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Owned by Fire	By : Andartha Category: Avatar - The Last Airbender > Het - Male/Female Views: 16516 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: Avatar: The last Airbender and all the characters therein are the intellectual property of Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko and I, like all the other fans, only get to play with them every once in a while. I make NO profit from "Own

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Disclaimer: Avatar: The last Airbender and all the characters therein are the intellectual property of Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko and I, like all the other fans, only get to play with them every once in a while.
Summary: Ozai has broken her, but she remains his, even after he has set off to conquer the world.
Author’s note:
Pairing Ozai/OC.
Het.
Starts about 3 years before A:TLA. Contains flashbacks.
Sequel to “Owned by Fire”, but can also be read as a stand-alone vignette.
Warnings: Some swearing, mention of slavery; non-con, NC-17
IMPORTANT: NOT death-fic, NO character death. Everybody gets out alive and appearances can be deceiving ^_~

These days, she is little more than a living doll.
She moves when ordered, speaks when asked, dances and smiles when commanded.
The colours of her world seem oddly faded. The chatter of the servants, once her key to what she treasured most, news from outside, from home, has become a faint hum somewhere in the background. When he asks her to touch him, her fingers cannot tell whether his skin is as warm as she remembers or as cold as she thinks it should be.
She deems the loss of her spirit a small price for keeping her integrity and her soul.
Even though she is still his slave, in a way her rebellion was successful. The memory of the agony as he whipped and burned her in punishment has become a wall between them that neither of them can breach anymore.
It’s not as if he hasn’t tried. Playing with a broken toy turned out to be quite unsatisfactory and so he tries to mend things. First with gentleness and gifts, but for all the pretty and polite “thank you’s”, her response remains vapid and empty. Irritated, he tries cruelty next, but her cries for mercy ring as hollow as did her thanks.
In the end, he convinces himself that a mindless, obedient slave is a much more fitting plaything for the ruler of the Fire Nation than a lively, but not so obedient one.
Weeks pass, turning into months and then into years. Her minds starts to slip here and there. She looses time, sometimes no longer able to remember how she got from here to there or what happened between breakfast and lunch. One moment, she sees the corpses of friends and family littering the ruins of the palace, only to find them gone and the palace as intact as ever in the next. As she sleeps on her pallet, chained to the foot of his bed, nightmares haunt her, but she can neither move nor scream.
She is not the only one unravelling and as she watches, the remnants of what made him human disappear.
Each day, he becomes faster to anger and slower to appease. He used to regard failures as an opportunity to weed out errors and flaws; now, failures are reduced to an opportunity to mete out the harshest punishment possible.
In the beginning, he still worried about the causalities of war, asserting that the grandeur of the Fire Nation would be meaningless if there weren’t any people around to appreciate it. If it didn’t hinder the progress of his conquest, he would pick tactics that spared the lives of his soldiers and of civilians. He doesn’t anymore. By now, a dead civilian is just a fallen enemy and a fallen soldier a weakling who didn’t deserve better.
He still finds satisfaction in the victories of his army, but other than that, there are fewer things each day that will move his heart. He takes immense pleasure in planning and executing his next move, but increasingly less in anything else. Fucking her becomes no more than taking care of a bodily need and he pays more attention to the furniture than to her.
The day she first met him, she could feel the warmth of his fire, even though it was surrounded by a wall of ice.
The day he maimed his son, the fire went out, leaving but glowing embers.
A chilling, creeping frost is claiming him, and she watches the last sparks wink out one by one.
When he leaves to conquer the world, he doesn’t even tell her good-bye.
What wakes her from her stupor is not the prattling of an old servant, telling her that she’s free. It is Ozai’s prolonged absence. Regardless of all else, for the last seven years, his has been the tune she has danced to. Now there is only a deafening silence.
She hardly notices when they take off her chains. The only thing she knows is that she has to find him, because she does not know what to do with herself without him. Like a ghost, she drifts from one room to the next. First within his quarters, and, when no one hinders her from doing so, in the rest of the palace.
The thing that startles her into full awareness is running across people from the Southern Water Tribe, from home, wandering freely around the palace, at ease, joking with each other. She hides behind the nearest pillar from them, her heart pounding. At first, she is not sure whether this is just another one of her hallucinations, but when it happens more than once and she also sees people from the Earth Kingdom, she knows things have changed.
By her dress, she is just another minor Fire Nation Noblewoman and as long as no one notices her blue eyes, which she keeps carefully lowered, no one pays attention to her. So once she begins to eavesdrop on those around her, it does not take her long to gather the full story. Ozai has been defeated by the Avatar, his firebending taken away and he himself thrown into jail.
