Cog in the Machine, Chapter 14
Remember me? *Not sure I do*. Anyway, I've made a promise to myself to finish my Avatar stories before the series itself ends. That should give me plenty of time, right?
Chapter 14:
Now the spectre of insanity had taken more choate form in the Fire Princess. Ah, and wasn’t she some expression on the fates’ part of some overall insanity? Sokka grasped at this as he knew he’d be given no time to consider how the latest evidence of his own instability - the odd vision he’d experienced as he was brought above deck - should affect his overall strategy. Maybe this was a good thing. Being here, having to deal with her again. Maybe he actually was better at thinking on his feet, rather than analyzing to death any particular problem.
Yeah. That was the optimist’s route. Only problem was, he’d never believed in optimism. Then again, given the nightmarish contents his imagination tended to throw at him lately, with all those hours devoted to no more than contemplation, maybe optimism was a route worth exploring…
Well, once, anyway. He shook his head in a physical attempt to clear it, daring to close his eyes momentarily. It would be nice, he thought, if he could convince himself that none of this really mattered. It would be such a relief to imagine himself as a mere cog among many others in the war machine, an infinitesimal element easily eliminated, plowed under without meaning in the greater scope of it all, something easily replaced.
Except that Sokka was enough of a natural engineer to understand that if the analogy of mechanistic warfare held true, than he needed to admit that even if he were a mere grain of sand grinding against the workings of the machine, such grinding could in fact wear at some crucial part. It could cause the machine to falter and, at least, slow down. It all depended, didn’t it, on just where that grain of sand happened to be rubbing, and wasn’t it the case that even a tiny cog was necessary to the machine’s functioning?
Ah, well then. A single cog could stop the entire engine.
------------------------
Azula found herself taking some pleasure in the appearance of the Tribesman beyond contemplating crushing Ty Lee’s absurd little ownership claim or her own, admittedly already subrogated, concerns of him as an avenue towards the crucial goal of attaining conquest over the Avatar.
The power she had over all prisoners gave her sway over this particular individual, of course. It was her call as to whether her immediate subordinate plans for Sokka should come to fruition. She was not at all above acknowledging the pleasure this power gave her, and that was the full extent of her own claim upon him, of course. She was, perhaps, not quite sufficiently self-aware as to question her assessment of the investment Ty Lee had made in Sokka, or her own investment, for that matter…
Azula had, in fact, wholly expected Ty Lee’s reports regarding Sokka to be, well, somewhat incomplete. She had heightened her own perceptions of him during her encounters with the Tribesman to compensate for what she anticipated might be failings in Ty Lee’s ability to evaluate his threat to the Fire Nation. Of course, Ty Lee had never failed to accurately assess a lover’s capabilities to impact Azula’s ambitions. Both positively and negatively. Such prescience and loyalty had won Ty Lee a secure place at her mistress’s side. But Azula was by no means prepared to rest what she sensed was a critical decision on the judgment of a peon - no matter how trusted. After all, it would be foolish to assume that there couldn’t be first time in anything, especially when it came to failures in judgment.
Azula believed in redundancy. After all, she could afford it. The whole point of keeping Ty Lee and Mai beside her since her father had finally given her free rein was to exploit their different talents and perspectives to her own advantage.
It had, actually, surprised her a bit that Mai had extended herself in any way regarding the Water Tribesman. Fastidious to a fault, Mai’s reluctance to lift more than a perfunctory finger in anything more than Azula’s safety was a constant, if minor, source of irritation for the Fire Nation Princess. Granted, Mai was quick to investigate any possibility of danger, and did not hesitate to face any such danger in defense of her principal. But she reflected her noble upbringing in her disdain for extending herself beyond what was absolutely required to achieve her goals. Quite honestly, Azula suspected Mai of being something of a lazy ass.
But not where Azula’s safety was at issue. She would like to think Mai had as much regard for Azula’s goals, but the other girl seemed largely oblivious to them. Still, her instinct for threats against Azula’s person was infallible.
So Azula had no particular concerns regarding any overt acts of the Water Tribesman. He could not hurt her. Nor could he, in any likelihood, escape her.
