This one is kind of a bit different. It's more or less platonic or family love, so I don't know if it would be 100% on par with Femslash February. But the prompt was from the challenge.

Azula hunched over shivering.

It was dark and damp.

She couldn't bring herself to stand nor sit back up. She felt empty, hollow. The spirit vine was still looped around her arm, but it was now limp in her hand. A hand that she barely had the strength to flex. It was all so cold. Everything was so cold. A fire still burned within her belly, but it did nothing to warm her. She was so frigid inside.

What had she done to herself?

Somewhere she could hear the cry of a baby. It was so close, yet so distant all at once.

It chilled her even more. The sound was so foreignly familiar. As though she were listening to herself cry but with the ears of someone else. She cupped her hands over her ears.

This swamp had been playing with her from the start.

Finally she found it in her to pick herself up.

The wailing didn't cease.

It wasn't real.

It was just another swap trick.

The baby cried with more furry, as though it knew she was going to leave it.

.oOo.

Lost.

She wandered a desert that stretched in sandbanks to the horizon. Part of Acxa thought that the sandbank must stretch even beyond the horizon. That she could walk endlessly and never leave it. Not that doing so would be much different than what she did currently. One of these days she'd have to find a place that accepted her. A place that was hospitable.

Sand whipped at her face, stinging her eyes and drying her mouth uncomfortably. Her lips were cracked y in and bleeding, she could almost feel the sand working its way into the small splits. She wanted to lick the blood and sand away but didn't want to risk letting the particles into her mouth or on her tongue. Instead she tried to wipe with the back of her hand. The sand stung.

She blinked, feeling her eyes grow more and more irritated as more sand assaulted her. It was relentless and uncaring. Finally she made it to a canyon of sorts. She hustled inside and allows the hulking rock structures to shield her from the cruel dust storm.

She leaned against the craggy surface and let herself slip down to the floor, hugging her knees. She watched sand blow into the canyon whipping about in erratic, slithering whips. The noise of it. Lord, the noise of it was dreadful. It was a piercing howl. An almost evil sound. It almost seemed to suggest that it was willing to topple the canyon upon her.

Acxa attempted to ignore it, instead trying to think of something else. But her own mind was almost more vile than the furious wind and sand. Her mind wandered to the Galra Empire. To the days spent in a military camp.

She could never recollect how she had come to be there.

But she remembered a swamp.

It had taken care of her for the first four, perhaps five years of her life.

It hadn't had the bioluminescent organisms, nor the abundance of technology. But it had its own sort of magic that allowed the vines themselves and the animals to nurture her until she could do it herself. Faintly she remembered a pond. Her memory went black after that.

The next thing she could recall of her life was a vast forest. Those weren't the same trees that had taken care of her. It didn't matter, she was taken from that planet very quickly. The Galra had invaded it the week after her arrival. They'd found her famished and tearful and declared that she was one of their own.

Or at least, half so.

Acxa didn't agree. She looked like them in some regards, but she couldn't possible have any of their blood running through her veins. She wasn't of this galaxy.

But her stomach begged for food and her body yearned for shelter.

So she let them take her.

A poor decision, in retrospect.

They did feed her. But not that well.

They did provide shelter, but it was no home.

They did clothe her. But only because they had to.

They trained her to fight. They did everything they could to sap her humanity away. If she couldn't complete their intense obstacle course then she'd be deprived of food. It was a terrible cycle; the lack of food weakened her to the point where she couldn't complete the tasks that would earn her a meal. Her only other option was to take a volunteer beating. After her lip was sufficiently bloodied and swollen and her arms sufficiently bruise, she'd have something to eat.

They pushed her until they rendered her emotionless. Beat her until that brand of pain no longer fazed her. They exposed her to the worst aspects of life, making sure she looked at every bit of carnage her older fellow combatants had created. They shaped her into some sort of unfeeling weapon.

She made her first kill when she was eleven.

It lurched her stomach and left her heaving on the side of the road she'd killed the boy on. He was a child soldier too. She swore that he had to be a year or two younger than she. Her superiors stood breathing down her neck and she knew that if she didn't deliver the killing blow she'd be left to the mercy of the streets, directionless and without a chance.

The military was the only option for a half-breed.

For someone who didn't truly possess a drop of Galra blood at all.

That night she wished with all of her soul that she could find out exactly what she was. Where she was from. She yearned to find that swamp again. Between fleeting images of that boy's dull eyes and slack jaw, she conjured up memories of the swamp. The sweet and pungent floral odors. The inviting warmth, the kind that wasn't as sticky and muggy as the air on this planet.

Eventually though, the boy's face would sneak back into her mind with a vengeance. Sometimes he would screech at her for killing him. Other times he would tearfully ask why.

Her second kill was a little easier.

Her third easier still.

By the sixth she had learned to block it out.

Mercifully desensitized.

Sitting on the floor of the canyon she is furious with herself all over again. She stared at her hands. Hands that she bloodied over and over again. Hands that had shed so much blood, caused so much pain. She thought that she deserved to die in that canyon.

She supposed that she deserved to starve to death in that desert. It would serve her right for killing people to get food.

