A finger was worth ten-thousand gold pieces. A pound of flesh was worth ten-thousand and five-hundred. A lung was worth twenty or so thousand and a sack of ribs were worth twenty-thousand per rib. A heart? That was where the money was. A heart was worth one-hundred-thousand gold pieces.
Double that if the person was of high birth.
Triple it if they were of royal status.
Azula never contemplated the worth of human organs and bones. Much less her own. She had that kind of money already. Even if she didn't, she wasn't barbaric enough to carve out a person's kidney or pluck an eye for it.
There were enough savages around without her, that much had become apparent.
No, she hadn't put any thought at all into the price of organs until she was drugged and well on her way to be harvested. She tried to move, but she found her body paralyzed. Shishru venom, it had to be. She hoped that they would at least put her completely out when they started the harvesting process. But from what she had heard, this lot had little regard for their captured. Not that she expected tenderness from black market sellers.
She imagined that they'd be dragging her along without any regard whatsoever, if it weren't quicker to just carry her to their dwelling. The place they are taking her to lies on the volcano's rim; the place her father told her to avoid at all costs. A place that smelled strongly of sulfur and production waste. A place prone to the Fire Nation's worst people.
Azula could taste the pollution and rot on her tongue. She didn't think it would be long before she joined the rot.
The entire slum town was crafted of rusting steel. The whole place was crumbling, its state of decay might have been a cause for the rotting stench. And the building she was entering was somehow worse still. It looked like it hadn't ever seen a day of well-repair. They take her through a set of heavy looking doors with more rust than she had seen in the wreck-yard they had by-passed.
A copper tinge wept from the opened entryway.
It wasn't the copper of a factory. No, it was the copper of blood.
If only the scent was powerful enough to wake her sleeping body. It roused her mind well enough. The woman carrying her muttered something that sounded so far away. With that incoherent jumble of words, they stripped her of her clothing and laid her on a terribly chilly and dreadfully dirty operating table. She could feel the crust of old blood scratching at her back. She felt sick, her gag reflex was kicking in, but not enough for her to actually lurch up and act upon it. Even if it had been enough, the woman was strapping her down. Probably a precautionary measure.
She could hear footsteps, the sound was muffled through fear and shishru venom. It mixed with the wails of men and women in the same grisly position as she. The footsteps came closer and closer still, until a man loomed directly over her.
"This one is going to be worth a fortune." She was certain she had heard him right.
"You don't snatch up a royal every day." The woman agreed. They sounded like they were underwater.
She saw her captor lift a blade and a scalpel. Her heart hammered in her chest, she wondered how long it would do that for. Not long, she imagined. She could hear a cry from another room, followed by a tearing and sucking sound. The scream began to bleed into the slurping noises. Azula's heart beat harder still and she savored it, because soon its dying beat would be in someone's palm rather than in her chest.
Her breathing was growing ragged as the scalpel came closer. And she felt the sharp, cold sting of it digging into her skin. It would seem that they were opening her stomach first, that was probably the easiest thing to do—though she didn't know anything about slicing a body. The pain was searing, white-hot, as the blade dragged downward.
All too late, feeling returned to her limbs, she could twitch her fingers and toes. Reflexively her body convulsed against the pain. It deterred her captors only a little. They resumed quickly.
"You're going to be a difficult one aren't you?" The man with the scalpel asked. He knew the answer already.
"Am I?" She asked weakly.
He moved the blade away from her belly and positions it beneath her eye. Her own blood dripped onto her cheek and drizzled warmly down. Azula's lip twitched into a smile as weak as her voice. "I am, yes." She confirmed before drawing in a deep breath.
He realized that he'd been standing too close much too late. She released her breath in a river of blue flame. It hurt her stomach terribly, but it had done its job. The man was on the floor writing, clutching his face.
His companions went to him. And as they did, Azula decided to do something a little more drastic. The fight was leaving her, she was growing woozy. But she would die fighting. She closed her eyes and brought the flames to her lips. She spilled them over her own left arm, until the strap binding it had burned away.
It was a tricky feat to undo the other strap with a freshly roasted limb, but she freed herself.
Her captors are on her in only moments.
It didn't hurt, not that she could recall. Pain seemed like background fuzz under layers of adrenaline and survival instinct. She threw them off a few at a time as they pounced her. Her head was pounding, her attention pulled in so many directions. For the first time in her life, she wasn't sure exactly what she was doing; there was no thought, no careful plan. Just action and instinct.
She didn't know how, but she was surrounded by bloodied, unconscious foes and perhaps a body or two. She stumbled back, crashing herself into a cart of operating supply and she toppled with it.
It had been a good fight; at least they hadn't the pleasure of killing her.
Her hand fell upon the opening in her stomach and she tried feebly to hold it together, that late in the game, it was only an illusion of usefulness. It was comforting to gauge, that the slash wasn't quite as deep as she had thought.
.oOo.
She woke up to a thumping behind her ears. A throbbing in her chest. She wanted to cry because the beat is where it belonged. A feeble hand fell over her chest, she savored the rhythm that thudded against her palm.
Azula didn't know how. She was almost certain that she was a dead woman. But her heart. Her heart, it was beating so strongly.
Her vision blurred and she felt herself fading again. She is afraid to fall into the dark because she wasn't sure that she would be able to leave it again. But it dragged her under. The only comfort she had, the only reassurance that the night hadn't swallowed her completely were small sound tidbits and hard to decipher sensory cues. If she could guess she would have said that a cool, wet rag dabbed at her forehead, that someone took her hand, that someone was running their hand over her hair.
She woke again, that time the awakening was more pleasant. Her heartbeat was still reassuringly steady. There was a chilly sensation at her belly, but it was relaxing. A tingle instead of a stinging. She wasn't alone this time. Not as alone as the first time. Her brother, her mother, Katara, and TyLee were the faces she picked out. Katara was in the middle of a healing, so the soothing sensation was accounted for. Her mother was gripping her hand, rubbing her thumb up and down. Zuko stood next to their mother with a bowl of what she assumed was soup. TyLee was on the bed with her, her hand caressing Azula's cheek; her heartbeat picked up.
She opened her mouth but she didn't know what to say nor what to ask. Instead she used her free hand to take TyLee's, a physical gesture seemed easier. A small way to let them know that she was awake and aware. TyLee gave a soft smile. The hand she clutched with was bandaged and pieces began to come back to her. She had saved herself…and then what?
So came the first question, "how did you find me?"
"We've been tracking the black market for a while now." Zuko informed her. That much she had already known.
"I was in charge of that, remember Zuzu?" She realized that her question had been equally as silly. Of course the black market sellers would have been the prime suspects in her disappearance.
"We looked through a lot of your notes and consulted with Toph's police squad, the common consensus was that their hideout was somewhere on the volcano's rim."
"From there, we just followed the screaming." TyLee added.
"You did a good number on those guys." Katara noted.
"Good." Azula grumbled. "They wanted my heart."
Zuko practically snorted, "they wouldn't have found it."
Her eyes narrowed. "Thanks, Zuzu." She hated to admit it, but it was a clever jest and she needed the humor.
TyLee snuggled closer, nuzzling against Azula taking the care to avoid disturbing her injuries. "I'm glad we found you, Azula."
Azula moved the girl's hand and let it rest over her heart. That seemed somehow reassuring to her. Frankly she was glad to have been found, and—more or less—in one piece. She felt TyLee's lips brush the crook of her neck, a sensation she had missed terribly. She was reminded more deeply, that her heart was still where it belonged.