Work Text:
Hello, can I speak to...
Oh, never mind
So won't you? Will you be my cherry?
So come on talk to me, talk to me
Will you, will you be mine?
1, 2, 3, let's go
Down the subway, you looked my way
With your girl gaze, with your girl gaze
That was the day everything changed
Couldn't stay the same
Now it's Tuesday and I'm thinking
'Bout to tuck in, 'bout to tuck in
Telling myself that it's cheating
But it's something else
The first time she’d seen Ty Lee was at the new student orientation for the Royal Fire Academy for Girls where she was surrounded by a small crowd of six other girls who looked exactly like her. There wasn’t anything particularly interesting about them; they all had the same outfit on and had had their hair done in the same fashion. The only thing that was seemingly remarkable about Ty Lee was that she was the only one who wasn’t engaged in the conversation that her sisters - Mai assumed - were having. Instead, her gaze was locked on the floor, her feet turned inward and shoulders curled down as if she was trying to hide. Mai twitched. That girl’s behavior was unbecoming of a girl from a noble family, much less for a girl who was soon to be attending the Royal Fire Academy for Girls.
Mai had always been taught to hold her head up high, to not speak unless spoken to, and to grab as little attention to herself as possible. Her life was about elevating her father’s status, after all. Any misstep or error in calculation would have likely gotten her a lecture from her parents about how her behavior would taint her father’s status. She’d learned quickly that her first priority in life must always be to support anyone who supported the Fire Lord, and this meant being on the good side of every stuffy nobleman her father would meet. Being able to attend the Royal Fire Academy for Girls was a privilege that only few were able to achieve, so she wasn’t sure what to do about the girl in the corner who was behaving less than stellar and wasting her time by examining her frilly socks.
Her parents weren’t with her and had been stuffed into a room with the other nobles who were receiving a presentation about the Academy, so Mai was stuck outside with the other noble girls. She hadn’t been allowed to bring her new throwing knives, and now she was forced to look at the eyes of the other Fire Nation girls and hope that one of them would eventually become her friend. After a quick scan of the room, her gaze unfortunately locked on the big eyes of the girl who had previously been looking at the ground. This was a mistake, she thought as the girl started trotting over to her. Her mother isn’t going to be happy that she’d decided to talk to a girl who could barely look her own sisters in the eye and trots instead of walks.
“Hi! My name’s Ty Lee. What’s yours?” the girl asked, sporting a wide grin and sparkling eyes. Oh.
“My name is Mai,” came her answer. Precise, rehearsed, and perfect. “Are those your sisters?”
The girl, Ty Lee, turned back and visibly deflated, which made Mai feel a little guilty. Ty Lee probably got asked about them a lot. Nevertheless, she turned back to Mai with a grin and nodded. “Do you have siblings? Or do you have a brother, I should ask. I’m guessing you don’t have a sister, otherwise she’d be here with you, right? Well I guess if she was super old then she might have already graduated. Or if you had a baby sister then she’d be inside with your mother,” she paused. “Well, do you have siblings?”
Mai blinked. She hadn’t expected an onslaught of questions from a girl who seemed to want to disappear just less than five minutes ago.
“I’m an only child. My mom has a sister, though. She runs a flower shop,” she offered. Mai figured that if Ty Lee was like any other noble kid, she’d want to know the family history of those she befriended. And she seemed like the type of person to like flower shops.
Ty Lee tilted her head, “that’s cool!”
“Thanks.” Mai turned and resumed standing the position she was in before Ty Lee had trotted over. If Ty Lee wasn’t going to offer any more information on her family, then Mai wouldn’t ask. The conversation was probably over, anyway. There wasn’t anything else that they could talk about.
“Do you have any hobbies?” Ty Lee asked, apparently finding Mai’s hobbies intriguing enough to talk about. “I’m really interested in learning acrobatics, but I don’t think it counts as a hobby if everyone in my family does it? My mom recently told me about a fighting style that can block a bender’s chi path! Wait, are you a bender? I’m not. No one in my family can bend fire. I guess it’s cool because that means we have time to learn other things, but it also seems really cool to pull fire from thin air! I don’t know. What do you think?”
“No one in my family can bend,” Mai said. “I… like throwing knives. For fun,” she added, then internally cringed at her hesitance. First of all, she wasn’t supposed to be making small talk or any talk about her interests, especially her knives. Her mother had told her it wasn’t proper for young girls to play with knives, so she shouldn’t let her interest spread. Second, she wasn’t allowed to make mistakes, especially if said mistakes were caused by her own carelessness. While Ty Lee had been talking, Mai had become distracted by how her every sentence was punctuated by a new facial expression, and how her eyes lit up when it seemed like a new topic had popped into her head.
Snap out of it. You’re not allowed to stare, Mai scolded herself. She’s usually good at taking orders and obeying commands, but her brain had apparently been washed away by the cadences of Ty Lee’s voice. Mai started feeling dizzy.