If anything, an obedient slave has good self-control, so she makes it back to his quarters before she breaks down. She curls up on her pallet and dissolves into a fit of helpless giggles, which change into heartbroken sobs, which segue right into mad laughter. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat.
It takes her until next morning to get her act together and to seriously think about the situation. A servant comes in and brings her breakfast, like they have kept doing all the time. For a change, she does not just stare right through the man, but addresses him once he has set the food down on a table.
“Kuro?”
“Kyaaahhhh!!!!” He jumps almost hip-high and then tumbles down in an untidy heap, he is that startled. As he picks himself up from the ground, she bows deeply to him and apologizes.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.” She rights herself and, not looking at him, plucks at the sleeve of her robe, one of the more sumptuous ones Ozai clothed her in.
He brushes himself off, still panting a bit. “Uhm…it’s alright Mylady. It’s just that….uhm….”
She tentatively looks up at him and gives him a tremulous smile. “Yes, I know. But the world is changing…and that change is affecting me to…..and you as well, I believe. I guess….I guess it’s sink or swim for either of us?”
“Uhm, yes Milady.”
“I remember old Zanto coming in and explaining something about all the slaves being freed. I’m afraid I was in no state to pay him much attention at that time, and I would be grateful if you could repeat it to me…..please.”
Kuro, who has seen her in various stages of undress as well as tied up, tied down and marked by Ozai’s little games, but who has never actually talked with her, blushes, flustered and unsure how to handle their changed positions. People who couldn’t adapt quickly tended not to last long in the old Firelord’s service though, and Kuro’s been on the staff for the Firelord’s private quarters for years. He gives her a curt bow, Fire Nation style, and then starts rattling off information.
It turns out that indeed all the slaves and all prisoners of war have been freed. However, taking care of them and sending them home again, turns out to be an organizational nightmare. Some of them have been born in captivity. Some of them no longer have homes to return to. Some owners refuse to give up their property and try to hide their slaves. A few have been treated well by the ones that owned them, and have made their new home within the Fire Nation. Others, after long years existing as property, abused and degraded, simply have trouble adjusting to being free again. She is painfully aware that she belongs in this latter category. The way she keeps avoiding her people like the plague, even though she has dreamed of going home all these years, bears ugly testimony to that.
Lists with names and locations of the former slaves are being compiled and continuously updated as information about the enslaved people’s whereabouts trickle in. Teams, composed of Fire Nation officials working together with guests from the other nations, are searching them out and, if necessary, extricating them from their owners. Things mostly go smoothly that way, with the freed slaves trusting the people from the Earth Kingdom or the Water Tribe more than they would anybody from the Fire Nation, and the Fire Nation Officials adding the bureaucratic oomph to the process. There’s also a kind of refugee camp in the capital, where former slaves that for some reason or other aren’t ready to go home can live and re-orient themselves.
All in all, it’s a tremendous amount of work, and for the time being, those that are at no risk of further abuse have been classified as low priority and have been left where they are, unless they expressed wishes otherwise. She belongs in that category and so far, no one had come to see her.
She dreads the day when someone will.
How will she explain to her tribe, to her family, to her brother what she has become?
How can she live with them, knowing she will see pity and regrets in their eyes?
She rages at Ozai, for barring her from returning home, even though he shouldn’t have power over her anymore. But even imprisoned, he rules her life yet.
Slowly, she settles into a new routine. In the mornings, she will bathe and dress herself. In the past, she had been cleaning herself with oiled pieces of cloth as Ozai hadn’t allowed her anywhere near a larger quantity of water. It had especially irked her, because there was a bath adjoining the Firelord’s sleeping chamber, which she KNEW contained a small pool for bathing, fed by a warm underground spring. Now, she can go there too, right past the intricately decorated metal door that barred her access until now. Having enough water to actually immerse herself fully makes her purr with satisfaction. Afterwards, Kuro will bring her breakfast and then she will spend the day roaming the palace, trying to figure out what to do with her life, now that everything has changed.
The fact that her lover and tormentor is imprisoned is both a curse and a blessing.
It is exhilarating to be free again, to just walk about without anybody stopping her. Nobody is giving her orders or punishing her and people, who just see another Fire Nation Noble when they look at her, are giving her respectful nods when she passes them in the hallway….But she is strangely restless, ill at ease.
