Ty Lee is a ghost.
She's been everywhere and nowhere, the world passing as easily as the space her body moves through, and her memories are as distant as the life she's left behind. She's twenty four and she outruns her regrets like she outruns the fourteen year old girl with braids and thin, pallid smiles. She leaves footprints disappearing into time and the lingering knowledge that this isn't all she used to be. She used to be something more.
When the war ends, she drifts through the rest of her life with the ease of a routine, a practiced drill, a dance. Kyoshi Island is a grave, and she haunts it easier than she revisited the remembrance of a golden-eyed girl.
Marriage is an important occasion, even amongst people who have since stopped being friends. When Mai summons her, Ty Lee arrives, more out of honor for who they used to be than out of the bond that comes with friendship or love. The Fire Nation is brighter than she remembers it. It shines out of the dark memories of the war and through ten years of self-banishment and lies she stopped telling herself. Its beauty is ancient and new all at once, and faced towards its new era, its old legacies decayed, flaking and sloughed off like paint.
Azula is here too. Somewhere in the city, the princess had lived as she did, and waited just the same for the world to forget them, to unfreeze them in time, to come creeping, burgeoning back to life.
The capital is blanketed with night lights, its vastness reminding her of the grains of sand, washing and ebbing away, and that like with all things, this too was just a transience. Ty Lee moved between the buildings, through the streets, as anonymously as the people she found in the alleyways and inns, emerging in the glimmering lanterns of the palace halls and summer pavilion. No one recognized her anymore, and each person is as faceless as the last.
She doesn't recognize her the first time. Ty Lee's too busy trying to find herself in an unfamiliar crowd, dodging hurriedly between servants with laden trays, trying to obscure herself before she can be seen that she has to look twice. But surely enough, as she marvels how easy it is for her heart to suddenly stop, she knows it's Azula, even without the retinue of soldiers, even without the crown and the fire that had been in her eyes.
The sense of terror that had been so habitual is mysteriously missing, but her hands tremble anyway, even if all she's ever been good at is holding things together. She has spent her life being buoyant and civil in place of dutiful and loyal.
Azula remains enthralling and all the more beautiful, and every bit as Ty Lee imagined her to have grown to be. When the fabricated reintroductions pass, they remain detached but polite. They don't talk about the asylum, just like they don't talk about Kyoshi Island, nor Zuko, nor Mai, nor Suki, nor the man Ty Lee was supposed to marry by year's end. They are congenial, not asking questions to things they already knew. Ty Lee is both relieved and heartsick to find that Azula is different, but summarily the same.
"Did you rejoin the circus?" The princess asks out of genuine interest rather than veiled malice when they are finally alone, still mindful of the loitering dignitaries, the other couples that shared the garden veranda. The elegance in Azula's poise as her finger ran the rim of the glass is perfect, but the years have made Ty Lee wiser and she finds the worn holes in the princess' decrepit defenses inexplicably easily.
"No." She wonders if Azula has always been this obvious, if the years passed yielded a new clarity or if the princess herself has worn tired of artifices that were too flimsy to protect her. She wonders if Azula had lost more than the throne, her pride, the gleam in her eyes and the conquest in her smile.
"Don't look like that." Azula lifts the glass to her humorless lips, and through the terrace they heard the pavilion erupt into thunderous applause at the royal couple made their entrance somewhere distantly.
"Like what?" Ty Lee asks as she watched Mai smile and lean in to kiss her husband. The crown glitters in the Fire Lady's hair prettily, its jewels sparkling coldly in the light of countless torches.
The reply was uttered so quietly that Ty Lee was sure that she had imagined it.
"I'm the one who should be ashamed."
At once, she wants Azula to take it back, to return to all the strength she had known her for, all the things she knew her to be, the powers inherent in the princess she had known forever ago, because this isn't who she is and for all the lies Azula wielded like knives, it's the truth that cuts straight through Ty Lee that like her, Azula has languished and decayed.
Ty Lee is a footnote in history, a shadow cast by flame in place of where her body had once been.
Azula's glass is untouched as she watches dispassionately as her brother marries the friend who had passed her over, the days of her prime burnished in memory, her life lived by those less deserving. Ty Lee doesn't pity her. Pity implies regret, and she wouldn't know how to apologize, how to say that she too had lived her defeats in quiet moments, in every breath, in every morning, waking and dying.
They're back at Ty Lee's room before the end of the reception. The speech she was supposed to give falls out of her dress and ends up on the floor along with her shoes and Azula's coat. They leave a trail of clothing from the doorway, stumbling into the room, bumping into walls and overturning furniture.
