The palace feels like a catacomb nowadays, though it's always bustling with courtiers— whenever Azula wanders the halls, all she can see are the swollen-bellied corpses, the ghosts, the blood that can't be wiped up. When she was a little girl, she was of no importance to anyone, just the daughter of a minor prince; when her father became Fire Lord, she still languished in the shadow of her brother's greater claim to the throne; now, at thirteen, she hovers in the hinterland between child and adult, and there is only one person between her and the pinnacle. She spends pining hours rotating in front of her mirror, scrutinizing her flawless makeup, the armor that's still too big for her, the crown gleaming in her topknot, and wonders what her body would look like with the throat slit or marred by burns, thick and ropey and oozing pus.

Since Mai and Ty Lee left— Mai's father unceremoniously dumped in the bowels of the Earth Kingdom after the loss of her betrothal contract, Ty Lee running away to do acrobatic tricks in some colonial circus— since Zuko was exiled, and there is no one to flaunt her superiority over— since she was taken out of the girls' academy where she could play at holding court to be kept close, under careful supervision— anticipation pools in her limbs as she paces this place like a lion-tiger in its cage, as jealous of their freedom as she is contemptuous of their inferiority. Waiting for greatness, waiting for the rest of her life to start, waiting for something solid to sink her teeth into again.

"Princess Azula, could you please pass the soba?" Hitomi's voice, obsequious and breathy, knocks her out of her deliberation; blinking twice, she realizes she's at the dinner table, and doesn't quite recall how she got there. Aren't you afraid it'll make you put on weight? Azula wants to snipe back, see shock and hurt cross her flour-pale face for the sheer pleasure of causing pain, but she doesn't dare, not with her father sitting on her left.

Hitomi is Azula's fourth 'stepmother' in the past five years, their father uncomfortable without a woman to foist his childrearing off on; she can barely differentiate between them anymore, and doesn't care much about her father's courtesans, as long as they remember who the lady of the house is. Zuko bickered with them, bickered fruitlessly with Father, claimed he didn't want anyone replacing Mother— all Azula fears is that one of them might have a son who could replace her. That in the end, Father might decide to purge his bloodline entirely, and she will prove no less disposable than any of the others.

"You seem distracted, daughter." Father's words send a shockwave of alarm through her; though fire blossoms in his hands, his touch to her forearm is always cold. "I got a report from your trainer today. If you continue to progress at this rate, you may be ready to start with lightning soon."

He never gives her praise, not directly, but she can hear the pride shining through his neutral recitation of fact, that she's capable of the highest feat in firebending. She is precious— the gemstone at the center of the geode, all that was common and worthless chipped away to expose her— and she clings to that like an anchor in all of the uncertainty.

(Maybe lightning will be an even more stable one, the ultimate weapon, one that can never betray her.)