Please, if it's really illegible, tell me and I'll stop the massacre! I dont't realize it. The translation phase takes a lot of time for me so if no one is interested, I won't be offended and will content myself with my French version!
Chapter 2 – The Awakening
When she emerged the next morning from the mists of a deep, dreamless sleep, Azula opened her eyes to a bare, white ceiling. The golden glow that bathed the room she was in proved it must be dawn. Firebenders always awoke with the sun. But the princess had a vague feeling that hadn't happened for a long time. She felt like she had wandered in darkness for years, alone and lost.
The sensation of a padded surface under her back told her she must be on a bed; but the mattress was too firm, almost hard compared to the softness of her bed and the silk sheets of her palace room. A violent headache spread to her temples and her forehead. Raising her left hand to carry it at her head, she felt a resistance. Looking at her hands, she understood why. She was tied, handcuffed, to either side of the bed, held up by short metal chains.
Immediately, she felt panic take hold of her, and her headache intensified as incongruous images crept into her mind.
The courtyard of the Agni Kai, the shimmering reflection of the sun on a flame-shaped crown, a phoenix in flight…
With an exclamation of pain, she closed her eyelids tightly in an attempt to push them away.
Mai and Ty Lee, a flying bison...
Azula began to stir on her bed - Lightning! - trying to loosen her ties and soon she realized that her ankles too were shackled by metal chains.
Panic completely overwhelmed her.
A crimson sky and dark clouds... Zuko... water, so much water... icy water that entered her throat and seeped into her lungs, causing a dull ache in her chest.
Azula was suffocating. She wanted to scream but knew it was useless and dangerous. She was only going to absorb more water and finish drowning in this icy flower that the peasant girl accompanying Zuko had enveloped them both in.
She tried to struggle and shifted on her narrow bed, her body contorted in a position that must have seemed grotesque.
Where was Father? Why didn't he come to free her?
Suddenly the memory hit her with the force of a punch that would have landed in her face.
Father's fist ...
The Fire Lord had decided to conquer the Earth Kingdom. He had gone to face the Avatar. And he had left her alone to rule over the Fire Nation and a deserted palace.
How did she get here? Was it Zuko who put her here? Or was it Father, to punish her for failing to defeat her failed brother and the Water Tribe peasant he seemed to be infatuated with?
"Silence yourself, Azula!"
The harsh, icy voice had emerged out of nowhere just behind her. She quickly turned her head but saw nothing. She forced herself to remain calm.
There is no water, it's just in your head. There is no voice. It's just your mind... father is not here. Father has gone to destroy the Earth Kingdom. Father also abandoned you.
No reason to panic, she was probably imagining all this. Sometimes she saw things that were not really there. Father didn't know. No one should know. She was Azula, Princess of the Fire Nation, favorite of Agni himself, the blue flamed prodigy, the genius of firebending who had learned to master lightning at the age of only thirteen, in just a few months. The one that had almost wiped out the Avatar.
No one should know her secret. Father would no longer leave her any responsibility if he knew, he would no longer send her on missions. He would keep her cloistered up in the palace and she would have to be alone with him. He would hide her from everyone's eyes, the disturbed little princess who heard voices.
She loved and worshiped her father, but she couldn't be alone with him, she couldn't anymore. Wasn't that why she had so desperately hunted Zuko throughout the world? Why she had convinced him to join her in Ba Sing Se? Why she lied to Ozai?
But Zuko was gone. He had left her alone again. And he had betrayed her secret.
She didn't want to think about Zuko now. She had more pressing issues. The white walls and the hard mattress were real, she could see and feel them. She had to find out where she was and find a way to escape. With a glance, she swept the room. She was in what looked like a hospital room, or an infirmary, except that the white walls, instead of being smooth, were padded. Padded walls. The word came back to her, but she shook the thought away for now. The idea it contained was too unpleasant, too frightening to consider.
The room was unfurnished except for the single bed on which she was lying, and a bedside, placed just to her right and screwed to the wall, provided with a box and a small drawer, probably intended to contain personal artifacts.
She turned her attention back to the walls and saw, high above her, a narrow, rectangular window that bordered part of the ceiling lengthwise, a single opening to the outside world. It was from there that the golden glow she had noticed when she woke up came. On the opposite wall, to her right, a heavy metal door separated her from the rest of the building. A small rectangular hole had been cut into it at face height.
