AN: This chapter gets trippy. Please let me know how I handle the trippiness because this is very unexplored territory!

(XI)

The first hours of her exile bore fruit to a boundless pride that marked each step through the suffocating greenery. After all, Azula was nothing if not determined. Her resolution was strong. Constitution unbowed. She'd bend to adapt long before she broke.

Or so she told herself, anyway.

Those first few hours were tolerable because Azula was still some semblance of royalty. In green, rather than red, a little banged up and burnt, perhaps. But she was clean; she was regal; she was powerful.

Then the first hours evaporated and peeled back to reveal just how hopeless her situation was. She'd hazarded a guess that based on the suffocating heat she'd been placed in some arid environment practically designed to kill her. To make matters worse, the ceaseless yipping of fluffy wildlife and screeching of soaring birds would be considered relaxing to some earth peasants.

To her, it was insufferable.

"Be silent you miserable BEASTS!" Azula shrieked right back at the twittering bird song, bathing the nearest tree in so much fire the bark crumpled to ash within seconds.

She'd burn every last tree in this forest if those Agni-cursed birds didn't learn restraint!

Save your strength, Azula winced, chastising herself as a new wave of nausea assailed her head. You never should've drunk that water, Princess.

What fool possessed fresh water and chanced drinking at a pond deceptively clear pond? Save the cannisters, she said. You might not find a clean water source again, she said.

Princess

She mocked her own past title with scorn. It was no less than she currently deserved. Challenging and losing the Agni Kai... Not that she wouldn't fry half the population of the world in these woods for similar disrespect. It was one thing to be cruel to herself, (self-pity? Is that what that was called?) but she had little intention of letting her honour be challenged by lesser beings.

Of course, that assumed she survived the wilds enough to meet lesser beings.

Of all the skills in her impressive repertoire. Roughing it, or survival, was one of the very few she never had need of.

Past journeys in the Earth Kingdom had Ty Lee dancing at her beck and whim. Azula was accustomed to the pampered life of luxurious propriety that fit a firebender of her noble station. Why should she learn the ways of peasants? Foraging the poisonous fruits from the nutritious? Why should she be expected to know the difference between what looked like clean water and what was actually clean water?! Well, she shouldn't. But here she was, a vagabond and an exile roaming the wilds like some lost urchin. It was beyond undignified and if she thought her pride couldn't be lowered further, she'd been woefully disproven.

You're still the only firebender to command the blue flame, she reassured, You've mastered the cold-fire and you're only fifteen. She allowed the thoughts of her qualities to reassure her for a few seconds before the forest did something else to cause her rage.

Like ordering an assault with a small swarm of bugs that sought to blanket her in filth. Azula's eyes filled with hate and she torched every last one with a flick of her finger, smugly revelling in how their crumpled little winged bodies were vaporized into ash.

"Filthy bugs."

She couldn't help but wince, though, as the fire lingered in the air left of her intended aim. Her balance was gone. Even her steps felt wrong. Like each one veered against her mind's command. It didn't help that the strain of half-vision was beginning to cause her good eye no small amount of pain.

Add it to the list of physical debilitations I'm wearing, she blew the bangs from her face and sighed.

Azula wasn't ignorant to the fact her emotional condition wasn't exactly stable (if it ever was to begin with) but her physical condition was a matter of life and death. No matter how much the physician claimed her face would make a complete visual recovery, the feeling (or lack thereof) in her eye was a cause for concern. Even without the bandage she couldn't see through it. It looked fine through a reflection, it even appeared to follow where her gaze commanded, knowledge she'd learnt at the same pond that she'd mistakenly quenched her thirst at.

But appearances didn't change facts.

She was half-blind, at least temporarily, likely permanently. Azula couldn't help but wonder if Zuko's goal was never to disfigure her, like father did to him, but to maim her. A half-blind firebender would have to learn and re-learn every aspect of firebending to stabilize their equilibrium. It introduced a blind spot, a scathing weakness that stayed for life. Did he think to prevail in their rematch now he robbed her of some sight? Did he spare her of permanent scarring just so he could pretend he never took it and feel fulfilled should he ever win? As if it was fair?

Her anger and vindication was almost enough to overrule just how impressed she was. She despised her brother and father both. But to rob her of vision whilst he kept his... To repay his disfigurement with a crippling weakness. It was so very... her.

Azula hated that she was impressed.

Of course, the eye was the least of her worries. That was a problem for future battles. The burns on her face were not extensive or particularly deep. But her entire upper right torso sported deeper blemishes where pink mottled skin stretched from her bicep to the rear of her neck, snaking across her shoulder like a mocking pathway demonstrating her shame. The burning was both worse than her face and covered a considerably larger area, without medical attention, and with her mired in such constant filth, the dangers of infection were high.

