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“you must love him a great deal,” ty lee whispers and it echoes in the haunting empty of their shared cell.
it’s a small mercy that azula couldn’t be bothered to separate them, and that given their good behavior no one deemed necessary to separate them at any point. as always, their shared ability to make themselves more digestible is the only thing holding them together, in every sense of the word.
“what do you mean?”
sitting next to mai on the cold floor, ty lee turns to look at her. her eyes look tired, and one would think that was more of a mai thing, but it’s not.
“you’re afraid of azula, yet you betrayed her so he could escape,” ty lee says, not whispering but still very quiet and plain. not at all like her usual tone. “so you must love him a great deal.”
she doesn’t need to clarify who ‘he’ is. he has been the same ‘he’ since they were kids. and mai supposes she does love him, to an extent. it would be strange not to. but she gets the feeling, lately, this is not how she should feel about him. she should feel that way about ty lee, and not him. and she should feel like she feels about him about ty lee instead, but this is what she’s got, in the end. two friends, one fighting a war and the other one in prison rags sitting next to her.
sitting next to mai in a prison has never been where she imagined ty lee would rather be. she has always been so focused on her survival and her surroundings and her political importance and azula, and yet. mai is not yet convinced this is not a fluke. a hallucination her brain manifested to keep her stable and alive.
(she has never felt more alive than every second after throwing her knives at those guards and talking back to azula and allowing zuko to leave, to escape, to be free. she has never felt this unafraid. this brave.)
“i don’t think i was afraid of anything anymore when i chose to do what i did,” mai says, and it is true, to an extent. except, of course, for mentioning the actual thing she did. give it a name. she’s not sure what she even did. she thinks she did everything.
“i was,” ty lee says, simple, definitive. “i was really afraid.”
mai tells her, “you didn’t seem to be,” but she knows it to be the truth, because ty lee never says what she means like this.
“i wasn’t thinking, really,” ty lee comments in that casual way of hers, darker than before (the real before, the before with azula in it.)
“you can say that again,” mai answers, and then something in her aches and makes her breath catch. “i still don’t understand why you’d betray her like that.” she doesn’t need to clarify who ‘she’ is either. she has been the same ‘she’ since they’ve got memory.
and mai can, logically, deduce why ty lee would do that. in a way, ty lee just told her. but she has always known better than to hold onto hope. at times, she wishes ty lee would say what she means, just so she can ignite that spark of hope in her chest, or crush it. ty lee just threw away political connections she’s spent her entire life forming, just jumped from the power ladder she spent her entire life climbing. and for what? ty lee has kept her eyes on mai this whole time. mai knows this, and she keeps her eyes down. she’s good at that. was it for this? was it worth it? will ty lee ever even say? it feels like a rock dropping on her stomach making a hole in it, thinking mai might’ve been completely wrong about this.
after a couple of minutes, silent in the dead of the night, after the fluttering in mai’s stomach has died, ty lee says, “i was hoping you’d escape.”
mai sighs, as if preparing herself, and raises her head. her eyes meet ty lee’s.