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They should have killed her.
She’d wanted them to, Zuko and his pet waterbender. She’d been defeated, and this had been a duel to the death. They should have killed her.
But they didn’t.
They bound her in chains, instead, and kept her in a metal cage. In time (no longer than a day, but it felt like a year) they brought the Avatar to her. The boy (just a boy, a stupid boy, but a boy who’d felled an empire) pressed a hand to her forehead. She felt herself bend, break, scream, weaken. Freeze. Azula froze, in that moment, every drop of warmth in her trembling body taken from her.
They removed her chains, then, and left her alone in a cage long but not tall, too short for her to stand inside, with a candle for warmth and light (and wasn’t that an insult, leaving her with a flame she could no longer feel, touch, come to know and love?).
They took Azula’s soul from her.
---
She rots in the darkness, miserable and alone, and eons seem to pass. It is no matter, the shadows dance for her, the world kneels at her bruised and bloodied feet, (and perhaps it isn’t real, and perhaps she is mad, yes, yes, quite mad).
She’d taken her own sanity because true power must consume, burn, ruin its owner and exalt them the same. Azula was always mad, but the shell, the pretty shell, had been burned away. Now all that is left is the demon that had always been, and she is so very, very cold.
There had been too much fire, she thinks, after months of metallic silence, curled in one corner, barely moving save for within her too-vivid dreams. Yes, far, far too much fire, but she’d loved it so.
It is two months before Azula realizes that the flame is still warm, even if it does not throb and pulse beneath her skin, even if it is no longer her heartbeat. From then on, she sleeps a little closer to the candle, and murmurs to it softly, as if in prayer.
---
The candle doesn’t talk back.
But Azula knows this, Azula knows many things, and she knows that the silly, flickering flame of the candle cannot reply (she tells it secrets anyway, perhaps because it cannot speak, she tells it of ice and waterbenders and how lovely it must be, to feel this cold all the time and not to fear it, but embrace it).
She clings to the fire left to her. She does not know what she is without it, and she is frightened to find out.
---
“Are you sure this is a good idea?”
Voices. Azula perks up, like a rabbit in the springtime, like a child left too long in the dark, at the sound of voices. She knows those voices. She hates those voices.
No one talks to Azula. They leave her her food, and leave her in silence. No one talks to the mad princess; no one cares enough to discover whether she would talk back if they did.
If she’s honest (and Azula hasn’t been truly honest in a long, long time), she doesn’t know the answer herself. Would she talk back? Or is silence all that is left to her, now, the closest approximation of death they can manage while moralistically maintaining her heartbeat.
“I’m sure, Zuko. We need to know if she’s still… her.”
“Sokka, she’s my sister,” no, no she isn’t, she was never that, sisters love their brothers, and all Azula can feel is icy hatred, envy, pain in her chest like she’s never known. She instinctively calls forth a burst of vengeful fire… but, of course, nothing happens. “Trust me, she’ll always be what she is.”
“You didn’t kill her,” Sokka says, quietly, as if it means something. Stupid puppy: her living only means that Zuko can ensure a lifetime of suffering, without ever sacrificing his precious high ground (and far be it for her to point out that she’d had the top of a mountain from which to rule, and her fall had been so sudden she’d barely felt it).
“No, I didn’t. Could you kill Katara?”
Azula hisses quietly in the darkness: she loathes the water girl more even than Zuko himself. Her goodly opposite, her soft mirror image, her destroyer. Zuko was her brother, but Katara was her counterpoint.
She should have killed Azula: they shouldn’t exist in the same universe.
“Katara never tried to kill me,” Sokka says.
“There’s nothing in there worth saving, Sokka,” Zuko insists, as if he’d know, as if he’s certain (and how can he be, when Azula herself doesn’t know anymore?). “You’re wasting your time.”
“I know,” Sokka says, too lightly, as if they discuss the weather and not a woman stripped of her very essence, and locked away in a metal coffin. As if it doesn’t matter, it’s a whim, nothing more. Azula was lord of half the world, and now she is a peasant-warrior’s whim. She wishes she had the energy to even whisper a word in her own defence. “But look… Mai-“
“I know what Mai said,” Zuko says, heavily, quickly, and what happened there? Azula feels a small, wicked smile twitch her lips, her madness still roaring in her brain, someone’s not telling secrets. Someone has something to say, and there is blood in this tale, she can nearly taste it on her tongue. “I know… just, don’t expect miracles, okay?”
