Disclaimer: I don't own anything you see here, except my own opinion.

A/N: Azkadellia as a character really captured me. More than the "hero", at any rate. And I thought the actress who played her acted Zooey Deschanel off the screen. But this is a one-shot deal. I may delve into a fuller story later, because I have the feeling the story of "What next?" after Tin Man is fascinating (at least, the little bits and pieces I'm getting are), but I've got way too much on my plate already.

A FLICKER OF LIGHT IN THE STORM

It hurts.

Finaqua has always been warm, even in the shadows of a lingering rain. But ice slices through her now, quick slashes of pain straight to the heart of her, and she screams. Deege? Where – why –

Her little sister is much younger, still scared of the dark and tales of mobats that suck blood. The Witch, because that's who she must be, scared her into running and Az's light wasn't enough to keep Her away. Not enough, not alone – Deege!

Clawed fingers are digging into her shoulders, she knows it because her eyes are locked open, staring at the horrid, desiccated face grinning into her own. Blackness pours into her with each sobbing breath, muffling the light she never even felt, because it was as much a part of her as her heart or lungs, as essential as blood and breath. It hurts.

And then, quick as lightning, everything vanishes. Even her.

Azkadellia is eleven annuals old, and living in a tiny corner of her own mind, when the Witch kills her sister.

She can't tell the passing of time in the blank brightness. She can't control her body; it was undone and remade when the Witch's power flowed over her. She has only her thoughts for company, and the few rare memories of the times the Witch lets her see out of her own eyes. So far, she has gathered only three such recollections, new and shiny as a sword, and just as sharp. Her mother, looking at her in horror. Her little sister, shying from her in fear. And a puppy, soft and sweet like one she had been begging for, bloody and dead by her hand.

But the Witch grabs her, holds her tight in the space behind her eyes, not even blinking as she raises Az's arms and uses the darkness to choke the life out of her little sister. She thrashes against the shadow binding her fast, but it does as much good as it has done before – which is to say, none.

She's screaming and crying inside her own mind, voice raised loud and completely unheard. No, no, no! No!

Come now, my pet.

The voice is oily and shockingly new against the silence, and Az freezes. There's only one person it could be, and this isn't the first time it's talked to her.

Don't you want her dead? the Witch croons. Just a little? She did leave you, after all . . .

No. Az has had months alone in her own head to think about this. DG is only five annuals old. Almost six, but not there yet. Az is eleven. She's older, like Mother always says. She's responsible. She knew something was wrong, and she could have picked Deege up and carried her, kicking and screaming, back to Mother's pavilion. She didn't.

She was afraid too, and she wanted to leave. Az can't blame DG for running, even though she wants to. It wouldn't be fair. She could have stopped her, and she didn't. My fault.

Somehow, she's not sure how, she keeps the Witch from hearing it.

The Witch likes to listen to her, likes to turn her thoughts against her when She has nothing better to do. Az can hide them, but only in the brightest of the light she has left to her, crushed close in the little space of her own body she can still call her own. She wants to escape.

As far as Az can tell, the Witch never sleeps.

With a snarl, she is hurled back into the blinding white.

The Witch lets Azkadellia out for the entire funeral. It hurts, because her parents are cocooned together in sorrow and they don't look at her. Az knows it's the Witch, holding her three long steps away in the rain, but neither of them even glances her way. Not once.

It hurts, in a way entirely different from the way the Witch forced evil power into her heart. Because the Witch is the one sitting behind her eyes, using her face, but she's still in here, too.

She looks at them, suddenly realizing she can control her eyes, and a thought slips over the surface of her mind. Momma?

But the Witch has closed her throat off, and her parents turn to leave.

Az misses the suns.

She recreates the memory – she's gotten very good at that, all alone here with nothing but her magic to keep her alive – and it's warm and soft and cheerful all at once. The Witch almost never lets her out, mostly pokes and pries and lays all her memories out like a story for the pleasure of her reading. But the upside of that is that Azkadellia has taught herself how to poke back. She can feel the Witch's plans, all the while being put into motion, step by tiny, unnoticeable step, as She waits for Azkadellia's body to grow.

Apparently, no one takes a child's attempts to usurp power seriously.

