This is a little something I started writing about a year ago. In honor of my newfound obsession with Daredevil on Netflix and my excitement over Age of Ultron coming out this weekend combined with a small dose of insomnia, I thought it was an appropriate time to polish it up and post. This definitely has the potential (read: half-assed outline) to turn into a full-blown fic, but I'm focusing on finishing my current project before moving on to other big things.
A heavy cloud hung low over the Ba Sing Se freight yard, hiding the moon and stars and making it seem darker than normal. The rails were packed with trains out of service for the night, and the ground between was littered with decommissioned trains from the past. Nothing stirred in the darkness. The Blue Spirit waited in the shadows of a toppled tramcar to see if the deal he had investigated for the past week would come to fruition. It was already past two in the morning; the meeting was an hour late, and the air reeked of apprehensive rain. The Blue Spirit usually hated staying up so late after the sun had set, especially with the air so heavy with moisture. His patience was stretched to a snapping point, and he hoped that Jet hadn't been playing him. He was there to intercept a weapons deal; after the Fire Nation had brokered a peace deal with the other three nations, they had a surplus of machinery and military-grade tanks and fire bending suits. The excess had slowly dwindled in the years following the peace, and not completely due to disarmament. The Blue Spirit had a vested interest in stopping these deals, and went to great lengths to investigate the trickle of the stockpiles from Fire Nation vaults into the hand of Earth Kingdom crime lords.
The most notorious underworld dealings were with the Dai Li. The Dai Li was a criminal organization made of powerful individuals involved in all levels of government, including both the Earth Kingdom and Fire Nation. The Spirit knew that if he could gather enough evidence to trace up the Dai Li command chain, he would be able to eliminate most of the illegal weapon deals in the world, while bringing down a good number of corrupt officials in the process.
A light rain began to fall as an ostrich horse-pulled carriage came into the yard. A seem in the ground opened, and a contingent of Dai Li agents in their wide-brimmed hats and long robes rose in the middle of the yard. He blinked again through the rain, not able to hear the exchange. He crept closer, keeping his swords stowed away on his back. He could see the agents, but not the individual who alighted from the carriage. He slowly climbed up the car to its roof, cursing the rain for muddling his hearing. He squinted to make out the mysterious carriage occupant, and failed to see the figures swooping around him.
Luckily for the masked vigilante, the rain had made one of the agents careless. As he alighted on a decommissioned train near the Blue Spirit's perch, his loose robes slapped on the granite heavily. The Blue Spirit lept from the roof as a dozen clay hands collided with one another where he had been. Clay handcuffs exploded around him as he ducked and rolled around them. As he found some cover and paused to catch his breath, the earth beneath him rumbled. He flipped over a pile of junk as two agents came at him from the earth. There was a great deal of shouting near the ostrich carriage, and as he ran toward it to catch a glimpse of the occupant, two Dai Li agents punched jagged pieces of boulders at him. He dodged again, but could not keep one from catching his left side and the other glancing off his head.
He only blacked out for a minute, but it was long enough for the operatives to all scatter. He followed suit and got himself away from the freight yards as quickly as possible. He usually stitched himself up, but did not think he could manage these injuries tonight. After making sure his wounds would not leave a blood trail, he climbed on a rooftop and began a delirious flight for a better part of the Lower Ring. He needed to find a place reputable enough not to give him an infection, but not so reputable they would refuse to treat him. The Blue Spirit knew he was gambling with more than he could afford, but knew he would not make it over the wall out of the Lower Ring without treatment.
There was a clinic nearby, staffed by doctors with a non-profit, and if he could just find it –
His foot slipped on a loose tile, and he slid off a roof into a garbage pile in an ally. Cursing his luck – of course it's still steaming from the rain – he didn't see the young woman in healers' scrubs sitting in the rain by the back door. He was still struggling to climb out of the bin when he felt her grabbing his elbow and hauling him out.
"Tui and La," she exclaimed, seeing the dark red seeping through his clothing. "You need to be admitted."
He shook his head emphatically and held a finger to the lips on his mask.
She gave him a piercing look, and seemed to recognize the mask. "Of course the Blue Spirit doesn't need to be admitted," she ventured in a flat voice. "But perhaps the man behind the mask still needs some medical attention?"
