attackfish (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
attackfish) wrote2014-04-01 01:51 pm
attackfish) wrote2014-04-01 01:51 pm
Entry tags:
Shortfic: Empty Bodies, Empty Smiles
Disclaimer: I don't own Avatar: the Last Airbender. If I did, it would be one long angstfest and you know it.
Summary: Zuko sorts through the wreckage of his childhood and comes across a doll given to his sister.
Author's Note: It's been a while since I wrote a fic just because. Feels good.
Empty Bodies, Empty Smiles
It wasn't long after the coronation, or the battle that preceded it, that he found her headless wooden body, and for a few brief moments, he contemplated giving her a proper cremation. His own body still throbbed with the force of his sister's lightning. Fiery sparks of pain ran through him every time he breathed along the pathways she had carved. He could see the looks on the faces of his court when he winced and faltered. What his uncle had sought to prevent by sending Zuko to claim the throne had come to pass anyway. Brother fought sister for the crown, and took it from her when he won. That was what the people of his homeland saw when they looked at him, and cast their eyes on the wounds he had earned fighting for their freedom.
He tucked doll his, their, uncle had given Azula, head burned away, body blackened, surviving remnants of her green dress streaked with soot and ash, away in the pocket of his robe and examined the box he had found her in. She had lain, buried in old clothes, the ceremonial mourning clothes he had worn to his father's coronation. She had left black smudges all over the gleaming white silk. The palace servants had put her there for the Firelord's personal servants to deal with, rather than risk disposing of her and angering their new ruler.
The Firelord's chamber, hastily cleared of his father's possessions, stood crowded with dozens of such boxes from Zuko's old rooms, all filled with the remnants of his childhood and his memories. With a sudden stab of sheepish horror, he wondered if the palace servants had found the rest of Azula's stolen dolls. His feet carried him down the corridors, back to his old rooms. He stood in front of the door, a strange and discomforting feeling of loss surging through him. With a glance around at the empty corridor, he pushed his way in.
It had seemed so big, when he had been first allowed his own rooms, big and empty and echoing, and too much. And now it was even emptier. The enormous bed, stripped of its blankets, mattress and pillows, stood skeletal and alone, the only thing left in the entire room. In Sozin's day and for hundreds of years previous, these rooms had housed the Firelord, the grandest suite in the grandest palace in all the islands for a man who dreamed of being the mightiest ruler in the world. Then, Azulon had built grander halls, with grander rooms, and these ones had been relegated to the son of the Firelord's second son, a distant contender for his great grandfather's throne.
And then, Lu Ten had died, and the world had tilted on its axis, and when it had righted itself, Ozai was the Firelord, and Zuko was his firstborn. The servants had come to move him into his uncle's old rooms, and he had screamed his refusal, and slept on the bare floor of his room for four nights in a row before they moved everything back and gave Azula the crown prince's chambers instead. Their uncle was moved into Lu Ten's old rooms, and Zuko was left alone. So much politics, he thought, contained in where someone slept, even when they slept alone. And now he was the Firelord.
After the battle, they had put him in his uncle's rooms, in Lu Ten's old rooms. He wondered if his uncle had anything to do with that somehow.
Shaking off his musings, Zuko strode across the room to the far wall, and gently tapped against it until he found the part that rang hollow. Then, he moved just to the right of it and pushed that panel back, and then slid it into the hollow panel. A cloud of dust rose up. It was untouched. The servants hadn't found it.
Before Azulon's building spree, it had been a secret escape passage for the Firelord. Now, it was a strange malformed little triangle, walled off on one end. Zuko had never been gladder that he had discovered this place after he knew what Azula was like, and so had never shared it with her, or with anyone else. On the floor against the back wall, under a pile of dust sat in inlaid wooden box, stolen from some out of the way corner of the palace. Coughing, Zuko dusted the lid off and picked it up. He remembered when he was little having to drag it across the floor.
With a jolt, he realized as he slid the panel closed and pulled it back into place beside its fellows, that he was leaving that little secret room for probably the very last time. He turned that over in his mind to see how it felt.
