Chapter Text
Waves rolled gently over the sea shore, the moon and stars shone brightly overhead, and the dying embers of a former beach house crackled merrily in the distance. Princess Azula walked quietly down a black sand beach, alone – still alone – with her thoughts.
The night had been a rather mixed bag, all told. Zuko, Mai, and Ty Lee’s reminiscing by the fire had left her feeling strange. She still wasn’t sure what had provoked her own slip of the tongue, but like any imperfection it left a bad taste in her mouth. What was worse was failing to secure a partner when even Zuko had managed it. She exceeded him in all things, so why was he able to pair up with her apathetic friend despite so many clashes while she couldn’t convince a boy to join her? She didn’t understand it, and what she didn’t understand irritated her. On the other hand, torching the beach home of that fool who had spurned her had been quite therapeutic.
Still… the implied failure on her part still stung a bit, which was what had brought her out here in the first place. She needed a short while to consider the problem where no one would see before she could approach it again with her usual confidence. In the meantime, uncertainty implied weakness, and weakness in front of others was unacceptable. That much she had known from childhood.
Azula walked along the beach, hands folded behind her back and pondering the issue. She wanted to find a date of the male persuasion – that was what girls her age were expected to be doing, the strange fluttery feelings in the pit of her stomach urged her to do it, and most importantly of all she couldn’t allow Zuko to have anything she didn’t. Why was it so oddly difficult, then? She was the conqueror of Ba Sing Se, surely, she could conquer the heart of some fortunate boy?
Maybe she had been too gentle the first time around? Fear was always the most reliable way of getting someone to do what you wanted. It wouldn’t be too difficult to simply order a boy of the right background and whom she found adequately attractive to join her in social merriment. Once someone spent enough time around her, they’d have no choice but to like her eventually.
It was while the princess was mulling over potential solutions to her romantic woes that she felt a sudden, sharp pain on the sole of her left foot as she stepped on something hard. Silently vowing to cook the thing alive for interrupting if it was a buried turtle crab, she took one step back and lit up the palm of one hand. The soft blue glow revealed neither an animal nor a rock, but instead a slight metallic glint poking just out of the volcanic sand. Azula raised an eyebrow.
She had walked a good distance from Lo and Li’s beach house, further out towards Ember Island’s less developed side. There weren’t any houses around here, and there weren’t likely to be any people either – precisely why she’d chosen to come this way. Slightly curious in spite of herself, Azula crouched down, gripped the edge, and tore the offending object free from the sand in a single expert move.
It was a lantern, she realized almost at once, though an unusual one. Regaining her feet and holding up a low flame to it, she immediately recognized it as antiquated, tarnished bronze. A short, squat cylinder was sandwiched between what looked for all the world like a pair of curling house roofs. Azula turned it over in her hands, noting that while there was a hinged panel counterproductively covered in smoky glass for light to shine out of, there was no apparent way for smoke to escape. How was this thing supposed to function if the fire inside would inevitably smother itself in seconds? Further, there were extremely worn traces of script visible here and there, none of them characters she could read. Considering her education, that was rare indeed.
“Alright you,” Azula murmured as she turned it over in her hands again, “what’s your secret?”
In her own mind, this odd antique had challenged her by interrupting her train of thought. And while she certainly wasn’t above declining a challenge if it was more advantageous for her, it was equally true that she enjoyed them when they came. An opportunity to demonstrate mastery in even the smallest of ways ought to be seized with both hands.
As she went back to walking along, the princess examined the lantern from several angles, looking for some way it could actually function. But no matter where she looked the little irritant continued to be solid, albeit corroded, bronze with no exit holes of any kind. It occurred to her that it might be intended to house luminescent crystals similar to those she had witnessed beneath Ba Sing Se. But even if that were the case, it was still terribly designed, seemingly meant more to smother light than to broadcast it.
After a short while of trying to puzzle it out mentally, Azula sighed and decided that there was nothing for it. Setting a light inside it herself was hardly as intellectually stimulating, but it was certainly better than conceding a second defeat of the night. Two fingers poised for firebending, she flicked open the little glass panel with her thumb.
That very instant, Azula felt a clenching, burning sensation wrapping around the deepest levels of her gut, and had only a split second to realize that she’d just made a terrible mistake.
Several hours later, a concerned-looking Ty Lee was pacing the interior of Lo and Li’s small beach house, looking furtively out over the balcony for any sign of her friend’s return. It was, part of her knew, completely irrational, but she couldn’t help feeling that for some reason Azula might be in trouble.
“Where is she?” the acrobat asked herself, wincing as she stepped on a squeaky board.
“Azula said she might be gone a while,” came the answer from the next room over. “Can you keep it down?”
