Reposting this chapter after the awesome Jiao-jie volunteered to translate my Spanglish to English! Thanks.
Disclaimer: I do not own any character in this fiction, I ll even give away the ones that I might make up to make sure the story makes sense.
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"You? All you had to do was smile and people loved you! Mom, Dad, Iroh…even Mai and Ty lee…Me? I was just…" Her voice cut off, almost as if she was about to cry.
But…Azula doesn't cry unless is out of frustration and never while talking to me, Zuko thought, but she definitely looked like she was about to.
"You were the perfect one," Zuko stated, confused.
"PERFECT?" She yelled, incredulous and angry as if she hated that word, "Azula, the prodigy, right?" She sobbed this time. Zuko, in disbelief, had to start to consider that Azula did cry sometimes. "YES! That was SUCH a blessing!" She said sarcastically, half laughing, half crying.
Zuko was getting more and more confused.
"Don't look at me like that, Brother! It was always so easy for you!"
Zuko stared at her in total disbelief.
Easy for me? he thought, but didn't interrupt her.
He had to admit that a part of him was sort of happy to see Azula vulnerable, to know that he wasn't the only one who suffered in childhood; that Azula had apparently had it tough too and that she had felt Zuko was the one that had what she wanted. Not that it made him happy to see his sister so upset, but it was nice to see that she was human! It was nice that they could share something other than their DNA; even if all they shared was a crappy childhood.
"I was the one woken up in the middle of the night and dragged out by our father to be paraded around! I was the one forced to do awful things, because 'I was a prodigy.' Father gave you a Fire Nation soldier uniform on your 5th birthday. Do you know what he got me?"
Zuko didn't remember his 5th birthday gift, much less Azula's. He always thought her presents were better, but he didn't really remember any of them. Yet, hearing his sister's voice he started to doubt that her presents had been better.
Zuko shook his head and barely whispered, "No," a trace of guilt in his voice.
"A sleepless night, burning puppies to death!" She screamed, "He woke me up in the middle of the night and took me with his friends. They had puppies at different distances and father forced me to 'Try my aim and the strength of my fire.' 'Show them how good you are Azula, make me proud,' he said as he forced me to burn them all to the ground. 'Happy birthday,' he said, in the early morning when he finally let me go back to sleep."
Azula's voice had turned emotionless while telling the story, though this time, it didn't make Zuko think she was a monster without feelings, but it actually reminded him of Mai. He knew Mai had a lot of feelings, all bottled up inside but she had been forced to cork them, hide them and never express anything.
"I am scared that if one day I let them out," Mai had said once, "They will never stop flowing and I won't be able to handle them. I might go insane!"
Well, it seemed like there was a crack in Azula's bottle. The feelings were leaking and she was doing her best to handle them.
"How did Mom allow all that?" Zuko whispered, confused and controlled his impulse to hug his sister. He really didn't know what Azula had gone through and now he was feeling guilty he hadn't helped her; he hadn't been there for his baby sister.
"When Fire Lord Ozai tells you to shut up and not to tell anyone. You don't tell anyone, Zuko." Her eyes became watery. "I remember envying you so much. You could sleep at night and Mom could comfort you if you had a nightmare, you could talk to her! I couldn't tell anyone what was eating me up. I spent the nights in fear, praying that he wouldn't come and get me that night. Or lying in my bed, unable to sleep, for when I closed my eyes, I would see the terrible things he had forced me to do. When Mom left, things got even worse! And puppies turned into innocent people and kids, just burnt to the ground to please some old generals, as sick in the head as Father was!" She stopped for a second, and then barely whispered, "As sick as me."
Hearing all that their father had forced Azula to do in her childhood made him reconsider all he had ever thought about his childhood and his sister's. Now he was wondering if he was really the one that got the short end of the stick. If being "the prodigy" or "the perfect one" had made her life any better.
