Work Text:
“I have milk,” Zuko offers. “Uncle would be appalled, of course.”
Azula doesn’t answer.
Security having grown lax over the past years, guards and servants had gradually assisted princess Azula in her steady migration to one of the outer rooms, windows still barred as much for her protection as anyone else.
Birdsong and morning light pour through the slats, casting bands of orange light along the ornate carpet while the musk of dew-damp grass mingles with the warm muscatel notes wafting up from the arrangement of fine porcelain between them.
Motions sweeping and slow, everything just slightly torpid, radiating heat rather than jets of flame, Zuko portions and measures out, weighs the crushed leaves by honed instincts. Uncle taught him well over the years, even if he hadn't truly been attending to the gentle lessons. Without thought, he could prepare favored teas or exotic imports that even the Jade Dragon tea house could never have hoped to serve.
Her eyes follow him through every action, whether it's a quirk of his hands or stroll over to the window while he waits for the tea to steep. With his back to her, though he's angled so that he can still view her through his good eye, he watches her fingers trail the edges of gold embroidery along her robe, picking away though there are no loose threads.
After straightening the dull wooden spoons so that they are arranged in a fine line, Zuko moves on to the paper plate of confections and miniature pastries so delicate that they look as if they will crumble under their own weight; these he does not touch, of course, without first gathering a napkin to keep from soiling them with his hands.
Still, Azula sits dumb while he recalls the simple pleasure of those seconds, drawn out and fat with promise and dripping with his youthful impatience, as Uncle sat with him on the road-side, waiting for his tea to soak.
Finally, just as it's nearly strong enough but not bitter, Azula speaks.
"You know that I'm going to escape, don't you, Zuzu?” She leans her chin to her palm, elbow against the arm of her chair in an affectation of pure regal boredom. “You can't hold me here forever."
Ah. It’s this again. Azula always surprises even when she conjures familiar debates, as comfortable as well-worn boots.
"The only thing that I know, Azula,” he responds smoothly, measured as the portions, while filling her teal cup that matches the rest of the set only in that each piece is a different make and hue, “is that your tea is ready."
A modicum of Azula's old sardonically arrogant humor shines through in a taunt. "More worried about cold tea than father's kingdom slipping from your grasp? You've been spending too much time with uncle."
If only that were possible. From the very first days of his rule, optics and duty demanded that the Dragon of the West stay far, far from the Fire Nation capital, lest rumors of a puppet King on the master tactician's strings spread. That was just the tinder to spark a rebellion among the disgruntled military and political elite, vestiges from his father's reign and a cancer that itself had to be cut and cauterized.
"Not as much as I would have liked,” Zuko admits in hope that the weakness of the revelation will soften her when these days Azula's flames flow without focus, mercurial like water in a troubled stream. “Not as much as I should have."
"What? Did that fat, senile fool finally keel over and die?" Ripples unsettle the placid surface of her tea as the cup shakes in her hand, the other rising to try to stabilize it while she feigns raising the drink to her cracked lips. It’s possible she thinks that it’s poisoned. With her empty smile a gaping abyss opens up where once two teeth, shattered in a failed escape attempt and then pulled to spare her the pain. "It's about time, really."
"We all have our time, Azula.” When he raises his own mug, the tea is sweet and pure, scalding his tongue in that way that can only be described as pleasantly painful – just enough to remind the body that it's still alive as liquid heat flows into his throat and chest. “No one can escape destiny; he merely rises to meet it, or is crushed under its weight."
"You have been spending time with uncle. All that smugness won't help you, though, Zuzu. You can't hide the fact that you're lost without him – without me out there to push you. That was the only reason you ever got anywhere, you know, with him holding you back, keeping you out of trouble, and me, always-” She trails off into absentmindedness, scowls, and finds herself once again. “I was so- so far ahead of you, giving you something to try to keep up with."
"I would never deny the role you played in making me a better man."
“Still nothing compared to father, of course.” Now she drinks the tea, and he can tug out a modicum of satisfaction from that, her lips pursing as she blows away steam. “He's so ashamed of you, you know?"
"I'm certain that he is,' Zuko grants, setting down his cup so that he can sample one of the apple puffs, tart and rich so as not to overpower the blend of Camellia sinensis. “Have you spoken with him recently?"
"Of course!” His sister's laugh cuts and churns the air between them before she stifles it with a second, somehow mocking sip from her cup, eying him over the rim. “He lets me in on all his plans, you know – not like you. After speaking out of turn in council, it's a miracle that he ever trusted you again, even when you captured Ba Sing Se."
