Author's Note: I don't write these often but I have received enough questions in the past where I think it deserves clarification that while Memento Mori follows post-ATLA canon as closely as possible, it significantly deviates in several ways. This is more noticeable in the changes I've made to the governance of Kyoshi Island, and the organizational structure of Kyoshi Warriors and the Dai Li. The experiences of the Kyoshi Warriors (and other soldier groups) during the war are also rooted in canon, however extrapolated to their logical ends had the series not been bound by the constraints of its genre.

If you have been following me until now thank you for your patience. For the last few years I've been away at school, which has decreased my writing output dramatically to about one chapter a year. This will continue until my graduation this coming spring and pending the results of my hard work after summer. It's my hope that I can come back up to speed soon after that. Until then thank you again for reading.

Azula had grown used to waking up before the sun was in the sky. Her body no longer complained when she woke in the morning, her palms grew thick and calloused, and the skin of her hands no longer split in the cold wind.

Her recovery eventually outpaced how busy her tasks at Emi's house could keep her, but although her body had healed, the villagers never returned her to her previous job paving the village roads. The village council had been content, instead, to rent her out to various jobs that the village found wanting, each subsequent task as unrelated to the one that preceded it. Yet after months of endless monotony in scrubbing laundry and bathrooms, she was happy to take whatever assignment so long as she could be left alone. She found that as long as her jobs were finished according to the village's calendar, the Kyoshi Warrior who followed her cared very little of how she went about it and there was a certain value in having the discretion to walk through the island on her own accord.

She learned the vices and weaknesses of each of her guards in turn. While Miyo was ever-unyielding, she could manage to get Emi to give her a spare newspaper or Suzu would let slip what the villagers had been gossiping about or Yui would grumble about the time it was taking for Suki to return from the mainland. Azula played to their weaknesses equally, eager to find what she could about the island's relations with the Fire Nation, hungering for any news of home.

More often than not she would sit on the beach, her fingers sifted through the grains of sand under a vast, gray expanse, as she watched the rainclouds rolling in from the sea. Her time at the hospital had made her claustrophobic and she had found that she couldn't stand to be inside the confines of walls for longer than she could stomach it (the windows thrown wide open, her own bed pushed as close to them as health allowed.) Kyoshi Island neither lacked for pastoral scenes, and she developed a hobby of watching the sunrise from wherever part of the island she was, watching the veil of the sun pull away the night, her skin prickling with warmth. She didn't think until recently that she had ever bothered to watch a sunrise and she had yet to stop being surprised at how empty Wuhan (and all of its entailments) had made her. She watched the patterns of migrating birds, the rolling waves, the wavering treetops of the forest.

Winter was hard coming to Kyoshi Island. The polar winds had already brought the first waves of snowfalls, and much of her time was taken in repairing holes and reinforcing the thick thatches of the village's roofs. It was harder to work in the mornings now, when the hours were the darkest before the sun, and the air still smelled like the remnants of the night's fog. Yet with nothing to do (even with no end in sight) she worked tirelessly, pushing her body beyond what her physician had until then thought her capable of. It was as if her entire time on Wuhan had been spent in slumber and now she couldn't bear to be at rest long enough to think. About Zuko, about her father, about the person she had been (left behind) and now was (left behind.)

"You sure learn quick, Azula." Emi let out a low whistle as she admired Azula's work in favorable inspection, patting the thick weaves in search of a non-existent abscess. "Thatching a roof isn't as easy as people think."

"It's not as hard as people make it to be." The princess replied as she ran her hand over the tied bundles, trimming the ends of the straw with a pair of shears. She had started patching the hole in the silo the previous morning and had finished ahead of her week's schedule.

The villagers had begun their preparations for the coming snowfalls and when Azula wasn't repairing holes in the ceilings of people's houses, she was mending the fishermen's nets and culling lumber from the foothills with the woodcutters. While before Miyo had been careful to keep her within the gaze of the common passer-by, every job given to her now took place at their shoulders.

They tolerated her with the barest patience, pointing her to whatever task needed to be done, and punishing her when it wasn't finished to their standards. Every now and then this took the form of a decrease in her entitled stipend, but more commonly she was forced to work longer shifts and stay longer after every worker had gone, toiling in the dark with no one but a lone Kyoshi Warrior to hold a lantern. She learned to be meticulous. When it was Emi who guarded her, Azula could at least count on her earnestness. Despite Miyo's new policies, Azula wasn't willing to unlearn the lessons Aya had been so eager to teach. The village children still alternated between gawking at her and throwing stones at her back.

