ASHES, the last airbender

INTRODUCTION

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Love was for fools, the saying had been drilled into her young mind the moment she could walk, the moment she could bend...love was for fools and a princess isn't a fool...and yet it was later, of course, that she'd had the suspicion that it had nothing to do with her being a princess and everything to do with the fact her father was a malicious bastard who didn't want a daughter but a soldier, a successor, a weapon that he could control like a puppet hanging from strings that had wound tight around her pale neck like a damning noose, like a collar, like a prison.

Honora had been sliced loose by bloodstained hands and he'd called it salvation, had called it mercy, had called it necessary and she'd believed him most desperately because what else could it have been except his truest word...but she could still feel the flames, she could still feel the burn as she was molded like clay into something bitter and monstrous, molded into nothing more than a weapon ripe for anarchy, for the chaos of war, forced to become a legend, a horror story waiting to be told to bring the nations to their downfall on their bended knees with the ashes of their devastation dirtying their feet in soot and death.

She had not been fed love from silver spoons, so she had learned to lick it off knives, knowing that she'd never be adored or cherished like fine silk or sparking jewels and so fear would have to do, that the masses wouldn't know the true meaning of the word terror until they had looked into her golden eyes when death called their names only to find nothing but a god staring back at them, ready to burn them for their deceit, for their miserable lives that choked her on the blood she breathed. Fire, she supposed, was like love, like hate, like passion, all powerful and all consuming, burning everything down to simple cinders, to ash that settled over the corpses of the damned and the stupid.

And quite like fire, there was only one thing that the princess, the abomination of the Firenation, had purpose for...to torch everything that stood in their way in ivory catastrophe. To be brutal, to entice and conquer, to be stronger that their boats and their weapons, to be their inevitable demise with pale hands scarred with murder and ash and sin, she had been made into something wrong, something not quite human, something with a smile that was too sharp and a golden gaze that were too dead, with pale skin littered with the constellations of ruin, something that didn't understand the meaning of the word mercy, didn't understand the meaning of the word kindness.

To be a monster was to be free, to be feared, to be isolated and respected, and so Honora would take that title with pride and with whatever accusations came with it...because it was something that they could hide behind, because while she hadn't been shown love, while she hadn't been shown adoration, she still knew what it felt like, she somehow knew how to give it, and she knew how weak it could leave you when she'd look into amber eyes that were so similar to her own and realized she'd would do anything and everything to keep them safe, to give them the childhood she'd dreamed of, that she'd condemn the world to dust for the love she'd give but never take.

She had thought, believed, prayed to the divine that her true salvation would be her siblings, would be her brother, would be her sister...she thought they would have been her chance at redemption, to repent for the disaster she'd wielded like wildfire, her one chance at being something other than a creature of mass destruction created from their fathers cruel intention. But in the end...in the end it she'd found that it would be her weakness, her love for them that would be her everlasting ruin, would be the reason she'd crumbled, she'd ached, she'd lost everything she'd wanted to hold dear.

Love was for fools, it was true...and as it turned out, Honora had been the biggest fool of all...for ever believing she could be anything more than a monster of her own creation.

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"YOU ARE A WEAPON AND WEAPONS DON'T WEEP."

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Dedications;

-hanlonss Deadlocked21 ichorborn BiggStress nikolasheperd icewolffae silkysike SweeterKitty And to everyone who reads this fic! I hope you like the re-vamped version of Ashes, which will be different from the first story as in it'll be darker, it'll be given far more depth and it'll touch on things that the show implied. Such as the family dynamics of the firenation siblings, and show how the three represent different effects of child abuse. With Zuko being desperate to be given the love he believes to be conditional, falling into the mindset that he was abused because he wasn't good enough while Azula falls into the category of becoming an abuser which we see with how she treats Ty-Lee and Mai and even her brother.

And finally Honora, who falls into a rather vengeful state of knowing that she was abused and wanting revenge, who's angry and hateful, who doesn't know who to be other than her fathers weapon and is still learning to be her own person, the person she'd wanted to be, while desperately trying to protect her brother from the abuse she suffered, shouldering alot of responsibility, and not realizing they were going through their own. Aka neglect, learned behaviour and physical abuse...so yes, I hope you enjoy the fic, thankyou so much for reading and i love you all so very much! <3