Promote those who are worthy
Two more prompt fills for the Bechdel test comment fic meme, both Azula/Ty Lee (this seems to be a popular request, and I am not really complaining. Although it is surprisingly difficult), both G or PG depending on your feelings on kissing.
One for myfloralbonnet, for prompt 'Found people to love, left people to drown / I'm not scared to jump, I'm not scared to fall / If there was nowhere to land I wouldn't be scared at all':
Ty Lee delights in her curve, the flick of her aura over the town as she lands a foot on a roof-ridge, a hand through the air to the coping, fingers outstretched on the dark shiny green glaze.
She pushes herself down into her middle finger, a spike of bright pinkness like one of Mai’s nails flirting out for an instant. Pushes off. Over an alley where small Earth Kingdom people do not look up, it is not like the circus, they do not clap. But there on the balcony waits Azula, sat out on the railing, a map spread beside her. Ty Lee quickens her pace. Her aura flags out behind her, trailing out pale into stony New Ozai.
She lands with both hands on the balcony, flips herself over into obeisance.
“They’re gone, Azula. I looked everywhere, I promise.”
Azula smoothes out the scroll, crosses her legs.
“Of course they are, Ty Lee.”
She marks out the map with a fingernail, a few quick curves, the paper blossoming with brown smoking lines.
“I wouldn’t worry. We’ll catch up.” She tilts her head back, as if to see the governor’s palace behind her, a dark door to the poky audience chamber, thick varnish slapped out over raw new wood, bright red tiles shipped over from the Fire Nation. “But you, Ty Lee. We came here in such a rush, we never really had a chance to chat.”
They had come with a royal procession, quite slowly. Ty Lee had walked beside Azula and told her all about the circus. She had not once, not ever, called it home, although she had admitted it had its good points. Azula’s aura had burned hard and blue, as usual. The palanquin had cast a grainy shadow across her face.
“I already told you all about the fight, Azula,” she says.
“Actually, Ty Lee, what you told me was how terrible the waterbender’s hairdo was. But please, don’t trouble yourself, I got some useful information out of Mai.”
“Sorry, Azula.”
Azula lifts a hand. “Please, Ty Lee. I didn’t pick you to be the brains of the operation.”
“Of course not, Azula! That’s your job.”
Azula laughs, briefly.
Ty Lee beams, pours over backwards, upside down and high over the city. For a moment her aura shows clear pink as it pools round her hands, pink as half-sucked red ice, and it is as if they are little again, and in the palace gardens, her fingers sticky with stolen sweets, posting them into Azula’s mouth because a princess must never get sugar stuck under her nails.
“Was it weird, Azula?” The words leave her mouth like sugar, like smoke.
Azula raises an eyebrow. Waits.
Ty Lee turns right side up. Pale fishbelly-pink streams out around her, into the belling grey sky. Great clangs come steadily from far below; they are sheeting the main courtyards with metal. Earthbenders are pretty easy to deal with, on the whole. She takes a breath.
“I just mean, after Mai left. That’s all. And I know you told me all about the quelling the Seika Island riots and the disturbances in the lower city and about your training and it was just like a spirit story but better, because it always is with you! And of course Mai is very gloomy so maybe it was a nice change. I just wondered because of course I always missed you a lot. In the circus.”
Azula is still, but she leaves one foot swinging, back and forth over the city, in time with the hammer. She looks across at Ty Lee.
Who tilts, suddenly, eyes wide and grey and the stone sliding under her, one last silly Earthbender making a stand, hooked into the high wall below them and slamming the heel of his hand on the stonework. Sheared off by blue fire, Ty Lee sees, falling, her fingers unfurling to brush at the rough wall.
It is like practice, she thinks, the empty tent, wet sea winds outside, her teeth furred with cheap colony sweets, canvas around her heaving like a punched stomach. Her fingers find the stone.
She presses herself into the wall, rock cold against her skin. Suddenly smooth, for long breaths.
A swatch of coarse silk slaps down beside her.
Not quite enough to bear her weight, but enough to run up and along, cloth thrumming through her fingers, pink over red silk. A banner from the audience chamber, Azula waiting at the top, bracing herself against the railing.
The Earthbender is nowhere important.
Ty Lee bends before Azula, palms together round the red.
She says quickly, around her short breath, “Thank you, Azula.”
She lets the cloth fall, looks up. Azula is blue against the sky and their teeth knock together, Ty Lee’s stomach jerking with her breath against Azula’s armour, hot and smooth and sliding as laughter.
They are both taller than they used to be.
