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The new Fire Lord eventually stops coming to see him. Good riddance, he thinks. Ozai doesn’t want to see Zuko. Not when he would see the flame in him that was ripped from his own body. He’s simmering and no one talks to him anymore, not that he’s pathetic enough to try.
He knows Zuko is the reason for that and it makes him hate him even more. If the guards just talked to him, he could rile them up, get them to end this miserable existence.
Time loses all meaning much quicker than expected. It’s dark, the cell is too small to stand fully, he’s out of it for one hour a day, taunted by Agni. He’s known as the former warlord who got what he deserved.
It starts off as a long, imposing shadow. Always just outside his cell where he can feel the judgement emanating from it. Ozai tries not to look at it but that only seems to make it more prominent.
…
Ozai kneels before his father. He can feel the Fire Lord’s flame flare in anger at his disrespect.
“Rise and fight, Prince Ozai.”
His eyebrows furrow. It’s not the audience room but the Agni Kai arena when he forces himself to look up. He’s a grown man, he’s not afraid. He refuses to be afraid.
The torches appear blinding despite their small stature. There’s an audience, murmuring but mostly silent observers. The bricks under him make his knees ache and he almost goes to bow his head again, reflexive with the piercing golden stare of his imperial father. He was inferior, he was the Fire Lord’s loyal servant, and he was weak. Tears were streaming down his face. (The Fire Lord doesn’t cry.)
“You will learn respect and suffering will be your teacher.” Azulon’s hand reaches out, oddly gentle when it glides on his skin. And then it starts burning.
Ozai screams, shooting up off the floor of his familiar cell, gasping. His hair adheres to sweaty skin and he covers his face with his hands, touching where he can feel the phantom sensation. There’s nothing there. Relief floods him.
Quickly, he pulls his hands away, watching as they tremble. He can’t help the way his eyes keep catching onto his right one. He touches at his face again. Still smooth. Ozai breathes shakily and closes his eyes, leaning forward to duck between his knees while burying his hands in his knotted hair.
The floor of his cell is eerily similar to that of the arena.
Ozai doesn’t eat when the guard brings in his next meal. This one doesn’t even bother to look him the eye. It allowed Ozai to pretend he had some semblance of dignity left. Others could be more brazen but were soon replaced if the Fire Lord caught wind of any impropriety.
Who knows how long he’s been in here and who cares.
At some point, he falls asleep again.
…
It’s Zuko standing above him. His brand is stark in the sunlight and the expression he wears is indifference. It’s odd to visualize his father alongside Zuko, gazing down at him with a matching stare. Why they have become interchangeable in his mind, he does not know.
Everything’s so twisted up now.
He can hear the cheering clear as day, just as he had when it was him in Zuko’s position. When he gave Zuko the mark of his dishonor.
He’s falling.
He’s ice cold, his flame is gone. The Avatar is merciless. This is the cruelest punishment one can bestow upon on a bender. He is cut off from Agni forever. He’s in a padded white room, coddled in pristine restraints that force him into a self-hug. His ebony hair is chopped messily where it hangs in front of his eyes.
Azulon looms next to him. Peering down from his upturned nose, a feature Ozai inherited. “I’m proud of you, Ozai.”
“You fear me.” His mouth says without permission. It’s not his own words. Deep down, Ozai knows it’s the other way around.
“No. I love you, Ozai.”
Ozai begins to thrash. His skin burns without flame and it feels like nothing. Tears are bubbling over his cheeks. “You’d never say that! You blamed me, you’ve always blamed me!”
He lunges towards the mirage and his eyes shoot open.
He’s slumped on his side, curled up like an infant. The cell floor grates his skin but he finds no motivation to move. His fingernails are bitten raw and his eyes will forever remain bloodshot from the inability to truly rest. Ozai stares blankly at the bars of his home until it all blurs together. There’s a sort of haziness to surviving in solitary, except his stay is permanent. And he’s long past haziness, sinking into tumultuous waves of catatonia.
Someone comes in and out with a meal. He doesn’t even flinch.
There’s something broken inside him.
His father looms over him. Oppressive and menacing, daunting with a purposeful silence that speaks for him. Azulon never needed words to get a message across.
He can feel the disappointment in the air, smell the distaste pouring off the apparition. That icy, piercing stare is penetrating him to the absentee inner flame. Where he’s been made effectively inadequate. As his father always knew he was.
It’s crumbling around him. The prison, the person, the place.
He’s rubbing at the gritty floor with stained fingertips. They ache from his mindless biting and give a sharp pang of his reality.
Azulon still stands above him, “You should count yourself lucky I spared your life.”
