Azula sat on the ground, methodically flicking her index and middle fingers, commanding a small arc of razor sharp flames.

"Ty Lee, go. I will catch up once I get this trap off my leg." She ordered, referring to the large animal trap that had sunk its teeth deep into the flesh of her calf and shin. Glancing up from her work, she saw the other girl standing unmoving, her normally vibrant gray eyes glossed over.

"Ty Lee, I said go." She waited a moment, gritting her teeth through the new wave of pain that came as the metal heated up. The girl still stood unmoving.

"Leave. Go back to the inn. If I'm not there within two hours come back with Mai. That's an order." Azula said while still slicing at the metal that encased her leg. She still didn't move.

"Are you disobeying a direct order?" The Princess raised an eyebrow.

"I guess I am." The acrobat fluidly sank down next to the seething firebender.

"And you know what the punishment for disobeying one of the royal family is, do you not?" She questioned, a sharp tone of anger edging her voice. Ty Lee paused for a moment. Fifty lashes with the fire whip. She shivered unwittingly.

"I do."

"And you're still staying?"

"I am." The other girl confirmed, and the Princess smirked, but let the matter drop and returned to her slicing. After near twenty minutes of silent slicing, the arc went through the top of the trap, leaving it split Azula wordlessly pulled the piece with the teeth out of her shin. She then lifted her leg up off of the bottom row that was embedded in her calf, and released a blast of fire at the ground from both palms, which effectively shot her up into the air.

She landed on her unhurt leg, and started limping back towards the inn, which was about three miles away. Ty Lee jumped up and followed silently for about ten minutes, before sliding next to Azula and trying to slip her arm around the injured girl, but she was pushed away.

"You've lost a lot of blood, Azula. Let me help you." Ty Lee said.

"I don't need your help." Azula continued walking as Ty Lee focused on the blood seeping through the Princess' torn armor.

"You're bleeding." She stated.

"I know." Came the curt reply.

"I know you don't want my help, but you're hurting yourself, you're going to faint, please let me help you, please don't make me…" Ty Lee trailed off.

"No. I can take care of myself."

Ty Lee sighed and let herself fall a step behind her friend, before gently stabbed the points across her neck that were necessary to immobilize the firebender from the waist down, and then eased her to the ground.

"You…how dare you?" Azula growled, firing rapid blasts of blue flames at Ty Lee that she nimbly dodged.

"You know how many lashes an attack on a member of the royal family is?" She said, continuing to shoot blasts. "Three hundred, plus your fifty; do you have a death wish, Ty Lee?" She yelled at the wildly moving acrobat, who didn't seem to be tiring. "Why don't you just get it over with? Then we can get back to the inn and you can get your last night's sleep!" She dared her to get closer.

"Alright," Ty Lee brought herself to a complete stop about five feet from Azula. "Burn me." She said, holding her hands up in a gesture of surrender.

"Come closer." The firebender growled, and Ty Lee moved until she was within her grasp. Azula reached out and wrapped her hand around the other girl's lower leg, caught her eye, and bit by bit let her hand grow hotter and hotter, waiting as the other girl's eyes began to water, her leg began to shake, and the tears ran freely down her face, but she only let go when the acrobat finally screamed.

"Now, how long until this…whatever it is, wears off?"

Ty Lee wiped the tears from her eyes before speaking. "Two hours or so."

"Well then, I suppose you'll be carrying me, won't you?" Azula said, as she looked up at the rapidly darkening sky. Ty Lee nodded mutely and bent over, forcing her arm underneath the Princess, and picked her up, carefully avoiding her wounds and started to walk, putting her own pain out of her mind. Within a few minutes, Azula fell asleep in Ty Lee's arms, exhausted.

Almost an hour later, Ty Lee made it back to the inn, and told the innkeeper to call for the nearest healer, then clumsily climbed up a flight of stairs, walked down the hallway, and pushed open the door to their room. She was greeted by a knife wielding Mai, who relaxed after seeing who it was. She looked from the sleeping Azula to the burned Ty Lee, shook her head, and returned to sharpening the dozens of blades that lay around her in a circle on the floor.

Ty Lee gently laid Azula down on the room's only bed, then flopped down on her sleeping pad, and put her own bottom half into paralysis, effectively numbing her leg. Mai looked over at the hand shaped burn and disinterestedly asked,

"So how did that happen?"

"Well, we went out so she could practice, but Azula got stuck in a trap, and I wouldn't leave her, then she cut herself out, then I paralyzed her because she was walking, and then she burned me, and I had to carry her back, but she fell asleep. And I called a healer. And my leg hurts. What did I miss?" Ty Lee rambled.

"Just sharpening some of my knives." Mai replied.

"Oh. That sounds like…fun." Ty Lee assumed that Mai's knives were like her own acrobatics, but she just didn't get it.

"Mai?" She asked.

"Hmm?"

"How many fire lashes does it take to kill someone?"

Mai raised an eyebrow at her. "How big?"

"About my size." Ty Lee looked in the other direction.

"Maybe two hundred. That depends on how strong the fire is. If it was someone like her," The assassin nodded in Azula's direction, "Then maybe eighty. Why?"