A harsh wind from the sea drove over the rooftops and Azula ducked under her coat collar, reaching a hand up and curling a finger against one of the studs buried near a nerve in her neck to push it away from her skin. The alloy so far had been merciful in keeping from rusting, but was equally unforgiving in how well it held the temperature. As the weather marched steadily into winter, the more problematic it was to work steadily with a brace of ice around her neck. Since the morning, she had already sent Emi away twice to fetch hot water.

"This is barely as cold as it's gonna get. We have two months until then and that's going to last another two more-oh I wouldn't if I were you." Emi cautioned helpfully as she watched Azula climb down from the roof onto the scaffolding to inspect the thick porridge that sat chilling from the workers' fire. While the rest of the builders customarily took their meals together, the leftovers were given to Azula to do with however she pleased and the princess quickly understood why Ty Lee was insistent that she take a boxed lunch every day.

Azula lifted the ladle from the pot and watched as a thin film of mucous descended back into the vessel in a stringy webuous line. She had anticipated as much, but had yet to stop wishing.

"You know if you can wait a little bit we can probably have our lunch inside at the training hall. Or if you want, I can ask Miyo since you finished early" Emi offered. It was the villagers hope that the last of the early winter rains would abate long enough for the builders to finish their patchwork but she could still smell the storm that was waiting to make landfall. She inspected the grey sky dubiously and looked back to the princess who was presently fighting off a sneezing fit. "Seriously," Emi insisted.

"As much as your concern touches me, I'll decline." Azula said, gathering the last of the unused straw and wrapping it in canvas, tying it together with the stock wood with a thick rope.

"Ty Lee's teaching a seminar today." Emi offered spontaneously when she peeked her head over the edge of the railing with a wide smile. Azula knew where this conversation was leading.

"That's nice." Azula replied blandly. The entirety of the bundles of straw tied together had to be carried across her shoulders as she made the descent on a series of rickety ladders, laid end to end from the scaffold to the ground in a precarious angle.

"Don't you want to see how good she's got?" Emi goaded. Given Ty Lee's pool of practice partners, Azula found the prospect highly unlikely.

"No." Azula barked as she walked off without looking back, her boots trudging through the mud as her unwieldy burden pressed her into the wet earth with each step.

Emi's baits were unsophisticated and Azula had no patience to entertain them at the moment. She couldn't see the good that could come by barging into Ty Lee's workplace, whether to spend a lunch hour together or not. They had no common interests (Azula despised the warriors) and they wouldn't have anything to talk about. Their time together in the cottage was regulated to evenings and early mornings, and their conversations related to tedious talk about the village, or the weather, or housework. Even the once steady stream of banal chatting Ty Lee conjured to fill the empty air between them had started to wane.

Lately, Ty Lee was withdrawn and bordered on forlorn. In the beginning, Azula attributed it to one of the girl's childish moods, but was disappointed that when pressed, Ty Lee didn't volunteer anything beyond her usual triteness and empty banter. For the time being, Azula was happy to give Ty Lee space but the feeling of sudden guilt persisted.

It had occurred to the princess that forbidding Ty Lee from writing Mai had been done out of misplaced anger and hastily made (what more harm could her brother do to her after all). Had Ty Lee still been writing letters, Azula might have felt better, taken some solace from the fact that Ty Lee could have, at least, been confiding in someone (anyone).

Although in time she had learned the depths of Ty Lee's gratitude for the generosity of the Earth Kingdom in allowing her to start a new life, Azula was never sure whether Ty Lee actually liked being with the Kyoshi Warriors themselves. While it was clear that Ty Lee enjoyed her work, her impression was never that of one who spent a moment of time with her comrades beyond what was necessary. Her conversations with Emi had been illuminating and from them Azula was able to glean a picture of Ty Lee's life that had so far eluded her.

Perhaps in keeping with their shared promise of new beginnings, Ty Lee had always careful to keep Azula and her work separate and what little Azula knew of Ty Lee's capacity with her squad was regulated to the moments she would see the girl returning late in the evening, worn from a day's worth of stress running haggard in a bureaucratic office.

