Burn (oneshot)

Title: Burn
Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Rating: T
Characters: Azula, Ursa, Zuko
Warnings: Spoilers for Sozin's Comet, present-tense rambling, psychosis, non-hallucinatory hallucinations, and is unbeta'd.
Chapter: 1/1
Word Count: 965
Notes: I have to say that writing Azula is fun, if challenging, and I'm not sure I quite pulled it off but I'm pretty happy anyway. This is really based on the fact that I want to see a family reunion for the Fire Nation royals, but I don't think it would turn out especially well on several fronts. There's also so much more I could do with this, but I have enough stuff to do right now without adding another multichapter to the mix. If anyone else wants to take the idea and run with it, GO AHEAD. I'd love to read it.
Teaser: She scrambles forward, struggling to move across the ground, her shackles holding her hands just shy of the grate. She leans as far as she can, puts her forehead to the linked metal, and rasps out “Mama…”


. : Burn: .

She burns.

She burns and she burns and she howls from deep in her throat, sobs and screams and can’t stop won’t stop doesn’t remember how to stop—

It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair that they should see her like this, when all she can do is claw at her face and scream and choke and cast weak blue light from her fingertips, shackles too heavy for her to complete the motion to make it brighter.

She’s always been like this. She screams it, loud and long to the sky, the metal walls of her cell reverberating on and on, even after she’s finally too hoarse to scream, too hoarse to speak, choking on air and tears and the burning inside her head.

She’s a monster. Everyone knows she’s a monster, they’ve always known, and she wishes so hard that she could be sorry.

She can’t. No matter what she does, she can’t be sorry.

Because she’s always been like this.

It’s why she doesn’t look up when she hears the locks clanking and whining, why she doesn’t move when the door creaks open, why she doesn’t say a thing when a shadow blocks the sliver of light from the outside.

She hears the delicate tap of slippered feet on the metal flooring, can just barely smell the familiar breath of vanilla blossoms and cinnamon sticks, but still she doesn’t turn. The chain links barring her cage from the visitor section of the cell rattle slightly as fingers push through them and hold tight.

A long moment passes in silence.

She thinks she can hear her visitor’s heartbeat.

The scent in the air is thick now, so thick she chokes again, doubling over to cough and gasp. It hurts, her throat is so raw she thinks it might always hurt now. The smell makes her cry again, harder, and she struggles to lift her hands and wipe at her face.

“…Oh, my poor little girl.”

The voice is low and feminine. Older, a little rougher than she remembers. More tired. The tone is familiar, but not one she ever heard for herself—only by proxy, only secondhand.

It’s the tone her mother always took when she spoke to Zuko.

Now, at last, she turns. Metallic gold meets warm amber, and her breath catches in her ragged, ruined throat.

“…Mother…”

The woman kneels, runs her hand down the fence. “Azula,” she says softly, “I am so sorry.”

She just stares. This…This isn’t like before. She can smell her this time, taste her in the air. Vanilla blossoms and cinnamon sticks. Cookies and tea, she’d have them every day at eleven. Every day, for as long as she can remember. Vanilla cookies and cinnamon tea.

She’s changed, her mother. There are strands of white mingling with the inky black of her hair, faint lines around her honey-colored eyes and her gentle, ever-smiling mouth.

This isn’t the same as before her coronation.

This is real.

She scrambles forward, struggling to move across the ground, her shackles holding her hands just shy of the grate. She leans as far as she can, puts her forehead to the linked metal, and rasps out “Mama…”

Ursa smiles, sad and hurting, and leans her brow to the fence just on the other side from her daughter. “I am so sorry, Azula. If I’d been able to stay, if I’d known what was happening, I promise I wouldn’t have let you fall.”

“Yes you would,” she hisses. “I’m not Zuzu. You came back for Zuzu, not me. Never me. You hate me.”

“I don’t hate you.”

“You think I’m a monster.”

Ursa’s fingers lace into the latticework again. “I think you’ve lost your way.”

“You—You wish father had been ordered to kill me instead of Zuzu!”

Ursa closes her eyes, a pained expression flitting over her features, and moves her hands down to fit through the gaps in the fence and stroke her mad daughter’s cheeks.

“I love you, Azula. No matter what you are, I love you. I’ve always loved you.”

She—Azula, who burns blue and screams in her sleep—lets out a sob.

*

Zuko is waiting outside the door to Azula’s cell when Ursa comes out, almost an hour later. He’s taller than his mother now, black hair down past his shoulderblades, gold eyes sharp and confident—but concerned when they cast down on her, curious.

“She’s sleeping,” Ursa says softly, looking not at him but at the space just past his left shoulder. She closes her eyes. “How long?”

“A year and a half,” he replies grimly. “Since Sozin’s Comet.”

She shakes her head. “I am so sor—”

“No.”

She starts, turns to look up at him. On his right she sees Ozai in his youth, on his left she sees this strange, scarred king that was once her child—is still her child, but will never be a child again.

“Don’t be sorry.” He smiles, just a little. It’s crooked, the expression stifled by the mass of twisted tissue on his left. “You set everything into motion, Mother. You played your part.”

She shakes her head. “But Azula—”

“Azula chose her own path, and it made her into this. Maybe now she can choose the path back.”

Ursa stares. This man—it seems he was never a boy—so ugly and so beautiful, so brilliant it burns, is her son. She wonders how in the world she’ll catch up with him.

She lowers her head, and she hopes.

*

In the dark, curled up on the floor, she burns.

She burns and she burns—but she sings in her sleep, and dreams of amber eyes and gentle hands and “I love you, Azula, I’ve always loved you,” and vanilla blossoms and cinnamon sticks.

. : End: .