But the Witch's thoughts are a freezing stickiness that cloy and cling to her, polluted and rank. It's light enough in her corner that she can find the dregs of them and chase them out, but she's exhausted after, and the corner she's squished in is only a tiny part of her whole. Every so often anger will overcome her and she'll lash out – and she gets farther than she thought she could sometimes - but in the end the Witch always slams her back into her tiny bubble of light.

She doesn't want it to, but the anger is melting away into acceptance.

When the mourning period is over, Father leaves.

Az isn't dragged out to watch his departure, because even the Witch doesn't know until it's over.

He sneaks off in the middle of the night, although Mother says they agreed to separate. The death of their daughter was too difficult a storm for their relationship to weather.

That cuts just as deeply as his unexpected departure, because she's been mourning too, and as far as Az knows, neither one of her parents extended any sympathy towards her. Maybe they did while she was backed into her corner, but surely the Witch would love nothing more than to make her watch as her body rebuffed any attempts at comfort.

Maybe they know She did it.

But that thought is silly. The Witch is hiding behind Az's face. If her parents have any inkling at all, they think Azkadellia killed her little sister.

But I wouldn't! I couldn't ever!

The thought is horrible, but it maybe explains the looks her Mother gives her, now that they are alone together. The Witch brings Az out more and more, just to let her see that there is no love in lavender eyes when they rest on the older – only, now – princess.

Ambrose is kind and understanding, even in the face of what Az knows is a complete behavior change. She likes him, even if his smile is a lie. No one likes the Princess Azkadellia. Not even Tutor. Not anymore.

Az is let out completely for classes. Not her expressions or her voice or her body, but she can see and hear and feel her skin again. For the first few days it doesn't feel completely right, and then she realizes that she's forgotten what it's like to not be crunched into a space barely big enough to contain her, to not be shrunk down as small as she can make herself.

She has the idea that somehow this benefits the Witch, something about raw versus controlled power, and for also familiarizing the ancient evil with the world She has been locked away from for so long.

But it's not important enough that the Witch wants to waste Her time on it. Why should She, when all She has to do is flay Azkadellia's mind open to get what She wants? And while Az is soaking up history and economics and trade contracts, the Witch's plots are running slickly underneath her, a polluted stream choked with trash that still, somehow, manages to flow.

When she tries to look more closely at them, or ponders fighting enough to get control of hand or voice long enough to communicate, to lock eyes with someone and cry Help me!, the darkness swells threateningly. It hasn't choked her down entirely yet, but Az thinks maybe it could.

One day she sees the date by accident, and almost cries. It's been an annual since DG's murder, and Az doesn't know the girl the Witch shows her in the mirror.

She thinks maybe she's older. Maybe twelve. Maybe a hundred.

Az knows the face in the mirror has to be hers, but she has no control over the clothes or the hair, or what she sees or hears or feels or doesn't – not unless the Witch is working a major casting, dark and perilous, and Her control wavers.

The first time it happened, Az was thrown out of her corner and into the forefront of her body, uncoordinated limbs longer than the gangly ones she half-remembers. The clothes emphasize a bosom that seems to have just appeared, hips that stretch out the fabric of her nightgown – which is sheer and flimsy in the cold night air. Az frowns down at it, feeling exposed after so long crouched and covered, waiting for attack inside her own mind.

She runs to her Mother.

Az makes it all the way into her Mother's room before the Witch roars back to power, controlling her with an effortless thought.

It doesn't make any difference, though.

Mother wasn't there.

There are seven of them, these twisted remnants of a darker time. And they, like no one living, seem able to tell the difference between Azkadellia and the Witch. They are completely in-tune with the Witch's plan, which Az still doesn't really know, though she knows it must be bad.

They'll kill her if she tries anything, while the Witch is sleeping.

Because the Witch does need to sleep. Major castings, and even apparently the constant effort of keeping Az caged, take their toll. It's never for long, and a lot of the time it's when Az herself is sleeping, but it happens occasionally.

Not occasionally enough for her to plan for it, but enough to give her a taste of freedom to hold close.

Those moments are precious, in the quiet she is left in. The Witch hardly ever tortures her anymore, something she is grateful for. No pain, no hurtful words. Just silence and the sickly darkness she's quite used to, by now.

It's been three more annuals, if she can trust the infrequent glances she gets at a calendar, and Az and the Witch barely ever come into contact with one another despite sharing space in the same body. She thinks of herself and the Witch now as "us", and it doesn't even feel like she's losing anything. After all, everyone else does.

Everyone who hasn't left.

