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pixie-dust-and-pain · 8 months

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These Shackles of Gold

Part 1: The Child

me??? after posting nothing for the longest time??? yes.

Summary: Ozai is a careless leader. She learns this early on, wary of his scathing tongue and biting words, yet intrigued by how he doesn't hold back, even for the sake of diplomacy. This is not how you rule a country. This is how you start a civil war and lose all your allies. Azula is careful, she picks and chooses and strikes when the time is right, not before and not after. She realizes that her father is a careless leader, and that, if left to him, the entire Fire Nation will be burnt to the ground. This will not do, Azula will be Fire Lord soon, and a ruler needs her subjects. Logically, the only thing to do in this case is seek the help of her dead brother, traitor uncle, and their miscreant group of friends that they seem to have acquired, including the avatar he was sent to kill.

It begins with mother. Everything, she thinks, begins with mother. Sometimes, when Azula is lying under the stars, completely alone save for her thoughts, she allows her mind to drift and wonders what mother’s beginning was. Her family is complicated, she is aware of this fact, has seen it up close and personal multiple times, but she still wonders what mother’s beginning was, her tipping point, the point where the dominoes began to tumble, falling one after another until there were finally no more left. Was it Azula? Was she her mother’s beginning, and, ultimately, her end? Or was it Zuko? It couldn’t have been him, he’s perfectly flawed and adored. Was it grandfather? Or father? Or perhaps her beginning, too, was her mother. Perhaps it goes back, the beginning of every girl’s end is her mother.

When she’s in a more spiritual mood, she likes to think that it was fate. The very moment of her birth had her fate decided for her, written out in golden ink somewhere in the Spirit World by Agni, wearing a crown of sunbeams and incandescence. Perhaps they were all destined to suffer.

Nevertheless, it begins with mother. It begins with Fire Lady Ursa, descendent of Avatar Roku, a woman of seemingly no name and status or quality to her other than the fact that her predecessor had the opportunity of fucking the Avatar. It’s a little pathetic, but then again, most nobles with little to themselves are. It begins when Azula is born.

She is born on the summer solstice, mid-afternoon. That, in itself, is something that has the entirety of the palace staff cooing at her, at her opportune time of birth. Fire Lady Ursa holds a little girl in her arms and smiles down at her with what Azula presumes is love. She’s certain her mother held some semblance of affection for her when she was born. Azula’s birth was, according to others, a difficult one, one that left the Fire Lady tremendously weak for days to come.

She was born a deficit, taking more from her mother than she was willing to give, a black hole of want, pulling all those around her into oblivion.

She has been told time and time again that she shouldn’t blame their mother, that it is her father who is at fault. Her father, who is a small man, who holds no place in his heart for his son or daughter or wife. Mother, she thinks, when she’s feeling particularly vengeful, you never held a place in your heart for your daughter, either.

It begins with her mother, as the stories of all daughters do.

Azula is born with a flame that is too bright to hold inside her. The Fire Sages praise Ozai for having had such a strong bender, they crow about her inner flame and her spark and, had they not been somewhat dignified, they would’ve started weeping. The Fire Lady is tired after delivery. She does not weep or praise, nor does she laugh. Instead, she smiles softly, tiredly, at the little girl and calls her an angel.

Ozai looms over them, a daunting presence, one wholly unwelcome in the sacred space that is the delivery room, in the fragile bubble of happiness that Ursa has created for herself, scrapped together through bits and pieces. She allows him in, nevertheless, handing him her baby. He looks at her as though assessing a particularly interesting piece of technology, or a new battle strategy. Then he hands her back, nodding once in approval. It’s little, but it’s more than his first born ever got.

(He had proposed too kill his first born, when the child hadn’t shown a spark. A nonbender heir would be humiliating, and he couldn’t have that. They ignore that the last time Ozai was in this room he’d been threatening the murder of his own infant.)

Zuko is gently handed his sister and he looks at the little bundle in his arms as though she’s hung the stars. Azula is pretty sure this is the only time her family has ever existed happily in the same room together.

It begins on the summer solstice.

