A/N: I don't know why don't ask me ahhhhhhh! *hides*
And yes, the title is stupid. /cough Read on!
Saving Face
It has been a long, long time since she has seen a smile.
The faces around her are broken and serious, all emotions but guilt and despair and pure, raw bitterness at the world hidden behind the heavy brows and set frowns. She can look into the eyes of those around her and taste their loss, smell their anger, hear their pain. She can brush back the dirty hair from their foreheads and twitch the corner of her mouth, trying to remember how she used to smile, and get a weak approximation in return. She can hold them in her arms and rock them back and forth until they fall asleep on her shoulder, because they can act strong and hell-bent on revenge but she's still their mother and they're still just children who have felt the slap of a two-edged sword. She can whisper sweet nothings into their ears until their tense muscles relax and the scowls fade. She can hold a hand gloved in glowing water to their temples and massage away the memories, ease away the pain; at least for a while, until they come back to her, begging her for more crushing relief.
She cannot, though – will not – ask them to pay her back. Because the price she would set is far too steep for them to pay. For if a picture is worth a thousand words, a smile must be worth a thousand lives.
She tries not to let it affect her, because she is the ever-hopeful and constantly optimistic sweetheart with a bad undertone that should only show in times of battle. She is the sister, she is the mother, she is the once-time lover to some, and she must be strong and stand up for them when they cannot walk on their own. She tries not to feel their weight on her shoulders, because, she tells herself over and over and over, it's not like they're some burden. They are her friends, her family, her people, her world, and it's not words like duty or obligation or responsibility that drive her on, but…
She sighs to herself and rubs her painfully throbbing hand idly. It's love, she tells herself. True love. And if it isn't shown on their face, it's not like she can blame them. It's not like they don't love her back. She knows they do; she doesn't need some silly thing like a smile to make her pain go away.
What she needs, she thinks, is some revenge. Playing the avenger for the Avatar and the Prince – no, Aang and Zuko, because they were more than figureheads, and they loved her, they did – would do her a world of good. Seeing some pale faces with lips curled back in a scream and eyes dancing with the pale blue light of her lightning-fast water and perfect black hair frozen in fragile icicles that snap as she slices off their head with a single neat motion would be so much better, so much more worthwhile, than a little upturning of the edge of someone's bloody lips. That damn smile is worth a thousand lives; if she can kill as many of the Firebenders as they killed of her men, her Earth and Water and warriors, than she would deserve a smile.
She doesn't deserve it. She doesn't kill that many.
The second attack is not so much a failure as the first. They don't have the Avatar or the Prince – no, Aang and Zuko, because they were people too, not mindless weapons – but neither is it the blood-red day of Sozin's Comet, and nor is Ozai alive, and nor is Azula quite so perfect, and nor are the people quite so worried about resurgence, and nor is Katara the weak little water tribe savage that watched the Big Bad Royal Siblings fight to the death while she did nothing. Toph is not such a small child, and she has learned how to play her cards for more than cheap scams for money. She has rallied the Earth Kingdom and ignored the Cowardly King Who Ran Away, because she has money and she has a pretty face and she can call men to duty like she owned their very souls because she scares them, and yet intrigues them unignorably. Sokka is not such an innocent boy who stumbles over his speeches, because he has grown taller than their father and broader in the shoulders, and his wolf tail is fuller than the scraggly bunch of messy hair it was when he was a teen, and his jawline is square and set and his eyes heavy and his voice deep as he tells the men to think of everything they lost ten years ago. His eyes flash a bit, and the memory of the past chief is almost enough to spur the warriors into frenzy to avenge him; Sokka's feral war cry is just enough to push them over the edge. He doesn't care much for crafty inventions anymore; but then, they don't get his men's blood pumping. And what's the use of pretty little tools when they couldn't save the plan, couldn't save his father, couldn't save his bride-to-be?
Katara has no doubts that he and Toph are 'friends' on the side, because they both lost the ones they loved the most in the last war, and hey, times are rough. She wonders if they at least smile.
And Katara – Katara is alone. Of course she has her brother and her friend and what's left of her people and their small thrown-together band. But more importantly, she has her old memories. She remembers going penguin sledding on that day with Aang, the sun shining bright and his laughter brighter, a wide grin spread from ear to ear. She remembers at the North Pole when Sokka got his first kiss and came back smirking like he was the King of the World, and she had giggled and teased him mercilessly because he really was 'sort of a Prince'. (She doesn't mention that she'd had her first kiss long ago, with an old childhood friend, because he probably would have bent her over his knee and paddled her backside – more from jealousy than an urge to punish her.) She remembers Toph pointing her finger and laughing mockingly at Aang, her smile impish and promising all planes of hell to be unleashed.
She remembered Zuko's gentle smile when she had wrapped her arms around him and whispered "I forgive you" into his ear, her lips brushing the delicate pink skin of his scar.