For all of Emi's motions of friendship, the young girl herself was careful to not spend time with Ty Lee in front of the other warriors. It didn't help Azula's dismal opinion of Emi, knowing that with Suki nowhere to be found, the only gestures of goodwill Ty Lee received came from an insincere dimwit. Ty Lee, in her never-ending search for security (for acceptance), largely made friends with those who were just like herself, down to every minute speck of spineless unaccountability.

But she's trying her best and you've been lying. Azula thought to herself. The prospect that Ty Lee had unraveled her was a repeating lance of paranoia through the pit of her stomach. Lately, she had been unable to escape the persistence of her fears, that all her false motions of friendship that had been contrived for the sake of plying Ty Lee's into false security had been exposed for what they were. That Ty Lee had found she had been trading false gifts, that she remained the incurable liar.

Her birthday had been a genuine surprise, if not entirely for the fact that for the past couple of months it had been harder to keep her days straight. In all of the errands Azula was sent on to the market, she was never able to get a cabbage for less than a half-silver and yet Ty Lee had presented her with a tableful of luxuries as a gift, a fortune for a hard-fought measly gathering, and in return had looked for nothing except for a hint that Azula had been pleased.

If punishment meant pain, nothing had ever humbled her as much as Ty Lee's smile.

It had taken a long time before Azula was confronted with the uncomfortable discovery that while in Wuhan she might have prayed for Ty Lee to suffer the full consequences of her treason, she was never able to envision what that punishment would have looked like. In the months since her arrival on the island, that desire had waned, replaced by the full understanding of what Ty Lee's life had been like in their years apart. There were no circuses (no dreams) in Kyoshi Island, nothing bright or hopeful, and for all of the possible ways Azula had wished for Ty Lee's destruction, this was not the end she had wanted for her.

"Finished that early huh?" The foreman looked up from his clipboard, where he stood counting the lots of lumber and and straw, grunting approvingly as he watched her. He was a balding, middle-aged man whose eyes were hidden under a pair of black bushy eyebrows and spoke with a booming voice that was somehow never dampened by his thick beard.

Azula dropped the remaining bundle of straw and wood onto the waiting plot at his feet, shaking sawdust-flecked mud from the length of her apron.

"How does it look?" He asked amicably, tucking his pencil behind his ear as he came over to inspect the leftovers of her morning's work.

"How it's supposed to." She replied defensively, pulling her thick gloves off with her teeth. She had replicated the exact process that had been demonstrated to her over and over again on a dozen houses, doing exactly as she was instructed and found no reason to deviate for the sake of creativity and giving them room to complain.

Apparently the answer didn't satisfy him, and he frowned at her from beneath his thick bushy beard. "You should reflect on the work you've done." She could tell from his tone that he believed everything that he was saying, and that he felt that he was imparting a piece of great wisdom he had unearthed through years of working at a lumber yard.

"It's different than digging roads. When you build something, when you make things, it's good for your soul. The stonecutters will tell you the same thing if you ask them. When you finish reinforcing the seawall you'll understand that the pride you put into your work has payoffs for the people around you. Even with all the gifts from the Fire Nation coming in, the island is in no less of a need for hard work."

Azula clapped the ledger shut, slipping the pen back into its inkwell, and replaced the book with the other logs on the shelf. "As much as I enjoy your words of wisdom I really should be going." Even if she had no choice in the matter, she had no interest in being lectured on the virtues of servitude by the villagers who had taken a twisted sense of pity to her. She had gradually found that the stories of the war coupled with her relative youth had inspired equal amounts of misplaced and perverted sympathy as it did disgust in the villagers.

She retrieved her pack, closing her locker and walking out of the office again without a backward glance to his fierce expression.

Outside, Emi was waiting for her, having already gathered the rest of Azula's tools and falling quickly in step with her. On some days Azula felt that in Emi she wasn't given a guard so much as an underfoot tagalong. It occurred to her frequently that should she ever decide to, overpowering Emi would have been all too easy. But she supposed that was the reason why her tasks everyday carried her deeper into the heart of the village, where her presence stuck out like a sore thumb, where the eye of every spare person was trained on her.

There was no fun in easy fights anyways, she told herself.

