On Shinzei's twelfth birthday, the palace is silent.
Ozai used to throw gala's on Azula's birthday. All of the noble families attended and she was always the center of attention. Everyone wanted to be near her. Those evenings are some of Azula's fonder memories of her childhood. She can remember hiding under tables with Mai and Ty Lee pretending to be soldier in enemy territory on her seventh birthday. She can remember dancing with Ty Lee, holding each other too close to only be friends, on her thirteenth.
The common children were taught in school that dancing was evil, a frivolous distraction from what needed to be done. But in the Caldera, among nobility, high generals, and the Fire Lord himself, they danced. It became like bending lightning, a hobby reserved for the upper class, and Azula can still remember how Ty Lee's hands felt on her waist that evening, how badly she wanted to kiss her.
Shinzei does not want to have a birthday party. Mai is jealous because Izumi's birthdays are always grand affairs that take weeks of preparation, and she has to have them because she is the Crown Princess. It is killing Ty Lee, because she absolutely delights in party planning and has probably been looking forward to Shinzei's birthday this year since Shinzei's birthday last year. It kills Azula for a different reason.
"Mother, do I have to have a birthday party?"
It is late at night, and Azula is not supposed to be working. In fact, she had assumed when her daughter appeared in the doorway that Ty Lee sent her to drag Azula from her office, but instead, she is just milling around, running her fingers across the spines of the volumes on the bookshelves, occasionally lingering on one when she likes how it feels.
"Royal birthdays have always been special occasions in the Fire Nation," Azula answers without really responding to the question. "Even your great-great-grandfather, Fire Lord Sozin, and his great-great-grandfather, Fire Lord Zofu, had balls thrown for them as children."
Shinzei's shoulders slump, but she continues to argue. "But I'm not a Fire Lord. Did Sozin's cousin also have to have a party?"
Azula sighs and lays down her fountain pen. "Why wouldn't you want to have a birthday party, Shinzei?"
"No one will come," she answers glumly. "The other kids don't like me. Izumi says they say things about me when I'm not there. Bad things. And sometimes they don't even wait until I'm not there."
She is still staring at the bookshelf on the wall to Azula's left, running one finger back and forth over the binding of Essays on Policy and Politics in Times of War. She does not seem particularly angry, like Azula would have been, or confused and hurt, like Ty Lee would have been. She just sounds resigned. Azula, on the other hand, is furious. She could point out that everyone will come because she is a princess and no one will want to waste an opportunity to rub elbows with the Royal Family, but she does not think she wants those awful peasant children or their obviously just as awful parents anywhere near the palace. It is bad enough that Zuko revoked the law instated by their father that made insulting royalty a crime. So she makes an executive decision that she may or may not actually have the authority to make.
"No, you don't have to have a birthday party."
"Good," Shinzei replies, and she leaves the room without so much as a thank you.
Azula did not thank people at that age either.
So Ty Lee suggests that they take their daughter out in the Caldera for a day instead. Her idea was probably dinner and a show and maybe a walk on the pier afterwards, but as soon as Ty Lee mentions going out to their daughter, her eyes light up.
"I want to go to the glass factory."
Ty Lee's mouth falls open. "That's… not…"
"It's your birthday," Azula interrupts. "If you want to go to the glass factory, that is what we'll do." She has had enough of parents imposing their own interests on their children for one lifetime, even if she knows that her wife does not mean to.
They arrive just after lunch at the large, dirty brick building. It is one of the old relics, from before the Caldera became a bustling metropolis, when the nation was made up almost entirely of peasants working on farms, and only those who could not afford their own land lived in city tenements and worked in industry. It is not located in a particularly savory part of town, and their palanquins stuck out like Azula's blue fire in the Earth Kingdom. Broken bottles litter the ground around them, and most of the surrounding buildings have cracked windows.
"That's Fire Lord Heinai," Azula tells her daughter as they pass by a statue in the front of the factory. "She ruled during the transition period when the bulk of our economy shifted from agriculture to production. She built dwellings that people actually wanted to live in and set a minimum wage so the younger children of farmers, who weren't going to inherit any land, would come to the city instead."
"Huh," is all Shinzei responds. She is not very interested in Fire Nation history, not the way Azula always has been, but she will one day be Izumi's first advisor, and it is a subject she needs to be familiar with.
The owner of the factory, a round man with a thick, grey mustache named Kanei, gives them a personal tour. It is… not as mind-numbing as Azula expected to find it, though the glass dust sends Ty Lee into a coughing fit twice, but Shinzei looks more excited than Azula thinks she has ever seen her about anything, and that is enough for both of them.
"Our master craftsmen have their own studios," he tells Shinzei as they leave the workroom floor, all of them sweating through their robes from the heat of the kilns in the Fire Nation summer, and climb down a narrow set of stairs into the basement. "They work below ground because it is cooler. The rooms on the third floor can be suffocating, especially at this time of year." Their footsteps echo through the silent hallway in a way that reminds Azula of the asylum she had the misfortune of living in for years. They stop at a doorway. "This is where Girazu works. He is the most talented glass blowers in the Fire Nation, and when I told him the Princess was coming for her birthday, he said he might want to make you something."
Girazu is a lean, middle-aged man with a whitening beard and well-muscled arms. He is working with something very small on the end of a pipe under a magnifying glass. He looks up when they enter the room.
