Fic: Exile: Chapter 12: The Wasteland

Chapter 12: The Wasteland

Azula kept walking. She didn’t know where she was going, or what she was going away from, but staying still for too long always gave her a bad feeling, like the gray all around was creeping into her and leaching her of color and warmth. It was better when she was moving, even though the flat, featureless, dead landscape never changed in any way, so for all she knew she was walking in small circles. Still, she walked, clinging close to the small center of internal fire she was able to hold against the creeping chill that had settled into her limbs. The cold in her muscles and bones had been getting deeper lately, more pervasive, harder to shake off. Something had happened to her bending, so she couldn’t even warm herself. So she walked. And walked. And the ghosts walked with her.

Azula.

Just a ghost mutter.

Then a little louder: Azula!

She paused, wondering which ghost was getting full of itself.

The mother-ghost, of course.  It was drifting closer with something that looked like purpose.

Strange.

Azula, it said.

“Shut up and go away. You don’t want me and I don’t want you. I’ve told you that a thousand times, and you never listen.”

But I do want you. Come to me, please, my daughter. My darling.

Azula was surprised by the sudden stirring of anger in her guts. It had been a long time since she had had the energy for real emotion in this place. “Liar. You never did. Father told me. You would have taken Zuko and gone and left me behind. You wanted to. Zuko was always your darling. Never me. He needed you and I didn’t, so you hated me. Go away.”

Azula, if you do not come to me, you will be lost forever. You will die, do you understand? You are dying even now, slowly. You can feel it, I know you can. You must come to me. Come back to me. My love.

Azula shuddered, suddenly confused and off-balance, a feeling she loathed. “I…you’re lying. This is …some kind of Avatar magic, trapping me here. Father will find him and stop him, and then we’ll make him pay. Him and my traitor brother.”

Your father can’t help you, my dear. He lies imprisoned, defeated and powerless. And no one has trapped you here but yourself.

“Liar! Father would die rather than be taken!”

He tried very hard to make that happen, yes. The Avatar chose to spare him. And you.

She clamped her hands over her ears. “Liar! Shut up!”

The voice – it was now quite clearly a voice, not a ghost-whisper -- did not weaken in the slightest. If anything, it grew louder. “Azula. If you come out, you can see him. I know he would like to see you. I am sure he is worried about you.”

That reached her. Yes, Father. She had forgotten. She had a reason to escape from this dead, dry, cold place. She had to find Father, even though he, too, had left her behind at the end. Father always knew what to do, was always certain, was always right. Father. She looked at the father-ghost, but it stayed at a distance, pale and indifferent. “Father?” she asked it, but it made no response. “Won’t you come for me? Please? I –“ They were the words she had never said out loud, and she knew Father wouldn’t be pleased to hear them, but they tore themselves out of her and she was unable to stop them. “Please, Father. Please help me. I need you.”

There was no response from the father-ghost. It did not turn to look at her.

“I believe he would help you if he could, but his bond to the spirit world is all but severed now. He has only enough remaining to allow him to live. He could never reach this place the way I have.”

“Stop lying! Father will come for me! He’ll come back for me!” She turned and ran away from the tormenting mother-ghost. It made no difference – the ghost, no longer quite so transparent, hovered by her side effortlessly until, exhausted far too soon, she stumbled and fell to her knees. She felt the sobs rising as they had before, the water that had torn her apart far more effectively than anything that little waterbender peasant witch could summon up. She pushed them back frantically, desperately seeking the steely control that had always served her so well in the past. Why was she so weak now? What had they done to her?  She would wreak fiery vengeance – when she finally escaped this place. When Father came. She had to believe in him. He was the only one who had never, ever, left her or let her down.

“He left you behind at the end finally, Azula. He, like you, made his own lonely world by cutting himself off from everyone who ever cared for him – from me, from his brother, from his son, from everything and everyone – and it cost him everything but his life, and he retains that only because the Avatar showed mercy. You are still young. You have another choice. You can walk a different path.”

“If any of that were true, it would be no mercy at all for Father.”

“That is hard to say. It may be true, but Aang’s intentions were good. Ozai is not so very old himself; he has many years to rethink his choices, if he chooses to, though I doubt he will. He was not always a power-maddened monster. Once he was a man I found it easy enough to love, and to bear two beautiful and gifted children with. Once, he loved me, and them. Then he left all of us behind in his search for power, for control. All of us, Azula. He left you behind as well. But I will always come for you, my love, until my last breath leaves my body, and after if I can. I never meant to leave the two of you with him, but I did not fully understand what was happening until it was too late. It may be I never will truly understand why he became what he did, but that does not matter. What matters is your life, my little one. Please, come to me, so I can help you leave this terrible place.”

“You…you’re lying. Lying!”  The sobs welled up again, the water that was putting out her fire, that was chilling her to the core and robbing her of…yes, of life. She could sense that. That much was true. She was dying in here. When the last of her fire died, she would die with it, for what was she if not a child of pure fire?

“Fire yes, but flesh as well. You are not the fire, Azula. It does not rule you. You rule it. You must. You know the death that awaits you if you let the fire take control and consume you, as it nearly did during the Comet’s pass, which you were not prepared to deal with mentally or spiritually.  But the Comet it gone now. It is safe. You must come back, my dear. Please, take my hand.”

“You…you…you can’t lead me anywhere. You’re only a ghost.”

“Not any longer. I am here. Look at me.”

