Chapter 21: In which I got a haircut (Patreon)

Mai had decided, roughly three hours into the negotiations, that she was going to kill the King of Omashu.

Not in an imminent, immediate manner, of course; if nothing else, that would bother Azula, who would be cross about all her ‘hard work’ going to waste.

Yue would probably give her that look as well, that kind soft one that was somehow worse than any words, and tell her it was alright and they would work it out.

Zuko would sigh in the way he did when he thought something was his fault even when it absolutely wasn’t and offer her a warm smile.

But eventually, even with the King dead, the Fire Nation would still be a problem, not for her, but for the people of Omashu.

Which was why she couldn’t mess this negotiation up.

“And so you see,” King Bumi said, his single remaining tooth gleaming as he leaned forward on his throne, “the cabbage merchant was right all along!”

Mai stared at him, doing her best to direct her attention through his head out of the vain hope it would prevent her from impaling the old man through the eye with one of her knives.

Beside her, Yi nodded seriously, as if this was a perfectly reasonable conclusion to a story that had begun with Mai’s words on Fire Nation’s troop movements along the southern ridge of the Mountains that surrounded Omashu and had somehow arrived at produce, through leaps of logic that Mai hadn’t been able to track.

Ya was openly grinning, in a disturbingly smug way that meant Mai would need another training session where Ya had to block and dodge her knives.

For training purposes of course.

“Your Majesty,” Mai said, and she was rather proud of how dead her voice was, her voice skating across the room like water over ice, “The Fire Nation has three divisions moving toward this city. They will be at your walls within a month.”

“Oh, sooner than that, I’d think,” Bumi said cheerfully, picking up a green chunk of what Mai had initially believed was a decorative crystal from a dish by his elbow and popping it into his mouth. It crunched loudly. “Rock candy?” he offered, holding out the dish.

Mai looked long and hard at the offering, “No,” Mai said smoothly, “Thank you.”

“I’ll take one,” Ya said brightly, stepping forward and bouncing on her heels, dressed in dark black robes trimmed in an elegant violet that they all wore, before Mai could so much as shoot a warning glance at her.

Yi elbowed her sister sharply in the side. “We’re supposed to be professional,” she hissed, though it certainly wasn’t quite enough to not be heard by Bumi in the echoing chamber.

“I am very professional,” Ya hissed back and then tugged free of her sister’s group, walking up to the throne and plate, taking the green rock. “It’s rude to refuse a king.”

‘It’s true,” Bumi remarked amusedly.

She bit into it, and Mai watched with no small amount of satisfaction as Ya’s face went through several distinct stages of regret, first starting from interest, surprise, joy, then a degree of sadness as it disappeared past her lips.

“That,” Ya said thickly, “is a tasty rock.”

Bumi snorted, and then the snort turned into a cackle that echoed off the green stone of the throne room, bouncing back at them from every angle until Mai felt as if she were surrounded by a dozen of the old man, which, considering what Zuko had said about his earthbending prowess, they might as well be.

Mai took a deep breath through her nose.

She had been chosen for this because she was a noble. More particularly because everyone knew that neither Ty Lee nor Toph could be trusted with diplomacy.

That, and she understood how nobles spoke, how they danced around what they meant until both parties walked away seemingly none the wiser.

She had not expected negotiations with a hundred-and-twelve-year-old man who had made them each guess his favorite color before he would let them sit down.

(It had been Smaragdine, whatever that was. Yi had guessed green. Ya had guessed green. Mai, after some deliberation staring at the wizened king’s face had guessed green. He had said they were all wrong, though Mai rather suspected that they had guessed right.)

“Your Majesty,” Mai tried again, dipping into the deep reserves of patience that these last four years had given her, “Omashu is the most defensible city in the Earth Kingdom. If you hold it, the Fire Nation’s advance across the south will stall for another year at least. Possibly more. Our,” she paused, choosing her words carefully, “associates are prepared to provide you with intelligence on their supply lines and their commanders. We can hurt them before they ever reach your walls. Funding troops, anything you could give us would buy your city time.”

Bumi hummed, chewing thoughtfully, and for a moment, just a moment, Mai thought she saw something in his wild eyes that was sharp, and old, and entirely too sane.

Then he swallowed. “No,” he said happily.

Mai’s eye twitched.

“No?” Yi repeated, cocking her head to the side.

“No,” Bumi agreed. “I don’t think I will.”

“Huh,” Ya remarked, then looked at her sister. “Well, this was a waste of time.”

“Your Majesty,” Mai said, and now there was something like an edge in her voice that she couldn’t hide, which she found she didn’t mind at all considering the gravity of the situation, “If you don’t hold the city, it will fall. Your people will live under the rule of the Fire Nation. Do you have any idea what that looks like?”