A million memories flitting through her mind like a sad, unfinished movie, and nowhere to put them but into her bending. Zuko always said not to fuel her fighting with anger, but from the masses that lay bleeding before her on that day, she figured he could be wrong about some things. Their faces are contorted in pain and suffering, and she tries to find it in her twisted heart - as it must be as black and frozen as the ice you always avoided in the south pole - to love every moment of it. But she can't. She sees the whites of two more eyes and the whites of a perfect set of clean, straight teeth glaring up at her. She kicks the head away with a scowl and swallows the bile that rises in her throat. Because she hasn't killed enough yet, not enough to pay them back.
She hasn't seen a smile in a long time, and she knows she misses them, but she knows better than to ask. She doesn't deserve it. She hasn't done enough yet.
She strides to the palace and through the doors like she own the place, because she might as well have owned the streets for all the living in them. She makes her way to the throne room, the path burned into her memory as if with perfect blue fire, and she pushes those doors open too. She knows what she'll find there, and she doesn't care if the plan was to wait for her brother and for Toph, because she may just be that child with a stinging wound too, and maybe she's just as broken and hopeless, but she really is hell-bent on revenge.
Oh how nice it would be, she thinks as she stares into the pretty gold eyes glinting at her with an unhealthy, insane light from the throne, to see a smile on her face as she killed her.
The battle is over quickly, really. Azula may be a prodigy, but she was slipping. She had no guards who she trusted, and the palace was all but deserted. Her hair hung limp from her face in uneven strands cut by unsteady hands. Katara, who had trained for a decade with determination she hadn't put into anything in her life, made easy work of her.
But it was karma. It was the only thing she could expect, because she just hadn't killed enough; her hatred and her will to avenge just hadn't been strong enough. Azula knelt at her feet with a pool of blood staining her perfect gold-trimmed silk robes and soaking into Katara's leather boots, staring up at her ferally, but the grin she had had all throughout their fight, the maniacal laughter, even the condescending smirk, was vanished from her face. Her gold eyes pierced through her as the light faded from them, and Katara was immediately transported back to when she had held the girl's brother – they looked so alike just then, at their last moments – as the same happened to her. And the pensive, tentative, almost frightened look that flicked across the Princess's face as she muttered, "Mother?" and slipped, her forehead careening into Katara's thigh with jarring impact, brought her no joy. She knelt down, face-to-face with the one who had ruined absolutely everything. She was still breathing shallowly, because she was of the line of Agni, and she just wouldn't die.
"Will you smile for me?" she whispered, and she lifted a tan hand to cup the girl's face and lift her rapidly dulling gaze to meet hers. "I know it's a lot to ask…."
Uncertainty flickered in Azula's eyes. "You're not my mother," her hoarse voice choked out.
A laugh burst passed Katara's lips, a single unamused snort. "That's never mattered to anyone," she mumbled. "They still wanted me to be."
Azula held her stare for another suspended moment, the air still and silent, before her head fell into her hand with dead weight. Katara clutched her chin for a second after the girl's last breath had whispered past her lips, the carefully applied red lipstick not hiding the cracks and tears in the delicate skin. The watertribess considered the Princess before her, her face as beautiful in death as it ever had been in life. She lifted her other hand slowly and held it before her captive's unseeing gaze, almost wondering why her arm didn't shake. She twitched a few fingers in quick motion, and after ten years it was only to be expected that she could do it so efficiently, full moon be damned.
When Sokka and Toph had burst into the room a few minutes later, hair tousled and breath coming in gasps and open wounds bleeding, they had seen Katara staring down dispassionately at the dead Princess, who looked as though she had fallen to the ground in a crumpled heap. They rushed to her side and Sokka enveloped her in a desperate hug, patting her singed hair and fraying clothes with distraught fervency. "You're okay," he had whispered into her ear as he pulled her close, but when she looked up, his drawn face wasn't smiling. She looked to Toph, who was checking Azula's pulse with mechanic disinterest. After a long and silent minute, she stood and offered a tersely respective nod to Katara.
"Is it just me," the blind girl asked, smoky pale eyes expressionless, "or is she smiling?"
Sokka bent closer and scrutinized the Princess's face with tired curiosity. "Yeah, she is," he finally sighed. "That's odd. She's that last person I would have expected to be happy as she died."
Katara just strode past the both of them without a backward glance at the body. "Maybe all this time, she was just saving face," she called quietly. "Maybe she only wanted one unachievable thing, and now she's dead, she'll be able to receive it. Maybe that's why she was smiling – she could finally have what held too steep a cost to ask for."
Her last word echoed in Katara's mind. Mother.
Sighing, she pushed out of the throne room and down the halls alone. They had won the battle, and this time, won the war. There was so much left to do, too much to think about. And maybe she'd had to resort to the lowest level she could think of, and maybe her hand burned with more than Azula's lightning – burned with searing guilt for the power it held in just two twitching fingers that could call to the veins in Azula's rapidly cooling face and control the blood in them – but someone, at least, had finally smiled for her.
Her hand flamed at her side, lightning racing painfully through her veins, but the sinful thought that maybe she could make others do the same hovered in a dark, back corner of her mind as she peered over the city, drenched in the blood of its citizens and the deep orange of the sun setting over the waves and the guilt and heavy revenge of its conquerors.
A/N: You can see how hard this was for me. There is painful blood from my mind in every sentence. So please, make it worth it and leave a review. Thank you very muchzies.