When he tells me, I say nothing. I hear nothing. I see nothing. Everything else fades away to complete emptiness.
I feel nothing.
And then.
A flash.
A flame.
An explosion of rage—of hate—that propels me halfway to the prison crater. I say nothing. I hear nothing. I see nothing. Everything else burns to ash in complete FURY. I am fire. I am hatred itself.
And then I remember that the sight of me, in whatever state, will please him, however slightly. So I will hurt him—PUNISH him—in the only way I can.
And then I weep.
I crumble to the ground, tearing at the grass. I let out a scream that would've breathed flame.
All I see is Zuko's face.
His young face, perfect, free of blemishes. His eyes widening in fear. His scream. My nightmare made all too real. The fire that licks his cheek. The burnt flesh left behind. The red. The blood. The rush to clean and cover it. The scarring. The forever scar.
I feel a hand on my shoulder, then on the other as well, and he helps me sit back up.
I kiss his cheeks, able to speak only because I have to be, I have to I tell him, assure him that this is a permanent mark of honor. It always has been. It's a scar of integrity, proof that he did the right thing, spoke out against injustice when no one else would, he followed his conscience no matter the consequence.
I am so incredibly proud of it. Because of what it means, it's beautiful to me.
But it cannot less a mother's wrath. It cannot prevent me from loathing its maker with all I have in me. I never understood blame until now, when it all belongs to him. He deserves to die in it, for guilt to incinerate him. He hurt my baby. Our baby. I can't fathom how. How he could do this to his son. How anyone who had been the man I loved…
As surely as our love had been unconditional, this is unforgivable.
And it cannot be undone.
I need a firebending bodyguard to visit my own daughter.
Zuko apologizes for not accompanying me, trying to persuade me to wait until after his meeting, but I can't. I need to see her.
The facility is homier than I expected, lovely even. The staff seem kind, gentle, polite, and incredibly warm. Their soft smiles are sincere, flowing naturally and with a sense of great peace. They're healers through and through, and several are from other nations, bringing wisdom from every culture.
They do their best to update me on her state, struggling to be both honest and comforting. They need to prepare me, lower my expectations, understand how difficult it is for them to help her, understand why the straightjacket can't be removed.
I listen, but I can't really hear.
Especially when we reach the hallway with her room.
There's a window on her door, but I can't bring myself to peer through it. Not yet.
One of the healers knocks, and I remind the bender with me to wait outside.
"Your highness, you have a visitor."
She steps aside so that I may enter.
"Azula?"
She has her back to me, her long hair covering most of it, but there's already a dagger in my heart. Her height reminds me of all the years lost, all the inches I never got to see, and that white jacket...
"My love, please look at me."
She turns, slowly, showing me her face for the first time in so long. She's grown even prettier, her features sharper than mine, strong and enchanting.
But there's madness in her eyes, especially once they see me.
The pools of gold widen in disbelief, her brow twitching, horror and panic seizing her, freezing her.
My miracle. Ozai's weapon.
"You're not real," she declares, attempting in vain to express disbelief.
She used to be much better at lying.
She says it, but she doesn't believe it.
Her hallucinations are too routine for reality not to glare its differences.
"Azula—"
"Shut up!" she screams, eyes mad as she steps back, pulling at her jacket.
My daughter is afraid of me.
"You're a liar. You're not my mother. My mother fears me. My mother—"
Everything they've said to me, everything they've warned me about, leaves as if it'd never been there. All I remember is her. All I want—need—is to hold her.
"I'm not afraid of you, Azula," I try to explain, crossing closer to her, becoming desperate myself. "I love you. I do!"
"No!" she screams, sitting down, fighting back tears as if her life depended on never releasing them. "You think I'm a monster."
"I think you're confused, and I think you're hurting, but I love you. I always have, and I always will."
"You love Zuko. Precious, little ZuZu," she spits, but she doesn't jerk away when I sit down next to her.
"Yes. As much as I do you."
"You left me."
"I'm sorry."
"You left me with—"
"I'm so sorry, Azula. I want to tell you all about that night, about… every night, but there's time for that. There's a lifetime for that. I am never leaving you again."
I reach for her, and she recoils.
"Liar. You're not a mother. You're not—"
I start humming, and she freezes, blinking at me, tentative, but with more hope and sanity than I'd seen in her eyes in some time.
I sing her lullaby, a song I sang to her five thousand times, and remove her jacket.
She doesn't speak. She's forgotten how to lie. She doesn't know what to say.
The straightjacket falls away, and the song ends.
"Mom?" she asks as if she doesn't know the answer.
"I'm here, my love. I'm here."
She hurls herself into my arms, and the guard rushes in on instinct.
I hold her, rock her back and forth as she weeps into my chest. I smooth her hair and hum her song, and I remind her.
"I'm here."
Her eyes are slammed shut, her cry is a wail, snot runs down with her tears.
But this is the strongest she's ever been. This is her most beautiful.
I'm probably little comfort in this release of a lifetime's pain, but she clings to me. She needs me.
I'll never let her go.
Her healing isn't easy. Her forgiveness and trust need to be earned. I visit her daily, sometimes with Zuko, sometimes not. There's still resentment, madness, jealousy, and hurt. She screams at me a lot. There are still times when she doesn't recognize her own name. But the healing is happening. No one can deny that. I brush her hair, sing to her. She asks me questions, and I answer all of them. She eats the food I offer her. She trusts I'll return tomorrow. It may take months, but my daughter's coming back to us. I'm learning, and she's learning, and I'm never leaving her again.
