Shitteiru
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Azula never wondered how it would feel to be struck by the lightning she could rend the air with. She knew, with all certainty, that it would be cold white fire arcing and winding through the veins, across the chest, and in the heart. The fire she brought into the world was not something that gave her cause for philosophical thought. She was more than aware of how much pain fire was able to bring about; she studied it.
The red-yellow flames of her youngest years had set the rats she had used for moving target practice to squeaking and shrieking in the manner rats had. There had been one moment, and only one, where she had missed a nearby sparrowkeet as it swooped down from a branch. The fireball had gone by the sparrowkeet's tail feathers to strike the shoulder of a passing scullery maid. The girl, ten years old to Azula's five, had screamed and dropped the dirty trays she had been carrying.
Lady Ursa, always close at hand with Zuko clinging to her robes, had rushed over. She dropped down on one knee, taking Azula's shoulders in her hands. She shook the girl, demanding an explanation. Azula did not hear her mother, instead watching the scullery maid. The girl's shriek had caught her ears, and she stood listening to the squeaking of her breath as she sobbed and gasped, hand cupped over the burn on her shoulder.
That night, after Ursa had forced an apology from the small princess, Azula strode from her room. Her intent, for once, was not to keep Zuko from a solid night of sleep. She went to the pantry, oversized as it was in the palace. A flame that shrank and swelled on her fingertip with each breath acted as her torch, and she carefully crouched down to look under the lowest shelves.
Bread crumbs, torn from a stale loaf, brought out a rat from a bag of flour. It paused once, chattering and shaking its brown fur free of white flour, and hopped to the nearest crumb. Azula snatched the rat, pinching its skull between thumb and forefinger to keep it from writhing and delivering a glancing bite to her fingers. Nevertheless, it squirmed and squealed. The girl stared at the rat, turning it to look at its hairless pink tail.
The shriek the rat gave as the flame touched the end of its tail made Azula think of the scullery maid that morning. She took the flame away for a moment, watching the pale gray smoke rise and wind from the charred black end of the rat's tail. It continued to scream, and Azula pinched its head tighter to assure that its teeth would not tear her skin.
She returned the flame to its tail, listening as its screams began to last as long as breath sustained. She trailed the flame up the tail's length, moving centimeter by centimeter so slowly that three minutes had passed before she reached the junction of tail and body. The rat's screaming had tapered into short bursts of squeaking after a minute, and the strength of each squeak waned. After two minutes, the rat had grown entirely silent, panting for each hard and fast breath. Azula glanced at the rat's face, blinking once at its closed eyes. The animal's breath was slow and deep, its chest still expanding to touch her hand. She blew out the embers that had begun to glow on the fur nearest the charred stump of the tail and tossed the creature back beneath the shelf, careful to toss it away from the bag of flour.
There was a smile on her face the next morning when she saw the burned maid. The maid hurried away from the princess as quickly as possible, wounded shoulder hunched low and turned aside. Azula let the girl pass without a second glance. She felt no urge to repeat the incident of the previous morning, unwilling to miss for a second time and without need to know if the screams and squeals had been a simple stroke of luck.
It was shortly after Ozai's ascension to the throne that Azula, at eight years old, was declared a firebending prodigy. At the age when the crown prince had yet to master the most basic of forms, Azula had come to her father one day after a session of drilling advanced forms. As she went through the forms for him, her teachers and tutors on their knees nearby, the Fire Lord's lips twitched fractionally into a smile. The red flames flickered, not into weak wisps, but into a different spectrum of color. It darkened at first, the core flaring crimson as the tails and tendrils died off in the air as yellow. The light grew brighter at the narrowing of Azula's eyes, the edges of the flame flashing violet for an instant as the core burned blue.
Mere minutes after she had begun her forms, the flame shone in Ozai's vision with the core white and its edges faint blue. He watched his daughter finish the set with a flourishing double-fisted punch, a fireball coming close to the fires that burned constantly around the throne before imploding in a shower of blue sparks. She bowed at the waist to him, and sank down to her knees. He lifted a hand for her to speak.
