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myths-of-fantasy · 1 year ago

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“Alright, one more time – when in the Earth Kingdom, we are…”

“The Song family.”

“And we are…”

“Merchants.”

“That sell-”

“-Bread, maps and trinkets.”

“Good, good.”

Ezani looked over her collection of children, all of them speaking in firm but quiet voices as they watched her with serious eyes. They had been preparing for this day for a while now. It had been about four months since Iroh had sailed off with Zuko on the doomed-to-failure search for the Avatar. The hidden waterbender had been training her kids – hers because honestly fuck Ozai – to handle the world outside of the Fire Nation. Her heart still clenched at the infrequently letters coming from Zuko, the boy’s pain and palpable confusion coming through clearly as he reported failure after failure in his search even as he tried to hide it.

The Azula, Mei and Ty-Lee would curl up among themselves while Ezani read the latest letter for them, doing her best to keep the raw sadness she felt for the boy out of her voice. Inevitably, they would ask for the letter to read it themselves and she would hand it over for them to inspect, Azula sadly tracing her fingers across the characters shaped by her brother’s hands.

On the other side, Ezani would unravel the secret letters delivered to her by Iroh; reporting on what the current climate was like. While Zuko hadn’t the luxury of being preemptively desensitized, unwound from the prejudices of the Fire Nation, Ezani had been carefully planting seeds of doubt in all of the most important places in the minds of the girls. She kept encouraging them to ask questions, to look deeper into every order, not to take things said at face value and she could see that it was starting to sink in. Even the act of asking for the letter, choosing to read it themselves rather than count on her to tell them the exact contents of the letter was a sign of their changing demeanor.

Though what happened to Zuko was vile and sickening, the final act to seal Ozai’s image in the eyes of his children not as their father but as their master, the shock of his actions had ruptured their entire worlds. No matter what Ezani had tried to teach Azula before, Ozai had been her father and much of the Fire Nation saw him as the fair if strict father.

The needless cruelty towards his own son for the mere crime of caring about their soldiers had been a blow to their world-views leaving them more vulnerable to Ezani’s teachings.

She hated to think about it like that but she’d been raised with the war in mind, raised to understand the vulnerabilities that could open themselves in a person’s armor and how to both exploit them and protect her own.

Ezani had been prepared to pack up her girls and ditch the island only a couple days after Iroh had left but looking at the girls now, she reluctantly admitted that staying for a bit longer had been for the best. They were stronger through their training, the adults in their lives entrusting them with more and more complex foot-work which would serve them well on the outside.

“We’re in the Earth Kingdom.” she said sharply, making them all straighten up. “What are your names?”

“Lily,” Azula said immediately, putting on her best ‘innocent child’ expression. Ezani smiled warmly – she had been wary about using the girl’s pet-name as an alias but she’d been careful to never express the name in public. ‘Fire-Lily’ was usually reserved for private moments within her little shop, so hopefully it would fly easily enough under the radar.

“Aster,” Ty Lee declared, straightening up.

“Song Sage,” Mei reported.

“Well-done – let’s work on your breads again.”

The girls rushed the stand, pulling out their premade dough while Ezani watched with a critical eye. Their cover would be simple – a small family of merchants that traveled semi-regularly selling the various trinkets they found on their journeys alongside their very good breads. For those who looked upon their band with confusion, she would profess to having taken over her own father’s business. Others who would look at her dark skin and brown eyes with suspicion next to her triad of paler skinned girls, would be told that she’d once had a partner (but carefully not a husband, she possessed none of the dressings for a widow to pass that story) whom perished defending them when the girls were young.

She tried to keep the other details close to reality to prevent the girls from slipping up – Mei was her eldest daughter and Azula her youngest. Given that Azula and Ty Lee looked nothing alike, she’d declared that she was just a little girl when they escaped the attack and so, Ezani took her with them. The waterbender had initially wanted to pass them off as twins but they didn’t look similar enough to be convincing. She’d say she had a son once but he’d been killed alongside his father, defending their family while the girls escaped.

Not a very detailed story no but it had enough information to keep the average citizen from looking into them too deeply. Bandits were a known problem throughout the world.

“How much longer do we have to wait?” Azula’s words snapped her out of her thoughts. Her little girl looked so grown up now, 13 years old but with the serious eyes and flecked with faint scars. It certainly lent to their story but her heart still crumbled looking at the singed marked on her daughter’s skin, where she’d dodge a knife a little too slowly; hadn’t blocked a fire covered fist quite quickly enough. Mei was the eldest and yet, Azula’s body was a hidden mosaic of suffering. “I can’t take it much longer. Being in the castle with him.”

She spat the last word venomously – Azula hadn’t referred to the Firelord as her father since the day he exiled Zuko. Not that the self-centered man had even noticed, she wouldn’t be surprised if the bastard assumed she was just showing him the proper respect befitting his station.

I wish I could kill him, Ezani thought to herself bitterly. A life-time of grooming and yet, when faced with her task all she could see overwhelming failure waiting for her. She knew intellectually the Firelord was surrounded by high-ranking military officials, that attempting a rush on the palace would be paramount to suicide and yet…. It still felt like she was failing her parents, failing Zuko by letting that bastard continue drawing breath. Some day.

“Soon,” she answers Azula, careful to hide any signs of her inner torment. “I have an idea of where to go, food and maps. I’ve already packed all of the most important aspects of the stall and destroyed anything else that could tip-off the guards.”

She sighed a little, “The hardest part is managing to parse out a ship willing to smuggle the Firelord’s precious daughter out of the Nation without sending word back to the palace.”

Azula growled at being called the Firelord’s daughter but said nothing about it – though she no longer viewed the cruel man as a father, Firelord Ozai was still certain of her loyalty to him, still seemed to think her his loyal puppet.

