Disclaimer: Avatar: the last Airbender belongs to Michael
Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko.
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The first secret of the White Lotus Society was: "Four countries; one world."
Iroh was still young when he was first introduced into the society,
but not so young that he hadn't traveled outside of the Fire Nation's borders
and been in the war. He grasped the
meaning sooner than many other initiates had.
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Iroh first saw lightning used not long after he entered the army. He started as a lieutenant, and one day the company his platoon was a part of ran into a squad of waterbenders. The fight had barely begun before the major in charge--who was not quite young, very talented, and was still only a major by the simple fact that his commission had not arrived yet--used the waterbenders' own element to conduct the lightning.
The smell had been terrible.
Later, as he oversaw the cleanup (the soldiers tied handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths beneath their face plates), Iroh distracted himself by thinking of how ironic it was, that fire's polar opposite could become its aid under the right conditions.
He mentioned it in his next letter to his father. Azulon's reply was to send back the instructions on the technique along with several questions about the battles that had occurred between the sent letter and the response.
The instructions were written in his brother's best script;
Iroh supposed that Ozai had been pleased at the opportunity to gain access to
high-level firebending scrolls.
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Iroh didn't attempt the technique while he was still in the field. Troops needed consistent orders and an effective example in order to trust their leader, and while Iroh was friendly with those who worked under him, he also presented himself as a man who was absolutely talented with ease. He did his training early in the morning, before dawn, when only the guards were awake to see it; and he had their patrols timed so that he knew when he could practice new techniques and when to run through the basics until they came so easily that they seemed fluid.
He tucked the instructions away and waited until he was home
again--his mother has been conducting marriage interviews in his absence, and
had apparently settled everything enough to the point that he was allowed to be
involved--to practice, away from those he had to be an example for and only around those he
had to be an example to.
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He didn't intend to aim for the tree, but then the lightning was moving through him and it was either the tree or the wall, or himself.
Afterward, Iroh stood in front of the chinaberry and stared at the vicious split that now severed a large branch from the tree. It had fallen oddly, so that it was propped up by the ground and still connected to the trunk by a thin strip of bark. Many of the leaves along the split were smoking, and the smell of the singed fruit was slowly tainting the air.
Eventually, he noticed the coloring of the sky over the
wall--the sun was rising. Iroh gave the
chinaberry one last, long glance, and then bowed to it and headed back to his
rooms.
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Apparently, the gardener could come up with no explanation for why one tree in the small, little used garden in the east wing was the only thing struck by lightning, especially taking into account the fact that there had been no storm last night.
Iroh had continued talking to his prospective bride while a servant was giving Azulon the report at breakfast. He lowered his voice so as not to be disruptive, but otherwise displayed no attention to the news.
He also noticed the looks that both his father and his brother gave him after the servant left, but since he wasn't directly addressed by either, he continued flirting.
That was probably what had infuriated Ozai the most, though that hadn't been Iroh's intention.
The next time he went to the garden--a few days later, because there were larger and more suitable rooms for firebending practice within the palace, and his fiancée had expressed interest in watching--there were charred marks along the wall near the tree. Iroh rubbed his thumb over one of them and wondered how much Ozai had bribed the gardener to keep this quiet.
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Azula was still a child when her firebending instructor declared that she was ready to begin advanced techniques.
It was when she was practicing intensifying a flame--the temperature needed to incinerate someone was extremely high, and the fire had to be kept a far enough distance away to avoid burns from the heat--that she first noticed the feeling. It didn't come from the fire itself, not exactly; or rather, it wasn't from the fire as a whole. Azula knew what fire felt like, and this flame was just what a flame was supposed to be. Instead, it was like something within the fire was scraping together, and it did so more noticeably as she increased the heat.
Azula released the flame with a frown and stood silently in the room, ignoring the question from her instructor standing to the right.
The she exhaled and resumed her stance. She produced the flame and once again brought up its temperature, increasing it until the fire was discolored and the heat was searing even from a distance and her instructor shouted.
He knocked her hands out of their position a moment later, and Azula reflexively lashed out. He deflected the fire and took two steps back, bowing slightly.
"You must be careful, Princess Azula," he explained. "In the confines of a room like this, too much heat could burn you."
She knew that. It could burn her even if they'd been in a larger room or outside; that was the point of the technique.
But. . . .
Azula licked her dried lips and eyed the area where the fire had been.
"Fine," she snapped shortly, and the man glanced at her in surprise. Azula ignored him and took a new stance. "What's next?"
It hadn't been a scraping sensation. Something had been peeling within the fire,
two parts splitting away, even though the flame had stayed in the same spot.
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Later that evening, her father asked why she had made such a mistake--he would have expected a loss of control from Zuko, but not her.
"May I speak to you after dinner, Father?" Azula
asked in reply, as Zuko bent his head slightly over his bowl.
