Disclaimer: I own no rights to the characters, universe or plot devices that are derived from 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' and may be used herein. I mean no offence by posting this and make no money from it.

When Zuko comes home, her heart breaks.

She has forgotten this, she thinks, forgotten how to love and hurt and yearn.

The shadows move and she moves with them. And he, well, her son is still so naive.

She doesn't understand it, really. The little boy she remembers was innocent but not stupid, lacking in power but not lacking in perception. He had only required a little experience, a little encouragement.

She is almost happy at first that he has kept his innocence but he is too old now for such a word. Now he is naive. He is hopeful and blind. She watches him move through the corridors, unaware of the shadows, and she wonders if he even carries a weapon. If he considers that he needs to.

Death stalks him in Caldera. She can smell it as she flits behind the walls and under the floors. She hears it through elaborately carved grids in the state rooms and when the locks are turned, she creeps through the secret doors to find the information she needs in reports and papers that never look as though her hand has touched them.

No one notices the shadow that doesn't move. Least of all her son, who sleeps with no protection within reach.

She keeps watch during the nights, knife in hand. But they are too clever and they know, as she does, that to murder the Crown Prince in his bed will not go unquestioned.

She knows this because she was the last to murder in the palace. She was the last to go to Azulon himself, with no weapon except a poisonous cup of tea and a sweet smile. Gentle Ursa, whom no one would suspect except that like the turtleducks she will attack to protect her children.

She does not regret it. Her son lies asleep in his bed and she would put a thousand monsters on the throne to protect one hair on the head of her precious children. Both of them, though Azula is lost to her.

She knows what it cost her to do it. It cost her freedom and sunlight. It cost her luxury and hope and the love of the young man who shifts restlessly in the night.

She toys with the idea of appearing to him. Of holding out her arms and having him close.

He is taller now, as tall as she is, and he is still growing. He looks strong and handsome from where she stands in the shadows. Until he turns his head, and then she catches the glimpse of the gnarled, ugly surface of the scar over his left eye.

The bolt of anger that it still brings her is now familiar.

Ursa does not move from the shadows because she knows that while Zuko is naive, he is still perceptive and intelligent. He is still highly trained. She allows herself the luxury of a smile. He is not as highly trained as she is, however.

She hopes he never has to be, not when the best teacher is necessity and terror.

And she has already appeared to him once. She assumes that he has pushed it aside as a fever dream but she appeared to him when the scar was still a wound only two hours old, when he was blinded with pain and terror and hurt, clinging to the sheets and praying for someone to comfort him.

She had hushed him and soothed him, touched his hand and the skin of his undamaged cheek. She had fed him drops of a potion to take his pain away and had waited until he fell asleep, and with her own hands she had shaved his hair back from the wound to prevent infection.

Iroh had stopped her seeking vengeance.

"Now is not the time."

"He hurt my son."

"And he will pay for it. Zuko must heal and grow. He will come to see this for what it is and he will face Ozai when he is ready. It is not for us to deny him that future."

Thirteen, she thinks, and lets the anger boil, a child. Her son was a child and Ozai did his best to ruin his innocence.

He has almost succeeded.

She wonders if Zuko's banishment would account for his naivety. Three years he has been away. He has grown and healed, as Iroh had said he would, as nature had dictated that he would, and her heart breaks to see him struggle.

Every day he fights himself and his demons. Every day he moves inexorably closer to the truth.

She cannot soothe his fears this time, nor drug him nor give him the advice that he asks for, but she can keep him safe. So she watches over him until he wakes, and when the sun rises, she slips away into the catacombs below the palace to find her own restless sleep for an hour or two, hopeful only that he is growing strong enough to protect himself should he need to.

Days pass in this manner. She listens to the rumours from her vantage points in the space inside hollow wooden pillars.

She is not her son and she is not naive, so she calculates the days in which her children are safe. She watches Azula and sees some trace of the little girl still left in those cold eyes.

But she dares not get too close to her daughter.

Azula sees things Ursa cannot understand. She sees things for what they are, and what they can do to help her attain her goals. Azula sees things, in short, like Ozai. What frightens Ursa is that even Ozai would fail to outthink the genius of Azula's mind.

