Warning: This drabble is an outtake from Restraint because I had requests for that. I try to make them so they can stand alone without the fic, and are without major spoilers. But there are references to the fic and all, so *mild* spoilers afoot.


#16: Gilded Kisses and Sapphire Stars, or Outtake from Restraint (during Chapter 37)
Prompted By: ice cold desire

In the glow of the lanterns, the thousand stars are overshadowed by earthly fire.

It is too pretty, too quaint and Azula finds no pleasure in it. Ty Lee's eyes reflect the glowing lights, wide and excited by it. How anything thrills her anymore is startling to Azula who is honestly simply exhausted from caring for a baby who drains the life from her.

"You look nice," Azula attempts as her fingers are interlocked with her wife's.

"Azula," Ty Lee says, her eyes suddenly wide. Azula swallows; she does not know what she could have said wrong. "That was a real compliment! Not a disguised insult!"

"I suppose it was." Azula shrugs. Pretends she does not care. Cools the blush on her cheeks.

She sparkles in the lamplight somehow, tearing Azula apart. It feels oddly liberating to be away from Azusami's clinging and crying. Just set free from a cage and given the opportunity to have a date.

"I don't think we've ever had a date that ended very well," Azula murmurs, smirking. She leans against a steel wall, the metal hot against her back. The summer burns with vivacity, the hot night like the heated, feverish kisses of a couple that has been married for three years today.

On the week when the fire lilies bloom.

"You haven't been doing so well lately," Ty Lee says softly, leaning next to Azula as they watch the rich kids play in the brilliantly lit streets. Azula frowns.

Of course. Of course this is going to turn into a dissection of her so fractured mind. Of her struggles with motherhood.

"I don't want to hear it," Azula says sharply, glaring at a kissing teenage couple across the way. "Look, I got you a gift."

Ty Lee is instantly distracted from her attempt to psychoanalyze her wife and her borderline post-partum depression. Azula is immensely grateful that she did not marry the brightest candle in the bunch. Even if she is the shiniest one of the lot.

"Yay!" She claps two hands together as Azula hands her a gilded necklace with a sapphire stone.

Ty Lee likes expensive, useless trinkets. She glows as she clasps it around her neck, the blue stone resting atop her cleavage, on the outside of her red dress with too many bows.

"Good, you like it." Azula knew she would like it, of course.

"Do you remember the kiss after that fight in Ba Sing Se?" Ty Lee murmurs and of course Azula does.

"It was reckless and insane. Not part of my usual repertoire I admit," Azula says with a small smirk. They were just breathing so heavily, and gasping and Azula felt that the only thing she could do was... well...

"It was the kind of kiss that made me know I had never been so happy in my whole life," Ty Lee murmurs, leaning very close.

"Well, isn't that romantic?" Scathing response, of course. Ty Lee rolls her eyes when Azula isn't looking. And cue her dramatic, silvery tone of haughty mockery with, "I did have a compound fracture and three broken ribs, you know? But if my agony pleases you─"

She is met by warm lips against hers. Pressure and fingers clasped around her wrists.

It is the kind of kiss that makes her forget everything that is making her hurt.

Maybe she isn't as happy as she has been in her whole life. Some days Azula is downright miserable.

But it is the kind of kiss that makes everything else disappear.