ch: instinct.
characters: jet, zuko.
tumblr prompt: jetko week.
…
"Hold on," that deep laugh had sounded, young, bright eyes turning towards that voice attentively, "hold on, Jet, we'll be home soon."
It's the first thought that flashes across his mind after the rage dies down into something minutely vicious, toiling with remorse instead. How could he, how dare he suggest that there was a home there? How could he, when Jet remembered so vividly the broody, downcast boy who'd felt that same intangible memory of home that he had?
We'll be home soon, his father had told him, and they'd gone home, and Jet had gone to play in the forest, come back only to see it all incinerating. Li had been like that, because Jet knew what it looked like, even in eyes as yellow as his, to see reflections of fire destroying everything you loved.
And Li had been Zuko, and Zuko had been Fire Nation, but he was just like Jet, gone for a moment only to lose everything.
Jet didn't care that Zuko was reaching out now, because he wanted no part of a home in the Fire Nation, when every deep, crimson piece of décor made him flinch with memories that could bring tears to the creases of his eyes. That was no power he wanted to turn over to anyone else, least of all Li—Zuko—who'd already made a fool of him once with those thin, pink lips and calloused fingers over his skin.
Friends, he'd said when Smellerbee asked where he disappeared to, they'd been nothing more than friends and Jet didn't keep track, it was in his blood to distance himself from these things, something he did without thinking about, really. The same way those memories were in his blood, a constant reminder, a broken moral compass.
"Jet?"
But Zuko is real, and even Jet knows when he turns his back, if he turns his back to leave, that fire will not consume him.
(Because he is fire, and even if everything else is charred to dust, he will still have him, so why not have something that will last?)