The old man looked at her for a long moment, his smile fading away.

“Do you?” he asked mildly.

Mai’s mouth closed.

Bumi leaned back into his throne, threading his fingers together over his stomach, his long, wiry white hair spilling over his shoulders. “I’ve been king a long time, girl,” he said, and his voice had lost none of its cheer, but something underneath it had settled, like a stone dropped into deep water, and Mai almost imagined that the Earth beneath her feet had shifted, a shimmering coming off the stone that Ty Lee would have been ecstatic about her ability to see.

She still wasn’t used to it.

“I’ve been around longer than your parents have been alive, probably longer than their parents.” Bumi chuckled lightly. “I’ve paid for it in boys who should be using our mail delivery system as a slide. They never got to grow old enough to be that stupid.”

He waved a hand. “Your associates want me to spend my soldiers buying them a year. Maybe they’re even right that it’s a good trade. But they aren’t the ones spending it.”

“The people of the city want to fight,” Mai said flatly.

“Some of them,” Bumi agreed, nodding. “And they’ll keep wanting to. For a while. But it’s pointless until the right moment.”

“So what?” Ya asked, having somehow grabbed another piece of rock candy and now chewing on it with a thoughtful expression on her face. “You just wait?”

Bumi grinned at her, wide and wild, burning emerald in his face. “Exactly! You get it!”

The three of them looked at each other.

“That’s it?” Yi said slowly, looking a bit nervous. “That’s the plan?”

“It’s the best plan,” Bumi said, raising a gnarled finger. “Earthbending isn’t just about pushing rocks around, you know. Rocks are heavy! The trick,” he leaned forward, eyes gleaming, “is knowing when to do nothing at all. You wait, and you listen, and you wait some more, and when the moment comes, you strike.”

“And if the moment never comes?” Mai asked, staring hard at the man.

“Then you missed it! You weren’t listening hard enough.” Bumi tapped the side of his nose. “Neutral jing. It’s very sophisticated. I wouldn’t expect a firebender’s friend to understand. Though I suppose he’s not just that.”

Mai went very still.

Beside her, she felt more than saw the twins stiffen, their weight shifting onto the balls of their feet in perfect unison, the way Zuko had drilled into them until it had become instinct; Yi’s hands had settled in her sleeves, and Ya was rubbing her knuckles together with a frown on her face.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Mai said evenly.

Bumi cackled again. “Oh, that was very good. Very calm. Your face didn’t do anything at all.” He wiggled his bare toes against the stone of the dais in an oddly disturbing manner. “Your heart did a little jump, though. Thump-thump!”

He pointed at her. “Fire Nation. Noble, from how you stand, like there’s a stick somewhere I won’t mention.” He pointed at Yi, then Ya. “Kyoshi Island. You walk as those Avatar fan girls do. Very pretty footwork. Stern, stubborn like Rock.”

Ya opened her mouth, looking offended, and Yi stepped on her foot, continuing to eye Bumi coolly.

“But that’s not the really interesting part,” Bumi said, and he leaned forward again, and this time, the madness in his eyes seemed to drain away entirely, leaving something that made the hairs on the back of Mai’s neck rise. “The interesting part is what you’re all carrying.”

“We aren’t carrying anything,” Yi said.

“Not in your packs,” Bumi said patiently. “In you.”

He pressed one palm flat against the arm of his throne, closing his eyes, and Mai felt a faint tremor roll beneath her feet as something brushed against her Chi, only to be sent startlingly back as the feeling of warmth pushed through her.

“There’s fire in you,” he murmured, eyes still closed, nodding toward the twins. “Old fire, put there by somebody else. Somebody who knew what they were doing or at least was talented enough to be lucky.” His head tilted. “And it’s a strange fire. It’s got water all through it, like a riverbed touched by the sun.”

His eyes snapped open, fixing on Mai.

“I’ve been listening to the earth for a hundred years, girl. I’ve never felt anything like that. Fire that remembers being water that itself was fire.” He smiled, slowly, and it was not an entirely comforting smile.

The silence in the throne room stretched as Mai adjusted her strategy.

“You aren’t going to ask who they are?” Mai said finally.

“Would you tell me?”

“No,” she admitted easily, as if it was an inconsequential statement, but meaning it with every fiber of her being; Earthbender or no, she and Yi and Ya weren’t the type to go down that easily- anything short of the king actually turning out to be a Dunshi Mai was sure they could handle.

Especially considering the man would be entirely unprepared to lose his Chi.

“Then why would I ask?” Bumi said nodding his head reasonably, and then he grinned, and the madness was back, surging forth like it had never left. “Besides, I like a mystery! Keeps the mind young! Now,” he clapped his hands, “I think that’s enough business for one day. I’ve decided you’ll be staying for dinner.”