She suddenly wondered if someone was standing on the other side, watching her. She looked down at her own body to find bare legs, covered in bruises, sticking out from a long, light blue shirt that reached above the knees. The cold on her arms told her that the shirt sleeves were also short. Although she was alone, she felt suddenly ashamed to discover her outfit.
Azula didn't like to display her body very much. The light outfit she'd sported at Chan's party on Ember Island was an exception. She would never have dressed so short in her nation or in a place where she was sure she would be recognized.
Focus! the part of her mind that usually spoke in Ozai's voice rebuffed her.
You have to find out where you are and find a way out! You have to understand what you are doing here and what happened on the day of the comet!
But how could she know? She didn't know how much time had passed since the comet. She had a vague feeling that it had been some time now, although she had no recollection of it. A quick examination of her bare arms and legs revealed that she had lost weight, and the thin hairs, almost imperceptible except to her, that covered her legs told her that it must have been a few days, if not a few weeks since the last time she took care to wax them, the day before her coronation, the maids applied a hot wax to her when she left the bath.
The sense of unworthiness she already felt before this discovery grew stronger. In the Fire Nation, body hair was considered as a sign of neglect, and even men traditionally shaved their legs and torso. Only facial hair was tolerated among the soldiers of the Royal Army. As for the women, there was no way that a single hair was visible on their legs or under their armpits. Fortunately for her, despite her raven black hair, Azula did not suffer from extravagant hair growth.
With a bitter sneer, she remembered the first time their father had pointed out to Zuko, then age twelve, that it was time for him to start paying attention to his appearance and had sent him two maids with all the equipment needed for hair removal. Azula had attended the waxing session despite her brother's strong protests. The maids had not dared to chase her away. The maids never dared say anything to her anyway. She had reveled in his cries of rage and grimaces of pain as the maids brutally tore the strips of hot wax from him with the sound of an adhesive. She had chased him through the halls of the palace for part of the day, imitating his most comical faces and he had ended up chasing her and pinning her to the ground.
She had produced an orange ball of flame in her hand and was about to strike him when the Fire Lord himself appeared out of nowhere, conversing with two of his ministers and discovered the piteous spectacle of his two children rolling on the ground like ordinary ragpickers.
He'd rushed over to them and grabbed them, each by an arm and pulled them apart. Azula still remembered the sharp pain as her father twisted her arm in his strong hand, until she cried out.
Both had been deprived of meals and forced to present their apologies in the throne room to the entire Council. He then put them in a room to copy the records of the last ten years of trade treaties and transactions made during Azulon's rule. Every now and then they exchanged murderous glances and Azula stuck her tongue out at Zuko who brandished a threatening fist at her until the tutor who was guarding them forced the siblings into silence.
Of course, Azula finished her work long before her foolish brother who had to spend an extra half day in the archive room while she ran with Mai and Ty Lee in the royal garden and learned new tricks that the little acrobat showed her. She remembered that Mai, leaning against a tree, looking bored, occasionally glanced at the window behind which Zuko was completing his dull punishment. Azula had laughed a lot when their father, after Zuko had come to present his completed work, full of erasures, gave him a new list of chores, each more humiliating than the next. After all, it was he who had pounced on Azula and started the fight. It was only fair.
At that time, it had been two years since Ursa had left the palace, leaving no trace. Azula's relationship with Zuko had grown more and more strained. It deteriorated further a few months later when Ozai discovered with great amazement the new hue of Azula's flames. The blue fire was a rarity, a sign of the blessing of Agni himself. From there, his interest in the princess increased tenfold and he spent more and more time with her, when she wasn't at the Academy of Young Girls, in order to teach her very advanced techniques that even her teachers didn't know. He used to lock himself in the study room with her for long hours where Ozai spoke at length about the military history of their nation.
Zuko was excluded of those sessions. Azula rejoiced deeply.
It had finished pulling him away from her. Their rare exchanges were limited to insults or sarcasm and whenever she appeared in his line of sight, he would frown and looked at her with an expression of deep disgust that she feigned not to notice.
For her part, Azula had decided it was time for her to grow up. A princess did not spend her time fighting with boys or exploring the secret passages of the palace. She began to ignore Zuko and cast a dismissive look on him when she saw him playing with his friends from the Boys Academy.
