Avatar // Interlude, with Brooms // Part 1 of 1
For jlh in kindoflikeyou 2008.
Title:Interlude, with Brooms
Rating: PG
Words: 1,301
a conflation of two themes: - "The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost." (William Carlos Williams) 2) "As a matter of fact, she's even changed her shape. She was a dumpy little thing at one time." (The Philadelphia Story)
*
In which Zuko and Mai make out. In a closet.
Zuko wouldn't call the feeling entrapment; not after living through the months after the fall of Ba Sing Se under Azula's psychopathic thumb. That was almost as bad imprisonment, and this entrapment came out of obligation - to his people and to the people his people had spent the last hundred years rolling up, over and setting on fire. Obligation to his body, to sleep at least four hours a night - and even then, twenty-hour days wore him thin.
The last thing Mai had said the last time she had seen him was that she felt like she'd seen more of him when she'd been in jail than she did now. She wore a half-smile on her face when she spoke, her new default expression. Zuko couldn't be sure whether it meant she was plotting to get him back for ignoring her (possible), or whether she understood completely and accepted this unfortunate aspect of being engaged to the Fire Lord (unlikely), or whether it meant she was just as frustrated about it as he was (probable).
At least someone else was planning the wedding. According to Mai's last letter - (Definitely just as frustrated as he was, that they had to resort to sending messages through the palace runner system. He had Teo's father on contract to come up with something better, but the mechanist said he needed more time to tease the problem out.) - Aang, Katara and Toph would be flying in any day to set up the wedding pavilion, at Toph's insistence. She didn't trust his underlings, Mai reported, and Mai agreed with her.
Have I mentioned that your subjects can be pretty bloodthirsty if they think they're getting pushed aside? Mother says some of returning colonials are ready to get rid of the monarchy entirely and start voting for their leaders. By the way, sixty-three days until the wedding. I think we should just skip the next sixty-two of them. Or elope in the Earth Kingdom six months ago.
Zuko pinned the note up above his work table despite (because of) that last remark and reminded himself to let the incoming colonials vote about something. He decided that it was worth upsetting some of his father's loyalists about, since the colonials outnumbered them. Besides, she'd been right about the official state wedding being a horrible idea.
He wished he could at least see Mai, talk to her in person, and while he'd enjoy nothing more than being able to make out with her or more, at this point he would settle for the chance to sit in the same room with her. Zuko cursed the herd of advisors who followed him everywhere, and the flock of foreign dignitaries and the - the murder of ambitious young noblewomen making a new career out of sucking up to his fiancee. He'd only wished he could order everyone to leave them both alone, forever a couple of times. And he hadn't actually given that order, or begged Uncle to abandoned his semiretirement and come back because Zuko was was going completely insane. Yet.
Between private diplomatic meetings - General How and Chief Hakoda (Sokka's dad would forgive him for skipping out, Zuko hoped. A lot.) - he wrote out a few quick characters and sent them to Mai's pai sho circle ("Mai's pai sho circle": number 398 on the list of things he never expected to attribute to her; Zuko could do groveling at his former enemies if it meant peace, but he thanked any available, applicable higher power every day for Mai's unexpected capability at politick.). Zuko gave the runner two gold pieces, a kid no older than seven, his green eyes betraying mixed parentage, and told him to go faster than he'd ever gone before. With any luck Zuko would be first, this time. He took off at a run himself, robes streaming behind him and making him look really undignified.
He had run these corridors as a kid, not as a runner but for the sake of learning the lay of the palace and all the places it boasted to hide and escape. Even at the height of power Zuko's ancestors were a bunch of paranoiacs, insisting that their young know how to flee if they had to. This time he ran through he kitchens, grinning at the collective Look the cooks gave him and laughing at their rolled eyes. He never wanted his people to be afraid to say their Fire Lord couldn't make a fool of himself. Past the food storages rooms, underground into a series of root and wine cellars and up again, through the palace laundry and out into an extinct lava tube that'd been converted for storage years ago.