Even so, escape often came to mind. Despite the safeguards of the Kyoshi Warriors, Azula had pieced together three actionable avenues and despite herself she frequently thought about what it would be like to actually carry them out, to pull herself out from under the thumb of the Earth Kingdom peasantry, to rejoin the world and to see it in all of its entirety of what is had become in her absence (and not the fragments she was able to pull together from the newspapers and scraps of gossip from the fishmongers and the tradesmen from Ba Sing Se of the life that had changed for the people in the Earth Kingdom and abroad.) She had, of course, dreamed of returning home sometimes (when she was careless and cruel enough to herself to venture into wild fantasies) although she knew that it wouldn't be the same as she remembered it (the same way in that she hadn't recognized it in the festival, dilapidated and wasting, a shadow lost between shifting frames where she blinks twice and is in two places at once and her father is waiting for her beneath the shade of the elm tree whispering into her ear that kingdoms don't wait, they are built on the ashes of those that are razed.) And yet the kingdom she knows is gone, and all those that served her and her father are dead, their skeletons hung in gallows as examples, their rotting heads looking down on her from their hooks as their hollow breathless mouths wrapped around her name, the name that was given to her by blood and legacy, Azula, Azula, Azula, Azula until she woke up from her dreams with her own mouth frozen open in a scream and she is reminded that there is no one in the world who remembers her. She could run as far as she wanted to and still wouldn't be able to escape the world.

And yet she still had the one person who had been beside her all along.

"He wants you on the team building the rowhouses." Emi had an exuberant and sandy voice that had the astounding, perpetual quality of sounding like she was an adolescent male on the verge of breaking into maturity. "You learn really fast and he thinks if you're there then we can have more people repairing the boats." Emi explained. Fishing was the livelihood of the islanders in winter and once the season turned, all free efforts went in support of the industry. Despite assurances from Emi that she would not be drafted into the frigid ocean to help drag the laden nets in from the boats, Azula was less certain from the way her duties were being freely handed out that such a promise would be kept.

A pair of old women were huddled outside of the training yard, vigorously discussing the activities of the Kyoshi Warriors trading blows in padded gloves. Watching their movements reminded Azula of Ty Lee, and how long it had been since she had seen her doing anything that didn't involve sitting at her study filling paperwork or shuffling around the house in her apron and a broom and it occurred to Azula that Emi had a point sometimes. For all the the time they now spent together, Azula had trouble thinking of Ty Lee as anyone except for a girl now grown (as she was), resplendent in the failings of a new era, cheated by promises made at the bottom of a prison by would-be friends who had nothing to lose.

And who put you in that prison? Her father's voice intonated low in her ear and all of her efforts couldn't have shut him out. In the morning she could drink the medicine deeper than any finely brewed tea, her throat threatening to rebel with every drop that slithered down her throat, and know that for the rest of her life there would be nothing that could have lessened her burden, that could have strengthened her resolve into believing that this wasn't her greatest weakness.

"How about getting tea at my house then? I can put a kettle on the stove and we can have lunch there. I think my aunt still has some red bean cakes. The ones with the pancakes?" Emi said, cupping her hands together in the shape of a clam.

Azula admitted the prospect sounded enticing after that morning slogging through the cold wind and the knowledge that her work detail in the afternoon included hauling stones up to the merchant quarter to help lay the foundation on another warehouse. After spending the past month finishing her assignment working for Emi's grandmother, Azula had found it easier to visit their house on her own terms whenever the young Kyoshi Warrior prompted her with an invite. The family matriarch had formerly served on the village council and so it seemed like Emi's house was never lacking leftover favors or gifts from esteemed villagers.

"Only if we don't play Pai Sho again." While it had been entertaining at first, Azula was tired of teaching board game tactics whenever Emi found a spare moment in their time. Even though the girl was improving, she was still leagues away in skill and also a very sore loser. Azula was tired of having to put up with Emi's childish antics after ever every defeat.

"I'll trade you the newspaper." Emi offered without missing a beat, clenching a fist in victory when Azula half-heartedly accepted.

They were back on the road to Emi's house, passing a row of bakeries when Emi eventually said what Azula had been waiting for her to say.

"So..." Emi had the subtlety of a hammer. "I heard I missed your birthday."

"Here it comes." Azula declared.

"You should have said something!" The younger girl protested.

"Oh? And what were you doing to get me?" Azula deadpanned. "An especially impressive-looking sea urchin? No thanks." She made a derisive sound. Emi was very proud working as a free diver, spending her mornings selling the shellfish and kelp she pulled off the seafloor for a handful of coppers, and never skipped a chance to discuss the finer points of the profession and all of its advantageous accompaniments. It often drove Azula to exasperation, who had yet to discover the novelty Kyoshi Islands' peasants took in their schedules, their obsession with the meticulous details of their unremarkable lives. "Besides, isn't it unprofessional for you to be giving gifts to the prisoner?" Azula didn't imagine that Miyo approved of much of Emi's behavior, but she didn't imagine that Miyo knew much of what her any of her squad was doing.

