Nine:
Azula slowly moved through the forms she had been practicing since she had first started fire-bending training as a small child. She started with the simple ones and, shifting her weight from one foot to the next as her hands switched places in front of her. She timed her breaths, in and out with the movements. And then she progressed onto the more complicated ones.
"You don't have to stare, Zuko," she said. "It's nothing you don't do in practice yourself."
Rainy season was almost over, and it was the first day they could practice outside. There was even a little sun out this morning.
"I don't do them like that," he said as he approached. He had not expected to see her out on the field, he had expected the weight she had gained would throw off her balance, but she was tallented enough to adjust. He always forgot how good she actually was. "I suppose you should be practicing slowly in your condition. I can especially see why you're doing them without any actual fire."
She gave him a condescending glare. "You don't go through your forms slowly in the morning?"
"I learned them slowly, and without fire. But there's no reason to keep practicing them like that after you've mastered them."
She rolled her eyes. "I always wondered why I was better than you. Now I know. Besides. This was the only way I could practice in Ba Sing Se. It's dangerous in the Earth Kingdom for known fire-benders. The war is far from over in the minds of most."
"You were practicing in that alley that whole time?" Zuko said.
"I practiced many places. First of all, Zuko. Come here. Second, tie back your hair to get it out of your face."
"What?"
"Come here."
He went over to where she was standing. She made him stand in front of her. Then she walked around him and jabbed him in the shoulders to make him stand up straighter.
"It sickens me how long you've obviously been practicing alone, without instruction. I can tell by your posture alone. An insult to the art. Widen your stance!" She stood in front of him. "We'll go through the forms in order. One at a time. I can't teach you how to be a non-mediocre fire-bender but I can teach you how to practice. In the mean time hire an instructor. Not even the Fire Lord himself is above receiving a little coaching."
Azula had him mirror her as she went through the simplest of forms, the ones that brought back memories of being a small boy attending his first lessons. She barked out corrections frequently, making him painfully aware of how sloppy he'd become. He remembered watching Azula practice this way with their father when they were children. Zuko had always felt a little jealous of the one-on-one attention he gave her, but of the constant nagging and berating he gave her, he had not been jealous at all.
She sounded a lot like him. Going through the forms with her was uncomfortable on many levels.
"Shouldn't you be resting?" he said to her.
"Straighten your feet!" she answered. "For the child's sake? Your healer is perfectly fine with these exorcizes. And I promise you, brother, it never rests, always squirming around, stretching it's limbs, at all hours. Why should I rest for it?" A tiny smirk appeared on her face and then disappeared. "A sign it will be a powerful fire-bender like its mother and father."
"He was a fire bender?"
"Of course, it could also mean it will grow up to be like you. Impatient, undisciplined, a hopeless insomniac, a headache for his teachers… For the love of! Zuko! Your feet!"
"I guess we'll never know," he said as they started the form from the top.
"For a few years at least, though there will be less uncertainty if I train it myself."
"I thought you were going to give him away. You changed your mind?
"And I'm not allowed to do that?"
"Well..."
"I fail to imagine anyone more capable than myself of training this child to reach it's full potential. If it looks up to me, it will learn all of the possibilities it has for itself, watching what it's mother manages to achieve."
"Achieve what?
"You could use me on the court, Zuko," she said. "I'm skilled at reading people, predicting their actions. You are not much better than a usurper, and your youth alone is reason for the officers and barons to doubt your competence. Even though you have done your best to purge your staff, there are still those who are loyal to Father who would have you killed in your sleep." She sighed. "Of course, killing you myself is tempting, I suppose. But I also am young, and I also would be a usurper. And I also would not be Father. I would have no better luck than you. Your feet! How many times must I tell you!"
Zuko adjusted his footing, his throat going somewhat dry. Of course, the mere fact that Azula had mentioned the idea aloud told him she probably had no intention of carrying it out. It was the things she didn't tell him, like the letters she was writing to their father, that he had reason to fear.
"Or perhaps I would be better suited to a role in the military. I would also be a formidable general," she said. "If you managed to keep my loyalty, you would fear no threat to your throne or this country, as you can imagine."
Zuko imagined a coup.
"Or even just a life of relaxation, the type noble-women of old would lead. Perhaps I can lay claim over the family's old summer home on Ember Island. My point is, I've had plenty of time to think these last several weeks, which has been easier to do now that your healer has made some progress on me. I've begun to realize that I have more options for my future than I had previously imagined."
"What had you imagined before?"
