I. WILLPOWER

If there is one thing worse than being an ugly duckling in a house of swans, it's having the swans pretend there's no difference.

- Teena Booth, Falling From Fire

When Ty Lee was a child, she attended the Royal Academy for Girls. It was where all Fire Nation nobles sent their daughters. The first time that Ty Lee saw the large structure, it seemed to her a huge looming building over her with lanterns hanging at planned out intervals and people whose smiles didn’t really reach their eyes. She remembers the first time, while walking down the hall with a lady who had a nervous smile on her face, the sounds she heard coming from one of the rooms.

She didn’t know, until years later, that there were certain laws in the Fire Nation concerning young women. All noble girls had equal rank to men and, contrary to parts of the other nations, they all trained to be warriors from a young age. Ty Lee can work with weapons like Mai, but she had always been overly fond of acrobatics, and children like Azula that can bend have separate lessons for that. But she never wanted to be overly violent – she had grown up in a home where her parents were so pro-war that it was ridiculous and her father told her that war was always the right action, but Ty Lee had never really believed that. She had always thought she had fit in enough to get by.

But not since she saw a young boy with a scar on his arm, a burn mark; he was from the Earth Nation. He was an example for their assassination class and the teacher had pointed out areas to aim for on the live, shackled boy and Ty Lee was shocked. She asked her teacher a question, and the teacher replied.

“What did this to him, sensei?”

“War,” the woman had said, eyes haunted harshly for a moment before she returned to the empty shell she was. It wasn’t until after the teacher had turned around had Ty Lee realized she was the only one who had asked, the only one who actually cared. And then she watched as the little boy was burnt to death. She liked to think that it didn’t hurt, but her teacher later told her as the old sensei was on her deathbed (lung rot) that he had suffocated from the smoke before the fire could consume him, and the young woman was emotionless, before pressing a chaste kiss to the teacher’s forehead, and whispered softly into the breeze, arigatou, sensei…

Maybe her not fitting in was how Azula was attracted to be her friend, like a fly to honey water. Her and Mai had always been almost-outcasts from the first day they arrived, Ty Lee having been so jolly that it hurt her, honestly it did, and Mai being a bit anti-social (she really just didn’t like brainless girls, and that’s how she had been sucked into the cruel allure of Azula).

Azula was the kind of girl that didn’t want a doll that hundreds of other girls might have or possess one with likeness to hers; she was the kind of girl that wants something unique, something no one else could ever have.

When Ty Lee had turned eleven, after five years of grueling work at the academy, she learns what those screams that she sometimes heard was. She knew that one of the many reasons behind them was punishment, either for failing a mission or even for disrupting the class. As being one of Azula’s favorites, she had the lucky honor of not being taken in when she returned from a mission wounded and with her target still breathing. She had only been a child, but they had all grown up too quickly.

But the day that she had first walked through the dark, shrouded, and almost haunted hallways she had heard a scream coming from one of the rooms – and she knew what it was, years later, when she turned eleven. It was an innocent girl medically getting her virginity removed, so that if she was raped on a mission or during the spoils of war at least that couldn’t be taken from her. The girl had screamed because it had hurt, but Ty Lee had known the girl, and from that day on, she was a lifeless shell like the others.

It was at the age of eleven and a half that Ty Lee is assigned a mission to kill a woman. She has never killed a fellow female before, and she felt hollow. The Mistress of the Academy looked Ty Lee over once she had been assigned her assassination mission, and she dreadfully asked, “How old are you, girl?” And when she said girl, she meant it in the most degrading way possible.

Ty Lee had dutifully answered, truthfully, and the cold Mistress had looked her over before saying, “I will schedule an appointment next week. We should be extra careful of you and the other girl, Mai.” She knew what she meant by appointment, and Ty Lee was suddenly angry, because they are Azula’s favorites, because they are pawns and nothing but puppets to be used, either by their so-called friends or by their mentors and their ancestors and their country. Ty Lee knew what the appointment was for, and she wasn’t ready for that, and so she did what she had once told her mother she was going to do: she ran away to the circus.

II. SHAME

The deeper sorrow carves into your being the more joy you can contain.

- Kahlil Gibran

The sickening crunch of bone breaking was what woke Ty Lee up on some nights, after the war was over. It wasn’t a real sound, but a recurring noise that popped up again and again in her dreams. Though Azula had once seemed so kind and friendly, it hadn’t been long before she had shown her true side. The memory that plagued her at night, however, was of during the war, when Azula had thrown a Dai Li member back several feet and he had crashed against the wall, and it looked like it hurt.

That wasn’t all she did, because Azula didn’t give second chances. She had mercilessly tortured the man before throwing him to the side and requesting him to be taken care of.

Moments had passed while she stared at the floor (oh the blood), the sight not exactly new but not exactly old either, and then Ty Lee had promptly laughed, a hysterical out-of-control laugh that made Azula sigh in her oh-so-Azula way and have Mai escort her out of the room. She really isn’t just the bubble you see on the outside, she’s also the oxygen that floats once it’s popped. Ty Lee had looked at Mai the moment they were outside the throne room’s doors and she had said, her voice quiet and quivering with the lack of control, “This has to stop.”

Mai nodded her head solemnly, and this was the moment in which they betrayed Azula.

She still dreams of the many times Azula had hurt people, of how she had burnt Ty Lee on the shoulder and the girl had a mark to prove it, shiny as if it was new, though now it was years old. Azula had claimed she hadn’t meant to do it, but Ty Lee knew better. She hadn’t always, but she did now. Eyes closed and tight and shut, she lets the moonlight wash over her and she sighs because even though of the nightmares, she’s happier than she’s been in years, because she is no longer the bubble on the outside but also the oxygen inside. Years later, everything is over and Azula is dead, but she's still hurting Ty Lee.

It isn’t until after the war and Ty Lee is leaning lightly against the wood of the window, the cold seeping through her clothes, that she can hear the murmurs of the maids and the thoughts of her being a traitor, and why does Zuko allow her in the palace again?

But she laughs, at them and at the world, and it feels nice.