did to you was really fucked up. I had no right to take your autonomy away like that with regard to who you disclose to, and if you’d let me, I’d like to apologize in person.

Her nostrils flare. Fuck off and die.

She means it.

Chapter Text

Beifong thinks that Azula owes her brother, but thanking him for sharing with her sounds like hell, sounds like the kind of thing her father might have slapped her for when he was free and alive and here. It’s hard to adjust to the fact that he’s not here and he can’t discipline her. It’s hard to not miss his presence no matter how much time she’s spent wishing he’d leave her alone for the rest of her life and never touch her again.

Wu called it a re-framing of self the other day, said that she has to reimagine her entire sense of self now that Father is gone.

Azula hates that as much as she hates the idea of thanking Zuko for anything, least of all for coming out to her. Why should she have to thank him for being gay and happening to tell her that? Especially when he lied to her for so long.

(Because it was scary, because she made it hard, because she reacted badly, because he’s her brother and maybe he should get to know that despite every reason he’s ever been given by her or their father or uncle or mother to believe otherwise, she cares. She always did, and she always will.)

She drags her hands down her face even though she can still hear her mother telling her not to do that in her ear. She has to thank her brother for coming out to her. She has to ignore that he lied for so long, and it hurt not like being split open over and over again but like when Ty Lee chose Mai and Azula had to live with the knowledge, on some level, that she deserved that.

If she wants to deserve her brother’s trust in her, she has to thank him. She has to restructure herself, re-frame her identity, rewrite the girl her father programmed her to be. It feels dramatic and stupid and awful, but for Zuko, she’s going to do it.

For the brother who gave up on her a thousand times but still came back, she’s going to try.

Azula gets up from her chair. She stretches like a cat, rolls her shoulders back in their sockets. And then she’s marching out her bedroom door and making a beeline for Zuko’s room.

She knocks too fast and too hard on his door. It’s overly assertive for how uncomfortable she feels in her skin, like she could peel it all off at any moment now.

“Coming,” Zuko says, muffled from behind the door. He’s just gotten home from work maybe a half hour earlier, and he’s probably in the middle of schoolwork or something equally important like talking to Sokka, and it’s too late for Azula to abandon ship. The door opens; Zuko looks shorter than he normally does. “Uh, what’s up, Azula?”

“I reacted poorly before. Let me take you to the movies or something to… thank you for sharing that pertinent information with me,” she says. There was as much confidence as she could muster in her voice for as mechanical as she knew she sounded.

“You… wanna take me to the movies? To thank me for, um, coming out to you?” He blinks slowly at her. 

She feels impossibly stupid for assuming her brother would want to spend time with her. “No, it’s fine; I don’t know what I was thinking. I hate the movies, and there’s nothing coming out that either of us wants to see anyway.” With that, Azula turns on her heel to leave.

“Wait!” he says, catching her by the arm.

Azula’s blood runs colder than the arctic.

Zuko notices, and he drops her arm a second later. “Sorry. I wasn’t saying no, I was just making sure I heard you right. Yeah, we can go to the movies.”

“Oh,” she says.

He cracks a nervous, idiotic smile that comes out all wrong.

She returns it.

They’re in the car, and neither of them are saying anything, and Azula almost thinks that it’s better that way, with no words for them both to twist into something awful. She twitches, wanting to turn the radio on, but she thinks better of it. Zuko knows she does that when she doesn’t want to talk.

It’s less that she doesn’t want to talk and more that she doesn’t know what she could possibly say to him. Part of her is afraid that she’ll snap at him like the attack dog she was raised to be, and the rest of her is afraid that she’ll make a fool of herself again. So she lets the silence sit over them like fog.

And then Zuko breaks it. “Jet apologized to me.”

“What?” Azula asks. She wants to be strong. She wants to be angry. But it comes out in a single breath. She doesn’t know how to fix it.

He clears his throat. “Uh, Jet, he reached out to me. I know you don’t forgive him—and you don’t have to! I don’t think you should, really. But he apologized for… for everything. I haven’t responded yet. I don’t know what I should say,” he says.

Something ugly is clawing its way up to her throat, wants to spill out from her lips like bile. She could choke on it. She could unleash it and tell her brother how awful he is, how much she hates him (she doesn’t, not as much as she loves him), and how much him and Jet deserve each other. She thinks she would have every right to considering what he just told her about the boy who is the reason people can’t look at her the same way ever again, the reason everyone sees her and sees what her father did to her.

But she doesn’t do that. She swallows the ugly thing sitting in her throat. 

She takes a deep breath, channels Wu, and she says, “I will never forgive that rat for what he did to me. But… There's nothing I can do to stop him from moving on with his life however he wants. I just want him to stay out of mine. Even if he re-enters yours.”

Zuko stares at her for so long that the cars behind them start honking at them—the red turned to green, and he’s just stalled, wondering who his sister is if the gape of his mouth is anything to go by.

“Drive,” she says, clearing her throat.

For once, he listens to her. Then he says, “Jet doesn’t have to be a part of my life. I don’t—I’m not trying to hurt you, Azula. You’re my little sister. He’s just some asshole I dated who hurt you. You matter more than him.” His voice doesn’t break, but she can hear it tear.

She considers closing the gap between them, but she doesn’t know how to. Physical distance is one thing, but the emotional distance between them is like lightning; she fears she can’t touch it without dying. She settles on saying, “I know,” and hopes to every god she’s ever heard of that he understands.

But he’s Zuko, so he doesn’t, or at least, he doesn’t quite grasp the gravity of it. The magnitude of what she’s said. He just nods like she said something simple.

The movie is kind of terrible. There really hadn’t been anything that either of them wanted to go see, and this whole affair was shoe-horned if Azula is honest for a minute.

(She’s never been honest a day in her life, not until she looked her brother and uncle in the eyes and told them her father had touched her everywhere a father should never touch his daughter.)

Still, Zuko smiles at her when it’s over and asks if she wants to get Somi-Somi.

As much as she doesn’t want it to, Azula’s stomach lurches at the thought. She’s still texting Zirin for every meal she eats and getting a text back, but it’s one thing to eat a light lunch or fruit or fish or something healthy. It’s a whole other beast to imagine ice cream and taiyaki down her throat without coming back up.

Zuko’s smile falters at her expression. “We can do that another time.”

