The Commander notes the woman is standing very still. She has those striking, silver golden eyes tightly shut, and holds her bone thin form completely straight. Even now, starved and filthy, grasping her hands together and massaging her wrists, mad with freedom, there is something…arresting about her.

Perhaps, he thinks to himself, it's that pure race. That blood of a noble family. Pure Fire Nation – uncontaminated with the filthy taint of any other race.

She stands in the middle of the throne room, where she had been brought. Her dress is in tatters – and her ivory skin shows through.

'Lady Mai.' She opens her eyes.

'You.'

'My Lady.' He nods.

'You're the man who spoke to us. When we were taken from the cell. You're the High Commander?' He walks closer to her – and despite the broken leg, the bruises and the scars, she does not flinch away.

'I thought it would be best to be the first to officially welcome you.'

'Then or now?'

'Why not both? I have practice at the role.'

'It seems a little unoriginal.' He smiles at that, and the way she raises her eyebrows. Challenging him.

Just three hours before she was dragged from the cell, screaming, hysterical, and telling them every possible secret they could want to know. The weakest defenses of the city walls. The traders who are spies for the highest bidder. The secret passages of the palace, and every possible weakness, every possible vulnerability, of the great Fire Lord Zuko.

'I prefer the term perfected.' Then she smiles, too. It changes the face – it makes her seem, somehow, dangerous.

He likes it.

'So what am I to call you, O so very practiced welcome of strangers (although I hasten to add I hope this greeting bodes better than the last.'

'I do not have a name that people use, any more. I am a military man for a military nation, with the sacred duty of reclaiming the Fire Nation for the racially pure and forcing the other races back into their appropriate places. I am simply the Commander.'

She bows to him then, and her loose, waist length hair sweeps in front of her shoulders.

'And now, on behalf of the Country of Flames, I thank you for the services rendered. You have been…most helpful. We are indebted to you.'

'Does that mean you owe me something, then?' He's surprised at that – she should be sobbing gratitude that he will not have her tortured once again. He walks even closer to her, until he's barely a hairs breadth distance from the perfection of her mangled face.

She could be very beautiful.

'What do you want?'

'The Waterbender. What fate awaits her?'

'We cannot kill her. Yet. Until we have beaten Zuko to the ground and can kill her in front of him.'

'Very well.' She meets his eyes gaze for gaze – there is steel in her irises and in her smiling mouth. Slowly she starts to walk around the commander.

It's a kind of game. A kind of gamble.

And she intends to win.

'I have spent the past few months locked up in a cell with a woman I despise. I have been tortured, humiliated and wrecked in various ways. So I have a question. I know how you got past the Kyoshi warriors. But how did you get us out of the palace?'

'My soldiers put you in a cart and covered it with blankets and said they were bringing supplies for the troops. The guards were searching everything that went in – not out.'

Mai pauses behind him.

'Stupid fools.' She circles to face him once again.

'And now a request.'

The High Commander raises one eyebrow. The woman is starved skeletal, and hardly capable of walking. Her eyes are weak, she shakes as she stands, her pearly skin is marred with red cuts and purple bruises. But still she lifts her chin and meets his eye.

He looks at her for a moment. Her tilting mouth, her darting eyes, the nervous trembling in her newly freed, much abused hands.

'What do you want, Lady?'

'My husband betrayed me for a Water Tribe bitch and their contaminated offspring. He threw me in prison. He ignored the fact that I had given up everything I had to help him. I devoted my life to him. He threw me in prison and put his hands around my throat and said that if I harmed his whore he would have me killed. I suffered for him – chose him over my friend. Was put in a cell for him, long ago, before now where…there were unspeakable things. Everything I have given up for him has been met with betrayal. So. I want revenge.'

'I think you've told us more than enough to have revenge.'

'Then I want power again. And the same level of power I had before.'

The High Commander narrows his eyes. She is not – surely…

'Are you suggesting…?'

'Am I so unattractive? My bloodline is flawless, I am well versed in every aspect of Fire Nation tradition, I am a shrewd politician and a very effective fighter. This would be your chance to humiliate the Fire Lord, the man who betrayed his country, his ancestors and his race.

And, most importantly.

I hate Zuko more than you can possibly imagine.'