For now Azula is young, and the Fire Lord has strength and resources. Father and daughter unite for a common goal but Ursa knows what will happen when Azula is old enough to recognise that her father is no longer any use to her.

She aches to sit Azula down and simply tell her that this is wrong, that she is better than this, but how can she, when Azula plays games that Ursa knows all too well. Just as she knows that Azula will forever know that it was her mother who pulled the strings that led to Fire Lord Azulon's death.

It is a choice. Ursa has the ruthlessness but chose not to use it until her hand was forced. Azula chooses not to follow her mother's path. Azula's tragedy is that she has also inherited her father's firebending to build muscle behind her mother's mind.

The political climate boils in Caldera and Ursa moves with the shadows, knowing that no one sees her in the recesses that no one knows about.

She hears enough to know where Iroh is being held.

Ironically she cannot penetrate the prison, even should she want to. It's too closely guarded, and the shadows are where most eyes turn. But there are ways and means, even for a banished Fire Lady who lives under the Fire Lord's very nose.

It is nothing to tie back her hair, disguise her clothes, change her voice. It is nothing to find a guard, Ming, staring enviously at some useless bauble.

Money is something Ursa still has. She takes it straight from the coffers, and the goods it buys are sweeter for knowing that it denies the palace some small luxury.

Ming will carry her messages in cups of special teas and servings of specific foods. Iroh is no fool and he will know what the signals are. Beyond that, he is on his own.

She discounts Iroh for the war that will soon come to the Palace. He will not be kept down, not if the rumours that reach her with news of the Earth Kingdom and the Avatar are true, but his path is not her path, and they will follow their own destinies as they always have.

The Avatar becomes the key upon which her feverish plans turn. The Avatar is power, and change.

It confounds her that Zuko rejected the chance to join the other side for the existence he now leads. He retains his loyalty in spite of it all. It is a foolish move. Ursa hears the gossip that Zuko doesn't and there are no allies here for him. The trick will be to extract him when the time is right.

To her calculations, the Avatar is the safest protector for her son.

She reviews Zuko's personality, his ideals, and finds that there is no simpler way than to appeal to his better nature.

It is not hard to ink the secret text and to leave the scroll outside her son's door. It is not hard to let a few careful sounds accompany the action.

She does her son the honour of hiding while he storms out of his room. There is always the option of fading into the shadows but Zuko has kept himself alive with a certain level of paranoia and she respects that. The last thing she wants is to be brought back to her husband at the point of her son's sword.

Zuko reacts the way she expects. She has seen him go to the prison and she notes his misery when he leaves. She has heard why Iroh is imprisoned and Zuko is free and while she is sorry for Iroh as a friend who helped her and those she loves, she can regret no action of her son's that keeps him alive in the face of his father's and sister's deceptions.

It is no matter. Ursa is deceptive as well. And the years in the catacombs beneath the palace have hardened her. She will be deceptive enough for them both.

Ursa has always known that information is the corner stone of a plan. Know yourself, your enemy, your allies, and then know the subjects that serve both sides. So that is what she does. She profiles the court to find that one weakness, those thin cracks in the mask.

There are documents that go missing for any length of time between a day or an hour. Some disappear altogether. Meetings are recorded, alliances are noted. And all this information is gathered, processed and re-distributed.

Small matters that have built for eight years are now slithering like rat vipers through the corridors of the Fire Lord's palace. Yes, the political climate is positively volcanic and when the smoke clears, she hopes that the pawns she has nudged gently into place will play their part as she expects them to.

In light of this complex machinery of sabotage, her schemes for Zuko are laughably simple. He does as she expects him to.

When he was small, Zuko's emotions were so large they were barely contained in his little body. Everything was brighter, bigger, bolder to him. Azula had always seen things exactly as they were, no more, no less, but Zuko's imagination would paint him pictures that were more exciting than anything he could see with his own eyes.

He is older now, so he does not react with the same fire that she remembers. But he does react.

Still he does not move. He does not pack or plan or seek.

She frets in the shadows and wonders what more she can do to draw him closer to the Avatar.

She wonders if it isn't the girl he spends his time with that keeps him in Caldera. Mai is someone she recognises from the past, and she remembers enough of the child to note the signs of love that flicker over the bored face.

It is good for Zuko to experience his first love but this is not the time, and she had calculated that he would know this. He was raised to put his people first and his heart second. She would wish that she could give him his chance to enjoy what he has found but there is no time.