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Azula was old enough to dislike the look her father gave her after she explained the strange splitting feeling, but she didn't show it.
He took her to the library and showed her a scroll on
lightning the next morning, however, before leaving her there to attend to
business. Azula tucked the memory of his
expression away for future consideration and spread the scroll out on the
table.
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The first time she produced lightning--scorching two of the pillars in the main training room and cracking one--Azula was frustrated to find that her hands shook afterward, and she couldn't immediately will them to stop.
The lightning had been loud
in the room.
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Her instructor never looked at her quite the same after that day; his gaze was always slightly lowered when he wasn't watching her move through the positions. He was soon replaced, for having nothing more to teach her.
No one looked at her quite the same afterward, especially her father and brother. Azula bowed at her father's praise and smirked at Zuko's frustrated jealousy, and decided it was time to speak to the old servants.
Ozai's praise of her had always been more of a condemnation of Zuko's skills than actual admiration of her developments, which had satisfied her enough; but it had been distinctly sparse this time. Azula didn't like it--this was something rare, that only a few firebenders were capable of doing, and she did it at eleven. It wasn't perfect yet, but it was still heads above what everyone else around her could do.
It was that thought that made her realize it might actually
be better than what everyone else in
the palace could do.
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She had been half-right--the servants told her tales of her uncle's use of lightning in his old battles, and of how her great-grandfather had been considered a master of it. None of them mentioned her father.
The next time Azula saw Iroh in the halls, she stared at him after he'd passed by and tried to understand how he could be her competition. That old man, that grieving failure. . . .
"'The way of war is a way of deception,'" her father had quoted to her once, when Azula had questioned how it was dignified for Fire Nation soldiers to wear Earth Kingdom garb to infiltrate a group of suspected Air nomads.
She remained suspicious of Iroh after that, and paid more
attention whenever he spoke to or trained Zuko.
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Azula graduated from the Royal Fire Academy for Girls two months after she first succeedfully performed the lightning technique, and a week before Ty Lee cheerfully flunked out.
She learned from Mai--in between complaints of how boring the classes were now--that Ty Lee had taken up a study of anatomy and chi in addition to her martial arts training in order to keep her mother satisfied that she wasn't becoming too unfeminine.
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When the reports of the failed siege at the North Pole arrived at the palace, the first person Ozai called after reading them was Azula.
"I have a task for you," he told her, and watched
her expression carefully as she lifted her face.
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After Azula received the instructions of how she was to retrieve her uncle and brother--she would be setting out the next morning by ship, of all things; it was the only mode of travel, she knew, but at the same time she was fourteen now and she disliked the parallel--she thanked her father and left the throne room to pack.
Azula had been using the lightning technique for three years straight now; it made other firebenders uncomfortable around her, she knew, to see that she favored the cold fire so highly over the familiar warm one.
The discomfort extended to her father, it seemed.
Azula decided that it would be wise to send out letters to
Mai and Ty Lee when she docked at the resort Zuko and Iroh had been reported
at. The time had come for her to bring
back her allies, before anyone else could get to them first.
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Shortly before dawn the next morning, Azula made her way to the small garden in the east wing.
The place had come up in the stories about Iroh years ago, and Azula had been aware of it even before then--she knew every inch of this palace, from the kitchens to the Fire Lord's private rooms.
The tree split by lightning still stood. The garden was so rarely used that getting rid of it would have drawn more attention than leaving it to die. The walls, however, had been well-scrubbed and repainted.
Even years later, it was obvious that the paint on the side wall was newer than anything else in the garden. Azula scraped at one of the places where it was slightly thicker with an ornamental rock, until she uncovered the charred marks underneath.
She eyed the ashy black for a few moments, and then smiled.
Azula tossed the rock to the side and stepped back. Then she exhaled once, slowly, before shifting into stance.
The lightning severed the chinaberry tree at the base. It toppled to the left, scraping the wall and snapping the thin length of bark that had still been connecting the old, already-split branch.
The noise of the falling tree had been louder than the lightning. Azula eyed the chinaberry as smoke curled up from the singed trunk, and listened to the slow cracking as smaller branches collapsed under the weight that had already broken the larger ones.
Then she brushed her bangs back into place and left. When she returned to her rooms, she ordered
two servants to transfer her luggage to the shipyard and sent a third to tell
the kitchens to have her breakfast ready--she would be departing shortly.
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The gardener's note was included in the list of reports that Ozai read that night; Azula's ship had long set sail by then. He set the scroll aside in silence after reading it, without even finishing.
He granted Azula permission to chase Iroh and Zuko only after he'd confirmed that they had escaped through the captain's foolish mistake and not through her own cunning, as an excuse to avoid returning home.
He was unsurprised when the guards he'd assigned to her sent
back word that she had released them from their duties immediately after she
had met up with the second of two school friends.
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