Avatar: Fiction: Personal Effects
Jul. 3rd, 2007 09:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
foxysquidalsoTitle: Personal Effects
Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Pairing: Jet/Zuko
Spoilers: up to season two, episode 14, "City of Walls and Secrets"
Warnings: Implied slash
Word count: 2300
Notes: Jet is determined to prove that the boy from the ferry and his uncle are Firebenders.
Personal Effects.
Breaking and entering was like breathing: just that easy. The building had no security to speak of, and during the day, most of the residents were at work. This was a working class neighborhood. His only obstacle was the lock on the apartment door--if that could be considered an obstacle. It took him less than a minute to pick it.
Once he was inside, Jet pocketed his picks, shut the door behind him, and drew a deep breath. As he exhaled, he smiled, crossing the room with a leisurely stride. His heart was beating fast, but the rest of him wasn't in any rush. He knew when Li and his Uncle Mushi--if those were their real names--went to work at the teashop, and he knew what time they came home. He had a while before he had to hurry.
Working at a teashop. It was a good cover, but it didn't fool him. He knew what he'd seen. Hot tea that should have been cold. Steam suddenly rising, like magic. But you couldn't heat tea with magic; there was no such thing. You needed fire. Yet it wasn't only what he'd seen that had made him sure of his suspicions. He'd be the first to admit that eyes could easily be deceived. No, it was more than that. He had a feeling.
From the first, Li had interested him. It was the scar he had noticed before anything else, the dark blaze of tissue covering much of the left side of the other boy's face. A burn scar, obviously. Secondly, he'd noted the way the boy moved: like a warrior. Jet could always tell another fighter. It was no wonder he had been intrigued. The majority of the other refugees on the ferry had been soft: frightened older men and women, many of them with small children in tow. Ordinary people. Li had stood out among them. Most healthy young men of Li's age--of his own age--were fighting in the war.
Jet knew what he wanted. His gaze fell upon the old man's teapot. A simple clay pot surrounded by matching teacups. They weren't what he sought, but what he was looking for wouldn't be far away--yes. There. Two small green rocks caught his eye. He snatched them up and tucked them into one of the pockets sewn into his belt. Without their spark rocks, Li's uncle wouldn't be able to make fire--unless he used firebending. And when the old man went to make tea that night, as he did every night, Jet would be watching.
He grinned. That would be the proof he needed. He'd tell Smellerbee and Longshot what he'd seen, and they'd finally believe him. Together, the three of them would uncover what the Firebenders were plotting and stop them. It would be like old times. Once they had foiled the Firebenders' plot and earned the praise of the Ba Sing Se authorities, they could really start over. As heroes. It wasn't that he craved glory, but he'd like to be thought of as a hero for once. In spite of all their efforts to fight the Fire Nation over the years, his Freedom Fighters had too often been perceived as outlaws by their own people.
Jet headed for the door, but paused halfway there. The Firebenders had been careful so far, but what if they'd made a very obvious mistake? What if they'd brought something from the Fire Nation with them, something to remind them of home? It was a possibility. Jet's grin widened. He had plenty of time. He might as well look through their things.
The interior of the apartment was familiar to him. He'd seen it from the outside many times. He knew where to look, and he decided to start with Li's possessions. Li was younger. In spite of the old man's foolish mistake of heating his tea at the station, Li was probably the one more likely to make an error of the kind Jet was interested in now, more likely to be homesick.
He was fine until he began to search through Li's clothes, as few as they were. The scent of the other boy's body rose from his clothes chest. That smell was as familiar to him as the layout of the apartment. He remembered it from the ferry. Jet frowned for the first time since he'd broken and entered. He gritted his teeth, his hands firming their grasp on Li's shirt. His pulse tripped through his wrists and his throat.
He was still angry at himself for misinterpreting his feeling about the Fire Nation boy. How could he have been so stupid? He'd gone so far as to ask Li to join his Freedom Fighters before he'd learned the truth. Unthinkingly, he lifted Li's shirt to his face. He breathed in deeply before he caught himself and threw the shirt down. He scowled. He'd made too much of a mess. Now he had to refold the clothes, and he'd never been any good at folding.