------------------------
As the Fire Nation princess closed the ground between them, the rising sun over her shoulder, Sokka clung to that odd after-image of the water-bender beside her, and resolved anew to stand before his enemies without fear, without faltering, and with every bit of cunning and connivance the spirits had seen fit to bless him. He focused on his memory of her cruelty, her sharp intelligence that seemed to prowl every circumstance like a ravening lynx-wolf, alert to any sign of weakness or hesitation in her prey.
Deliberately Sokka’s brain plied his vision with another illusion. The flawless paradigm of Fire Nation feminine beauty morphed before his eyes into a snowy predator. But then, unbidden, his imagination surrendered up an odd assortment of images: while the linxwolf ruled the tundra, she could not out maneuver the Water Tribe, once alerted to her presence. Even so, she had as much right to existence as the Tribesmen; the Tribe recognized as much and made accommodations.
It was odd, because, frankly, for all her beauty she had little of value to give the Tribe. It should have been a simple decision to simply find a way to eliminate her. Yet every generation of Tribesman had considered the lynxwolf and accepted that, in her sheer beauty and fierceness, she embodied a life-force too important to destroy. The predator made life on the tundra a bit harder, yes, but also somehow elevated it as well.
This time Sokka shook his head more vigorously. Quite obviously he had either been ingesting some mind-numbing drug or his incarceration had rendered more harm than he had recognized. His perception of the Fire Nation was totally fucked-up. This was patently obvious by the urges he forced himself to admit he felt given his captors. He wanted to insinuate his body in every possible way with one Fire Nation native; to share his wit and skill with another as with a comrade; and finally, to find some form of accord for existence with the scion of the Fire Nation itself. He couldn’t, at the moment, imagine how any of these longings could possibly serve his tribe, let alone the world at large he had given allegiance to in taking up the cause of the Avatar.
He grit his teeth as he considered his position. It was either exceptionally positive - he’d managed somehow to isolate each from the other in terms of their goals - or he was at the center of a deviously triangulated plot. It was possible that they had all approached him independently, each with, he had come to suspect, a reason to somehow shade exactly how much progress each had made in their, ah…negotiations, with him when comparing such with the others. Then again, everything could all be in fact a concerted ploy on the part of the fiendishly clever woman now grasping the cloth proffered by the guard a few steps to one side of him, even as she fixated him with her eyes.
Well, he felt so far his best success had been to take the situation by the balls and plunge forward. Why change course now?
“Damn, girl,” he drawled. “Granted, where I come from hot baths are a luxury, but we do try to ration them out such that our guests aren’t subjected to the stench of the hunt or other, em, strenuous activities, when we greet them.”
Like the lynxwolf, Azula showed him her teeth, but not before throwing the cloth aside after dragging it first across her face, then along her neck and shoulders, exposed before she then drew on a tunic, almost languorously closing the frogs across her chest and neck as she attempted to stare him down.
Sokka allowed his grin to linger, merely tilting his head a bit without breaking eye contact as he recognized that she had decided to ignore his comment. Fine then, the boundaries between them continued to fluctuate. He’d be damned if he would indicate in any way that it was a problem for him!
---------------------------
A part of her brain had considered the peasant’s reaction to stripped-down appearance, bearing in mind his confusion over Ty Lee’s aggressive sexuality and her own preconceptions regarding his primitive culture. She had, admittedly, intended to provoke him into some kind of response. She had not anticipated that he would quite manage to place her in the role of barbarian, though. No, she thought to herself, she had been expecting something more along the lines of awe and humility.
Again she had underestimated him.
A corner of Azula’s mouth curled. Much as it annoyed her to have miscalculated yet again, she couldn’t help but be amused at the prisoner’s consistent audacity in his interactions with her. It was obvious that he was determined to deny her any real recognition of her obvious superiority over him.
Azula had deliberately slowed her hands in their efficient restoration of her dress from casual work-out to presentation mode. No single movement could have been claimed as improper, yet she allowed the clean lines of pale skin from shoulder to chest to be exposed just a heartbeat longer than absolutely necessary. And she was ready to swear the prisoner’s eyes made note of the view.
