Title: Yesteryear 4/?
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plotline.
Summary: Things aren't always what they seem, but some things transcend appearances.
Rating: Call it PG for now.
Notes: Not that I've explained anything yet, really, but we'll call it forward plot movement, right?
The next morning, Lee was startled awake by Lian and her minions. It was only by dint of throwing a childlike fit that he managed to get them to leave him alone for even part of his bath, and even then, she came swooping in just after he'd finished the delicate bits to finish him off.
Then, refusing him any more than the barest modicum of privacy, he was dragged out to a table where he received another sanding, this time of both his feet and hands, had a massage that was rather more brisk than relaxing, and was again stuffed into clothes that made him feel like some sort of peacock elk, all display feathers and antlers. She bustled him out the door and into the waiting arms of the guards, who led him down to the dining room where the Fire Lord was waiting.
He received another shock to the system as he walked in, as there were a bunch of people his own age in the room, dressed not in finery, but in a variety of types of normal clothes. There was one younger girl dressed in Earth Kingdom clothes that were quite finely made, if practical. Another Earth Kingdom girl, this one just about Lee's age in solidly made warrior's clothes, who was talking intensely with a young man of the Water Tribes.
The sight of the dark skin and blue eyes sparked another flash of longing for his wife, and the resemblance made him wonder if the young man were perhaps a cousin to his orphaned Tara.
Also there was a boy, dressed in unusual clothes of oranges and yellows, who was playing with some sort of flying monkey thing. More oddly, the boy had no hair and arrow-shaped tattoos on his head and hands. The Fire Lord was grinning happily at the small group and looked up as Lee walked in. "Ah! Prince Zuko! Do join us. I had extended an invitation to the Avatar, Aang," here the tattooed boy bowed in acknowledgement, then spoiled his dignity by waving cheerily. "And his friends, Sokka of the Southern Water Tribe, Suki, of the Kyoshi Warriors and Miss Toph Bei Fong of the Gaoling Bei Fong family."
Each of them nodded to him, and Lee was left wondering what this new thing was intended to accomplish.
"So Iroh," said Sokka. "Why did you want us here?" Then he jerked his head at Lee. "Any particular reason you needed to introduce us to Zuko? He chased us long enough to know who we are, anyhow."
Oh, it was something to do with that again. Lee stomped into the room, once again in high dudgeon, saying, "Not this again. You've already made it impossible for me to go home, Fire Lord. Why you insist on telling people I'm your nephew I don't know. I'm not Zuko and I never have been."
The Avatar was suddenly leaning far over, in Lee's face and said, "Well, if you're not that's a pretty amazing coincidence." He poked at Lee's scar. "I can't imagine too many people have a scar just like that."
Lee batted his hand away irritably. "Stop that! I'm not a zoo animal, I teach fighting at a dojo in the Earth Kingdom and I'd really like to get back to that instead of sitting in this stupid palace with strange women who insist on watching me bathe."
"Really?" said Sokka perking up. "That's-"
"A lot less appealing than you'd think," he said dryly, having a good idea what the other man was thinking.
"Yes, honey," said the Kyoshi Warrior woman, Suki wasn't it? "I'm pretty sure that would be very unappealing." She fixed Sokka with a Look. "I know I'd find it unappealing to have you alone in a room with a bunch of women watching you bathe."
"Yes, dear," said Sokka.
He had to ask though. "Zuko chased you?"
"Yeah," Aang told him. "You were banished by Ozai because you didn't want to send troops out to die for no reason. It was when you got that scar," he blithely narrated the story, unaware of the discomfort Lee felt at this reference to someone he wasn't. "Anyhow, he said you could only come home if you brought him the Avatar. So you chased me everywhere. Until you just vanished that time in Ba Sing Se."
"Ba Sing Se," he repeated slowly.
"Yes," said the Avatar, cheerfully. Seemingly unaware of Lee's surprise at the mention of the city. Then he suddenly seemed to become a little downcast. "A good friend of mine vanished in there as well. We're still trying to find out what happened there."
"I'm sorry," Lee replied automatically. He was already distracted by his own memories of Ba Sing Se. He'd wound up in hiding there after fleeing his army unit and it was where he'd met Tara. Could it be . . .
No. He told himself firmly. If you were the prince, you'd know. Where would this many fake memories come from anyhow?
The rest of breakfast was taken up in reminiscences of times he didn't remember, and a series of hopeful looks by the Fire Lord. When it was time to leave, he was about to let his guard-nursemaids lead him back to his suite, when the Fire Lord told him, "Today you will spend your day with me. You must learn the administration of the country, Prince Zuko."
