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Mother’s come to visit.
Out of all people to stop by, Azula supposes, Ursa isn’t the worst. Mother has always been quiet and meek and easy to ignore. Some habits are hard to break, in life as in death as in institutionalization, and Azula has never been a mama’s girl; on a good day, Azula would be able to tune her out completely.
Today is not a particularly good day. Defying Azula’s willful ignorance, the Fire Lady’s figure haunts the open doorway of her room, calling out in a tone gentler than she’d ever have used in life.
Softly, sweetly: a voice reserved for turtleducks and Zuko and things easily bruised. Not monsters.
“Azula?”
The girl in question observes her visitor lazily from the corner of her eye. The right half of Ursa’s skull is caved in, bone shattered and concave, revealing the gray, pulsating tissue underneath. Her eye sockets are bloodied hollows.
It seems as likely a fate as any other, seeing how Princess Consort Ursa’s cause of death was never publicized. Sometimes, Mother is draped in the Fire Lord’s robes, with burns licking up and down her bare chest. Sometimes it’s a loose dress and a white silk cord wrapped around her neck, or the five-piece rags of the drawn and quartered. Azula’s favorite is when she gets to see Mother drowned, her fingernails bloody from struggling and her limbs swollen up to comical proportions, but nowadays Azula rarely gets what she wants.
Often, Mother wears a spotless royal gown, and nothing visibly fatal at all.
“Azula, are you there?”
Today, Mother is in the brocade garment Azula last saw her in, a silken red-gold thing suited more to the floors of court than the filth of prison. A steady drip, drip, drip of cerebrospinal fluid stains her slim shoulder, the dark patch spreading insidiously across fine fabric, and what’s left of her hair has been gathered into an elaborately pinned and braided updo.
Despite everything, the style is rather lovely. Azula wants to set it on fire.
“Apologies, Mother, but I’m hardly in a state for guests,” she says, instead of lighting up a dead woman. She props herself up on the mattress with her elbows. “You’ll have to excuse my poor hospitality.”
Ursa smiles lightly in the direction of Azula’s voice. “Of course.”
Mother delicately picks her way over to the bed. The ratty mattress doesn’t sink when she sits on it, nary a crease appearing on the bleach-white sheets, but Azula still feels an inexplicable pull forwards. Struck by this odd sensation, she doesn’t have time to slap away the pale hand cupping her cheek. Ursa’s fingers are thin and cold on her face.
“You’re so skinny,” her mother chides. “You need to eat more.”
A steaming wooden bowl of congee cools on the bedside table, untouched, as have her last three meals. Azula snorts. “I’d like to be fully cognizant when they execute me, if it’s all the same to you.”
“They’re not going to execute you, Azula. And you need to eat.” Ursa tsks as her knuckles graze Azula’s gaunt cheeks, the sunkenness of her eyelids. “I promise they haven’t drugged your porridge.”
“What, like you promised Grandfather you didn’t drug his tea?” Azula takes the opportunity to toss away her mother’s wrist, drawing her knees to her chest like a child. She would never usually allow herself this show of weakness, especially not in front of someone like Ursa, but it’s not as if the woman can see her right now.
Her mother thins her lips. Her gaze, eyeless and eerie, somehow meets Azula’s. “I was doing what I had to.”
Azula forces herself to glare back. “Am I not doing the same?”
“You’re starving yourself over an impossibility, darling. You know Zuko wouldn’t do that to you.”
“Zuzu won’t have a choice,” Azula snaps.
“Why not?”
Azula rolls her eyes. “Surely even you aren’t that ignorant. His reign is unstable enough without me in the equation, and the court is crammed fuller with loyalists than a mooseberry-stuffed turtleduck. How many groups have already sprung up in opposition to his claim? I’ve been contacted by three, for Agni’s sake.”
(There’s a small pile of ash in the corner of her room where she burned the coded letters. Her room has no nook or cranny big enough to fit three sheets of paper, and anyway, she gets surprise inspections from the guards every month or so.)
“Azula—”
Azula cuts her off. “You were easy to disappear, Mother. You weren’t charismatic, or powerful, or even nobility. The princess consort hardly existed in the people’s collective consciousness. But I’m different—for each person that hates me, there’s a hundred that adore their Crown Princess,” she sneers. “If Zuzu killed me with no reasoning, it would be political suicide. But he can’t keep me alive, either, so where does that leave him?”
“Have you ever considered,” her mother urges, “that Zuko might want to help you?”
The ferocity of the fit of giggles that overtakes Azula almost shocks her. It’s been a long time since she laughed this hard. “He doesn’t want to help me, Mother dearest, he’s terrified of me. And even if he wasn’t, I don’t need his help,” she cackles. “I don’t need his pity, or his kindness, or whatever the fuck he’s so graciously deigned to give me last.”
“Then what do you need, Azula?” Ursa pleads. Her brow is furrowed in pain and concern, which only makes Azula laugh harder.
“What do I need?” she chokes out between sniggers. “I need his crown. I need him dead. I need you dead, properly, because it obviously didn’t stick the first time, and I need to get—I need to get out of this Agni-damned room, fuck—”
Her mother’s arms are, quite suddenly, wrapped around her. Azula finds herself weeping into spinal fluid and silk.
“He’s terrified of me,” Azula screams. “You’re all terrified of me, and you should be, because I’m a monster and when I get out of here I’m burning everything he’s built to the fucking ground. ”
“I’m not afraid of you, Azula,” Ursa murmurs into her hair. “I don’t think you’re a monster.”
They’ve had this conversation before. Azula knows how it ends, and she can think of nothing she’d like less than to go through it again, but when Azula clutches at her, the bruising grip of her fingers only sloughs the tissue off of her mother’s bones. Slapping a palm over Ursa’s mouth does nothing when her lips and tongue come away like the flesh of an overripe fruit.
By the end, it’s a skeleton that whispers “I love you,” into her ear.