Chapter Text
“Yeah. Me too.”
The three words that keep playing in her mind.
That have been playing in her mind for a week or so now.
Sokka hasn’t left.
Hasn’t returned home.
Had chosen to follow her to her ‘home’.
And why not?
She might as well let him see where she has been living.
It has no furniture.
She isn’t there enough to warrant furnishing the place.
He calls it a sad little hovel.
She agrees.
A sad place to dwell for a miserable person.
At any rate she spends all of her money on drugs and sake.
And rooms in brothels.
She is running out of money.
Hasn’t found herself any clients in a good while.
Is no longer comfortable with anyone seeing her body.
Nobody but Sokka and most of the time not even he.
“Do you ever miss home?”
He asks her.
She wants to go home all the time.
She can’t imagine that she ever will.
She no longer belongs there.
Couldn’t imagine trying to reintegrate herself back into the higher class, mingling with the well-mannered and straight-laced.
With the people she used to fit right in with, with the lifestyle that she used to embody.
She has ruined herself in every way possible.
“Yes.”
She answers.
“I want to go home too.” Sokka replies.
That is not what he had asked.
She does not want to go home.
Not like this.
Not until she can make herself presentable and at least somewhat dignified.
.oOo.
Tremors.
Azula has become a woman of few words and a lot of tremors.
Her fingers twitch.
Her hands shake.
Her whole body shudders as the opioids work their way out of her system.
And after a certain point he can no longer see Azula in her dilated eyes.
There is no spark left in them. No fire.
Which might be because they are always watering.
Sometimes he can’t tell how much of that is withdrawal and how much is pain and misery.
He hasn’t overfed her in days but she still complains of stomach cramps.
And she throws up.
She is a mess and he doesn’t know what to do with her other than just sit there and make sure that she keeps on breathing.
And she breathes.
Fast and erratic.
Her heart beats too fast.
Her heart is in so much pain.
It has been for a long time.
Now and then she reaches for his hand and squeezes.
Now and then she half-whispers to him that she is scared.
So is he.
He is terrified.
For her.
For himself.
For both of them.
For many reasons.
He wishes that he was stronger.
He wishes that she was stronger.
So that she can be strong for the both of them.
But that is his job right now.
Just like it used to be.
He knows that he shouldn’t but one day he tells her that he loves her.
He isn’t sure if he means it or if he is just trying to give her something to cling to.
It doesn’t matter.
She doesn’t believe him anyhow.
She drinks a lot of water.
More water than she had ever consumed sake.
She is always uncomfortable.
And when she is uncomfortable she gets demanding.
She yells at him to get her a bottle of sake.
He ignores her.
She hollers at him to just give her some opioids. Just a bit. To get her through this.
He ignores her.
She shouts at him to just leave, to let her be alone. She deserves it anyhow.
He ignores her.
And a few weeks later.
A few horrible weeks later…
She turns her head to look at him.
And her eyes look so clear, more familiar.
The hand that squeezes his has stopped shaking.
He asks her how she is feeling.
She tells him that she isn’t sure.
.oOo.
He asks her again if she wants to go for a walk.
Not particularly.
But the air in this place is getting rank.
She needs to take a bath first.
She doesn’t want to take a bath because she doesn’t want to be naked.
Doesn’t want to look at herself naked.
She needs to leave her bed.
She hasn’t done so in so long.
Dirty.
Lazy.
Useless.
She stumbles out of bed.
Her whole body hurts.
She chances a look at Sokka who watches her arise.
He smiles at her.
She doesn’t return it.
The smile doesn’t make it to his tired eyes anyhow.
She stays in the bath for a long time.
Maybe she hopes that she can wash her shame away.
Clean all of her nights of excess and debauchery away.
Watch them swirl down the drain.
What a stupid thing to hope for.
She soaks and scrubs for hours.
And when she emerges she is still the same as she had been when she entered the bath.
Filthy.
Fat.
Failure.
Frightened.
