Disclaimer: I do not own Avatar: The Last Airbender.
She knew what Hayashi had meant. Her powers were far beyond that of an Avatar, and it was time she decided to use them, and she knew now that she had the spirit world behind her. Immediately she had a plan. Simply going to Azula and completely healing her in one fell swoop wouldn't fix any problems. The fire princess was going to be in a very unstable state, and Umi knew it was best to take things slow. She decided to only heal the girl enough to allow her to make the decisions on how she wanted the encounter and subsequent ones to go. She would let Azula set the pace, and see how things went.
Umi concentrated on that dank, dark cell where the younger sister of the man she loved was being tortured. She remembered it, seeing it once again through the eyes of the evil man who had tormented the fire princess. Knowing that he only appeared during a certain time, she made sure to appear before that time.
Slowly her body materialized directly in front of the restraining bed in the center of the cell. Taking a fully human-looking form, she made sure the cell was completely soundproof with a cocoon of water before she addressed the moaning figure in the bed. Knowing the girl wasn't coherent, Umi took a deep breath and prepared to perform the first act of mercy she had come to do; revoke the mental lucidity order.
She covered her hand in slightly bluish glowing water, hovering her hand over the forehead of the figure on the bed, allowing only the barest touch of liquid to create the connection she needed to complete her task.
The moaning stopped. Instantly. The only sound inside the cell was shallow breathing that had immediately begun to be more rapid.
"Azula." Umi simply said. She would not call the poor girl 'princess'; that would be too cruel.
"Gnnaaaooo…" came the reply, and she could feel the fear.
Before she even moved closer she began to speak in hopes it would calm the girl down. "My name is Umi and I'm from the spirit world. I have been sent to help you and protect you until you are safe."
The figure on the bed shifted nervously and moaned loudly, fear clearly overpowering her now functional mental capacity.
Umi stepped over to the twisted and burned almost-corpse before her and placed a hand directly over the poor girl's mouth and throat. Water began to glow around her hand as she allowed the cool liquid to gently caress the lungs, then throat, absorbing into the skin to restore first the lung capacity, then the vocal chords and tongue.
The restrained girl on the bed jerked involuntarily at the touch, but could do nothing as the water performed its job.
While there seemed to be little visible difference on the outside at first, the difference inside was marked. Azula's throat, lungs, tongue, jaw, and eventually lips were quickly restored after mere moments of intense healing.
During the process the girl didn't move a muscle. At first she had fought, but once she realized something was different, she lay still and quiet. At last Umi removed her hand and stepped back to give the girl on the 'bed' some room. She fashioned a seat out of water and perched on it quietly; waiting for the girl in front of her to speak first.
She didn't wait long.
"Wha….what…ugh" she coughed slightly, then continued. "Who..What are…you?"
Umi opened her mouth to answer but was interrupted. "What did you do to me? Why can I talk now? Why can I think so well? Where is…" Her steady stream of questions abruptly stopped and she almost seemed to shrink into herself.
"Azula." Umi spoke gently, quietly.
"Don't call me that!" The girl on the bed harshly screeched. "That's not my name, my name is…p…prin…princess.." She stuttered in shame, her voice fading away as she turned her head slightly.
"Azula." Umi merely spoke her name again.
"No…!" the anguished cry came, "I'm not…her. She's dead, she's dead and her father hates her. Only he knows me!"
The emphasis she put on the he told Umi all she needed to know. The girl's mind was well and truly broken. She would have to be so very careful to mend the damage done. She knew she could do it. She had to. For Zuko, and yes, for the poor creature before her.
"Who is this he?" Umi replied to the impassioned cry.
"He comes to…visit…me. NO one else visits. He comes and talks to me, says…things." Her voice trailed off again.
"What kinds of things does he say to you Azula?"
She screeched in frustration. "NOT Azula! Princess! Prin…ceess…." Her voice trailed off again as if she didn't want to believe her own words.
