Chapter Text
Ty Lee was born in the summer in a small house deep in the farmlands of the Fire Nation. Her mother told her that it had been raining hard the morning she was born. There was a risk of flood, the water in the fields rising and rising, and the doctor couldn’t make it. Her father had cut the umbilical cord and it had sat with the placenta in a stone pot in the bedroom until the water had gone down. It was bad luck to leave the cord unburied like that, especially for a little girl.
Ty Lee was the oldest of seven daughters, more twins than you could count. All brunettes with bright eyes, that not quite Fire Nation look. Her youngest two sisters were born when they’d already found out her father was dead. Her bad luck was his. Maybe displaced, maybe hereditary.
She’d figured out from an early age that being the oldest meant something. There was an implication hidden in her age meaning that she had work to do. Her mother was good, cared for her daughters, wanted them to grow up smart and capable. They all went to school in town, learned to read and write and do math. Clever and educated and independent young women. But things were different for Ty Lee. When she was eight, Ty Lee started working the fields with her mother.
The same early fall that she first became involved with the harvest, Min from up the lane had pulled her behind the general store and tried to kiss her. He was two years older than her and they went to school together, Ty Lee knew his face. She didn’t scream when he did it, but she did bite him. He leaned in for her mouth and she grabbed his arm, used his momentum, and bit his hand so hard she felt something snap.
Min reared back, looking terrified. His thumb was at a strange angle, he grew pale looking at it. And he ran. Ty Lee knew that he hadn’t really meant it, this trying to take something from her that she didn’t want to give, that it was what he’d been told to do. Even at eight years old, she knew that people looked at her differently. His broken thumb sat as penance, she didn’t think he told anybody about what he tried to do and what she’d done in turn. He never talked to her again.
This episode was important. Min was just a stupid kid and Ty Lee knew there were far worse things than him. She had to get smarter every second. It was also important because it was the first time that Ty Lee had ever broken someone’s bone. She’d remember it every time after that.
A year later, the Fire Lord’s family visited their town.
Ty Lee was a lot of things. She and her sisters were the best dancers in town. She was a nighttime farm worker. She was the top of her class. Her father had been dead for more of her life than he’d been alive, leaving her mother alone and exhausted. Ty Lee had a lot to take care of.
They hadn’t even gotten her father’s bones back. They were lost in the Earth Nation. He’d gone to war and that was it. The same story told across the nation, they send their fathers and sons and sisters and aunts and they don’t come back. Later Ty Lee would learn just how expendable her father was to those in the Imperial City. But that was later. At this point, she was still that bright eyed farmer’s daughter, glowing and cheerful, half radiant.
Azula had seen that glow, anyone could see it from a mile away. And Azula had loved it, had coveted it. Ty Lee had taken a risk that night the Fire Lord’s family had come to town and it had paid off.
They were so rich. They had so much and Ty Lee could almost taste it in the air. These two children could’ve seemed almost normal as they sat for dinner if it wasn’t for the way they held themselves. The sister teased the brother and they completed each other and they shifted and smiled and joked. They could’ve been just like everybody else if it wasn’t for the way everybody in town refused to meet their eyes. If it wasn’t for that posture that nobles had, that stiffness, that poise. The youngest daughter was her age, Ty Lee felt centuries older.
Still, she took her risk. The music began and Ty Lee knew that she had a chance. And she danced. Completed one dance and smiled at the princess, then offered her a hand.
Azula was nine years old. Children aren’t born cruel, but nine is old enough for the scales to begin to tip one way or another. But it wasn’t too late yet. Azula took her hand and danced with Ty Lee in that circle. Danced with the kind of poor scum that she wouldn’t even let touch her shoes two years later. But for that night, Azula danced.
In the morning, she made an offer.
Ty Lee had always known what Azula was. Later she and Mai would talk about it, how Mai believed herself some kind of exception to Azula’s cruelty. But Ty Lee had always known, always known this to be precarious and false. She’d always pegged Azula as the liar she would become. She’d loved her anyways.
Azula asked her to come with them back to the city the same way you ask for a pet. Ty Lee felt like an animal, like she was being bartered with. She spoke to her mother about it, in hushed voices so that her younger sisters wouldn’t hear. Ty Lee’s mother held her daughter’s face in her hands and said that Ty Lee didn’t have to do anything she didn’t want to. She didn’t have to, she didn’t have to go. She didn’t owe them anything. It was her decision.