Taking a deep breath and resigning himself to being even further wedged into the place of the prince, Lee got up and followed the old man out to his office where he spent a surprisingly not completely dull morning learning about distribution of resources, politic means of putting off requests for funding and various initiatives to better the nation.
Then came lunch and another stretch of semi-boredom, this time as the Fire Lord went to a series of meetings and audiences with various people and Lee got to watch him do what he'd been doing all morning as he wrote letters to various officials, only this time face to face. In between each meeting, the Fire Lord would deconstruct everything he'd done so that Lee could follow his reasons for this or that action.
Dinner followed and the return of the Avatar and his friends. At the end of the meal, Sokka asked if he could spar with Lee. "Aang said you were the best with these two swords," he said. "I wanted to see how good you really are."
For a moment, he thought to refuse. If he brought out his dao blades he'd be giving in to this delusion that he was the prince.
But he really wanted a fight.
Tara always said he was too impulsive. "Just because the blades are my weapons doesn't mean I'm the prince," he protested. The logic was weak even to him.
They were soon settled into the sparring arena and Lee found himself relaxing for the first time since he'd been kidnapped. All that mattered was the thrust, parry and counterthrust of the spar. He felt a grin on his lips as he spun and had to hastily change his tactics to keep this Water tribesman from disarming him.
The Kyoshi woman asked for the chance to fight him next, and those wickedly sharp, bladed fans of hers lost him two battles out of three. "I'll want a rematch," he told her, breathing hard and grinning from the joy of the challenge.
She smirked. "Oh? You're that desperate to lose?"
"You're that willing to bet I can't beat you more than one time out of three?" he asked back in the same tone.
"I wanna try!" exclaimed the Avatar.
Lee whipped around. "What?"
The Avatar shrugged. "You've made it obvious you're a firebender, and since we were both trained by your uncle-"
"He's not my uncle because I'm not the prince," interrupted Lee, his good mood shot. Then a question occurred to him. "How did you wind up being trained by the Fire Lord anyhow?"
Shrugging a little, the Avatar said, "Azula had captured Sokka in Ba Sing Se and he came with me and Toph to rescue him. Then he came with us when we left the city. I still needed to learn firebending and he hadn't found any trace of y-" He cut himself off, and said, "Zuko. So . . ." he shrugged again. Lee was grateful for that small concession to his feelings on the issue.
"If you're so determined that you're not the prince," asked the girl Toph, "Why haven't you left yet?"
He glared at her, sourly. "I tried. Agni knows, I tried. The Fire Lord now has me tailed by guards everywhere and a dozen guards under the windows. I'm willing to be he has every single secret exit to the palace being watched as well. I can't escape."
"Ah," she said, and sat back in satisfaction.
"Ah? That's it?" he asked her.
She shot him a grin. "Well, I was worried you'd just been sitting here and whining the whole time. If you actually tried, then I can respect that." Toph raised an eyebrow at him. "The real question is, are you still trying?"
Was he, he wondered. Which was when a new plan came to him. It would take a little longer, but if he played along enough, maybe he could get the old man to ease up on the guards. When that happened, he'd try running again. "Yes," he told her.
"And you're not lying, either," she said in satisfaction. "I like you princey."
"I'm not the prince," he told her sharply.
"Never said you were."
He blinked at her, confused. "That's just how Toph tells people she likes them," Aang explained. "You get a nickname. Or she hits you."
"Or both," Sokka said irritably.
Aang suddenly bounced on the balls of his feet. "So, can we spar?" he asked.
The break had been enough, and it had been a while since he'd been able to spar with another bender. The last one was his wife. He nodded. "Okay."
They went out into the arena, and Sokka counted them in. "Okay. Three . . . Two . . . One!"
Fighting the airbender was like getting into a fight with a leaf blown on the wind. While the boy was firebending, he seemed to have no centre, no root. No matter how he tried to strike at the other, his opponent just wasn't there. At least at first. Eventually, however, he started to pick the pattern out of the Avatar's movements.
When the boy tried a flame strike, he was finally able to retaliate as he caught the flames that hurtled towards him, spinning them around and returning them, doubled to trip up his opponent. A whirling motion of his hands and two discs of flame spun between them, forcing the Avatar into one place. Before he could follow up on his attack, he had to duck out of the way of a highly aggressive series of kicks, but blocked the last of them with a wall of flame roaring up, seemingly out of the ground.
In the end he lost, but it was very close. "Where did you learn how to return the fire like that?" asked the Avatar eagerly.
