an end you can never find.
characters: katara, mai, ty lee, zuko.
…
She does not react when Ty Lee pushes her door open slowly, pointed pink boots needling into the floor with fraying nerves, because she already knows what she has come to say (she can hear the words in the hollow of her throat and she waits for them like rain to fall). She already knows Ty Lee is going to fling her arms about the narrow pass of her shoulders and remind her, assure her, that it is okay to feel something.
The terrible tragedy of it all stands to be, that Mai is just so tired of feeling some things. She is just so tired of fishing her own feelings from the deep wells of exhaustion and regret and decomposing love that she has no energy left.
And that is why, most of the time, Mai seems as if she feels nothing.
Ty Lee curls her arms around her waist, scoots herself across half of Mai's chair, and announces quietly that the honorable Fire Lord Zuko is engaged to be married in a quarter of a year away from today. Maybe what she feels rattling around in her chest is some sort of explosive sadness, maybe it is the beautiful sunrise of something pleased, but she finds it difficult to place words to it when Ty Lee is trying to comfort her, trying to seal up some invisible aching wound that Mai doesn't even know she has.
It isn't until she leaves her home in the center of the Caldera, later, that she even sees them; it's an odd experience, to witness the two of them so entwined the way she'd once imagined herself. But she can see the differences, the grins that tear across his lips, the shameless, sinking way that she leans into his side and lets something she can't quite see swallow her up completely.
The sun sets slowly around them and Mai wants to approach them, although she is parched dry for words of congratulation, completely bereft of anything other than vacant, tight-lipped smiles and reminders that she is okay—
for some reason, she must convince everyone else that she is fine
—and that she will be there, in the fraction of time when their wedding will occur, and she will toss flower petals just like the rest and send a bountiful gift of fruit for fertility and prosperity to the Fire Lord and his Lady.
She is certain that this fabricated soliloquy would have gone over so well.
…
Mai hears from Ty Lee that Katara is concerned that she refuses to be honored in the toast, and she no longer has the capacity to flinch. (Mai is far too worn to let surprises leech her energy, too worn to pretend it even matters.) But most of all, she knows what grand dishonor it would be to have eternity frozen in pity-sadness in the form of eyes over glasses, staring at her in the centre of their wedding.
She is not worth any honor, unless it is an honor that she could not love the Fire Lord the way his intended bride does; because if it is one thing that yanks her to extremes, to outward shows of emotion, it is the idea that she was not enough, that she did not love, that she knew no emotion.
Mai finds a lot of value in the kinds of love that are secret, like whispers, because she has always been softspoken over things she cared deeply about (and no one was there on the nights she had curled herself close and explained the intangible piece of herself Zuko had cut and stolen from her that she would never get back, even now).
What drives her to frothing, overflowing hatred is the way that everyone thinks she feels nothing, because Mai feels everything so suddenly and sharply and in focus that it short circuits her into a woman heavy with sighs and frowns and narrowed eyes.
There are so many things she never learned to express, and happiness is the top tier of it all. She is happy for Zuko, for Katara, but she will not be the centerpiece of their wedding (she has enough trouble trying to stay away from the way people tangle her between the two of them, as if she has any business there).
She would rather remind people that trying to overlap her and Katara and dissect the differences between the two of them, find what qualities made Katara his match and what qualities made her unlovable, she would so much rather remind people that she was in love, too, and Katara is in love, and Zuko was and is in love with all of these differences.
(She would so much rather remind people of how much she loved Zuko for being able to love so many different things, because she couldn't.)
She tells Ty Lee that perhaps she shouldn't attend the wedding.
…
The palace is haunted by a gaunt, beautiful ghost after Zuko and Katara are married, and no one has the means to set it free.
(It is that piece of Mai that never really escaped, the way her name still seems to flit across people's tongues, and she wonders whether they will ever speak of Zuko and Katara without her.)
…
notes: i just really wanted to write one of these one-sided maiko and zutara things because i love mai and i think it's annoying as hell when people paint mai as a terrible match for zuko. granted, i think katara is a better match, but mai is still a really great match too. she probably gets tired of the way people in zutara fanfiction always feel so sorry for her because she doesn't feel sorry for herself (and most of all, she's really pissed at those of you who seem to think she is unfeeling—she has a lot of emotions but none of them are for the public eye).
hope this made some sense!