Avatar: The Book Of The Phoenix

In Dreams

Omashu at night still sounded like a city that had not agreed to be taken.

From the high terrace the streets below were a map of old earth and new fire: torches in the watchtowers, smoke from kitchens that had changed hands, the distant grind of carts the Dai Li would have called orderly. Azula stood with her arms folded, looking down as if the view were a problem she had already solved.

Mai sat on the rail, legs hanging, knife turning once in her fingers and then going still. Ty Lee was on her back on the warm stone, tracing constellations that did not belong to this sky.

"I asked again," Azula said.

Ty Lee rolled onto an elbow. "Asked who?"

"The garrison records. The last dispatches from the eastern front. The lists of the dead they bother to write down." Azula's voice was light, almost bored. "Nothing. No letters. No name. If he is alive, he has decided the post is not worth the paper."

Mai did not look at her. "He isn't coming back."

Azula's mouth tightened a fraction. "I didn't ask for your optimism."

"You asked for records," Mai said. "If he wanted to find you, he would have. He knows where the palace is. He knows where you are. Silence is an answer."

Ty Lee sat up, too bright, the way she always was when the air went sharp. "Maybe he's busy. Soldiers get busy. They get sent places. They get promoted." She bounced once on her palms. "When he's a colonel he'll come back and sweep you off your feet. You'll see. He'll have a better uniform and a worse haircut and he'll pretend he wasn't thinking about you the whole time."

Azula did not smile.

She looked at the dark streets of a city that had just learned her name, and she kept her voice light.

"He would have written," she said. "Even a colonel writes."

Mai turned the knife once and let it go still.

"Then he isn't a colonel," she said. "Or he isn't coming."

Ty Lee opened her mouth, thought better of the next cheerful thing, and lay back down on the stone.

Azula stayed at the rail.

Omashu burned quietly below them. Somewhere east, a war she had already won was still eating names she could not find on any list.

She did not say the rest.

The beach had the wrong kind of sun.

Ty Lee had a crowd before noon. Boys from the other houses, a cousin of Chan's, someone who claimed he could firebend with his feet and then could not. She laughed at all of them and meant it. Mai sat under the umbrella with Zuko and did not laugh at anyone. Their silence had a shape. It belonged to two people who had already decided they were a pair.

Azula sat a little apart and counted the spaces.
There was no third chair that was hers. There was no boy who looked at her and did not look away first. The ones who did look looked at the crown she was not wearing and the smile she was wearing instead.

She thought of Aarslan anyway.

Not the letters that never came. The way he used to match her when they were young—not the bowing, not the careful compliments, the fire. He was the only one who did not flinch when she got sharp. He was the only one who made her work for the last word. She had spent the years since the front pretending that was a small thing. On Ember Island, with Ty Lee collecting boys like shells and Mai already claimed, it did not feel small.

She thought of him through the afternoon. Through the swimming. Through Ty Lee's third admirer falling into the surf and pretending it was charming. Through Zuko and Mai walking the waterline without speaking and somehow still being a conversation. Through Chan saying her name like it was a prize he had already won.

She thought of him at the party.

The water was black glass under the lanterns. She could still feel Chan's mouth and it sat wrong, like putting on someone else's armor. Guilt was not a word she used. She used it anyway. Kissing him had been a test she had already known the answer to. He could not match her. He could not even stay on the balcony when she stopped performing.

Aarslan could.

That was the part she had been circling all day and not saying.  The rest of them wanted the princess. He had wanted the girl who would trip her own brother to win a race.

She looked at the open ocean and did not say his name.

She thought it anyway.

The capital had the feeling of a held breath.
Banners were already going up. Couriers moved like they were late for the end of the world. Azula found her father in one of the quieter hours, between councils, when the throne room was empty and the fire in the braziers had been allowed to burn low.

He was standing at the map table, not sitting. That was how she knew the moment was usable. Sitting meant court. Standing meant he might answer.

She chose the words the way she chose a first strike.

"Father. I need a name from the eastern lists."

Ozai did not look up. "Which name?"

"Aarslan. Shoka's son. He was sent to the front years ago. I want to know his status."

That made him look.

Not because the name surprised him. Because she had said it in this room.

"I remember the boy," Ozai said. "Talented. Too visible. He went with his father when I sent Shoka back to the war."

Azula kept her face still. "And after that?"

"After that he was a soldier." Ozai returned to the map as if the matter had been filed. "The front swallows soldiers. That is its purpose."

"I asked for a status," she said. Careful. Not pleading. "Not a proverb."

Ozai's eyes lifted again, cooler now.

"You should not concern yourself with petty romances. You are a princess of the Fire Nation. In a few weeks the comet will rise and the world will remember what that means. A general's son is not part of that work." He let the next sentence fall without ornament. "He is likely dead."

The room did not change. The braziers did not flare. Azula felt the words anyway, clean as a cut.
She did not ask how he knew. She did not ask if anyone had written it down. She stood in the heat of the throne room and held her face together while her eyes burned and did not, quite, spill.

"I see..." she said.

Ozai had already gone back to the map.

Azula bowed because that was what the room required, and left before the first tear could decide it had permission.

In the corridor she stopped, one hand on the stone, and waited until her breathing remembered how to be a weapon again.

Then she walked on, and did not wipe her face until she was sure no one was watching.

The throne room faded first.

Then the corridor. Then the map table and her father's voice saying likely dead as if it were weather.

Azula woke with her hand already on Viszla.
The swamp camp was still around her: low fire, wet air, wolves at the edge of the light. Sozin slept against Rokkun's chest a few feet away. Zuko's tent was dark. For a moment the palace stone was still under her palm. Then it was only damp canvas and a child breathing.

She lay still and let the other nights finish leaving.

Omashu's terrace. Mai saying he was not coming back. Ty Lee inventing a colonel with a worse haircut. Ember Island and a kiss that had belonged to no one who could keep up. The capital, weeks before the comet, and the one question she had been stupid enough to ask her father.

Years of lists. Years of no letters. Years of assuming the front had eaten him.

And now he was here, a few feet away, with their sons, and his father's name still sitting in the dark like a second fire.

Azula looked at Rokkun's face in the coals' last light.

She did not wake him.

She only watched him breathe, and did not go back to sleep for a long time.