Every night before bed, her mother read her a chapter from a novel she was reading; if she was lucky, she’d get a couple of pages of poetry read to her. Mai fondly thinks about the nights where her and her mother had scoured over romantic texts and analysed poems that revered the feelings that accompanied one’s first love. Mai had been raised to be impassive and unyielding, her mother often telling her that showing emotion would be seen as a weakness. Apparently she felt guilty about stifling her daughter’s feelings, so she allowed Mai a nightly reprieve from stoicism through literature and adventure readings. As soon as Mai had seen Ty Lee’s bright smile and twinkling eyes, she had been plagued by every romantic poem, love song, and romantic poem she’d ever heard.
No. It’s not supposed to be like this, Mai told herself. All the stories she had been told had been about slowly falling for the way someone moved through the world and breathed as if the air was made for them, but they hadn’t prepared her for the way her thoughts grinded to a halt and for every waking moment to be TyLeeTyLeeTyLee.
That evening, when she had finally reached home after hours of orientation and preparation, she scolded herself again. It had been hours since she had talked to Ty Lee, and yet every syllable she had breathed engraved itself into Mai’s mind. It’s not supposed to be like this. It’s not supposed to happen this fast. I’m not supposed to feel like this yet. It’s wrong, it’s cheating.
However that night, as she fell asleep with Ty Lee’s smile blinding her mind, she couldn’t bring it in herself to care.
Even though I'm satisfied
I lead my life within a lie
Holding onto feelings
I'm not used to feeling
'Cause, oh, they make me feel alive
Mai’s life had fundamentally changed after meeting Ty Lee that fateful day at the Royal Fire Academy for Girls. As a child, had anyone seen Mai, they’d rightfully assume that she was just as stoic inside as she was on the outside; that her thoughts were monotonous and dull and that she held no emotions in that heart of hers. She’d been described as gloomy and dim for as long as she could recall, and only appeared to speak if asked an important question. She had always performed well as an obedient daughter, impressing noblemen with her poised persona and earning a reputation of cold and clever. Hiding her emotions had never been difficult if she’d never felt anything in the first place, and schooling herself into appearing calm had never been a challenge when she felt no urge to act otherwise.
It was only after meeting Ty Lee that these truths became difficult to maintain.
Growing up as the daughter to a nobleman hadn’t been as exciting as a commoner would imagine it to be. She’s never been able to touch or play with anything in her own home, as everything was either an antique or an inconsequential gift from the Royal Family. The parties she’d been forced to attend were simply for exchanging pleasantries and networking with the children of nobles. She hadn’t even been allowed to experiment with different clothing styles from the fabrics her family had gotten in the Earth Kingdom. The only thing that it seemed she had been allowed to do was to throw her knives and read in her bedroom. Of course, this had allowed her to perfect her knife-throwing skills and become well-versed in literature, but it hadn’t been anything monumental nor had it been anything that most teenagers would want to experience.
The first time Ty Lee had come over to Mai’s home, her entire world had been upturned. Ty Lee had filled the empty spaces between the gold and mahogany of Mai’s house with the twirling of delicate pink fabrics and spinning of a long brown braid. The antique furniture had simply been an aid to whatever acrobatic act Ty Lee had mastered that week. A house that had previously echoed with silence had been filled to the brim with Ty Lee’s laughter and conversation. The halls that Mai had walked through had come to life as soon as Ty Lee had cartwheeled through them, pointing out the patterns in the floor carpet or the paintings on the wall.
Mai had never thought it was possible for her to walk in her home and want to smile; for her to look at the spirals in her furniture and think of acrobats; for her to look at red but see pink.
Everything that she had learned from her upbringing had forced her to want to hide and abandon these feelings. If her mother found out that Mai’s mind rivalled every romantic poem she’d ever shown her, Mai would surely be told to sit down and dispose of it. Mai had grown up learning how to reject anything that had made her feel but couldn’t bring herself to do anything but hold onto Ty Lee and the feelings she would bring along with her.
When they tell you that you've got to stay the same
Even though you're not yourself
And you've got somebody else
When they tell you that you've got yourself to blame
Even though it's not your fault
But your heart just wants to know, know
She hadn’t been aware that her carefully curated demeanor had slipped until her mother pulled her into a hallway in the middle of a dinner with the nobles and demanded to know what was happening.
“Mai, you’re acting strange,” her mother had said.
Mai narrowed her eyes. “I’m not acting anything. Azula just said something funny.”
“You can’t act like that in front of the Royal Family, Mai,” her mother said with a tight grip on her arm. “Think of what Fire Lord Ozai could do to your father.”
“I can hardly see how my cracking a smile could affect Fire Lord Ozai. Besides, Azula likes it when Ty Lee and I play along with her jokes. I thought you wanted me to develop a good relationship with her,” Mai said as she tried to subtly shrug away from her mother’s grip.