In the end, the eclipse is upon them. Azula knows of the invasion and Ursa hears of the precautions that will be taken.

She debates the wisdom of leading the Avatar to the right chamber. Should she succeed, and should the Avatar prevail, she hopes that there will be a chance that she could step forward back into sunlight. Zuko would not have to leave this precious security where she could watch over him, Azula would have her worst influence removed from before her, and the war would end.

The advantages pile up until she comes to one very basic point- who is to say that the Avatar will win?

Ursa calculates the odds and as her daughter would, so does she see what is actually there. A twelve year old is still a child, and to send a child against a monster with only a thin sliver of time as his shield is cruelty.

Like Iroh, she senses that this is not the time.

She is still surprised when her son removes his armour and picks up a pack she hadn't realised he was gathering.

He kneels before her picture, and she fights the urge to step forward. She wants to hold him and tell him that it will be alright, that she will protect him and save him and that all he needs to do is trust her and let her think for them both.

But as she watches him she sees the boy grow up to be sixteen years old, not a man but not a child, and she presses back into the shadows and leaves him the privacy to converse with his memory of his mother.

The irony is not lost on her, which is why she stays in the palace out of curiosity to see the all-power Avatar.

When the boy arrives, she is the only one still left in the palace. The servants were dismissed and the soldiers are out in the streets. The retinue and the Court are in the bunkers below the city and she has been so careful not to let her forgotten catacombs come to light.

She watches the little bald monk with his blue arrows and is surprised to find herself so compassionate.

He is not her child, but he is tragically young, and she knows better than anyone what Ozai is capable of.

She stays silent when he calls for his fight. Just like Zuko, she thinks, with the sickening memory of her son's arrogance, knowing that he was mistaken and would live to regret his mistake. Then she had trusted Ozai to humiliate but not hurt. Now she knows better. And so she watches this boy display the same blind courage as her son and she refuses to lead him to certain death.

When Zuko leaves, it is as though a silence comes down. She reads the letter he leaves for Mai and she raises her eyebrows at the words. She can imagine what the girl would do to Zuko were he still in range.

She can only hope her son learns something about women before Mai decides he is not worth the aggravation.

She returns the letter to its original place with nimble fingers, no crease or smudged line or twisted ribbon to say that it was ever moved.

She stands still for a moment, caught in a rare space of quiet. The eclipse is over and she believes that the invaders have lost. She holds herself still in the middle of her son's room and just breathes in, deep and calm. And then she retreats back into her shadows and awaits the next step in this game.

She goes that night to Azula's room, and she does not enter using the shadows but watches from outside. In the distance she sees the gentle mound of her daughter's sleeping form and she wishes that the girl would see further than her own needs. If she would only see the bigger tapestry.

Fear, as Ursa will tell her, only lasts while there is nothing worthier to die for.

She can already see the signs of tension in Mai's figure, the split second stillness that greets Azula's commands. Mai has always obeyed so far but her pull towards Zuko is strong, and Ursa wonders how that will affect Azula's game.

It is not hard to calculate. Iroh would say it was like a game of pai sho, but for Ursa, it is like nature. One turtleduck is not the same as another, and the water required must be the right depth. Turtleducks do not like silver reeds to grow beside their pond but they like shade from trees and yet also like frogs. But frogs will often not like turtleducks and will require cover like silver reed or a fallen log. As turtleducks do not like silver reed, one must use a fallen log, but one must remember that three year old boys will always try to climb up on the log, no matter how slippery, and then they will fall into the pond and swallow water and it will take a mother to pull the small boy free and distract him from his distress beneath the shade of the big tree.

To create a paradise, nature must be considered.

The days and weeks drag on. She hears of Iroh's escape and mentally bows in respect to her old friend. She wishes him luck on his journeys.

She hears the news from her hiding place inside the War chamber. She sits within a box set in the near wall. There is one hole through which she may see the Fire Lord in profile, and hear his counsel as her brain ticks over with plans and schemes.

She hears that her son infiltrated the Boiling Rock prison with the Avatar's friend, and that they succeeded in their quest to free a prisoner. She feels the surge of pride but vanquishes it to listen closer.

