Chapter Ten.
Lying still and giving off body heat was something she could do asleep as easily as she could awake and so she opted for slumber. It was the only way to make cuddling a savage bearable but she had to admit his wiry, muscular form did give off no small amount of warmth. After what felt like days, but could not have been more than half of one, he stuck his hand out from beneath the blankets.
"I think it's broken," he said. "The Deep Cold. I mean, it's cold, but it doesn't seem as bad now."
They decided if they were going to leave soon, Azula may as well be near the door and so their camp was moved back to the hallway. Her leg suffered no less for it and thought some of her brother's luck might have rubbed off on her.
Once the camp was reestablished, Sokka went outside and left her to face her usual problems. After some hours, she wiped her eyes with her hands, feeling the tears that dampened her face come off as thin bits of ice. Lying on her back dressed in thick cold weather clothing she silently asked whatever spirits would listen to make her pass out if they wouldn't make her leg stop hurting.
She was always in pain, even when she had been sitting for a long time. She'd taken as few toilet breaks as she could get away with as such simple movement would put her in a heightened state of agony for hours. Being moved outside and onto a sled had been a hell that seemed to have lasted days.
Sokka made her a crutch from a piece of metal which she tried unsuccessfully to use. By the end she took a fierce pride in having kept her expressions of pain down to a few tears and whimpers. She had wanted to scream herself hoarse but her voice was one of the few weapons she had left to her.
"All set?" he asked, setting their meager rations onto the sled by her side, followed by a sack containing all the useful tools and items they'd recovered from the crashed ship.
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak. The pain in her leg, cold on her skin, and rumbling in her stomach consumed her senses and she paid enough attention to be sure all was well with the sled around her before falling back into her own world of private agony.
Being a firebender she knew wounds and pain. Cuts, scrapes, and bumps were nothing compared to burns which were persistent and powerful. Broken bones she found were similar to burns in that way. The pain she felt now was like standing in deep water, trying to keep her head above it so as not to be overwhelmed. Every so often a wave would come over her, perhaps to remind her who was in control.
All her meditation techniques seemed useless. The sled's motion was constant but jerky and when the wind gusted it stung her, further testing her concentration. The last trick she knew was to focus on the pain and the pain alone, to feel it so completely there was nothing else. Pain couldn't exist on its own, it needed something else to give it perspective and so she sought to make it the only thing she was experiencing. This worked and the pain became a buzzing, warm sensation.
Pain was how the body knows it's hurt, she remembered. -Well, have you figured it out now?- she thought. She imagined what the bone looked like compared it to the other unbroken one and the image of a snapped twig came to mind. She thought if she could accurately picture how the bone had broken the pain would leave her alone.
Gruesome as these thoughts were they were better than thoughts of the mountain which had been so persistent they had worn her down like the tide wears down a sand castle. She remembered her conversation with the Water Tribe boy from earlier when she corrected him and said the fire beneath the mountain was calling to her. He had been right, had he not? It wasn't fire under the mountain calling, it was the mountain itself. -Or something else,- she thought.
She tapped her wounded leg with her foot and let the pain wash over her to drown out her thoughts.
There was no way to tell time in the state she was in. The sky never seemed to change. The sun was in the west now and she had been in too much pain when they left to notice where it had been before. They were going slower now and once she decided that wasn't her imagination they stopped.
The snowshoes Sokka made flopped near the bottom of the sled and he pulled up a long, wide piece of canvass. He stood by her injured side and let the wind blow the canvass over her before tucking one end under the sled. He tucked the other side down as well and did the bottom after he crawled under it.
"What are you doing?" she asked, feeling every movement of the sled in her leg. Her entire body tensed she he lay against her his head touching her shoulder.
"Sleeping," he said, his voice muffled. "I'm tired and we need to share body heat."
His presence made her squirm but the opportunity to do something useful had presented itself and so she focused on raising her body temperature to keep them both warm under the canvass. It was more difficult to do than she thought and the energy flowing through her body made it feel like there was a cold hole on her injured leg.
Azula tried to remain awake knowing the dreams of the mountain would overtake her, but she was unable to fight sleep for long. This time she was at the mountain basking in the warmth of its shadow, feeling the pulse from deep inside. There was something new, now. A slithering sound like smooth rocks moving against each other filled her ears under the pulsing. It had a rhythm to it that kept time with the pulsing and reminded her almost of speech.
Her mother was back. This time a distant speck in the east although Azula could see her clearly. She stood in the manner of someone at a graveside and Azula sensed she turning her head away although she never quite completed the motion.
Azula shouted began shouting at her. She didn't know what she said but it was like a burden had been lifted from her and she looked down to see her legs worked and she was standing. Her mother was gone now and she looked back to the mountain, knowing whatever was there had nothing to do with the woman. Nonsense and mind-fluff was all she had been.
The slithering sound was louder and had a wet quality to it like a tongue over a set of lips or teeth.
She woke up to see Sokka's dark skinned, bleary face close to hers. His lips were pursed and he muttered something that sounded like "Suki" as he tried to kiss her. She slapped his cheek and jerked her head back as he rolled away and rose to wakefulness. "Ow," he said, rubbing his face. He looked around and winced when he saw her.
"Have a nice nap, did you? Sweet dreams?"
"The sweetest," he mumbled.
He rose and rolled up the canvass they had used for a makeshift tent letting the heat into the air. He had some trouble fixing his snowshoes back to his feet but after a few minutes succeeded and went back to towing the sled. Her leg hurt less now and she left it that way feeling the mountain press at the back of her head while the western sky swirled with another storm, one she thought Sokka had to have noticed. She watched it, seeing it was hours away yet and tried not to think too much about the wet slithering sound she'd heard the mountain make.
To be continued...