Her mother let out an impatient sigh, as if she were speaking with a disobedient child and not her teenage daughter who she happened to catch smiling. “You can’t laugh when the joke is about Prince Zuko. The Fire Lord and the Fire Princess saw you blatantly disrespecting the Crown Prince, Mai! This could severely affect our relations amongst the nobles! I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately.”
There were a lot of things that her mother had said that Mai wanted to respond to. If she had been allowed to, she would have furrowed her eyebrows, she would have rolled her eyes, she would have screamed. Just as she was about to respond to her mother, Ty Lee had called out from the entrance of the hall. “Mai? Are you in here?”
A flash of fierce understanding appeared behind her mother’s eyes as Mai inadvertently quirked a smile at the sound of Ty Lee’s voice. Mai’s blood went cold.
“I’m disappointed in you, Mai. Fix this,” her mother demanded before she strode down the hall and flashed a tight-lipped smile at Ty Lee.
As soon as her mother had walked out of sight, Ty Lee rushed up to Mai and grabbed her arms. Her grip was tighter than her mother’s had been, yet somehow it seemed more caring. “Mai? Are you okay? What did your mom want?” As expected, Ty Lee wanted to talk about her feelings, and as usual, Mai wouldn’t be able to hide anything from her.
Ty Lee had secretly begun to study spirituality from ancient texts that her family had stolen from the Air Nomads. While Ty Lee resented the methods used to collect the texts, she figured it would be beneficial if she could somehow revive Air Nomad culture through her practices. Mai wasn’t entirely sure that Ty Lee’s affinity towards auras would be enough to revive obsolete spiritual practices amongst the remaining three nations, but Mai was known to be a pessimist anyway. Regardless, Ty Lee was able to take one look at Mai and be able to read her face as if she were reading a book. While it had taken Mai years of effort to be able to perfect any flaws in her poker face, Ty Lee had spent more effort learning how to navigate the narrow passes in Mai’s expression.
Mai’s heart had been beating furiously against her chest, but she had had to steel her expression into something impenetrable in order to be able to say this to Ty Lee’s unguarded face. “I think… I want- no, I need to start dating Zuko,” she said, allowing herself to make mistakes in her speech in front of the one person who would never judge her for them.
Ty Lee’s expression turned disbelieving as she took in Mai’s response. “Mai?”
“I think it would be in my family’s best interest if I were to begin a relationship with Prince Zuko,” she recited, heart breaking at the look on Ty Lee’s face. While everything inside her screamed at her to lock away any emotion that could be seen on her, she desperately hoped that Ty Lee could see the message she was trying to convey through her eyes.
As usual, Mai wasn’t able to hide anything from Ty Lee.
Ty Lee nodded and released her grip on Mai’s arms to connect their hands. She understood.
She understood. Those two words had held more weight than anything her parents could have ever put onto her. From the very second Mai had met Ty Lee, she understood. From the most minute expression that Mai held to the secret contrite looks she’d given to Zuko whenever Azula or Ozai had said something particularly nasty, Ty Lee had always understood. Ty Lee understood that Mai’s obligation has always been to her father’s life and legacy, and never her own. She understood that Mai had been raised with impossible standards to fulfil and that every meeting with nobles was a performance she’d been rehearsing since the day she was born.
“I understand, Mai,” Ty Lee had said as she cradled one of Mai’s hands between them. They hadn’t been anything yet. Up until that point, they’d only exchanged meaningful glances and spent borrowed time together. She had rehearsed feelings with Ty Lee but had to perform next to Zuko.
Later, when Mai had managed to catch Zuko alone on the balcony and told him of her proposition, he had only turned pink in the face and nodded. It wasn’t so much of a shy or bashful shade of pink as it was a nervous and reluctant sort of pink. Maybe she wasn’t the only one performing.
Down the subway, you looked my way
With your girl gaze, with your girl gaze
That was the day everything changed
Now it's something else
News of their courtship had broken out as soon as they’d left the dinner that night. While Crown Prince Zuko wasn’t as highly revered as Fire Princess Azula, their relationship had ignited excited chatter amongst Fire Nation commoners and colonials alike. Mai initially hadn’t planned for the relationship to last as long as it had, but she figured that once you had start dating a member of the Royal Family, you had to make the relationship stick.
Zuko had been decent at performing his task. He’d bought her fruit tarts and clothing whenever she’d ask, and made a show of kissing her in the presence of servants and merchants. While neither of them particularly enjoyed public displays of affection, they both had a part to play for their families and they both needed to be good at playing them.
Regardless of how much she had resented having to perform to keep up appearances, Zuko was still one of her best friends. He had quickly become the second person outside of Ty Lee to be able to read her expressions and later he had learned to be able to break them apart as well, with his badly-timed jokes and laughable ideas of romance. He’d become the first person to know about how deep her own fondness for Ty Lee ran and she’d become the first person that he’d confided in that maybe he hadn’t looked at women the way his family needed him to. They had both played their parts together well.