She tossed his arm around her shoulder and would not let him try to move unaided. After a second thought, he was not sure he would have managed to walk a straight line after his latest fall. He allowed the young woman lead him through the back door into the brightly lit hallway. His blood loss was catching up with him, and he felt light-headed. Footsteps echoed from around a corner, and the doctor pushed him into a small storage alcove behind a curtain to avoid detection. As he leaned close to her to keep his balance, he noticed that her hair smelled warm, like gingersnaps or spices or something else really nice – not at all the medicinal scent one would expect from somebody who worked in a hospital, or even like cheap fruit shampoos. He sniffed again, and the woman looked up at him with her brow furrowed and mouth set in a no-nonsense line. He realized what a creep he was being and tried to stand up away from her wonderful homey smell. When the effort started to make him light-headed, he began to snigger. The person in the hallway approached the curtain, humming a little ditty, and the woman reached her hand under the mask to silence his breathing. When she deemed it was clear again, she dragged him into an empty examination room. She unstrapped his swords from his back and helped him up on the table. Leaning back felt much nicer, so he lay down on the table while she gathered supplies. She finished washing her hands and began cutting his bloody shirt off.
"You're lucky that I'm the doctor on duty this morning," she said softly. "I don't think too many of my coworkers would be crazy about healing a masked vigilante." She grabbed a basin of cool water and put her hands in it, and seemed to reconsider her statement. "Actually, I'm probably the only one crazy enough to help a guy who runs around the city in a mask at night with swords strapped to his back, and had lost enough blood to make him giggle."
She held her water-encased hands to his battered left side, and he gradually felt ribs going back in their rightful place and tendons reknitting themselves. He sighed in relief. This was the worst he had been hit so far, and the first time he had really needed to seek professional help. As the pain receded and his earlier desire to giggle deserted him, he studied the doctor some more. She had smooth dark skin and the bluest eyes he had ever seen. As she leaned over his torso to examine his other side, he caught a whiff of her hair again – it was like baked goods.
There was a part of him that wanted to bury his nose in her hair, but he chalked that desire up to the same instinct that made him feel goofy before. She obviously already thought he might be deranged, and he needed whatever help she was willing to give him. He realized with her healing abilities, she was probably from a Water tribe. The end of the war had helped Ba Sing Se flourish into an even greater and more diverse city than before, as people of all nations began pouring in for the education to help their homes rebuild.
The doctor continued to mutter to herself about how insane she must be as she made a few last adjustments to his bandages. "I guess I'd want the same courtesy," was the only thing he caught out of her rambling.
"There," she said as she stepped back. "Just don't do anything too strenuous for the rest of the night – maybe not tomorrow either. You've lost a bit of blood but with time and rest you should be fine."
He wished that she would find another excuse to touch him, and summed his strange thoughts up to the blood loss. He realized that he couldn't put his ruined shirt back on, and tried to pantomime his problem to her.
"Oh," she groaned. "I'll go find you something. Stay here, and don't touch anything."
He began looking around the room, trying to find more clues as to his new favorite doctor's identity, but found it completely devoid of personal touches. He wondered if she did that on purpose, or if she was just a low man on the totem pole. Or, the thought was worse, she wasn't a permanent employee here.
When he heard her returning, he climbed back on the examining table, trying to flex as subtly as possible. A part of his brain thought he must have suffered severe brain trauma, and made a note to get that checked out in the morning. She whispered back through the curtain holding a set of blue scrubs
"Your color choices were blue and green; this way I figured you could at least match," she joked as she helped pull the remains of his dark blue outfit off. As he held his mask in place while she patiently threaded his arms through the sleeves and pulled the shirt down, he imagined she was blushing a little.
She strapped his swords on his back and warned him not to rat on her if anybody caught him.
He was embarrassed about changing his pants as well, but as she pointed out, he would be less conspicuous from a distance in a complete scrub set. "Of course, you would be even less noticeable if you removed the mask and swords," she pressed, teasing him.
If he had been able to speak, he would have cracked that she just wanted to get him out of his pants. He desperately wanted to joke with this woman. She led him back out the way they came in; the sky was beginning to lighten to the east. He definitely claimed that he had a fever later. He didn't know this doctor's identity or when she would be on duty again, so he took a risk. He grabbed her hand and knelt in front of her. She looked tired and confused, and he tipped his mask up to kiss the back of her hand.
She arched an eyebrow. "Romeo, I think you may have lost more blood that either of us realized."
He involuntarily snorted, and ran down the alley, scaling the wall that lead to the middle ring. He was pissed that he still didn't know any more about the weapons deal other than the mystery party showed up to meetings in an ostrich horse carriage and they all knew that the Blue Spirit was onto them. But his ribs felt better, he was thinking more clearly, and he had found a potential ally in a doctor that morning. He promised himself he would find out more about this mysterious doctor who was willing to stich up strange men while keeping the questions to a minimum.
The Blue Spirit might not talk, he thought. But Zuko definitely can.