Azula jerked her head up, and Ursa was there. The warm colors of her skin and clothes blazing against the dead gray background of the wasteland. She gave off a soft golden glow that fell across Azula’s tear-streaked face, warming the dying fire inside with the almost-forgotten light of the beloved sun. Ursa reached for her, and Azula scrambled backward desperately, avoiding the touch of those suddenly too-solid hands.

Ursa lowered her arms and did not move closer, but simply stood there watching, sorrow on her features. For as long as she could remember, Azula had thought of herself as her father’s daughter, but there was no denying that this regal woman with her quiet beauty was also a part of her. The weak part, the part she had tried to strip from her soul for so many years.

“Won’t you come with me? Back to life? The choice is completely yours, my darling, but I will do everything I can to bring you back, because I cannot stand the thought of you dying here, alone, in this gray cold.  There is still color and warmth out there waiting for you.”

“And what else waits for me?” Azula said bitterly. “If I believe what you say, Father is defeated. My dear brother challenged me to an Agni Kai and lost, but the Avatar’s water witch brought me down in chains. Chains! And then…I…I don’t know what happened then, but I ended up here, where they put me somehow. Don’t think I’ll forget it when I escape. My brother, the Avatar and his water peasant, Mai, Ty Lee – I won’t forget any of them.”

“I would hope not,” Ursa said. “One should never forget one’s friends and family, or the friends of family.  Is that what returning to life would mean to you? Only a chance to take vengeance for past betrayals?”

“What else? That, and to rescue Father and repair whatever damage they’ve done to him. He is the true Fire Lord, and no one else!”

Ursa shook her head. “He was never that, my dear. His crown was stolen from both your grandfather and your uncle through murder and the cruelest of treacheries. I do not know if you will believe this of your father, but it is true.”

“He only did that to bring an end to the war!” Azula felt herself getting angrier. No one but she had ever really understood her father. “The way they were fighting it, it would have gone on for another hundred years!  Father made more progress in six years than grandfather and Uncle Iroh made in decades!”

Ursa shuddered. “If by progress you mean the killing and enslavement of large numbers of innocent civilians, and finally their wholesale slaughter, then yes, that was….progress.” She let the word fall from her mouth as if it were poisoned. “I suppose that is one way to win, if you consider total destruction a victory. In some battles that may be the only way, but if you remember your history, Sozin began this war as a way to gain new territory for our colonies, a policy that Azulon expanded on and made successful. It made the Fire Nation wealthy and powerful beyond any dream of avarice Sozin might have had. Your father proposed to destroy all that, merely so he could claim to have finally won.  He would have won nothing but a charred wasteland, but yes, he would have won.” 

“That’s not true! Father didn’t –“ Azula broke off, remembering the massed fleets of  war airships, the conscripted firebenders in their long ranks. So much power, she had marveled. Nothing could stand before it. And indeed, if not for the Avatar, nothing would have.

Nothing.

The entire Earth Kingdom, the glorious city of Ba Sing Se she had won in her Father’s name without taking a single life – her beautiful, elegant, tactically perfect victory, the start of the great legend she intended to make of her life – all gone. Swept away in the inferno. The cleansing fire, her father had said, needed to burn away the old so the new could arise. But Ba Sing Se was the work of centuries, and it would take centuries again to rebuild it. She would be long gone before that happened, and her priceless, precious victory would be dust and forgotten. As would her part in the taking of Omashu and the capture of King Bumi, most powerful of earthbenders.  She remembered that mad old man, who was somehow also not quite mad, how he had leered at her when she had him imprisoned in cold steel – What a thinker! If you were a little older I’d marry you, girlie! She had laughed at him. But secretly, his respect had been the crowning glory of the conquest of Omashu for her.

Her own legend would have been left as ashes in the wake of her father’s dream of destruction.

A spasm wracked her body. She had known this, on some level. She had known what he meant to do, that he would throw away all her magnificent victories – won when she was barely out of childhood! – in order to glorify his own vision.  She had not wanted to face it. Father was right, always right. Zuko was wrong to help the Avatar. Mai was wrong to help Zuko. Ty Lee was wrong to help Mai. Wasn’t that the chain that had hurt her far more than any iron bands? The chain of betrayal?

Azula looked up at Ursa, meeting her eyes for the first time. “What happened to Ba Sing Se?”

She had succeeded in throwing her mother off-balance, and that pleased her greatly. But after a moment, Ursa replied, “Your uncle and his friends liberated the city. King Kuei rules there again.”

“How bad was the damage from the fighting?”

Ursa looked worried, as if this line of questioning made no sense to her. Which it probably did not.  Again, Azula felt that small surge of satisfaction. “There was very little. Your uncle was careful.”

“And Omashu?”

“Omashu stands also, and was freed itself on the day of the Eclipse by King Bumi.”

Azula found a small smile creeping over her face for the first time since….she couldn’t remember. But it was there. “I might have known that old bastard would find the right time.”

Her mother frowned a little. “Why do you care about the Earth Kingdom cities?”

“Because they’re mine,” Azula told her. “Or at least they were. I took them, you understand? And I didn’t have to kill anyone to do it. And I didn’t destroy them. They still exist, and so my victories still exist.”

Ursa frowned more. “But both cities are free again now.”

Azula shook her head. “You mean they’ve simply gone back to being ruled by the Earth Kingdom royalty instead of me. That’s all right, though. They’ll never forget that I conquered them. They’ll never forget me, now. And maybe someday…maybe they’ll be mine again. Those cities, or others.” She studied her mother’s worried face, then deliberately held out a hand. “Yes, Mother. I think I am ready to go back.”

To Be Continued