Ty Lee does not know what to do. She is naked, flushed, and sweaty, lying in the Princess' bed, where she can hear Azula breathing haltingly beside her. The slightly less humid autumn air blows from off the Caldera through the open window, chilling her exposed body as she stares up at the ceiling, trying desperately to think of a way to end the awkward silence that has settled over them.
They are seventeen and they have just had sex with each other for the first time, and now Ty Lee does not know what to do.
It was not her first time, not by a long shot, but she thinks that it was Azula's, considering how the Princess kept demanding that Ty Lee explain everything she was doing and how she needed to be told where to put her fingers. However, this was different than anything T Lee has ever experienced. This was not a pick-up in a bar that basically amounted to an exchange of orgasms and a half-hearted promise to do it again sometime. Azula is one of her best friends, and their relationship has been slowly progressing towards this since they were children.
The first time Ty Lee kisses Azula, they are ten years old. Ty Lee has wanted to for at least a year and has finally reconciled herself with the fact that if she gets her lips burned off as a result, that will just have to be the price she pays to live. Azula does not burn her lips off, but she does push her away in shock almost as soon as their lips touch. They are behind the dining room at the Royal Fire Academy just after lunch, and Azula goes back inside to sulk at the table in the corner with Mai without another word. It is not at all romantic, not at all the way Ty Lee pictured it. She spends the better part of the next year pretending it never happened and hoping Azula will do the same, instead of mocking her for it or spreading it around so that it will eventually get back to her parents, who would surely punish her for risking her relationship with the Fire Lord's daughter for something as silly as a childhood crush.
And then one day, when they are eleven and walking through the royal gardens behind the palace, looking for the cat that was once kept by Azula's mother and now skulks haplessly around the grounds, yowling at birds and small rodents and hating Azula, the Princess holds her hand, her sweaty palms and twitching fingers betraying her uncharacteristic nervousness. Ty Lee feels a rush in her stomach, and it is all she can do to not look too happy in case this is some sort of joke that only Azula would find funny. And then, when they reach one of the many cherry trees that speckle the garden, one with a twisted trunk from where it had grown around something that had long since been removed, Azula finally kisses her back. It is soft and careful and perfect, everything Ty Lee imagined her first kiss would be, and she decides to pretend the other one does not exist.
"That cat mocks me, Ty Lee, and as heir to the Fire Nation, I must put an end to it," Azula tells her later, but Ty Lee does not think they were ever looking for the cat at all.
The kisses are ever only lips pressed against each other until Azula retrieves Ty Lee from the circus. They have not seen each other in over a year, but that night, Ty Lee finds herself on a tent on her back with a tongue in her mouth that does not belong to her, wondering where exactly Azula learned to kiss like that, as the fire still crackles cheerfully outside. But as soon as she tries to slip her fingers up Azula's sides under her shirt—because Ty Lee has learned some tricks too—the Princess pulls away, her face rapidly growing red, and refuses to look at her for the rest of the evening. The kisses stop when Mai is with them, because she has an annoying and probably not accidental habit of going into loud coughing fits and ruining the mood whenever she finds them attached at the mouth.
They return to the Fire Nation as heroes, and after that Ty Lee and Azula spend most of their suddenly abundant free time lounging around the latter's bedchambers alternating between making out and complaining about how bored they are, but the kisses always stop at kisses. Ty Lee does not try to venture under Azula's clothes again.
On a stifling afternoon at the beginning of the summer, Azula takes Ty Lee by the hand and leads her outside to the garden. She does not say a word, but as they pick through paths that have fallen into disrepair in Princess Ursa's absence and Fire Lord Ozai's obsession with the Avatar, Ty Lee knows that they are looking for the cherry tree.
When they finally come across it, in need of a trim and surrounded by weeds and decaying cherries, Azula produces a stiletto that looks like one of Mai's from her robes and they carve each other's names into the trunk.
"Now our love will be immortalized forever," Azula tells her. "A romance that matches the Fire Nation itself in strength and scale."
Azula has always had a way with words, and Ty Lee thinks it is the most beautiful thing she has ever heard. Azula kisses her and the moment is perfect.
