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but the well is dry

Summary:

As a side-effect of Zuko dying before her brain developed the ability to retain long-term memory, Azula can’t tell if death via prolonged high fever stripped all of his common sense and planning ability or if he never had any in the first place.

Or: the one where a ghost haunts Azula and all the consequences that crash upon the ground as a result.

Notes:

Oh ashes, ashes, dust to dust
The devil’s after both of us
Oh, lay my curses out to rest
Make a mercy out of me

Title from “Curses” by The Crane Wives.

Brought to you by the same asshole who stripped Zuko of his name, this time I straight up murder him. Enjoy.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Chapter 1: you can’t be tried for crimes if you’re already dead

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Azula’s ghost infrequently watches her firebending training. Instead, when she finishes practice and her instructor returns her bow and make his departure, he hops down from the tiled roofs and shows her the latest secret tunnel he found. He’s obviously memorized the patterns and habits of the palace guards and servants, because each time he exposes a new secret to her, he always leads her along winding paths free of watching eyes and listening ears. Then, personally satisfied she’s learned her new lesson, Azula leads every time they return to a dusty stone corridor or drop into a dark hidey-hole in the palace rafters.

Without a single hair out of place, Azula swings into what used to be a pygmy puma nest tucked into the second floor of the main hall’s west wing. Her ghost’s already in the crevice’s cramped space. He twitches an errant sleeve out of the way of her feet.

“Hey Azula,” he says. “When’s your next lesson with Imura?”

“In half an hour,” she replies and flicks a ball of dust through his arm.

An annoyed hand swats the dust away. He hums and tells her, “I’m heading into the city for a couple days. Anything specific you want to hear about?”

“Linying’s been gossiping about the new minister to the Hu Xin Provinces,” says Azula. “Your hair’s a mess.”

“No, it’s not,” he snaps. “Alright. Hu Xin, I’ll see what I can find. You should talk to Cousin Lu Ten more. Figure out how to get through officer training even faster than Uncle and Father.”

She frowns at his dim gold eyes and tells him, “I don’t need you telling me how to do anything.”

He laughs, something rough and dusty with cremation ash.


Azula tracks down Lu Ten on one of his rare leaves from the officer academy out of her own volition and choice, not because some ghost who spends his free time giving second-rate theatre actors paranoia during their rehearsals tells her to.

Her cousin’s thankfully alone, sitting in the shadows of a pear tree on the grass of a garden in the eastern wing of the main palace, reading the contents of a thin book.

“Cousin Lu Ten,” she calls, and his head raises with a grin. The book quickly drops to the grass.

He waves and pats the ground, cheerfully saying, “Azula! How’s my favorite little cousin!”

“I’m your only cousin.” Azula rolls her eyes, but she sits because she does have questions.

They’re both respectively the sole heirs of their fathers, a quality that makes them about as priceless and well-guarded as national treasures. Aunt Zuyou died ages ago and the possibility of Uncle Iroh having more kids at this stage doesn’t bear thinking about. In Azula’s branch, besides the occasional murmured gossip among the servants, there hasn’t been any talk about further children.

If Lu Ten ever dies and Azula doesn’t, one way or the other, the throne will eventually land in her hands.

Azula refuses to die, and hence, “What are you learning at the academy now?”

That elicits a deep groan and Lu Ten thumping his head back against the tree’s trunk. He picks his book back up from the ground and flips it over for her inspection. “Naval and land strategies from over three hundred years ago. And not just the interesting ones like the fleet chained together into a floating battleground. We have to memorize all of them.”

She takes the book and tucks away the author and title for a future moment. “Wasn’t the chained fleet set on fire?”

Lu Ten makes a face, like his father does and like her father would never tolerate from her. “Yes, which is why it only happened once. But it’s still more interesting than the skirmish between our Ninth Fleet and the Water Tribe in the Earth Kingdom’s southeastern sea in year 16 of Fire Lord Tsuhana’s reign which no one won anyways.”

