1 - Closure

The trouble started when Zuko got an idea.

To be fair, it was actually a good idea. One of this better ones, even. But there's a long journey between a good idea and a good outcome, and it's a journey done on bare feet, over wild country, with a map that says nothing but, "Look out behind you." Everyone knew that Zuko's ideas hardly ever went to good places. Zuko knew that Zuko's ideas hardly ever went to good places, probably because of all the trick maps his father had commissioned for him. So, like any sane person, he made an effort to limit the damage.

This, of course, is where he went wrong. Sanity isn't as over-rated as they say, but it doesn't come with very helpful instructions.

It's not that Zuko didn't put in the effort. Several powerful spirits would be so moved by his earnest desire to keep everything from falling apart that they intervened in human history, arranging for the Fire Nation's prosperity as long as his line holds the throne. This was very nice of them, but would result in a chain of events culminating in a city named Republic City being destroyed by a giant robot with a laser gun, of all things. This is why no one trusts a gift from spirits: they're weird and destructive in equal measure.

But Zuko himself wasn't making deals with spirits. That part happened in the background. No, he started treating with something even worse.

Lawyers.

Because, as Mai would say, in the course of events, lawyers and romance go so well together.

She can sometimes be a rather sarcastic girl.

Mai first found out that she was getting married when the angry mob showed up outside her workplace.

It had been a quiet day in Aunt Mura's flower shop. Auntie herself was experimenting with some arrangements in the back, using the peace to indulge her more artistic side with some old stock. The summer wedding rush was still a month away, and the last romance-themed festival was about a week ago, creating one of those lulls where everyone was getting sick of flower petals all over the floor and no one had yet had the opportunity to screw things up enough to need a dozen roses- no, two dozen, and yes the price is fine, and also is there somewhere around here where they sell nice jewelry?

Mai had already done that first great duty of unoccupied apprentices, Sweeping The Floor. She'd moved on to the next epic waypoint of a slow day, Wiping The Counter. She was considering the looming arrival of the dreaded Doing An Inventory, hoping against hope to be dramatically saved at the last moment by the great hero Taking An Early Lunch.

And then the first head of rotten cabbage smacked against the window.

Mai breathed a sigh of relief. Security was among her duties, and also her hobbies. She moved to the window, ignoring the slimy cabbage pieces sliding down the other side of the glass. This close, she could hear the angry chanting outside, although there was something wrong- it was lacking a certain bass sound, like when the Kyoshi Warriors had an argument about who was paying for dinner.

She peered out at the enemy, and quickly discovered why.

"Ugh," Mai said. "This ash again."

Their uniform was the fine robes of High Caldera Society. Their weapons were misogynistic epithets and the occasional half-priced cabbage. And their cause was one for which so many would-be (but not quite) adults had tried to sacrifice themselves, across many eras, in countless variations.

Zuko's (unofficial) fangirl brigade roared their disapproval of Zuko's current lover, and one of them threw another cabbage at the shop. It splattered against the front door.

Aunt Mura came careening out of the shop's back, still holding her best sheers. "What's going on out there?"

Mai didn't move her gaze from the window. "You know how Zuko's big heroic return from his exile all those years ago made every teenage girl in the Caldera fall in love with him to such a degree that they gathered outside of the palace for just a glimpse of him? And sometimes one of two would cause enough of a security problem that they're arrested and held by the guards for a few hours before being cut loose? And then even they grew up, a lot of the never grew out of it?"

Aunt Mura snorted. "I recall hearing you say something about that. They haven't been able to find real husbands instead of staying hung up on an impossible dream?"

Mai shrugged. She could hardly blame for something she had also done; that it had happened to work out for her was still something she had trouble believing. "Well, their enthusiasm flagged a bit when he committed High Treason and allied himself with the Fire Nation enemies, but his going from a brooding teen-aged prince to a smiling adult monarch actually made him more popular with those types. And now they're outside and seem to be confusing our shop with the world's slimiest salad bowl."

