Rumors about the ship's most important guest spread like lightning. Not a day had passed before it seemed that everybody knew something about the princess, from her white fire to the constant smirk that adorned her red lips to the bandages that she was apparently wearing on both hands. And then there were other, less verifiable stories, like that she had been seen kissing the Fire Lord before boarding the ship, or that she was only coming to act as a spy for her father, or that in her short couple of days on the ship she had already burned a man for crossing her.
The captain didn't know what to make of the rumors, and he largely didn't care. If the girl really was there because Ozai suspected him of something, then he had nothing to hide. The other rumors were the kind of idle gossip that he expected to hear when there was someone as distinguished as the princess onboard. If anything, he was disappointed that the soldiers under his command were speaking of such things in the first place.
The captain had to admit, however, that there was something about the princess. Maybe it was just the way her golden eyes locked onto him as if she could kill him with a glance, but being in her presence was distinctly uncomfortable. He was looking forward to leaving her on solid ground, safely in the care of the army.
Thinking of such things reminded him that, centuries ago, having a woman onboard a ship was considered bad luck. The thought made him chuckle; he could imagine what the women in his crew would have to say about that. But the princess seemed like the kind of person who could summon a storm just by her presence. Uncanny. Unlucky. Odd.
"What happened to your hands, Princess Azula?"
It was admittedly more difficult to do things with white cloth bound over her palms and the backs of her hands, but Azula wasn't about to take the bandages off. Last night, and the night previous, she had pulled up a bucket of salty water from over the edge of the ship, brought it back to her room, and immersed her hands in it. It made the lacerations burn as if they were on fire. She liked the pain, the feeling that the salt was cleansing her, getting rid of infection from the inside out.
The bleeding between her legs had finally subsided, turning from a red flood to a slow brown leak. It was with relief that she stopped wearing the thick cloth pads in her undergarments. Every time she had gone to the bathroom or changed clothes, every time she was forced to see the blood coming out of her, she was reminded of her father. His last kiss still burned on her lips, still haunted her. When she met the eyes of others on the ship, she wondered if they knew. But nobody had dared say anything to her about the incident, leaving Azula restless and full of pent-up energy, a spring that had been coiled too tightly.
"Blisters," she said indifferently, not bothering to turn her eyes away from her reading. With Ozai now days away, Lo and Li had no power. She didn't have to entertain their questions, and were they to order her to remove her bandages, she could simply refuse.
"On your fingers too?" The hags' voices never seemed to change, but there seemed to be a note of skepticism buried deep in those words. An idea of a new challenge occurred to Azula: how much emotion could she get the twins to show?
"I've been holding a lot of things lately." Her tone was snide. Again, she didn't look up.
In contrast to her usual historical readings, Azula was studying several scrolls detailing military protocol, as well as a copy of the plans concerning the area to which the ship was headed. It was necessary, if not fascinating, and she was surprised by how much of the information she hadn't previously known. It struck her, for instance, that she had never given too much thought about how bending was taught in a military setting. Her own teaching had been piecemeal and incremental, a whole host of teachers providing their techniques, resulting in a style that was hers and no others. But the forms illustrated in her scroll were simpler, uniform, with notes about which movement should be used when. To the soldiers, bending was being taught as science; to Azula, it had been taught as art.
The commander of the company with which she was traveling seemed unsure of what Azula's role was to be. She suspected where the confusion arose: though his orders might have been to treat her as an ordinary soldier, he could probably guess that his life would be forfeit if he let anything happen to the Fire Lord's beloved daughter.
"Princess Azula, while you are away from the capital, you are under our direct supervision," the other twin said. Azula resisted the urge to roll her eyes. "If you are not honest with us, we must report that back to your father."
"By all means, trouble Fire Lord Ozai with letters about how my hands are bandaged. I'm sure he doesn't have anything better to do than hear about that."
The two stared at each other, princess and mentor, and Azula noted that, despite her age, Li (or Lo)'s eyes were still sharp, beady, despite almost disappearing into the mass of wrinkles that composed her face. It made Azula wonder what the twins had looked like when they were younger.
And then she remembered that Lo and Li had just been teenagers in the service of Fire Lord Sozin, just two young girls under the thumb of a man old enough to be their grandfather.
Despite herself, Azula's mind started drawing parallels, and she hated herself for it. She was nothing like them. They had just been concubines, ordinary whores. She was the apple of her father's eye. He needed her. She was not replaceable, not disposable. Were something to happen to her, Ozai would mourn. She was more than just a receptacle, more than just flesh under his lustful hands. She was his daughter and she would be his heir.