“We really can’t,” Mai said.

“I insist,” Bumi said, “and I’m the king. Oh! And before dinner, you have to take the chutes.”

“The what?” Yi asked.

Mai, who had seen the delivery chutes on their way into the city, the long stone channels where crates and parcels and, on a notable occasion, a screaming merchant were hurled across the city’s face at terrifying speeds, felt her soul quietly leave her body.

The Dragons were bad enough; this-

“No,” she said.

“It’s tradition!” Bumi exclaimed.

“It is not,” Mai said, suddenly so sure of her answer that it made previous knowledge insufficient.

“It is now. I just made it one.” Bumi turned to the twins, his eyes gleaming. “Remember I’m the King! And I want to see which one of you comes out the bottom first; it’ll be a contest.”

Yi and Ya turned to look at each other, and Mai constrained her palm from hitting her face. “No-” she tried to regain control of the situation, but it was already too late. Something had passed between them, something Mai had seen countless times now, quick and sharp and wordless.

“I’ll go first,” Yi said.

“No, I will,” Ya said.

“I was born first! I make the rules!”

“You always say it’s cause you’re born first; that doesn’t mean you get to be first-“

“That’s literally what being first means-“

Bumi was watching them with the delighted expression of a man who had found exactly what he’d been hoping for; it was oddly like an old man staring proudly at his granddaughters.

If the old man was not related and certifiably insane, maybe that just made it a bit disturbing, in the sort of way that one felt being around a feral spider-monkey.

Mai pinched the bridge of her nose as Yi and Ya sprinted out of the room.

“Don’t think I didn’t notice you,” Bumi said, quiet enough that only she could hear it, and Mai turned to find the old king studying her with his head cocked, chewing another piece of rock candy. “Those two are fighting over who gets to go first. You’re standing very still, hoping nobody notices you got in line.”

Mai felt her face go perfectly, absolutely blank.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Thump-thump,” Bumi said cheerfully.

Mai looked at the ceiling, and thought, very seriously, about the logistics of regicide, in a way so deeply in the moment she was sure Azula may have even taken a note.

“Neutral jing,” Bumi said, nodding sagely, and patted her on the arm as he hobbled past her toward the doorway the twins had sprinted out of. “Very sophisticated. Just make sure you’re actually waiting for something you intend to eventually move to grasp, girl. Otherwise it’s just standing still.”

Mai did not respond; she did follow her friends out into the sun beating down warmly on the city of Omashu, taking in the city for a moment as Yi and Ya argued with each other between two carts.

“This one will obviously be faster; it’s literally bigger!”

“But this one looks more aerodynamic,” the twins pointed between the two stone carts, and Mai’s evidently untrained eye could not see a single difference. Mai looked out over the carved stone of the cart and was struck by an odd feeling, something like what Ty Lee would have called destiny.

She really shouldn’t.

Yet she couldn’t deny it was the real reason she had selected babysitting duty as one of the few of Dragon Lily who could engage in diplomacy.

Given that she was even considering it, it was reasonable to fear the whole group had lost its collective mind, though perhaps that had already happened years ago.

A small bead of cool ice formed on her back, running up its length for a second before melting again into sweat.

Mai rolled her eyes, “Let’s go, you two-“ she stepped forward and shoved them both into the cart in a toppling motion, causing them to land as awkwardly as two teenage girls could over each other in a mess of limbs onto the floor.

Mai looked back at Bumi as she swung side saddle onto the side of the cart.

Bumi stared back challengingly.

Mai rolled her eyes, and then the part of her that always listened to Zuko kicked back against the stone hard, her chi flaring through her limbs, causing the stone to shatter as they were launched forward down the slide.

Mai was able to savor Bumi’s look of fascinated surprise for one second before they were rocketing down the chute.

Oh, and Yi and Ya were screaming, holding each other.

“Why’d you do that-” Yi cried out in horror.

“-You Psychotic Bitch!” Ya finished cackling cheerfully.

-

I sat on a rock on the outskirts of Omashu, slowly dragging a stone down my dao swords, running my eyes over the surface of the silver blade. Toph had made this pair with Azula in a joint attempt to stop me from breaking swords, Toph manipulating the coal and raw ore and Azula the heat of the forge.

From the ripples, I could feel the steel beginning to warp; this pair wasn’t long for the world either.

Who knew rapidly heating and cooling metal would be bad for it?

I continued the oddly soothing task until I felt them approaching in a hurried huddle, running at a ground-eating pace that was rather faster than even normal benders could run.

They arrived in the clearing in a flurry of dust, standing in front of me, their arms crossed in lack of amusement.

