Kisses aren't Promises
Chapter 10: The Little Brother
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters (design and personality) recognizable from "Avatar the Last Airbender" series. I don't own the plot of "Avatar the Last Airbender" series, which I'm using as a base for this fanfiction. However, I feel that it is within my rights to claim ownership over this fanfiction's plot & original characters that may appear along the way, and thus, so I do.
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"I'm surprised she didn't bend his guts out." Zuko grunted, sipping from a glass of Rose Wine, the only drink in the whole nation that wasn't red.
"Me too, you know... I was just waiting for a full-power Katara-Blast, but I'm glad it didn't come..." Sokka paused pensively, holding his glass with both hands. "Kinda...it would've been interesting." He finished with humor and put his glass down."This stuff's really good, even if it's a pink girly drink."
"It's the only one the servants are allowed to buy." The Fire Lord didn't trust himself around more potent drinks, he knew his own temper and knew what drunk men with a temper like his were prone to do.
"How much of it would someone have to drink to get hammered?"asked Sokka, eyeing the bottle on a stand by the fireplace.
"More than two bottles." Zuko answered decisively.
"You know that from personal experience." Sokka's voice was accusing but friendly.
"Yeah." Zuko knocked back the rest of his glass. "While I was exiled. When Uncle found me the buzz was starting to get good. The stronger stuff was locked up." He put his glass in the table along with Sokka's and sat up a little straighter. "You didn't come here to try to get drunk on Rose Wine, though."
"Oh, believe me, I wish!" The Prince took a letter from the inner folds of his tunic and gave it to Zuko, who recognized it at once. The Fire Lord let himself slump back against the chair with a sigh.
"You don't know how glad I am to be dealing with you about this. Your father is very level headed and all but..."
"I understand." Sokka waved him off. "I've been avoiding deal with him, too. So what exactly was your deal with Dad?"
"Unlike the Earth Kingdom, your father didn't want monetary reparations," Zuko explained. "He called it blood stained money and said he'd rather have the Water Benders back. So we agreed that those funds would be used to find out what happened to them, where they are and then take them back home if they want to. I'm to contact him once I have a list with names and locations."
The Water Prince nodded. That sounded like his father. Not that a little extra money would do any harm, but when push came to shove, they never really needed it.
"Starting from the beginning!" Zuko announced and cleaned his throat. "When Fire Lord Azulon first started the raids, the benders were put in this bender-proof prison. One of them, a woman, escaped but for some reason left the others behind. When questioned they said that they thought she had made a bargain with an evil spirit, traded her sanity for power. They were more afraid of her than of the prison. I hid them away for safekeeping, right over…"
He was going to point where he hid the documents, but realized he didn't remember where he put them and ended up pointing in a lot of different directions as his voice trailed off.
"Around here somewhere. I'll get them later if you want to see for yourself. That prison siphoned too much money, and, obviously, wasn't really bender-proof, so Azulon commissioned a group to find a way to block bending permanently, closed the prison, and when their bending was blocked, he sold the benders to some nobles to get some of the money back."
"Didn't miss a beat did he..." Sokka pursed his lips. "But block bending? How?"
"Just like Ty Lee does, but by implanting small metal spheres under the skin to for permanent pressure on chi flow points. Even without bending they still got away the first chance they had." Zuko wanted to rip his crown and top knot off and mess his hair so he would have something to do with his hands, but he didn't.
"And were recaptured?" said Sokka, very neutrally.
The Fire Lord took a deep noisy breath before answering. "This part is mostly gossip: Fire Lord Azulon was going to put a hunting team together but Grandmother Ilah talked him out of it, convincing him that now there was a chance that the next Avatar would be born inside the Fire Nation and instead, the money he would have spent on that went to the creation of the Royal Academy for Girls."
"That one is kinda hard to buy." The Water Prince rose an eyebrow.
"I know, I said it was gossip... but Grandmother wasn't about to give up on the new branch of the Royal Academy, it was her pet project." Zuko started to play with the hem of his sleeves. "After that they only took the occasional bender that also had their bending blocked, were sold off, ran away... except the last one: Junko. She was only eleven when she was brought here, all the others had been at least fifteen. The public outcry was really bad."
