post-canon, nothing but angst
She has absolutely nothing to do here but think.
The silence eats away at her like a physical thing, or maybe it’s just the objections of her body as she tries to stifle its will to keep her alive. The pain is physical and emotional and mental all at once, a force that she cannot forget about or ignore. There is no distraction. The only time she can slip away is when she sleeps, and the visions that accost her in the twilight between sleeping and waking are horrifying enough to make her fear that just as much.
You failed. You are nothing. You failed. You are nothing. You failed you are nothing failed nothing failed nothing failedthing fail--
The refrain circles her mind again and again and again. There is no way out. In the first days she screamed and cried, but she lacks the energy for that now. She stares at the unchanging wall and wonders why she can’t summon the strength to just bite off her tongue and get it over with.
Because she has to think about something, she traces each forsaken event back to its inception. She recalls everything with near-perfect clarity. It was a gift. Now it’s a torment. She remembers every little look Mai and Ty Lee exchanged. She remembers Zuko’s brooding, terse words.
(She remembers being nine again: Ursa disappearing from her life without bothering to say goodbye; Ozai smiling at his father’s funeral; something rotten catching up to the semblance of a family and destroying it from the inside out.)
There are so many mistakes that she cannot begin to think what she should have done differently. There are so many mistakes there that she knows she deserves this. So many things she could have avoided. So many things she was too foolish to see. She supposes that’s why she’s still breathing; she’s too stupid to deserve to die.
I’m proud of you, Ursa whispers from the corner of the cell, and if Azula’s hands were free she would rip her own throat out.
A bout of fever catches her and she hears the doctors worry aloud as her temperature rises and rises. She knows it’s no disease. With nowhere else to go, with bending impossible given the degree of her restraints, her fire is burning her alive.
She laughs and laughs even as the heat blurs the cell into the palace and the manacles into her father’s hands. They can force her mouth open to push food down her throat, but perhaps this will be enough to end it.
They force her into a cooling chamber and the fever breaks. They put her back in her cell, she sits and stares at the wall, and nothing has changed.
Zuko comes to see her. She notes snidely that it takes her almost dying. She would almost try harder to keep herself alive if she never had to see him again. But there he is, the traitor, sitting cross-legged on the far side of the bars in robes he does not deserve.
“The recovery is going well,” he says awkwardly. “Uh, the nation’s, I mean.”
She will not entertain his asinine attempt at civility.
“No, it’s not. The Earth Kingdom is taking advantage of the Avatar and your traitorous leanings to punish the citizens. The colonies have been reclaimed. Our military has been almost entirely disbanded. And the people resent you for it. Fire Lord Zuko’s more interested in protecting the Earth Kingdom’s interests than his own nation. And then there’s all the greedy, corrupt nobles you’ve been displacing...watch your back, Zuzu.”
She sees fear and confusion and anger on his face, and she smiles.
He jumps to his feet. “I’m trying, Azula! What does it take? Why are you so stubborn? Isn’t there anything you regret? You have to move forward! It took me a long time too, you know, but you have to at least try!”
“There is something I regret,” she says slowly. Her smile is gone. She lets her eyes fix on his feet. “I regret not killing you at Ba Sing Se, and I regret letting you draw every ungrateful breath after that.”
He glares down at her, his anger apparently beyond words. How he resembles their father. Ozai and Zuko have used her and discarded her just the same. She bows her head and hears his footsteps on his way out.