Reasonably sure that her ghost can help her locate a copy of Lu Ten’s reading homework, Azula hands the book back. She’ll have to work in some time for reading his homework materials around her classes at the Royal Academy and her training and her father’s nightly harsh interrogations over her progress. Prince Ozai’s been regularly pressuring the Academy for Girls’ headmistress to fast-track Azula’s education towards an early graduation. Without her brother reciting passages he memorized out of boredom in the middle of the night when everyone else is asleep, Azula might – well, of course she can always keep up with her father’s expectations.

“What else are you learning? If you’re going to help Granddad and your father, you must be learning more than the failures of dead people,” Azula asks.

“Hmm.” Lu Ten runs a hand against the back of his neck, then he eyes alight. “Hey, have your instructors taught you any pair and group variants to firebending forms? I bet they haven’t, let me teach you some cool ones.”


Through the western palace library’s windows opening towards a courtyard of willow trees and lotus blossoms, Azula watches as storm clouds roil across the sky in heavy, dark gray anger. A wind whistles through the stone and metal work. The candles illuminating the room flicker in the air’s wake.

Her mother runs a hand over the curve of her skull in broad, smooth strokes. Despite the history of the Fire Nation laid out on the table before them, all the tales of their might and their victories, instead of reading from the scroll, Ursa says, “You have an older brother.”

“Had,” Azula corrects.

Her mother sighs. “Had,” she accepts. “Your brother, Zuko, he was so happy to have a younger sister. If only …” Ursa trails off, as she always does in the rare instances when she breathes her son’s name. Azula blinks silently up, waiting for the soonest moment she can put her hair back up after her mother finishes combing it.

“You live long and well for us,” Ursa says with a trace of a smile and presses a light kiss against Azula’s crown.


He comes back too soon from the city with what he’s learned, and it’ll be hours yet before Azula’s done with her day and back in the privacy of her bedroom. The hawks in the message tower can’t quite confirm his existence, but his nearby presence unnerves them as much as he unnerves the various cats slinking through the servant quarters hunting vermin. Usually, he keeps away from the message tower for the birds’ sake, but there’s this one path along the palace’s lower roofs that the guards occasionally seem to miss that goes right past the tower and to a window at the upper floors. If he glances to his left while crouching on the sloped tiles, he can catch a hint of the coronation grounds.

With a bored grumble, Zuko tips off the roof and hurtles towards the paved ground below. There’s no jolt of an impact when he hits the stone, only a touch of will that sends him tumbling instead of gliding to a halt. Rain splatters through him.

It turns out the gossip about the newly appointed Minister Dong to the Hu Xin Provinces is just that: meaningless gossip. Azula will still do the best she can to wheedle every detail she can out of him, probably so she can find the sharpest knife to stab her classmate with, but Zuko honestly cares even less about what she does at school than he does about the Minister’s maybe mistress. One scattered week dragged along to his sister’s school and pacing up and down the classroom’s rows of desk while the students recited textbook passages was enough for him. Though the sheer desperation to get out of another hour of lecture did help them discover he could teleport to Ember Island at a hard enough thought.

Zuko stares unblinking at the storm clouds above, then finally rolls back to his feet. Patting nonexistent dust from his lightly wrinkled clothing, he sets out for the Fire Sages’ temple. He still isn’t done exploring all their secret rooms.


When Azula closes the door to her room, she finds Zuko laying on her bed with his eyes closed. She takes a running leap and jumps straight through him.

Instantly, his eyes snap open and he shouts, “Seriously?”

“It’s my bed and it’s useless to you anyways. Pretending to sleep isn’t going to make you any less dead,” she retorts and sits down where she landed.

Grumbling, Zuko rolls out of her space and sits up. He shakes his loose hair into a more orderly state and asks, “Do any of your classmates know someone called Ayame from Donghua District of the capital? In her twenties, owner of a shop selling general goods and processing mail for soldiers sent to the northeastern war fronts? I think she has either a sister or a cousin in your school. Their family uses an iris wren seal.”

