#belleshallbemine

Hiroko had just finished playing soccer and was all sweaty and numb from it when sunset came around. She decided she needed a shower and headed inside. As soon as she closed the door behind her she heard someone in the school.

Belle spun a couple times around the center pole on the stage, then did a backbend and flipped from her hands to her feet as the last song of her shift ended. She had more than enough bills stuck into her cleavage and the waistband of her leotard by the club's patrons to make up for the fee it cost her to dance every night. It had been a good night, and she couldn't wait to get to her car so she could count out her earnings and decide how much she could afford to deposit at the bank and how much she could keep in-pocket for the week. Who knew? Maybe she'd be able to splurge a little this weekend. If she was lucky.

"So, child?" Koh purred, coiling around the fallen princess.  Azula had lost a drastic amount of weight in the two years she’d been interred in the asylum.  Two years of ritual humiliation and routine torture, two years of writing letters to Zuko about her treatment there…  She had no idea that they’d been intercepted by the asylum staff, that Zuko had no idea of the abuses she suffered there.  Given the bad blood between her and her brother running already, she assumed he was complicit in it, if not the one that had ordered it outright.

After two years, she could take it no longer.  She’d begun pleading to the Spirits, for assistance, for death, for anything to get her out of that place.  The one that had answered her was Koh, the trickster and face stealer, but also a very wise old spirit who sometimes dealt in knowledge.  Or, it seemed, in favours.

"I’ll take you somewhere you will not be tracked.  You will not be chased.  You won’t be able to do anything against your brother or his allies from there, but neither will they against you.  This is a fresh start, completely.  I’m not going to offer you useless platitudes about turning over a fresh leaf, but it would be a waste if you didn’t learn from some of your old mistakes.  For the duration of your life, you won’t need to worry about our agreement at all.  I’ll come for you when you die.  You won’t be using your face after that anyway, so I’ll have it then.  Do we have a deal?"

Reflexively, Azula reached up to run her fingers over her eye and cheek, now sunken and hollow, and shadows appearing below the first.  Despite the nervousness she felt dealing with a Spirit that was known to cause havoc, she nodded her head.  She really had meant it.  Anything to get her out of that place. “W-we have a deal.  The terms are fair.”

"Lay down, child," Koh murmured, patting the bed Azula had in her cell in a mockery of parental affection, switching to the face of a moderately pretty woman of Fire Nation descent.

Azula stretched out obediently, closing her eyes for a moment…

Now…

The room was quiet, altogether boring in its stillness. Then, suddenly, thirty, maybe fifty feet of a giant insectoid body and its mass of many, many legs, all at once appeared there, winding around the room and twisting through the furniture, irreverently knocking things over. A face painted with makeup to look like a mask peered down into Gaston's eyes--so large was the centipede that it towered over even him. The painted lips of the mask-like face pulled into a smile, and the creature held out the body of an unconscious sixteen year old girl, forcing her into the other’s arms. ”Here, you can have this,” the creature said, then withdrew, skittering up a wall and out of reality.

The girl, on the other hand, was most decidedly there, and she was in poor state, too—clearly malnourished and having been maltreated for some time. Her hair was matted and her eyes were shadowed, and around her wrists were the marks of shackles and restraints that likely hadn’t been removed often for a very long time. The clothes she wore were handmade and had once been fine, done in the style of the people of China, as were her features.