“I made a promise,” Sokka says, and Azula sees it then, the barest crack of light through a door always kept sealed and locked, an opening. “I’ll see it through.”
“Okay,” Zuko remains invisible, as the water boy enters the room. “I warned you.”
“You did the ominous thing,” Sokka replies, with a grin, and Azula growls low in her throat (a jester, she is visited by a jester, a fool in a blue tunic, and they keep her alive out of spite, not mercy), “You’re the Ominous Lord, we’ll make it official with another big ceremony.”
Zuko laughs, quietly. Azula wants to watch them bleed.
And then the door shuts, and they are alone.
“Did you hear that?” Sokka starts. Azula does not reply, she doesn’t speak to puppies. Only candles, flames, fires, things with heat and power. Sokka cannot even bend: what use is he to anyone, really?
But she did hear it. For all that she is mad, Azula does still know the common tongue.
“Right, don’t answer me,” he nods, ruefully: she can see everything in the light of her beloved, sweet little candle, where he is likely blind. An advantage, if a futile one, and if there is anything Azula knows it is a battlefield. “Look, I came to treat you like a person, even though God knows you don’t deserve it. You tried to kill my sister, you nearly succeeded!” he throws up his hands. “God, I don’t even know why I’m here.”
He leaves without another word, and that should be the end of it.
---
He’s back, some time later, days or weeks, she doesn’t know.
“You deserve all of this, you know.”
“Why?” she snaps, hisses. He flinches, in surprise she thinks, more than fear (what has he to fear? They took everything that made her dangerous, strong, powerful, her, in one negligent brush of a hand).
“Um, because you wanted to burn down half the planet?” he quips back, and no, no, that is not what she asked. She won’t say any more: she is insane, but he is stupid, and this is her cage, her world. She won’t speak with dogs too blind and ignorant to answer a simple question.
“Because we left you in here,” he says, softly, unexpectedly. “You deserve it, but still.”
Pity. She tastes ashes and bile in her mouth: the whelp comes to her out of pity.
“I would have killed you,” she hisses, softly. “If I ever get out of this cage, I still will.”
To her surprise, he smiles.
“Nice to see you too, Azula.”
He stands, straightens, and leaves.
---
Azula has become used to the dark: it’s her home, now, with just her pretty candle for company (she suspects they change it while she sleeps, for how else could they keep it from ever burning low and out, but if she doesn’t think then she won’t weep for the loss).
She forgets the boy’s visits. They matter little; she is alone either way.
But he returns again, and this time there is no Zuko to tell him no.
“Hello, Azula,” he says, his voice caught between resignation and an attempt at cordiality. She does not answer.
He sits with her for perhaps twenty minutes, and says nothing, simply examining a tablet he brought with him before standing and leaving. He stole the light from her candle, all she possesses in the world, to read markings she could not make out from her position in the corner, as far from him as could be. He stole the light, and she hates him all the more for that.
---
He returns at what are, perhaps, regular intervals. Azula cannot know: she is both mad, and hidden from the sun, after all. Sokka comes and sits at the foot of her cage, and reads or draws or, sometimes, sharpens his sword with a whetstone, and makes her teeth wince.
She almost snaps at him for that, before she remembers that she does not speak to ignorant peasants. She is a mad princess, but still a lord, always a lord. Her cage is her domain, and she will not bow.
---
It is four meetings (it is an odd way to measure time, but it is all she has) before he says more than a greeting to her.
“I brought you some meat,” he says, softly. “You must be sick of gruel.”
She says nothing: she is not an animal, begging for scraps and treats.
“I’m staying whether you like it or not,” he tells her, softly. “I know you can speak.”
“I am little more than a snarling street-cat to you,” she snaps, “leave me alone.”
“To me, yes,” he says, candidly. It brings her up short: the fool knows he has her at the weakest a person can be, and now has no fear in exploiting it. How cruel these heroes are, when given the chance. “But a friend of yours made me swear to visit. She used to come, but now you have me instead."
“No one comes,” she says, her rasping, unused voice harsh in the dark. She laughs: it is broken like a cracked flute, and she’d once had such a pretty laugh. “Not ever.”