Azula is four when she begins to show sparks. She is in the courtyard, screaming at Zuko as she yanks a parchment out of his grip, furious little hands and her miniscule upper body strength being the only things that aid her. She tries biting down at his exposed wrist, and snarls when he knees her in the stomach. She does not remember why they were fighting, nor does she care. She has to win.

She jerks her elbow upward, and sets the parchment on fire. Both her and Zuko stop, as though frozen in time, staring at the aflame piece of paper in their hands, despite the fact that it blisters her palms and stings at her fingertips. When she realizes that it’s her that lit it on fire, not Zuko, she tears her hands away and laughs. Her brother laughs with her, pulling her into a hug, because they are young and not exactly carefree with their affection, but lenient with it nonetheless because it’ll be a few more years until Ozai has drilled it into them to be miserly with every kind word and brushed hand and gaze, before they are instructed to not hold hands and to walk with a two feet gap between them, before they are taught the proper ways of court, of curling your fists and ignoring your family and holding love like a sword over the other’s throat. Not now, though; now they are children and they are happy, and that is all that matters.

Zuko praises her, and in the midst of his own happiness for his sister his jealousy is almost diminished. Almost. Azula doesn’t notice.

They both know what this means, that she’ll be separated from Zuko during practice, that she will have her own, modified routine to follow now, and the scarce moments they salvaged away will too be ripped away from their greedy hands. But it also means father’s approval, and that might just be worth it.

While Azula trains, Zuko and mother go feed the stupid animals in the pond. They’re turtleducks, with seemingly no purpose other than to be cooed and adored and stared at from afar. Utterly useless save for their superficial aesthetically serving purposes. Much like mother herself.

Azula leaves training with burns on her arms and her palms stinging as though they’ve been rubbed at too hard. A tutor suggests that they lessen her workload, that she’s only a child and that an excess amount of practice might just render her ‘burnt out’ and ‘exhausted-not to mention, may Agni forbid, hurt’. The tutor is fired the next day, literally or metaphorically she does not know.

But the stinging of her palms and the bleeding of her knees is a small price to pay for the proud smile on her father’s face when she shows him the advanced kata she’s learnt perfectly, in half the time as stupid Zuko, who can’t seem to learn anything (it isn’t that he can’t learn, she decides one day, watching him train, but rather that their teaching methods are too sharp and quick and shallow for him. She does not tell father this), and she supposes that this will amount to something.

She would consider herself to be stupid to savor her father’s affection, were it not the only thing attainable. Her father demands very little, clear-cut things. She does well and she is loved. She excels and she is rewarded. It is as simple as that, and doesn’t make her want to cry out in frustration when she does something wrong, when she oversteps an unspoken rule because apparently nobody thought it important to inform her. Instead, she follows a specific set of rules, and is rewarded accordingly. It is a fine system, especially since it makes his affection a lot easier to attain compared to mother or uncle’s.

Azula makes her way to the pond after her training. Her forearms, pale skin wrapped in white bandages and burn cream, are hidden under the delicate robes only royalty can afford, embroidered gold lining the velvety red material of her sleeves, and she clasps her hands directly in front of her torso the way she’s seen ladies at court do.

She presents herself in front of Zuko and mother, who have not yet turned to look at her. The blatant ignorance of her very presence stings more than it should, but she keeps her expression neutral. She is here not for war, but peace.

“Mother,” she begins, pleased when she looks up from where she’s hunched over one of Zuko’s textbooks, “I wish to help you feed the turtleducks,”

She is more than pleased when mother smiles (mother hasn’t smiled at her in months, it’s new and foreign and somewhat disturbing, but it’s happy nonetheless) and allows herself to sit in the space mother makes for her. Zuko makes a face, complaining about how Azula’s intruding, and mother doesn’t tell him off the way she would had Azula been the one making the comments, but instead sighs. Azula allows herself a moment of hesitation before she takes the definitely unsanitary bread from her outstretched hands and breaks it into pieces, flinging it at the ungrateful animals.

She doesn’t care much for animal feeding or, well, any activities that can be counted as leisure time. But mother enjoys it, and she enjoys mother’s attention. Her attention that has currently been diverted, focused once again back to Zuko. She breaks the bread and launches it with more force than necessary, receiving a chide from her mother when it makes a splash and the animals quack with indignantly.

