Author's Note: The knife that Azula holds when she tells Sokka to "come and get it" looks very similar to the ones that Mai uses. I headcanon that she stole it from Mai.


Mai honed her collection of knives every night before bed. It passed the long hours with repetition and focus. It was boring, but it was hers. Few people saw the value of her habit. When she had been little, her parents had frowned at her, but since Princess Azula had encouraged Mai, they had done nothing about it. But she knew what they thought:

Sullen Mai with her silly knives.

But even though it was because of Azula that her parents had let her have this one thing without too much of a fuss, it would also be Azula who would just take one of her knives without asking, as if they belonged to her instead of Mai. She glared at the empty space where her set should have been complete.

She wondered when Azula had taken her knife. She wondered if she still had it. If she had ever used it. If the prodigy had thrown it as straight as Mai could have. If she had had a chance to use it at all.

She wondered why Azula just hadn't asked for Mai's expertise instead of just taking it as her own. If she had just asked, Mai probably would have agreed to whatever scheme Azula had cooked up. Mai didn't like sitting around doing nothing. She most definitely probably would have said yes if Azula had simply asked her to come.

Not for the first time, Mai wondered if she should tell Zuko about the missing knife. He had told her how he had found Azula hurting herself, and how they had to remove most of the sharp objects from her room.

Maybe it would be better if Azula did as she willed with the missing knife—if only she made sure to leave it where Mai could easily find it again and thus keep her collection complete.

Her frown deepened into that expression her mother would have told her to smile away, and she clenched her fist around the knife she held, the one she was supposed to have been cleaning and sharpening.

Just because Mai honed herself into the very best a fire princess could ask for didn't mean that Azula could just brush her aside. It didn't mean she could take the very thing that had always been Mai's, that she needed Mai for, and use it herself.

She shook her head. It wasn't as if she hadn't been expecting it. She had known that Azula would betray her (and Ty Lee) sooner or later. She had just been hoping it would be later.

A knock offered a small distraction, and she said, "Come in." Zuko entered, and she smiled. "Hello, Fire Lord." She reached for him.

"Mai."

He kissed her forehead, and she allowed him to cradle her head against his chest, his chin resting against her dark hair. She closed her eyes, and held him.

There was a time when she had thought she would never see him again. There was a time where she had wondered why he had not come for her. But she tried not to think about those times anymore.

"Do you want to sit on the couch? It's more comfortable," Mai said. Cuddling with Zuko was nice.

"Is it okay if we talk about Azula?" Zuko whispered as they curled in close to each other. His breath tickled the shell of her ear.

"I don't care." Mai rolled a little away from him, muscles tensing. She remembered the empty space, the missing knife.

Zuko let her distance herself, not catching her or pulling her back. He always listened to the way she held her body, seeing the way she moved though everybody else saw a bored teenager with a bad attitude. She liked that about him.

"She wants to restore her honor," Zuko said.

Mai rolled her eyes. "Azula? Honor? Stop, you'll make me laugh. You know how much I hate that."

"That's what Uncle said." He nuzzled her neck, and she could feel his smile against her skin. "I like it when you laugh," he added softly.

"Laughing makes me nauseous," Mai said, but she turned back towards Zuko and let him hold her. "So what are you going to do?"

"I don't know. I don't want to be responsible for anything horrible Azula does if she's gone. But I don't want her to be on her own because I learned that's not always the best path. But I can't accompany her because I can't abandon the Fire Nation—not now that I'm Fire Lord." He sighed.

Mai touched his cheek as she sighed with him, almost not quite believing she was about to indulge whatever scheme Azula was planning. "How does she intend to restore her honor?"

Zuko paused for a moment. He looked away from her as he said, "She said that she'd try to find out what happened to our mom."

Mai was silent, frowning only a little bit. She had not expected him to say something like that, but of course Azula would make a promise like that to Zuko. She had chosen her approach wisely, zeroing in on what would always be Zuko's weakness judging from what had been said on the beach, all those months ago. "Oh."

