Prompt: Locked in a Cage
Hurt Character: Suki
Comforting Character(s): Sokka
Characters: Suki, OCs
Relationships: Minor Sokka/Suki
Warnings (Aside from the Self-Evident): Kidnapping, human trafficking, mentions of slavery, implied sexual assault, dehumanization, victim blaming
Other Tags: Post-canon, bodyguard Suki, uses some ideas from the comics but it's not necessary to have read them

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me."

"I assure you, this is not a joke." The masked man stepped right up to the cage where they'd thrown her, leaning forward so his face was right next to the bars. "This—" he made an expansive gesture that encompassed the whole underground prison that surrounded them, "—is deadly serious."

"I repeat." Suki raised her eyes to squarely meet her captor's gaze. "You have got to be kidding me."

"Think whatever you want." The man turned his back on her with a theatrical wave of his hand. "It won't change your situation."

Yes, her situation. That was a problem.

As it turned out, Ty Lee and the other Kyoshi Warriors weren't the only people in the world who knew how to chi block—and when you were the Fire Lord's elite bodyguards, you tended to run afoul of a lot of people with chips on their shoulders and an arsenal of deadly martial arts techniques up their sleeves. It also meant that you were always the ones who ended up standing between them and their intended quarry.

Or, in this case, flopping. After being thrown. Into a cage. And completely unable to move.

Honestly, this was just embarrassing.

At least she had done her job prior to being caught. The second the group of armed, masked assailants had broken into the palace, the Kyoshi Warriors had closed ranks, forming a human wall between Zuko and his would-be attackers. Then, they were escorting the Fire Lord (over his protests) out of the room, with Suki bringing up the rear and shouting "Go! Go! Go!"—and, because she was the leader, she was the one who'd stayed behind to face the attackers despite being badly outnumbered.

Yeah. That had ended just about as well as she'd expected it to.

"So what do you want with me?" If you'd been kidnapped, finding out the answer to this question was always the first priority—it would tell you how much you could get away with and whether it would actually be a good idea to goad your captors, not to mention that escape attempts were always that much easier if they needed you alive. "I'm guessing that you didn't manage to succeed in whatever it was you were trying to do, since I'm not seeing Zuko anywhere here."

"Unfortunately, no. As a matter of fact, that cage would have been housing the impostor Fire Lord, had you not so rudely interfered."

"Hey, I was just doing my job. And I never asked you to come barging into the palace and ruin my day either, you know."

"It was never our intention to harm bystanders, and we bear no grudge against you personally… but you should have known the consequences of putting your life on the line to protect a traitor to his nation who never should have taken the throne. You did not have to be here, but for your own choices."

I wouldn't have had to be here if not for you putting me here, Suki thought, but did not say. She already knew that there were people in the world who just couldn't be reasoned with.

"Well, like it or not, I'm the one you got," she said instead. "So now that you have me, what do you intend to do with me?"

For a moment, the masked man was silent, tilting his head as if considering how much he should tell her. Evidently deciding it couldn't do any harm to his cause, he continued with a shrug. "Provided you behave yourself, you're worth slightly more to us alive than you are dead. There are those who will pay good money in the underground slave markets—especially for a pretty young girl such as yourself."

Suki couldn't help it: she laughed. This was straight out of the plot of one of those tacky romance stories that Sokka denied keeping under his pillow. "Can you even hear yourself right now? I've heard better lines from the Ember Island Players." Whoever he was, she was beginning to wish he would take off his mask: without being able to see his facial expression, it was impossible to tell whether any of her barbs were actually hitting the mark. "Besides, do you really think the rest of my girls are just going to let this go without trying to find me? Or for that matter, that the Avatar will?"

"Don't you ever speak that name in my presence!" In a flash the man was at the side of the cage and hauling her toward him by the hair, and Suki, chi-blocked as she was, could do nothing to physically resist.

"Not ever," he repeated, giving a quick shake that caused Suki to grit her teeth against the pain. "Do I make myself clear?"