"What kinds of things does he say to you?" Umi amended, not allowing the girl to wiggle out of the question.
"He tells me…things. He talks to me." She repeated herself hesitantly.
"Tell me one good, positive thing he said to you." Umi asked quietly.
There was silence for awhile, then, the girl began to moan quietly.
"Azula."
"NO! Not Azula!" The girl's moaning stopped and she immediately screamed her frustration.
"What did Zuko call you?" Umi tried a different tactic.
"Zu…zu…" She was silent for a moment. "He hurt me." She finally replied.
"You hurt him too." Umi would not allow the girl to forget that day. "Allow me to remind you who you used to be."
The water spirit stood up and placed a water-covered hand over the charred and marbled flesh of Azula's forehead and allowed the memory of the battle between Zuko and Azula to replay through the connection of the cool water.
Her head attempted to thrash beneath the water covered hand, but Umi would not allow the connection to be severed until Azula had been shown the entire fight.
Once it was finished, Umi removed her hand and sat back down, giving Azula, who was now breathing hard as if she had been running, a moment to process what she had seen.
"You killed him, and at the same time your recklessness forced him to respond in kind, and he killed you." Umi stated quietly.
After several moments of silence, Azula responded. "I'm…not…dead. You're lying."
"There are those in the spirit world who brought you back to pay for what you had done." She replied simply.
She was finally listening. "The spirits…made…me pay?"
"To live in your body as it was; to be a living corpse unable to more or speak, see or touch, with ten minutes of lucidity each day so that you could realize your fate. That was your sentence."
There was silence.
"YOU!" She shouted, her tone angry, remaining facial muscles attempting a look of rage on the ravaged face. "You're a spirit, you know what happened! You did this to me?!"
"No Azula, you did this to yourself. Your choices brought your fate, not I."
"I didn't choose…" she hesitated and her voice softened "this". Her body shifted restlessly on the restraining bed. "I didn't choose…him."
It seemed to Umi that reason was beginning to surface slowly for the poor girl and she braced herself for what inevitably came next.
"He…" she choked. "Took…took..advantage…" she gave an anguished cry. "He tortured me!" She cried.
"I know. I'm so so sorry. This was never meant to happen." Umi's contrition was real, and rich in her voice. "You should never have experienced something that horrible." She paused.
"There is nothing I can do to change what has been done. All I ask is that you begin to allow your heart to heal. I know something about what you've gone through, and I would never wish that on even my worst enemy." Umi fervently vowed.
The figure on the bed convulsed slightly with a garbled choking that nearly sounded like derisive laughter.
"How could you, a spirit being, know anything at all about what I've been through?" the once-proud fire princess sneered with but a fraction of her old self.
Umi sighed quietly. "I do know, whether you choose to believe it or not."
Hesitating, she finally continued. "The way his words somehow make you feel so dirty, as if nothing can quite make you clean again. How you are so very alone, completely trapped and unable to move, forced to endure things no being should be forced to endure for what seems like a lifetime with no hope in sight. Finding out you've begun to seek his company…then wanting to die but being unable to do so, wanting to feel something other than disgust, wanting…" she paused in her overflow of words that seemed to pour out of her when she thought about the time she had spent trapped in the tree. "Wanting someone to save you...rescue you…and no one comes."
After she finished speaking it was quiet for such a long time she wondered if the girl had actually fallen asleep.
Suddenly she spoke. Her voice was pensive, quiet, and almost choked. "You've…you…" she stammered ungracefully. "You…know."
"Yes" she responded shortly "for many of your lifespans."
"How…?"
"Another time, Azula, another place." Umi replied quietly. "I'm here for you, now. You need to decide what you want to do, how you want to move forward."
"I don't…don't know…h..how." There was a hitch in her voice.
"Let's start with your name. What is your name?" Umi was sure that the girl's name was the key to unlocking her mind.
