#ursa atla

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Every child, on their tenth birthday, is given a soulmark. 

Which is why on this one morning Zuko finally turns a year older, Ursa allows Ozai to go to their son with her. She might be indifferent to him but her son needs a father, and she will dry every ounce of his love for her to ensure he treats her children the way a father is supposed to.

And just like this, Zuko wakes to the face of both of his parents, to the soft caress of his mother’s hand on his face, to the almost tender look in his father’s eyes. 

A wave of realization crashes on his shores, and Zuko jumps on his bed, accompanied by his sister’s excited shouts, looks at his arms, his legs, squeezes his cheeks with his small hands but he can’t find a single hint; takes off his shirt, searches for a soulmark on his stomach but his skin is as fair as the day before. 

Zuko bites his lips, mortified. He must have one, somewhere, because everyone has a soulmark, his mother does, his father too, so he has to bear one. 

Jumping off his bed, Zuko searches for a mirror yet freezes as soon as an astonished gasp escapes his sister’s mouth. 

“Zuko’s soulmark is blue!” She shouts, turning to their parents. “Not red!” 

Zuko turns around, trying to look past his shoulder but he can’t get a proper look so his mother kneels, kindly touches his lower back with the tip of her finger and instinctively Zuko’s hand joins hers, a relieved smile spreading on his lips. 

He has a soulmate. There’s another part of his soul somewhere on this earth, waiting for him and only him and it overjoys him, brings warmth to his heart and glee to his soul, yet it all starts to fade and crumble the moment he meets his father’s eyes, so full of fury and contempt a soulmate each of them has yet to meet. 

Ursa notices, turns around to face her husband, a cold voice hidden behind sweeter words,

“My love, aren’t you glad? Our son has a soulmate, he shall love and be loved, just like we were.” She says, knowing very well it sounds more like a curse than a blessing.

And the thing is, Ursa doesn’t mean it when she calls him ‘my love’. It sounds plain and forced because the last time she called him like this was when she begged for him to spare her lover’s life and Ozai knows but he’s weak, would conquer the whole world if it meant Ursa would give him crumbs of the old love they once shared, has already tried to. 

So Ozai nods, his face rid of the anger he wielded before, even though a soulmate from the water tribe is weak and terrible and he expected so much more from the prince of the great Fire nation. 

“Yes. Quite glad.”

Ursa knows he doesn’t mean it. 

But Zuko is happy, so she will take it.

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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