(Zutara) Let Me Pretend; Your Soul is Winter Fire

Cityof (Walls and) Secrets

One week is long enough for Zuko to decide he hates Ba Sing Se.

The food is too stodgy, the air too thick. Earth Kingdom citizens would rather bite their own tongues off than say they were sorry for shoving you or snubbed your well-deserved tip. And it always smells. Day and night. Wherever he went in the lower ring, he couldn't escape the fetid stink of unwashed bodies crammed together in one place.

Yes, one week was plenty to make an informed decision. Two working in Pao's tiny, stinking tea shop was enough for him to start tearing out his newly grown hair. Only his uncle's relentless cheeriness stays his hand. Barely. He keeps switching back and forth between being content at finally seeing Uncle thriving and wanting to ring his neck if he tells him to think positively one more time.

Zuko doesn't want a life here. Zuko doesn't want to start planning a different future. He's spent sleepless nights agonising over the what if's, most of them haunted by a pair of blue eyes, their judgement as bottomless as the sea. The flowers his uncle bought to spruce up their cramped apartment are purple and wilted, reminding Zuko of the frost iris he plucked from the south pole. From being tangled in endless waves of thick brown hair to being held between his pale forefinger and thumb. He wonders if it's still on the ship with whoever took it over, pressed between the pages of one of the watertribe history tomes he bought for Katara.

Then he remembers that ship was blown up by pirates, taking the precious memories of those moments with it.

Zuko is well aware that life happens wherever he is, he's felt its hand at his throat enough times. The one time he wanted it, screamed for its choking grasp or careless slap of cosmic punishment in the shape of a lightning bolt, it ignored his cries. Leaving him alone, it knew like it always does, was the cruellest punishment it could inflict.

It inflicts that same indifference now, marooning him in Ba Sing Se. You want to make Agni laugh, tell him your plans.

The bitter sentiment sustains the low flame of Zuko's irritation as he wipes down the same table he's already cleaned four times this evening. Seriously, do the people of Ba Sing Se actually drink the tea or use it to water the dead wood of his tables?

The irritation spikes again when a familiar, shaggy mess of brown hair strides into the tea shop like he owns the place. Zuko thought dismissing Jet at the train station was the last he'd see of the slickly charismatic young man. At the time he felt bad about it. Regrets find each other, Zuko thinks, the men who hold them wretched vessels of bad choices. Self-sustaining pools of misery.

Making a mistake is forgivable. Only people who know what it means to choose wrong know it can't be so easily washed away.

He recognised wounds similar to his own scars across the boy's soul. Those and an empty stomach forged an easy, if fleeting, bond between them, strengthened by full stomachs after working together on the ferry.

Dismissing Jet's offer at the train station wasn't as easy as he'd made it seem. He's starting over, his Uncle's way, and joining something as anarchist sounding as 'Freedom Fighters' doesn't bring to Zuko's mind the simple honour of poverty his Uncle plans for them. And, truthfully, he had to get away.

He saw the three of them together on the ferry: Jet, Long-Shot and Smellerbee. They're friends, life-long if he trusts his gut. Easy together in a way Zuko would only intrude upon. He watched how Long-Shot soothed the girls wounded sense of self after his Uncle's comment, and it laid bare his own wounds of Katara. He'd never be able to lighten her day with something as simple as his presence, a smile, a hand on the shoulder.

He couldn't ruin the Freedom Fighters like he'd ruined her.

What he didn't count on was Jet's persistence. While yet to bring up the offer again, the lanky youth has made it his mission to stop in at the shop every day. Today, as he's done countless times before, Jet waltzes in as the late afternoon crowd becomes the evening after-workers and heads to a table near the back.