The word was stated with a carefree confidence, as if the idea was easy.
But, to Ozai, it was. To Zuko, it was. It may not come as easily to Azula. She was quite like Iroh in that regard, whether she admitted it or not. Too overcome with emotion. Burdened. Stressed. Strained.
One eye peeked open at Azula. His daughter–could he even say that anymore?
One hand, trembling, reached up, threaded through the unruly strands of his beard, greying at the fringes.
Despite it all, there was still power in that look he gave her.
battered, maybe. not broken. lesson from the pain and risen again.
ashen. phoenix.
“They say that when the world is darkest, the light becomes the brightest.” He was never one for proverbs, and merely saying it made him feel far, far too much like Iroh. But, what else did he have to do?
He’d spent a quarter of his life here in this cell. He was hard pressed to remember his life prior. Sure, he could, for example, remember the schematics of the throne room. He could likely accurately recall the exact dimensions, the locations of every pillar. But, the vibrancy of the memory was gone. He could not recall the feeling of sitting on the throne. Of power.
It was of no consequence.
“You were always phenomenal,” he recalled, eyes gazing upwards, something sparkling in them. Was it pride? Regret? Envy? Nostalgia? Ozai was never one good at wrangling his own emotions, and he wasn’t about to start trying now.
“I suppose that left you unprepared to handle being nothing. To have everything fall out from beneath you.” He paused, both eyes open now. There was a noise, short and rough, from his throat. “You are more like Iroh than I care to admit. He experienced the same, in Ba Sing Se. His reclusive spiral. It’s of little consequence to those of us who have always had nothing.”
He shifted his gaze now, back against the wall, arms folded on his lap. The aching void of losing his firebending was still there, but it was tolerable. The cell was not as cold anymore.
“The world has changed, Azula. You can either change with it, or you can die.”
“Or, you can let me free.” It was an insincere suggestion, one accompanied by a snort of a laugh. It never hurt to ask after all.
For a moment, inexplicably, her father sounded just like Iroh. Azula leaned her head against the bars of the cell, her back braced on the same wall as Ozai’s, and she played with the frayed cuffs of her faded green Earth Kingdom tunic. She’d been back in Caldera for a month, and still she couldn’t quite get used to the silks of the Fire Nation again. They felt wrong. Too sumptuous, too...light? As though they weren’t even there.
And maybe it was simply that the Earth Kingdom garment was warmer, and Azula had found it very difficult to be warm once the ember at the center of her chest where her bending had always resided had gone dormant fifteen years before (to stop you from hurting yourself and everyone else, Zuko had said at the time -- now it seemed so very pointless). Locked away behind a barrier that she had yet to figure out how to cross.
A dry laugh escaped at the comparison of her to Iroh. She smoothed a hand through the short ends of her hair, more used to not having a long mane to draw them through any longer than she had been when she’d returned to the Fire Nation, after the Dai Li had taken her hair from her.
To the horror of everyone here.
As for her father having always had nothing -- it was blatantly untrue. He’d been Fire Lord. He’d had everything. Surely even he had spiralled when first he’d found himself interred here?
Azula also couldn’t quite deny how much Ozai comparing her to Iroh stung, though.
“And if I did release you?” she asked, “What would you do?”
