Spans Book 1 to 3: Truly snapshots of Zuko's POV through MES.


When Mai spoke, Zuko was surprised she was still awake. He liked to lie awake at night and just talk into their silence, reasoning out his day or life or anything that was bothering him. It was great for Mai, who seemed to find his voice as powerful a narcotic as opium.

Tonight, halfway through his diatribe about Azula, Mai sat up sharply in bed.

"Are you okay?" he asked, for the moment thinking she was sleepwalking. That hadn't happened before; she only tended to snore when she was really tired.

"Let me get this straight, Zuko: you constantly bitch and whine about Azula not accepting Iroh has her father, but what you really want is for them never to be close."

Wow, she actually sounded angry. "That's not true—"

"Yes it is. You whine that only reason he came to the Fire Nation was for her, and you're the one who's benefiting from that in the first place. He's here, doing whatever it is that fat retired generals do, and he's doing a lot of that with you every day."

"But he—"

"Shut up and listen to me. All I ever hear when I'm around you is about how sucky your family life is. Guess what I see: a mother who loves you, an uncle who wishes he were your father, and a sister who tolerates you. Big fucking whoop. It must be so hard to be Zuko, surrounded by people who love him."

"I've had plenty of hard family life too!" Zuko snapped, his anger rising in self-defense.

"You're not the only person in the world who's had your dad slap you around. Do you really think Azula didn't get smacked around by Ozai? She did, almost every day. So stop it with the woe-is-me bullshit. Ozai burned your face and sent you away with a man who loved you to wander the world for years. Such a hard life." Her voice dripped with sarcasm.

Zuko couldn't believe this. "Are you taking her side?"

"You need to stop being so pig-headed." Mai's sharp nail pricked his chest as she tapped him there. Her eyes were nearly back in the darkness. "Do you really think Azula wants Iroh to be her dad? How would you feel if someone told you Ursa wasn't your mother?"

Zuko leaned back against the headboard of the bed, relaxing slowly as he stared at Mai. "Are you still loyal to her?"

Mai shrugged. "She's my still my princess. And I'm really getting tired of only hearing you talk about how much your life sucks. Deal with it."

And just like that, she snuggled back up to his chest and started to snore less than five minutes later.


"You did this on purpose!" Ursa snapped, stomping out onto the balcony.

Zuko sloshed wine on his robes, feeling like a little kid in the face of his mother's anger. "What did I do?"

"You sent that water tribe girl to Azula, and she's seduced her!"

Iroh exhaled a batch of tea, Mai actually dropped her cup, and Zuko's wine spilled fully on his robes. He lurched to his feet to yank off his outer robe, throwing it off and wondering why he hadn't done it earlier. Ursa had said 'seduced', which probably was a figurative use of the word. "What did Katara do, exactly?"

"They're sleeping together," Ursa said, her cheeks pink. "Your sister is completely bewitched by that girl; it's completely inappropriate, completely ruining her reputation!"

Mai started to laugh harder than Zuko had ever witnessed. "Ty Lee was right!"

"Azula's a lesbian?!" he gasped. Then he thought about it again. "Katara and Azula are—they're—but—I don't understand."

"Well, well," Iroh murmured, having wiped his beard dry. "This is an interesting development."

"They're having sex?" Zuko finally managed to ask.

"Yes, they're having sex," Ursa snapped. "And it's your fault!"

Zuko stared at his mother. "I... What?"


Zuko contemplated the hem of his robes as he walked into his office. When he lifted his head, he jerked back in shock, taking a defensive stance before he could even think about it. Azula was sitting at his desk, flipping through a few documents calmly. She looked up at him and rolled her eyes in the height of condescension.

"What are you doing here?"

"Our mother made a few threats." Azula set the scroll down. "This is alarming, Zuko."

"What?" he asked, a chill running down his spine despite himself. Azula was probably just screwing around, but he couldn't help the reaction. Which, he realized with another shiver of unease, meant he trusted her to some extent.

"A man named Yun is a corporal in charge of the set of naval ships patrolling our colonies in western Earth Kingdom."

"They aren't our colonies anymore."

"We protect them from the pirates that are rampant along the way, so yes, they're still ours. They just don't pay taxes for said protection," Azula retorted.

It wasn't worth the argument. "What's wrong with Yun?"

"He's in Suzo's pocket."

"Suzo?" Zuko asked, his mind trying to sort the name out. The name was familiar, but he'd been juggling so many family names for so many months he couldn't entirely place it.

Azula leaned back, flapping the sheet of paper in her hand. "Suzo, who has a great deal to gain now that his rival, Lam, has been removed from his position as the private company that protected the said colonies and transported said colonies' merchandise ships."