After returning the other boy's clothes to their original condition, or as near as he could manage, he seated himself on Li's bed. He'd been elated while breaking in and stealing the spark rocks, but that momentary high had faded. Now he was frustrated, uneasy.
He hadn't found anything incriminating. Li didn't own many things. No personal momentos, no souvenirs of anything. The boy might as well have had no past. That in itself was incriminating, in Jet's mind, but it wasn't proof that he could show or describe to someone else.
Jet stretched out on the bed. He told himself, as he had before, that the old man and his nephew wouldn't be back for a while. He closed his eyes. Unbidden, the image of Katara came to his mind, her face flushed with anger. You're a monster! she told him again. His eyes snapped open.
No. She hadn't understood. The Firebenders were the monsters. Jet rolled over onto his side. He could smell Li there, too; the scent had permeated the bed's covers, the thin mattress. He breathed in. His hand formed a fist. The boy was a Firebender, he told himself. A monster.
A sudden spasm of rage tensed and then released his muscles. Before he was aware of what he was doing, he was on his feet, moving, kicking out at the wall in blind frustration. He managed to stop himself before he had kicked two times. Damn. He was going to attract unwanted attention acting like that. What was wrong with him? He usually had no problem keeping quiet.
Jet turned and saw that he'd knocked over a small table in his fury. He bent to right it and noticed that there was a panel on the side that had come loose. It wasn't broken; he could tell at once that it was meant to open. False fronts and secret compartments were popular contrivances among Earth Kingdom furniture makers. Having lived in the forest for so long, Jet had all but forgotten about that. Reminded, he vaguely remembered a similar table in his own home when he was a child, but he suppressed the recollection. Not now.
He set the table back on its feet and slid the panel all the way open, revealing the mouth of a deep, narrow compartment. There was something inside. He reached for it. Was this what he'd been hoping to find? It was about the size of a dinner plate and wrapped in dark cloth. He wasted no time in picking it up and tearing off the wrapping. The cloth fell to the floor, and Jet bared his teeth, recoiling from the object even as he gripped it tighter. A Fire Nation mask.
It was blue and white, its mouth wide in a grin that might have been a grimace. Its teeth were large, the canines curved like a boar's tusks. Its head was crowned with what looked like--a crown. Jet looked into its eyes. They were expressionless. Of course. It was a mask. A chill slid down Jet's spine. Like a catbird landing on his grave: that was the old expression.
This was the proof he needed. Unfortunately, it wasn't good enough. The Fire Nation had been occupying parts of the Earth Kingdom for so long, many regions of the countryside had adopted the tradition of making masks for their festivals. This was different, though. This was old, and the carving was fine, unlike any number of crude approximations he'd seen. It was a real Fire Nation mask. He knew it was.
However, there were a hundred plausible reasons someone from the Earth Kingdom might have had one. Many of the refugees coming into the city, although they dressed in plain clothes, had been wealthy once. Many of them carried precious objects with them, hidden to keep them safe from thieves. It was plausible that someone from the Earth Kingdom might have a mask like this, but Jet didn't believe Li and his uncle were from the Earth Kingdom.
Jet held the mask up to his face. He looked through its eyes. He tried to imagine what the Firebenders were thinking. What were they planning? He had to know. Lives were depending on him. He was the only one aware of the true identity of the two seemingly innocent refugees.
The world looked different through the eyes of the mask, his field of vision bordered. He felt hemmed in, but also, strangely, focused. He licked his lips, and the tip of his tongue brushed the surface of the mask. The smooth, carved wood was nearly tasteless, but there was the trace of a taste there: salt. He quickly drew the mask away from his face. It was all he could do not to fling it to the floor, but he kept his grip on it. It was only a mask.
Turning it in his hands, he regarded the mask from the outside again. His instinct told him it belonged to Li, not the old man. He wondered why the Firebender had brought the mask all this way. The masks he had seen were for festivals, but there was nothing festive about this one. Was it a family heirloom? A relic from Li's childhood? Some part of the Firebenders' plan?
I should take it. The impulse was so strong that it surprised him, but he resisted. If he took the mask, they would notice it was gone. They would know someone was watching them, suspected them. It would make them more cautious. He'd be less likely to get the proof he needed. He had to put it back.
