A/N: Okay guys, I'm just going to be straight with you: this semester has been insane in terms of writing my honors thesis, and with all the medical literature I've been reading I'm worried I've forgotten how to write this fic properly. I'm going to slowly get back into it, but if you feel like I'm writing my own story oddly, please feel free to call me out on it. However, hopefully this chapter will be good because it was beta-read by the fabulous, incredible, unbelievably kind force of a human life known as songofhopeandhonor on tumblr. If you don't already follow her, go do so now!
Once I'm inside Azula's room and the door behind me closes, it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness pulled softly around my shoulders. The princess is sitting on the very edge of her bed. She's rolling something small in the upturned cusp of her palm. Before I can quite make out the object, she slips it into a pocket and folds her hands neatly on her lap. My own hands are cool, damp, wanting nothing more than to fidget. I force them into stillness by my sides.
"You wanted to see me," I say, letting no inflection slip into my voice that might betray fear.
Azula stands and walks over to a bedside table. She lights a candle that fills the room with soft, flickering light. "No need to be so formal. Lighten up," she says.
I stand straighter, taller. My heartbeat pounds with such force that I can hear it in my ears. I'm afraid to speak now because I know there's a lash of hate on the tip of my tongue, but my wiser side warns me that right now she has all the advantage. Better to just deal with whatever she wants and get out of here.
"How have you been enjoying your life at the palace?"
If only I could sit somewhere and stick my hands under my thighs. I fold and unfold them, my two hands that want nothing more than to punch her across the face. How does she think I'm enjoying imprisonment?
Azula turns her eyes on me, narrowed and filled with copper fire. "Nervous? You shouldn't be. I'd only like to ask you one question."
She crosses the room with precise, unhurried steps and pauses right before me. Her eyes are veiled in shadow so I can no longer make them out. I shift my position to better see their calculating glint. I nod to prompt her, still not daring to speak.
"Father asked to see you alone," she says. "What did he want with you?"
Hmm? Oh, she must mean when Ozai circled me in the throne room and asked about my mother's necklace. "I don't know," I admit. It's the truth.
"Did he ask you questions? Tell you anything?" Azula circles me slowly, just like her father in his royal hall. The lure of entrapping a person within a ring of pacing must run in the family. I watch the candlelight slide across the polished floor of her room. "Well?" she insists, a shard of impatience edging into her voice.
Azula is my enemy; there is no way around this fact. To heighten her rage by withholding useless information would be foolish. "He asked about this necklace." I touch the pendant. "He wanted to know where it came from."
"That's all?" she asks softly.
I shrug. "Sorry if that's disappointing."
She pauses in front of me and stands quite still, looking directly at my eyes. "I see," she says, smiling because of course she doesn't believe me. "I just thought it would be something more interesting since you're the first prisoner he's asked to see alone in years."
"Servant," I remind her, though somehow I suspect that might be even rarer.
"Did you know that he dismissed all guards while you two were speaking? Father seemed to really want a private chat."
Azula carefully studies my face as she says this, probably hoping for some instinctual reaction that might betray my lies. If my face shows anything, it's surprise. Sure, I don't exactly have my bending thanks to Ty Lee and so I'm not much in the way of a threat, but why chase out all of the guards?
"Great questions. I'd love the answers, too." It's as close to backtalk as I dare come.
Azula is still watching me but now with her head tilted slightly to one side. She smiles widely as if relishing the disgust I feel in her presence. "Well, if that's really all, then I suppose there's no reason to keep you. You may go."
I turn around, planning to leave without a word. My hands are on the wooden panels, ready to push the doors open and break into a run, when I hear her add: "Actually, there is one more thing."
I glance back. Her teeth are bared in a half-smirk. Exposed canines glisten on one side of her mouth. I guess she's finally decided to let me in on the real reason she called me.
"Do you miss him?" she asks.
"Who?"
"Your precious Avatar. Your precious Aang."
So there it is. There it all is, and this time I can't keep my eyes from betraying sudden terror. Just because they can't kill Aang doesn't mean he's not under torment. I imagine a scenario in which he's pinned against a floor on a bed of tiny needles, each pin pressing just hard enough to open red drops across his entire body. Such torture would promise not death but infinite pain if Aang so much as breathed too deeply. And there are even worse things they could do in the black dungeons of this palace.
"What did you do?" I accuse, my voice so low I can't believe it's coming from my throat.
