Title: a wolf in meditation
Author: sangi (honestly-sangi)
Disclaimer: I disclaim any rights to Avatar: the Last Airbender or the characters contained therein.
Rating: T (PG-13)
Words: 2647
Prompt: prompt for 31_days on livejournal; october 12 – "A soft woman / is simply a wolf / caught in meditation."
Char/Pair: Ursa/Ozai
Warnings: Some spoilers for The Search, but with an AU twist. Unbeta'd.
Summary: Ursa is a perfectly delectable mouse in a pit of vipers, and with that she is content.
Notes: I like the Fire Nation Royal Family.

0. poplar

When she is eighteen, she is in love.

Ikem, her heart whispers.

At twenty-one she becomes betrothed.

The conscription letter comes for him two weeks later.

For a year they exchange letters, sent by falcon-hawks across long distances.

One day he does not write back.

1. chrysanthemum

With her large amber eyes and delicately embroidered dresses, Ursa is the epitome of femininity.

Roku's granddaughter takes the capital by storm. She appears with her parents one day and stays in a house near the unfashionable area to the south, but is immediately invited to parties after appearing in the public marketplace. The son of every nobleman claims to be in love with her, with her shy smiles and gentle laughs. They cite the way that performs the tea ceremony perfectly, or her beautiful spark-style calligraphy that adorns the otherwise plain walls of her modest home.

Her admirers know that she is always soft-spoken, when she speaks at all. Ursa seems at first painfully shy, blushing when fire lilies are sent by suitors to her house in large bundles.

What they do not know is that up her sleeves hide small knives, each carefully sharpened. Two are tipped with a rare poison from one of the western isles, a poison that leaves its victim struggling to breathe for days before a painful death claims them. They do not know that from lowered eyes she watches everything with a calm deliberation that belies her outward bashfulness. Her besotted suitors do not realize that her mother Rina has taught her all of the possible poisons that can be made from the grasses and flowers growing in a noble's gardens.

In the small town of Hira'a she honed her skills.

Here in the capital, she will practice them.

She is the granddaughter of Avatar Roku, and she knows the cruelty that lurks behind the face of each noble and soldier… and prince.

Ursa is a perfectly delectable mouse in a pit of vipers, and with that she is content.

2. peony

When the invitation arrives from Fire Lady Ilah herself to attend Prince Lu Ten's birthday party, Ursa's mother frowns.

"These are a dangerous people, Ursa," Rina warns. Both she and her daughter know what the past has revealed about the Fire Nation Royal Family.

Sozin was a covetous man, and Azulon more so; Ursa has only heard rumors about Crown Prince Iroh and his younger brother, Prince Ozai, but she imagines them to be the same. Men such as they always want what others want, and usually get it too.

Ursa smiles and smoothens the thick rice paper in her hands, reading the invitation yet again. It is addressed to her specifically; not her mother, or her father, who is little more than a rural magistrate.

Her, and her alone.

"I would like to go," she says, voice quiet. Rina does not question it, but motions to their household maid, who bows and disappears.

When the young woman looks up, her mother is staring at her with pursed lips. "You know I do not agree with your sentiments, Ursa. But… if you wish to go, we will need to have a new set of robes by next week. I am afraid that nothing we have is fit for the kind of finery that royalty expect."

Pink lips frown. "Mother, if it is possible, can I do the embroidery myself?"

"In one week? I hardly think you have time, Ursa."

"I will make time. It is very important. The design must be perfect."

"Fine, then." The room in which they sit – her mother's private parlor area – is plain, with simple furniture and wall hangings all painted with her own hand. Pictures of phoenixes and bright red roses, and dragons too. Always dragons. Ursa examines it all for a moment, her eyes resting on the beautiful hair piece set in a delicate display case overhanging the low tea table. Gold glints in the afternoon light.

She looks back at Rina. "Thank you, mother. I promise I will not disappoint our family."

3. orchid

The dark-haired woman enters the room alone, no man on her arm, and Ozai immediately realizes why all of his friends are so besotted with her.

Bright eyes, intelligent and kind, sit atop a long nose flanked by high, delicate cheekbones. Her lips are pink and plump. The gift in her hands is elegantly wrapped in red silk, and when Lu Ten unwraps it cautiously he reveals a beautiful long knife, with an engraving upon the silver steel. He is too far away to read the characters, but he watches his nephew's lips as he reads it aloud. Prince Lu Ten finally smiles and bows to Ursa, who bows much lower in return. Iroh and his wife greet her, smiling while she makes pleasant conversation.

