Azula drifts between sleeping and awaking, but in both states there are only nightmares. Ceaseless, ceaseless nightmares. Some of them are waking, because she sees unfamiliar faces and hears hushed whispers of doctors, her captors, her captors that her brother handed her over to.
She sees her failure again and again. She sees her father and she feels him, she feels him against her as if he were right here, right now. She cannot escape. Ty Lee, Agni, she sees her, and she sees Mai. And one night she sees the two of them kissing each other and she screams and sobs until she has to be sedated.
The disgraced princess tries to shut them out, tries to stop it. She claws at her body until her fingers are blood and her beautiful, perfect ivory skin is ruined and ripped. Azula will not accept defeat... she will not let this asylum break her.
She won't. She won't. She won't.
There is no telling, in her mind, how long she has been here. But she has to make it out eventually. Or at least her head will collapse and she will be gone, long gone. Azula, at the Boiling Rock, would hear stories from laughing guards about tortured prisoners of war and how they would just go away, be happy. They were gone.
Azula, some days, wants that.
"Azula," says a very clear voice. It is sweet, yet honest, so familiar. She would recognize it anywhere.
Azula sits up, one of those lucid moments. One of those lucid moments despite the girl standing in front of her.
She looks at her, leaning in and crawling to the foot of her bed. Dark eyes, dark hair, such beautiful features, wide, glittering eyes that might be grey or might be brown and Azula never took the time to figure it out.
"You're really not going to give in, are you?" Ty Lee strides confidently from one side of the cell to sit beside Azula on her agonizingly soft and expensive sheets that she tears to tatters almost intentionally.
Azula compares Ty Lee's flawless, tight, very tight clothes to what she last saw her wearing, and she thinks that this might not be a nightmarish hallucination. This might be a fantasy. Maybe she has lost it at last, and gone to that place she heard about when she was torturing that Suki girl.
Ty Lee presses her lips against Azula's neck wordlessly. It is a shiver of excitement as Azula leans further into her, grasping at her and kissing harder, harder. She wants to leave bruises, she wants to do something to make someone not real into someone real.
"You've come for me, haven't you?" Azula asks like an idiot. Like the young girl she is certain she will never be again. But it feels alright, with this woman's arm wrapped around her back.
"Of course," Ty Lee whispers in her ear and Azula could swear, could swear that her hot breath is real. "Be patient, Azula. Things always do work out for you in the end."
Ty Lee kisses her lips and Azula knows she can feel warmth against the chill of the asylum.
And when Ty Lee gently pushes Azula backwards, the princess whispers, "Are you real?"
Pause. Silence.
"No."
Azula grabs her by the neck and they fall into each other.
If it is a dream, it is Azula's first good one in what must have been millennia. And she will make the best of it.
Azula is drowning. She is falling deeper and deeper below the surface, in this forest, in this forest where she supposes she knew she would die when she made her choice. But it was her choice all the same.
Then she looks up for a moment, sees a hand, a hand reaching for her. Azula grabs it and lets it drag her to the surface.
When Azula next opens her eyes, she is beside a road. She looks around for who saved her, but she can only remember the gentle, soothing noises in her ear as she drifted through darkness. Ty Lee.
Ty Lee who Azula wants to never see again because she thinks she likes the hallucination of her better than the real her.
"Where is she?" asks Azula as she is dancing on the arms of her brother. Dancing, or maybe swaying, maybe about to pass out. She doesn't really know quite where she is.
"Here," Zuko says, pulling on Azula. She is still dancing with him, still dancing on top of this incredibly high tower that Azula hopes she will not fall off of.
Zuko takes her gently to her bed and helps her into it before looking at her. Azula closes her eyes and breathes; she struggles to breathe at this point.
She can hear their voices.
"I have her under control. I do. She is fine," Zuko snarls and his voice hurts Azula's head.
Azula still pretends to be asleep, but she does not think she could get up if she tried.
"Yes. She is passed out drunk. You have her under such control." The Water Whore who stole everything of Azula's. But the princess cannot move to kill her; she just fantasizes about it. "Zuko... your feelings for her are getting in the way of you seeing the truth."
"That's a lie," Zuko shouts before exhaling. "I'm sorry. Just give me a few more weeks, okay? I am her conservator, and I am trying."
The Water Peasant makes a hmming sound that makes Azula's foot writhe in pain. It hurts her head terribly.
"I know. But I think you're too caught up in the fake image you have of her to see the real her. There's no way she can heal if you're just chasing a fantasy," The Water Girl continues, and Azula is completely unconscious before she hears the rest of the conversation.
Azula curls up in her bed and tries to go to sleep. She is doing worse, after doing better for a long time, and Zuko is miserable about it. Well, Azula has to give him some credit for how much he has tried, and how much he has worked to help her.
Sometimes she feels human, on rare occasions. Most of the time she doesn't hate him as much as she used to. It has been one year, and Zuko shouted about how he could not believe that days before a tribunal would decide Azula's fate, she had relapsed.
Like she decided to do it to spite him...
She didn't, did she?
She has no idea.
When Azula is under her blankets, lying awake as the reality does set in, blending with her overpowering thoughts... This is it. Agni, this is it and these horrible people who stole everything from Azula now get to choose her fate. It makes her feel sick; and she has to fight the gagging in her throat to keep from getting sick.
Someone walks to her bed with her.
"Stay with me..." Azula whispers. "I know you're not real but stay with me..."
"I always will," her sweet, sweet half-awake hallucination of Ty Lee whispers warmly. And their limbs are intertwined until Azula falls into a deep, deep sleep, hoping she will forget herself.
But she wakes in the morning. She had to eventually.
AN: This might be a two-shot, in which Azula actually sees the real Ty Lee at the tribunal. If anybody is interested in that. If not, I really like this ending as much as the one I've thought of for the two-shot, but I'm uncertain or else I would've put all of the stuff I'd do in the next part in this part and have it be a oneshot.