In all things for the emperor’s use plainness is desirable

[fulselden]

In all things for the emperor’s use plainness is desirable.
Kenko, Essays in Idleness

Series: Avatar
Characters: Mai, Ty Lee, Azula
Rating: G

After Ty Lee had thrown her arms around her for the third time in a day and handed her a flat pot of too-expensive hand-cream (‘because I know you don’t like lip-paint’), a flaking shell box (‘and I’ve kept it ever since that time on Ember Island, do you remember’), and a picture of the three of them she’d done when they were all kids and it was still ok to draw Azula’s fire in a blobby red-and-yellow arc over her head (‘it’ll get all messed up if I take it along’), hopped up into the ship, bag over her shoulder and face vague and white peering down over the rail with the other colony-bound passengers, Mai turned away from the docks. She headed back up into the upper reaches of the city, great plugs of acrid gutter-stench rising from gratings and children with grainy grey skin jumping and hooting past her.

 

Around the waterfront the streets were full of screeching metal, stiff gouts of hot air from pipes bulging overhead, the air gritty with smoke or soft with grease and steam. Further up the midday streets were dusty and taut with sunlight, little alleys belling out smells of clear broth and damp washing, knots of housewives haggling around stalls hung with wet red tags of meat. Mai walked rather slowly, and people let her pass.

 

When she was summoned to the palace she found the princess going through the seventh Dragon-Tooth kata, arms bare, lines of slick blue flame slamming through the air around her. Her instructors stood to one side, never taking their eyes off her, pale and perfectly unharmed. Mai folded herself down in the gallery where Li and Lo sometimes sat, twirling a knife round one finger, one leg laid out in line with the worn cedar boards. When Azula finished her set and came in, dry heat was rising off her in a quivering sheet, dust crackling around her on the floor. Mai inclined her head.

 

Azula paused and regarded Mai before rolling her shoulders and making for her dressing chamber. The maids at the door were so accustomed to Ty Lee accompanying her that it took a moment before they entered behind the princess, towels over their arms, heads bent.

Mai passed the time flicking a row of darts into the opposite wall. She was going back down the line splitting the darts with kunai when Azula returned, dry and crisp in her court costume.

Mai rose, bowed.

Azula flicked her hair back.

“Well,” she said. “I suppose it’s just you and me, now.”

 

“Just the three of us,” she had said two years back, taking the opportunity to poke through Zuko’s drawers, still full of carefully folded boy-clothes and scruffy sheets of military history, maps, dog-eared genealogical lists. Azula had reached to the back, pulled out a scroll.

“Love Among the Dragons,” she read. “Oh, Zuzu.”

She held it out to Mai, raised an eyebrow.

“I’m sure you could find a better souvenir,” Mai said. “If you really want to keep on looking, that is.”

Azula stared for a beat, quirked her lips.

“No,” she said, “I insist.”

Mai took the scroll. Behind them, Ty Lee shuffled her feet. Servants were clearing out the desk, its inkstone, brushes, pale jade water-holder. Dust soughed off into the air.

 

Now Azula stared out over the city, hands at her back, feet apart. Mai leant against the wall behind her, out of the wind, red arms crossed. Thin rills of cloud shook themselves out over their heads, coming in from the sea.

“I do hope that Ty Lee fits in at this circus,” said Azula. Her voice dripped with concern. “After all that trouble with her family, too.”

“I think she’ll manage.” Mai levered herself away from the wall, stood at Azula’s shoulder.

“She told me to tell you she’ll miss you.”

Azula sighed.

“Well, naturally.”

Her gaze slid over to Mai.

“Though I suppose she could see you, at least, if your father gets that Earth Kingdom governorship he’s been angling for.”

“I suppose,” said Mai. She looked out across the palace roofs, across the city. Green hills and black rock and red rooftops, the shoreline blurred with sagging smog. She slid Ty Lee’s pot of hand-cream out of her sleeve.

 “Oh, honestly, Ty Lee.” Azula rolled her eyes. “I can’t believe she gave you the same thing. For such a flighty girl, she possesses no imagination whatsoever.”

She looked across at Mai.

“And, really, blades are more your style, I’d say.”

Mai inclined her head, unscrewed the lid. The cream lay perfectly flat and unbroken, like milk or marble. She slicked a finger along the surface.

Azula held out her hand.

“Oh, very well, I suppose. Good cuticle care is important.”

Mai passed her the pot. Azula took Mai’s hands in her own, slapped a blob of cream out across her palms, their precise, dead white callouses, their sharp creases shaped to her knives. She spread it out, rather inexpertly, circled it down into the skin. Shook her head.

“You’ll have to watch out, Mai,” she told her. “It’s such a strain on the joints. Your fingers will be stiff before you’re thirty, at this rate.”

She gave Mai her hands back, rubbed her own together, sniffed.

“At least it isn’t scented. Ty Lee knows that much.”

She rubbed, briefly, at her nails.

Mai folded her hands together, bowed over them.

“Thank you, Azula.”

In the hollow space between her palms, she held for an instant a bender’s heat, tight and close under the film of white cream.

 

Comments

[quigonejinn]

Man, I've been thinking about this piece all afternoon, ever since I read it. It's so precisely observed, and it's so careful, and it's so good. I love how all the really important things in this aren't said at all (Azula doesn't go down to see Ty Lee off, whatever else is between them) or just glossed over (Ty Lee following Azula in after practice) or the absence of Zuko or the complicated, complicated nature of the relationship between Azula and Mai.

Man.

Your Azula characterization is fucking awesome. A lot of the Azula fic that I read tones her down or tries to explain away the crazy or whatever, but this really doesn't shrink from it at all and that's the point.

Also, the flashback is ace. Love Among Dragons notwithstanding, this characterization of Zuko is just fantastic -- Zuko’s drawers, still full of carefully folded boy-clothes and scruffy sheets of military history, maps, dog-eared genealogical lists.

[fulselden]

Oh, wow: thank you so much! And believe me, I have had your finding-Ursa story rattling around in my head since I read it the other day: that lullaby. And, heh, after reading your epic thread on Fire Nation dysfunction, I feel we may have similar tastes, Avatar-wise.

I'm especially glad you think I did ok with Azula - I don't think she's served well in fic either, but then, she is hard to write without straying into gratuitously crazy-lady territory or making her flat out eeeevil or something equally boring.

And her relationship with Mai fascinates me, because they're so close to being equals in a lot of ways. I can see both of them really, really needing a tempering influence (well, I mean, Azula needs a lot more than that, of course), be it Zuko or Ty Lee. And without them you get this massively disturbing situation where everyone and everything is acting as a substitute for someone else and all these power-plays are being fought out but never stated, because, absent Ty Lee or Zuko, there's no-one there who needs this stuff explained to them. Wellll, at least - that's kinda what I was going for.