He’s gotten better at not giving her useless information. Azula considers his words. “An iris wren seal? Not in my class, but maybe one of Ty Lee’s sisters has seen it. Sounds like new nobility,” she says dismissively.

“They are,” Zuko confirms. “When I broke into their house, I couldn’t find anything to confirm what Linying was probably talking about, but they could have destroyed the evidence already since the rumors have spread so far. Allegedly Minister Dong took on this Ayame lady as a mistress and her mother found out through a servant. She was furious, especially when it turned out that he’d been seeing other women too and maybe stealing stuff? Or bribing someone? Anyways, I heard that Dong’s wife got fed up and got him transferred to the colonies.”

He shrugs and flops back, head and arms hanging over the side of Azula’s bed. “It’s stupid. Did you talk to Lu Ten?”

Lu Ten’s stupid. He tried showing me a firebending form I already learned ages ago. I’m not surprised you can’t figure out why this information’s important, you never could see the bigger picture,” Azula says.

Zuko’s head tips up momentarily to look at her, then he snorts and lets his head hang back down. “Linying’s not worth it, she’s barely a threat to you. Her family can’t afford to keep sending her to the Royal Academy for long, they’re too busy paying off the debts on that new house they bought. Everyone’s going to forget about her. It’s stupid.”

The worst part about her older brother being dead is that Azula can’t kick him off her bed.


Ursa reads poetry to Azula, who doesn’t sprawl on the ground – Zuko – but leans a bare degree towards her mother’s side. It’s all useless words about quail feathers and autumn leaves, but Ursa once cut off Azula’s pouting with, “Fire Lords understand the power of great speech writers and only educated Fire Lords know which speech writers would make them into fools.” So fine, bamboo forests and mountain vistas away.

On Ursa’s other side, Zuko lays on his stomach, chin propped up in his hands and feet slowly kicking in the air. Neither Azula nor Ursa glance a single time in his direction, as he listens enraptured to the words. Though Azula does note a mused edge to his hair with a few loose strands escaping from their tied back brethren. He refuses to answer any of Azula’s questions about where he’s been routinely disappearing to lately and he hasn’t batted a single eye at jabs of fire to his face in years. Something athletic, she guesses, because she caught him yesterday swinging a fist in a sweeping curve through the air.

“Ask her to read the story about the bakeneko at the harbor,” Zuko requests.

The one with the medicine seller that Ursa always censors about half of its contents because it’s really a story about bloody revenge spanning generations and really bad marriage decisions? Azula hates that story. She ignores him.

His head drops to the floor in a baleful pique.

“It’s not fair,” he’d almost said once when Azula was four. She watched the words crawl through his lungs and how the pinch of his frown drew the words up through his throat, as he stared down at the adoration in Ursa’s hands trailing over Azula’s hair and straightening the folds of her shirt. His chin slowly raised as Ursa said, “Aren’t you the prettiest daughter in the world?”

But ultimately, he swallowed the words back down, turning away and walking out of the room, straight through a servant in his preoccupation.

“You are dead,” Azula reminded him that evening. “She has better things to do than kneel at a stone tablet every day.”

With his arms wrapped around his knees and his face pressed into the white fabric of his pants, she could barely make out his muffled words. “She didn’t spend this much time with me when I was alive either.”

“Then you weren’t perfect enough,” she said and shrugged in a useless gesture since he couldn’t see it anyways. “And besides, Father’s attention is more important. If Mother suddenly disappeared, no one would say anything. I wouldn’t care at all.”

That finally got Zuko to lift his head and squint at her direction.

“You’re lying,” he said decisively.


