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“Can you braid my hair?”
Mai tilts her head, eyes Ty Lee with a mix of curiosity and suspicion. She’s sitting on Mai’s bed, right in front of her, cross-legged and holding up a hand as if presenting it, a hair tie lying in her open palm. Brown waves stream down her shoulders, dancing freely with every movement. She’d been humming absentmindedly just a few moments ago, but even though she has fallen silent with that question, she still seems…happy, somehow. Carefree, even now. As if she just commented on the weather, and not…
“…Why?”
Ty Lee shrugs. “I don’t want to get knots.”
Mai raises an eyebrow. “Why can’t you do it yourself?”
“I can’t put all of my hair into the braid if I do it myself,” Ty Lee says breezily. “And then it’ll get tangled, just closer to the roots, dummy.”
She must recognise something in Mai’s expression (she hasn’t been guarding it as much lately, no need for it when it’s just the two of them—not that it matters, since Ty Lee has always been able to see through whatever mask she puts on) because she drops her smile and lets something else take its place. Something more natural, more grounded. More genuine.
(Ty Lee would know about performances and masks, after all.)
She holds Mai’s gaze. “If that’s what you’re worried about,” she says, tipping her head towards the door, “you know the guards won’t be back for another hour. No one will see us.”
Mai knows that. She doesn’t understand why she is putting up such a fight, if she’s being honest. Why she can’t just let go and not care anymore in the way Ty Lee can. They’ve already doomed themselves anyway, forsaken everything they have ever stood for. Irredeemable, past the point of no return. What’s a little further?
(Maybe it’s her mother’s voice still floating in the back of her mind, no matter how hard she tries to get rid of it. How could she suddenly let go of an ideal she had been taught to value above all else, that she had been taught to strive for even in its unattainability? Knowing perfection and propriety are impossible to achieve doesn’t help when that fact is all she has ever known. A truth that lies at the fundaments of her very being.)
Ty Lee places her hand on the mattress in front of hers—just a brush of fingertips, but Mai still has to fight a shiver at the touch. “Please?”
The plea is paired with big eyes and a pout, and looking at Ty Lee like this, Mai knows she would do anything for her, even if she’d never ask her to.
(Maybe, just maybe, she can learn to let go. Just a little.
Maybe one day she won’t care what others would think if they knew, but for now, the knowledge they don’t know will have to be enough.)
“…Okay.”
Ty Lee hands her the hair tie and turns her back to Mai, settling down in front of her with her hands lying clasped in her lap. There’s a vulnerability, a trust to the action, somehow, and yet Mai is still caught off guard at the ease with which it comes.
(Perhaps she should be more surprised at how easily that same trust comes to her, too. But she isn’t, not really. Not anymore.)
“I tried to comb it through with my fingers as well as I could,” Ty Lee says, pulling Mai back to reality. “There shouldn’t be any knots left, but if there are, you can untangle them. I don’t mind.”
“I’ll be careful,” Mai says, and it feels more like a confession than it should.
When Ty Lee replies, her voice is soft, tinged with an emotion Mai can’t quite place. “I know.”
Mai closes her eyes for a moment, then gathers Ty Lee’s hair behind her back, careful to avoid the skin of her shoulders the prison uniform leaves bare. She runs her fingers through the curls. Slowly. When they catch on a knot close to the nape of her neck, she sets about disentangling it, picking at the edges with care.
When she’s sure the hair is as tangle-free as it can be, she gathers it behind Ty Lee’s head, making sure there’s not a strand left hanging in front of her face. Mai wonders what would happen if she ran her fingers through it one more time, only once more than truly necessary. If Ty Lee would notice. Were she a different person, she would take the way her fingers itch for desire to reach out, but Mai knows better than anyone that wanting is a dangerous thing. So she doesn’t. Instead, she lets her hands fall.
She starts at the front, at the beginning of her hairline. She parts the hair there into three even pieces, dragging her nails over the scalp ever so lightly (if she didn’t know better, she would think she felt Ty Lee shudder) and begins braiding.
With every twist of her hand she incorporates a new strand into the one she’s holding and crosses it over the middle one, and soon, a dragon’s tail takes shape. It’s the first braid Mai learned to do, back at the Academy, when Ty Lee had asked her to do her hair for the first time, in a moment strikingly similar to this one. Ty Lee’s hair was the first and only Mai had ever touched besides her own.
It has been years, but the motions are familiar, still. Her fingers slip into an easy rhythm, a remnant from the time when this was a regular occurrence, when they were young and foolish and didn’t know they shouldn’t. When they hadn’t yet learned that this was something to be hidden.
And still, they fall into this dance as if not a day has passed since those evenings in their dorm at the Academy. It’s the same silence that washes over them, the same ease with which Ty Lee follows Mai’s wordless instructions. She only has to pull lightly for her to follow, to tilt her head to the side Mai wants her to, as if her thoughts are being projected across the room instead of tucked away nicely inside her head.
(Ty Lee has always known better than anyone how to read them.)
Yet there is something fundamentally different about this, and they both know it. Mai’s fingers tremble in a way they never did before, and her breath feels quivery, unsteady. Ty Lee is tense, too, back straight and squeezing her clasped hands in her lap a little more tightly than usual.
(There was a reason they stopped braiding each other’s hair, after all.)
Lost in her rumination, Mai’s hand slips.
Ty Lee's breath hitches as she brushes her neck—Mai barely grazes the skin and flinches away immediately, rigid-fingered and wide-eyed, but it’s enough. Enough for her to realise how much she wants.
She always wants what she cannot have.
She closes her eyes. “Sorry,” she says, barely more than a hoarse whisper, and they both know she’s apologising for more than just this slip-up.
She doesn’t need to face Ty Lee to see the way she smiles, soft and reassuring, but there’s a thickness to her voice when she whispers, “You don’t need to be.”
Mai lowers her head. She picks up the half-unravelled braid again, gingerly, and resumes braiding. There’s a tension to the silence, now—a solidity to the air, the heaviness of a realisation that wasn’t there before—but neither dares to try alleviate it.
Mai braids slowly. Steady fingers pull the strands tight. She can’t allow them to fumble, to betray her once again, not in the way the shakiness of her breath and the thunder in her chest are doing. She tries to lose herself in the familiar motions, tries to untangle her thoughts the way she untangled Ty Lee’s hair, but longing clings to her skin like spidersilk no matter how hard she tries to shake it, and her heart aches with all the things she longs to say.
(But through the deliberate silence and the understanding that spreads through it, she gets the feeling Ty Lee knows regardless.)
The braid is done far too quickly.
When Mai has wrapped the hair tie around the end, Ty Lee turns around. She gives Mai a smile, warm and soft and so unlike the bright grins Mai knows from her. “…Thank you.” She tilts her head, and her voice becomes a little softer, a little more unsure, her smile wavering. “Do you…want me to braid your hair too?”
Mai knows how dangerous it is to want. One of the first lessons she remembers being taught is how important it is to hide your emotions—only fools wear their hearts on their sleeves, only fools put their desires on display, right where everyone can see and take advantage of them. She can still see her mother counting examples on her fingers as she looks at Mai with her upper lip curled and eyebrows raised in disapproval. Manipulation, blackmailing, and so on, and so forth.
But she also knows Ty Lee would never do any of those things. Not to her. She trusts her, an unshakable truth her foundation relies upon, and she knows now that Ty Lee would never break that trust, the very reason they are here together. There is no one who can see them here, no one who can use this against her, no one who can intrude on this secret. No one here but them.
So, for once, Mai allows herself to have what she wants.
“…Okay.”