“Azula! Gently, you needn’t declare warfare with the poor creatures,” she takes the bread from her hands, breaking it into smaller pieces, and gently tossing it, “You’ll never be loved if you’re going to be so harsh,” she says, handing her the bread back, and Azula gets the sense that she isn’t talking about the bread anymore.

She scowls, “Whatever, they’re just useless animals, anyway,”

Zuko grins, clearly overjoyed by this turn of events, “What’s wrong, Azula, upset you’re bad at something?”

Why this fool can’t shut his mouth and stay in his place, she’ll never understand. She flings an arc of fire towards him, and he cowers, immediately rushing to hide behind mummy’s skirts.

She receives a slap to the cheek for it. It’s quick, stinging and not in the way father’s fire is, and is somehow worse. No matter the brunt of the punishment she faces, Azula always remains calm, she doesn’t blubber like a baby, but getting slapped in the face is new and it’s humiliating, and brings hot tears to her eyes that she can’t really control. She’s never been slapped before.

“Azula, apologize,” The Fire Lady orders from where she’s got a hand on stupid Zuko’s back. She wants to set them both on fire.

“No,” she grits out, then adds, “It wasn’t going to hurt him, anyway,”

“Azula,” Fire Lady Ursa begins, but she’s already fled, vision blurred by tears and rubbing furiously at her eyes with her right hand. In her left hand she clenches the bread.

It begins, as she said, with mother. When it begins with mother, she cannot tell. She cannot pinpoint the moment her mother began hating her. If she is asked to remember, she cannot.

She cannot remember a single moment her mother hated her, but then again, she cannot remember a single moment her mother loved her, either.

When Zuko begins showing signs of being a bender, Azula barely holds in a sigh of relief. Because she needs him to make her look better, obviously, nothing more, but if his bending got delayed another year he’d be pronounced a nonbender (and most probably dead in the week that followed, due to completely unrelated reasons of course), and Azula couldn’t imagine a fate worse than that. So, instead, she allows herself a genuine smile. It’s a rarity.

Zuko fails at basic katas over and over again, and Azula watches as father burns him for the first time. He lays a hand on his back to pull him upright and leaves burns in the shapes of fingerprints in his wake. She watches how Zuko flinches and winces, and decides not to comment. When he’s done applying the salve that’s become a permanent resident to her body, and apparently a new one to his, she grabs him by the wrist and tugs him into an enclosed alcove in the gardens.

“Father burnt me.” He states, blunt as ever.

She nods, “I saw,” She does not know what he wants from her.

“Has he ever…” he trails off in an awkward manner that is so painfully Zuko it makes her head hurt, “You know?” he finishes lamely, because he’s the most socially inept individual in the most socially centred job ever.

“Know what?” she challenges. Because she hates him and is a little shit like that.

“To you?” he cringes in on himself, folding in like a house of cards at his own inability to string together a singular coherent thought. He begins again, “Has he ever burnt? You?”

The last two come out as separate questions, and Azula raises a brow. Ah, so that’s what he wants from her, to know that he is not alone in his misery, that Azula also fails and falls and fumbles. She will not give him the satisfaction, she decides, and that’s the only reason she turns away and says, “He only does it because you’re an idiot. Now-” she continues on, not giving him a chance to refute, “-stand in a wider stance with your knees bent outwards, upper body straight,”

They run through the same kata all afternoon until they’re both sweat-soaked and Zuko can probably do it flawlessly in his sleep.

He smiles at her, warm and gummy and it makes her feel something…weird in her chest. “Thanks, Lala,”

She scowls, “You’re an idiot, now go,”

She watches him leave and, instead of making his way to his own quarters, he makes his way to where mother’s. Azula, against her own better judgment, follows. She watches him make his way to mother, and grab onto her from behind. She startles, dropping the parchment she’d been closely inspecting in her hand, and laughs. She files the information away for later.