“Right,” she says, but she can’t shake the feeling that maybe she ruined this with her inability to function like a normal fucking person. Not for the first time, she hates her body. It’s been ruined over and over again. First by her mother’s face, then by her father’s touch, and finally by her own starvation.

“Shit, hey, don’t—don’t be so upset, okay?” Zuko says. 

It’s not helpful, but it’s so him that she can’t help but laugh at him, loud and unafraid of the repercussions.

It takes a second, and it comes out nervous, but he laughs too as they walk through the parking lot. “What’s so funny?”

“You’re such a dum-dum,” she says.

He scowls, but she can see the corners of his mouth twitching up. He’s not mad. She’s not pushing him away.

Maybe they really can be siblings. Maybe she wants that.

“How did you know you liked boys?” She doesn’t know why she asks it, but she does.

Zuko blinks at her. Whatever he expected her to say, it wasn’t that. “Uh, does it… does it matter?” he asks.

“I suppose not,” she says. “We can drop it if it makes you uncomfortable.” She’s not used to the way being considerate tastes on her tongue, but she doesn’t think it’s awful. If she likes the taste of cigarettes, she can grow to like this taste, too.

Her fingers twitch. There are times when her whole body aches for a cigarette. She doesn’t want to burn anymore, though. Still—she reaches for her purse, for the gum. She ran out of the pack that Mai gave her, but she repurchased it. She hasn’t told Mai.

Except, she doesn’t feel the pack of gum in her bag. Just her old cigarettes. The last pack she bought.

“I thought Mai made you quit.”

“She didn’t make me do anything.”

“She could, though.”

It’s true, but Azula doesn’t want to dignify it with a response. She lights up.

“You can’t smoke that in the car. Uncle will kill us,” he says.

She stares at him and tries to imagine it: Iroh treating them anything like Father did. She finds that she can’t. “No, he won’t.”

“No, he won’t,” Zuko says, deflating. “But please don’t smoke in Druk.”

“You named the car Druk?” She doesn’t bother hiding a snicker. It’s exactly the kind of stupid thing that Zuko would do.

He flushes bright red. “I—shut up! Don’t be a bitch!”

She laughs harder; it’s like overflowing. She can’t help it, even when it makes her drop her cigarette. She hisses sharply. Before, she would have been desperate to smoke it even once it had kissed the ground. Now, she still wants it, but that’s cut in half when she thinks of the look on Mai’s face.

“That movie was awful,” she says conversationally.

“It really was,” Zuko says.

They spend the whole drive back ripping into it like any of this is normal.

Alone in her room, fresh off a phone call from Zirin about how she hadn’t been able to bring herself to eat dinner, Azula texts Beifong. I thanked the dum-dum.

There you go. You’re almost human. She could hear Beifong laughing at her, crowing like the little kid she was. You should talk to Emo now. She definitely wants to hear something kind from you.

Azula stared at the phone screen. I thought she was okay.

I’m not close with her or anything, but you care about her, don’t you? That’s what Sparky says. Something in Azula shifts like tectonic plates when she reads that, and then her legs have tremors all throughout them, rooted in her knees but sprawling up and down her legs, too. It’s one thing for Zuko himself to accuse Azula of caring about Mai,—a weakness her father could never beat out of her—but there’s something awful knowing he’s told other people.

(Is it written on her face? She doesn’t know what it could say. She doesn’t know why it hurts like this. She just knows Father would have looked at her like she was wrong and told her to strip if he saw it. He must have seen it a million times.)

Azula doesn’t respond to that text. Or the ones that come after it asking if she’s being weird or something. Or the one that reads far too gentle for Beifong’s mouth or hands, asking if she’s okay.

The shower water is burning hot. 

She thought it might make her feel better. It just makes her raw skin feel rawer, red creeping along the expanse of her form, painting her angry, proving her tender. Here’s the thing: Azula is sixteen now, and she still feels as cut open and awful as she did last year and the year before that and the year before that and the year before that and the first year her father split her wide open to pluck something out from her that she never did get back.

She scours her limbs, her chest, every inch of skin that there is to be touched and never untouched. Her eyes burn more than her flesh does. But she doesn’t let herself cry. Or maybe she does, and she doesn’t know it because the shower water is everywhere, even in her eyes.

It doesn’t matter. She turns the water off when Iroh knocks to ask if she’s okay.

She straightens her spine out where it has hunched over, says,  “I’m fine, Uncle. Just shaving.”

He believes her. It shouldn’t hurt that he does; Azula inherited her mother’s gift for lying—acting, Ursa always called it, like that made a difference. But something inside her aches at the ease with which he accepts her lie. “All right, Niece. I don’t mean to rush you.”

Azula sits on the floor of the shower, wraps her arms around her knees, pulling them into her chest, and exhales.

She wants to feel better now.

“I need more gum,” Azula says.

Mai blinks at her. It’s seven, and Azula is on her porch with still damp hair and without so much as a warning text while Mai’s family is eating dinner. “You ran out?”

“Yes,” she says.

There’s a second where she thinks Mai will say no to her, will point out that she’s in the middle of something, that Michi wouldn’t be okay with her running off for any reason, that she wants to spend time with anyone but Azula right now. The second passes. “Let me get a jacket.”

“You’re wearing long sleeves,” Azula says.

“It’s for you, idiot,” Mai says.

Azula feels her face burn slightly.

“Mom, Dad, Azula needs to borrow me. Finish dinner without me, okay? I’ll be back soon,” Mai says from the hall. It’s ruder than Azula has ever heard Mai speak to her parents.

“That’s all right, Mai. Things must be… difficult for her,” Michi says. It’s a reminder that everything is different now. What would have earned Mai disciplinary action before is met with acceptance because it involves Azula, a girl who is tainted to her core. She almost wants to ask what Michi and Ukano think of her now. She doesn’t. It would make Mai uncomfortable, and Azula isn’t sure she wants to know the answer anyway.

“Let’s go,” Mai says, handing Azula a jacket. “What were you thinking, coming here without one? You’re gonna catch a cold.”

“I thought idiots couldn’t catch colds,” Azula says.

Mai’s face softens. “I guess not. So you’re really quitting, huh?”

“Something like that.” It’s not a lie. She’s trying to be better now. To get better. She didn’t even finish the cigarette from earlier with Zuko.

“I’m glad.” Mai nudges Azula with her shoulder.

“I’m not doing it for you,” Azula says.

