#gonna say this before it becomes a ship war this is zukka

Ursa doesn’t love her husband.

There was a time in which she did, when they were young and he was only known as the Fire Lord’s second son, when his heart wasn’t yet poisoned with a raw hunger for power and he was but a blushing eighteen years old proposing to her after discovering she bore his soulmark, a deep crimson palm spread astride her neck and collarbone.

Because this is how soulmarks work, colored as the nation they hail from, and as Ozai bends and reveres fire, of a deep, dark red Ursa’s mark is.

Sometimes she laughs at herself, alone in her bedroom thinking of how cruel the spirits were, to mark a ten-year-old girl on her neck as to show her her soulmate’s true color. Angry. Envious. Possessive. Controlling.

So Ursa no longer loves her husband; but she still accepts him, in memory of the fondness they shared and the respect he shows her because of her lineage, but in her bedroom he shall no longer enter and in her sight he shall no longer appear.

Ozai lets her. Because deeps down under piles of hatred for his own blood and unrestrained ambition he still loves her, deeply, like a soulmate should and Ursa knows it, uses it, because even though the spirits promised them to each other her heart belongs elsewhere, to another soul from her hometown. To Ikem, a young boy without any soul mark, the one she swore to cherish before she married Ozai.

Ursa knows she shouldn’t use his feelings, but he and his father used her for her blood as she descends from Avatar Roku, so if she wants to hurt him as much as he hurt her, no one has any right to stop her.

And the thing is, Ursa would have accepted this life. She wouldn’t have been delighted by it, but she has her children with her, and they’re everything she needs, but the problem arises the moment they are given their soulmark.

Or rather, when Zuko gains one and Azula discovers she is a monster deprived of one.

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