Chapter Text
Sokka came to slowly and all at once, jerking out of unconsciousness and into an upright panic full seconds before any of his senses painted any kind of picture he could understand, arms pinwheeling as he lurched for something he couldn’t grasp.
That was bad, right? He was having trouble thinking, his mind pushing through heavy fog, but that seemed bad.
It was dark. Significant, right? But it had been dark before, during the… storm?
He’d been fishing. Trying to make a little money, because… right. They didn’t have local money, and he was a better fisherman than Katara, and Aang didn’t kill fish. Aang was keeping Katara safe while he worked on a trawler for a day. Katara was working on that stupid scroll, which at least was keeping her safe and not picking fights with pirates any more.
He wasn’t on a boat now, right? There was stone under his feet, no swell, solid, motionless, very much not on the ocean.
There’d been a storm. He could still hear the rain.
He’d been in a storm. A tiny little Earth Kingdom sailboat too far out, stupid old man didn’t know what he was doing half as well as he thought he did, he’d-
He’d stayed out when the weather turned. Bad. Stupid, bad, desperate, stupid, what kind of moron -
Sokka’d gone overboard. Right? Ship capsized? Launched up, smacked down by a wave the size of a fortress wall, mashed to paste by the sea?
No, that didn’t feel right, he still had all his bones, he was pretty sure. Paste was off the table.
But he had fallen. Did he drown?
Hmm. Not impossible, but at glance this place didn’t look like the Spirit World. Unless there were parts of the Spirit World that looked like abandoned Earth Kingdom houses. Which there could be, he guessed, it wasn’t like he could look at the inside of an igloo and extrapolate what Kyoshi Island looked like from just that, so he really shouldn’t be making assumptions.
Would he even go to the Spirit World when he died? He’d thought he was dead the first time, for a while, which had been kind of underwhelming honestly, but eventually he’d figured if he was dead he wouldn’t still need to pee, and after long enough he’d definitely needed to pee, so he’d been pretty confident in his conclusion that he wasn’t dead even before Aang rescued him.
If, when he died, it still turned out he had to do stuff like eat and sleep and go to the bathroom, he’d have some serious complaints.
Wait, that was what happened to Aang, right? He’d died and then after he died he woke up in a body that still needed maintaining? That sounded exhausting.
He tried, in an experimental way, to take a shuffling step through the gloom towards a line of dim light that was probably a door, and the air swam in front of him, whirling and dreamlike, which was a solid point in favour of the Spirit World Hypothesis, until he doubled over in a wave of agony as muscles cramped and locked and he dropped crashing to his knees.
Oh.
Right.
He’d fallen into the sea. His clothes were soaked. He was cold.
This was bad. This was really bad actually. Everything else was officially on hold.
He needed to get his shirt off immediately.
Mai was choosing to view this whole thing as a learning experience. It was that or cry, and she didn’t have that kind of energy.
The plan had been simple- follow the Avatar, jump him at the first opportunity- but simple and good weren’t actually the same, it turned out. One of the Avatar’s minders had split off for the group to work as a day labourer- and Mai was looking at their own rapidly dwindling finances and trying not to see her own future, drawing a wage like some kind of menial- and so Her Prince had declared that they were going to capture and interrogate him, maybe hold him hostage? Her Prince wasn’t always keen on sharing the full extent of his ambitions with his retinue.
Mai, being his retinue in its entirety, had got used to that. She didn’t mind, really. And this was a solid, practical plan. Grab the guy, hole up somewhere secure, ask a few pointed questions, maybe deliver the Avatar a couple of his fingers or something-
(You’ve got to make sure people take you seriously, recited a voice in her head that sounded like Azula, and Mai had been stupid enough to volunteer for this without thinking about what she’d been getting into, she didn’t have the right to go around missing people.)
-But, like everything, there were a lot of little things neither of them had apparently thought of. Swiping the guy had just been a matter of renting a boat and sailing after them, until a storm had swept in out of nowhere, and it had become a matter of pulling the guy out of the water and getting back to shore before they all drowned together. Only once they managed to avoid drowning by the tiniest of margins had they realised that they didn’t have anywhere to keep their new friend, so they had to carry him to the ruins of some Earth Kingdom city before he woke up and made things awkward. Then they realised they didn’t have any way of locking the guy in anywhere, so they just threw him into the nearest building that still had four walls and a ceiling, and just stuck a chair in front of the door.
