Chapter Text
Ty Lee was six years old when she used her bending for the first time. For a bender, that was quite late. In years to come, she would try and piece together if she’d done it before, instinctively, without realizing. Try as she might though, she would never be quite sure. All she knew for certain that one day when she was six years old, she was playing a game she'd made up which involved jumping from rooftop to rooftop, when she misjudged the distance, and rather than plummeting to the ground she managed to propel herself onto the neighboring rooftop.
Now, if she’d been older, or less terrified, or more trusting of the adults around her, the story might have gone very differently. As it was, she was a child who had been given a long leash, and generally overlooked by her parents in favor of her older sisters. As it was, even as a young child she knew enough to be afraid she was going to be executed as an airbender. As it was, she needed to talk to someone. So, she went to the only people she could trust.
Mai and Azula took the whole thing very seriously. Even at six, Mai was a somber, subdued girl more prone to silence than to talkativeness, and Azula always looked for the advantage in the situation. Both of them were listened intently as Ty Lee, somewhat hysterically, blurted the whole mess out to them. When she was done, there was a long pause into which Ty Lee let out half-gasp half-sobs. Eventually, Azula spoke,
“We can use this.” Mai frowned at her,
“Use?”
“Ty Lee could very well be the last airbender in existence! At the very least, one of only a few. That’s useful to us!” Azula argued.
“Not if we end up in the palace dungeon for the rest of our lives!” Mai retorted.
“I wouldn’t even get that.” Ty Lee put in tremulously. Azula sighed, clearly put out by Ty Lee’s emotion.
“Come here.” She said and proceeded to draw both of her friends into the stiffest, most awkward hug Ty Lee had ever experience. “We are not going to prison.”
Azula’s voice would probably have been more imperious sounding had it not been muffled by Mai’s shoulder. Reluctantly, Ty Lee drew herself out of the first hug she had ever received from her friend to look at her better.
“How can you be so sure?” Ty Lee asked.
“Because we aren’t going to tell anyone.” Azula replied staunchly. “We can keep it secret between the three of us.”
“But then…how will it be useful?” Mai asked, the ‘duh’ clear in her voice.
“We won’t keep it secret forever.” The ‘duh’ was also obvious in Azula’s voice. Ty Lee did giggle a little at her friends then, and Mai shot her a reassuring smile as Azula plowed on, “Obviously Grandfather will never allow it, but eventually Iroh will be Firelord, and then Lu Ten. Lu Ten will definitely be fine with it, he’d never do anything to get us in trouble.”
This was, of course, an excellent point. At six they hadn’t quite made the connection to the fact that this assumed Azula’s grandfather and uncle would be dead, but they all agreed that Lu Ten would be an excellent Firelord. This was based primarily on the fact that a) he snuck them candy when he was home, and b) he never tattled on them. By the time she was eleven, Ty Lee felt this was a silly reason to think someone would be a good leader. By the time she was fourteen, she’d come to the conclusion that looking at the way an adult treats a six-year-old is an excellent way to determine how they as a leader would treat their subjects.
In any case, they all double pinky promised to keep it a secret, and then carried on with their lives. Except sometimes, Azula snuck them into a small interior courtyard of the palace to do ‘secret training’. This consisted of sparring, essentially, but Ty Lee was allowed to use her bending. This had the double advantage of training Ty Lee to bend, and Mai and Azula to fight airbenders.
Mai asked why they would ever need to fight airbenders, since they were all dead. Azula had just rolled her eyes at this.
“Obviously the aren’t all dead, since Ty Lee is alive. Besides, even if Ty Lee’s the only plain airbender, the Avatar might still be out there somewhere.”
They all shivered a bit at the prospect. The Avatar was a ghost story in the Fire Nation. A terrible monster who could bend any element, and therefore act with impunity. The Avatar had been prevented from regenerating with the destruction of the Air Nomads, or so everyone hoped.
“You don’t think… I could be the Avatar, do you?” Ty Lee asked nervously, but Azula scoffed at the idea.
“Don’t be silly, if the Avatar was reborn in the Fire Nation, that would mean that an air, water, and earth avatar had all been born and died unnoticed in the last century.”
“Besides,” reasoned Mai, “The Avatar can bend all four elements, you can only bend one.”
Ty Lee nodded, reassured by her friends’ logic.
It was two months later that they got caught. Zuko, bored and lonely, came looking for them after his lessons one afternoon. Ty Lee, much less graceful in her bending than she was on her feet, or hands, or elbows, managed to propel herself backwards and upwards out of Azula’s line of fire (Ty Lee had been pretty proud of that pun, Mai and Azula had groaned) and hit the ground hard, stumbling backwards into a stunned and openmouthed Zuko.
A minute of frantic scrambling followed, ultimately resulting in Azula standing protectively in front of Ty Lee, Mai stone-faced behind, and Zuko standing in a slightly confused but tense defensive crouch.
“What- How- Are… are you an airbender?” Zuko fumbled, looking at Ty Lee like she’d just revealed herself to be the Avatar in disguise. Which, in fairness, wasn’t that far off.
“… yea.”
“Ty Lee! Don’t tell him that!” Azula snapped.
“Why not? He already saw, and it’s not like he’s going to say anything.” Mai retorted, “Right, Zuko?”
Zuko nodded vigorously.
“’Course not. But you have to let me train with you.” Zuko insisted, then added, a bit more uncertainly, “And you probably shouldn’t be so obvious in your bending. Then you could actually use it in real life, rather than just with Azula and Mai.”
Azula looked at him in surprise.
“That’s actually a smart idea, Zuzu.”
“I am smart!” Zuko shouted back. Azula seemed less convinced.
It was strange, adding Zuko to their group. Mai was more comfortable with it than Azula, who seemed worried that her brother would steal her friends. Ty Lee firmly banished any misgivings and threw herself firmly into knitting her new group together. And, slowly but surely, it began to work. It was, then, with this group, bound together by their secrets, that the four children faced the oncoming troubles.