…
“Ozai.”
He turns his head away from the corner and out towards his cell. It’s the Fire Lord. He’s gotten a lot older.
“They tell me you haven’t been eating.”
Ursa stands in place of Zuko, he sounds enough like her. Ozai can remember her hiss: “You’re just a small, small man trying with all your might to be big.”
“Why not?”
It’s the passivity with which he says it that has him drifting, Ozai tells himself. Certainly not that he’s been spacing out like this more often than not. Certainly not that his father’s glare is freezing him in place.
“Ozai.” Zuko’s voice is louder, closer. His red and gold robes are a mass of color in front of him.
Azulon is leaning over him, a suffocating sensation. A fierce, pointed smile that tells of painful repercussions should Ozai disobey. He’s rocking, the walls around him the dark metal of a Fire Naval ship.
He’s writhing on a cot, all the cloth around him stifling. There’s a sticky bandage on his face and he wants to claw at it until it bleeds. The itchiness is unbearable. He feels unreal and confused. Azulon’s smile is twisting into something reminiscent of Iroh’s when he had first held Lu Ten.
There’s a calloused hand caressing the skin of his cheek beneath the bandage. Azulon has never shown such weakness, “It’s okay, Ozai. You’re safe now.”
What does that mean? Azulon’s face is twisting to that of- Zuko’s. His gaze is scrutinizing and shrewd. The downturn of his lips is so similar to the disapproval of his father, Ozai’s breath shudders.
Ozai disappears back into his mind. It’s safer there.
…
“But you… your punishment has scarcely begun!” It’s the same heat from the same wall of flames it always is.
Azulon didn’t care for his ascetic cell, nor for his inability to separate himself from the floor. Ozai was scum beneath his boot, the cause of his wife’s death, and the child he never wanted.
Fire comes from the breath and Ozai’s hasn’t been steady since his flame was stolen. He stutters through a deep, tremulous intake.
His father is prostrate, “Ozai, silence yourself.”
“You did this to me.” Ozai pushes his face into the brick beneath him, his beard and hair catching on the inconsistencies. His voice muffles into the grime, he rasps his loathing, “It’s all your fault.”
“No. You’re weak, Ozai. I did this to teach you respect.”
Wetness was spreading against his skin, burning like lava as it leaked from his eyes. He failed, his father’s right. He is weak.
“You did this for yourself,” Ozai chokes. He denies, denies, denies. It’s Azulon’s fault. It’s all Azulon’s fault. “Say what it is you want from me.”
“You’ve failed me, Ozai. There’s a reason you were born second.”
“Azulon always lies. Azulon always lies.” It’s not his voice that says it but he can’t pinpoint who.
Ozai clutches the sole thin cover he’d been allowed and pushes himself more forcefully into his designated corner. He’s a pathetic coward, trying to hide from his own mind. Because his father isn’t truly there. He did a vicious, treacherous thing.
His father glares, “You were lucky to be born.”
His austere tone leaves nothing to the imagination. Azulon has always been straightforward with his words and he didn’t deign to entertain Ozai’s manipulation of his own. Not even when Ozai spoke the truth.
His knuckles whiten on his blanket. “I should have killed you myself.”
“Like you weren’t the cause. A power hungry scoundrel such as yourself should know true power triumphs. You think you could have defeated me?” His laugh is low and severe, a feral sound of evident disbelief.
“You are an old fool, just as jealous as my traitorous brother.”
“Insolent child, this pathetic display of yours reflects poorly on you alone,” Azulon leers.
Ozai can feel the frigid gaze as if it were a touch. He can’t stop his chest stumbling through breaths. Can’t stop the burning wetness etching his humiliation for all to see. His father is the lone witness.
“Disgraceful.”
Ozai coughs on his next shaky inhale, blinking and clearing the gunk in his vision. The cell is dark and brooding, empty. He doesn’t know if he’s thankful for that or not. He’s a husk of who he once was and he’s reminded every time the Fire Lord shows his face.
The insignificant cushion under him is wet from his dream. His imagination runs wild with nothing to fuel it and it always ends up twisting real, recent memories into the old. The tackiness on his eyelashes from his shame is an embarrassment but no one can judge him here.
Except his father. Who is ever-present even when he awakens.
“I should have killed you the day you were born.”
…
“Deplorable. You call yourself a king? Who rises from the ashes? You’re nothing but a spare. You have no use to me.”
Azulon’s hand on his shoulder is bruising and steaming. Ozai didn’t wince under the pain. His father would only see it as further proof.
“You have no business calling that boy of yours weak when you are the same.”