For a long time after that, Ty Lee is convinced that their relationship is over for good. How can it not be? Ty Lee betrayed Azula, and then Azula locked her in prison and went insane. By the time Ty Lee returns from the Boiling Rock, Azula is in an asylum, and the acrobat decides not to visit her before she leaves for Kyoshi Island. She will feel bad about the decision for years, until Zuko tells her that Azula was completely non-responsive and prone to violent outbursts at that point in time anyway and Azula reluctantly backs him up. Even then, Ty Lee will regret not stopping by, so that Azula would have at least known she still cared about her.
When Ty Lee returns to the Caldera as a Kyoshi Warrior, the Princess is angry at everyone and everything and only lucid on some days. Zuko and Mai seem to think this is some kind of remarkable improvement, but Ty Lee sadly remembers the girl who conquered an empire just because she felt like it and cannot see how any of her current behavior can be deemed a good thing.
"You haven't been here," Mai tells her, her voice devoid of the accusation Ty Lee is expecting. "She isn't that person anymore, and holding her to those standards will only hurt her." So Ty Lee does her best to shelve her nostalgia about Crown Princess Azula of the Fire Nation, Conqueror of Ba Sing Se, and focus on the snarling, sickly, hurt Azula in front of her, and slowly, Azula improves, just as Zuko and Mai have been telling her.
There are more and more lucid days, fewer and fewer restraints, until Zuko takes Azula to find their mother. Ty Lee could have told him she was not ready. Anyone could have told him that, even Mai, who is communicating with Ty Lee through letters and has not actually seen Azula in nearly a year. Azula still has hallucinations and is still wildly unstable, but when Ty Lee voices her concern, Zuko merely shrugs. "She insisted."
When Zuko returns without his sister, news spreads quickly through the palace that Princess Azula has run away. Some are relieved, a few are worried, Ty Lee is terrified. The next day, the Kyoshi Warriors and half the army are on their way to the dense, spirit-inhabited forests of the Southern Fire Nation. Ty Lee's stomach ties itself in knots the entire journey, wondering if she has already seen Azula for the last time.
The Princess is found by a foot soldier that Ty Lee has never seen before as the sun is setting on the fourth day of searching. Ty Lee is present when she is reunited with Zuko. He hugs her, and to everyone's surprise, including probably her own, Azula sinks into it.
"I can't go back there," she gasps into her brother's shoulder. "I can't go back to the hospital."
"Okay," Zuko agrees easily as he rubs her back. "You don't have to."
Azula will never say why. As far as Ty Lee knows, no one will ever ask.
Ty Lee is kept on as Azula's guard, except now instead of standing outside the door of a hospital room, she is charged with making sure Azula eats a solid meal and goes outside at least once a day. Ty Lee takes her on walks through the garden, pointing out all the spots where they played as children before Zuko was banished and Azula was not allowed to play anymore. Azula rarely says anything. She seems lost in her own mind most of the time, and then one day when they are in the garden, she takes Ty Lee's hand. She does not look at her, and she does not say a word. A prick of panic rises through the acrobat's body, because she does not know if Azula is ready for this. She has been home less than two months.
But Azula leads her to a cherry tree, and it takes her a moment to notice that the Princess is staring at the letters they carved into the twisted trunk long ago, when they were fourteen and thought their love was invincible, and to realize that this is the tree where Azula first kissed her.
"These are the only memories I want to revisit," Azula tells her softly, and then she is kissing her, and Ty Lee allows it to happen because none of the people she has kissed since she was ten have felt the way that kissing Azula feels.
"Would you… like to stay for dinner?"
They have been dating for five months now, but Ty Lee still eats her meals in the servants' quarters with the palace guards and the other Kyoshi Warriors unless she is invited to do otherwise.
"Okay," she squeaks. Azula's clammy hand gropes in the sheets until it finds hers, and Ty Lee figures this must be a good sign. She drops her head to the side, looking at the girl next to her for the first time since their bodies parted and expecting to find her staring determinedly at the ceiling like Ty Lee was. Instead, golden eyes bore into her own.
"Is this real?" Azula whispers. With her hair down and strewn around her face and across the silk pillowcase and her lack of broad-shouldered, royal robes, she looks very young. Ty Lee smiles sadly. Azula asks her this question less often now than she once did, and Ty Lee can appreciate the subtle improvements that, when she first returned to the Caldera, only frustrated her.
"Of course it is," she answers, reaching over and tapping Azula on the nose, a signal they developed the week Azula returned to the palace, in case her mind ever tried to lie to her.
