Writer's Note: Occurs during Book One and may contain spoilers. Written for Lavanya Six, as a little AU fic.

"This is boring," Mai snapped, glaring with all of her power over Tom-Tom's head and at her father and mother, who were standing nearby with strained expressions on their faces. (Tom-Tom disagreed; he flailed his arms and made Mai almost drop him.)

The fishing port they were docked at was small, and smelly, and it was a necessary evil, since they were set to go to Omashu for her father's new post and they had to cut through...but still. This is stupid and boring and I want to go home...

She wasn't always this petulant. She had always assumed she had left this brattiness behind when she turned sixteen. But here it was, in full spirits, raging in her chest like angry waves. She resented being sent here, resented having to deal with foreign people who hated her and her family and her Nation. She would put up with hundreds of hoity-toity meetings with her mother and her empty-headed lady friends if it meant never having to set foot in the Earth Kingdom ever again.

But these were silly thoughts. She was stuck here. That was that.

Their ship was a modest affair, considering. Her father's promotion hadn't quite kicked in yet, but with the advance Firelord Ozai gave them they were still able to get a rather decent boat. A cloud of hired hands went back and forth from it now, loading a nearby caravan that would bring them to Omashu, their new home.

Bleck, was Mai's recurring thought. She hoisted Tom-Tom up on her hip a little higher, listening to him laugh in her ear. She watched expressionless as her life changed, though inside her heart was raging.

Zuko's hand was permanently stuck to his face. There was really no other way for it to be.

Iroh stood in front of what looked like a delapitated and barely-standing storefront, his eyes raking over the characters that read, in faded ink, "Peng's Tea - Now Celebrating 100 Years of Excellence!" The storefront was closed at the moment, but the note on the door indicated that they would be open "any damn time that I wake up, okay?" For Iroh, this meant waiting. And if he was waiting, that meant Zuko was waiting.

"Uncle," he tried again. "This stupid shop looks like it's been unchanged for a hundred years! What makes you think the tea will be any good?"

Iroh didn't look at him, but he did answer. "Any shop that can stay open this long has something worth selling. The look of the place should tell you this right away!"

Zuko's hand dropped from his face. "All it tells me is that the owner is lazy!" he snapped.

Iroh now turned to him, looking disappointed in him. "Now, you see, that's just not true. It means that they are so devoted to tea-making that they cannot keep up with demands long enough to fix their store. It is enviable, really."

Zuko rolled his eyes, a bite of frustration cutting into him. "I'm going to the ship," he grated. "When you're done wasting time, hurry back! We still have to track down the Avatar, and we can't waste our time!"

"Yes, yes," Iroh answered. "I will meet you."

Zuko turned on his heel, his palms going hot, sparks jumping up from his fingertips as he stormed away.

"Come back to help me load the ship later!" Iroh suddenly called after him.

Zuko merely growled in reply, quickening his pace to get as far away as possible.

Doesn't he get it? Doesn't he get how important this is? Why is he always wasting time-

He stopped, his thoughts silenced, his body stilled. His eye had caught a glimpse of something, following the glimpse until it became a picture, and now he was seeing the picture. And he couldn't breathe. Not one breath.

Standing there, holding a baby in her arms and looking like the woman he thought she would grow to be, was Mai.

Mai's instincts were always good. Her uncle had taught her the importance of this - he, who had to deal with hundreds of people who wanted him dead on a daily basis.

So when she felt a set of eyes on her, she turned in the direction she felt the gaze come from, one hand disappearing under her sleeve, the other tightening her hold on her brother.

And she felt a kick to the gut.

A lopsided gaze met hers, one eye burned into a glare. The hair was gone, all but for a square of long hair pulled into a defiant tail. He wore armour that looked uncomfortable and his hands were clenched into fists, but his face...despite the obvious, most of his face was still the same. And he was just as shocked as she.

Zuko...

For a moment, there was a long pause between them, where they just stared at each other, unable to see or hear anything else around them. Then, ever so subtle, Zuko tilted his head to one side, then turned and vanished into the crowd.

With her heart in her throat, Mai walked to her mother and handed her brother over. Before her mother could protest, Mai answered with, "Nature calls."

She hurried after him, not quite sure what she was doing at all, but knowing that she had to do it.

Zuko waited for what felt like a decade. He paced. He fretted. He started to assume she wasn't going to follow - and who would, really, follow someone into a dark alley after not seeing them for years? - and his hand went to his nose and he winced and was about to leave when suddenly...