Ty Lee felt it then and could finally label it for what it was. The same feeling that caused her to get up and go work, that made her the best dancer in town, that made her crush Min’s finger underneath her teeth. That want. Ty Lee wanted and she wanted bad. She wanted success and approval and money and recognition. She wanted. And she was going to have it.
She plastered her brightest smile on her face and mostly meant it and followed Azula to the city.
Ty Lee learned a lot and learned it fast. She had three years in that city, in that palace. They put her in a small guest room, a foot larger in every direction than the servant’s quarters, but twice the size of her room back home.
She woke up early her first morning there, before the sun had even risen. It was when she’d always woken up, the best work done early in the morning before school began. She slipped out of her room and into the palace. It was so vast. It was like being in a hive or a nest, everything alive. Even at this time of morning, there were people moving. Even in the palace, tense and crushingly silent, Ty Lee could still feel the life within it, making it sing.
She followed the feeling. The further she walked, the less confident she was that she would find her way back. Later she would learn just how dangerous this was, but for now she found herself in the kitchens of the Fire Nation.
It smelled nice and it was beautiful and there were people in it. Talking low and singing songs. It felt almost like home.
She’d been flying without knowing where she would land. She’d been drowning. She’d been falling and the ground was rushing to meet her. She’d been swallowed by a great beast and the stomach acid had begun to burn and burn. There was something in the kitchens that she knew. She let herself feel safe enough to be frightened.
And someone saw her. Saw the little girl, taken from her hometown on a whim, on a chance, permitted to stay as long as she wasn’t too noticed.
The head baker looked at her and thought that the girl had a strong frame, tanned from work out in the sun, and that she’d do well making bread. She waved Ty Lee over and she was just enough like her mother that Ty Lee followed.
The head baker was a very old and very short woman with gray eyes, a lightness on her brow and a serious steady line of a mouth. Ty Lee trusted her implicitly.
Ty Lee knew the things that allowed her to stay in the Imperial City those three years. Azula’s love and Mai’s protection. Her hard work and her efforts in school. And Okisu, the head baker.
Okisu was the first person to look at Ty Lee and realize just how little she knew. Realized just how tenuous of a position that nine year old girl was in. She was the one who seated Ty Lee at breakfast in front of the Fire Nation’s most important family and told her that things were different here, holding her head up high wouldn’t do any favors, instead she should bow it so low that she’d never look higher than the Fire Lord’s polished shoes. And Ty Lee listened.
Within two months, Ty Lee wasn’t living in the palace, but in Okisu’s spare room. She was still Azula’s guest, received a stipulation for staying, an education, some money for her expenses. But Ty Lee was who she’d always been. She looked at Okisu and asked for a job. She didn’t beg for it, didn’t demand it, she just asked.
Okisu gave her one. Maybe she shouldn’t have, Ty Lee was so young, strong but still small for her age, but there was no harm in it. Ty Lee worked, but her hours were few because of school. It was a small early morning job, washing dishes mostly, kneading bread when Okisu’s old hands got tired.
Ty Lee sent every single cent she earned back home. It would arrive once a month in a neat little envelope at her mother’s door and her mother would shake just looking at. The proof that her daughter was still alive, still breathing. Relieving and worrying in turn.
Later, Ty Lee would chalk these up as mostly a good three years. She would say they were informative and shaped her into what she was. In the moment, she would return home from school, into Okisu’s small house, and shake with the terror of it. With everything she didn’t know, with everything people wanted to take and take and take from her.
But she did learn. She learned to blend into the city. She loved the city immediately and eventually the city loved her back. Then she learned how to blend into Azula’s people, wealthy and distant and ridiculous. Posturing nobles, playing their own hands of card under the table. If only they would rip out each other’s throats at dinner parties like they meant to, not poison one another in their sleep.
Ty Lee wasn’t perfect at it at that age, but she was so charming, people ate it up. They would always sigh so earnestly when, after she turned away, someone would swoop in and tell the sweet story of how Azula saved her from her rural hometown.
Ty Lee would just smile, keep her back straight, her hands relaxed. But sometimes she couldn’t. Sometimes she’d look at Mai and not know what to do, lost beyond words. Mai was a natural, despite her clear distaste for it. Her hands were so steady, her posture exact, she held her forebears in every step she took. Ty Lee was a wicked capable little girl, but sometimes adults are more cruel than you can take.
Ty Lee never let Azula see her cry. But she let Mai see. Mai would block the rest of the world for just a second, at school, at dinner parties. Mai stood guard and it would give Ty Lee a moment of pure privacy. Later Ty Lee would realize that’s when it started. Mai as her sentinel, not pitying and not judging, honest and protective. Ty Lee loved her early on. It was so so easy to.