Fire Lady Ilah comes up next to Ozai, a smug look gracing her face. "I told you. Your father should have listened to the Fire Sages. That girl will bear powerful children, and beautiful as well. Do not doubt it, Ozai."

He does not. "You were right, mother. It was good of you to invite her." Idly he wonders if Azulon will be displeased, but the thought is fleeting.

Her hands are elegant when she sips from a cup of tea that a servant has brought her, the fingers long and the nails carefully polished. Ursa's long hair is half-up, leaving some tendrils to fall about her face, curling around her chin. But it is her dress that draws the most attention; a shimmering delight of black and red silk, the front panels are decorated with a phoenix and dragon facing each other, both done in shades of magnificent gold and red.

Before the cup is back on the small plate he is moving to introduce himself to her.

When he arrives, standing next to his brother, her eyes lower and a flush spreads across her cheeks. Iroh looks at both of them with an air of consideration. "Ursa, this is my brother, Prince Ozai."

"It is a great honor to meet you, my Prince," she says, voice tremulous as she bows.

Ozai's returning bow is just a fraction lower than it should be and all of them know it. His smile appears more a smirk than anything else when he sees her widened eyes. "Lady Ursa, it is all my pleasure."

"Please, I am no lady. Only Ursa." Her hand is shaking when he captures it with his own.

Perhaps she is not a lady, but he will make her one.

4. peach blossom

They are married less than two months later.

She never sees her parents again.

5. duckweed

The letters are hidden in a small puzzle box in a drawer full of jewelry. They speak of blushing cheeks, clammy hands clasped together in the summer heat, and moonlit nights beneath starry skies. They speak, truly, of love. The kind of love that only the young can experience and later look back upon with a strange kind of nostalgia and regret.

But they are not letters from Ozai.

Ikem.

When her husband finds them, he is livid. He stamps into her private rooms and sends out the servants before he starts yelling at her, furnishing the carefully preserved letters in his hands. Afraid, Ursa stares at him with large eyes, kneeling on a mat with her hair half-brushed and only wearing light undergarments. The tapestry behind him, a blood-red dragon breathing fire over a village, seems oddly fitting. Finally he finishes, his face an unbecoming red. The papers are crumpled, the characters unreadable.

"Do you have anything to say?" he asks after a pregnant moment.

"No." Her voice is quiet but strong. "They are letters from long ago, before we were married. They are merely a keepsake, my prince."

Wicked gold eyes regard her for a moment. "You have never written or said such things about me. Is my touch so unbearable to you, Ursa, even after you have given me two children?"

His wife does not answer, and when he moves to sit facing her, to cup her soft cheek in his palm – well, she flinches away.

Rage takes over his features once again and he stands in the same moment that he sets the letters blazing in his hands. The smell of smoke and ash fills Ursa's nostrils and throat, yet she does not cough. She will not give him that weakness.

"Perhaps," he says, dangerously, once the papers are forever gone, "you wish that Zuko is not my child, but the child of your lover. Is that what you want, Ursa? To know that your children are the product of love? Did he live long enough to make you his?"

"Ozai, please –"

He does not let her speak. "If that is what you wish, Ursa, then I accept it. From this day forward, I will treat Zuko as if he is not my son."

His hand is on the door when her voice catches him. "And Azula?"

The prince's laugh is cold and mocking. It chills her to the bone. "Azula has her grandmother's eyes."

Once he is gone, she retreats to the nursery, where she goes when there is nowhere else to hide. Both of her children still reside there. Zuko is at that awkward age where he is too old to stay in the nursery but yet too young for his own room. Her daughter, though, is not even a year old. Both are asleep when she enters, and the servants are keeping a quiet watch in the corner.

For several hours she just looks at them, thinking silently, until they wake and clamor for her attention, of which she only has so much to give.

What her husband said was true; even at her age, Azula has her grandmother's eyes. Fire Lady Ilah's cold, calculating eyes. Zuko's eyes are warmer. They remind her of Ikem in a way that makes her heart ache.

When Ursa returns to their rooms that night, he is waiting for her in their bed.

Ozai does not forget, and he does not forgive.

6. narcissus

In her gilded cage she makes a nest and sings.

Ursa spends time with her children, who have grown up to be so different that she can barely comprehend it.