When she dresses herself, she will also take a peek at the clothes he left behind. Goosebumps run up her arms as she touches the robe he wore the night he first claimed her. She hides her face in the shirt he wore when he first smiled at her, and cries. The scarf he often used to tie her hands, she nearly cuts apart. The small knife, recently picked up somewhere in the palace, is already in her hand, but then she gently folds the fabric instead and hides it in the depth of the wardrobe. A few strands of his hair in a brush, lost and forgotten under a dressing table, are her most treasured find. Without thinking much about it, she weaves them into a bracelet which she wears night and day. In the evenings, she finds herself snuggling into the covers of the bed (now hers), trying to find some remnant of his presence, his scent, and she finally admits to herself that she misses him; for all that she hates him too.
It is an infuriating realization and the next morning, just because she needs to vent, she sneaks up into his personal library, and uses his portrait there as a target for her knife throwing practice. Hours later, still fuming, she finally figures out how the feelings for him that she thought long dead have dared to be reborn from the ashes: the overall good mood, the frickin’ HOPE for a better future that pervades the whole palace has gotten to her too. And even thought her mind tells her heart that it’s gone bat-shit insane, her heart insist that there is a possibility, even if it’s only a possibility the size of a grain of sand, that Ozai might change too.
She is not in love with the monster that imprisoned and tortured her. She is in love with the man he could be and who was her companion, her lover, her friend, for a few short moments, all gone too fast:
Seven years back, when it was THAT time of the month for her and she had been suffering from exceptionally bad cramps, he had warmed her aching back with his hands, easing her discomfort.
Six years back, the capitol had been celebrating midsummer night. Music had been sweet in the air, for even though Fire Nation people as a rule didn’t dance, deeming it undignified and barbaric, they still appreciated the pleasure a beautiful tune could bring to the heart. Her Lord and Master had been off, presiding over some banquet, or so she thought, and so she had grasped at the opportunity and had snuck into the gardens and had danced to her hearts content. When she heard him chuckling from the shadows she froze like a rabbit confronted with a venomous snake. He had been behind her, and she could hear his footsteps on the gravel as he approached. As he reached her, he gently turned her around. She didn’t dare look at him, but his fingers lifted her chin until her eyes met his. She stood, surprised and mesmerized by the sight of his smile, which had warmed his eyes to a golden glow. He had leisurely pulled her close to him, and had spun her around in a slow waltz, his eyes never leaving hers.
Five years back, she saw him fly into a black rage when he learned that in one of the conquered cities, an official had been accusing people on trumped up charges, only so he could imprison them and torture them to death…for fun. He has the man discharged from his post, publicly beaten and then imprisoned for life and she is happy to see justice served by his hand. And while she also grinds her teeth in frustration because he can’t see how his own conduct is a milder version of what his minion has been doing, the disgust in his face as he reads the detailed reports tells her that some part of him can still tell what is right and what is wrong.
The fact that she has started to sort out her feelings, that she knows why she misses him, what she hopes for, helps somewhat, but not much. Now that Ozai has become a prisoner and has a LOT of time to reflect on things does not mean that the good that she once saw in him is still there. And even if it was: he is a proud and arrogant creature and any pressure exerted on him will only be met with defiance and contempt.
And if she went to see him? The prison where the previous Fire Lord is held is not far away. But even if they let her in…she doubts seeing her would mean anything to him at all. Her love for the man he could have been means nothing to him and the man he is could not care less about either her love or her burning anger.
So for the time being, as her hope keeps nudging her with “maybe time WILL change him and THEN you can go talk to him”, she takes comfort in knowing he is still around, and begins to make plans for the future. She will need a place to stay, a place where she can wait until either he has indeed changed (“Hah! Not bloody likely!” her reason interjects) or until she has managed to untangle her emotions for Ozai enough to be indifferent to him and his fate. Everybody around her is building a new life, and she decides she will do the same. She can’t ever go home again, but the world is a big place and she figures that with her healing skills, she can contribute her part to making the Four Nations whole again.
In her search for a place to stay and people to stay with (she has been too lonely these last few years and she swears to herself she will never be alone again), she closely observes the ongoings around her, and most of what she sees and hears makes her happy and feeds her hope for a better future:
Prince Zuko, ally and friend to the Avatar, has become the new Firelord and in his own way, he is making Sozin’s dream come true. The Fire Nation IS sharing its’ greatness with the rest of the world.
Fire Nation mechanists are designing equipment that will assist farmers in the Earth Kingdom. The material for these farming machines is coming from the disassembled parts of Fire Nation war tanks. The Navy is shipping building material and goods to the Water Tribes to help them rebuild their villages and towns, not all of which had originally been made of snow and ice. Fire Nation airships are used to transport workers and artisans to the Air Temples in an effort to rebuild them.
The Avatar and his friends, down to and including Fire Lord Zuko, are making trips around the country, inspecting everything from schools to fisheries and making changes, and while the process itself is sometimes quite humorous (there is one infamous incident involving a snowman and a tannery owner who was polluting the earth for miles around), the results are undeniably improvements on current conditions and find the approval of the common people.