"Please, Katara. Why do you assume anything's wrong? I'd like to make you a kind offer." She closes the distance between us with a few quick steps. "Would you like to see your friend?"
If Azula has ever had a kind moment, I've never been around to witness it. "Yeah, sure. As if it's that simple," I snap. "What do I have to do first? What's the catch?"
She innocently holds up her open palms. "No catch. I'm offering to escort you to the prison to tell your friend hello. If you're not interested, go." She gestures towards the door. "No one's keeping you."
My hands tremble. I wait.
"But if you want to see him, follow me." She walks past me and out the door. I follow, as of course she knows I would.
Azula takes me to the prisons where she waves to the guards at the entrance. They bow and part like water, letting us pass. I follow her down a row of mostly empty prison cells until she gestures toward a black door on the far wall. Of course the Avatar has a special holding chamber. Two more guards keeping watch at the door salute our approach.
"The Avatar has a visitor," she tells them.
One guard steps aside while the other tugs the door open and bows, a gesture of welcome. Beyond the doorway is nothing but darkness, no doubt a component of Aang's torture. Yes, there are blind people like Toph who are used to life in absolute darkness. For them, absence of light is the norm; they have never known color, a glimpse of sunlight even through closed eyelids. But throw the average human into silence, shadows, solitude for too long and he will go insane. Once you have known light it becomes like air, essential. You don't know how much you need a thing until you lose it.
"Well? Go in," Azula says, pointing me through the black gateway.
I step into the shadow of the prison chamber; the only illumination here comes from flickering torch light outside the cell where Azula and the two guards wait. They leave the door opened a crack. It's enough light only to see my own feet and the outline of silver prison bars along the center of the room. Beyond those bars, it's impossible to make out anything in the shadows.
I fist a hand against my mother's betrothal pendant as I take a few more steps, each one bringing me miles away from the Fire Nation and into a temporary safe haven where there is only my friend and myself and the firelight for company.
"Aang?" I whisper as I kneel before the bars.
As my eyes slowly adjust to the dim lightning, I notice the slumped online of a body along the far wall. The body does not belong to an Avatar. It does not belong to a hero of war. It belongs to a very small child whose body has curved in around unendurable suffering, a boy unable to respond even to my desperate begging.
"Aang!" I call, throwing myself against the bars like a bird against its cage. I reach for him, but he's too far to touch. "Aang!"
Behind me, Azula has to say he's unconscious several times before I hear her. "Don't worry, he's very much alive," she assures me. "Just drugged so he's not a danger and in such a sad state, I'll admit. A shame he can't be released."
The shadows around me are thicker than I expected, so thick they coat the inside of my lungs and make drawing breath a struggle. Punching Azula doesn't seem like enough anymore. It's not enough to want to throw things, either. I stand up and turn around to stare into the relentless calm of her smiling face. I want to grab her hair and shatter her calm, crumble her down like she has chipped fragments off my endurance, make her feel the agony inside me. But I will not cry. I will not cry. I echo this like a mantra because otherwise I will do more than cry; I will drop to my knees and scratch lines of blood into my cheeks so my tears run as red as my bleeding heart. For Azula, I bet there's a satisfaction to observing raw, ugly helplessness. I won't give her that pleasure.
"Why not let him enter the Avatar State and kill him?" The words are out of my throat before I can trap and keep them down. I need to know because I don't understand. What's the use of this game when that was her plan down in the crystal catacombs, anyway?
Azula neatly links her hands at the small of her back. "He's useful alive, don't you think? And besides, he doesn't have to stay like this. He doesn't have to be our prisoner."
The void in my chest previous brimming with overwhelming anger sudden begins to flow, channeled into uncertainty. "What?" I ask, studying her pose and as she stands just a little taller.
"Your friend is very dear to you, isn't he? Is there anything you wouldn't do to free him?"
There is a difference between perceiving darkness and perceiving an absolute lack of visual input. For a moment I teeter on the knife-edge of unconsciousness from the implications of her question. Would she give me a chance to free Aang? "What do you want?" I stammer.
"Why don't we talk somewhere more . . . private." Without waiting for an answer, probably because she already knows the only possible reply, she leads the way out of the prison cell. I glance back at Aang just once, looking back at the crumpled body in its dim corner, and I know. I know I will do nearly anything.
But what if she asks something that Aang would not want me to do?
