The stone walls of the underground prison oozed with an unidentifiable liquid, which trickled down in sickly rivulets to puddle on the floor. Farther down the passage and to Mai's right, torchlight glimmered off a pool of water that was slowly seeping up from a deeper tunnel. The air was rank with mold.
"My Lady, if we don't stabilize the supports, the entire lake will collapse down into the tunnels in a matter of weeks!" explained a royal architect. Shan wore a pair of thick spectacles, and clutched a diagram of the underground lake prison. Unhelpfully, he waved the diagram at Mai, as if she knew what subterranean support structures would look like. "We will lose a priceless historical building, dating back over 500 years!"
Of course, the lake's collapse would also drown all the prisoners. Mai wondered, would the bodies float to the surface, or remain trapped underground? And all the corpses frozen in the ice room would thaw…Mai swiped a finger across the wall experimentally. Disgusting. She rubbed the slime onto her robes and finally addressed Shan.
"So stabilize the supports," she said. "Do whatever you have to do to keep the prison functional, by order of the Firelord." Zuko was up and attending meetings to prepare for the wedding, but since there was so much to do Mai had volunteered to oversee the Crescent Lake Prison renovation. After all, both Zuko's father and her mother were interned down here. It was practically a family residence. She noticed that the water from the passage ahead and to the right was had crept to the tips of her boots. It was icy cold.
"Do we need to evacuate the prisoners?" Mai asked, stepping back slightly. She hoped not; finding a new place for Ozai, her mother, and all the other prisoners would be such a bother. She'd almost rather let them drown.
Shan coughed awkwardly. "Um, no, My Lady, I don't think moving the prisoners will be necessary. The supports are a bit outside where the jail cells are located—aghhhhhh!" He let out an unearthly scream and scrambled backwards desperately, eyes bugging at something down the hall. Mai looked up and saw the half-frozen, half-thawed body of one of the New Ozai Society rebels floating out into passageway. Her stomach turned as she realized that the ice room must have already flooded.
Thankfully, the body floated face-down, its black hair drifting on the surface of the water. Its skin was a mottled grey-purple, with the thawed feet swollen and thick with water. And the smell …behind her, the architect noisily threw up, his vomit splashing onto the already-wet stone floor. For a second, Mai imagined the corpse getting up from the water, lifting its half-frozen face to grin at her while it stretched out its arms…
"Right," said Mai. "Okay. So the lower passages are clearly flooded." The body drifted to a halt right in front of her, beaching itself against the rough rock floor. Mai willed herself not to move, even as she gagged at the odor. She would be the Firelady soon. She could be imperturbable—not because her mother told her she had to be quiet, or because her father lectured her—but because she chose to be, to protect the people she loved.
"Shan, does this mean the entire prison is flooding right now?" Mai demanded of the architect. He wiped some spit off his face and looked at her weakly. "Still no; the upper levels of the lake should be safe. Actually, we knew that tunnel had flooded, we just didn't know-oh great Spirits no!" He retched again, and Mai turned her head to see another three bodies rounding the corner into their passage.
"Pull yourself together, Shan," Mai said coldly. "They're just bodies. They won't hurt you." Not like the living can. The architect nodded half-heartedly, still leaning his forearms heavily on his thighs. He breathed in and out through his mouth.
"Guards!" Mai called to the women several meters behind her and the architect. "Send a message to the Prison Warden. Tell him to move all prisoners to the upper level, and to send for a team of construction workers at once to help Architect Shan fix the supports. I want each high-value prisoner guarded with at least a dozen guards during the move. Seal all the exits while the transfers are taking place. Besides all the construction crew, no one leaves until I say so." The Guards nodded and jogged off to carry out her orders.
"My Lady," Shan actually tugged on her sleeve, and Mai jerked her arm out of his grasp irritably. "My Lady, I simply cannot proceed while these…impediments are in my way!" He pointed at the face-down corpse in disgust. "Who knows how many more of these are floating in the dark, drifting…"
"Assemble your team, Shan," Mai said dismissively. "I'll handle things here." Bowing, he made his way unsteadily down the hall, dodging the slowly-spreading puddle of his own sick. Mai sighed and turned back to the four bodies, which had continued floating and formed a log jam in the passageway. Not all the corpses were face-down, and Mai averted her eyes.
Fortunately, Mai remembered from her trip with Suki that there had only been ten bodies in the ice room, two of which had been returned to their families. That left eight frozen, floating former rebels, and four were right here. The Imperial Guards would need all hands to safely shift the prisoners up a level. And someone had to clear the passageway for Shan…
Abandoning all hope of salvaging her dress after this, Mai stepped a few paces forward, covered her hands with the cloth of her sleeves, and grasped the arms of the first corpse. The skin squished unpleasantly, and Mai gagged a little. Still rather be doing this than helping move Ozai or my mother, she told herself. She dragged the body fully out of the water and stopped, panting. It was heavier than she expected. Throwing her weight backwards, Mai hauled the corpse another few meters and then dropped it against the wall with a squelch. She'd at least pull all the bodies out of the water, and then someone could wheel them up to the surface and burn them.