"Even then, he never held me in his confidence."
"True. True,” she grants like it's an indulgence to acknowledge that he's right about something for once. “Only I was worthy of that – am worthy of that."
"You worked so hard to prove that to him." Immediately, he knows that it is the wrong thing to say. Color floods his sister's cheeks, splintered with creases of rage.
"I never had to prove that to him!" The hiss is accompanied by a fervent thrash of her hands, the still mostly full mug tossed aside and careening into a blank wall. Such a waste of good tea. At least she hasn't scalded herself. "Greatness recognizes greatness. Only I understood him!"
"I misspoke."
"No you didn't, Zuzu.” She's calm and pleasant again. Where once the instantaneous shift would have set him on the back foot, he's learnt to plant his feet over the years. So much in life came down to maintaining a solid, basic stance. “It was just you being jealous again, but I forgive you, you know. Your younger sister is so magnanimous. I'll make such a wonderful Fire Lord when father assumes his rightful place as the Phoenix King."
He puts his thumb to the edge of his cup, tracing the smooth rim as he watches a play of emotions over the pale reflection of his uncle's face. "That would be quite the sight to see."
"Glorious,” she insists, gleefully manic now. “Poetic, really. Rising up out of the ashes of the prison you've stowed him in."
Her eyes are wild when he looks up at her. "That's all that any of us can hope."
"Getting philosophical, just like uncle?” A greedy swipe collects one of the fat pastries which, in a discrepantly dainty bite, she chews and swallows. “Tell me, has he died yet? Or is he still the same doddering, rambling, senile fool?"
Back to that.
"Uncle is as he has ever been."
"Well, he'll be drawn and quartered when father returns." The threat slurs and squishes through the gaps in her teeth, grease even from the delicate crust of her desert slick on her tongue, gumming her up as she swallows.
"So you were saying."
As if trying to reach something or raising up a hand in praise, her arm sweeps towards the ceiling. "Oh, yes – he has such a glorious plan – he told me himself, you know. All the details. Everything about it."
There's almost something believable in that; for years after his father's imprisonment, Zuko had been certain that there was still a plan, some contingency in place for the great Fire Lord had surely foreseen this possibility and orchestrated events to ensure his escape. Awake even with Mai against his chest, a complaint lingering in the folds of her cheeks and downturned mouth while she waited in her sleep for him to rouse her, he'd turned over the possibilities in his mind again and again.
Then father died.
Only on that day had Zuko finally admitted that Ozai was, and only ever had been, just a man.
Even witnessing him on his knees, stripped of his bending, hadn't been enough to do that.
"If there was anyone he could have trusted,” Zuka assures in part to himself, “it would be you."
"That's right.” Her nod is imperious. “That's why it's happening in only a few days."
"Oh, is it?"
"Yes. He sent me letters. They're all there." A gesture over her shoulder indicates the heavy wooden writing desk set against the wall. It's useless now that she no longer reads, but sometimes, when the woman ceases to speak and only listens, he'll pluck up a book – any book from among all her childhood favorites - and read aloud to himself. "It's all set in motion. Too late to stop. Mai and Ty Lee will be here to rescue me."
A ransom worthy of the Fire Lord would be a small price to pay.
There is a moment of spite when a Zuko who, heralded by the black snow, alighted in the South, wants to tell her that Mai and Ty Lee are dead. Have been dead for years. That was life – a long, slow spiral wherein all the things around you and inside of you slipped away.
Looking at the withered, aged husk of a woman, he knows that to be true. Everything but her eyes still seems immaculate. Servants come every morning, routines set perfectly, like the phases of the moon, but disrupted by a single word from Azula who asks where her father is; whether the conquest of the Earth Kingdom moves apace; if the plans for her coronation ceremony have been executed to the letter.
Her robe is embroidered with the emblems of the old Fire Nation, and throughout their conversation, she has swirled her finger over the flame insignia, the gold-filigrees of the fine jewelry – ruby earrings and father's old signet ring, the crest of their house on the middle of her chest.
"I would love to see them try." Even at his age, when there is no time left in a world that's passed them by, there is still a pleasant shock in choosing the truths that one wishes to speak.
"Oh, so smug, brother? So sure of your defenses? Just like you were so sure of their loyalty, weren't you? But that was all part of the plan. They always worked for me. No one could ever love you more than they feared me. Rubbish. You should know that you can't trust them."
