#The Chase is them chasing him all over the Earth Kingdom#Azula meanwhile keeps getting thoughts about being the best and Earth Rumbles. only one of these is abnormal.#I'm sure that'll be fine#atla#avatar the last airbender#platonic brain polycule let's goooo#Zuko#Sokka#Aang#the gaang
I haven't touched a:tla in years but if there's one thing MuffinLance can do it's inspire me.
Azula keeps dreaming that she is blind.
It's strange, not least because when she dreams it it does not seem strange in the slightest, but it has alerted her to a weakness, and she cannot abide weaknesses.
The servants never question her (they are too afraid of her, which is meant to feel good but mostly feels twisty in the very depths of her stomach like if she thinks of Mai and Ty Lee for too long) so she is almost always left to her own devices. She knows they watch her, think her strange, as she wanders the palace halls, a blindfold over her face, tracing the walls until she has mapped every corner.
She'll know it better than the face in the mirror when she's finished. Better than her hands, which are her father's, and her hair, which is her mother's. This will be her's.
"Okay, what the fuck," Toph says, upon sitting up.
"Language," The Boulder says tiredly. "C'mon, I told you guys to watch it around her."
"Are you, alright, Bandit?" Headhunter asks. "This is the third time this week."
"I'm fine," Toph grumbles, because she is fine, she just keeps randomly falling asleep when she usually stays up way later and it's annoying more than anything.
"Maybe you should--" the Gecko begins. He is cut off by Toph hurling rocks at him.
It's good. Mai and Ty Lee are with her again and it's good. They're hers and she's finally got them back and that's good.
Azula ignores the little voice in her head that thinks that's sort of fucked up. That is decidedly not hers and therefore none of her concern.
Toph is pretty sure you can't own people. Or at least, if you do, it's very bad. That's not how having friends works. Except she finally has friends, for the first time in her whole life, and she's not totally sure it counts.
There's something... off. It's like she's always standing on the outside of their little circle. Like there's always something they're not telling her. Like the feeling of someone else shifting the earth beneath her feet before she wrenches it back from them.
Maybe they're not her friends, because they're clearly not hers.
She throws more rocks at the Avatar and doesn't think about it.
When Azula dreams of her brother's faceless voice, it is not unusual; she doesn't know what he looks like anymore, although she can guess. When she dreams of him laughing, easily, surrounded by friends, it is unusual.
Mai and Ty Lee are there when she sleeps, sometimes uncontrollably. They both seem to understand that the world has changed for her, with the shifting of the ground and the sounds of the air singing far more than the visual cues she used to rely upon.
She can't trust anyone, she knows that. But if she could, she would trust them. Them, and the little voice in the back of her head that is definitely not hers.
Toph cannot see when she is awake and she cannot see when she dreams. That is what it means to be blind.
"What troubles you, young earthbender?" Uncle asks. Everyone just calls him 'Uncle' even though he's only Zuko's and nobody bothered telling her his name. Well. She's not going to ask.
Toph cannot see when she dreams her own dreams but sometimes. Sometimes she dreams of calligraphy brushes and play scrolls and classrooms and somehow she recognises them.
(Sometimes, she dreams of a long platform and two figures and flames and sometimes she is frozen and sometimes she screams and screams until everything is blue.) (She shouldn't even know what blue is.)
"Nothing," Toph says, flicking her foot and sending a rock the size of Uncle's stomach flying.
"What the hell, Toph?" the others all demand in perfect unison.
"Nothing," she repeats, soundless underneath their shared laughter.
Uncle's heartbeat thumps worried.
"You can go home," Azula says after waking, feeling sick at herself and shaky. She cannot abide weakness. "You can go home, if you want. I'm not keeping you here."
"Why would I want to do that?" Mai drawls, picking underneath her nails with one of her knives.
Ty Lee smiles sympathetically. "Are you having nightmares?" The 'again' is silent.
"No," Azula lies, because one truth is one too many and she cannot abide weakness.
"We're not going home," Ty Lee agrees after a moment. "Where would be the fun in that?"
Azula should simply nod, accepting their loyalty, act as though it was a test. She feels sand in her throat at the thought. "Good," she says, half her voice, half another.
"Go back to sleep, you two," Mai grumbles, "or do you want to take my watch?"
When Azula dreams, she dreams of their days at the Royal Academy, before things were complicated and the worst part of her life was her mother's complaints. She dreams of Mai and Ty Lee and a girl in green who smiles as wide as Ty Lee and laughs twice as loud.