“You’re supposed to be dealing with the Yu Yan,” Yi said with a snooty look. “Don’t tell me you are slacking off and leaving Ao and Yue to handle everything?” She smiled teasingly despite the fact that her tone was almost tired.

Probably because we both knew how I had dealt with them. They were too valuable of an asset for the Fire Nation to do more than end cleanly.

“I needed a break, so they picked up my slack,” I smiled lazily, peering up from my curtain of black hair, which was well past mop and hovering somewhere in curtain, “But what would I do without such valuable and impressive friends?”

Yi blinked and looked a little taken aback. “Did something happen?” she asked softly, stepping forward and frowning.

I realized I had been too effusive; perhaps it was because I hadn’t been around them in a while. I had missed them.

“Nothing, Yi. I’m glad to see you’re well.”

“Hah!” Ya cried out, jabbing a finger into her sister’s ribs. “You’re doing the dumb blinky face.”

Yi’s expression became a scowl, and then she launched herself in a kick at her sister's head.

Ya caught it and struck out with a fist.

I ignored them both and turned to Mai, “Everything all right?”

Mai gave me something approaching a tired smile, which for Mai was a small lowering of her eyelids and almost infinitesimal twitch of her lips, “Nothing we would have needed the big bad Blue Spirit for.”

“That’s a shame,” I gave her a soft smile, “I would have loved to see how good of an Earthbender King Bumi is.”

Mai snorted, something dry entering her lips. “I’m sure he would still indulge you; he’s weird,” she said bluntly.

“Are you saying I’m weird?” I asked curiously.

Mai raised an eyebrow at me and then flounced, or at least Mai’s version of flouncing, over to sit next to me on the rock before she turned back to look at the battling twins, where Yi was getting the upper hand in some sort of wrestling move as she tried to yank Ya’s torso over herself.

“It’s as you said,” Mai said tiredly, “Even Bumi, one of the more eccentric Kings in the Earth Kingdom, would rather wait than attempt to fight the Fire Nation. Four years means nothing,” she said softly, almost bitterly.

I frowned. Mai had a tendency to take these things too much to heart. “I’m not surprised, really.” I shook my head. “It was always a long shot attempting to get the Earth Kingdom to stand up for itself; they simply don’t want to fight this war any longer.”

“We do,” Mai said quietly. “We’ve sacrificed so much, and for what?”

“The Fire Nation’s hold is not so deep in the Earth Kingdom, and they’ve made no progress on the Water Tribes. The Southern Water Tribe is rebuilding, and there are Air Benders, real Air Benders now,” I said calmly. “It was never going to be as simple as eliminating the Fire Lord.”

“But would it help?” Mai turned to look at me, raising an eyebrow, which was unusually expressive for her. “If the world needed you to, would you?”

I laughed, taken off guard. “Of course.”

“Then why didn’t you, back then, five years ago?” Mai asked.

I grimaced. “At the time, I thought it wouldn’t end anything. My father’s power was perhaps still too entrenched; just because that head of the snake was cut off wouldn’t mean the Fire Nation couldn’t still prosecute the war. The Fire Lord is just one man.”

“Are they?” Mai pushed, and her amber eyes were now clear, her dry voice perked up slightly, “In many ways wouldn’t you say the Avatar and the Fire Lord are more similar than not? They are powerful benders, believed by some to be anointed by spirits, who are listened to inordinately as to the future of the world.”

“Which is why the Avatar isn’t a solution either,” I released a long breath, “Even if you assume the Avatar attempts to do their best in every situation, it’s still one person deciding everything; it’s also a single point of failure as we’ve already learned, a bad or incapable Avatar negatively affects the world too.”

Mai looked at me for a long moment, seemingly thinking of the old ground we were retreading. “Then what about you, Zuko? Haven’t you already crossed that line?”

I looked down at my reflection in my swords. “I hope not,” I admitted quietly.

Mai gave a groaning sigh, and then suddenly I felt her lean into my side, nestling against me in a distinctly un-Mai-like way. “I just want you to think about it,” she said listlessly. “I don’t really care so long as you know.”

“Giving up on the world?” I asked, a smile turning my lips up.

“No,” Mai yawned, “I just know it’s in good hands.”

-

“-and the barges went down at the Huan bend, all six of them,” Suki said, not bothering to look up from the map pinned across the table with four of Azula’s knives, Mai’s knives, technically, though Suki had long stopped asking which of them actually owned anything anymore. “Grain, lamp oil, two hulls of coal. Sosha cut the tow lines while I dealt with the escort.”

Azula hummed, and the corner of her painted lips lifted the smallest amount, which from Azula was something like applause.

