When the moon approaches its zenith, Azula is fast asleep. But next to her, Katara is still awake. She turns to one side and the other for hours. She relights the candle next to their bed and continues her reading, but when she's reached the end, she's still no more tired.

She makes a spur-of-the-moment decision and slips out of bed.

When she cracks the door open, the guards are engrossed in conversation a few steps away, backs turned to her. It's ridiculously easy to sneak past them. By now, she knows the palace well enough to dodge what few patrols there are on her way, slipping in and out of the shadows, ducking behind pillars to wait out guards passing, and she reaches the library without incident. There, she wanders the shelves before settling on a Taiso-era biography of Fire Sage Senzo to take back with her.

She's almost back when she hears voices around the corner and quickly ducks behind a tapestry.

"—don't know how they tolerate it. She desecrates the values of our people, it's… it's sick, really."

"Lord Ozai would have killed her the day he captured her. Our new Lord, may she live long and her reign be prosperous of course, she's not what I expected."

"She's weak, that's it. The girl has poisoned her. I shudder to think what kind of sick thoughts she whispers into her ear."

"Shh! You can't say that!"

"And what of it? A doosara agni in the highest echelons of the palace? If it were anyone else, they would be buried alive in the palace square! Or drowned in the harbour!"

"Don't you think—"

"Fire would be too good for them. If they want to act like savages, their savage elements are all they deserve…"

The footsteps walk away and the voices fade. Inside her little hideout, Katara is shaking. There can be no doubt who the two were talking about, but the hatred dripping from their voices – one of them, at least – still comes as a shock to her. It's not like she's expected the palace to welcome her with open arms, but this… it's disturbing.

Doosara agni? The term is unfamiliar to Katara, although she can tell it's from the ancient language of the Fire Nation. She's seen enough of it in the library to recognise it, even though she doesn't speak it.

After waiting for a few more minutes just to be sure, she sneaks back to their rooms. A couple corners away, she purposefully hits a statue – Princess Zeisan, she believes – and waits out of sight for the guards to run past her before slipping back into Azula's chambers. When she goes to bed, she's lost her boredom, and she falls into a restless sleep after lying awake for another hour.

The next morning, over breakfast – for once, Azula is still there when Katara wakes up – Azula is thinking through her schedule for the day when Katara speaks up.

"Can you translate something for me?"

Oh? The annoyance about being interrupted mixes with curiosity, perhaps a little satisfaction that Katara needs something from her.

"It's in the old language. I'd like to know what it means."

Azula isn't nearly as versed in the ancient tongue as Katara seems to expect, but she nods regardless.

"The words were 'doosara agni'."

Her thoughts grind to a screeching halt and she abruptly slams her cup down.

"Where did you hear that?"

Katara recoils at her sharp voice.

"Just something I overheard. Some people were talking."

Under Azula's icy glare, she adds, "about you and me, I think."

A thousand things race through Azula's head. Anger, shock, fear. The need to find out everything, the who, when, why, what. The desire to burn things, people, anything, to punish this infraction.

"What does it mean?"

"Don't ask", she growls, but she underestimates Katara's curiosity.

"No, I'm asking. What is it?"

Azula breathes out.

"It's an insult for people who… engage in forbidden… acts."

Katara raises her eyebrow. "I'm not a child, you know. If you're talking about", she coughs, "making love, I know what that is. Growing up in a small village, you get the idea pretty quickly."

"That's not it. Doosara agni… it's unnatural. Dishonourable." When Katara only gives her a challenging look, she adds, "a man and another man. Or a woman with a woman."

"What? What in the spirits is wrong with that?"

"Of course you wouldn't understand."

"Don't give me that shit. What's your problem?"

Azula sighs.

"The literal translation is 'second sun'. It describes people who defy Agni's will by being selfish and wanting another person of the same sex. Just like the world orbits the sun, so is love meant for a man and a woman, a sun and a planet, not a second sun. By having another sun, another fire, they show their disrespect for Agni, who is the only other sun they are meant to worship."