She can scrub her skin raw but she can’t wash any of it away.
Sokka tells her that she smells nice.
That her hair is so pretty and silky.
She wants to cut it all off, chop it away and showcase her shame.
Make it official.
Sokka takes the scissors from her hands.
Replaces it with a brush.
He takes it back when she combs hard enough to rip clumps of it out.
He is gentler with her hair than she is.
Residue of her past tells her that she shouldn’t let a dirty waterbender, a peasant no less, touch her hair.
But what does it matter? He has already touched her everywhere else.
“There.” He says. “Do you want to see?”
She shakes her head.
She can’t look at herself anymore.
Probably won’t ever look at herself again.
And if she does, it certainly won’t be in the same way.
He takes her hand.
And for the first time in ages, Azula sees the outside world.
Curses it with her presence.
.oOo.
It makes him feel better to make her feel better.
But he doesn’t think that he is actually making himself better at all.
In fact focusing on Azula makes it easier to avoid helping himself.
It’s easier too.
Azula is blunt.
Willing to list out every way in which she fucked up.
Too willing most of the time.
Evidently that in itself is on her list of fuck ups.
“I can’t even treat myself well!” She laments.
“I always say horrible things about myself.”
And she says that she knows that she always had, even when she was as close to perfect as she would ever be.
And that’s why she will get better.
That’s why she will be fine.
Because she knows what’s wrong with her.
Can admit where she needs to improve.
It’s just that she doesn’t know what to do with this awareness. Doesn’t know how to be gentle with herself. Doesn’t know how to make a balance between too critical and too coddling.
So she always lands on critical.
So he coddles her.
Every time she degrades herself, he offers praise where it isn’t due.
She is annoyed by this.
Demands that he stops giving her praise that isn’t warranted; telling her things that aren’t true.
He makes her a deal.
He’ll only give her undue praise when she gives herself undue criticism.
She takes him up on his deal.
Steadily the way she speaks of herself changes. It starts with the trivial, surface level things.
“I’m ugly and fat” becomes “I should probably comb my hair and start firebending again.”
It’s an improvement.
Eventually “I’m useless” becomes “I need to find something to do with myself.”
She gives herself an out; a chance to fix herself.
“Nobody wants to talk to me because I’m a monster” becomes “I don’t really know how to talk to people.”
She can learn to talk to people.
She does learn to talk to people.
When they go for their walks she says hello to the people who pass by.
Her small talk is clumsy but she makes it with the people that they buy food and clothes from.
She slips up and says that she is dumb, that she should be more eloquent than she is.
He tells her that she is the kindest, most sociable person that he has ever met.
She retracts her prior statement and amends that she wishes that conversation was less awkward and came more easily to her.
Sometimes she has bad days.
Horrible days.
On these days she demands sex.
Sometimes she catches him on a day that he is feeling particularly down.
And old habits come back.
They indulge to forget.
And they have a lot to forget.
And Azula can add all of these relapses to that list of things to forget.
On these bad days they lose control in synchrony.
His lust takes hold and her pride slips away.
And he has her lying face up and naked on the bed, stomach tight and swollen.
He has himself lying face down and naked on the bed, back and ass scratched and bleeding.
Sokka realizes that what Azula calls a humiliating relapse has no significance at all to him.
He can’t relapse or disappoint himself if he had never made progress to begin with.
Azula is braver than he is.
Azula has the self-respect to try.
And he is her punishment when she feels like she has failed herself.
She only fucks him when she already feels degraded, when she wants to bask in that feeling.
And now the tables have turned.
He feels like an object.
And he keeps just as quiet as she had.
He wouldn’t have it any other way.
Until she asks him when he is going to start working on himself.
Until she tells him that she doesn’t want to be on this journey alone.
.oOo.
He is so gentle with her now.
Too gentle.
Cautious.
Overly so.
She doesn’t blame him.
He is afraid to make her cry again.
She doesn’t particularly want to relive that either.
But she is a little bored.
She has grown tired of taking pleasure in extremes.
