A/N: Written for the ATLA Secret Santa swap on Promptbending. Prompts: dragonflies, spirits, Azula
Azula hates her prison.
It's not a prison, they say; it's merely a facility, a place meant to help her, a place where she can recover away from the prying eyes of others. As the days after the final Agni Kai grow longer and longer and clarity starts returning to her mind bit by bit, they remove her shackles, remove her restraints, let her outside once a week to firebend.
Weeks pass without incident and they stop switching guards outside her room every hour, stop flinching every time they come in to bring her food. Seasons blur into each other one after another, summer and autumn and winter and spring and then summer again, and the first year of Zuko's reign comes to an end. Zuko visits her on the anniversary of his coronation; she smiles sweetly and congratulates him on not being dead yet.
He responds by getting her a better room. One without bars on the windows, one with a view overlooking the garden below.
Azula doesn't care what they say, doesn't care that Zuko visits her once a week, doesn't care that Mai and Ty Lee haven't visited at all. She hasn't seen Mother in months now and she is no fool. Her mind may be weak but it has not lost its acuity and only a fool would think this is anything but a prison.
"The doctors said they think you should be able to spend the holidays with us," Zuko tells her. He looks more relaxed than usual, his hair unpinned, his Fire Lord robes replaced by a loose red-and-gold tunic and pants. Sometimes he visits her in full Fire Lord regalia, other times he dresses casually. Azula doesn't care what he wears; she doesn't want to see him at all.
Her lip curls into a sneer. "Did they say I want to spend the holidays with you?"
Azula hates the holidays. There is nothing she despises more than the inane, and the celebrations around the new year are the epitome of everything that is. One year is no different from another; if the new year were in the summer the celebrations would arouse equal excitement. Even as a princess, she has been jostled by excited crowds watching dragon dances, and the firecrackers going off in the center of the city can be heard all the way from her bedroom in the palace.
Zuko should expect no enthusiasm from her, especially not now, but he manages to look faintly wounded by her words anyway. "It's the holidays, Azula; have some spirit. There's going to be a great feast; Uncle Iroh hired musicians from all over the nation to perform."
"Spare me."
"Everyone's going to be there."
By everyone he means his little band of friends, including the Avatar and that meddling waterbender. She clenches her teeth, not deigning to answer.
He sighs. "Well, the doctors said you can come if you want. It's next week—I'll see you before then?"
She picks at her nails, ignoring his huff of frustration when she gives no indication of listening. After a moment, he stands and walks away, shutting the door to her room quietly behind him, his footsteps receding down the hallway.
She does not watch him go—she hates it when he visits, but she hates it more when he leaves.
x.
Azula hates dreams.
Before her friends betrayed her and her mind splintered and Mother rose from the dead, she had absolute control over every aspect of her life. Her servants were most afraid of displeasing her, her father indulged her; her every whim was catered to. There was nothing she had no power over—nothing but her dreams.
She never dreamed much before that day Zuko stole her rightful crown, and when she did she was able to ignore them, but now she often finds herself waking in the middle of the night with cold sweat dripping down her back. At first she would scream, blast lightning at the ceiling and char holes in the walls and wait for people to run in and sedate her, but now she is better at dealing with the nightmares. It is difficult to remember them upon awakening, but each one sends her heart into a cold, empty place, her mind teetering back towards insanity.
This dream is different. In this dream, she is alone.
She stands by the bank of a river, water trickling at her feet, frogs croaking and crickets chirping in the otherwise still night around her. There is a noticeable weight on her shoulders; she looks down and sees pointy-toed boots, realizes she is wearing her armor once more and not the loose silky clothing she is usually given. Her hair is tied back, and when she moves to touch it she feels the cool smooth gold of her Fire Princess crown tucked neatly in her topknot.
Well. This is an interesting development.
Azula surveys the landscape: it is a dense gray forest, fog shimmering in the air, obscuring her view of what may lie beyond the trees. Everything seems to have a bluish tinge to it, like she is seeing things through someone else's perspective in a faint memory.
She gives her surroundings another cursory glance and turns around—and suppresses a shriek of surprise.
There is a giant—something right behind her, a bug of some sort, a huge creature with bulbous eyes and a long, grotesque body and longer, translucent wings. It hovers in the air, nearly her size, and were it a person she would say it is staring at her inquisitively.
It takes her a moment to realize what it is: a dragonfly. Azula hates dragonflies. She hates all bugs but there has always been something about dragonflies that particularly disturbs her.
She takes a quick step back and shifts into a bending stance, pointing two fingers at the creature and focusing her attention on the area between its eyes. Her stomach is cold and she cannot sense the spark of fire within, but she shoots blue fire at it anyway.
At least that is her intention; nothing actually happens. Her bending does not appear to work in this dream.
"Well, now, that's not how you treat an old friend, is it?"
The voice is high, reedy, and amused, coming from right in front of her. Azula frowns. Surely it isn't—
"Don't you remember me, princess? Your mother used to tell you stories about me."