"I don't care, I would have gotten you a whole bunch of urchins!" Emi exclaimed before she launched into a long-drawn discussion of the best methods of preparing sea urchins, interspersed with the occasional rhetorical question of whether Azula had ever had an urchin or a scallop from the waters of the island's bay cut fresh from the shell and still-foaming from the ocean waves and wasn't that the best feeling in the whole wide world. But Azula was already a million leagues away, thinking about that night, and the blush on Ty Lee's face as their eyes met in the mirror.

"Suki said you're gonna be here for a really long time and it doesn't make sense to keep you away from everyone. You're not gonna be a prisoner forever." Emi shrugged when they passed by a group of teenagers, who skulked away without replying to the young girl's enthusiastic wave.

"And what does Miyo think about that?'

Emi sighed. "Between you and me, no one really cares about what Miyo thinks. She lives in the stone ages."

Azula thought about Miyo's declining favor with the warriors for a moment before reconsidering how her own situation would have benefited more if only she had not antagonized Suki at the Mid-Summer Festival. "Will I be allowed to go back to the Fire Nation?"

"No, but-"

"Then everything remains pretty much the same." Azula replied.

It used to be that when Azula thought of returning home she thought about something more specific beyond the smell of the evening fire when she returned from work, Ty Lee's slow, warm smile when she looked up from her desk, and the moments of quiet that overtook them that had grown so soft when she wasn't looking until at last it had started to feel less like a tenuous truce and more like something entirely new. The things she had pretended (a newfound promise of change, of renewed sincerity to earn Ty Lee's friendship while she had been waiting, hoping for a weakness, a gap in the weaves of Ty Lee's armor) were motions she had, from the outset, pretended. Yet for all of her self-awareness it had crept beneath her as surely and unassumingly as though she had none. She had lost a sense of urgency, the powerful drive for self-preservation that had anchored her for so long and the belief that as long as she could have weathered the insanity of Kyoshi Island that there was something waiting for her and that all of her patience and suffering could have amounted for something. In its place, she found herself grasping, feeling uselessly around in the dark for a new sense of purpose in the wake that there was nothing waiting for her at all.

It was four years since they had dragged her dragged from the city and after all that time it was hard to know what revenge was supposed to look like. When she thought of the palace, she thought of the light of the hearth of Ty Lee's cottage and the warmth that shivered through her spine when Ty Lee took her hands and massaged the day's work from her wrists. She thought of the way Ty Lee's face looked in the glow of the evening fire.

Azula had a recurring dream sometimes, of lying on the ground, a woman weeping as she cradled her and smoothed blood from her mouth and face, telling her to live.

I'm forgetting things that I used to know. Why can't I remember?

"Do you not like Kyoshi Island, Azula?" Emi asked, kicking a stray pebble as she walked, her eyes chasing the rock as it skittered and bounced on the road.

Azula would have laughed in her face if she thought that Emi's goodwill wasn't something she needed. "One generally doesn't fear for their own lives in their homes."

"Right." Emi's eyes flickered to the thin scar on Azula's eyebrow long enough for Azula to notice and be reminded yet again that Emi was much smarter than the others would have credited her. The girl had her uses but Azula didn't trust that vapid smile farther than she could throw the girl. "Only I meant, if you liked it enough. Ty Lee loved Kyoshi Island when she first came here. Even if her feelings have changed."

Walking up the slope of the road, they had come upon the crest of the hill, and she was thinking back to the time she had last been here with Ty Lee, remembering the first sight of the ocean when the warriors had marched her through village. Azula couldn't think back to a time before coming to the island when she had ever cared about Ty Lee's opinion of her. It made her anxious, as if she was waiting for something to happen.

"Ty Lee's been very...kind." Azula said, rolling her eyes when Emi nodded approvingly.

Of course, she was indebted to the appearance of normalcy that Ty Lee tried to fit into the artificial arrangement of their days. Routine benefited her; Azula could pretend like there was nothing wrong with skinning potatoes and that she had been doing laundry her entire life. On clear days they watched the sky together as she listened to Ty Lee make up pictures in the clouds or the stars. On good days, Azula allowed herself to revel in her freedom. While she begrudged the opinion of the village physician, it seemed that the more she maintained her regimen the easier it was to maintain her effervescent hold on time. Time, that she had previously lost, that had slipped through her fingers as she climbed out of the wretched crevices of her own mind and found that she couldn't find the difference between what had happened two days or two months ago.