Azula finished the final of the elementary forms. She took a deep breath. "Living in Ba Sing Se, I suppose. Perhaps that would not have been so terrible if everything hadn't changed in the end. I would have preferred living somewhere else, where my child would not grow up as a pariah. To be honest, I hadn't imagined much at all."
She took a deep breath, centered herself, then, with a few quick and elegant movements, generated a bolt of electricity that shot across the practice field and hit a target far off in the distance. The noise echoed off the hills in the distance. Zuko thought he felt his soul leave his body. When Azula shook the smoke off her fingertips, a small smile crept onto her face.
"Something I could not do while in hiding," she said.
"You could have gone into hiding in the Fire Nation where you could have practiced your fire bending all you wanted, and you stayed there," Zuko said. "Something was keeping you there, and I don't think it was an inability to escape. And you haven't told me what it was."
"Guess away," she said. "None of that is relevant now."
"You've brought a lot home with you to tell me it isn't relevant."
"I've brought an embryo. Those are not particularly difficult to come by, if you really think about."
"And scars," Zuko said. "And I want to know if they're from the same person. You just let slip he was a fire bender."
She turned to face him. "Why are you so interested in the very things I don't want to tell you? Why is it so hard for you to accept that I'm here? I'm safe. As far as you know I have no intention of killing you anytime soon, and I've been getting treatment and am more lucid than I have been since..." she trailed off, then paused to put a hand on her stomach. "I should not continue on with the more advanced forms. My back is aching and I have to sit. Nature takes it's course."
"Since when we were young, before I left?" he said.
She glared at him. "It doesn't matter, I'm lucid now, for the most part. I've been better, but it doesn't matter. I'm going back inside." She took a drink of water from the servant girl who was carrying a pitcher for the very purpose, then headed back toward the palace.
Zuko watched her, then curled his hands into fists and ran to catch up. "Listen!" he said. "All these things you want to do, all these 'wonderful things' you're 'imagining for the future,' you'll need my permission. I'm your legal guardian and I have the papers to prove that. Maybe you're getting better, but you're nowhere near ready to be emancipated, even though you are now of age."
"The Fire Lord himself is nothing more than one more government bureaucrat citing red tape it appears."
"And if you want me to trust you, want me to believe you're capable of something other than... destroying everything you touch, I need to know where it is you're coming from. You were gone for two years. I don't know you, Azula! You need to help me out."
Azula spun on her heals, fire escaped from her mouth and her hands as she snapped. "Then why don't you read about it in my letters! You seem to taken great interest in them!" She stepped forward into Zuko's personal space. "Staying up late, burning oil, enraptured in the thrilling plot of my account of last week's weather for Father! Golly, I wonder what it will be next week, rain you suppose? I know you've been intercepting them. I know exactly how long it takes for a messenger hawk to travel to the places I've been sending them, and I can estimate how long it will take for a response to return, even if I know the only reply I'll get is a courtesy note from a prison guard that it was received. I can do calculations in my head and I know how to work an abacus when I can't. And the only explanation I have for the delay is you."
"I'm not reading your letters!"
"Funny. That sounded almost as convincing as your garbage about how you knowing my past is somehow necessary!"
Her volume had gone up. Several of the servants around the nearby garden had paused and turned.
He motioned for her to lower his voice, but he had to admit, that had been a pretty weak lie. "I just want to get to the truth."
Her face turned red. She turned and shot a hot a blast at a eucalyptus tree growing nearby. Thirty feet of foliage suddenly disappeared beneath the flame, and if it hadn't been isolated from the other trees the entire garden might have been destroyed. "Tell the truth yourself before you dare ask it from me!" Then she stormed away, back to her room.
He kept following her. "Azula! Just let me speak to you!"
She didn't turn around for him, but finally he caught up to her in the hallway.
"Just let me talk to you," he said. "I just want to know what happened to you."
"I can't tell you that," she said, refusing to look at him. "And I don't have to explain to you why."
"I know you want your space, but—"
"It's not space that I want," she said. "It's respect I need."
He looked at her for a moment. "Okay," he said. "I understand."
She took a deep breath. "Please promise me," she said, "I have things in my past that I don't want you to know, because I don't want to remember them. I can't face them. It's behind me and I have to move forward. Promise me you'll stop this nonsense detective work."
Zuko put his hands on her shoulder, only to have her brush them away. There was nothing he could do to placate her except give her what she wanted. He knows what she would do if he couldn't?
"Promise me," she said.
"Fine," he said. "I promise. We can leave the past in the past, and I won't do any more digging."
She looked him up and down with a cold glare, almost sure she couldn't trust him. "Good," she said. "I expect you to keep your word, though you have a history of disappointing me." She stormed away as a group of servants ran outside to address the issue of the burning tree.