Much as Suki hated the thought of knuckling under to some self-aggrandizing criminal, she also knew how to pick her battles—the only thing she could hope to accomplish by giving the retort she wanted was to provoke him into really hurting her, and she wanted her body intact enough to escape by the time the chi-blocking wore off. "Perfectly clear," she gritted out. He opened his fingers, releasing her head to thunk against the floor. "Though I can't help but wonder what exactly it is that you're so afraid of."

"I'm not the one who needs to be afraid here." He took a step back from the cage, signifying that the conversation was over. "Enjoy this accommodation while it lasts—I have a feeling you won't be kept nearly as comfortable after we've disposed of you."

Okay, so the good news was that they had more to gain from keeping her alive than they did from killing her.

The bad news was what they were keeping her alive for.

In the end, Suki decided that it was better to die trying to escape than it would be to have to live through that horror. The next time someone came to bring her water, she shot her hand out from between the bars to grab him by his collar and yank him hard against the side of the cage. The bowl clattered to the floor as she pressed her thumb very deliberately into the side of his eye socket.

"You know, I really don't have anything against you personally," she said pleasantly as he thrashed and flailed. "As a matter of fact, you can hand over the keys, and we can just forget this whole thing ever happened—or you can be stubborn about it, and I can put out your eye."

He handed over the keys. Suki didn't put out his eye—but she did throw him into the cage in her place, chi-blocked and with a makeshift gag in his mouth.

Okay, so the good news was that she was free. The bad news was that she didn't have the first clue where the exit was.

To her credit, it took several hours' worth of wandering and an orchestrated attack by at least two dozen firebenders and three chi blockers before she was caught again.

"You're lucky you're worth more to us alive than dead," the ringleader growled as they cuffed her and threw her back into the cage.

After that, they started making sure her hands and feet were secured at all times.

They cuffed her hands behind her, and either lowered her food and water in through the top of the cage, or pushed it between the bars at the end of a long pole. When Suki managed to maneuver her bound hands from her back to her front, they passed the chain of the cuffs around one of the bars behind her instead, so she couldn't change their position and now had to lean forward to slurp her food and water out of the bowl, like an animal.

Just when she was starting to think her situation couldn't possibly get any worse, the cage started moving.

"Sorry, Sweetheart," one of the henchmen said, not sounding a bit sorry, as they hefted the cage onto the back of a wagon, wrenching Suki's shoulders as she was jostled from side to side. "But we couldn't take the risk of you actually being rescued, now could we?" He shot her a nasty grin, filled with half-rotted teeth, and Suki wished she had enough freedom of movement to pound a foot right into his face.

Once the cage had been secured to the back of the wagon, one of the men stuffed a gag into her mouth. Then, they draped a cloth over the top of the cage.

Well, there went any hope of being able to break free while she was being transported.

She had no idea how long they were moving, having nothing to go by but the level of light that was filtering through the cloth that covered the cage. By the time the motion finally stopped, that light level was down to almost nothing; sure enough, when they whipped the cover off, it was to reveal a sky filled with stars, with the faintest of light just fading below the horizon: night had fallen.

"Hm. She doesn't look like much."

Suki's heart sank when she laid eyes on the speaker. She'd passed through enough seedy places on her travels to know a pirate when she saw one.

"Trust me," one of her captors spat, giving a vicious shake to the chain of her handcuffs. "Appearances can be deceiving."

The new man stroked his beard. "I'm going to need to see what she looks like without the makeup," he said at last.

And that was how, on top of everything else, Suki found herself getting a bucket of water thrown in her face.

"Hmmmmmm." The pirate leaned in to examine her as she spat out water, and tried to shake her dripping hair out of her face. "Pretty enough… but I'd wager she's not even close to being broken."

As the two men haggled, Suki closed her eyes. She knew full well what pirates did to pretty young women and girls… and she also knew how slim her chances were of fighting her way out of this. If only she could use her hands…

For the first time since she'd been captured, Suki began to feel the creep of real fear, fear brought on by her own complete powerlessness. In any other situation, she'd be able to fight her way free, or at least ride it out while she waited for rescue. If they got her onto that boat, though, she'd be completely helpless… helpless, and beyond the reach of anyone who cared to try and save her.

…and that was when a boomerang came flying out of nowhere and struck the pirate in the head.

The captor who'd been handling the negotiations turned on his comrades with a snarl. "What was that? I thought I told you to make sure that no one could track us!"