“Mai did,” Zuko says, softly. “When you slept, or when you raved. She came and sat with you. You scratched her once.”
Azula remembers, a dim memory of a hand reaching for her candle, the candle she loves as if it were her own child (the child she will now never have, the prince or princess who would have been as cruel and beautiful as their mother). She had lashed out in anger, and heard a cry. She’d thought she’d dreamt it.
“Yes,” she whispers, softly, too quietly, surely, for the peasant to hear.
“She made me promise to come instead,” Sokka tells her, “she doesn’t think you should be left alone.”
“I am always alone,” Azula’s voice is louder, and shaking, like it used to in her glory days when she was about to destroy a village. Now she can barely muster the strength to reach through the bars, to strike again as she must have before. Now she is weak, and so very, very cold.
“You deserve it,” Sokka replies, a little harshly. He would have killed her, she thinks. Absurdly, that makes her hate him a little less.
She does deserve it, for losing to them
He leaves soon after; the meat he left behind makes her a little stronger (she’s been too weak to even move in so long, that stretching tired muscles feels strange and new, but it doesn’t matter: she’ll never walk anyplace again, anyway)
---
He brings her food again, next time, and the next. The sixth time, he asks the guard on the way out to spread the bars to the ceiling, so that she can stand.
He tries to sit nearer the candle, one day; she hisses and scuttles a little closer, and he backs away. He says he’s sorry. He seems to mean it.
She tried to kill him, so many times, and he’s sorry?
She doesn’t know if that’s disgustingly weak, or unbelievably strong. She used to know strength from weakness, but she barely knows light from dark, anymore, so it’s hard to tell.
---
“You said something,” she says, and shocks herself, when he’s sat by her now-tall cage once more. She doesn’t try to hurt him, and so he remains. She has lost count of his visits: they are as normal a thing as the rising sun or the flickering candlelight, now.
“I say lots of things,” he replies, and he thinks he’s funny.
“About Mai,” she specifies. His face turns grave.
“Ask, Azula,” he says, softly. As if he’s sad for her, or perhaps on her behalf. As if he’s trying to brace her for a fall.
“Why did she visit?”
She sees him relax; she wonders what he had thought she was about to ask (it hardly matters, the expectations of a stupid pup, but aside from the candle his presence is all that she has, and so it is not stupid for her to worry for it, a little).
“She was your friend, Azula,” he reminds, as if to a child (but then Azula was always a child, a wicked little girl in love with her father’s pride, when it was Zuko who was allowed to leave, disgraced, and find peace, adulthood).
She cannot be offended. She has not earned anything better, not from Sokka of the South Pole.
“She betrayed me,” she says, softly. She feels a tear fall, but thankfully, thankfully, it is too dark for him to see.
“You betrayed yourself,” Sokka argues, in that same soft voice. “You could have seen it was lost and redeemed yourself.”
“What happened to your jokes, boy?” she snaps, instead of addressing that little grain of wisdom (it’ll remain, just under her skin, festering and niggling until it destroys her from within, but he’ll not see, no, he’ll never see).
“I don’t feel like provoking an angry former firebender,” he replies, a little lighter than before, more like how she remembers him from her days in the sun. She prefers him this way, she thinks: gentle gravity sets a little too somberly on his shoulders, and he was built to play the fool.
He played the fool but won the war. There’s truth there, she thinks, if only it were bright enough in here to see it.
“Alright,” he sighs, continuing, “What do the little kids in Omashu say when their parents tuck them in at night?”
She doesn’t say anything; the pause, she thinks, is for effect.
“O' ma, I love shu!’”
They’re both startled by the odd, cracked giggle that comes out of Azula’s parched lips.
---
After that, he brings her a joke along with the food whenever he visits.
He is irreverent, inconsiderate, even insensitive, much of the time. Azula likes it that way, as much as she can like anything or anyone anymore. Sokka’s not so weak as to tiptoe around a creature so thoroughly beaten, as to be utterly harmless. She’s the defeated, and he’s the conqueror. That, and that alone, makes sense.
She doesn’t know why he comes to tell jokes, to give her better food than the watery gruel that sustains her, to bring her out. She crawls close enough to the edge of her cage to speak properly, now, and the candlelight is brighter here. She prefers it, she thinks, to her corner.