When she had overheard Zuko hinting towards Azula that she should invite Ty Lee over, Mai knew that she didn’t have to be in love with him to love him just the same.
Zuko’s careful in the way that he takes her to the turtleduck pond exactly thirty minutes before Ty Lee showed up at the Fire Palace, once she had started getting invited again. He’s careful in the way he angles his body towards Mai so that she’s facing Azula and Ty Lee and his back is towards them, even if it leaves his left side vulnerable. In return, she’d make sure that he could see the knives she hid on the right side of her body to make up for his lack of alertness on his left. Outside of Ty Lee, he’s her best friend. She deemed it safe to assume that she’s also his.
Although Mai and Ty Lee had never visited the Fire Palace for each other, the looks they shared held more fire than any flame the Royal Family could hold in the palm of their hands. Ty Lee always liked to stare at Mai while she was practicing her handstands, feigning that she was listening to Azula rant about some general or another. Azula had met Ty Lee as a child and was none the wiser that Ty Lee’s airheaded qualities were simply a guise for her cunning. While normally calculating and sharp-witted, Azula prided herself on quick judgement based on first impressions, and would rather die than reevaluate her snap decision making. Second-guessing Ty Lee’s personality would counter as a failure on Azula’s own part, and both Ty Lee and Azula were aware of that fact.
Zuko carefully grabbed her hand. “You’re being obvious,” he muttered to her under his breath.
“You’re being obvious,” she hissed back, indignant. She laced their fingers for good measure.
He huffed at her, unamused. “I have nothing to be obvious about. You, on the other hand…,” he tilted back to where Azula and Ty Lee were on the grass.
Were she a lesser person, she would have snorted at his attempt at subtlety. “Azula’s too important in her own head to pay any attention to what Ty Lee and I are doing. The most she’d assume is that Ty Lee is staring at a butterfly or something and that you bore me so much that I’d rather watch the grass grow.”
Zuko is a lesser person, so he snorted at her response. “That second part is true,” he pointed out and leaned forward onto her shoulder.
“It is,” Mai mused, “and Azula is none the wiser.”
“What do you think Azula would do? If she found out.”
Mai raised an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t you know? You’re her brother.”
“But I’m not her friend. She threatens me every day, I’m used to it. What would she do if she found out that your loyalty is stronger towards Ty Lee than it is to her?”
“I’m not afraid of Azula. I’m afraid of my mother.” At this, Zuko raised his head and asked, “would she hurt you?”
Mai rolled her eyes and tucked his head back into her shoulder. “Ugh, shush up. She wouldn’t. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m afraid of her voice. Inside my head.”
“I know what that feels like.”
She ran her fingers through his hair, scratching at his scalp. “I’m sure. Now can you please let me watch the grass without your mouth moving in my ear.”
“You just want to watch Ty Lee’s ass.”
“Shush up, Zuko!” She lightly slapped the back of his head. “Not like you wouldn’t do the same if there’d been some boy walking around here.”
She felt his face warm from under her clothes and grinned. “There’s never gonna be a boy,” he mumbled, embarrassed.
“Maybe if you’d left the palace and smiled once in a while, there would be.”
Even though I'm satisfied
I lead my life within a lie
Holding onto feelings
I'm not used to feeling
'Cause, oh, they make me feel alive
(Oh, they make me feel alive)
The next thing she’d known, Zuko had left the palace. Maybe it was always inevitable. He had always been at war with himself, fighting who he wanted to be with who he had to be. Maybe that’s why their relationship seemed to work. To others, they had a noble match. The Crown Prince with a woman of high social standing. The brooding royal and his intimidating girlfriend. The Prince and his arm piece. But that’s not all that they had been, or were, to each other. They’re best friends. They’re their families’ pawns in a game that would never end. They were co-stars in a performance where no one knew the real actors. They were two people who had the same war going on inside of them.
Really, she should have expected this. Dear Mai, I’m sorry you have to find out this way, but I’m leaving. All she gets is a letter? Zuko was brash, but he could be cunning when he had to be. There were no specific words that had indicated they would break up, so their shoddy performance of a relationship was still going to continue. He hadn’t stated when or why he was leaving, only that he was. She had heard that General Iroh was no longer in the Fire Palace’s designated prison, so maybe Zuko had left with him to live in the Earth Kingdom somewhere.
She wasn’t sad. She was rarely ever sad. She was mad when her brother had been taken, annoyed when she and Ty Lee were forced to track down the Water Tribe kids, and furious on Ember Island, where everything just felt wrong. She’s not worried, either. Zuko can handle himself on his own. If he can handle a burn from the Fire Lord and three years of banishment, he can survive a couple of weeks in an Earth Kingdom city, or wherever else he would end up.
