Gems: pretty sure I responded to your review of this one on Ao3. So I'll continue that discussion there as well (if I haven't already).
They have her strapped down again. Strapped down and confined to a bed in a white room and they leave her with time to think. To ruminate over how she had come to be there, how she had let herself fall so far. To dwell upon more recent humiliations. Granted it isn't so bad this time but her stomach still flutters and her cheeks still flush when she thinks about it. About those manufactured feelings of affection.
It is hard for her to conceptualize that it had been her. That she had spent the night silently pining for the avatar and then mustered up the courage to embrace the man. She wonders what he must think of her now. She wonders if she should care.
She knows that she has fallen from grace and is sinking further still. Her lapse in control has led to a much deeper more and more complete lack of control.
She knows as well as anyone else that the dragon has been tamed, the conqueror has been conquered.
Today is a free day, they give her at least one a week, where they leave her mind untampered with. Not that it is enough time for her to recover and regain her senses. She thinks that, that is how they want it; so even when they aren't playing with her emotions, she is still left uncertain of them. Uncertainty becomes the only thing she is certain of, to the point where she is somehow uncertain of this. The paradox is maddening. It unravels her faster than anything else has and she concretely knows-as if she hadn't already-that they have no investment whatsoever in helping her heal and find a place back in society. If anything, they seek to undo her so deeply that she never will.
She is fairly certain that she is herself right now. Paranoid is the real her. The only feeling that is truly hers. It is the feeling that has landed her here. It is the feeling that she clings to. The insecurity of paranoia has become her only sense of security. If she is paranoid and afraid, she is aware. If she is aware than she is herself. And so fear becomes truly her as well. She will build her personality around feeling various degrees of afraid and persecuted.
She wonders if paranoia truly is a sign of insanity if everything she is suspicious of is, in fact, as shady as she imagines.
And so she might not be crazy at all.
Not by nature. Not until they induce it.
.oOo.
"Avatar." She greets flatly at the sound of the door opening. She doesn't turn to face him but she knows that it is him. He is the only one who bothers knocking. And his footsteps are so light that she almost can't hear them even in the silence.
She doesn't want to speak with him. She finds that her face grows delicately pink whenever he is around and then redder still when her mind draws unprompted parallels to the feelings artificially instilled within her.
She thinks of how she'd wrapped her arms around him. About how intense her longing for closeness had been.
"What do you want me to feel today, Avatar?" She asks upon his arrival at her bedside. "I'll spare you the trouble and try to act the part." And perhaps she shouldn't be so harsh. He doesn't seem particularly comfortable either.
He returns Ai-Emi's-or maybe she had been Nari last night-embraces with a rigid awkwardness and a sheepish smile. With a hesitance and a flush of his own.
She considers for the first time that he might somehow be as captive as she.
"You can just be yourself, Azula."
"And who is that?"
He presses opens his mouth and his expression dims. "You're acting like yourself right now." He tries a smile.
Her heart flutters at the reassurance. At the notion that she might truly be Azula for a change, even if it is only for a few hours. It flutters less pleasantly at the realization that she needs a second opinion to know who she is and when she is who she once was.
"Have you come to change that?" She ought to be kinder to him, he is the only one who treats her with even an inkling of respect. Even still, she must compensate for Ai-Emi. She needs to make damn sure that the Avatar knows that she isn't truly infatuated with him.
"I came to ask you if you want to go for a walk." He rebuffs her off handed question. "Sangyul is away and I convinced the other doctors to let you have some fresh air."
Fresh air.
The sun.
She holds an arm out and observes the pallor of her skin. She looks sickly. Ghostly. She hasn't had fresh air and sunlight in a very long time. She misses the warmth of it on her skin and is dreadfully disappointed when she arrives outside to a cloudy sky. She finds herself so overwhelmed with frustration that she nearly sheds tears. "Where's the sun?" She whispers more to herself.
"Sorry, I was trying to wait it out and see if it'd get sunnier but it has been like this all day."
"Yeah…" she mutters, suddenly feeling tired all over again. "We can go back inside again."
Aang leads her to a bench. A gust runs through her hair. "I am not going to sit on a bench with you." She says.
He stands up and motions for her to sit. She takes a deep breath and sits. She wishes that he weren't so tender with and considerate of her. She wishes that she could hate him so that she may never feel anything close to fondness of him.
"If only I was allowed to hate you as much as you hate me."
"Wh-why would you think that?"
"I would resent someone who killed me." She shrugs. "I guess this isn't entirely unwarranted. It isn't commonplace to have such an opportunity to destroy an enemy so befittingly…"
"Azula, I don't hate you."
"Then why?" She mutters. "Why are you helping them."
"I'm trying to help you! So you can feel happy and relaxed."
"It isn't real. The real me is…" she trails off. "I'd rather be irreparably out of my mind if it means that my mind is...my mind. If it's going to be broken and distorted, I'd like it to be broken naturally."
"I didn't say that there is something wrong with you. I just said that you have trouble feeling happy…"
"You're saying that I'm depressed. Isn't that the same as broken? And yes, Avatar, I'd rather be miserable than whatever the hell I am now." She scoffs. The wind snaps her hair into her face and she brushes it back over her shoulders. "If you want me to feel 'happy' and 'relaxed' then take me home."
"I can't."
She says nothing more to him. There is no sense. She will say plenty when they beckon it out of her.
.oOo.
Sangyul arrives early and she takes the fall. It is just one more reason for her to loathe the Avatar with all of her soul. "Recreation time is up." The man scowls. It takes only four simple words to have her roughly yanked from the bench. Aang flinches when the wrench her up. In her confinement she has grown frail and he knows that her wrists are going to bruise.
Azula herself doesn't flinch. Neither does she try to resist. She goes passive, it is easier that way. But their force is excessive anyways. Used for the sake of using it. He thinks the nurses like hurting her. Perhaps over some personal vendetta or perhaps it is simply because they have the power to do so.
She can walk. She will walk willingly if they let her. But they don't give her the chance. They drag her back into the building as she tries to stand and keep her knees from getting scrapped. Aang follows along asking them to just let her walk.
"We can't chance her making a break for it." Sangyul shrugs.
"If she was going to run, she would have done it when we were outside. While you were gone." He thinks that, that might have been what he was hoping she'd have done.
"No matter." He waves Aang off. "She knows that she isn't supposed to be outside."
"She was promised an hour of recreation time each day!"
"That was before we found out that we were dealing with such a severe case."
"Severe? She hasn't…"
"Avatar Aang, with all do respect, you need to stop encroaching on matters that don't concern you. She is a war criminal, need I remind you."
"She's your patient. And I'm helping you treat her, I think that it does concern me." Aang insists as they throw open the door to her room and shove her in. Her body meets the floor with a gut wrenching thud.
"Your job is to handle her emotional wellbeing. We'll handle her physical wellbeing."
"You aren't doing a good job." Aang offers her a hand. She slaps it away. He cringes if for no other reason than knowing that she is only proving them right. He wonders if she thinks that snubbing him had been worth the straightjacket that they are squishing her into.
"It doesn't need to be so tight!"
"We heard that she has a reputation for wiggling out of them." Sangyul dismisses. "Take you leave, Avatar. Your services won't be needed until tomorrow."
He sees the flash of a needle before it falls into Azula's neck. She goes tense and then her body slackens. In minutes it is completely limp. He feels as though he is looking at a corpse. He can't help but to think that, though she is alive, she is still a husk.