Another cabbage struck the shop front.

Aunt Mura came over to the window and squinted past the liquid cabbage remnants. "They're jealous because you're entangled with Zuko again?"

Mai put on her most scandalized expression, the one she had used to save for when Mother asked her to try smiling more. "I'm not entangled. Zuko and I are cautiously exploring a renewal of our previous close relationship, with the understanding that if we've grown apart too much to fit into each other's lives, we'll go our separate ways with mutual respect and understanding."

"And if he's a jerk again, you'll kick him to the curb and maybe in the fireballs, too."

"Yes, I thought that part was understood."

A smile flicked across Aunt Mura's lips. "Apparently so. So how do we get rid of the jealous girls?"

Mai frowned and stepped away from the window. Now that Aunt Mura called attention to it, it didn't really make sense. "But they've never been jealous of me. Sure, I've been called some nasty names by people in the Caldera because of my ties to Zuko, but the fangirls only seemed to hate me when I broke up with him. Defending his broken heart or something. They never really saw me as an obstacle to their dreams of seducing him by screaming at his house at all hours and sometimes trying to break into his guarded bedroom. I guess I don't seem the type to be upset about that."

Aunt Mura's eyebrows rose. "Is that a compliment or an insult?"

"I couldn't tell you, and I never cared." Mai moved over to the front door and put her ear against it. The chanting sounded like it could be something like, 'Death to Mai!' How odd. All the other people who wanted her dead throughout her life had actually made the effort of trying to kill her. This was almost cute. "Might as well try to find out, though."

Despite Aunt Mura's cry of protest, Mai opened the door and stepped outside.

The crowd of angry young ladies roared at her.

Mai waved back. "Hi. Zuko's not here. Go home. Shoo."

One of the (unofficial) brigade members screamed back, "You go home! You gold-digger!"

The crowd shouted in approval.

Mai ignored the insult against her virtue and intentions, squinting against the sun's glare, and picked out the girl who called people names. "Bao? Is that you?"

"N- no!" The girl in question blushed. "You don't know me!"

"Yes, I do. You're Bao. You graduated a year after me from the Royal Academy for Girls, and the palace guards arrested you twice for trying to dig under the palace's outer wall. You were pretty good with a spear in the after-class tournaments, as I recall."

Bao said, "Oh, thank you! I-" She stopped. "I mean, you must be confusing me with someone else." She pointed at Mai. "Anyway, this is about you! We won't let you ruin things!"

"Yeah," another of the other girls called out as she threw a rotten cabbage (she had a stack of them behind her) at the shop. "We won't let a gold-digger steal the Fire Lord!"

The crowd roared their support.

Mai brought her hands together in her sleeves. "I can't steal him. I still have the receipt."

The girl opened her mouth to retort, but stopped short of actually saying anything. She blinked. Then she looked back to Bao.

Bao sighed. "You can't confuse us by mixing metaphors. Again. We won't let a woman like you force her way into the Fire Lord's life forever! Not after all the pain you've caused him."

The crowd cheered angrily, a thing Mai had never actually heard before. The Fire Nation usually expressed its anger with- well, fire, mostly.

Mai, however, had never fit in with Fire Nation society. She merely faced the crowd blankly and said, "Why not?"

This time, it was Bao who needed a moment just to blink. "What?"

"Why not? What's so bad about me, specifically? You try to force your way into his life all the time. And you know he feels bad whenever one of you has to miss lunch because you're in jail."

The crowd murmured some halfhearted acknowledgment of the point.

Bao looked around with a betrayed expression, and then balled her hands into fists and turned back to Mai. "But none of us is forcing him into marriage! You are!"

"-I am?"

Bao looked around and got confirming nods from the girls around her, but she still couldn't quite manage full confidence as she retorted, "Yes?"

"Are you sure?"

The crowd consulted and eventually whispered the consensus into Bao's ear. "Well, all the people in the Capital are saying it. The granny-network has it on full blast, and the kids at the academies are already chanting obscene rhymes about your upcoming wedding."

