AtLA fic: Airbender's Child: Fire 2/15
Disclaimer: I don't own anything in this story, in fact a lot of the dialogue will probably be cadged straight from the show itself, which means I own even less.
Author's Notes: I know. This is short. However, I'm adapting The Beach next, and since that's a whole episode (which I promise not to do verbatim, but it's still a whole episode to do), I didn't want this chapter to get out of control. Also, you've all been waiting for a while for this, so I'm giving you an update now, when I have a completed chapter, rather than making you wait even longer. Thank you for your patience.
Sleep had helped in the short term, but Zuko found that it didn't help in general. Somehow, in the time he and Mai had been separated, something had happened that made them both awkward and fumbling with a relationship and friendship that had been in place for years. It was as though they were getting to know each other as romantic partners all over again.
Most likely, Zuko thought, it was his fault. Something strange and disturbing had happened to him while he was ill in Ba Sing Se. He felt different and it made no sense. Instead of the gratefulness he knew he should feel - could remember feeling with great clarity - towards his sister, all he felt was combative and annoyed.
With great determination he wrenched his attention back to his girlfriend. He wasn't being fair to her at all. They'd been sitting in the garden, talking, and Zuko had just completely lost the thread of the conversation. Rather than admit it, Zuko suddenly leapt to his feet. "Let's get out of here for a while," he said to her.
She blinked in surprise. "Out of the garden?" she asked, "Or out of the palace? The city? The Fire Nation?"
He smiled at her dry delivery. Not many people saw how funny she was because they thought a funny person needed to be somehow more expressive. Mai expressed herself just fine. "Just out of the palace for a while," he explained. "You, Ty Lee and Azula have all gotten to go everywhere. You've seen all sorts of things, and I've been stuck here." He grinned simply to keep himself from sounding bitter.
Mai heard it anyhow. "The next time your father needs Azula to be his right hand, she'll ask you. You were everything she needed in Ba Sing Se."
"Really?" he heard himself ask. He shook his head. This wasn't where he'd planned to go with this proposal. "Well, that's not what I was talking about. We can head up the volcano and have a picnic up there." When she gave him an irritated look, Zuko sighed. "I know you don't like picnics, but we'll have real privacy. No servants, no one to see us at all . . ." he trailed off meaningfully.
When she offered one her rare smiles, he knew he'd gotten it right. "I'll swing by the kitchens to get the food if you commandeer a few supplies for us," he said, smiling back.
Mai pecked him on the cheek and went off to order the servants around, while Zuko raided the kitchen. They met up at the gates and walked, hand in hand, up the path until they found a good spot to settle down in. Zuko laid out the blanket and their food, chivalrously holding a hand out to Mai to 'help' her down.
They sat, and Mai looked through the basket Zuko had purloined, a look of real surprise crossing her face as she pulled out one item. "Fruit tarts! With rose petals!" she said in honest surprise. "How did you know my favourite?"
He hadn't. He knew she liked roses and he knew she liked fruit tarts, so he'd snagged a few off the counter. "Lucky guess." Also . . . "They're my favourite too," he confessed.
She kissed him for a while, which was very pleasant. Then they ate, watching the scenery and the light change. Eventually the sun started to set and Mai commented idly, "Orange is such an awful color."
Zuko grinned, knowing a cue when he heard one. "You're so beautiful when you hate the world," he told her, leaning closer.
"I don't hate you," she said.
"I don't hate you, either," Zuko replied with a smile, and closed the gap. She sighed lightly into his mouth as they kissed, and Zuko relaxed into the feeling of his girlfriend pressed tightly against him, their lips pressed together and how perfect the moment was.
Suddenly there was a stab of pain from his temples and for a moment he didn't know where he was.
Grabbing the girl's arm, he pulled her against him, and kissed her. She let out a startled squeak as he did so, her mouth opening under his. She felt startlingly pleasant pressed against him in the dark, and for a moment, he forgot all about wondering why they were doing this.