For now it looked empty enough; no one in sight as far as he could see either up or down the chamber. Ninth door on the left, the black-rock walls melted into a smooth, rippled puddle on the floor and covered over in steel. The natural hall glowed orange with the gas lamps. Zuko didn't knock, but eased himself in through the bare crack he made when he slid the door open with a creak from long-unused steel hinges.
"You're getting slow in your old age," Mai said over the click of spark stones between her fingers. Her lantern caught and the space around them flared to light and dust and buckets and brooms; Mai set the lantern down and smirked at him. Her voice held an uncharacteristically light lilt, even for these days.
"How do you do - mmph - "
Zuko leaned into the kiss, forgetting Mai's mockery to focus instead on breathing and the the heat of her lips against his. One hand fell to her hip while the other rose to the back of Mai's skull to tangle in her hair. He could feel her breath against his cheek as Mai pulled back just enough to rest her forehead against his. Zuko opened his eyes at the same time Mai opened hers, bright and wicked sharp and this woman could turn him into a platter of sashimi if she wanted to, and he's really, really missed this.
"- that?" Mai finished. Her breath came in quick, shallow puffs. Zuko felt her raised eyebrow more than he saw it.
"Get here so fast," he corrected, pulling her close to kiss her neck. Mai smelled ridiculously good.
"That's my secret," Mai said. She shifted her weight to send Zuko over her hip - not in a throw but a rearrangement of him to exactly where Mai wanted him. "And you don't get to sneak up on me," she said. And oh - she smirked with her voice. At least he expected the look on her face that went with it. Zuko moved in for another kiss, this one long and slow and fierce, as much teeth hands and flame in the pit of his stomach as it was lips.
This time Zuko pulled away, because if he didn't he was sure he would suffocate. He didn't let go of her, though, but let the palms of his hands rest on the small of her back. Mai held her arms around his shoulders; Zuko felt weeks of tension slip away from him, down and out the soles of his feet. He wanted to soak up all her warmth he could, right now, before he had to turn around and head back out the door and start being Fire Lord again.
They could wait two more months, he told himself. They would probably even have a better chance at getting ten minutes alone together then. "Do you think it would scandalize the courtiers if I made out with my wife in public?" he asked.
"Absolutely," Mai replied, and kissed him again. Zuko kissed back for all he was worth.
Title:Interlude, with Brooms
Rating: PG
Words: 1,301
a conflation of two themes: - "The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost." (William Carlos Williams) 2) "As a matter of fact, she's even changed her shape. She was a dumpy little thing at one time." (The Philadelphia Story)
*
In which Zuko and Mai make out. In a closet.
Zuko wouldn't call the feeling entrapment; not after living through the months after the fall of Ba Sing Se under Azula's psychopathic thumb. That was almost as bad imprisonment, and this entrapment came out of obligation - to his people and to the people his people had spent the last hundred years rolling up, over and setting on fire. Obligation to his body, to sleep at least four hours a night - and even then, twenty-hour days wore him thin.
The last thing Mai had said the last time she had seen him was that she felt like she'd seen more of him when she'd been in jail than she did now. She wore a half-smile on her face when she spoke, her new default expression. Zuko couldn't be sure whether it meant she was plotting to get him back for ignoring her (possible), or whether she understood completely and accepted this unfortunate aspect of being engaged to the Fire Lord (unlikely), or whether it meant she was just as frustrated about it as he was (probable).
At least someone else was planning the wedding. According to Mai's last letter - (Definitely just as frustrated as he was, that they had to resort to sending messages through the palace runner system. He had Teo's father on contract to come up with something better, but the mechanist said he needed more time to tease the problem out.) - Aang, Katara and Toph would be flying in any day to set up the wedding pavilion, at Toph's insistence. She didn't trust his underlings, Mai reported, and Mai agreed with her.
Have I mentioned that your subjects can be pretty bloodthirsty if they think they're getting pushed aside? Mother says some of returning colonials are ready to get rid of the monarchy entirely and start voting for their leaders. By the way, sixty-three days until the wedding. I think we should just skip the next sixty-two of them. Or elope in the Earth Kingdom six months ago.
Zuko pinned the note up above his work table despite (because of) that last remark and reminded himself to let the incoming colonials vote about something. He decided that it was worth upsetting some of his father's loyalists about, since the colonials outnumbered them. Besides, she'd been right about the official state wedding being a horrible idea.