She hears the plans for the Earth Kingdom and her blood runs cold. She will send her messages to one adviser within the palace, and to her contacts within the Earth Kingdom. If they can succeed in removing people from the coast, they may lose fewer lives.

She hears that Mai has betrayed Azula's cause. As has the other girl, the happy one who seems to have no bones in her body at all. Ty Lee. Both of Azula's friends are gone, having found a better reason to fight than fear.

Ursa pauses, waits, hopes that this will be the turning point, but there is no change for good.

But she does notice that there is something wrong when Azula pauses after being dismissed from the Court. It is an uncharacteristically uncertain movement for her confident daughter.

Azula questions the Fire Lord about secret passages.

Ursa feels the fear rise up and choke her.

Ozai dismisses Azula's queries with impatience but Ursa looks at Azula's cold, hard speculation and knows that there will be a reckoning.

Azula never liked her. Never trusted her.

And to some extent, Ursa knows the blame is hers. She was not the mother for Azula, and the rivalry between Azula and Zuko was treated as a problem, not the symptom that it really was. And now she sits hidden within the walls of the palace she should rule as Fire Lady and she hears her daughter plot her son's death. She hears her husband sanction it with no hesitation.

Like Mai, Ursa now has a choice. Unlike Mai, her choice was made too many years ago to break now. The reason that she has failed Azula as a mother is the same reason for which she will damn Azula.

And now, Ursa thinks grimly, begins the game in earnest.

There are ways of communicating within the palace. Notes left on the desks of certain officials; the slight sign of hasty work in the wrong direction. Action and reaction- this is what drives a bureaucracy.

Ozai unknowingly does not make it easy for her. He has done away with so much of the written documentation that the Fire Nation courts have always taken pride in.

He has no written plans for the comet's return. He has simply ordered, and from fear, people have obeyed.

Ursa steels her heart and there are memories to be stirred.

She pays a seamstress in the city to create a doll. The details she gives are very precise. As an old woman with a beloved grandchild, she is believable. The seamstress smiles and does her work.

In the catacombs, in the cold dank passages that Ursa calls home, she burns the doll to charred, blackened stuff and leaves it four paces beyond her daughter's bedroom door.

She scrambles messages, and watches with a heavy heart while Azula condemns a man to death for not readying her airships as per her instructions.

The delay is costly but it will buy Zuko some time. Ursa does not need to be perceptive to read the tension in her daughter's frame that is only there when the matter concerns Zuko. That is Azula's weakness, her obsession with her brother.

Zuko, with his struggle for control, is the symbol of all that Azula despises. He is her focus of what is wrong in her life, her impression of an unworthy obstacle. And unworthy obstacles must be removed.

Ursa has hardened her heart and she made her favourites too clear at an age when it caused more damage than her husband's cruelty and uncertain temper. Having made her choice, she is left to stand by it now that the end draws near.

And to that end, Azula must be sacrificed.

A myriad of things go wrong with the airships- boiler door catches that break; control levers than jam; windows than break; valves that are loosened. No one sees the shadow that shifts in and out of the airships in the army training grounds two leagues away. No one, that is, until the Princess Azula arrives.

Azula's instinct is better than most generals and Ursa does not dare to disable the ships a second time the following night.

Besides, the Fire Nation guards are replaced by Dai Li agents and Ursa is loath to draw their attention. Her secrets are hidden in the earth beneath the palace and the last thing she needs is an earthbender uncovering her hiding places.

But there is another trick she can play. While the Dai Li guard the airships, no one is guarding Azula.

Ursa has some small knowledge of exotic potions, and she spies a plant nearby. It is not poisonous, nor is it dangerous, but it is a muscle relaxant.

It will not actually work to Azula's detriment- and may even be a favour- but Ursa gambles on Azula's paranoia, on her fear that she will be let down by someone much closer than even Mai and Ty Lee: herself.

Her body, Ursa thinks, must become the next target.

Azula has no chance. There are salves that can be slipped into everyday ointments, essences mixed into lamp oil. There are potions that release hallucinogenic vapour and Ursa, the granddaughter of Avatar Roku, knows the irony of poisoning her daughter with toxic smoke in especially prepared candles. They cost her more time and resources than she likes to spend but they yield devastating results.

Azula does not seem to notice.

Her eyes are fever bright. Her temper is fraying.

