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The first feeling she is aware of is how her throat, aching and raw, feels like sandpaper. Like something has crawled in it and died, perhaps her dignity, and she is left without a voice in its absence.
The second feeling she is aware of, when she tries to reach a hand up to hold her neck, is that her hands are chained behind her and out of reach. Her shoulders ache and her back is tight, and her wrists are raw from where the metal has been rubbing at them for Agni knows how long.
The third feeling she is aware of, and perhaps the worst of them all, is the black hole that has opened in her gut and has been slowly consuming her, for how long Azula cannot be sure.
Perhaps it predates her entirely. It has been here since the start and Azula has only moved into it, and one day it will consume her so entirely that she never existed at all. And perhaps that would be for the best.
It is this third feeling that makes sitting alone in a holding cell beneath the palace hell on earth. The physical sensations are nothing, bearable at the very worst, but the gnawing ache that has found its home in her ribcage makes her feel like little more than a shell curling in on itself.
And despite the rawness in her throat, the burning and stabbing pain when she so much as wheezes on an exhale, she screams. It rips itself from her throat before conscious thought thinks to stop it, and Azula screams and sobs so loudly her lungs feel ready to burst from the effort of it.
Time seems to lose its meaning when she does, and Azula isn’t sure if it’s seconds, minutes, hours, before the crackle of torchlight brings with it a shadow to loom long over her.
“You’re going to hurt yourself if you keep screaming like that,” Zuko says, and Azula strains to try and find the compassion in his voice. He sounds impassive at best, and after everything else Azula isn’t quite sure she can handle the apathy coming from someone who should be caring for her. She might almost prefer the cold and callous rebukes of her mother to the stranger her brother has become since his banishment.
The devil you know, and all.
“Where’s Ty Lee? I want to see Ty Lee.”
Her friend’s name tastes like bile in her mouth, and she can’t figure out quite why. Only that it makes her want to be sick to say it, to demand (or maybe beg) to know where she is like she’s the one remedy to this awful loneliness she feels.
“Ty Lee is on Kyoshi Island with the other Kyoshi Warriors.” Zuko has become surprisingly adept at throwing salt in the wound, and very distantly Azula wonders if he’s learned it from her. After a moment of her glowering up at him from her kneeling position on the floor, he continues. “She joined them after the war ended.”
So the war is over.
All in all, it’s for the best. If it hadn’t ended, her father would’ve killed her for losing to Zuko and his peasant friend.
Now, Zuko wears the crown that should’ve belonged to her in his topknot. She wonders if it’s too heavy for him to carry.
“Ty Lee would never join up with those imbeciles. She’s too talented for them.”
“She’s friends with them. I hear they like her a lot. Suki likes her even, despite the whole prison thing.”
Azula wonders how Zuko can be so nonchalant about this.
She wonders a lot of things, actually. Where her father is right now, and what happens to him if the war is over. What Zuko plans to do as Fire Lord with no real experience as the heir. Most of all, she wonders why Ty Lee is doing halfway across the world with a group of girls she was once responsible for taking down, now making friends with them and playing at being one of those stupid Kyoshi Warriors.
She wonders if Ty Lee is thinking about her, too.
If, maybe somewhere on the other side of the world, Ty Lee is wondering how she is faring, alone in a jail cell beneath the Fire Nation palace. If her friend has a shred of compassion for her while she is off halfway across the world enjoying the company of the girls she was once so keen to make fun of.
Probably not.
“You won’t have to stay down here forever. This isn’t a permanent solution,” Zuko tells her. It would be comforting, but this is Zuko promising her this. The brother that took her throne, what was rightfully hers, promising her better than a cell where she would hardly have enough room to pace even if her chains had enough slack to allow her to walk around.
“I suppose I should be grateful,” she spits, rising up on her knees like a predator, “that you have enough compassion to not leave your sister to rot alone in a cell.” She would do the same to him, of course, if the roles were reversed, but it’s enough to make Zuko visibly recoil anyway, and it gives her a bit of satisfaction in her cold heart.
It turns out that the permanent solution, or at least the semi-permanent one, is to move her to a care facility that can handle her. Zuko doesn’t say the word ‘handle’, but his tone implies it even when he suggests instead that the doctors there will be able to ‘help’ her. She doesn’t know exactly what kind of help needs, and though she is resistant to the idea, it is her only option.
Secretly, deep down, she wonders if they can help her. Or, if as her mother suggested, inferred, implied, there is something within her broken beyond repair that will forever keep her from being whole. Ty Lee had been a way to fill the black hole that consumed her, but even that was temporary; better to watch her run away than to watch her be sucked in and destroyed by the wildfire Azula is.
So the doctors attempt to help her, asking poking and prodding and prying questions that mean nothing, not really. How does that make you feel and What thoughts go through your mind when… Azula doesn’t find their questions particularly pressing to respond to, and spends her so-called therapy sessions largely mute. It’s better than responding to asinine questions that lead her nowhere but back to her own spiraling thoughts.
A week in, the questions that swing at her like pickaxes trying to chip away at her rocky exterior finally find a vein of gold. Her therapist, a thin, spindly woman with glasses that perch delicately at the end of her nose, asks a question that finally makes Azula tick.
