It had been a year since the Hundred Year War ended, but more importantly, it had been a year since Azula was defeated by her brother, the reigning Firelord. He had broken her and turned away from her as if she was unimportant, leaving the guards who had once been hers to command to pick her up. Those disloyal men were the ones who dragged her to this prison they dared call a centre of healing.

In short, it had been a whole year since Azula's whole world was ripped from her.

The significance of this date kept running through her mind as she sat in front of Dr Chin's desk, arms belted down around her in a straightjacket. Behind the ominously large desk, Azula's head doctor stared her down just as she stared back. These moments annoyed Azula to no end. Chin was drawing out the uncomfortable silence in a show of "who's-in-charge", but what he didn't realise, thought Azula, was that royalty cannot bow down to their peasants any more than a mountain can bow to the wind. So Azula pinned down his tiny beady eyes until her own eyes hurt. Finally, the doctor spoke.

"Azula."

"Chin," she sneered, that one syllable full of venom.

"Doctor Chin," he corrected, his tone changed abruptly from cajoling to mirror her hateful tone instead.

Azula narrowed her eyes at Chin, but she'd known him long enough to hold her tongue at moments like this, lest he decide to tighten her bindings.

"One of my staff nurses tells me you've been firebending."

"My tea was cold…doctor." Azula bites out the last word, tempering her defiance with the acknowledgement of his title. Chin merely grins.

"The way I heard it, you tried to singe his hands."

"Then maybe he should keep his hands to himself."

"I'm disappointed Azula," Chin said as he stepped from behind his desk. "You know the punishment for unauthorized firebending is the icebox."

"I'm not afraid of a little cold."

Now Chin was right in front of Azula, openly studying her.

"No, maybe not."

Chin jerks his head at the nurses behind Azula. They step forward and begin releasing her arms from the jacket. But before she can breathe in relief, Azula is forced out of her chair and pushed to her knees. She struggles against the burly nurses, but they manage to chain her hands behind her back. Being put into this defeated position triggers a panic in Azula, and she watches as Dr Chin merely smirked. His eyes flicker with a dangerous glint Azula hadn't seen before.

"See, Azula. You should know better than to constantly defy me." He brings his face right up to hers and his pungent breath hits her like a house of bricks. "You should know better than to go against someone who knows your weaknesses. And I know you hate being faced with defeat."

The doctor turns towards the nurses, ordering them to hold her down as he placed a strange apparatus on her head and shoved a rubbery mouth guard between her teeth.

"Let me go," Azula tries to shout as she fights against the chains, but her words are mumbled.

"Let me go!"

"Let go of her," the doctor tells the nurses.

"Charging up to to 5 volts. Applying 10 seconds pulsed at 5 volts per second."

Azula couldn't even scream in earnest as pain shot through her like lightning.

The memory of her time in the mental institution had come back to Azula as she waited to hear Sokka's breath slow as a sign of deep sleep. As soon as she heard the soft snores, she shook off the memory and got to work. After she was done, instead of leaving him then, Azula grabbed his travelling pack and sat down in front of him, waiting for him to rouse.

When Sokka awoke, the first thing he saw was the incense that he had lit to keep away animals in the night. Then he saw a boot crushing the incense and looked up.

"You said no resistance," Sokka accused Azula as he pulled against the rope tied around his wrists and ankles in front of him.

She merely shrugged and said, "It seems like the only one resisting anything here is you."

Sokka then regrets not pushing her harder to tell him where she was headed to the night before. No good deed goes unpunished, he thought bitterly as he recalled last night when he was trying to employ as much gentleness as caution in dealing with Azula. He didn't want to hurt her more than he already had but he also hadn't wanted a situation like what was currently unfolding.

Perhaps he should have exercised more caution.

Azula swung his travelling pack onto her back, about to leave.

"Thanks for the supplies," she mocks. "Didn't have enough time to get my own. Too busy trying to get rid of you yesterday."

Sokka twisted his body trying to see if he could get to his knife on the side of his belt.

"How stupid do you think I am, Water Tribe?"

Azula was twirling his knife in her hand and her voice was deliberately coloured with boredom. But the tension in her body betrayed her. As Sokka noticed Azula favouring her uninjured foot, he was surprised to recognise the tension stemmed from guilt that her eyes couldn't hide. Azula the ruthless conqueror feeling guilt was a difficult notion for Sokka to imagine, but the wheels in his mind were already turning. He quickly came up with a plan to use this knowledge to his advantage.

Sokka stopped struggling and kept his face blank so as not to betray any emotion. He tried a different tactic.

"Why would you tie someone up," he began, keeping his voice barely louder than a whisper, "when you hate it yourself?"

Azula's confident façade cracks a little, but she holds it up long enough to turn away. As she walked off, Azula thought again of weaknesses and not going against someone who knew them.

Azula looked around the recreation room at the other patients also shuffling their feet along. She tried to focus her concentration on a single target but her mind wouldn't let her.

"Stop eating the medicine they feed you," Azula heard someone say directly into her ear.

