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There's a point in Azula's life where she’s sat by a river and finally takes the chance to gaze upon her own reflection in the dimness of the moonlight. She’s not sleeping again. She can’t. She’s got far too many enemies now; she’s alienated herself from those last few who supported her and now she’s a loose end. If she sleeps now, they could get her. She can hear them now, sneaking up behind her with their swords drawn, and she whips around in a fury of blue flame and a cry that was supposed to sound intimidating, but in reality, comes out as quite desperate.
It all works out, though. She’s not embarrassed too badly, since there was no person there after all.
She sighs, and finally takes that look at herself. For a while, when she was still holed up in inns with a pseudonym and just enough makeup to make her look unlike herself, she would look in the mirror and see only Ursa, her mother’s face masking her own.
After that, it was reflected in the shards of silvered glass that littered the floor, hundreds of times around her. A sick reality that she couldn’t escape.
Inns come and go, she’s traveled most of the world, and they’d run out of safe houses. They'd run out of everything. She'd run out of everything. Money. Food. Supporters. Her existence was day to day, stealing like the scum in the dirtiest parts of Ba Sing Se, pulling scraps from dumpsters and hiding from guards out of habit, a life she’d laughed at just years before.
With her gaunt reflection staring back at her, she laughs. And then laughs harder as the action only sucked her cheeks in more, making her face seem like more of a skull than she’d ever seen it be. How things had grown so dire without her noticing, she’d had no idea.
Then again, she has no idea about many things.
She knows nothing of the passage of time. Nothing of the day of the week, the season, nor how many years had passed her by. She knows only the rise and fall of the sun, but not the hour that it is, for the sun is an unreliable timekeeper.
She prefers the moon anyway; the cooler light fits better with the cold blue of her inner flame.
Her laughter dies down but the hysteria doesn’t. The pangs of hunger force her to still, gripping the earth beneath her to try and ground herself and ignore the way her ever empty stomach twists and constricts, trying to digest the last dregs of anything that she has.
She snorts, realising that it's her pride that she’s finally swallowing.
She lays back as the pain overwhelms her, and she wonders if it's just time to stop. Maybe it would be easier to sleep, let them kill her. It would be over, she could rest. Maybe she could head to the capital. Zuko had always been too forgiving for his own good, he’d welcome her back with open arms ,surely.
She retches, launching onto her hands and knees so she doesn’t choke on the bile. Perhaps she can’t quite get rid of all of her remaining pride at once.
She’d quite like to, though.
Zuko... he’d welcome her back. Maybe he’d send her back to the asylum. She’d have to beg. The thought makes her retch once more. Still, at least the asylum fed her. She had a bed, and it was a stable source of food, but they forced those foul-tasting solutions into her mouth, pulled and strained her arms tightly around her body to neutralise her threat level. Back then, Zuko had promised that they were going to help her. He’d reassured her as she was muzzled and had her arms bound so that she couldn’t fight.
He'd lied.
He must have done it on purpose; it must have been some sick and twisted revenge for everything that she’d done to him. If that was the case, well the feeling welling up in her chest must have been pride. She'd not felt anything positive in... a long time. She didn’t know.
Maybe it was time to give up, she muses, running her hand through the hair she’d hacked and destroyed in an attempt to remove all traces of her mother from her. Maybe she could do it, if she played it off right. She could go to the palace, and beg for her place back, and maybe she could lie and tell Zuko she loved him and that she was sorry.
A laugh peals from her lips again, and for a moment she could almost taste the wax from the lipstick she wore so many moons ago dancing on her tongue as it darted out to wet them. The action stung, they must have been cracked for so long that they’d scar. Surely Zuko couldn’t turn her away when she looked so pitiful, he wouldn’t be able to. And even if he did, the Avatar was supposed to be very forgiving, wasn’t he?
For a second, as she dares to let herself hope, the voices were quiet, and she could feel Zuko’s hand running through her hair, the tugging of the brush through the knots and a whispered apology, because he loved her.
Then she laughs again. She must have been more ill than once thought if she could think of such a scene. Zuko would sooner have her executed than brush her hair before dinner, to make her presentable to the inevitable gang of diners.
How jealous she was, she realises, that he had people to love him when that was the last thing he deserved. He was always so weak, blubbering and wailing about something insignificant, he was a sub-par firebender that couldn’t even defeat her as her mind shattered in real time. No, that job was done by that horrible girl from the water tribes, the one who should have been just like her, the one who had too grown up without a mother, thrust carelessly into the mouth of a war they were far too young to fight. The only reason she hadn’t been chewed up and swallowed by it like Azula had, was because she had a father, one that truly loved her.
Azula forces herself into a seated position and wails. She mourns for the first time. She mourns her father, how she had lost him, the only thing that she had ever allowed herself to love. She mourns her mother, for never loving her when she had the chance and living with the guilt. She mourns her friends, Ty Lee and Mai. She should have scared them more. She should have scared them more.
And she shrieks, because her body can’t handle the pain anymore.
It's time to go home, Azula, she decides, and Ursa agrees.
It's time to go home.
So she does. She hauls herself back to the caldera, and it takes longer than she’ll ever admit but she does it. Maybe one day she’ll tell this story to her nieces and nephews when they complain about the palanquin being too slow.
“Your poor aunt Azula had to carry herself and her cargo all the way from a village in the earth kingdom back to the caldera, to the palace alone, over mountains and through jungles.”
She snorts at the thought again. She was going to jail, and yet she was excited. It was time to go home, it was over. She was done. She’d rot in prison just like her father, the way she had always meant to. She didn’t know if Zuko still had men looking for her anymore, or if she looked so incorrect nowadays that they’d walked right past her, never once thinking that the vagrant in the drain could be the princess.