Azula may repeatedly claim to his face that Zuko needs her more than she needs him, but she can’t teach him anything about fighting with swords. Firebending is a foregone conclusion for him; he barely started learning before he died, and ghosts can’t bend. But he accidentally startled a servant in one of the narrow passages snaking beneath the palace the other day when he went hurtling down the hall too fast and slammed his palm against the metal wall. There’s also the time he knocked a whole bowl of plums onto Azula’s foot. And another time, well –

“Come on hilt, work with me,” Zuko growls.

The hilt, stubbornly made of wood and leather over the metal core inside, continues refusing to work with him. It slips through his fingers and catches against his scrambling nails. Hissing, he snatches the sword by the blade before it can hit the ground and alert the mansion’s guards. The moonlight pouring across floor laughs at him.

Not that one either then. With a sigh, he guides the blade back into its sheath and fumbles it all back onto its mount. Satisfied that he returned everything to the way it should look, Zuko goes off in search for swords in progress of assembly. If he concentrates, he can hold onto wood, but then he has barely any attention to spare on the environment or against an enemy. Hypothetically.

Master Piandao specializes in jian, particularly single-handed swords, with a few hand-and-a-half variations. They’re works of art, typically bought by nobility rather than the rank and file of the armies. Each blade, unique and balanced, is worth admiration and a point of pride for its owner. And Zuko’s spending his sleepless nights riffling through all of Piandao’s swords like a thief.

He’ll find some way to compensate the master after Zuko inevitable makes off with a blade that fits him, and also as thanks for the lessons he spies on during the day. Azula could probably commission a sword for him that doesn’t use any wood so Zuko can actually hold it properly, but there’s no easy explaining to their parents for why she would.

The two of them never formally agreed out loud to keep Zuko’s continued existence a secret: it just happened. She never knew better when she was tiny that the brother she played with was a ghost. Which is his fault – he wasn’t unaware of what he was. But he spent most of the first month after … after, trailing behind his mother, fruitlessly tugging on her silk sleeves, begging her to look at him. He was fine now, the fever broke, he pleaded to her deaf ears while she cried alone in an alcove with no one around expect her closest handmaidens demurely but forcefully chasing off anyone who came near. Please, mother, he said in the face of his father’s silence and his uncle’s shuddering sympathy. It was a relief to sit besides Azula’s bed and make silly faces at her.

She caught on quickly, quickly enough that no one suspected she even had an invisible friend. And then they just carried on without saying anything. To her memories, her brother was always dead and that’s just the status quo.

Being a ghost and no one knowing he’s a ghost has its advantages. Closed doors can’t keep him out of anywhere. Metal ones give him a bit more trouble, but Zuko can usually find another path into a room before putting any effort into intangibility. When his family visits Ember Island and there are fewer guards they can bring with them, Zuko helps patrol the grounds leading to his sister’s room. He once knocked out a would-be thief with a metal pot that way. Fun times.

Most importantly, he throws everything he can into supporting Azula’s climb to greatness. She’s smart enough that she could probably figure out and do everything Zuko helps her with on her own, but it’s faster with him at her side. Father certainly has no trouble believing that all of Azula’s achievements are purely from her own merit and they make no moves to correct his assumptions. Zuko memorizes Lu Ten’s curriculum, she memorizes the textbooks he brings her, and their father praises her prodigious intellect. The cycle repeats.

And Zuko will do everything he can to keep his sister alive, hence the surreptitious lessons he’s stealing from Piandao’s students, but if, Agni forbid, she does die before their father… Well maybe then Ozai would shed a single tear at his child’s funeral pyre.


Two days before he’s due to ship out towards the arid dust of the Earth Kingdom once again, Crown Prince Iroh secures permission for a visit to Lady Ursa.

Azula’s classes at the Royal Academy wrap up in time for her to dodge three guards, evade a few handmaidens, and shimmy down the thin gap between the walls of her mother’s room for greeting guests. A strip of wood digs into her shoulder blade once she finds a spot the voices are clearest. Zuko nods absently to her.

