Here's the sequel you all requested. Enjoy!
- Arual-san
00000000000000000000000000
A sea of clouds lay above and a sea of trees below, spanning on for miles with barely a spot of blue sky or brown dirt to be spotted in between. All that could be seen to break up the two fields of color was a spot of red like a fleck of paint accidentally flicked from the smock of the artist that had painted it. On further inspection it could be seen bearing the emblem of the Fire Nation, those within however were hardly loyal parties to the mighty empire. Even after they had mercifully washed their hands of playing the awkward role of both abductor and nursemaid to their most dangerous enemy and had dropped off the Kyoshi Island native Khan in the nearest village so he could hitch a ride home, space in the balloon basket was still a tight fit with even one more passenger to carry than what they'd had at takeoff. One could barely shift a sleeping position without banging an elbow or two.
"You're not taking up space, Mom," Zuko assured at the third time he'd managed to tread over Toph's fingers. "It's uh…this bulky stove." He banged a hand against the stove he was manning to emphasize the fact.
"Thanks, sweetie," said the former Fire Lady, offering up a smile at his less than smooth comment. "It's nice to hear I've managed to keep my girlish figure after all these years."
"Yeah, sweetie," Katara echoed with slit eyes and an excessively wry grin stolen from her brother. She'd snuck up on Zuko with that expression and was at his shoulder wearing it before he could trace.
Zuko's mouth stretched low and he drew away with some apprehension. Shaking his head as if it could banish away that mocking face of hers, he got back to his mother. "Ugh, I'm seventeen! Don't call me that!"
"Oh, that's right; your birthday was last month, wasn't it? Is Cherries Jubilee still your favorite dessert?"
"Mom," Zuko pressed in a low, warning tone.
"I do hope they got the liqueur amounts right," she carried on, oblivious. "That one time the servant girl positively marinated the poor cake in spirits. It wasn't much but it was so potent on yours and Azula's little bodies that you kept crashing into the other, giggling and drunk all throughout the apple bobbing."
At the very thought Katara and Toph's faces puffed out red and to enormous widths to keep from exploding.
"Mom!" It did Zuko no good being reminded of the stupidest time he had almost drowned.
"Still the fussy thing you always were, I see," Ursa sighed. She pulled her knees to her chest in effort to stretch and even clothed in the raggedy garb of a peasant and the less than ladylike position she still held herself like a lady. "What shall I call you then?"
"Zuzu!" And like a spring-loaded trap Toph sprung up from the basket's bottom straight into their circle. "He loves that!"
"He hates that!" Zuko corrected, growling.
"Bah, like that means anything," the girl waved off with little care. "What you hate could fill up several scrolls."
"Want to guess where you rank on that list?"
She shrugged. "Somewhere between big, sloppy bison kisses and getting the flat of Sokka's sword – him several ranks your lesser – on your backside at your last sparring session?"
"You're getting a higher rank every word you speak."
"Ooo-wee, I'm so scared." And she put up a false show of fright. "You know, you're lucky you never had to face me in all those Avatar hunts of yours. Just had to deal with Sugar 'n Sunshine and our effeminate little savior of the world."
"What about Sokka?" Katara felt she had to mention.
"Who?"
"Our Idea Guy? You remember how incomplete everything felt when he was off training."
Despite how it didn't surface to her face, Toph recalled the time when the group had all been lounging around as boneless as any sea slug and with little more energy than one, having to suffer through Katara's painfully bad attempts to fill the comic void of her brother. Sokka had brought the life back into them just by showing up, brought back the cheer and even a blush to the young girl's cheeks without even trying.
It wasn't that Toph didn't have her feminine side, for she did, she just didn't feel at the moment in indulging in it.
"You're right, Katara."
Toph's words caught Katara off guard.
"I've been neglecting appreciation of the crucial members of our group for far too long." Toph reached for Momo, whom she'd recently been sharing body heat with while sleeping in the cold air. "Thank you Momo for always finding us the best berry bushes…even though you try to hoard them all for yourself, for all the times you-"
"Never mind," said Katara, brushing it off as Toph continued on and on thanking Momo for tiny, trivial things.
"To answer your question," Zuko started up again to his mother since the conversation had veered off track, "my name will do just fine, thank you."
"Oh I was just teasing, Zuko," Katara came back when she saw that the big stiff was not for the first time taking things too seriously. "Let your mom call you what she pleases, I don't mind. I think it's sweet."
That of course made him want to protest endearment names even more. He still had to hold up the pride ingrained into him of a Fire Nation prince…even if his title was at present time null and void. If it was allowed to fly with the girls Zuko didn't even want to imagine how hard of a time the guys would give him once they reached the temple: their former enemy for so long seen as the embodiment of his native element all fiery anger and destruction…now with a loving mother to coax from him his feelings.
They would never let him live it down, especially not Sokka.
Somehow Ursa seemed to pick up in her son's silence that he was at that stage in his adolescence where one craved independence. Though he would still always be hers, Zuko wasn't her little boy anymore. He was fast becoming a man.
"Very well, Zuko," she said and it wasn't a huge sacrifice she had to make. She was still just thankful to be in good regards with at least one of her children, not brainwashed into a bloodthirsty combatant by her ex-husband.
"Not to worry there, ol' boy," said Toph, giving him a slug in the arm. "We tease because we love."
Growling over it to himself, Zuko subtly rubbed at the arm, trying not to show how hard the little earthbender could hit.
"Since we're all awake may as well pass out rations." Katara passed out not the usual bowls of rice but an assortment of fruit they'd picked up in the forest from their last stop and for once she gave an equal portion of it to Zuko whom, since his arrival at the Western Air Temple, had always been received by her with the last and least bottom-of-the-pot scrapings of burnt rice.
