Chapter Text
Zuko had talked them into giving him a different room. It was still in the infirmary, but… not in the suite meant for royalty, not the part with dizzyingly large amounts of space around the bed, space that wasn’t there for any reason except to make him feel small and windows so large he wouldn’t have even had to duck to jump through them and just leave except they’d kept two guards inside with him the whole time watching to make sure he didn’t. His new room was better. It was in some kind of isolation ward, for plagues or prisoners. Small enough he could reach out and touch the walls from his bed, and no windows, so the guards could stay outside. And there was a door, with a cold draft under it when he pressed his hand to the floor just to check. That was luxury enough.
They’d left him a candle, and a small stack of unlit ones. He… didn’t know why. A joke, maybe? It should be after dark by now, probably a lot after dark, so he didn’t need it. He should just blow it out, but instead he’d been diligently lighting a new one each time the flame on the last started to gutter. He’d been in this room for three candles. He didn’t know how long that was compared to anything else, but it was a measurement.
Keeping track of time was a luxury, too. Uncle was already a better jailer than Ozai.
Zuko shoved his hand over his mouth, and did not laugh. It didn’t work. He tried to regulate his breathing, to count to five on each inhale and exhale, he even stared at the little candle flame and pretended its flickerings were caused by him, but it didn’t work. He even held his breath, but he was still—
Zuko kept holding his breath until it burned, but he could still hear the laughing.
That… wasn’t him.
He glanced at his door, and the guards he knew were right out there. But it wasn’t coming from their direction, and it wasn’t the kind of laugh a free person would make. He slid off the bed, his bare feet touching cold tiles (easier to scrub clean than tatami, easier to disinfect once he was gone), and pressed his good ear to the wall. He walked slowly, and listened, and slid down to a crouch in the far corner of his room. It was loudest here.
“Hello?” he whispered, and the laughing stopped.
“You don’t sound like mother,” a voice accused.
“…Azula?”
“Zuzu, get out of my head. It’s too crowded, and I don’t need your stupid.”
She sounded… really offended. And really, really drugged. He knew that feeling, where the world spun slowly around his head and everything was too largesmall, too slowfast, and he had to fight not to sleep because that was what they wanted and nothing good ever came from doing what others wanted of him. (He’d refused a cup of tea… awhile ago. Asked the doctor if he could just try to sleep on his own, please, he didn’t want it didn’t need it he was calm now. The man hadn’t called in the guards to force him to drink it like back in the room with the too-big windows after Captain Izumi and Uncle’s voice had left. He’d just left it on the bedside table, next to the candle.) (The doctor also hadn’t left any water in the room, and Zuko didn’t know whether he was supposed to just ask the guards when he got thirsty or if this was how they were going to make him drink it anyway. He’d been a lot thirstier than this for a lot longer, so there wasn’t any reason to find out.)
“I’m not in your head,” Zuko said. “I’m on the other side of the wall.”
“Hm. Prove it.”
Zuko cast a glance at his own shut door, then knocked quietly on the wood.
There was a pause, and then she knocked back.
“…So. You’re out of your wing.”
“Uncle escorted me,” she said breezily. “He’s very considerate, our uncle.”
Zuko clapped a hand over his mouth, and knew he was the one laughing this time.
“Quite,” Azula agreed. “So. On your knees, or out fighting?”
It took him a moment to remember what she was talking about. It… felt like it was awhile ago, in some distant past he didn’t think about anymore. “Fighting.”
“Good.”
He didn’t have to ask about her. Fighting, of course. “…How many people did you kill?”
“Do you really think I can count that high while the room is full of birds, Zuzu?”
…She was really, really drugged. Probably with something different than him, because sleep aids didn’t cause hallucinations. “Um. They do get pretty loud.”
“Their chirping is insufferable. Flitting and crowding and saying such nonsense, if they don’t want us then what do they want from us.”
“I’ll let you know when I figure it out,” Zuko said, and he wasn’t sure they were talking about birds anymore.
It was quiet for awhile. He settled down more comfortably. Wondered if he should grab the blanket off his bed (but then he might miss something she said). Wondered if she had any water in her room, or just a cup of tea on her bedside table.