But that doesn’t mean that she has developed a palette for vanilla.
“You are enjoying this, right?”
He asks all the time.
“Yes.”
She replies.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Are you still enjoying this?”
“Yes.” And then she pauses and sighs. “I’d enjoy it more if you’d trust me to tell you if I want to stop.”
Fear is a turn on.
But only when she is trying to be intimidating and domineering.
Fear is a turn off.
When it makes his hands reluctant.
“But are you comfortable?”
“Unfortuatly.”
That is precisely the problem.
“But—”
“Less coddling, more food.”
More knots and ribbons would be nice too but he seems scared to tie her up these days.
“You’re afraid of yourself.” She says nonchalantly.
A swift and easy way of killing the mood.
It’s fine.
She was bored anyways. And he was being too hesitant for her liking.
He is lucky that she is more observant than he had been.
“But…”
She holds a finger to his lips.
“Don’t try to pretend like you’re into any of this.”
He uses sex the way that she had used sake and food.
It is a tool with several purposes.
A shield. A distraction. A punishment.
“Go home, Sokka.” She tells him.
“You’re kicking me out!?”
“And don’t come back until you patch things up with your ex and your idiot sister…and my more idiotic brother.”
He leaves, yeah.
But he comes back.
He had to hold her shaking hand until sobriety steadied it.
She is going to have to hold his hand until he has someone else to take it.
Dully she notes that helping him fix his relationships will be the end of theirs.
Whatever sort of relationship it had been.
Doomed. Destructive. Unhealthy.
It is fine, he had only been there to be her most thrilling thrill, the epitome of her unrestrained desire.
She is done with that life now.
She will make herself a new life.
And she will let him return to his old life.
The one before her.
Before them.
.oOo.
“Where have you been!?”
The question answers itself when Azula steps out from behind him.
Concern dissipates.
Anger takes its place.
Katara shakes her head.
Azula had warned him that it would be a dreadful idea to bring her along. He had assumed that she wasn’t ready to go home and face the people that they both used to know.
He realizes, standing on the steps of the palace, that she has the sort of calm that can only come with resignation.
With acceptance.
With knowing that she has relationships that can’t be mended.
Which is why it hurts so much when Zuko hugs her.
Which is why he ignores the panic in her eyes when she turns to him.
And Sokka is mad at her all over again for being so scared of the thing that he craves so much.
Forgiveness.
Which is why it hurts so much when Zuko says that he is relieved that she has come home.
Which is why he rebuffs her when she asks him how to handle it, claiming that he is more socially apt than she.
And Sokka resents her for being so apprehensive about the thing that he yearns for.
Reconciliation.
He realizes that she is going to be just fine.
(So long as she can resist her natural urge to self-sabotage).
He realizes that he had helped get her here.
(His company and his patience).
He realizes that fair is fair.
(He had helped break her worse than she had broken herself).
And so he says such terrible things about her. Throws her under the wagon wheels.
Insists that she is a manipulative slut and that she forced him to do things that he wasn’t comfortable doing, that he wouldn’t have done if she wasn’t taking advantage of him during a vulnerable moment.
A perfect antithesis to everything he had whispered to her during those nights spent shaking and crying and sweating out opioids.
A perfect antithesis to what actually happened.
But she says such nice things about him. Throws herself under the wagon wheels.
Agrees that she had been seducing him and lapping at his weaknesses.
He thinks that she believes herself.
And maybe it is true.
But, as per usual, she sprinkles details sparingly; leaves out critical portions of the truth.
Details such as how mutual it all was.
And in taking all of the blame, she takes none of it.
Azula, he realizes, has lost her ability to keep her eyes from conveying certain emotions.
Earnest or not in taking the blame, the hurt is plain on her face.
The guilt softens her expression.
Meekens her posture.
And finally…
Only after the palace staff had started calling her a dirty, overfed whore to her face…
Only after she finally curled herself up in her room for another good cry…
Did he admit that she couldn’t have made him do anything that he didn’t want to do.
