So this is just a drabble that popped into my head one day during Spanish class…go figure. It was originally going to be longer, but sometimes you can clutter the feeling of a piece with too many words, and I think that this one was meant to be short. Feel free to disagree. Anyway, thanks for reading!
In his dreams she screams and spits blue fire. When he wakes, gasping for breath over the pounding of his heart, he grieves over his shattered memories of his sister. This is how she always appears to him, now, broken and beyond reach. Even those who hate her cannot ignore the tragedy of Azula's slide into madness.
Zuko wonders what it was that brought her to that point. Looking back, there was so much time that he did not spend with his sister; the times when she was playing with Mai and Ty Lee and he was avoiding them at all costs, her time at the Fire Nation Academy for Girls, the period of his exile, her time training with Ozai.
He tries not to think about what his father might have done to make her this way.
He has gone to visit her every month since he locked her away. Some days she ignores him and doesn't speak, which he hates. Some days she screams and thrashes against the guards who have to hold her down, which is worse. Some days her eyes seem fixed to the right side of his face, the side that looks like their father, and she flinches when he moves. He used to think those days were the worst, but he's realized that those come when Azula looks at him and he knows that she is in agony, when he can almost feel her drowning in the horrors swirling through her mind as she fights to keep him from knowing what she has known.
Those are the days he wishes he had the strength to kill her. She is his sister, and her suffering claws at his heart.
How sad that it has come to this.