“Is father dead?” she asked. Suddenly, maybe lucidly, but still slurred-slow.
“No.”
“That was stupid of them.”
He didn’t tell her about Ozai’s bending. It… probably wouldn’t help her. “The Avatar is a pacifist,” he said instead.
“Also stupid. If they’d killed the airbender off, in a few years they could have had a Water Tribe savage, shouting and waving an ice spear. Much more practical.”
“I don’t think the other nations think about tactically killing the Avatar. Usually.”
“Must I keep repeating myself, Zuzu?” By which she meant, they’re stupid.
Would father have been proud of him, if he’d killed the Avatar enough times to bring the cycle back to Fire?
…Would he ever stop having thoughts that started with ’would father have been proud of him if’?
“Probably not,” Azula said. “Mother left us ages ago and she certainly never shuts up.”
He’d been talking out loud. Or she’d been hallucinating that he’d been. There wasn’t a functional difference, in this little room with its flickering candle.
“I’m not sorry I did it,” he said. “I hate father. I hate him so much. Why didn’t grandfather protect us from him? The whole court had to have known what he was like, he didn’t hide it—”
“Uncle never cared, you know,” she said, which meant that either she was hearing a totally different conversation, or hearing this one exactly right. “He was playing you to get to father. He admitted it during our fight.”
“Stop lying. He… he loves me. He said I’m like his son.”
“Zuzu, he put his son in active battle like some expendable foot soldier, instead of ten miles back in a command tent. Being like his son is hardly a compliment. …That laugh is appalling, stop it at once.”
Zuko drew his knees up and pressed his face into the pants they’d given him. Silk for the former Fire Lord. It was as much a joke as candles for a former firebender. “Sorry, Azula.”
“For Agni’s sake, stop apologizing. If you want to laugh hysterically, laugh hysterically. You’re a prince of the blood, no one has the right to shut you up.”
“Except my little sister?”
“Of course. Stop laughing.”
“Sorr—”
“Stop apologizing!”
He laughed into his knees, and it… felt like a real laugh, that time.
“I don’t know why the rabbit-mice all run to you,” Azula groused. Which… probably meant something to her. “I’m better, anyone can see.”
“You are,” he agreed. “But I keep bread in my pockets.”
She hmmed, as if seriously considering this statement. “So feeding the turtleducks has been a cover, all along? Devious,” she finally replied, with a hint of respect.
…Zuko realized he might still be a little drugged, too. Just a little. And thirsty. “Ozai never got fooled by the bread.”
“No, father is far more carnivorous. He eats them down to the bones, even their children. You were too much mother’s; he didn’t recognize you as his.”
Zuko wasn’t laughing anymore. But he kept his head down on his knees, and just… breathed. “I was his, though. I… I always was.”
“You’re right,” Azula said, which was the closest he’d ever heard her come to saying I’m wrong. “Zuzu, you are the most wasted resource in the Fire Nation.”
So now he was a natural resource, not a chewed-up puppy-cub. “I… what?”
“Father burned half your face off and you were still loyal. He should have put you in the Home Guard, or given you a division to command somewhere far enough away that you wouldn’t leak honor on the palace floors.” She sniffed. He could imagine her raised chin, her imperious gaze at her own shadow-dark wall. “If he’d done that to me, I’d have killed him a year later.”
Zuko laughed once, startled. “A year?”
“On the anniversary, of course. Long enough that he wouldn’t suspect, clever enough that no one could prove it, but everyone would know.”
“Why didn’t I think of that,” Zuko said, a little sardonically.
“Because you’re a Dum-Dum who shoved his pockets full of breadcrumbs, like the rabbit-mice matter. They couldn’t save you, Zuzu. This time or last time or ever. The lion-ferret roared but the dragon couldn’t help; the nets had already tangled her wings even though she didn’t see until she tried to fly.”
“…That’s rough,” Zuko settled on, because he had to say something. She’d been really impassioned.
“Loyalty is the scarcest commodity in court,” she continued, perfectly lucid and perfectly reasonable, as if that last speech hadn’t happened. “…I wouldn’t have killed you. When I reclaimed my crown.”
