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Mai learned poetry at the Academy with everyone else. She hated it.
She hated it the same way she hated everything that her mother would drill her on when she returned home during school breaks. She hated kado, calligraphy, poetry, painting, everything she would have to demonstrate, perform with: first to her mother, then (if her mother thought it was good enough) to her father. And if she performed well enough, everything was fine. And if she didn't, she listened to the lecture, impassive, and had to do it all over again in a few days, after her mother hovered over her shoulder, pushing her on in practice.
It was generally less trouble to just make sure it was perfect the first time. It wasn't (so they explained, both her parents, at nauseating length) that they wanted her to be unhappy. Quite the contrary. If she thought about it (they said) she would see that this was all for her. They loved her; her father's career would bring her future happiness. She needed to do these things perfectly so as not to screw it up; she needed to do things perfectly so that she would be an accomplished young lady. It was very important.
It got so that if she heard the speeches one more time, delivered in her mother's gentle, concerned voice, she was going to throw herself out the window.
So Mai learned to do all the things she hated, including poetry. Learned to do them fast, adequate, and once that was done she could spend time on the things she didn't hate.
Her mother and father disapproved of almost all of them. But when the Fire Lord's daughter offers yours the chance to study with her arms tutor, and you're thinking about your political career, you don't refuse.
The tutor paid little attention to Mai, to be honest. Azula took pretty much all his time. It didn't matter in the long run. Mai taught herself, and watched Azula, and sometimes - on those school breaks, when she was in the palace with her friends, rather than at home - she would watch Azula's brother.
It got so that she liked that better. Azula did everything perfectly the first time, and her father never had anything to say to her but praise. Which was only more important, when your father was the Fire Lord, but it still made Mai envious.
Zuko made mistakes. And his father didn't seem to like him. He was, of course, her best friend's stupid older brother, but it was nice to watch someone else who wasn't perfect do things.
At the core, it started with that: neither of them was what they were supposed to be. She was too hard, too loud, too sharp, too harsh, too cold; he was too careful, too attached, too easily hurt, too sensitive, too loving. It was the first thing they shared; it was the bridge between the two of them, when honestly, they had very little else in common.
Mai had used Azula. She was more than honest enough to admit it to herself. The freedom that came from being the princess' friend, the way Azula (and in many ways, only Azula) could kick through Mai's parents' objections, the way Azula broke through Mai's parents' desire for a perfect doll-girl to smile prettily and make a good alliance marriage, the fact that going with Azula meant she got everything she wanted to do anyway, got excitement, danger, fights, hunts, everything: that was more than worth putting up with Azula's temper, her capriciousness, her obsessions and her off-hand, unthinking cruelty.
When you were young enough, "best friend" just meant "the person I spend the most time with." So that was Azula - Azula and Ty Lee, yes, but always, first and foremost, Azula. Because Azula warped the orbit of anything around her; because she was the princess, and perfect, and life got miserable when she was angry with you.
Mai was used to that. Used to life being more difficult when you didn't do what someone wanted. She made that decision every day: decided to do as she was told, because it was easier. It was the same either way, but going with Azula gave her everything else. Life with her parents gave Mai nothing.
She was old enough, had seen enough of other people - mostly servants and other people her father outranked - to know that wasn't what friendship was supposed to mean. Knew it (when she admitted it to herself, which wasn't often) in the difference between being Azula's friend and being Ty Lee's, even as frustrating and annoying as Ty Lee could be and often was.
It didn't matter. Friend was what people called it; friend was the word she used. Mai had every reason to be Princess Azula's friend.
She'd used Azula. It was that simple.
She'd wanted Zuko. From before she even knew what that meant, had anything to attach to the way he drew her. Before paying attention to a friend's dumb older brother was anything other than setting yourself up for months of teasing. Before she knew what to do with the feeling.
He was . . . heat, in a way not linked like an enslaved cliche to the idea of fire. Warmth, maybe. Maybe that was the word. He looked at things and made them matter. Made them mean something. Azula opened the wide world to Mai to break open at her pleasure; Zuko made sitting still and looking at it seem like a good way to pass the day.
Which was a weird thing to say about someone who lost his temper at the flick of a finger and spent most of his time yelling at people. But then, that was part of it. He cared enough to lose his temper. It was annoying and captivating at the same time.
