This one took a while to write but I'm finally finished. Don't worry everyone I haven't forgotten about Keiko. Thank you very much for reviewing – it makes me so happy! ;) Enjoy!
Arual-san
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An hour passed by like a year in the mind of a toddler and soon Keiko was bored and, as any family that had raised benders knew, such a thing could prove dangerous.
At first she just fiddled with her fingers in her lap but very soon she was restless, plunking down onto her back and stretching her legs in the cramped space of the tree hole. Keiko jut out her limbs every which way and Momo squeaked and contorted into odd positions to avoid impact. Keiko jogged an invisible race upside down, whined and moaned and put every small thing available in the tree in her mouth to chew on. Surely the big, tough, invincible idol she saw when she looked to her newly discovered half-brother was more than enough to beat that mean red head that had been chasing them.
The whole innards of the tree became marked by her teeth and drool and still Zuko didn't return.
If he was playing another of his strange games then Keiko soon concluded that it wasn't very fun.
As it was the space was much too small for both a small child and a lemur to fit comfortably in but once three hours passed it became unbearable. Keiko entertained herself by pulling on Momo's oversized ears and his furry arms to see how wide his concealed wings would spread.
In only minutes of the rough treatment Momo had had enough and was off past the crude door Zuko had fashioned. Keiko however wasn't finished playing and grabbed onto his legs as he took off.
As Keiko giggled in delight and kicked her little legs round she was unmindful of Momo's panicked and ultimately futile attempts to keep aloft with her added weight. They lost altitude quickly and came up to a length of tree roots where Keiko touched down to a jogging stop. If Momo thought he could seize that chance to escape he was mistaken when Keiko grabbed him into a suffocating hug for the much needed fun.
In Momo's struggling to duck out from under her, that Keiko was not yet a master at walking with her short, chubby legs, the little girl lost her balance on the roots and went tumbling back into the mucky water the two had thought they had just cleared.
"Eeeee!"
Keiko surfaced with a great glob of mud where her face should've been and when she tried to say something instead of words a great mud bubble frothed from her mouth. She wiped it off with another giggle. She wiped at the rest of her face.
Harassed and dripping wet, Momo scurried back onto dry land and shook himself dry.
After transferring most of the mud onto her sleeves instead, Keiko was nearly as clean as she was going to get, mimicking through the motions her mother went through whenever Keiko had wandered into mud puddles after heavy rains.
When she looked down to her reflection Keiko saw that the only mud that remained was in a large diamond-like shape over her left eye. Seeing that made Keiko's lips droop low and she looked up as though expecting to see the real thing. Zuko of course wasn't there and her gloppy, mud-covered face was a poor imitation to say the least. She wiped it off and her little face was pink and soft once again.
Keiko pulled herself onto dry land beside Momo, looking at him curiously when he'd started to lick at his wet fur and wondering why he was getting himself wetter. She looked back over the swamp but only saw a swarm of insects, a couple birds and a few harmless spirits.
"Zuzu?" she called out, trying to raise her voice higher than the noise of the animals.
The swamp noises droned on and on.
She was without an answer.
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The low-cut canoes parted through the water that was as green stained glass and made the only ripples in its surface for several yards. As the swamp folk started up a new song about warty frogs or something equally disgusting Mai tried to drown out the never-ending annoyance she felt by focusing instead on how many and what kinds of those slimy creatures were contributing to the background "music".
It wasn't something she enjoyed but it was slightly more bearable.
While Mai's ears were focused where they were the rest of her was focused on Zuko who lay next to her on the bottom of the canoe, sleeping and propped up against one of the seats. The perfume Gumni had been collecting for his sister's birthday seemed to be the break Zuko needed; when Mai sat next to him she saw that his forehead was coated in sweat.
"You're more trouble than you're worth," Mai sighed but she ran a cloth through the water and wiped his head all the same. It didn't after all take much effort to do so.
Mai had believed what she'd said before in that Zuko wasn't weak and the evidence there was the proof she needed to see that he had been fighting with much force the unseen demon for hours before she'd discovered him. She'd also happened to discover Zuko at a time when his side was waning.
Zuko tossed his head and groaned slightly, the wildness of his actions tamed to next to nothing while he was asleep and he and the demon had all the space of his subconscious to avoid one another. He wouldn't be nearly so peaceful when he woke up again.
"Kei…Keiko, I'm coming! Don't…" he trailed off and started anew, "Stop slacking off, Aang! Some Avatar you are!"
"Much more trouble," Mai decided as she moved the cloth from his nose back onto his forehead.