He spoke without looking at Sokka, ashamed of what his family had done to the people of his friend's tribe.
"No one really knew what to do with her. The worse she could do was explode a bit of water when she was very stressed, so Grandmother decided to put her to work in the palace's kitchen. Peeling potatoes is probably the lightest work-load around here. For some reason, years later Mother requested that Junko become her personal servant. She disappeared along with Mother and she may still be with her, she's the only one I couldn't locate."
"Why did Azulon change orders from capture to kill?" Sokka asked, forcing himself to remain calm and cool.
Zuko closed his eyes, scrunching his eyebrows together and taking a deep breath before looking away from Sokka and answering. "He didn't. Fire Lord Azulon built his rule over pleasing the larger crowd. After the fiasco over kidnapping a kid, he gave orders for the Southern Raiders to stop the raids and just hunt for pirates."
"So, no orders to kill the benders?" Sokka stated, his fists tightening as he lost his cool, while Zuko just nodded, looking sober. It didn't take long for Sokka to breath in deep himself and go back to his level headed attitude, but the question still hung in the air: why?
"The raiders were corrupt to the core... Still are... Actually, very few institutions aren't nowadays. They couldn't show up here with a bender under their arms anymore but wanted keep stealing pearls and whale bone. Those fetch high prices in the black market. It's always been one of the fastest ways of getting rich," Zuko said in a quiet tone.
Sokka kept quiet for a while longer, looking at the flames. "You said you had a list. Names and locations."
"Yes." Zuko straightened himself up a bit on his seat, trying to re-capture the light mood from before. "They blended in, became fishermen and the like. One is a novelist; he wrote one of my mother's favorite books though most of his work was blacklisted by my father. Of the other benders, almost half of them died, the older ones... a Hama woman was arrested and afterwards killed herself in prison a week or so before the comet... the others are still alive and have family here, and when I say here, I mean the colonies."
"Did you get in contact with any of them?" Sokka also picked up his act, eager to dispel the gloom that had settled.
"No, I didn't think they would react well to being summoned here by me." Zuko made a face that was a mix of annoyance, frustration and sympathy.
"Aw, Spirits!" Sokka pouted, surprising Zuko. "I was thinking you would just dump a bunch of bones on my lap, I would take them back then we'd sink them, spend the whole night chanting and drinking Ice Liquor, have hangovers and go on with our lives. Not that I'm not glad some are well and all that... But there's still a lot to be done there and Suki was going to visit soon and I haven't seen her in a month and a half..."
Zuko nodded in understanding. Both of the times he came back under the false impression that things, while not exactly easy, wouldn't be too hard... But they were, and here he was now, an overworked teenage Fire Lord unable to delegate chores since the only people he knew he could trust were the Team Aang, stressed, with almost too little support among the nobles and having to cater to a little hoard of brainless half-fan-girls-half-gold-diggers.
"Stay a while, write to your father if you want, just be careful with the wording... Or ask Li and Lo, those two have some pretty good advice."
"I will, I will..." Sokka paused to digest the conversation. They stayed there in now comfortable silence for a few moments, until something clicked in the Tribal Prince's head. "You said pearls are fetching high prices around here?"
"Yes, they've become pretty rare, since your tribe corners the market on them."
"Wanna open a new trade line?" Sokka asked with an eyebrow raised and almost half joking, since this wasn't what he went there for. Seeing an interested glint in Zuko's eye, he made a proposition. "Say, oil lanterns with glass panels, those with pretty colorful mosaics, salted hippo cow meat and... koala sheep wool. For our pearls."
"Throw in tiger seal blubber and we can open official negotiations." Zuko didn't even bat an eyelash.
"Done!" The Prince offered his hand and the Fire Lord shook it enthusiastically.
"I'll go write Dad. Can I use your desk?" Sokka, asked pointing with his thumb to the overly large piece of black wooden furniture.
"Sure."