She was there.

Granted, her hands were hidden in her sleeves, and her eyes were narrowed and suspicious, but she was there. That means something, doesn't it?

His feet were moving him forward before he realised it. There was no way to explain why, really. He had been clouded in loneliness for three years, with men who resented him and a mission he knew would fail. Seeing her there, a spectre of his past, made him yearn to touch her, to make sure she was real...

Mai's eyes widened a little, but she didn't move away. She just...stood there. As if waiting.

That is, until he reached out. She leaned back a little and pulled her hands free of her sleeves, and Zuko winced, waiting for the bite of knives that he knew were sure to strike him.

What he got instead were cool hands taking his, long fingers closing over his hot ones, and he froze, something warming deep inside of him.

"Zuko," she murmured, her eyes on his. She squeezed his hands, her face carefully blank. Her eyes, however, were wavering and full of the emotion she was afraid to show. "You never said goodbye, you know."

He opened his mouth to say her name, but something wordless and hoarse came out instead, a vocalisation of a repressed emotion that he never got to express. His hands squeezed hers hard, but she didn't wince or pull away. She gave him a tug, a hard one, one that spoke of sparring in the royal gardens and tossing each other in water fountains, and he stumbled, caught by her, her arms viselike around him in a grip that he never wanted loosened.

With his face in her shoulder, he crumpled. His hands clutched at her back, and he fell apart.

In was strange. It was one of the most bizarre situations that Mai had ever found herself in (the most bizarre by far being the day her mother gave birth and she was invited to watch), and yet...it felt oddly natural. Like she had been doing this for as long as she could remember.

She leaned close, resting her cheek on the top of his head. Smooth and a little damp with sweat. She stroked his ponytail. A little coarser than she remembered.

Taller, too. Bigger. Still kinda scrawny, but more muscular.

Still Zuko.

This feels natural...

"Sorry," Zuko suddenly grated out, pulling away and turning his back to her faster than she could even blink. Her arms were still open, even. "I just..." His shoulders drooped. "You have no idea how hard it's been..."

Mai lowered her arms slowly. "I don't?" she wondered.

Zuko turned and looked over his shoulder at her. She blinked slowly. A small smile broke onto his lips, and his eyes closed. She walked to him, sliding her arms around him like she used to when they were small, and he leaned back a little, just a little.

"How long do you have until you have to go back?" he suddenly asked, startling her out of her reverie.

"I think maybe a half-hour," she said after a moment. "My parents brought a lot of things."

"Do you think we could...go somewhere?"

She looked at him, peering over his shoulder and into his lopsided gaze. She was already used to it. It was so strange. Her fingers dug a little deeper, her mouth set. Wordlessly, she nodded.

A half-hour wasn't enough. They could take the whole day and, Zuko knew, it wouldn't be enough. It wouldn't ever be enough.

When they were kids, things came easy. It was simple to declare your feelings with a shove or a hair-pull, simple to want to play with the one you liked for the sake of spending time with them. It was simple to distract yourself with these simple times and simple gestures.

But they weren't kids anymore. That much was obvious just by looking at Mai, by actually taking in that beneath those layers of clothes she had a figure, that the chubbiness around her face was gone, that she no longer walked with unsure steps. She was a woman. It was obvious.

But Zuko didn't feel quite like a man. It was strange. He was sixteen - clearly a man in age - but he still felt lost, like a thirteen-year-old, caught in some kind of limbo that would allow real aging once the Avatar was caught.

They walked in silence, slipping away from crowds of people and closed-in buildings, desperate for some sort of reprieve from the madness of civilization.

When Mai took his hand, he found himself squeezing it without a second thought. When he saw her soft look of surprise and affection, he felt his heart warm up, just a little.

Finally, they came across a clearing, an open space that usually went unnoticed by anyone since it lacked a stall with wares. The ground was a little dusty and only a few tufts of grass poked out from the ground, and the openness made the grey sky obvious, but it was quiet and deserted and Zuko found it was the best they would find.

"Want to just...sit?" He wondered, hating that his voice cracked a little on the question. When she nodded slowly without laughing, they walked to the grassiest patch and sat down, side-by-side. Mai took her hand back and began fussing with one of her sleeves, looking down at the ground.

He opened his mouth to say something - anything - but she beat him to it. She said his name, and he froze; her tone was serious, far more serious that usual. She looked up at him, and her face was blank. When he nodded, she spoke again.