Silence reigned for the space of almost a minute before the quiet response was heard. "Au..uh..zu…zu.." her voice trailed off.
"I didn't quite catch that, what did you say your name was?" she pressed.
Azula tried to shake her head and groaned "I ca..can't..it's too.." she gasped and seemed to freeze in place suddenly. Then she began to shake. "Stop it! I WILL!" she shouted, and Umi nearly jumped in surprise.
"It's fire p.." she shook her head, then stopped "p..prin…princess Azu..zu..princ…! It's princess! Princess! Princess! Quit trying to make me say it isn't!" The tormented girl screamed "you're a liar!" She began to thrash around as much as her ruined body would allow.
Taken aback slightly, Umi took a deep breath and finally filled her hand again with her own water covering it, reaching over the forehead of the young woman screeching in her madness that was hers alone. This had to stop, and Umi was ending it right now.
Allowing tendrils of water to reach over to the insane girl's crazily whipping head, the former water spirit connected her water to the girl through the pores of her skin, instantly connecting herself to the thrashing figure on the bed.
She would never normally do something so horribly invasive without at least some form of permission; but this was an emergency, and the mad girl could not be controlled by mere words any longer. It seemed to Umi that she had poked the beast inside, and it was raging. How little she knew.
Steeling herself, Umi permitted her consciousness to flow through the link she'd created; allowing herself into the mind and thoughts of Azula and immediately wresting control of the girl's own body from her ruined mind; allowing the body to relax and lie still.
Then, she 'turned' toward the mind. The mind of the poor girl whose fate had been set so long ago, a fate caused by unknown sources, a madness and evil perhaps hereditary, perhaps learned; Umi wasn't sure.
Allowing herself to move deeper into the girl's mind, Umi found what she had been looking for. At least she thought she had. The former water spirit was horrified. She had been expecting to see the fire princess looking how she did when she had fought Zuko. Most people's inner person reflected their most common and comfortable 'outer' person and their mind created a 'meeting place' or 'room' out of their most commonly inhabited location.
Such was not the case for the once-almost unbeatable Fire Princess Azula. Umi stood, in her somewhat humanoid water spirit form, staring at the scene before her, almost unable to comprehend what she saw.
She was standing on a precipice in the crater of a massive volcano. Below her, magma bubbled and popped, the atmosphere so heavy even she, as a powerful outsider, was affected by it; her water being warmed by its intense and searing heat.
An absolutely gargantuan vaguely dog-like creature sat in the lava, itself seeming to be made of the same. Staring at it, Umi wondered if the creature was the reason for the lava in the first place; it seemed to perpetually shed lava as she watched. Still staring in disbelief at what she had found in Azula's mind, she took in the dark, curved, almost horn-like ears, white-hot eyes set deep in the boxy face and the wide muzzle with deep black nose and gaping maw. Its teeth gleamed in the lava-light, looking white at the base, then changing to reddish orange and ending in shiny black points.
Its thick neck was surrounded by a wide collar made of some type of very dark metal with long, shiny dark spikes sticking straight out that almost seemed to strain towards her as if the malevolence of their wearer had somehow been transferred into them.
She almost shuddered, finally remembering her reason for being in this place. Umi looked around for Azula; this was after all, her mind, she had to be in it. Somewhere.
Suddenly, the former water spirit heard a small sound above the constant bubbling and low key hum she could hear. She looked more closely at the massive dog-like lava beast and felt her heart plummet. Immediately dispersing into her flight and quick movement water particles, Umi drew close to the head of the creature before her that still had not acknowledged her presence.
As she flew next to its gaping maw she at last glimpsed the one she sought. Azula. At least, she believed it was Azula. It felt like the girl to her water, even though it looked very little like a human being. It appeared more like a very dense cloud of poisonous miasma perched like very bad dog-breath inside the open mouth of the vaguely canine monster.