Then he sensed a glow through his closed eyes, and pulled away, staring upwards, startled.
The sky wasn't glowing green with phosphorescent crystals. It was still the colours of a sky at sunset, and Zuko pressed his fingertips to his temples to try and speed the pain away as it began to ebb. "What happened?" Mai demanded.
"I just . . . my head started to hurt all of a sudden," Zuko said, baffled. "Then I . . . I think I hallucinated."
"Hallucinated?" Mai asked.
Zuko finally managed to straighten up. "Yeah. I thought . . . we were in a cave, or . . . I don't know." One thing he did know, he wasn't going to tell Mai he'd been kissing someone else in his hallucination.
She sighed. "I suppose it would be too much for you to be over whatever it was you caught in Ba Sing Se."
Zuko felt the sting of her blame. "I'm sorry."
When she replied, "It's okay," he knew it wasn't. Why did everything he did have to just mean he messed up more?
Before he could try to apologise for screwing up again, Azula arrived. "Zuko, can I talk to you for a minute?"
Mai bristled ever-so-slightly and said, "Zuko and I were in the middle of something, Azula."
"Oh, Mai," said his sister. "Ty Lee needs your help untangling her braid."
"You should go," Zuko said, hastily. Whatever Azula wanted was more important than him, and he had to remember that. He'd been forgetting all too often, lately. He made a mental note, again, to pay better attention to Azula. Azula was always right. Mai shot him a sideways look, then gathered herself to leave.
As she reached the path, she turned and said to Azula, "You know, you don't have to control everything." She shot a significant look at Zuko as she said the last word, then left.
"What was that about?" Zuko asked, baffled. Then he shook his head. Whatever that was, it was between Mai and Azula, and if he'd ask Mai later about the look she'd aimed at him. "Nevermind. What did you need, Azula?"
His sister looked uncomfortable, then said, too abruptly, "Do you suppose, with the burn-out in Cheng-Dhu, we've gotten most of the last Air Nomads?"
Zuko frowned a little. That question set off alarm bells in his head on a lot of levels. Not only had they had no discussion of anything to do with the last dregs of the airbenders over the last few weeks, Azula had never particularly cared about the, 'Witless, airheaded wastes of bending,' that were the Air Nomads, either way. Her sudden interest meant something had happened to make her interested. Either their father was planning some particular campaign against them, or . . .
"How have your visits with our older sister been?" he asked, trying his best to sound casual.
Perhaps on someone else it could have been counted no reaction, but Zuko had grown up with Azula, had watched her mask improve and knew all the miniature tells she had. They were few, and her ability to lie was unsurpassed, but even she could be surprised into revealing something. "Have you been spying, Zuzu?" she asked, crooning the nickname he hated so much.
"No," he replied, frankly. Yelling at her about how much he hated that she treated him like a brain-damaged five-year-old would get him nowhere. "You just gave it away. What other reason would you have to be asking about airbenders?"
"How are you so sure she's our sister?" Azula demanded. When he just looked at her, silently asking if she really needed to ask why he believed them related to a girl who might as well be Azula's twin, she let out a hiss of annoyance. "You don't think our mother might have had an affair?" she tried.
Zuko shrugged. "Maybe. But I know our parents had a child before me. People said she was stillborn."
Azula's eyes were wide. "How do you know that?" she demanded.
"I . . ." How did he know that? He knew it unequivocally, the way he knew the names of all the Fire Lords in chronological order from the first, Lord Pauzon, rumoured to have been placed on the Fire Throne by Agni himself, to the latest, their father, Lord Ozai. He couldn't recall which tutor he'd learned those facts under, or which scrolls he'd memorised the names from, but he knew them. Likewise, he knew he'd heard of their older sister from somewhere, but he didn't know where. "I must have overheard one of father's ministers talking about her at some point."
She gave him an oddly suspicious look, but just said, "Why didn't I hear about this?"