There’s something hard to the way Mai looks at her. “I didn’t say you were. Anyway, you should get better because you want to. Don’t do it for someone else, okay?” It sounds like the kind of thing Wu would say to her, but she doesn’t comment on that.

Azula just accepts it and nods.

They’re quiet for a while. It’s just the sound of their feet on the pavement and the water dripping from Azula’s hair all over Mai’s jacket. Eventually, Mai offers her an earbud, and she accepts.

Too suddenly, she says, “Thank you.”

“It’s just music,” Mai says, blinking. She looks at Azula with something between curiosity and amusement in her eyes. It’s not how Azula wants to be looked at.

“No. For telling me. Even if you took forever to do it.”

“Oh. That.” She doesn’t meet Azula’s eyes, opting to instead fidget with her phone, looking for the right playlist to put on. Something in the air has shifted between them.

Azula doesn’t know if it’s bad or not.

Wu seems pleased when Azula tells her about how things went with Zuko now that he’s come out to her. Wu seems pleased about a lot of things Azula is saying today that she wasn’t saying before. She doesn’t want to talk about monsters today, but Wu is fine with that as she has to be.

“I think he forgave me. For… reacting poorly to news of his sexuality,” Azula says.

“I’m glad to hear that,” Wu says. “You still look tense, though. Is something else on your mind?”

Azula shakes her head too quickly.

Wu shifts forward, closer to her. “You know, as important as it is for Zuko to forgive you, it’s just as important that you forgive yourself. Have you?”

“Why would I do that?” Azula asks, crossing her arms.

“It’s part of healing,” Wu says.

“All I did was be a touch insensitive about my brother’s homosexuality,” Azula snaps back. “I don’t have to make some big fuss forgiving myself for that.”

Wu purses her lips. “That’s not the only thing you should forgive yourself for, Azula.”

“Whatever. It’s not like anyone has ever really forgiven me for anything—not anything bigger than what Zuzu did.” She’s regressing. She can feel it in her tongue. She can’t stop it, though.

“Have you ever apologized?” Wu asks.

Azula’s nails bite the flesh of her palms. “Of course, I’ve apologized.”

“I know your mother made you apologize as a child, but I’m not asking about that, Azula. I’m asking if you ever really apologized of your own volition.”

She meets Wu’s sincerity with an awful kind of silence, reminiscent of how their sessions were in the beginning, when she couldn’t have wanted to be there less.

“You can’t know if people forgive you unless you try apologizing to them. But you have to mean it, too,” Wu says gently. It’s so much gentler than Azula has ever deserved. She wants to hate it. Finds that she can’t.

(Azula is eight, and her mother is still around, forcing her to shell out apologies when she hurts people—mostly Zuko, sometimes Ty Lee and Mai.

Father doesn’t like that. Father hates that so much he snares her arm in a vice-grip and tugs her to the other room where he kneels down and asks, “Why are you being weak, Azula?”

She doesn’t know how to respond to that. She hates letting him down more than she hates apologizing to her brother so uselessly, so unable to actually remedy whatever she did wrong this time. Her mouth flutters uselessly. “I don’t know,” she says eventually. “I’m sorry.”

He moves like he might slap her, but he thinks better of it. He stops short of the act.

Azula still flinches.

“Don’t apologize. It makes you look weak. Inferior. You are neither of those things. Do you understand?” he asks, taking her by the shoulders. He rubs his thumbs in circles over her arms.

“I understand, but what about Mom?” she asks.

“Pretend if you must, but never do it of your own will, and never mean it, girl,” he says.

Azula nods with urgency. She doesn’t know how to tell her father no, after all. She never will. Not even when he’s gone.)

Azula leaves her therapy appointment feeling hazy. The world as she knew it continues to blur over all its hard edges the same way her body starts to reject its right angles. This, too, is healing. That’s what she tells herself like a mantra as she half-listens to Iroh tell her about his day.

That’s what she tells herself as she calls Ty Lee’s number in her phone and it pours out of her when the other girl picks up, “I’m sorry I outed you to Mai.” She’s never issued an apology quite like this before. She’s never had to.

(She’s had a million things to apologize for; she’s just never known how to before this.)

“Hey to you, too, Azula,” Ty Lee says with a little laugh. “You don’t have to apologize. It’s fine, really. I’m totally over it.”

Except—how could she be? How could anyone ever get over anything, least of all that?

“Just because my father groomed me for more than just success doesn’t mean you have to forgive me, Ty. I’m sorry. For all of it. And I’m sorry if I made it so you couldn’t be angry with me,” Azula says. They aren’t her words, though. It’s Wu coming out of her mouth, and Iroh, and Ursa, and everyone Azula has never known how to imitate before because all there was was her father, pressing down on her like gravity.

Ty Lee is quiet for a long moment. “I was angry for a really long time. About a lot of things, not just that. But especially that. It was really fucked up, Azu. And it made it hurt a lot more when you stopped being my friend, too. But I’m not angry anymore. It’s not just because I found out either,” she says.

Azula exhales in a tremor. “I’m sorry I stopped being your friend. If you’re… all right with it, I want to be friends again.”

“Of course, we can be friends. Just one condition: Let’s try this time without the games and the manipulations. I hear that’s good for you,” Ty Lee says.

“Okay,” Azula says. And then, because there is nothing else she can say, “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too.”

Is it that simple? Can an apology be enough if it is sincere? Azula has never known a kindness like this before. She has never known how it could hurt her chest so good, this kind of catharsis. She wants to familiarize herself with it. She wants to know it like she knows—there is so little good that she knows so intimately.

Wu would say that if she apologizes,—to herself, to everyone else—she can change that.

At the last minute, Azula is invited to Aang and Sokka’s joint birthday party. She’s not sure exactly how it happens; she just knows that one minute, she’s doing homework and the next, Zuko is telling her that she has to get ready for a party.

“I don’t know if you noticed, but the last party we attended didn’t go very well, Zuko,” she says from her desk.

“This party won’t have any assholes at it. It’s for, uh, our friends,” he says.

Azula shoots him a hard look. “If there won’t be any assholes, why are you invited? Anyway, your friends are not my friends.”

“They could be,” he says. “Your friends used to be my friends.”

“Hardly. Ty Lee hates you, and you hate her.” She doesn’t move from her chair.