When he is in the room, the world falls into straight lines again: weak and strong, winner and loser, free and captive, lost and found. Absurd as it seems, Sokka’s presence makes the world make sense, just a little, just enough to find Azula buried under a mad lord’s robe.
“What is Appa's tail to a Fire Nation soldier?
A Fire Swatter!”
“How many avatars does it take to screw in a light bulb?
One to find out where the light bulb is, one to actually screw it in, one to tell theprevious guy how to screw in the light bulb, and another one to BE the light bulb”
Her favourite is personal, of course. He tells it to her more than once, to make her laugh hard enough that her stomach hurts.
“So a man in the Fire Nation is looking at the sky, and he says to his friend, ‘hey, I thought Sozen’s comet was last year!’ and his friend says, ‘yeah, it was, why’d you ask?’ The man’s confused, and asks, ‘Well then, what’s that bright flying useless thing in the sky?’ His friend replies ‘Oh, that? That’s Prince Zuko’s honor!’”
It’s the first time Sokka says his name in Azula’s hearing. She’s amazed when she doesn’t fall back off the deep end, into the madness she has only just escaped.
---
“Why doesn’t Mai visit anymore?” she asks, out of the blue. Sokka looks up from the meal he’s brought to share with her, and she sees his face tighten.
He looks her in the face, these days. It’s nice, to see features, eyes and nose and mouth. She’s almost fond of these, now: they’re all she sees, in the perpetual gloom.
Until he goes away again, of course, back into the victoriously peaceful world, and leaves its defeated nemesis to rot in the dark once more.
“She can’t,” he says, softly.
“Why not?” Azula knows she sounds like a child again, but all the fight, all the spite and anger and all that firey hatred, has been knocked out of her with her bending. Now she is only sad and curious: now she is more water than fire (and maybe that’s Sokka’s fault, maybe he has poisoned her with her element’s opposite, maybe that’s his purpose here).
“She and Zuko… they were going to have a child,” he tells her, softly. Her heart catches and stops with the horrid, numbing jealousy. “But something went wrong. Mai was never really strong enough, not in the right ways and…”
“No jokes now?” she asks, softly. He shakes his head.
“We all came to see her. She knew what was happening, even while Zuko and Katara denied it, and everyone else just stared at her. She knew, and she bound us all with promises. Zuko’s supposed to remarry and love again, someone to can hold him steady, Aang’s to rebuild the Air Nomads… and I‘m to keep an eye on you.” Sokka laughs, quietly, ruefully, “We didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into. I don’t think your friend trusted us to run the world without her.”
“Without her?” Azula’s voice cracks, just a little, but she doesn’t care. Of course she doesn’t: Mai betrayed her, Mai hurt her, Mai let her rot here.
Mai came to visit her, often, even when she couldn’t know she was there. Mai made Sokka continue that legacy, and made sure she wasn’t alone the rest of her days.
Two more tears fall. She’s shed three, in all this time locked away in the dark, and two aren’t even for herself. Mai was always too good for her, she thinks, in the quiet, soft edges of her mind. Mai was always the sanity, the anchor, the weight.
“It was a deathbed promise,” Sokka tells her, and confirms what she really already knew. Mai was always better than her: she’d even managed to die first, and surrounded by those who loved her.
When Azula dies she will be alone (but then, she has always known that, hasn’t she?).
“I’m sorry,” Sokka says. His hand touches her shoulder through the bars.
They sit that way for a long time. Azula can’t move to brush him off (and really, no part but the shrinking part that is still fire and hatred and burning spires wants him to leave at all).
---
Sokka visits every week, or so he says. He does so for a long, long time.
Sometimes he stays a whole evening, and they talk. Azula has never felt so sane, as she does then, with Sokka on the other side of the bars and Azula without her powers, powerless and simple. She’d never been that, out in the world: had she been born a peasant she would have schemed herself to better things.
Her mother called her a monster, and monsters can’t be tamed.
But in her cage, she is docile. Sokka treats her like a human being, like no one has in so long, and without the fire… the fire made everything difficult, hot and bright and distracting, desperate for release. Here things are cool, and quiet, calm and whole.
He visits, and they talk, and gradually the years roll by. Gradually she is granted a window, and a bowl of water, a carpet for her bare feet. Gradually she earns a human cage, albeit a cage still.
The candle remains, day or night. She screams and claws at any who attempt to touch it while she watches.
