Title: beat the devil's tattoo
Author: andromeda3116/cupid-painted-blind
Rating: Hard R, for gore
Characters/Pairings: Suki, Mai, cameos from Azula and mentions of Ty Lee; twisted Mai/Suki
Summary: They don't have a phrase for "Stockholm Syndrome" but Suki could write the book on it.
A/N: Song is the completely kick-ass "Beat the Devil's Tattoo" by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and you should listen to it now.
you have forsaken all the love you've taken, sleeping on a razor, there's nowhere left to fall
your body's aching, every bone is breaking, nothing seems to shake it, it just keeps holding on.
i thread the needle through, you beat the devil's tattoo -
Metal on metal wakes her up. A rhythmic ting-ing sound, something being tapped on something else, just slightly off-beat, just enough to really get under her skin. She swallows hard, old blood in her mouth, and opens her eyes. Soft gold ones look in at her, and she doesn't know whether to cringe or be relieved - it's the dark, gloomy girl, not the princess.
Knife wounds hurt far less than burns, but leave deeper scars. Azula has mastered the art of rationing pain for maximum amusement, but the dark girl doesn't care, and that's both better and worse; Suki can't figure out what she wants, let alone deny her of it, but she's also quicker to lose interest and leave Suki alone.
"Look who's awake," she croaks, opening the door and slipping in, hands taut in her sleeves. Suki strains against the chains ineffectually. She knows she can't break them, but she also knows that if she stops fighting, she'll die, one way or another. Twisting her features into a snarl that's more routine than emotion, she growls and clenches her jaw and prepares herself mentally, adding mortar to the walls she's spent weeks building.
"What do you want?" she snaps, because she's supposed to, because they have a script to follow, and because she knows that the dark girl won't tell her. The tenacious part of Suki wants Azula to come in, to tell her what she wants, to give her all the gruesome details; each time Azula comes by, she spends some time being sick in the corner of her cell, but less each time. She's working up an immunity to it, and it's not a moment too soon. But the dark girl throws a wrench into her plans - how can she defend against something that has no plan of attack? - and she worries that increased exposure to Gloomy will thin her defenses against Azula, that maybe there's only so much she can take without shattering.
"Hmm," is all Gloomy says in reply, tapping a knife against her cheek. She leans down until her eyes are level with Suki's, and curiosity flashes across her face. "What do you want?" she asks, voice barely a whisper. "Why are you here?"
"Why?" she shouts, a scream rising within her, desperate to change Gloomy's expression, to have an effect, to inspire empathy, to survive. "You put me here! You and your crazy princess! I'm trying to protect my people, my friends, my - " she stops speaking when her voice scratches to a halt, because if she continues to speak, she'll begin to sob, and Suki will not be seen to sob in front of anyone, Fire Nation or otherwise.
"But why?" Gloomy replies, unfazed. "Why fight for them?"
The words hit the silence with all the force of an arrow, and fall to the ground between them hard. Suki's walls shudder, but don't break. "Because they're mine. Because they don't deserve to be conquered and - and enslaved. Because no one else will, and someone has to. Why do you fight for the Fire Nation?"
Gloomy blinks. "I don't," she says flatly. "I fight for myself. Azula and I are old - " she hesitates " - friends. I'm here as a favor, nothing more."
Suki tries not to say it. She really tries not to speak, because she knows that anything she says will just make it worse. But the words rise up in her and force their way out of her mouth, and she lacks the strength to fight it. "Then that makes you worse than her," Suki spits. "At least Azula's fighting for something she believes in, or at least she's getting something out of it."
"What makes you think I'm not getting anything out of it?" Gloomy counters, before Suki can keep going. She doesn't even look angry, just still staring at her with those creepy yellow eyes and that knife tap-tap-tapping a rhythm on her cheek. Oddly, it's her nails that draw Suki's attention - they're perfect, manicured and filed and painted black. Too perfect, Suki thinks, for someone who fights with her hands. She should have scars from mis-thrown knives, chipped, uneven nails and cracked paint. That means that either Gloomy has a more-evil twin who does her fighting for her, or she - or perhaps someone else, for her - insists on having perfect nails, regardless of the situation.
It's obsessive behavior, the kind of attention to detail that you only see in really messed-up people and really traumatized people, who devote their time to perfecting tiny things that will distract them from the larger horrors.
She wonders if that explains Gloomy's knife skills, and Gloomy's personality, all at the same time.
Gloomy leaves without saying another word, and Suki knows she should consider it a win, since she didn't get any new wounds, but somehow, she just feels worse, like Gloomy has stumbled on a whole new sort of torture. She wonders what Gloomy's name is. She wonders what Gloomy is like when she doesn't have knives in her hands. She wonders what Gloomy's childhood was like.