Mai was force to accept that. It was pretty definitive, as far as Caldera culture got. She tried to remember if Zuko had proposed to her recently, but nothing came to mind. And he didn't joke about things like that, so there was no chance of something said in jest taken too seriously by the wrong person; that seemed more like something that would happen to Suki and Sokka. Besides, she and Zuko were still taking things slowly, so they were both being careful to avoid even planning a dinner together more than a week in advance.

However, they had been back together for a while, despite Mai's protests to Aunt Mura before. The coming together had been messy, at first- the horribleness of the breakup aside, when Zuko hadn't given up on her, Mai had been forced to point out exactly why they only wound up hurting each other when they were together, and he had taken it only marginally worse than she did. But, against the odds, telling the love of her life what was wrong with him had somehow ended up with them getting back together. It probably had something to do with Zuko vowing and then demonstrating better behavior, but Mai couldn't rule out that she was just a sentimental fool where he was concerned. Either way, their time back together had been-

Well, it had been nice.

And the days had turned into weeks had turned into months had turned into-

Oh, dear.

Sometimes, it seemed like Mai and Zuko had been broken up for longer than they'd ever been together, but now that she thought about it, that was no longer true. They were together, they were stable, they were happy-

Was it time to get married? Had one of them missed the signal and now the universe was just going to proceed as if they'd already raised and settled the matter?

Or had Zuko brought it up and Mai was so cold and unfeeling that she had completely forgotten that she promised to become someone's wife, just like Mother had always warned would happen if she didn't smile more?

"Could you," she said to Bao, "stay here for one moment? I need to check something." Without waiting for a reply, she scooted back into the flower shop, where Aunt Mura had put a flowerpot on her head and armed herself with her longest sheers, either in preparation for a siege or cleaning all the rotten cabbage off the walls. "Auntie, I'd tell you if I was getting married, right?"

Aunt Mura frowned. "I hope so. Why, are you-" Her face slowly untightened into a smile like a blooming flower, a comparison that would no doubt satisfy her professional pride. "Are you saying that you-"

"I don't know." And with that, Mai realized that she was being silly. Worrying about marriage - never mind actually talking it out with the angry mob calling for her death - was for the kind of person who didn't cover their bodies with hidden weapons before putting on pants in the morning. She would get closure on this matter one way or another, and there was only one place where that could be done.

The palace.

Where Zuko was.

"I'm taking an early lunch," Mai declared. "I might not be back before closing time."

Aunt Mura put the sheers down on the front counter. "I don't understand, but you do what you have to do. Although- uh, what about the people outside throwing rotten produce at my shop?"

Mai shrugged. "Call the Guard. It's not like those girls haven't seen the inside of a jail cell before. And if they cause any real trouble, tell them that my mother knows their mothers. That always gets them to back down."

And with that, Mai made a quick exit out the shop's rear.

Of course, having a goal - even an adventurously romantic one - was all well and good, but figuring out how to accomplish it was another matter.

It wasn't that she couldn't talk to her boyfriend-maybe-fiance; she did that all the time, often without even thinking about it. Much dumber people than her were able to talk to Zuko, and sometimes he even talked back to them.

No, that was the easy part. And it wasn't like it was hard to find her boyfriend; yes, she technically lived in another town, but the trip from Lower Harbor City to the Caldera just consisted of taking a zig-zagging road up the side of the local volcano. The nobility did it all the time when they wanted to shop or hire an assassin. And once Mai was in the Caldera, all she had to do was make for the big pointy building in the center.

No one impeded her, but was it her imagination, or was she drawing more stares that she usually did?

Nevertheless, it wasn't until the part between getting to the palace and actually entering Zuko's presence where she encountered the first problem.

"What do you mean," she said to the Crimson Guard soldier standing in front of the palace's outer gate, "I can't come in?"