It had taken her much too long to realize that it wasn't worth it. Much too long to realize that she needed to go her own way. As much as she had grown to resent Lotor, she had to thank him for helping her see that she needed to fix her moral compass again.

She laid down and longed again, for that swamp. When she woke up, the sand had stopped screaming. Acxa made her way back out of the canyon and continued her endless walk. She wished that she had fueled her ship earlier. Maybe then she wouldn't be stranded and lost.

It was just one more regret.

Just one more thing she had brought on herself and deserved.

Sweat trickled down her skin. She was getting much too hot. Finally she caved and stripped. It wasn't as though there was anyone around to ogle her. She has heard in the past that it is counter-productive to do so, but she pined for even a temporary relief.

She decided that she'd dress herself again in a few minutes.

Soon after she dressed herself once more she found her eyes welling with tears.

In front of her was a generously sized oasis.

.oOo.

The cold never left her.

It was always there.

Always brutal.

She had grown used to it though, and could mostly ignore it though. But she consistently felt empty. Empty was the only thing she seemed to feel in full anymore. Sure, her hallucinations and delusions were gone and the brunt had been taken off her sadness and insecurities. But it felt disturbingly unnatural.

Azula wanted to feel again. Even if it meant reclaiming her insanity.

She just wanted to feel.

She was making Mai look like temperamental.

Zuko had kicked up a good fuss, suspecting her doctors of giving her a lobotomy or something of the sort. She had to remind him that she'd been off on her own and well away from the institution before she had come home. With her emotions so dulled, it didn't bother her to vocalize that her current condition was her own doing.

Whatever she had been trying to accomplish by stealing those spirit vines, it hadn't gone as she'd planned. She could no longer recall what her goal had even been, likely a grab for control, assessing her past actions. She couldn't be sure, but she thought that she might have been trying to use the spirit vines to correct her unstable mind. In a sense, she realized that she had accomplished that in some form or another.

She tried again, to ignite a fire in her palm.

It didn't come.

It never did these days.

She had grown to frosty on the inside.

Azula missed her fire.

.oOo.

The longing brought her back to the swamp. She hoped, but without a drop of optimism, that she could undo whatever it was that she had done nearly two decades ago. She had thirty years on her now, but she felt as though she had many, many more.

Nearly two decades and she spent them in a perpetual state of cold, functioning just enough to be deemed as one of the living. At last she found it, the spot under the overlarge banyan tree. The place where she'd stolen the vine and destroyed herself.

Now that she was there, she didn't know what to do.

So she sat and waited.

She did so for days, only moving to cook or relieve herself.

She was beginning to think that she had wasted her time. The type of damage she inflicted upon herself probably wasn't the kind that could be undone. Feeling somehow emptier than even before she lowers herself to the ground.

Despair was oppressive.

She heard a gurgling and a bubbling from one of the stagnant pools. With nothing else to do, she wanders towards the vile suckling sound. A figure emerged from it, panting and gasping, caked in mud and in...sand?

The woman pulled herself full from the thick silt. She lay there for a long while, bunched up and shivering. She had a tall and dangerously skinny build. The woman had probably gone quite some time without a decent meal. Azula could tell that her struggle had weakened her. Whatever she had gotten into left a coating of blue on her skin and in her hair. Azula did her best to carry the woman over to a cleaner body of water.

Once there, she did her best to clean the woman, who wasn't doing much to help the process along-either she was to resigned or too fatigued. Azula found it curious, her sudden drive. Her sudden willpower. She scrubbed at the woman's skin with a purpose, as though stopping would smother the spark that had ignited. As Azula scrubbed, it was becoming more and more apparent that blue was the natural hue of this woman's skin and hair.

Finally, the woman began to pick clumps of sludge away for herself.

She remained quiet.

Azula observes the woman sitting there, tidying herself to the best of her ability, and suddenly she felt whole again. Suddenly she knew what she had done all those years ago. She had severed her soul and now she was looking right at the physical manifestation of it.

It looked so battered and tormented.

Calm and collected yet fierce and in pain.

This woman...her soul, was quiet.

Quiet and somber. Azula wondered if it...if she felt any different. If she also felt more complete. The woman turns to her, fixing her with soft blue eyes. Azula had to laugh softly to herself, TyLee had mentioned that she had a blue aura.

The woman didn't speak, and Azula wondered if she even could. Soon her question is answered. "What is this place?"

Not, 'where am I', but 'what is this place.' And Azula was certain that this woman was the baby she had heard crying. Because this woman recognized the place. It occurred to Azula, then, that she actually didn't have an answer. It was just a swamp. Yet, it wasn't, at all, simply a swamp. It was something more, but Azula doesn't know exactly what. "It is a place with a lot of spirit energy…"

The woman nodded. "I am Acxa."

So her soul had a name.

She wondered who had given it to her.

Hesitantly, Azula approaches her. She needed get close to the woman. Needed to get as close to her soul as she possibly could. Acxa didn't protest as Azula slid her arms around her. In fact, she leaned into the embrace and Azula is certain of two things; that the woman had been just as deprived of affection as she and that the woman had felt the connection too.

She holds her soul close.

She feels whole again.

She feels warm again.