Disclaimer: I acknowledge that I own no rights to 'Avatar: The Last Airbender', or to the characters, events and plotline derived from there. I make no money from posting this and mean no offence by it.
The end of the war passes him by. Bitter irony that he is locked in a cell, starving and half-broken, his dream of a glorious sacrifice for the Earth Kingdom lying in tatters around his bare toes with only a scar to show for it.
The scar cuts in a thick line across the concave softness of his stomach, jagged and white against the fading tan of his skin.
He hates the Dai Li, he hates the Fire Nation and he hates the weakness- the treachery- of his own mind. But he is dependent upon all three in his prison cell in Ba Sing Se. Of the three, his mind is probably the harshest jailor.
He rages at the first appearance of Fire Nation guards, and his redoubled efforts to escape result in a severe beating that cracks his ribs- again- and knocks out two teeth.
During the two day interrogation he goes through, an official comes to see him. Since he is tied to a chair, with the chair overturned, and since his eyes are mostly swelling shut, all Jet can see are the toes of very thick, very heavy boots. When he tilts his head, he sees the black and red uniform and a glint of cold, dark eyes.
Jet clenches his teeth shut on the names of his fellow conspirators. He keeps firm hold of his sanity and settles for silence and glaring.
The official shouts, kicks him a few times, shouts some more, and then leaves. Then the guards come back.
When the guards are done, there's nothing much that Jet can do to still his tongue, his racing heart, or his panic. In a desperate bid to distract them and himself, he talks about his previous experience of imprisonment under the Dai Li. They're not really interested until he starts talking about Li.
Not that they tell him then what he finds out later- he was right. Not Li, but Zuko. Prince Zuko, son and heir to the bastard Fire Lord himself.
Jet finds out from a fellow prisoner who shares his cell for a few days. He knows the Fire Nation soldiers react to the words 'boy', 'disguise' and 'burn scar over left eye', so he's basically asking anyone and everyone that he can.
He has talked himself into some fanciful notion of Li as some kind of firebender resistance operative. Like maybe even firebenders don't think this war is right, maybe even firebenders don't like their insane, sadistic Fire Lord, and maybe Li was on the run from his own kind. Jet still doesn't trust a firebender, but he thinks it would explain Li's conflict. Plus that damn suspicion that always burned in those golden eyes.
Jet has almost talked himself into some weird belief that Li was just like him when his temporary cell mate arrives. He asks idly, not really expecting an answer, and the guy looks at him like he's just sworn an allegiance to the Fire Nation.
Jet ends up slammed against the wall, a hand at his throat, and through the roaring in his ears, he hears the words 'Zuko', 'Prince', 'Fire Nation', 'friends' and 'betrayed us'.
He chokes and can't breathe, so he doesn't get a chance to say that he has never and will never be any kind of friend to a Fire Nation citizen, firebender or not, royalty or not. He blacks out and when he comes to, he finds that he's acquired a reputation for fraternizing with the enemy.
He loses his sanity for a few days after that and never quite remembers what went on. There are flashes- mostly conversations with people who couldn't possibly have been there. People like Aang and Katara and Smellerbee and Longshot. People like Long Feng. People like Li.
Zuko. He tests it on his tongue and shouts it as he kicks the walls and door and then falls over and drums his fists on the ground.
He had the Fire Nation Prince in his grasp and he let him slip through. This same Prince who helped his sister kill Aang and capture Ba Sing Se. This same Prince who is responsible for the Fire Nation soldiers tramping through the streets of the capital of the Earth Kingdom. The Prince who is the son of the man who caused the deaths of Jet's parents.
He heals, though. There is nothing else to do in prison but either go mad or heal. And Jet's mind has already proved to do nothing that he expects. He doesn't get let out of his prison, and because of his reputation he doesn't get nominated for any escape plans going the rounds.