I dare to wonder what's next for us, for her. Someday, when Zuko is older, when my presence is stifling instead of uplifting, when Azula's been home for years, maybe she and I will go back to the Academy, now a school for the orphans of war. I'd love to teach, to protect and raise those girls, and I think she would too, more than she realizes. She'd make a wonderful firebending master, eventually, and her students would idolize her. We would still see Zuko and Iroh often. We would find a new family routine.
Of course, all I really want and need are here with me. My babies, my darlings so grown up but still so deserving more than me. I give them all I have, and all I am, and they continue to give me everything.
I wish they could occupy my every thought.
I wish I could stop thinking about some things.
Well, one thing really. One question that doesn't just nag. It keeps sinking, digging into my mind like a blade, twisting deeper with each passing day, with each time I see Zuko's face.
How?
Azula's the only one who ever asks me about him after I've told her and Zuko the story, as much as I could.
"Are you going to kill him?" she asks on a day in which she's flipflopped sanity and insanity with relative ease.
As always, I answer sincerely any question.
"I'd be lying if I said I hadn't considered it, or fantasized about it…"
"But?"
"Living is torture enough for him."
She isn't quite satisfied by this—I think she might kill him if she could and make a note to warn Zuko of this—but she smiles because I didn't take the opportunity to mention how wrong murder is, regardless of circumstance or justification, how we must always be better than the cruel and never lower ourselves to the level of those who do evil.
I believe all those things, and I want her to as well, but it'd be deceitful for me to mention them without confessing what comforts me the most.
But the question still haunts me. It screams when I try to sleep. It sinks and sinks until there's nothing else to think.
I consider slamming my head against the cell wall, bashing my skull into the stone until there's nothing left, but I know I only have one chance to do it. If it doesn't work, if a guard comes too soon, I'll wake up in a padded cell instead, and Iroh will be beyond insufferable.
But I can't bring myself to do it for another reason.
As long as she lives, as long as she breathes, our memories keep living.
Our children… I still don't know what I can do for them, whether or not I should.
All I know, all I've ever known, is her.
Our love was more than bone-deep. It was genetic. When my heart stops and my spirit leaves, when my skin burns and bones shatter, it will be in our ashes.
A love like that ceases to be a choice.
Azula was six years old and Zuko seven when they welcomed home their future tormenter—the father who would twist devotion into madness, happiness into despair, and honor into dishonor, the man who would hurt and haunt their lives.
A decade later, I went to him.
I recognize her this time. I believe it because not even my dreams hoped to imagine she would visit me.
There's no kindness in her eyes, but I don't care. They're still her eyes.
"What? No tea?" he taunts because it's the cruelest thing he can say, but he can't enrage me anymore.
I know what real rage is.
"You're more Azulon than Azulon ever hoped to be," I say because it's true, and it'll hurt him.
It's my turn to listen. She's more than earned the right to say whatever she wills.
"How can someone who has devoted so much of his life to being nothing like his father manage to become him so completely?"
I cannot answer.
I kneel down to glare and growl at his level.
"All Zuko wanted was to be loved by you, to be just like you, and nothing terrified you more. All Zuko wanted was to be loved by his father, just like you. Is that…?"
Looking at him, looking at this husk of a man in filth and rags, sitting in a prison, hair disheveled, it's difficult to remember what I came here to say. He's not the monster, the dragon of my nightmares and memories. He's Ozai.
"He forgives you, you know. Not because he wants to or ever wants to see you again. Not because you deserve it. But because he needs to, to break the hold you have on him. Hatred isn't a burden worth carrying…
"But you burned our son."
For a while, she doesn't say anything, and I try to hide how much I'm soaking her in, how precious every second of this hell is to me.
"How?" she demands as if it's that easy, her face neutral, but her eyes searing, scalding.
I welcome the scorching.
He crawls to the bars, and I stand up, step back so he can't reach me.
His self-pity is gone, but the self-loathing never will be.
I know my words are killing him and delighting him at once, I know it's still Ozai, but I don't care.
I ask again, fighting the tears I swore I would never let him see again.
"How?"
I can tell her that I thought Zuko was me, his cheek my own, his punishment the least that I deserved. I can tell her that she was everywhere I looked, that Azulon was screaming in my ears every day, that everything was on fire anyway. I can tell her Azula was not the first to descend into madness. I can tell her what happened when I left. All the things I did. Why I did them to be with her.
She might pity me enough, might nurse me as someone truly insane. She might be horrified enough to attempt forgiving me.
But that would destroy her.
I say nothing because it's the kind—least cruel thing I am capable of. It's a small thing to do for her, the only way to atone, so I do it without thinking.
I still don't know whether our love was mostly a lie or mostly true. I only know that, for a while, it felt truer than every truth.
It was beautiful. For however brief a while, it was beautiful.
She screams at me. When I open my mouth to apologize, she screams louder and crumbles to the floor.
Her hands grab the cell bars, but I dare not touch them. Nothing can comfort this mother in front of me.
She sobs for hours, maybe years, and lets her head hang in silence for another eternity.
We sit there for a while.
Then she looks up at me.
Our eyes always said what we could not.
I will always love you, Ursa, even though I emotionally can't.
I will always love you, Ozai, even though I morally can't.