She wonders, so she doesn't stop to think about the gaping maw of pity rising in her.
It's awfully ironic.
After Azula leaves, Gloomy slips in. It's too much to hope for a bowl of cold water and cloths to lay on her newest burns, but she glances up in desperation anyway. Gloomy looks at her like she doesn't know why Suki's in pain, why there are tears on her face, why there's vomit in the corner of her cell again.
"You shouldn't encourage her," Gloomy says quietly, and Suki lets out the scream that's been building for days. For the first time, Gloomy fliches; Suki dissolves into hysterical, choked, unwanted, heaving sobs that are as much retching as they are crying. She can smell her own burnt skin, she can taste blood and smoke and bile, and she can't think straight through the haze of pain. Dimly, she's aware that she's begging for Sokka, of all people.
Dimly, she's aware that she's horribly ashamed.
When her vision clears again and her breathing catches again and she can take more than a short, shallow gasp at a time, she sees Gloomy, standing at the doorway, an odd look on her face.
"What did she do to you?" she whispers, and Suki has no answer.
An hour later, a terrified guard comes in with a bowl of ice water and a dish cloth, drops it in the cell at Suki's feet, and leaves in a rush.
The kindness somehow hurts worse.
She sees no one for days, and convinces herself, somewhat hysterically and somewhat hopefully, that they've all forgotten her. She tries to feel offended, to rally her strength and her pride, to be herself again, the person who challenged them to come find her, who would rather be a thorn in their sides than a footnote in their history books, any other prisoner.
It doesn't work. She can't feel anything but bitter relief.
Metal on metal again; it's Gloomy this time, which is better than all the other ones. The acrobat is too airheaded to care about her, and the princess is the last person she wants to see, but Gloomy, if nothing else, pities her. She wants to be angry, knows she should be angry, but she's been here for months, now, and can't muster the energy.
They look at each other, Gloomy standing uncomfortably in the doorway, playing with her knives in that same compulsive way. Suki licks her lips, cracked and split and chapped, and knows she looks like hell, but somehow, Gloomy's polished, obsessively perfect appearance looks worse. At least, she thinks, she looks exactly how she feels, tells a story in the scars and the burns and the shadows; all Gloomy's appearance says is that Gloomy does not stand out, will not stand out.
"Azula doesn't want you to think we've forgotten about you," she says slowly. "I told her that I would come and remind you that we still care."
Suki smiles viciously. "Do your worst," she croaks, and Gloomy looks away. Comprehension dawns on her - Gloomy didn't come here to torture her. Gloomy came here to keep Azula from coming here. Gloomy is, in her own way, doing Suki a favor, the kindest thing she can do without putting herself in danger.
"She'll check," Gloomy whispers. "She'll look and see if - " she cuts herself off and shakes her head. "I've sharpened them," she adds apologetically. "They're too sharp to hurt badly." And then, because it seems like she's fighting both to say something and not say something, she opens and closes her mouth a few times. "It's better this way," she says, and an almost earnest look comes into her eyes. Suki wonders just who she's trying to convince.
"I understand," she replies, and is startled to find that she does. It's a kindness, a way of saving her without actually having to save her. It's one of those rare moments that encompasses a person's entire being, compresses it into a single action, a single word. Suki realizes that she now knows Gloomy better than anyone else in the world.
She wonders if the reverse is true for Gloomy, and then decides that she doesn't want to know.
Gloomy was right; the knives were too sharp to hurt badly. Instead, there's something oddly alluring about this kind of pain, the shallow, needle-sharp incisions, something that makes her heartbeat pick up. She thinks that her mind has simply had too much of pain, and so turns it into a twisted, masochistic pleasure. After Gloomy leaves, she picks at the scabs and wonders what she's becoming.
It becomes a weekly ritual, that Gloomy will come in with knives sharper than razors and thinner than paper, and cut her in small but effective places. Azula checks in on them occasionally, making sure that Suki remembers how much better off she is that Gloomy has become her cheif torturer, a strange sort of smugness in her face when she stands in the doorway, watching.
It occurs to her, midway through their third session, that Gloomy is being tortured just as effectively as Suki.
When Azula leaves, they talk as Gloomy carves shallow patterns into her arm, always careful to avoid the other scars, always careful to avoid cutting so deep as to leave permanent marks. They talk about innocuous things, never mentioning Sokka or Azula or the Fire Nation or the Kyoshi Warriors, or anything that might show too much vulnerability in either of them. Gloomy is determinedly strong, distant, and careless; Suki knows better than to believe it, but wonders if anyone else does.
"You're better than this," Suki whispers, as Gloomy takes her leave. Their eyes meet across the cell, and Gloomy shakes her head.
"No," she says quietly, "I'm much worse."
"Why doesn't the other one ever come?" she asks, as Gloomy comes in for the fourth week. Her hands twitch in her sleeves.
