He was unconscious.
No, that's not right.
How could he be unconscious if he knew that were the case? The knowledge was a strange and unexpected complication. Shouldn't all be soot-dark and soundless, a dry drowning of the senses?
Dreaming, perhaps.
Ozai could not remember the last time he had dreamt, if he ever had. It had been a talking point amongst the Fire Sages when he had been a boy. Princes were supposed to dream, to receive visions from Agni of their would-be conquests, just as his brother had of Ba Sing Se. For Ozai, sleep had always been an extended blink – a shuttering of the eyes and of the waking mind until the body was ready to serve its purpose again. He always woke rested.
For all their mummering, Ozai rather considered the Fire Sages fools for their emphasis on something so ephemeral, and which took place at night, no less, when the reassuring blaze of the sun could not be consulted. Iroh putting stock in such things had always struck the younger man as the first sign of his brother's weakness, his utter stupidity.
He'd had no need for visions or premonitions stirred up in sleep like silt from the bottom of a lucid stream – even as a child, Ozai was a creature of living conviction, all uncompromising decisiveness and iron-clad will.
So, what then?
… dead?
On instinct, he looked down at himself, surprised to find that he was clothed. His hands traced the familiar frame of his body beneath the robes, searching for signs of a wound.
"Wrong again, Fire Lord."
The voice was guttural and velveteen all at once, pervasive, unpleasant. Ozai turned to glower at the speaker, and felt as though he had been struck violently at the back of the head.
The world around him spun like a wheel, colours and landscapes shifting in a blur, even the ground beneath his feet somehow seeming to move, and then suddenly, all was still.
He reeled, dropped to his knees, and tried to reign in the overpowering nausea that had overcome him.
"Tsk tsk," the voice crooned above him, "this position is most unbecoming for a man of your station. Or have you grown accustomed to kneeling?"
Ozai snarled and made to stand, to strike out at the insolent speaker, but his vision swam again. He blinked – one moment staring at the shape of a gnarled, leafless tree in the far distance, and in the next, down at the inverted and worn heel of a soldier's boot.
"Ah, not quite ready, are you?"
His head lolled.
Ta Ming grit her teeth and adjusted the man draped over her shoulder. She paused in the cover of shadow near the end of the prison stairway, breathing in deep and steady before committing to the last leg of her – their – escape. She'd come with no plan, no intention of anything transpiring that had, and her mind raced with the need for direction. How much easier this whole ordeal would have been if she had only known.
Perhaps not, though.
She still would have had to go alone. Would not have been able to tell anyone or issue a command for assistance from the small body of privates and corporals that she – and she still needed reminding of this fact – had rank over. The whole point of this relocation was that it be kept a secret.
No, she realized, the only way this could possibly have gone any different would be if there were direct intervention from Fire Lord Zuko himself. The captain blinked a bead of sweat from her eye. Such a thing might seem a welcome alternative now, in the moment, but she knew it would have been counterproductive to the ultimate mission. The Fire Lord's direct involvement with his disgraced father would likely be seen more as meddling rather than mercy – it would complicate the sympathies of his supporters, potentially encourage some of them to join his detractors. One did not need to be an Ozai loyalist or revisionist to take issue with his son. The four guards she had ambushed were proof enough of that.
Renouncing the Fire Lord was a difficult thing for Ta Ming to comprehend, and the thought of multiple citizens doing so as a result of what she did next sent an uncomfortable sensation down her spine. Unconsciously, her grip on the crest of Ozai's toned thigh tightened.
If – and it was rather a big if – she managed to get her charge outside the prison walls, the priority would be to avoid all manner of detection and recognition. The unstated but obvious element of her mission was to make things as easy for Fire Lord Zuko as possible. She would hide Ozai in her home and await further instruction from her lord and General Iroh. Simple enough.
Getting to that point, less so.
Ta Ming was no war minister, no strategist, but she did understand consequence. Whatever action she took to get to safety would reflect back not only on herself, but on her lord. Killing seemed out of the question, a wanton act of violence, and yet how else to ensure anonymity? If she was unnecessarily aggressive, perhaps Ozai's escape could be twisted into a revisionist kidnapping. But then, Fire Lord Zuko would be seen as incompetent, a man with no control over his own people. The uproar might even be enough to incite another insurrection.
Never mind the fact he'd be lying to his own people.
The captain gnawed her bottom lip, peeling a loose bit of skin.
Telling the truth seemed equally problematic. The political repercussions would be just as bad if the people decided their Fire Lord was too lenient, sparing his father from the odious realities of prison.
The sneering guard's voice echoed back at her at the thought.
We don't treat prisoners this way.
All evidence to the contrary.
Ta Ming's fingers nearly pressed bruises into Ozai's leg.
General Iroh had not treated prisoners poorly – when there were any to be taken. But he was one man, and an exceptional man at that, in all meanings of the word, she realized.