Mai had spent the last four hours operating a sailboat, nearly dying in a storm, carrying a lanky jerk and all the lanky jerk’s various weapons up a hill, dodging curious Earth Kingdom militias and the Agni-damned Yu-Yan, all while being rained on, and now she had to sit by the door and stare at the camp fire she had failed to light while trying not to think about how their only hope rested on being able to detain the Actual Avatar long enough to haul him halfway across the world and they were having this much trouble dealing with some guy with a machete who hadn’t even woken up yet.
Fortunately, a distraction presented itself with the sound of someone inside their makeshift prison standing up and then immediately falling over again.
“Well,” Zuko said, setting his shoulders for maximum intimidation as he pulled himself to his feet. “I guess he’s up.”
“I’m assuming you’ve got a plan,” Mai drawled, and barely even felt the flash of terror that always came with talking back to royalty.
Zuko stopped short, and turned owlishly to look at her.
“What do you mean?”
Well. He’d asked. “I’m just saying. You could just try talking to him. It’s not like he’s going to know who you are.”
Zuko scowled. “I need them to take me seriously.”
Mai rolled her eyes. “Then threaten to cut off a finger or something.”
It was getting harder to think, which was… not great. Head full of rocks, heavy and slow, but he was following the plan; he was doing the right things.
Boots? Off, turned upside-down, draining as best they could in a corner.
Shirt? Off, wrung out in the opposite corner, cold seawater all over his hands as he twisted the cloth, he’d be salt-crusted when he dried, which was gross but salt was useful, should he be trying to store that somehow? Or would Aang think that was immoral? Aang ate salt, didn’t he? Salt was a vegetable, right?
Hair? Hair-
He reached up with shivering hands, pulling the tie out of his hair and winding it loosely around one wrist, fingers threading through his plastered-down hair, shaking it loose with a vigorous head-wiggle that sent droplets scattering through the dark and-
-oh no, mistake, abort, the room swam and his head lurched out of time with the rest of his body and he doubled over in a crouch as everything in his world went different directions at the same time and he needed not to throw up right now-
Breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth. In, out, in out, it’d pass, just nausea, he just had to hold on until his idiot brain told his idiot stomach that the room wasn’t upside-down and he didn’t need to lose what was left of his lunch.
Okay. Okay. He was fine, and nobody saw that, it was fine.
He stood, cautiously and more than a little self-consciously, combing his hair with his hands until it relaxed out of its wolf-tail, hanging down the sides of his head in a way that looked kind of silly but at least would dry quicker. Tick. Accomplished.
Pants? Still on, for the moment, but he really should do something about that. Ideally he’d have some dry clothes to change into, but for some reason he didn’t seem to have his spares with him right now.
In Mai’s opinion, if Zuko was going to dodge responsibility for lighting the campfire to go interrogate their first ever prisoner, she deserved to take a break as well. The second the door slammed closed in Zuko’s wake, she sidled over to their stashed supplies.
The Water Tribe guy had been carrying enough weapons on him for Mai to be pretty confident that he wasn’t any kind of bender (one of Zuko’s best qualities, in her opinion, was that he was the only firebender she’d ever met who was sensible enough to also carry a couple of swords at all times), and out of professional curiosity she figured she should have a look at what other cultures were doing in the field of edged weapons.
So she was a little disappointed that the first thing she could identify turned out to be a club. Fortunately, the rest of his stuff was a lot more familiar- a broad-bladed knife that she was fascinated to realise had teeth on it, a long machete that was kind of a let down after the tooth-knife, and a… thing. A bit of edged metal that bent in a right-angle and didn’t seem to have a grip or anything.
Probably another machete that had gotten bent out of shape or something. Maybe he was carrying it around looking to get it fixed; it was the only other bit of metal he had on him, that was probably hard to come by in the South Pole, she guessed.
