In the end, it is empathy that drives her to his door.
Her days are busy and full and exciting and she always has something to do while he… he has nothing. He has four walls and a sliver of sky barely visible through stone.
The guards that deliver his food do not speak to him, not even in mockery or derision. If they deign to acknowledge him in any way, it is to whisper about him in the hallways, as though he isn't right there, on the other side of the door. As though he cannot hear them.
When – if – Zuko visits, it is because he wants or needs something. Lady Ursa came once, but that seemed more for herself than anything, and she has not returned. Iroh does not come at all. Azula can't, even if she wanted to, and Ty Lee's not entirely sure she would. It's complicated.
But a part of her can't stop thinking about her own father, were he the one behind bars. How lonely he would be, how sad, how utterly bored. Especially if neither his wife nor his many daughters came to visit. Isolation is synonymous with cruelty for Ty Lee, so one day she grabs an old deck of cards and a board for playing cái nôi and she sets off for the prison.
Guards salute for her, and though their eyes linger on the cards, they ask no questions. She is a Kyoshi Warrior, a venerated guest and guardian of the Fire Lord, and therefore beyond reproach. It is one of a few ways that belonging to this matching set has its upsides.
After she has climbed the long stairway to the top of the prison, Ty Lee takes a moment to collect her breath and her thoughts.
Nervousness flips and roils in her belly, but it is not fear. Not quite yet, anyway.
Not like how it was, sometimes still is, with Azula.
In truth, it is hard for her to be afraid of Ozai. She wonders if this is because she has always seen him through Azula's eyes, rather than Zuko's. Maybe it is simply because she has known the man since her own girlhood, has eaten at the same table as him, has seen him in the audience of the Royal Fire Academy for Girls during their annual proficiency performance. She has known him since before his coronation as Fire Lord – back when he was just a prince, and not even the heir apparent. She has always paid him the utmost respect, but she has never really thought of him in terms of royalty.
He's always just been her best friend's dad.
And now he's just a sad man, alone in a prison cell.
Ty Lee pushes the door open.
"Um… hello? Lord Ozai… sir?" her voice is bright but uncertain in the dimly illuminated space. She takes a tentative step forward, letting her eyes adjust.
Coarse cloth rustles, and then she can see Ozai turn to face her through a mess of disheveled hair. He scowls for a moment, reflexively, but then confused recognition lights up his amber eyes, and his expression softens. Beneath the curtain of his hair, she can he has arched an eyebrow inquisitively.
"…Ty Lee?" he asks, voice still deep and rich, but hoarse from disuse.
"That's me!" she chirps, taking a seat in front of the bars of his cage. She smiles, teeth as white as her warpaint. "I thought maybe you might like some company."
He snorts at that, and her shoulders drop just a little, but then she catches him taking a surreptitious glance at the items in her arm. She holds up the cards invitingly, and begins to shuffle them with a few elaborate moves she picked up while in the circus. Everyone loves card tricks, after all, and it's not like he's getting any other entertainment.
In fact, she thinks to herself, it looks as though he isn't getting much of anything. He is thinner than she remembers.
The cards arc across the air, a cascade of painted paper, and Ty Lee widens her grin, pleased with her own performance.
"Do you want to play some cái nôi? I can teach you if you don't know how, it's really simple."
Her mother's father taught her how to play, as he taught all of his granddaughters. They used to have family tournaments together. The game is a little old-fashioned, perhaps, and much less sophisticated than pai sho, but the cards are easier to pass through the bars and she can move the pegs along the board when Ozai can no longer reach.
It does not occur to Ty Lee that, in her well-meaning invitation, she has just implied a former Fire Lord might not know something – could be fallible, ignorant. It does not occur to her that such reckless familiarity, such seeming condescension, might once have been a capital offence.
Ozai notices, of course, actually gapes at her for a full second in disbelief at her unintentional flippancy, but then he chuckles. The cards nearly slip from Ty Lee's fingers at the unfamiliar sound.
"No need, girl," he sneers from the interior of his cage, "I've been playing this game longer than you've been alive." After a moment of rapid shuffling, he adds, "If you have them, I'll take the red pegs."