And while there is some grumbling amongst the nobles and the soldiers about…well, not exactly having lost, but not exactly having won the war either…most people don’t seem to miss the fighting all that much. It is simply that the list of lives lost is long in the Fire Nation too and all families have loved ones missing: grandfathers and sons and aunts and best friends.
Soldiers, away from home for years, finally return, and are welcomed with open arms and tears of joy by their spouses and children. Now that people no longer need to worry if those that have gone to war will ever return, the relief is palpable. Also, if glory can no longer been gained by fighting Water Tribes and Earth Kingdom, it sure as hell can be gained helping them, so even those that hunger to prove themselves to their families and the world are able to find their place.
Still, for the last years, she has watched Ozai deal with the darker sides of his court and his nation, and she knows where to look to find what lurks in the shadows. There are those who have gained wealth and power in the war and who are loosing most of that now, as retribution is paid to the other Nations. She knows who they are and she takes note of them and their retainers and the furtive glances between them as they pass each other in the corridors of the palace. Nobody else seems to pay them much attention. She hopes this is an oversight that someone will correct soon, for otherwise, the new Fire Lord and his reign will come to an ugly end in the near future.
She contemplates telling someone, but she has no proof, no solid evidence, and who would be willing to listen to the ramblings of the former Fire Lord’s pleasure slave?
So for the time being, she resigns herself to observe and to write reports in the hope that sometime soon, she will find something solid to pass on. She figures that if she has something to corroborate her claims, maybe she can get someone like Mai, Fire Lord Zuko’s fiancé to listen. Lady Mai is no stranger to court intrigue and for all her affectations of boredom, she’s as sharp as the throwing darts she favours, plus, for a future Fire Lady, she’s still pretty accessible for someone who looks like a minor court noble.
Keeping track of possible traitors (she snickers as she notices how much like Ozai she has become in this regard) is not her only occupation as weeks pass. She plans her future and after defeatedly resigning herself to taking up residence in the capitol (she can’t bring herself to leave him behind just yet), she contacts the office responsible for the relocation of former slaves. She refuses to tell them who her family is, and she damn well won’t let them know that she is a waterbender (only Ozai knew that) but those are options that are open to former slaves and without further ado, the bureaucrats help her sign the lease for a small room in the city, rented out by a nice elderly couple. She plans to set up a business offering massages and acupressure in order to pay her bills and keep food in her mouth. Kuro helps her pack her things. Together, they sort out which things she can keep (All of the clothes, some of which she might sell at a later date to help fund her business; some minor trinkets and baubles) and which things she can’t keep (There’s a pearl necklace she loves for its shimmering, pure beauty, so much like the moon from which she draws her power. Ozai would have her wear just the necklace and little else, and there are actually some happy memories connected to that. But it belongs to the royal treasury and is returned there.).
She is in the bedchamber, folding a gossamer shirt that will go into the last crate that has to be packed and sent to her new home as Kuro comes in. In the past weeks they both have discovered that easygoing banter is a good way to deal with the embarrassments of the past, so when he remains silent and won’t even look at her, she feels a flurry of dark butterflies take wing in her centre. Her hands tremble as she grips the shirt, her knuckles white.
“What has happened? Tell me!” Her voice is terse.
He takes a sharp breath, exhales and finally meets her eyes. His eyes, usually a golden brown, are black with grief, if for himself or for her, she can’t tell.
“He is dead.” There is no need to clarify who he is talking about.
She shakes her head, slowly. “No….Kuro…he can’t be….He can’t! You must be mistaken…He has to be alive….He…”. Her voice trails off, her denial silenced by the certainty written in every line of his face.
“They found him in his cell this morning, the rigor of death already setting in. There was not a mark on his body. Rumour has it that he simply willed his breath to stop in one last act of spite towards his son and the Avatar. There’s an ongoing investigation to see if foul-play was involved, but so far it has turned up nothing. My cousin was one of the jailers assigned to Fire Lord Oz….former Fire Lord Ozai, that’s how I know for sure. I….I’m sorry.”
Inwardly she rages that it can’t be true, that there must be some kind of mistake, but the sincerity of Kuro’s words pierces the rapid fire of desperate lies that she tries to tell herself. She wants to say something, but her throat is so tight she can barely breathe and all that comes out is a harsh cry that echoes in the room like ice breaking. Her hands clench and unclench, frantically trying to grasp something that is no longer there.
