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A blade of moonlight cleaves the room in two. Mai’s eyes follow the light’s path from its source—the moon shining high above in the star-studded sky—through the window, along its sharp edge as it cuts across the floor and the dark wooden table, to where it ends in a tip keen enough to draw blood. It falls short just before the door. As if pointing.
Mai retraces the path, but halfway along her gaze catches on something. Next to where the bright light divides the table, there’s an imperfection on the otherwise flawless, polished surface. A stain. They must have missed it while wiping it down tonight.
They’ll have to clean it up tomorrow morning. The dorm can’t be left like this. The rooms are always inspected before the students leave for the holidays, and a stain on the table is proof they went against the school rules by eating in their room.
It wasn’t the first time they had shared a meal together at that table. Not nearly. Mai’s frown softens as she remembers.
Moon peaches.
They were just a few weeks into their first year. They didn’t know each other very well back then, and Mai didn’t yet know quite how to interact with her first ever roommate. So she’d had no response ready when she’d entered the room and was immediately greeted by a cheerful, “Hey, can I borrow one of your knives?”
She blinked at first. Crossed her arms as she felt a stab of annoyance, but cleaned the frown from her face when she remembered her diplomacy lessons and eventually settled on something between levelling Ty Lee with a blank stare and surveying her suspiciously. Though Ty Lee's expression was a tad hard to judge, seeing as she was hanging upside-down from her bed.
“Why?”
Ty Lee handsprang to her feet. “Because I don’t have any myself,” she said casually as she walked towards Mai, her braid falling over her shoulder as she shrugged. She averted her eyes, playing with the end of her braid. “And if I went to the kitchens to ask for one, uh…” A short pause. Then she looked at Mai again, throwing her an awkward smile. “I’d have to tell them I sneaked in food.”
Mai blinked, surprised. She hadn’t expected her roommate to be such a rule-breaker.
Well, as long as she didn’t get caught…this could make the year more interesting.
She rolled her eyes, but grumbled, “Fine.” She procured a knife from her sleeve—single-bladed, probably the smartest option for cutting food, though she shuddered at the thought—and extended the grip to Ty Lee. “But only so whatever food you brought doesn’t rot and make the whole room stink.”
Ty Lee took it, careful not to touch Mai’s hand, holding the blade. She threw her a dazzling smile. “Thank you so, so much!” She turned around to go back to her side of the room, and Mai did the same (she really needed to start writing that essay Professor Yan had set the class), but just as she had smoothed out the scroll on her desk, Ty Lee called out to her. “You can have some, if you’d like! It’s the least I could do, for letting me borrow your knife.”
Mai turned her head, ready to decline on the grounds of not wanting to break the school rules—but the words stilled on her lips when she saw Ty Lee holding a basket of pink-orange fruits.
Moon peaches. Her favourite. An imported delicacy, she hadn’t had any in months.
She looked at the paper, and back at Ty Lee, who met her eyes with a smile softer than the bright grins she knew of her. Then she mumbled, “Alright,” and left behind her desk to take a seat where Ty Lee motioned for her to sit, right next to her.
“Do you like moon peaches?” Ty Lee asked as she cut up the fruit. Mai winced when the blade hit the stone inside.
“Yeah.” The word felt like a confession of something heavier, something infinitely more complicated than this simple thing.
“Great!” Ty Lee said as she handed Mai a quarter of the fruit, still smiling. “Me too.”
Mai carefully took a bite, holding a hand under her mouth to shield the table from the juice. The skin of the peach was as soft as she’d always imagined a kis–
She bit her cheek and swallowed. Not here, not now. “How’d you get these, anyway?” she asked, a tad too quickly.
Ty Lee didn’t seem to notice. “Oh, my family owns an orchard,” she replied between bites.
“I thought they only grew in the Earth Kingdom?”
“Well, apparently not.” Ty Lee shrugged. “But our island is one of the most northernmost, so they probably just came via the Earth Kingdom.”
Mai shrugged too. “Makes sense.”
They ate the rest of the peaches in silence. When the basket was empty, Ty Lee carefully wiped the knife with a cloth and held it out to Mai. “Thank you so much for letting me borrow it.”
Mai looked at the knife, then at Ty Lee, wearing an expression she couldn’t quite decipher. “Keep it,” she said finally. “So you won’t have to ask me again.” She glanced at the edge, and suppressed a wince as she recalled the sound of it scraping a peach pit. Several times. “The blade is probably useless for throwing now anyway.”
Ty Lee beamed. She put away the knife, and then—threw her arms around Mai. “Thank you so much, that is so kind of you!” she squealed. “I don’t know how to repay you.”
Mai froze, still as a statue. None of her etiquette lessons had ever taught her what the appropriate response was to this. “Yeah, uh,” she said intelligently, patting Ty Lee’s shoulder. “No problem. I, uh, can miss a single knife.”
“Still,” Ty Lee said, stepping back. “Thank you.”