“Maybe I can help,” Ty Lee offered, rocking back and forth on her feet. The young girl was constantly in motion – it seemed the restless energy she usually expended in the circus had become just another part of her.

“I don’t want you to risk getting hurt,” Ezani told her gently, suppressing the fear of what could happen if they were discovered. She herself was already just barely avoiding execution for what was – at the very least – treason, kidnapping and given her communications with Iroh, espionage.

“Oh little poppy, I don’t mean it that way,” she cooed when Ty Lee wilted a bit. “I know you want to help but I want you girls to be as innocent in this as possible. If I am caught, I want you to three to stay together and look out for each other.”

“You won’t get caught though,” Azula declared.

“It’s always a risk,” said the ever realistic Mei in a softer voice. “Those nobles are always poking around her shop. And they’re mean when they don’t get what they want.”

Ezani wordlessly placed her hand on Mei’s shoulder, squeezing lightly in an attempt at comfort. The eldest’s emotions were always a bit muted, more contained and tightly sewn together compared to Azula and Ty Lee’s. Ezani had wondered for a while if that was by nature or if it was taught to her – regardless, she recognized the comment as the quiet girl’s way of expressing her concerns.

“I won’t lie to you all – you’re old enough to understand the truth. And the truth is that what I’m planning is dangerous – that just living here had been a major gamble. This world isn’t as kind as I would like it to be and as long as Ozai is Firelord, there is always the risk that I will be taken from you.”

Azula clenched her fists as Ty Lee shuffled closer to her, eyes tearing up with frightened sadness.

“I will do my best to stay with you,” Ezani told them seriously. “But if it comes down to a choice of me or you, I will always choose you. And I hope I can count on you three to choose yourselves too.”

She doesn’t think they would, not by the steel in their eyes and the stiffness to their bodies but she’d at least told them the truth. There was no point in attempting to shelter them from this fact – not when she would be labeled the Fire Nation’s number one enemy if her plan were to succeed.

For now, she let them knead their dough while she formulated a reply to Iroh – only a few more months at the most.

Then they would be free.

| | |

“Thank you,” Ezani said quietly.

The merchant nodded, accepting the small pouch of money that she’d carefully collected. A healthy amount of coin of both Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom currency to further entice the man to keep quiet. Thank the spirits, it seemed that the Fire Lord had disgruntled quite a few merchants with his stricter trading policies and the higher taxes he imposed upon them. The merchant was a frequenter of the less popular docks, electing to travel by foot through the lands to increase the chances of encountering a potential customer – it works perfectly in her favor. The unpopulated docks meant that there would be fewer people who would recognize Azula, the guards would be in the looser part of the Firelord’s palm rather than tightly grasped in his grips and it would allow them to vanish on the roads between the major cities.

She turned and motioned for the girls to follow, creeping from the shadows slowly.

She blinked a little, readjusting once more to the slightly jarring sight of her girls dressed as ordinary citizens, each clutching a small bag in their hands. It would’ve been smarter if she’d told them no, denied them the opportunity to take the small items that would surely reveal their flight but she didn’t have the heart to. She was already taking them away from all that they knew, into a hostile world where they would live on the run presumably for the rest of their lives, dogged by the Firelord and his loyal soldiers.

So she helped Ty Lee onto the boat first, saying nothing about the small beaded necklace that shimmered in the bag, about the decorative knife that Mei held as she crossed onto the boat or the teddy bear – the only gift from Ursa to her daughter – clutched in Azula’s arms.

Ezani was holding her breath the entire time.

She’d sent word to Iroh that they were finally leaving, that she’d send him a second message when they reached shore again – her tern-falcon alongside Ducky were packed safely onto the ship near the merchant’s goods, carefully out of sight of an immediate glance near the merchant’s own iguana-parrot. She watched the shore of the Fire Nation fade into the distance as her girls were ushered beneath the deck to change from their Fire Nation commoner robes to something more suitable for the average traveling merchant.

She waited with her heart in her throat as they sailed further and further out to sea, her pulse thumping loudly in her ears.

In the end, she needn’t have worried – they passed the check-point easily, the guards tired and uncaring of what they saw as an ordinary merchant passing by with subpar material. It was late at night and the Firelord was convinced his Azula was still his darling puppet – he’d stopped looking in on her room when she didn’t leave with Zuko. Her little girl had masked her hurt and upset masterfully within the palace, disguising her grief as a newfound blood-lust in training that made the Firelord cackle with pleasure.

It would only be the next morning, when her Fire Lily didn’t answer his summons and the servants found her room empty, her sheets untouched that he would realize what had happened. He would storm the little stand she’d called her own only to find an empty shell with no evidence of where they’d gone. She’d reluctantly given away her lips to one of the noble-women who continued to press her, push her and ensured her silence, kept her from alerting the guards that she was leaving so they couldn’t stop her swift-night’s packing.

She releases a gentle sigh, her muscles relaxing as she looked upon the open sea stretching before her; the water silver from the bright moon’s light and she’d never felt more at home than she did now. Ezani always felt the safest on the sea – ironic considering it was where she’d been most in danger with the Fire Nation’s fleet patrolling the waters.

“Nothing to do but wait now,” she said aloud, as she settled onto her spot on the ship. She unwrapped a bit of blueberry bread she’d produced with Azula’s help.

She ate, watching the moonlight and imagined the Firelord’s enraged roar with a smirk upon her lips.

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@ultimatebottom69

Being sporadic as hell but this time, I'm remembering to include you in this lmao

#azula's breadmaker #projects by ankh #atla fanfic #atla azula #azula redemption #child azula #we've reached actual plot now #pretty sure I missed an update #oc - Ezani

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