“And so you yet live,” she murmured, as if to herself in half-question. “I don’t suppose you feel any sense of obligation to me for my forbearance.”
“Hell, no,” Sokka responded. “Thought I told you yesterday I was rather prepared to live, all things considered.”
“Ah, but, we discussed so many lovely ways for you to die, didn’t we?” she queried sweetly. How far would he continue this, anyway?
“I did think we might be speaking hypothetically, of course,” Sokka relaxed his stance yet further, forcing the cockiness from his grin into a more genial smile. “I don’t suppose you’d thought of making this a breakfast meeting, had you?”
He allowed an element of genuine hopefulness to infuse his voice.
It wasn’t as though he presented himself as a prince with demands as a royal prisoner, she thought to herself, trying to analyze just why his arrogance didn’t inspire in her a desire to immediately fry his balls. No, he didn’t attempt to elevate himself in any way. And yet, he also refused to acknowledge her obvious superiority to him. And this should have infuriated her.
Somehow, instead, it amused her. With effort, she schooled her own expression to remain bland. Keeping her eyes on Sokka, she ordered the purser to bring her a pot of tea. One cup.
“I’d say someone flunked their lessons in diplomacy, but then, hey. I can’t say I ever had any myself, so who am I to talk?”
“Indeed. Who are you?”
It had occurred to Azula that her best course with the Tribesman may well lie in silence. He seemed constitutionally incapable of keeping his own mouth shut for any appreciable time period, and thus would almost certainly inadvertently say more than he wished.
Again she remembered Ty Lee’s early ability to fluster him into foolishness. She realized she’d taken her model of Mai with him too far before; Mai was habitually silent and had to be provoked into unguarded utterances. Sokka, on the other hand, was habitually voluble, taking refuge in speech that was generally disregarded. As such, if she just let him speak long enough he would eventually slip up. In his own arrogance he wouldn’t be able to help himself. He wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to include, in a sea of otherwise irrelevance, nuggets of value purely on the assumption that they, too, would be disregarded.
Azula considered how allowing him to actually eat breakfast with her might further this particular strategy.
-------------------------------
Okay. He was ready to swear she’d been flirting with him just then, giving him such a view of her throat, shoulders and, yes, the swell of her chest. There was no way it was acceptable for Fire Nation royalty to flaunt their particular perfections, at least as to figure, anyway, the way she did. Granted, customs were different among the Tribes, the Earth Kingdom, and certainly the Fire Nation, and spirits knew Ty Lee had shocked him beyond belief with her own forwardness. But Sokka felt fairly secure in assuming that the circus girl probably operated by different standards than that allowed the First House of the Fire Nation.
He reached into his memory of his previous encounters with Princess Azula for clues as to how to handle himself. Boldness had served him well with her so far, he thought, along with an explicit recognition of her position as having the upper hand, for now at least. It also occurred to him that he had, almost unconsciously, treated her as if she were another male.
Was that what had inspired her deliberate exposure of pale skin and opulent curves, hidden only by the same type of form-fitting bindings Katara wore to swim in? Did she resent his oblique assumption that command assumed masculinity? Was he reading too much in that glimpse of creamy breast?
Oh yeah, almost certainly. He would be much better off following a mode of address already proven successful. Now was not the time to remember that Azula was, in fact, a princess!
It was, after all, fairly easy to drop into the familiar role of ignorant fool, shading every utterance with hidden meaning. He knew she had seen beyond the fool, but he was also fairly certain he still had her guessing as to when - and what - importance might lie in what he had to say. After all, most of the time he was truly just flapping his gums, nothing more than a joke for his own amusement lying beneath his words.
He was tempted to smirk when she ordered tea for herself. After all, she had no way of knowing what a cretin she appeared in denying even an enemy the form of hospitality, if not its substance. And if he survived, it was an interesting cultural tidbit to remember for future negotiations with the Fire Nation.
