I know, if she is alive, she will come.
I know, with absolute certainty, she will come.
Yet I don't realize it's her. I don't recognize the sound of her footsteps. I refuse to speak to the cloaked figure kneeling at my cell. I refuse to look at him/her/it.
It is the silence that makes me look. There is something familiar about it, something even the heart I didn't know I still had registers as...
Her.
All is forgotten. The past six years. My reign. Everyone else on the planet. Time ceases to exist as those long locks fall from her hood, as my body trembles, as her fair, perfect jawline slopes smoothly yet sharply, cutting my heart like a knife.
For a brief second, his eyes widen in petrified hope. He leans forward to see better through strands of tangled hair, doubting his own eyes. He is a skeleton of a man. The mask is gone. There is only a skull. Gaping. Hungry.
Desperate.
For a brief second.
I am in a state of disbelief. I doubt my own eyes. It can't be. She can't be. I am terrified that the image will shatter, the mirage will fade, if I reach out to touch, if I crawl or move or breathe.
But all I want to do is leap at the bars.
For a brief second, my eyes widen. I lean forward to see better, and a flawless hand moves to lower the hood.
And then they look at me, soul-piercing, mind-numbing, breathtaking, twisting the blade even deeper. Two flames. Two jewels. Two bottomless, endless pools.
Their sadness is beautiful.
She has not aged a day.
When Zuko told me Ozai no longer had his bending, he expected me to be relieved. But that wasn't my immediate response.
All I could see, all I could picture was the boy I loved at his most alive, one with his flame.
Aang meant it be kind, an act of mercy, and he could never hurt anyone again…
But he'd never be himself.
It was crueler than killing him in some ways, in ways I could never fully articulate, much less explain.
My Ozai had been the embodiment of flame. Bending was his spirit, his soul, his life.
So even though I knew my Ozai could never be regained regardless of an ability to bend, the loss of that blaze meant something even more. It was a loss of freewill, of the reality that he had a choice, even if it was one he would never make. He was incapable of joining any world. No form of peace with himself could ever be restored.
The Avatar took away the possibility of his doing evil, but he also took away the possibility of his doing good.
"Ozai," I say aloud for the first time in years, surprised at the peace it brings me.
The most beautiful voice in the world, saying my name…
He doesn't respond. He refuses to. Not a nod or a blink or a change of expression.
But he can't tear his eyes off me, and he stays in the light, and that's enough.
The last time she saw me, I was a prince. She would never see me as Fire Lord. She sees me now in filth and rags, stripped of any title I ever had, while she is the princess she has always been.
"I won't wait for you to answer me," I say, rising to leave his prison cell.
The moment my hand touches the door, he speaks.
"Wait," some foreign voice creaks.
She turns back.
She sits.
She smiles at me.
"I missed you too."
He's expressionless and silent and stays in the shadow, but I continue.
"Zuko told me where you where, but he doesn't know I'm here. He's such… an amazing Fire Lord. An amazing young man."
"Oh, it took a full minute before you mentioned Zuko," I deride, savoring the sarcasm dripping from my voice. "Such restraint. I should feel honored."
"Would you prefer I mention Azula?" I ask bluntly.
I close my eyes and, unable to say what I should, ask,
"Why are you here?"
She smiles again, but it doesn't reach her sad, beautiful eyes.
"Do you remember the day we met?"
I'm the only one who could perceive the slightest of reactions produced by this question. He's insulted by the question, appalled that I could doubt it, but he nods.
"Do you remember the promise you made me?"
She pauses for too long; the air is too thick, the combination of her silence and her presence forcing me to end it in any way I can, the guilt and shame her eyes elicit forcing me to defend myself with something true.
Thank the spirits one thing is.
"I have never lied to you."
"No. Just to yourself."
She shares her memories—our memories—in agonizing detail. The turtle ducks. My attempts to train her. The first time she saw me bend. Ember island. The players. The day she saved my life. The day her mother died. Fire flakes and ash banana bread. Lu Sen. My duel with Iroh. With Zhao.
Our first kiss. Our first, "I love you." Our dances with fans and flames and heartache. Our wedding, and our wedding night. Just snippets from our married life. Silly moments that still stuck out to her, usually involving my crankiness and short temper, the way I'd look at her with smoldering eyes or touch her.
The day she told me she was pregnant for the first time. For the second. The days our children were born. The infinite little happinesses and sorrows they brought us.
But that's absurd, I was never happy. Not truly.
"Yes, you were," she says, knowing my thoughts. "We were. But you were never satisfied."
She asks me questions, but I only nod or shake her head. She gets a few things wrong just to see if I'll correct her. I usually don't.
For some stories, the ones he must consider cruel of me to share, he closes his eyes, clenches his fists and digs them into the cold stone floor. For others, he can't look away from my face.