The accursed dragonfly's mandibles are clicking. She shakes her head in disbelief. The dragonfly is talking.
"I am Qing Ting. What have you called me for, princess?"
Azula licks her lips. This is a dream. "No one called you."
"Ah, but you did." The dragonfly rises in the air and she scrambles a few steps back, hoping to put as much distance between herself and the giant talking bug as possible. "I am associated with many things in your culture, a symbol of power and victory, of harmony and prosperity, of self-discovery—all things you seem to be lacking at the moment, hmm?"
Her fists clench ever so slightly.
"What do you need, princess?"
She looks away deliberately, avoiding the question. A dragonfly, a manifestation of many things, speaking to her in her dreams… she knows where she is now. "This is the Spirit World?"
"Clever."
She pinches herself, her long fingernails digging trenches in her skin. The world remains blue and still around her, and the dragonfly unfortunately very corporeal.
"I need to wake up."
Qing Ting continues to stare down at her, eyes round and blank, no sign of life in them. But when it speaks, it sounds strangely human. "Perhaps you need your mother instead."
She blinks and the world vanishes around her.
x.
Azula hates memories.
She was assaulted with them that time she went to Ember Island with her brother and her (former) friends, enough to the point that she let herself admit things she hadn't admitted to anyone before. Everyone lives in the present; there is no point dwelling in the past, in previously pleasant things gone sour and could-have-beens. The past is only a trap, preventing people from living life in the most efficient way possible in the present.
It is a definite trap now, one she is ensnared in, one with no exit—because she is watching herself a decade ago, a child of only five years, sitting with her mother and brother on a bed in Princess Ursa's chambers, and there is no way to escape the scene playing out before her.
Qing Ting hovers next to her and she fixes her eyes on the carpet in the room, refusing to meet its alien gaze. "Do you remember this?" it asks.
Not really; she was only five. But as Ursa tickles her children and they shriek with laughter, Azula starts to recall bits and pieces of that night: they were supposed to have a holiday dinner, just the four of them, Prince Ozai and his family, but Prince Ozai himself never showed up.
"Your father will be out of his meeting soon," Ursa says, smoothing a hand over young Zuko's hair. Young Azula scrambles into her lap and she holds her daughter close, pressing a kiss to the little girl's cheek. Young Azula giggles with delight.
Azula stares at the scene, wondering when she was ever such a foolish child. Before she bent blue fire, certainly. Before her father took an interest in her education.
"Two months after this, Princess Azula began private lessons with her father Prince Ozai," Qing Ting says, like the dragonfly spirit is telling the story of a stranger's life.
"Who wants to hear a myth?" Ursa asks her children.
"Tell the one about the dragonfly!" Zuko bounces up and down on the bed, nearly toppling his sister off their mother's lap. Young Azula glares at him and Ursa laughs.
"I don't like dragonflies," the little girl declares. "They're ugly."
"But the dragonfly is a marvelous creature," Ursa says. "Did you know it only needs to flap its wings thirty times a minute, yet it can move just as fast as a sparrowkeet and fly in six different directions?"
Zuko scrunches up his nose. "Backwards too?"
"Yes, backwards too. The dragonfly is an agile little insect, and in most myths it is a symbol of change." Ursa strokes her daughter's hair. "You will have to be like a dragonfly, because things will change and you will change with them, but you must be graceful about it, just like the dragonfly."
"I don't want to be like a dragonfly. They're gross." Young Azula makes a face. "I don't want things to change."
Watching her mother speak to herself in the past, Azula wonders if it is only a coincidence this is the memory Qing Ting chose to show her. She turns to glare at the dragonfly spirit, but it has vanished.
"Where—"
The room around her disappears, tapestries on the wall melting into gold, the floor and walls into specks of red. For one moment she feels like she is falling, and then she lands on solid ground.
She looks around with a sigh of impatience. Now she is standing on the dais below the Fire Lord's throne, though the fires before it are absent and the Fire Lord himself is nowhere to be seen. A low light flickers at the end of the long hallway, casting uneven shadows across the floor.
"C'mon, Azula, you promised!"
"Father is waiting for me, Zuko."
The voices come from the other side of the room, faint but increasing in volume. The door to the throne room bangs open and Ursa and Ozai's two children march in.
"He's not even here." Young Zuko throws up his hands in exasperation and Azula is struck by how… well… strange her brother looks without the scar. His features are too delicate, too even, almost feminine. She is too accustomed to the scar now; without it he doesn't look like Zuko anymore.
"He'll be here. He said he'd meet me here." Young Azula folds her arms across her chest and looks away, a hint of a pout crossing her face. She looks eight years old, but Azula isn't too sure.
"It's the holidays. We're supposed to have dinner together, a celebration or something." Zuko scowls, the expression doing nothing to mar the fine symmetrical lines of his face. "You promised."
"Lessons are more important than some silly useless holiday dinner," young Azula sneers. "If you knew that, Zuzu, maybe you wouldn't be so bad at firebending right now."