And with the grief, the rage comes. Rage at the loss of potential futures that are dying before they were even born, rage at opportunities missed, rage at a past that will never find closure. The hope that kept her going, for all that she knew that is was probably futile, shatters and with its’ remains fuels an incandescent fury that overwhelms everything she is. The last thing she feels before the maelstrom of her wrath rips her apart are hot tears coursing down her cheeks.
Over the years, Kuro has seen how deeply her life has become entwined with Ozai’s, for better or worse. He has noticed the bracelet of braided dark hair she has started to wear and he figured it had to be some of the former Fire Lords’, which she had woven into a keepsake. He knew she would take the news badly. He had expected the tears. But he hadn’t expected the tears to start collecting in the air between them, instead of falling to the ground. He hadn’t expected them to start spinning, slowly at first, and, as her eyes grow dead and vacant, faster and faster. There are ominous rumbles coming from the direction of the garden and the bath and his mouth goes dry as he remembers that both have spring-fed pools. He turns and runs, barely escaping the waves that come crashing into the room, already bearing the debris of smashed furniture and decorations with them.
Thankfully, as a steward, he knows where Lord Zuko and his entourage can be found at this time of day and hopefully, as a head steward, he can count on the guards to let him through without much fuss. His feet fly over the costly marble tiles and more than one person leisurely strolling through the corridors is rudely shoved aside as he passes. It takes him only a fifth of the time it normally would to get to the big pagoda at the edge of the palace gardens. It still seems to long.
The spirits of luck are smiling at him though, for talking to the Fire Lord are some of the Southern Water Tribe, including their waterbender, Lady Katara.
Eyebrows go up as he almost collapses in front of the group, panting heard, hair dishevelled, a few superficial scratches on his arms, where he was hit by debris, bleeding sluggishly.
“Berserk…waterbender…” he gasps. “Former slave….south wing. Old quarters….of…”
Before he can finish, the group is already moving.
As he runs, Zuko silently curses his father. He has been doing that a lot lately and the fact that his father just died does not alleviate the anger he feels for the man. Ozai has built an empire built on hatred and tyranny and Zuko keeps stumbling over things his father has set up or done that turn his stomach. Hearing that his father had kept a personal pleasure slave in his quarters was just one bit of bad news amongst many others. He was glad when one of the head stewards, Kuro, reported to him that the lady seemed to be adjusting surprisingly well. And now she has snapped after all. Zuko prays that she won’t have gone as mad as that old waterbender, Hama, that Katara, Sokka and Aang had to fight on their journey.
It’s hard work, keeping up with a firebender and a waterbender who use their powers to speed up their flight. Hakoda manages though, as the years of fighting have honed his strength and endurance. The same goes for Bato, who is running side by side with him. The palace is huge and it takes them a few minutes, but they can already hear the crashing and roaring from far away. They arrive at something that must have been the entryway to a large room or a small hall. It’s hard to tell as the wall has been partially torn down and it’s hard to see through the torrent of water that is spinning inside. As he watches, the water freezes and with a resounding boom, he can hear rocks split as the frozen water cracks the walls where it has seeped between the blocks. Then the water liquefies once more and resumes its mad-dash spinning, taking the wreckage with it. It’s difficult to hear over the din, but Katara’s shouting something about someone being inside the room and as he watches, his daughter bends a doorway into the torrential flood and they slip inside.
Her back is turned to them, but the form revealed by the soaked through dress tells Hakoda that it’s a woman and he is surprised. What Southern Water Tribe waterbenders there are, he thought accounted for, either dead or returned home. The Northern Water Tribe would never have trained a woman to wreak the kind of havoc that is reluctantly abating around them, thanks to Katara wresting control from the dishevelled stranger. And then, as she turns, she is a stranger no more. Dark brown hair that should be wavy, but has been pulled straight by its own weight, it has grown so long. Bright blue eyes and sharp cheekbones that match his own. He thought her dead. Going by the darkness that shadows her eyes, she is, but he calls out to her nevertheless.
“KIAN!”
And in a heartbeat, her eyes blaze to life and her face twists in a snarl so full of blind rage that he takes a step back, stunned. A sharp flick of her wrist turns the water droplets that spin in the air between them into an icy dagger that flies at him faster than he can blink. He expects it to kill him, he has seen his death in her eyes, but it stops abruptly in front of his throat, humming with menace. The tip of it has drawn a few drops of his blood and the blade seems….hungry.
Her voice resembles more the growl of a wild animal than human speech, and yet her words are painfully clear. “Don’t you DARE come near me. Don’t you DARE touch me. I don’t EVER want to see you again, do you hear me, Hakoda?”
Then his sister closes her eyes and he watches helplessly as her form crumples to the ground in front of him.
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Owned by Fire