When the war ends, he hears the distance-dull thumps and explosions but he doesn't get to participate. The guards are clearly busy so he doesn't get fed for a few days either. Or maybe it was just one day. He's lost track now. He hasn't seen the sun since he last saw Aang and the others, and his mind keeps playing tricks on him.
In the end, it takes another six months for some harassed official to get around to his imprisonment record. There are actual thieves and murderers and lunatics in the prison, so prisoners aren't high on the new post-war agenda. Anyway, all the political prisoners who matter are known to each other and their friends on the outside, so they get freed pretty quickly. Jet has no one to vouch for him. He's got a reputation for befriending firebenders and Fire Nation Princes, so the Earth Kingdom guards sort of ignore him for the most part.
Jet doesn't get to hear much about the outside world so he presumes that Aang has won and the Fire Lord has fallen, and somewhere in there his vengeance slavers at the thought that Li too would be dead or captured. Hopefully tortured. Beaten. Trapped.
Six months later he is allowed to leave. He tries to track down Smellerbee and Longshot but they were arrested too when the Dai Li found them in the tunnels under Lake Laogi. They're too unimportant for people to know where they are.
He hangs around and stretches his legs for a week. Then he hears the tales- the Masters of three elements who took back the city by themselves, the Avatar's victory, the Fire Lord's defeat, the Dai Li's duplicity. He hears about Zuko.
Sorry, Fire Lord Zuko. Killed his sister to take the throne.
Cruel, but since Zuko is apparently on the side of the Earth Kingdom, no one seems to care. Jet walks off the tension and feels his fingers itch for his hook swords.
There are no Fire Nation soldiers allowed into Ba Sing Se but their signs are everywhere. Jet finds helmets in gutters, tanks piled up in a square, burn marks on the walls. There are hastily hidden Fire Nation wares still available on the black market, because honestly, hungry people do not care where food comes from so long as they can eat.
Jet stands on his principles and the last reserves of his strength for five days before weakness and starvation drive him to the nearest charity centre.
It's a lesson in humility. He's the only whole, able-bodied boy of his age there. It's mostly full of old people, children and maimed survivors.
A girl comes in with a child in her arms, dusty and obviously tired. The child has a bandage wrapped around her head but she seems cheerful enough. Looking around with big dark eyes she spots Jet, who hadn't meant to stare except that the girl is pretty and serene and looks like she's capable of carrying all the world's cares on her shoulders. Jet hasn't seen too many girls like her before, and he's spent eleven months seeing hardly anyone at all.
The girl's attention is brought to him by a little hand tugging insistently at her sleeve.
"What is it?" she says, and actually looks. Not like half the exhausted mothers around her.
The child points at Jet and Jet slouches, grimacing, whipping his head away and trying not to be seen.
It doesn't exactly work. The child apparently has a head wound that she will not let the healer touch it, and after fifteen minutes of hearing sobs and screams and wailing, Jet snaps. He used to be good with kids and he used to be charming, and so he goes over and tries to do both so the kid will just stop screaming.
His head in pounding; there are little white spots on the edges of his vision and that's usually a sign that his sanity is slipping. Since he fears that as much as he hates it, he does his best to get some peace and quiet. The fact that he succeeds feels slightly unfamiliar after all this time.
The girl doesn't touch him but she lifts a hand gently, slowly, like she's used to soothing people who are skittish.
"Thank you," she says, and, "What's your name?"
Nobody's wanted to know his name in so long that it feels strange to say it. "Jet."
"I'm Song," she says, and nods once.
The child is exhausted with crying and pain and the journey, so Jet watches as she is gathered up into plump, dependable arms.
Old habits die hard and Jet can be charming, but he can also observe- the way a refugee stares, moves, like a warrior- so he doesn't find it hard to pick up the signs that the girl is just as tired as her little charge. So he says, "Let me help," and takes over the burden.
A pair of steady, smiling, completely sane grey eyes looks up at him and the girl dips her head gently in agreement.
