Challege 75 - Portent

Title: Learned
Author: Lady Zip
Word Count: 338
Warning: Character death.
Challenge: 75 - Portent



It fails to worry Ozai when he catches Azula pulling the wings from small insects in the garden. She is a smart girl, not to be stunted with rules and boundaries. He lets her be.

He scolds her only mildly when she singes the tail of her pet badgerdog to make it fear fire and therefore her hand. He thinks that learning about such power at this young age will make her see what she can one day have as ruler of the world’s greatest nation.

Between his lenience and her mother’s firmer hand Azula learns to manipulate people – to play her parents off of one another and lie as well as her father does. Ozai can usually tell when she is deceiving him – sometimes letting her get away with it other times snatching her secrets out into the open. Every time she is found out it enrages her. Every time it gets harder to read her expression.

When Ursa leaves, Azula makes a point to run to the end of her father’s tenuous leash on her again and again, testing and pushing him to give her more slack. Distracted and grieving, he gives it.

Around the time she is ten years old it seems that she has stopped telling him lies. But in fact it is just that she tells him less and less at all. They talk, but their topics are specific and limited. They are close, but miles apart. She is grown and lost to him by the time Ozai realizes that their affection has become so insincere.

When her brother is banished she doesn’t show a flinch of sympathy or remorse. When she is sent to bring Zuko home she only nods.

When she strides into the throne chamber in triumphant return from the Earth Kingdom and Ozai moves to embrace her she plunges the dagger he gave her for her thirteenth birthday into his heart with a smile.

In hindsight, he thinks, the insects should have worried him more.