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Mai glared as the chariot took them home from the air-ship dock, after a few hours traveling back to the main island. Their State was in a smaller city next to the Capital, a three hours ride on a bumpy stone-paved road.
She had taken sick pleasure in telling her mother that she wrote to Zuko ending things officially. Her mother had looked back at her, bug-eyed, pale and the vein on her forehead looking like it would burst, but she didn't get the scolding she thought she would. Instead, her mother left her in her room and completed the spa package that was already paid for, not caring one bit for what Mai did or didn't do.
The chariot stopped before the small palace and Tom-Tom came running from the door, shouting his sister's name, the sound of the i wavering every time one of his feet hit the floor. He jumped, hugged her waist and put his legs around her knees. Mai embraced him back, losing the glare at such a warm welcome. He had grown a lot, gotten heavier too, and just now she realized she had actually missed him.
"Dinner will be in an hour and a half," their mother announced to her children and the servants unloading their luggage from the chariot, before paying the driver and going inside, giving Mai the cold shoulder.
She'll probably go nag Father into talking some sense into me. Mai chose to ignore her mother and focus on her little brother. "Want to hear a story about Ba Sing Se?"
The boy nodded enthusiastically, his eyes full of adoration and Mai felt that it wasn't a total disaster after all.
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"This is to be sent to the Southern Water Tribe." The palace servant gave a sealed scroll to the Head of the Post Office, who looked like he was about to go to sleep in his long reddish gray caftan, then handed him a velvet bag with a few silver coins for payment.
"I'll dispatch our fastest Owl-Hawk," said the Head as they bowed to each other. When the servant was gone, he let his lips curl in distaste. Water Tribe.
He got a cup of water from the kitchens then went to his office and closed the door, walked to his desk, pulled a drawer open and took a long, thin metal plate, a few powders, and red wax, in the same color and shade the Fire Lord used.
The last two missives he had handled were interesting to say the least. A very generic letter from Zuko to the southern Chief that Lord Ozai found intriguing and a note from Mai to Zuko breaking off their relationship that got him more than a few gold coins from the nobles whose pockets he was familiar with.
He put his nose inside the parchment straw and tried to pick up scents like those of lemon. No such luck, but not a bad thing. Inserted the metal plate between the folds and adjusted them so they were under the wax seal, then started to heat the plate with Fire Bending. When the wax became malleable enough, he carefully pried it from the letter so the seal design would remain intact, unrolled the parchment and read it:
Hey there Dad! It's Sokka here.
Zuko let me use his seal to send this fast. I'm ok, he is ok too, we spent the whole afternoon talking about our friends from the war, you know. He said one of them even became a novelist, how awesome is that? I think I'd like to visit them, but I don't know if I should.
We also talked about Katara and he asked what her necklace was made of, and what tiger seal blubber looked like, and some other Water Tribe stuff.
I took a nap after lunch and my pillow was stuffed with koala sheep wool – it was the fluffiest thing ever! I think Gran Gran would like it so I'll see if I can buy one tomorrow, and I saw this pretty lantern with pretty colored glass panels in Zuko's office, I think I'll buy one too and I didn't think I'd miss salted hippo cow meat so much!
Anyways, I'm here and I'm fine. Take care!
The Post Office Head raised an eyebrow. This letter couldn't be serious, there had to be something hidden there. Holding the letter against the light of a candle he saw no water marks or reactions to the heat.
He put on a Komodo leather glove that only covered the index and middle fingers, dipped the gloved fingers in the water and let it drip over one powders, then mixed it and rubbed the paste gently on some parts of the parchment. Seeing no reaction, he wiped the glove in a clean bit of cotton cloth and tried, one by one, the other powders.
Nothing. No invisible ink was used.
Gritting his teeth at the lost time, he copied the letter, imitating the handwriting, onto clean parchment, used a bit of wax to glue the seal, fetched a case and made his way to the back of the Post Office, where the hacks were kept.
He didn't even bother to keep a copy for himself. Clearly, the Southern Prince was just as much as of a buffoon as that play in Ember Island had implied.
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Special thanks: To MizJoely who beta-ed this chapter.