Chapter 4: Restrained
Air whispered across her skin, in through her nose, out through her mouth. How ironic, that although she had sworn to eradicate the only person living who bent that lesser element, it was still so necessary to her azure flames.
With a little toss of her head to flick an imperceptibly mussed hair back into place, she drew a circle in the air with her long-nailed fingers, electricity trailing behind them in an arc of blue destruction.
He was only a child, the boy surrounded by all the glowing energy. Light reflected off of the green gemstones which comprised the cave where they fought, and her foe was nothing more than a small dark silhouette.
He was a small target… but not too small for her.
Rue woke up gasping desperately for oxygen, asphyxiated by her blanket and drenched with sweat. Once she had caught her breath, she leaned forward, pressing her forehead against her knees. This was a mistake. If she hadn't smelled the faint odor of smoke on her clothes, she might have been able to pass off the events of the previous night as crazy dreams, much like the one she'd just had.
Who knew if even that was only a dream though?
"Rue, thank goodness!" Her mother's soft voice was tense with concern as she entered the little tent and sat down on her own bedroll. "What happened last night?"
Rue told the story as well as she could, but she had trouble distinguishing between the fantasy and the reality. She didn't really want to tell her mother about the hallucinations; that would make them seem all the more real. She also wanted to keep secret the freakishly close resemblance she bore to a famous criminal…
Wait.
Wasn't princess Azula locked up? Hadn't she been in the loony bin since the war?
The pieces fell together in Rue's mind. So that was what was going on. Azula must have escaped, and everyone was so desperate to find her that they were grasping at straws.
"The Fire Lord brought you back last night," her mother reminded her, emphasizing "Fire Lord." "What on earth was going on with you two yesterday? He was awfully nice."
'Zuzu always was disgustingly gracious to you commoners.' The thought had formed itself into words and Rue had to clamp her teeth painfully down on her tongue to keep them from spilling out. Where had that come from?
-0-
Zuko sneezed loudly, which aggravated his pounding headache. He had not gotten much sleep the previous night, returning home around two and getting up at six for training and paperwork and a long, hard talk with the Castle Defense Chief about disciplining his officers. After that he'd had breakfast on the way to a meeting with some officials from the Southern Water Tribe, and had skipped lunch in order to finish drafting some plans for a revised education system. It didn't help that he could remember exactly how ungrateful children were for adults' hard work on improving their minds. He had been one of the worst, playing truant and pulling faces at his teachers' backs.
"How do the wicked, hedonistic kings ever have time to lounge around and watch people get their heads cut off?" he demanded of the empty hallway as he trudged from his office to the throne room. The hallway remained silent, having no answer to give him.
He knew he could always have a servant go and fetch the royal seal from the royal dais for him, but his legs were quite numb and badly in need of movement. With a mental note to have a less traditional desk made, with a chair instead of a floor-cushion, he pushed the side-door to the audience chamber—once called the war-room—open with the silent motion of well-oiled hinges.
-0-
"She cannot be allowed to roam free!"
Former Chairman Ahaz paced restlessly up and down his office, fuming to a pair of guards who stood at attention nearby.
"She's a menace, a danger to the common people! A monster like that ought to be locked up where she can't harm anyone; it's only wise!"
"What can you do?" asked a silkily smooth voice, issuing from the lips of a tall, masked man who lounged on a couch nearby. "She's a child still. Will you have her arrested for her face? Will you lock her up in the dungeon, or send her to the Boiling Rock, perhaps? Somehow I do not think the king would approve of either option. He does tend to be rather… sentimental."
"The Boiling Rock…" Ahaz muttered, latching onto the idea and completely disregarding the rest of the man's speech. "Warden Ran does owe me a favor or two; I'm sure I could convince him to keep quiet if we sent her there!" With a feverish excitement burning in his eyes, he set about giving orders to the two guards.
Folding his arms behind his head, the masked man lay flat on the couch, a smile touching his obscured lips.
-0-
Rue felt dazed and befuddled by lack of sleep for the rest of the day, and when soldiers from the palace arrived to escort her there for safekeeping, she mounted the ostrich-horse offered to her in a dreamlike state of half-consciousness. She barely heard the leader's assurances to her parents that she would be well looked-after, and it wasn't for several minutes that she noticed the scenery around her beyond a vague idea that she was still in the city.
It was almost like there was a veil between her and what she saw, like riding in a gilded palanquin…
Slapping her cheeks with both hands, she tried desperately to jar herself into awareness. She cast her eyes around, looking for something to divert her mind. Beneath her mount's clawed hoofs, the road had become worn and rugged; the even, level paving stones of the marketplace giving way to rutted earth.
In mounting confusion, she glanced around at the worn, crumbling buildings. They appeared to be in some old, abandoned quarter of the city. It was hardly the scenery she expected on the road to the palace. Senses heightened by a growing feeling of trepidation, she snuck a peek at the soldiers around her, and her heart sank into her shoes at their identically grim expressions.
She was being kidnapped.