Mai, not knowing how to react to her roommate’s excessive expressions of gratitude, just stepped back and awkwardly gestured to her desk. “I, uh, I’m gonna work on Professor Yan’s essay now.”
“Oh, good luck!” Ty Lee chirped. “I finished it yesterday. If you need help, just ask!” She glanced at the clock. “Oh! I said I’d show Ming some acrobacy tricks at eight, so I gotta run.” She smiled at Mai. “Good luck with the essay!”
Before Mai could thank her, she was gone.
They ate moon peaches this evening, too. It was a mirror of that first time, the two of them sitting at that table, sharing their favourite fruit. The feeling of peach juice dripping from their fingers and onto the table, sweet and sticky as honey. Savouring every bite, licking the juice from their fingers like children, abandoning their manners, Ty Lee laughing and making Mai smile in return. They could be messy, childlike. No one would know.
A tired voice sweeps away the memory. “Can’t sleep?”
Ty Lee’s voice sounds rough with something other than sleep. Unguarded. It feels like something secret, something only Mai is allowed to hear.
Mai shifts her gaze to the ceiling above her bed and sighs. “Just thinking.”
“Ooh,” Ty Lee coos, “dangerous.”
Mai would snipe back, were it not for the truth that lies beneath that jab. They both know there are few things more dangerous than thinking.
Ty Lee doesn’t ask what she’s thinking about. Instead, there’s a ruffling sound, and when Mai turns her head to see what in Agni’s name Ty Lee is doing, Ty Lee is standing next to her bed, a cloak wrapped around her shoulders. She tilts her head towards the window, where the moon is still shining. “Come,” she whispers.
After a second of deliberation, Mai lets herself be pulled out of bed. Wordlessly, they climb out the window and help each other onto the roof.
The Academy building isn’t incredibly tall—it spreads out over the landscape, a sign of affluence on the Fire Islands where space is so precious—but its height, combined with the tiered roofing, is enough to allow two girls fortunate enough to have a room on the third and highest floor to escape the eye of the guards on patrol below.
They sit together amidst a world blanketed in darkness. The trees that normally cushion the grounds with a leafy green canopy are barely visible, and as Ty Lee swings her legs over the edge of the roof, Mai can’t shake the feeling she’s sitting at the brink of the abyss. She’s afraid Ty Lee will fall, and that Mai won’t be able to catch her. She wants to pull her back.
Ty Lee stays quiet, which is unusual. Normally she’s pointing out how pretty the moon looks by now, or gossiping about their classmates, or suggesting they stargaze. But instead, she has fixed her gaze to the horizon, brow furrowed. Mai wants to smooth it out.
After what feels like an eternity, Ty Lee speaks, keeping her eyes on the mountains that fade into nothingness far, far away. Her voice is a birdsong above the rustling of leaves below.
“I’m leaving.”
Oh.
(So the peaches tonight were an apology.)
(It wouldn’t have been the first time. Mai remembers marvelling, once, at how a blade meant to pierce, to hurt, could, in a different hand, instead be used to mend.
She wonders if, in the same way, when she thinks about this moment years from now, she will feel nothing but warmth and fondness, instead of the ice-sharp chill that grips her now. Wonders, or knows, if the opposite can be true too. If pretty words meant to soften, to placate, come easily, but true ones hurt the self.
They never speak a lot when it’s just the two of them.)
(Perhaps Ty Lee is all about change, about movement, while Mai is stagnant, unchanging. Rooted. Perhaps that is what brought them here.)
Mai swallows away the dryness that has nestled in her throat. “Where to?” Her voice sounds hoarse.
“You remember that travelling circus we went to?”
Of course Mai remembers. Azula hadn’t gone with them, so it was just the two of them sitting next to each other, fading into the audience. During the scary part of the trapeze act, Ty Lee had gripped Mai’s hand, and Mai had let her. Even though she knew Ty Lee didn’t get scared easily.
(She didn’t let go until the end of the show.)
“Yeah,” she just says.
Ty Lee turns her head, finally meeting Mai’s eyes. “Well, they’ve got a vacant place ever since their trapezist left.”
“…And you got the job.” Mai’s voice is free of ire, just sorrowful resignation.
“…Yeah.”
Now is Mai’s turn to look away. “Do you think you’ll be happy there?”
“Yeah.” Ty Lee’s voice is breathy, barely audible. “I think…I think it’s my calling.”
Mai doesn’t know what to say to that. Maybe there is nothing to say. She knows of Ty Lee’s desire for freedom and individuality, of her contempt for court and everything related to it. Knows how she longs for adventure, to see more of the world. To be the star of the show. Who is Mai to deny her that? To cage her when all she wants is to fly?
She knows she’ll be happier there, so Mai can stamp down this selfish desire to keep her here, to ask her to stay.
There is nothing more to say, so she doesn’t. Instead, she nods, silent. Intertwines their fingers, an indulgent action concealed by the night. In wordless unanimity, they lie back to watch the stars twinkle high above.
But Mai can’t focus on finding constellations as she usually does. She keeps thinking about how this is the last time she’ll ever see Ty Lee, the thought a storm in her mind.
