Disclaiming Banner: If I had any claim over ATLA, I would be going to Comic Con this summer instead of trolling YouTube for fan videos.
Oversight
In some ways, Ty Lee was still invisible. She now stood apart from her sisters, but she was overshadowed by her friends. It was frustrating, it was humiliating and painful, but she would never let it show. Instead while people were watching what they thought she was, she was working out what they really were; smiling all the time.
Ty Lee's family had built a fortune from metalworking and she had visited the foundries often. She had witnessed the skin and hair of workers scorch as they fed the all consuming blaze arching from deep within the furnace. Princess Azula held fire, used fire, melded scraps of ugliness into searing, raw perfection. As long as something was there to feed on.
Mai, her dearest confidant, was overshadowed herself by Azula but less discontented by it. She had a will like an ember: constant, comforting, and waiting for the moment she could achieve what she wanted. That drive was only part of the reason Ty Lee could never act on her own wants.
When Zuko had been banished, she had gone through her days as cheerfully as expected. She was Princess Azula's first, and could not behave as less. But at night she had cried alone in her room for a month. Azula was like a blast furnace, but Zuko was the fire. He was growing up to have the skill and the power to make without destroying everything.
He never looked her way.