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(family)

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She avoids him for weeks. It's as easy as avoiding the infirmary, because he won't leave Zuko's side, until now.

Iroh looks old.

Azula shakes off the thought before it can bother her. "What are you doing here?" she snaps. "Why aren't you with Zuko?" She spits her brother's name onto the floor.

"He woke up this morning ... My brother demanded an audience with him immediately."

Azula knows her uncle well enough to expect good news when he says my brother in that slow, disappointed voice, but she quiets her sudden excitement. Father wouldn't hurt Zuko. It would be dishonorable to strike a wounded opponent.

A bit more briskly than necessary, she says, "Out with it."

"Zuko has been exiled from the Fire Nation. I will accompany him."

Exile is a hard word to voice, and Iroh's face sags. Azula doesn't blink.

I am crown princess of the Fire Nation, she thinks, feeling her stomach swoop. If it means Zuko and Iroh have to leave, so be it. People like them don't belong here.

Mother didn't, either.

All of a sudden she feels exhausted. She turns away, and is about to close the door in his face, but Iroh sweeps into her room, determined to speak.

"The price of his honorand his throneis the capture of the Avatar."

She can't help the sharp laughter that breaks from her mouth. It turns shrill in moments, and she doesn't care about the frown lines deepening on Iroh's brow. "So you're here for me? As if Zuzu could keep the throne that belongs to me!" Every muscle in her body tenses, ready to lunge.

"No!"

He seems genuinely upset by her words, as she knew he would. But she can't have predicted this

"We will be gone by sunrise. Before our ship leaves, you will learn to redirect lightning. You must."

The crackle of blue in his hands is a cold promise.

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Azula usually can't stand her washed-up uncle's explanations, but the starlight spirits listen with rapt attention. They are impressed, she realizes. His words resonate deep inside of her.

Push, pull, tide, whirl. Above her, the moon drifts across the sky, and without looking she knows exactly where it hangs.

Below her, the sink of the earth waits, black and hungry. In the smooth marble of her floor, she feels the rifts that will guide the fire down, down, into the welcoming arms of the earth.

The leaping spark is barely enough to burn hair, but she knows only a master could control the uncontrollable like this. She takes the lightning without a word, utterly perfect in form, and channels it through herself and into the floor, harmlessly dissipated.

Except it doesn't happen that way, and the recoil hurls her into the far wall.

I thought you were a prodigy, Azula, Iroh doesn't say.

She only stands and motions him to try again, with a terrible smile on her face.

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The ship is already halfway into the bay by the time she drags herself out of bed.

"Even Mother took the time to say goodbye to me," she says to the window.

The predawn shadows wrap around her as she pulls the covers around her and shakes the scent of lightning out of her hair.

On an impulse, she breathes deep and fires a streamer of white fire up and out into the dark sky. It leaves a smoky question mark hanging over the Palace long after the flames eat themselves away.

If there's a reply, she doesn't see it. The sun creeps over the horizon and sets the water alight.

Softly, Azula says, "Just me and Father now."

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Azula hates the courtesans who drift through the halls like poison, draped in silk stiff enough to conceal a thousand knives. Their eyes dance with self-satisfaction, proud of their victories in meaningless Court intrigues.

(Not Mai, though. Never Mai, who pierces their veils, who never wanted to play at their games. Mai, who is as blunt and honest as a badgermole.)

Father has been humoring them more and more recently.

The one with eyes like a viper's approaches the throne to request favors for her familypetty appointments and substanceless titlesin a low, silky voice utterly inappropriate to happenings at Court.

Mother's voice was beautiful. She can't remember it very well any more, but she knows it was a lullaby, as warm as the sun, a loving whisper on a fateful night.

The Fire Lord allows the corner of his mouth to smile. She edges nearer, not quite outside the borders etiquette allows. The golden serpent coiled in her hair glints in the light, and even behind the curtain, Azula can smell the sickly perfume.

Azula hates her.

She's glad Zuko's not here to see this.

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Azula is perfect.

She must be perfect.

The world needs her to be perfect.

Azula moves her arms in an elegant, whirling gesture, and a pure white flame leaps towards the clouds. She holds it there for long moments, watching it twine sinuously around itself, and finding the hazy focus she needs to keep the flame as fine as a white silk ribbon. Too much intensity streaks it blue; too little, and it dissipates into unsubtle yellow. She tilts her head and watches it dance.

It is beautiful.

"It is weak," Father says from behind her, and her calm splinters. The dancing tendrils flare into orange rags. Immediately, Azula curses, honing her concentration again, and the fire simmers blue.

"My apologies, Father, but I thought"

"You must be without contamination," he continues, pressing a long-nailed hand into her shoulder. He stands in her blind spot. The small of her back tingles, remembering knives.

"Father"

"A fire that burns white has too much air."

Not a muscle moves in her expression, but she knows he felt the jolt that passed through her spine, the way his fingers tense painfully into the flesh of her arm. His words brush by the back of her neck as he steps closer.

"You need to be perfect."

I am perfect.

"I will work harder, Father."

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In the practice yard, her face is closed, and her fire lances out bright blue, searingly hot. Li and Lo begin to run out of criticism. Father never smiles at her, but she knows he approves.

In her room, with the door locked and the window cracked just enough for a breeze, she lights her meditation candles and breathes. They come to life like three small white doves, fluttering in the faint wind.

As she closes her eyes, Azula smiles without a trace of bitterness.

In the stillness, a shy voice drifts towards her, soft as the mountain echo, and bearing the scent of frost on the breeze.

... Hi, he says.

He looks like the sort of person who dies young, Azula thinks, looking at the wide eyes that are somehow immensely sad and happy at once.