On the other side of the wall, Ursa’s voice says, worried, “Your son will be joining you so soon after graduating from the officer academy?”

“I trust in Headmaster Yun’s guidance and I’ve tested Lu Ten myself. He’ll be as ready for the front as a new officer can be. At least Father allowed me to soothe my concerns by having him at my side. His first deployment could have been worse,” Iroh says. There’s a soft click of porcelain set on the lacquered surface of a table.

Zuko shoves his face through the wall for a moment, then draws it back so he can whisper to Azula, “Uncle’s pouring the tea himself again.”

She makes a silent face. That’s what servants are for.

“But a siege, Brother Iroh? And so far east into the Earth Kingdom? Protecting your supplies will be half your problems,” says their mother.

“So it will be,” their uncle agrees. “But the Ministry of War promises they’re building me new catapults and bombs for taking down Ba Sing Se’s great walls. The city’s perimeter may be long, but there are only a few key entrances in and out for their supplies. I’ll have enough resources to choke those off and soon this war will be over. The blow of losing Ba Sing Se will be too great.”

And what would that look like? Eccentric Uncle Iroh ushering in the final decisive blow against the Earth Kingdom? Azula will still have use for all her training regardless if he succeeds or not; ruling an empire requires troops monitoring the colonies and putting down anyone foolish enough to rebel against the Fire Nation’s might. She’s still have her role with the military, just as everyone else of noble blood in her family has.

“A siege on Ba Sing Se’s going to pull away troops from the southeast. Is he going to use the navy to bring supplies to his army?” Zuko asks.

Azula shakes her head and writes on his sleeve, “Not with new artillery. Land supply through west.”

He lets out a grumpy hum and mutters, “Fair enough.” He always did like scaring navy troops more than the army soldiers. “Do you want to listen to their whole talk? Mother saw that new production the other day, they’re going to be talking about the theatre for hours. And I found a new hole in the guards’ patrols that I want to show you.”

She swings an arm for him to lead the way and slides out from their hiding place.


Technically, unauthorized obtainment and possession of highly classified documents like the personal correspondence for the Fire Lord’s eyes only, tracking the progress of the frontlines through the Earth Gu Dong districts and the Kingdom’s debt towards colonial contractors, are grounds for execution.

“I’m already dead,” Zuko says with a shrug, all his royal pious thrown away. “And there’s nothing to connect to you.”

He smacks a hand out and before Azula can stop this unfolding disaster, Zuko fumbles a grip on her brush. With an expression of intense concentration, he copies down the salient points of his espionage. His characters struggle down the page in crooked lines. He doesn’t even hold his sleeve out of the way either, just lets it drag against the surface of her desk and the paper. Halfway through he gives up and drops her brush back against its porcelain rest. Ink splatters on her desk and Azula makes a small noise of outrage.

“Whoops,” Zuko blandly says.

Azula wipes away the droplets with a small sheet of paper, then crumples it and hurls it through his face. He doesn’t even have the decency to blink as it goes sailing through his nose. Instead he waves a hand at his atrocious calligraphy and says, “Well?”

She looks down and reads over what he wrote. “How can anyone read your writing, Zuzu,” Azula says. “It’s a code all in itself.”

He puffs up in folds of white outrage. “Well, if people would stop using only bamboo and animal hair for brushes, I could actually hold something to write with.”

“Charcoal,” she points out, despite refusing to let something so prone to dirtying and smudging in her room.

Peevish, he says, “Do you want to hear about Grandfather’s personal letters or not?”

“Alright, fine, go on,” she allows. She begins poking flaming holes through his handwriting.


Given how much time Azula spends in the company of Mai and Ty Lee, it’s unfortunate that Zuko doesn’t so much as give them the time of day. “You should play with us,” Azula said once. He silently stared at her. Then with a single, “No,” he pointedly disappeared to wherever.

She got back at him for that by sticking her hand or her foot into him every time he reappeared for a week afterwards, to his squawking and shouting dismay.

