when it comes for you.
characters: ozai, ursa.
notes: for the fatherlord.
…
Ozai thinks it may be easier to maintain control.
He smiles from inside of his father's shadow, watches her face animate with several emotions at once. Something inside of him prickles with a thrilling rush of pride, knowing that he will have a strategically arranged marriage to a beautiful, fragile thing like her, that it will provide him with both influence and power.
It's not love, that's for certain. He thinks it may just be his own covetous nature, tangled possessively around her thin frame, squeezing tightly so that she knows she belongs to him. A girl raised in a greenhouse ought to know the dangers of fine-winding tendrils of thorny vines.
And yet, when she looks at him beseechingly in their carriage, calls him that common pet name, something grips him tightly enough, makes him foolish enough to mistake that for affection.
…
Ozai doesn't think much of the common peasant his wife has left behind.
After all, she is his now.
But she floats around the palace with a distant look in her eyes that most newlyweds seem to leave behind after a few weeks. It doesn't worry him, looking into those dim golden eyes every night, but he suspects she may never regain a spark, and he has to admit he enjoys it this way.
She is restrained, but she is here, and soon, she will become accustomed to it with this same passive attitude.
So when he marks her as his, with his hand around her waist and a whispering kiss in her ear, "Smile, wife," he's surprised when she pulls away and hisses at him, when her eyes light up and venom drips between those smooth, harmless lips, when she regards him with perilous anger.
Her response is something to the tone of, "I won't."
In the same vein that dribbles his excitement for her tenacity, a fear sparks in his belly.
…
Ozai thinks she has underestimated him in severe ways.
He's not sure how to feel with the knowledge that his wife yearns for this peasant, because she holds onto him so tightly, because she refuses to entertain the prospect of the infinite future in front of her.
He tears the letter into pieces in front of his guards, his face contorted in anger. He would burn it, he would burn all of those Agni forsaken letters, but there is something dissatisfying about watching it waste away as if it'd never even happened.
Ozai will never forget what he has read.
…
Ozai thinks he shouldn't be so elated by her smile, the way her thin fingers curl around the edges of her hand. She moves it over her stomach and he should feel nothing but roiling disgust and hatred, nothing but disdain for this woman.
But something thumps in the center of his palm and his eyebrows hitch up just a little bit higher and his lips twitch to fight off a smile. There's a chance that this child will be ruinous to his name, that it will stand to dismantle everything he stands for simply because it isn't his, but there's still some inflated ignorance that allows him to be the closest to happy he will ever get with this infernal Princess who will never love him.
This shouldn't make him happy but for a moment, he forgets, and just reacts.
…
Ozai thinks it was wise not to be there for his wife during labor. He had no desire to watch her, near death, push out a weak infant like that boy. Zuko, for her father; weak, like his real father.
He doesn't afford Zuko any sympathy, even on the day he was born.
…
Ozai thinks what destroys him the most about Ursa's emotional infidelity, her clear disregard for his rules, is that he cannot control her. He does not own her the way he once imagined he did, with dull eyes rising to meet his, hands slow to move and body too lethargic at times.
It hurts because he thought that this was just another thing to overcome, just another obstacle. Ozai is not used to defeat, he is used to tearing and burning and wrecking things until the dilapidated remains are his to do with as he pleases.
This hurts the most because he had once believed he could manipulate Ursa into falling in love with him, and all he's done is fall in love with her, the silently poisonous flower that smooths its petals along your skin until you soak in the deadly toxins.
Ursa will kill him.
…
Ozai thinks he is too attached when she submits to him for a second time, when she digs her fingers into his scalp, doesn't push away from the feeling of his mouth on her neck. He expects resistance and fuss, but he is met with devious smirks and smiles slightly stained with regret.
He thinks if he can make her feel good, it will absolve some of the things he feels he has lost in this marriage. His pride has certainly suffered enough with this unrestrained hellion he's married, with the constant battle he is in with her.
But when he touches her roughly, lips pulled back into a mocking grin, she tosses her head back and moans and screams his name, and it rings with such genuine longing and passion that it grips Ozai's heart in that tight, vice-like grip that he can't stand.
It squeezes until her body falls limp against him, and when she lies back into the bed, she turns her back to him.
It hurts, like an old scar that throbs from old memories, with no source, with no reason, with nothing but pain.
…
Ozai thinks this will kill her.
When he says it, when he relishes in the imaginary feeling of this peasant's blood on his hands and the horror on her face, he wonders if she will ever let go.
He wonders if he will ever have her.
But all he can do is present a sickly smile, hope that Ursa will slowly begin to forget about this man, abandon him the way she has done her own family. She is his and she should turn her back on all other things.
She cries silently the entire night; Ozai pretends it is nothing new.
…
Ozai thinks about vicious, treasonous things.
He was the one who sent her away, the one who had promised mercy for that princely bastard child, and she had given him what he wanted, for once. It was something he wasn't used to and when she'd offered to take care of his father, to assure that he would be in power, he wasn't sure what a greenhouse girl knew about the castes of royalty.
But Ursa knew plenty about manipulation because she had manipulated him for so long he had gotten comfortable, devised ways to win her back into his grip because he thought she had been there, once.
He had only been playing with a mannequin; it was Ursa who maneuvered him with pulls of string.
Zuko is the only bitter reminder of what happened between them, other than the way he looks at things and they slowly devolve into memories of her, soaked into grass and hidden in the cracks of enclosed brick walls, memories tucked underneath silk pillows and kept in servants' chambers.
Ozai thinks one day, she will come back for him.