CHAPTER 3: BLOOD (PART 2)

A low fever broke out over Kei during the next few hours, and with the sleepless turn of events the night had brought, Iroh decided it was in everyone's best interest to close the Jasmine Dragon for the entirety of the day. He left with a now washed, but frantic, Len in tow, giving Zuko the task of monitoring her condition in his absence. The scarred teen sat in the room beside the woman, meditating in the darkness. He broke to change the wet cloth on her forehead at random intervals, watching the muscles in her face contort into a range of painful frowns.

Don't you dare pity her. He willed himself not to soften his resolve towards this stranger. She brought it on herself.

A sudden moan snapped him from the thoughts of his mind, and he turned to regard Kei's eyelids fluttering slowly. Leaning forward, he said her name in the silence, trying to get a lucid reaction from her. His voice didn't seem to register any change, and she closed her eyes again, turning slowly in her fever-induced slumber. Her hand shot out in his direction, a soft mumble breaking from her lips. His eye twitched at her helpless state, wanting nothing more than to leave her to her own unhappy dreams as his thoughts grew uncomfortable. Despite the urge to get up and leave, he knew the honorable thing to do was stay here until she settled down again.

Reaching out, he put his hand over hers. The extra heat of her fevered skin would have bothered most people, but being a Firebender, the risen temperature seemed almost comforting. In all his life, the only hand of a woman that he had ever held was that of his mother. His mind snapped back to the memories of those days, filtering through their happy moments together until the sharp imposition of her departure brought them all to a sudden halt. Unlike his mother, Kei's hand was nobbled and slightly worn, probably from her toilsome work. He had always assumed that girls had small, dainty hands, but in reality, most women were sent out to work if not of noble blood. The thought of women sent a cold tingle up his spine, and willing himself not to think about his heinous sister or her two cohorts, he turned his thoughts else where, going back to his quest for the Avatar.

Kei let out a heavy sigh, her hand drooping limpidly against the edge of the blanket. Zuko looked over her, only to see her face more relaxed. The years seemed to slip off her face, and he was almost baffled that she looked so vulnerable and childish. There is no way she's already in her twenties. He grumbled to himself, snatching his hand from hers. And there is no way everything she's told to us is the truth. Who is she really here to help? Or is she only here to destroy?

Her fever broke the next night when the two men were going to turn in for the night. They had been sitting in Iroh's room, attempting to play a game of Pai Sho, when a few undecipherable words escaped the now conscious woman's mouth. Moving over to where she was now slumped over in a feeble attempt to sit, Iroh helped support her wavering posture, while Zuko sat by his side with a signature scowl plastered on his face.

"Easy, Kei." Iroh pleaded with her gently, watching as a low hiss of pain escaped her lips. "You have sustained a nasty knife wound. Do not force your body if it is not ready yet."

One of her hands crumpled around her head, shielding her expression from the men. "I'll be alright. The boy?"

"He's fine!" Zuko snapped, wondering how in the world she could be thinking of that pretentious street urchin at this moment in time. "He ate our food, got a nice nap, and hey, we even decided to sweeten the deal and gave him a bath! Anything else we were supposed to do?"

Her first reaction to his irritation was a deft punch that intersected his jaw. The scarred prince cradled the dull pain for a moment, before snarling at her with a look of pure loathing. Iroh only chuckled at the turn of events, knowing that humor was usually the easiest way to break Zuko away from a worthless venture in his uncontrollable emotions. The teenager shot him a look, making to get up, but the thought occurred to him that interrogating her would be worth more than the trouble she was trying to cause, causing him to sit down again with an irritable sigh.

"Sorry." She whispered, pinching the bridge of her nose before sweeping a heavy gaze between the two. Her eyes were brimming with unshed tears, but by the way her lips were set, it was clear she was doing her best to not break down in front of them. "I'm in a mess of trouble, aren't I?"

"It all depends." Iroh said cautiously, releasing his hold on her. He looked to Zuko, who was gesturing to get on with it already. Heaving a sigh, he looked back to the anguished woman. "Kei, it has become clear to me that you know something of our existence before coming to Ba-Sing-Se. Although it may not mean much to you, it is very dangerous for you to have this knowledge. Before anything else, we must know how this knowledge came to your ears, and see how to proceed with the situation as it sits."

She nodded, looking at Zuko with a torn expression, before turning her gaze towards the nothingness of the air directly in front of her. "It's a long story, so please bear with me. When I was a young child, there was a large plaque that swept through my landlocked village, about a two-week journey from Ba-Sing-Se. I barely survived it, and things were always different from then on. I-" Her voice cracked, but the tears remained held within the boundaries of her gleaming eyes. "I was always a little too knowledgeable about things then most children should have been. My parents just threw it off as an overactive imagination, and for a while I just accepted it. The children of the village didn't feel comfortable around me from the get-go, except for Huang-Fu."