Ty Lee feels Azula’s mouth quirk at the corner. Azula’s hand, red silk crunched up in it, tips up her chin, moves her face to one side.
“Well,” says Azula. “That’s one thing I knew you could do, Ty Lee.”
She tosses the silk out over the city, its red line uncurling like burns on a map.
And one for branded_irony: 'Azula/Ty Lee - I love a girl, but the girl loves royalty':
Ty Lee is lacing up Azula’s armour. She has taught herself to do it faster than Mai (not hard), faster than Azula herself (much more difficult). Even now she is fast and perfect, quick as a punch to the gut, steady as a sprint across the high-wire, now when the metal is finger-dancing hot, although the Avatar is dead and Zuko is back.
Although Zuko should change his clothes, the new stiff good clothes of almost-rich people putting on a show, Ty Lee knows the type and Prince Zuko should not. And there is his face, of course.
But Azula is putting on her armour, now that the first troops have come into the city, now they can show themselves. Ty Lee offers quick kisses as she fits it together, nothing to impede her hands. Lips to the hot hinges, over the silk.
It is the kind of thing - tying on armour - a girl like her might be expecting to do every day, at her age, as a military adjutant or as a provincial wife, some puffing minor noble going out every day to watch the women in the rice fields and shout at the soldiers in his coastal watch stations, out over the grey warm sea with buoys for spider-crab traps on the silky-soft sea floor. Ty Lee had seen them, diving off Ember Island, fat silvery bubbles coming past her face and Azula ahead, legs pale in the slow mushrooms of silt, the light coming through in shafts and the crabs poking their long legs out through the holes. But that, the fat noble, the place in the army, that was before Azula stood before her after class and said to her back as she bowed, both hands flat to the floor, that she would appreciate your company, Ty Lee, appreciate it at the palace in two day’s time at noon, please announce yourself at the Western Gate.
Now they are in the Earth King’s palace, high and green and smelling of old incense and scent in the public rooms, lower down of stone and steel and rot.
Everything is much bigger than it should be, but that is the way of palaces, Ty Lee knows.
A Dai Li agent enters, and Azula’s armour cools with a crackle, almost too soft to hear. He informs her that the outer wall is down. He leaves.
“Well, Ty Lee,” says Azula. “Hurry up. It appears we have a kingdom to attend to, not simply a city.”
“It’s so wonderful, Azula. And so good for the Earth Kingdom people!”
Ty Lee tugs close the tie under Azula’s armpit, steps back, bows.
“Oh, Ty Lee,” says Azula, brushing herself down. “Please don’t be soppy. You must have some idea of what this will entail for large portions of the population. Even my brother appears to have some concept of the practicalities of an occupation.”
Ty Lee comes closer, a step. Her Dai Li clothes are stiff and dark, the sky shows pink through the windows, the city in the twilight like a field of rough-cut hay, damp and heaped and sparking with rot-fire. About to go up in flames.
“That’s probably because he was one of them for a while. He would have been forever and ever, if you hadn’t come.” She pauses. “Will we go back home, now, Azula?”
“What, you don’t want to go back to your little circus? Entertain the troops?”
“Of course not, Azula. It would be my honour to serve you. For as long as you want.”
“Well, naturally, Ty Lee.” Azula smiles at her, red and gold in the green light. “That was never in question.” She selects a few scrolls from the rack on the desk, turns to the door. “Well. Let’s go and discover if Mai has found out anything remotely useful about troop numbers in the northern provinces, shall we? I wouldn’t want to leave things less than tidy, when we go.”
“It really is yours, Azula, isn’t it,” says Ty Lee. “The whole Earth Kingdom.”
The city outside the window is wide and smells of spring and dust and cooking, rice burning dry in little pots. Damp washing and outside the walls (the walls that are gone) the rushing railroad and (the lake that is theirs) and the desert and rivers and mountains, little fields up the hills like fingernail parings and the circus tents in bright red oilcloth, the sounds of the animals in their cages.
“No, Ty Lee,” says Azula. “It’s ours.”
“Ours?”
“It belongs, Ty Lee,” says Azula, “to the Fire Nation. The story of my victory, Ty Lee, will be told by children not yet born. By their children, and their children’s children.” She looks across at Ty Lee, green and brown and worried against the window. “Of our victory, that is,” she says, kindly, “mine and yours and Mai’s.”
“Of course, Azula,” says Ty Lee.
Azula lowers her head and accepts a kiss.
Man, I remember when I read Ted Hughes' translation of (some of) the Metamorphoses and then went to a Chinese circus straight afterwards. Say what you will about Hughes himself, those were good times. (What? Ty Lee - circus - Ovid. Clear progression).