Sosha, sitting at Suki’s left as she always did, shifted a fraction in her seat, her short black hair falling into her eyes. Suki didn’t need to look to know her sister was staring at the grain of the table and not at anyone in particular. She had been like that since the river. She always was like that, after.

Suki pressed her knee against Sosha’s under the table, once, firm, and felt the girl press back.

Good.

The purple tent was too small for all of them, a problem Suki had raised twice and that had been summarily ignored twice, mostly because Azula liked the tent for some reason and nobody had the energy to fight Azula about a tent. So they were crammed in, shoulders and elbows, ten people around a table meant for six, and Druk’s long red snout pushing in through the tent flap every few minutes as if checking that nobody had started eating without him because Druk was just like that.

Ten people right now, down from their usual elven. Five Kyoshi Warriors who had left an Island that couldn’t protect them. Three Fire Nation girls who should have been her enemy. A Princess of the Northern Water Tribe.

And him.

Toph’s absence was particularly stark as the spot by the fire atop a pair of lush purple pillows was unoccupied.

“The supplies were bound for the Fire Nation divisions moving on Omashu,” Suki continued, finally looking up. “Without the oil and the coal, they’ll have to wait on resupply from the colonies. Two weeks. Maybe three if the river stays high, but I wouldn’t count on much longer.”

There was a short silence.

“Well,” Ya said brightly from across the table, where she was sitting half in her sister’s lap as she tried to jab her fingers into ticklish spots on her side, “that’s awkward.”

Suki frowned, “Why is that awkward?”

“Because Bumi said no,” Mai said, her voice as flat as the table.

Suki turned to look at the other girl. Mai was slumped in her chair at Zuko’s right, which Suki noted was new, though she did not let it show on her face; Mai usually took the seat furthest from wherever Zuko was, as if proximity itself was a weakness she refused to give anyone.

Especially him.

“No?” Suki asked.

“No,” Mai confirmed. “He won’t hold the city. He’s going to let it fall, wait, and take it back when he thinks the time is right.” Her lips twisted the smallest amount. “Neutral jing. It’s very sophisticated, apparently.”

“He made us guess his favorite color,” Yi offered helpfully.

“It was green,” Ya added.

“It wasn’t green,” Yi corrected her.

“It was literally green, he just used a stupid word for it-“

“So the three weeks I bought him,” Suki interrupted, and the twins quieted instantly, the way they did when her voice took that particular edge, “are three weeks he won’t use.”

“He’ll use them,” Zuko said quietly.

Suki looked at him.

He was sitting with his chair tipped back on two legs in a way that had always irritated her, from how unsteady yet firm he looked, his black hair hanging over his face in a curtain that badly needed cutting, as his swords rested across his knees in their lacquered purple sheath.

The words escaped her mouth before she had given them much thought: “When was the last time you cut your hair?” she interrupted the entire conversation.

Zuko looked surprised and then frowned to himself. “I-” he hesitated, then shook his head. “I don’t remember,” he admitted, seemingly bewildered.

His eyes were their real color today, that pale gold that still made something in the back of Suki’s neck prickle, though it wasn’t the old instinct of enemy- but something else she didn’t have the time to name.

“You really should take better care of yourself,” Azula sighed, grabbing a couple of strands of his dark hair and playing with them between her fingers.

“I think it makes him look manly,” Ty Lee opined brightly.

Ao shook her head. “More princely, don’t you think?”

Zuko released a long breath, and he smiled a soft, warm, and ever so slightly tired smile. “King Bumi will use those weeks. Just not the way we want him to,” Zuko continued. “Three weeks is three weeks more for the people of Omashu to get out if they want to. Three weeks more for Bumi to get whatever he’s planning in place.” He shrugged. “It’s not nothing, Suki. It’s never nothing.”

Suki held his gaze for a moment, then nodded once, sharply but with no real heat to the movement, and almost imperceptibly she felt her expression relax, because if Zuko said it was fine.

It was fine.

“Fine,” she said. “That’s all on my end.

Azula straightened in her seat, pulling a scroll from the pile at her elbow. “General How,” she announced, “has decided he wants us to assist the Southern Water Tribe fleet in clearing the Serpent’s Pass. The Fire Nation has been running blockades along it for months; refugees heading for Ba Sing Se are being turned back or sunk.”

“I didn’t realize what the Southern Water Tribe had qualified as a fleet?” Yi remarked.

“It’s rather recently constructed,” Yue said from where she sat to Zuko’s left, her white hair braided down her back, her hands folded neatly on the table. “Master Pakku and my father’s ships have been helping them rebuild.” Her blue eyes slid toward Zuko, and something deeply amused flickered in them. “Their Chief asked to be made useful.”

There was another silence, this one of a very different quality, not quite excitement but something like anticipation.