There are no more masters to teach you, he says in a twelve-year-old voice she can't help but hate, being twelve herself. You need to go to the source. The sky bison

"I'm not leaving," she says firmly. "Father needs me here."

He looks puzzled and tries to protest, but she tunes her mind to a perfectly still place, and he vanishes like mist. The candles burn blue for a long time.

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The sky won't stop calling her name.

Ty Lee doesn't question her when she scales the wall of the Fire Academy for Girls and starts to run over the moonlit tiles. They leap from roof to roof, light as birds, dancing in illusory freedom. The acrobat giggles and starts turning cartwheels.

Azula doesn't smile, exactly, but something softens in the angles of her face, and she pulls her long hair free from its customary bun so she can feel the hand of the wind whip through it.

She looks just like her mother.

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If she closes her eyes, she might be able to hear the scream of yin and yang being separated.

She doesn't dare, of course, because it would be death to take her eyes off the actinic lightning leaping over her fingers and scorching blisters into her skin where just she can't quite hold it off.

With a shout, she hurls the stinging energy away from herself. The courtyard is illuminated for a stark blue instant, and a deafening crack of thunder shakes the walls.

Azula pants and clutches her singed arms. She muffles a whimper.

"You lack control," Father says from the corner. "Until you learn to seize power, you will never have it."

"I understand."

"Again."

She shuts off everything. She quietly folds away the pain clawing up her wrists, the call of the wind, the way Zuko screamed, the not-memory of being burned alive under the comet-bright sky. There is only the bone-deep cold and the splitting, screaming chi.

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The Palace is so empty without Zuko and Iroh (and Mother). She fends off the loneliness with endless katas and exercisesbut at the end of the day, she still needs to walk to her room.

There's something malevolent about the way the shadows gather in the corners of the halls when she walks by herself, so more and more she walks with her eyes closed.

Most often it's the blind woman who walks alongside her, casting a faint pearly light over the darkness. Azula never says she's grateful, but the calmness in her heartbeat is obvious.

By the time she reaches Zuko's room, Azula is alone again.

It doesn't look like the servants have come by in weeks, the same way they've avoided Mother's room for years. The closet hangs open, clothes vomited onto the floor, as if he'd gone through it in a panic, or had just been sloppy. His table has been literally swept clean, as if by an arm knocking everything into a bag.

"Idiot," she says, and jumps at the sound of her own voice breaking the silence. The quiet crowds back around her in moments. She's never felt too small before, but the gaping emptiness leers at her until she backtreads softly and locks the door behind her.

Mother's room is more welcoming, still full of clothing and hints of her presence. It doesn't look like she took anything with hereven the proud golden flame lies on the side table, forgotten, or discarded. Azula walks past it without touching it, as she always does.

Azula takes a precious bottle of perfume and touches it to the sheets, so the pillows will still smell like her, even after two years. She crawls under the covers and breathes.

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Again and again, Azula sends cold fire into the wall in the practice courtyard. She does not flinch from the arcing chains wreathing her hands. They do not burn her.

Not a single hair out of place.

Father doesn't comment on her technique anymore, so she must be perfect, at last. She'll always need to improve her stamina, but there's only so much a thirteen-year-old can do.

Azula's almost ready to declare herself a Firebending master when she finds one of the few uncensored military reports in storage. Jeong Jeong the Deserter could fly.

There are no other details, but they aren't necessaryshe knows what to do, as if she's done it all her lifewhy she didn't think of it the moment she felt the kickback of a burst of flame, she'll never know

The sky-longing hits her stronger than ever, and she can hardly control herself as she climbs to the Palace roof. From here, she can see almost the entire Capital. The wind swirls around her like a tamed beast.

The height makes her giddy, but she's not afraid. She's lived in lofty Air Temples her whole life; she's danced through the air on nothing but a red kite. She's a prodigy, and Jeong Jeong the Deserter is a nobody.

She takes a running leap off the tiles, and embraces the sky.

Hot air blooms below her, buoying her up straight into the sun; the fire in her hands presses her higher, higher. She can feel the air raging around her, tearing out her hairpin to clatter to the stones so very far below.

The fires pull at her in four directions with the force of charging komodo rhinos, and it's all she can do to keep from being torn apart. Her arms and legs shake with the effort of holding them steady. The feeling of hanging in midair is worth it.

Getting down is another issue entirely, but she holds off exhaustion with the strength of her will until she's ten meters up. The wind blows more than entirely necessary as she freefalls into the Palace garden.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Father's robes sweep around a corner, and vanish.

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Father says, "My daughter."

He's very proud of her skill, he says. Azula can feel the jitter of his pulse tremble with falsehood.

She was born lucky, says the minister of finance, eyes full of envy. She'll make a powerful Fire Lord, says the minister of war.

Something flickers in Father's heartbeat before he says, "Yes."

Azula smiles all through dinner. Afterward, the shadows swirl in her wake and nip at her ankles as she walks through the halls, every movement tightly controlled until she reaches Mother's room.

"He's afraid of me," she whispers shakily, slamming the door and collapsing against it. She hugs her knees to her chest and tries to quiet the frantic pounding of her heart. "All of them. Everyone is ... afraid of me."

Good, she wants to say, but it chokes in her throat.

"I am a monster," she says to the mirror, hating the way her voice cracks and threatens to crumple. "Iam"

Azula, says a voice like a lullaby, and it's too much for her. She buries her face in the sheets and doesn't cry. The bed creaks when Mother sits next to her and sighs.

Be strong, she says, stroking her hair with a hand of starlight that is somehow too rough to belong to Ursa, but Azula leans into it nonetheless, and shakes with the sobs she will not free.

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