Child's Play ➳ Azula

turtle-ducks.

Day twenty-five. It had been twenty-five days. A week since Suzume was moved out of the underground bunker and into a different underground bunker farther away. She was working on her fourteenth set of fire bending, and while her flame still flickered between orange and blue, it was becoming stronger. She no longer slept in a dingy prison cell and she slept in a replicate room of her own back at the palace, it was nice, but it wasn't home, and her mother wasn't there. She was starting to wonder if Ozai had lied and she wouldn't see her mother ever again, he had said it at first and then changed his word after he saw that she could bend fire. Training sessions were getting more difficult and it certainly showed with just how exhausted the toddler was becoming, Ozai's immense drive to have power was sending this little girl into exhaustion.

Suzume had developed a new schedule; eat, sleep, and train, but it was on this particular night that she decided to venture off and roam the bunker. The fire nation insignia was all around her, her great nation's insignia was everywhere.

Her fingers trailed against the dirt walls, dust and dirt falling as she did so. She was noticeably bored; she wanted to feel the sun on her face again, she wanted to feel the heat that she was so used to. She dreamt of it, she dreamt of seeing the sun again, the feeling on her face as the glorious vitamin D soaked into her skin giving her a light glow. She was brought out of her thoughts when she noticed something in the middle of the pathway. It was a scorpion beetle, this seemed suspicious to the three-year-old. Nevertheless, she approached the bug and picked it up. Where could she release it so that it wouldn't be harmed? She looked around, there was nowhere that she could see in a far distance to help the poor bug escape.

Suzume let out a sad sigh before letting the bug roam around on her hands, she moved a hand beside the other so the bug kept walking forwards even though it wasn't making much progress at all, and she let out a little smile before her thoughts were cut from her, causing her to drop the bug on the ground immediately.

"Suzume, what are you doing at this hour awake?" She inhaled a large breath as her limbs froze. She turned herself around and looked up, her eyes eventually met Ozai's, he would get mad at her for wandering around. She knew it.

"I-I saw this bug and I wanted to play with it so I did and-" Her stuttering didn't please him, she knew that, so she became quiet before she made a fool of herself.

"Where's the bug?" Suzume wasted no time in turning around to pick the bug up to show him, she was intimidated by him and it easily showed, although, she knew at the same time that aside from his strength, he was useless. She could bend her flame at him and kill him now if she wanted to, they both knew it, "A scorpion-beetle, hrm. Aren't these poisonous, Suzume? How would your mother feel if she knew you were putting yourself in danger by playing with a poisonous bug?" Her mother would be mortified if she had caught her playing with the bug. Suzume felt her throat begin to close up as a thick layer of mucous coated it, her face became hot and she had to try her hardest to not cry in front of her grandfather.

"She would be worried if she saw me playing with it," The child stuck her ground, trying to not sound as defeated as she felt.

"Exactly. Now, what are you going to do with this bug?" Suzume became confused, what was she going to do with it? She couldn't play with it; what else was there to do?

"I wanted to let it go but-"

"If you let it go, the poisonous bug could come back and hurt you, even worse, kill you. It could find its way to your mother and harm her. There's only one thing to do, my dear," Suzume understood now. She understood much too clearly what Ozai wanted her to do.

"You want me to kill it? Why can't you?" Suzume was trying to see if she didn't have to be the one to kill the bug, she had never killed anything before. Her mother would be upset if she killed it, it was so unlike Suzume to harm anything. She was prolonging the creature's death.