"Oh, now you've gone and done it," Suki said with a smirk. "I did warn you."

She had just enough time to savor the expression of shocked rage on his face before a furious force of nature's worth of blind earthbender burst from the ground at his feet, after which he wasn't able to focus on anything other than not being crushed by flying rocks.

"Suki!"

"That you, honey?" She craned her neck in order to look through the bars at her back, and yep, that was Sokka behind her trying to get the cuffs off with little more than his bare hands.

His hands were shaking as his fingers fumbled around the lock mechanism. "Suki, do you know where the keys are?"

"Um… I'm pretty sure they're on that guy Toph just buried."

"Monkey feathers!" He took a deep breath, and Suki heard the distinct sound of steel sliding from a sheath. "Okay. Don't move."

Guessing what he was about to do, Suki pulled her hands as far apart as the shackles would allow, squeezed her eyes shut, and didn't move. Her trust was rewarded when a black blade sheared straight through the chain that bound her, and even though the manacles themselves were still around her wrists, she could move her hands freely for the first time in days.

"Remind me to thank Master Piandao for helping you forge that sword," she said after he'd hacked off the lock to her cage, and then sliced through the chain on her ankles.

In the end, it was almost disappointing how easy it was to take her captors down: thinking that Suki had been sufficiently restrained and that none of her allies would be able to locate her in time, they'd gotten lax, and had sent only a handful of men to guard her. A few stomps from Toph's feet and well-placed jabs from Suki's fists, and suddenly they were the helpless prisoners.

Once they were sure that all the hostiles had been taken down, the first thing they did was procure the keys. While Toph began her interrogation of those prisoners who were still conscious, Sokka took the time to unlock Suki's shackles properly. He didn't comment on the fact that her hands were shaking too badly to do it herself.

Her wrists and ankles had been rubbed raw, partly thanks to her own struggling, but mostly courtesy of being jounced around while chained up in a moving wagon for the better part of a day. It seemed like every muscle in her body had gone stiff from spending so much time being unable to change her position. "It's nothing Katara won't be able to fix," she reassured Sokka when he began to fuss. "Tell me what happened."

Her kidnappers, as it turned out, had made one critical mistake: they had assumed that no one who mattered would notice or care about her disappearance. No member of the aristocracy, much less the Fire Lord, could be expected to care about the fate of a commoner. If such an event had happened during Ozai's reign, or Azulon's, or even Sozin's, he would have sneered that any bodyguard worthy of serving royalty ought to be competent enough to protect herself as well, and that if she was weak enough to get herself kidnapped (never mind the potential number of mitigating factors that would make it impossible for anyone to fight back), then she was on her own.

They'd forgotten that they weren't dealing with Ozai, or with Azulon. They were dealing with Zuko. Zuko, as it turned out, was furious that one of his bodyguards had been taken—and that was without even knowing what they'd been planning to do with her.

So, Zuko had immediately dropped everything in preparation to tear the country apart in order to find her, and summoned the others, who'd immediately done the same. Sokka had gathered information. Toph had mapped out the underground hideouts. Once they had a working plan in place, Zuko had taken Aang, Katara, and a handful of his most trusted generals to flush out the kidnappers' lair. Sokka, meanwhile, had had a hunch and decided to follow up on some rumors he'd heard about a wagon that had been seen leaving from that direction, taking Toph along for backup.

"Thanks, guys." Despite feeling tired, and wrung out, and a lot more shaken than she'd like to admit, Suki managed a smile. "I was starting to think that I was on my own."

"Hey, you're one of us." Sokka reached out to give her shoulder a gentle squeeze. "If you're on Team Avatar, you're never on your own. Believe me, some of us have tried." He jerked his head toward Toph, and was rewarded with a pounding on the back by a pillar of earth that knocked him flat on his face.

Suki giggled as he sat up, rubbing his back. Sokka gave her a brief (not to mention adorable) pouty face, but then stood up and offered his hand. "You ready to go back?"

She sighed, but reached out to grasp his fingers. "Yeah. Yeah, I guess I am."

A/N: Reminder that Suki is a badass, but she's also all about that teamwork.