She had told Ty Lee once that kindness didn't come without a price, that in the end, even the most benign gestures came with debts that would eventually want claiming. She had asked Ty Lee for her own price (appalled and repulsed as the other girl's reaction had been) but still all the same found herself without an answer, even now she grasped for the cause of all that incomprehensible altruism, asking why when she had tried to force it from Ty Lee in their youth that it had slipped underneath her grasp and now when she had nothing to her name that it had come back, meek and eager.

Ty Lee's affections made her restless. It troubled Azula knowing that after all they had been through, she desperately wanted to keep them.

Whenever she thought she had the other girl figured out, something happened to show how little she actually knew about the person Ty Lee had become. It was tempting to accept that (in the grandest scheme of things) her life was the largest blessing the new world could have given her. And yet it felt too much like giving up. On accepting a defeat by which she had pledged to die under before she succumbed. All things she wasn't ready for.

Miyo was late.

Miyo was never late, and the sounds of the practice hall downstairs echoing through the building signaled that afternoon practice was already underway when there had to have been an officer to lead it.

Ty Lee wondered if she had been stood up. As the officer in charge of Azula's welfare, she thought that a well-worded complaint would have been enough to pique Miyo's concerns. They were friends after all, even if they had been having the occasional spat.

But perhaps there was something more to it than that.

Miyo had fiercely disputed Azula's change in residence, and so Ty Lee imagined that her proposal would go over well without deep askance, although, perhaps, not without her mea culpas. She had been rehearsing what she planned on saying, imagining the different questions she thought Miyo would prod her with, why, why now, why after everything.

The week had not been kind to Ty Lee. Since Azula's birthday, Ty Lee had done anything she could get her hands on to be perpetually busy. Where she had previously done her paperwork at home so as to spend as much time with Azula as she could, she now elected to spend more hours of her evening at the office, toiling when all the others had retired as if in all of her great effort she could have solved her most monumental problem as long as she gave herself enough time, as if everything could have solved itself as long as she didn't dwell on it.

Gales of wind screamed tumultuously outside, incessant now in the worsening weather, rattling the shutters and whistling through their loose seams. Leaving the table to secure their locks, she glanced outside to find that there was no sign of Miyo. A pack of laborers was driving a cart of stones marched tiresomely through the road and Ty Lee watched their progress with mild interest, reminding herself to find Azula a suitable scarf before the start of winter.

Places could change people. Ty Lee had known that more than anyone. In the Earth Kingdom she had felt reborn, in the same way that she knew Azula would (in the same way that Azula had, strong and youthful, pensive and mourning, still the same, now wholly different.)

She couldn't have loved the person Azula had been in the war. But of the person Azula had become now, Ty Lee couldn't have said the same.

If love was life, Ty Lee had been dying.

She had doomed herself in bits and pieces. Her love had flowered beneath her, sprouted with reckless abandon, seeded by the parts of Azula that Ty Lee had mourned and ached so painfully to discover again, burgeoning and renewed. And yet so much of it was a curse (with everything at stake, with her honesty to prove, when Azula had no one else to turn to, when all Azula would surely see was that her friendship was false again, cloaked with illicit, perverse intentions.)

One evening she had come home to the sight of Azula sitting on the veranda, the length of an interior door laid before her, stripped of its panels. A jar of glue, a roll of thick paper, and a thin knife rested near her.

Noticing Ty Lee's return from the corner of her eye, Azula held the door aloft and tilted its face to demonstrate the worn holes peppering the door's body.

"I borrowed some paper sheeting from Emi's house. You have a lot of broken panels." She explained without looking up, her fingers running down the sides of the lattice frame, taking a pencil and ticking off measurements as she worked. "The peasants live in better houses than we do." She said humorlessly, retracing her etchings with the knife.

It had never occurred to Ty Lee that Azula would find use in the skills she was taught by the peasants. She had carried an even smaller hope that Azula would eventually fit into the space the Kyoshi Warriors had carved for her and Ty Lee wondered where her gift for survival had gotten her, what all her talents had given her except misery and the constant reminder that there wasn't any more to her life other than what she had already lived when she was a young girl. It was a general rule that people's lives grew deeper, grew rich, as they grew older. Ty Lee wouldn't know. Ty Lee had, in fact, been content on living her entire life exactly as what she was.

