Found Something Real
Everything in the life of Princess Azula was hollow and forced. That was the price of perfection; nothing was real, nothing at all. Nor were her hallucinations. Nor were the things that stalked her, the shadowy creatures in the night that clawed upwards until she forced herself to fall asleep.
She no longer feared them by this age. If they took her, she would not care. All she ever learned to be was a weapon. She conquered Ba Sing Se. She came up with a plan to conquer the rest of the world. Maybe her work was done.
She was a weapon. She might as well have been made of metal and matches.
Princess Azula was an idea, an object, and she was not real.
But she came close to finding something real. She looked at a bubblegum girl with bright happiness and dirt on her knees (Azula would never let anything soil her flawless ivory skin and well-tailored clothes). A girl who still did cartwheels at an old age of fourteen. Ty Lee was very real, very flawed, and Azula did not know why she was so attracted to that.
She needed to be a legend. She needed legendary love, not something with someone real.
But she liked it.
She liked Ty Lee and the dandelions in her hand and her messy braid she could never keep straight to save her life. She liked the way Ty Lee looked at her, not as a deity or weapon, but as someone who warmed her heart like fire in a hearth.
They came very close.
Azula came very close to forever holding something real in her hand.
The first real thing she would ever own.
Ty Lee.
The first real thing she would ever own would have been Ty Lee.
But, now, the day after the horrid incident at the Boiling Rock, there she lay like some common mortal, crying her eyes out over something as foolish as love. She wept and wept and clasped her hand over her mouth so no one could hear.
No one asked her why she was so sad.
No one asked her why she was pivoting into a world of the imaginary and terrifying.
It was because, for the first time in her entire life, she almost found something real.
Ty Lee was real. Kissing Ty Lee on the lips was the closest she ever came to real. Standing on the beach, tasting sand and sweetness as they made out in the cold night, myriad stars above. That was the first time Azula believed there was anything real in the world worth having.
But Ty Lee betrayed her.
Maybe Azula was better off with the imaginary.
Because real things die. Real things fade. Real things go away.
Azula almost found something real.
She decided to pretend that she was happier in a world of lies and illusions.
But she kept thinking about those lips, those real lips.
Cruel fate took away the only real thing she ever came close to having.
Honest feelings and bad timing were the most painful combination.