Azula was so doped up she couldn't even summon the concentration to swat at the voice.

"Stop eating it. You'll feel better, I promise."

Later, Azula sat alone in her ward and stared at the meal placed in front of her. Next to it was the cup of coloured pills that she had been consistently tipping back without a thought. Clarity was now returning to her senses and the fog in her mind was disappearing. She hadn't a notion who the owner of the voice was, but his advice kept ringing in her ears and she was compelled to obey it.

Uncovering a corner of her bed sheet, Azula dug into the mattress until there was a hole big enough to hide the pills. Then she waited for the nurse to come back for her tray. Out of the corner of her eye, Azula noticed the nurse inspecting her medicine cup and was careful to keep up the illusion of drowsiness until the nurse had gone. When the last of the retreating footsteps in the corridor had faded, Azula went back to the corner of her bed to examine the pills, unable to believe what how stupid she had been.

A few days passed and Azula kept up the ritual of hiding her mealtime medicine while feigning catatonia. In truth, it wasn't hard to mimic the zombie-like shuffling movements of the other patients around her. Soon, she found herself back at the rec room laying her head lifelessly on a pai sho table. She watched through hooded eyes as another patient shuffled his feet slowly over to her table and laid his head similarly on the table. His eyes were sharp and aware as he waited for the nurses to be out of earshot before he spoke.

"Hello, Azula."

It was the voice that had pierced through the drug-induced fog that once clouded her mind.

"I'm Lee."

She waited until another nurse walked past them before acknowledging his self-introduction. Still keeping her eyes to the patterns on the pai sho table, Azula only had one question for Lee.

"How did you know?"

Instead of answering her question about the pills, Lee launched into an outline of what sounded like an operation.

"Work with me, and I'll tell you. Do you see that big nurse there? When she walks past us, I will retch out my breakfast. As she bends over to clean up the mess, I need you to take out a hairpin from her bun while I distract her long enough for you. Make sure the other nurses don't see what you're doing."

Before Azula could disagree with the plan, there was vomit on the floor. Lee put on an act of moaning in pain, falling over on his side and crawling under the table. Sure enough, the nurse bent over next to the table, exposing her hair bun directly to Azula. Without hesitation, Azula nicked two hairpins and tucked them up her sleeve.

Once the floor was clean, the nurse dragged Lee out from under the table like a rag doll and placed his head back on the table next to Azula in the position he was before he vomited. Lee keeps his head down in the way the nurse left him, so his words are a little muffled. But Azula hears him well enough.

"Did you get it?"

"I got two," Azula whispers back, noticing the muscles in his cheek twitch in what might have been a grin.

"I owe you one."

"No," Azula says as Lee slowly rises his head up so that only his eyes are seen. She looks at him dead straight in the eye.

"This is a debt repaid."

As soon as Azula was a distance away, Sokka quickly kicked out the small knife secretly embedded in the sole of his boot and freed himself. Searching his own body, Sokka found that Azula had taken not just the knife on his belt but the one hidden in his shirt.

Sokka frees himself from the rope and runs after Azula. The next few moments pass like a blur. He tackles her but cushions her fall with his body. He holds her palms down to the ground, his head between her arms.

"You can't just run away from me like that. A deal was a deal, Azula."

She twists his hands so that now she was the one pinning him down.

"What's to stop me from burning you to ashes right here on the ground?"

Sokka bares his teeth in annoyance before turning her over so her back was to the ground. This time he pushed the back of her hands to the ground and held his body over her. Even as he did this, he was careful about her injured hands and foot. But damn if he wasn't both angry at her foolish arrogance and at himself for noticing how well their bodies fit against each other.

"I cleaned the wounds on your wrist and bandaged them. I wrapped your twisted ankle myself. I fed you my meat! All I asked was for you to let me take you to wherever you need to go. You owe me."

"You want to take me back to where I am a prisoner in my own nation."

"I saved you from the man who tried to stab you back in Yu Dao. You owe me."

The words are out before Sokka realises it, and Azula's expression changes to an unreadable emotion.

"Get off me. Your bag is digging into my back." Then she sighs before saying, "I won't run."

Sokka lets go of her and sits up. They sit silently next to each other for a long time while the morning air swirled around the trees, a gentle breeze so opposite to the tension between them. Both their heads were filled with the implications of each other's words. Azula's life in the Fire Nation had been anything but pleasant. Sokka had been following her longer than she thought. Surprisingly, it is Azula who breaks the silence first.

"I will allow you the privilege of accompanying me. I will not burn you."

She looks up at him, her expression hardening.

"The debt is repayed," Azula continues before spitting out the last few words.

"I owe you nothing."

This time, Sokka decides to weaken the acid in her tone with softness on his part.

"Then get up," he says gently as he holds out a hand in an offer to pull her up. "I'll find you a staff that you can lean on so you don't overexert your ankle."

This time, it is Azula who becomes cautious. She becomes wary of the kindness from a stranger with hauntingly blue eyes. She eyes the open hand reaching out to her suspiciously.

But eventually, she lays her hand in his and lets him help her.