Zuko starts tossing clothes at her—it’s a horrible outfit; it’s like he’s barely even gay. “She could grow on me one day. You text Toph, you hang out with Katara; everyone wants you there. Even Suki agreed to it.”

“Did the birthday boys?” she asks.

“Aang invited you. At Katara’s request, but still. Sokka wants to get to know you. He says you deserve a second chance after your bad first impression,” he says.

Azula rolls her eyes so hard it half hurts. “I don’t have presents for them.” She picks up the outfit he tossed to her and examines it with disdain.

“You can buy them gift cards online.”

“I should do schoolwork. I can’t fall behind this year like I did last year.”

“You’re at the top of your class. You don’t have to keep making excuses if you don’t want to go, Azula.” He looks like a beaten dog. He looks like a beaten dog because he wants her to go, and he’s sad she doesn’t want to, and it shouldn’t make her heart hurt even a little bit, but it does.

She sighs. “All right. I’ll go. Just not in this awful outfit you picked out. What’s wrong with you? Get out of my room.”

He lights up.

Azula pushes him out of her bedroom, and she slams the door shut.

“I’ll wait in the living room!”

She ignores that, and she digs through her closet for an actually nice outfit. She can’t look perfect with this time crunch, but it’s a small party. A get-together, really. She’ll be all right not being perfect this once. She tells herself that over and over as she pulls her clothes on, and she ties her hair up into a sleek ponytail. It’s not her best, but it will have to do.

Mai and Ty Lee are there. Mai and Ty Lee are there, and they smile at Azula. So do all of Zuko’s friends, but they matter less. Maybe that’s cruel, but it’s true.

She says polite hello’s and an even more polite happy birthday to Sokka, who grins nervously, and Aang, who almost goes for a hug before he thinks better of it, but then she makes a beeline for Mai and Ty Lee.

Mai nods at her, and she smiles back.

“Hey, Azula, did you know Suki plays kuai ball, too?” Ty Lee asks brightly.

“I did not know that, no,” Azula says.

“I’m pretty good if I don’t say so myself,” Suki says.

Azula raises an eyebrow. She’s always been competitive by nature. “That can’t be true. I don’t remember ever playing against you.”

“I don’t play for my school’s team. I play club. Who’s your favorite player?”

“Rangi. Yours?” Azula’s answer is immediate. She doesn’t even have to think about it for a moment like it’s locked and loaded in her mouth.

“Kyoshi.”

Azula scoffs lightly. “How predictable. Not bad, of course. Kyoshi is one of the greats, but she’s such a typical answer.”

“Careful, Ty, you unleashed the kraken,” Mai says, a lazy smile on her lips.

If Suki hears, she barrels on. “Because I’m bisexual? Your choice is literally her girlfriend, Azula.”

Azula splutters. “What does that have to do with anything?”

Suki’s face opens, and then she nods like she understands something now. “Nevermind. It’s because I’m Earth Kingdom, isn’t it?”

“Well, you said it,” Azula shrugs.

“Typical Fire Nation.” There’s no edge to it, though.

Azula almost feels normal.

When the party is over, Zuko insists on staying to help Sokka and Katara clean up. Everyone does, so Azula finds herself stuck in this house, bagging trash in the kitchen with Katara when she’d much rather be with Mai or Ty Lee or at home with her schoolwork. She doesn’t complain, though. Not when she finally has a chance to ask Katara something.

“Why did you bother with me, Katara?”

“What?” she asks, blinking those big blue eyes up at Azula.

“In the beginning. Before you… knew. Why did you bother trying?”

Katara’s face droops into something sad. “My dad, um, he saw you. In the hospital. He got called in by one of your doctors after… Anyway. He didn’t tell me what you said that day; don’t worry about that. He would never have done that, but he did tell me that I should be patient with you when I complained about you after meeting you. He said you probably just needed someone to be kind to you.”

It feels horribly like pity. It feels disgusting across her chest and in her ears. Azula wants to reject it completely. But she hears Wu’s voice in her ear, telling her that Katara being patient with her is a good thing, even if she treats Azula like glass sometimes, telling her that it’s not untrue; no one has ever been very kind to Azula.

So she asks, “Well, how hard was it?”

Katara sucks in a breath. Then it all comes pouring out. “It was a nightmare. You’re racist and classist and just plain nasty, and you spent like fifteen years supporting your dad’s awful, racist policies and violations of indigenous rights, and it’s his fault my mom’s dead, but I kept telling myself that it wasn’t your fault his company killed her—”

“I’m sorry,” Azula says. “I had no idea your mother was dead.”

“That’s a horrible apology,” Katara says.

“I’m working on the whole apology thing,” Azula says.

Katara smiles, but it’s watery. “Practice makes perfect.”

“I’m sorry I wasted your time,” Azula says again.

“That’s the thing, Azula. As much as I hated you, and as much as I felt like it was a waste of time to show you kindness, I kept telling myself you were more than just his daughter. More than the shitty, jerk-ass exterior you showed me,” Katara says.

“And am I?”

Katra’s eyes shine. “Yeah. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of jerk-assery you need to work on, but you’re just a girl. It’s not your fault your dad, who I hope is burning in hell, tried to make you into a monster.”

“Tried?” Azula feels lightheaded.

But Katara just nods. “Yeah, he tried.”

“I always thought he succeeded,” Azula says. It comes out a whisper as the rest of the group laughs and crinkles trash bags. It comes out louder than anything Azula has ever said.

“He didn’t,” Katara says. “There’s still a person in there. Somewhere.”

Chapter Text

It’s Ty Lee’s sixteenth birthday, and Azula is sitting on the roof with her and Mai, and they’re all eating a slice of cake as if any of this is easy. As if any of this makes it okay that this time last year, Azula shut them out.

The cake is saccharine on her tongue. She still has a hard time eating things like this. She might always have a hard time. But Ty Lee is telling her about how Ty Woo’s separate birthday party is going to be so much lamer than Ty Lee’s birthday party tonight, and Azula doesn’t know what she can do but smile and be here. She doesn’t know what else she would ever want to do.

(A lie; there is a part of Azula that wishes she could be kneeling in the bathroom before her porcelain altar and hacking up the shit in her stomach, emptying herself into something powerful and pretty, not chained by weak feelings like nostalgia and sentimentality and love.)

She’s here, and Ty Lee and Mai are here, and they’re solid and real, and she still hasn’t apologized for last year. She should apologize for last year.