He wished he could at least see Mai, talk to her in person, and while he'd enjoy nothing more than being able to make out with her or more, at this point he would settle for the chance to sit in the same room with her. Zuko cursed the herd of advisors who followed him everywhere, and the flock of foreign dignitaries and the - the murder of ambitious young noblewomen making a new career out of sucking up to his fiancee. He'd only wished he could order everyone to leave them both alone, forever a couple of times. And he hadn't actually given that order, or begged Uncle to abandoned his semiretirement and come back because Zuko was was going completely insane. Yet.
Between private diplomatic meetings - General How and Chief Hakoda (Sokka's dad would forgive him for skipping out, Zuko hoped. A lot.) - he wrote out a few quick characters and sent them to Mai's pai sho circle ("Mai's pai sho circle": number 398 on the list of things he never expected to attribute to her; Zuko could do groveling at his former enemies if it meant peace, but he thanked any available, applicable higher power every day for Mai's unexpected capability at politick.). Zuko gave the runner two gold pieces, a kid no older than seven, his green eyes betraying mixed parentage, and told him to go faster than he'd ever gone before. With any luck Zuko would be first, this time. He took off at a run himself, robes streaming behind him and making him look really undignified.
He had run these corridors as a kid, not as a runner but for the sake of learning the lay of the palace and all the places it boasted to hide and escape. Even at the height of power Zuko's ancestors were a bunch of paranoiacs, insisting that their young know how to flee if they had to. This time he ran through he kitchens, grinning at the collective Look the cooks gave him and laughing at their rolled eyes. He never wanted his people to be afraid to say their Fire Lord couldn't make a fool of himself. Past the food storages rooms, underground into a series of root and wine cellars and up again, through the palace laundry and out into an extinct lava tube that'd been converted for storage years ago.
For now it looked empty enough; no one in sight as far as he could see either up or down the chamber. Ninth door on the left, the black-rock walls melted into a smooth, rippled puddle on the floor and covered over in steel. The natural hall glowed orange with the gas lamps. Zuko didn't knock, but eased himself in through the bare crack he made when he slid the door open with a creak from long-unused steel hinges.
"You're getting slow in your old age," Mai said over the click of spark stones between her fingers. Her lantern caught and the space around them flared to light and dust and buckets and brooms; Mai set the lantern down and smirked at him. Her voice held an uncharacteristically light lilt, even for these days.
"How do you do - mmph - "
Zuko leaned into the kiss, forgetting Mai's mockery to focus instead on breathing and the the heat of her lips against his. One hand fell to her hip while the other rose to the back of Mai's skull to tangle in her hair. He could feel her breath against his cheek as Mai pulled back just enough to rest her forehead against his. Zuko opened his eyes at the same time Mai opened hers, bright and wicked sharp and this woman could turn him into a platter of sashimi if she wanted to, and he's really, really missed this.
"- that?" Mai finished. Her breath came in quick, shallow puffs. Zuko felt her raised eyebrow more than he saw it.
"Get here so fast," he corrected, pulling her close to kiss her neck. Mai smelled ridiculously good.
"That's my secret," Mai said. She shifted her weight to send Zuko over her hip - not in a throw but a rearrangement of him to exactly where Mai wanted him. "And you don't get to sneak up on me," she said. And oh - she smirked with her voice. At least he expected the look on her face that went with it. Zuko moved in for another kiss, this one long and slow and fierce, as much teeth hands and flame in the pit of his stomach as it was lips.
This time Zuko pulled away, because if he didn't he was sure he would suffocate. He didn't let go of her, though, but let the palms of his hands rest on the small of her back. Mai held her arms around his shoulders; Zuko felt weeks of tension slip away from him, down and out the soles of his feet. He wanted to soak up all her warmth he could, right now, before he had to turn around and head back out the door and start being Fire Lord again.
They could wait two more months, he told himself. They would probably even have a better chance at getting ten minutes alone together then. "Do you think it would scandalize the courtiers if I made out with my wife in public?" he asked.
"Absolutely," Mai replied, and kissed him again. Zuko kissed back for all he was worth.