AN: This is this week's drabble from Liars Start Fires, but I loved it so much that I wanted to make it its own little story. It works with Halloween season too.
Ty Lee has always feared child a bit. The truth is, her little girl loves her deeply and Ty Lee loves her back, loves her more than she loves anything else on this planet. But, she cannot help the fact that she might understand Ursa now. She despised the woman for years because of her attitude towards Azula, but she began to regret her feelings after she started raising her wife's daughter. Their daughter.
The fear has always been unfounded—to an extent—until today. Ty Lee could always dismiss her thoughts by thinking about how sweetly her little girl smiles, but she knows deep down that Azula smiled like that too as a girl. And Ty Lee was very right to fear her.
Ty Lee, today, has been searching for stolen fire gummies in her seven-year-old daughter's bedroom. Every mother must do that eventually.
Not every mother opens the closet door and finds a graveyard. A graveyard of birds and maybe other small creatures Ty Lee does not identify. They are not in any state of decomposition because the bones are charred enough to remove flesh, but not so much that the bones do not shine off-white in places. She can only imagine what had led to this.
She wants to think it is a morbid collection and not the work of a killer.
She knows Azula and therefore knows better, but she decides to assume her daughter collects death like other children collects death… instead of admitting that her beautiful child could do something horrid.
The image of the yellowed and half-hidden bones burns itself into her retinas, into her memory, lighting the embers of fear into a fire of revulsion.
Ty Lee has never felt so sick.
She wonders if she should say something, if she should point it out to Zuko or Mai or Suki or her own mother or…
No, no, obviously not. Ty Lee has been the keeper of dark secrets since the day she met Princess Azula and that habit applies twice as strongly to her beautiful daughter.
She stares at a graveyard and thinks about birth, seeing the first moment she held her little baby, and her sparkling, luminescent golden eyes that drank in the world. It hurts when she thinks about her baby taking her first steps and holding Ty Lee's hand and beginning to speak in eloquent sentences far too early in life.
Love conquers fear. Love conquers disgust. Love conquers all.
A good, selfless person would consider telling someone to be an ultimate act of love.
But Ty Lee has never been a good, selfless person, especially when it comes to her family.
She closes her eyes and decides that she signed up for this when she married Azula.
Ty Lee seals the closet, makes mental note to clean all of that up and bury it, and keeps the contents a secret.
She can hide the crimes and ignore the signs but it does not change the thoughts simmering beneath the surface when she watches her innocent little baby smirk in victory as Ty Lee hides the evidence and kisses her daughter's forehead and makes her promise not to tell anyone, especially not Azula.
Despite that display of affection…
Ty Lee thought her own daughter was a monster, and nothing has ever hurt her more than discovering she was right.