When he picked up the box again, his chest felt as if there were cinders inside of it, and his breath hissed out of him. He let it bear him down to the floor, and sank to his knees, ready to push it along like he had when he had been to small to lift it instead of too injured. And a moment later, he rolled his eyes at his own foolishness and called for a porter. There was no need to sneak around anymore like a second prince's unwanted firstborn son.
The porter carried the box to the firelord's chambers as Zuko led the way, pausing as the firelord leaned against the wall, sweating and weak, to rest. Once the box was safely in his new rooms, Zuko dismissed the porter with a wave of his hand and opened the lid.
Faces stared back at him.
On Ember Island, Sokka had told them all about the time he got stuck gutting fish for a week after he stole Katara's doll. Katara had teased him a little about wanting a doll, and Zuko had asked why Sokka didn't have one in the first place. They had all given him that look, like they couldn't figure out what to do with him again. Sokka laughed it off, telling him that he didn't want the doll, he wanted to annoy his sister, but then Toph asked, snidely if he had dolls as a kid. He shook his head. No one had given him a doll since the day Azula figured out she could set fire to them and make her brother cry.
It was surreal, listening to Sokka's story and remembering how he had stolen Azula's dolls. One more memory of his that was almost, but not quite, like everyone else's.
He cradled each of Azula's dolls, rescued and mended as well as he had been able to all those years ago, and laid them gently on the floor until the box was empty. Their faces gazed back at them, smiling gently in spite of their wounds, close to twenty of them, battered hidden away, to protect them from his sister. There was a soldier with her arms twisted off, a circus ringmaster with her hair hacked and burned away, a fisherman with fingerprint burns all over his body, an archer with his cheek burned clean through. Zuko pressed his finger to the burned and jagged edge of the scar, and then to his own.
Before she had gotten real people for toys, Mai, and Ty Lee, and after their mother left, Zuko, Azula had loved playing with her dolls, deciding what they would say and do, ruling them absolutely. But even lifeless wood, clay, and cloth couldn't meet her exacting standards of obedience, and she punished them accordingly.
Zuko wondered if Azula knew it was Zuko who spirited them away after, or if she had just assumed that was what happened to broken dolls.
There was one last doll, and Zuko flinched as he picked her up, his face growing wet. She was perfect, unblemished, her hair neat, her robe crisp. This one had been Azula's favorite, because she wore their mother's face. She used to told her, and talk to her, and make her answer back the way she wanted her to instead of the way their mother did. She used to tell their mother that she loved the doll better than the real her, and smiled at their mother's distress.
This doll alone, Zuko had rescued in time, and Azula had searched everywhere for her, and screamed at the servants, while Zuko hid her away never to be found.
After their mom left, he used to sit in the secret passage and hug the Ursa doll tight and imagine she was the real thing.
Slowly, he turned back to the other dolls, and stripped off the makeshift bandages he had made for them as a child. He set the Earth Kingdom doll down with them, threw the scraps of bandages away, and stared at the dolls and their faces for a long, long time, just trying to figure out what to do with them now.
Summary: Zuko sorts through the wreckage of his childhood and comes across a doll given to his sister.
Author's Note: It's been a while since I wrote a fic just because. Feels good.
Empty Bodies, Empty Smiles
It wasn't long after the coronation, or the battle that preceded it, that he found her headless wooden body, and for a few brief moments, he contemplated giving her a proper cremation. His own body still throbbed with the force of his sister's lightning. Fiery sparks of pain ran through him every time he breathed along the pathways she had carved. He could see the looks on the faces of his court when he winced and faltered. What his uncle had sought to prevent by sending Zuko to claim the throne had come to pass anyway. Brother fought sister for the crown, and took it from her when he won. That was what the people of his homeland saw when they looked at him, and cast their eyes on the wounds he had earned fighting for their freedom.
He tucked doll his, their, uncle had given Azula, head burned away, body blackened, surviving remnants of her green dress streaked with soot and ash, away in the pocket of his robe and examined the box he had found her in. She had lain, buried in old clothes, the ceremonial mourning clothes he had worn to his father's coronation. She had left black smudges all over the gleaming white silk. The palace servants had put her there for the Firelord's personal servants to deal with, rather than risk disposing of her and angering their new ruler.
