The hat wanted to put her in Gryffindor. There wasn't a single day that went by that Mai didn't think she should have let it. Maybe if she had, maybe… Ty Lee was sorted after her, with the Ts. Maybe she could have saved them both.
She had known even then that someday she was going to defy her parents, that some day she wasn't going to be able to be what they wanted her to be. Otherwise, she never would have made friends with a Muggleborn girl on the train (never would have dragged her down with her into Slytherin) but there, with the hat on her head and the whole school watching, it had just been too much.
Later, Ty Lee would tell people that they had really bonded on the train. Mai didn't know if it was bonding, if it was possible to bond with someone when everything felt distant and cold, and much, much too big. The things that had mattered to Ty Lee, their Japanese mothers, the way they were both already wearing their uniforms, and had picked out the same candy to eat, none of that mattered to Mai. All that had mattered was that she needed someone, anyone, to talk to. Or maybe someone to talk to her, and let her just listen.
Somewhere along the line, she had bonded to Ty Lee. The when and how didn't really matter anymore.
She didn't know what ambitions had justified her sorting. She certainly hadn't felt ambitious (or brave) at eleven. She only knew why she had picked Slytherin, because it was the safe choice. Only a Pureblood, with a venerable family name and the wealth of an ancient house behind her could really look at Slytherin and see it as the safe choice.
But Slytherin made her its own. Or maybe it was Azula who made her a Slytherin, but Mai thought that was the same thing in the end. There was nothing like someone trying to force her down to her knees that made her realize every reason she had to stay standing, and how far she was willing to go to keep on her feet.
o0O0o
Ty Lee Is Muggleborn. There were days at the beginning when it felt as if that had been stamped on her forehead. She came to Hogwarts less than a decade after the Death Eaters and their collaborators had rounded up people like her and killed them.
The Sorting Hat had doomed her. When it had called out Slytherin, she had gone into the belly of the beast, ignorant of the history she now had to bear. Mai told her once that the hat had tried to tell her she belonged in Gryffindor, but she had insisted, and the hat had acquiesced. She wondered what it said about her that the hat had never considered any house for her but Slytherin.
Slytherin was where she met Azula.
After a while, she'd gotten used to it, used to the cold and the dark, used to the politics and the power plays. The word Muggleborn faded from her forehead. Once Mai asked if she had ever thought about how easy it would be for her to convince everybody she was a Pureblood. She almost laughed in her face. Of course she had thought about it.
Her parents spent millions on purchasing a crumbling Georgian manor when she was five, as a place to knock around in and fix up when they retired. It wouldn't be that hard for Ty Lee and her magic to make it habitable. She could sink her magic into the stones and glass, and make the place a proper Wizarding manor, like the one Mai's father inherited, and so many of the old Pureblood families were so proud of. It wouldn't be hard to set herself up in it and play lady of the manor, just like so many foreign Purebloods did in the wake of the Second Voldemort War, after the near-total disintegration of British Pureblood aristocracy.
And she had money. She might even be richer than Mai. Money smoothed over so many secrets. She probably wouldn't fool anyone, but the only people who would talk about it would do it in whispers, behind her back. She could find a desperate Pureblood spouse, and everyone would look the other way. But after Azula… It wasn't until after Azula that she learned how to tease out her own ambitions from the ones foisted upon her.
The knowledge was hard-won. Sometimes Ty Lee wondered about what would have happened if the hat had given her the choice of another house, and if she had taken it. It probably would have meant giving up Mai. It would have meant giving up who she had become. Not even Azula was worth that.