He hugged his sister this time, he thought she was going to pull away and not let him touch her. Quite the contrary, he was surprised when Azula welcomed the embrace and started crying on his shoulder.
"You are not like him, Azula," Zuko found himself saying, "You can change, it's up to you! You don't have to be like that! I am so sorry! I should have known! I should have sensed something was happening, I should have helped you!"
"It was better that way," Azula said, wiping her tears. "I envied you, yes. I wished I could be the one being comforted by our mother and the one that could play around happily. But I loved you Zuko, I prayed that you would never find out, that he would never dragged you and forced you to the things he forced me to do. There was too much goodness, you were too pure to be corrupted like that."
"What about you? There is goodness and pureness in you too!"
"Not anymore, Zuko," She said sadly, "Not anymore, but I still love you, you know? You shouldn't have stand in the middle of my lighting that day. You shouldn't have! There was a reason it wasn't directed to you! I thought I could do it… I thought I could. But I realized when I had you in front of me, that I just couldn't."
Zuko realized for the first time that the lighting directed at Katara wasn't part of an evil master plan Azula had, but it had been the only thing Azula could think of when forced to throw lighting at her brother.
Zuko felt lightheaded, the heaviness that he had felt in his chest since Azula's lighting felt even heavier. The scar was healing and everybody seemed to think he was ok but he hadn't felt "right" since then. He wondered one more time if he should go to a healer and get his chest checked, but he discarded the idea right away, just like every other time he thought about it. He had too much to do and too little time to do it. The thought of someone telling him that something was wrong with him and that he had to spend a week on the medical ward was not appealing to him in any way.
He took a deep breath and shook his head violently, trying to shake the dizziness out of his system.
"I love you, Azula! I do. All you have to do is smile and I'll love you" He said, repeating the words she had said earlier in the conversation.
She looked at him and smiled in a way he hadn't seen her smile in years. It was not a crazy smile, it was not an evil smile, it was as if she had been expecting those words all her life and now she smiled at him expectantly.
"Really?" She asked meekly, and Zuko realized for the first time how much his sister really cared about his approval. How, for all these years, her cruel detachment had been her way of dealing with her feeling that Zuko hated her. That all he had to do, after all these years, to make her change was showing her some affection, a light at the end of the tunnel, just like Iroh had shown him. In the end, what had driven Super-Azula, the one that everybody believed couldn't feel anything but hate, to madness was having the only two people she believed loved her, make her believe that they didn't.
He knew Mai loved Azula, or at least, loved the good days of Azula. Ty Lee, he was almost certain, loved Azula too. Ty Lee, with her bouncy, happy personality was the most affectionate of the trio and was the only person in the world, at least that he knew about, that had willingly hugged Azula.
"I'll find mom, Azula. I promise I'll go to Fa-Ozai again and force him to tell me where she is. I'll bring her here and she'll tell you that she loves you, that you are her little princess, just like she used to. And I'll bring Uncle Iroh and Mai and Ty Lee and they'll tell you that they love you too!"
"They'll say it, yes, because you asked them to or because they fear me, but they won't mean it." She pouted.
Zuko beat himself up for never even trying to have this conversation with his sister. Granted, it had taken five months locked in a mental institution without any other person to talk to besides him and Iroh and a lot of surprisingly good and caring doctors (Zuko had made sure of that) to get her to calm down and finally be able to say the things she had apparently bottled out since she was a little girl.
The first couple of months, she would cry in a constant state of paranoia. The mental institution had devised some special medicine to temporarily bind bending . This made sure that their patients wouldn't hurt themselves or each other, but more than one doctor and nurse had ended up with broken bones thanks to Azula's madness. She had been confined to a jail-like room, where she could see and talk to the people that came to visit her, but she wasn't able to touch them. Eventually the tireless work of the doctors had been fruitful and she started to calm down, to see the people in front of her. They moved her to a normal room, people could come and visit her, touch her, she didn't talk to anyone for a few weeks, but she looked different.