(They were almost certain the Avatar had come out of the South. It had been one of the two places Mai had been keeping half an eye on, given the whole Reincarnation Cycle thing, and sure, it had been surprising to find out that the Avatar was by all accounts a little airbending boy and not a wizened Water Tribes mystic, but that aside he was definitely travelling up the continent and his two accomplices were dressed all in blue, so, mystery solved, she supposed. What he'd been doing down there all this time was anyone's guess.)
Without any shame at all, she took the toothed knife, leaving the rest of the stuff where it was, and wandered back towards the fire-in-waiting, turning the weapon over in her hands. It was lighter than it looked, but not balanced for throwing, and made out of… bone? That would explain the teeth, probably. Experimentally running the pad of one thumb over the row of teeth that stuck out of the back of the blade revealed that they had been sharpened, filed into a kind of saw. So probably a survival tool first, weapon second. Useful. And kind of pretty.
She held it up to the last of the sunlight, peering at it, and tried to imagine what kind of animal it might have been made of. After a few seconds of deep thought, she determined it was probably the jawbone of some kind of animal with teeth.
Nobody had ever accused her of caring about natural history.
She might have come to a more detailed conclusion, or at least could have spent a relatively content hour imagining what kind of tooth-having monsters lived at the South Pole, but all of a sudden the door slammed open and Zuko emerged, a complicated look on his face, and without looking Mai in the eye he blustered his way over to their bags, pulled out one of his spare shirts, and flung it over his shoulder through the still-open doorway.
From the makeshift cell, a voice inexplicably yelled “Thanks!” at his retreating back.
“Mai,” he growled, in the way he did when he was trying to cover something up. “Guard the prisoner. I’m going to scout the area.”
He paused, like he expected her to say something. He always did, when he was like this; even though Mai hadn’t talked back, ever, he always waited to see if she was going to try and argue.
She didn’t.
He continued, almost smoothly, “The Avatar will have realised Sokka’s missing, so he won’t leave the area. He’ll be looking for his friend, so he won’t be expecting me.”
Mai shrugged. “Okay.” Then she frowned, a little, as something occurred to her. “He told you his name?”
Zuko nodded, but that stiffness came over him again at the mention of their captive, and Mai was dying to know what this Sokka had done in the at most one minute he’d spent talking to Zuko to affect him like this.
“Well,” she said, instead, “have fun. I’ll be here, I guess.”
He nodded, some of the tension leaving his shoulders as he stood, buckling his sword to his back, and he turned towards the wilderness, a desperate kind of hope scratched into his face.
Mai waited until he probably couldn’t hear her before she sighed, shook her head, and turned back to the pile of logs that would become a fire at some point, she was almost sure.
Sokka hung in the doorway, leaning heavily on the frame, and considered his options.
The guy who’d come in to check on him hadn’t stuck around or paid attention to any of his questions, even after Sokka had introduced himself, but he had at least gotten Sokka a shirt like he’d asked for and that had actually answered a couple of questions at once.
It was a nice shirt, expensive, probably, with fine stitching, but it had a faded kind of feel, soft from a lot of washes, and a tear along one sleeve had been mended by someone who was still figuring out what end you held a needle by, it looked like. The guy was broader than Sokka, so it hung off him in ways he wasn’t self-conscious about at all, but the sleeves were shorter than he’d expected. There was a stain on the hem that looked like it had survived at least a few washes- a metal oil, it looked like- but someone had tried to scrub it out, rather than turning it into rags or something.
Also? It was red, with gold edging.
So, added up, it looked like Sokka had been rescued by a guy who came from money but had been living without it for at least a couple of years, didn’t know how to sew but did know how to maintain a bladed weapon, and just happened to have a lot of red-dyed clothes lying around.
So. Not a rescue, then.
On the plus side, there was only one person guarding him now. That was a solid one hundred percent improvement rate right there. Even better, he had a dry shirt, so he might not get a fever after all, as long as he got some warm food and a rest soon.
On the minus side, he didn’t have any of his weapons, he didn’t know where he was, he didn’t know where Katara and Aang were, it was the middle of the night, he still needed to at least let his boots dry before he tried running anywhere unless he wanted to risk losing a toe, his head hurt, he was cold and tired and yes, only the girl with the shiny hair was still here, and yes, maybe she’d turn out to be a terrible firebender or something and he could get away with all his stuff and maybe any money they had lying around, but he didn’t trust his luck even when things were going well.
