The Devil's Tears
These wounds won't seem to heal,
This pain is just too real,
There's just so much that time cannot erase
My Immortal - Evanescence
She sits on the cold, stone floor day after day, year after year. She is staring, always staring into the nothingness that her life has become. Looking into her past she wishes for nothing more than forgiveness but knows she will receive none for her crimes.
She spends night after night staring at the ceiling of her small, plain room. Sighing she turns onto her side, only to stare into more blackness. She closes her eyes tight but quickly resigns to the fact she won't be sleeping tonight.
She sometimes tries to count the days, months, even years that she has been in her cell, but always they blend together as they forever will. Nobody ever comes to visit her or see how she is but that is to be expected. Who needs a forgotten princess when they have all they had ever wanted.
Sometimes she hears the other prisoners screaming as they try to sleep, but she never makes a sound. She does not want the guards to know how she regrets and how she wishes that one day she will be home in the Fire Nation once more.
In her mind she replays her last memories with Zu-Zu and that girl, always that girl. Katara they called her, the water-bender. If it had not been for the water-bender, it would be she, and not her brother, that sat on the throne. But now she was nothing, reduced to what she would once call the worst sort of filth.
If she had only changed one thing, one little thing, she would be sitting at home with Zuko and Mae, laughing while their children danced and played around the palace, as they had done when she was just a child. She would teach the next Fire Lord to bend lightening and train them in the ways of the Phoenix King. She laughs at the thought.
It has been many years since thoughts of her father had plagued her mind. In the beginning he was all she thought of, but now she rarely even thinks of Zuko. Most of her thoughts centre on death. A grim subject, she knows, but what else does she have to look forward to.
Deep down, she knew she would ask forgiveness, but her heart knew she would never forgive herself if she did.