“Why don’t we try discussing your relationship with your mother?”
Why don’t they try discussing it, Azula thinks. Why not begin to unpack the woman who didn’t love her, not really, only pretended to until she was a figment of her imagination, appearing to tell her things that were never true.
She clears her throat in a way that sounds suspiciously like a sob, and the therapist- her name is Jiang, and Azula has known this all along while refusing to acknowledge her by name- is startled so badly she nearly jumps out of her seat. “Next question,” Azula says, her voice breaking ever so slightly, though she hopes Jiang does not notice the slip up in her tone. She moves on, taking notes and trying more questions, more angles from which to chisel away at Azula.
Too lost in thought to pay them any mind, Azula finds her mind elsewhere.
She was nine. On important days, of festivals and celebrations, Azula was not entrusted to the care of servants to dress and adorn herself. Rather than a handmaid gently brushing her hair up into a topknot or a group of laundresses pressing her robes to wear, her mother sits with her to do these tasks.
It does feel like a task where her mother is concerned. Azula watches from her perch on her bed while her mother rifles through the dressing closet with a deep, sad frown. She sees the slight, almost imperceptible changes in her face, and wonders what they might mean. If she disregards one tunic because it won’t fit since the growth spurt she had last month, or if she is dissatisfied with the tailoring on a pair of pants.
Once Azula is dressed in suitable clothing, her mother turns her attention to her hair. As she stands behind Azula at her vanity, an elephant-boar hair brush gently smooths out the bumps in her hair. Stroke by stroke, the brush finds each hair a place on top of Azula’s head, tucked securely into her top knot tied with ribbon.
Even at nine, Azula takes pride in her appearance. Even after a day of training, a long day of school, a day of playing with Ty Lee and Mai in the palace gardens, she refuses to have a hair out of place. It gives her a sense of calm, of peace, of order to have her appearance firmly squared away, to make it one less thing to worry about.
The only thing left now is the crown to be tucked into her topknot, the heritage of all princesses of the Fire Nation. Azula takes pride in this, too, the shining and glittering gold headpiece that distinguishes and sets her apart from what is common. She is special, the crown tells her. She wields blue fire, she can have lightning spark from her fingertips, and she is special .
In her mother’s hands, the crown looks heavy and austere.
“Stop squirming, Azula,” she says, despite the fact that Azula has yet to so much as shift in her seat this entire time. In fact, she is an extraordinarily well-behaved child. “You look so beautiful.”
Yet the hand holding her crown trembles; just slightly, but enough that Azula notices it. Her grip on it tightens, and she watches as the point of her two-pronged flame scores a red mark on the tip of her mother’s pointer finger until a crimson-red drop of blood appears.
She feels her mother’s fingernails dig into her shoulder, poking uncomfortably underneath her collarbone.
“That hurts,” Azula says quietly, looking not at her mother but the reflection of her in the mirror, ever-so-slightly distorted. “Stop it! That hurts!” She adds, more insistent.
Her mother drops the crown onto the vanity as Azula wrenches her shoulder out of her grasp. “Azula,” she says, in the monotone voice that somehow cuts just as deeply as the sharp admonishments she gets when teasing Zuko or siding with Father in family discussions. “I don’t know what came over me.”
With the practiced grace of a princess far older than her nine years, Azula slips the crown into her topknot with ease and scampers out of her bedroom.
“Princess,” Jiang says, and it startles Azula so much to be referred to by her title rather than her name that it brings her fully back to reality. Suddenly, she is hyperaware of her surroundings; the feel of the chair beneath her, the tight tensing of her hands into fists, the attempt at making the room calming with the smell of jasmine tea. The here and now comes to her so suddenly that it makes all her thoughts stop short, crashing into one another like a merchant cart in one of Caldera’s traffic jams.
“Princess, you’re crying.” Jiang extends a handkerchief in her direction.
Once the psychiatric evaluations she undergoes prove that she is a danger to neither herself nor others, Azula is allowed the luxury of having visitors. It’s funny to think of this as a luxury, to have the comings and goings of guests be something that she cannot possibly take for granted in the event it is revoked from her.
Still, with this privilege afforded to her, no one comes.
It is disappointing, but not entirely surprising, that no one visits her. Not even Zuko, who Azula imagines going out of his mind with stress trying to run the entire country and bear the weight of the world on his shoulders. It makes her smile, a little, to imagine it, and when the doctors ask her why she is smiling a light and cheerful “nothing” convinces them she is alright.
It is, in fact, more surprising when her brother does come to visit her, standing in the doorway in her suite (it is an insult to call it a suite when it is smaller than even the most meager of guest residences at the palace) with one of the doctors over his shoulder.
“Azula,” he says, and she is not sure why it hurts to have him say her name without venom, without much intonation at all. Before she can bite back with one of her cutting remarks, he continues. “I have someone here who wants to see you.”
He does an awkward shuffle out of the doorway and back into the hall, and Azula prepares for the worst. Their mother, their father perhaps, maybe even doddering Uncle Iroh. She wants to see none of them.
It is none of them. Instead, the figure that emerges in the transom is wearing green. Armor, overtop of her dress. And on her face is the distinctive warpaint of the Kyoshi Warriors.