On the other hand, he truly was hungry, and he suspected his stomach would shortly betray him by rumbling audibly. She would, no doubt, enjoy that.
Even so, her last question did disconcert him a bit.
Who was he to dare to treat with the princess of the Fire Nation?
They both knew he was one of the Avatar’s companions. There was no gainsaying that. It had earned him a seat before heads of state that his own status as the son of the leader of the Southern Water Tribe remnants or as a warrior probably would not. Did that actually grant him any particular authority? Of course not.
And that, Sokka reminded himself, is what I need to concentrate upon. As long as I remember my own essential redundancy, she can’t hurt me. She can’t hurt us!
So it was fair game to tease and taunt her, to try to convince her that he was with-holding some great secret from her. The only really vital information he held was that regarding the date of the next black sun. And there was no way Azula would even be able to imagine such a possibility.
Unconsciously, Sokka turned his face to the rising sun and smiled with genuine satisfaction.
“Aw, c’mon, Princess,” he said. “You know my name already. I thought you knew everything about me. Wanna know about the time I got these two fish-hooks stuck in my thumb? I gotta admit, it was kinda dumb, I mean, the second one. The first one coulda happened to anyone, mind you, and really, the whole thing was years ago. I was just a kid…”
-----------------------------------
Azula feigned indifference as the prisoner blathered on, wondering if she needed to stop him purely in order to prevent her guard from getting ideas about her willingness to put up with idiocy. After all, she’d worked hard to instill the proper amount of fear in her subordinates regarding her wishes. She suspected that her lapses regarding the Water Tribe prisoner might be doing some damage to this discipline.
Still, there was undoubted entertainment value in watching him stretch his imagination for one inanity after another, presented in all due seriousness. If she hadn’t honestly believed it was all an act, she would have been driven to distraction by it all, and he could not have survived.
She clenched her jaw slightly. It was all an act, surely.
She heartily wished she could trust some subordinate to sieve through Sokka’s foolishness for that kernel of information she was convinced must be there. Mai, perhaps. But could even Mai recognize among all the blatantly false meanderings the element of truth that was crucial? Or was it perhaps somehow imbedded in the process of his idiocy itself?
Hadn’t she had to analyze his conversation after the fact to spot the contrived nature of it in the first place? With a sudden quake of self-doubt Azula wondered if perhaps she had given more credit to the Avatar’s companion than was, in fact, due him. Had she over-thought their interactions? Was she even now making a fool of herself by continuing to listen to him, by keeping him alive?
Azula suddenly tossed the empty teacup high into the air, and then gathered her energies together for a precision lightning blast that shattered the cup. She’d thrown it such that, had it hit the deck, it would have done so mere inches in front of Sokka. As it was, the young man’s hair literally stood on end as lightning surged a few feet above his head, and sheer reflex sent him crouching down, arms thrown protectively over his head and eyes bulging in shot nerves.
As the debris from the shattered cup rained down upon him he remained in his crouched position on the deck. Seconds later he lifted his arms, carefully searched first the sky and then Azula for signs of further foul weather.
The princess stood half turned away from him, one arm bent at the waist and the other drawing a line along her forward leg. He noted the faintest trail of smoke curling from her extended fingers on that arm, and the smirk that drew an echoing curl up one side of her perfectly painted lips.
Sokka drew himself back up to his full height, unconsciously turning his body to mirror the princess’ stance. He pulled the fingers of one hand through his hair, his scalp still tingling as he attempted to impose some order on his appearance.
As he turned his gaze back upon Azula he couldn’t help the expression of appraisal that overtook his wide-eyed surprise, brows furrowed slightly and lids hooding his pupils to darken their depths.
The very air itself was charged in the aftermath of her strike, and perhaps for the first time Sokka realized just how close to death he stood.
In the heartbeats encompassing the time their eyes met each other, Azula smiled. The intelligence behind his gaze in the face of her violence was exactly the reaction she had been expecting - no, hoping for. This was no fool before her. And it was high time he realized that she knew exactly who he was.
