Some days, she couldn't help but remember the feel of porcelain skin. It was cool and white, it didn't have the right to be, here among all the heat, but it was, cool and dry and pale, like her skin. The eyes in the glass face were sculpted sad for her.
For her brother, it was different. The eyes always smiled for her brother. She didn't want to remember that either.
The voice comes to her sometimes. It tells her 'I love you' until she wants to bleed, she wants to make it bleed. But she can't touch a voice any more than she can kill a reflection.
She runs and she hides, hides from the brightness of that soul, the light that threatens to expose her dark places, bleach them out and make them shine. She hates the darkness, she really does, but it is her darkness. It is the one thing in the world she knows is hers and no one may touch those dark, broken places.
It's the cracks that let the blackness in, cracks that forms when the sad sculpted eyes had turned her way for the millionth time. She was old enough now to see it there, what those eyes thought of her, a little girl-child in a big, bright world.
She can remember, and this is what she truly hates remembering most of all, the feeling of wrongwrongwrong, whycan'tyougetitright? It makes her feel sick. She knew, of course she did. Big brother got everything right in those eyes, but she could never manage it. All she ever got was wrongness, the knowledge that she hadn't done it right, but what was the right way to do?
She was desperate, alone, starved for approval. Everyone told her what she was doing wrong, but no one ever told her how to do it right, they thought she should know, couldn't they see she didn't?
The fire behind the fire told her "Good job". She had done something right at last. She tried her best to keep them coming, to be great, to be the best. She wanted him to tell her she was doing good, that she met someone's expectations.
But she loved her brother.
No one believes her, especially now. No one ever taught her the right way to love her brother, either. She tried, she played games with him and tried to give him a girlfriend, brought him with her when she spied on the grownups, shared secrets and cookies. It wasn't enough. She tried to warn him, the only way she knew how. She loved her brother. She just didn't know how to.
And then…..
She still remembers the glow of porcelain skin under a dark hood, those sad sculpted eyes peering out of a face and, had she realized she'd never see those eyes and their disappointment ever again, she would've run to them and begged them to stay.
No one believes her, especially now but…..
Azula loved her mother.