She doesn’t know what she’s feeling. She doesn’t know what she wants. Zuko’s disappearance has only helped her realise that he’s always been a fighter. Never give up without a fight, his dagger from General Iroh had said. With everything, he had always fought. He had directly opposed a war general, had been forced into an Agni Kai with his father, had fought against his own father’s, the Fire Lord’s, flames, even when he knew he couldn’t win. What had she been doing her entire life? Hiding.
She hadn’t come back smoothed over from Ember Island. Her aura remained dingy and grey, in the words of Ty Lee. Her whole life, she’d existed as just a big blah, in the words of Zuko. Words had never hurt her before, but maybe they hurt then because they came from her friends rather than her parents. She could evade her parents’ comments easily, their words going over her head with a roll of her eyes. Azula, Zuko, and Ty Lee, however... their words stung. Zuko’s words towards Ty Lee had stung just the same way Ty Lee’s words towards herself had stung. She hadn’t been smoothed over on Ember Island. She’d been cracked open.
Ember Island cracked her open like the geodes from the Earth Kingdom her mother collects. Like those geodes, she’s unassuming on the outside; no mark of greater potential or greatness could be seen in her. Now that she’s been cracked open, however, she sees that there’s a world of possibilities. Maybe she’s not sparkly and swirly and magnificent like Ty Lee. That’s fine. That’s never going to change. Ty Lee exists in her own world, where she’s a seashell, a smooth rock, and a glittering sandstone all at once. Mai exists in another; she’s a rock that cracked from pressure and released a subtle sparkle into the world at best.
For the first time since she’d met Ty Lee, she allows herself to feel, now that she’s alone with herself. Ty Lee isn’t here to be a catalyst for her strong emotions. No one’s home. The recent invasion hadn’t been much of a surprise; anyone worth their salt would know that the Fire Nation would always be left vulnerable during an eclipse. No one had been perturbed at the invasion. The real surprise was the sheer force of it: inventions and technology that no one had seen nor heard of before. Caldera City was a mess, and her parents had to attend meetings upon meetings to help fix the damage the invasion had caused. They had to prepare for Sozin’s Comet if this was the damage that the Avatar’s entourage would bring.
Mai doesn’t care about this war, the war that had been going on for decades. She cares about the war inside herself; a crossroads, is what Zuko had labelled it back when he was telling her about Ba Sing Se. He hadn’t been afraid of telling Mai about the Water Tribe girl in the catacombs, but he had been shaking when he described how he betrayed General Iroh. He hadn’t seemed concerned at the consequences of his actions if he turned around and had betrayed Azula instead, and was afraid of the mere prospect of General Iroh being angry with him. And maybe that’s what it was all about: holding onto the people that made you feel better rather than holding onto the people you’d learned you had to stay loyal to.
Her entire life, she’d learned to stay loyal to the Fire Lord and those who stayed loyal to him. Now she’s left wondering why she would ever stay loyal to a title that allowed a father to permanently scar his son; that caused a princess to feel no empathy; that convinced her parents to stifle their children’s childhoods. Why should she stay loyal to generations of people who had justified the genocide of an entire nation? She’ll admit that maybe it had taken her a while to get to denouncing her upbringing, but now the floodgates have opened and there’s no stopping her newfound feelings.
Feelings. That had been a dirty word growing up. The rare instances where her father had eaten dinner with her and her mother, he’d fling it around as if it were a weakness that the Air Nation had been plagued with. He’d bring home stories from war meetings and scoffed when he told Mai about a particular general who let his feelings get in the way of a successful raid. He’d talk about feelings when he ridiculed the coward Prince Zuko for defending an amateur division. He’d praised Mai when he finally noticed that she’d mastered schooling her expressions, as if teaching his daughter apathy had been his greatest achievement in life.
Mai knows better now. She gathers that feelings would bring her strength, just like it had brought Ty Lee and Zuko strength. Zuko was long gone, but maybe she’d be able to track down Ty Lee and run away somewhere far away. Maybe they could live with her Aunt Mura? She’d stayed out of the war thus far, choosing to manage a flower shop instead. It could be inconspicuous enough. Her only other option would have been her uncle, but he was the warden of the Boiling Rock, a prison a little ways away from Caldera City. She’d rather die than go to a grimy, dusty prison.
So won't you? Will you be my cherry?
So come on, talk to me, talk to me
Will you, will you be mine?
I see you watching me, will you be mine, baby?
Will I be your cherry?
So come on, talk to me, talk to me
Will you, will you be mine?
Funnily enough, a couple of months later, her uncle had sent her a letter stating that the traitor Prince Zuko is being dealt with in the Fire Nation’s highest security prison: the Boiling Rock. She had had enough practice with this feelings thing to raise her eyebrows in surprise at what the letter had said. Zuko had managed to disguise himself as a prison guard and sneak his way into the prison, only getting arrested because he had fought another guard and had gotten exposed. He willingly went to the Boiling Rock? She’d always known Zuko to be incredibly reckless, but they’d both grown up with stories of what types of torturous malpractice went on behind prison bars so he should have known better than to get himself locked there. From what she was able to deduct from the letter, he hadn’t even been arrested and then taken to the Boiling Rock. He had apparently been hiding out there for who who knows how long, and had eventually gotten exposed.