Zuko is gentle but determined. When he fails at his lessons, he spends an hour each afternoon working to correct his mistakes. He has little patience and more often than not yells back at his tutors, leaving them cowering. Crown Prince Iroh is fond of him, and the two take their tea near the small pond that houses the turtle-ducks. A pai-sho board sits in front of them, but usually goes untended after her son loses interest in the game (which is rather often and rather soon after the game starts). With Ursa there, they feed the turtle-ducks bits of bread and leftover buns from lunch.

The young prince desperately wants to learn how to use dao swords, and has even begged Prince Lu Ten to give him lessons. "I promise I'll try really hard, cousin! I promise," he says, with sincere golden eyes, and Lu Ten reluctantly gives in.

When he performs a firebending technique in front of his father, with few mistakes, his bow is cautious. Zuko looks up, and Ozai is staring at him with an odd look on his face. "Again," he says, voice curt.

Yet when Azula performs, it is perfect, and Ozai beams. "Excellent."

Azula is a prodigy. There is no other word for the way that she wields blue fire like a weapon of the apocalypse, burning the gardens quicker than they can be replanted. All of the servants assigned to her break down within just three weeks of the terror's antics; half of them are reassigned somewhere else with singed eyebrows or burn marks criss-crossing their arms.

"It makes them more interesting," the princess says when questioned. Ursa warns her that such behavior is unacceptable, but the small smile on the girl's face is openly mocking. Just one week later a servant kneels in front of Ursa, wrist burned with small characters spelling out a name: A-zu-la.

She feels something dreadful in her heart and knows it to be fear.

Azula reminds Ursa of Ozai, and of Azulon, and of Sozin.

What Azula wants, she gets.

If not by persuasion, then by force.

The Fire Princess's refuge, the nest she builds within her cage, is a private garden within the palace courtyards themselves, the land gifted to her by Fire Lady Ilah. Few are allowed into the area other than her trusted gardeners.

In her garden she grows monkshood and oleander; when the gardeners ask her why she would want to keep such dangerous plants around, she just smiles.

"But they're so beautiful, aren't they?"

7. lotus

In a very sick way, Ursa enjoys watching the light slowly leave Azulon's eyes.

It was hard to believe that only hours before she had spent the day playing with Zuko in the gardens, at least until Azula revealed what she had seen with Azulon and Ozai. A bargain she struck with the latter; the throne for Zuko's life.

One demon is much the same as another, after all. There are few differences to be had between Azulon and Ozai.

She says goodbye to Zuko, but only lingers at Azula's door for a moment before moving on.

Azulon sometimes stays up late at night in his private office in the Royal Family's quarters of the palace. This habit has only grown more frequent since his wife's passing several years ago. From time to time Ursa walks by, only to be caught by his strong voice and inveigled into having tea with him. His eyes always watch her hands carefully, and the Fire Lord oft admires how beautifully she performs the tea ceremony.

Tonight is little different than those nights. Strolling by the open door, his voice calls out to her and she wanders in, a shy smile on her face. When he asks her to pour the tea, Ursa gives in gracefully, and from her sleeve slips out a small amount of clear substance into his porcelain cup.

The Fire Lord does not notice it.

"Wonderful, as always," he says, the compliment warming his cold voice.

Ursa smiles. "Thank you, Fire Lord Azulon. You honor with me your kind words."

Within ten minutes he struggles to breathe, eyes half-closed and his body convulsed in spasms across the beautiful red silk cushions.

When he speaks, the words are barely a hiss. "Why?"

His daughter by marriage pushes the hair out of his eyes with gentle hands from above. "You have taken much from me, Fire Lord Azulon. The respect my grandfather, Avatar Roku, deserved. My first love, killed as a soldier in your wars. My innocence. The possibility of some kind of affection for my husband. I bided my time, waiting for an opportunity. There is only so much time I can wait." His breathing is weak now. "Because there is one thing I will not allow you to take."

"The… prince…"

"Yes." The word is simple. By the time she has finished saying it, the Fire Lord is dead.

She arranges his body and dumps the tea into a plant in the corner, leaving the porcelain set in its proper place. Before Ursa leaves the room, she glances over it, making sure nothing is out of place.

It is immaculate.

Her komodo-rhino has gone halfway to the outskirts of the capital before she realizes that she has no further plans.

With a panicked feeling in her stomach, she urges the beast below her on.

What does the once-caged bird do once freed? Where does she go?

Ursa does not know.

The moon is full and the night is cold.