Jet squeezed his eyes shut, his grip on the mask tightening. He'd been so eager to throw it away a moment ago. Why was it so difficult to let go of now? Li is a Firebender, he told himself. He lied to me. He let me think we were friends.
He bent to pick up the cloth that the mask had been wrapped in. Still holding the mask tightly in one hand, he began to wind the cloth around it again. He took his time, but eventually, he had to let go. He returned the mask to its place within the table, and he replaced the panel that hid the compartment.
He turned back towards the clothes chest. He wanted to take something. A prize. But when he had the chest open again and looked down at the painfully refolded clothes, he knew that there was nothing he could take. Li had nothing superfluous. Everything would be missed. His hand went to his belt. He felt the shape of the spark rocks there. They were something, but they weren't enough.
He should have been used to not having enough. He wasn't. He reached down into the still open chest and grabbed the shirt on top. He couldn't take it, but--he worried at the edge of the sleeve until he had freed a thread from the weave. He pulled at it until he had quite a length of loose thread, then brought it up to his lips and bit through. He threw the shirt down.
The thread was rough, dull green. He wasn't thinking of anything as he wrapped it around his index finger several times, then tied a quick knot. There. It still wasn't enough, but it was something more. He reached down to close the chest, and almost didn't remember to refold the shirt first.
Leaving was as easy as entering had been. No one noticed the gangly boy slip down the corridor, pushing his hair back from his face, only to have it fall immediately in front of his eyes again.
#
The next morning, as he pulled his shirt on (he'd never thought having a change of clothes would seem like a luxury), Zuko noticed a loose thread hanging from one of the sleeves, the end brushing his wrist. He let a sigh escape hissingly through his teeth but did nothing about the errant thread, pulling his shirt the rest of the way on, then slipping into his robe. It was more of the same. Everything unraveling.
He trudged to work at his uncle's side as he did every day, his head down. He half-ignored his uncle's comments, grunting when he thought a reply might called for. A usual day. Halfway to the teashop, however, he shivered, the back of his neck tingling. He straightened suddenly, shooting a glance over his shoulder.
No one was there.
Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Pairing: Jet/Zuko
Spoilers: up to season two, episode 14, "City of Walls and Secrets"
Warnings: Implied slash
Word count: 2300
Notes: Jet is determined to prove that the boy from the ferry and his uncle are Firebenders.
Personal Effects.
Breaking and entering was like breathing: just that easy. The building had no security to speak of, and during the day, most of the residents were at work. This was a working class neighborhood. His only obstacle was the lock on the apartment door--if that could be considered an obstacle. It took him less than a minute to pick it.
Once he was inside, Jet pocketed his picks, shut the door behind him, and drew a deep breath. As he exhaled, he smiled, crossing the room with a leisurely stride. His heart was beating fast, but the rest of him wasn't in any rush. He knew when Li and his Uncle Mushi--if those were their real names--went to work at the teashop, and he knew what time they came home. He had a while before he had to hurry.
Working at a teashop. It was a good cover, but it didn't fool him. He knew what he'd seen. Hot tea that should have been cold. Steam suddenly rising, like magic. But you couldn't heat tea with magic; there was no such thing. You needed fire. Yet it wasn't only what he'd seen that had made him sure of his suspicions. He'd be the first to admit that eyes could easily be deceived. No, it was more than that. He had a feeling.
From the first, Li had interested him. It was the scar he had noticed before anything else, the dark blaze of tissue covering much of the left side of the other boy's face. A burn scar, obviously. Secondly, he'd noted the way the boy moved: like a warrior. Jet could always tell another fighter. It was no wonder he had been intrigued. The majority of the other refugees on the ferry had been soft: frightened older men and women, many of them with small children in tow. Ordinary people. Li had stood out among them. Most healthy young men of Li's age--of his own age--were fighting in the war.
Jet knew what he wanted. His gaze fell upon the old man's teapot. A simple clay pot surrounded by matching teacups. They weren't what he sought, but what he was looking for wouldn't be far away--yes. There. Two small green rocks caught his eye. He snatched them up and tucked them into one of the pockets sewn into his belt. Without their spark rocks, Li's uncle wouldn't be able to make fire--unless he used firebending. And when the old man went to make tea that night, as he did every night, Jet would be watching.