The child is almost painfully light and Jet doesn't know if it's because his strength is coming back or if the poor thing's just too skinny, but he finds himself more captivated by the figure walking beside him. The old self-confidence is easy to fake, just for a few minutes, and he leaves them at a vegetable stall.
Except that he doesn't leave. He lingers, watching the curve of a pale neck.
Song looks up at him as if she's seen it all before, the best and worst in people, and she says, "Thank you," again, as if this small act of kindness has meant so much.
Jet thinks for a minute that she might be a bit of a flirt, might be trying her luck with a down-and-out ex-soldier, but there is nothing at all flirty about the friendly way she asks him if he wants to eat with them.
They go to a hawker's stall nearby and eat noodles while sitting on empty fruit crates. The child, Kyra, goes to watch a street juggler spin coloured balls.
A drunk staggers past singing a dirty song, the shredded remains of a soldier's coat thrown over his shoulders and Jet lurches in anger before he sits back down again.
"It's so strange to think the war is over," Song says softly, watching the man stumble away.
Jet shoots her a look from the corner of his eye but she doesn't seem to have any hidden intentions, no hidden agenda, no double meaning.
"Some people don't know what to do with themselves. For so long all we've known has been violence and anger. Now that it's over- what do we have left?"
"Is that what you think? That the anger goes away because one Fire Lord dies?" Jet asks her. He can't stop the bitterness dredge up from the soles of his feet. "In case anyone has forgotten, there's still another Fire Lord alive. The Fire Nation still exists. The murderers and thieves who killed our families and burned our villages get to go home to their wives and children, carrying gifts taken from the homes of our people."
"But the new Fire Lord is..."
"Why should he be any different to the old one?" Jet interrupts, "How can we just forgive everything they've done in the past one hundred years?"
Song turns her face away and they sit in silence for a minute.
He thinks of Li, lifting not a finger to help him as he is led away by the Dai Li. The old man standing there protesting their innocence, lying through his teeth, and Zuko- with his face cold and hard as stone, allowing an innocent man to be arrested for knowing the truth.
Not that he is innocent. Jet thinks he may have lost his innocence at eight, hearing the screams of pain and death as his village was burned to the ground. He may have lost whatever was left when he first drove a knife into the back of a Fire Nation soldier. He certainly lost his sanity in Ba Sing Se, watching the light go around and around.
But he had been right. And Li had let him be arrested anyway.
"We have to go," Song tells him, and stands up.
Jet lumbers to his feet and the cold noodles sit like rocks in his belly. He's been hungry for so long that his stomach doesn't know what to do with the food.
"Do you live near here?" he asks.
She smiles at him. "No. We live in a village outside Ba Sing Se."
Jet leaves the city without looking back.
The village he finds himself in is small and half ruined. Roofs have holes and broken carts lie by the sides of houses with warped wooden walls.
People stare at him as the old vegetable seller drives them down the track that goes through the middle.
"Half the young men never came back," Song whispers to him over Kyra's drowsy head, "And those who came back are not whole."
Jet stays a day and he sees what she means. The handful of soldiers who return are not happy men. They are not violent, nor are they uncaring, but they are haunted. Half of them carry scars. The other half carry guilt. They all carry pain.
Jet, who has his own scar and his own guilt and his own pain, feels like shaking them and screaming at them that this is not the way it ends. This is not what they fought for- this resignation and helpless ignorance of what normal life is.
Song's mother does not like him. She regards him with suspicion and though she gives him a meal, she stands on the porch when he leaves and waits until he is out of sight.
Song looks an apology with her calm grey eyes but Jet shrugs. He is a suspicious person himself and he finds a place to stay with an old potter whose daughter died in the uniform of the Earth Kingdom.
The old man shapes the wet clay with his hands, making simple pots and utensils for eating. Jet watches him and thinks that after six months there must be earthbenders who have returned to this job, who could shape their pots without the worry and care that this old man takes.
