Pale skin peeked out beneath a black hoodie and Jet immediately took notice. This was the Freedom Fighter's turf. Not many of the upper class ventured to the Jungle, and those who did usually surrounded themselves with bodyguards or travelled in groups. This one was alone.

He shouldered his gun and began to trail the boy as he weaved through the streets. Whatever a high-class kid like that was doing around here, he wanted to know.

There were few people besides them, and those who were there were mostly Jet's. He gave each of them the signal to stand down, let him deal with this, a quick cut downwards with his hand, and kept walking as silently as he could on the glass-strewn pavement. Metal and broken windows towered above them, their foundations rotted and their tops gleaming with the folly of the rich. The sky shone a bright, hot blue at the top. The buildings from before blocked the view of the gray haze at its sides. The Jungle was a harsh place, filled with harsh people, and the soft hands and feet and pale, easily burned skin of the upper class had no place here.

So what was this boy doing here?

There seemed to be no pattern to his movements. He just walked through the streets, hood up, trying to make himself unnoticeable. It didn't work too well. It was an easy time following him. And there was something else strange: despite the day being over forty Celcius, the boy was shivering in his bulky hoodie.

The boy made what were almost certainly a couple wrong turns, and they ended up in the really abandoned section of the Jungle. Jet, despite his better judgement, followed him into the shadowed, rotting alleys. Here, almost no one lived, and those who did…

Well. They usually weren't worth mentioning.

He and the boy twisted and turned through the streets, following each other into shaded alleys. Even with the sun burning white above it felt like night in this place.

The boy turned right, behind an old tattoo parlor, and Jet followed him almost without thinking—he'd committed to this fully the moment he set foot in the abandoned section. He stepped in front of the gap between buildings to see a dead end. The boy waited for him in the shadows.

Okay. Clearly this was meant to be some sort of trap. Jet settled his AK on his shoulder and advanced towards the boy.

Said boy didn't move.

"What you doing down here, brat?" he snapped, trying to get a rise out of him. Still no movement. Kriff. Guess he was doing this.

He shouldered his gun and aimed it. "Come over here and answer me."

That got a reaction: a simple raised finger, palm turned inwards, curling back towards the boy. A beckoning.

It didn't occur to Jet to not follow it. He kept his gun raised, trained on the boy's head, but his willingness to shoot drained away the closer he got. The boy kept curling and uncurling his finger, every time getting a few steps out of Jet, until he could have knocked the boy's forehead with the barrel. Instead he flipped the boy's hood off to reveal pale skin and black hair forming a sharp, slightly feminine, almost angelic face. His eyes were closed.

But he'd avoided every bit of broken glass just fine…

Jet's heart nearly stopped. Mutant.

"Not quite," the boy said.

His voice was a high tenor, with an undertone of grinding rock and crackling fire. His eyes snapped open—red-gold eyes, demon eyes—and he smiled, sharp teeth gleaming in the little light that filtered from behind the rooftops. Jet tried to scramble back—but his feet were stuck to the pavement and he fell hard onto shattered glass, losing his gun, unable to back away. The boy picked him up one-handed with ease, despite whatever stickiness had trapped him before.

"No!" Jet managed to gasp.

"Yes," the demon said, calmly, as he dragged Jet back into the shadows.

They emerged onto a cliff towering above an entirely different hellscape. The sky was red here, and it was even hotter than before, probably due to the large swaths of low-burning flames that dotted the landscape.

Was this actual hell?

The demon kept his grip on Jet's shirt, shedding his hoodie and revealing huge scaly wings. Jet managed to lean back, fighting hard to break his grip or maybe rip his own shirt, but neither happened before the demon got his other hand free, grabbed Jet's bicep, and launched into the air.

Still Jet struggled, trying to get free of the demon's shifting grip, until he heard a voice hiss in his ear. The demon's. "Do you want to fall and die?"

That got him to stop moving.

Jet didn't know how long they flew, his arms wrapped around the demon's torso, the demon's hand pressing the small of Jet's back to his stomach. It felt like only a few minutes. But eventually Jet managed to work up the courage to look down, and the same view as before greeted him—swaths of flames and charcoal marring a red rock landscape that dipped and swirled to house those flames, with pockets of other, stranger microecosystems dotted between them. He tilted his head to look where they were going and got a face full of ashy air and streaming eyes for his trouble.

Only moments later they began to drop, and Jet's heart plummeted into his intestines. It was really taking a beating. He couldn't twist his head to see whether or not he was going to die before he was suddenly submerged in lukewarm, dirty water, the weight of the demon dragging him down into seemingly endless depths, silt filling his throat and burning in his lungs.

Oh Agni he was going to drown—

He thrashed on the dark bottom, stirring up more burning silt, trying to break the demon's hold and find which way was up. None of it worked. The demon pushed him down, punched his gut to make him lose his breath, even as he struggled, even as hot pain lanced under his shoulderblades and made him gasp away his remaining air. Pins and needles started poking at his skin and the agony eclipsed even the feeling of drowning. The demon was still pinning him down. Something was changing inside him, heat pulsing from his lungs out into his body until his entire existence was pain. He wanted to scream, but the water in his lungs stifled his cries. His muscles screamed for relief. His mind whimpered. He wasn't sure how much more he could take—

He was leaving the water.

The pain disappeared almost instantly, and a hand on his back roughly encouraged him to start coughing up the tepid water. There was wood beneath his hands and warm legs beneath his torso. Another hand curled around his neck and shoulders, thumb caressing his chin as violent convulsions forced the water out of his lungs and stomach.

"That's it, that's it," the demon's voice said from somewhere above him. "You're safe here. You're safe now."

…it didn't sound as grating as it had before. The crackling fire reminded him of a hearth, the grinding rock now a deep, soul-soothing rumble. He found himself sinking into the soft sounds of comfort as the last of the water left his mouth.

He opened his eyes at last. Branches hung suspended low over the brownish-gray water, choked with an ashfall that drifted around him. The air, once suffocatingly hot, now felt cool on his wet skin. He sat up, guided by the arm around his shoulders, and realized—he wasn't laying on branches. He was laying on roots that stretched from the trunks by the bank of the slow river into its depths.

Mangrove trees. He'd heard of them, once, but he'd never thought he'd see them in person.

Limbs stirred behind him, and he looked back lethargically and realized he had wings. He was too tired, too shocked, to care.

"Don't worry. I'm here." Jet was sitting on the demon's lap, and he stroked a hand down from his forehead to tuck a strand of hair behind his ear. "I'm Zuko, and I'm going to take care of you."

He—Zuko—still had the face of an angel.