Despite the danger, Mai didn't leave Zuko's side…but she hadn't protested either when the swamp folk had bound him up in rope for their own safety. She wasn't so overconfident in her abilities to not acknowledge how close she had come to losing the fight with the kuwanji controlling Zuko, to having to require the backup of Gumni's that she had been so quick to discard. The swamp was like a different world, so much more than switching from the advanced society of the Fire Nation in which she'd been raised to the city of Omashu and all over the rest of the Earth Kingdom in her princess's pursuit of the Avatar. Adapting to the swamp wouldn't happen in a day nor had it yet happened in the three days Mai had been there nor did she intend to make adaptation a necessary thing.
Mai was no swamp dweller. She was getting out of there as soon as possible.
A few things stood in the way of that desire though: first, there were few places to hide from the Fire Nation inside the nation itself, second, they needed transportation and third was…
"Mai!" a voice shouted, ecstatic.
The friend who was her polar opposite waved madly and jumped in place like she was flagging down a rescue ship.
For reasons Mai couldn't fathom, Ty Lee actually liked the slime pit they wound up in. She gave a flick of her hand in acknowledgment.
Ty Lee bounded up to the boat before it had even docked – jumping up from the circle of tribal women the instant she saw the small fleet – and she helped tug it in. Like Mai, the perkier girl had also discarded her prison attire to stitch up a blouse and skirt made of leaves. She even went so far as to dye them pink with berries as a stand-in for her beloved circus uniform. Mai's leaf outfit was functional while Ty Lee's was fashionable but even with the same materials to work with both their personalities of sun or gloom reflected through all in how they were cut.
"Oooo, they're singing again!" Ty Lee beamed on hearing a new song from the hunters. She received several smiles. "You guys are great! So creative! Can you teach me the lyrics?"
Mai's eyes slit so narrow she could barely see through.
"Hey, Zuko's here too!" she continued, happy for the familiar face, popping her front into the boat. "What the heck did you do to your hair? And why are you tied up? Are you two playing some weird dating game and Mai won or something? Anyway, the girls and I had oodles of fun back in camp." She turned back to them. "Right, girls?"
A round of affirmative cheers rose from the group of women.
Ty Lee gave them a wave and she got back to her friends as the boats were pulled onto the village shore. "We repaired some loose reeds on a few of the huts, shared stories around the campfire and sang! I can't remember the last time I took part in any sort of music! It – it was so exhilarating! Did you have a good time hunting, Mai?"
"Fantastic," Mai replied in scorn but in her excitement Ty Lee overlooked her friend's usual lack of enthusiasm to get back to Zuko, who she'd not seen in many long days.
She pulled from her sleeve a necklace knotted from vines, too loose in some places, too tight in others.
"I made it!" Ty Lee declared and the blisters on her fingers were proof. "You don't know how many times it snapped and I had to start over but here it is! Isn't it pretty, Zuko?"
Throughout Ty Lee's rambling Zuko had begun to shift in his position. On the ride there Mai's voice was low and the songs from the swamp folk had a certain flow to them that was similar to the natural flow of the currents below.
Ty Lee on the other hand could've been banging drumsticks inside Zuko's eardrums, now hypersensitive like most of his senses while playing host to the demon.
When she leaned in nearer to him it was enough to override the perfume's effect too early.
"Well? Isn't it pretty?"
The kuwanji spirit within Zuko snapped to life and made a rabid bite at her outstretched fingers.
Pulling away in the nick of time, Ty Lee gave a high-pitched shriek of alarm like a cat that'd had its tail trod on. "I didn't think it was that bad! Don't be such a-!" But Ty Lee figured it out on her own at Zuko's wild thrashing in his restraints and the reds of his eyes. "What's going on?"
"Just run and prepare the village medium please," said Mai but before they could separate a blast of flame did it for them.
The hunters stuffed a wad of cloth into Zuko's mouth to prevent any more breathes of fire and it took three of their strongest to restrain and bring him into the village. Still they were slowed and many small fires from the little he could move had to be put out. Mothers rushed their little ones inside. The kuwanji seemed positively furious that it had been detained and was set on causing as much destruction as possible. It nearly struggled free from the men's clutches but even then it would've had no where to go in being bound so tightly.
The village wasn't large and soon they reached the medium's hut, slightly removed from its neighbors for the sake of privacy.
From its curtain doors Ty Lee slid out with the nervous stance similar of a thief though she had stolen nothing. She kept her lip buttoned and her hands clutched low at her front as the hunters brought Zuko in.
She looked after with betraying curiosity but then looked back to Mai as though asking permission.
"Don't give me that," Mai said flatly, pushing her in and following after. "He's your friend too."