She needed to talk to him. Enough time had passed with him gone for her to spread news about a hostile breakup, so no one would question why the ex-prince’s seemingly patriotic ex-girlfriend would show up at a maximum security prison. They could stage a fight within earshot of a couple of guards and then she could eventually get information out of him about where the fuck he’s been the past few months. She’d figured she could take Ty Lee too, since she had probably missed Zuko as well. Azula would probably take the first chance she had to shoot him with lightning, so she’d have to make their departure discreet.
Unfortunately by the time she had gotten to Ty Lee’s house, one of her sisters (Ty Woo? Mai still couldn’t tell) had rudely told her that Ty Lee had already taken off with Azula on a field trip to “some prison.” Fuck. She had to get to Zuko before Azula could reach him. Azula and Ozai had already laid enough emotional torture onto Zuko in his own home to last a couple of lifetimes, there would be no stopping Azula if she had him cornered in a prison where everyone already hates him. She’d invited herself into Ty Lee’s house and had sent out a black ribbon message to her uncle at the prison, asking for a mode of transport immediately. She didn’t care about exchanging small talk with the sisters, nor had she cared about asking about the welfare of her uncle whom she hadn’t seen in years. She just had to know if Zuko’s fight was worth it.
Luckily, being the niece of the Boiling Rock’s warden came with a couple of perks. She had been able to make the journey within the day and had managed to find out from a couple of gossiping guards that Azula and Ty Lee were making rounds to visit an escaped prisoner. They probably hadn’t gotten to see Zuko yet, with Azula saving her favorite victim for last. Perfect. She’d ordered one of the guards escorting her to tell the warden to get her in a room alone with Prince Zuko. For his sake, she’d hoped his acting skills weren’t too rusty.
She grimaced and held back a groan when she had been led to a putrid-smelling interrogation room. She had been mentally practicing what she’d say to Zuko in her head when she’d finally heard thumping and familiar indignant yelling from down the hall. Her heart swelled at the sound of Zuko’s voice after a couple of months without him. If he was fighting back against literal prison guards then he’s at least a little bit okay.
“What are you doing? Where are you taking me?” He’d been slammed into a little chair in the middle of the room and called back, “I didn’t do anything wrong!”
She resisted the urge to smile at his indignance and steeled her voice in order to sound annoyed.
“Come on, Zuko. We all know that’s a lie,” she huffed and glanced out the door at the guard stationed outside. “Leave! This isn’t your conversation,” she barked at him.
“How did you know I was here?” Zuko asked, his eye wide.
“Because I know you so well,” Mai teased. “The warden’s my uncle, you idiot,” she said as she brought out the letter he’d written her, “the truth is, I guess I don’t know you. All I get is a letter? You could have at least looked me in the eye when you ripped out my heart.”
She cringed internally at herself. She had to make sure any guard that was left stationed outside felt compelled to leave once they’d heard a bad enough breakup speech.
Zuko had seemed to catch on. “I didn’t mean to–”
“You didn’t mean to? Dear Mai, I’m sorry you have to find out this way but I’m leaving.”
“Stop! This isn’t about you. This is about the Fire Nation!” Really? That’s the best he could come up with?
She bunches up the letter and throws it at him. “Thanks, Zuko. That makes me feel all better.”
He grabbed her hands and looked her in the eyes. He makes a decent desperate ex-boyfriend. “Mai, I never wanted to hurt you, but I have to do this to save my country.”
“Save it?” She yanks her hands out of his grip, “you’re betraying your country!” Admittedly, this was painful to say to his branded face, which was indicative of his previous efforts to save the loyal citizens of his country.
He seemed to know what she was thinking, as usual, and let his posture relax into resignation. “That’s not how I see it.”
She glanced out the door and found that they’d been left alone in their tirades. She let herself guide her hand towards his face, edging against his scar. “How have you been?” Mai asked softly.
Zuko huffed. “How much do you want to know?”
“You know when I said to leave the palace and smile once in a while, I didn’t mean for you to take it literally and get beat up by my uncle. How did you end up here? What the fuck did you do?”
Much to her surprise, the right side of his face turned pink enough to rival the skin on his scar and he looked away, bashful. Her mouth opened in shock and she found herself unable to stop a wicked grin from forming on her face. “Zuko. Please tell me you didn’t follow some boy–”
“So! How have you and Ty Lee been?” He cut her off. Fine. She tabled her question for later.
She dropped her hand and sighed. “I haven’t seen her for a while. I heard she’s here though. With Azula.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. What are you planning?”
“I’m in on an escape plan with a couple of other prisoners. There’s no doubt that Azula’s gonna end up finding us. Can you hold her off if you find her?”