As she set about pulling the next half-frozen body from the water, Mai thought about the irony of this being what she was up to the day before her wedding. The day before she became Firelady. Other women had parties, but she pulled turgid corpses out of a flooded prison. And let's not forget that the corpses were there in the first place because her soon-to-be-husband had ordered them preserved in ice for his own purposes.
What in the name of all the Fire Sages am I doing here? thought Mai. The third body was covered in maggots, so Mai ripped off her outer robe and wrapped the cloth around the man's upper torso so she wouldn't have to touch any part of him. She was here because she loved Zuko, for one thing. A costly love as it turned out. Squelch. But worth it.
She was also here because she cared about Kazuto, and helping Zuko rule kept the boy safe as well. Last night, Zuko had asked her if she wanted to be Kazuto's mother. But even though she loved Kazuto, Mai honestly wasn't sure. In her experience, mothers weren't really the loving kind. Her own mother had criticized and judged her constantly, and sometimes Mai worried that she just wasn't cut out for motherhood. As her mother had once said, she was too detached. On the other hand, Ozai had been the worst father imaginable, and Mai could already tell Zuko would be an excellent father. Even as she fished the maggot-ridden corpse out of the water, Mai smiled to herself. Sometimes, when she saw Zuko was playing with Kazuto, something would clench in her chest. She'd want to run and hug both of them, and kiss Kazuto's cheek, and let herself melt into Zuko's arms the way only he made her do…
Mai threw the third body onto the pile, and thought she saw its hand collapse through the ribcage of one of the other former rebels. Repulsive. This kind of manual labor would have shocked her mother. But Mai didn't have a good idea of what else she could do, and not just in this situation. It often bothered her that while Zuko and Suki had set jobs and goals, Mai just…hung around. 'Firelady' was not a job description like Firelord was, and Mai didn't know what she wanted to do. As a teenager, she had rejected politics as too boring. But then she had gotten swept up with Azula, and then Zuko, and had never really taken the time to figure out what she did enjoy.
Mai smirked to herself. Well, there was one thing she enjoyed, but she should probably find other productive things to do with her time. Absent-mindedly, her mind on far more pleasurable activities, Mai reached down and grabbed the ankles of the fourth body with her bare hands. The skin sloughed off in her hands, green and rotting. Mai swore.
Her composure finally broken, Mai desperately sunk her hands into the water, trying to rid herself of the residue of rotten flesh off and still swearing violently. She would just order someone else to do this, this was ridiculous. But no. None of the Guards could be sacrificed, and Shan needed the passage cleared. She'd see this through. Stubbornly, Mai picked up her former black robe, now her corpse-handling implement, and wrapped it around the insurgent's ankles. Gently, she ushered it out of the water and dragged it to the pile of other bodies. Halfway there.
Now standing in a thin black shift, her soaked and soiled robe in her hand, Mai faced the flooded corridor. She'd have to wade in to find the four final corpses. Mai kicked off her boots-no point in ruining good leather—and walked in. The water was freezing, probably both because it came from deep underground and because this passage led to the ice room. Mai waded in to her knees, then to her waist, and tried to occupy her mind with other things.
Did she want to be a mother? Mai had given the idea surprisingly little thought. There had been that one time, after Zuko ran away with the Avatar, when she had worried she was pregnant, but that had thankfully come to nothing. And afterwards, everything had moved and changed so quickly. Zuko became Firelord. They stayed together for a year, and then broke up due to the strain of the throne. She found someone new. And eventually, she and Zuko realized that even with their problems, there was really no one else they would rather be with. But in all that time, being a mother was not something that occurred to her.
"It's your choice," Zuko had said to her last night."But you're a loving person, Mai. If you want to be Kazuto's adopted mother, I know you'll be amazing."It was things like that that made Mai love Zuko. He knew she was a loving person? Who else believed that of her? Zuko sometimes saw a warmth in her that she didn't even see.
Icy water now rising up to her ribcage, Mai spotted three bodies floating together just down the hall. Excellent. She swam over to them, and, using the cloth push them, shoved them down the passage towards shallower water. Hopefully they'd float back to the end of the tunnel and she could pick them up once she found the final corpse. She kept swimming.
I'll have to teach Kazuto how to swim, she thought to herself, doing the breaststroke down an increasingly dark channel of water. He'd love the beach by Ember Island; Zuko and I should plan a vacation.She pictured Kazuto and Zuko building little sand castles by the ocean. The sun would be warm, and they'd both look up as she approached, Kazuto screaming like he always did, and Zuko smiling, rising to greet her…And in a prison below Crescent Lake, surrounded by icy water and at least one more frozen corpse, Mai realized something: she might not know what she wanted to do with her life. She might have a pretty screwed up relationship with her parents. But more than anything, she wanted a new family with Zuko and Kazuto.
"So I'll be a mother," Mai said aloud. The words echoed off the stone walls. By the light of the final torch in the hall, Mai saw a glimmer of white, dead skin. Fantastic! Mai thought. Starting to shiver from the cold, feeling warmer inside than she had since Zuko's Agni Kai, Mai paddled over to drag the last body out of the water. For her family.