AN: Back! Budapest is lovely, guys. Try not to pick up eye infections while you're there, though. 10/10 trip, blurry/10 ability to look at this screen without super upping the font size oww. I hereby blame typos on all the letters looking the same.

Chapter 23: Momo Goes For Water

It wasn't so much that it seemed like a good idea at the time, just that Aang had no other choice. Yes they were really really close to Fire Nation territory and some big scary fort, but they couldn't just keep flying when Sokka was so sick. Thought-he-was-an-earthbender sick. That was the kind of thing that needed medicine, right? Right.

And it wasn't like Aang really thought the ruins of an isolated herbal institute would still have a super-competent staff that would go oh yes, we know exactly what's wrong with your friends, and we have this medicine and this illustrated pamphlet of instructions already prepared please take them, but he didn't have a choice. This place was close enough to check, and he'd rather do that first than risk going into a town when Katara's (oddly accurate) knowledge of which towns were under Fire Nation control was starting to get as wobbly as her ability to stand. And, well, if a crazy old lady told him to shove frozen frogs in his friends mouths, it was worth a try at least. Right? ...Right.

And okay, so maybe he should have turned around and windstorm-run the other way when the hail of scarily accurate arrows started, but just then he spotted a frog—a frozen frog!—and apparently the things were real, so maybe they really worked, and he just needed two and it wasn't like the archers were trying to kill him or anything so they probably worked for Zuko anyway. He'd been a little (lightning-y) angry the last time they'd seen him, sure, but it wasn't like he'd leave Katara and Sokka all sick if he knew about them, maybe Aang should just go ahead and get captured so he could explain—

(They didn't. Work for Zuko.)

Now he was hanging from chains and this must be the Zhao guy Sokka and Katara had warned him about. And he'd gotten the frogs, but these chains were… really tight. And he was in a big stone room with no windows, and he'd seen how many guards were out in the hall, and how many soldiers were in the fort, and Zhao's smile as he talked about the long, long life Aang had ahead of him. Aang could feel the air all around him, but it was stale and it wasn't enough and he couldn't breathe and—

And he really didn't think Zhao was leaving to get him tea.

"Water, Momo," she-who-rationed-the-food said, and handed him the dead folded flesh of an animal that sloshed when it was moved. (Though it did not slosh now.) The lemur tilted his head, and churred.

Groan, his no-wings size-of-mountain fluff-of-cloud flying-friend translated, though he was self-admittedly more fluent in Rapidly Chattering Monk-Child than Very Small Mother-of-Flock.

Chitter, the lemur replied, and did his best. She-who-rationed-the-food had handed him a not-sloshing meat-bag. So the lemur took a guess, and returned with a still-sloshing meat-bag.

She-who-rationed-the-food was not pleased by the dead vole-mouse on her chest. "Water," she repeated.

So he tried again. And again.

By the time he brought the ring-of-shinies and set it atop her head, the lemur admitted he was just guessing.

"Water," she said, and started coughing. He'd really like to bring her water for that, but there weren't any good fruit trees around here, and how could a lemur carry water to sick-flock-mates if it were not inside of fruit? And these flock-mates were very sick. Even he-whose-stomach-challenged-the-gods was shaking like a just-born in a spring-storm-that-brings-snow-death. The male hadn't tried to eat the vole-mouse, either, even though he was a bad!-danger!-carnivore! and it was meat-near-mouth.

Flying-friend lowed his concern. The lemur chittered, and took to the air again. If thing-she-wanted was not here, then he would fly further and try harder, because flocks were only as strong as their most-likely-to-be-eaten-by-hawks member.

Fujita tried to remain expressionless. The Yuyan tattoos helped. The lemur trying to steal the arrows off Ritsuko's back didn't. Especially not when her face was somewhere between what in Koh's name and oh-my-gosh-cute.

Should I shoot it? This was conveyed through a single hand signal. That signal was, perhaps predictably, the act of nocking an arrow.