She was nothing like Zuko, and she was nothing like the hags, and she was nothing like her mother either. She was going to take the throne. She was going to seize power with her own two hands. She was smarter, and she was stronger, and if she had survived everything she had been through then surely what was ahead would be no worse.
"Very well," Li (or Lo) finally said, and the old woman was the first to look away.
Azula smiled.
The time aboard the ship was otherwise unremarkable. Azula found herself participating in the soldiers' daily drills, which were done in rotations on the spacious deck under the watchful eye of Yutaka, brigadier general and the overseer of the company. She found it difficult to conform to their movements. Her training emphasized moving from one form to another, keeping her motions fluid, but the soldiers did everything in segments, stopping after the individual pieces. Only with extreme concentration could she force her body to move the same way, and the slightest distraction made her focus slip. For that reason she much preferred the sparring. The soldiers all had size and build on her, but their armor made them bulky, slow targets. Though Azula lacked muscle, her firepower was stronger than any of theirs, emphasized by its unique color. By the second week of the voyage, the soldiers knew that being paired off with the princess would result in burns.
The day before they landed, Yutaka pulled her aside, out of earshot of both the soldiers and Lo and Li. Azula kept her golden eyes fixed on the man in a blatant show of disrespect; she might have been under his command for the time being, but she was princess and heir to the throne, and he was nothing more than an aging military man whose career was probably on the downhill.
"Now, Princess Azula, I understand that your father wishes for you to have experience with real combat, and I would never dare disobey His Majesty's orders. But you must follow my every order. We will be in a war zone, Princess, where the danger of death is very, very real. I would not let anything happen to you under my watch, but accidents happen. Perhaps it would be best, therefore, if you were to remain behind in one of the safer towns while we cross the central Earth Kingdom…"
The man's voice trailed away. He probably saw how futile his request was based on the gleam in Azula's eyes and the smile forming on her lips.
"You want me to remain safely behind, and yet you would never dare disobey my father? No, General. I will travel with you, and I will fight alongside you, unless you would rather I report you for treason. I assure you that, should I die, it will be my own weakness and not a failure on your part. My father will recognize it as such." That was a lie. Azula was confident that anyone whom Ozai could perceive as being at fault would end up dead if something were to happen to her. "Fulfill your orders as you've been instructed. I don't have the time or energy to waste on safety."
She turned and strode away without waiting for a response from Yutaka. He didn't approach her again. She supposed he thought of her as simply a spoiled royal brat who didn't understand the consequences, but she would prove him wrong.
Azula stood in formation with the other soldiers as the ship pulled into dock. The heat of the summer had taken hold with full force, so that even simply standing on the deck while the sun blazed was uncomfortable. She was only glad that she didn't have to wear a helmet, although her dark hair did seem to function like an oven under the glare. The fire built up in her veins, longing for an outlet, but she couldn't bend without moving, so she stayed still. Sweat rolled in droplets down her forehead and chest, and she loathed the feeling.
Soon enough, however, the ship was hitting the dock with a gentle thump and the ramp was being prepared, and then all the soldiers were descending in their columns. Azula looked down at the water, blue-gray, lapping innocuously at the shore, and remembered her time in the Earth Kingdom two summers ago. She had been afraid of the ocean then, but now the sight didn't cause so much as a stir in her stomach.
If she were to fall, after all, her armor would just drag her down, down, down, and the heir to the throne of the Fire Nation would become a feast for the fish at the bottom of the sea. An ironic way to go. A smile curled Azula's lips. Yes, she had changed, hadn't she?
The port where the ship had docked, Kuo-Shei, was the closest Fire Nation landing to Ba Sing Se, and had been so since very near the beginning of the war. As such, it was a sprawling base, hosting several shipyards and at least a hundred ships at any given time. It was also a center of industry where the Fire Nation built its war machines, far too expensive to ferry across the ocean. The attached city had been razed to the ground and rebuilt in the Fire Nation style, now housing over ten thousand colonists. The only remaining Earth Kingdom population of the area was entirely enslaved, working in the shipyards and factories. And indeed, as the army marched through, Azula found it quite reminiscent of home.
Citizens gathered on the streets to cheer as their soldiers passed. Azula caught quite a few pairs of eyes glancing her direction, probably since she was the only soldier not wearing a helmet. She wondered whether they had any idea of the significance of the crest she wore in her bun. They weren't merely looking at an odd soldier, after all.