The only thing even remotely human about the cloud was perhaps a very vague shape of a body, and then a far more well-formed, yet small, wrist and hand. Around the wrist was a thick chain, completely dwarfing the small wrist, tightly secured without a lock, the chain links themselves held the chain around it. The chain grew larger as it got further away from the hand, growing massive as it went outside the creature's mouth and up to its neck ending somewhere in the huge spiked collar.
All of a sudden she noticed another hand on the other side of the cloud; this one seemed to be holding a whip made of small metal scales studded with tiny spikes. The strange whip glowed with blue flame and the hand holding it seemed to be clinging to it with a death grip.
"A…Azula?" Umi stammered to the miasmic figure before her in her shock. The beast growled, shaking her to her core; the cloud seemed to react too, beginning to undulate strangely, but the hand holding the whip twitched and somehow moved, disturbing the miasma as it slowly let the length of the whip drop until just the tip of it touched the tongue of the massive creature.
Out of its gigantic mouth came a terrible howling sound, the miasma roiled, the vague figure seemed to get a bit more solid inside the cloud, and the whip was quickly drawn back up somehow. In the back of her mind Umi noticed how much dimmer the blue flame looked when the whip was drawn back up, and wondered if it had been somehow depleted of power. Before she was able to follow the thought any further, she realized she could see the figure more clearly. It looked like a child; just a toddler, really.
Horror-struck, she tried to understand how the wrists and hands she could still see, the chained hand and the one holding the whip; could belong to such a tiny girl. As she watched, it was quite apparent they did.
Completely off balance and totally unsure of how to proceed for the first time in her immortal existence, Umi could do nothing but stare, horrified at things she'd never seen before, and all of it inside the mind of one human girl.
Finally forcing herself to snap out of the shock and focus on the little girl that must be Azula, Umi once again called her name. This time, though the creature once again growled, the girls' form was much clearer, and her face was visible. Once again the former water spirit was shocked to the core. The face of what she knew had to be toddler Azula was agonized; terror and madness twisted what should have been adorable childish features into a grotesque demonic mask full of misery and torture and abject loneliness.
Red-tinged eyes began to fill with moisture that was quickly turned into steam as soon as it appeared, disappearing with a soft hiss that shouldn't have been audible over the sound of the volcano below.
It was these tears that finally snapped her out of shock and galvanized Umi into action. Thinking the shackles of chain links encircling Azula's wrist might be what was keeping her bound, Umi created a razor-sharp water whip and prepared to use it to slice the massive chain in two.
"No!" came a surprisingly loud cry from the tiny Azula in the beast's mouth. "If…if…you.." she seemed exhausted, as if she were in constant motion and breathless "if you…break it…I die" she bit out, as if the mere action of speaking were causing her great distress.
Umi froze. "Tell me how I can help you Azula!" she cried, hardly able to comprehend what she was seeing and hearing.
The creature growled again, and her entire being shook with the ferocity of it. What was this thing? It seemed to growl when she used the girl's name; it was angry, but she was unsure why. How could such a thing even exist in someone's mind? She couldn't fathom it.
The grotesque toddler still partially hidden in the murky fog seemed to grapple with the ability to speak, the miasma looking as if it might actually be alive and sentient, attempting to gag her and cover her head once more in its disgusting poisonous cloud.
Struggling mightily, the Azula-child seemed to rally; she yanked her head out of the cloud with a sharp yelp and seemed to almost hang there, gasping.
"Th…the collar…read…" she gasped and said nothing else as she panted for breath.
Wasting no time, Umi flew up to the giant demon dog's collar and spread her form all the way around the collar in an attempt to read it as quickly as possible.
In burning letters, dripping with some kind of foul poison that hissed and spit as it hit the lava below, were written the words "Sozin's Secret – Azulon's Ambition – Ozai's Obsession".