Don't you dare, these things are super endangered, Ritsuko returned. The fact that the Yuyan had a concise signal for this spoke volumes towards their history as a unit. And what bored sharpshooters get up to while stationed in backwater forests, or islands with isolated ecosystems. The signal was largely just a frantic no no no wave, reminiscent of the rapid fluttering of the (tragically extinct) humming-snipe.

Toriyama, thinking faster and less homicidally than Fujita, offered the lemur one of the arrows he'd been re-fletching after that morning's mission. It had three new feathers on its end, a scrap of orange fabric still caught on its tip, and smelled a lot like fresh glue.

The lemur jumped off Ritsuko, ran a loop around Toriyama's shoulders, then grabbed the arrow in its lower paws and took off with a lot of chittering. It swooped down off the walls of Pohuai Stronghold, disappearing into the forest towards the mountains, gliding into a somewhat erratic headwind that would make for interesting targeting—

Super endangered, Ritsuko repeated, with a pointed humming-snipe flap of her hand that came really close to smacking Fujita upside the head.

"Oh, shoot," Toriyama said, momentarily at a loss for nonverbal communication. "That glue was still wet."

Somewhere below, a super endangered lemur screeched as it realized the same thing.

You idiot, Ritsuko conveyed. The signal for this was a face palm.

"Water."

The lemur's ears drooped.

"Water."

He tried to drop off his latest attempt, but… couldn't. He shook his paw, and gnawed at the wood-and-feathers, and growled his fiercest but it refused to be scared off.

"Water."

The lemur had no idea what that vocalization meant, but he was coming to hate it. The things he did for his no-flight bipeds. (And why did this sticking-stick smell like his flying biped?)

"Wat—"

With an exasperated shriek, the lemur took to the air. Again. Trailing an arrow and a scrap of cloth behind him.

Zuko was face-first on his futon. This was where he lived now.

(Part of him couldn't help but think how nice it was to be able to press his face into his pillow and not have it hurt, his burn was almost totally healed, but the rest of him refused to admit that anything could be nice right now. Because Zhao was an admiral and he had the Avatar and Zuko was never going home and—)

Zuko was face-first on his futon with the Blue Spirit mask next to him, but as long as he didn't raise his head he didn't need to look at it and think about how maybe the Avatar could mysteriously escape.

He hadn't eaten all day but his stomach still really hurt. He'd opened the porthole earlier to get fresh air (well, Uncle had, before Zuko locked him out), but the dock outside smelled like dead fish and sounded like loyal citizens celebrating a great enemy's capture, and if he was a loyal citizen too he'd be happy no matter who'd caught the Avatar. The stupid town-destroying monk needed to be stopped, he knew that, he'd been ready to do it himself. But—

(But when he contemplated Father's track record with twelve-year-olds and mercy he started to wonder if letting the airbender and his smiles anywhere near Father and his smiles was ever a thing he should have tried to do, no matter how much he wanted to go home, and there was a traitor-voice in the back of his mind that sounded like him but it couldn't be because it was asking if he really did want to go home, why-would-he? Mother was gone and Azula had probably let the hawks eat all the turtleducks by now—)

(Azula was ten and alone with Father, and that was so much worse than being twelve and half-way across the world with Uncle.)

Zuko was face-first on his futon and… and why was there a hawk grooming his hair, did Fire Flake destroy another cage? The hawk chittered. Which was… not a hawk sound.

He turned his head, just a little. A lemur peered down at him. Zuko turned his face back into the pillow and laughed a not-good laugh. Zhao had the Avatar, and Zuko had the Avatar's pet. If ever an animal looked like a participation ribbon, the lemur did.

"Go away," the (banished) (banished forever) prince said.

The lemur responded to this very reasonable request by smacking the back of Zuko's head with an arrow.

This offense on his royal person was met with shouting and arm flapping. The lemur was an excellent conversational partner, in this regard.

"Prince Zuko?" his Uncle called through the door. He didn't ask something stupid like are you okay. "Did a seagull-rat fly in, or has Jee's parrot returned?"

"Neither," Zuko huffed.