"Then perhaps my weakness is in trusting too readily."
An answer stutters out and dies before it's born when she lunges for him, scrabbling for his forearm and bearing down on it, knuckles bulging like great white pustules under her skin.
Were it the first time, he might react beyond placing his palm to her elbow, cradling to hold her steady as she totters but refusing to grip.
Azula had such pristine skin as a girl, even when it was baked by a tan, as if the sun adored the little child and doted upon her as its own. Her arms and neck and the sensitive flesh along her collar had only tinted a lovelier coppery-yellow shade.
Rimed with blood, her cuticles are ragged. She gnaws on them constantly, the servants tell him, picks at them, and they are bloated with infection that her nurses treat with healing salves and bitter ointments to try to keep them from her mouth. Overgrown, unkempt nails pierce into his forearm as she clings like a cat on a hunk of driftwood at sea. Varicose veins, blue and swollen through papery skin mottled with age spots, engorge even further on the back of her hand. The nurses note that they are everywhere – on her thighs, calves, hands.
“Can I go home, Zuzu?” she asks with the voice of a child, a small girl asking her older brother if she's old enough to join him as he and his friends leave the palace by palanquin to visit the markets, even though they despise the pomp.
Had Azula ever spoken like that, or are those memories merely emanations from the mists of a geriatric mind?
“I- I have to go home.” Azula nods to herself, though he yearns to say that it is for him. “Mother worries about me.”
There is no healing this.
He leans down until their foreheads are pressed together, his thick white beard bunching and digging into the soft flesh of his chin. Her breath smells of pastry, chamomile tea, and rot.
“Of course mother is worried about you,” he assures as she clutches even tighter, “little sister.”
In pulling herself away, her nose upturns and there is a vague impression, like a footprint left in mud during a rainstorm, of that young, young child, hurling gouts of blue flame towards him atop an airship.
“I don't care that she worries,” Azula insists as he summons his uncle's spirit to maintain his placid expression, though his blood froths up from the puncture marks she's gouging deeper in his arm, mingling with the little streaks of reddened puss that leak out from the corners of her fingernails. “It's good that I'm not going home.”
“But you will, one day soon.”
“Of course I will. I have my coronation to attend. Mai and – and...” She’s trying so hard, struggling against the shadows of herself, and in a moment of foolishness, he tries to help.
“Ty Lee?”
“Of course Ty Lee!” she spits and flecks of food that she can't detect rain down on her robe, spittle on her chin, dribbling down onto her regal dress. “Don't interrupt me, Zuzu!”
"I'm sorry.”
“You're so pathetic.” Loathing, directionless, drips from her mouth like the venom of an asp, as she starts to cry, a few streaking tears from her sunken eyes getting caught up in the creases of her cheeks. “Asking for forgiveness. Weak. You’re weak! You're embarrassing us both. You're embarrassing me!”
“I know, Azula.” Zuko pats her arm and she deigns to allow him to smooth away the wetness on her face with a clean cloth napkin. “I will try to be better. It's good that I spend time with you; you teach me a great deal about strength and honor.”
“Of course I do.” She withdraws to imbibe her tea, scowling when it's nowhere to be found. Streaks of pale liquid trail down the far wall and pool amid shards of porcelain on the ruined carpet. Some unfathomable scrap of a memory or a thought that contorts her features, makes her look pained and tumultuously sick, scrapes through her mind. Processing always enrages her the longer she tries to grasp hold of the half-formed things like spirits left behind by the pieces of herself that are dead; they fade in and out of sight and haunt the crags and recesses of her mind. Always ready to spring forth and consume her.
Turning to him, she smiles, somehow a mingling of youthful and aged ugliness, and a flutter of her eyes clears only part of the mist.
“Are you one of the new servants? Here to escort me to my coronation?” she scoffs, flicking her shaking hand as she flays his skin with a judgmental glare. “You seem awfully feeble for a palanquin-bearer.”
“Everything is already prepared, just as you requested,” he assures while dabbing at his beard with the slightly moist napkin and then pressing it to the nail-marks that Azula no longer sees, though the blood still stains her fingertips. “Your majesty will be departing shortly. Very soon, now.”
The former Fire Lord Zuko, removing a sliver of pastry from the serving tray between them and placing it on her plate, summons an attendant to bring them another cup.
“In the meantime-” He lifts the teapot. “Would you care for some tea?”