It was Sokka’s jaw’s turn to clench. He realized that he had, in fact, become somewhat complacent in his apparent successes with his Fire Nation captors. He had just received a very potent reminder of the dangers of such complacency.
Chapter 14:
Now the spectre of insanity had taken more choate form in the Fire Princess. Ah, and wasn’t she some expression on the fates’ part of some overall insanity? Sokka grasped at this as he knew he’d be given no time to consider how the latest evidence of his own instability - the odd vision he’d experienced as he was brought above deck - should affect his overall strategy. Maybe this was a good thing. Being here, having to deal with her again. Maybe he actually was better at thinking on his feet, rather than analyzing to death any particular problem.
Yeah. That was the optimist’s route. Only problem was, he’d never believed in optimism. Then again, given the nightmarish contents his imagination tended to throw at him lately, with all those hours devoted to no more than contemplation, maybe optimism was a route worth exploring…
Well, once, anyway. He shook his head in a physical attempt to clear it, daring to close his eyes momentarily. It would be nice, he thought, if he could convince himself that none of this really mattered. It would be such a relief to imagine himself as a mere cog among many others in the war machine, an infinitesimal element easily eliminated, plowed under without meaning in the greater scope of it all, something easily replaced.
Except that Sokka was enough of a natural engineer to understand that if the analogy of mechanistic warfare held true, than he needed to admit that even if he were a mere grain of sand grinding against the workings of the machine, such grinding could in fact wear at some crucial part. It could cause the machine to falter and, at least, slow down. It all depended, didn’t it, on just where that grain of sand happened to be rubbing, and wasn’t it the case that even a tiny cog was necessary to the machine’s functioning?
Ah, well then. A single cog could stop the entire engine.
------------------------
Azula found herself taking some pleasure in the appearance of the Tribesman beyond contemplating crushing Ty Lee’s absurd little ownership claim or her own, admittedly already subrogated, concerns of him as an avenue towards the crucial goal of attaining conquest over the Avatar.
The power she had over all prisoners gave her sway over this particular individual, of course. It was her call as to whether her immediate subordinate plans for Sokka should come to fruition. She was not at all above acknowledging the pleasure this power gave her, and that was the full extent of her own claim upon him, of course. She was, perhaps, not quite sufficiently self-aware as to question her assessment of the investment Ty Lee had made in Sokka, or her own investment, for that matter…
Azula had, in fact, wholly expected Ty Lee’s reports regarding Sokka to be, well, somewhat incomplete. She had heightened her own perceptions of him during her encounters with the Tribesman to compensate for what she anticipated might be failings in Ty Lee’s ability to evaluate his threat to the Fire Nation. Of course, Ty Lee had never failed to accurately assess a lover’s capabilities to impact Azula’s ambitions. Both positively and negatively. Such prescience and loyalty had won Ty Lee a secure place at her mistress’s side. But Azula was by no means prepared to rest what she sensed was a critical decision on the judgment of a peon - no matter how trusted. After all, it would be foolish to assume that there couldn’t be first time in anything, especially when it came to failures in judgment.
Azula believed in redundancy. After all, she could afford it. The whole point of keeping Ty Lee and Mai beside her since her father had finally given her free rein was to exploit their different talents and perspectives to her own advantage.
It had, actually, surprised her a bit that Mai had extended herself in any way regarding the Water Tribesman. Fastidious to a fault, Mai’s reluctance to lift more than a perfunctory finger in anything more than Azula’s safety was a constant, if minor, source of irritation for the Fire Nation Princess. Granted, Mai was quick to investigate any possibility of danger, and did not hesitate to face any such danger in defense of her principal. But she reflected her noble upbringing in her disdain for extending herself beyond what was absolutely required to achieve her goals. Quite honestly, Azula suspected Mai of being something of a lazy ass.
But not where Azula’s safety was at issue. She would like to think Mai had as much regard for Azula’s goals, but the other girl seemed largely oblivious to them. Still, her instinct for threats against Azula’s person was infallible.
So Azula had no particular concerns regarding any overt acts of the Water Tribesman. He could not hurt her. Nor could he, in any likelihood, escape her.