At only eleven, she began to wear makeup and soon gave up her tomboy attitude to look arrogant; a haughty and elegant gait which was more suited to a princess of her rank.
A few months later, Ozai announced the end of her lessons at the Academy, where he said a genius of her caliber was wasting her time. At first, Azula didn't care about it, especially since Mai had gone with her parents to Omashu and Ty Lee was spending more and more time in the company of the other girls, now avoiding Azula who refused to participate in their superficial conversations which mainly revolved around the subject of boys.
Boys occasionally made an appearance at the Academy's gate, sending obscene signs to the young students who began to giggle with excitement. Azula was outraged at this behavior and once sent an azure fireball through the gate to chase one of the intruders away. Firebending was prohibited during playtime but no one had dared to summon the princess who, at the age of eleven, already possessed a singular aura which ensured her the respect of everyone at school. Both students and teachers. Therefore, it was with satisfaction that she returned to the palace where Ozai would take care of her education by himself.
She hadn't foreseen how things would turn out.
Her father became more and more demanding and harsh. Training's session sometimes turned into a nightmare, and when she limped back to her room, covered in bruises and loose hair sticking out of her bun, she would occasionally meet her brother in the hallways.
Wordlessly, he gave her a stern look and stared at her with a cruel smirk when his gaze fell on her scratched knees or on the streaks of blood just under her nose, where Father had hit her with the stick he used in training.
That's why she too had smiled, that same cruel sneer, when her father challenged her thirteen-year-old brother for an Agni Kai and stood up intimidatingly in front of him to launch a fatal attack on him.
Her smile had faded, however, when she saw Zuko on the ground and had time to catch a glimpse of the butchery in his face before the crowd stood up to walk to the unconscious prince's side, while Ozai was leaving the arena in the opposite direction, without a glance at his son.
Azula had screamed her brother's name. But her voice had quickly been drowned out by the tumult of the frantic conversations around her and she had not been able to get to his side until he woke up, a few hours later, in the infirmary, the left part of his face covered with bandages, deeply sedated.
Here, Azula stopped the train of her thoughts. She didn't want to think back to the way Zuko had treated her when she came to his bedside, the way he had yelled at her and the flames he had send to chase her away. He hadn't even had time to notice the bouquet of hyacinths she held in her hands, which had been reduced to ashes.
She often thought that she shouldn't have teased him about what had happened in the arena, that she should have refrained from laughing when, completely disoriented from the drugs and the bandage that covered the left side of his face, he had awkwardly knocked down the whole metal tray at his bedside, knocking over drugs, herbs and medical utensils. Zuko called her a monster, spat his hatred in her face.
And she had never seen him again.
When she crept into his room after his leaving, she saw the envelope she had left on his desk, still intact. The red seal had not been broken and Zuko was gone, without taking with him the only words of encouragement she had ever given him. He was gone, leaving her alone with their father.
Then Ty Lee...
Her shoulders slumped at the thought, and she tried to fight back the tears that loomed over the edges of her eyelids. At that precise moment, a metallic click sounded and pulled her from her thoughts. She turned her head to the right and saw a short man with a bald head appear in the doorway, wearing half-moon glasses and a black goatee lined with gray hair. He was dressed in a green blouse and flanked by two colossi with mighty muscles and shaved heads who took their places in the cell, on either side of the small man and crossed their large arms over their chest, giving Azula an intimating glance.
Azula resisted the urge to laugh. She wasn't one to be impressed by the mere display of physical strength, and she vowed, whoever those two mountains of muscle were, not to let them think for a second that they could scare her.
She returned her attention to the frail figure of the man between them. Azula had enough political and military background to know that it was always the person in the middle that mattered. Wasn't that the place she held when she traveled the world surrounded by Mai and Ty Lee?
Suddenly, after examining her for a long time, the little man spoke.
"Hello Princess Azula. Glad to see you are finally awake."
Azula didn't deign to answer but noted the title with which he addressed her. He had said "Princess," not "Fire Lord".
"Do you know who you are and where you are?"
"I was expecting you would tell me," she smirked in the sweetest tone she could use. "Who better than the host to advise me on the lovely place I find myself in? Based on the sophistication of your outfits, I expect to be the lucky host of a mighty lord!"