But in that moment, Ty Lee was stunned, standing at the entrance of her house as if a mirage had taken hold in her home, a miracle stretching beyond the limits of her wildest dreams. If her belief in gods and spirits had failed she dared to believe in them again in the faintest parts of her heart.

In time, Ty Lee had started to read Azula with the same initiative the other girl had beseeched her to pry others with. Azula's relentless stubbornness and tenacity notwithstanding, her father's defeat had etched a softness that Ty Lee was continually surprised (bittersweet) to find. She could see Azula's desires as easily as if they were her own and how Azula longed to return home to the Fire Nation. Inwardly, Ty Lee also dreamed one day Azula's imprisonment would end and Zuko (and Mai) would welcome his sister back into the palace.

Even more clearly, Ty Lee could see that none of those desires had anything to do with her. She continually smothered the fleeting wisp of hope that threatened to devour her whole, knowing that it would only rise again elsewhere, treacherous and beguiling. She had read into every fleeting glance, every conversation, divining intentions that weren't there, haunted by the thought that an errant touch could have meant even an iota more than what it was. Ty Lee was left to a fate of deciding between crueler consequences, that Azula should scorn her feelings, or that desperately left with no one else in the world, Azula should depravedly return them.

She had not been completely opaque. Azula had read her, once, without meaning to.

For all of her reasonings none of it seemed to matter when she needed it most, when all of her strength would fail her even in the smallest moments, when all it took from Azula was one look or gesture and those reasons that she agonized over for the entirety of her day evaporated, shimmering in a heat growing bright.

Last night, Ty Lee had fallen asleep at her desk and in the morning she found a blanket draped over her back and a fresh stack of wood next to the fire. In place of Azula's usual kettle of medicine was a steaming pot of tea, and the table had a plate of bread and ham and a note requesting that if Ty Lee wasn't going to bother sleeping in her bed that she at least put out the candles so as to not to kill them all in the middle of the night.

The last part made her smile as she imagined Azula peeking into her room and frowning before putting out the lights. She wondered if Azula debated dropping a stack of files over her shoulders before deciding on a blanket from the nearby bed. She wondered if Azula thought for a second about carrying her to it.

It felt silly pining over some hastily written letter Azula had made in the small hours of the morning, but she thought about it all day, contemplating why out of all the gifts showered on her by ex-boyfriends and lovers in her past that none of them had ever made her feel the same way Azula made her feel.

She had put off the truth for as long as she could, that the more she ignored her love for Azula the more it would grow.

"Sorry I'm late." A voice accompanied the sound of the door opening, pulling Ty Lee away from the window as she hastened to erase any trace of her thoughts that might have been showing on her face.

Ty Lee was fully aware that it was taking longer than necessary to reply, her stomach plummeting to the floor as she begrudged her doomed position as the scorned turncoat of the squad-made an officer purely from the necessity of her skills-forever alienated from the circles of trust that could have saved her, that could have warned her of Suki's homecoming. "Oh, you're back." She managed not to sound strangled.

Suki let out an incredulous laugh. "Is that all I get?"

"No-I mean. I mean, it's just such a surprise." They met together in a hug. Suki clapped her warmly on the back as they parted and by then Ty Lee had remembered her role again.

Stepping back, she could see that Suki looked different than she had upon her departure. When she left for the mainland, Suki had been haggard, exhausted from fights with the village council and her preparations with Aang. Now returned, Suki was bright-eyed, spirited and looked more like the leader she was known to be.

Ty Lee had the strangest sense of dissociation, wondering what Suki saw in her now that they stood looking at each other, of powerful envy in wishing that she could have the same powers of relentless endurance and fortitude of character all native Earth Kingdom seemed to possess.

She took a deep breath, disguising it as a dramatic and wistful sigh. "I'm so glad. It's been forever."

She told herself that Suki's reassumption of her duties didn't matter. Whether it had been Miyo or Suki, her circumstances hadn't changed, and neither had the necessity of what she had come here to do. Yet, facing the person who had made Azula's freedom a reality made the burden of her decision that much harder.

"Hasn't it?" Suki groaned. "I took the last airship out. With everything between Ba Sing Se, all I've wanted to do this whole time was to go home and sleep in my own bed."