“Their Chief,” Ao said slowly, looking up from a scroll, where she sat very straight beside Yue, “is named Hakoda, is he not? A warrior of some renown to the Fire Nation.”

“He is,” Yue agreed pleasantly.

Ao turned to look at Zuko with her cool blue eyes, entirely without expression. “Did you consider that you shared his name when you took it?”

“I considered it,” Zuko said, tipping his chair back further. “I just thought it would become a problem for later me.”

“It is later,” Ao remarked in her usual placid way.

“I see that now,” Zuko said with a chuckle.

Ty Lee giggled, then seemed to realize she was sitting directly across from Azula and abruptly stopped, her cheeks going pink as she very carefully looked at anything else in the tent. Azula, for her part, smiled serenely at the scroll in her hands, though Suki noticed she had read the same line at least three times now.

Suki filed it away.

“Report on the Yu Yan?” she asked, turning to Yue and Ao.

“Done,” Ao said simply.

“Pohuai has been quiet since,” Yue added, and her smile softened at the edges into something Suki had learned to be careful of, something cold and frozen as the sheets of Ice Yue hailed from. “Their replacements will take some time to train, that is, if they can be trained, considering we decimated the entire unit. The Fire Nation won’t have eyes like that in the region for at least a year.”

Suki nodded. A year. By the time it mattered, the comet would have come and gone, and they would all have won, or they would all be dead, at least so Zuko had said, and if you could trust anyone.

It was him.

“So,” she said, bracing her palms on the map, rolling her hands across the parchment, “Omashu is likely to fall whether we like it or not. The Serpent’s Pass is a mess. The Southern Water Tribe wants to take their fight further. The Northern Water Tribe is enjoying its new trade. And Ba Sing Se?”

Azula didn’t even look up from her scroll. “It's Ba Sing Se.”

“Meaning?”

“Which means,” Azula said, finally setting the scroll down and looking at Suki with a sharp, pleased expression, the one she wore when someone asked her exactly the right question, “that the same city whose gold paid bandits to bleed their own roads is now the only place left for the refugees to go. And no one in that city has the slightest intention of letting the war past its walls.” She smiled. “I’d call that an opportunity.”

“You would,” Mai said dryly, and one of her free hands had found a cream puff that she was shredding piece by piece into her mouth.

“I did,” Azula agreed.

Suki looked down at the map, at the long thin line of the Serpent’s Pass and the great sprawl of Ba Sing Se at its end, at the green of Omashu that would soon have to be replaced red, at all the little marks she and Ao had made over four years of raids and ambushes and burned barges. It looked like a lot when she laid it out like this. It looked like they had done something.

Four years means nothing, Mai had said once, months ago, in one of her rare bitter moods.

Suki didn’t want to believe it.

“Then we go to the Pass,” she said. “We help the fleet clear the blockade and keep the route open to Ba Sing Se. I can take Ao-“

“I’ll go,” Zuko said.

Suki looked up at him, frowning. “The Chief may be calmer around a Northern Water Tribe Prince, but the relations are still rocky.”

“I know,” Zuko said. “But Hakoda is the only one that he’s likely to trust.” He let his chair fall back onto all four legs with a soft thud, and something shifted in the tent, a small tension in everyone’s shoulders, the way it always did when Zuko stopped joking. “The Blue Spirit can’t do diplomacy.”

“That,” Azula said, in the tone of someone who was about to deliver a very long lecture, “is an absolutely terrible-“

“Sosha’s coming with me,” Zuko said.

Sosha’s head snapped up, looking elated for a moment before her expression quickly schooled across her face.

Suki felt her sister go completely still beside her, felt the air in the tent twist faintly around the girl the way it did when Sosha was surprised and hadn’t yet decided how to feel about it.

“Me?” Sosha said.

“You,” Zuko said, and smiled at her, that same soft smile that was so devastating to the psyche of every single girl in this tent, and Suki watched her sister’s ears turn red.

Across the table, Ty Lee was beaming so hard it looked painful.

Suki opened her mouth to object, to say that Sosha had just come off a mission, that she was tired, that she always got quiet after a fight and needed time, that Suki could go instead and handle the fleet and the blockade and keep their dead prince’s stupid head attached to his shoulders-

Sosha’s knee pressed against hers under the table. Once. Firm.

Suki closed her mouth.

“Fine,” she said. “Ao and I will take the coast and watch for Fire Nation reinforcements. Mai, Yi, Ya, you stay on Omashu. If Bumi changes his mind, we need to know.”

“He won’t,” Mai said.

“Then we should know that too.”

Mai looked at her for a long moment, then dipped her head, and Suki thought she saw the faintest trace of something like approval.

“Meeting’s over,” Suki said, rolling up the map. “Get some sleep. Eat something. Yi, let Ya breathe.”