"No reason…I'm just wondering." Right then there was a knock on the door, and Mai looked from Azula's sleeping form, to Ty Lee's paralyzed form, and set her knife down on the floor and rose to open the door for the healer, who immediately widened her eyes when she saw the circle of various knives on the floor.

"They're not for you." Mai calmed her. "Please take a look at her," She said, nodding towards Azula. "We're willing to pay whatever you require."

The healer nodded, and moved over to the Princess, and gasped when she saw who it was.

"I hope you understand how important it is that no one knows we were here." Mai said, staring the healer down, a semi-sharpened blade in her hand.

"Of course." She said, "Where is she hurt?"

"Her right leg."

The healer pulled out a small knife and cut the fabric from mid way up her thigh down to the top of her boots away, revealing five horizontal holes in Azula's leg, which the healer healed so that they looked much better, then lifted up her leg and healed the five that were spread across the underside of her leg.

"She shouldn't put much strain on her leg for the next two weeks, but I would assume that would be impossible. If she would chew on this," She pulled out a leafy herb, "It should help to ebb the pain and speed up the healing process. I…" She noticed Ty Lee. "Will she need healing as well?"

"Ye…" Mai started.

"No, I'm okay." Ty Lee jumped in, making Mai narrow her eyes.

"Alright...I'm going to have to charge…"

"Will this be enough?" Mai cut her off, producing nine gold coins from within her sleeve, causing the healer's mouth to drop.

"Are you…"

"If it will not be sufficient…" Mai cut her off again, retracting her hand back into her sleeve.

"Oh, no, of course, thank you." The healer stammered out.

"Thank you for your services. Have a good night." Mai dismissed the healer, locked the door, and returned to her ring of shuriken.

"Get some sleep Ty Lee. I'm right behind you."

"Okay. Good night, Mai!" Ty Lee turned her head to face the other direction.

"Good night, Ty Lee." A few minutes later, Ty Lee heard the assassin put her knives away, and crawl into her sleeping pad, but unlike the other girl, sleep was nowhere in sight. Despite how tired she should have been, her body was stubbornly awake, and it took almost four hours for the acrobat to fall asleep.

"Ty Lee, get up."

"Huh?" The sleeping girl dragged a fist up and rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, then popped them open to see Azula standing at the foot of her pad.

"Ty Lee!"

"I'm up, Azula. I'm up." She mumbled and pulled herself up off of her pad, and shook her head, partly in pain from her leg, and partly shaking sleep away; she then pulled a band off of her wrist and began weaving her hair into a braid.

"You're coming with me." Azula said as she pulled open the door to the room. She turned back to look at Ty Lee, who was slipping her feet into her shoes. "Come on." Ty Lee followed Azula out of the door, still wondering if the Princess was planning to follow through.

She trailed Azula in silence back to the clearing in the woods that they had been in the day before, where the firebender dropped cross-legged to the ground, and Ty Lee waited for her to give a slight nod before she dropped to the ground in front of her. She watched as Azula shut her eyes, waited a moment, then popped them open again and took a deep breath.

"I want to know why you did it, Ty." Azula said, and Ty Lee's face flashed confusion and the firebender explained herself, "The trap, the staying, the burn, the healer, everything. I want to know."

"Well, I…I didn't want you to get hurt. I'm supposed to protect you." Ty Lee started, dancing around the underlying reason.

"Loyalty, then?" Azula questioned her.

"No…well, yes, butyou're my friend, and I don't want to see you get hurt. I wasn't going to leave you like that. You could have died, Azula! I shouldn't have…done what I did, I know, but…" She struggled for the appropriate words, "At the time it seemed like the only way. I made a mistake. By that time I figured that if you were going to burn me, then you were going to, eventually, no matter what I did, and it would only make us go faster if I just got it over with. After a few minutes you fell asleep, and when we got back to the inn, I asked the lady to call a healer, and went up to the room. I think you'd fainted, because you didn't even move, not even when Mai and I were talking, or when the lady healed you. And then she left, and I went to bed." Ty Lee finished, and looked up from the ground to meet the Princess' eyes.

"You didn't finish." Azula pointedly dropped her eyes to Ty Lee's own injury.

"I didn't know if it would make you mad. You didn't tell me I could get it healed, and I didn't want you to be any madder at me then you already were." Ty Lee said, confused when Azula gave one curt nod, and said she'd call the healer when they got to the inn and stood up, starting her practice like nothing had happened. Ty Lee let herself get lost in the blue flames that were soon crisscrossing around the clearing.

"Ty Lee? Are you in there?" The acrobat shook her head and jumped to her feet, coming out of her trance-like state.

"Sorry." And she fell in behind Azula, silent, until about half of the way home.

"A-Azula?" She asked, and the firebender turned to look at her, and she gathered her courage,

"What about the lashes?" She looked into the Princess' calculating amber eyes, and thought that perhaps they were a bit less cold then usual as they looked back at her. The other girl gave her a funny look.

"What lashes?" She bluntly replied, then turned back around and kept walking, the faintest trace of a smile on her lips.

Azula's head turned back, after a minute, with all hints of any previous smile gone.

"What are you waiting for? We haven't got all day; we need to move out." She pivoted back around and kept moving, at a faster pace.

Ty Lee grinned and ran to catch up with her.