Zuko opened his mouth to point out there was nothing related, and he looked back at Azula. Lam's small merchant fleet had been basically demolished by pirates, taking with it some of his men, some colonial civilians, and all of its cargo. Suzo, he realized, was all of a week away from being approved to take over Lam's position. Suzo, who owned a man that controlled the Fire Nation navy in that area of the seas. "Are you insinuating that Yun was paid by Suzo to allow in enemy forces to attack the ships moving in and out of the port, so that Lam would be forced out?"

"And now Suzo has submitted an application for taking his men and his ships to fill the void that now exists."

Zuko felt a shiver of fear. He knew a lot, a lot more than he'd known when he started those years ago, but there was still so much more than went on under the surface. He stared at the sheet. "What should I do?"

"Find someone else. Someone cheaper. Someone who you want to owe you a favor. Most importantly, get rid of Yun posthaste. Promote him—"

"Promote him? You just said—"

"To a desk position somewhere far away from anywhere he can make any changes. Promote him to a position that's a dead-end so he can never again be promoted."

It was a neat and quiet…efficient. Like the lie that had almost made him board the ship to the Fire Nation during the war, like the fall of Ba Sing Se, like the plan during the eclipse. Very Azula. Unlike those other things, Zuko didn't know the why of this generosity. Zuko watched his sister for a long moment.

Azula slowly raised her eyes. "What?"

"Why do you care? Why tell me this?"

"I wouldn't put it past Suzo to stage a faux rebellion, slaughter civilians, and incite a nice little conflict on the coast. We can't afford that financially or in the eyes of the international market. It's messy."

"Most of the people who live in those cities are Earth Kingdomers. You wanted all those people to burn just a few years ago." He didn't know what he wanted her to say or do, but he pushed anyway. He wanted some sort of answer to make sense of what it was that Azula wanted.

"It was war, Brother," Azula replied sharply. "They were enemies in that war. Now there's no war, and they aren't our enemies. What's the point of spending our money on them and not protecting them?"

"How can you just turn it off like that? They're the same people whether we're fighting them or protecting them."

Azula rolled her eyes and stood up. "No wonder all the world leaders are slobbering over peace. You never had the stomach for war."

"What would you have done if you'd won?"

Azula stopped beside him, her back rigid, her gaze straight ahead. Her hair was still short, barely past her shoulders, but the lines of her face were very much their mother. That didn't sting as much as it used to.

"Won what?" she asked quietly.

"If you'd won the war."

She remained silent for a long time. "If Sozin's Comet hadn't come to pass, I would have declared Agni Kai against Father, killed him, ascended the throne, and launched a war of attrition on the Earth Kingdom. I would have brought them famine, plague, and death more than they would have ever known. I would have broken their spirit. The North would have fallen soon after." She glanced at him. "And then there would have been no more war."

For a long time after she left, he pondered those words. Zuko sat at his desk, and instead of the thousands of things he needed to do, he stared out of his balcony and turned those words over and over again. "And then there would have been no more war."

Shit. There was no way.

Ozai had fought the war for blood and his own personal glory. And Zuko's sister, who was just as ruthless, cruel, and evil as Ozai, just claimed she would have won the war for peace.

Iroh had always taught Zuko perspective: see things from more than one angle. But now Zuko saw biases in Iroh's perspective. He'd never cared to explain why anyone would want to fight a war like the Hundred Year War. Wars had been waged for as long as men could travel far enough to meet each other. Sozin launched the war for the glory of the Fire Nation. Azula apparently would have ended it to glorify the entire world in her way.

She was wrong, but… She was his little sister, and it was becoming a little bit easier to think of her that way.


Zuko hunkered down against his balcony railing, staying silent to overhear the strangest conversation he'd ever eavesdropped on. Mai quietly exited their shared apartment, and stared down at him dubiously. He quickly made a 'hush' gesture before she could voice her obvious question, and motioned for her to sit next to him.

Mai opened her mouth and closed it when laughter came up from the gardens.

It was Katara's voice, too low to make out words. Then more laughter. Mai raised an eyebrow at Zuko, but she remained where she was.

"Mai put in a new bed in my apartment," Azula said suddenly. "Though it is a nice bed, so I suppose I can forgive it."

Zuko turned his head at the silence, and his jaw dropped to see Katara and Azula actually kissing. Gross. And weird. Katara was sitting in Azula's lap, and she leaned her head against Azula's shoulder. And Azula… Her expression was soft and open, tender, which was the weirdest fucking thing Zuko had ever seen.