"Good," she replies, and for a moment she seems satisfied, but then her eyes widen in horror. "It was good, wasn't it? I felt good about it."
"Yeah," Ty Lee assures her, stifling a giggle. "Yeah, it was really good." Azula narrows her eyes, trying to spot a lie. She has never said anything, but Ty Lee has gathered that the Princess is insecure about the disparities in their levels of experience. She is not used to not effortlessly being the best at everything she attempts. True, it was not the best sex Ty Lee has ever had, but it was because it was with Azula.
"Can I ask you a question?"
Azula's eyebrows shoot up in curiosity. "Hmm?"
"Remember that first night in the tent when we were on our way to pick Mai up from Omashu during the war?" The Princess nods, and Ty Lee can see a nervous understanding wash over her face. "Why didn't you want me to take your shirt off. It's not like you have anything to be ashamed of. I mean," she runs her eyes across Azula's body, absentmindedly licking her lips, "no one has anything to be ashamed of, but wow, you really don't."
Azula sighs and drops her eyes to the sheets. "I didn't want you to see the bruises." Ty Le understands. Azula's skin is speckled with scars, some from her rigorous training and others that are more suspicious, but there have not been bruises that were not self-inflicted on her body for three years. Ty Lee knows they were there though. She knows what happened.
"You know it wouldn't have mattered right?" she asks softly. "It wouldn't have changed how I felt about you."
"It would have changed out I felt about me," Azula answers quietly. They lie there for a moment, looking at each other, and then Ty Lee rests her hand on her girlfriend's hip and leans in to kiss her again, but Azula slips out of her grasp.
"Are you okay?" Ty Lee frowns as the Princess climbs out of bed and pulls a robe over her body. "Should I not have brought it up? I'm sorry. I've just… I've been wondering…"
"Get dressed," Azula tells her in lieu of an answer. "Come with me."
She takes Ty Lee by the hand down to the gardens, and it takes the acrobat longer than it probably should to realize that they are going to the cherry tree with the twisted trunk where they once carved their names to make sure that their love would be timeless.
"I've decided to have a bench erected here," Azula announces. "As a monument to the most unlikely and enduring romance the Fire Nation has ever known. Future generations will sit upon it and remember all we went through to be together."
"Aww!" Ty Lee coos as she squeezes Azula's arm. "That's so sweet!" She leans up to peck her girlfriend on the cheek, and the Princess' face reddens the way it did seven years ago, when Ty Lee sprung that first kiss on her behind the Royal Fire Academy for Girls. "Future Fire Lords and Fire Ladies can sit here and tell our story to the little princes and princesses."
"We will be in all the books. The Fire Nation's great romance," Azula agrees with a solemn nod.
Ty Lee giggles. "I bet they'll even write songs about us."
"Ty Lee, I love you," Azula says abruptly, and the acrobat's mouth drops open. She gasps for breath for a moment, and she can see panic in Azula's eyes that she can only assume is caused by a fear that the sentiment will be unreturned.
"You do?" she finally squeaks when she regains her capacity for speech.
Azula's eyes dart around the garden as she searches for a way out. When she cannot think of one, her shoulders sag. "I do."
"Well good, because I love you too." It takes a moment for Azula to process what has just been said, but when she does, she breaks into the widest smile Ty Lee has ever seen grace the face of the Fire Nation's princess. She tugs Ty Lee toward her, and the acrobat obliges happily, wrapping her arms around her girlfriend's neck and pressing their lips together.
They sink into the grass in the spot where a marble bench will one day sit, where Azula will slide a ring onto Ty Lee's anxious finger, where they will decide to become parents, where they will watch a girl with sleek black hair and golden eyes turn perfect cartwheels with her older cousin, and where one day, a grey-haired Ty Lee will kiss Azula's wrinkled cheek, and despite her aching joint and clouding vision, Azula will smile back at her the same way she did when she was eleven, kissing Ty Lee for the first time beneath the cherry tree.
A/N: This is probably the closest to fluff I will ever come. Anyway, this came to me on Thursday at work, and I wrote it out on Thursday and Friday by hand in a notebook because I didn't have access to a computer. I didn't really originally know where it was going at first, but I think it came together pretty okay in the end.
Reviews are always very appreciated, even on oneshots.