By the time she had gotten into her head the hazy concept of kicking her mount into a gallop and making a run for it, the guard on her left noticed her sudden attentiveness. Inhaling the cloying stink of a cloth full of sedative which he pressed over her mouth and nose, she faded off into true unconsciousness.
-0-
"Would it kill them to let me have all my clothes on?" Rue muttered, half in irritation, half to try and hide her own fear from herself as she sat huddled in the corner of a bare metal cell. Her tunic, sash and under-dress had all been taken from her, replaced by a rough red shift-like of garment and matching baggy pants. Only her shoes and underwear were her own.
She had awoken around an hour ago, if the changing shadows cast by the wan sun through the heavy clouds and the bars of the window were any indicator. So far, she had seen no one, and had no idea where she was. Standing shakily from the lingering effects of the drug, she tottered to the big steel door and pounded on it with her small, white fist. The boom it made on impact was so loud it seemed to pulse through her whole body, and she slumped dizzily to her knees. She felt like she was going to throw up.
With a squeal of rusty metal on rusty metal and a heavy click of a lock being turned, the door was unfastened, and Rue was forced to scurry away as it swung open. The people who entered were dressed in red armored uniforms and wore helmets to frame grim, stoic faces. There were three of them; a large, muscular man who appeared to be in charge from the way he carried himself, a lean woman with a face like a hound, and a squat little man with very red skin.
"It seems you've awoken," the muscular man commented without introduction or other preamble.
'Wow,' she thought, suddenly irritated, 'nothing gets by you, does it? Care to tell me where in the name of Ozai's dirty underwear I am?' But fear doused her anger like water on a flame, and all she said aloud was, "Please, where am I, and why have you brought me here?" The big man smiled threateningly before he answered.
"My deepest apologies, highness," he mocked her, bowing with a flourish. "Welcome to the Boiling Rock. I am your warden, Warden Ran."
"The Boiling Rock?" she whispered incredulously. "The prison?" She'd heard the horror stories her whole life. It was a detention facility for the Fire Nation's most dangerous criminals, located on an inescapable island in the center of a boiling lake. There were wild tales of horrible punishments inflicted on those who misbehaved, of terrible crimes committed by those prisoners who had nothing left to lose, of illegal interrogations and prisoners who simply… disappeared. Of course, these reports were sure to be highly exaggerated, and Fire Lord Zuko had fixed things up a lot over the course of his reign, but reality seldom quenches legends.
"Why am I here?" she demanded, fear slowly morphing back into anger. This was ludicrous! Who in their right mind locked up an eleven-year-old girl in a famous prison? Had all the grown-ups in the world gone insane?
'As if they knew what they were doing to begin with…' the thought flashed through her mind briefly, but she had no idea where it could've come from. She had always trusted the adults around her to keep her safe and run the world. Just because some of them were idiots didn't devalue their whole age group, did it? The word 'Naïve' flashed through her mind, but she ignored it.
"I think there's been some sort of mistake," she protested quietly. Warden Ran shook his head.
"No," he replied, "we know exactly who you are; Rue An-Din, farm girl from the mountains." There was sarcasm in his tone, but she disregarded it, taking his words as sincere.
"If you know that, then why—?" she exclaimed, but he cut her off.
"Don't play dumb, Princess Azula," he sneered. "This disgraceful, cowardly hiding doesn't suit you. A child of royalty ought to have more pride than to cower in some ditch in the mountains for eleven years and then deny who she is to her own, less powerful brother."
"I keep telling you people," Rue exploded, "I'm not her! Why will nobody listen to me?"
"Because we all know how good a liar you are," Warden Ran replied. "Now, enough of this orientation nonsense. Follow me; I'll escort your little highness to her cell, where perhaps she'll rethink her deceitful ways."
A thousand things to say flooded Rue's mind; protests, insults, snappy comebacks, threats, pleas, but she clamped her mouth shut on the words—any of which could easily have condemned her—and followed Warden Ran out of the room. He led her down a hallway with a metal wall on one side and a railing on the other, allowing Rue to peer down into the interior of the building. On the ground floor, three or four stories below her, people in red tunics and pants milled about, cleaning the floor, eating food, or just hanging around aimlessly.
The cell she was ushered into was little more than a metal box, three meters tall or so, about as far across, and two meters deep. In one corner lay a cylindrical object; probably a bedroll. The room contained no other furnishings.
Warden Ran and the dog-faced woman departed, leaving the fat man to explain that as a new prisoner, she would be kept in her cell for the first twenty-four hours before being allowed to go out among the other inmates. Rue remained silent, staring glumly at the cold iron floor beneath her feet.
"Not what you're used to; is it?" the man commented with something almost like sympathy in his voice.
"My room at home is smaller than this," she whispered, shaking her head, "but it's made of wood, with pictures on the walls and my own little bed and quilt. This place just seems so… cold." The man shrugged and left, letting the door slide shut behind him with a loud "clang." Rue turned and ran to the door, pulling herself up on the bars of the little window to peep out.
The fat man was marching off down the hallway, and across the open expanse, she could see other guards and the occasional prisoner hurrying along on their business. Letting herself down, she slid against the metal door until she was huddled against it, kneeling on the cold, smooth floor.