If the slime and the muck and the creepy crawlers were enough to make Mai almost long for her former prison cell her first step into the medium's hut made that loathing amplify thrice over when dangling down from the ceiling were all manners of dried chicken feet, twisted roots and animal bones rearranged into deranged-looking wind chimes. The jars on the shelves were worse and neither girl could even bear to look long enough to identify what horrible things were bottled up inside.
"Out! Out! All of you out now! I must be left alone to examine the patient!"
The girls looked down and what they saw more closely resembled a large species of owl rather than any human they'd come across. The medium was hunched over with age, the cloak that lay over her shoulders was far too large for her withered frame and when she moved the sleeves swished like wings. Even her bare feet seemed to arch back in claws.
The demands of her croaky little voice however belied her age and sent the men out in a hurry.
"Out now!" the medium gestured to the girls, shooing at them. "You too!"
Mai looked not at the medium but her focus shifted to where Zuko lay writhing on the dirt ground, desperate to rid the demon from his skin, so dead focused on that one thing that he held no awareness in any of his other senses.
Mai sat down right where she was. She folded her arms.
"If it's not absolutely necessary for us to leave," Ty Lee said for the sake of politeness, sitting down too, "we'd like to stay."
"Heh!" the old medium spat out. "You stay then you work! Up off that floor!" She jabbed her fingers in all manners of directions. "Get me that vase, that jar and its brother three spots over! A handful of that! That, that and that!"
If the medium had been hoping for a chance to get rid of them by a set of rapid instructions she was disappointed when each of the requested items just as rapidly were lined up in a row at her feet. By her orders Mai and Ty Lee rushed to set down and light blood-red candles in a circle around Zuko, they stirred and measured out amounts into bowls.
Together they poured out an intricate pattern of sand from a page in a book, ending at the same point at each other's feet, synchronized even in matters less intense than combat.
"Now sit and be quiet!"
The medium swept the girls back as she stepped into the circle. One of the noxious substances mixed appeared to be a sweet treat to the old woman, for she gulped it down with gusto.
Mai shoved back down her throat the scowl she wished to utter and sat.
"Umm…" Ty Lee tried, twitting her fingers, "it's not like this is the worst temper tantrum Zuko's ever had."
Mai was not amused. She only stared to where the old medium drew up Zuko's head to her in a clawed vice-grip, examined his eyes and any other traces of irregularity. She poked and prodded him all with the care of sticking in needles into a pincushion.
"A rare specimen this is," the medium announced, "…for the area anyway." Rather than any sort of concern for the boy, she seemed all too eager to extract the shining gem that lay within to add to her collection and for that Mai didn't trust her enough to leave.
Mai was in no mood to wait. "Just get it out of him."
The old medium made a 'hmmph'ing noise and she stretched her hands forward in preparation, cracking several joints. Her payment for the exorcism was the demon itself and the specially symboled vial at her hip was enough to trap the kuwanji up tight and prevent it from going from Zuko right into any of them instead.
Unable to follow when the woman started to chant an ancient language lost to the present world, Mai and Ty Lee watched with silent angst
The medium worked and as she continued her incantation the sands sparked with violet flame but seemed not to burn either her or Zuko. She continued on as Zuko writhed and thrashed on the ground with his most energy yet but after a time the bucks seemed not his own. It was like he was having a seizure.
Ty Lee laid a hand over her friend's.
Finally something happened. Zuko's spine arched back and stayed in that awkward and uncomfortable position as a strange red mist seemed to flow out from his eyes. As he fought beneath the gag again muffled voices shifted between Zuko's and the kuwanji's.
At first the girls were hopeful…but his voice was in evident pain. The kuwanji didn't want to give up its host, sunk its claws more deeply into him against the pull that threatened to expel it.
Mai's every muscle tightened when Zuko's head bucked back and hit the ground hard but she couldn't stay silent when tears started to gather in the corners of the eyes that weren't his. "Stop it! You're hurting him!"
"I am saving him," the medium corrected, never looking up from her work. The vial was nearly full and the kuwanji was clawing out its last spirited attempts to win a losing battle, ripping madly against the restraints.
Seconds passed and the vial filled to the top.
Zuko wilted to the ground, his head sagging to a side. The red stripes in his hair began to fade back to black and his overlong nails receded but with the demon gone all the life and passion he was struggled with before was gone. He was motionless.
No longer could Mai force herself to stand by. She ran into the circle, knocking over a number of candles as she did.
"Zuko!"
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Ooo, cliffhanger! Sorry guys but that's all you get until the next chapter. Please R&R!