"You mean the uh . . ." he vaguely demonstrated the movement.
Nodding eagerly, the Avatar said, "That looks like a waterbending move."
Lee nodded. "It is I . . ." he almost mentioned Tara. He couldn't. He had to keep her safe because he still didn't know how these people would take the Water Tribe woman and her supposed prince. "I knew a waterbender once. I learned a few things."
The Avatar shot him a look. "You're not helping your case that you're not Zuko, you know," he said. "Iroh learned how to redirect lightning by watching waterbenders."
When his guards showed up, the whole exchange had so rattled Lee that he didn't even send them his usual look of aggravation. Walking through the halls, he nearly walked into one of the guards when he thought he saw Tara standing in a room with an open door they passed. He shook his head. He had to focus. They were all just getting to him and he had to find a way to bide his time without doubting who he was.
In any event, he was pretty sure that he'd never get to stay married to Tara if he decided he was going to pretend to be the prince. All alone she was worth giving up the luxury. When he walked into his room to be faced with Lian and her dreadful assistants, he realised he had a lot of reasons to get out of there.
This time they ignored his hissy fit.
He needed more strategies than just the one to get out of there, it seemed.
Tara presented herself at the servant's gate the next morning, asking to speak with the woman in charge of hiring the palace maid staff. She breathed a small sigh of relief it was the same woman she'd seen grousing the day before.
"You do realise this is quite irregular," the woman told her crisply. "I have not posted any advertisements for staff, nor have I asked anyone for recommendations."
Tara quickly bowed. "I realise that. However, I must admit to overhearing you yesterday, as you spoke of requiring new household staff," she said. "I worked as a ladies' maid in Ba Sing Se for a year, and I only stopped when I married." It was the truth. She'd been working as a ladies' maid when she met Lee. Her mistress had been having an illicit meeting with a handsome groomsman in the lower ring, and she had been brought along to lie to the master that she and the mistress had been shopping in the middle ring.
While the woman had gotten up to whatever they'd been getting up to in the cheap inn, Tara had gone out to find some ribbons and other trinkets to prove the truth of the trip. She'd run into Lee, who had gotten himself into a fight with some idiot with strange hooked swords and his two flunkies. She'd used her waterbending to help him and they'd driven the lot off.
Lee had insisted on escorting her back to the inn, and on every trip around the lower ring with her mistress after that. He'd also followed her back up to the upper ring many times, risking his safety to slip past the guards again and again while he brought her flowers and was just generally the most romantic man she'd ever met.
After all that courtship, they'd both decided they wanted out of the overly segregated city, and had left, searching for a new life. Tara shook her head a little to focus. Now wasn't the time to lose herself in the memory of Lee. She had to get this job.
The woman raised a sceptical eyebrow. "And where is your husband now?"
"Missing. I . . . I haven't seen him in a long time," Tara said, letting all the worry she'd suffered come out in her voice. "He . . ." she searched for a feasible excuse, faking grief as the cause of her pause. "He was a fisherman, and we think his ship was lost in a storm." Tara shrugged. "There was no way for me to make a living in my old village and I'm an orphan with no family to return to."
Lian nodded. "So you came here to find work."
"Yes." Tara was quite grateful the woman seemed willing to accept her story.
With a sharp nod, Lian told her, "Very well. I shall give you a trial. If you do well, I will hire you on permanently. If you do poorly, you're on your own again."
With that, Tara was given a rapid tour, and was set as the servant for a visiting dignitary who was going to be there the one night only. She firmly set herself to the task of caring for Lord Pitan. After all, she wouldn't have any chance at getting around the palace freely to find Lee if she got herself fired the first day.
Things had settled into a fair routine after only a few days, and Lian seemed pleased with her work. So was a little startled to be woken one morning by an agitated Lian. "Hurry up. Both my assistants have become ill this morning, and you seem the best qualified." With no explanation she was hurried into her uniform, given her toilet items and was whisked up the stairs to a particularly ornate section of the palace.
Staring at the door while Lian rapped sharply on it to announce their presence, Tara wondered if she was to assist with the morning preparations of the Fire Lord himself. Preparing herself for the worst, she followed Lian into what seemed an empty suite.
Lian hissed in annoyance about men who should know their place in the scheme of things before leading Tara to the bathroom. Standing half in and half out of the enormous tub of steaming water, was her husband. "I see you are trying to get out of having our assistance," Lian said in some exasperation and scooped up a cloth, looking expectantly at Lee.
Tara couldn't stop the squeak of surprise that escaped her.