Azula is careful. She meticulously files away the information she gains, sectioning it neatly in the cervices of her mind to be applied when necessary. She memorizes pages upon pages of courtroom etiquette and perfects the way she sits, the way she talks, until father deems her adequate. She watches Zuko and she learns.

She picks the moment precisely because it’s an exact copy of what Zuko’s done, and thus, nothing can go wrong. She reduces all external factors that might account to error, and plans her move perfectly. Halfway through it occurs to her that all this planning is sort of ridiculous, especially since it serves no aim other than to garner mother’s affection. Nevertheless, affection is to be earned, and she will earn it.

She corners mother like predator would do to prey, except this time she has different goals in mind, less violent and more…self-indulgent. She waits, coiled tight like a spring, until mother sighs in the midst of the letter she’s reading, and then pounces, clasping her around the upper thigh because she cannot reach above that, and mother lets out a startled exclaim.

“Azula! Please, behave,” she orders harshly, and Azula feels her flames before she even registers them. Why is she always wrong? “What?” the Fire Lady demands, and Azula throws a flame at her in lieu of responding. She hears a servant make her way towards her, assisting her in putting the flame out. Azula hears her say, “What is wrong with that girl?” and asks herself the same question.

She rushes past the winding corridors and into her father’s quarters. He takes one look at her, red-faced and teary-eyed, and raises a brow. “Explain,” he states simply.

“Why does mother prefer Zuko?” she asks instead, so painfully earnest it sounds foreign even to her own ears.

Her father raises a brow, and then slowly extends a hand, beckoning her forward. She makes her way to him slowly, and then allows herself to crawl into his lap, seated on one leg as he wraps an arm around her small body. She feels simultaneously safe and terrified.

“They do not understand true power,” He says, “They fear you. They’ve seen what you are, Agni’s best creation, flame incarnate, and they don’t understand how a little girl can be so powerful, so strong. They would rather you be delicate and helpless and unsure, as little girls are expected to be. Zuko,” he says it as though it’s a swear, “is easily molded to their agenda. He’s easy to manipulate and possesses no clear ambition or drive, they see him and feel needed. You do not need them, you don’t need a babysitter, my flame, you need someone to take all this restless energy and potential in you and you need someone to help you light the spark you carry,”

She nods. It makes sense, she supposes. “Like you,” she says.

He smiles, a barely there thing that makes her feel warm. “Yes. We don’t need them, they don’t understand us, do we, my flame?”

“No,” she says quietly, “It’ll be us against the world, then?”

He chuckles, and he sounds fond and Azula tells herself that Zuko will never experience this, will never know what it’s like to be wanted because you have value, not simply because you’re someone’s blood. “No, Azula, it’ll be us above the world,” he smooths a hand down her silky hair, “Now, tell me how your lessons are going,”

She smiles.

It begins with mother. Are all daughters born of eternal debt? Azula owes the very fibers of her being to her mother, the locks of hair, the skin of her face, the sinews of her muscles and the liquid of her blood. All she ever does is take and take and never give. Perhaps that is why mother hates her and father does not. Father did not welcome Azula into this world screaming with pain as she took more than he could give, he welcomed her with barely spared appraisal. And yet, Zuko was born from the same mother, so she does not understand why he is not despised.

Perhaps it is because he’s simply easier. Easier to love, easier to push, easier to mold. Nobody wants what is difficult, what is rigid, what is hard, and Azula has been fashioned by her father into stone. She is more monster than girl.

It begins with mother and a monster she could never raise.

She is on the roof of the palace, under Agni’s warm rays, and Zuko climbs on after her. He’s always been more nimble than her, agility flowing through his veins like blood, whereas she fumbles. He stands next to her and blessedly does not comment on her heaving breaths. Azula stands above the rest of the city in the warm afternoon Sun and feels invincible, as though nothing can touch her, not mother’s sharp nails digging into her arm or father’s stinging fingertips gently placed at the nape of her neck, burning into her skin, she feels like a God.

He unfolds the ridiculous knot he’s tied in his royal robes, effectively defacing the material, and uncovers a variety of sweet breads, fruits, and nuts. He grins at her as she reaches out for the biggest cake hungrily.