On the plus side again, she wasn’t attacking him right now. So whatever he was doing right this second was probably correct, as far as she was concerned. Unless she was too busy trying to invent new exciting ways to light a fire to pay any attention.
He needed a fire. Boots wouldn’t get dry if he didn’t have a fire. Why hadn’t the firebender started a fire yet? He could have started a fire by now. Maybe he should give her some pointers, if that wasn’t condescending.
Decision made, he loped over towards the girl, who was so busy swearing under her breath that he got at least three feet before she whirled around and there was a dagger embedded in the wall by his left ear.
He exhaled, very carefully.
There was also a dagger by his right ear.
And right by the nape of his neck, actually. Stuck deep enough into the stone wall that it would take too long to pull them out, if he tried that then yes, possibly he’d have a knife within five to ten seconds but also he’d have turned around and occupied both his hands for five to ten seconds. He hadn’t seen her move.
Okay. Message received.
He swallowed, carefully, and raised his hands, in what he hoped was a friendly and casual nonthreatening kind of way.
“You’re not setting that up right,” he squeaked. “The fire. I mean not to tell you how to do fire, but it’s too damp to- the wood won’t take that way. I could do it? My boots are wet, I need a fire. Thanks for the new shirt, I don’t remember if I said that.”
The girl, with a blankness so total it almost circled around into being an expression again, slowly looked down at Sokka’s bare feet, then back up to the pair of boots he was still gripping in one hand. She didn’t look like she got it.
Maybe her gran-gran hadn’t lectured her about all the ways laundry could kill you if you didn’t respect it.
“If you wear wet boots too long your toes start rotting. Also I needed a new shirt because you can get a fever if you don’t change out of wet clothes. I mean I should probably change my pants as well but I can probably get away with sitting by a fire for a few hours. So it’s in my best interests to get a fire lit, which I can help with, if you don’t throw any knives at me.”
Her nose wrinkled, delicately. After an eternity, she shrugged, lowering her arm, and stepped back, clearing a path to the not-actually-a-fire-yet.
He had to be lying about that, right?
She couldn’t possibly also have to deal with the fact that if she got rained on her body might start falling apart, right? That had to be some weird Water Tribe superstition, like how sneezing meant someone had lied to you, or how eating shellfish gave you nightmares. The kinds of things your parents were supposed to repeat at you when you were young enough to believe them.
In theory. Mai couldn’t remember any specific aphorisms her parents had ever passed down. ‘If you make friends with that Azula girl, it’ll be good for your father’s career’ probably didn’t count as folk wisdom.
She blinked, realising she hadn’t been paying attention for a while there, and the prisoner had taken her lack of interest to mean permission.
He’d started the fire by the time she turned round, and was peering up at her from his seat, slumped against the ruined wall.
Whatever. At least there was a fire now.
She loped back to the spot of dirt she’d designated as hers, and sat down, one knee tucked under her chin, a knife idly twirling around her fingers in a soothing pattern, and she looked back at her charge. It wasn’t like there was anything else to do.
Okay, so did she have his- yep. There was his stuff, piled in a corner among a few bags, just far enough away that they might as well not exist, great.
The girl- he really had to find out her name, calling her ‘the girl’ even in his head was starting to feel weird- was staring at him. If staring was the right word. She was looking in his direction, golden eyes half-closed in the firelight, but for all he could tell she could be reading every thought going through his head or she could be about to fall asleep and was only looking at him because her head had to be pointed somewhere.
Neither option explained what he was doing here, who these people were, or what they’d do if he tried to leave. She’d thrown knives in his direction, but that might have just been because he startled her.
“...So,” he coughed, inching closer to the fire, soaking the heat into his skin and feeling the warmth settle into his bones. “Can I clarify a couple things here?”
He’d let his hair down. When they’d fished him out of the sea he’d had his hair tied back in a kind of topknot style, but for whatever reason he’d untied it, letting it fall down the sides of his head, framing his face.
It wasn’t a bad look, she decided.
