AN: This is my entry for Autumn Tyzula Week 2017.
Colors
32. Red
Azula should have known better than to trust Ty Lee's fickle heart.
She let someone in and suffered the consequences. She let herself fall for Ty Lee again and let herself be shocked by the inevitable betrayal.
The woman ran away when they were to be married. It sickens the princess to the very core.
Princess Azula crushes countless possessions in her rage. She destroys everything in her past.
No one has the heart to stop her.
Everyone deserves a breakdown from time to time, especially when they just have been left at the altar by the only person they ever loved.
Azula sees red. Red and only red. Rage in her eyes.
She never understood what people meant by seeing red until she felt this level of anger. Rage sucks out all the other emotions a personal feels; rage sucks out all of the colors in the world except for red. And Azula burns the crimson curtains and smashes Iroh's favorite scarlet teapot.
Azula stops seeing red. Blinks back tears.
Sees herself surrounded by the wreckage of ruby Fire Nation treasures.
Does not care about her heritage even for a second.
Ty Lee left.
Azula knew she would.
Ty Lee left for no good reason.
Azula knew she would.
Ty Lee left not only Azula, but also the baby she claimed to love.
Azula knew she would.
Ty Lee left.
A thousand things surge through her mind as she tries to figure out the proper thing to say. Azula at last settles on, "I should've known better. I should've stopped it before she could ruin it."
No one argues with her, even those who disagree.
Meanwhile, many miles away, on the same deplorably rainy day, Ty Lee bleeds from her moon cycle and thinks about the baby she ran away from. Why did she do that? Izumi is so beautiful and now Ty Lee lost her forever.
Why is Ty Lee so stupid? Everybody told her that she was her whole life.
Okay, maybe Azula is crazy and cruel and other awful words that anybody in the Universe could easily confirm. But Ty Lee knew that she could love her and all of that would go away.
So here she was at her sister's house, hiding from the wedding she foolishly fled from. Ty Lee thought the emotion of hate was a waste of time, but she hated her situation at the moment.
She looks at red rags she washes.
Ty Lee could have just said she wanted to wait on the wedding. Azula might be angry, but she would probably give Ty Lee that one wish.
She could have stayed a mother to that sweet, incredible baby whose every breath left Ty Lee feeling utter wonder.
When Ty Lee punches the mirror over the wash basin and breaks it, she sees red.
33. Orange
In the rural Fire Nation, Ty Lee sits in a poorly-decorated farmhouse with two toddlers, one awkward man, and her sister who can claim that whole family. Ty Lee did not know where else to go when she panicked and bolted on her wedding.
"Check out that rainbow," points out Ty Lee's sister with a broad smile.
"It's fine, I guess," says Ty Lee, biting into her orange. The juice douses and sticks to her chin but she does not bother to clean her face up. Nothing seems to have much of a point anymore.
"Okay, okay, what's wrong with you? You love rainbows. They get you, like, weirdly excited."
"Nothing seems really exciting anymore."
"You miss her."
"It's how it works. I leave for—for really good reasons, okay? They're really good reasons that I leave her. But then I miss her and I need her and I come crawling back. I need to stop doing that."
"There are other people out there." Her sister picked up one of the oranges from the bowl that she kept outside mainly for décor reasons. "Oranges are not the only fruit. Azula is not the only person who could make you happy."
"Yes, she is," snaps Ty Lee. "She always has been."
She walks away from the rainbow.
Colors don't look pretty when she is so overwhelmingly sad.
34. Yellow
"How do you know when someone is right for you?" Azula asks.
"You feel in you this, this feeling. I can only call it 'yellow' because it reminds me of yellow. I know, silly. But you could date a hundred amazing people you're way into, but this one person makes you feel that warm, happy yellow inside. You know nobody else could ever make you feel that way. And if they're the one, that feeling never goes away."
Azula ignores a thousand memories, ignores her knowledge of her own feelings.
"Well, good. I did not have that with her," she coldly says.
She did. She did. She did.
Ty Lee scared Azula in the past because she made her feel that yellow deep in her core.
And now Azula must conclude that Ty Lee never felt it.
35. Green
The bruises on Azula's knuckles have faded from dark purple to green.
She studies them with an angrily curled lip as her brother walks into the room. Azula does not acknowledge his entrance and he does not pressure her to do so.
"I think she'll come back."
"She better not." Azula finally looks away from the green bruises and directs her burning gaze at Fire Lord Zuko. "I will murder her if she does. I—I—why do you think she'd come back, anyway?"
"Because she loves you. Your love hurts and your love sucks but so does everybody else's."
"This is nothing like anyone else has ever experienced before!"
"You're not the only one who ever had her heart broken."