“Thought we’d be hungry,” he says, although he means you, because he takes one peach and nibbles on it daintily. Firebenders need food like fuel. It’s a lesson every bender is taught from an early age. Firebenders are the only benders to produce the element they are to bend, thus the superior race, because all other benders require an outside source. Not them, though. It’s why they were so successful in taking over the other nations, they’d only needed themselves and ration. The more a firebender practices their bending, the more fuel they’ll need. Applying that logic onto Azula, who trains at least seven hours a day and is also a growing girl, it’s no surprise she’s always hungry.

She isn’t supposed to be, she’s a growing firebender, hence needing more food, but she’s also a young lady. Young ladies eat with delicate cutlery and take small bites, chewing with the grace of a thousand pigeondoves or some bullshit. It’s the only rule Azula’s struggled at following. Zuko, though, is a big strong man who should be eating the equivalent of what a small family would consume daily. That’s how the palace staff act, at least. His lack of appetite further signifies his lack of strength, her appetite further signifies her lack of sensitivity.

Zuko evidently does not care. At every meal he takes extras, and shoves some of his rice or flaked fish or spiced vegetables onto her plate, and the one night they dine with father she goes to bed hungry. After her training she comes back to find a fruit left innocently sitting on her dresser, and does not spare a moment to think whether its poisoned or not before biting into it. Azula is always hungry. She thinks of mother’s delicate hands slapping away her own when she reaches for seconds, of her saying, “Azula, please,” with the same tone she uses to address the stupid guard that keeps stabbing himself with his sword. She flushes and places the food back.

“I’m not hungry,” she says in a clipped tone.

“I am,” he says jovially and takes an obnoxiously large bite, “You should eat these, they’re really good. Even if you’re not hungry. You know, to-” he pauses, at a loss of words, and blinks, “-to keep me company,”

She snorts at her idiot brother and picks up the cake again.

They sit in silence, simply chewing for a bit, until Zuko says something stupid, and she almost laughs. She cannot remember what it was, it seems irrelevant. She is eight years old and impulsive; he is ten and somehow worse than her. He says, “I hope you won’t kill me to get the throne,” because Lu Ten is gone, and Uncle is grieving, and this is the first time Zuko’s mentioned him to her. Zuko is second in line to the throne.

She snorts, “I’ll declare you a traitor to the throne and keep you locked in the dungeons as my personal jester for whenever I grow bored as Fire Lord,” she says, uncaring of the fact that they do not have dungeons, Azula, that’s barbaric, we have prisons, and shoves at his shoulder. She miscalculates, and sends him tumbling down. His shriek is sharp and cut off, followed by a sickening thud. She stumbles, peers down to look at him, on the ground, red faced and crying in pain, when she feels the ground slide out from under her. It happens all too fast, one moment she is on the roof, perfectly steady, mildly concerned but mostly amused at Zuko’s stupidity now that she’s ensured he’s not dead, and the next she’s on the ground, half on top of him.

His wrist is bent in a way that is unmistakably wrong, and yet the first words out of his mouth are, “Are you okay?” He’s blubbering, tears streaming down his face, and yet that’s the first thing he asks her. She purses her lips, and her response is cut off by their mother rushing down the steps to kneel by their place on the ground.

“Azula, what did you do?” she asks, horrified, as though it is just that natural to presume that she did something. Perhaps it is. Azula’s always been more fire and flame than person, more cruel than seven year old girls usually are.

She smiles sardonically at her mother, the same way she’s seen Mai do, the way she’d practised for nights before bed until she’d perfected it, and says, “I pushed him,”

“’Zula-” her idiot brother begins, but he’s already being hauled off the floor by the royal servants and healers. The Fire Lady looks at her with such disgust, and Azula finally registers something she realizes she’s known her entire life. She looks up at her mother from her spot on the floor, bloody knees and scrapes decorating her arms, and realizes that her mother hates her.

“Sometimes I think you’re a monster,” her mother says, leaving her on the floor, surrounded by solitude. Oh, she thinks, and then laughs. She’s a fool. She’d been trying to gain back affection all this time, but you cannot get back something that wasn’t there in the first place.

It begins with mother.

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