“But I mean, go off, Ty Woo! If it’s so awful to share a birthday with me!” Ty Lee huffs, but she doesn’t mean it, not fully.

“I wouldn’t mind sharing a birthday with you,” Mai says.

“I’m sorry I didn’t join you last year,” Azula says.

The shape of the conversation changes irreversibly. Ty Lee’s eyes grow wide and sad. Mai shifts her body toward Azula. They exchange a look.

“No one’s mad at you for that, Azu,” Ty Lee says.

“I kind of am,” Mai says, “but it’s okay. I’ll get over it. You’re here now. That’s what counts.”

Ty Lee jabs Mai in the ribs. “Well, I forgive you! And I’m the birthday girl!”

Azula takes a stab at another piece of cake. She swallows it whole. “Thank you, Ty. And you too, Mai. For your honesty.” She means it. She’s never meant a thank you more in her life. She’s never loved two people more in her life.

“Oh! And another thing! Ty Woo’s birthday party color palette is mint green and baby blue! She’s purposefully excluding pink because she hates me! What a cow, right?” Ty Lee says.

“Yes, she’s quite the cow,” Azula says.

Mai laughs, her eyes crinkling with the action. Azula feels something warm inside her like a furnace.

The three of them keep eating their cake like nothing has ever been wrong. And in that moment, maybe it hasn’t.

Everyone is staring. 

They’re always staring now, have been staring since they all found out the awful, ugly truth about her and Father. It feels worse this time, though. Azula just wants to buy a stupid drink from the vending machine in peace, and yet she’s accosted with the secret that was not Jet’s to tell at every turn.

She tells herself it doesn’t matter as she presses the button for a Diet Coke. She tells herself it doesn’t matter as she drinks it next to the vending machine. She tells herself it doesn’t matter when her skin starts to crawl so badly that she forsakes her manners and walks back to her classroom with her already opened and drunk from soda.

Azula’s classroom is hardly any better when in the end, she’s still alone and vulnerable and raw for all these people to see and cast judgment (pity) upon.

Sokka calls Azula after school gets out. She only answers because it’s so strange. Sokka has never been the one to reach out to Azula; that’s been Katara’s thing all these months.

“This is Azula,” she says.

“Uh, yeah, hi. Sorry. I know this is weird, but can you come over to my house? It’s Sokka, by the way,” he says.

She frowns. “You’re right. It is weird. I know I went to your birthday party, but we don’t hang out.”

“It’s not because I want to hang out with you, Azula. I mean, I don’t not want to hang out, but that’s—ugh, this is so not the point! My dad wants to talk to you. Ty Lee told Katara something, and she told Dad, and now he’s worried. She’d call you herself, but she’s at debate practice. Can you just come over?” Sokka sounds exasperated with her. Azula doesn’t blame him.

“Fine. I’ll come over,” she says.

“Okay, great. Do you need me to text you the address?” he asks.

“No, I know it.” She blushes when she realizes what she’s admitted. “It’s not because I like hanging out with you or your sister. You’re both still kind of grating. I just have a good memory.”

“Right. Whatever you say, Azula,” Sokka says, but he’s laughing a bit.

“Ugh, I see why Zuko likes you so much,” Azula says.

“Huh? Wait, what? Zuko likes me?” He sounds deeply flustered. Azula isn’t sure why.

“Yes, you’re friends, aren’t you? Anyway, goodbye. I’ll be at your house in thirty minutes.” With that, she hangs up, and she’s on her way.

Sokka and Katara’s house is the same as it was at the party: small in her eyes but more welcoming than any other house she’s ever visited. She knocks and is greeted by Sokka who looks like he wants to talk to her as she takes her shoes off but is interrupted by his father, Hakoda.

Azula remembers this man. She remembers the psych ward. She remembers the straitjacket. She rolls her shoulders reflexively, needs the reminder of her mobility. Hakoda tracks the movement with something heavy in his eyes.

“Hello, Azula,” he says.

“Sir,” she says. “Sokka was just leaving.”

Sokka takes the cue and heads to what Azula assumes is his room.

“I hear people are giving you a hard time. I’m sorry about that,” Hakoda says.

Azula shakes her head. “They don’t give me a hard time. That’s the problem. Everyone looks at me and pities me because they think they know what Father did to me. It makes them feel good about themselves to imagine it and feel glad he’s dead.”

“Is that what you think?” Hakoda asks. He sounds surprised.

“It’s what I know.” She imagines punctuating herself with a drag from a cigarette. It only makes her feel a margin more comfortable with this conversation. It would be armor, but it would be flimsy, and it would come at the cost of her progress as Wu likes to call it.

“Well, I can’t change the way people look at you, but if you want, I could talk to my connection at the DA office about pressing charges against Zhao and anyone else who knew but did nothing to stop it. I could also see about pressing charges against the people who leaked the tape. They violated your privacy beyond comprehension.”

If it’s supposed to make her feel safer, it doesn’t. “I just want them all to drop dead. If you can’t give me that, then you shouldn’t bother trying.”

From the look on his face, he can’t give her that.

It’s what Azula expected.

“Is there anything on your mind today, Azula?” Wu asks. They’re sitting across from each other; Azula is cross-legged and detached today. She feels lightning humming all around her, a force field of protection even when Wu can see her every crack.

“Did I ever tell you about the things Father made me do for him?” she asks.

Wu sits up. “You want to talk more about your father’s abuse?”

Azula smiles a blood-curdling red smile. She begins with the first time he came to her. How he told her it would hurt but promised to make her feel good too, and she describes every detail of that night, the smell of him on her, the shape of him inside her as he ripped her apart, the taste of his kiss smothering her, all of him, all of it. And then she discusses the first time he wanted to experiment beyond the world of what Azula would consider vanilla: the choking, the lingerie, the handcuffs, the anal sex, the kinks, every vulgar, rotten thing he ever did or asked her to do.

Wu looks pale. She looks sick.

This is the first time Azula has ever recounted it, really recounted it, to anyone. It feels like a weight off her chest. It feels like drowning. It feels like she’s finally scared Wu away for good.

(It doesn’t feel good to think that, and so she averts her proud gaze.)

“Do you blame yourself for it, Azula?” Wu asks.

It’s not what she was expecting at all.

“What?” she asks, blinking.

