category: Avatar the Last Airbender
disclaimer: I don't own it.
notes: Every AtLA writer has do Azula sometime, so I figured I might as well jump on it.
She heard the door of her brother's room creak open. There was a hushed voice (her mother, she identified), and then there was only silence. Footsteps in the hallway paused for a moment, and she was sure she heard a hand on her doorknob. The pressure was quickly released, and quiet again. She felt the blood pounding in her ears.
The next morning she was told that her mother had left. She already knew.
x
Their father became Fire Lord the very day after Azulon was dead. Her lousy uncle never came home. Cousin Lu Ten was dead, and she didn't mind because it meant that she was the best firebending grandchild. There were no signs of her mother anywhere. Zuko moped. The Fire Lord basked in newfound glory.
For a few weeks after that climatic night, Azula had a hard time sleeping. She chalked it up to the metabolism changes with the increased bending she was doing, although sometimes she swore she saw her mother drifting around the palace. She came to her in the middle of dark nights and touched her forehead with icy fingers. Once, she stroked her hair and sighed sadly.
Azula always woke up with a cold sheen of sweat on her forehead, clammy palms, a throbbing pulse, uneven breathing. Next door she could hear the sniffles of her feeble brother at all hours of the night. She wanted to scoff at and disparage him a million times over, but a little part of her understood.
Four months and three days after Ursa fled, Azula cried.
x
All the things most people hated about being on the road were welcome signs to Azula that confirmed she was in her natural element. Five hours of sleep per night beckoned her to an instinctive state of heightened senses. The grubby food and translucent river water pushed her into a last-ditch survival impulse and allowed her to think with the clarity not possessed by those comfortable in their surroundings. Trekking through shallow waters to hide tracks and listening through towns for talk of an arrowed boy boiled her blood for the hunt.
She thrived by making her prey miserable, confused, terrified. When the Avatar and his friends were not available, she settled for poking bitter fun at Ty Lee's freakish circus background or how Mai tried and failed not to turn red upon the slightest reference to Zuzu.
x
Her mother's spirit spoke to her through the solidity of the ground under her boot and the rustling of leaves at sunset. The presence whispered things Azula could not understand – of love and sacrifice and forgiveness.
Azula purposefully crushed all bugs she saw scuttling around near her shoes and hoped wherever her mother was, she felt the pain.
x
She never forgave her mother of the night that she left without a glance farewell. Her father muttered things about there not being a trace of her anywhere. She hoped she was dead.
x
Zuko left too. One minute before an eclipse he was there and the next he was not, following the meteoric tail of a comet to sweeter seas. She wasn't surprised when he didn't say goodbye, because she supposed he didn't care. Neither did she. Goodbye was the moment she was told by their father to hunt him and end him. Familial loyalties bear the strain of strife only as long as no one snaps.
Her mother caressed the air with slicing words and a forceful push of stifling air through the windowpanes.
x
The day of her coronation could not have started (or ended) any worse than it had. In the very early morning, she nearly died of a cherry pit. Then her servants forgot to scrub between her toes and all she could feel for the rest of the day was bacteria lingering and eating through the flesh of her foot and blood everywhere.
Finally, her topknot would just not stay in place. A few snips of the scissors provided a temporary release, but then she realized all her hair was gone and itching at her shoeless feet.
Her mother breathed words of kindness behind her back. "I love you, Azula," in a slow exhale, and smiled up to her eyes.
Azula threw the hairbrush and shattered the mirror, but the freezing fingers clamping around her windpipe remained chokingly unyielding.
x
Her failure of a brother showed up at her crowdless coronation. He wanted an agni kai, and she obliged willfully. She didn't remember much except that she'd been able to pull up one of her strongest bouts of lightning, an entire storm. He got distracted and didn't redirect it, and fell to the stones in a twitching, sparking heap.
She laughed.
She didn't remember much of anything else because that water tribe peasant got lucky and chained her up.
That set her off; Azula felt in her veins a scorching magma that flowed through her ears to her toenails. Everything was falling to shambles around her chafing wrists. Everything she had ever worked for: all that plotting and effort and scheming and almost-there success, and she'd never even tasted power on the tip of her tongue.
An unquenchable fire exploded from every pore in her body as a dozen voices began screaming in her head. Her father, Zuko, Iroh, that stupid servant, her mother. Yes, her mother was in her mind and dominating her line of sight and beating on the insides of her ears – bringing to a head the words she'd thrown around carelessly for the years since she left. Sacrifice and compassion and love and forgiveness and consideration and redemption.
There was a climax in Azula's being where all she smelled was summer and turtle-ducks on her mother's robe.
Then her foot slid down the slope of sanity and into a dark dark abyss, and she could not stop laughing as blue fire spewed from her lungs.