That kind of contradiction was a family trait.
In the end, it was simple: her world was better when Zuko was in it. So Mai wanted him, and she wanted to keep him. And she was furious at him for leaving, furious with a cold burn that almost nothing actually provoked in her; and she was furious with him for wanting to take the world and turn it upside down and shake it, change everything, change sides.
She was furious. She wanted to rip him to shreds, and she wasn't sure whether she meant with her words or her knives, and didn't really care. She wanted him to understand how he was wrong; she wanted grovelling and apologies.
Except that she didn't know what she'd do if she got it - and she knew she wasn't going to get it anyway. For once in her life, she didn't have any idea what she was doing, or why she was doing it.
That was the problem with caring. It made you do stupid things.
But when it came down to it, the world without him in it threatened with its grey expanse, the future stretching out before her with nothing in it except sitting at Azula's side, playing the balance between survival and servility she couldn't really stomach anymore, and searching hopelessly for something that mattered, until she was too old to fight, too old to hunt, too old to do anything but flutter at Azula's children the way Lo and Li fussed after Azula now.
And so they still shared that one bridge: they still weren't what they were supposed to be. And now they were both traitors. And Mai harboured the cold satisfaction of knowing she was the first person to hurt Azula - to really truly hurt her, get under her skin - in years.
Prison gave her nothing but time to think.
Ty Lee couldn't figure out why the guards left them alone, keeping their harassment limited to, well, every other woman and many of the men they could get their hands on. Mai didn't bother to enlighten her, but she knew.
Someone who would betray Princess Azula and then stand to face the consequences, someone who could take down all the guards trying to cut that gondola down? That person might be good enough, might be crazy enough, to kill the guard who laid hands on her. And sure, she'd pay for it afterwards - but that first guard, and maybe the next two after, would still be dead. And most of the others would be hurt.
Badly.
When they looked at Mai, she made sure to meet their eyes, and knew that her own face said, yes. I will. Go ahead and test it.
They left her alone.
Ty Lee made friends; Ty Lee always made friends, with the desperate hope of protection from the strongest among them. Two of the older women adopted her as their own, at least for a while.
Mai ignored them. She kept an eye on Ty Lee, but mostly ignored her, too. They were an annoyance, mostly; at best, they were a distraction. She sat in her cell, or in the yard apart from the others, and wrapped herself in her own thoughts.
Caring made you do stupid things, but the stupid thing was already done. She was here. It was over. I know one thing I care about, she'd said on the beach at Ember Island, and hadn't realized what she was chaining herself to by speaking the truth. Saying things out loud made them real.
But Zuko had poured out words, and Mai had understood, like an unwinding scroll in her head: why he was so ridiculous, why he was being such a jerk, what really was wrong with him. What he was so afraid of. If she'd been really honest, she'd've seen everything coming, especially after the war-meeting, but that had been too big a thought, and too frightening for her. She'd tried to fool herself into thinking what she saw would go away with time.
Her mistake.
She'd understood Zuko right then, and all the wanting had come back, reminded her what it felt like, and so she'd said words out loud, said I care about you and trapped herself. Now she understood him even better, and wanted to hit him as hard as she could, and then make very, very sure he was never anywhere other than beside her for the rest of their lives.
It was disgusting and sentimental, but there it was. And here Mai was.
The question was what happened next.
She was branded a traitor, tried by the court of Azula's anger and sentenced to rot. She was lucky (for a certain value of lucky) to be alive at all. If Azula won, if the Fire Lord won, if the comet gave them everything they wanted and the Avatar fell, she would spend the rest of her life in this cold isolation, until she was ancient and decrepit, and the new generation of guards didn't even remember why she was here.
If she were lucky. If Azula didn't decide, when given power, that it would be more fun to torment Mai and Ty Lee directly. If she could get over the fear of facing the people she thought were safely leashed, and turned out to be completely out of her control.
That future didn't need any planning. If, then: if the Avatar lost, then there was no real future, only grey waiting and death. No need to think about it.
So she looked it full in the face, and then she ignored it, and decided to believe, for now, that as crazy as it seemed, as wrong as it seemed, that Zuko had picked the right side (where "right" meant "winning"), and what would happen then: what she would do then.
What that meant.