She smiled, the tears finally spilling slowly down her ivory cheeks. "He was always there for me. We used to climb trees, dance, play games together, and he always listened when I had one of my.. moments of clairvoyance. It helped for a while, and everything continued on with little incidence. Then one day, as Huang-Fu and I were climbing an old gnarled tree as teenagers, I had a sudden vision come over me of our village burning from the viewpoint of where I was standing. My consciousness faded, and I fell from the tree before he could even pieced together what was happening. I sustained a concussion, and my parents could not take the mess my clairvoyance had turned me into."

She paused, gesturing for Zuko to hold out his hand. After a huff, he handed it to her, only to have it placed on the back of her head. There was a coin-sized lump hidden within the tresses of her hair, and it seemed to move slightly against where it met her scalp. Disgusted, he pulled away, looking at her wearily. She shrugged, rubbing the back of her head lightly.

"Just to give some truth to what I was saying." She muttered sullenly, before clearing her voice. "Anyway, I was locked in my home. They gave me lessons on all sorts of etiquette that they had neglected to pin on me from an earlier age, and that's how I came to work on embroidery and the such. Life was hell. It was like those silly little stories you heard as a child of girls locked up in towers, left there to wait for someone else to take responsibility of their existence. Though no one ever did for a long time.

"I tried to tell them about my vision for months after everything settled down about my accident, but it always fell on deaf ears. After a while, I started to think that I was crazy. No one ever believed me. That was, until Huang-Fu was finally allowed to see again. Thinking back on it, I think my parents always blamed him for letting me fall. He listened intently as I told him about my vision, and surprisingly, he believed in my intuition, like he always had.

"We made a plan to escape at the end of the week, not knowing when or how the fire was going to occur. And we did. His family had so many kids, they wouldn't miss Huang-Fu, who was always a little to serious for his own good. The two of us traveled inwards towards the country, finding small work to add to our funds. It was hard, but spirits, it was freedom for both of us. After four months of running, we finally got the news that flipped our world upside down: Our village had been burned to the ground as the Fire Nation was working their way towards Ba-Sing-Se. My vision had actually come true."

The gravity of her confession seemed to weigh heavily on the group for a few moments. She let out a sharp exhale, as a mirthless smile began tugging at her lips. "That was what it took to convince Hunag-Fu that we needed to settle down and move on with our lives. Up until then, my visions had just been de-ja-vu moments that usually had little worth, but this changed everything. Going to Ba-Sing-Se was our best option, but we had some difficult decisions to make ahead of us. Knowing the city, we would most likely be separated since we were not related to each other, and that was never an option. So, the two of us got married the day I turned sixteen.

"We made our way to this city, and did our best to find work to support ourselves in this new home. After months of living in the lower ring, it was so hard to keep going. I was constantly tired and hungry, and the secret that Huang-Fu had been hiding from me finally came out: He had been an Earthbender since we were children. I was shocked. Sure, I had seen him practicing stances as a kid, but whenever I was around, he was just there to join in with whatever I felt like doing; he was just being a regular child like me. He asked if I would be alright with him signing on to begin training for the city's guards or even the Dai Li. I was a little reluctant for him to be put in harms way, but I ended up agreeing in his cause.

"Life turned around for us when he was officially inducted into the guards. We moved here, into the middle ring. Working for the city, he knew who and what went around, and ended up getting me some work at Madame Lu-Ji's, for whom I've been working diligently ever since. We were happy, at least it seemed, for a year or two as we got into the pace of things in a brighter future. I had never really loved Huang-Fu, despite the fact that we had been married for a short while, but as life got its own steady pace again, my feelings took flight, and I loved that man more than life itself.

"As my feelings grew more, the visions seemed to flicker into non-existence. For once in my life, it felt like I was finally able to function like a regular person. But Huang-Fu, he began to change. He saw so much on his shifts as a guard, that I think it was finally getting to him. I wanted him to confide in me, like I had from the very beginning with him, but he would just shrug and say he didn't want to get me involved in the particulars of his job. One night, a guard came to my door, saying that my husband had been caught assisting a group of lower-ring people who were talking about a coup against the workings and was now visiting the Earth King at Lake Laogi."

She broke off to let out a frustrated growl, hinting that the situation had taken a swift turn of events. "When he returned a few days later, Huang-Fu was a completely different person. He had no care to do anything but go to work, eat a little with me, then go off to sleep. I.. I felt so helpless and alone. I tried to fight with him, to plead with him, but it seemed like whatever I said went over his head. My visions came back in fragments and pieces, and now I had no one to help me out through them. We were both lost. I used to pray to the spirits to bring us back to the top of our lives again, so that Huang-Fu could find a way out of whatever it was that holding him captive. I just wanted him back.