"It's her metamorphosis," Iroh had told Zuko, "Your sister is changing, just like you did in Ba Sing Se and when she is done, she is going to need you more than she ever did. And it is going to be up to you, my dear nephew, to decide what she is going to become."
At first, he didn't know what his uncle meant, but today, he realized that as always, he had been right; that this was probably the most important conversation in Azula's life and maybe in his too.
After weeks, she finally started talking; to the doctors first, Zuko thought now it was because they had been kinder to her and more patient with her than anyone had ever been. One of the doctors, Dr. Koda, specially, seemed to have bonded with Azula in a way Zuko had never thought possible. He was a young doctor; all his credentials portrayed him as a prodigy, just like Azula. He had taken her case because he loved the challenge; he had never had a case he could not "fix" and apparently this was not going to be the one.
Zuko knew that after a little while with Azula, the "challenge" became real affection and that Dr. Koda really cared about Azula. Azula seemed to believe it too and nobody knew what they talked about (Sessions were private and only the doctor and patient will ever know what was discussed in them) but Azula seemed to be confiding in him more and more and be getting better and better with each day that passed.
It had been five months since the comet and since Azula was locked in the hospital. Zuko and Iroh had tried their best to go there every week. Mai and Ty Lee had gone several times, but never dared to talk to her. Zuko believed they felt guilty, or maybe they thought Azula didn't want to see them. He had seen Ty Lee get as close as the door of Azula's room, but it had been a bad day for Azula. She was crying and paranoid, everyone around her was a traitor; just seeing her in that state made Ty Lee run away in tears. Mai followed her friend and comforted her.
After that, Ty Lee couldn't bring herself to come anymore and would cry every time something reminded her of Azula. Mai would come with him or his uncle, but waited outside. She would talk to the doctors, make sure the cook knew what Azula's favorite foods were, make sure she was treated kindly and that she didn't need anything from the outside world. Mai would use her undetached deadpan expression all the time and say that she didn't care. She would say she was doing it because she was Zuko's sister or because Ty Lee had asked her to, but Zuko knew his girlfriend better than that.
Zuko told all that to Azula, how Mai was right outside, how Ty Lee couldn't help crying, how he was going to find their mother and how Iroh still saw the good in her. Azula smiled at him, trying really hard to believe him. He was going to run and get Mai to prove her that he was saying the truth when Doctor Koda came into Azula's room.
"Visiting time is over Zuko," he said as kindly as possible and shared a knowing and affectionate look with Azula.
"But I need Mai to come," Zuko pouted.
"Mai is outside, just like she always is and that knowledge should be sufficient to Azula right now. It has been an intense day for both of you and it is probably better for everybody that we don't keep adding more emotions to the mix," Dr. Koda said.
Zuko knew intuitively that Dr. Koda had expected that conversation to take place that day . He was probably the one that encouraged Azula to talk to Zuko and tell him what she was really feeling and for that, Zuko would be forever indebted to him.
"Mai and Ty Lee can come tomorrow?" Azula said, eagerly and hopefully, almost sounding like the teenager she was. It reminded Zuko of Ty Lee. The doctor nodded, "If they want, of course." She finished her line a lot more sadly and scared that Zuko would have liked to hear at that point.
Zuko kissed Azula's forehead; she seemed surprised but happy.
"See you soon," He said. She just smiled.
Zuko shook the doctor's hand, "I'll never be able to thank you enough," he said and he meant it.
The doctor smiled, Zuko could see the man was as happy as he was and was glad that someone cared about Azula like that.
When Zuko left the room, he could hear the doctor asking, "So, how did it go?"
"It was GREAT," She exclaimed, happily "I never thought he would understand, I never thought he cared, but he does!"
"Of course he cares, Azula! We all care about you!" was the last thing Zuko heard as he left the ward smiling. He never thought she would understand or care either, but she did. He could not wait to tell his uncle and Mai everything that had happened