She talks to herself and Ursa now moves into the walls to listen.

Outside in the corridors, the eight years of work she has carried out bears fruit in small whispers of discontent, feeding out into eddies of rumour and whirlpools of defiance.

She holds her breath and prays that Ozai will not hear it, too drunk on his own plans for violence and domination.

Her calculations holds good. The storm gathers above Caldera and the heat is oppressive. The comet is coming and her daughter is being driven out of her mind.

A certain scent is all it takes to trigger a reaction, a scent Ursa keeps from her days in the sunlight, before she had the blood of a Fire Lord on her hands. The last bottle of her perfume was kept for the occasion of her return to that life, as a symbol that she can be who she once was, but she sacrifices this small reminder of her past in a bid for her son's future.

Azula orders her clothes burned, the ones that smell of her mother's perfume. Her reality fractures on the day before the comet is due.

No one notices one more soldier in the ranks, one more faceless, nameless, genderless uniform. Ursa stands with hundreds of her fellow citizens and she knows that should she be discovered, she will never escape this alive. She will die, or she will be taken before her husband. Either way, her life will not be worth the blood in her veins.

But danger has grown around her like a second skin, like a layer of armour, and she cannot imagine having no fear to guide her footfalls. She cannot imagine how it will be to forget who walks behind her, or where she is, or to fall asleep with no knife beneath her pillow. She only hopes that she will have the chance to find out.

Her husband is truly a magnificent sight. The Phoenix King is glorious, chilling. The fire blazes to the skies and she feels the answering burn in her soul. She is Fire Nation and she is fiercely proud of her people.

But when the madness has passed, when she sees Azula descend to the palanquin, she knows there is something amiss. Azula is not striding in her warrior's way, she is trailing her feet, shoulders hunched. She is turning her head and looking side to side.

There is something wrong.

Ursa's heart squeezes painfully tight and she wants to believe that she has done enough. That no more need be done. Azula has been brought to her knees and that will be serve. Even as she thinks this, Ursa mixes the final poison.

Azula is wild-eyed and frantic, covered in a thin veneer of haughty arrogance. She is a pressure valve ready to explode.

The bowl of cherries has been left in Azula's sitting room, merely lying there while her attendants bathe her.

Ursa is risking everything to leave the walls in broad daylight, to walk to the centre of the room and use precious time to soak the cherries liberally in the mixture. Like the others, it will not kill and it will not hurt, but it will manipulate.

She has mixed it for the final betrayal- to turn Azula's mind against her.

It works only too well.

Azula unravels in spectacular fashion. Ursa does not stay to watch; there is one more trick she can play, and it will involve a visit to a room she has not entered for eight years.

Her old room is easy to find. The door is shut but not sealed. Ozai never assumed that his disgraced wife would stay within the palace itself. He cannot suspect her of that much audacity.

To him, she is weak. He thinks this for her desire for love and kindness, for her choice to protect and nurture rather than reject and terrify. To him, her soft words are worthless and her mind is a wasted talent in one who will not use it to gain power.

Azula, now, Azula will suspect her presence in the palace because Azula sees what is really there, and because her memories of her mother are of a woman who would refuse her. Azula's memories are of a mother who saw through her lies and her sweet smile. Who was unmoved by her demands and valued her firebending abilities no more or less highly than her weak brother's.

Ursa finds the room easily where both her children were born with such promise, in a family that had been happy, to parents who rejoiced in them if not in each other. This room where Ursa herself was a princess, the highest ranking woman in the Fire Nation when the reigning Fire Lady died.

The bed is still made, as though her return is imminent, but the curtains are drawn. The air is cold and stale and there is dust on the furniture. But the chests, when she opens them, still contain the clothes she used to wear.

It is not difficult to change, and eight years have given her practise with tending to her own needs. She does not need a servant or a handmaiden.

Unlike her daughter, there is no one to scrub her feet, or brush her hair, or hold a bowl of cherries for her. There is no one to soften her hands and shape her nails.

She inspects her hands with rueful mourning and thinks not only of what those hands have done but what they now look like. The nails are filed to sharp points, as is the custom taught to girls who will be warriors, but they are unpainted. There is dirt in the cuticles, and the edges are ragged. The skin of her hands is worn and weathered from the cold and the dust. The knuckles are hard and uncompromising.