Which was quite uninformative, but confirmed for Uncle that the boy was not being torn apart by an errant flock of wolf-hawks, despite all sounds to the contrary. In this regard, it accomplished exactly what it was meant to. "I will be just down the hall, nephew."

"...I know."

Uncle's footsteps retreated. Zuko stared down at the lemur in his lap. It tilted its head, its ears tall and attentive.

"You don't know where to go now either, huh?" But wait, that didn't make any sense. "Why aren't you with Sokka and Katara? They didn't get caught, I know they didn't."

It wasn't hard to keep up with Zhao's exploits when the man gloated so much. He was probably already practicing his I-caught-the-Avatar speech on whoever was closest to him. The lemur tilted its head the other way, and then lifted up its foot and gnawed at the arrow.

The Yuyan arrow.

The Yuyan arrow with a scrap of airbender-orange attached. That was glued to its foot, why.

Zuko spent an unreasonable proportion of the next hour trying to give the lemur a foot bath using only the supplies on hand. Namely, the pot of tea that had been sitting by his door for hours. By the end, Zuko had an arrow with white fur in its fletchings, a shirt that needed changing, and a lemur that smelled like ginseng. The lemur sat on the far side of his futon and only interrupted licking its paw to chitter-scold him, like this was his fault. What kind of idiot glued an arrow to a lemur?

...Zuko's mind readily supplied the image of a Water Tribe peasant. Only then did it occur to him that Sokka and Katara were still free. And the Avatar's lemur was in his room, carrying a pretty clear 'hey, in case you didn't know, the Avatar got captured' message, like some kind of discount messenger hawk. And Sokka never did seem to have his own paper (Zuko turned the arrow over in his hands looking for titles, but if there had been any, the tea probably washed them off.)

"Is he asking for my help?" Zuko asked the lemur, voice somewhere between deeply offended and cautiously hopeful. This was a message, wasn't it? Were they breaking the Avatar out and they wanted his help? Katara knew how sneaky he was, and both siblings knew he needed to catch the Avatar for himself, and they probably (stupidly) (...correctly) thought it would be easier to get the monk back from Zuko's ship than from Pohuai Stronghold. But even if this were a message and he did help, could they break the Avatar out? Pohuai Stronghold was the Boiling Rock of the Earth Kingdom, only minus the boiling lake and the steep crater and the ocean and all terrain advantages that would stop a twelve-year-old from easily approaching. And also, not really specialized at holding prisoners.

The lemur gave its foot one last lick. Then it grabbed his Blue Spirit mask, and made for the window.

"Wait!"

Zuko snatched back his mask. Then he used the smallest scrap of paper possible, and a ribbon-not-glue, to attach a note to the lemur's foot.

Tonight. Try not to die before I can save you.

The lemur flew off. Zuko stared down at his mask, his heart beating fast, and thought about all the things he needed to do before sunset. He hadn't eaten all day and he was suddenly really hungry, and he needed some new tea because the old pot would taste like lemur feet, and maybe he should actually sleep a little instead of just angsting aggressively, and—

The lemur landed on one of flying-friend's horns, and gnawed at the ribbon tied to his leg.

"Water…" she-who-rationed-the-food-and-made-very-unclear-demands said.

The roll-of-thin-bark bounced off her head, and rolled to the floor. The lemur took some small satisfaction in this. He flapped his wings.

Groan, flying-friend scolded.

Chitter, the lemur retorted scathingly, and took to the air. At least boy-who-smelled-like-hawks-and-fire appreciated a good arm-flap shouting match.

AN: Replies to guesties:

badtothebone, ch 7: Jee does not find this hilarious. At all.

badtothebone, ch 22: The show teased Zuko-lightning so hard and never delivered. I hereby promise that I will never tease when I can do so much worse. *cackles*

thewriterstory, ch 13: Iroh's intelligent side is the best! Well, second best; Iroh's turtleduck-momming of Zuko is clearly the best-best. But I love letting the Former-Crown-Prince shine through. This Iroh has had much less time away from court than show!Iroh, and has a much younger fire-duckling to defend…

thewriterstory, ch 22: More has been delivered! With more to come!