Until I know for sure, I can do nothing more than follow Azula back through the winding halls of the palace until we reach her room. We enter the space filled only with guttered candlelight from one small flame on her nightstand. Something else steps in behind us, a breathless sense of foreboding that accompanies the moment in which one's soul is ripped from the body. I suspect that is precisely what is about to happen to my own.
"What do you want?" I ask again. My voice seems incapable of producing any other words until I get an answer to those.
There is a dreamlike quality to Azula's shadowed body as she turns around and holds out a hand into the translucent darkness between us. Every fragment of my coherence orients itself to that gesture. There is only a very small distance between us, and for a moment I think she wants me to shake her hand. Then I realize her palm is not empty. It contains a very small vial, the very object she was rolling in the cusp of her palm when I first entered the room.
"Do you know what this is, Katara?"
There's some kind of clear liquid sloshing gently in the container. My mind immediately leaps to the only recent place where I've seen such a substance. "The drug you use on Aang?"
"It is a drug, but not that one," she says. "It's calibrated in a way that, if slipped into the drink of an adult male of a certain weight, it will lull him into sleep for approximately a single hour."
"And you want me to give it to someone," I say, following her line of logic.
Azula smiles in her typical calculating manner. No need to be subtle when we both understand how things work between two people when one is a prisoner and the other holds all the advantage.
"Why me?" I ask, probing for the catch. "You've got servants who'll lay their lives down for you. Why go through the trouble of making a deal with me?"
"My servants are very loyal, but their loyalty has boundaries," Azula explains. She's no longer fully looking at me, instead focusing on a point just above my head. "My orders are absolute unless they conflict with a higher power. I am only a princess, after all."
"But who's more powerful than . . ."
My mouth remains open of its own accord, but words no longer pass through. My throat constricts as I back up, suddenly connecting the information she already presented and following it to the one logical conclusion.
"Why?" It's the only word I can muster.
"Because there is something he keeps on his person at all times, tucked away in the inner folds of his robes in a pocket just over the heart. I need you to get it for me."
"What happens when I do?"
"I set you and the Avatar free," she says simply.
"That's not my question," I press, but the unyielding smile on her face lets me know that this is not something I am allowed to know. If I plan to agree, I'll have to do so on a leap of faith without knowing what she plans to do with the object I'm supposed to get. I had been breathing heavily, but in this moment I cease to breathe at all. I bring up my trembling hand as support for my face. "And what is it, exactly?" I go on, trying to get out any kind of information.
"If you agree, I guess you'll find out."
"And how do you expect me to pull this off?"
Her hands calmly hang at her sides. "You're a clever girl. Once I arrange for a better position from which you can act, I'm sure you'll take advantage of some window of opportunity."
There is something obscuring my vision. Only gradually do I come to understand that this is tears, and that they are in my eyes. "If I do this, you'll let Aang go?"
"Yes," she says. "I will let you both go and guarantee your safe passage out of the Fire Nation."
The floor seems to soften beneath my feet. I brace myself against the nearest wall and slide down slowly, attempting to grasp the immensity of her offer. I will let you both go. Neither of us has to die in this place, but the risk my part of the bargain entails . . .
Thinking that, I already know my answer. Aang would give his life for me without hesitation. I will risk anything, everything, to set him free. There's only one more thing I have to know. "Why me?" A whisper of naked pain.
"Because for some reason, my aging fool of a father seems to welcome your company in privacy. Even when we speak, he keeps his guards around. You have a rare, unique privilege for a reason apparently neither of us understands. We'll simply have to accept it and work with what we do know."
I suddenly feel so dizzy and tired. Nodding is the only response I can manage.
"So," she says. "Have we got a deal?"
I wipe away a single hot streak from my left cheek. Azula is gazing down almost kindly upon me, a rare moment of what seems like genuine tenderness. She can probably see me trembling as I stand on the treacherous brink of sealing a deal with a monster like herself. But isn't there a reason why the enemy of your enemy is called your friend? And sometimes when you stand on an edge like that, you simply have to take a leap forward and trust in fate to guide you. The spirits must have brought me here for a reason. For a chance at freeing Aang, I'm willing to find out why. And worse case scenario, it's not like I'd be hurting anyone I care about.
"I'll do it," I say.
"Good. In that case, I'll send Father a request to let him know you wish to see him. While I'm away, Mai will explain what you are to do."
