con·va·lesce / to recover health and strength after illness; make progress toward recovery of health / verb

Summary: Azula fights (herself / her brother / her demons) to maintain her sanity.
Rating: M for Mature; dark themes, character death, mentions of blood, and violence.
Notes: This started off as a one-shot but I wanted to explore what would happen if Azula and Zuko grew up with the influence of Iroh instead of Ozai, so it will be continued after this. Feedback would be very much appreciated! Especially critiques on the writing style I used specifically for this series.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything affiliated with Avatar: the Last Airbender or any of the characters portrayed here.

de·te·ri·o·rate / to make or become worse or inferior in character, quality, value, etc; to disintegrate or wear away / verb

Azula watches. Azula waits. And then, Azula strikes.

She slides her bare feet against the expensive hand woven rugs, the soles of her feet charged with electricity, with her own tiny form of lightning. She summons all the strength her five years have given her; she stares down at Ursa with every memory of her mother's favoritism brimming at the slightly unscrewed cap of her mind. She remembers the first time her mother discovered just how deeply twisted Azula was on the inside. Even though her eyes are closed, Azula can see her mother's eyes lingering over her with something that doesn't quite appear to be worry; maybe it's just plain (terror / discomfort / loathing). She's always had a strange look in her eyes when Azula would bring her turtleduck feathers to convince her that she had controlled the pond or when she had carved a wooden knife with her dagger instead of the ornate goblet her brother had fashioned her for her birthday—

It wouldn't be any good for Mother to drink from it if her throat is slit, Zu-Zu.

—or when Azula had cut her arm deeply and just so casually lapped the blood gushing from her wound into her mouth. Azula knew her time to make up for it was now and she calls upon every (scrape / bruise / tear) thing that has ever hurt her and draws (a smile / the blade / her revenge) across her mother's neck. She smiles too, at the (wide / bloody / toothless) smile she makes below her mother's mouth – with her dagger.

Finally, her conscience sighs, mother is smiling at me—she loves me.

It takes her no time at all to find her father's room. She never remembered her parents sharing (a bedroom / a kiss / a life) together; Ozai had never encouraged her to share her talents either. It's why she's always seemed so clumsy with the dagger when she was skilled with everything else. It was why she allowed him to think it was nothing more than a toy to her. It's why he doesn't hesitate to lift her up into his bed when she crawls into his room. She laughs as he feels the blood in her palms and scolds her for cutting herself. She laughs at him because she knows that as he frantically looks at her hands that he'll never find the origin of the blood. She laughs as she raises up, inflicting her fury, curving her blade through the air, and it separates the skin from bone and the muscles and tendons flexing underneath.

She laughs as it stops his heart in his chest.

Her father was a fool for wasting a valuable resource, her conscience purrs to the sight of blood at his back; he wasn't using his heart for anything anyway.

Azula grounds her teeth together. Of course Zuko is awake, sitting upright in his bed and reading by candlelight, his reading set aside to turn his eyes to as much of her countenance as he can make out in the meager lighting. Zuko is smarter than their father. The sight of blood on the tiny, trembling palms elicits no sympathy from the Fire Prince. Where her mother feared and her father knew not, the blueprints of the horrors his baby sister was capable of hung in the back of Zuko's mind. The royal siblings stare at each other in a deadlock. Azula does not advance onto Zuko because he expects her and Zuko does not flee from Azula because she expects him.

"Zu-Zu," her voice slips from her mouth and wisps in the distance between them, barely reaching him as his golden eyes watch her intently, like smoke wrapping around him in a cloud.

"'Zula," his voice is firm but quivers from his mouth; Azula can feel the aftershock of the nickname under her feet, threatening to crumble the ground from underneath her.

Zuko is the only member of her family who knows what she is capable of and finds himself (begrudgingly / resentfully / insufferably) loving her despite it. He is the only member of her family alive and the only one who can shake her back to her foundations. He reminds her with a soft, golden gaze, that she is only (his baby sister / the Fire Princess / human) acting like she has to be a monster, alone; she doesn't have to be either of those things.

Her dagger takes her hair as its first casualty and Zuko's wrist as its second.

Azula lets out a gasp as her brother's blood pours down the front of her and he rolls over her, pinning her hands to the ground. Her brain commands her body numbly; she shrieks and flails and fights him with every tiny bone in her body, with every fiber of her being, with every spark of inner fire than she can summon. But she can't free herself or her dagger from her brother's grip. He doesn't struggle, he doesn't reach to taper off the blood dripping down his hands and across her forearms, and he doesn't do anything but hold her down (and hold her back).

"I love you, 'Zula," he whispers into her neck and her eyes bleed ferociously from the wound his words commit. Her brain dares not register this as crying (crying is weak and Azula is not weak) but as carnage, as an injury to her psyche. He continues his assault. "Father loves you, 'Zula. Mother loves you, 'Zula. I love you, 'Zula." His words are as detrimental to her mind as her dagger would be to her own flesh. Part of Azula wishes Zuko had just stabbed her in the chest instead. But he holds her captive between the earth and his body, gently, safely, non-threateningly, comfortingly.

"Stop fighting," his command comes gently and Azula feels her humanity sliding back over her. She can feel her body still pulsing against him, her hands struggling and her legs kicking out at him, licking fire against his bed clothes (and Zuko does nothing; but Ozai still finds him weaker than Azula). Her brain pushes her to fight and she does. She curls her fingers into claws and lashes out to take prisoners of his skin, to draw his blood to the forefront of his body, to make him stop trying to salvage her.

End it, her conscience pushes her.

She does.

Her dagger falls to the floor and Azula falls (into his arms) to the unbearable, irrevocable feeling that maybe her brother does love her.