“Do you blame yourself for it?” Wu repeats herself.

Azula tilts her head cautiously. She feels as if she is about to fall out of a moving vehicle, as if all her arms and legs are not tucked safely away and she is about to lose them, lose herself, lose everything. Her stomach is falling. “Who else can I blame?”

“You can blame Ozai. It was his fault. He was the adult, and you were the child entrusted to his care, and he betrayed you by asking you to do those things. We don’t have to use the word victim if you aren’t comfortable with that—some people prefer to call themselves survivors. But I want to make sure you hear that it wasn’t your fault, Azula. You were just a girl, whether you felt like a monster or not. You never could have done anything to warrant the ways in which your father violated you,” Wu says.

(Azula is nine the first time she hears her uncle say that beauty and fortune do not mix. He laughs sadly about his wife over sake with a friend, and he says it: “Beautiful women are destined to lead unfortunate lives.”

Azula is ten the first time someone calls her beautiful. She is ten, and she is growing into a young woman, or so she’s told, and her uncle believes that she is destined to lead an unfortunate life.

She is made for misery and born with her mother’s face, and isn’t Ursa someone who’s led an unfortunate life?

She certainly made an unfortunate wife.

Azula knows she is no different within the year.)

Azula arrives home to messages from Aang. He’s thanking her for having come to his and Sokka’s birthday party as if he didn’t do this exact thing in person at said party.

She blinks down at his messages, bright and smiley as they are.

She types out that he need not thank her for her presence, and then she (awkwardly) thanks him for having invited her. It was kind of him. She knows that she wouldn’t have invited herself if she were in Aang’s shoes. She knows that she should be grateful for every ounce of kindness she receives.

She still feels too cut open to actually feel those things, though. She tells herself it will pass, and she pops a wad of nicotine gum.

Iroh goes grand with dinner that night. Azula takes one look at the decadent meal before her, and she knows that she cannot stomach a bite of this. She sets her chopsticks down and says, “I can’t eat this.”

His face grows sad and apologetic, and she regrets having spoken up at all. “It’s no problem at all, Niece! I will run out and buy something you feel up to. One of your safe foods is tonjiru, right?” he asks.

“Yes… It is,” Azula says. She blinks twice. He remembers her safe foods. He remembers that soup is easier for her. She does not know what to do with this information, and so she stows it away somewhere it can’t surface from yet. She wants time to process it, her uncle’s growing care.

“Will you two be fine if I leave you here while I go fetch some takeout?” Iroh asks.

“Yes, Uncle,” Zuko and Azula chorus.

He leaves with a smile on his face.

Silence falls over them both.

Azula clasps her hands tightly, applying enough pressure to her knuckles that it hurts. She hates how out of control she feels when nothing bad at all has happened to her recently. Healing is slow, and it is painful, and it has so many bumps in the road that Azula can hardly believe she’s still seated sometimes.

Zuko clears his throat, but he says nothing.

“Can we talk?” Azula asks.

“Uh, about what?” he asks.

She tries to find a nice way to say it; she finds there is only the direct approach. “Our childhoods.”

Zuko pales. “I’ve already forgiven you for everything, Azula. We don’t have anything to talk about.”

“You’re a horrible liar. I haven’t forgiven you for what you did to me, so I know you can’t have forgiven me for everything I did to you,” she says. She avoids eye contact, makes it with her nails instead.

She still catches sight of his frown. “What did I ever do to you?”

Azula glances up at him. “The first time Father raped me was when I was ten and you were twelve. After he left, I broke everything I could in my room and had a—Wu would call it a panic attack, I suppose. But you came to my bedroom door and told me I was being too loud. Father had just finished raping me, and I was being too loud about my—” Azula cuts herself off. She will not call it what it is.

(Grief, it lines her throat like stones. Grief, it mars her heart like bruises. Grief, it is all over her at every moment of every day.)

Zuko’s whole face has fallen. “Azula, I’m so sorry. I—I had no idea that had happened, but if I could have helped you—”

“I never wanted you to help me, Zuko. Not really. I knew you couldn’t do anything more to stop Father than I could. I just wanted you to care,” she says. It might be the most honest she’s ever been with Zuko.

He reaches out, but he doesn’t touch her as if he thinks she’ll hurt if he does. “I care. I care so much, Azula. You’re my little sister, and—I wish I’d killed that bastard myself.”

She casts her gaze downward. She feels shame wash over her. “I… I struggle to feel that way about Father in regard to what he did to you. I… feel numb about it mostly, but I want you to know that I never took pleasure in watching it happen. I just wanted Father to be proud of me. That’s awful, but he told me that if I flinched at your pain, then I was like you. I was so scared to be like you.”

“Why did you laugh when he burned me?” Zuko asks, hoarse and quiet and vulnerable.

“I don’t know. I just remember the way that night smelled and Father telling me to cry when he called the ambulance,” she confesses.

“Do you think it was funny?” he asks.

“No.” It’s so immediate that it catches Azula off guard, and Zuko too.

His face softens. He rests his hand next to hers, and it feels like an olive branch.

“I care about you too, dum-dum. I always have,” she says. Then she clears her throat before he can react to that. “Is Jet still bothering you?”

“I blocked him. I mean, I loved him once, and I hope he… gets better and learns from what he did, but it’s not something I can move past,” Zuko says, sounding somewhat dumbfounded.

“You’re not such a bad brother,” she says.

“You’re not such a bad sister either,” he says. “Maybe we aren’t okay yet, but we can be one day, right?”

Azula doesn’t answer that. She hugs her brother instead. It feels infinitely stranger than hugging Ty Lee or half-hugging Mai. But it seems like the right thing to do. It isn’t a bad feeling either. Just different.

Chapter Text

It’s not a good idea, but Azula’s body is not hers to move right now. She feels out of her head delirious as she walks automatically, watching over her body as it gets closer and closer to its destination. To Zhao.

She hasn’t been able to shake it since she spent the night talking to Zuko about it. About the part that Zhao played in making both their lives a living hell all those years. She remembers Hakoda’s offer to attempt to get Zhao prosecuted, and she wants to, but she doesn’t think it will be enough to rid her of this feeling that’s been weighing down on her chest as far back as she can remember, doesn’t think anything will ever be enough.

She asked Zuko, too.

All he wants is an apology. Something sincere. Someone to say, “You didn’t deserve to be treated that way.”

