Disclaimer: I do not own Avatar: The Last Airbender or any related characters. This was written out of enjoyment of the series, and no profit is being made.
Ships: Onji/Hide.
Warnings: Spoilers for episode 42, "The Headband".
Detention
Day 1.
"You're lucky they didn't send you to the coal mines, you know."
She doesn't say anything to him the entire time. She scrubs the courtyard until the sun starts to sink and then she hands him the brush and the bucket and asks, "I will be cleaning the wall tomorrow, won't I?"
He glances at the wall with which she had painted the message, "The Avatar Lives" upon it. The special chemical wash that will remove it hasn't arrived in the mail yet.
He nods.
She bows and walks home.
Day 2.
She scrubs at the wall with bare hands and a tiny brush.
He sits cross-legged and watches her. She makes no move to escape.
He reads the bottle on the label of the chemical wash. It warns to wear gloves while using it to clean anything. The headmaster never gave him any.
"Onji? How are you feeling?"
The glare she sends him says, "Just fine."
Day 5.
"I just realized, we haven't spent this much time together for a while."
She continues scrubbing.
"I'm sorry about that."
Onji is silent. Hide sighs. He's tried for the past four days for her to speak to him, but nothing works.
"But nothing else I take it?"
He jumps slightly, looking up at her. "What?"
"You're not sorry for anything else?" she asks, not turning from the wall.
He closes his mouth.
He may be supervising her, but it seems that Onji is in control.
Day 9.
The chemical wash she uses has finally taken its toll on her hands. He saw her scratching at them in the halls and her friends asked, but she only glared over at him.
After school, she goes to pour the wash into the bucket, but he takes the bottle out of her red, scratchy, hands.
"What are you doing?" she asks, glaring.
He pauses, and looks from the bottle to her helplessly. "I want to help you, Onji."
She opens her mouth in shock and rage and can't say anything for a minute. Then-
"Help me? You want to help me, Hide?"
The sun is starting to set again. A couple of leaves skit across the courtyard as the wind blows through the scene.
There are tears in her eyes as she says, "Then for the sake of everything I thought you were once, let me finish my job in peace."
He nodded numbly and handed the bottle back to her.
He sits far, far away for the rest of the detention and watches the back of the crouched girl.
He swears he hears her sniff over the next couple of hours.
Day 10.
One of Hide's friends is looking over her detention today. When she asks, he mumbles something about him being sick, even though he had seemed perfectly healthy yesterday.
Other than that, there is another sign of something strange going on.
Hide's friend gives her a new brush, one much larger than the tiny toothbrush-ish stick she had been using. He says it was the headmaster's orders to give it to her.
As she works, (her masterpiece now only reads "The Avatar Li") she pauses briefly and stares at it. Hide's friend yells at her to get working.
That night, at home, she turns the brush over and over in her hands. Finally she spots what she suspected all along.
Hide's name carved into the handle near the bristles.
Day 14.
The new brush and her new guide certainly helped Onji's morale. She finished cleaning away her graffiti a day early.
She has been assigned to write lines on the chalkboard. "I will not deface school property and am dreadfully sorry for having offended the great and honourable Fire Lord Ozai through my misdeeds."
It should be easy. But there are two problems.
She is not sorry.
And her hands hurt.
Luckily, no one has to watch her today. Hide hasn't shown up to school since their argument, so now a teacher strolls by, nods at her and continues on every ten minutes or so.
She is finally free to let the tears go.
She can't help but wonder what went wrong. They had known each other ever since she could remember. When she was ten, her heart started beating faster around him and the silences between them were thicker and there was an awkwardness that had never existed before.
One day after school, they walked along the beach and he said that he wanted to be...something more than friends.
She was overjoyed. She had been thinking the same thing.
Pain shoots through her fingers. She winces and wipes at her eyes with her sleeve.
She can't remember the beginning of their friendship, not like her other friends. She remembers meeting them the first day of kindergarten, all sitting at the same table.
She can't remember how she met Hide. All she remembers is how they would walk over the hills after school on their way home. She would tell him about all the silly things she could think of to make him smile.
It seemed Hide's mind was the only one beside her own that could comprehend her stories. When he couldn't understand the notes on sungi horn's musical staff, she told him a story about four racing lanes in a river and the seaweed lines that separated them, and the turtle-ducks that could swim down them.
When he couldn't understand the Great Siege of Ba Sing Se, she told him a story about the Great Dragon Iroh attacking the Castle of Stone to reach the most rare blossom of all: a Fire Lily.
"So, are Fire Lilies real?"
