Renovation
Part I: Cloudy Days
00:00
Ty Lee twisted in her tangled sheets.
Her feet were peeking out from beneath the red, and they were freezing cold. The window was still broken, because nobody ‒ Azula – fixed anything but her. She was too tired to wake Azula up and whine at her until she did something about it, and so she just pulled her feet back under and pressed them against the princess's back.
There. Warmth.
Azula twisted in her tangled sheets.
She was going to fix that window in the morning.
01:00
It started raining.
The broken window decided to swallow up as much of the water as possible.
02:00
Azula woke up on the verge of screaming, but swallowed it.
The broken window was making an awful screeching sound, and her hands were shaking. She wasn't going to get out of bed at all if she didn't find something to occupy herself with, and so she rose from bed and went to go figure out how people were supposed to do this.
Trial and error mostly just made her burn things.
She did evaporate the water, however, which was a very nice thing of her to do.
03:00
"You're gonna get hypothermia," Ty Lee said, yawning into her cup of water.
Azula glared at her.
Ty Lee held up the hammer in one of her hands.
"Where did you get that? What even is that?" Azula demanded.
"It's a hammer, and I found it in the attic." Ty Lee sat down, and talked too much.
Azula needed her to talk too much after nightmares like those.
04:00
It stopped raining.
The clouds could fade, but they couldn't soak up the damp droplets on the skin of the two girls who had somehow successfully fixed a window.
05:00
Something crashed loudly just as the sun began to rise.
"I told you that you were using that thing wrong," Azula snapped, trying to cover up how much that sound horrified her.
"I'm not that experienced with hammers." Ty Lee curled up and ignored it.
06:00
Ty Lee found Azula missing when she went to go do her morning swim.
Azula ran. Ty Lee swum. They never got far away from the problems they were trying to escape.
Like this horrible house that Ty Lee inherited and really thought she could fix up.
It was initially better than the palace.
Ty Lee decided she would move back there if the window broke again.
07:00
Ty Lee found Azula outside when she walked back to land from the shore. The house loomed in front of them, the windows gazing out at Ember Island in the distance from beneath the slanted red and gold roof.
She was bending.
She looked really beautiful in the early sun with bright blue fire on her hands.
08:00
"Will you garden with me?" Ty Lee begged.
"It's cloudy out and disgusting," Azula protested, glaring up at the sky.
She batted her eyelashes as if that would help.
It did.
Azula didn't exactly garden; she sat on a rock and oversaw since, according to her, that was an extremely important job, but Ty Lee was happy for the company. This place got kind of lonely sometimes.
Life got kind of lonely sometimes.
Azula might have been someone awful, but she was someone.
09:00
"That was tiring and a waste of time," Azula said as Ty Lee pushed the juice across the table to her. "It was dark and there's definitely rain coming. It will destroy all of your hard work due to your poor planning and lack of attention to the weather."
Ty Lee rolled her eyes. "You could've quit whenever you wanted. You had fun."
"I didn't have fun," Azula snapped.
"You did."
"Didn't."
"Did."
"Didn't."
"Did. Drink your juice."
Azula glared and began to say something, but she was too tired.
She drank her juice.
10:00
It rained but the garden survived.
(most of the garden survived)
The clouds didn't let up.
The window devoured more rainfall and now the entire ceiling was leaking. Azula pretended that it wasn't, even when Ty Lee frantically pointed.
"I'll fix it," Ty Lee relented at last.
11:00
The broken window haunted their new home like a very passive aggressive ghost.
When the sun finally began to poke out from behind the clouds, it captured the light and made a kaleidoscope of colors.
"Those aren't that impressive," Azula remarked.
Ty Lee rolled her eyes and tried not to kiss her.
12:00
By noon, it was sunny out.
Ty Lee tried to convince Azula to swim.
Azula wasn't swayed.
They did lie there and look up at the cloudless blue sky, with warm air on their skin, and a broken window inside that they had no desire to think about for a few more hours.
Or at least until it rained again.
To be continued...