Did he admit that he is spirling, has been for a while.
That he lost all control and made her an outlet for all of it.
He says that he should be taking all of the blame.
All of the insults.
That he’s the whore.
She says that shame is a partner activity.
They’ve made shame a competition.
And Azula is adamant that they have tied.
Their prize…?
Everyone is tired of them. Tired of their self-pity.
At least they have each other.
He has made healing a competition.
And for it, Azula is in the lead.
.oOo.
She has gotten better, she realizes, at talking about her feelings.
Those weird uncomfortable things.
A byproduct of her shame.
Familiarity, she realizes, has desensitized her to the discomforts that come with admitting that she is afraid and lonely.
Admitting that she is embarrassed and embarrassed to be embarrassed.
But familiarity takes the edge off of that too. She has gotten used to feeling flustered.
Used to feeling down.
Used to feeling insecure about every aspect of herself from her physique to her psyche.
So used to it, in fact, that feeling some semblance of security makes her feel strangely uneasy.
The first time she believes Sokka when he tells her that she is pretty, it makes her feel jittery.
She physical shifts in her chair, doesn’t meet his gaze.
He has told her that he found her sexy and alluring before.
But that was all bedroom talk.
Everything is sexy when he’s rock hard and horny enough.
They aren’t in the bedroom.
And his limbido has been stolen by depression.
“They hate me so much.” He says.
“They don’t hate you.” She replies.
“They won’t forgive me. Nobody will…”
She touches her pointer to his lips again.
“I forgave you.”
He never asked her to forgive him for trying to let her take the fall, for calling her a harlot, for his failure to recognize her discomfort and the signals that she failed to adequately convey.
But she forgives him for it.
Just like he has forgiven her for her hand in the war and for contributing to the deterioration of his marriage even though she hadn’t apologized.
“Suki…”
“Doesn’t have to forgive you.”
And TyLee and Mai don’t have to forgive her.
“Katara will though.”
Just like Zuko had forgiven her.
“What about Aang and Toph?”
Azula can’t see either of them holding a grudge. They got on just fine with her and she has done them much worse. “You never actually told them what was wrong. You never told me either.”
.oOo.
He tells her now.
He tells her that he has been numb for such a long time.
That their nights together had been the closest that he has come to feeling something.
That he had felt something.
That most of those feelings, aside from the pleasure, had been horrible.
But they were still better than feeling nothing at all.
He tells her that his ‘happy’ life had felt hollow. That he couldn’t stand to be around his own friends who came out of the war with renewed optimism and cheer while he came out of it damaged and haunted. Couldn’t stand the smiles and laughter when his were the only ones that had to be forced.
Tells her that he was so tired of having to pretend to be the same goofy but sarcastic guy that his friends all adored.
He had to keep up the act.
He tells her so much.
Tells her all of the things that he was afraid to tell his own friends.
It is easy to talk to her because he wouldn’t mind if the truth scared her away.
No.
That’s not right at all.
It is easier to talk to her because he knows that the truth won’t scare her away.
It occurs to him only after he finishes, that he is terrified to lose her too.
“Please don’t leave me too.”
It occurs to him that she understands him in a way that nobody else ever could.
That very same request probably burns on her tongue.
She also had a life made for her that she had thrown away.
They shared the same secrets.
They share the same shames.
“I’m not going to leave you, Sokka. Where would I go?”
Hopefully somewhere kind.
“My friends seem to like you a lot.”
More than they like him these days.
“Well that’ll make things easier when we tell them…”
She stops herself short.
“That we’re a couple.”
He finishes.
“Are we?”
“I think…”
But should they be?
.oOo.
Sokka is telling jokes.
Some of them are really dark and cynical.
She doesn’t mind these.
Some of them are stupid.
Really bad jokes.
Jokes that make her cheeks redder than the sake ever had.
Redder than any mentions of their former nightly activities ever could.
But she’ll take chuckling Sokka with his horrid jokes over moping, miserable Sokka.
