AN: Because I can't really live without Azula as a Dragon!Mother.
T/M for future sexual content, some violence and mature topics.
This is very AU, by way of extreme canon divergence, but everything up until the beginning of this story completely canon compliant (edit: except I wrote it before Smoke and Shadow). It picks up right after The Search (after the in-medias-res prologue).

The Dragon's Lullaby

Prologue

Political disputes are not the only ramifications losing balance for a century.

The rebuilding involves more than apologizing, imprisoning and redrawing the lines of who owns what. This became very evident after the war, when forests and rivers were forgotten and the focus shifted to angry kings and old grudges. The unification of humans was very easily destroyed by the eternal union of spirits and the spurned, and now, after a war that lasted One Hundred Years, there is another.

Now, there has been a shift in the spirits. Something inexplicable and devastating to the carefully rebuilt world around them. While there is so much fire consuming the countryside, creatures of destruction, it is very easy to see the fact that it is a world being reborn in fire.

If it were not being led by Azula, it would be so easy to emphasize with the cause. If her first action had not been to seize Caldera and make herself a fortress, using dragons to make herself untouchable, maybe this would have been seen as an act of justice.

See, when Azula got lost, she got found, and somehow managed to bring living creatures of nightmare back from the Spirit World with her.

And now Ty Lee stands in front of Zuko, her husband of several years, and they are both alone and separated from their friends. Aang vanished into the Spirit World as soon as Azula took Caldera, and he hasn't come back yet. It is impossible to figure out where anyone else is in this nightmarish regime, but the former Fire Lord and Fire Lady are hiding in the woods where they once got lost with Azula and Mai as kids.

Azula and Mai, who are in the Fire Nation palace. With dragons. With fucking dragons. Who can overthrow a tyrant with dragons at her disposal?

Zuko sniffs in the cool breeze and shifts his weight uncomfortably. "I think you're the best chance we have right now, since everyone we've tried to contact hasn't said a word back. You go to her and do something sweet and... sexy."

"She wouldn't trust me. She wouldn't trust me in a million years, Zuko," Ty Lee says sharply, crossing her arms. If the idea of what he has just suggested is not bad enough, it also sucks. "She'll know something's wrong in an instant."

"Maybe she won't trust you, but I don't think she'll turn you down. You're persuasive," Zuko says earnestly and Ty Lee does know that this horrible, ill-thought out plan is way better than waiting to be dragged out of the forest and eaten.

Ty Lee gulps and again looks at the nearly sheer dress pressed against her tan skin.

If only they weren't so scattered. With all transport shut down for fear of dragon attacks, people remain quarantined and with curfews, and that makes it nearly impossible to reach the rest of their friends. If they had the Kyoshi Warriors, Zuko's super powerful friends like Toph and Katara, and the White Lotus, they could storm Caldera and have a decent chance of winning it back.

But the Spirits were not meant to be fucked with by the Fire Nation. Why exactly they didn't ask Aang to help them, or maybe someone from the Water Tribes ─ Sokka's ex-girlfriend is the Moon Spirit, right? ─ it would make more sense. But Azula? Azula?

If Ty Lee lives through Zuko's awful plan, she wants some of what the Spirits are smoking.

And as Ty Lee applies a swatch of lipstick, she decides that she can provide the best kind of subtle. She licks her lips gently, remembering her guilt and pain, and how it immediately became bitter in her mouth after Azula returned and this all began.

It spiraled from a strange occurrence into an atrocity, and Ty Lee stood by and watched it. They all did.

Maybe Ty Lee is the only one who has a chance with Azula. Their feelings never quite... died. Ty Lee has never met a person who wouldn't sleep with her, and she knows how Azula works after so many years living in fear of her.

"I'll do it," says Ty Lee.

She will seduce and assassinate the Dragon Queen.