Chapter Text
The sky ripples with iridescent blues and pinks, streaming the setting sunlight in stray waves of gentle shades; through the fogless glass panes and over the drying wood tables of The Jasmine Dragon, above the empty cars and across the streets in quiet yellow tides. Jin wrings out the damp towel over the sink behind the counter, drapes it over the rack, and unties the sash of her green apron to hang inside the backroom. Azula finishes sweeping the floors and leans the broom beside the other girl’s apron, sliding the OPEN sign around to its backside.
Uncle comes around the other side of the shop, holding his phone upside down and frowning into it, until he looks up and catches sight of his niece, promptly breaking into a concerningly cheerful smile. “Ah, Niece!” he exclaims. “I have a surprise for you.”
Jin pulls out her car keys and jingles them lightly, brushing past Azula. “I’ll leave you two now,” she says quickly. “Happy birthday, Azula.”
The brief contact leaves a warm flutter in Azula’s chest, and she flushes as Jin gives her an unfairly attractive grin before vanishing around the glass corner’s peripheral. Rolls her eyes at herself, because — because feelings are stupid, and —
Uncle’s not laughing at her, yet she gets the distinct feeling that he is. Very silently.
She barely even wants to throttle him. Improvement, Katara’s voice says, while Toph’s shamelessly calls her a wuss.
“Your ‘surprise’. Please don’t tell me you ordered a pony,” Azula says instead. “Or another jade-inlaid teapot. It just so happens to be my birthday.”
Uncle actually laughs this time, and passes the phone over facedown. Azula looks at him suspiciously, but his innocuous smile only widens, and there isn’t really much else to do but look.
Mai’s eyes stare back at her.
Azula’s heart drops.
“Azula!” Ty Lee’s face bounces into the camera, shoving her perpetually-grouchy friend aside and filling the screen with her own bubbly smile. “It’s so good to see you!”
“Yeah,” Mai’s swathy sand-dry voice says, though not necessarily uncordially. “A delight. We missed you. Hasn’t been the same without your… exuberant personality around at all times.”
“Mai!” Ty Lee whacks the girl off-screen, before turning back with a continually bright smile. “Stop that. She’s still like that,” she admits apologetically to the camera. “But that’s not the point, heh. We really did miss you, Azula.”
Azula doesn’t know what to say. She’s thought about them (it’d be a lie to say she hasn’t, and she doesn’t want to be a liar anymore), but she hasn’t truly thought about what she’d say to them. Suki’s suggestion for apologies from months ago floods back into her mind, so she places the phone down with its screen angled at the roof lights, and braces herself to plunge for the right words. Uncle’s looking over at her from across the room with something that might almost be worry etched in his features, but she shakes her head at him, and so he leaves her alone with his phone and two friends(?) she hasn’t talked to for years.
(Because she’d ruined everything she might’ve had with them, the way she ruins everything.)
Finally, she picks the phone back up. Mai and Ty Lee are looking at her with surprisingly matching expressions of what looks kind of like they’re about to swallow their own words, like they’re worried about her reaction, and Azula hates that it stirs such a twist inside of her.
“You… missed me?” is what comes out, instead of Why are you talking to me?, or I’m sorry, or possibly anything else that wouldn’t be the pinnacle of dallying embarrassment.
Mai’s sigh permeates sharply, as she wrestles the camera out of Ty Lee’s grip to address it more directly. “Yes, we missed you.” There’s a moment of silence, then she adds, softer, “I’m sorry about Zuko.”
Azula swallows, thinking back to Mai and her brother’s odd relationship. “Myself as well.”
“I’m sure he would’ve loved to be there with you, though,” Ty Lee butts in, voice more subdued than usual, but somehow still wholly sincere.
“Maybe,” Azula says distantly. “Perhaps he would’ve.”
She looks over to the counter, where Uncle’s vanished from sight entirely — probably finishing up the dishes. Glances back at the screen, then blurts out, “Listen, I’m sorry. For being a shitty friend to you both. You deserved better.”
Zuko was better, she thinks, but doesn’t say.
Ty Lee looks vaguely uncomfortable as the two girls exchange a look, before the taller starts to speak. “You’re right,” Mai says bluntly, never one to dull the blade. “But, well… we understand it better, now. And it doesn’t excuse anything, but we still do care about you, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking to you.” (It’s been years since we last spoke, but you’re better now, right?) A pause, then — “Did you just say ‘shitty’?”