"March to the barracks! We're staying here for the night!" Yutaka was astride an ostrich-horse now and riding up and down the flanks, issuing the order. The sight reminded Azula of Dust, and she vaguely wondered what had become of the beast, but then the column was moving again and there was no more time to waste on sentimentality.
In contrast to the ship, the barracks had no special room for the princess. She was bunking with three other soldiers, an entirely foreign experience. Azula was the last to her assigned room, her three roommates already present. All of them gave her brief looks and then turned back to what they were doing. Azula's lip curled at the display of disrespect, but perhaps it was what had been ordered.
If they wouldn't respect her on the basis of her title, before the mission was over she would force them to respect her for her talent.
She spent the afternoon in her bunk, continuing the study of her scrolls. For the first time in the past few months, she wasn't under the keen eye of Lo and Li as she read. Their absence made her feel exhilarated, free. It occurred to Azula that she could easily break out of the barracks, run into the wilds of the Earth Kingdom, disappear and begin a divergent life away from her home.
She shook the thoughts away with disgust. She had been given the mission to prove her skills to her father, and she was thinking of abandoning it? Pathetic. Azula was heir, and she was going to succeed the throne. All other ways of thinking were dangerous distractions, nothing more than daydreams flitting about her head.
Her reading was admittedly not as precise as it could have been, for Azula spent a good chunk of her time eavesdropping on the conversations of the women sharing her room. They were all very tight-lipped, which she attributed to her presence, but even the short snippets of speech they shared with one another sketched them in Azula's mind.
Choko was the eldest, a thirty-eight-year-old woman on her fourth deployment to the Earth Kingdom. She boasted affluent parents who could have easily removed her from service, but she joined the military out of pride for her country.
Misuka was twenty-six, a child of the colonies who had already been stationed at the barracks rather than one of the soldiers who had been on the ship with Azula. She was the one doing most of the talking.
Kei was quiet and nervous, answering questions monosyllabically. She was a fresh recruit, stepping foot on foreign land for the first time in her life.
And then there was Azula, the princess who was there by choice, young enough to be Misuka or Choko's daughter. It was hard for her to compare herself to them, for they were simply on different levels. Azula was far from ordinary in almost all ways. She felt utterly disconnected from them. They were joined by the mission, but Azula was an outcast by definition. She wasn't even a soldier, not really.
The mess hall was full when Azula and her roommates arrived, but Azula still managed to find herself a corner of a table with nobody directly beside her. The situation was ludicrously reminiscent of school, of struggling to find a place to sit, of the peers who always stared and made comments behind her back.
Sitting alone brought out conflicting emotions within Azula. On the one hand, she felt pathetic, a loner surrounded by people who sensed how separate she was. But on the other, she felt above them. She was a princess, a prodigy. They didn't deserve to touch her light. And so she convinced herself that she sat apart by choice.
After dinner, though, the soldiers were to go to the city's baths, with the pointed suggestion that it would likely be the last opportunity they would have. Azula, though wary, followed her roommates and others down the streets, which were notably different at night. Lanterns were strung along the sides of buildings, looking festive. On the way to the bathhouse, the troop of soldiers passed the main square, where Azula's attention was drawn to three large metal statues. She recognized them, of course, as would any student of the Fire Nation. On the right stood Sozin, the iron of his face colored and scratched from exposure to the elements. On the left was Azulon, though younger than Azula had ever known him. And in the center was the likeness of her own father, staring imposingly over the rooftops, his blank iron eyes as imposing as his real ones. All three statues had their hands extended; all three bore handfuls of real fire.
Azula allowed herself to indulge in a fantasy: a fourth statue, rising in front of her father's, depicting not a man but a woman, the crest of Fire Lord in her hair, her bangs loose around her face and her fire not orange but white. Someday she would stand here, side by side with her ancestors, claiming her rightful place on the throne and in the history books.
Too soon the statues were obscured behind buildings again, but the vision didn't fade from Azula's mind. It was a symbol of the splendor of the Fire Nation. In the name of her country and her father, she would complete what she had been sent to do. Bloodlust and the fierce desire to prove herself burned alike within her at the thought of her prey. She would bring the Earth Kingdom to its knees, piece by piece, starting with the guerillas.
The bathhouse was a low-roofed building with a separate section for men and women. Since the Earth Kingdom had less geothermal activity than the Fire Nation, the pools were heated manually, not naturally, a change for Azula.
She lingered for far longer in the changing room than the other soldiers. Most of the women were only too eager to bathe. They stripped with impunity, without thought, battle scars and birthmarks and warts revealing themselves, stretch marks and cellulite and baggy skin. Azula watched them all, but was still uncomfortable, because the marks on her were different.