Perhaps the worst part was, for all Azula's genius, she didn't see a single solution in sight. You can't cauterize ruined burn wounds. This wasn't a cut. Further flames would just cause her own disfigurement. Staying in the forest was out of the question; she didn't have the skill to survive in the wilds. A sad fact. Sad but true. At best she could hunt, but something told her just cooking her meal still living wasn't how hunting was supposed to be done. The last thing she needed was stomach parasites from incorrect cooking. Sooner or later she needed water and just boiling it wasn't enough to clean it as evidenced by her current stomach cramps from the pond.

Most importantly, Azula hated the forest. If she had to stay here for more than a handful of days she might welcome the spirit world with open arms.

But where else could she go?

Everywhere from Ba Sing Se to the colonies was Fire Nation controlled and those that were still holdouts for the now-defeated Earth Kingdom were just as hungry for revenge. There was undoubtedly a very lucrative bounty on her head and Azula wasn't exactly difficult to recognize. Outlaw though she may be, she wasn't about to start sacrificing her sense of identity. Her hair stayed as it was.

The face wraps make an adequate disguise, Azula scoffed to herself again, Thanks for the foresight, Zuko.

In her boredom she weaved a sapphire stream between her hands. Still deep in thought over her next destination.

Join the Avatar's group? Azula snorted at her own hilarious joke. I'd rather throw myself from the cliffs.

Exile or not she had a personal score to settle with the queen of peasants who'd "bested" her in Ba Sing Se.

Azula's brows hardened. Zuko was the one to cut those grasping water tendrils loose. She'd invited his help. Idiot boy.

Besides, she wore her slaying of the Avatar as a badge of honour. If he was alive, she intended to slay him again just so she could brag about doing it twice. Not that she had anyone to brag to, but her own mind was entertaining enough.

Maybe I can find mom?

Azula paused amidst drifting oak and swallowed hard. Mother was banished... Where would she even look?

No, she couldn't get lost in idle fantasies and pretty dreams. One step in front of the other. Injuries, then survival, then shelter.

The aching throb in her shoulder pulsed like lingering currents across her dull muscles and she bit back a pained grimace. She had to change these bandages soon... Even if she didn't know how to change bandages.

When did I become so useless!

The rhetorical question cut her mind with bleeding clarity.

When you were forced to depend on only yourself.

For the second time in two days. Azula found herself wishing the extremely annoying and positively charged acrobat was here. What would she even say to her once-friend?

Sorry for trying to kill you back at the circus, Ty Lee. Azula pursed her lips, And in my room.

Azula squeezed her eyes tight and banished sight of the dull colours of the forest. She let her mind dabble with constructs and what-ifs. Would she even mean it? Did she only want Ty Lee because she'd be a glorified servant? Azula didn't feel guilty over what she did. She needed Ty Lee to join her even if it took dangerous coercion. If the acrobat was present she would be a glorified servant and that suit Azula just fine...

But that wasn't why she wanted Ty Lee here.

The exiled Princess blew her bangs from her face again, annoyedly booting a slithering snake that hissed too close with a flaming foot.

She wanted a friend.

Perhaps the only friend she'd ever had.

You burned that bridge and now you walk alone. Now you have no one. Very well done. Are you proud of yourself?

Azula let herself slide against a crooked tree beside her path with a sigh, ignoring the baking spotlight of a domineering sun inching through the leaves. The bark scraped against her skin and Azula decided self-pity was the most undesirable emotional state on the planet. She elected to banish it.

It didn't work.

Nightfall bled through the stars and with it came the fury of the winds. For a place so devastatingly humid in day's dominion, night was a wet and chilling experience. Azula could handle the cold, however. Firebending allowed her to keep herself warm where the world failed to.

"You're mine..." She whispered lowly, spying a lazy boar skittering through a mudded patch. She didn't need meat, but she needed something to sleep. Boar hide was easy to clean and easier to dry. She wasn't well-versed on skinning hides, but it seemed simple in theory.

Azula crept into the mudded sludge. Small boiling surfaced around her feet, the fire blazing an easy path through. Then she lunged forward and tried to stab the boar with her (poorly) sharpened. The boar let out a guttural screech and charged through the mud, Azula's face flashed with rage as its feet kicked up globs of wet sludge that ruined her uniform and invaded her skin.

Angry, she bathed the mud pit (and the boar) in a massive wave of fire blue fire and seethed heaving breaths of red.

The momentary satisfaction paled as she realized this was shaping up to be a sleepless night. She not only had little idea of how to survive, but the physical ability to sleep on anything but the brink of exhaustion wasn't present. It wasn't in her bearing to endure such putrid conditions.

"You were always weak."

Azula wreathed herself in a tight ring of fire and turned on her feet.

"Father." She breathed, low and angry, though the winds never replied to her breath. Azula noticed the silence. Bugs sang their songs, chittering and buzzing, a howl pierced the moon's veil and the winds wrestled leaves and trees with angry surges.