These people are nothing to you, it occurs to Toph as Aang shouts at her, like it's her fault they all left her to guard everything, like they didn't all leave her outside the library just like they leave her on the outside of everything else. Her hands are almost shaking with the rage that builds up in her, half hers, half another's, but all there, tight in her chest.
"How could you abandon him?" Aang cries.
The snap is more mental than audible.
"How could I do anything else?" Toph screams back. "How am I supposed to know what to do when none of you tell me anything?! Would you rather I let all of the rest of you get buried in that stupid library? Would that have just been a convenient way to get rid of me? Don't think I can't tell that you all hide things from me! What, is it some kind of signal the stupid little blind girl can't see? Well, this little blind girl saved all of your lives, so maybe you should be a little grateful! Maybe I shouldn't even bother with any of you!"
She hates them, all of them, with their stupid inside jokes, and their stupid expectations, and their stupid secret language she can't see.
They're all idiots, clearly. They hang around with Zuzu.
They apologise, after a while, because she's right, and they promise they didn't mean to exclude her.
"It's just that we've all got this spooky spirit psychic link," Sokka explains, a few days later. "We can kind of hear each others' thoughts and see each others' dreams. It's weird."
They can see each others' dreams. Huh.
Azula dreams of the Fire Lord condemning her failure. She dreams of flames. She dreams of watching Zuko burn and being Zuko burning and of screaming. It's a familiar scene, up until it isn't.
Suddenly, as she dreams of being Zuko, burning because she failed, she dreams instead of the earth bursting forth to crush the Fire Lord. She dreams of him vanishing down, deep underground. She dreams of walls of earth and mud and stone rising between them, of flames bouncing helplessly off rocks.
She dreams of great beasts that make the earth rumble and feel more like home than the palace ever did.
When she wakes up, Mai and Ty Lee are watching her with a frown.
No matter how strange her dreams become, Azula knows reality. She has no choice.
"We're going to get into Ba Sing Se," she says, "and we're going to kill the Avatar."
Ba Sing Se is awful, just like Toph thought it would be. Everybody is still keeping things from her, and it hurts regardless of whether or not they mean it.
She's been having nightmares, too. Or, rather, the girl whos dreams she's seeing is having nightmares, and Toph can't seem to help all that much. She wishes she could do more, could save the girl's brother, but the fear paralyses her almost as badly as it paralyses her dreammate. It's all she can do to protect this girl, this firebender who is deathly afraid of the Fire Lord.
"Toph?" says Sokka. "We're going out to put up the Appa posters. Don't forget to bring a snack."
Toph grabs at the fruit bowl and comes away with an orange. She scowls and shoves it in her pocket; she's never been able to peel oranges properly. It's still in her pocket when she is captured.
They won't bother to rescue me, comes the thought, bitter and resigned and very much not her's.
They'll take too long to even notice that I'm gone.
Azula pauses her planning. It's taken some time to understand, but she's fairly certain that the voice in her head, the girl in green from her dreams, and the earthbender guarding her nightmares are one and the same. This is just the last piece of the puzzle.
"Mai," she says quietly, considering. "Ty Lee. Would you leave me for a moment? I need to meditate."
They share a look, concerned, that makes her fond in a way she wouldn't have been before this, but they leave.
These people are nothing, the other girl in Toph's head reassures her through her panic. What people say is impossible is nothing for people like us.
She breathes. In, and out, like the badgermoles taught her (like her father taught her).
Toph stands up and feels for the earth, for the parts of it that remain, no matter what is done to it.
Toph breathes, and stands up, and bends metal.
Azula watches the earthbender listen to the Avatar's sky bison leave, the beating of its limbs through the air above them roaring like a great flame.
Uncle Iroh twists to look at her, already trapped by the Dai Li. "Toph," he says, warningly, and the tone reminds Azula of every time he scolded her for retaliating against Zuko, every time he sided with her mother, every time he told her that's not a lady's way. In any case, the earthbender ignores him and turns to trudge towards them, shoving a hand into her pocket as she goes.
When she stops in front of Azula, she's holding out an orange.
"I think this is for you," the earthbender says.
You're mine, she thinks. You're mine to protect, like I'm yours, aren't I?
Azula takes the orange. "Yes," she says. "Yes, I think you're right."
