A/N:

This – above all – is the story of a friendship. A friendship between two women. Two very different, very contrasting women. Yet who better to understand you, truly? After all, when you look in the mirror, the reflection that you see is a perfect opposite.

I'm writing this for catharsis, really. Atonement, because I feel Mai is too often cheated by the writing of the series and the fans—including myself. There will be implied relationships in this fic, and they might not be ones you like, but they are what they are. I'd encourage you to watch and wait and see what develops.

This first segment is nothing more than a prologue. What follows won't be as much "prose;" it will have legitimate dialogue, and action, and scenes and so forth rather than just reflections and thoughts. As always, reviews are lovely~ They make the world go round, and flakes like me keep writing, I promise they do.

Also, consider this your standard, standing disclaimer. AtLA isn't mine. I'm playing in someone else's sandbox.

Book One

Mai

The silver swan, who, living had no note

When death approached unlocked her silent throat

Orlando Gibbons

She sleeps alone.

Her bed was not always so empty. Once there was night after night of shadowed smiles and sweet nothings and promises of things to come. But those promises turned into realities such as this is what forever will be like and questions of is this what forever will be like? and suddenly there was a seed of loneliness planted in her heart.

It thrived on quiet moments, like that day in his office not two weeks before. He was lost in his work, such an easy feat for him, and she was attempting the same in a neat pile of correspondence. At first the task had been pleasant, exhilarating, suggested with a smile on his face, an arm around her waist, his breath warm as he murmured that she could prove what a brilliant Lady she already could make. That was five years ago.

Now the letters were nothing more than pruning shears, trimming that plant as it secretly bloomed. His advisers wrote of their lofty ideals and ambitions that were harder to bury than Ozai who slept deep in his cell. The nobility was armed with smiles and coquettish niceties as they lined their daughters up to take her place. Every missive became another stab, a sharp point of those knives she'd long since left behind as a relic of a war-torn past.

When she resumed carrying one in her sleeve, it was another careful snip of those thorny branches. The fact that he didn't notice was a week's worth of gardening.

She had taken to shuffling and reshuffling the papers while he remained oblivious and she remained embittered about how things could have been different. What different even was eluded her until one note slipped from the rest, a too-formal, too-ornate script decrying her suitability as a wife. The content was nothing new; it was the climate of her heart that had finally become different.

For one brief moment the thought slipped like a whisper of silk across her mind that he might already have replaced her.

But his very posture erased the notion altogether. The tension in his neck, in his shoulders. Hard—like his father's face, or his sister's heart. A worse fate than being neatly shoved aside was knowing she could somehow be held responsible for the weight that molded him into their likeness.

"Would you like me to rub your shoulders?" was her means of making amends, of pouring poison over that plant, a paltry attempt to uproot it. And he would always agree, give her one of his half-formed smiles that in and of itself spoke of a distance she once had thought bridged forever.

That day he said no, and that was that.

Snip, snip.

They tell her to smile. It will make things easier. When has anything been easy? It's another word that she has never known the full meaning of in her life. It is not for people like her to have things easy. Anyone who says otherwise is ignorant, foolish, naïve, and she blames herself for ever believing those lies. It was the girl in her that did, the same girl who loved a shy and awkward prince, who trusted a conniving, manipulative princess, and everyone knew both of those had long since ceased to exist.

She would not believe them again. She doesn't smile. Her face, the mask she wears, is the last thing in her control. She dons her gloves and tends her gardening yet again.

###

It was exactly three days later that she felt the first pain.