She doesn't remember how they got here, and she frowns as the top of her vanity is swept off, her back hitting the cold mirror as she is lifted up and placed on the table.
"That was my best moisturizer." Ty Lee says faintly, sighing into Azula's lips as the princess unlaces her dress.
They end up on the bed somewhere between Ty Lee's torn bodice and clumsy fumbling.
She's hurried and almost frantic, unable to move fast enough, ravenous and drinking in every memory of Azula on her skin before she can wake up and realize she's still on Kyoshi Island, in the bed she shared with her loutish brute of a fiancé asking her for his necktie and breakfast.
Dreams are treacherous, but never as painful as reality.
Azula strips her naked, kissing away eons to find her under the dust, and Ty Lee is fourteen again, uncovered, unburied, revived from stone and ash. She marvels to find herself as well, unbroken, undiminished, and whole.
Azula is tireless. She has years to make up for, and more. She learns prodigiously, and each time is exhausting and somehow more vitalizing than the last.
Ty Lee's hips move on their own, in time with the long, languid strokes of the princess' fingers, until it's too much and in her own ears she hears herself begging, pushing futilely against Azula's shoulders. "N-No, please…" Her head is heavy with wine and the summer heat. Azula's lips are dizzying, trailing down her body, imprinting where she's been, pulling them back in time, pulling Ty Lee from the earth.
"Please." Her protests are weak, her sighs climbing to shallow, panting breaths. Her hands run through Azula's long dark hair, clinging, holding the girl to her body, afraid to let go.
"Please." She cries pitifully.
Azula's eyes are molten steel. "You never visited me." The soft gentleness of her hands are unmerciful when she pauses inopportunely, cruelly, hovering as Ty Lee mewls pathetically in her ear. In the dark, her voice gives nothing away, and Ty Lee trembles as Azula traced a delicate finger up her thigh.
Not even once. Ty Lee knows it just as keenly as her. Ten years are gone into the ground, hard and cold. Azula changes, but stays the same, repenting sins the world tells her to regret, begging for the things that had been hers at the start. Azula's cracks run through her like fissured lightning, and in the darkness they are bleeding through, brimming and spilling out.
"I waited for you." She whispers when Ty Lee presses her face to the princess' neck and screams her name. She meets her at the pinnacle and follows her down, hushing their gasps, catching them and bringing them, at last, together.
For the first time in so long, Ty Lee doesn't dream, and when she wakes up, Azula is still sleeping.
Ty Lee is a ghost. She rises before the dawn, silent and ethereal, extracting herself from the warmth of the bed and Azula's arms, retrieving her scattered clothing, tracing herself through the broken room, revisiting the places she's missed, and saying goodbye. With her bag on her shoulder, her things gathered quietly and haphazardly, it's easier to fall into old habits than it is to fight the person she has become, to do as she has done endlessly before.
The sky outside glows bright with heralding light. The night is gone and with it Ty Lee's armor peels back into place, slowly and fitting her into the pieces of her life, slowly grinding back into motion.
But Azula remains under the sheets, her hair splayed around her as soft as dusk. Her coat in Ty Lee's hands bears the insignia of a general instead of a princess', and Ty Lee wonders if dynasties could rise and fall, if civilizations could change and grow, if Azula could leave herself behind and start anew, then why couldn't she as well.
Ty Lee's hand lifts again to find the tracks of blooming red she knows Azula has left on her skin. The princess' face is serene, and Ty Lee imagines what it would be like to tell her everything, to confess that she too had dreamt of this, that ever since they were children, Ty Lee had only wanted one thing.
Nations evolve, and so must they. Ty Lee leaves her fears, and the ticket to Kyoshi Island on the dresser. Out the window, the sky seeps open in blooming gold and blue, streaming in washing crepuscular shadows. She imagines what they would talk about, the things she would say when the princess came slowly, blinking awake.
Her heart in her throat, she touches Azula's shoulder, kneeling to brush her lips against the other woman's ear.
"Azula." Ty Lee says her name in reverence, in fond memory, marveling at the light playing on the curves of her body, the nakedness on the princess' face. The world has made them weary, their illusions all bygone, and they search for contentment instead of the lofty peaks of ambitions, but Ty Lee is surprised to see that it them all she still believes in their salvation. The hope sparked by Azula's eyes are a beginning, and she smiles at the caress running down her face .
"Azula, wake up, it's sunrise."