"That… is the biggest leopard shit I have ever heard. Anyway, why do you care so much about some gossip?"

"It's not just 'gossip'", Azula shoots back. "It's against the law. Such things have been forbidden since the old times. It's punishable by death, since our primitive ancestors were enlightened by Agni."

"Wow."

"I suppose you tribals don't care about it at all, then?"

Katara shoots her a dirty glare for the condescending choice of words.

"It's rare, but acceptable, if that's what you mean. The elders call it 'warrior for warrior', unataqti unataqtimut. If it's between men, it's thought that their brotherhood in arms is simply taken a step further. Between women, each of them does double duty and serves as half a wife, half a warrior."

It's exactly the kind of utilitarian attitude Azula expects from people who live in huts admidst the snow.

"After my father and the other men left to fight, it became a little more common", Katara continues. "It gets lonely. Mothers would share a home to raise their children together, widows would move in with widows… it's not hard to see how that would turn into something more."

Raising a child is communal work. Parents and grandparents, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, neighbours and friends. Living in such close proximity, even before her father left, it hadn't been uncommon that neighbouring families would take care of each other's children, that mothers would bring their children with them to a friend's house while the fathers were away to hunt. From what she's seen, it's a far cry from the Fire Nation and its isolated, closed-off families.

"I see."

She shrugs. "It's not really spoken about a lot, but it's nobody's place to involve themselves in another's family. It's different in the North, where girls and boys aren't supposed to meet a lot unless they're married. They don't train women to fight and they look down on it a little more, men and women who try to play both roles."

"You mentioned it."

"But at the same time, from what I've seen and heard when I was there… when the men only spend time with the men, the women with the women… sometimes, such things just happen, you know? Nobody talks about it, but everyone seems to know that it happens."

It's a completely foreign thought to Azula. To think of men doing Agni-knows-what out on their boats, or women the same in their homes, with little to no privacy… she shudders to think about it. At the same time, she can't help but draw parallels. To her time at the Royal Fire Academy for Girls, to classmates who were a little closer than usual. To girls breaking the rules and sleeping over in each other's dorm rooms. Hell, she can easily see something like this from Mai and Ty Lee, now that she thinks about it. Ty Lee certainly always seemed much more fond of Mai than she did of Azula. Those Kyoshi Warriors, too – only women, living and fighting together? Half wife, half warrior?

The uncomfortable realisation that she and Katara are, effectively, at the co-habitating stage of what Katara describes is hastily pushed away, but it reminds her of why they're speaking about it in the first place:

Insubordinate slander about her.

"I suppose I can't expect primitive ways of life to measure up to mine", she pointedly says, knowing full-well that it will upset Katara enough to end the conversation, and it does.

She will have a lot to do later.

Once alone, Azula curses herself. She should never have let things get out of control this much. Of course people would gossip about the prisoner who lives in the Fire Lord's quarters and eats from the Fire Lord's table. She can only hope nobody knows about Katara sharing her— sleeping in the same bed as her. The potential damage to her reputation would be incalculable.

The next days, Katara buries herself in books, anything she can find about this particular part of the nation's history. Old law books, collections of past Fire Lords' decrees, scrolls on marriage and essays about love. She has to dig deep into the old, unused sections of the library, but what she finds is staggering. Accounts of Fire Lord Aijin and his history of lovers. A biography of General Hanabira, known for wearing her hair short like a man and taking her second-in-command as a husband in name only, alleged to have loved the Minister of Agriculture's daughter. A proclamation about the granting of land and shared title to two officers under Fire Lady Seji, who passed the title on to an orphan they raised as their own son.

And then she finds it.