The Firelord's chamber, hastily cleared of his father's possessions, stood crowded with dozens of such boxes from Zuko's old rooms, all filled with the remnants of his childhood and his memories. With a sudden stab of sheepish horror, he wondered if the palace servants had found the rest of Azula's stolen dolls. His feet carried him down the corridors, back to his old rooms. He stood in front of the door, a strange and discomforting feeling of loss surging through him. With a glance around at the empty corridor, he pushed his way in.
It had seemed so big, when he had been first allowed his own rooms, big and empty and echoing, and too much. And now it was even emptier. The enormous bed, stripped of its blankets, mattress and pillows, stood skeletal and alone, the only thing left in the entire room. In Sozin's day and for hundreds of years previous, these rooms had housed the Firelord, the grandest suite in the grandest palace in all the islands for a man who dreamed of being the mightiest ruler in the world. Then, Azulon had built grander halls, with grander rooms, and these ones had been relegated to the son of the Firelord's second son, a distant contender for his great grandfather's throne.
And then, Lu Ten had died, and the world had tilted on its axis, and when it had righted itself, Ozai was the Firelord, and Zuko was his firstborn. The servants had come to move him into his uncle's old rooms, and he had screamed his refusal, and slept on the bare floor of his room for four nights in a row before they moved everything back and gave Azula the crown prince's chambers instead. Their uncle was moved into Lu Ten's old rooms, and Zuko was left alone. So much politics, he thought, contained in where someone slept, even when they slept alone. And now he was the Firelord.
After the battle, they had put him in his uncle's rooms, in Lu Ten's old rooms. He wondered if his uncle had anything to do with that somehow.
Shaking off his musings, Zuko strode across the room to the far wall, and gently tapped against it until he found the part that rang hollow. Then, he moved just to the right of it and pushed that panel back, and then slid it into the hollow panel. A cloud of dust rose up. It was untouched. The servants hadn't found it.
Before Azulon's building spree, it had been a secret escape passage for the Firelord. Now, it was a strange malformed little triangle, walled off on one end. Zuko had never been gladder that he had discovered this place after he knew what Azula was like, and so had never shared it with her, or with anyone else. On the floor against the back wall, under a pile of dust sat in inlaid wooden box, stolen from some out of the way corner of the palace. Coughing, Zuko dusted the lid off and picked it up. He remembered when he was little having to drag it across the floor.
With a jolt, he realized as he slid the panel closed and pulled it back into place beside its fellows, that he was leaving that little secret room for probably the very last time. He turned that over in his mind to see how it felt.
When he picked up the box again, his chest felt as if there were cinders inside of it, and his breath hissed out of him. He let it bear him down to the floor, and sank to his knees, ready to push it along like he had when he had been to small to lift it instead of too injured. And a moment later, he rolled his eyes at his own foolishness and called for a porter. There was no need to sneak around anymore like a second prince's unwanted firstborn son.
The porter carried the box to the firelord's chambers as Zuko led the way, pausing as the firelord leaned against the wall, sweating and weak, to rest. Once the box was safely in his new rooms, Zuko dismissed the porter with a wave of his hand and opened the lid.
Faces stared back at him.
On Ember Island, Sokka had told them all about the time he got stuck gutting fish for a week after he stole Katara's doll. Katara had teased him a little about wanting a doll, and Zuko had asked why Sokka didn't have one in the first place. They had all given him that look, like they couldn't figure out what to do with him again. Sokka laughed it off, telling him that he didn't want the doll, he wanted to annoy his sister, but then Toph asked, snidely if he had dolls as a kid. He shook his head. No one had given him a doll since the day Azula figured out she could set fire to them and make her brother cry.
It was surreal, listening to Sokka's story and remembering how he had stolen Azula's dolls. One more memory of his that was almost, but not quite, like everyone else's.
