A/N: So due to a review I got, I want to make this clear. I never said that this was canonically written. And if I actually knew the person I'd probably get into a very heated debate with them, so I'm glad I don't really know them. And if all the things I have written are "so wrong" which, actually they aren't, then I guess you can consider this an unspoken AU. Thank you.

"…banished?" her young voice was breathless with incredulity as her father's glower was lost in the shadows of a wall of flames that licked hungrily for any handout. The stark look and posture of her father's feigned indifference, and his usual demeanor about things, told her not to ask. But she felt the growing press of curiosity and some other such emotion urging her forward. The words spilled before she could stop them. "But, Father, why?"

"Does it matter why, child?" his voice was cruel, but to the young girl it was all but the norm. She had never heard his tone any differently. On nights when she would eavesdrop upon her mother's conversations with her useless older brother, she could make out key points in the conversation that made her Father out to be less like the man he was, sitting lax atop a raised dais, and more like a gentleman out of a fable. "She's gone and that is that. I will not have questions raised – even from you."

She nodded, immediately obliging to his whim as a good child should. And a good and devoted child she was. If not that, young Azula lost all identity of herself. Her brother held more dynamic than her, albeit negative connotation to each word used for him. He was the spitting image in persona to their uncle; lazy, stupid, dumb, ignorant, and childish. The only two words she could claim for herself were devoted and prodigy. Her father's sharp words cut her back to the moment.

"Now should your brother ask, simply tell him that she left. The choice as to how you would explain it after the fact is solely up to you, Azula." He smiled wickedly, dismissing her with a waved hand.

She bowed, forming the curled snarl she knew he enjoyed for it was so akin to his, and strode away. But as she turned her back from her father, insecurity reigned like rain proceeded a drought. Yet her eyes were like her land, dry and cracked, needing to be mended with a rain that would never come.

-x-

"Azula – where is mom!" a small boy came storming over, feet stamping hard into the ground, disrupting a nest of turtleducks as his fury took him past their river bed. They squawked as angrily as he himself did.

Waking up to find a missing haven, stolen away from you into the night, was this little man's nightmare. And now he was reveling in the waking dream that was his life. He was near to tears as his fists clenched before a nonchalant sibling.

"Ah, yes. Hello to you too, Zuzu." She scrubbed her pristine nails against the cloth of her fine robes, checking them forwards and back with an air of indifference.

"Stop calling me that and tell me where mom is."

"So demanding. Why do you want to know, Zu? Was mommy not there to wake up her precious baby boy? No little baths and lullabies this morning?"

His young jaw clenched as he gnawed his teeth together, golden eyes dancing to an exotic beat of pain and anger. "What. Happened. To Mom?" he spat out, smoke curling from his lips in light wisps.

Azula sat straighter, eyes glued to the smog escaping his thinned mouth. He must have been absolutely seething to be doing that at such a tender age. It made the terrifying monster within her cheer in devious delight.

"What, didn't anyone tell you, Zuzu?" she continued to use the name just to spite him – and it worked, hands digging crescent moons into his palm as they burrowed deeper into the security of flesh. "She was banished."

His face jolted, frozen in horror and surprise. He began to shake his head, a tremble at first that soon turned to outright revulsion and disbelief. It all made sense. His father, try as he might to believe otherwise, was a cruel, cruel man. And the message his mother left. It wasn't a dream. It wasn't a dream at all. She really had walked into his room. She really had said…she was gone? No. "No…no, he wouldn't…he wouldn't!"

"Oh. But he would." It was terrifying, the glee she felt at almost bringing her own brother to his knees, weeping. It hadn't happened, but it was only a matter of time before he did so. Just a few more shoves and he would be pushed past that brink. Just as she was every time Mother chose him.

"You're lying!" he shouted into her face, hands flinging to point accusingly at her, as if the action would change everything and all would be set right. "Stop it, Azula, just stop it!"

"Oh, I'm not lying this time. Go and see for yourself, her room should be emptied. Cast out like trash, in the middle of the night. You know, I think she killed grandpa. Probably to allow Father to ascend to the throne so he wouldn't have to kill you."

His head dropped as he listened, hot pain shot at the back of each eye. "You're the worst sister ever! Shut up, Azula – she's not gone! She can't be gone…she isn't! I'll prove it to you. Grandfather's still here and so is she!" he bounded off, back into the direction of the housing quarters of the palace. "I hate you, Azula!" he called back to her thickly. "I wish you'd never been born!"

That one hurt. He had never said he hated her. No one ever did, though she knew they all thought it. Her 'friends', her family, her servants. She had thoughts that he and his mother spent the long hours of the night conspiratorially speaking angry words at her behind her back, but she'd had no proof. She simply knew, even if it was false, the two were always thinking it. No one in that family loved her. Perhaps her father, he said he did, but she could never believe it. Her uncle loved Zuko more, and as did her mother. But Azula could care less about any of that. Affection was merely a means of having a hold on another being through metaphysical ties. Nothing more, or so Father had always told her, creating a perfect pawn from birth. She didn't care that her mother thought she was a monster, and that it was true. She didn't care that even when she said she didn't, she knew she really did.

The one thing that everyone seemed to forget was that behind the sharp, angular mask of the haughty princess was a little girl, frightened and insecure despite her status of near perfection. And it hurt. Before her father had truly transformed her into the way she was now, conniving and manipulating, it had sent stabbing pangs through her heart, spiked her blood with dread and lead, and caused searing trails to tear down tracks along her cheeks. She hated how it felt. Hated how she could do nothing right. Hated that through the web of her mind, she could never find a true person to blame. A true entity to shove all the doubt onto. And from that hate, spurred the beginnings of the cold ice that gripped her heart, that steeled her away from all that pain, and deluded herself from the fact that she was just as human as her brother and her uncle. Even if all anyone ever saw of her was the growing shadow of her father.

And the last crucial element they all forgot along the fractured road was that Ursa was her mother too. Even if no one would accept that.