“I’m sorry,” Ty Lee popped her head into the bedroom, where Mai and Zuko had already retired for the night on those lovely seashell bedspreads. “But it isn’t like Azula to just spend the whole night wandering off alone all the way into the wee hours of the morning.”
“Yes it is,” said Mai and Zuko simultaneously.
“Besides,” Mai continued, “she wanted to be alone. I’ve been there. Just leave her to it.”
“Aren’t you worried about her at all though?” she asked.
“Are you kidding me?” Zuko barely looked up. “Azula’s the scariest thing on this island. I’m more worried for anyone she runs into.”
Ty Lee considered that for a moment.
“Okay yeah, you’re probably right,” she admitted. “But for some reason I just have the feeling that she might need help.”
“Azula can take care of herself,” Mai said, rolling over. “And you can stop wearing a hole in the floor while some people are trying to sleep.”
"If she isn’t back by morning, promise we’ll go looking for her?” Ty Lee pleaded.
“If it’ll make you quiet down,” Zuko grumbled, pulling the blanket over his head.
The moon went down and the sun rose again, and the princess didn’t turn up. The three remaining teenagers and two old women had a light breakfast of fruit and eggs, and she still didn’t turn up. Zuko and Mai headed back to the beach for another sulking session and managed to ignore the downcast acrobat for almost an hour before she just got too pitiful looking to turn away from any longer.
That was why, in spite of his own better judgement, Zuko found himself walking north along the beach in search of his perfect younger sister. Mai had gone south, and Ty Lee was checking the houses and the island’s interior. He knew it was pointless – Azula had wandered right through multiple warzones and directly into the heart of the enemy capital to overthrow its government. To think that she couldn’t burn down half of Ember Island by herself if she felt threatened by anything was absurd. And he’d like to see the tiger shark that thought it could make a meal out of her.
She’d most likely just charmed or forced her way into a nicer beach house, one with private rooms that didn’t smell like old lady. By now she was probably running it, Zuko thought as he wandered down an empty beach far from the island’s developed side. She’d turn up, well-rested and well-fed, with a new entourage of terrified lackies, whenever she felt like it. With everything else going on in his head, he couldn’t bring himself to feel concerned.
It didn’t take too long for his mind to wander back into the same morass of confusion from the night before. He had everything he’d been wanting for three years, and he still wasn’t happy. If anything, he’d been angrier these past few weeks than before. Why? What was missing? He’d done the right thing back in the Earth Kingdom, or at least he told himself that he had, and still he hadn’t found any peace. His father… well, he couldn’t quite convince himself that Ozai loved him, but at least he respected his son now. His honor had been restored. He was back home and on vacation with his cranky girlfriend. So why did everything still feel so wrong? He didn’t know, and he didn’t like the feeling.
The scarred prince had been marinating in his own murky thoughts for a good little while when he rounded a bend and spotted something unusual. There, just lying out on the black sand, was a weather-beaten bronze lantern of obvious foreign make. Junk washed up from the sea wouldn’t normally interest him, except it was midmorning and there was a faint glow coming from inside the darkly tinted glass. Someone had to have been here recently to light it, but there was no one else on the beach, and no footprints in the sand. A glance told him there was no one in the water either.
And besides, who needed a lit lantern for a cloudless day on the beach?
That made him curious enough to give the little piece of flotsam a second glance as he meandered by. What he saw made him pause.
"It’s blue…” he muttered.
He’d recognize the sapphire glow dimly perceptible in the morning sun anywhere. The prince immediately looked around again, but still saw no signs that anyone else was anywhere near here. He looked down, and the sand still showed nothing but the smooth flow caused by lapping tides. Three years’ worth of tracking experience told him that that wasn’t possible, that there had to be some physical traces left from so recent a trail. But no, nothing. So, what? Azula had flown down here, set a fire in a lantern for no apparent reason, then flown off again? It didn’t make any more sense than the rest of his current life.
“She can’t have been gone long,” Zuko said as he picked the strange little thing up. “This thing’s not big enough to burn for hours.”
He looked around, scowling and more confused than before. It was low tide and had been for several hours, there was no way that even his sister shouldn’t have left some physical sign of her passing. The prince looked the lantern over for answers and found none, not even a thin trail of smoke from the flame inside. The flickering blue fire seemed to taunt him in that moment.
“Poor, stupid little Zuzu,” it seemed to say. “Can’t figure it out, can you?”
Irritably, he opened the hinged portal to snuff the annoyance out. It exploded in his face.
Zuko dropped the lantern and reeled back with an arm over his head as a veritable geyser of blue fire erupted from the tiny opening, enough to sear the rest of his face from his skull. The torrent hosed him down as the bronze thing fell to the black sand, but it didn’t burn. In fact, it passed right through him as though he weren’t even there. As he took several steps back, the prince could feel an odd tingling sensation spreading down his limbs, accompanied by a sense of presence and weight he couldn’t place.