He cradled each of Azula's dolls, rescued and mended as well as he had been able to all those years ago, and laid them gently on the floor until the box was empty. Their faces gazed back at them, smiling gently in spite of their wounds, close to twenty of them, battered hidden away, to protect them from his sister. There was a soldier with her arms twisted off, a circus ringmaster with her hair hacked and burned away, a fisherman with fingerprint burns all over his body, an archer with his cheek burned clean through. Zuko pressed his finger to the burned and jagged edge of the scar, and then to his own.
Before she had gotten real people for toys, Mai, and Ty Lee, and after their mother left, Zuko, Azula had loved playing with her dolls, deciding what they would say and do, ruling them absolutely. But even lifeless wood, clay, and cloth couldn't meet her exacting standards of obedience, and she punished them accordingly.
Zuko wondered if Azula knew it was Zuko who spirited them away after, or if she had just assumed that was what happened to broken dolls.
There was one last doll, and Zuko flinched as he picked her up, his face growing wet. She was perfect, unblemished, her hair neat, her robe crisp. This one had been Azula's favorite, because she wore their mother's face. She used to told her, and talk to her, and make her answer back the way she wanted her to instead of the way their mother did. She used to tell their mother that she loved the doll better than the real her, and smiled at their mother's distress.
This doll alone, Zuko had rescued in time, and Azula had searched everywhere for her, and screamed at the servants, while Zuko hid her away never to be found.
After their mom left, he used to sit in the secret passage and hug the Ursa doll tight and imagine she was the real thing.
Slowly, he turned back to the other dolls, and stripped off the makeshift bandages he had made for them as a child. He set the Earth Kingdom doll down with them, threw the scraps of bandages away, and stared at the dolls and their faces for a long, long time, just trying to figure out what to do with them now.
no subject
And yes, she was definitely already slipping in "The Southern Raiders." Her affect is much less flat. She grins instead of smirks. She practically starts cackling. She reacts instead of plans. And she goes after Zuko instead of Aang. Eliminating her toy turned rival, and the evidence of her failure is more important than capturing or killing the one person who can stop the Fire Nation conquest. This to me is evidence of her putting her emotional needs over her political best interests. It's the same thing with not killing Zuko for so long in the first place. As long as he was alive, there was the chance that something could happen, and Zuko would end up on the throne, as in fact, he did. If he were safely dead, there would be no other claimant to challenge her. On the other hand, if Zuko is dead, not only does she lose her toy and the last person who loves her, but also, as you said, she loses her fall guy. But he isn't a fall guy for problems external to her as much as he's someone she can feel superior to in her own mind. She has internalized Ozai's view of Zuko as a failure, and so when she needs a self esteem boost, she looks at her brother and thinks "better than that.".
There's a really telling scene in the Southern Raiders where Azula is falling, right before she catches herself with her royal hairpiece (symbolic, given the last tether to sanity, the last prop for her self image she has is her royal father's estimation of her) where Zuko says "she's... not going to make it," and he looks so stunned and so sad. Then she catches herself, and he switches to angry and resentful and says "Of course she did." Azula's right. Zuko loves her, in spite of himself.
no subject
Your nuance, it's breaking the internetz! :D I'm in the same camp myself, and I absolutely agree on the horrible, awful implications of thinking that abuse turns you evil--it was one of the reasons I couldn't stand LoK Book 1.
Of course, some of the terrible ideas with real staying power are a twist and a step away from valid and supportable ones. "Abuse turns you evil" is one of those ideas, being a gross and hurtful simplification of the fact that abuse marks a person in ways that may take a long time to recover from, and the damage can take the form of hurting others as well as one's self.
Now, I don't think the core of Azula's manipulative and amoral personality was formed by Ozai's upbringing, so in that sense Ozai didn't turn Azula evil. On the other hand, I don't think her breakdown can be neatly separated from the evil she did. She may always have had the capacity to hurt people without batting an eyelid, but Ozai had a large part in teaching her she could do so without consequence, and also in creating her driving need to gain absolute control. Nothing absolves Azula for the choices she made, but it's also true that she would have been a very different person if Ursa had been the primary presence in her childhood.