"Ty Lee doesn't see things that she doesn't want to see," Gloomy says, by way of reply. Suki rearranges her mental heirarchy of the three women, to place Ty Lee at the bottom; Suki can forgive many, many things, but willful ignorance and refusal to do anything in the face of atrocity turns her stomach in a whole new way. At least Gloomy has to good sense and compassion to feel bad about what she's doing.
"So Ty Lee is the ditz, Azula is the monster, and... I don't even know your name, you're the cold one? How do you fit into this?"
"Azula isn't a monster," Gloomy says slowly, sitting on the floor against the door, hands absent of knives for the first time since Suki's known her. She looks as though she doesn't know what to do with them. "Azula is what she has been told to be, nothing more. If anyone is a monster, it's - " she starts, and then cuts herself off sharply, like she was about to say something horribly treasonous. Suki knows what it was (it's the Fire Lord, he's the monster that made Azula what she is) and she knows why Gloomy doesn't dare say anything. It may seem like they're alone, but if there's anything Suki's learned about the prison - and, by extension, the Fire Nation - is that no one is ever truly alone. There's always someone waiting in the wings to use your words against you.
It reinforces her image of Gloomy as a person who lives her life in a state of constant, unrelenting fear, so overwhelming that she's responded by shutting down, banking on the belief that that which cannot touch you cannot hurt you. Suki wishes she could believe that.
"My name is Mai," Gloomy says, shifting the conversation away from treason and emotion and empathy. "Sun Mai. It's a boring name."
"Reinvent yourself, then," Suki replies, allowing the matter to drop. "Change your name. My mother's birth name was Yumi, and she hated it so much that she changed it to Misaki."
Gloomy - no, wait, Mai - gives her a strange look. "It isn't that simple. I'm a high-ranking noble. I can't just change my name. Everyone important in the Fire Nation knows who I am."
"So leave the Fire Nation," Suki says simply, aware that she's striking Mai where she's most vulnerable: at her deepest, most impossible desire. Mai's expression doesn't change.
"It isn't that simple," she repeats, voice strangely quiet.
"Why not?"
Mai's jaw tightens almost imperceptibly. "I can't," she whispers. What she doesn't say, but what floats under her words is, I'm too scared.
Mai is always afraid.
Very suddenly, the guards open her door and unchain her. Suki looks at them in confusion. "What's going on?" she asks, too cynical by now to hope that she's being released.
"The Princess and her consorts have returned to the capital city on a more permanent basis," one of the guards says. She recognizes him as the one who always brings her bandages, but he won't look at her in the eye. "Lady Mai left orders that you were to be treated as a normal prisoner from now on, and allowed into the common areas for three hours a day, as is standard."
"That's standard?" she asks, righteous anger rising up in her. She's been chained up in a cramped cell for months, allowed only a single meal per day, forced to use a chamber pot, and kept locked away from the sun and the sky and the earth and the fresh air; she's survived by thinking that this was normal, that it's the worst prison in the Fire Nation - of course that's how they treat their prisoners. But it's not, and it's like a slap to the face.
She had thought that Azula's torture was simply physical. Looking back, she wonders how she could have been so naive.
Given access to the outside world - or, well, what passes for the outside world in a prison - she begins to turn her thoughts from survival to escape. She builds up her strength again, stretches cramped, stiff muscles, works life back into her bones. Several of the prisoners look at her oddly, at the scars that criss-cross her arms, at the old, slow-to-heal burns. She wonders what they see when they look at her, if they pity her, if they fear her, if they know what happened to her. Has her fate been whispered through the halls? She overhears someone refer to her as the princess's favorite but she doesn't know how much they know.
No one mentions Mai, even in passing. She thinks that old Gloomy would want it that way, but wouldn't like it. Mai was always more than she allowed herself to be.
She misses Mai, and hates herself for it. In the darkness of her cell, sometimes she still picks at the scabs, draws her nails over her skin, the poor man's knives, and remembers yellow eyes and black nails. She makes herself sick; she makes herself hurt; she makes herself numb. The sudden absence of the torture makes her skin confused, makes her mental walls shift uneasily. She doesn't know what to feel when she isn't feeling pain, how to think when she isn't under attack, how to move when she isn't chained to the wall. She wants to be Suki, Leader of the Kyoshi Warriors again, but she's become too accustomed to knives to return to fans.
Better knives than burns, she thinks; better Mai than Azula.
Better Sokka than any of them, she tells herself, but doesn't really believe it.
Zuko isn't the only one who looks back when Mai turns on Azula at the Boiling Rock, allowing them to escape.
Suki is oddly proud, and even more oddly sad.
She traces a scar on her arm, and bites her tongue until she tastes blood. The familiarity comforts her.