Ty Lee spends her entire morning wondering if she should send Azula the message or not. She feels gross from her night out, but she feels even worse about the fact that things went so awry for she and her date. Not her date.

Asking Haru was such a mistake. And so was pushing Azula like she did, particularly at the party. Ty Lee wants closure, answers and maybe a taste of happily ever after. That should not be too much to ask for, but she still keeps debating.

Ty Lee has never redrafted or even proofread anything she has written. Texts to friends, notes, essays... but she cannot stop staring at and changing the words of what she wants to say.

Does she even know what she wants to say?

Ty Lee walks downstairs after her very long morning beauty ritual, and sits down beside her mother. Her mom is making marks on her students' essays as she gazes at a commercial for plastic surgery to attain those perfect Fire Nation features.

Those features Ty Lee does not have, but is beautiful without.

"Mom... you're a professor..." Ty Lee begins, unsure how to say any of this.

"Did you just notice?" Her mother chuckles and sips her lemony tea.

"No, I... you're good at saying the words you want to say," Ty Lee begins as she sits down on the plush sofa. "Can I ask you for something?"

"Yes. But there's some press conference with the Fire Lord on in a few minutes that I can't miss. I'm demanding that my students watch it, after all." But mom does put down her papers and look at Ty Lee.

It makes Ty Lee almost feel truly loved. Instead of just another initial on another uniform item or clothes rack in the messy apartment. At least sometimes mom will just talk to her.

"I have this..." Ty Lee looks down at the floor. She knows this is probably treason, but she knows she can be vague enough. "I have this girlfriend. And..."

"But you brought Haru to homecoming?" mom asks before realizing what Ty Lee is saying. "Oh. Is she not allowed to date?"

"You could say that." Ty Lee grimaces and sets her phone down in front of her mom. Mom holds it closer, and then in front of her, and at last grabs her glasses to read it. "I really upset her last night and I want to tell her how I feel. And that I'm sorry and I think I actually might love her."

Mom then purses her lips and sets down the phone. Slowly, she removes her glasses and neatly sets them aside.

"You need to tell her in person. That isn't something you could write. Even in a thousand page novel," mom insists and Ty Lee hates how right she is.

But before they can continue their conversation, the commercial ends and the program begins. Princess Azula looks incredible on television. Even today, when she has had so many layers of make-up and odd things poked into her to mask her rough night, the attention all goes directly to her, even if the cameras are aimed at her father.

She will speak, of course, and Ty Lee watches, chewing on her cereal and nearly breaking her teeth a few times when she finds herself chewing on nothing. And then biting on the spoon too hard before giving up on breakfast altogether.

Ty Lee looks at this image, this image that is so very different from the hurt girl who was so angry about Haru. Or the girl getting drunk at a party in hopes of somehow scoring Ty Lee in some inexplicable way. The girl who sucks on her blue highlighter, leaving traces of sticky red lipstick.

This girl, is the girl who will one day lead an empire. This girl, is the girl that everyone adores and talks about. This girl, is the girl who is dressed smoothly in business clothes, and not a uniform that starts the day flawless but winds up looking like she went through a tornado by the afternoon.

Ty Lee watches Azula, and is hypnotized by her, like everyone else is. The way she talks, the way she looks at people. It makes somebody feel important, even if Azula has no idea who they are. And, more importantly, it makes Azula seem very important, and seem like the kind of person you want to follow without batting an eye at anything odd.

She takes after her grandfather, then. Her grandfather, who turned against Sozin's regime, and used the war and the peace he instilled as an advantage. Ozai, while charismatic and clearly powerful, does not possess that kind of internal power.

It is probably something that people are just born with.

Or maybe the ability to start and end wars with a few sentences skips a generation.

Ty Lee smiles a little bit at that, and then remembers her dinner with Ozai. And then gets an incredibly terrible but incredibly good idea at the same time. She grabs her favorite pink sweater, adjusts her make-up that took her over an hour to apply, seizes her purse and races out to go get the girl she knows.

Not the beautiful robot on the television screen. The completely dysfunctional and awkward human who happens to probably secretly be filled with wires inside.


Azula sits down in the cool, air conditioned dressing room that smells like orange incense. Her father is still finishing up a few things, but she has been sent to lurk here alone. And cope with both her hangover and the fact that father is absolutely going to be talking to her about last night when they get home.

Unfortunately for her, father does not wait until they get home. They are both sitting in the limousine when he decides to breach the topic.

"What did you really do last night?" Ozai says and his quietness reveals the severity.

At Zuko, he shouts, rages. That's how Zuko got so brutally burnt. At Azula, he becomes very quiet and severe. That's how Azula knows she is better off, but hates it all the same.

"I went to an after-party with Mai," Azula says and his muscles tense. "I didn't do anything that you're thinking. But yes I did drink and no it wasn't a problem. I had Mai drive me home when I was done and it all was fine."