They moved to the desk, taking opposite chairs, with Suki pushing aside the stack of files that had been Miyo's. "You weren't in the Earth Kingdom?" Ty Lee asked curiously. She wondered how far from the circle the squad had really left her.

"Up until a week ago. Zuko asked me to visit." The way Suki spoke told that whatever visit it was hadn't been a comfortable one. "He thinks Azula had been attacked by an assassin from Ba Sing Se. I told him that was impossible with how tightly leashed King Kuei has his ministries right now but he wasn't convinced."

But it wasn't an outrageous notion. If it had been her sitting so far across the ocean, Ty Lee was certain she would have had the same fears.

"Miyo and I thought maybe it could have been someone from the village." Ty Lee said vaguely, not daring to reveal her suspicions. With Suki, Ty Lee was confident that her opinions could amount to some weight, but without basis in evidence, she had no way of speaking freely without risking her words coming back to bite her. Suki's objectivity was already a returned blessing.

"I thought the same. But I couldn't exactly say we couldn't protect her from our own people." Suki stated grimly.

The captain reached under the neck of her clothes, pulling a long thin chain over her head that she held out to the other girl. There was no mistaking it. Ty Lee had only seen that key once before in her life, years ago. When she picked it up she was surprised (stunned) by how light it was, how small it was in her hand. Ty Lee wondered how strange it was that something so delicate could hold the power to release something to vital to someone's personage.

When she was a child, Azula had manipulated her power as skillfully and easily as she breathed. Ty Lee wondered if Azula had forgotten the feeling, if the girl feared the lapse of its memory, the brilliance that had been her hallmark.

Ty Lee returned the key quickly.

"Zuko asked me to return Azula's firebending. At first, I refused him." Suki said gravely, putting the chain on again, the weariness of her tone saying just how often she had been forced to debate the topic, waving her hand in submissive deference. "But we agreed your opinion is the most important."

Ty Lee was hesitant. As much as she wanted to be happy for Zuko's change of heart, there was something to its timing that prevented her from taking the gesture on face value. The aftermath of the Four Nations' Summit still stung and made her distrustful. Far from the hot-headed boy she had known, Zuko was fast-growing into the Fire Lord his people needed. "Why now?" When they had agreed to seal away Azula's bending, Zuko had been altogether emphatic and had maintained that position until Azula's departure to Kyoshi Island. If anything about the political climate had changed, it made Ty Lee anxious that she couldn't see it.

"If the attack really was an assassination attempt, Zuko doubts our ability to protect Azula and I couldn't argue with him in good faith. I know you have a better perspective than I did at the time." Suki's eyes were earnest and Ty Lee had a hard time not imagining how easily Suki's attitude would change, how fast her understanding would slough into outrage. "I told him that with you there he had nothing to worry about. It was a mistake not keeping Azula with you to begin with, so until we figure this out we should keep this between us… Ty Lee, are you okay?"

Secrets, more secrets when Ty Lee had told Azula that she would be, from here on out, truthful. But now there was no going back. She looked at Suki and knew that no matter what she did she would forever be the person she feared she was, a coward who hid behind her intentions and used them to justify her failings. Suki was looking for a guarantee of her people's safety, a guarantee that was not Ty Lee's place (not her right) to give.

In her mind she thought of the new life she had made with Azula, precious and small, over before it had started. For how deeply she cherished it, she had wished for the dream of it to last forever, blind to the realities of her heart. Deep down she had already known, had never cared to see.

And yet she had never imagined that day would come as it did.

She thought of the tenuous trust they had started to build. She thought of the close moments spent in the smallness of her house. She imagined one day (eventually, inevitably) when it would be a careless touch, a word said in the wrong way, a stray look that lingered too long that darted too fast that would give her away and all of the goodwill she had worked so hard to rebuild would dissolve in an instant in Azula's eyes when comprehension would melt into disgust, vindication, to have uncovered Ty Lee's price at last. Ty Lee thought of all her happiness turning to ash, willing to sustain herself on scant fond memories than to risk the pain of her whole heart and to be left with nothing.

She surprised Suki with the strength of her words, her conviction, her belief (her knowledge) and the years of mistakes that rose behind her, compelling her, driving her to towards the last brave thing she could ever do for Azula.

"I can't be Azula's caretaker anymore." She swore she wouldn't cry, no matter how Suki reacted, angry or not. She had left that part of her behind. "I'm resigning."