"Ty Lee, it's so nice to see you again."

The girl in question froze in mid-step, glancing around the small room as if looking for the source of that voice - that friendly, welcoming, non-murderous voice. Eventually, slowly, she turned back to the cage that took up the far wall, which she'd been headed towards.

"A-Azula?"

"Yes of course," the fox-eyed girl responded with a reassuring touch of her usual irritation and impatience, "Who else could it be, Ty Lee? Honestly."

Ty Lee chose not to dwell on the kind of malfunction that resulted in her finding Azula's irritation soothing.

"Well, I don't know," she started, knuckling the top of her head with a goofy - and forced - smile, "You just didn't sound like yourself for a second there, 'Zula!"

"I'm not myself," Azula responded, her mouth doing something strange that seemed as though it was meant to be a normal, friendly smile.

At first glance that seemed like a blatant lie - Azula looked more herself than she had in the four years she'd been imprisoned. Year after year she'd been moved into bigger, better, more plush cages. Her current accommodations were probably nicer than Ty Lee's guest room in the palace...although Ty Lee had never been chained to a bolt in the middle of the floor, nor was she under constant surveillance. Still, it soothed the guilty spots in the acrobat's heart to compare the Azula of today to the Azula of four years prior. She was clean, well-dressed, wearing her topknot - although it looked strange without her crown - and reclining with her usual hard-edged grace in her finely wrought desk chair. She seemed so very 'herself' that Ty Lee had a hard time not dropping into an obeisance automatically.

The brown-haired girl started then, suddenly realizing that she hadn't been paying attention for several moments. She looked up at Azula's face, ready to flinch away from the shorter girl's anger...only to be disappointed.

"Are you finished?" The princess was back to that strange friendly voice, although her awkward attempt at a smile had dissolved into a more proper smirk at some point.

"Y-yeah. Sorry, 'Zula."

"As I was saying, I am not myself." Azula leaned forward, her fingers interlaced, and she smiled her nasty plotting smile at the girl who used to be her best friend and who was now her only unofficial contact with the world. At that moment, she had never seemed more like her old self, but if she knew...

"You-"

"Be quiet, Ty Lee." Even Azula's giving-orders voice seemed off. It was too mild, too much like the gentle command of a concerned friend or a loving mother. It wasn't Azula's voice, and the chi blocker wondered where - and why! - she'd picked it up. But Ty Lee was quiet.

"I am not myself," Azula repeated for the third time. "I am better than that. I have had four years to think, to meditate, to understand my mistakes. I was wrong, four years ago; I was young and angry and I made some poor choices. I want to make peace with my brother. I want to stand beside him again, the last children of Sozin. Do you understand?"

She didn't. Azula looked so much herself: Her smile, her posture, the way she sat with her legs crossed - only the missing crown and the added shackle ruined the picture. Even those piercing gold eyes seemed as lethal as ever. But her voice, her words...it was all wrong, and it broke Ty Lee's heart for the hundredth time.

"Azula," she breathed softly, stepping close enough to take the bars of the cage in her hands, to rest her forehead on the cold steel, "I love you. I love you so much, and I'm so sorry. You...I can't. You can't. Not yet...maybe someday, when you're all better."

Azula surged to her feet, lunging at the bars just as Ty Lee stepped backwards, anticipating this.

"I AM better," growled the princess, "I'm better! I'll be the good little princess, the good sister! I'll apologize to my brother, to M- to his wife, to that blustering old fool of an uncle! Just let me out of here! Ty Lee, you're all I have, you have to help me!"

She'd descended into tears at some point, one hand stretching desperately through the bars towards the pink-clad girl just out of reach.

"Ty Lee," she begged, "Please, Ty Lee! Please!"

The acrobat took the reaching hand gently between both of hers, placing a feather-soft kiss on the palm before cupping it against her cheek.

"Azula," she sniffled softly, fighting a losing battle with her own tears, "I wish I could. But you...you're not better. Not all the way. Someday, someday I promise...we'll go to the beach again, all of us. I love you."

The princess sank to the floor, her hand slipping away from her companion's, her body leaning heavily against the bars. Ty Lee stepped close again and joined her, carefully entwining her fingers with those of her beloved - her short, blunt fingernails another small difference - and sat with her until she cried herself to sleep.

Over and over, until she was hoarse and Azula was dead to the world, she murmured: "I love you."

The heavy door that separated Azula's cell from the rest of the building closed surprisingly quietly behind her, and she stopped to wipe her eyes once more before turning to the man who waited nearby.

"That bad?" he asked softly. She just nodded, fresh tears spilling down her cheeks as she struggled for words between hiccups and weeping.

"The worst. When she's like that, I just...I can't NOT hope that...but then, you know..."

"I know," Zuko answered, subdued. "You're stronger than I am, Ty Lee. I can't handle her lucid days."