Azula tried repeating those words to him and found them foreign in her mouth like a second language, once removed from her tongue.

He laughed and told her how strange it was to hear from her. And he repeated it back to her.

It’s stranger than incest to forgive her brother and to see him forgive her.

It shouldn’t be, though. It shouldn’t be, and she wants to believe that it’s as much Zhao’s fault as it is Father’s that it is. She wants someone to blame and to hate, and it can’t be Father. It never could’ve, but least of all now that he’s gone.

So Azula bangs on Zhao’s front door. It’s 6:30 in the morning on a weekend, and she doesn’t care if she wakes him up or his whole neighborhood up. She hates him too much to care.

He pulls the door open blearily, looking disheveled and freshly awake. “Azula? What are you doing here?” he asks.

She bares her teeth for him. “Do you feel guilty about any of it?”

“… What?” he asks. He looks sincerely confused. She hates him even more for that.

“Do you feel guilty?” she demands.

“About what? What are you talking about, girl?” He’s growing impatient with her. “It’s six AM. You shouldn’t even be here—”

“I don’t care. The part you played in ruining my life, in ruining Zuko’s—do you feel guilty about any of it? Even for a minute, have you ever felt a shred of remorse for what you’ve done to us both?” she spits out.

Zhao glares at her. “I’m not the one with anything to feel guilty about. That would’ve been your father. Perhaps your mother and uncle as well.”

Azula has been angry with most of those people, and it hasn’t ever helped anything. She will not be angry with them in someone else’s place. She will not be distracted by his awfulness. She switches tactics instead. “You know, Zhao, Hakoda offered to see you prosecuted. He believes scum like you should rot in prison. I wasn’t sure if I agreed before, but perhaps I’ve been convinced.”

He pales. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Yes. You knew, and you did nothing to help us,” she says, smiling sweetly. “Isn’t that awful?”

He slams the door in her face.

Azula announces her return home and is greeted by a concerned Iroh in the midst of brewing tea.

“I was wondering where you’d gone,” he says. “Did you go for a run?”

She says yes then hesitates. Is it good to lie to her uncle now that they’re trying? “No, I didn’t. I don’t know why I lied. I went to see Zhao,” she says.

Iroh freezes. “Is that so, Niece?” He sounds serious now.

“Yes, I wanted to ask him if he was sorry,” she says.

His expression darkens. There’s something melancholy to his eyes. “I take it he was not.”

“Not at all,” she says.

He sighs. “I’m sorry, Niece. You deserve better than what a man like that is willing to give you.”

“It wasn’t just for me. It was for Zuko too,” she says. She doesn’t think about it before it’s falling out of her, and then it’s all she can think about.

Iroh smiles slightly, though. “That is a kind thing for you to do. I’m sure Zuko appreciates it, but I’m sure he’d also rather you not put yourself in harm’s way.”

“I know, Uncle,” she says.

“Good. Now, sit. Have some tea. It’s your favorite.”

Azula sits with her spine ramrod straight. She sips at the tea. Iroh wasn’t lying. It is in fact her favorite.

“Are you trying to get me in a good mood or something?” she asks, suspicious even now.

“An uncle can’t do something kind for his niece?” he asks, smiling.

She raises an eyebrow at him.

He laughs earnestly. “Okay, you’ve caught me. There was… something that I wanted to ask you. On behalf of your mother.”

“No.” The rejection has left her mouth before she’s even processed it. She might not hate Ursa for what Father did, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t hate Ursa for what she did.

(It’s not hatred, and it never was. Azula dislikes her mother because her mother dislikes her; it is as simple and complex as that. Except, Azula doesn’t hate her mother, not even a little bit. She only hates all the absences that become her.)

Iroh smiles wearily. “I thought that you might say that, and I understand that you have every right to not want anything to do with her after… what you have been through—and after all she has failed to do for you. But she begged me to at least get you to listen to her request.”

“What does that woman want?” Azula asks sharply. She feels raw all over and tender like a bruise.

“To see you. She wants to talk to you if you’ll let her, but she’d settle for just getting to see that you’re doing well,” he says.

Azula closes her eyes and feels all the tension and anger within her. And underneath that, she feels the part of her that is still a little girl who wants nothing more than to be wanted. Ursa has gotten Azula’s hopes up before.

Ursa has hurt her before.

Is there any hope for them at all?

“I’ll consider it.”

“I’m sure she will be grateful to hear that.”

For a fleeting moment, Azula resents that everyone has decided she’s so much easier to love now that she’s wounded for them to see. It passes.

The clock is ticking slowly. Azula isn’t sure what to say.

“Did I tell you I’m friends with Mai and Ty Lee again?” she asks.

“Oh? When did that happen?” Wu asks.

Azula shrugs. “On Ty’s birthday, so two weeks ago, I guess. I apologized. Like you said I should.”

“Did you mean it?” Wu asks.

Azula’s face warms. “Yes.”

Wu smiles proudly. “That’s good, Azula. That’s progress. You weren’t always a good friend to the two of them before, but you know that now. And you want to do better by them, don’t you?”

“I do,” Azula admits. There’s still so much shame clouding her heart when it comes to this. So much of her doesn’t want to admit she was ever not good. It’s not who she’s supposed to be, and this version of better is still so new. “But I’m still—I have to fight against everything Father ever taught me.”

“It’s not an easy battle, and it will never be over, but you’re stronger than you know. As long as you keep fighting it, you’re winning,” Wu says.

“What if Mai—what if they both leave again anyway?” Azula asks. She hates how weak it sounds.

“Don’t cross that bridge unless you reach it. It’s not good to worry yourself needlessly,” Wu says. “But… are you more afraid of losing Mai than Ty Lee?”

Azula goes rigid. “What do you mean by that?” she demands. She’s searching for something in Wu, but she has no idea what it could possibly be.

Wu smiles softly. “I’m asking if there’s a chance that you might be in love with Mai.”

The air leaves Azula’s lungs for just a moment, and then she hardens. Rebuilds the walls she’s spent so many moons trying to bring down in a matter of seconds.

“I don’t even know what it’s like to want to kiss someone,” Azula says.

“And that’s understandable given your father’s weaponization of physical intimacy, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t have fallen in love,” Wu says.

“I’m—” (fundamentally broken, damaged beyond repair, not something soft enough to love or be loved) “a monster.”