------------------------
As the Fire Nation princess closed the ground between them, the rising sun over her shoulder, Sokka clung to that odd after-image of the water-bender beside her, and resolved anew to stand before his enemies without fear, without faltering, and with every bit of cunning and connivance the spirits had seen fit to bless him. He focused on his memory of her cruelty, her sharp intelligence that seemed to prowl every circumstance like a ravening lynx-wolf, alert to any sign of weakness or hesitation in her prey.
Deliberately Sokka’s brain plied his vision with another illusion. The flawless paradigm of Fire Nation feminine beauty morphed before his eyes into a snowy predator. But then, unbidden, his imagination surrendered up an odd assortment of images: while the linxwolf ruled the tundra, she could not out maneuver the Water Tribe, once alerted to her presence. Even so, she had as much right to existence as the Tribesmen; the Tribe recognized as much and made accommodations.
It was odd, because, frankly, for all her beauty she had little of value to give the Tribe. It should have been a simple decision to simply find a way to eliminate her. Yet every generation of Tribesman had considered the lynxwolf and accepted that, in her sheer beauty and fierceness, she embodied a life-force too important to destroy. The predator made life on the tundra a bit harder, yes, but also somehow elevated it as well.
This time Sokka shook his head more vigorously. Quite obviously he had either been ingesting some mind-numbing drug or his incarceration had rendered more harm than he had recognized. His perception of the Fire Nation was totally fucked-up. This was patently obvious by the urges he forced himself to admit he felt given his captors. He wanted to insinuate his body in every possible way with one Fire Nation native; to share his wit and skill with another as with a comrade; and finally, to find some form of accord for existence with the scion of the Fire Nation itself. He couldn’t, at the moment, imagine how any of these longings could possibly serve his tribe, let alone the world at large he had given allegiance to in taking up the cause of the Avatar.
He grit his teeth as he considered his position. It was either exceptionally positive - he’d managed somehow to isolate each from the other in terms of their goals - or he was at the center of a deviously triangulated plot. It was possible that they had all approached him independently, each with, he had come to suspect, a reason to somehow shade exactly how much progress each had made in their, ah…negotiations, with him when comparing such with the others. Then again, everything could all be in fact a concerted ploy on the part of the fiendishly clever woman now grasping the cloth proffered by the guard a few steps to one side of him, even as she fixated him with her eyes.
Well, he felt so far his best success had been to take the situation by the balls and plunge forward. Why change course now?
“Damn, girl,” he drawled. “Granted, where I come from hot baths are a luxury, but we do try to ration them out such that our guests aren’t subjected to the stench of the hunt or other, em, strenuous activities, when we greet them.”
Like the lynxwolf, Azula showed him her teeth, but not before throwing the cloth aside after dragging it first across her face, then along her neck and shoulders, exposed before she then drew on a tunic, almost languorously closing the frogs across her chest and neck as she attempted to stare him down.
Sokka allowed his grin to linger, merely tilting his head a bit without breaking eye contact as he recognized that she had decided to ignore his comment. Fine then, the boundaries between them continued to fluctuate. He’d be damned if he would indicate in any way that it was a problem for him!
---------------------------
A part of her brain had considered the peasant’s reaction to stripped-down appearance, bearing in mind his confusion over Ty Lee’s aggressive sexuality and her own preconceptions regarding his primitive culture. She had, admittedly, intended to provoke him into some kind of response. She had not anticipated that he would quite manage to place her in the role of barbarian, though. No, she thought to herself, she had been expecting something more along the lines of awe and humility.
Again she had underestimated him.
A corner of Azula’s mouth curled. Much as it annoyed her to have miscalculated yet again, she couldn’t help but be amused at the prisoner’s consistent audacity in his interactions with her. It was obvious that he was determined to deny her any real recognition of her obvious superiority over him.
Azula had deliberately slowed her hands in their efficient restoration of her dress from casual work-out to presentation mode. No single movement could have been claimed as improper, yet she allowed the clean lines of pale skin from shoulder to chest to be exposed just a heartbeat longer than absolutely necessary. And she was ready to swear the prisoner’s eyes made note of the view.