He made sure to nod to her in appreciation.
She received it and returned her own small nod, gestures which no one else noticed.
"So this-" – Katara pointed to a point at the map spread between them – "Is where we are right now. We're going to be going over a minor river in about a half a mile and then adjust the balloon southeast for the Western Air Temple."
"The Avatar," Ursa said quietly, looking down upon the map, "Such an honor. I apologize, but I may just be an extra commodity in any upcoming battles."
"You're not required to fight, Ursa," said Katara. "But I'm sure you can provide us inside information about the inner workings of the palace."
"You could've asked me that," Zuko pointed out with some annoyance, oblivious as males could sometimes be that Katara had been trying to ease his mother's burden.
"Yes," answered Katara, "but I'm sure with her higher position she may've been privy to certain things that you weren't."
Zuko's reply was a simple grunt.
"I feel that I must thank you kind girls again for rescuing me," And, despite that she was born into royalty, Ursa bowed her head to the two. "You didn't know me and yet you risked your lives for me. I am in your debt."
"No," Katara disagreed and in that she was firm. "You owe me nothing."
"Same here," Toph agreed. "Glad to help."
"You have saved my life. Bound to my honor, I am indebted to you until I can return to you a favor of equal value."
"That's really not-"
"It is the way of our nation."
"Hey, hold it a second," Toph slashed her hand through the air, directing attention her way. "Is this why Princess over here has been grinning and bearing all the overtime hours of payback I've been taking out on him for burning my feet? I'd have stopped a long time ago but he never said anything!"
Shock alighted Ursa's fair features. "You burned her feet?"
"Kinda," he gulped. "It was an accident."
"Oh no," Katara breathed out when it dawned on her. "You're not…for every…" For every wrong Zuko had done their group, for the kindness they'd nevertheless paid him in return he could very well be making it up for years. "Don't you go keeping tabs on everything," she said to him, making the older boy feel smaller than her. "I hereby revoke any and all debts, you hear me? Leave it in the past."
"I…" Zuko started, unsure.
"If you're so set on turning against your own nation for the good of this world you'll respect the ways of my tribe along with your own. We do not hold onto such things forever and ever. You may have been our enemy once but-"
"But you're our comrade now," Toph finished for Katara, though the words she spoke might not have been dead-on with Katara's.
From his seat Zuko sat motionless. He blinked very slowly. He blinked again. "I……thank you."
Again, using her powers of observation rather than speaking, a skill she'd developed finely as a noblewoman, Ursa decided not to pry into things she ought not to pry. She changed the subject quite suddenly, not a difficult task in the others' silence, by pointing to a second location on the map. "This is the village of my former residence. I hate to press this upon you but there is some number of possessions I would like to pick up. It's not far and a select few are quite valuable to me, I daresay. Would you mind?"
"Only five miles? No, not at all."
The balloon reached the village in the early stages of night. It was a modest little place small enough to likely not even be marked on most maps and most of its inhabitants had gone home for the night. Only a gang of panther-cats prowled the streets and, out of recollection of the breed, Momo remained behind in the balloon while the four headed into the deserted alleyways. Their destination was the teashop/inn where Ursa had worked and when they entered it they found the owner staring face on with them, a bo in hand.
Each of the kids froze in place in plenty awkward positions.
"He sleeps with his eyes open," Ursa assured them all and she clapped her hands before the old man's face to prove it. Her fingers walked along the wall behind him and closed over a key. "My room is number four. Retrieve what you can."
Awkwardness turned to confusion.
"You're not coming with?"
"I have another destination in mind."
With a mighty snort, the old man jolted in his sleep, mumbling about old glory days in the war, thereby silencing anything the three of them had been meaning to say. Ursa shooed them to the stairs and they didn't question her orders.
The stairs pushed Katara to the limit with every step creaking with the force of thunderbolt in the dead quiet of the inn. She didn't want to have to use her bending against a frail old man when she could seriously injure him with even a movement of subdual. Though it seemed nothing short of a quaking fissure rupturing through the ground would wake the old man, Toph still pointed out for the others the weak points in the floor below to prevent any further noise.
Door number four opened soundlessly enough and the three started packing up whatever possessions of Ursa's had not yet been pawned.
Navigating still through the ground floor of the inn, Ursa knew that her end of the mission was the riskier of the two she'd had to make for the innkeeper's wife was not the same deep sleeper as he. She closed a hand over the handle and turned it round with great caution.
There the old woman lay in a rickety old rocking chair, swaying back and forth with the weight of her fleshy body.
With the same great care taken it opening it, Ursa pushed back the door, holding her breath at the thin wail it made. She took the bedroom in as a whole with its pile of ashes in the hearth, homemade quilt over the small bed and the washing basin and mirror. She scanned it all and found what she was looking for at once.
She made her first step inside.
00000000000000000000000000
Already had Katara and Toph hopped back into the basket of the balloon while Zuko loaded up the things they had managed to save. Three wrapped up bundles of cloth lay at his feet and, as some of them were quite heavy, he loaded them in one at a time to the girls. Almost on cue, Ursa arrived just as Zuko had been turning to go back for her. "Is that the last of it?" he asked, looking to where she held yet other bundle in her arms. He clapped his hands. "Toss it over and we'll get going."
Looking up from the thing she held, Ursa fixed him with a very odd look that he could not place.
"Uhh…" Zuko stuttered, unsure of what he was supposed to say or do, what she was expecting of him, "that's fine though if you want to err…pull your own weight or what have you." He stepped aside. "After you."
She stepped past him and into the balloon.
It wasn't until they had cleared the village that she turned back to and knelt beside him.
"Mom?"
From the bundle that lay on her lap Ursa pulled back a flap from its top to reveal the tiny face of a sleeping toddler.
"Say hello to your second little sister."