He spends less time with her now that he is investing more time into working through the traumas of war. The things that he had to do.
“I think that I blame her.” He says one night. “I had to hurt a lot of people to keep her safe. Katara too.”
He says that he punished them instead of facing himself.
That this is a pattern he needs to break.
Recognition.
Admission.
They go a long way.
He spends less time with her now that his friends are talking to him again.
That’s alright, she needs some time to herself now and then.
She has grown so accustomed to being lonely that company gets overwhelming.
These days she has to excuse herself from it.
At any rate, distance for them is healthy.
Old habits like to cling.
But they cannot.
They have to let each other go now and then.
Let each other work on their own problems independently from each other.
It is like this that they settle into new routines.
A delicate blending of the new and the old.
Old habits cling.
Sometimes he still feeds her, it is what they are used to.
Is it embarrassing?
Yes.
It is comforting in its familiarity.
Also yes.
Is she bizarrely comfortable with being uncomfortable.
She supposes that she has been for quite some time now.
Sometimes he still feeds her, it is what they are used to.
But their meal is shared on a bed with lavish silk sheets and a canopy with curtains to pull.
Now and then it is shared atop thick furs in a room that is too cold for her tastes.
But never in a sketchy brothel.
Sometimes she feeds him, it is a diversion that makes things exciting.
Keeps her more comfortable.
He tells her that she is going to have to learn to cook if this is going to be their arrangement.
And Azula learns a new skill.
It puts a more cozy spin on their usual thrills.
He likes to wrap his arms around her…
…rest his hands on her hips while she attempts to flip strips of seal meat in the pan.
He laughs at the crinkle of her brow when she concentrates.
Tells her that it’s cute.
She thinks that she enjoys this form of foreplay more than what comes after.
For a good while she can’t figure out why.
And then he tucks her bangs behind her ear.
And he whispers into her ear not that she is sexy or pretty but that it is time to turn the meat over.
She laughs and asks him why he’d said it using his bedroom voice.
He does too and tells her that he wanted to hear her laugh.
And she realizes that she has what she wanted.
Something genuine.
He must cherish her if he is willing to put up with burnt meat.
First nights are for pampering and familiarity.
For reclaiming old delights in moderation.
A delicate balance of pleasure and restraint.
Second nights are for nothing at all.
A brief respite.
A moment to catch their breaths.
Maybe go out on the town or spend time with friends.
Third nights are for praise and affirmation.
He worships her body.
Regardless of what shape it takes on any given day or night.
He ought to.
She is, afterall, a princess.
He traces small circles on her belly or back depending on how she is laying.
He tells her he loves her body so much.
And that he loves her so much more than that.
She returns the favor.
Not with words as he does but with gestures.
By tracing the lines of his biceps.
By licking the outline of his abs.
By kissing his inner thighs and his chest and resisting the urge to tell him to shave.
By drowning in the shape of him.
Tonight is a second night.
She is on her back just like the second nights of the past.
She is fully clothed unlike second nights of the past.
Instead of stains on the ceiling she counts stars.
She feels Sokka’s touch just like second nights of the past.
His hand pats her cheek or squeezes hers unlike second nights of the past.
She has traded greed and gluttony for affection and meaningful moments.
And it all seems so far away; the nights of nausea and distended stomachs.
Of ribbons, red impressions on her skin, and regrets.
Of the fog in her brain and the cravings that left her hands shaking.
Really it hasn’t been all that long.
But after a life of thrills and rushes.
Life seems so slow.
She rolls over.
Faces him.
He rolls over.
Faces her.
It occurs to her that they never really met each other’s eyes on second nights.
He strokes her cheek with his thumb.
She tells him that he is going to miss the meteor shower if he keeps staring at her.
He says that that’s fine with him so long as she ‘meteor shows him with kisses.’
She groans.
He grins.
She tells him to just shut up and look at the stars or whatever.
Tonight is a second night.
Second nights are her favorite.