But she noticed, to her dismay, that her voice was hoarse, much different from what she knew, and remembered that she hadn't spoken in days. The effect she had intended to produce by her sarcastic comment was greatly reduced, and she felt a growing shame that only intensified when she caught the amused glance the two gorillas next to the little man exchanged.
"Who are these two fools?" she resumed impatiently, not trying to disguise her anger this time.
"Princess, despite the consideration due to your rank and the fact you are the beloved sister of our new Fire Lord, I would be grateful if you would address my staff and myself in a more respectful tone. You are no longer in a position to give orders or demand anything. I demand of all my patients, whoever they are, they..."
"Your patients?" Azula interrupted, not even bothering to take offense at what the intruder had dared to tell her. "What do you mean?"
Suddenly her gaze fell on the padded walls she had scorned earlier and then on the blouse of the man who, she guessed now, could only be a doctor.
"You are at the Institute for Mental Illnesses and Mind Disorders. This is my institution. And it was your brother, Fire Lord Zuko himself, who has entrusted me with the honorable task of taking care of you until you're healed."
"I'm perfectly fine," Azula snapped, feeling a weight tighten in her chest.
"I'm not talking about your physical health, Princess," he replied false contrition coloring his voice, removing his glasses and taking a tissue from his pocket which he used to rub his fogged glasses. He continued, "But I think you already knew that. Your intelligence is notorious throughout the nation and even sick, a mind like yours will not fail to notice the clues." He concludes, gesturing to the rest of the room devoid of any materials and furnishings.
Azula's heart was pounding in her chest. She felt her throat narrow to the thickness of a pin. She was hyperventilating now and soon she began to fidget, struggling to break free from her bonds. Air, she needed air! She looked at the doctor with wide, panicked eyes. Understanding her distress, he pulled an object out of his blouse that Azula identified as a syringe and nodded to his two henchmen.
Immediately, the two men left their posts and walked towards Azula. Seeing them approach her with their heavy, threatening step, something happened to her, like a shock.
She didn't want these men to touch her. When they were close, she stopped. The fire that had been imprisoned inside her for days, grew sharply until it got out of hand. She decided to let it speak.
Then, while her hands were shackled, she opened her mouth wide and let out a torrent of pure blue flames in the direction of the two giants who fell backwards in surprise. Confusedly, she heard the shock of their two huge bodies collapsing to the floor and the shrill scream of the doctor who quickly yelled at his men to stand up. "Quickly! Don't let her start over! She must be neutralized!"
"No! No! NO!" Azula yelled as a huge head emerged to her right and a heavy hand rested on her stomach. She felt the weight of the man lying on top of her, his head against her chest to avoid another burst of flame. She struggled like a trapped animal but soon couldn't move anymore. She was preparing to spit out another burst of flame when a huge fist slammed into her face. She heard an awful crackle and her eyesight blurred instantly, a red veil passing over her eyes.
Then it was darkness again.
Night had fallen now.
Azula was resting on a hard, cold surface. She was tied up in what she pictured was a straitjacket, her arms held tight, crossed around her stomach and she had no room to move.
A ray of moonlight seeped through the narrow window and bathed part of the room in an almost spectral atmosphere. Her hair fell in scattered strands over her face. The blood that had squirted from the blow she had received had dried and wicks had stuck under her nose and on her mouth. She felt her upper lip swell. The sensation was familiar to her. This is also where Father liked to hit her when she did not live up to his expectations.
The other girls at school were shocked when Azula started wearing lipstick at age of only eleven. She had just ignored their comments. They didn't understand anyway. They didn't understand that Azula didn't wear makeup to be seen. She was putting on make-up to hide herself. To hide cuts, black eyes, swollen lips... camouflage had become second nature, makeup a second skin.
Zuko was looking at her strangely too. For some reason she couldn't explain, the devices she used seemed to irritate him. Maybe they reminded him of their mother? After all, it was among Ursa's former belongings that she had found the cosmetics after a particularly intense training session. She had taken refuge in her mother's old apartments, where neither father, nor Zuko, nor anyone else would come to get her. Everyone knew that the young princess felt nothing but contempt for Ursa, that she had not shown the slightest emotion when she left, even though Zuko had been inconsolable, much to her irritation.