But there was no voice.

No Ozai.

The ex-Princess shook her head and resigned herself to a harsh night. She supposed she'd coil around a warm campfire in a relatively secure location, such as a rocky outcrop, or estuary, and plan from there.

I don't care, I don't care, I don't care.

Azula pushed through the thickets into a blood-red clearing. Her body conspired to see her fall, one foot caught the edge of a deviously-placed rock, aided by her inability to see. She clenched her teeth and squawked into her palms from where she lay. A girl stared back through a shallow pool of water.

"Why did you leave me, mother?" Azula's voice was soft and hoarse as Ursa stared back with a sad frown, "Are... are you trapped?" She grasped breathlessly through the ripples. "I can save you..." Her hands pierced the water as if to pull her mother into a tight embrace; but Azula startled with remorseful shock as she found only her own eyes staring back mockingly. "Give her back!"

Azula's rage spilled over, she clenched her eyes shut and boiled the water with flaming, combing, hands, as if to burrow the pond from its ditch. "GIVE HER BACK!"

She couldn't fight the anguished screech that left her throat a second time. Her body shuddered with the force of shattered hopes. Tendrils of reality curled about her vision, illusions and falsehoods dancing in her sight.

Mother wasn't here.

"He never loved you."

"And you think he loves you?! How could anyone love you? Look at you. Malformed and wretched!" Azula spat the words with hate, spewing a small unseen plume of flame from her mouth. A part of Azula knew these were waking dreams. But she couldn't find the will to distinguish the truth from the lies anymore.

How long had she been here?

At first she'd thought to map her path by marking trees as she passed. By the second day of re-tracing her own markings, Azula numbly accepted she was going in circles and was caught out in a downpair and left to shiver the night through.

The next day she tried to blast her way through the forest, swiping greenery aside with flames and might, burning every tree or leaf in sight as she marched forward.

It didn't matter.

It brought her here. Right here, before the blood-red pond. Where she'd started her markings. Where she'd drunk the unclean water so long ago. And her path had continued to bring her here, for what else did she have? All signs of her destructive path swallowed by the healing vines. The markings on bark laughed at her impossible folly.

Because it was impossible.

The Forest was cursed, as if it shifted to entrap her. Traitors back in the court, traitors in the trees...

The dried meat disappeared yesterday. She did not eat the last of the reserves, she simply misplaced the pack. She was chasing mother and must've forgot it.

"Where did you go?" Azula called, soft and strangled. "Don't leave me again. Please!"

"Everyone leaves you."

"Shut up, Zuzu!" She staggered from her brother's voice. His hideous scar offended her now half-sight.

Now we're even, She hummed spitefully.

Perhaps, she considered, she was already dead. This was the Spirit World and Azula was lost.

Maybe her burns were rotting to infection and these delusions were a grim side-effect as her body broke down.

Or maybe Azula was just crazy and there was no spirit forest at all. No medically induced delusions. No death. That was an amusing thought.

"You're a spiteful creature. You always have been. I can't believe I ever let you control me for so long."

Azula's frazzled anxiety bled into a dull groan. "Lovely to see you too, Mai." She bit back with a scowl, "You always were easy to control, what with having the emotional range of a dead panda lion. Really' I've never seen someone so miserable." Azula let out a low chuckle, "No wonder my brother likes you. You're more boorish than he is."

Not-Mai glowered. Azula rolled her eyes.

"Azula, why-"

Azula cleared her throat and stepped by the acrobat, "Not interested."

Against all odds, her dismissal seemed to work. Though Azula still had to put distance between herself and her ghosts.

Even if it that path leads back to the accursed red pond...

She walked for a while. As she always did. Trudging steps through thick mud, dragging her dried skin through shades of black and grey. Bugs wrought unpleasant tingles across her skin like scratches. Azula gave up on burning a path through such offences. Though, she couldn't remember when exactly she decided to stop.

When did I start walking?

She paused with a frown. Wasn't she at a pond? Everything was so... scattered. Like embers soaring into the night, each one a haze of memory, drifting away. Burning.

"Look! There she is!"

Voices, Azula groaned. I bet my working eye it's my uncle this time.

Raising her chin with a sigh, Azula was startled and agitated to see not her uncle, I suppose I have to blind myself now, but a merry band of green-garb wearing earth peasants.

"Zhaozhi I don't know about this... It looks like the curse got her..."

"Don't be an idiot, Ching! She's just run-down from being lost in the woods! That means we can take her!"

Azul pursed her lips, she had little need of hearing their words. Better they heard her words. "Have you seen my mother?" She asked, innocent and ignorant.

The fearful peasant backed away, "She's seeing things... I-I'm telling you, the curse-"

"There is no curse!" Zhaozhi interrupted fiercely, "Not since Hei Bei's spirit left!"

