Chapter 36

Fire Lord Azula settled into a new routine.

In the mornings, she woke at dawn and trained for an hour or two. Then she spent the next three or four hours in private lessons on history, economics, law, or philosophy. After a quick lunch, she had meetings all afternoon with her ministers. In the evenings, she studied to prepare for the following day's lessons, and read proposals, until she fell asleep. She found she had never worked so hard in her life.

Whenever her energy flagged or she became discouraged, she returned to her hope that someday Aang would be proud of her. The Avatar's words became her mantra: Make the Fire Nation peaceful and prosperous. End suffering. Be better.

Captain Raiden watched the Fire Lord from the sidelines of practice drills, the back of council meetings, and the library door during evening study sessions. Her energy and work ethic impressed him. He listened without speaking during conclave with her ministers, as it was not his place to volunteer his thoughts, but she frequently asked him for his opinion on some matter. They usually found themselves alone at some point in the day, usually in the afternoon lull, or during her evening studies. That was when they chatted about her plans for the country and the way they were being implemented. He took note of what she was reading in her lessons and tried to keep up during his free time. After he chimed in on several conversations about her history lessons with her tutor, Professor Rekishi invited him to join, and Azula assented.

So the Fire Lord and the captain of her guard grew closer, in a slow way that Azula, for one, barely noticed. Others did, though. The rumor about the two never really died, but neither did it grow. It had little fuel, besides imagination, and perhaps Raiden's occasional unguarded gaze. There was also no evidence to disprove it, as neither of them dated anyone else.

When Azula's hair began to grow out of its cut, she decided to trim it, rather than growing it out into a new topknot. The cut looked amazing on her, and had become a kind of trademark, a constant visual reminder to everyone about how dramatically she had changed their culture.

Raiden though, let his hair grow. It surprised him how quickly it sprouted, from a finger's width buzz to a length of a few inches in only a couple of months. First it fell rakishly over his forehead, and then when it began to get in his eyes, he started slicking it straight back, even though it was still too short to secure with a topknot.

The first time he wore it this way, Azula did a double take as he took his seat beside her in the library for their history lesson. She had never noticed that her captain of the guard had opera-star good looks. He shot her an uncomfortable, questioning glance.

She looked away from him, straight forward. In the most neutral tone she could manage, she stated, "That new hairstyle suits you, Captain."

He blushed furiously and stammered his thanks. Before they could lapse into an awkward silence, Professor Rekishi began asking them questions about the Camellia-Peony War.

As the months went by, Azula found that her council meetings became more interesting, because she had more context for what the ministers were talking about. Now, she understood the relevance of their debates, and cared about the outcomes. Her tutors told her that in a couple years she would have the equivalent of a university degree.

Azula expected every day that Aang, Zuko, Mai, and Ty Lee would show up at her door, but they never did. They never even sent her a letter expressing concern over the two assassination attempts she had survived. Surely they understood that her speech pardoning them was meant as an invitation to come back into her life.

Chibi, for one, seemed to doubt that her message had been clear. "I read that speech. You didn't say a thing about wanting them to visit you," he pointed out.

"I pardoned them," the Fire Lord stated, as if the connection were obvious. "They should know that means that they are free to return whenever they please."

"They are permitted to return, but they did not hear you express a desire for their return."

She frowned, contemplating this nuance.

"How would you feel if they did come back?" the therapist wondered.

"I don't know," she admitted, crossing her arms. "I'm still angry with them for betraying me. I certainly can't trust them anymore."

"And you can't work through that complexity without them here," he nodded understanding. "If you truly hope to reunite with your absent friends, then I advise you to make your invitation less ambiguous."

"It wasn't ambiguous! If I didn't want them back, I wouldn't have mentioned them at all!" she insisted. "But anyway, they've disappeared."

Zuko, Mai, and Ty Lee, for all she could tell, had gone into hiding. The Resistance seemed to have disbanded, just as she hoped it would, after there were no longer any armed occupiers to fight against. At least that part of her original plan had worked. Meanwhile, Aang had gone completely off the map. There were rumors that he had started a cult and taken a group of people to one of the Air Temples. Zuko had been sighted in Ba Sing Se and Yu Dao, but he also seemed to move around a lot, at least according to gossip, which was all she had to go on. She no longer had a spy network or an army to give her information. Now, she only had ambassadors, who only heard the most basic, widely disseminated reports. She would have sought out her friends, but feared that sending investigators into the Earth Kingdom might be seen as an act of espionage or political aggression. She was unwilling to disturb the hard-won peace because her former friends were too stubborn to send her a note. She resented their refusal to contact her, and grew more stubborn herself in response.

Her loneliness only increased.

The one bright exception to Azula's solitude was the gradual warming of her relationship with her mother. After hashing out the issue with her therapist for several weeks, Azula finally answered one of her mother's monthly letters. Though her replies to her mother were short and terse at first, Ursa's chatty and effusive missives, and Chibi's generous analysis of them, eventually convinced her that the older woman had good intentions.

When the first anniversary of her coronation came, the Fire Lord invited Ursa and her family to the palace for the celebration. She presented the starstruck Kiyi with a dragon toy, and before the night was over, the little girl had begged to see her famous wall of fire, so they went out to the training grounds, though it was late. Ursa and Noren looked on fondly as Azula taught Kiyi how to pull the fire up from the ground. Then the family watched the fireworks from the palace rooftop, wariness turning to peace.

Thanks in part to its leader's assiduous application of the resurrected wisdom of Szeto, the Fire Nation prospered. The past Avatar's philosophy was all about equal rights for all, a fair distribution of resources, efficiency, and transparency. It all seemed so commonsensical, Azula wondered why they had moved away from these principles. "Because it made people money," Mai would have answered, in her typical cynical tone.

The agriculture minister had some difficulty adapting Szeto's teachings to current practice, because several new inventions had revolutionized farming. Centuries ago, there were no mechanized plowing, harvesting or threshing operations. Some of the previous Avatar's recommendations in this area had to be discarded, but Azula insisted on implementing his rules for crop rotation. "The soil has not changed, I presume," she archly told the doubting minister. The first couple of harvests produced yields that were merely above-average, thanks mostly to some fortuitously-timed rains, but the true proof of Szeto's foresight would come years later, when instead of depleted dust, the soil remained rich, producing more rice and fruit than ever before.

The war economy made a slow but profitable transition to peaceful industry. The Mechanist had invented a combustion engine that could be operated by non-firebenders, and the product proved incredibly lucrative. Munitions factories became automobile plants, and the decommissioned navy ships became merchant marines, transporting cars to eager buyers in the Earth Kingdom. To facilitate this trade, the inventor had created a method of communicating over long distances using electric pulses over a wire, and soon a system of wires crossed the ocean, carrying news, product orders, and diplomatic memos.

As the army downsized, there was a need to support the soldiers coming off active duty, lest they turn into a mob of unemployed malcontents who were also trained killers. So Azula raided the royal treasury, then shamed the nobles into donating to a fund for education, job training, and loans for homes or businesses for the veterans. Understanding that the aristocrats cared more about showing off their prestige than anything, she let the rich egotists put their names on university dormitories and neighborhoods, so that they began to compete with each other to be the most charitable. She was convinced that by investing in the young people who had served their country, she would create a foundation for the golden age she was hoping to begin. She also ensured that every boon the veterans received came with a certificate stamped with her personal seal, so that they would all know who to thank for their good fortune.

Author's Note: So we are skipping forward in time over a year.

Edited to add, June 29, 2023: This chapter has been edited from its previous version as of today.

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