questions colored gray

azula/aang

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She despises him from the start—not for her father's reasons, not because he could stop the war—because she never sees him as human, and so he's a threat. She doesn't see him as human because he's impossibly perfect and just so brilliantly good that he has to be some kind of good dream (but that can't be it because she only has nightmares nowadays) or illusion—but maybe, some part of her thinks, maybe you just never knew how good someone could be—after all, you're the Fire Nation princess. Except she shakes off the idea, because she doesn't want to admit how evil they (she) were.

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The first time she looks into his (beautifully kind) gray eyes, she's taken aback at how different they are—large and round and innocent, but then she looks again and she sees the most amazing mix of young and old, story worthy and story less, so much history that she doesn't know how to react to it all. And under it all, she sees knowledge and power and dreams and bitterness and love and fear?

Why is he afraid? she wonders. He's the Avatar, shouldn't I be no threat?

It makes her realize just how human he is.

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And the next time she looks in the mirror, she glares at herself and her evil, angry(sad), golden eyes, because she didn't have anything to tell—she was always her father's favorite, always the prodigy. She never had to work for anything like he did. And she honestly wonders why exactly they were hunting him down. Because—

No! He's the enemy!

She stops glaring and doesn't know who she's really looking at.

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At one point, she looks at her father and refrains from yelling, "the good guys always win! We can't win!" because no, the Fire Nation is strong, and strong beats good. And because she's utterly afraid of her father's fire—red and blazing, not blue and heartless like hers—and saying something like that would earn her Zuko's fate—wandering and burnt.

She doesn't know when she stopped feeling sympathy for her brother, (she barely ever did) but she could hardly care—it was his own disrespect that caused his punishment, after all.

(She's always been heartless like her fire.)

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She's chasing him down with Mai and Ty Lee when she feels suddenly weak.

He's my enemy, my nations enemy and yet—yet I'm still infatuated with him in the strangest way.

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Under Ba Sing Se, when Zuko joins forces with her, she shoots the Avatar—no, Aang, she thinks—down with lightning and is suddenly afraid that she might have killed him. Just imagine if I did, though—father would be so proud, and—and I'd have killed off the world's last hope. She can't believe herself, because she's never been the caring, empathetic type—it had always, always been about her.

So she tells Ozai Zuko killed off the Avatar, and hopes that he's alive—because she's afraid that if he wasn't, she wouldn't really have a reason for doing anything anymore and that would be the worst life. And maybe because she's in love with him from a (forbidden) distance.

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When she's sitting there and the Avatar barges in, she feels incredibly vulnerable (not only because of the eclipse), and so she (more or less) runs.

And as she's taunting the Water Tribe boy, she's silently watching Aang in the background, and she is happysadangryrelieved that he's alive.

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Zuko leaves, to go and help Aang, and she feels like she should be there too, but she just stays behind, because she just wanted to be the Fire Lord and help her father.

Right?

Oh god, please say I'm right.

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In the end, when she's going insane and Zuko and that Water Tribe girl the Avatar loves catch her, handcuff her, defeat her, she despises the Avatar, not because he won, but because she still loves him.

.fin.