She wasn't modest. She had undressed a thousand times for her father, but this was different. Showing these people her scars, the ones she had left on herself and the ones her father had left on her, was akin to showing them the depths of her mind, things they didn't deserve to see. The scars were physical manifestations of her emotional state, the only such thing on her. It was insecurity that plagued her, because her skin told stories she wished to keep to herself.
But Azula wasn't about to be stopped from bathing by her own self-critical thoughts, so she pulled her clothes off as well and followed the women into the baths.
The pool was fairly large, perhaps twenty by forty feet, though the amount of people currently in the water made it look much smaller. Steam rose up from the surface of the water, disappearing through slats cut in the roof for that sole purpose. The room was largely undecorated, though the bottom of the pool featured a mosaic of a water dragon.
Azula walked across the room with a feigned confidence, even as every step seemed to make her heart pound faster. She resisted the temptation to cover herself with her arms like a blushing maiden. She didn't have enough hands to cover all of her scars, anyway. She reassured herself that they were minute enough to not be seen from a distance, but the walk from the changing room to the hot pool still seemed to take an eternity. When she finally slipped into the water, Azula let out an inaudible sigh of relief. Now the distortions underneath the surface, as well as the other bodies around her, were enough to block her insecurities from view.
She rested back against the edge of the pool and closed her eyes, only to immediately open them. It was quite comfortable, and extremely relaxing, but not being able to see her surroundings put her instantly on edge. It would be easy for any of the people surrounding her to simply grab her head and force it underwater.
"Princess!" Azula's thoughts were interrupted by a greeting. She lifted her head to see Misuka, one of her roommates, standing with another woman she didn't recognize. Azula's eyes followed Misuka's tangled, half-wet hair down her shoulders, and then she found herself staring at droplets of water glistening on the skin of Misuka's breasts.
She forced herself to blink. "What?"
"I thought this was to be your first time in battle."
Azula felt uncomfortably dwarfed with them standing over her, so she shifted to a more upright position, even if doing so exposed more of her skin.
"It's my first time in official combat, yes, but I've sparred and fought in tournaments before," Azula said. The way Misuka spoke sounded as if she was accusing Azula of being completely new to fighting, which couldn't be further from the truth. "Why?"
"Oh, that's where you got that? Sparring?" Misuka gestured with one hand. Azula looked down. Exposed above the surface of the water was a scar just beneath her collarbone, the flesh there wrinkled and whitish. Looking at it, Azula remembered her father's tongue, hot as if he would breathe fire over her, tracing the pattern of her bone under her skin. Despite the warmth of the water, she resisted the urge to shiver.
"Just sparring. You don't have very many scars at all for someone who claims to be a career soldier." There was venom in Azula's voice, hidden only by a very thin layer of cordiality. But contrary to her expectations, Misuka simply laughed.
"You've got me there. I've never actually been in serious combat before. But soon I'll get to show those Earth Kingdom scum the power of the Fire Nation. I've got skill, I know I do."
"She's too impulsive," the other woman chimed in, the one Azula didn't know. She was laughing and looking at Misuka in a way that suggested something more than friendship. Curious about this observation, Azula tilted her head and watched the two women. "She once burned the commander's eyebrows, and she was this close to burning his face as well…"
Misuka laughed and pushed her friend aside. "Don't listen to her, Princess Azula. She's just jealous that I've been chosen for the team instead."
Azula smiled thinly and took advantage of the opportunity to drift away through the water. When she looked back over her shoulder, Misuka and her friend were still splashing each other. They appeared like nothing so much as lovers.
It made Azula uncomfortable for reasons she couldn't describe.
Later, back at the barracks, as she put on her nightclothes and prepared herself for bed, Azula couldn't help but watch Misuka out of the corner of her eye. Try as she might to convince herself that she was simply sizing up the soldier who would be fighting by her side on the upcoming mission, she couldn't completely erase the images of the woman's naked form from her mind. She went to sleep annoyed with herself for this apparent lack of control.
Her unconscious taunted her with images of Mai and Ty Lee swimming naked with her instead. Azula awoke with sweat on her brow, sure that Ozai would be coming to punish her for such dreams.
But after a few short breaths and as her mind calmed down, Azula remembered that Ozai was far, far away, and that she was free of Lo and Li, and that her thoughts were hers and only hers.
The soft breathing of her roommates helped Azula fall back asleep, and this time she did not remember her dreams.