“I’m not fighting Ty Lee, Zuko.”
“I didn’t ask you to. Just stop Azula from whatever she’s going to do to me. Team up with Ty Lee or something, I don’t know.”
“That’s a lot to ask for, Zuko. After what, three months?”
“I’m really sorry, Mai, but your uncle, my sister, and my father are all trying to kill me, and I don’t want to find out which one of them’s gonna be the first to get to me. You’re my only chance at fighting them.” Never give up without a fight.
Before she had been able to respond, the door flung open, Zuko had sent a blast of fire (why was it colorful?) towards her feet and got himself out the door.
She sighed. Dick. He was right, though. Some of the most powerful people in the Fire Nation were after his head. She really was his only shot at true survival. No one would ever expect the daughter of a noble to save the traitorous ex-Crown Prince. Azula would laugh at the irony of it all if she ever snapped out of her own character.
She had had to wait another twenty minutes before someone came to get her out of the cell. So much for the perks that came with being the warden’s niece. The gondolas were the only way on and off the island the prison was on, so she ran towards the direction of the exits.
Upon arriving at the gondolas, she had figured out that she was too late. In the distance, she could hear Ty Lee yell, “they’re about to cut the line!” and focused her gaze on the two guards retrieving a saw from storage and lining it up with the line holding up the gondolas. Fuck. Luckily, Azula hadn’t seemed to hurt Zuko too badly, if his grip on that boy in the gondola was anything to go by. Hm.
Snapping out of her reverie, she unsheathed the four stilettos hidden in her sleeve and flung them towards the guards cutting the line, causing them to let go of the saw and fly backwards against the wall, pinning them against the surface.
One of the pinned guards looked at her incredulously. “What are you doing?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Saving the jerk who dumped me.”
Two other guards had wasted no time in running towards her and punched forward with identical blasts of fire. She managed to unsheathe two more blades and pin one of the guards by the wrist against the same wall as the previous guard. The other guard paused, looking back at the guards pinned behind her. Quickly snapping out of it, she launched two more flames towards Mai, who was slipping underneath the lines, trying to locate the other blades on her body. From her landing spot, Mai could see two guards coming towards her from the hallway, so she wielded a couple of blades and sent the guards flying back as she pinned their uniforms against the floor behind them.
On her left, she could see three guards gaining on her. Quickly realising that she would be short on blades, she pulled the guard closest to her towards her own body and lodged blades into the cuffs of the two guards remaining, causing them to fall back against the bars lodged into the line and effectively removing one of them. Mai quickly grabbed a stiletto from her boot and pinned the guard she was holding against the ground by forcing a knife through the collar of her uniform.
After successfully evading the guards in her immediate vicinity, Mai moved to kick the remaining bar from out of its position in the line, causing the gondolas to resume their movement. Out of breath, Mai looked from where she was to see if she could locate Zuko on the quickly disappearing gondola, trying to express both love and contempt towards him through her eyes.
Not soon after, however, she’d been captured by two guards who had her wrists pinned behind her. She looked up to find Azula and Ty Lee staring at her; Ty Lee staring at her with equal parts concern and equal parts wonder, and Azula looking at her with hatred and scorn. Mai lifted her head. There wasn’t anything Azula could do to her to make her afraid.
“Leave us alone,” Azula commanded from the guards. “I never expected this from you,” she sneered, “The thing I don't understand is "Why?" Why would you do it? You know the consequences.”
Mai allowed herself to bare her soul to Azula. “I guess you just don't know people as well as you think you do. You miscalculated. I love Zuko more than I fear you.” This was the wrong thing to say to Azula, and all three of them knew it.
While she would never otherwise openly admit it, Azula had a small burst of insecurity back on Ember Island, as they all had. Once Zuko had gone to bed, she’d confessed to Ty Lee and Mai that she had always resented Zuko over the fact that their mother had shown more love and care towards him growing up. The unfortunate truth of the Royal Family is that while Zuko, albeit temporarily, received love from at least one of his parents, Azula had never had the privilege of remembering when a parent had genuinely cared for her. Her father never viewed her as a human being and had effectively disabled all the feeling from out of her, and her own mother was afraid of her. Her own mother was scared of her, but she never held more fear for Azula than she held love for Zuko.
In hindsight, Mai knew it was shitty to deploy Azula’s one public insecurity against her, but this would be the only way she could aid Zuko’s survival. Besides, she had been telling the truth. She hadn’t been afraid of Azula.
Azula’s face contorted into rage. “No, you miscalculated! You should have feared me more!” Azula’s body moved on its own accord into the telltale signs that she was preparing to call lightning from her fingertips. Mai narrows her eyes and unsheathes a shuriken from the thick belt surrounding her waist, preparing for Azula’s inevitable attack. She tracked Ty Lee’s eyes and Azula’s breathing. While a simple blade wouldn’t be enough to match Azula’s speed and agility, she had to do something. From the corner of her eye, she saw Ty Lee get into action. Before either Mai or Azula had realised, Ty Lee quickly juts out her hands, landing two precise strikes against Azula’s body, leaving Azula paralyzed on the ground.