"I don't have a heart to break. I understand why she left, anyway. Weddings bring out the worst in people. And, honestly, she saw me for who I truly am. Violent, mistrustful, entitled, manipulative…"
Zuko ignores the truth in those words. He does not think she wants him to comment, and he is right to believe that.
The Fire Lord at last says, "Just give her a few days. Maybe she just let cold feet overwhelm her head. If she still loves you after everything you two have been through, I don't think her panicking about a wedding is going to be the last stick on the pyre."
"I hate her. I want her gone. I want her dead."
"You love her. You want her back. You'll probably just kiss her when she shows up."
Azula snaps from the sudden rush of nauseating rage.
"Screw firebending! I am going to punch you so hard in your mouth you bite your own heart," she snarls at her brother, clenching her suddenly smoking fists.
He does not move, nor does he flinch. She desperately wanted him to be afraid, or at least angry. Instead, he looks at her with pity in his golden eyes.
"You miss her."
"I hate her."
"But you miss her."
Azula cannot find the strength to argue.
36. Blue
Ty Lee's lips are blue as she stands in the ice-cold rain.
She left her sister's house as soon as the bright blue sky became pitch black, the moon and stars the only thing lighting her way after she stepped out of the farmhouse. Ty Lee packed her bag, made her decision, and now she intends to return to her princess.
To try again.
To work things out.
To stop worrying because she feels that warmth inside of her and she knows very well she will never feel it with anyone else.
Her hands suffer the same fate, but she does not feel the sting of approaching frostbite. She just keeps focusing on walking. Walking back to Caldera in the middle of the rainy night like a lunatic. That is what love has reduced her to.
Or maybe she always was that way. Or maybe it is a good thing that she would do this. Or maybe she is making the best worst mistake of her life.
Probably the last one.
She will have ample time to figure it out while she walks on the muddy, decaying rural Fire Nation roads, her bag slung loosely over her sore shoulder.
Ty Lee keeps walking while muddy ice blue tears drip from her sparkling big brown eyes.
37. Indigo
The indigo night approaches the orange of sunrise when Ty Lee finally arrives in Caldera.
She enters the palace with no trouble; the guards know her. The only person who comes in between her and the woman of her dreams is Mai.
"Hi." Ty Lee hugs Mai and hears her groan.
"Now I'm wet and muddy. Ugh," the Fire Lady complains.
Ty Lee faintly smiles. "You know me. I love to share."
"Are you here for Azula?"
Ty Lee smiles wider, to Mai's utter bewilderment. "Of course I am. I had some time on my own to figure my fears out and—"
"Okay, I want you to stop and think about this for a minute before you do it. She's the absolute worst suffering you've ever faced."
"I felt pretty miserable when I left her too. Maybe I'm just an unhappy person."
That is not true, but perhaps Ty Lee has begun to doubt her perpetual optimism.
Mai says with a shocking level of emotion in her words, "She makes you unhappy."
Ty Lee shrugs. "She makes me happy too. She's a really confusing part of my life."
"Did you just figure that out? Because I did before it even began."
"I guess you're just smarter than me," says Ty Lee, not intending to sound so brusque. But maybe it bothers her that people point out the reality of her relationship with Azula. She cannot pretend that nothing ever upsets her.
"She said she thought she knew why you left."
"Why?"
"Because you saw her for who she truly is."
"And it scared me at first. It really did. That's why I ran. But I realized that even though she's a lot of awful things, I love her. I used to love her because she was perfect, and I don't think I deserved her then. But now I love her even though I know she's not perfect."
"This self-awareness is somehow not at all helpful to anyone."
"I need to see her. Goodnight, Mai." Ty Lee sounds confident in a different way than she ever did in the past. Something about trudging to Caldera for miles in the mud, her lungs burning and screaming, her head racing, has given her a dizzy sense of clarity.
Ty Lee walks past a hall of tall windows on her way to Azula's rooms.
The bright, blazing red of a magnificent sunrise drains the indigo hue from the night sky.
38. Violet
When she walks through that door, Princess Azula wants to hurt Ty Lee.
She wants to destroy her, tear her to pieces, burn her paper heart to a crisp.
But Azula pulls Ty Lee closer with a ferocity. She kisses her so hard that it hurts, and Ty Lee loves it, moaning into her mouth and leaning closer.
They close their eyes and their lips collide again and again.
Azula digs her nails into Ty Lee's back so that she can never run away again.
But Ty Lee wants to stay.
Ty Lee wants to stay.
Ty Lee wants to stay.
Ty Lee wants to stay.
Even if they destroy each other, she never wants to leave Azula's side again.
.
.
.
end part six
A/N: Not many chaps left. I'm planning on going to forty. Thank you for reading, thank you for getting us to 1k reviews, and I really hope you're enjoying my story.