Ozai is now an alarming level of quiet. Quieter than he was when he picked her up from the hospital and told her exactly how things were going to change. Quieter than he was when Azula's outburst that landed her in said hospital occurred.

Azula hates that. "It was only an after-party. Only a party. What were you doing at my age, anyway?"

"Going to after-parties and fucking girls your age. And I regret all of the things I did when I was young. I won't see you make them. Not after you putting me through Koh's Realm and back," Ozai states and Azula wants to punch him.

For the first time in her life, she wants to punch him. And only because he is looking out for her best interest. She feels so ridiculous about that that she sighs and slumps in her chair. He seems to see it as a sign of defeat and submission, and it eases a bit of the tension in the limousine.

"That was two years ago," Azula says, hoping she does not sound indignant. "And I turned my life around. I did it myself and you were proud."

Proud. Her father was proud of her for brushing her hair and not going into hysterics about not being able to find her shoe immediately. His pride was always difficult to earn, which either speaks for his desperation at the time, or how weak he saw Azula as then.

"I know. You've kept it up and have been doing very well. You have the perfect life, and I refuse to let you risk it like that again," Ozai says and their conversation comes comfortably to a premature end when they reach their building.

They walk inside and are met by a girl sitting on the luxury benches, being given rather nasty looks by the staff and the few other privileged residents.

"Ty Lee." Azula's mouth could not have been drier, but she thinks it somehow is.

"That's your friend from dinner," Ozai says, not mentioning the skipping school incident. Azula glances at him, wondering if he will do the right thing and send her away because of said incident. "Perhaps she would like to stay for dinner again."

Then Azula realizes it. Ozai would rather host a dinner with the girl who got his daughter to become a cheerleader and skip school than continue the discussion about the very unsolved familial issues.

Not that they won't burst when Zuko comes home for the holidays in a few weeks, but Azula and Ozai are trying not to think about that.

Ty Lee moves to hug Azula, and then hesitates. She knows Azula probably does not want to hug her, but, nonetheless, the princess embraces her if only to make sure that Ozai does not sense the rift between them. A rift that would lead to investigation, that would lead to their relationship being found out.

In the private elevator, Azula and Ozai are silent and robotic, while Ty Lee shifts her weight and wrings her hands and tries to think of anything possible to say.

Once they reach their penthouse, Ty Lee looks at Azula and tries to show with her eyes how much she wants to say.

She thinks Azula can tell, but she also thinks that they are going to have to endure this dinner first.


The dinner goes better than the first. Which is not a huge statement, but Ty Lee did actually have a few things to say that she knew Fire Lord Ozai would like, and Azula could tell that he was warming up to Ty Lee by the end.

He even let her sleep over for the night, again. At least this time it is a weekend, and at least this time, Azula and Ty Lee are not so desperate to touch each other that they would risk so much in Azula's bedroom.

"Is there something you want to say?" Azula asks and Ty Lee nods.

"I want to say that I'm sorry, and also that I really don't know much about you." Ty Lee waits for that one to explode, but it does not. "And I want to know you. I want to be with you, and I want to be openly with you."

Azula is not sure what to say to that, or what she is supposed to do.

"Can you just get into my bed and we watch a movie?" Azula offers coldly and Ty Lee bites down on her lip.

It is easier, Ty Lee knows, but she wishes that her profuse sweating, pounding heart and emotional expression would have made Azula budge. All the same, Azula does lie very close beside her, and Ty Lee does not see the end of the movie once slender fingers are making irresistible circles around the inside of her thighs.

Ty Lee turns around and kisses her, pressing their bodies even more tightly together. They are beneath blankets and trying very hard to seem like normal friends and not two lovers removing each other's clothes and unable to keep from tasting each other beneath Azula's thick red comforter.

This is perfect, and Ty Lee loves the roaring heat within her.

They lie there together, sweaty and intertwined. The moaning was kept quiet enough by the urgent insistence of each other, and now they can actually hear the film. Not that they have any idea what is happening in it. It looks pretty boring in Ty Lee's opinion. Azula agrees.

"We aren't fixed, are we?" Ty Lee asks quietly.

"That was definitely make-up sex, though."

"Better than break-up sex," the cheerleader admits happily, even though she has a bit of a sunken sensation inside of her.

"Well, we can definitely say that homecoming as a couple ended slightly better than it started," Azula offers, trying on Ty Lee's disgusting optimism on for size.

Ty Lee chortles. "It ended slightly better than it started."

"Mhm," is Azula response, her breath tickling Ty Lee's neck.

"I want that engraved on my tombstone, okay? It ended slightly better than it started."

They both are smiling now, in the darkness.

Ty Lee nestles further into her girlfriend's arms, and hopes that tomorrow will be slightly better than today.