Yet, she had said "Goodbye" to him, right?
So sometimes, when the loneliness and the pain got too unbearable, when discouragement took hold of her, she would come and hide here and curl up in the large empty and cold bed. She would try to find lost sensations, perhaps the specter of a perfume, the echo of a voice that would have reminded her of Mum.
She wondered what her life would have become if her mother could have loved her. If she hadn't been the monster Ursa feared and looked at with growing disgust. She wondered if Mum would still have preferred Zuko. Would she have taken Azula with her the night she disappeared? Would she have come to say goodbye to her, as she had done with her son?
How many times had Azula replayed those fanciful farewells in her mind? What dialogues, what caresses she had imagined!
Now, collapsed like a vulgar rag doll on the hard floor of her cell, Azula expected nothing more. It had been a long time since certitudes had replaced doubts and hopes. She no longer believed in anything, and she was alone in the dark.
In addition to her bloody lips, her head and chest were painful. Each breath caused her a sharp pain. She thought that she had probably cracked a rib during the altercation with the gigantic male nurse who had held her while his comrade punched her.
She wondered what Zuko would have thought. If she had understood correctly, it was he who had put her here. She could only draw one conclusion: she had lost the Agni Kai. Zuko had become Fire Lord. And he had sent her to rot in a madhouse, giving the sadistic doctors carte blanche to put an end to her.
It sounded a lot like Zuko: he wouldn't want to get his hands dirty, let alone with his family's blood. He would have delegated. Wasn't that what he had done by letting the Avatar take care of Ozai? And when he had brought with him this blue-eyed peasant who bent water almost as well as she bent fire?
If Zuko was the Fire Lord, then what happened to her father? Was he dead? Had he found the Avatar?
He must be dead. Otherwise, he would have come looking for her, right? Wasn't she his best lieutenant? His beloved daughter? His perfect heir? Or had he abandoned her? Like Mom, like Mai, like Ty Lee.
Like Zuko.
At the thought, it seemed to her that a dam had given way. All the tears she was holding back burst forth and flooded her face, blurring her eyesight and mingling with the blood that was already smearing her face. What a pathetic spectacle she must offer! She was glad that it was night and that there were no witnesses to see her.
No witnesses, except...
"Oh! My poor, poor baby!"
With an exclamation of amazement, Azula threw her head back sharply, to where the sound was coming from, and rolled onto her side as best she could, as much as her straitjacket allowed her and saw what she had dreaded so much from the moment she had regained consciousness that morning.
Right behind her, kneeling and preparing to place a comforting hand on her shoulders, Ursa stared at her, her golden eyes filled with gentleness and compassion. Azula's amber ones widened in terror.
"My poor little girl… why are you crying? Are you in pain?"
Azula closed her eyelids tightly. It was impossible. She couldn't be there. When Azula opened her eyes again, Ursa would disappeare and she would be alone in the dark again. As she always had been.
She rolled over onto her side, her back to the apparition, curled up on herself and tried to ignore the hand that rested gently on her shoulder and began to rub circles on it. She shuddered when she felt her mother's face lean into hers and place a stealthy kiss on her cheek soaked with blood and tears.
She wanted to yell at this thing to go, throw flames in its face, inflict on it, for a second, a quarter of the pain this woman had caused her. She confusedly felt her mother behind her as if she laid down against her back and put an arm around her, holding her tightly against her, while humming a lullaby that Azula remembered hearing long ago, in her very early childhood.
Soon the hand that was caressing her shoulder moved up to her face and wiped away the blood and tears that had gathered there into a somewhat viscous and loathsome substance.
Her whole body tensed at the contact. It wasn't the first time she saw things that weren't there. But never before had one of these apparitions touched her. The sensation seemed very real, but no warmth emanated from Ursa. Azula couldn't summon a similar memory in her mind. She didn't remember her mother ever having consoled her like that.
Azula clenched her jaw to keep it from trembling and searched in her mind for the most hurtful words, the most scathing retort she could say to the woman who had abandoned her.
But those weren't the words that crossed her bloody lips when she tried to snuggle up to her mother and whispered in a small, piping and pleading voice that was unlike her:
"Don't leave me!"
"Hush baby, hush. I'm always with you."