He grinned. That would be the proof he needed. He'd tell Smellerbee and Longshot what he'd seen, and they'd finally believe him. Together, the three of them would uncover what the Firebenders were plotting and stop them. It would be like old times. Once they had foiled the Firebenders' plot and earned the praise of the Ba Sing Se authorities, they could really start over. As heroes. It wasn't that he craved glory, but he'd like to be thought of as a hero for once. In spite of all their efforts to fight the Fire Nation over the years, his Freedom Fighters had too often been perceived as outlaws by their own people.
Jet headed for the door, but paused halfway there. The Firebenders had been careful so far, but what if they'd made a very obvious mistake? What if they'd brought something from the Fire Nation with them, something to remind them of home? It was a possibility. Jet's grin widened. He had plenty of time. He might as well look through their things.
The interior of the apartment was familiar to him. He'd seen it from the outside many times. He knew where to look, and he decided to start with Li's possessions. Li was younger. In spite of the old man's foolish mistake of heating his tea at the station, Li was probably the one more likely to make an error of the kind Jet was interested in now, more likely to be homesick.
He was fine until he began to search through Li's clothes, as few as they were. The scent of the other boy's body rose from his clothes chest. That smell was as familiar to him as the layout of the apartment. He remembered it from the ferry. Jet frowned for the first time since he'd broken and entered. He gritted his teeth, his hands firming their grasp on Li's shirt. His pulse tripped through his wrists and his throat.
He was still angry at himself for misinterpreting his feeling about the Fire Nation boy. How could he have been so stupid? He'd gone so far as to ask Li to join his Freedom Fighters before he'd learned the truth. Unthinkingly, he lifted Li's shirt to his face. He breathed in deeply before he caught himself and threw the shirt down. He scowled. He'd made too much of a mess. Now he had to refold the clothes, and he'd never been any good at folding.
After returning the other boy's clothes to their original condition, or as near as he could manage, he seated himself on Li's bed. He'd been elated while breaking in and stealing the spark rocks, but that momentary high had faded. Now he was frustrated, uneasy.
He hadn't found anything incriminating. Li didn't own many things. No personal momentos, no souvenirs of anything. The boy might as well have had no past. That in itself was incriminating, in Jet's mind, but it wasn't proof that he could show or describe to someone else.
Jet stretched out on the bed. He told himself, as he had before, that the old man and his nephew wouldn't be back for a while. He closed his eyes. Unbidden, the image of Katara came to his mind, her face flushed with anger. You're a monster! she told him again. His eyes snapped open.
No. She hadn't understood. The Firebenders were the monsters. Jet rolled over onto his side. He could smell Li there, too; the scent had permeated the bed's covers, the thin mattress. He breathed in. His hand formed a fist. The boy was a Firebender, he told himself. A monster.
A sudden spasm of rage tensed and then released his muscles. Before he was aware of what he was doing, he was on his feet, moving, kicking out at the wall in blind frustration. He managed to stop himself before he had kicked two times. Damn. He was going to attract unwanted attention acting like that. What was wrong with him? He usually had no problem keeping quiet.
Jet turned and saw that he'd knocked over a small table in his fury. He bent to right it and noticed that there was a panel on the side that had come loose. It wasn't broken; he could tell at once that it was meant to open. False fronts and secret compartments were popular contrivances among Earth Kingdom furniture makers. Having lived in the forest for so long, Jet had all but forgotten about that. Reminded, he vaguely remembered a similar table in his own home when he was a child, but he suppressed the recollection. Not now.
He set the table back on its feet and slid the panel all the way open, revealing the mouth of a deep, narrow compartment. There was something inside. He reached for it. Was this what he'd been hoping to find? It was about the size of a dinner plate and wrapped in dark cloth. He wasted no time in picking it up and tearing off the wrapping. The cloth fell to the floor, and Jet bared his teeth, recoiling from the object even as he gripped it tighter. A Fire Nation mask.