The Crimson Guard was a special unit assigned to all royal matters, each of them Firebenders of special skill, and their special red armor concealed the entirety of their bodies. Mai had never really thought much of people who felt the need to be special in a very public and general way. In her opinion, the only thing worth noting about the whole fuss was the oddly designed helmets that left her wondering if she should be trying to find some eyeholes to direct her glare at or if what looked like a mouthplate was actually a visor.

The guard in the stupid special helmet said, "No one passes through the gate except at the Fire Lord's invitation."

Mai nodded. "I'm his girlfriend. You know, the lady with the knives whose lips are always touching his? You do recognize me, don't you?"

The guard didn't move. "I do, Lady Mai."

"Then what's the problem?"

"No one passes through the gate except at the Fire Lord's invitation."

"Don't I have a standing invitation?"

This time, there was a discernible hesitation. "No one passes through the gate except at the Fire Lord's invitation."

Mai tried to see the world through the eyes - or, in this case, what could have been either some oddly shaped eyeholes or a visor - of a soldier tasked with standing at the gate of the most secure building in the entire country. "And how are we defining an invitation?"

The guard made a quick hand motion at the closed gate behind him. "A royal palanquin comes up to the gate, and I open it and stand aside."

Mai had indeed entered the palace that way many times. Sometimes, she'd even missed the entire thing with the gate because she and Zuko had lowered the curtains on the palanquin they were sharing so that they could properly enjoy each other's company. Even as a child, when Azula wanted Mai and/or Ty Lee to visit her, a palanquin would be sent, carried by a team of the palace's servants, to fetch them and bring them around.

Mai was starting to realize she'd never actually approached the palace on her own initiative before. Of course, she was not simply someone to be sent for when the Fire Lord desired her company, as the fangirl brigade had implied. There were plenty of times when Zuko had come to her. It used to be their preferred method of getting together, during his brief time as an unbanished prince, because everyone in the palace was awful. And now that they were taking things slow, so Mai would often wait for Zuko to come to her, and she'd finish a day's work in Auntie's shop only to find a palanquin waiting outside for her-

No wonder she had no idea if she was getting married or not. She was only at the palace's front gate and already she'd stumbled into a disastrous logistical gap. She hated logistical gaps, or at least ones she couldn't stab. How could she find closure on the matter with logistical gaps all over the place? Gaps weren't closed, by definition.

She said to the guard, "And, maybe just this once, we can open the gate without me being on a palanquin, since you know who I am and that the Fire Lord wants to see me."

The guard's helmet tilted just a little. "Perhaps he does not want to see you at this precise moment in time. No one passes through the gate except at the Fire Lord's invitation."

Mai kept her face blank and worked very hard to stop herself from jamming one of her blades into the nearest convenient eyehole and/or visor. "But the Avatar just lands on the palace grounds all the time without waiting for a palanquin. Surely there's some kind of exception policy?"

The guard's back straightened a bit. "No one passes through the gate except at the Fire Lord's invitation."

Mai indulged in a sigh. "You can't- I don't know, maybe just go ask the Fire Lord if I'm invited right now, given my long and salacious history with him?"

The guard said (and this time, Mai said the words with him), "No one passes through the gate except at the Fire Lord's invitation."

She pointed behind the guard. "It isn't even locked! I can just push the doors open and walk in!"

"No one passes through the gate except at the Fire Lord's invitation."

Okay. Mai had tried doing things the right way. There were angry mobs calling for her death, she might or might not be getting married, and now the world's dimmest guard was strangling her in nonsensical protocol.

She stepped around him and touched the gate door.

She was immediately grabbed by her upper-right arm, a very stupid choice because it left her with an entire other arm and both feet to fight with, never mind her weapons, but then the guard intoned, "That's an act of unlawful entry, and by the ancient royal codes, it is now my legal duty to bring you before the Fire Lord for your punishment!"

Huh. Doing the stupidest thing she could had worked.

It certainly wouldn't be the first time that Fire Nation law was completely stupid, and this time no little boys were getting their faces set on fire.

Mai allowed herself to be dragged into the palace.

A few minutes later, Mai smiled up at Zuko and waved. "I got arrested!"

