Choices Made, and Choices to be Made [Isoko]

One year. One year had passed, since she had been defeated and thrown into an asylum. Well, generally speaking, at least. It had also been six months since she had been aware of being here, in this asylum just outside the Imperial City. Built into the side of the volcano, the asylum itself was as secure as the underground bunker the Roayls used in times of cirisis. This also meant that white crystal imported from Ba Sing Se was used for lighting, and that there were no windows, save for in those rooms which faced the sea, as the asylum was built into the far side of the dormant volcano, and accessible only through a pathway directly from the Imperial City itself. For the moment, the most famous – or infamous, depending on who was asked – patient of the asylum, one Princess Azula lay on her back on the padded floor of her cell, staring at the equally padded ceiling. Her mid-back-length dark brown locks spread about her on the white floor, her still-choppy and uneven bangs falling to either side of her too-pale, too thin face. Her once-golden eyes had dulled to coppery amber, now no-longer alight with calculating shrewdness, but sometimes gleaming with madness. For the moment, however, she didn’t appear anything like the psychotic tyrant she had been, just one year ago now, at her failed coronation.

No, she simply looked like a too-pale, too-thin girl who had lost everything she had once held dear. And, in essence, she supposed, that was what she was. She was not as mad as she had once been, this past year, but she knew, too that she had a long way to go. After all, fifteen years of abuse, neglect, abandonment, being hated, and having thousands of kilos of metaphorical pressure placed upon her shoulders to be perfect every moment of ever hour of every day weren’t cured in just a year. While she knew that her hallucinations may never go away, she also knew that she needed to find out what she wanted for herself… As for that moment, however, one Princess Azula, former Crown Princess and would-be Fire Lord of the Fire Nation had no idea what she wanted… and wondered if it even mattered at all anymore. And though there was a part of herself that hated what she had become, what she had been reduced to… There was also a greater part that knew this was inevitable, when the pain she had always been in was something she could no-longer hide from anyone. This was, she supposed, her[/i[ Crossroads of Destiny – if she could find the will to make any choice at all, of course.