"Do you...still..." She sighed, making a face, and he felt himself relax a little. She wasn't always too expressive, but when she was, it was comforting. She muttered something he didn't catch, her head going up faster than he could follow.

Her eyes met his, searching them. He swallowed hard, unable to keep himself from searching for hints of disgust there, from he sight of how he looked now...

She frowned. Her eyes narrowed. "You know something?" she said suddenly, her voice hard. "Words are boring."

She lunged for him, her fingers grabbing onto his face in a firm but painless grip. He felt himself being pulled to her, and before he could even breathe she was kissing him. Kissing him, a real kiss, not like the kisses they had stolen from each other on hot summer days amidst a backdrop of gardens and happiness.

His hands reached out. They held onto her, bringing her closer. He kissed her back, unable to quite comprehend doing anything else. He was clumsy and confused, and she was a little tense and stiff, but once they got the feel of it, there was nothing better.

Zuko was a terrible kisser. But then, so was she, so who was she to judge?

The method and style wasn't what was important, though. What was was that Zuko was kissing her, and that was that. And it wasn't just kissing; there was touching, lots of touching. Lots of awkward, shaky, fumbling touching. Zuko's breath was hot against her lips, his tongue even hotter, a slippery kind of heat, and his fingers were warm and close and so, so wonderful...

Mai had never felt like she had a real home. She felt like an outsider at all times under her own roof. She loved her parents because she had to and she did bear some sort of affection for them despite their flaws. But to be at home was something truly alien to her.

But there was something familiar about Zuko, something that made her feel as close to home as possible, even so far away from the Fire Nation. The way he smelled, the way he felt, the way he sounded...everything about him spoke of peacefulness and calmness, even though their circumstance was anything but. He was exiled from his home, on a wild-goose-duck chase; she was forced to live in the Earth Kingdom, amidst people who would love to see her and her family dead.

And yet...this is okay. This is more than okay. This is really good...

A pocket of time can last ages. It can also last seconds. It felt like seconds when Zuko pulled away, looking shocked and rushed and confused. "Time," he whispered. "My uncle is probably looking for me." His eyes were shiny, and his face was red.

No amount of schooling was able to keep the disappointment from her face, she knew. She knew it especially when Zuko bit his lip, shutting his eyes for longer than a blink. "This was...this is...more to me...than just..." He growled, rubbing his forehead in exasperation. Words were never, ever one of his strong points.

"I know," she said softly, reaching up and cupping his cheek - the burnt one - with one hand. He froze, a flicker of fear showing, and she rubbed the rough skin slowly, her heart doing a little flip at the feel of it, but not out of revulsion; it was of anger on his behalf.

"Mai, I..." and here he shut his eyes, leaning into her hand.

"I know," she answered, pretty sure she did, hoping she did. She put her other hand on his other cheek, and his eyes opened. She smiled, but her lips quivered, just a bit.

"Come visit me in Omashu one day, okay?" she said calmly, internally marveling at how calm she was able to keep her voice.

He was struggling, she could tell. It was obvious in the way he bit his lips hard, the way he clenched his fists at his knees. But he managed to overcome it, swallowing hard and nodding against her hands. She let go.

When he rose to his feet, his stride was shaky. When he walked away, he looked back more than once.

Mai stayed where she was, on the dirty ground, her hands in her lap. She waved once, when he wasn't looking. When he vanished from sight, she hugged her folded legs to her chest and wept.

"Nephew! You're late!"

Zuko raised his head towards the sound of the voice with some trepidation. He was sure his sadness would be obvious, especially in front of Iroh - it always was, after all.

But when he went to join his uncle, watching him and his men load several barrels of tea onto the ship, Iroh said nothing to him outside of the ordinary ("I had to haggle some, but the results were magnificent!). If he didn't know any better, he would have thought that his moment with Mai had been some kind of fever-dream, a delusion he gifted himself to keep him sane.

But when he turned towards where her family's ship was docked, and caught distant flashes of muted red and black, he knew it had been real. He kept his eyes on those figures until they faded and the ship left from the dock.

"Come visit me in Omashu..."

He sighed deeply, lowering his head. When Iroh's hand went on his shoulder, he opened them to find a concerned look on his uncle's face. But it wasn't something he was ready to share, not quite yet. Wordlessly, together, they walked onto the ship, back on the water, back towards destiny.

But sometimes, he looked back. Sometimes, his gaze still lingered.