There had been that battalion of captured Earth Kingdom men, trussed up in crimson and ebony, their hands blackened and charred, placed on the wrong side of the frontline…
The woman's ears burned and buzzed, a flood of unsavory information from her re-education coming back. Even the Fire Nation's own people had not been immune to their own barbarism. The infantry still skipped a division, after the willful massacre of the 41st.
The massacre sanctioned by the very man she now found herself ordered to protect.
Was it still an honourable death if your own nation led you to it like koala sheep to the abattoir?
You are not a judge, she reminded herself with a shaky inhale, recalling the sight of the former Fire Lord on his knees and how ill it had made her. Such decisions are not for you. You are a soldier. You serve, you fight.
It was just so much easier to do that when she had an order to follow, rather than having to determine a directive for herself. Ta Ming sighed, shifting Ozai's weight on her shoulder. In some ways, she supposed they were lucky. She had crossed paths with no guards on the way down the stairs, had been forced to hurt no one else. Whatever the four renegades had arranged for that evening, it had inadvertently allowed her to avoid detection up to this point. And with the change of guards still hours away, she might have managed to slip out and back to her mount unnoticed on her own – Ta Ming had never been particularly wily, but she wore inconsequentiality well, something that almost passed for invisibility.
There was, however, the matter of her charge. Marching out the only entrance of the prison with a naked man was hardly the definition of discrete, even this deep into the night.
She could make a mad dash for it, she supposed, legs pumping, knees up to her chest, the man slung over her shoulders bouncing like a sack of daikon as she raced to get beyond the gate. It was that, or leave him sequestered in the shadows somewhere while she tried to locate her ostrich horse, and pray to Agni that no one spotted either of them in the meantime. Neither were favorable gambits.
The muscles beneath her clawed grip twitched, and the captain startled as an exhausted voice growled over her shoulder.
"Put. Me. Down."
The woman bent her knees almost automatically at the command, until Ozai could feel his feet carefully guided back to the prison floor. She kept one hand firmly on his shoulder, her broad palm and slender fingers warm and calloused against his bare skin. As Ozai swayed he realized it was as much to keep him upright as to keep him from escape. He did not jerk away. Her touch was, as intended, steadying.
The world here did not spin, there was no bodiless voice that crooned mockingly.
"Which level are we on?" Ozai asked huskily, his throat impossibly dry.
The woman opened her mouth, but seemed to struggle for an answer. Training dictated that a soldier respond quickly, accurately, reverently. It occurred to Ozai that she was lost for an honorific. To call him by name would challenge so many edicts of propriety as to be unthinkable for her, yet it would be just as improper – treasonous, in fact – to fall back on the old habit and call him 'lord'.
"The main level, almost at the entrance… sir."
So that was her reasonable compromise. Agni, she was quick to make herself subordinate. That was good. That was useful. He might not even have to twist her apprehension of disrespect into outright fear.
"And you walked?"
She shook her head.
"I came by ostrich horse."
Perfect.
Ozai peered at the darkened landing before them, gathering his bearings. His lips moved as he counted soundlessly to himself, limping past the woman and down the corridor towards the east, away from the prison's entrance. He stopped in front of a sconce, where a torch crackled against the cool stone. The woman stared at him, her expression a mix of relief and mistrust. If he weren't battered to such utter hell and clinging to this new and inexplicable wave of cogency in desperation, Ozai might have allowed himself a smirk.
A desire for leadership and direction was one thing, in a soldier, but her obvious consolation at no longer being wholly in charge was almost pathetic.
He gestured for her, one hand beckoning in his shackles while the other hung limp. Cautiously, she approached.
"When my brother escaped this place, destroying much of it in the process, the architects realized the folly of having only a single entrance. A corridor was added during repairs, leading straight to the stables. Hidden, naturally."
The woman eyed him warily in the torchlight. He stared at her squarely, took in the sight of her scorched armor, the blistered skin it revealed, her singed hair, bloodied knuckles.
All that, just for me. The furious shame of needing to be rescued had been replaced by something else. It was almost gratifying.
He reached out, grabbed her chin, sneering.
"Brave little soldier girl."
It was an absurd thing to do and say, especially given her age, for there was nothing girlish about this woman at all. Ozai wasn't quite sure what had driven him to do it, other than the need to somehow assert himself, to regain a sense of power that had spiraled so far from him the past couple weeks.
She swatted his hand away, a slightly disapproving turn to her mouth. Ozai grinned – it was more of a grimace by the time it reached his face – reaching up to grasp the sconce. Part of the metal frame depressed beneath his hand. A rumble followed, and then a portion of the wall slid away from view.
"Let's go marching home."
A/N
Chapter 6 is about halfway done, should be up sometime before the end of next week. Feedback, of course, is always welcome and much appreciated.