She tucks her hands into her sleeves and straightens her spine.

She is proudest of her hair, which looks like it used to look in the days when she was dressed to be seen, to be noticed. And her hair is still soft and smooth, healthy, and long.

Not unkempt like her son's.

She pushes Zuko firmly from her mind for this all important task. It is imperative that she think only of Azula, and focus.

She has mounted her attacks with ever increasing ferocity and this will be the killing blow. She is counting on Azula's fragile mental state to shatter at this last trick.

And looking at herself in the glass, she thinks distantly that she may shatter her own. The comet is coming and the heat is pouring right through her body to her very bones.

Ursa is an indifferent firebender at best but she comes from a line descended from the last Avatar born to the Fire Nation, and so she is sensitive to the flow of chi within her body. It gives her feelings of such great power that for one moment she is drunk on it, watching herself as she used to be, when guests would bow deeply before her and when servants carried out her every order to the letter.

She harnesses that power as she makes her way back into the walls. That self-control is what Ozai and Azula have never acquired and she counts on that to be their vulnerability.

The journey takes forever and not long at all. After that, all she can do is wait for her cue.

She watches her daughter alone and distressed, struggling to put up her own hair, the frustration, the unfocused violence, and then the pair of scissors in Azula's hands. She finds her cue when Azula has cut her own hair in anger and is staring at her own warped image of herself in the mirror.

Then Ursa steps out of the shadows and forward into the light. Finally, finally, into the light.

And she watches her daughter's heart tear.

"I love you, Azula," she says, and she means it. This is her cruelty. Her killing blow. Ozai has always had his fire and terror but Ursa has used her soft words and kindness to rip the last threads of her daughter's sanity.

When Azula shatters the mirror, Ursa vanishes. She steps back into the shadows and she has to fight to keep her breath steady, to keep herself still.

It has been too much and her heart is thundering.

She wants nothing more than to go to her daughter and hold her. Hush her. Help her.

But she can't. Azula is beyond help. She has put her beyond help and now she has seen it through.

She waits while Azula buckles on her armour, ties knotted and ungainly. Lopsided. The ragged chunks of hair litter the floor and the bowl of poisoned cherries is still waiting on the table.

Ursa has not cried since she was a little girl and she did not cry that fateful night when she killed one monster and put power into the hands of another. She did not cry when she sat alone in the catacombs, in the dust and the darkness and felt her exile stretch out before her. She did not cry when she sat beside her son, with the burn on his face not even two hours old and the wild sobbing almost tearing his throat apart in his efforts to swallow down the pain and heartbreak.

But she cries now for her daughter, who was lost as soon as she was old enough to recognise the world around her, who was taken away as soon as she was old enough to firebend, who was driven away as soon as she was old enough to recognise that Mother had a special place in her heart for her favourite child, and it was not Azula.

She cries in a storm of weeping, of wet gulps and pouring tears and painful, wracking convulsions of her body. The sound drags up from the soles of her feet into an eerie mourning that echoes around the catacombs.

The Lady Ursa sits in the dust in her finery beneath the palace and she does not know until two days later that her son and her daughter fought each other in the grounds of the estate above her head. She does not know then that Zuko almost died or that Azula's rage exposed the bloodied shards that were left of her sense of reality.

When she does hear this, she is once again behind the wall in the Fire Lord's throne room. She sits in her little box and watches her son's profile as he makes his case before the fire sages.

His voice is softer than his father's, his words are stiff but gentler. There is still pride there, and impatience, but none of the darkness that lurked in his father's personality.

She lovingly traces the sight of his living face with her eyes and she knows, even though it hurts her, that he will be a good Fire Lord. And that she has no place beside him.

Like the turtleducks, she must now let him go. It's time to take the exile she was given.

She hears her son demand information about her whereabouts from the Fire Sages but they protest their ignorance. As they should. No one has known except a select few, and even the select few have not known her hiding places.

And now they never will. She will not leave the Fire Nation, she thinks, because that is who she is, but there are places to hide in the farthest corners that even Zuko will never consider.

She allows herself the luxury of a smile. Her son is tenacious, perceptive, and he has proved that he is highly trained. But he is still not as highly trained as she is.

He will never find her. Of that, she is certain.