It was blue and white, its mouth wide in a grin that might have been a grimace. Its teeth were large, the canines curved like a boar's tusks. Its head was crowned with what looked like--a crown. Jet looked into its eyes. They were expressionless. Of course. It was a mask. A chill slid down Jet's spine. Like a catbird landing on his grave: that was the old expression.
This was the proof he needed. Unfortunately, it wasn't good enough. The Fire Nation had been occupying parts of the Earth Kingdom for so long, many regions of the countryside had adopted the tradition of making masks for their festivals. This was different, though. This was old, and the carving was fine, unlike any number of crude approximations he'd seen. It was a real Fire Nation mask. He knew it was.
However, there were a hundred plausible reasons someone from the Earth Kingdom might have had one. Many of the refugees coming into the city, although they dressed in plain clothes, had been wealthy once. Many of them carried precious objects with them, hidden to keep them safe from thieves. It was plausible that someone from the Earth Kingdom might have a mask like this, but Jet didn't believe Li and his uncle were from the Earth Kingdom.
Jet held the mask up to his face. He looked through its eyes. He tried to imagine what the Firebenders were thinking. What were they planning? He had to know. Lives were depending on him. He was the only one aware of the true identity of the two seemingly innocent refugees.
The world looked different through the eyes of the mask, his field of vision bordered. He felt hemmed in, but also, strangely, focused. He licked his lips, and the tip of his tongue brushed the surface of the mask. The smooth, carved wood was nearly tasteless, but there was the trace of a taste there: salt. He quickly drew the mask away from his face. It was all he could do not to fling it to the floor, but he kept his grip on it. It was only a mask.
Turning it in his hands, he regarded the mask from the outside again. His instinct told him it belonged to Li, not the old man. He wondered why the Firebender had brought the mask all this way. The masks he had seen were for festivals, but there was nothing festive about this one. Was it a family heirloom? A relic from Li's childhood? Some part of the Firebenders' plan?
I should take it. The impulse was so strong that it surprised him, but he resisted. If he took the mask, they would notice it was gone. They would know someone was watching them, suspected them. It would make them more cautious. He'd be less likely to get the proof he needed. He had to put it back.
Jet squeezed his eyes shut, his grip on the mask tightening. He'd been so eager to throw it away a moment ago. Why was it so difficult to let go of now? Li is a Firebender, he told himself. He lied to me. He let me think we were friends.
He bent to pick up the cloth that the mask had been wrapped in. Still holding the mask tightly in one hand, he began to wind the cloth around it again. He took his time, but eventually, he had to let go. He returned the mask to its place within the table, and he replaced the panel that hid the compartment.
He turned back towards the clothes chest. He wanted to take something. A prize. But when he had the chest open again and looked down at the painfully refolded clothes, he knew that there was nothing he could take. Li had nothing superfluous. Everything would be missed. His hand went to his belt. He felt the shape of the spark rocks there. They were something, but they weren't enough.
He should have been used to not having enough. He wasn't. He reached down into the still open chest and grabbed the shirt on top. He couldn't take it, but--he worried at the edge of the sleeve until he had freed a thread from the weave. He pulled at it until he had quite a length of loose thread, then brought it up to his lips and bit through. He threw the shirt down.
The thread was rough, dull green. He wasn't thinking of anything as he wrapped it around his index finger several times, then tied a quick knot. There. It still wasn't enough, but it was something more. He reached down to close the chest, and almost didn't remember to refold the shirt first.
Leaving was as easy as entering had been. No one noticed the gangly boy slip down the corridor, pushing his hair back from his face, only to have it fall immediately in front of his eyes again.
The next morning, as he pulled his shirt on (he'd never thought having a change of clothes would seem like a luxury), Zuko noticed a loose thread hanging from one of the sleeves, the end brushing his wrist. He let a sigh escape hissingly through his teeth but did nothing about the errant thread, pulling his shirt the rest of the way on, then slipping into his robe. It was more of the same. Everything unraveling.
He trudged to work at his uncle's side as he did every day, his head down. He half-ignored his uncle's comments, grunting when he thought a reply might called for. A usual day. Halfway to the teashop, however, he shivered, the back of his neck tingling. He straightened suddenly, shooting a glance over his shoulder.
No one was there.