So I guess my position is more or less: "Azula was abused, and her capacity for evil was encouraged and amplified by Ozai, and it excuses nothing."
I think it's really significant that Mai and Ty Lee left Azula for Zuko
Oh, absolutely. It was a DOES NOT COMPUTE situation for Azula, I imagine. While the thought that Zuko was somehow "better" than her and "beat" her at the own game would have been unbearable in itself as you outlined, I think the alternative explanation was even more unthinkable--that people cannot always be controlled by fear, and act on motivations other than self-interest and self-preservation, meaning Azula cannot control everything no matter how much she browbeats and terrorizes those around her. Hence the mass layoff back at the Fire Palace, because no one was trustworthy anymore--as in, no one was a dependable automaton who would always and mindlessly do her bidding.
I can't help but feel sorry for Azula because the situation with Mai was Ursa all over again, yet another person throwing away everything to abandon her for Zuko, seemingly defying reason and sanity. I don't doubt that the central emotional underpinning of Azula's need for control was the trauma of losing her mother. No doubt she took the lesson that in order to avoid ever being hurt or rejected again she had to keep an absolute hold on people. Well, it didn't work, and thus she was left in this terrifying void where she had no hold on the world, because Ozai had helped cut away every tendril other than absolute dominance she might have used to reach out to the world. Once that last string was cut, she had nothing she could use to deal with life. Hence madness.
no subject
And this is part of why I loved Frozen (and for that matter Airbender) so much. They showed recovery as messy, which is pathetically rare in media.
"Azula was abused, and her capacity for evil was encouraged and amplified by Ozai, and it excuses nothing."
Oh yes, Ozai certainly shaped and gave direction to Azula's existing impulses. She wasn't born genetically programmed to conquer the world instead of say conning old ladies out of their life savings, or becoming a captain of industry and tormenting her brother in her days off. I had a conversation with water-soter in which I said that good people aren't always from good families and really awful people aren't always from bad families, but family always has an effect. How we were raised, what happened to us or what we were exposed to in childhood helps shape how we interact with the world. Azula would have been a psychopath without Ozai, but that would have manifested in a different way had she been raised differently. In other words, she's evil independent of Ozai and his abuse, but he helped determine what kind of evil and gave her the resources to realize her worst impulses on a global scale.
One of the affects Ozai's raising has on Azula is very subtle, but to me shows the absolute lack of humanity Ozai displays towards his favored child. You talked about how Azula feels that desperate need to control and how it does not compute for her when people throw everything away to side with her brother, and this reminded me of something else. We never see Azula manipulate through affection after Ursa leaves, only through fear. When she's a child, she plays the sweet little girl for her mother, at least briefly, but during the main timeline, she very briefly dangles the promise of their father's love in front of Zuko, and that's it. Most psychopaths are very adept at manipulating affection. It's part of what makes them so miserable to have in a family. But Azula doesn't have very much practice manipulating someone else's love for her after Ursa leaves, because Ozai doesn't love her. She doesn't understand love, not only because she doesn't feel it herself, but because after her mother abandoned her, for Zuko, no one except maybe sometimes Zuko, who's also terrified of her, shows her any love. It's a very nuanced and realistic version of the "Evil cannot comprehend good" trope.
Interestingly, she does understand that threatening people's families and friends can be used to control them, which I think is because she relies so heavily on her father's opinion of her to maintain her own self esteem. This is also probably how she perceives Zuko's wish for their father's love. But she does not understand what love actually is, and she doesn't seem to realize anyone can love her. While being loved wouldn't make her a good person, or able to feel love in return, it's still profoundly sad, and says a lot about her relationship with Ozai.