Ty Lee sets the thoroughly shuffled deck down between them, lifting a third of the cards to expose the one on the bottom. Ozai reaches through his bars, delicately holding back his prison uniform sleeve as though it were a ceremonial robe, and draws the next card. It is of a much higher value than Ty Lee's own, so he places it back in the deck and gestures for her to deal.
The cards flick through the air with practiced precision – just like Mai's knives! – and Ty Lee rummages in the compartment at the bottom of the board for the pegs. She finds a pair of rust coloured ones, and then chooses an unpainted pair for herself. She glances over at Ozai, thoughtfully arranging his hand, and tries to ignore the feeling of utter wrongness at his auraless skin.
Ozai's red used to be the strongest aura that Ty Lee can ever remember seeing. It had been the colour of hippo-ox blood. Now there's nothing, not even a haze or a shimmer.
It's not right.
He clears his throat, tilts his head impatiently at the cards still laying face down on the stone floor of his cell. Ty Lee squeaks out an "Oh!" and then picks up her own hand, quickly withdrawing two and placing them facedown on the floor again. Pinched between two fingers, Ozai sends her a pair of his own.
Ty Lee takes them gingerly, careful to not brush her fingertips against his own.
The first couple rounds are silent save for their declarations of score. Any half-formed thoughts Ty Lee may have had about letting him win are swiftly banished from her mind.Cái nôiis a fast-paced game, and a ruthless one, where an opponent may snare a player's points if they aren't declared or recognized quickly enough. Ozai plays with competitive fervor, offering her a barely polite amount of time to tally her points before jumping in to claim the ones she has missed and add them to his own.
He doesn't need her help with winning. At this rate, he'll be halfway across the board in a few hands.
It's rude, perhaps, to play so aggressively, but it's also reassuringly familiar. It reminds her of Azula.
After a while the silence becomes difficult for Ty Lee. It's not awkward, thankfully, but still dreadfully empty, and so she begins to talk. She tells Ozai about the weather and how the harvests are doing, describes her first experience with Water Tribe food – "If anyone offers you sea prunes, just say no," – and any other banal thing that comes to mind. Nothing political, nothing that he could actually use, but enough to paint a picture of the nation just outside the walls of his cell. Enough for him to not feel completely deprived of the world.
To her amazement, he reciprocates by inquiring about her parents and her sisters. Each one of them. By name.
Ty Lee has always known that Azula's father was an observant man, but she had always assumed that was a skill honed for important political and military details. It had never occurred to her that her family might be considered equally noteworthy. That she could, in fact, be counted among his tactical concerns.
Nevertheless, she recounts to him what she knows her sisters' exploits as a coordinated circus act, and her own conflict at finding her place amongst them.
"It's just hard, y'know," she shrugs and looks down at her hand, frowning at the poor arrangement of cards. Across from her, Ozai makes a rumble of affirmation.
"Living in the shadow of a sibling can be… difficult."
Ty Lee raises her eyes and meets Ozai's own through the bars of his cage. There is a glimmer of something she doesn't recognize in those twin pools of gold, and unbidden, she thinks of Azula's own tawny gaze.
If, in the ensuing silence, Ozai senses he has said something to make her uncomfortable, he doesn't acknowledge it. He shuffles the cards in his much larger hands with ease, casually executing a few dexterous moves of his own, including a one-handed technique Ty Lee's petite grip will never permit her to replicate. She is curious, of course, questions leaping to her throat about whether he learned such moves from his own brother – his father, perhaps? – but she reigns in the temptation, focuses on meticulously counting her hand so that he cannot purloin anymore points from her.
She still loses. Rather badly, in fact.
"You'll have to go easier on me, next time," she musters on her way out of the cell, grey eyes crinkling at the corners, "otherwise I might not come back!"
Ozai's expression is indulgent, his voice almost a purr.
"You were never a sore loser, Ty Lee. It wasn't in your disposition as a girl, it shouldn't be now that you've grown."
Ty Lee thinks of cartwheels and handstands in the palace gardens, of grass-stained knees and scraped palms, Azula's shoving hand against her shoulder. She thinks of all the ways that identity becomes entangled with issues of supremacy.
She wonders if Ozai ever played cái nôi with Azula.
She wonders if he ever let her win.