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"Azula was a failure," Azula says, sitting with her legs folded and her hands at rest on top of them. It's the position of someone calm and at peace, or trying to be. The effect is kind of ruined by how she's still talking like she's figured out how to kill everybody without anyone noticing. "So I've decided to be someone else."
It's a good thing Aang already knows for a fact he can stay perfectly expressionless. He doesn't know what he'd do if he had to worry about what was showing on his face on top of everything else. "Someone who shaved all her hair off?"
Not very well. There are cuts all over her scalp, fuzz and bristles almost everywhere, and an entire quarter of her head where she'd only been able to hack it down to knuckle-length before the guards wrestled her makeshift razor away from her. Zuko's worried about how long it took them to notice.
"It was bothering me," she says dismissively.
"I can understand that," says Aang.
She asked to speak to 'Avatar Aang' personally, and apparently implied she had something really important to tell him. Everyone, including Zuko, warned him that she was going to try to assassinate him as soon as she saw him, which is probably why Zuko had been trying so hard not to ask that Aang give it a shot anyway. He'd just looked upset, and mentioned that she hasn't been asking for anything he could actually give her up until now, and then yelled at Aang when he said he'd do it.
She didn't try to assassinate him as soon as she saw him. So far she hasn't apologized for that time she shot him with lightning, either, but he knew better than to expect that.
"Do you want me to tidy it up for you?" he asks, ignoring the noises the guards immediately make. "Just in case the razor missed a spot."
She looks down her nose at him. Her hands, in their not-quite-meditation pose, don't even twitch, much less close in anger. "If it would make you feel better," she says in a way that sounds like a taunt. "You won't find anything."
"Avatar Aang," one of her guards hisses as he stands up. He should find out what their names are, what they're like.
"It's okay!" Aang says brightly. "I've been shaving my own head for years, it won't take long."
It wasn't like becoming Ozai, when he took his bending away, when he nearly lost himself to him. It wasn't like remembering his memories or thinking his thoughts. He doesn't know how he talked to her, whether deep down he really did love her, what ways he hurt her when nobody else could see. What Aang does know is that when he sits down behind her with something sharp in his hands, the two of them surrounded by guards whose first order, right now, is to keep her from hurting him—it's a test. It's a test he's giving her, whether he likes it or not. It's a test she's giving him, no matter how scared she must be.
He doesn't go slowly, because Ozai would have taken his time to be cruel. He doesn't go fast, because Ozai would have moved faster than she could stop him. He just goes, careful and thorough like if he were helping show one of the younger kids what to do. She sits with her back and her bare neck to him, hands perfectly motionless on her legs, and she doesn't flinch at all.
"There we go!" Aang says when he's done. She follows him from the corner of her eye as he circles back around to sit in front of her again. "You were right, it looks great."
"Of course it does," she sniffs.