Sorry, guys, my internet self is mostly over at dreamwidth: fulselden. Please do comment over there.
One for myfloralbonnet, for prompt 'Found people to love, left people to drown / I'm not scared to jump, I'm not scared to fall / If there was nowhere to land I wouldn't be scared at all':
Ty Lee delights in her curve, the flick of her aura over the town as she lands a foot on a roof-ridge, a hand through the air to the coping, fingers outstretched on the dark shiny green glaze.
She pushes herself down into her middle finger, a spike of bright pinkness like one of Mai’s nails flirting out for an instant. Pushes off. Over an alley where small Earth Kingdom people do not look up, it is not like the circus, they do not clap. But there on the balcony waits Azula, sat out on the railing, a map spread beside her. Ty Lee quickens her pace. Her aura flags out behind her, trailing out pale into stony New Ozai.
She lands with both hands on the balcony, flips herself over into obeisance.
“They’re gone, Azula. I looked everywhere, I promise.”
Azula smoothes out the scroll, crosses her legs.
“Of course they are, Ty Lee.”
She marks out the map with a fingernail, a few quick curves, the paper blossoming with brown smoking lines.
“I wouldn’t worry. We’ll catch up.” She tilts her head back, as if to see the governor’s palace behind her, a dark door to the poky audience chamber, thick varnish slapped out over raw new wood, bright red tiles shipped over from the Fire Nation. “But you, Ty Lee. We came here in such a rush, we never really had a chance to chat.”
They had come with a royal procession, quite slowly. Ty Lee had walked beside Azula and told her all about the circus. She had not once, not ever, called it home, although she had admitted it had its good points. Azula’s aura had burned hard and blue, as usual. The palanquin had cast a grainy shadow across her face.
“I already told you all about the fight, Azula,” she says.
“Actually, Ty Lee, what you told me was how terrible the waterbender’s hairdo was. But please, don’t trouble yourself, I got some useful information out of Mai.”
“Sorry, Azula.”
Azula lifts a hand. “Please, Ty Lee. I didn’t pick you to be the brains of the operation.”
“Of course not, Azula! That’s your job.”
Azula laughs, briefly.
Ty Lee beams, pours over backwards, upside down and high over the city. For a moment her aura shows clear pink as it pools round her hands, pink as half-sucked red ice, and it is as if they are little again, and in the palace gardens, her fingers sticky with stolen sweets, posting them into Azula’s mouth because a princess must never get sugar stuck under her nails.
“Was it weird, Azula?” The words leave her mouth like sugar, like smoke.
Azula raises an eyebrow. Waits.
Ty Lee turns right side up. Pale fishbelly-pink streams out around her, into the belling grey sky. Great clangs come steadily from far below; they are sheeting the main courtyards with metal. Earthbenders are pretty easy to deal with, on the whole. She takes a breath.
“I just mean, after Mai left. That’s all. And I know you told me all about the quelling the Seika Island riots and the disturbances in the lower city and about your training and it was just like a spirit story but better, because it always is with you! And of course Mai is very gloomy so maybe it was a nice change. I just wondered because of course I always missed you a lot. In the circus.”
Azula is still, but she leaves one foot swinging, back and forth over the city, in time with the hammer. She looks across at Ty Lee.
Who tilts, suddenly, eyes wide and grey and the stone sliding under her, one last silly Earthbender making a stand, hooked into the high wall below them and slamming the heel of his hand on the stonework. Sheared off by blue fire, Ty Lee sees, falling, her fingers unfurling to brush at the rough wall.
It is like practice, she thinks, the empty tent, wet sea winds outside, her teeth furred with cheap colony sweets, canvas around her heaving like a punched stomach. Her fingers find the stone.
She presses herself into the wall, rock cold against her skin. Suddenly smooth, for long breaths.
A swatch of coarse silk slaps down beside her.
Not quite enough to bear her weight, but enough to run up and along, cloth thrumming through her fingers, pink over red silk. A banner from the audience chamber, Azula waiting at the top, bracing herself against the railing.
The Earthbender is nowhere important.
Ty Lee bends before Azula, palms together round the red.
She says quickly, around her short breath, “Thank you, Azula.”
She lets the cloth fall, looks up. Azula is blue against the sky and their teeth knock together, Ty Lee’s stomach jerking with her breath against Azula’s armour, hot and smooth and sliding as laughter.
They are both taller than they used to be.
Ty Lee feels Azula’s mouth quirk at the corner. Azula’s hand, red silk crunched up in it, tips up her chin, moves her face to one side.