“Liar. I’m more powerful than you ever were.”
“You are a boy playing at war.” Azulon’s face morphs into Iroh’s. Ozai almost flinches away at the scar marring his features. “You don’t know suffering.”
He’s yanked down by the Avatar’s grip on his beard. He tries to strike but, with his tattoos glowing, he sees it coming. Then Ozai is the one running.
Azulon’s voice is echoing around him as he gets encased in earth just like last time: “You will fight for your honor.”
His heart is pounding, he’s hyperventilating. He doesn’t want to go through this again. One last ditch effort, he breathes flame but the Avatar blows it away with little effort.
He recalls now the intense feeling of horror when the Avatar initially placed his hands on him. Not understanding what he could possibly do without an element. Remembers something in him cracking open before he came to without his fire.
“ I am disgusted by your showcase of shame and weakness. You have failed me enough times, Ozai.”
The clang of the door snaps him out of the maudlin dream. It’s getting easier to wake up and harder to go to sleep. Food is waiting for him but crawling over there is daunting. It smells bland and lacking and why should he put in the effort for something he won’t even like.
“Eat, Ozai.” Azulon’s not concerned. He never is. “You will obey me or this defiant breath will be your last.”
Ironic he hears the same words he said to Zuko lashed back at him. In that same expectant tone, where defiance is unthinkable and the Fire Lord is always right. He sometimes wonders if he’d have ever wanted to make those decisions had he known the repercussions of failure.
He used to weigh out the possibility of failure when his father was on the throne. If odds were against him, he’d bring it up in more subtle suggestions. If they were with him, he nipped it in the bud. He’d miscalculated Ursa and Zuko the day he asked for Iroh’s birthright. He should’ve predicted the favoritism, as blatant as it was.
He tucks his blanket up underneath his nose, narrowed eyes glazed and darting. His hair itches where it brushes his shoulders and back.
Azulon’s voice rings loud in the quiet and its imminent threat, “One hair out of place...
“I won’t be so merciful.”
…
Rarely is he lucid anymore. When he is, it’s evident decades have passed. Then, he always thinks it’s a good thing he’s locked in here because he doesn’t want to know the world outside.
During the lucidity, Ozai gathers the strength to sit up and eat all of his scheduled meals. The hunger pangs never go away though. There’s no ridding of the empty pit where his bending was.
He’ll pick at his silver hair and mourn the rich color it used be. His frailty amazes him as much as it disgusts him, leaving Ozai to bite at his nails some more or avidly avoid a certain designated spot that even empty holds the weight of loathing. His father’s presence is more poisonous than the absence of his flame.
He likes to imagine lightning dancing between his fingertips. Pale, cold blue that flickered along his skin, smelling of ozone and sparking himself as much as it would maim whoever he directed it towards. Picture burning flames bursting forth from his maw. All his skill and effort is a waste now. Azulon would tell him it had always been a waste. As long as Iroh was around, Ozai was a waste too.
All it ever does is send him back to that place, that time. It always starts with Zuko returning the lightning like fluid and ends with the Avatar standing over his worn, defeated body. Hardly can Ozai recall being bound by rope—an insult to his lack of ability, he swears—brought before his bastard son in Fire Lord regalia.
The awareness never ends up lasting for long.
“You belong to me, Ozai. I will do with you as I wish.”
He’s standing over Zuko but it’s Azulon’s voice reverberating in his head. The audience is utterly silent and dismissive, reeking of pomposity. Zuko is kneeling with tears streaming down his face and Ozai is matching him tear for tear.
Where’s the excitement from the original memory? Where’s the righteousness? The relief to have this excuse to finally be rid of this failure?
It’s all missing.
Azulon is behind him. Towering over him. One of his hands is searing Ozai’s chin where he cups it, sharp fingers biting remorseless into his jaw, keeping his eyes locked with his firstborn’s.
Zuko before him is screaming, hoarse. He’s going limp under his heated palm, Ozai can feel the tackiness of a burn already forming.
Azulon’s other hand doesn’t have to direct him to brand Zuko. His father keeps that one on his shoulder, where he can dig his claws in and tell Ozai without speaking that he needs to be stronger. Tell him that his power is forever limited while under the perpetual scrutiny of the Fire Lord.
Azulon’s breath whispers against the shell of his ear, nothing more than a statement. They’re peering down at Zuko together but his tone retains its passivity. “You were nothing but a mere weapon. A monster for my own gain.”
Zuko’s burning and Ozai’s burning and he wonders if Sozin is behind Azulon, if they’re both burning. It doesn’t matter. It’s never mattered.
“That is all you will ever be.”