Chapter Text
Azula had drowned once before.
Back before everything, on her mother‘s favorite beach in Ember Island, Azula had been foolish and arrogant as all six-year-olds were. And when you’re a little god of your little world, you think you can conquer anything. Even the tides and all her capriciousness. So, of course, being the godly little thing that Azula was, she turned her back on the ocean. One moment spent plucking sea glass from tide pools in a cove and the next swallowed by a rogue wave sinking straight down under a rush of white water.
She doesn’t quite remember how she got back to shore, she doesn’t even remember what happened after that. But the cold? The pouring of the void without heat, without sunlight or the breath that was oxygen into her lungs-
That is something she remembers even now.
And this time, like the last, she isn’t quite sure how she had gotten back to dry land.
When Azula comes to, she realizes her hands are tied down below her to a sewer grate. Deliriously, she recalls yanking at the chains, hard enough that her wrists bruised and her knees, bled and cut on the metal below her. Dripping wet in her ceremonial clothes, it takes a stretch of time she can’t read all that well anymore to regain her bearings. The comet, Father in the Earth Kingdom, her coronation- the Agni Kai.
Across the courtyard, Azula finds where she had shot lightning and the Water Tribe girl, Katara, she vaguely recalls hovering over her foolish, stupid brother that couldn’t stay in his place. She watches the girl panic and shake over him and despite her own hysteria, can’t help but hiss at her. “Oh, please, I barely used any lightning at all—“
Azula doesn’t expect the scream the girl lashes at her. “Shut up! How could- he was your brother! If anyone, if Sokka-“
Katara chokes on her next words, and in a distant, removed way, Azula finds it all hilarious. Imagine that- a Water Tribe girl. Choking and drowning on dry land.
The hum of the glowing water wreathed around her hands starts to fade, and suddenly it’s just regular water, sinking into the folds of Zuko’s shirt, a large damp spot where his heart should be. The girl’s hands travel from his torso up to his head, and it takes a moment for Azula to realize all she is doing is brushing the hair from his forehead, like something she’d imagined her mother or maybe even Zuko himself had done for her so long ago.
Something dreadful roots in her lungs. “What are you doing- why aren’t you healing him?”
All Katara does is brush his hair, adjust the collars of his red tunic dampened with water- that’s water, right?
There are a few moments before she speaks. “There- there’s nothing to heal.”
A chill seeps back into her bones. A scoff escapes her raw throat, a bark of laughter she didn’t quite believe in. “He’s not. He’s isnt- I didn’t even hit him that hard.”
The girl, Katara, some whisper at the back of her mind says, stares at her with those cold, ocean eyes that made her feel the same way drowning did. “He’s gone, Azula. He’s dead.”
Dead? She thinks of Grandfather’s funeral rites, of Mother’s letter from Uncle about Lu Ten, a burning turtleduck pond when Zuko tested Father a little too much. That was dead. Dead was meant for things like them, not him, not-
If Azula was a little god, Zuko was the annoying little priest at the foot of her altar. With his big, wanting eyes and reverent, clumsy footwork. Always following her wildfire with sparks that would never measure up. Tiring, persistent Zuko and all his stupid worldly worries of Avatars and honor and their dear old father’s attention. Crybaby Zuko who sobbed when Mother left and Father boiled away the pond in her mother’s favorite garden. Zuko who watched her katas with stars in his eyes and trailed like a lost turtleduck behind her? The shadow to her blaze? That Zuko?
Dead?
“No, you’re wrong. You’re lying-“
Katara’s voice cuts coolly and Azula shivers despite the scorching comet above them. “Aren’t you the one who always lies?”
Azula bares her teeth. “Zuko doesn’t die. The idiot never knows when to give up. Everyone has tried. Father did, Grandfather and the Council-“
Katara hisses right back. “Well then congratulations, Princess Azula. You’ve done what no other firebender has done before. Are you happy now? Are you-“
An earth shaking crack splits the air above the courtyard and the sky above them blisters everything below it. The comet’s heat blinds even Agni in the sky, overtaking his rays, a dying blaze of light-
are they all dying? where’s the sun? why is it so cold-
A burst of orange and blue ripple through the sky, splitting it apart, but Azula barely acknowledges the world falling apart, her understanding of it had already been shattered the moment her lightning had struck her brother.
Azula looks back to Katara and her brother across the grounds, watching the way her fingers run over his eyelids, closing them. He's asleep, he’s just sleeping, she murmurs into the ground. As the earth becomes dried and the heat becomes unbearably hot, Azula tries to imagine Zuko jolting awake, yelling at her- she can almost imagine herself cackling and screaming back. She wants to stand so that she can walk over to him, so that she can get the image in her head right, but the chains at her wrists stop her. Instead she just imagines.
Azula remembers looming over him hours after his very first Agni Kai. He couldn’t open his freshly burnt eye and the other was a milky, pink color she'd seen on benders who’d looked at flames a little too bright, a little too close. The temporary, embarrassing kind of blindness that she’d never be caught dead in. In his sleep, she remembers Zuko calling out to their parents in his delirium and for the few moments Azula had been there, woken up. When he’d tried to open his unseeing eyes, the terror, the desperation of his nightmares were nowhere to be seen. Mother or Father had not been uttered by him.
Azula, Azula, Azula.
He’d murmured her name then. Almost like prayer. Like reverence. Something unfamiliar. Azula never quite understood what it had been that day.
She could have killed him then. Azula had held her palms hot and glowing near his face then, just watching him squirm at heat he could feel but could not see. She had reveled in the power of it. She could have killed him.
Her father was a cruel man, he always had been and always would be. Killing Zuko would be real mercy. She could give it to him. A benevolent little god and her pathetic priest. But Zuko had just stared up at her, back then, his single unburnt eye wide and uncomprehending and unseeing but still said her name without an ounce of fear.
Azula. Azula. Azula.
She wonders why she couldn’t strike him then, but somehow, could now.
This is what she wants right? The star child, the only child. The only object her Father orbits around.
She looks around her where the courtyard lay in ruin, the palace in flames, her brother- what good was it to rule ashes, a little god without devotees? As she kneels in the ruin of the burning empire Father had tossed to her like a scrap to a dog, Azula realizes she’s been played for a fool.
The earth below them starts to split apart, the magma rising from below reminding her just what their ancestors had decided to build this city on. She looks up, Zuko is still motionless and Katara's panicked shouting is lost among the rumbling noise in her ears. Whether it is the sound of the boiling waters below the palace sewer grates, the laugh she can barely recognize crackling from her mouth like a flame, the splitting of the world falling apart around her- Azula can’t bring herself to care.
Her eyes are only looking at Zuko.
Azula finds that she can’t imagine him ever staring back up at her, murmuring her name like he used to. So she just laughs and laughs and sobs and screams at it all- because what about all of this was mercy?
Her father’s cruel orange light burns blisteringly bright around them as the world goes utterly dark.