“Well,” says Azula. “That’s one thing I knew you could do, Ty Lee.”
She tosses the silk out over the city, its red line uncurling like burns on a map.
And one for branded_irony: 'Azula/Ty Lee - I love a girl, but the girl loves royalty':
Ty Lee is lacing up Azula’s armour. She has taught herself to do it faster than Mai (not hard), faster than Azula herself (much more difficult). Even now she is fast and perfect, quick as a punch to the gut, steady as a sprint across the high-wire, now when the metal is finger-dancing hot, although the Avatar is dead and Zuko is back.
Although Zuko should change his clothes, the new stiff good clothes of almost-rich people putting on a show, Ty Lee knows the type and Prince Zuko should not. And there is his face, of course.
But Azula is putting on her armour, now that the first troops have come into the city, now they can show themselves. Ty Lee offers quick kisses as she fits it together, nothing to impede her hands. Lips to the hot hinges, over the silk.
It is the kind of thing - tying on armour - a girl like her might be expecting to do every day, at her age, as a military adjutant or as a provincial wife, some puffing minor noble going out every day to watch the women in the rice fields and shout at the soldiers in his coastal watch stations, out over the grey warm sea with buoys for spider-crab traps on the silky-soft sea floor. Ty Lee had seen them, diving off Ember Island, fat silvery bubbles coming past her face and Azula ahead, legs pale in the slow mushrooms of silt, the light coming through in shafts and the crabs poking their long legs out through the holes. But that, the fat noble, the place in the army, that was before Azula stood before her after class and said to her back as she bowed, both hands flat to the floor, that she would appreciate your company, Ty Lee, appreciate it at the palace in two day’s time at noon, please announce yourself at the Western Gate.
Now they are in the Earth King’s palace, high and green and smelling of old incense and scent in the public rooms, lower down of stone and steel and rot.
Everything is much bigger than it should be, but that is the way of palaces, Ty Lee knows.
A Dai Li agent enters, and Azula’s armour cools with a crackle, almost too soft to hear. He informs her that the outer wall is down. He leaves.
“Well, Ty Lee,” says Azula. “Hurry up. It appears we have a kingdom to attend to, not simply a city.”
“It’s so wonderful, Azula. And so good for the Earth Kingdom people!”
Ty Lee tugs close the tie under Azula’s armpit, steps back, bows.
“Oh, Ty Lee,” says Azula, brushing herself down. “Please don’t be soppy. You must have some idea of what this will entail for large portions of the population. Even my brother appears to have some concept of the practicalities of an occupation.”
Ty Lee comes closer, a step. Her Dai Li clothes are stiff and dark, the sky shows pink through the windows, the city in the twilight like a field of rough-cut hay, damp and heaped and sparking with rot-fire. About to go up in flames.
“That’s probably because he was one of them for a while. He would have been forever and ever, if you hadn’t come.” She pauses. “Will we go back home, now, Azula?”
“What, you don’t want to go back to your little circus? Entertain the troops?”
“Of course not, Azula. It would be my honour to serve you. For as long as you want.”
“Well, naturally, Ty Lee.” Azula smiles at her, red and gold in the green light. “That was never in question.” She selects a few scrolls from the rack on the desk, turns to the door. “Well. Let’s go and discover if Mai has found out anything remotely useful about troop numbers in the northern provinces, shall we? I wouldn’t want to leave things less than tidy, when we go.”
“It really is yours, Azula, isn’t it,” says Ty Lee. “The whole Earth Kingdom.”
The city outside the window is wide and smells of spring and dust and cooking, rice burning dry in little pots. Damp washing and outside the walls (the walls that are gone) the rushing railroad and (the lake that is theirs) and the desert and rivers and mountains, little fields up the hills like fingernail parings and the circus tents in bright red oilcloth, the sounds of the animals in their cages.
“No, Ty Lee,” says Azula. “It’s ours.”
“Ours?”
“It belongs, Ty Lee,” says Azula, “to the Fire Nation. The story of my victory, Ty Lee, will be told by children not yet born. By their children, and their children’s children.” She looks across at Ty Lee, green and brown and worried against the window. “Of our victory, that is,” she says, kindly, “mine and yours and Mai’s.”
“Of course, Azula,” says Ty Lee.
Azula lowers her head and accepts a kiss.
Man, I remember when I read Ted Hughes' translation of (some of) the Metamorphoses and then went to a Chinese circus straight afterwards. Say what you will about Hughes himself, those were good times. (What? Ty Lee - circus - Ovid. Clear progression).
Sorry, guys, my internet self is mostly over at dreamwidth: fulselden. Please do comment over there.