Chapter Text
In her dreams, he’s always on his knees.
Sometimes he’s shoved face first into a corner.
Sometimes he’s hiding in his bedroom, shuddering under a blanket by his bed.
Sometimes he’s smiling, and feeding the ducks at the pond.
Sometimes he’s screaming on the kitchen floor as the stench of burning flesh attaches itself to the walls.
But he’s always on his knees.
And, no matter how old he is, in the dreams, Zuko is always scarred.
She can’t remember his face without the twist of red and purple mottling across his eye.
She didn’t used to think they were nightmares.
She used to wake up in the middle of the night, the sound of her brother’s cries etched across her brain, and think it was fine. That it was normal.
That every family was like this.
That every father had a favorite and a spare.
That every spare whimpered in a ball in the corner of the kitchen for hours after their father left them there.
That every favorite sometimes woke up with a gasp on their lips as they automatically went to throw themselves out of bed to help their sibling, and had to restrain themselves from sprinting towards the banging and shouting and crying from the room across the hall.
She doesn’t think she thinks that anymore.
Now, sitting in the small room with sunlight streaming through the windows, other patients wandering around in the garden, she can barely even remember if it was real.
She’s only been in this place forty eight hours, and the outside world already feels distant and colorless.
It might be the fact that she slept without nightmares for the first time in years the night before.
It might be the three pills she was asked to take before bed, or the two she took this morning.
It might be the shock.
Because seventy two hours ago, Father had left her.
Father had told her driver to take her to Iroh’s instead. And when she’d got there, the old man had been standing in front of a stack of her possessions in his living room.
She had raged, and screamed, and hit his stupid, soft belly with vicious fists, but he had just stood there, and taken it, and then pulled her into the first hug she’d had since she was too small to know to wriggle away from her mother.
And she’d made her confession.
How Father had told her that she’d electrocuted her brother in a bathtub tinged pink with his blood. How she didn’t remember. How she couldn’t stop hearing the voices, baying for blood in her head. How her mother’s voice, urging her to leave her father’s house, begging her to seek out her brother and uncle, was the loudest of them all.
And he had wiped her tears away with a warm, calloused thumb, and hugged her again. And he’d told her about this place.
She’d come here willingly, in the end.
He promised they would help with the voices. With the endless screaming in the back of her head, echos of her brother’s cries.
So she’d come.
And she’d slept.
And she’d taken her pills.
And now she’s sitting opposite a middle aged man, one of his legs bent casually over the other, his dark jeans and burgundy sweater accenting his look of polite sympathy.
“Azula,” he asks softly, breaking the almost peaceful quiet of the room. “Do you understand why you’re here?”
She nods, unable to quite trust herself to speak.
“Why do you think you’re here?”
“My Uncle thinks I’m crazy,” she folds herself up into the chair, perching on her feet and wrapping her arms around her knees, “and my Father doesn’t want me.”
It hurts, that admission.
Father always wanted her.
She is, was, his favorite. His good child. His loyal daughter, ready and willing to do exactly what he said, how he said to do it.
Not anymore.
Tears prick at her eyes and she holds them back with tight fists. She will not show weakness in front of this man.
“Your uncle told us that you’ve been hearing voices,” he says, and his voice is honey, soothing as it reaches her ears.
She nods, once, not daring to say it out loud.
“Can you tell me what that feels like? Or what you hear?”
Azula hunches in a little over her legs.
Hearing voices is never a good sign. Hearing voices gets you locked up, and drugged, and abandoned.
“I want to work with you, Azula,” the man’s voice washes over her again. “We can work together to help you deal with this.”
Azula nods slightly. She wants to deal with it. She wants to be able to go home.
“There are lots of them,” she says quietly.
“Do they say anything?”
“They... not all the time. Most of the time they just... it’s just like buzzing, or whispering, and I can’t hear it. But... a week or so ago...”
She trails off. She doesn’t want to talk about Zuko. About the belt, or the blood, or the bathtub.
“What happened last week?” He asks, and she can tell he knows already. It’s in his eyes, the spark of pity that usually lit up in other people when they look at Zuko.
“M-my... my father... he had to, Zuko was being... but he... and then I...”
She can’t finish a thought, and the voices swell up in her head, loud enough that she barely conceals a flinch.
“Can you tell me what happened?” He smiles gently at her, and he looks so calm and accepting that the voices settle a little, and the room feels warm instead of icy.
“Zuko... my brother... fell asleep at the table. Father was so angry... I’ve never seen him angry like that before. Zuko never learned, he was always fucking up and being rude and not listening. Father had to do it. He had to.”
“What did your father do?” He asks, and there’s that gentleness again, like she can tell him things and he won’t hate her.
“He...” Azula’s throat closes a little. She’s never told anyone. She’s not allowed to tell. Not allowed to let anyone know about the bruises or the burns or the sheer terror of seeing splatters of blood on the floor in the morning. “Father just wants...”
She finds the words, old words her father had told her, so long ago, the first and only time she’d shot a worried glance at her brother’s slumped form.
“He had to learn,” she says firmly, and the voices roar in appreciation, “he’s weak, and useless, and he never does as he’s told. Father only does what is required.”
The man nods slowly, and she sees his tooth hook slightly over his lip before pulling back into his mouth.
“As I understand it...” he said slowly, “your brother is currently in the hospital with some serious injuries. Is that how your Father hopes he will learn?”
Azula hears the slight edge of disgust in his voice, and feels her own horror echo back. The voices rear in protest.
She shakes her head, trying to get them to be quiet, and it helps, a little, for a moment.
“He was disrespectful,” she whispers.
“Respect is important to your father?”
“The most important,” she nods.
“What happens, when you or your brother are disrespectful?”
She represses a whole body shudder.