“No, Azula, you aren’t. I think you know that.”

(“What are you doing?” Father asks.

Azula freezes in place. “I—I was making breakfast for Mom,” she says. It’s better to tell him the truth and be reprimanded for her weakness than it is to lie and be disciplined for her failure to do as he says, to be malleable to his will.

“Why would you do that?” he asks.

“Because—”

There aren’t words that she can use to justify this to him. She’s already lost from the moment she conceptualized this.

She closes her mouth firmly.

He sighs. “Do you understand that she hates you?”

“What?” Azula asks, wide-eyed. She’s a child. She’s only ever a child.

“She resents that you were even born. Don’t you remember after the roof incident? She called you a monster. Did you think she didn’t mean it?” He’s kneeling to speak with her like she’s slow. If she doesn’t understand that her mother fundamentally doesn’t love her, then maybe she is.

“I didn’t know…” Azula says.

“You won’t make that mistake again, my sweet. Will you?”

“I won’t, Father.”)

Tomorrow is Zuko’s eighteenth birthday, and tonight they’re having dinner with Mai and Ty Lee while Iroh has to meet with some investors out of town. He’s supposed to be back early in the morning, but for now, they can play at being adults while telling Zuko how old he’s getting.

They’ve got the news playing to feel more grown up, even though none of them really care or listen to what’s being said.

At least, not until Zhao’s face appears on the screen and the words “dead by apparent suicide” flash over it.

“What?” Zuko asks.

“Did I read that right?” Ty Lee asks.

“He’s really dead,” Mai says.

“I must have scared him,” Azula says.

“Well, you sure are scary,” Ty Lee says.

“Don’t I know it,” Zuko scoffs.

Mai laughs. It’s slight, but it’s there. “Azula is all talk,” she says.

“And yet she scared Zhao so bad he killed himself,” Ty Lee sing-songs. “I think that kind of indicates she’s scary!”

“In a good way,” Zuko says.

Azula busts out into full-bellied laughter.

“We should drink to this,” Ty Lee says.

“Sake sounds good,” Mai says. “Where does Iroh keep his stash?”

“In the pantry. I’ll go get it,” Zuko says.

“Get the snow aged junmai one,” Azula says.

“The what?” Zuko asks, blinking.

Azula rolls her eyes. “The white one, dum-dum!”

“Just say that next time,” Zuko huffs.

They’re on their fifth shot of it when Azula finally asks the question that’s been on her mind all this time: “Did you really get disowned for telling Father about Zhao being a pervert?”

Zuko blinks stupidly at her then laughs. “Yeah! Yeah, I did! Who told you?”

Azula laughs with him. “Uncle told me! I think he thought it would make me like you!”

“That’s ridiculous. What could make you like Zuko?” Mai asks.

“What could make anyone like Zuko?” Ty Lee interjects.

The four of them burst into another round of laughter.

“You’re not such a bad big brother,” Azula says quietly. The room grows somber. “Thank you, dum-dum. I shouldn’t have chosen Father over you. I’m sorry.”

Zuko looks at her, wet-eyed. “You’re not such a bad little sister. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was talking to Mom. I shouldn’t have chosen her over you.” He reaches over awkwardly, and then all at once, he hugs Azula.

“Group hug!” Ty Lee yells, dragging Mai in with her and shattering all the tension in the room.

“Ugh, I hate hugs, Ty,” Mai grumbles.

“But you love us!” Ty Lee says cheerfully.

She’s not wrong, and they all know it. Azula’s already warm stomach feels like it’s on fire.

Azula has been playing with the idea since she let Iroh’s words sink in. She knows her limits. She cannot speak to Ursa alone, not without the conversation derailing into an attack, into the weaponization of all the spaces Ursa has not filled in Azula’s life.

But she could do it… in a moderated setting.

“Aunt Wu,” she says, laying it on thick, “could we do a session with my mother?”

Wu smiles at her. “You’ve never called me Aunt Wu before. You must really want to talk to her. Do you want to understand your mother?”

“I want to know what there is to understand. I want to know what could’ve made abandoning me to him okay,” Azula says.

Wu’s smile grows sad around the edges. “Of course. Well, we can schedule that with her. I’ll give you a list of my openings next week, and your uncle can send them to her.”

“Good.”

It almost means thank you here.

Sokka is sitting in Azula’s living room, which is really Iroh’s living room, waiting for Zuko to be home from work. Apparently, they have plans. They’re seeing a movie and getting takeout or something. Azula doesn’t really care all that much what her brother does with his friends.

She does, however, care about how intolerable she finds their awkward small talk. And about how awful she is at small talk, apparently.

“Were you close with your mom?” she asks him. Is she stupid? Why would she say that? They were talking about the weather and then school and then his grandmother’s cooking, and she chose to ask him about his dead mom. “Katara told me she died…”

She wants to eat her fist. She must be stupider than she ever believed Zuko to be. Why would she say that?

“Oh. I mean—sorry. Uh, I didn’t expect you to say that,” Sokka says awkwardly.

“Neither did I,” Azula says.

He laughs.

“I’m—sorry,” she says forcefully.

“It’s okay. I mean… honestly, Katara was closer with her, but it’s not like I didn’t love her too,” he says.

Azula frowns. “It didn’t bother you that she loved Katara more?”

Sokka mirrors her frown. “My sister being closer with her than I was doesn’t mean she loved Katara more than me. I don’t think that’s ever what that means for any siblings.”

She blinks in surprise then narrows her eyes. “You’ve never met my mother.”

“I mean, I haven’t, but—I don’t think she loves you less than she loves Zuko. I could be wrong, but maybe she just didn’t know how to talk to you when your father was so biased about you and Zuko. Whatever it was, I can’t imagine she feels good about it now that she knows what that bastard was really doing to you,” he says. “Like it’s not really my business, but… I don’t know. From everything Zuko’s ever said about her, I’m sure she loves you too. She just… She wasn’t very good at being a mom when you were growing up. And she’s still learning now.”

(Azula needed her mother as a girl. It doesn’t make it okay that her mother didn’t know how to be one for her. It doesn’t make it hurt less. Does that make Azula a bad person? Does it make her angry and spiteful and awful?)

“Do you think that means I owe her forgiveness?” she asks, whisper-quiet.

Sokka studies her long and hard. And then he surprises her: “No. It doesn’t.”

Zuko gets home before she can respond.