She thought about the guilt on his face when he realized who she was, why he'd been dragged away from the others; she thought about how defensive he'd been, telling her that it wasn't about her. She remembered, for that matter, that he had bothered to write her a note at all.
She thought about Zuko as a ruler. She thought about what the world would look like, after the war was over. What the Fire Nation would look like. The work that would have to be done. She thought about what you didn't learn if you were thrown out of the court when you were thirteen and didn't come back until past sixteen, and hadn't been very good at figuring people out even before that.
Then she thought about how he would have seen her turn on his sister. For him.
Sitting cross-legged in her cell, Mai felt her mouth curving into a smile.
She wondered if Azula would live to see Mai raised over her; to see Mai's children become princes, princesses.
Because if the Avatar won, Mai would be a queen.
Mai had used Azula. She'd learned a lot from Azula, too. Then in the end, she'd learned the last truth about Azula and it was almost funny, as long as you had a morbid sense of humour.
You should have feared me more, said the princess, and Mai had almost wanted to laugh.
If she'd understood Zuko on the beach, then right then and there, on the gondola landing, she'd finally understood Azula completely. Finally understood that Azula couldn't comprehend anything except fear. Mai had always known Azula depended on fear, but then, people had a lot of reasons to fear Azula, starting with the fact that she'd have them killed for forgetting to pit her cherries. And fear worked. People did a lot of things out of fear.
Azula did everything out of fear. Azula was terrified. Azula couldn't imagine anything more powerful than fear. You should have feared me more, she'd said, like she didn't realize that Mai expected to be killed right then and there. To die of burns, to burn to death. That after years of following her around, Mai knew exactly how screwed up, vicious and terrifying Azula could be.
Like Azula couldn't imagine someone knowing that and then deciding it was less important than something else. That there were worse things than captivity, pain, death, failure.
To rather not have a world, than to have a world without someone in it.
Azula didn't get it. Mai almost could have felt sorry for her.
But given she was sleeping in a cell and eating sludge because Azula was actually willing to kill her own brother, Mai didn't.
Mai wasn't Azula. So she wasn't surprised at all when her cell door opened and her uncle, looking terrified, determined and angry, with guards she recognized (recognized as owing him favours) behind him, and said, "Get up. You're leaving."
"You're really willing to risk this," Mai said. It probably wasn't fair, but just because the man was her uncle didn't mean she actually respected him. He was exactly the kind of person who grovelled at Azula's feet.
Her uncle scowled. "I am not leaving my sister's daughter," he said, through his teeth, "to die in a cell."
"She'll kill you if she finds out you've done this, you know," Mai replied, and they both knew she meant Azula. This time, her uncle's face went tight, but he didn't leave, didn't back away, and if he looked scared he also looked determined.
After all, he'd already shown he was willing to boil to death rather than face failure. This was probably nothing. "Hurry up, girl," he growled.
Mai stood up. "Ty Lee's coming with us," she said, calmly. Her uncle took a good look at her, and sent one of the guards behind him to go and get her; he didn't even argue.
She - they weren't getting out. He didn't have quite that much power. But there were ways of being imprisoned that were barely worse than being a noble daughter, chained to a house by your reputation. Better, in some ways, because nobody was around to tell you to sit up straight or practice your flower arranging or to nag you to smile over and over and over again.
If Azula won, in the end, it wouldn't matter: some day she'd remember Mai and Ty Lee existed, and kill them outright. And if Zuko won . . . .
Well. Mai would be right there, in the capital, and one smart soldier's career move away from walking free to a palanquin to carry her to the palace.
Her uncle scurried like a frightened rat-lizard, looking left and right as if he was afraid Azula would materialize out of the wall. Mai followed him without bothering to look around. Ty Lee would be waiting for them at the gondola; an airship would be waiting on the other end of the gondola; and one of the plush, careful and carefully locked rooms at the capital would be waiting for her at the end of the journey.
There had been rocks, in the yard, at the Boiling Rock. Mai had gathered a couple of the sharper edged ones, against need. Compared to her knives they were crude and clunky, but they'd work if she needed them.
One day she'd been bored enough to use one to scratch three lines into one of the stones of her cell wall.
Love is fear's mistress
We take the choice of ruler
Mine will make me queen.
Someone might think something of it, some day.