Avatar: The Book Of The Phoenix

Fire Lilies

The asylum smelled like clean things trying to cover a ruin.

Rokkun kept the hood up until the last step of the corridor. The nurse at the desk had already said no to someone else that morning–it was still on her face.

"If you're here for a tour, visiting hours are posted."

"I'm here for Princess Azula." He did not raise his voice. He did not have to. "And I did not walk across half a nation to collect a pamphlet."

"She isn't receiving visitors today. You can leave a name. Most people do."

He leaned in just enough that the lie had weight.

"Then you can explain to the Fire Lord why his personal envoy was sent home with a maybe. He writes such charming letters when he's disappointed."

The nurse went the color of paper. "I—well, fine. This way. And you are?"

Rokkun's mouth ticked. "An old friend of the family."

The room was smaller than the promise he had made on a dock. White stone. A high window that did not open. Azula in the jacket, hair unbrushed, eyes tracking corners as if the plaster were speaking. She was in the middle of an argument with someone who was not there.

"You don't get to stand there and look sorry," she told the empty air. "You left. You always leave. Don't put her face on it."

"You have five minutes. That is all I can allow." the nurse said, and the door shut like a verdict.

Rokkun went to his knees because standing felt like walking into her nightmare wearing boots.

"Azula." No swagger. The name came out scraped. "Look at me. Just once. I didn't come here to be another voice in the wall."

Her head snapped up. The suspicion was still hers.

That, at least, had survived.

"What do you want? Everyone who comes in here wants something. A confession. A cure. A story they can tell at court about how the princess wept on cue."

He laid fire lilies at her feet. Crimson on white. The same stupid offering.

"These are yours. They were always yours. You called them dumb when we were kids. I figured if I brought the dumb thing, you might remember the rest."

She did not look at the flowers. He pulled the hood back. Auburn hair. The face from the gardens. He brushed a strand off her cheek as if the skin might vanish if he was careless.

"Look at me. Please. Look what he did to you. Look what this house did when I wasn't in it."

Recognition flared. One clean, terrible beat.

"Aa—Aarslan?"

Then the room stole it back.

"No." Her voice climbed. "She sent you. She puts faces on empty air and then she laughs. You're not him. He left on a ship. I watched. You're a trick she trained."

"Who?" He already knew.

He asked anyway, because hearing it was the only way to stay in the room.

"Mother." A sob that wanted to be a laugh. "Or Zuko. He likes rooms like this. He likes doors that lock from the outside. He put me here and called it mercy. You're wearing a dead boy's face so I'll behave."

Rokkun's hands flexed on his knees.

"Zuko put you in a jacket and told the world it was kindness," he said, and the velvet was gone. "I know. I heard it in three cities before I found the gate. I'm not him. I'm the one who said I would come back. I am late. I am so late it should count as a crime. But I am here, and I am not a hallucination you can order out of the plaster."

He took her shoulders. Firm, not a jailer. "Feel that. Bones. Heat. I walked in. I bribed a nurse with your brother's title because I would have burned the desk if she said no again. I made you a promise when we were kids. I don't break those. Not to you."

"Stop talking like him." She thrashed in the canvas. "The doctors said if I answer you, you get bigger. You get a name. You get a ship. Then you leave and I have to start over."

He tried the gardens. The race she had rigged. The roses. The dock and the way she had held his tunic like the building was sinking. Each piece hit the jacket and slid to the floor beside the lilies.

"If you were real," she whispered, "you would have come before the jacket. You would have come when I still knew which voices were mine."

"I didn't know the room existed until it was already this." His forehead almost touched hers. "I thought you were in a palace hating me. I would have preferred that. I can fight a princess who hates me. I don't know what to do with this."

"Just go." The words tore. "Leave me alone. If you're him, you already left once. If you're not, I won't give you the satisfaction of watching me believe you."

The five minutes had been a joke from the start.

Rokkun stayed on his knees until staying became another kind of cruelty. Then he stood. The pain on his face would have been useful in a hall. Here it was only true.

"I'm coming back," he said, and hated how much it sounded like the dock. "Not as a ghost. Not as your mother's trick. As the man who is going to make the person who locked this door regret the key."

She laughed, thin and wrecked. "That's what all the voices say."

The fire lilies stayed where he had put them.

He did not look back. If he had, he would have taken the door off the hinges, and a ruined door would not have given her a mind.

"Sir."

Captain Khulan's voice cut the memory off at the knees.

Rokkun blinked. Midday on the Iron Dragon. Metal glare. A village below that had never heard of iron cannons. Azula stood beside him—his Azula, whole, deadly, hair in order, eyes on the thatch as if it had stolen her lunch.

"Are we ready to fire, my lord?"

The grin that returned was slow and had nothing to do with joy.

"Light it up, Captain. I want a sunrise they don't get to sleep through. I want the man who invented mercy to see the smoke from whatever hole he's hiding in."

Khulan hesitated half a breath. "All units. Fire!"

The Iron Dragon roared.

The village went up in orderly orange.

Rokkun watched the smoke write a name on a peaceful place and let the girl in the white room fade under the heat.

He had come back.

He had kept the promise the only way the front and the asylum had left him.

Power enough that nobody—not Ozai, not a nurse, not Zuko with his kind locked doors—could take him out of a room again.

Or take her.

Not without the world catching fire first.