"Of course they're real, silly. They're on the cover of our etiquette textbooks," she tapped on the illustration of the said textbook.
Hide furrowed his brow in all his nine-year-old confusion. "But then why did the Iroh go all the way to Ba Sing Se for it?"
"Because...it was a special Fire Lily that grows only in the Earth Kingdom. And General Iroh needed to bring it back to his father."
"A Fire Lily that grows in the Earth Kingdom?" he asked.
They blinked at each other, then laughed and laughed...
"Onji! Psst, Onji!"
The sound snapped her out of the constant motion of writing the sentence. She glanced at the window in surprise. (The sun had set already?)
"Shoji! What are you doing here?"
The wide-eyed boy slid the windowpane open, grinning from ear to ear. (It was obviously a good thing she was being held on the ground floor.) "Busting you out of here," he replied.
She furrowed her brow and cocked her head to side slightly. "Busting me out? Shoji, I can't just leave!"
"Why not?" He asked, his smile fading a little. "I dropped by your house earlier to ask if you could come to a party we're having. Your parents said that you weren't home. ...They're worried about you Onji."
She opened her mouth, closed it again, and bit her lip.
--
Shoji jogged slightly ahead of her and stood in front of the cave entrance. She could hear the Flamey-Os playing inside, and felt the bubble of excitement and nervousness that she hadn't felt since Kuzon was around.
"Alright, you have to put the headband on over your eyes," the boy explained, grinning from ear to ear.
She rolled her eyes but complied, untying her belt, (which they all called headbands now, no matter where they wore it) and tying it over her eyes.
Shoji led her in, and immediately the cave quieted. Her friend was careful to lead her by the wrist, avoiding her still raw hands.
He led her to the back of the cave, where he sat her near the fountain that Kuzon's dance partner had been attending to during the party. He guided her hands into what she assumed was water, but had a thicker texture. And, more importantly, soothed her hands quicker than any water could.
He untied her blindfold, and the whole cave burst out, "Surprise, Onji!"
The cave was decorated in chains of flowers, thick with her favourite scents of summer. A huge banner with her name on it was strung up on the wall behind the Flamey-Os, who started playing again.
"What is all this for?" she asked, turning to spot Shoji behind her.
"You took the blame for them," Hide answered instead, appearing in the place Shoji had been seconds earlier.
She immediately turned back to look down at the fountain. She had been right. It wasn't water. It was a slightly blue liquid; about the consistency of the cough syrup her mother gave her when she stayed in the fields too long in spring.
"I stole it from the cupboard at school," he admitted, sitting next to her. "The headmaster should've given you gloves for that wash."
"Why are you doing this?" she asked, looking up at him, challenge in her tone.
Hide looking down at the fountain of medicine, thoughtful for a second.
"I didn't get to dance with you that night. Not that you wanted to."
"Hide-"
"I've been a huge jerk. You deserve someone smarter than me, for one thing," he snorted.
They stared out at the floor as Shoji asked one of Onji's friends to dance.
"Someone like Shoji. He gets good grades," he got up to walk away.
She yanked her hands out of the medicine and felt the cool air rush over them as she grabbed his sleeve.
Their eyes met and the finality in her eyes and her voice as she said, "Don't you dare say that," convinced him to sit down again.
She paused before saying, "You are smart Hide. You just learn more slowly."
He snorted and rolled his eyes. She slapped his arm in reply. "Don't do that to me!" she whispered, as some of the kids turned to look. "All those stories I told you to help you understand, what, do they mean nothing to you?"
He immediately shook his head furiously. "No! I mean, of course they meant stuff to me, I..."
"Then let me teach you again," she said. She started dragging him out onto the dance floor. The crowd cheered.
"But, Onji, you're hands, and, I really shouldn't and-"
She stopped pulling and let their clasped hands bring them back together. "Once upon a time," she started whispering, "there was a warrior. But his mind was under the control of an evil wizard."
He sighed, avoiding her eyes. Seconds passed and then he whispered in return, "Luckily for him, there was a lady willing to risk her life to save him."
He made her blush for the first time in months. "Oh?"
"Yeah, her name was Lily."
She smiled and started to back towards the dance-floor, though Hide was much more willing this time. The crowd watched in anticipation.
"Lily Fire," he finished, and surrendered to the pull this girl, his friend, his fairytale had on his heart.
And she taught him how to dance.
AN. The idea for writing an Onji/Hide fic has been in my head practically ever since The Headband. I now that I've actually written it, I totally ship it. Crazy, eh? :)
Concrit is most definitely welcome on this. It was written over the course of long, long time, so it's probably off in parts.