DG is gone, because of the Witch. And that nightmare made her Father leave. It's been even longer since her Mother was with her in anything but the mere flesh. Az doesn't play in memories anymore; it hurts too much.

She doesn't know what the tipping point is – maybe an unexpected moment of freedom when her captor sleeps during the day so that she can see the suns, or the Witch letting her taste a bit of the sweet dessert that she only ever got on holidays or special occasions.

Whichever it is, Az is tired and so achingly, desperately alone.

She reaches out carefully to the darkness that has been her only constant since Finaqua. H-hello?

"My Mother and Father planned all this from the beginning, didn't they?" Az stares at the reflection, again in control of her body. The Witch says nothing from the waters of Finaqua. "They know all about us, don't they?"

For them to have planned this before Father left, they knew almost as soon as the Witch had taken her.

"They knew and they left you for dead. I, on the other hand, will never leave you."

And it's taken until now for them to do anything – now, when even Az knows it's too late. Even if she isn't the Witch, all of the O.Z. connects her name to the Witch's deeds of destruction and terror. If DG succeeds, Az will have to die. She doesn't feel twenty-six, though, she can't decide if she's older or younger. But she wants more annuals. She wants the suns, even if they'll disappear, should the Witch have her way.

Her whole family has left her, one way or another. For some reason, she wasn't enough to save. But DG was. For DG her mother will risk herself, her father will come out of whatever hole he's been hiding in for the past fourteen annuals. But Az? She was written off, from the very beginning. Acceptable loss.

She wants her family. She wants her family to want her.

But all she has is the Witch.

Az wants the suns, but she's willing to settle for the moon.

"Nothing can hurt us if we stay together. Take it. Take it," DG begs. "Take my hand."

And she can see a little girl, red ruffles lit by the brilliant green of the emerald's power.

"I'm sorry I let go, Az."

It's been so long since anyone has called her that. She wants the suns, so badly, but she's been the Witch and the Witch has been her for longer than she's been alone in her own skin, and . . . I'm scared.

"I'm here, and I'll never let go again. Take my hand!"

The Witch blasts forward, and Az reels a little – it feels like eternity since she was last shoved to the side. No!

And it must be the emerald's power, because the Witch ripples away.

DG hasn't budged an inch. "Take my hand."

The fight rages. Back and forth and back and forth, between the Witch's lust for power and the strength of the memories Az has unlocked in herself, the want for family that she's buried under the certainty of impossibility, which is finally breaking free.

But she can feel her body. And she can lift her arm.

Fingers lock, pulling with the strength of frantic hope. And Az tumbles free of the power beam and the Witch, alone in her own skin for the first time in . . . forever. Did we – am I -

The crone's face is uglier than she remembers; snaggle teeth and bloodshot eyes in a decrepit face and hunched body. "Fine. Take the little witch. I care not. For the heavens do my bidding!"

But the beam of power is blue, now, and weakened. Az gazes into the sky where the suns are vanishing behind the moon, somehow feeling Deege at her side, doing the same.

The Witch's face morphs into sudden anger. "The emerald! Give me the emerald!"

Az shakes her head, her voice – her own voice! – a whisper. "No." Her hand drops from the stone dangling by its silver chain. No. She hadn't thought she would ever be free, but now she is, and DG is here. They could always do more together, and Az wants the suns.

The Witch screams Her fury, and before their astonished eyes, grows upward. The darkness is smothering, and Az feels a bolt of fear strike her heart. Two sisters, facing down an evil Witch. They've done this before. Last time, DG ran. The words slip free, because she doesn't know how to keep them in. "Hold on!"

Her little sister's voice is determined in a way Az has never heard. "I'm not going anywhere."

A bubble of white light surrounds them, in time for twin bursts of fire to slam into their shield. The fear swells, and Az's fingers tighten. She's going to –

"I won't let go."

The Witch's yell grows louder, magic flaring on every side.

"Hold on," Az whispers. Please, please hold on.

And the violent shout suddenly changes to panicked pain – the giant creature before them sinks in on itself, sucked into the machine. Reverse pulsing, Az realizes. Someone below must have been working to pull the plug, and stop them. Good.

Deege's voice is surprised. "She melted."

And Az turns to her, unsure. The Witch is gone, but it had been her face, her body, that –

DG spreads her arms wide, smile bright, asking for a hug without saying a word.

Fin