"I know," Zuko said, voice rising. "She doesn't care about Mom—not like I do. She knew it would be the one thing I couldn't refuse. The one thing I wouldn't want to refuse, especially since my father won't tell me anything."

Was there a weakness Azula didn't know about? Probably not—it was people's strengths she tended to underestimate. Mai made what she hoped sounded like a sympathetic noise.

"Even powerless—" Zuko didn't finish his sentence, just pressed his head against the pillows and squeezed his eyes shut.

"Don't let her get to you," Mai said. "Don't let her win."

"I feel like she's been under my skin since birth, like a shadow I'll never be rid of."

Mai worked herself free from Zuko's arm, stretched, and paced around the couch, worrying her lip with her teeth. He looked up at her, but didn't follow. She wished they had some tea. All this talking was making her thirsty.

Zuko lifted himself on his elbow. "What? I can tell you have something in mind."

Mai kept walking in circles around the couch. She picked up the knife she had been tending to when Zuko came in. It's familiar weight was a comfort in her hand, and she twirled it through her fingers before she finally spoke. "I'll go with Azula. I'm an okay baby-sitter. If you ask anybody but my parents."

Zuko got up, trailed after Mai as she still paced her slow circle. "I can't ask you to do that."

"You didn't ask me. I volunteered. Besides, there's nothing to do here." Mai stopped, and turned towards Zuko. She had seen him less since he had become Fire Lord. Not that she blamed him for that. "I'm bored."

Zuko put his hands on her shoulders. "She would have burned you if Ty Lee hadn't stopped her. So instead she sent you away in the biggest, most secure prison in the Fire Nation. The place where prisoners are sent to be forgotten."

"You didn't forget about me," Mai said.

"That's not the point."

Mai rolled her eyes and shook him from her. "You're missing the point. You don't know what to do about Azula. Azula provided a solution but you can't trust her. You feel guilty about letting her languish when you could have been her if people hadn't helped you. So now you want to help her back, but you can't because you're the Fire Lord. You want your mom back, but you can't justify the decision to leave. And now you're telling me that I can't help you?" She folded her arms and glared at him. "That's not fair, Zuko. I can make my own decisions."

"I know—but it's just that-Azula is not a good friend."

Mai walked away from him, and looked out the window. Evening had already fallen and there wasn't much of a view. She liked it that way. "Azula wasn't always a bad friend." She looked down at the knife in her hand. Azula had encouraged her to learn this skill, and now it glinted from the candlelight in the room. "Maybe I wasn't a good friend either. I'm not an easy person to be around."

"That sounds like something Azula would say." Zuko looked up at her from under the fringe of his hair. "Which means it's not true."

Mai frowned. "It's not like she forced me to be her friend. It wasn't anything dramatic like that."

"Yeah?" He said it softly, tentatively, like if he spoke any louder he'd scare her off, and she wished he wouldn't do that, wished he wasn't so tender—but it was nice that he was. That he cared how she felt about something.

It reminded her of Azula, and she put her blade back down on the table. "It's a boring story. I was bored at school—and then there was Azula."

"Who wasn't boring," Zuko said after she didn't continue, his voice shifting upwards, like he asked a questioned he wanted her to answer, like he was prompting her to go on.

"I'm not going to tell you my whole life story," Mai said. "It doesn't matter."

He went to her, cupped her face in his hands as he pressed another kiss to her forehead, then to her lips. "If you really want to do this, I won't stop you. But be careful. She's still dangerous."

Mai graced Zuko with a small smile. "So am I."

"I know." He grinned back at her—the one Mai had recognized as the one he reserved for her and her alone. It made her feel special.

After Zuko left to attend the unending affairs of state which bored her so much—so much sitting, so much keeping of one's tongue—Mai also departed from her family's home to the royal palace. Everything was so quiet this time of night—the kind of quiet that would make Azula restless. The kind of quiet that would have spurred her to do something.

She got bored as quickly as Mai did.

Mai shook herself, and found her way towards Azula's chambers, knocking while she waited restlessly for Azula to invite her in, which she did with only the slightest of hesitations. She found Azula sitting on the bed in a thin robe, her face twisting when she saw Mai.