Ty Lee felt guilty about the way she couldn’t always handle it. Okisu had smiled and told her that she was much too good for that anyways, that Ty Lee was too kind and too caring to be anything like them. Ty Lee was still young enough that she was hurt by the statement.
This was also when she first learned acrobatics.
It was an optional class, but Ty Lee jumped at the chance. The first time she felt herself up there, so many feet off the ground, she knew it was what she was meant to do, what her body was made for. Up there it didn’t matter. Who or what she was, what secrets she harbored, what hatreds and desires she tucked away. She would disappear. A blur against the sky. It was everything she’d loved about dancing but better: she was too far away, too high above the earth, to have to acquiesce to what they wanted her to give them.
It also made her a perfect companion for Azula. They jumped and tumbled through the courtyard, Mai following close behind. Azula wasn’t kind at that age, but Ty Lee could recognize someone else’s hand in her behaviors. Ty Lee remembered Min, knew that things are taught and ingrained and it doesn’t make you blameless, but maybe still redeemable.
Ty Lee had never had a best friend before. Never had the time or the space. Ty Lee had always known what Azula was, but chose her anyways. Ty Lee saw through it, the thing that started to rot little Azula from the inside out, and held onto what was left in a vice grip.
Ty Lee loved it. She loved the city, she loved the opportunities of it. She was where she’d always wanted to be and she was thriving. Golden and shining in the sun, so full of potential. She started to grow up in that place.
But she couldn’t pretend forever.
She and Zuko weren’t close. But Ty Lee loved him anyways. She loved his mop of dark hair and his gentle hands. She loved how warm he was and how he made Mai laugh. She’d never liked the way Azula treated him, but it had never been her place to say anything. As much as she loved this, she still knew that it could be ripped away. It could disappear. Ty Lee had so much she needed to do, so much she still needed to become. She couldn’t risk it for the prince of the Fire Nation. Or at least not yet. You get older and things change and she would. One day, she would.
The change should’ve been gradual, but Ty Lee was always an optimist. It was what Okisu had tried to warn her about. As much as Ty Lee dreamed of making sure her mother never had to work another day in her life, the palace was poison. It would kill you. Okisu carried the weight of every one of her cooks who’d disappeared, who’d spilled soup, knocked over a glass, been in the wrong place at the wrong time. She knew and she’d tried to tell Ty Lee. She’d just been too much of a kid to see it.
Ty Lee had known why Zuko was banished. Of course she did. She’d gotten home from school that day and Okisu had told her in a hushed voice about what had happened. And Ty Lee couldn’t take it anymore.
She quit pretending in that moment. She knew that Zuko had been burned for being good, for being honest and kind. Ty Lee’s father had been dead for years and she finally reckoned with the fact that he could’ve lived. Zuko had tried, a little boy putting himself out on the line for people like her father and he’d been wounded and sent away as a reward. The emperor had given his own son a banishment, a ghost hunt, a death sentence.
It hurt. Ty Lee stopped her facade, stopped her rose colored vision, stopped her cheerfulness and her prettiness. She was tired. She’d been working so hard, in the kitchens and at school and as an acrobat. She’d sent money home and her mother had sent her quiet beautiful letters telling of how her sisters were growing older, of how the harvest came in each year. She nodded when Azula tried to feed her some lie about Zuko being a failure.
Ty Lee was so tired. Too tired for her age. She’d carried Azula’s abuse and every knowing look of how she didn’t truly belong, of just how poor and rural and grotesque she really was. Ty Lee had tried and she’d seen what became of you when you fucked up and she couldn’t take it. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much you want. Sometimes a place fits like a too small shoe. Ty Lee hurt.
She went home. It was slow travel, but she found herself in her hometown. She felt like she had nothing to show for it. Her mother had cried and Ty Lee came apart in her arms. She felt like a child for the first time in a long while, felt young and comforted by her mother’s touch.
But she’d come back changed.
She was so far ahead in her schoolwork now that the teacher had her on an independent study curriculum. She still loved the fields in the early morning, but she missed the kitchens and the gentle puff of the oven as it was fed the daily bread. She missed the sounds of the city, the rush and the bustle and the voices. Ty Lee could stand outside and howl, just to fill the space.
It didn’t end there. It could’ve. Ty Lee could’ve been the girl who’d had a chance at the city life, but got scared and had to run back home. But that was cruel and untrue and she was just a kid. They’d come back for her, it didn’t matter where she ran.