He shrugged. "It was two years before I was born and people weren't supposed to talk about it. You know father would never have wanted any speculation that the royal family had any such imperfections as would lead to a miscarriage." Before Azula said anything else, Zuko told her, "Look, I know it's not my business, and you probably know better, but I don't think you should talk to her, any more."
"Why not?" his sister snapped. "You think I can't handle an airbender?" Disdain dripped from the last word.
"It's not that," Zuko said. "It's just . . . you've been acting a little . . . differently, since we came home. She's the only thing that's different around here, so . . . just . . . be careful," he urged her.
For a moment, Zuko thought she might say something meaningful. Azula just took a breath, pulled herself together and sneered, "If anyone needs to be careful, it's you, clumsy." Then she turned on her heel and strode off, leaving Zuko feeling very off-balance.
Regretfully, he gathered up the remnants of what had been a pleasant picnic and started down the path after his sister. He hadn't gotten far when something whipped overhead and landed with a thud behind him. With a shout of startlement, Zuko dropped everything and whipped around. Standing on the path behind him was an enormous animal covered in white fur, with six legs, horns and a giant tail.
There was a sky bison on the trail with him.
Zuko froze, unsure of what to do. Some instinct told him this wasn't the Avatar's bison. So who's was it? Why was it here? What did it want? A thought suddenly occurred to him. How impressive would it be if he caught this one and trained it to his needs and wants? Perhaps he could impress father with a sky bison. They were supposed to be formidable airbenders, and having a mount that could bend in a fight would be a tremendous advantage. Perhaps his father would let him onto the front lines like Lu Ten and he'd be able to do better than his cousin and bring glory to the Fire Nation that way.
So he dropped his aggressive stance and hesitantly moved a little forward. He did it slowly, so as not to startle her. If she was one of the very few wild bisons left it would take a long time to train her and he had to be careful not to upset her.
She could be one of the ones the last Nomads had, though. There was very little information in the archives, generally, on the Nomad enclaves, only that one had to keep an eye out for them, but Zuko knew from somewhere that they had bisons. He couldn't recall either, which scrolls had described the way that a female bison's horns had a particular slant back, in contrast to the male horns that tilted a little forward, and how the stripes and arrows on a bison were thicker on the male by a good bit, as compared to the females. He knew, though, and this one was female. Hesitantly, he said, "Hey there." He took a few careful steps forward, braced to get out of her way if she charged, bended, or tried to do something that might need him to dodge.
She made an odd rumbling noise and, quite delicately for an animal that was so big, stepped forward and licked him.
"Ew."
She rumbled again, and he was pretty sure she was laughing at him. However, since he didn't dare do something to scare her off, he smoothed his face out and took the last few steps forward. Feeling very daring, he laid a hand on top of her nose, and was rewarded by her nudging against him.
Suddenly, a voice came from just behind the curve in the path, and Zuko was startled when the giant creature leapt into the air, moving so quickly she seemed to vanish, and was gone by the time Mai had come into view. "What was that?" Mai asked. Then she seemed to get a good look at him. "What happened to you?"
What was he supposed to say? He went with his first instinct, which was to hide the bison from everyone. "I . . . there was a monkey. And then it . . . it got upset . . . the monkey. It um . . ." he gestured vaguely, not even sure what he was implying and just hoping someone else would make up a story for him.
Mai had an idea, all right. "Oh my . . . Zuko! No! Don't touch anything! Just go back to the palace and have a bath and put on clean clothes!" She marched past him, muttering about the filthy habits of monkeys and why they couldn't be more like bear dogs and just mark trees.
Nothing loathe to get the bison spit off him, Zuko hurried back to the palace and a bath. Next time, he promised himself, he'd come up with a less disgusting story. He'd just keep the bison a secret until he'd gotten it properly trained as a battle mount. Then he'd impress father. He just had to make sure it was a surprise.
Since he didn't know what to make of it, he refused to think about just how happy being licked by the bison made him.
Prologue Part One Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six Part Seven Part Eight Part Nine Part Ten Part Eleven Part Twelve Part Thirteen Part Fourteen Part Fifteen
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