Honestly there was a lot she could appreciate now he was conscious- Zuko’s old shirt had a deep neck, as he leaned towards her the firelight caught on his chest, his skin prickling to goosebumps as it dried-
“Am I a prisoner?” he asked, jolting her out of her reverie, and she blinked, caught off-guard.
He sighed, and softly closed his eyes in a way she recognised as being a sign of someone putting up with incredible inconvenience. She should know, she’d made the same face a lot in the last couple of years.
“Am I,” he repeated, slowly, like he was talking to a child, or Zuko, “a prisoner? I’m grateful for the save, don’t get me wrong, but once my stuff’s dry I’d like to go home? I just need to know if that’s okay or if you’re going to throw knives at me about it.”
Mai frowned, slightly. Home? Why was he talking about home? Wasn’t his home hundreds of miles away- oh. Oh, he was lying. It was almost cute, honestly.
“We know who you are,” she drawled, almost letting some amusement through.
He squirmed, but got himself under control, quick enough that anyone who hadn’t come top two in her class in interrogation might have missed, and rolled his eyes in a passable imitation of some rube who didn’t know anything.
“Yeah, I told your boyfriend, my name’s Sokka, thanks for rescuing me from my job sinking, but I’d really like to get back to town before people start worrying. They know I was out when the storm hit, and I’d like to give them the good news that I didn’t drown so I can give them the bad news that I didn’t get paid.”
And he was even fishing for information! Seeing him try and get one over on her while trying to figure out if she was getting one over on him was giving her a heady kind of intoxication, a rush of smug satisfaction that came from knowing she could burst his bubble any time she wanted.
Was this how Azula felt all the time? That would explain some things.
Still, as funny as it was to let him try and figure out where all the traps were, it was also already starting to give her a headache, which, if that was a symptom, would explain most of the other things about Azula.
“You live on a flying cow. I’m supposed to keep you here until Zuko comes back.”
The way his face fell was almost pantomime, the facade of bumbling day labourer he’d been putting up splitting in two, replaced by an expression of hard-eyed suspicion.
On a whim, just to see what other kinds of faces he made, she threw him a bone. “And he’s not my boyfriend.”
She wasn’t disappointed. That particular fact got him to flick through about six expressions in three seconds, before settling, bafflingly, on what looked like honest abashment.
“Oh! Sorry, I assumed- never mind, that’s not relevant.”
Great, just great. He was doing amazing, getting so much important information already, and definitely wasn’t just being weird and asking inappropriate questions to the Fire Nation assassin. Sure, he’d learned something and maybe that’d be useful later but trying to gather information wasn’t even a priority right now.
He needed to do three things: get dry; get his stuff back; and get away. Making pretty girls uncomfortable with invasive questions wouldn’t help accomplish any of that, probably.
Might get him stabbed, though? Should he put that on the priority list? Don’t get stabbed? Should he be monitoring how close she was to stabbing him?
He should really be monitoring how close she was to stabbing him.
Screwing up his courage, he rolled his shoulders and looked up at her just in time to see her pull out a knife.
He’d gone quiet, staring at his hands with a furrowed look on his face.
Shame. She’d kind of hoped she’d get a break from the sound of silent brooding. Idly, she wondered what had happened to shut him up so abruptly. It couldn’t have been anything she’d said, probably. She’d answered his questions and everything.
It was probably the prisoner thing, come to think of it. He was probably coming to grips with being stuck here against his will with no idea how long it would be before he saw clean bedding again. Or something.
Maybe he was wondering why he’d agreed to any of this in the first place. Had he thought it was a good idea? Did he just not know what he’d signed up for? Had his parents listened to him when he’d told them he wanted to follow the Avatar all around the world, and they’d just nodded all ‘yes, great idea, this sounds like it’ll be good for your father’s career once everyone’s had a chance to cool off’?
…Probably not that last one. Nobody could think following the Avatar would be good for anyone’s career right now.
Ugh.
There was a reason Mai had been friends with Ty Lee, and that reason was mostly so she’d always had someone to fill the silences with. When it got too quiet the inside of Mai’s own head started to get loud, and if Sokka was going to sit there in grim and serious silence, she had to do something, or she’d start cataloguing reasons why she couldn’t just run away before Zuko got back.
