A/N - Hey! This is my first fanfic, so please please please review, and I'll be forever grateful. I'll be forever grateful plus one. To those who can't get this pairing - let's just say I go for the adversarial relationships, and you don't get a 'ship much more fraught with tension than ZukoxSokka! Thanks again for reading and (im going to beg so get ready for pitifulness) pretty please leave a review at the end?
Disclaimer: I don't own Avatar. (Or Sokka. or Zuko. sob.)
And The Spirits Smiled
The crowded outer circles of Ba Sing Sei provided the perfect cover for a refugee needing to lay low. New immigrants poured in daily and added their own faces, languages, and customs to the melting pot of the Earth kingdom's capital.
Despite his dislike of crowds, markets, cities, and generally anything having to do with people, Zuko felt grateful for the mobs that surrounded him. His pale skin was only one shade among thousands of others, his loose scruffy hair looked like any other teenagers', and even his scar could be chalked up to a war injury. Within the teeming streets of Ba Sing Sei's lower district, he had assumed he could walk for weeks without seeing a familiar face.
Either he had underestimated the anonymity the crowds gave him, or the spirits were severely irritated with him.
"Hey! You!... Yeah, stop running!"
Ignoring the indignant outcries of the lanky boy following behind him, Zuko dug his heels in to the sandy market floor and sped up.
'Damn. Too many people to get past... but if I can get out of his sight, I can take a side alley and lose him' Zuko thought distractedly. That was proving harder than he had expected. The loudmouth behind him was keeping pace, stride for stride. 'If only there weren't so many people here! If I could firebend, he'd be down in two seconds flat.' If it came to a fight between him and the idiot following him, Zuko had no doubts about who would win.
"I know it's you! Stop running and face me like a man, you coward!" Pant... Pant... "Or... are you... afraid I'll... beat you?!" His pursuer was wasting breath yelling, but it didn't seem to be slowing him down at all.
The crowds were thinning out as they reached the end of the markets, and Zuko knew he had to face the idiot chasing him and shut him up before he yelled something incriminating within an Earth guard's earshot.
He dashed to the left, sliding under a line of laundry and into the alley it hid. He pressed himself against the wall and stood silently, hoping he had lost his pursuer. That idiot Water peasant, what was he doing in Ba Sing Sei?
Seconds ticked by. Zuko caught his breath, and then stepped away from the wall, allowing himself a smirk. That fool had gone running right by, and was probably still chasing the back of someone he thought to be Zuko halfway through the city right now.
"AAAAUGH-HA!"
Or not. Quick reflexes were the only thing that kept Zuko from being brained by the piece of firewood his pursuer had hurled at him.
"You!" the Water tribesman seethed.
Aware that he couldn't risk using any firebending, Zuko fell back into a defensive stance and studied his opponent. Tan brown skin, accusing blue eyes, lanky figure, nonstop commentary... it was definitely the Avatar's friend. The Water tribe soldier. His hair was out of it's usual wolftail, loose and dripping. In fact, the rest of him was dripping too.
Wait a minute, where the hell was his shirt?!
Zuko realized the other boy had been talking during his assessment, and paid attention to see if the boy was saying anything important.
"– of my bath, and who walks by? Why, it's the psychotic Prince of the psychotic Fire Nation! And I say to myself, Sokka, you must be imagining things. Surely the spirits don't hate you that much, to make you get up in the middle of your only relaxation time and go chase after some fire weirdo –"
Zuko tuned him out again and focused on escape plans. Unfortunately, the indignant Water peasant blocking the alley's only exit had other ideas.
"– but it is you. What are you doing here?" The dark-haired boy stopped ranting and glared at him, catching Zuko's amber eyes with his own blue ones. Zuko noted that any efforts at intimidation on the tribesman's part were ruined by the fact that he was only wearing a pair of hastily grabbed cloth pants... which were sticking to him in very interesting places, and...
No. Now was not a good time to be thinking about that, specifically about the Water peasant. Actually, never was probably the best time to be thinking things like that about the Avatar's protector.
"The actions of the Fire Nation are of no concern to you, Waterpeasant." Zuko stated flatly.
"Gee, thanks, I'll remember that the next time I want to know when the Fire Nation takes its potty breaks. But I was asking about you." The tribesman emphasized his point by stepping forward and poking Zuko squarely in the chest with an extended finger.
'Well that makes things easier. I can beat him in close combat.'
Zuko grabbed the offending hand and pulled, elbowing the stumbling boy in the back as he jerked forwad, sweeping his legs out from under him and leaving him flat on the ground. Zuko got two steps away before the Water boy – Sokka, Zuko reminded himself sourly – hooked a foot around his own ankle and sent him crashing.
The blue-eyed boy scrambled over and aimed a fist at Zuko's face. Zuko rolled to the side and lashed out with a side kick. Sokka let out anoof and lay sprawled on his back in the alley. The fire prince ounced and within seconds, he loomed over the other boy, knees on either side of the darker boys' legs, hands pinning his wrists to the ground.
It might have been petty, but Zuko couldn't resist leaning closer to the boys' wide-eyed face. "These are the so-called skills of the Water tribe?" he asked silkily. "No wonder every true warrior in history has come from the Fire Nation. You have no planning, no strategy, no techni –"
His words were cut off by a soft pair of lips mashed against his own. An enthusiastic tongue came with it, tracing a path on his lower lip. Zuko's mind scrambled blindly, trying to remember if there had been any one else in the alley. No. It could only be the Water soldier. Whose teeth were worrying at his lower lip in a way that was filling Zuko's head with a pleasant buzzing...
"Mm-ugh!" He jerked his head up in surprise, and stared at the boy on the ground. Then he leapt to his feet with a cry and fled to the other side of the alley, as far from the Water boy as he could get, which was about the length of a tea vendor's cart.
Sokka – the apparently deranged Water teen – got to his feet on the other side, smirking at Zuko's astonished expression. "Ha! Now who says the best fighters come from Fire Nation? A true warrior can deal with any attack! Somebody from the Water tribe would have – "
The rest of Sokka's triumphant monologue didn't get a chance to leave his mouth, as Zuko lunged at him from the other side of the alley. Pale hands wrapped around a dark waist and pulled the Water boy against the chest of one extremely toned Fire heir. Zuko's lips fastened on Soka's in a frenzied way, and the other boys' struggling soon turned into something closer to writhing. Zuko found his whole body tuned into the buzzing that had filled his head when Sokka first kissed him as his hands found places to stroke and hold. Sokka, for his part, was busy trying to even the score between him and Zuko clothes-wise.
'Better than fighting. Definitely. Is this why I've always had so much fun taunting him?' Zuko wondered vaguely.
'Better than Suki! No wonder he always stares at me. But this might be hard to explain to Katara... oh shut up brain." Sokka tried harder than usual to ignore the voice in his mind.
With the few brain cells not being used to control tongue movement left, both boys decided that perhaps the spirits were not as irritated with them as they had thought.
Fin!
So what did you think? not enough description? disconnected plot? too many words ending in "-se"? Click on that beautiful blue button below to let me know!