"We should try out that new bed," Katara said, sitting up.

Azula followed her inside, and the last thing they heard was, "If it breaks, I can have my old bed back."

"Everyone wins."

"Well," Mai said. "Thank you for forcing me to listen to that. I need to go scrub my ears and eyes with lye water."

"That was really weird, right?" he asked as he followed her inside.

"You eavesdropping on your sister and her lover? Yes."

"No. Them. I've never seen Azula look like that."

"You aren't her lover, are you?" Mai asked. She sighed and slipped an arm around his neck, pulling him close to kiss his mouth. "I hope you don't look at her the way you look at me." She tossed him a saucy look as she turned on one heel and walked into their bedroom.

Well, hard to resist that. He hastened to follow.


Trust Azula to turn a coup attempt into a game. Zuko had thought it was a good way to occupy her boundless energy… At least until Azula was attacked in the streets. His men couldn't give him a satisfactory answer as to the identity of the attackers, and he found himself losing sleep over it.

"You and your sister are so stupid," Mai told him one morning after a particularly fitful night. "Just arrest them and be done with it."

"I can't do that."

"What you mean is you don't want to do that."

It was true, as stupid as that made him feel. Azula would tell him if she felt in danger. Of course, this was the same girl who fell off of a war balloon and caught herself on the rocks with her hairpiece. His conscience prickled at that particular thought. Azula was so self-confident she didn't see danger where danger lurked.

Whatever guilt and worry he felt through the weeks before his wedding were erased when he witnessed a handful of Dai Li agents burst from the ground at his wedding. Dai Li! It was going to put their relationship back with the Earth Kingdom years. She'd never said a word about contacting them, or dragon forbid, keeping them under her employ since the war.

And then Azula had the audacity to accept an agni kai challenge. Whatever situation he thought he had a handle on was rapidly spinning out of control. Azula did what Azula had always done: take over and get shit done. Despite that, he almost doubted her, especially after Iroh told him the truth about Azula's bending.

Zuko should have known better. Azula killed her opponent in seconds, and he could only shake his head. He wouldn't have done any better being able to firebend. Trust Azula to go above and beyond.

Maybe he could set aside a few weeks to travel with his sister to see the Sun Warriors. That ought to fix her right up. Zuko was crazy for even considering it, but he wanted that for her. Maybe after his private wedding...


"It's not your fault."

Zuko took another sip of fire whiskey and sighed, watching dully as the gray of morning shifted into dawn.

"Zuko."

Mai's voice held real worry.

"You were more helpful than I was. All I could do was just…" He shook his head and looked at his hands. There was still blood caked under his fingernails nearly a week later.

Mai's hand slipped around his neck, and she bent to kiss the side of his face before pulling him into a loose hug. "She'll survive this."

"Our father." He laughed bitterly and shook his head. "My father. He did this to her."

"You're not like him."

"I'm her big brother. I'm supposed to protect her, and all I've done is let her get hurt."

Mai's grip tightened, and she laughed bitterly. "Do you really think Azula would take your supposed protection? She's lived her entire life protecting herself. She doesn't know any better. All of this was her making."

"I told her to—"

"Like she would have stopped if you told her 'no'!"

It gave him pause, and Mai smiled at him gently for it. "Don't feel guilty for a situation that was her own doing. Azula will rise from this just as strong as she was before. She's that annoying indestructible."

"Who did she get that from?" he wondered.

"Iroh obviously."

Zuko laughed abruptly. He leaned his head on Mai's shoulder and sighed.

"Come to bed. Sleep for a little while, and then we'll go see her again."

He nodded, got up, and let his wife take care of him.


-5 years later-

"Excuse me, Fire Lord."

Zuko glanced up from trying and failing to entice Rina to eat carrots. He'd eaten more on her plate than she had at this point. Zuko's bodyservant bowed with a letter in his hand. They were in a restaurant in the noble district, and this was a time when politics was not allowed. Mai wasn't a strict about it as his mom, but he didn't like to interrupt his time with his kids. "I'll read it later."

"Fire Lord, it's a letter from your sister."

Zuko hesitated. He glanced at Mai, who pointedly did not offer an opinion. He took the scroll. It wasn't sealed with Azula's snooty dragon seal. It had been opened already too. This was all a little weird. Zuko unrolled it. Well, why not; this was technically family. "Kids, you want to hear what your aunt wrote?"

"Auntie Azula!" Tozin said with a grin. Rina used this as an excuse to push her plate away.

Mai heaved a sigh, but she smiled and placed a kiss on Tozin's dark head.