The memories make me laugh. A few make him smile. They should make me cry, but they don't. It unnerves him. It angers him that I can say some things so passively, that my expression is more stoic than his. Tears are weakness for him, a weakness he would rather die than indulge in again, but he doesn't see them as that in me, even now. I know he wants to leap at the bars, to confront me, comfort me, yell at me, but he doesn't. I know he remembers and just refuses to admit it.
She sings our song, and I realize something.
She had the most beautiful voice I ever heard, and I never even told her. Not once had I even complimented it beyond asking her to sing.
He won't look at me when I talk about the night Azulon died, but the combination of my silence and my presence makes the air too thick for him, and he has to break the fog.
"What?" he demands.
"Zuko told me about the next morning. Where he found you, and how you didn't turn away from the fountain."
Not a word, but this seems to be triggering a different emotion, one I can't quite place.
"He's told me about some of the changes you made. Some things we talked of doing. Some things we never dreamed of in the worst of our nightmares. Some things that must've reminded you too much of me."
Her flawless face, her piercing, searing gaze, torments me worse than any of my attempts to self-punish.
She reaches into her sleeve and pulls out a piece of parchment I know too well, even if she refuses to show me the side with her face.
"I found your chamber. Did you read my letters too?" she asks, placing the portrait back in her sleeve.
I nod, cursing myself for hoping that she might give it to me.
"Azula…"
I close my eyes, unable to say what I should.
"I trusted you with our children, Ozai."
He speaks again, casually, simply.
"You've always trusted me too much."
"No, my love, I've always believed in you. You think it 'too much' because you stopped believing in yourself."
"Quoting Iroh now, are we? 'While it is always best to believe in one's self, a little help from others can be a great blessing.'"
"Don't mock wisdom you once knew to be true."
"Once knew, my dear. Once."
"You admit it?"
"I admit nothing."
The memories keep flashing though the stories have stopped, which was her goal along.
I can't help but smile.
"I see you, Ozai. I still know you better than you know yourself, however much you hate that."
His "inscrutable" face is still open parchment to me. His facades fail to convince either of us. He hates that he can't win, that he can't stun me into silence.
"You still love me… Don't you?" he accuses mockingly, failing to hide how desperately he needs this to be true.
She doesn't hesitate.
"No."
The word echoes like a scream, scalding every cell in my body as the black organ in my chest drops to my stomach.
Her eyes always make me know when she's telling the truth.
"I love the man you were. I always will."
He says none of what he needs to.
"You loved me. You loved us. But you never came home. You never told me why. You decided we weren't enough. You banished Zuko. You neglected Azula. You let her, encouraged her to fall deeper and deeper—"
"You left."
His inflectionless tone startles me out of my pain.
"What?"
How dare he?
"How DARE you say that when I—after everything you put me through—after everything I did for you—after you—"
There's indignation and suffering in his eyes, heartbreak as he crosses closer to me, his hands clenching the bars.
"You left ME!"
"I didn't have a choice. You know I—"
"You could have stayed. With me. You could have chosen your country, your husband. You should have been there to protect them from me. To protect me from… myself."
This confession brings tears to his eyes, and I'm almost too startled to go to him, but I do. I place my hands on his, trying to loosen his grip with my soft touch.
"Ozai…" she coaxes, her smoother-than-water, softer-than-a-kitten touch on my skin for the first time in a century.
"You betrayed me. Zuko has no idea what I felt that morning. You have no idea."
But true agony—true anguish—is something not even he could hide. At least, not from me.
Her hand is on my cheek.
"Yes, I do."
Her eyes threatened to drown me, but I don't care. I welcome this surrender, this kind of defeat.
"I'm sorry. I loved you. I loved you all more than life."
His hoarse voice doesn't bring me any triumph or sense of victory, no rejoicing or despising or jeering. It doesn't bring me peace, but at least I broke through. At least I know he knows it too.
She stands up, but there's so much I haven't said. So much I want to say about what it felt like to be without her, about these years apart, about why, about how…
"Ursa."
It's the first time I've said her name in half a decade.
I fly into his cell, and he curls up into a ball. He lets the tears fall down when he feels my touch.
Her robes pool around me, her hands pull me close.
She holds me as I weep.
"Ursa, Ursa…"
They stream and they scald, but her touch is sweet relief.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry…" he sobs.
I weep with him, shushing him, holding him in my arms, prepared to do so until he cries himself to sleep, pushing back his tangled hair.
She kisses my forehead, and my golden gaze, aflame for once, meets her amber eyes.
And for one moment, he is the man I once knew. The man I love. The man he once was. He is my prince.
For one moment.
It isn't until the next morning, when she is gone, when memory returns, that I realize she doesn't know. No one has told her. But they will. As soon as they discover her visit to me, they'll tell her.
She'll know.
She'll know the cause of Zuko's scar.
And she'll hurt me, punish me in the only way she can.
And I know, with absolute certainty, I will never see her again.