“I would never disrespect my father,” she hears the arrogance and the surety in her voice, and it feels wrong somehow. Like it doesn’t fit.
“What about your brother? What happened the other night?”
Azula shakes her head and squeezes her eyes shut.
The voices tumble to the front of her brain again, and the rough voice that had chanted at her to make her brother hurt, to make him quiet, to make him pay, is loudest of all.
“Father made him hurt,” she doesn’t try to whisper it. She tries to say it offhandedly, and she’s horrified to hear the childish quietness of her words.
“What happened, Azula?” He asks so gently. Everything he’s said has been gentle. No one is ever gentle with Azula.
So she tells him.
About Zuko falling asleep at the table after almost three whole days of not being allowed to lie down.
About Zuko’s yelp of terror when the first blow hit, his eyes wide in confused disbelief.
About the blood that spattered across her father’s belt and hands and face. The drops that sprayed up to hit the wall. The little rivers pouring down the layers on layers of bruising on her brother’s back.
About the voices, screaming that he deserved it. That it was the only way to shut him up. The only way to make him behave.
About her mother’s voice, begging her to help her favorite child. Begging her to save him as his wailing cut off into fast, bubbling breaths.
About feeling like she wasn’t even inside her body as she watched her father place Zuko into the bath.
About the long, black, silent hours after she’d taken off his t-shirt and turned on the water.
About Father, hours later, looking at her like he was afraid. Telling her what she’d done. Asking if she truly didn’t remember.
About telling him that she didn’t. That the voices told her to do it. That mother had been there, talking and walking and breathing like a real person.
About Father telling her no one else had been there, and her world falling apart.
About walking through her classes the next day and barely seeing anything.
About getting in the car and realizing she wasn’t being taken home.
About Iroh’s understanding smile and sad eyes.
She tells him everything, and he listens.
“Was this week the first time you heard the voices?”
It seems odd, that this is his first question. That this is what he focuses on.
She shakes her head.
“When I was twelve,” she admits, and it’s like admitting to weakness. To failure.
She doesn’t flinch when he adjusts himself in his seat, but it’s a near thing.
“Can you remember how it started?”
“I... I was...” she screws her eyes shut, trying to remember. Trying to think back to the Before. To back when her head was quiet. “Father was away,” she remembers out loud. “He was on a business trip. And I was by myself.”
“Did he leave you alone often?” He asks, and there’s that quiet pity again, the edge to the voice people normally point at Zuko.
She nods once.
“The fourth, maybe fifth day,” she bites her lip, “I was... I was mad, and I... I was alone, and then... and then I just wasn’t.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“I...” she doesn’t know how to answer. Scared. Angry. More alone. Almost powerful. Protected.
“I imagine that it must have been frightening?” He says, and there’s that gentleness again, grating slightly in her ears but lurching something in her chest towards him.
She hums noncommittally, unwilling to give him the ammunition.
They sit in silence for a few long moments, and she has nothing to say.
One of the louder voices whispers.
How easy it would be to leap up and throttle him.
How there’s a letter opener on his desk that would embed deeply in his throat.
How the blood would flow.
A different voice snorts in derision.
She wouldn’t be able to get to him in time.
He’s bigger, and more powerful, and she is a weak little girl who allowed herself to be half sedated, who let them tell her what to do.
Her mother’s voice sighs and caresses her face with a ghost of a touch.
Azula screws her eyes shut, and it doesn’t make the voices stop.
“Azula?” He asks as the silence extends.
The voice isn’t whispering anymore. There’s an opportunity. He’s off guard. He’s not even blocking her way to the letter opener. She can hurt him. She can make him stop asking. She can make him bleed, and watch the things that make him gentle and soft and warm spill out of his neck like a slaughtered animal.
Her mother objects.
Her mother begs, like she begged for Zuko.
Begs her not to hurt him, not to waste this opportunity to talk to someone kind.
“Shut up!” She screams it, and her voice echos through the room as she launches to her feet. “Shut up!”
He jumps a little, a smaller flinch than she’s ever seen Zuko make, and the voices roar in appreciation.
She clutches the sides of her head and glares at him.
“I don’t want to be here!” She shouts, and her voice cracks with the volume of her rage. “Let me out!”
“I’m sorry, Azula, but you—”
“Father will come for me!” She screams, and she feels her sharp edges shred through the blanket of medication. “Father will come get me! I am not weak!”
“I know you’re not,” he leans forward, and his eyes are full of sad surety.
“Shut up!” She shouts again, “let me out! Let me go! I want to speak to my father!”
She pulls her hair, and the voices screech, unbearably loud, chanting for blood.
He pulls out a small pager from his pocket and presses a button, and she snarls, and hurls herself across the gap between them.
She sends them crashing backwards in his chair, and his head hits the ground as her fingernails swipe hard across the weak side of Zuko’s face.
How dare he still be talking, walking, looking at her, when Father had told him to be silent, and still, and had tried so hard to teach him?
She screams as her hand closes down over his left eye and her fingers dig into his scalp above his ear, where the scar should be, but he somehow managed to cover it, somehow managed to hide the brand of shame and disappointment and anger and failure.
Vaguely, she hears the door burst open as she wreaths her hand in flames.
The fire doesn’t burn him, but he looks afraid, looks like he should as she screams obscenities and straddles his stomach and lights him on fire.
And then she’s being pulled back by strong arms and blue scrubs.
She flails, and registers that she’s still screaming, and tries to dart for the letter opener but then there’s a sharp pain in the side of her neck, and the world tilts on its axis.
She feels herself falling, and then she’s being lowered to the ground, and someone is standing over her but it doesn’t matter because the voices aren’t screaming and neither is she.
And then there’s just blur.
And then there’s just dark.