She vaguely remembers which gate she comes up to, as she pulls her little cart without the aid of any animal, and slips though with a merchant as she mumbles her way home to herself. The streets had the audacity to look very different when one could actually see them, not obscured through the curtains of a palanquin.
It takes longer than she’ll ever admit, but she makes it to the gates of the palace.
She's stopped as she pulls her bags off of her cart and makes to move through the gate, of course. She’d have been furious if she hadn’t. It wouldn’t take long to verify her identity even if she didn’t look at all like she did aged fourteen, the cold fury of her fire was still within her, and the cart was engulfed in a blaze of brilliant blue, before cooling to the gentle crackling of an orange flame. Naturally, the girls in green chi block her before she even took her next breath, and as they drag her to the throne room, she laughs.
She’s weeping when she becomes aware of herself again, tucked up in a bed with a tray on her lap. A bowl of rice and a spicy smelling soup stare up at her watery eyes, a tear dropping into the vivid red, ripples disrupted by the shredded seafood within it. She surveys the room, and it's her old one, exactly as she left it.
She weeps again when she realises she can taste the soup on her tongue, and feel the harsh sting of the spices on her cracked lips. She presumes they’re bleeding, but she can’t bring herself to care. She fills herself up for the first time in what feels like years, and it may well have been, and lays back. She feels sick, over full.
It makes her smile, and the lingering bliss is enough to tug her gently into sleep.
Bliss never lasts, and she thinks she’d know this by now. It hits her worse when she wakes, there's no sun and for a second she thinks the world has ended because she’d forgotten where she is, she doesn’t know the time and she can’t feel the wind.
The voices spin and hiss awful things incoherently, like a storm of snakes in her own garden of eden. She grips her ears, desperately trying to block the noise, but they become more insistent. She can’t make out a word, and the volume raises higher, above the rapid thumping of her heart as she begins to panic. She grips her hair, and pulls hard. She can hear each strand leave her scalp with a rip, and for a second the pain calms the noise. She bites the apple like the snakes say, and opens her eyes.
Her room. The red silk sheets on her skin do little to ground her. She wants hessian, rough and abrasive against her skin. She rolls the silk between her fingertips, gently shushing the voices aloud in a way she knows never matters but she still feels better just to try, and gets out of the bed. She’s in a nightgown, but she goes for the door regardless. Decorum be damned, she wants to see that she was home, and not in some grim reconstruction of her bedroom to be her cell.
No, she needs to make sure.
She shoves the door open with her left foot, and gets into a rightward forward stance, in case she’s accosted. She thinks that maybe this is what the voices are warning her about this time, but they’re too incoherent to tell apart and decipher, and maybe if they wanted her to listen so badly then they should endeavour to be clearer.
Nothing happens, but a Kyoshi warrior looks into the doorway, and pulls out her fan when she sees that Azula is in a stance, ready to attack.
“It's just one of you. I’ll be going now.” the grittiness of her voice as she dismisses the warrior shocks her, and she sounds weak. Resentment must have flashed across her face, because the other woman tries to urge her back to bed.
“There’s nowhere for you to go, princess, but don’t fret. Your mother is stopping by in the morning.” The warrior is trying to be comforting, but something in Azula snaps. She grabs the woman, and with the last reserves of strength within her, slams her against the wall.
“You’re not to let that foul, treasonous woman anywhere near this room, no matter what she or the fire lord say to you. Do you understand me?” with the warm food still in her system, and her body finally accepting calories, she manages a venom to her voice that she’s not heard in... she doesn't know how long, but she’s glad to hear it again. She doesn’t let herself smile, but she does turn to go back to bed. The warrior was right, there’s nowhere to go. The sky is wine dark, like the depths of the oceans she’s sailed, not a single star to be seen. She searches for the moon, her guide. The dead girl, she remembers. When Zhao stole the moon, his greatest failure. Father had been furious, and she’d been scared at that time. She’ll never admit that, and it’s taken far too long to admit it to herself. She presses a hand against the glass of the window, blowing gently before she’s even realised she’d made her way there and willing the clouds to part. One dead girl to another, she thinks. She wants to thank her. She’ll pretend for her own sake that the moon gave her courage and not cowardice, that the rays didn’t make her think of the atrocities committed in her lifetime, that the white light on her near translucent skin didn’t make her sick to her stomach to think that she had grown a conscience in her time away.
She could honour the moon another day, thank it for taking pity on her in such a meaningful way.
“I just want it to stop, moon.” She whispers, “Please make it stop.”
The moon doesn’t hear her plea, and Azula sighs. She’s used up all of its goodwill, so she paces. For hours she paces as the paranoia sets in again, and the walls begin to crawl and the mirror begins to speak. It taunts her. It all taunts her. It always taunts her but she never knows what for, she can never make out real words in the sea of sound echoing in her skull, coming from the drawers in the dresser, knocking and trying to break out from behind the mirror and inside the closet, an ironic jab at how she’s constantly hid the thing that would have caused her own banishment. She raises a hand to the closet, wondering if she should open it.
She lowers her hand. Too far, too much, too soon. She should settle first.
Maybe Zuko would send her away again if he knew.
She’d dared to dream, and the voices filter away as the weight bears down on her. Their mission was to put her through hell, and she was miserable. Joy was fleeting, happiness was a farce and anyone who thought otherwise was an idiot and a liar. She lay on the bed again, trying to rip apart the silk sheets with her teeth.