Rating: Supernatural
Genre: T
Summary: Jet is warned. He doesn't listen. (Same universe as The King and Return, kid generation)
There was a boy his own age on the swingset, scuffing his sneaker against the woodchips. A younger girl, who looked like the boy's sister, was yelling up to an even younger boy. Jet decided to go over to the first boy.
"Hey," he said, leaning against the metal bars.
The boy raised an eyebrow at him. "Hey." Then after a moment's pause: "You're new, aren't you?"
"Yea," Jet confirmed. "My stepdad and I drove into town just a couple days ago. I don't think we're leaving."
The other boy looks away. "Hm. Just...don't go into the woods."
"What?"
"Don't go into the woods. People will tell you old legends about people who wandered into the woods and came back different, if they came back at all - and the legends have some truth to them. Over the past fifty years thirty people have gone missing in the woods around our town." He chuckled nervously. "What's weirder is that they were always outsiders."
The word set Jet a little on edge, but it was said so casually that he had to ask: "Outsiders?"
The boy shrugged. "Yea. Outsiders. Either people that had just moved here or people that had stopped in our town on a road trip and decided to go play in the woods. None of them ever came back, and the bodies were never found."
"How do you know all this?"
"My dad's chief of police here. Even if our police department is only five people."
"Oh. Well, thanks for the advice, um..."
"Sokka."
"Yea. Thanks, Sokka. I'm Jet."
Sokka smiled. "Good to meet you, Jet. And one other thing -" he said, losing his smile "- stay away from Zuko and his mother."
Jet blinked. "Who's Zuko?"
"Dark haired, very pale, looks somewhat Japanese. But more than anything he looks dead. When you touch him he's cold, and I think he knows something about the missing people - whenever I mentioned it back when I tried to make friends with him he's always get really vague and weird about it. His mother too."
"That's...that's weird."
"Yea."
JA chime came from Jet's pocket, and he pulled out his phone only to sigh at the text that awaited him. "Well. It was nice to talk to you, but I need to get back to my stepdad. I don't want him to get angry at me. See ya around, I guess."
"See ya around."
And with that, the words of Sokka's warnings echoing in his mind, Jet left the scene.
So, short one this month, and dialogue heavy. I put some character reactions into it because I really don't like pieces that are just dialogue.
This AU absolutely blew up thanks to a comment thread on Ao3, so this is something of a concept scene for it. Plenty of mystery and new questions to be answered, even if you've read the other two flash fictions in this AU.