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Book One:
Air
Chapter Two:
The Prisoners
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The creaking of metal began another day as ceremoniously as any day before it as a man in a maroon doctor's uniform let himself into her open cell. His sensible robes were well-tailored to his arms and didn't drag on the floor like most official Fire Nation uniforms, then again a doctor in his field had to worry about the grabby tendencies of 'kickers' and 'biters'. But the design of his robes would do nothing against a 'scorcher' such as the one he was paying another daily therapeutic visit with. He didn't say anything as he walked across from her metal bunk, on which she was seated, her arms and legs crossed with little grace as she slouched against the wall. It had been too long since she had exercised the royal manners which she was taught from childhood, they were useless in this place. But even now there was something about the way she carried herself that wasn't hard to recognize as the great, though slightly time-worn, pride only found in royalty.
The man took a seat quietly on the usual rusty metal chair.
A long moment of quiet passed as he took a deep breath as quietly as he could, she could almost feel his anxiety radiating off of him. She didn't control a twinge of a smirk.
"How are you feeling today?" The doctor asked with as much care as he could fake.
A small eruption of blue heat puffed out between her lips, giving her answer.
The doctor stiffened in his seat, his hands holding together tighter than before. The fresh burn hidden under the bandages under the sleeve of his uniform ached with the memory of that fire.
If there was anything about this place that was keeping her sane it was that. Those trace amounts of fear she could still invoke in those around her. She guessed she should've considered herself lucky that the Avatar hadn't stolen her power the same way he did her father's, but it was going to be the Avatar who would be very unlucky if she ever managed to escape.
The doctor shuffled in his seat, no doubt going to ask the next question just like always: 'Have you been thinking about what I said?' He never said anything different, though. Just the same textbook definition of her 'disorder'… she didn't believe a word of it. It was her own head; she knew how it worked better than any textbook.
But today's usual, stale 'heart-to-heart' was going to have to be rescheduled.
A timid knock at the side of the open cell was heard before the doctor could get the guts to find his voice again. The man looked relieved for the interruption. The patient was only mildly curious of the routine-break.
"Sir, we've received a… request… from the Palace." A meek voice of a woman spoke out from behind the corner of the wall, probably careful not to be seen by the cell's inhabitant, had trouble with that sentence.
The Palace?
The patient's interest was piqued.
"What?" The doctor asked up, confused.
The woman explained further, even quieter than before, "The Fire Lord requires the patient's audience."
"Really?" The doctor stood up from his seat just as 'the patient''s head lifted from the shadows.
"Yes, there are guards waiting at the entrance, they said tha-." The meek voice explained further before she was drowned out easily. A girl's sharp and cold laughter brought silence to the other two in her presence.
Azula let out the long laugh freely, her guffawing cracked at the end with a note of sincerity.
"What does my brother want from me now?" She caught her breath as she asked the other two with nobility in her voice that she should've long been stripped of. "Does he want to see me prance around like a jester while he sits in our father's throne… my throne?" She titled her head towards them, her stringy hair, now fully outgrown again, fell off of her face slowly. Her golden eyes were still sharp enough to threaten the voice out of the doctor.
The woman spoke up behind the corner of the doorway. "U-um." She faltered. "Fire Lord Zu-You're brother… He… Um…"
The former Princess grew impatient. "Spit it out."
The aid quivered in fear for a moment before jumping off the ground entirely when a tall, uniformed figure appeared behind her and answered for her as it walked into the doorway she'd been too fearful to enter before.
"He has been dethroned, Lady Azula, your majesty." The guard's voice sounded metallic behind that mask.
The sixteen-year-old's heart picked up its pace for a spare second like it hadn't since before day the Avatar defeated her father. Something like happiness threatened her, but it was more akin to malice.
Hearing that all too familiar title after her name woke up a part of the princess in her, dignity already flowing back into her after that single sentence. Her posture straightened, a smirk taking over her lips. "Really?" She asked rhetorically. The guard nodded swiftly.
So her brother fell. He failed.
Of course he did, he was weak, an embarrassment to her family's great and powerful lineage. It was only a matter of time.
She didn't get enough time to gloat before the important details were explained to her.
"Our new leader, Fire Lord Zhao, has granted you amnesty and would like speak with you… in person." The guard finished dutifully.