"But he never recovered. One night, he asked me for some of those little tea cakes that the store we went to in celebration usually sold. I was so ecstatic that he was finally asking for something that I ran all the way down there to get them to bake a fresh batch for him. When I came back, I heard the water running in the bathroom. I thought he was just taking a bath before we were going to sit and talk. Everything was going to turn around, finally. The water kept running for another ten minutes after I set out the cakes and made us some tea. I went to the door and knocked, but there was no response. The only logical thought running through my mind was that he probably just fell asleep in the tub waiting for me to return. When I opened the door, water was starting to spill out of the tub around him. It wasn't until I got closer that I noticed the blood seeping through the water around him. Huang-Fei had killed himself."

Both sets of golden eyes turned to gaze at her with elicit shock, unable to do anything but sit, completely floored, as she broke down into a heave of bereaved tears. Suicide? Zuko had heard of people doing such a things, and if he had to admit it, the idea had jumped into his head when he was first banished but... this man actually went through with it? The ability to rationalize what she had just said was jarring his mind.

The older man placed a sympathetic hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off with a gentle swipe from one of her own. "They came to to take him away, but since he had died an dishonorable death, everything went downhill very quickly for me. He wasn't even given a funeral. They wanted to make people who ended up like Huang-Fu disappear very quickly, you see. Ba-Sing-Se is a city of only the most honorable and hard working people, so those who break the mold are swallowed in the shadows of the city's undertakings. I was considered a widow in the light of technicalities, but the city still considered me married to him, so I was left on my own. They made me stay in our apartment, where every single moment made me think of him. It was sickening and maddening. After a while, I just stopped caring. A few people obviously got word of his suicide, and my world was flipped over all over again. Dirty looks and encounters on the streets happened all the time that I even began to expect them when I went out. No one ever came to my rescue, and I felt lost within myself. The grief of losing my husband, on top of these attacks seemed so burdensome on my pathetic excuse for a heart.

"My visions came and went, but I think my mind was just slipping. Nothing made any sense anymore. I just started disappearing into my own world, just to live with the pain. Then, about a few months ago, I had another vision."

She broke off to stare at Zuko with frighteningly serene gaze. "I was standing in a blank canvas of white. A whirlwind of colors and smells swept around me, and a large gray dragon was staring at me, wrapping its body in the endless width of the canvas around me. Looking into its large eyes, I was transported through fragments of different memories- A serene pond, a bloody, lifeless corpse, a game board tile, and lastly, you. You were walking away from wherever I was looking from, wearing some fancy crimson robe, and I heard someone yelling over my shoulder 'Zuko!' You looked over to me once, then kept walking. It ended with me standing in front of the dragon again, laying my head against it in a truce of understanding."

He chanced a glance at Iroh, who was now deep in thought. Everything she said seemed to ring true, which explained how his real name had come to her knowledge. But still, she couldn't possibly be talking about his uncle, could she? All those images she had just described fit into his life somehow: the Fire Palace's small pond, the loss of Lu Ten, his ridiculous obsession with Pai Sho, and of course, Zuko himself. Nothing else seemed to fit into what she was seeing.

Kei seemed to notice the tension in the air and gave a bitter scoff. "I should have known. I am crazy! Unless, you happen to know a dragon, Zuko."

She barked joylessly, shaking her head at her own accusations. Iroh cleared his voice in the silence that followed, gesturing for Zuko to let him answer. "Actually, Kei, you are not incorrect. My nephew does happen to know one dragon, though in name only. When I was a general, many gave me the nickname the Dragon of the West."

Her eyes were almost popping out of her skull when she finally found the strength to regard him. "I-Impossible-"

"It's true!" Zuko was losing his patience with her, now that it was clear that she was just a scatterbrained clairvoyant. "He was one of the best leaders this war had ever seen. You should be honored that your stupid vision showed him like that!"

"I am pleased to hear you speak so highly of me, nephew," Iroh had his signature grin plastered across his face. "But let us not provoke Kei."

She shook her head, placing her hands against her flushed face. "I think I'm going to be sick."

The older man chuckled, helping her to lay back down in the comfort of the blanket. "Easy now. You have just put yourself through another set of stress for our sake. I am sorry that we had to provoke you, but it seems that we both have some answers now, don't we?"

Her eyes seemed far off again, the corners of her mouth pulling into a confused grin. "Hm."

She flitted off to sleep after a few minutes, and Iroh got up, letting out a heavy sigh. Zuko watched him turn towards the door, seeming to be in another world. He was tempted to follow him, but at this moment, he knew there was really nothing to say. Instead, he reverted back to meditating, glad for the first time that he was the one who had been spared another round of conflict with this sad woman and her uncanny knack to stir up the deepest of memories in everyone she came into contact with.

AN: Well, here's a larger chapter. I see there's a few people keeping up with it, so thank you. Please enjoy! ~E.F.