We, Sozin, Fire Lord by Agni's grace, hereby decree that any disgraceful and unnatural acts committed by a man with another man, by a woman with another woman, shall henceforth be forbidden in all Our lands and punishable by nothing less than death. We declare that from this day on, the sons and daughters of Our great nation shall seek only to better their homeland, to contribute to its growth, to uphold its values and ensure a future for Our great people. In doing so, We fulfil Agni's will and rectify what Our forefathers have shamefully neglected. This now be law.

"Since ancient times my ass", Katara mumbles.

Now that she knows where to look, the evidence is everywhere. The officers and nobles she's read before are omitted from any history written after that point. Biographies of the Royal Family written in the last century barely mention Fire Lord Aijin, and generals, heroes of the nation, who were known to have taken the 'wrong' lovers in their lifetime are missing from collections of stories. One such book she finds even has pages torn out of it.

When she comes home in the evening, fuming with anger about the injustices she's discovered, she is silent at dinner and disappears into her own room before Azula can strike up a conversation.

How can any nation go to these lengths to punish love?

She remembers home. Kuuniqa, a friend of her grandmother, whose partner passed away when Katara was six. Nobody would have called them married, but everybody knew to offer condolences like they would have to a warrior whose wife died.

The Fire Nation would have killed her.

For all that she's hated them all her life, this is a side of the Fire Nation she has never thought about, never thought to think about. Too busy surviving, too busy focusing on immediate goals. Get to the North Pole. Get to Ba Sing Se. Learn bending. Run from Zuko, run from Azula. The invasion. Running again.

Eventually, she falls asleep to disturbing dreams about burning women and Fire Nation raids.

A/N: After the last chapter, we're getting to the part where I've started putting effort into names and such, instead of just stringing ATLA-sounding syllables together xD let me know if you notice any names' meanings from here on.

For the ways homosexuality is treated in the Fire Nation and Water Tribes, besides what the wiki could tell me about comics canon, I've done a little reading about homosexuality in Inuit cultures and Edo- and Meiji-era Japan – Meiji era being the most commonly cited inspiration for the Fire Nation, and Edo era (shogunate) roughly corresponding to the warlord and feudal eras before Fire Lord Zoryu's unification of the Fire Nation into its modern form (Kyoshi comics, I think). It's pretty fascinating; both the Inuit peoples in modern Canada as well as 19th/20th century Japan, from what I understand, partially adopted homophobia due to increasing colonialist/imperialist Western influences. The idea that 'practical' homosexuality is a side-effect of gender segregation in the Water Tribes was inspired by similar phenomena among indigenous people in what was colonised as Canada, specifically from the Wikipedia page about Two Soft Things, Two Hard Things, a documentary about queer communities in modern day Inuit communities.

For the phrase doosara agni, I started with trying to figure out the origin of the term "Agni", which fandom often takes to be some fiery deity. Agni is the Hindu god of fire, so I ran with that and the fanon about a fire god/spirit and tried to construct a plausible in-universe justification for homophobia in the Fire Nation. With a little help from Google Translate, I arrived at "doosara agni", "doosara" being Hindi for "second" (according to Google). Throughout this fic, I've been trying to emphasise gender equality in the Fire Nation (i.e. female soldiers, unlike the NWT) while also showing the flip side, that noble daughters are still marrying assets first and foremost and their equality has limits (see: Mai), and I figured that would go great with this "sun and planet" sexism that I've rooted FN homophobia in.

Lastly, add the cultural differences between the Southern and Northern Water Tribes, and you've got a recipe for different flavours of queer relationships: low-key but openly lived same-sex relationships in the SWT, seen as practical and an extension of neighbourly, familial, or warrior bonds, and a culture of closeted relationships in the NWT who really shouldn't be surprised that if you make men spend time mostly with men, and women mostly with women, it's gonna be a lot easier to facilitate some unofficial gay sex/love.

Idk, I just really put a lot of thought into trying to make this as plausible and coherent as possible within the Avatar universe and I needed to talk about what my thought process was xD