“She’s comfortable,” Yi protested.

“I’m not,” Ya denied.

“Off.”

Yi pouted and got off.

The tent emptied slowly, the way it always did, in clusters and pairs. Azula and Yue drifted out together, already bent over another scroll. Ty Lee bounced out after Mai and the twins, and very deliberately did not look at Azula as she passed. Ao paused at the flap long enough to give Suki a nod, the same small dip of her head she had given on the island before every spar, and then she too was gone.

Sosha lingered.

Suki didn’t say anything. She just finished rolling up the map and tied it with a cord, and waited, taking note of Zuko’s eyes falling upon them for a moment before he nodded with his gentle smile and walked free of the tent.

“Suki,” Sosha said finally, quietly. “Why would he pick me?”

Suki looked at her sister, at the girl who could hear a lie in the shape of a breath and who had never, not once in all the years Suki had known her, believed that she was allowed to want anything for herself.

Could not want anything for herself

“Because he wants to,” Suki said. “Go find out why.”

Sosha stared at her for a long moment. Then she nodded, slowly, and slipped out of the tent.

Suki stood alone among the empty chairs and the cold tea, the map tucked under her arm, and allowed herself exactly one singular breath that wasn’t about the mission they had been given.

Then she went to find Ao because someone needed to check over their weapons, and she wasn’t going to be doing it alone.

-

Sosha found him at the edge of the encampment where the trees gave way to a low creek, sitting on a flat stone with his shirt off and one of his dao blades held up beside his head at an angle that was better suited to cutting a limb off than cutting his hair.

She stopped at the treeline and watched him for a moment, the late afternoon sun glinting off his blade and making his eyes gleam a shade that put the sun itself to shame.

He gathered a fistful of black hair, frowned at it, and then lifted the sword.

“Don’t,” Sosha said, the word tearing free of her lips before she could give it much thought.

Zuko didn’t startle; he never startled, which was one of the more irritating things about him, though whether it was because he knew she was there or she just couldn’t startle him, she had no idea. He simply lowered the blade and turned his head toward her with a sheepish sort of smile, the fistful of hair still clutched in his other hand.

“Suki said it needed cutting,” he said.

“Suki says a lot of things,” Sosha replied, crossing the stones toward him. “She didn’t say to do it with a sword.”

“I’m very good with a sword.”

“You’re very good at killing people with a sword,” Sosha corrected him. “That’s different from being good at cutting hair.”

He considered that, then offered her the dao hilt-first with such easy trust that something in her stomach turned over, even though it wasn’t the first sign of trust he had given her.

Far from it; throwing himself off a building at the Eastern Air Temple and expecting her to catch him with her airbending had been far more impactful.

Yet she took his sword, because it would have been stranger not to, and then stood there holding a slightly warped steel blade that Toph and Azula had made for him, with absolutely no idea what to do next.

“Sit still,” she said finally, because she was a Kyoshi Warrior and when a Kyoshi Warrior didn’t know what to do, she gave orders until things started making sense.

Zuko sat still.

Sosha stepped behind him and gathered his hair in her free hand. It was longer than she had thought, falling well past his shoulders, thick and heavy and softer than it had any right to be, the strand of white running through it like a seam of moonlight. Up close, he smelled like woodsmoke and creek water and the faint ozone that always hung around him after he’d been bending.

She had cut her own hair since she was eight. She had cut Yi’s and Ya’s more times than she could count, because neither of them could be trusted with scissors around the other. This was the same thing.

It was entirely the same thing, except the fact she was doing it to an eighteen-year-old boy that she absolutely didn’t have feelings for.

She made the first cut, and he didn’t flinch, and she let out a breath she hadn’t noticed holding, a soft current of air that stirred the severed strands and carried them off toward the water.

“You’ve refined your technique,” Zuko observed.

“I know what I can do,” Sosha said.

“I know you do,” he said, and the air around his words lay flat and clean, nothing twisting in it at all.

Sosha’s hands paused.

That was the thing. That was always the thing about him. She had been able to hear lies for as long as she could remember: in the way breath caught behind teeth, in the way air bent strangely around a word that a person didn’t mean. Her mother had told her it was a gift. The Island had taught her it was a burden, because people lied all the time, about small things and large things, about being fine and about being afraid, and Sosha had always known.

And then a Fire Nation boy had shown up on the Island calling himself Lee, and the only lie he had ever told her was his name.

Four years later, she couldn’t always tell anymore. Toph said he was the second-best liar she’d ever met, and Sosha believed it; she had heard him speak to generals and to merchants and to the Avatar, and sometimes the air around him was so smooth she couldn’t find the seam of the lie at all.

But never to her. Not once, not about anything that mattered.