No one is around to hear. So, she turns to Ty Lee, and allows herself to whisper a selfish secret, almost lost to the wind. “I wish I could go with you.”
Ty Lee’s smile is bittersweet and knowing, and Mai feels bare beneath her gaze. All of her selfishness, her unbecoming desires left on display—but there’s no judgement in Ty Lee’s warm brown eyes, and when she lets the mask fall for just a moment, Mai catches a glimpse of her own reflection.
The same desires Ty Lee has laid bare in her, mirrored as if in the clear surface of the lake of Mai’s family’s gardens, only disturbed by the falling of plum blossoms. A glimpse of sunlight spun by children’s hands, hair braided in secret. Warmth in the accidental brushing of hands, in the cutting up and sharing of peaches, in genuine smiles reserved only for secret, stolen moments.
“Yeah,” Ty Lee whispers back. “Me too.”
Mai wants to lie here on the roof with Ty Lee long enough to watch the night unspool. Watch the horizon together and hope for a pink sunset. But she can’t show up at home looking as if she hasn’t slept a wink—and her parents will notice. That is, if the academy staff don’t notice first. Or their classmates. Another thing Ty Lee is leaving behind, the chainedness to other people’s expectations and opinions. Again, Mai wishes she could too. But that is all she does, all she can do. Just lie there, under the stars, and wish for something she knows she can’t have.
Eventually, the time comes when they have to slip back inside, and they do so one by one. But when Mai’s feet touch down on the dorm floor, she realises just how much she doesn’t want this moment to end. If this is to be their last moment together, surely some things can be excused.
So before Ty Lee can turn around, before she can say her final goodbye, Mai catches her wrist. Or perhaps catch isn’t the right word. It’s just a brush of fingers, but Ty Lee freezes all the same. When she slowly turns to look at Mai, a question written on her face, Mai immediately clasps her hands in front of herself again. Back straight, prim and proper. She swallows. “Your braid,” she blurts out. As if the words, if said too slowly, will incriminate her. “It’s unravelling.”
“Huh?” Ty Lee frowns when she sees what Mai is talking about. “Huh, yeah. I guess the tie must’ve fallen off.” She shrugs, but doesn’t move away.
“Let me,” Mai whispers. She doesn’t look Ty Lee in the eyes as she says it.
After a second that feels like an eternity, Ty Lee finally gives a minute nod. She turns to the window and Mai steps closer. She takes Ty Lee’s braid, carefully, and begins unravelling it, brushing her fingers through the soft brown waves. She works slowly, gingerly, as if the strands of Ty Lee’s hair are made of spun sunlight that will shatter at too harsh a touch—as if unravelling the braid too quickly might unravel this moment too.
The only sounds are their breaths, careful and measured, and the thundering of Mai’s heart in her ears. She wills it to be quiet.
“I’ll braid yours,” Ty Lee says when she’s done. It isn’t a question.
(Not that Mai ever would have said no.)
They switch places, and Mai stares out the window as she tries not to lose herself in the feeling of Ty Lee braiding her hair. She’s taken back to the times they’ve done this before. When they didn’t know better. She almost smiles at the memory of them decorating their braids with every accessory they could find. After she’d woven an obscene amount of pearl hairpins into it, Ty Lee had likened Mai’s to the tail of a falling star—but all Mai could think about when she saw Ty Lee, beaming and adorned with pink and yellow flowers, was that she looked like the sun personified.
It’s been a long time since then. They know better now. Know they can’t do this, not anymore. Know why.
And yet, in this moment, they allow themselves this, just this once. One last time.
Ty Lee wraps a hair ribbon around the end of the braid. “Done,” she says, voice bright but soft.
The white hair ribbon is a stark contrast against Mai’s night-dark hair, gleaming in the moonlight. She looks up and meets Ty Lee’s eyes. “Thank you,” she whispers.
“Thank you,” Ty Lee says. “For…”
For doing the same. For letting me be your friend. For eating moon peaches with me, today and years ago and every time in between. For being there for me. For everything.
“I know,” Mai says.
They stand still for a moment, and Mai drinks in everything about Ty Lee. The way her waves fall down her shoulders, a river of bronze in the moonlight. The round arch of her eyebrows, the soft curve of her jaw. The twinkle in her eyes. If this is the last time she will ever see her, she wants to remember every little detail.
But before she can finish, before she can commit every inch of her to memory, Ty Lee rushes forward and wraps her arms around her. “I’m gonna miss you,” she whispers.
Mai closes her eyes. “Yeah,” she says. “Me too.”
The next morning, Mai wakes to an empty room. Ty Lee’s side is barren, not a single hint she has ever been there, that she has ever existed, except for the handful of pink petals dancing in the breeze that blows in through the open window.
Ty Lee is gone, and Mai has nothing left to do except slide the white silk ribbon off the end of her braid and get ready for the day.
For a life without Ty Lee.
(She still needs to clean the moon peach stain off the table.)