“That’s… nice?” Less nice that she’d been actively thinking about it, but nice she’d decided on not killing him. He’d… been wondering. “I wouldn’t have killed you, either.”
“I know that, Dum-Dum.”
“How?”
“You were already Fire Lord.”
He wasn’t sure that keeping the crown warm for a few weeks really counted, but he wasn’t going to argue with a drugged fourteen year old. “So were you,” he said instead.
“Congratulations,” she drolled, “neither of us are as fratricidal as father and uncle.”
He was laughing again. Great. “Thanks, Lala.”
“If you speak that name where anyone else can hear, I will rescind my moratorium on fratricide.”
Zuko smirked. “I think that’s what makes you Lala.”
“…Dum-Dum.”
She hadn’t actually said not to call her that. Just not while anyone else was around. “Lala,” he said again, the smirk in his voice.
“I will hurt you,” she said. “I won’t kill you, but I will hurt you.” But she didn’t light the wall between them on fire. Which might have been the drugs, but so far as he could hear, she didn’t even try. “…It’s difficult to picture you dead, Zuzu. That’s not a privilege I can extend to most people.”
“Thanks,” he said, and wished he was from a family where he wasn’t sincere about that. A family where she’d been joking in the first place.
They kept talking. For hours or maybe days as the candle flickered on the table, lasting longer than it should. They talked like they hadn’t talked since he was seven and having nightmares (and she was five, and stuck a foot out to trip him in the hall as he went crying to mother, and the guards found them in the morning curled up in one of the secret passageways, still in the pillow fort they’d built while playing Earth Kingdom Assassins.)
(He’d always been the one assassinated. She had been very insistent about that, so that she could avenge his death with fire and cackling and the casual destruction of each of his toy soldiers in turn as they served as elite earthbenders only disguised as Fire infantry. And she always promised it would be his turn to avenge her next, but it never was.)
He didn’t know when he fell asleep. He woke to a gentle knock on the door, and a servant easing inside the room.
“Your Highness?” the man’s eyes went to the bed, first. He looked incredibly alarmed to find it empty. Even more so, to find Zuko groggily huddled in a corner. “…Please come with me, Your Highness. We’ll get you dressed. The Fire Lord wishes to speak with you.”
Zuko glanced back at the wall. Wondered if he should say goodbye, or let her know where he was going. His persistent stare at a blank wall only put the servant more on edge. Zuko knocked twice, lightly, and stood up. He felt like walking should be hard—his legs shaky or weak or something —but he actually felt better than he had in… probably since Ozai had thrown lightning at him, and he’d redirected for the first time in his life, then run half-way across the city with the aftereffects still burning in his chest. The waterbender knew what she was doing, apparently. (She would have had to, to save the Avatar after Ba Sing Se.)
He followed the servant steadily, out the door and past his two guards, and tried to seem completely casual when he glanced at the room next to his.
It was open. And empty.
“Your Highness?” the servant asked.
Zuko didn’t feel like laughing. He just felt cold again. He could… ask. If Azula had really been there, if they’d moved her before he’d woken up. He could see windows again; the sun was higher than he’d thought. Closer to noon than sunrise. Uncle probably would have wanted her moved to an institution as soon as possible; if he’d wanted her staying in the palace he would have left her alone, she wasn’t hurting anyone.
He could ask. But if they said no, he…
He didn’t ask.
Zuko followed the servant. People opened doors for him and bowed to him, bathed him and dressed him, firebent his hair dry with warm hands because they knew he couldn’t do it himself, everyone knew now.
The woman who always fussed over his robes wasn’t there. When he asked, they told him she had to leave the palace. Sick relatives.
“I hope they get better soon,” Zuko said. The warm hands paused in his hair, then finished tying off his topknot with clinical efficiency. It felt lighter, without the crown.
“…The Fire Lord is waiting, Your Highness,” the servant said, and didn’t meet his gaze a single time as they walked through the halls.
Everyone was very respectful as they passed, just like they’d been when Ozai and Azulon ruled. A real Fire Lord was back on the throne.
Zuko kept his head down, and followed where he was led.