He doesn't think to leave the village for a year until a visitor arrives, and tells him of the Jasmine Dragon in Ba Sing Se.
Jet knows why it affects him. The uncle of the Fire Lord. The old man who put the final seal to his arrest, almost to his death, certainly to his imprisonment. The old man who is a firebender.
The old man, the visitor tells him, who helped to take back Ba Sing Se for the Earth Kingdom.
This, then, is where Jet feels the rage fan itself into flames. A life paid for a city is a decision he understands. But where he would have made that decision against a cadre of Fire Nation soldiers, scum who had infected his valley, his forest, his home, he was called a monster and a traitor. A firebender who committed the act merely to save his own skin is the hero.
Jet clenches his fists and leaves the inn, striding into the night because there is nothing more he would like than to lose his temper and his mind and simply let go of it all.
His madness seems to come in fits and bursts, with flashes of dark green foliage and the bright bold moon in the sky, the grit of clay caked beneath his fingernails and the phantom weight of his long-gone swords missing from his hands, from his belt. He has nothing to swing but a stick these days.
He thinks of Li, remembers the glare in those amber eyes, the straight back and lean, cold lines of his face. A refugee, he called himself, but even his worn clothes and the dirt on his hands had not hidden what he was.
And this, this is what Jet now is. He shapes mud to make a pot and he mends roofs and walls and broken carts. When he is allowed, he sits with a girl with calm grey eyes and tries to pretend that he is sane, that he is at peace, but his body remembers the fight, and his blades, and it remembers the bruises and cramps and hot, molten, searing pain of injury. He cannot enter a room without looking for the angle, the exits, the occupants. He cannot ask a question without issuing a challenge.
This is all he knows and he finds himself outside Song's house in the middle of the night a year after he has met her, and as an honourable man he should wait until the morning. But Jet has never been honourable. He has been a fighter, not a warrior, and so he grasps the tree that is outside the house and climbs it, his body remembering the lithe flexibility it used to have, and he waits at the open window while his eyes adjust to the dark inside.
It's not Song's room; it's her mother's.
Jet grins to himself, vicious and desperate and past caring, and he goes in the window anyway. This is his challenge- he must move past the waiting dragon.
There is no art to this. The woman sleeps deeply, with dark smudges under her eyes and dead to the world. Jet slips out of the room and his heart is thundering. So loud he thinks it may wake the sleepers.
He finds Song easily enough. It's a small house. He puts a hand over her mouth and she wakes with a fright, trying to sit up and get away, and he thinks that if he were Zuko, he would have simply held a flame in his hand to show her who was there. But he has no fire, and has not thought to bring a candle or a lantern, so he whispers her name and his and tells her that he would never hurt her.
She takes him downstairs and out of the house, and they sit outside while the moon sinks towards the horizon and he does not tell her about Li. He tells her about the imprisonment, the Dai Li, the way they broke his mind and brainwashed him. He tells her how he almost died. He tells her that the man responsible is in Ba Sing Se and he must go and kill the man, but he asks, "Can I come back to you? When it's over?"
He's never had that. He's never had to travel for his fight. The Fire Nation came to the Earth Kingdom, the soldiers came to the forest, Li came to Ba Sing Se.
She shakes her head. "Let it stay in the past, Jet," she tells him, "The war is over. It's over and you're safe. You're alive. Stay alive."
Part of him thinks cynically that she must believe the man he talks about is young and dangerous. It rejoices that she doesn't want him to die. This side shows itself in his smile, the way his lips curve and his eyes glint with self-confidence as they look down at her. Another part of him knows that Mushi- Iroh- is no useless old man. The Dragon of the West, the visitor said, the man who led the Masters of the three elements in the final siege of Ba Sing Se.
And Jet has not touched a blade for almost two years.