Another man, larger, round like a wheel, swallowed hard. "Zhaozhi... they say the forest is cursed because Hei Bei left... If she's cursed..."

"This was your idea, Tian!" Another voice, this one from a woman, berated. "The bounty on her head is enough to make us all royalty!"

"She's a powerful firebender-"

"She's a little girl without her soldiers."

Voices, voices voices.

Azula clenched her eyes shut and opened them again. "I asked you a question! It's considered treason to ignore your Princess!"

"Princess?" The apparent leader, Zhaozhi, chuckled, "You hit your head, girly? You ain't Princess no more." A knife crawled from his belt screeching like lint scraping from linen. "That means we get to do what we want wi-"

The noise irritated Azula's senses. A flash of coiling lightning silenced it forever. The man collapsed, chest smoking, punctured by a terrifying empty hole. Eyes wide.

Eyes shocked. Just like he was. She strangled her own hilarious chuckle at the joke.

Besides, since when could she charge lightning so quick? It felt wonderful.

Azula never had the chance to linger on her own humour and budding mastery of the cold-fire.

The group splintered, several ran, others pulled rocks from the ground and sent them spiralling towards her. Azula summoned a blue net of riveted flames, shaped like diamonds, that carved the boulders into shredded pebbles. Then she winced as a whistling betrayed a sharp stinging in her waist. A barbed spiked arrow lodged through her green garb.

Azula's face contorted in rage. She'd grown to like the Dai Li uniform! Perhaps not as regal as her armour was, but the colours didn't betray her lost dignity, and it was comfy and combat sturdy. Even if the arrow would never have pierced the old armour...

She sent another wave of vengeful fashion-induced sapphire flames charging towards the amateur earthbenders. Then another. It wasn't much of a fight, they fell with each single strike. The lady-archer who chanced an arrow was now a smoking corpse.

The Princess winced as she pulled the arrow from her wound. Only pained breaths shook her as she pressed a boiling finger to the piercing hole embedding the flesh of her abdomen. The fire was her ally. If Zuko's scarring and her father's scarring couldn't hurt her, no flame ever would again.

Azula's mind never frayed. The cuts congregated from days of pushing through biting vines; the bruises through stumbling with off-balance coordination befitting a visually crippled disgrace; the rancid burn painting her torso; the less gnarly one more prominent and vision-stealing on her face.

None of it mattered. Not to her mental state.

But where the mind stood strong, even in the face of delusions, the body crumbled like a mighty tree matched to the woodsman's axe.

She didn't notice herself collapse amidst the soft-blown leaves and smouldering corpses of her would-be kidnappers. Azula stared up through the condensing fog that stifled her vision, she tried to bat away the lingering black splotches that pulled her somewhere else-somewhere she didn't want to go.

Something pierced the fog. A shadowed silhouette, old white hair blowing like wisps between the grey mist painted the shadow of his head. Azula tried to glare. She tried to call fire at her new opponent.

She tried.

But the abyss pulled stronger and Azula's eyes slowly fell to an unwilling slumber.

AN: I promise I won't make a habit of doing an A/N at the beginning and end of every chapter (I think it's frowned on to be doing one every chapter anyway but I like talking to readers, y'know) but! I'll answer some questions:

d021: I wouldn't say I'm trying to make Iroh/Mai/Zuko hated characters. However, I'm definitely trying to role reverse the show to make them more grey than they appear in canon (especially Iroh who I personally think always favoured Zuko and didn't care for Azula at all) though, I will say in his defence: "You did the right thing" is more about Zuko burning Azula to mitigate the damage Ozai would've done instead. But yes, Iroh doesn't exactly tell him off for attacking her in the streets or even try to figure if he had a good reason. He just assumes Zuko does because he's Zuko and she's Azula. (I could write an essay on Iroh's flaws and almost all of them relate to how he failed Azula)

Pidgeapodge: This is also why Iroh did not cry for Azula, not only does he not see her as a lost soul, he's just not as caring for her compared to Zuko, who he see's as his son ("She's crazy and she needs to go down"). Also thank you for the feedback on each chapter! I've combed through and changed things. I.e, the implication of a plan back in Chapter 4 has been explained to better demonstrate what Azula's "ruined plans" were after Zuko's unexpected assault. Same as the "lightningbending without the blast" which was just Azula practicing tracing the lightning circles without shooting the lightning. I've also took on all the other tips. (typos, unclear thunder in chapter 4, less eye colour focus, no more orb-eyes where I can see them) I couldn't find typos or mention of the floor in Chapter 6 which is probably on me since I mostly skimmed. "Baby" Brother was intentional and electricity would leave a distinct smell but your feedback helped me realize I misidentified it anyway. It wouldn't be iron, but ozone. Thanks again!