Upon his big and imposing burning throne, Zuko tried his best to maintain his Serious Fire Lord Expression. But Mai threw in a wink, and his stern visage crumbled into a goofy grin. "So I see. Any particular reason?"

Mai tapped her chin. "I was wondering that, myself."

The guard chimed in with, "No one passes through the gate except at the Fire Lord's invitation."

Zuko just stared silently, exactly like Mai had told him to do when he didn't understand something and would look dumb in front of everyone if he asked. The court he'd assembled wasn't as critical and cutthroat as Ozai's cronies had been, but as (the perhaps fictional) Avatar Nyi had said, "It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it." And there was absolutely no way that Mai could see to address the situation without looking like a complete dud in front of all the important people.

The court gathered now, in the new and improved throne room of Fire Lord Zuko, was a mix of appointed ministers, helpful advisers, and a few nobles who had been generous with their support. Some even liked Zuko, as amazing as that sounded. Mai knew all of them, and didn't find any disapproving glares turned her way. In fact, most were grinning at Zuko's obvious amusement with her, and the rest were giving her the kind looks that Sokka had for a while, when she'd first started spending time with Zuko's friends: a kind of pleasant but evaluating squint, a mixture of welcoming and trying to anticipate how much trouble she'd be causing in the near future.

It was different than the disapproval she used to get whenever she made a spectacle of herself (in ways that didn't involve stabbing someone on Azula's command). Perhaps it was the atmosphere of the remodeled throne room, with its new skylights letting in the sun and the reflective golden bas relief panels on the walls that depicted Firebenders frolicking with dragons (or maybe dragons frolicking with Firebenders, it was hard to tell). Or maybe Zuko had just managed not to associate with jerks.

Mai turned her attention back to her royal boyfriend. "So I am being thrown in jail? I can take one of the nicer cells you put the fangirls in."

Zuko raised his hand regally, but was still struggling with his grin. "I think we can take care of this without getting too official. Guard, you shall return to the gate, and- um, perhaps use a bit more judgment next time in the execution of your duty?"

The guard, who apparently had no limits on his talent obliviousness, declared, "My lord honors me!" He bowed and stomped off.

Zuko finally stopped trying to stop grinning. Instead, he closed his eyes and gave a motion with both hands to settle his chi, extinguishing the flames in front of his throne. That was apparently a kind of signal, as the courtiers all began moving towards the exit and discussing where to knock off for lunch. Zuko got to his feet and maneuvered his way down the stairs. Mai, having walked all the way from Lower Harbor City and been forced to get arrested to come see him, allowed him to come to her.

When he arrived, though, she had no trouble taking the initiate with the greeting.

It wasn't a special greeting. It was just the usual way they'd taken to saying hello to each while they were taking it slow with their renewed relationship. Things started with eye contact and smiles, then they rushed into each other's arms, and then came the kissing that only stopped when they ran out of oxygen. Usually they followed that by gazing into each other's eyes for a while, and depending on their schedule, they might go back for another round of the kissing. This time, though, Mai had business to take care of, so she moved things along by saying, "Hi."

"Hi," Zuko breathed back.

She reached up to stroke his face. "Hi."

"Hi." He chuckled and leaned into her touch.

Mai said, "Are we getting married?"

Zuko smiled. Zuko blushed. Zuko opened his mouth to speak-

And then he pulled out of her arms, took a defensive Firebending stance, and said, "What?"

Mai nodded. "Yes, that was my reaction, too."

And, it seemed, she had her answer. Or, at least, one of the answers, and possibly the most important one. Zuko was just as surprised as she had been. Whatever had happened, or not happened, it had happened (or not happened) to both of them.

She just wasn't sure if that was a good thing.

Then she saw that Zuko was still staring at her. And still hunched like he was expecting an attack. Why would he-

Mai realized how her question had sounded.

Oh.

She might have just proposed to her boyfriend.

Well, that would certainly settle things, one way or another.

TO BE CONTINUED