Title: Temerity
Status: Oneshot, complete.
Pairing: Mai/Zuko
Rating: T
Notes: This is the longest thing I've written in one sitting since my writer's block slapped me in the face. I have a huge soft spot of Maiko, so I had to include that here, but this is more Mai centric than anything, because I love her, and she's beautiful.
The comb, carved from a single piece of ivory, sluices through Mai's loose hair with all the ease of a knife through water. If there is anything about her physical appearance that she takes a heavy dose of prideful vanity in, it's her hair.
It is not quite as luxuriously thick as Azula's was – before self-inflected abuse and royally ordained confinement made it ragged and brittle by turns – nor does it possess that rare wave that hallmarks Ty Lee's hair out of its coiled braid. But it is straight as the blades Mai straps to her wrists, and such a pure black as to look stained blue in some lights. It reflects like a still body of water, smooth to the eyes and the touch.
And she has worn it in the exact same style since she was a very little girl who squirmed too much for her mother's tastes (never mind that she was a breathing statue as compared to Ty Lee, no, never mind that). Back then, the rarity of her smile was linked firmly to shyness, rather than the apathy she came to armor herself in out of self-defense.
The comb stills, caught halfway between her elegantly carved skull and her trim waist. Its motions pick up again not half a minute later, but the fingers fastened round its handle tremble – the slightest, most restrained of quivers.
Of all the things about her, her hair has always matched up the least with her carefully constructed personality. Maybe it suited the little girl who wore ribbons and stuttered in the presence of a handsome prince who rarely glanced her way until she began to grow breasts and hips (and then he was scarred, and then he was gone, and as with so many other things, she had to hide how much she cared). Maybe it suited the child who wore dusty pink on her cheeks, but it stands out as a discrepancy on the woman who wears knives beneath her clothes.
Mai starts to yank the comb back and forth, hard enough to make her eyes itch and water (because she is not crying, no). The framed mirror that's nailed to her bedroom wall reflects a twenty year old's disinterested face, not a child's glazed, furtive stare.
"You ought to keep this hairstyle, Mai. It distracts from your face. You aren't nearly pretty enough to pull off a topknot. Don't look at me like that, young lady; you should be grateful that Agni blessed you with petty hair, at the very least."
"She was such a pretty child. What in Koh's Lair happened?"
"Don't say that where she can hear you, dear."
Mai eyes the comb in her fist (when did her bones and skin knit themselves into a fist?) and pictures its teeth in her father's throat.
She can't kill (wouldn't kill, for all that her father deserves it) her parents, but she can thwart them. They wanted her to marry a prince and pave their way to the height of privilege; they did not expect her to wed a Fire Lord who would happily see her father weighted down by iron.
She'll have to settle for turning what they wanted from her on its head.
"Not nearly pretty enough to pull off a topknot. You're no Princess Azula, or even a Ty Lee."
"No," Mai says, quite clearly, because her reflection isn't there anymore. It's not a mirror, but a window, and her parents are on the other side. "No, I'm not."
She sets the comb down in the very center of her circular little vanity, bone white on plain, serviceable brown. Her fingers, nimble things that look like fleshy incarnations of her blades, sift through her hair, smooth tangles that aren't there.
With all the calculation, the deliberate restraint that's saved her tears and vulnerability (but never, ever pain, she was never safe from that) throughout the years, Mai twists her hair into a topknot.
Zuko glances up from a fat pile of paperwork (lists, treaties, letters, lists lists lists), just an automatic flick that serves to acknowledge Mai's slide into his office. But then they bounce up again, and the whole one twitches. His ink smeared fingertips still on the desk's surface.
"You changed your hair," he says, not as if it's a deathly shock. Just an observation of an unbidden change, a mundane shift.
"You do have a way of stating the unnecessarily obvious." Mai plants her hip on the desk's edge (this routine, this stagnant thing, will never change, even when this couple's neatly fastened topknots gray).
Zuko scrunches up his nose, sits back in his chair, and spreads his fingers over the sliding stacks of paperwork. "Anyone else would've made the same observation." Except Mai, herself, perhaps. But Mai is different.
Mai shrugs with neat twitches of her shoulders. The new distribution of pressure on her skull will take some getting used to. "I should start wearing it like this, right? If I'm going to wear a crown one day."
Zuko's carved lips twitch, smooth out again. "Will you wear a crown?" he asks his fiancé, quietly.
"Part of the package, isn't it?" Mai lifts her hand to smooth across a stripe of hair that drapes over her shoulder, her one concession to her childhood hairstyle.
"If you want it to be." Zuko reaches across the desk, and she lets him pull her minutely tremulous hands into his. "You're beautiful regardless of how you wear your hair."
Ah.
He's bad with words, this boy, this man, but sometimes, sometimes he has bright spots of clarity, and says exactly what she needs to hear from him before she has to ask for it.
" – Aren't nearly pretty enough."
"Like I care about something like that," she drawls, and bends like a willow across the heavy desk to touch their mouths together.
If her parents were here to see, she'd hoist her middle finger into the air.