"Ah," he smiles, "you must be the Princesses. And you must be Princess Shinzei." He kneels down her to level but, to Azula's relief, does not hold his hand out for her to shake. "They told me it was your birthday, and I was hoping you might stop by. I thought, if it's okay with you, I would make you a present."
"Make you a present," Shinzei agrees, flapping her hands and nodding her head eagerly. Beside Azula, Ty Lee smiles warmly.
Girazu pulls up a stool beside his table. "You can sit here and watch, but you have to promise not to touch anything. These tools can get very hot."
"Very hot," Shinzei repeats, still too excited to string together sentences of her own.
Girazu selects a thin stick of glass and holds it up to show her. "I hear you're a firebender. Would you mind heating this up for me?"
"Umm," Shinzei replies. She looks over her shoulder, in her mothers' direction, as her hands begin to twist in her lap.
"I'll do it," Azula announces. She steps forward and pushes her hand, balled into a fist, between Girazu and her daughter, and when she unfurls it, palm up, there is a small blue flame.
"Perfect," Girazu murmurs as he heats the glass. Shinzei leans away from the heat, but her eyes are still wide, avidly watching the glass blower's movements.
The glass swells under the fire until he removes it and brings it under the magnifying glass. "From here we have to work quickly," he tells Shinzei. "Before it cools."
He uses a pair of small metal tweezers to pull at the glass, forming legs and, eventually, claws, a paper-thin metal stick to draw a groove in the glass, forming the head, tweezers again for the mane, ears and snout, and then a pipe and bend the glass, making the animal's spin curve. He works for half an hour, and Shinzei watches him carefully the entire time. Finally, he breaks off what is left of the glass stick and holds it out to her.
"A dragon!" she exclaims.
The animals is standing on its hind legs, it's jaws open, finely-crafted teeth visible. It is as gorgeous as anything Azula and Ty Lee have ever bought for her, and neither of them minds.
"They say that, once upon a time, the Royal Family used to have a dragon form, and twice a year, during the solar eclipse, they would transform and fly high over the Fire Nation with the sun. Of course, over the years, the Royal Family lost their ability to transform and became entirely human, and now, firebending is all that is left, but I imagine that, if you could turn into a dragon, this is what you would look like."
Shinzei holds the glass dragon up to her face and studies it.
"What do you say," Ty Lee prods her after a moment.
"Thank you," Shinzei murmurs, still completely enthralled with her gift.
"Yes, thank you," Ty Lee tells him significantly as she holds her hand out for him to shake. "People aren't always…" she trails off as she glances at her daughter. "They just don't always understand her."
"You know, she reminds me of my grandson, Ran," Girazu says. "Though I wish he was as interesting in glass blowing. All he seems to talk about are grasshoppers."
Shinzei does not stop staring at the dragon until they arrive back at the palace. "What are you going to name it?" Azula asks her as they enter the grand foyer.
"Shinzei, of course," she mutters. "Girazu said it was me in my dragon form. I'm going to go show it t to Izumi." She does not give them a backward glance as she runs off through the halls.
Azula feels Ty Lee's arm curl around her waist as they watch their daughter's retreating back. "I think she had a pretty good time."
Azula smirks. "And you wanted to throw her a party."
The acrobat sighs. "It would have been awful for her. I admit it." She leans her head against her wife's shoulder and Azula toys with her hair.
"I'm sure Mai will let you plan Izumi's birthday party next year. You know she hates it," she suggests, but Ty Lee shakes her head.
"It's not the same. I mean, I like seeing Izumi happy, of course, but I really just wanted to throw a party that would our daughter happy."
Azula rubs her back. "We did make our daughter happy. We gave her a birthday she'll remember for the rest of her life."
"Yeah." Ty Lee smiles feebly as Azula's lips touch her hair. "She knows we love her, right?"
"I'm know she does," Azula answers. Not just because they—mostly Ty Lee—have told Shinzei that many, many times, but because Azula spent most of her childhood completely devoid of love, and now that that is no longer the case, she can feel the difference. A person can sense being loved. Azula can feel it from her wife and her brother, and she can feel it from her daughter, whom some people claim when they think Azula is out of earshot, is not human enough to love. And if Azula can feel it, monster that she was raised to be, she knows that Shinzei, who is has never known war, who grew up in stability instead of destruction, and who has great power at her fingertips but will not harness it, simply because it is not worth it for how uncomfortable it makes her, must be able to feel it as well.
A/N: I'm posting this on the one-year anniversary of when the Avatar universe became my own special interest. I hadn't seen ATLA since it first aired on Nickelodeon and I was a season and a half behind on Legend of Korra, but a year ago today, I watched all the way from The Drill to the end of the series, after watching from The Blind Bandit to Serpent's Pass the night before, and then I spent the next four days rewatching and catching up on LOK, and then at the beginning of August, I wrote If You Look for the Light, which was my first fic in this fandom. It really doesn't feel like it's been that long, but when you think about it, I lived in a different city then, I had just finished undergrad, I still thought I was attracted to men (lmao). So anyway, I really wanted to post something today.
Also, I'm going to take a second to shamelessly promote myself. I just posted the first chapter of a multi-chapter Tyzula fic a couple days ago. It's called The Wind Also Blows. It's going to be a hopefully unique spin on the Tyzula baby fic (that concept was less popular when I started planning the fic about seven or eight months ago), and the tone is noticeably darker than anything I've written before. I'm really excited about it, so if you're looking for something else to read, maybe head over there and give it a shot.
As always, I appreciate reviews!