“And so you yet live,” she murmured, as if to herself in half-question. “I don’t suppose you feel any sense of obligation to me for my forbearance.”
“Hell, no,” Sokka responded. “Thought I told you yesterday I was rather prepared to live, all things considered.”
“Ah, but, we discussed so many lovely ways for you to die, didn’t we?” she queried sweetly. How far would he continue this, anyway?
“I did think we might be speaking hypothetically, of course,” Sokka relaxed his stance yet further, forcing the cockiness from his grin into a more genial smile. “I don’t suppose you’d thought of making this a breakfast meeting, had you?”
He allowed an element of genuine hopefulness to infuse his voice.
It wasn’t as though he presented himself as a prince with demands as a royal prisoner, she thought to herself, trying to analyze just why his arrogance didn’t inspire in her a desire to immediately fry his balls. No, he didn’t attempt to elevate himself in any way. And yet, he also refused to acknowledge her obvious superiority to him. And this should have infuriated her.
Somehow, instead, it amused her. With effort, she schooled her own expression to remain bland. Keeping her eyes on Sokka, she ordered the purser to bring her a pot of tea. One cup.
“I’d say someone flunked their lessons in diplomacy, but then, hey. I can’t say I ever had any myself, so who am I to talk?”
“Indeed. Who are you?”
It had occurred to Azula that her best course with the Tribesman may well lie in silence. He seemed constitutionally incapable of keeping his own mouth shut for any appreciable time period, and thus would almost certainly inadvertently say more than he wished.
Again she remembered Ty Lee’s early ability to fluster him into foolishness. She realized she’d taken her model of Mai with him too far before; Mai was habitually silent and had to be provoked into unguarded utterances. Sokka, on the other hand, was habitually voluble, taking refuge in speech that was generally disregarded. As such, if she just let him speak long enough he would eventually slip up. In his own arrogance he wouldn’t be able to help himself. He wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to include, in a sea of otherwise irrelevance, nuggets of value purely on the assumption that they, too, would be disregarded.
Azula considered how allowing him to actually eat breakfast with her might further this particular strategy.
-------------------------------
Okay. He was ready to swear she’d been flirting with him just then, giving him such a view of her throat, shoulders and, yes, the swell of her chest. There was no way it was acceptable for Fire Nation royalty to flaunt their particular perfections, at least as to figure, anyway, the way she did. Granted, customs were different among the Tribes, the Earth Kingdom, and certainly the Fire Nation, and spirits knew Ty Lee had shocked him beyond belief with her own forwardness. But Sokka felt fairly secure in assuming that the circus girl probably operated by different standards than that allowed the First House of the Fire Nation.
He reached into his memory of his previous encounters with Princess Azula for clues as to how to handle himself. Boldness had served him well with her so far, he thought, along with an explicit recognition of her position as having the upper hand, for now at least. It also occurred to him that he had, almost unconsciously, treated her as if she were another male.
Was that what had inspired her deliberate exposure of pale skin and opulent curves, hidden only by the same type of form-fitting bindings Katara wore to swim in? Did she resent his oblique assumption that command assumed masculinity? Was he reading too much in that glimpse of creamy breast?
Oh yeah, almost certainly. He would be much better off following a mode of address already proven successful. Now was not the time to remember that Azula was, in fact, a princess!
It was, after all, fairly easy to drop into the familiar role of ignorant fool, shading every utterance with hidden meaning. He knew she had seen beyond the fool, but he was also fairly certain he still had her guessing as to when - and what - importance might lie in what he had to say. After all, most of the time he was truly just flapping his gums, nothing more than a joke for his own amusement lying beneath his words.
He was tempted to smirk when she ordered tea for herself. After all, she had no way of knowing what a cretin she appeared in denying even an enemy the form of hospitality, if not its substance. And if he survived, it was an interesting cultural tidbit to remember for future negotiations with the Fire Nation.
On the other hand, he truly was hungry, and he suspected his stomach would shortly betray him by rumbling audibly. She would, no doubt, enjoy that.