Clear hurt flashes across her brother's face. "Fine then. See if I care!"
He spins on his heel and storms off, the double doors at the end of the hall banging shut behind him. Young Azula sniffs and turns away, propping her hands on her hips, casting her gaze about the empty room with a petulant look on her face. After a moment, she leaves too, her boots clicking an impatient rhythm on the cold marble floor.
Azula stares after the disappearing figures. Something twinges in her chest and she thinks it might be regret, but she pushes that away. Regret is a weak emotion.
"This was the last holiday they had before their mother disappeared," Qing Ting announces.
She whirls around; the dragonfly is by her side once more. "Why are you showing me this?" she demands. Her voice comes out less evenly than she expected. "Bring me back, now."
If dragonflies could have expressions, she would call the look on this one's face sympathetic. "I am not showing you anything, princess. You are only showing yourself."
"What do you—"
The floor below her feet dissolves and everything blurs into shades of gray.
x.
Azula hates prophecies.
They are such unreliable things, mere words spoken by mere humans claiming to have knowledge of the future, words that for some reason others believe. People scramble all over the world, trying to discern meaning from meaningless words and embarking on dangerous quests, simply to see those words fulfilled in obscure ways.
It is difficult to believe anyone who says the future can be told, but it is also difficult to remember that what she is currently seeing isn't real.
This is a dream, she reminds herself, but everything looks so real, from the grooves in the walls to the thick layers of dust coating the floor; her feet leave prints when she moves. The only illumination comes from a small window in the corner; the shadows thrown against the wall are deep and not much darker than the actual objects in the room.
Azula squints through the blackness, trying to decipher where she is. There is a table, on which lies a tray with a half-eaten piece of bread and a jug of water. Four walls and one door and one cot in the corner.
Something tightens in her throat when her eyes fall on the figure curled up on it; she has a feeling she knows what she will find there. But when the figure shifts and Azula sees exactly whom she expected to see, her stomach flips anyway.
She is looking at herself—how many years older, she has no idea, but she recognizes her own face. Her skin is still unwrinkled, but her hair is streaked with gray, her complexion pallid, eyes dull and lifeless.
"What is this?" she snaps.
"The dragonfly has lost its wings," Qing Ting observes.
Azula's lips flatten. "Answer me, spirit."
"No one visits her now," it says. "She would not be swayed by her brother's attempts at reconciliation. In a fit of… let's call it anger, yes, in a fit of anger, she proclaimed to never want to see his face again—and he took those words to heart."
She stares at the miserable figure curled in a ball on the pathetic little cot—surely not. She would never let her emotions get away from her, not now, never let them cause her to say something with as much irrationality as the dragonfly is insinuating. She would never end up like this; she is Fire Nation royalty, the firebending prodigy Princess Azula. She was going to be Fire Lord, for Agni's sake.
"No," she declares.
"No to what, princess?" It could be her imagination, but the dragonfly sounds like it knows exactly what she is going to say.
"This isn't going to happen," she says. Because she may not be Fire Lord now, she will never be Fire Lord, but neither is she going to be the lonely crazy princess locked up in a cell for the rest of her life. "This is just a dream; you're just a dream. I control my future, not you."
"That's exactly what you needed to hear," Qing Ting says.
Azula frowns, confused. She opens her mouth to demand clarification, but the walls begin to fray at the edges, bits and pieces breaking off and shattering into thousands of black shards. The floor beneath her feet starts to collapse, and then everything around her crumbles and disappears, fading into oblivion.
x.
Azula hates waiting.
She sits straight in her chair, her hands folded neatly in her lap, counting the seconds in her head. It has been six minutes and seventeen seconds since Zuko was supposed to arrive, and he is still not here.
She breathes slowly, wondering what is causing the delay, wondering what he might be up to right now, wondering why Zuko has time in his busy schedule for her—anything but what that strange dream meant.
She hears his footsteps in the corridor before the door to her room opens; Zuko is slightly out of breath, which means he must have hurried over. He stands in the doorway, his tunic rumpled and bangs askew, blinking at her.
"You're late," she says.
"Council meeting took longer than expected," he says. He glances at the way she is seated on the edge of the chair, at the traveling cloak folded on her lap and the bag at her feet, and something lights up in his eyes.
"Are you—"
Azula flicks a strand of hair out of her eyes irritably. "Let's go."
A smile starts to twitch at the corners of his lips. "So you're—"
"Shut up, Zuzu." She hates having to spell everything out. "You're much more tolerable when you're quiet."
Zuko does not seem to hear the insult; he takes her bag for her, a full-blown grin on his face, and when he turns to her, still smiling, she nearly smiles back.
(Azula hates a lot of things, but her brother is not one of them.)
A/N: So this obviously disregards the comics (screw the comics). There was stuff I wanted to add to this about the dragonfly (some symbolism crap) but this is pretty late already so yeah I hope this isn't too terrible orz also this wasn't meant to be based on A Christmas Carol but it just kinda ended up that way?
Merry (belated) Christmas and happy holidays!