Zuko cleared his throat and pitched his voice high in his best Azula impression:

"'Most prestigious and powerful Fire Lord Zuko.'"

Rina giggled.

"'Greetings and salutations from the cold shores of the South Pole, et cetera ad nauseam.'"

"Did she really write that?" Mai asked.

"Yes. 'As much as I…love writing to my…awesome, favorite big brother during my vacation, I thought I should send word of my news.'"

Zuko read the next sentence silently without surprise. "Well, we expected…" He frowned when he read the second sentence. "Okay, weird. Azula and Katara got married. And apparently Katara adopted a kid." He sighed when he read the rest of the paragraph. Of course Azula would teach her new kid to call him a poopy head. He wasn't reading that aloud in front of his kids. They'd drop 'Daddy' in a heartbeat to call him that.

He continued reading the next paragraph. "'I've had many interesting experiences in the South Pole. We'll be returning at some point in the next few weeks. I do require one favor. Would you outlaw…'" His voice trailed off as he tried to figure out why exactly Azula had written that statement.

"What?" Mai actually looked curious now.

"'Would you outlaw dragon hunting?'"

Zuko glanced up at Mai, who shrugged. "Don't look at me. Your sister is nuts."

"Nuts!" Rina gasped.

"Yep, nuts." Zuko reached out to pick up a peanut from Mai's plate and put it on Rina's. "Don't they taste great?!"

She turned away with her nose up.

Zuko knew when to admit defeat. He reached out to sip his tea and saw there was print below Azula's flamboyant signature. He read it.

Zuko exhaled, and his mouthful of tea sprayed across the table. Mai's expression went tight as she wordlessly reached out to take his napkin and wipe her face off. Even the children understood the danger of that moment; they watched their mother with wide eyes. Zuko attempted to apologize even as he coughed up the tea he'd inhaled, but she lifted a finger in sharp warning to be quiet. Then she reached out and took the letter from him.

Mai stared at the letter in her hand, and her expression of anger melted into simple shock. "'Postscript: I can firebend again. Post-postscript: I tamed a dragon too.'"


In bed, Mai shifted around with her mountain of pillows until she had her usual barrier on either side. Thankfully their bed was huge or Zuko would be sleeping on the floor. "What are you going to do?" she asked.

A dragon. If it was true, this was the out he needed. Azula would want the throne now that she could firebend. And with a dragon, the Fire Nation would welcome her with open arms. He could pack up and leave, say goodbye to the long hours, the headaches, and the annoying noble drama. He could go to Republic City and watch it start from the ground up. Aang needed him there, and he could own something entirely new.

It still hurt to think of letting his nation go.

"I'm going to give it to her." He didn't sound as certain as he meant to.

"Are you sure?" she asked him without a hint of censure or doubt. He loved her just for that. She wouldn't care if he was a Fire Lord or a tea shop assistant as long as he loved her, loved their kids, and maintained a comfortable household for them all. So he didn't care if she wanted a part of the Fire Nation or not.

When he'd started dating her during the war, he never imagined they'd end up the way they were now. Even if there was a mound of pillows between them. Zuko reached out to snitch one, and Mai made a noise that meant, 'Do it and die.'

"Just one," he wheedled.

"Fine," she muttered with a long-suffering sigh.

Mai really did love him.

"Do you trust her?" Mai asked after a few minutes of quiet.

Trust his sister? Trust Azula?

The answer of that was a firm yes. During the war, he would have battened down the hatches and brought all of his guards to the capital for protection. Now he knew Azula wasn't a threat, at least in the traditional sense. He didn't know quite how his trust had formed; it was probably all of those stupid hugs they'd suffered for their mother's sake. Or maybe having to defend her from the few attempts to 'try' Azula for her actions in Ba Sing Se. One of those meetings was the only one Ursa ever sat in, and she'd completely cowed the usually unflappable Ba Sing Se reps. King Bumi's representative shrugged when they turned to him for support. "King Bumi likes her," he'd said. That was the end of the matter.

It still made Zuko smirk. If Ursa had been Fire Lady at any point in her life, she would have walked all over the Fire Nation.

Maybe he trusted Azula because he'd learned to work with her the last few years. Who the hell would have guessed they turn into a functional family?

"If she wanted to kill me, she wouldn't have written me in the first place."

"She could still kill you."

"Thanks," Zuko muttered. It still hurt his pride a little bit that his little sister was better than him at pretty much everything.

"She always could," Mai admitted. She said it to be supportive, as contrary as it sounded.

"I trust her," Zuko said truthfully. "And I trust her with the Fire Nation."

