@elf-kid2 in their last ask for the Reach this Moment AU asked for two things, each of which I decided needed its own post. The part I am answering here is What is Mai’s relationship like with the Gaang.
Conveniently, there are, minus Zuko, five members of the Gaang.
1. The member of the Gaang (other than Zuko) that Mai sees most often is Suki. Suki, as head of the Kyoshi Warriors, spends most of her time in the Fire Nation palace. She’s kind, she’s sympathetic, and she’s a natural born leader. Mai envies her, envies the ease she has with power, and with herself, and is so absolutely grateful for her presence that she could never express it. Not only does Suki admirably protect her new husband, toward whom she has many and complicated feelings, and gives Ty Lee the task to defend her, but she is also a fellow Earth Kingdom woman, an Earth Kingdom woman who is so far from what the Fire Nation expects of Earth Kingdom women, who comes with a band of Earth Kingdom women, who live well beyond the limits the Fire Nation expects. Mai is so grateful for all of them and their company. And she’s grateful for Ty Lee too, not that she’ll admit it.
2. Sokka shows up pretty regularly to visit his girlfriend. And the problem with Sokka is that he’s just one more complication. He’s a friend of her husband’s, a husband for whom her feelings are anything but straightforward. And of course he helped end the war with said husband, and he pops in and out of the palace, making being a foreigner there look effortless. She hates him just a little for that. And she hates him just a little for being able to help end the war, when she spent every minute she knew there was a war, running around just fixing one problem after another and trying to keep her head above water as the Fire Nation appointed governor. And does she also have complicated feelings about that? Yeah. But he also goes out of the way to make her laugh. He doesn’t treat her like a doll or a traitor for being Azula’s appointed governor. And yeah, she kind of hates sometimes him, but she also kind of likes him a lot more often.
3. Toph is always an anomaly. She only rarely comes to the Fire Nation royal palace, and when she does, she doesn’t stay long. She and Mai have become such different women, and yet they have so much in common, life experience, childhood, culture. Gaoling for all it is in the south, well south of the Si Wong desert, has tended to ape the cultural norms of Ba Sing Se as much as it was able. Supposedly the town was founded by the Bei Fongs, who were, and still are Ba Sing Se nobility and they still look to Ba Sing Se for spouses for their children. And like Mai, she grew up shut away, that restless despair and anger bubbling just under the surface. And like Mai Toph sees femininity as a prison. They each have their own relationship to that. Toph rejects it utterly, while Mai has learned to wield it. But neither likes it, neither is comfortable with it, any more than they are comfortable with their families, or their pasts. Mai doesn’t always get along with Toph, or agree with her, but at least when she’s around, Mai feels like their speaking the same language.
4. Katara and Aang came to the wedding. Sometimes, when she can’t hold back the sense of shame and anger, Mai remembers Katara’s look of pity. But they’ve met since then, talked, and Katara knows better now, knows that Mai has much sharper edges than she thought. Katara and Mai first really come to meet during the crisis over Yu Dao. It’s hard, maybe impossible, to find one’s way through a new role, one with no set parameters, that one is supposed to shape to suit one’s self when one has no idea what one wants out of it or out of anything when one’s whole life and purpose has fallen away twice in a year, and one hasn’t an goals left. But Mai was governor of Ba Sing Se, and her sense of responsibility hasn’t left her. And she knows intimately what it’s like to be conquered by the Fire Nation. She knows the horrors and the cruelties of it, small and large, deliberate and incidental. Political boundaries between the Earth Kingdom and Fire Nation over former colonies makes Mai’s nose twitch like a shirshu’s smelling its quarry. And Katara spots her immediately as a natural ally. Aang, she knows, is more wary of her. He knows what she is, a woman with her own agenda.
5. He isn’t wrong. For Mai, it’s not as simple as Fire Nation verses Earth Kingdom, colony or province. For Katara, it’s always simple. She’s so good at getting to the straight forward clarity of a thing, when Mai feels like she’s drowning in mud. But Mai has seen how little interest anyone in Ba Sing Se has beyond the walls, how it’s a nation unto itself, and how benign the neglect has not been. These problems were exploited by the Fire Nation but they predate the conquest. And besides, who is it ruling Ba Sing Se, who wants the colonies back so badly? Why it’s Long Feng. And Mai has found a goal, at least for now: making Long Feng’s life as hard as possible. Later, this will evolve, into fighting for her brother’s future independence as Earth King, but for now, she just wants to teach the man who used her and threw her out as soon as she was a threat, that he can’t screw with her. Underneath her anger, she knows, is fear, but she has agreed with herself not to look at that too closely.
6. Long Feng is not eager for a war he can’t win, and he’s fully confident he can run rings around the child Avatar and teenage Firelord. So he readily agrees to negotiate. But it’s neither Aang nor Zuko he meets on arrival in the Fire Nation capital. It’s Mai. Her husband leaves the negotiations to her, a gesture of profound trust, and one she does not forget.