She made another cut.

“Why me?” she asked, and it came out quieter than she meant it to.

Zuko was quiet for a moment.

“You’re the best scout we have,” he said. “If the blockade is as bad as How says, we’ll need someone who can hear a ship before we see it. And you can tell if Chief Hakoda is lying to us, which, considering whose name I’m wearing, is something I’d very much like to know.”

The words sat in the air, and they were true, every one of them.

They were also not the whole truth. Sosha could feel the shape of what he hadn’t said, the way you could feel the edges of a stone in your pocket without looking at it.

“That’s not all of it,” she said.

He laughed softly, and his shoulders relaxed beneath her hands. “No,” he admitted. “It’s not.”

She waited. She was good at waiting. The Island had taught her that, too.

“Ty Lee told me something,” Zuko said finally. “She said you only ever see me as the Blue Spirit, or as Hakoda. Never as just… me.” He tilted his head a little, and she had to adjust her grip to keep from cutting crooked. “She said you don’t know that part of me. And I realized she was right. I’ve known you for five years, Sosha, and I don’t think we’ve had a single conversation that wasn’t about training or a mission.”

Sosha thought about that.

She thought about the cliffside where she had first gone to confront him, and the bathhouse where she had walked in on him without knocking and demanded he teach her to airbend, and the road outside Gaoling, and every spar and every raid and every long night on watch. He wasn’t wrong.

“And what is that part of you?” she asked. “The just-Zuko part.”

“I honestly have no idea,” he said, and it was true, and something about how plainly he said it made her chest ache. “That’s sort of the problem. I’ve been someone else for so long I think I forgot to check.”

The creek ran on beside them. Druk was a dark shape on the far bank, curled up and snoring in rumbling waves, and somewhere back in the encampment Sosha could hear Yi and Ya arguing about something, their voices carried faintly to her on the evening air.

She made another cut, then another, working her way around to the side of his head, and then she had to step around in front of him to even it out, and suddenly she was looking down into his face, his pale gold eyes looking up at her with that soft, open, infuriating expression.

She looked at his hair instead. It was safer.

“Ty Lee and Mai love you,” she said, and she wasn’t sure why. “They said so. I made them say so.”

“I remember,” Zuko said, a smile in his voice. “You were very scary.”

“Someone had to be,” Sosha muttered. “You were all being so stupid about it.”

She trimmed a piece near his ear, carefully.

“They earned that,” she said quietly. “They grew up with you, or they nearly died for you, or they gave up their homes to follow you. I just-“ She stopped, her throat tightening, and made another cut instead of finishing the sentence.

I just came along, she didn’t say. I just hid. I was supposed to be on the Island, keeping my head down, never letting anyone see what I was, and then you saw it anyway.

Zuko didn’t say anything for a long time. He just sat there and let her cut his hair, his hands resting on his knees, and when she finally risked a glance back down at his face, he was looking at her with an expression she couldn’t name.

“You don’t have to earn anything from me, Sosha,” he said.

It was true. The air around it was so clean it almost hurt.

Sosha set the sword down on the stone beside him very carefully, because her hands were shaking now and she didn’t trust them with steel.

“Done,” she said, stepping back.

Zuko reached up and ran a hand through his hair, which now fell just past his jaw in a rough, uneven cut that was nonetheless far better than whatever he would have done to himself. He grinned at her. “How do I look?”

Like a boy, Sosha thought. Not a prince, or a spirit, or a Water Tribe warrior. Just a boy sitting by a creek with his shirt off and hair on his shoulders, grinning at her like she’d done something wonderful.

“Less ridiculous,” she said.

“High praise.”

“Don’t get used to it.”

He laughed and stood, brushing the loose hair from his shoulders. He was taller than her, he always had been, and for a moment they just stood there on the stones with the creek running between their feet.

“You don’t have to come,” he said. “To the Pass. If you’d rather stay with Suki, I won’t-“

“I want to come,” Sosha said.

The words left her mouth before she had decided to say them, and she heard them in the air the way she heard everything, and they were true.

She wanted to.

It was such a small thing. A trip to the Serpent’s Pass, a blockade, a fleet. It wasn’t anything like what Ty Lee and Mai had said in that clearing years ago with their faces red and their hearts on their sleeves.

But she wanted it, and she had said so, out loud, for herself.

Zuko smiled at her, and it wasn’t the soft tired smile he wore at the war table, or the easy one he wore as Hakoda. It was smaller, and a little crooked, and somehow entirely new.

“Good,” he said. “I want you to come too.”

Sosha turned on her heel and walked back toward the camp before he could see whatever her face was doing, a gust of air kicking up behind her and scattering the last of his hair across the water.

She was halfway through the trees before she realized she was smiling.