"As long as Katara's around, Azula's a sack of putty anyway," Mai muttered. "I can't believe she just adopted a kid out of nowhere like that."

"You know, she still hasn't thanked me." It wasn't the first time he'd said it. Mai was quiet. "I guess I'll just point it out at their wedding. 'You're welcome for introducing you.' Well…introducing you a second time, after the war ended. So that you two could realize your undying love for each other. I still don't know how they work as a couple. Did they just look at each other and decide to be girlfriends? Did you guess it would happen?"

Mai answered with a soft snore.

Zuko smiled in the darkness. He'd figure it out in the morning.


He was most afraid of what Iroh would say, but when Zuko looked at his uncle, he saw no disappointment.

"Are you disappointed?" he asked anyway.

Iroh sighed and slowed his walk. He rubbed his beard. "I'm not disappointed. I worry that you're doing this for the wrong reason."

"This is what I want."

"Is it?" Iroh asked him quietly. "I worry you'll have regrets."

"You don't think Azula's going to do a bad job, do you?"

Iroh shook his head. "No. But I'm not so certain she'll accept."

He had to be kidding. That had to be some sort of crazy joke. Of course Azula would accept. Iroh read his doubt and continued, "She wants different things now, Zuko. Just like you do."


It took a full week after Azula had returned to the Fire Nation before he had all the details ironed out…well, the details he had to have ironed out done. There were still a million others that Azula could take care of. Zuko was surprised every time they met that Azula didn't broach the topic herself. She obviously knew what was going on. The fact that she seemed unwilling to ask him made Zuko wonder if she was going to decline.

That was why he waited until the tapestry was finished to ask her.

Hook, line, and sinker.

Azula looked up at her tapestry expressionlessly. Then she smiled and laughed. She looked at Zuko and said, "No."

She'd just looked at her Fire Lord tapestry and said no. Zuko gaped at her, stunned beyond belief by that answer. Were they going to be the first two royal siblings to fight over who got to not be Fire Lord?

"What?"

"And yes."

She'd just said no and then yes.

Zuko groaned, his feelings fluctuating between disappointment and relief. He put his face in his hands. "Why are you always such a headache? What do you want? Yes or no."

"I want both. Just like you do," she said calmly. She met his eyes. "Shall we compromise?"

He wanted to cry. Why didn't she talk like a normal person? "What are you talking about?"

Of course Azula continued her thought without explaining herself. "It will take good communication between us. And compromise every day. But we if do it right, we both get what we want. You can go play around with Republic City. I can be with Katara when she goes home with our children. And we can both do our duties for our nation without fail."

Zuko's brain stopped. He was positive she'd just broken him with that word. Was that a scar on her ear? "Children?" And then he realized what she wanted. His jaw dropped. "You mean we'd both be Fire Lord."

"Ding, ding ding!" she sneered. Azula finished that off with a roll of her eyes. "That took longer than I expected."

It wasn't worth taking offense to. Zuko was also too busy being flummoxed to respond in that way. "But…we'd kill each other. We can't both have veto power, and law making would be impossible—"

"As I said," Azula replied. "It will take a great deal of compromise and communication. I would suggest at least for now that we spearhead our own causes separately. You'll need to be very nice to the Earth Kingdom ambassadors to be sure they don't do something silly when they find out about my new title. When we do travel, we'll have to leave specific instructions behind. We'll pay a fortune in postage, of course, but—"

Azula was a genius. She was a fucking genius. It was so simple, but it had never been done before so he hadn't even thought about it. Azula had probably not even considered they would be the first true coregency ever in the Fire Nation. But what did Azula care? She thought she could do anything. And right then, Zuko thought he could too.

"Yes," Zuko said. He grinned and a weight shifted from his shoulders. "Yes, I'll do it."

He held out his hand.

Azula raised her eyebrows. "You aren't going to spit in your palm like a hoodlum, are you?"

"That would be fuddy-duddy, wouldn't it?" he retorted, amused by the stupid-sounding words she always used.

Azula looked at him like he was an idiot. "Do you have any idea what that word actually means?"

He stared at his sister. "That's a real word?"

She was highly insulted by that. "Of course it's a real word. Do you think I walk around and speak gibberish? It means old-fashioned."

"Why don't you just say old-fashioned then?!"

"Some of us have vocabularies that extend beyond three tired words."

Zuko groaned in frustration. Azula rolled her eyes and put her hand in his. They shook firmly.

"Fire Lord Zuko," she said.

"Fire Lord Azula," he replied and then grumbled, "Poopy head."

"Dumb-dumb."

This was going to work.