Even so, her last question did disconcert him a bit.
Who was he to dare to treat with the princess of the Fire Nation?
They both knew he was one of the Avatar’s companions. There was no gainsaying that. It had earned him a seat before heads of state that his own status as the son of the leader of the Southern Water Tribe remnants or as a warrior probably would not. Did that actually grant him any particular authority? Of course not.
And that, Sokka reminded himself, is what I need to concentrate upon. As long as I remember my own essential redundancy, she can’t hurt me. She can’t hurt us!
So it was fair game to tease and taunt her, to try to convince her that he was with-holding some great secret from her. The only really vital information he held was that regarding the date of the next black sun. And there was no way Azula would even be able to imagine such a possibility.
Unconsciously, Sokka turned his face to the rising sun and smiled with genuine satisfaction.
“Aw, c’mon, Princess,” he said. “You know my name already. I thought you knew everything about me. Wanna know about the time I got these two fish-hooks stuck in my thumb? I gotta admit, it was kinda dumb, I mean, the second one. The first one coulda happened to anyone, mind you, and really, the whole thing was years ago. I was just a kid…”
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Azula feigned indifference as the prisoner blathered on, wondering if she needed to stop him purely in order to prevent her guard from getting ideas about her willingness to put up with idiocy. After all, she’d worked hard to instill the proper amount of fear in her subordinates regarding her wishes. She suspected that her lapses regarding the Water Tribe prisoner might be doing some damage to this discipline.
Still, there was undoubted entertainment value in watching him stretch his imagination for one inanity after another, presented in all due seriousness. If she hadn’t honestly believed it was all an act, she would have been driven to distraction by it all, and he could not have survived.
She clenched her jaw slightly. It was all an act, surely.
She heartily wished she could trust some subordinate to sieve through Sokka’s foolishness for that kernel of information she was convinced must be there. Mai, perhaps. But could even Mai recognize among all the blatantly false meanderings the element of truth that was crucial? Or was it perhaps somehow imbedded in the process of his idiocy itself?
Hadn’t she had to analyze his conversation after the fact to spot the contrived nature of it in the first place? With a sudden quake of self-doubt Azula wondered if perhaps she had given more credit to the Avatar’s companion than was, in fact, due him. Had she over-thought their interactions? Was she even now making a fool of herself by continuing to listen to him, by keeping him alive?
Azula suddenly tossed the empty teacup high into the air, and then gathered her energies together for a precision lightning blast that shattered the cup. She’d thrown it such that, had it hit the deck, it would have done so mere inches in front of Sokka. As it was, the young man’s hair literally stood on end as lightning surged a few feet above his head, and sheer reflex sent him crouching down, arms thrown protectively over his head and eyes bulging in shot nerves.
As the debris from the shattered cup rained down upon him he remained in his crouched position on the deck. Seconds later he lifted his arms, carefully searched first the sky and then Azula for signs of further foul weather.
The princess stood half turned away from him, one arm bent at the waist and the other drawing a line along her forward leg. He noted the faintest trail of smoke curling from her extended fingers on that arm, and the smirk that drew an echoing curl up one side of her perfectly painted lips.
Sokka drew himself back up to his full height, unconsciously turning his body to mirror the princess’ stance. He pulled the fingers of one hand through his hair, his scalp still tingling as he attempted to impose some order on his appearance.
As he turned his gaze back upon Azula he couldn’t help the expression of appraisal that overtook his wide-eyed surprise, brows furrowed slightly and lids hooding his pupils to darken their depths.
The very air itself was charged in the aftermath of her strike, and perhaps for the first time Sokka realized just how close to death he stood.
In the heartbeats encompassing the time their eyes met each other, Azula smiled. The intelligence behind his gaze in the face of her violence was exactly the reaction she had been expecting - no, hoping for. This was no fool before her. And it was high time he realized that she knew exactly who he was.
It was Sokka’s jaw’s turn to clench. He realized that he had, in fact, become somewhat complacent in his apparent successes with his Fire Nation captors. He had just received a very potent reminder of the dangers of such complacency.