The next moment he flinched to see the flames burst out of him, right from his chest. This time the blue blaze slammed down onto the beach as a fireball. It spread and coalesced, taking on a more definite form before rapidly solidifying. Zuko stared, took a step back, rubbed his eyes, and took a second look. There, on one knee – the last place he ever expected to see her – was his younger sister. Her head was bowed and her eyes closed, a passive expression on her face. Behind her, the strange lantern was dissolving before his eyes, bronze aging away to dust on the wind in scant seconds.
The moment passed quickly. Below him, Azula gave a faint groan and shook her head, hand on forehead. She looked up at her brother, squinting – then leapt to her feet faster than a three-legged frog viper.
“Azula, what-”
“I have no idea,” she cut him off immediately, brushing black sand from her legs and long skirt. She looked back up at him with a very unpleasant scowl on her face. “And as far as you’re concerned, nothing happened. Do you hear me?”
Zuko scowled right back. That was Azula alright.
“Yes, I spent a night on my own on the beach, amidst peace and quiet with no one around,” she finished brushing the last of the sand off her forearm, putting her hand on her hip. “And then you found me here, with nothing unusual to report. That’s all. Understood?”
“Azula, what’s going on?” Zuko demanded. “What happened with that weird lantern, and how-”
“Do you ever pay attention, Zuko?” she interrupted, walking right up to him. “Nothing happened, and that’s that. That’s all you need to know.”
“I need to know why my creepy sister vanished last night and showed up this morning as a fire blast in a piece of old junk.”
“No, you don’t,” Azula said simply, as if merely stating a fact. “Now out of my way, I have to-”
She’d rested her hand lightly against Zuko’s shoulder, then pushed. Or tried to, at least. Zuko could see her arm move, watched the lean muscles contract, but he… felt nothing. There was no force being exerted on him. Not that he could tell, at any rate. His sister appeared to redouble her efforts for just a second, arm twitching momentarily against him, and still there was no pressure. Azula looked up at him with an unfamiliar expression, then almost immediately settled back into a scowl.
“Hmph,” she snorted, simply stepping around him. “Like I was saying, I had better get back to our friends,” the princess said as she set off at a brisk pace. “I’m sure poor Ty Lee must be worried sick about me.”
“Like you care,” Zuko muttered as he watched her go, evidently eager to get away from this place and whatever it was that had happened here. This was too weird, adding another layer of confusion to his already troubled mind. He rubbed his forehead.
His sister didn’t make it far. Only a few hundred feet away Azula gave a sudden half-shriek and halted, arms twisted awkwardly behind her back. Zuko looked up to see her soft shoes digging deep into the sand, as if struggling to drag something along. He blinked a few times, rubbed his eyes some more, and stared again. Her wrists were both stuck behind her, and no matter how much she tugged and strained at apparently nothing the princess couldn’t seem to make them budge.
“Well don’t just stand there!” she barked back at him as she continued to pull. “Come on already!”
Zuko took a sudden step towards her. Azula toppled over forwards onto the beach.
“Azula, what’s going on?” he demanded as she picked herself up, closing the distance while she had to brush even more black sand off herself. “Something really strange happened here, and you know more than you’re telling me.”
“Don’t I always?” Azula muttered sourly, then spit out a few grains of sand.
“Yes, and this time you’re going to fill me in. I’ve got enough to think about as it is without wondering what’s wrong with you.”
“And if I choose to keep my business to myself?” the princess crossed her arms.
“Then…” Zuko looked around, eyes settling briefly to his right. “Then I’ll go sit by that rock in the shade and not budge an inch until you start talking.”
“You think you can threaten me?”
“Let’s find out.”
Zuko walked right over to the smooth stone beneath a nearby palm tree, sat down on the sand, and reclined there with his hands behind his head. Azula blinked, frowned, and turned around before marching around a nearby bend and out of sight. It wasn’t long before his ears caught the telltale sounds of straining, of grunting, even the *fwoosh* of firebending. Even in a mood as foul as his, he couldn’t resist the urge to grin a little. Maybe he wasn’t as good at underhanded scheming as his sister, but he wasn’t that oblivious.
It was a good half hour or more before Azula finally slunk back towards where he sat with an uncharacteristically defeated expression on her face. She looked bitterly down at her brother, one hand rubbing her temple.
“What…” she slowly hissed, “do you want to know?”
“What do you think I want to know?” he glanced up. “What’s going on here?”
“I don’t know everything,” she admitted, leaning against the tree. “Just a little bit.”
“Then tell me what you do know.”
“Look,” his sister sighed. “All I can tell you is what the instincts in my head are telling me. And what they’re telling me is that I’m now some sort of… spirit creature,” she all but spat the words.