"You're wasting your time," her own voice echoed through the twisting corridors of her mind. "That's not one of them."
"How do you know?" Another voice demanded in surprise; a deep, gravelly voice, from an imperious man with a very large mouth.
"Because I'm a people-person," she replied silkily.
Rue's throat ached and her eyes filled with tears.
"What's happening to me?" she breathed, shivering and hugging herself.
-0-
Rue could not remember ever having legitimately stayed up all night in her life. There were plenty of times where she only got a few hours of sleep, but at some point she had always drifted off.
Not this night.
She tossed and turned on the thin, lumpy bedroll for what seemed like days, and then gave up and paced the length of her cell; four steps across, and two and a half from the door to the back wall. Torches blazed in the hallway outside, but when she looked out, she could see no source of natural light, so she had no idea what time it was.
She knew it was morning when the steady tramp of booted feet came marching down the walkway, followed by a loud buzzer, which heralded the opening of the cell doors. Unnaturally hyper from exhaustion, Rue leapt up from where she had been sitting and darted out as soon as the door slid open far enough to allow her slender frame through.
Wrapping her hands around the railing on the other side of the walkway, she clung to the metal bar as if she expected the guards to decide that she wasn't going to be allowed out after all and drag her back. She was four levels of walkways above the floor, which was dotted with tables, but nearly empty of people, since the doors had only just been opened. The other prisoners all shuffled along in the same direction, and once Rue was sure no one was going to grab her, she joined the slow-moving throng as they descended the sloping hallway to the ground.
She had intended to vanish into the crowd, but by the time they entered what appeared to be the cafeteria, she felt like dozens of pairs of eyes were all trained on her. She caught four different people staring when she lifted her eyes from the ground to sweep the room for a moment.
It was only natural, she reasoned. She was tiny, compared to the other inmates. Of course, they were probably just confused because she was so young. When was the last time anyone in here saw a child, after all?
"Princess Azula," a man's voice drawled, shattering the illusion as soon as it was created. Rue had taken a pewter plate from the stack on a rickety table at the end of the room, and paused in the middle of ladling up some kind of porridge to glance at the speaker. He was a midsized man with pale skin and inky black hair with silver streaks, both streaming from his temples and spreading out in a half-groomed hedge from his chin.
"My name's Rue," Rue replied flatly, tapping the ladle on the edge of her plate to free the last drops of the unappetizing mess. "Look at me. I'm way too young to be her." She shuffled forward to make room for the woman behind her and, grabbing a tin cup full of water, started back across the room to find somewhere unobtrusive to eat her breakfast.
"No," the man replied softly, striding up behind her and swinging her around by the shoulder to face him. "I know your face… It has to be you… I'd know you anywhere; the woman who used me and then deposed me… You took all my hard work and shattered it in one night, you royal scum!" He spat, catching her on the cheek and causing her to stumble back in intimidation and disgust.
"Who are you?" she demanded, trying to keep her voice steady.
"You've beaten me at my own game," the man murmured, but something was different; he was different. His hair was dark and well-kept, pulled back into a pigtail at the nape of his neck.
"Don't flatter yourself," Rue's voice echoed through her mind, making her heart stutter and her knees weak. "You were never even a player."
"Long Feng," the man by that name snarled. "Master of the Dai Li."
"Former master, you mean," a new voice quipped, and another man strode up, his face half-obscured by an unkempt steel-grey mop that probably served him as hair. He was shorter than Long Feng, and his facial hair extended further up his cheeks.
"Well, well," he sneered, his eyes raking up and down Rue in a way that frightened her considerably. "I never thought I'd see you again, princess. But you're right," he added, sidling around to view her from all sides. She clamped her arms to her sides, gripping her dishes and trying to shrink as small as she could. "You are young. Fancy that! First I'm forced to take orders from a fourteen-year-old who can't even comb her own hair, then to add insult to injury, my precious drill was destroyed by that air-bending freak, and now you turn up! Children are the bane of my life!" He shrieked, tearing at his hair.
"Keep it down!" bellowed another voice, whether guard or prisoner Rue didn't know. The attention of the two men was diverted from her by the sound for a split-second, and she took that opportunity to turn and dash headlong for the spiraling walkway and the safety of her cramped little cell.
She knew the stories; she'd had to read about them in history class. Azula's coup in Ba Sing Se, and the Battle of the Outer Wall were ordinary events in modern history that everyone knew about, but meeting people who had actually been involved—and having them hate her right away—was a jarring experience.
'Maggots,' rang through her troubled mind. 'They were unworthy of their positions to begin with, or they wouldn't have lost them!'
"GO AWAY!" Rue shrieked, her dishes clattering to the metal floor and rolling off in opposite directions, spilling their contents in a pair of messy arcs of liquid and goo. "GET OUT OF MY HEAD!"
'Couldn't if I wanted too,' came the infuriating reply, 'and I don't want too. It was my head first. You're the one who doesn't belong here.'
Rue's heart froze, then beat once, twice, a third time.
"Who… are you?" she whispered, stumbling back against the steel wall and clutching her temples.
She didn't need to hear the reply.