He dips his head and kisses her, and keeps his eyes open so he can watch hers slip closed. No man, he thinks, could possibly do anything else when sitting beside a woman like her.
She doesn't push him away but she retreats from him, head down, face turned away, and Jet lets her go and watches as she lifts her leg and slowly lifts the hem of her robe.
The sight of the scar steals his breath away and for a moment he cannot think, cannot talk. His mind is a traitor and flashes a glint of fire golden eyes and the scar that can never be hidden, never be mistaken.
"We've all been hurt," she tells him, "But the past cannot be changed. The scars will stay, no matter what you do." And then, because he has kissed her, "I know it's not pretty to look at."
She pulls her dress down but he stops her. It's not honourable, but he has never been honourable. Honour is for nobility and royalty and even they are never honourable when they have been dragged to his level on the streets of Ba Sing Se. He reaches down, and he touches the tips of his fingers to the splotchy skin, the uneven surface cool and smooth and soft.
She does not push his hand away. But he sees her eyes look inward to something he cannot see, and then she just looks sad and tired and defeated.
In the year he has known her, Jet has never seen his Song look defeated. So he pulls his hand away and he says, "I'd kill him for you, the guy who did this."
And she smiles, even more tiredly, and says, "And I'd stop you from doing it, if I could."
"Fire destroys."
"Fire warms."
And it is ridiculous, that they are Earth Kingdom and non-benders, and yet they talk about the nature of fire while the sun comes up.
Jet leaves when the first rays pierce the cool blue early morning light, and as he goes, he feels her eyes follow him. There is something watchful in her gaze that he doesn't understand but he shrugs it off.
He ignores the grumbling from his old man and curls up in a corner of the inner room, wrapping his blanket around himself as he sleeps through the day. He dreams of flames and moons and green trees, of swinging high above the ground and giving his life to protect someone, anyone.
When he wakes up, he goes to Song's house. He bows to her mother and pays her respect. He speaks to her as calmly as he can while the white spots dance on the edges of his vision. The rage is kept hidden, locked firmly while he tries to show himself as worthy of the daughter of the house.
"She's too young," Song's mother tells him.
"I can wait," he says, and he tries to turn his smile from something cocky and self-assured to something genuine.
Song comes home from the clinic when he is still there and Jet turns his head to look at her. From the look on his face she guesses. And she stays composed, though she flushes as her eyes flick to her mother.
"Come back tomorrow," she tells him firmly, and steers him out of the house.
He loves her for it, this firm dependability, her sanity, her calm. He loves her for the way she is peace and serenity, and for the way she has suffered. There is no conflict, no hunger in her eyes. She stands with her back straight and her head up as if she can shoulder the burdens of the world.
He goes back the next day and she herself says she is too young.
"I told your mother I'd wait," Jet says, and this time he allows himself a smirk.
Song smiles up at him, and doesn't move back. Nor does she move forward. But she also looks worried. "We're... very different," she says slowly, "I don't know if I am the person you want."
"What does that mean?"
She doesn't answer him, and she looks as if she is embarrassed to explain it in words, so he leans down and kisses her.
"I want you," he whispers, "I can make your happy."
Her eyes slip closed again and he watches her face, her skin that is not perfect but is fair and soft, her hair that is brown and short. He has his hands on her waist and so he knows that she is no slender, delicate flower.
There is gossip that reaches even villages like this one; the Fire Lord came to Ba Sing Se after the war. He brought his betrothed to meet his uncle, a woman of his own nation. Jet has seen no images of the kind of the woman who can catch the Fire Lord's eye, but he has heard the description- tall, dark haired, fair skinned, slender. The Fire Lord came to Ba Sing Se, when Jet was still in prison, and his betrothed stood beside him.
There is other gossip. One rumour says the woman is also a firebender. Another rumour says that the woman is a swordsman. More than four rumours say she can use a weapon of some kind.
Song cannot use a weapon, but Jet does not care. There is no need for weapons when the war is over.