"You," Azula said. There was a flash of something like anger before it disappeared, and Azula relaxed, like she was going to pretend she wasn't going to care about anything. "Didn't I say something about never wanting to see your face again? Not that it matters now, I suppose, since everything is different. Perhaps now you can be happy, Mai, with all the changes in your life."

Mai shrugged. "I suppose you could say that."

Azula already climbed out of her bed, her body already adopting an offensive stance. Mai settled into another one to mirror hers.

"You think you could take me in a fair fight?" Azula snarled. "Ty Lee isn't here to protect you."

"How do you expect to fight without your bending?" Mai said. Not that it would unsettle Azula overly much—Mai had seen her fight without her bending before, and not even Aang and his friends had managed to pin her down and defeat her on the Day of Black Sun—but there was nothing Azula prized more than her blue fire and now it was gone and Mai had never felt so pleased about anything before.

"Come to gloat, Mai? How pathetically predictable of you."

"Hardly. Zuko told me about what you requested."

It was only then Azula allowed her offensive stance to relax. Mai did likewise. If people didn't look too closely, they might mistake their conversation as almost civil.

"Of course he did. Zuzu can't make a single decision without first consulting someone for all his talk about being the man he wants to be." Azula pretended to examine her fingernails, as if she didn't care about the topic of conversation.

"You don't know anything about Zuko," Mai said. "You never have. But this isn't about him—it's about you, and your scheme for escaping here. I'm surprised, actually."

Azula scoffed. "Mai is surprised. How remarkable."

"Surprised that you're still here. You should have escaped days ago." Mai took a step towards her, but Azula stood her ground. "The old Azula would have."

Azula smiled. "I know when I'm beaten."

"You're waiting," Mai said, "for Zuko to let you go so that you don't have to worry about an entire army searching for you."

Azula kept smiling. It didn't look good on her. "You never should have turned on me, Mai. We worked so well together because we were such good friends, and you threw it all away." Her eyes flashed with familiar anger.

Mai sighed, her glance sliding away from Azula as she took in the nearly empty room. She imagined herself in a room like this, and her flesh crawled in that way where she wanted to peel it from her bones. If Azula wasn't crazy before—well being stuck here would definitely finish the job. No wonder she was desperate to get away. Mai hated that she understood how she felt. "Then you'll be thrilled to know that I advised Zuko to accept your offer."

Azula's smile slipped for the first time—and she schooled her face so that it did not betray anything of her thoughts to Mai. "Of course you did, Mai. Ever since our little incident at the Boiling Rock, you probably want me as far away from you as possible, since we're not friends anymore."

Mai forced herself to meet Azula's face, to keep contact with her eyes. "I told him to accept as long as I accompanied you on this mission to supposedly restore you honor."

"So you're to be my babysitter." Azula's voice soured and she paced away from Mai in the familiar corkscrew spirals. "I see."

Mai glanced around the room, hopefully not obviously enough for Azula to pick up on it. She didn't see her missing knife, but knowing Azula, it was probably hidden in her sleeves somewhere.

Typical.

"You're just loving this aren't you?" Azula said, sitting down on the bed, smoothing her hair with her hands. "Seeing me like this. Humiliated."

"No." Mai opened the door to leave. "I don't feel anything, as you've constantly reminded me."

"You just feel for Zuko then." Azula pursed her lips, and pitched her voice lower and rougher so that it sounded something like Mai's. "I love Zuko more than I fear you." In her usual tone, she added, "So I guess you do feel something."

Mai went to leave, not even pausing as she let the door close behind her. "You've got me all figured out. Congratulations."

If Azula had more to say, she did not linger to hear it. She went to the gardens, where she and Azula and Ty Lee had played when they were little. It was quiet here, and she stood at the pond, looking at her reflection in the water. The wind rippled the water, distorting her image.

Being with Azula again had been unpleasant, but she could probably bear it for Zuko's sake. She knew she would regret volunteering for the mission sooner or later-probably sooner-but she was alright with that.

She had done many things she knew she would regret, and things had turned out alright in the end.

This would too, no matter what happened to Azula.