#duoqing

Ever since Zuko had brought Azula home from the asylum, her paranoia had seemed to increase exponentially.  Any sudden or unexpected noise prompted her to start looking around for the source of it, and she wouldn't calm down until she was certain of its origin.  But soon enough, Azula's fears would come to fruition.  She saw Appa land outside through one of the windows, and she immediately went running for the throne room.  Completely irreverent of whatever Zuko was in the middle of, she dived behind him to hide.

Zuko had changed.

It wasn't surprising--who wouldn't change after being branded and exiled by their father?--but it was irritating. His moods now seemed to range from unhappy to desolate with few in-betweens. It was so much less enjoyable to deepen a frown than to wipe away a smile.

Indeed, the only times she saw him smile now were when he was in the company of Mai. And perhaps that, more than her lessened joy of teasing him, more than the fact that he was still claiming large credit for the fall of Ba Sing Se, was what was bothering her.

He sat at Ozai's right hand and did not smile. The Fire Lord looked upon him with pride, even smiled at him, and Zuko's face did not move. 

His ungratefulness was infuriating.

Azula took the opportunity to torment him whenever possible. Needling him, watching him squirm, gave her an immense, vindictive pleasure. If he did not show the proper delight and honor in having his position restored, she would act as judge, jury, and disciplinary.

So on one morning when she happened to catch him outside, practicing his bending, she could not help but join him with a smirk and the promise of punishment in her heart.

When Zuko returned, he would find a distinctly less than pretty picture.  Azula's skin had gone ashen grey with hints of green and yellow, and her hair was matted and strawlike.  Her eyes were sunken and shadowed, she looked like she'd barely been sleeping.  Her face had red marks on it, some of them looked distinctly like she'd slashed her own face with her nails--thankfully now broken and short rather than the long and sharp claws she'd had during the war--but some of the marks looked more like pressure welts, like she'd slept wrong.  Or had something tied around her face, up until recently.

She seemed dazed and out of it, with her eyes wandering all around the room rather than focusing on Zuko.  The nurses said she'd been extremely ill-behaved since Zuko's last visit, that she'd been refusing to eat or let them comb her hair.  They insisted that they'd followed Zuko's new instructions for her care to the letter, that any problems that had arisen were purely because of Azula's willfulness and refusal to behave.

It was strange.  After years of having nothing but noise in her head, it was now the silence that was deafening.  Only one voice reached her in the quiet haze, where she floated in perfect darkness.  She tried to grab onto that voice, to hold it near her.  In her mind, she was screaming, clawing outwards and upwards through the weightless nothing.  She had to get closer to that voice.  Couldn't he hear her?  Couldn't he hear her screaming?

She'd heard him screaming.  Touring the newly founded Republic City had been interesting indeed, but his shout hadn't come fast enough.  These new machines, satomobiles, she hadn't realised how fast they moved.  Nor how dangerous they were.  The last thing she remembered had been his shout, and now no amount of screaming seemed to get through to him.  Nothing cut through the black nothing that was pressing in on her from all sides.  If she could just grab a hold of him, she might be able to fight her way out.

The Azula that stepped into the room wasn’t the cold-hearted manipulator that had made him play into her hands in Ba Sing Se.  Nor was she the vicious and cruel girl that had laughed and called an attempt on his life ‘celebrating becoming an only child’.  She wasn’t even the vicious, if unstable, soon-to-be-crowned Fire Lord whose coronation he had interrupted.  When the door opened, what was revealed was instead a lost child, haunted by nightmares of the past and the cracks in her fraying sanity.  Though one of the nurses had neatened up her bangs for her, the weight she’d lost and the shadows under her sunken and haunted eyes made for a truly pathetic picture.

She strode into the room with her back straight and her head held high, but there was just so much wrong with her that it seemed more like a farce, like death itself was impersonating Azula, wearing her skin and parading around in it.  She flopped into a seat across from him, always casual with him and irreverent of his status.  She was his sister, and she would never recognise him as royalty ahead of their status as siblings.