What could it mean? How could she save Azula with this information? Looking again, she suddenly noticed something she hadn't seen a moment ago. After the poisonous letters in strange, off-shaped characters that seemed to burn ever-so-slightly with a dim blue flame were now written the words "Azula's Answer".
"He..here" the small figure called and Umi rushed back to her side. She struggled to raise the hand holding the whip, but she managed, and unfurled just the end, holding it above Umi. "Hold o…out your..h…hand.." she gasped. Slightly nonplussed but refusing to let it show, she formed a hand and held it out.
Ever-so-slowly, the very tip of the whip, complete with its blue flame, was severed from the rest and fell slowly, as if gravity were reticent, until it almost reached her hand. Hovering mid air, it began to spin, slowly at first, then quickly, and as she watched, a long, elegant pen in the shape of a great curved claw tipped with the blue flame point finally came to rest on her palm. She grasped the pen and looked up at Azula questioningly.
It was clear she desired her to write something, but what? And where? The collar? Azula herself had already written on it though, so that couldn't be it. Frustrated and worried, she waited for Azula to speak.
The tiny figure seemed to be exerting great effort to hold herself together, and finally began to speak, gasping as if each word caused her considerable pain. "I…can't..say..th…the wo..word, you mu..must..you..write..must..you..not..no!" Her voice seemed to change at the end, turning malevolent, and Umi was taken aback.
"No!" The tone was almost venomous "must not write…not..must leave…NO!" It hardly sounded like her, Umi thought with trepidation, had she been overcome? The water spirit was glad for once that she still had her spirit form, because if she had been humanoid completely her heart would have beaten right out of her chest.
The enormous creature suddenly seemed to train its eye on her; seeming to acknowledge her at last. Glaring at her from the only eye she could see in her diminutive stature its gaze was as sinister as it looked. It hated her, wanted to destroy her, to utterly crush her out of existence and glory in the doing of it.
She cowered and shrank back, terror beginning to seep into her mind like poison. She should leave. She shouldn't be here…what was she doing here? She was in danger, why was she here?! Her gaze unfocused, her mind confused, the question kept pounding inside her consciousness, 'why was she here?' over and over and over. Fear turned to irritation, and in her irritation the haze in her mind slowly began to lessen.
Grasping the respite with everything she had, she wrested the reins of her willpower from the would-be captor of her mind and hissed at the giant beast in a distinctly cat-like fashion. Her entire form shaking, she chanced a glance at the tiny toddler that was still unresponsive and began to wrack her brain.
This was straight out of a human horror story! She shuddered. At least she could remember what Azula had told her to do now, but what could possibly be the correct thing to write, and where?!
She went back through the words written on the collar that finished with "Azula's Answer"; what was her answer? What would she say? "What would I want?" the former water spirit thought to herself.
Of course.
"Where? Where do I write?!" She shouted, again worried that Azula seemed so still.
It was so slight she almost missed it.
The chain rattled, shaken by the tiny wrist it was attached to. The mighty beast roared, and everything shook, but it didn't matter. She knew what to do.
Leaving her hand and wrist fully formed she flew quickly over to the giant chain connecting Azula to the creature in whose mouth she stood and, holding the pen firmly in her hand, wrote one word on the chain link that just suddenly seemed to almost glow.
"FREEDOM"
The link disintegrated and two things happened simultaneously. Umi fully formed herself and grabbed the child Azula, holding her tightly against her body.
The entirety of the volcano, its enormous and very ugly occupant roaring in abject fury complete with rapidly melting collar and chain was quickly sucked into a very tiny dot and then simply disappeared out of existence. They were left standing in the palace gardens beside a small pond with several turtle ducks wading and waddling about happily.
Almost too dazed to register the scenery Umi simply stood there, holding the toddler.
A/N: Thus begins the very first of the new chapters after some time. We sold our home and moved to another state, if you've ever done that, well, you know. Going to be trying to remember to post regularly; at least 10 more chapters are already written with more to come.