Without consciously thinking about it, a knife dropped into her palm. There was a tree on the edge of the firelight, with wide pointed leaves, that’d do.
Without bothering to get up, she threw, neatly clipping a leaf off the tree, then another, and another. It passed the time.
She was-
She-
Her fingers rolled, pulling a little plume of metal apart into a handful of tiny blades, three held between her knuckles and one pinched between thumb and forefinger-
He had to get it together, right now-
-and her hand flicked out and there was a delicate little click and another leaf was drifting to the ground, sixty feet away at least, right at the edge of the firelight-
He tried to swallow but his mouth was dry-
-and she just looked bored, as her fingers danced, rolling another knife along her knuckles with a kind of effortless ease up into her grip, reaching back and throwing in one liquid motion, calm and flat like missing wasn’t even a possibility.
He was staring. He was staring and his hands were itching and he was horribly aware of every inch of his own body and he really needed to stop acting like a creep before-
The last knife flew into the night, and she stopped, suddenly, and blinked in irritation before turning to look directly at him.
It suddenly occurred to her, only after about five minutes of meditative long-distance pruning, what she’d done.
She’d thrown an appreciable fraction of her weapons, her custom-made, highly specific weapons, into the woods. In the dark.
She was going to have to go get them back.
She was a moron.
She had to check on the prisoner, just in case he’d figured that out too. If he was laughing at her she’d prefer to know now, so she could make her peace with it. Best case scenario, he’d be intimidated, and get the message that running from her would be pointless. Worst case scenario, he’d assume she’d run out of knives, and try something irritating.
Before she could think too much about it, she turned to glare at him.
…He wasn’t laughing. And he didn’t look intimidated. He looked like… he was looking at her like he’d never seen anything like her before, eyes wide, nostrils flared, he looked stunned, like she could push him over with one hand, like she was something he couldn’t look away from.
What was she supposed to do with this. How was she meant to deal with this. She’d never had anyone’s undivided attention before, was there something she should be doing.
“What,” she growled, withering under his stare.
“Um,” he squeaked, a dark flush crawling up his neck as he quickly shied away, blue eyes no longer trained so unnervingly on her. “Not a firebender then?”
Mai blinked, slowly.
“No.”
“Figures,” he said, curled around a slightly hysterical smile. “I mean there’s no law against benders having a weapon but it’s an argument every day to get Katara to carry anything more than a knife, something about ‘not wanting to get used to it’ which is stupid, ‘cause sure she’s getting better at the whole waterbending thing but she could solve a lot of her problems if she just walked around with some way to defend herself that was a bit more reliable, you know?”
Mai sighed, contented, and nodded just enough to keep his rambling going. That was more like it.
“...So we’re in Omashu for maybe an hour before Aang gets us locked up, which was I think the third time we’ve been arrested in about as many weeks? And Katara’s no help at all, she’s absolutely determined to give me a heart attack, she just won’t let anything go, and who has to be the guy to clean up? I’m pretty sure I spend most of my time lying to pirates or getting attacked by obviously sketchy freedom fighters or being eaten by spirit monsters, and I’m still the only one who’s paying attention to how much money we’ve got, and if Aang can read a map he’s done a great job hiding it so far…”
Sokka could tell he was babbling. He’d run out of safe material about half an hour back, and he knew he was in danger of letting something important slip the longer he talked about life in Aang’s wake, but stopping wasn’t really an option.
The longer he talked, the more relaxed his captor seemed to be getting. Which was good, because that meant she was probably less likely to stab him, and also bought him time to finish getting dry. So that was two objectives ticked.
Still not sure how he was going to get out, but hey. Maybe she’d get so relaxed she fell asleep?
And there was the other thing, he reflected, as he launched into a spirited retelling of the whole Great Divide Nonsense- he’d figured something out about her pretty much entirely by accident.
She was really unhappy.
Not that how she felt was relevant to anything, but he couldn’t help but see it rolling off her in waves, and every time she almost-smirked at his perfectly justified grievances with Aang and his sister it looked like she temporarily forgot to be so incredibly miserable, and that wasn’t anything he needed to concern himself with at all, except it was increasingly eating away at him:
What, exactly, was she doing here?