The request that she made was one that brought raised eyebrows from all of her teachers. She did not ask to be allowed a period of rest after her drilling and practice, nor did she desire some type of celebration for her achievement. She only wanted to have a certain group of people brought before her: those women who had been born on the same date as her, and who were able to firebend. Ozai made no inquiries as to why Azula had such a desire. He waved his hand in acquiescence after a time, and the order was issued.
It took three days time before the women reached the palace. Only four had fallen under the specifications Azula had laid out. One was an adult woman, older than Ursa had been before she had gone, and with white strands showing in her black hair. Two others were twin sisters, just on the edge of turning six as Azula was near her ninth birthday. The last was a girl that teetered between childhood and becoming a woman, and it was on this girl that Azula's gaze focused on for more than a moment. The girl's eyes were half closed, a faint smile on her face. Standing a full head taller than Azula, she had to look down her nose with such an expression to focus on the princess.
The woman was the first that Azula turned to face completely. She had crouched, low and fast, and thrust out her right arm, two fingers pointing to guide the rush of blue flames. The heat incinerated the woman's fine clothes in a large circle, the concussive force knocking one leg back and up. The woman fell immediately to the ground, hands reaching toward the smoldering and smoking circle in her flesh. Her mouth hung open for a moment, honey-colored eyes wide enough to see the whites all around the iris. She coughed, sputtering, before letting out a low moan. The moan escalated, growing into a howling scream.
Azula gestured, and the guards snatched the twins off their feet before they could run out the doors. They shrieked and flailed, and Azula nodded. The guards paired up to hold the girls still, one man holding an arm and a leg on either side of a body. Azula went to each girl in turn, smiling as she held up the first two fingers of her right hand. The girls began to sob and whimper before Azula grasped the first girl's left wrist. Blue flames burned just off of her fingertips, and Azula traced the flames along the line in the palm of the girl's left hand. The girl screamed without words in the beginning, soon shrieking for her mother and father in turn when Azula moved to her right hand and repeated the tracing. The girl's twin did much the same, howls mixing with sobs as her hands were burned precisely as her sister's had been.
The guards had already taken hold of the last girl by the time Azula turned away from the twins. Despite the fact that only the girl's smile had faded and her eyes remained half-closed, Azula continued to smile. She nodded to the guards, and the girl's knees were bent with swift heel kicks to the back of the joints. The guards stepped away as Azula began to turn, her right foot dragging against the ground. The girl looked up, her chest exposed, and Azula turned faster, right leg rising. Blue flames gathered on her right heel, and she spun on her left. The kick swept over her head and came back down in a diagonal curve, the flame rushing from her foot along that arc.
Azula knew the girl's eyes would open and grow wide when the flames slammed into her chest. With this knowledge had come the smile on her face, and it lingered while she watched the girl fall back to the ground, her breath coming in shallow rushes. Azula knew she squeaked, whimpered, and gasped because she was unable to scream. Her chest had become tight, and Azula could see the terror of tearing the burn open further in the girl's eyes as she strode by. She left the guards with the burned women, and knowing that they would be dragged unceremoniously to the palace physicians kept the smile on her face.
There was no uncertainty for Azula when she regarded her flames and what purpose they served when she brought them into existence with her controlled breath. She knew the reactions that could be pulled from men, women, and children when they were confronted and touched by every flame that she could produce, and she smiled because she alone held this knowledge. When she came to face the Avatar in the catacombs beneath Ba Sing Se, her faith in Zuko's gullibility had given her smile strength.
When the Avatar hid away in the middle of battle, she smiled all the more. The lightning had come easily to her, passion and lust for battle glory gone with the return of knowing more than anyone else. She gave the lightning a guide to the Avatar's spine as he floated up, burgeoned by the air, and smiled. The boy writhed and twitched with the lightning's flow through his veins, his breath to scream taken by the crackling white fire in his chest. The glow that gave him the power of his past lives faded from his tattoos as his heart was touched and thrown out rhythm.
Azula knew what the lightning would do to the boy, and smiled because of it. She watched him fall, seeing that Ba Sing Se would fall with him, and heard herself chuckle with the pleasure of knowing.
—end—