"Mai?" I ask, but Azula has already gone through the double doors and slammed them shut. A dense patch of darkness along the far wall stirs, and only now I do I realize that the knife-thrower was watching us from the shadows all along.
She unsticks from the wall and crosses the room to stand above me. "You should probably get up," she says. It's an order disguised via suggestion. I get up slowly so we're on eye level. Only then does she say, "You're a fool, you know."
I close my eyes. "Are you supposed to give me instructions?"
She sighs, but there is something more than boredom in the quality of her heaved breath. "The first one is that making deals with Azula is dangerous."
We both know that I can't change my mind. "Just tell me what I'm supposed to do."
"When Azula comes back, you'll go to a meeting with the Fire Lord. You'll have to convince him to accept you as his servant. He'll refuse, but you'll have to insist. Come up with any reason. If you're in his service, you can get close to him."
My head doesn't stop nodding as she speaks, though only a very small part of my mind is present. The remainder of my conscious is suspending in a distance place, halfway between an opposite shore and a hopeless plummet to sharp stones below. I am a leaf, one that can either be swept to safety or to death. I hold on to the hope that the spirits will send a wind to carry me home rather than let me be tossed among the rocks.
"Katara?"
I focus on a very interesting pattern of stones on the floor and say nothing.
"Do you understand?"
"Yes," I say.
She lays the pressure on her fingers on my wrist. "For what it's worth, Azula looks down on waterbenders for your flaw of compassion. But I think I can see what Zuko sees in you. You have a reverence for life. You'd probably even help me if I were in real danger. You'd probably even help Azula."
I look up so our eyes meet. In this quiet moment, she's not entirely what I expected. "You and Zuko have been talking about me?"
"He really loves you, you know."
A real edge of anger punctuates my tone as I remember the moment when she, Azula, and Ty Lee cornered me in an alley before trapping me in the crystal catacombs. "Seems like he cares for you, too. Especially since you two were apparently hanging out in Ba Sing Se."
"We never spoke. Not directly," she says, guessing at my nature line of thought. "I followed him at Azula's orders and reported back on his activities. Zuko deserves no blame. If you want to hate someone, you can hate me. I don't mind." Her hand does not leave my wrist as she speaks, a hand warm with as much compassion as she claims my own heart holds. "But I think you would know better than anyone that when your friends need you, you'll do anything to help them."
I suddenly remember Zuko writhing in the horror of his agony at having done something to Tayla. I grab Mai's shirt, desperate for an answer. If she's being so generous with sharing secrets, maybe she can tell me what happened with that little girl—
A creak of the door handle. I let go and Mai steps back, establishing an appropriate distance. Azula comes in, beaming as before. "So," she says, glancing down at my huddled body. "Ready to go? Father has agreed to see you."
I look back at Mai as I follow Azula outside. Mai stands there so quietly, always withdrawn in Azula's presence. But maybe there is more she can tell me if I can find a way to get her alone. She seemed willing to talk in isolation, possibly because of our shared friendship with Zuko. Well, that's something to focus on later. For now, there is the matter of my own life, and of Aang's, and of the precious object I am to steal for a purpose I know nothing of.
Azula brings me to the familiar firelight curtain drawn over the throne room entrance. "You understand what you're supposed to do?" she asks.
"Yes." I study the curtain carefully, memorizing the calming way in which it sways.
"Good luck." Her smile is that of a hunter who has cornered a very small animal, as of course she has. For Aang's sake, what other choice do I have but to obey? All I know is whatever the future holds, I'll find the path back to freedom no matter how I may suffer along the road. Standing at the very brink of opportunity isn't the time to turn back. And I don't.
I move forward into the throne room, shedding fear in favor of unbendable courage.
A/N: Hey, at least it was some kind of update (says LadyAvatar as she huddles in a dark corner of her room, trembling in fear of disappointing you guys after two months of no updates). If you want to talk to me about it, leave a review or check out my new tumblr url {ladygreedling dot tumblr dot com}. My ask box is open to your comments! Lastly, here's an appropriate song for the occasion (from Azula's perspective). Now, 'till next time!
You poor unfortunate soul
It's sad but true
If you want to save the Avatar, my sweet
You've got the pay the toll
Take a gulp and take a breath
And go ahead and sign the scroll
Mai, Ty Lee, now I've got her, girls
The boss is on a roll
This poor unfortunate soul!