Azula laughs. It isn’t the kind of laughter she used to reserve for the mirror when she’d craved anything but a bitter resentment for life, or the kind she used to make when she’d remembered where she is now. It’s real, genuine amusement for a mention of something she’s come to say more openly, the way she’s working on her brother’s name and her mother’s face.
Ty Lee looks startled, then starts laughing chimes as well. “ Oh, ” she blurts out, eyes crinkling. “Mai, Azula learned how to swear. ”
It’s so inordinately, unreasonably funny. She laughs and laughs in front of her old friends half a world away and doesn’t stop, and doesn’t feel vulnerable or weak.
“Well,” Ty Lee finally manages, fighting back a snort, “we wouldn’t want to distract you from your tea shift.”
“My tea shift is over.”
Mai raises an eyebrow. “Then how about your new friends?”
Azula scowls, pushing down the instinct to deny their status in her life. “Uncle told you, didn’t he.” It’s not even a question.
Ty Lee giggles. “Yep!” It’s so unashamed, the gentle teasing and lightness, and Azula doesn’t know how she once tried to ruin the bubbly girl. “I hope you have a great time.”
“Yeah,” Mai’s voice interjects, though there’s something akin to affection that softens her rough edges. “You deserve it.”
They'll talk more, later, when the sun has risen again and the wind that blows across her room isn't from the colder nights. They'll talk about the past, about how when getting away would be the greatest thing and about everything they could've been; and they'll talk about Zuko and who he used to be for those that get it. About learning to be better to one another, for all the learned hurt that defined them before they could've escaped.
But right now, Azula has candles to light, and people to blow them out with.
☲☲☲
Her friends arrive after sunset, inviting themselves into the apartment with little grace for the most part. Toph’s parents escort her to the door with the most absurdly dyed, oversized birthday cake Azula’s had the privilege of laying her eyes on in her life, plant a kiss in their daughter’s hair. Toph drops the timid girl act and releases her bangs with a brush and scowl the moment they leave, informing Azula, Your actual present is a well and proper fistfight you don’t get to back out of. (Azula doesn’t try to disagree.)
Katara passes her an unevenly handsewn drawstring bag weighing more than empty air, containing a glass jar filled to the brim with kaleidoscopic paper cranes. Suki presents her a metal warfan from an island of her direct ancestors, one that snaps open with a clean flick of the wrist, and promises to show her how to use it traditionally when they hang out again. Aang gives her a sprig of what turns out to be half a dozen homemade, wood beaded friendship bracelets threaded with small braids that dangle off in a gentle fringe, alongside a large-leafed purple calathea with turned over stems he says will open with time and care.
Sokka hasn’t talked to her much over the past month after their discussion at the park, and Azula hasn’t minded keeping it that way. It’s unreasonably weird, merely being in the same room as her dead brother’s best friend — but he’s here today, and gives her a carefully written card wishing her a good year with Meet me at Pao’s tomorrow? scrawled messily on the back.
Azula thinks to herself that she’ll go. Perhaps it’s about time they talk properly.
The living room’s lights are off and the kitchen curtains drawn shut, leaving the six of them in the darkness around a candle planted amongst the frosted balloons. Azula keeps her knees under the kotatsu, while the rest of her friends collapse in an unrefined pile around her despite the three unoccupied ends of the four-sided table.
“Happy birthday,” Toph says, and the toothy smile in her voice makes it sound like it’s the best day she’s ever heard.
Azula closes her eyes, and inhales the scent of flickering flame. Feels a calm, steady thrum in her veins that doesn’t flare up with molten wax, and sits in a pliant red pillow with her palms pressed lightly against the weave.
She’s as old as her brother will ever be, and has all the things he might’ve had in a different universe, surrounded by the waft of jasmine tea and five kids who sit beside her like this is the best they could’ve been making company with. She’s as old as her brother will ever be, and the brief note folded in a sharp white envelope in her dresser drawer sometimes gets dusty, and its presence doesn’t twist a knife into her stomach each time she sees it anymore. She’s as old as her brother will ever be, and some nights she wishes it weren’t true, but some things might never come to reach if it were.
And she misses him, something she’d never have thought to feel for her older brother. But it doesn’t kill her. She’s here now, and it’s her birthday, and she’s alive.
Exhale.
Azula turns sixteen, and she’s oddly okay with how she’s spending her time on land.
☲☲☲
sometimes, when sailors are sailing, they think twice about where they’re anchoring
and i think, i could make better use of my time on land…
- if work permits, the format