That name… she thought that name and its owner had long since been dealt with… but to hear it now with the title of her father and her father's father… as well as once her own… she found her interest doubled.
"Zhao…" Azula's voice twisted that name with the wide smile she was now wearing.
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He picked up the left over cups from the third table with a heavy sigh.
Times had been rough lately, rougher now that the anxiety over the Fire Nation's reborn imperialistic habits were eating away at everyone who lived in this great, but not so impregnable, fortress of a city.
But the sixty-six year old owner of The Jasmine Dragon had other worries that were probably not shared by anyone else in his tea shop or in this city.
Perhaps I should not have told her.
Maybe it would have been best not answering her questions.
The old man wondered as he carried the cups on a tray to the back of the eerily quiet teashop. The determination that the young Bei Fong girl showed when she left this shop only days before was a dangerous one; she looked like she was thinking of doing something reckless. But he had not stopped her. It was not his place. Instead he paid her only words of warning and wisdom… but even now he felt as if the girl had probably already forgotten them and was now doing something terribly dangerous.
He sighed for the dozenth time that day and returned to his work, disappointed only in himself and his inability to get through to the young ones these days.
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I really should've just ignored the old man, shouldn't've I?
Toph half-seriously entertained second thoughts even though she knew full-well that there was no turning back now. Still on the peak of the rock wall that bordered the prison-soup like a bowl, she held her hands firmly against the volcanic stone. She cringed at the sickening feeling of this earth and tried to focus on something else.
Iroh said that there was a single gondola contraption that led prisoners into the prison… so that must be the most heavily guarded spot of this place, right?
She listened to the vibrations of the stone, it wasn't long before she located the metal cables that were implanted into the stone about seventy degrees of this rock-circle to her right.
Ok, so if that's the front, and it has the most guards…. Then the back shouldn't really have any guards right?
The logic seemed sound to her… but then again, it was hard to think right now.
She just acted on her gut feeling and started her stealthy path along the rock wall. She heard that the security here was killer. She took an extra precaution and collected small stones as she moved, letting them form something of a blanket over her to give her camouflage.
Travelling those hundred and eleven degrees without being noticed wasn't the hard part nor was it even managing to slide down the inner-side of the wall without being seen. Now was the hard part… crossing this insanely hot lake without being seen.
She thought for a second…
Ok, this is gonna be hard.
Water's not really my thing…
Even if I managed to get my metal boat over here, it would only cook me as I tried to cross…. Same thing if I made a rock-boat…. If I even could... Rocks are kind of famous sinking in water so that wouldn't work.
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Geez, being an earthbender right now isn't all as great as I remember it being…
She admitted to herself as she was having a hard time ignoring the rivers of magma flowing a dozen feet beneath the surface of rock she was standing on, or on how the water lapping the earth next to her toes seemed to be burning her already. But besides the natural elements right now that were giving her hell, there was a bigger problem that was bothering her…. The longer she spent here thinking the longer she was giving the guards a chance to spot her, and she wouldn't even know when they were looking at her, too. And even beyond that, the longer she spent out here like a wuss the longer that scar-face was going to have to stay in there.
She thought through the possibilities of her resources, feeling a little pressured now.
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The little fire in his hand bloomed and shrank every other second.
His eyes ached the longer he let the light burn. Even if he couldn't see the fire in his hands, he felt it's little heartbeat waver as his did. He had to get his eyes back to being used to light. If he was going to try and escape he couldn't expect to get that far if it hurt to look where he was going.
He was going to escape… he had to.
He had done it before… and even if he didn't have help this time around, or any plans…
He couldn't waste away in here for the rest of his life.
For a moment his will to live burned a little too strongly in his emotions, the flame grew larger, shedding more light into the dark and dank room. He quickly extinguished the little flame when he needed to squeeze his eyes shut with the dull pain they felt.
He felt like yelling, again.
That was until he heard the laughter.
Guards.
They'd been celebrating the new Fire Lord's coronation for a while now.
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This is either one of the smartest things I've ever thought of… or just the stupidest.
Nah, it's probably both.
She didn't care… this was the best shot she had.
She gave a single shrug to herself as she set her silent-invasion plan in motion with one strong back punch to the side of the rock wall.
Nothing happened for a long moment.
That was expected.