He trailed off, eventually. Which was fine, she couldn’t exactly demand he keep talking.
No, wait, he was her prisoner, technically. That was one of the things she was supposed to do, actually. That and keep him locked up, but she’d failed at that pretty much immediately. Her uncle would be so disappointed in her.
But he hadn’t said anything that could have qualified as useful, unless you counted ‘the Avatar is an interfering busybody’ as useful, and everyone knew that by now. So there was no real reason why she should encourage him to keep talking.
This was probably the longest anyone had talked to her in three years, anyway.
Ugh. She wasn’t usually this maudlin, she was almost sure.
“So…” he said, suddenly, stretching for casual and not quite reaching it, “what’s your guys deal? No offence but I wouldn’t have guessed you guys were Fire Nation based on your, you know.” He gestured all-encompassingly, but was kind enough not to point out specifics.
Mai shrugged. “His dad told him to go find the Avatar.”
Sokka blinked. “Okay? Why you two specifically, though? I mean your whole army is-”
“His dad told him to go find the Avatar three years ago.”
Sokka said nothing, but his expression was loud enough. After a long, complicated moment, he shook his head in something like amazement.
“And he found him? I mean, we got there first, but still.”
Mai couldn’t argue. “I was as surprised as you.”
That made no sense, right? That timeline didn’t add up at all, as far as he could figure out, and it still didn’t explain why she was doing any of this, but unfortunately any figuring of that out was going to have to be put on hold for at least ten minutes.
“Okay, as fun as this has been I have to warn you I’m going to need to go to the bathroom pretty soon, so how are we going to work that out?”
The sun was coming up. The actual sun was actually rising, and Zuko was still out in the woods doing… something.
He’d left her behind, like so much luggage, casually assuming she’d just stay put until he remembered she existed again.
Which, to be fair, she had.
Probably she should be worried that Zuko had never come back, and in fact the more she thought about it the more it was starting to gnaw at her, but she couldn’t help but notice that her first reaction had just been irritation. Which wasn’t great, probably.
Oh, hang on.
“You say something?” she asked, distractedly, still working on getting good and sulky for when Zuko got back and she’d never say anything but it felt nice to imagine yelling at him sometimes.
Sokka scratched the back of his head, awkwardly. “Uh, just that I kind of need to pee, so…”
Oh no, absolutely not.
She pinched the bridge of her nose, tried to scrape together any kind of sensible response, and found that she had reached the limit of her ability to care about what Zuko wanted her to do.
“Just get out of here,” she grumbled, waving to where most of his things were still stacked in the corner.
“Okay- wait, really? I mean that works, sure,” he said, striding over to his stuff like he expected her to change her mind.
“If anyone asks I fell asleep,” she said, trying hard to project how little she cared.
He gave her a lopsided grin, and an uncertain half-wave.
“Well. I guess I’ll see you around?”
She shrugged.
“Sure.”
With that, he turned, not entirely letting her out of his peripheral vision, and trotted off into the pre-dawn mist.
Later, much later, when the sun was fully in the sky and Zuko stormed back wearing an entirely new outfit and half a carnival mask, vibrating with a kind of frustration that Mai had learned to not acknowledge, he didn’t even ask what had happened to their prisoner.
In fairness, Mai didn’t ask what he’d done while ‘scouting’ that meant he had needed to dress up like the villain in a play about evil spirits. Some things just weren’t worth getting into.
“Hey, Katara, have you seen my knife anywhere?”
She looked up from her sewing, already irritated, and scowled in her brother’s general direction.
“Am I supposed to keep track of all your stuff now?” she groused. “Which one is it?”
“Y’know, the one Bato gave me, the skinning knife?”
Katara shrugged. “When did you last have it?”
Sokka’s brow furrowed in thought.
“I think it was …oh, I guess it was when I went overboard, huh.”
It was fine. He was fine, he’d always been fine, it hadn’t mattered that they’d never found him, because he’d not needed them to rescue him, because he was Sokka and the very idea of him needing their help was absurd.
“Well,” she said, and she didn’t sound hysterical at all, “I guess we’ve solved that mystery.”
“Yeah,” he said, looking downcast. He’d probably liked that knife.