#02: Fire Gummies
Prompted By: beautyandrage
"Festival food is delicious," Ty Lee declares and the look in her eyes dares anyone to disagree with her. Mai examines her tiny waist and wonders how she can consume so much sugar and still stay thin. Maybe something about cartwheeling everywhere she goes.
"I'm not allowed to eat it," Azula says airily as Ty Lee thrusts a red paper bag of candy into Azula's hands. She clasps her fingers around Azula's and Mai thinks she caught the princess blushing. "My father says it will─"
"Is your father here, princess?" Mai chimes in, smirking faintly. It is outstanding how her face can remain so sullen even when she is entertained. "You know you want to... just one fire gummy. The Fire Nation will not come to a screeching halt if you eat one."
Azula sighs haughtily and glances between her friends. This has to count for some kind of treason, but Azula plucks out one, her fingers now coated in cinnamon and spice, and pries the sticky gummies apart from each other. Mai chortles as she watches Azula struggle to separate the candies, and finally, the princess settles for tearing off a piece.
She puts it in her mouth with a contemplative expression that is far too serious for candy-sampling.
"These are..." Azula begins, raising an eyebrow. "Quite good, actually."
The princess pops two in her mouth and Ty Lee giggles. She wraps her arm around Azula's waist and now Mai is certain that the immovable princess with a cold storage shed in place of her heart just blushed. They're in love and it is disgusting, not that Mai would point it out. She doesn't like the idea of having lightning thrown at her.
They are bored and alone, wandering the city as the days creep by after the victory of Ba Sing Se. Waiting for an invasion, waiting for a comet, waiting. And Mai is watching her two best friends finally start confirming what they have been leading up to for so long it makes her head hurt. But that does not make it any less... creepy.
"Here," Ty Lee says, reaching into her own bag of sizzle crisps and putting two in Azula's mouth. "Completely terrible for you, but completely delicious."
"Oh, are you guys going to be that kind of couple?" Mai asks, grimacing with an eyebrow cocked.
"We are not a couple, Mai," Azula snarls, her eyes glittering as if she is about to burn an earthbender alive. "Do we look like a couple to you?"
"Kind of, princess," Mai says with a shrug, although she knows she is dancing with imminent disaster.
But Mai has poked a sleeping dragon, and in her haughtiest, iciest, facing down Long Feng tone, Azula replies, "We are not a couple, and we never will be. I am Princess Azula the Conqueror and I do not do couples─"
She is cut off by lips against hers. They taste like sugar and cinnamon and Mai suppresses laughter by sucking in air as Azula blushes yet again. It is kind of adorable, which is totally gross.
"We're whatever Princess Azula says we are, Mai," Ty Lee says sweetly, smirking at the kiss.
Azula has no response.
As soon as her friends are distracted by a street performer, who Azula notices has completely improper form, she brushes her fingertips against her lips. Her tongue still tastes like cinnamon.
Princess Azula does not do couples.