Meanwhile, Ty Lee shows Azula the quickest way to swing herself up a tree and Mai discovers the wonders of knives. In fact, she smuggled in a set of said knives today, somehow getting them past her parents and the palace guards, and is demonstrating her throwing skills to Azula. So far every one of her throws hits its target.

Zuko materializes on the other side of the courtyard.

“Here, let’s see how far you can really throw,” Azula immediately says. She points at the pole behind Zuko’s head. “Think you can hit that?”

Mai shrugs. The knife goes whistling.

Hey,” Zuko howls.

“Great job!” Ty Lee cheers.


Zuko’s making faces at Azula’s cartwheels when Ursa walks over, face pale and scroll hanging slack between her hands. She says with a waver in her voice, “Azula,” and pulls her in for a quick embrace, as if assuring herself that her daughter is safe.

Ursa draws back and says with tears in her eyes, “Your cousin, Lu Ten, died in battle. They’re bringing his body back soon.”

Oh. Well, there goes dumb Lu Ten and kooky Iroh.

And there goes any semblance of privacy for Azula. In the wake of the news, Ursa keeps Azula at her side whenever there isn’t classes or training. Azula studies her history textbooks in the library with her mother next to her, wearing a guarded expression daring the world to lay a single hair on her child. She’s there after a training session with Imura, she’s there to see Azula off to the Academy despite the rain, she’s there at night to check on Azula one last time before snuffing the candles out. The riled protective instinct is blatant enough that when Father says over dinner a few days later, “Azula doesn’t need handholding,” Ursa immediately strikes back with the snap of a whip, “Have some actual sympathy for your brother.”

Too bad Zuko’s not there to see that exchange.

Azula’s not her brother’s keeper, so when she doesn’t see him trailing after her for several days, she doesn’t say anything. He comes back by the end of the week regardless.

“Lu Ten’s moved on,” he simply says and falls back in line.

Amidst the growing preparations for the funeral and Uncle Iroh’s return, Father requests an audience with Fire Lord Azulon. With an edge in her eye that exactly conveys her opinion about this turn of events, Ursa helps Azula prepare her outfit for the meeting. In a low voice so the servants can’t hear, Ursa says to Azula, “Don’t let your father use you as a pawn in his games, love.”

Azula blinks innocently at her.

When they arrive at the throne room, Zuko’s already there, anxiously pacing. He immediately jogs over to Azula’s kneeling side and hisses, “Grandfather’s really not happy about this.”

He still allowed the audience, didn’t he?

The flames before the throne flicker at an even height, partially obscuring the aged lines and folds of the Fire Lord’s face. Besides her, Zuko sits with his arms crossed tight, his hands clenching at the fabric at his sides. Father sits on her other side and there’s no way to see Mother’s face like this.

When Ozai displays Azula’s skills, she obliges. It’s what she trained for. She recites her facts, she shows her moves.

The flames remain level and unimpressed. The Fire Lord demands, “The rest of you, go.”

“Azula, Mom’s going to turn around and instantly see you’re not behind her,” Zuko warns, chasing after her into the heavy curtains lining the walls. She shoves her hand through his face to silence him. He ducks his head out of the way and wipes his palms against his pants again in nervous agitation.

“You want me to betray Iroh?” the Fire Lord questions. “You want me to revoke his birthright?” the Fire Lord thunders. “Your arrogance exceeds you, Prince Ozai,” Fire Lord Azulon yells with towering flame. “You are right that your daughter is alive and the only remaining heir of her generation. But to ask me something like this during the period of mourning, you must be punished, Prince Ozai. You and your bloodline are hereby banned from the palace!”

Notes:

into the spiderverse meme of throwing away a current wip for a new idea
“this will be a short multi-chapter fic,” i said. “oh shit, the outline is almost twenty pages long,” i realized.

Let’s see how long I can stay committed to this chapter count.