I think one of the contributing factors for her breakdown may also have been Zuko's banishment. Not only was this the ultimate signal of the price of imperfection, but it was also the loss of the only person left who loved her, and so a source of self worth for her external to her father and her ability to control, as well as someone who could unwittingly help her hone her skills at manipulating affection. She was left all alone with Ozai, who had total control over her. He controlled all information she received, all ideology. She had to adapt it or risk being out of favor (and we saw what that led to when it finally happened). It must have been terrifying, and also, since she admired her father so much, and all of his attention, mostly positive attention at that, was all on her, absolutely thrilling.
no subject
It is! It might as well be a training montage set to the Rocky soundtrack. Either you recover quickly and easily, or you're Evil and thus unsalvageable. I don't deny that either of these things could happen (though I don't know of any RL case of easy recovery), but it seems such a disservice to ignore the vast muddled space in between where people struggle forward with a lot of false starts and backsliding, through airless nights and leaden days punctuated by unpredictable bursts of grace.
I think this erasure of the reality of abuse is insidious because people might very well conclude they're beyond hope unless they're insta-fixed, kind of like how people are led by media and social expectations to think a relationship must be unsalvageable if it has any problems (gasp!) that require honest conversation (horror!).
or becoming a captain of industry and tormenting her brother in her days off
I am reminded of Dagny "I'm so proud of sleeping with a married man which is totally OK because I want him and I'm a heroic businesswoman!" Taggert. Then again most of the so-called heroes in Atlas Shrugged are similarly sociopathic.
We never see Azula manipulate through affection after Ursa leaves, only through fear. . . . she does not understand what love actually is, and she doesn't seem to realize anyone can love her.
I never thought of that. Wow, that's chilling.
While being loved wouldn't make her a good person, or able to feel love in return, it's still profoundly sad, and says a lot about her relationship with Ozai.
With guidance and boundaries she could have learned to value the people around her and engage with them in less exploitative ways, if only for her own self-interest. While that's not strictly being a good person, it would have made her at least socially functional. Ursa seemed to be grasping for something like this in "Zuko Alone" before everything was shot to hell.
It must have been terrifying, and also, since she admired her father so much, and all of his attention, mostly positive attention at that, was all on her, absolutely thrilling.
German psychologist Alice Miller in her book The Body Never Lies compared this association between terror and thrill in the child-parent relationship to the dynamic of sexual abuse. That's sort of an explosive thing to say and Miller isn't known for moderation in her writing, but I can see her point that it is abusive to make a child associate the fear of being violated with the excitement of connecting to a parent. My theory is that this association broke Azula's already tenuous grasp on consequence, and ultimately caused her to crash all the harder when consequence, like gravity, reasserted itself.
no subject
If Nazism is a perfect narcissistic philosophy, objective is a perfect sociopathic philosophy. Also, evidence suggests that sociopaths are disproportionately represented in the upper levels of business.
With guidance and boundaries she could have learned to value the people around her and engage with them in less exploitative ways, if only for her own self-interest. While that's not strictly being a good person, it would have made her at least socially functional.
Exactly. Most sociopaths are able to function in society with a minimum of criminality. They're miserable to have in a family, but most learn not to transgress society's boundaries at least to the extent that they get caught. Azula could have grown up to be like that, but Ozai taught her another way.
That's sort of an explosive thing to say and Miller isn't known for moderation in her writing, but I can see her point that it is abusive to make a child associate the fear of being violated with the excitement of connecting to a parent. My theory is that this association broke Azula's already tenuous grasp on consequence, and ultimately caused her to crash all the harder when consequence, like gravity, reasserted itself.
Part of the reason that Azula apologists think she was sexually abused (which makes no sense given how bad she is at being the vamp) is because they don't think what we saw was bad enough to make her into who she became. And I'm like, are you kidding, what we saw was plenty horrible. Sexual or not, it was definitely sufficient to drive her over the edge.
no subject
Quoted for awesome, awesome truth.
Part of the reason that Azula apologists think she was sexually abused (which makes no sense given how bad she is at being the vamp) is because they don't think what we saw was bad enough to make her into who she became.
Oh, internetz. So much fail in one assertion, from the idea that Ozai's abuse of Azula wasn't "bad enough" to the assumption that a) abuse turns you evil and b) sexual abuse turns you eviller. I wonder if they realize how much they're objectifying her by defining her by what (they think) was done to her instead of what she did. Not too comfortable with proactive female characters, are they?