“And why can’t you go far from me?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re lying,” Zuko looked up at her, accusation writ large on his face.
She chuckled humorlessly. “This inconvenience must be putting me off my game, if even you can tell.”
“You don’t want to tell me something important.” It wasn’t a question. “But I’m not going anywhere until you do.”
“Would you believe me if I told you that I’m to be your guardian spirit now?”
Zuko just gave her a look.
“Didn’t think so.”
Azula sighed, running a hand through her long black hair, and then stared off into the gently roiling ocean.
“…Because I supposedly owe you,” she admitted after a lengthy pause. “I’m bound to serve the desires of my ‘liberator’. Three desires, to be exact. Three wishes I’m supposed to grant with whatever power this state bestows on me.” Azula looked at her hand. “After that’s done, I vanish to Agni knows where and do it again for someone else.”
Zuko stared up with more than a little suspicion in his eyes.
“It goes without saying that I’ll do no such thing, of course,” the princess put her hands on her hips. “We’re going back to the others and telling them that nothing happened, and when we return home you and I are going to find a cure for this… condition.”
Zuko said nothing.
“Now come on,” Azula beckoned him. “I’ve told you the embarrassing secret you so desperately wanted to hear, now it’s your turn. Get up, and let’s go and find Mai and Ty Lee. Being alone out here is depressing.”
“Fine.”
“Azula!” Ty Lee waved cheerfully a few minutes later, running over towards them with a big smile on her face. “You’re alright!”
“Well of course I’m alright,” the princess shrugged, right before her friend’s arms wrapped around her shoulders. “After all that time we spent travelling the Earth Kingdom together, you surely can’t think I’d go soft in a single night?”
“Well, no, but…” she wavered a second. “I just thought you, um, might be lonely.”
“A girl can’t have one night of privacy without everyone thinking the worst? You made Mai and poor Zuko go out looking for me.”
“I…”
“Don’t worry though, I forgive you your presumption,” Azula hugged her friend back just a little. “This time.”
“Thank you Azula,” Ty Lee smiled, squeezing much more tightly.
Zuko snorted.
“Oh look, Azula survived her night on the beach,” came the familiar monotone from not too far down the shoreline. “There’s a shocker.”
“It’s good to see you too, Mai,” the princess pulled away from the acrobat.
The pale girl just looked unmoved.
“I suppose I should thank you for your concern, even if it was wholly unnecessary,” Azula continued with a slight aside glance at Zuko. He didn’t contradict her.
“Now then, we didn’t come here for worrying, we came for a bit of fun. And nothing says fun quite like victory.” She eyed a nearby net. “I think a nice morning game of kuai ball should get us back in the proper mood. Come on, let’s find some victims.”
Hours passed relatively uneventfully, at least from Azula’s point of view. Oh, sure, kicking around one group of hapless teenagers after another was certainly a good time until they ran out of nets, but it failed to distract her mind properly.
She just couldn’t stop thinking about it. About the fact that she was, as she had not been in a long time, vulnerable to someone else. And to Zuko, of all people. Why did it have to be him that she was stuck to? The gnawing sense of weakness, of wrongness, simply would not go away. When she humiliated others in sports, it was there. When she ate a frozen treat, it was there. When she reclined on a mat, soaking up the sun’s rays, it was there. Taunting her, mocking her from the edge of her awareness, sapping the enjoyment she might otherwise have gotten from a pleasant day at the beach.
The princess never went far from her brother during that time, not nearly as far as she knew she could. She absolutely refused to countenance a potential public display of weakness; this whole episode was humiliating enough as it was. She just had to remain calm, be patient, and find a solution. She knew that, intellectually. But knowing was one thing, perfectly controlling the underlying unease was another.
Fortunately, Zuko was just as broody today as he had been the day before and didn’t seem at all inclined to blab to anyone about what he had seen. Azula was never far away, and even when she might have been mistaken for napping her ears were constantly trained on her brother. He never dropped the slightest hint, even to Mai, that anything was off about her. Then again, he didn’t say much of anything.
It was getting later in the afternoon, the sky beginning its slow transition to orange, when Lo and Li returned from doing… whatever people their age did in the water. She didn’t care to think about it. She flagged her two elderly teachers down as discretely as she could.
“There’s one thing that I’ve been meaning to ask you about while we were here,” Azula said softly when they were close. “In my reading, I vaguely remember coming across the name of a spirit supposedly connected to this place. Something called a… djinni?”
Lo and Li looked at one another, each with one hand on their chin in that eerie synchronization that seemed to come so easily to the elderly twins.
“I’ve never heard of anything like that,” both said simultaneously.
Azula couldn’t quite keep her face from falling.