But, sure enough, after only a few seconds of waiting anybody who didn't have extraordinary listening skills like Toph could still hear the rumbling and creaking of metal giving way. With that single punch Toph had directed a push of energy against the stone supports of those gondola cables. And now, even without having to see it, Toph could tell that with the little rock-alanche she created, those cables were definitely losing their hold on the rock-side.
She could hear guards yelling to each other about what to do.
There was nothing they could do, as far they as they knew this was just an act of nature. But what the guards didn't notice while they were watching the cables of their heavily guarded gondola lose their slack and fall towards the water was a five foot rock person leaping up at just the right moment and cutting off a rather long segment of right cable before it was lost to the water.
The guards ran around in confusion, shouting orders at each other while they secured the gondola cart onto the prison wall. Toph was already back up to the top of the rock cliff, balancing herself as she slinked her way to the opposite side of the hexagonal prison, bending the metal of the cable into a single, thinner, strand of metal rope.
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The laughter suddenly stopped for a reason Zuko could guess as well.
He felt it, too.
A deep rumbling and loud crashing sounds, like water splashing.
Something was happening outside of the walls of this prison.
For a second it was strange for Zuko to be so heavily reminded of just how real the world was outside the black walls of this cell, but it didn't take him long before he was wondering the same thing the, now not-laughing, guards were.
What just happened?
For a crazy moment Zuko wondered if someone was escaping right now.
It was probably only an earthquake.
He tried not to think of the fact that someone else might be getting free right now while he was still sitting here nursing his eyes back into light tolerance, but that word struck him.
Earthquake?
He remembered the last time he felt the earth rumble under his feet the same way he had heard the rumbling just now.
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It was almost… familiar.
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Hoping this would work, she fastened one end of the metal rope to a rock twice her weight and the other she used bending to bury deeply into the rock-side of the mountain, giving it an especially strong foundation.
And with one last check of distance and air speed she gave the rock a single earthbending jab.
It was now rocketing towards the little island in the middle of the boiling lake, the metal rope attached to it was whizzing through the air behind it with a slinky harmony. By the sound of the boulder making impact not with gravelly volcano-rock but flat stone, she knew she had aimed well.
It only took gravity less than a minute to do its job when Toph didn't hesitate to wrap her hands with a protective layer of sediment and grab onto the wire, letting herself slide down the metal rope, hopefully unnoticed as the guards were probably flooding the natural disaster she created earlier.
But she wasn't so lucky.
The moment her bare feet touched the smooth stone of the wall-landing of The Boiling Rock and before she could even smile in celebration of single-handedly breaking into one of the most inescapable prisons ever designed, she noticed that her feet weren't the only ones there.
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The hall was quiet, the only sound was the roaring of the fire. The searing heat and sound of which were barely noticeable to a man who had lived with fire his whole life, and especially for the man who was now fueling this fire guarding this throne like all the great Fire Lords before him had.
But that silence was soon interrupted.
"Fire Lord Zhao." Again, hearing his name like that was enough to take off the edge of his irritation for the interruption that let itself be known while he was trying to strategize a new battlefront for reclaiming the great lands the Fire Nation once called its own before the little Fire Lord before him decided to let go of their hard work and return the territories to the unworthy peasants
"Yes?" He obliged the servant with a response as he set aside his invasion plans for a certain Northern nation, or more appropriately 'tribe', that had humiliated him once in the past and won't again in the future.
"The prisoner you requested." The servant responded monotonously, "Lady Azula has arrived."
A smile crept along the Fire Lords lips.
"Very well." He spoke up, from his throne, "Send her in."
"Yes, Fir-"
"Alone." Zhao's voice bit through the air quickly.
The servant hesitated, as was expected. It was unnatural to allow a prisoner, let alone one of such power who had been admitted in a mental facility until recently, to see the Fire Lord unattended. But the servant was smart enough not to question his Lord's order.
"Yes, Fire Lord Zhao."
It wasn't long before the 'prisoner', still adorned in age-worn rags and an unkempt and dirty image complete with unwashed hair, walked back into a room she knew from childhood as her grandfather's, her father's, and her own for only a short day. The fire shrouding the single throne was a darker hue of red than she had remembered it ever being when her family belonged in this hall.
"Welcome."
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Phew, lots of story breakers in this one.
Feel free to tell me what you think so far. :D