The candle is all she has left, and it knows the best and the worst of her. It remains. It will remain until she no longer has breath in her body.
So long as Sokka keeps coming to see her, now and then, (now with pictures of his nieces and nephews, now with news of the world, always with another meal and another bad joke) then Azula can pretend, if only for an hour or two, that her mother was wrong. That she was never a monster, only mislead. That there is something real and good in her.
(There isn’t, and she knows that, but the fiction is nice all the same)
---
Azula lives her life in that room. After a while, it becomes more bearable, more light, more air, more food, even books and little comforts after a while. Forgiveness comes as slowly as water erodes stone, but come it does. (That’s the beauty of a hero defeating you, she thinks often: it is in their nature to forgive)
Sokka even asks for advice on occasion, confides in her. She trades him, a secret for a secret, and tells him she is glad that they didn’t kill her. They should have, but she’s not sorry they didn’t.
He tells her he feels the same. It’s the closest to love Azula has ever felt (and it’s still a long way from what the rest of humanity feels every day, but it’s warmth of a sort, and Azula hasn’t been warm since the Avatar came for her all those years ago).
He’s as important as the candle, now, but he always leaves. There’s a world outside her cage, she knows, and he belongs out there. She has always, and will always, belong here.
Behind bars, where everyone is safe from her, and where she is safe from herself.
Sokka kisses her forehead, the first and only time more than hands have touched, and Azula basks in it, her first and only true kiss. The memory of it keeps her warm as only the candle has before. It is a rare and fragile thing, and a blessing, and Azula has had so few blessings in her long, lost life.
---
His last visit is quiet: they have both grown quieter, as the years have progressed.
In their middle years they’d debated, as in their younger they’d communed and listened. Now they are both old, and they simply sit and take whatever they need from one another’s company. Azula knew, long ago, what she gains from Sokka’s presence: he has never, not once, told her why he still keeps the promise he made to a friend’s dying wife, no more than an acquaintance and a former enemy, so very long ago.
To ask would be to invite consideration, and then perhaps he’d not come back. He is as dear to her as flame, for all that he is water and steel, and Azula, who has never treasured anything beyond the flames that are her kin, treasures him too.
That day, they play the game of tiles her uncle once loved so dearly. She has become Iroh, she realizes, with a careworn smile, a smile only Sokka has ever seen.
His hair is grey, his skin old and wrinkled, and had she a mirror she'd see she looks much the same. Her hair grew back years ago: she stopped caring long before it did.
---
Azula’s last day, she feels when she awakens. Her bones creak, old and hard and ready for sleep, and her room, no longer a cage, is larger than ever before, and harder to move about.
She eats the gruel that, after all these years, has never changed, and checks on the candle. It burns low this morning, and she sees it sputter and feels its pain: she is weaker still, today, weak as she was those first months when the right back corner was her home, when the cage allowed her not even to stand, and she first whispered her secrets into its flickering light.
“Today will be the day,” she tells it, and hopes she’s right.
She knows she is, when the door opens, and blue robes and grey hair appear. But this figure is not the man she expects, her oldest and only friend. It is her double and opposite, the woman who vanquished her so long ago.
Her shoulders are bent and frail, her head bowed, her face cast in such sorrow that even Azula, who once wished such pain and destruction on this woman, can barely look.
They were girls, when they’d dueled. They are women now, old women, and share a love of the same man who raised them both, in his own way.
Katara doesn’t have to say anything. Azula doesn’t ask.
“Sokka made me promise to pass on a message,” Katara starts, slowly. Her words are needless, even diminishing to the overwhelming weight that has settled over Azula’s world, but she says them anyway. “He said, what do you call it when twenty air benders are in one room together? A wind tunnel.”
Azula’s fourth tear falls. It is the only one, and it’s gone in an instant, but Katara is a water bender so of course she sees it. Azula doesn’t care: let her look.
Katara leaves after a few more words, less than empty sympathies and a brief moment – so brief, because they’re too different and too similar and should never, ever, have met – of shared loss. Then Katara leaves, back to her world, and Azula curls up on her sleeping mat once more, and pretends she is seventeen again, mad and battered and broken beyond repair, and that she has a lifetime of calm, still darkness, and candlelight, and Sokka’s visits ahead of her.
(And she was right, today was the day, and when she slips into sleep she knows that it’s for the last time).