Mai quickly realised that she had miscalculated. She hadn’t known that Ty Lee loved Mai more than she’d feared Azula.
With one look you take me back to everything I used to be
When everyone was seventeen with no ID, no ID
Now I wanna love myself
'Cause nothing else is guaranteed
'Cause inside I'm still the same me with no ID, no ID
Won't you be my cherry now?
When Mai’s uncle refused to imprison his own niece at the Boiling Rock, Ty Lee and Mai had been forced into a prison in some dingy Fire Nation colony. Azula had called for the highest security they could manage, but the prison they had been sent to was highly mismanaged and unregulated. While most people expected a rigid regimen and strict prison guards, this prison, at best, resembled a rundown zoo, like the one in Ba Sing Se Zuko had told her about. The prisoners were sent to their own devices save for the few times a month a lazy higher-up would arrive to do routine checks.
The prisoners being left to their own devices meant that they would all occasionally mingle. Mai, of course, stayed out of sight from everyone except for Ty Lee. Ty Lee, on the other hand, had always been a social butterfly and quickly surrounded herself by a group they came to know as the Kyoshi Warriors. While Ty Lee had usually taken to dominating any conversation she was a part of, she seemed content to sit in the corner quietly and just listen in on a conversation between the warriors. Ty Lee had had enough conversations with them in the prison cafeteria to want to invite them back into their room, as Ty Lee had called it. As if they’ve been staying at a resort on Ember Island and not in a shitty prison in the Fire Nation colonies.
Mai huffed to herself, amused at what the scene reminded her of. Ty Lee looked up at the sound and got up to join Mai to where she was standing in the opposite corner. While the years had allowed them both to grow taller, Mai had a few more inches of height over Ty Lee.
Ty Lee looked up at her and smiled softly. “Are you okay? How are you feeling?”
Mai nodded. “I’m fine. Seeing you sit in the corner over there reminded me of when we first met.”
“Oh!” A look of understanding fell over Ty Lee’s face. “At the Academy orientation right? Where you were brooding against the wall?”
Mai looked at her, indignant. “I wasn’t brooding!”
“Oh, you so were!” Ty Lee giggled, and it was possibly Mai’s favorite sound in the whole world. “Before I even began studying auras, I just knew that you had storm clouds above you! I wanted to come play in the rain.”
It was Mai’s turn to make fun of Ty Lee. “Is that why you trotted over to me? To play in my rain?”
Ty Lee scoffed, offended. “I never trotted. I was just excited to see you!”
“We had never spoken before that, Ty Lee.”
“But still! I knew from the moment I’d saw you that we’d be close. Look at us now! We’re even in prison together.” Only Ty Lee could smile at the prospect of being in prison with Mai. Anyone else would likely bash their head against the wall within the first five minutes. Ty Lee has been here with her for over a month and still looks like she wants to spend every waking minute with her.
While Mai had initially wanted to retort with something witty, she could only melt at how Ty Lee felt an instinctual pull at her. While Mai hadn’t allowed herself to feel the same at the time, she does feel the pull now. She feels everything now. Mai can’t exactly pinpoint the moment where she’d begun to allow herself to feel, but she does know that Ty Lee was paramount in this process. She’d allowed herself to hold on to feelings she’d never had before, purely because they had reminded her of Ty Lee.
Mai had always been taught to hold her head up high, to not speak unless spoken to, and to grab as little attention to herself as possible. Ty Lee had been taught to arch her back and hold her legs up straight and taut. She’d speak to anyone who hadn’t been spoken to, and grabbed attention wherever she travelled, even if it was unintentional. To this day, she had never spoken ill of her parents, only about the fact that they’d raised their kids to be identical copies of a matched set. Maybe there wasn’t anything purely remarkable about Ty Lee to everyone else; she’d come from a family with six other sisters who were acrobats just like her and had their hair braided the same way; she was just another noble Fire Nation girl, bred to become loyal to the Fire Lord. Maybe her smile never set anyone else’s heart on fire, and her eyes never seemed to hold the universe’s secrets in them to the common man. However, as Mai looked at her from her corner of their room to where Ty Lee had once again joined the Kyoshi Warriors on the floor, she held her head up high and felt a familiar fire ignite between them.
Even though I'm satisfied
I lead my life within a lie
Holding onto feelings
I'm not used to feeling
'Cause, oh, they make me feel alive
So won't you? Will you be my cherry?
So come on, talk to me, talk to me
Will you, will you be mine?
I see you watching me, will you be mine, baby?
Will I be your cherry?
So come on, talk to me, talk to me
Will you, will you be mine?
I see you watching me, watching me