A/N: Grr. Still dealing with writer's block. So instead of working on my other stories I'm dabbling with this one. I'm reconciled to this being read by very few. And really, if you haven't read "Prison Conversations" this will make no sense whatsoever. I'm not a big fan of OC's generally myself, and I made it quite clear that this was a story in which the only characters would be Sokka and an OC, so only those few who found Ling-Ling a little too compelling are going to find this at all interesting. Also, I'm letting things get a bit darker than usual. Maybe it's all that criminal law I'm reading…
Disclaimer: Who me? Attempting to claim ownership or generate income therefrom? No chance. So go away and leave me to meander among my delusions…
Crossing the Line: Chapter 1
Sokka watched Ling-Ling struggle to regain the mask of dull indifference she had worn so well at the prison, and considered how he could continue to keep her off-balance. It was, he was sure, the only way he would ever keep the upper hand with her. It also offered, he noted, a view of a far more appealing side to her, one that he been wholly unaware might have existed.
He well remembered the girl they had taken for a drudge bringing meal trays to their cells, the timid scuttling walk, and her downcast eyes as she spoon-fed the fettered and furious fire-bender. With her hair in a careless knot and shapeless robes, she had appeared half oblivious to her surroundings, as if it took all her intelligence to concentrate on the task at hand. He couldn't remember what had made him realize that she was attracted to the fugitive prince, but subsequent events made him wonder if she hadn't been attempting to communicate this to Zuko all along. Zuko had just been too proud to acknowledge it.
Perhaps it had only been Sokka's desperate seeking for some means to escape that had made him notice her at all. In Zuko's absence, he may well have attempted to befriend her on his own, although he doubted it would have occurred to him to push beyond instilling in her a sympathy for him and willingness to help. At least, so he told himself. As it happened, Zuko was in the cell next door, and the charms of a foreign-born common warrior were no match for those of the handsome brooding prince. Pragmatic as always, Sokka had adapted, and he had no regrets that Ling-Ling's infatuation with the other boy had resulted in the means of escape for both of them. Granted, it wouldn't have surprised him if she felt some annoyance that they had taken her help and extended it to half-destroy the prison complex itself, freeing the other prisoners as well. Still, she seemed fairly sanguine at how things had turned out. And for that, he gave her credit. But could he believe it?
The girl sitting on the bench set in the curving wall still wore her hair carelessly, and with her robes now inside out the fit was even less flattering than before. The angularity of her face hadn't changed, and her eyes were still too widely set, her lips too firm in a mouth too large for a narrow jaw. What was the difference, then?
Ah, the eyes sparkled, whether in amusement or anger didn't seem to matter, but they gave overwhelming life and intelligence to her expression. Those firm lips twitching hinted at generosity, and Sokka remembered something Zuko had once remarked on, almost in passing, regarding Ling-Ling's more subtle qualities. Perhaps it shouldn't have been so surprising that she had in fact won, if not affection, respect and a kind of allegiance from the fire prince.
Sokka gave himself a good mental shake. He did not need to push his contemplations any further along that particular road. He suddenly remembered how limited his own experience with girls actually was, and how the girl before him had figuratively eaten young men like him for breakfast, time and again.
Since it was unlikely that she was here to do any harm, and since she was obviously so capable, was it really necessary for him to see her any further? After all, he had extricated her from the Earth Kingdom soldiers; surely his debt to her was now paid.
"You know, you're right. I do presume too much. I can see you're fine now, and we both have things that need doing. You need to get back across the river and I need to be on my way," Sokka decided it was time to bring this encounter to a close.
"No, wait. Please." Her hand shot out to clasp his arm frantically as he attempted to rise. "Don't go. Don't leave me alone – not yet!"
Without really thinking about it, he sank back down, allowing Ling-Ling to draw herself closer to him, and covered the hand on his arm with his own in a comforting gesture. It was done with the instinct of long practice, family born. And, again without thinking, he spoke the first words that came to mind.
"Hey. Trust me. I really can't tell you any more about Zuko," Sokka said gently. "And it's not just that you're Fire Nation. I couldn't tell anyone, really. It's just not safe. Not safe for him, and not for anyone who knows."
"He's going to rebel against the Fire Lord, his father, isn't he?" There was a fire burning in those eyes again, and Sokka wondered at the passion contained there.
"Who knows? Maybe he'd just like a quiet, peaceful life somewhere he can forget about his family." With what he knew of Zuko's life, Sokka wouldn't have blamed him if this were exactly what Zuko dreamed of.
"He can't. He's too dangerous."
"'He who isn't for me is against me'," Sokka said automatically in response, her words following his own thoughts with uncanny precision.
"Exactly. Unless the Fire Lord knows where he is, Prince Zuko will always be a threat to him. With all the good will in the world towards his father himself, others could still rebel in his name." Ling-Ling spoke bitterly, and with a certain sense of urgency.
"You've been thinking about this, and you want to find him to warn him," Sokka's own comfort level began to increase as the rightness of this deduction filled in some of the gaps that had confused his senses ever since running across Ling-Ling.
"Yes."
He smiled at her. "Ling-Ling, Zuko's no dummy. And even if he were, he does have maybe one or two smart friends watching his back. He's quite aware of the problem. Hey, his father gave him a death sentence, remember? The guy can put two and two together."
"He has no choice anymore. He has to rebel, or die." There was a note of real fear in her voice.
Sokka thought briefly about the likelihood of Zuko's accepting death if it would restore honor in his father's eyes. His smile turned grim at the lack of logic in such a prospect, and the time during which logic had had no hold on the prince's thinking. He also thought about Zuko's other choice.
"It's war-time, Ling-Ling. Any of us could die. As long as we're doing the right thing, maybe it doesn't matter."
She looked at him, and he watched the light in her eyes palpably dim, like a door closing. He found himself holding the hand of the girl who, less than a month before, had seen him as an obstacle hindering her enthrallment of the Fire Nation prince. He shivered, and carefully removed her hand from its now relaxed grip on his arm, placing it gently on her other hand in her lap. He slid back along the bench.
"You are encouraging him in this," she said, flatly.
Sokka sighed, exasperated. "As if he'd listen to anything I said. But look, what do you expect? I'm Water Tribe, remember? I want this war to end with the Fire Nation's defeat. I want Ozai and his crazy daughter dead. I do! I want anyone who thinks the Fire Nation should rule over the rest of us dead as well. Hell, I'll kill Zuko myself if he starts thinking like that again…"
"You did it! You did turn him against his people!"
"I did nothing of the sort. Shit, I wish I could! Things would be so much easier if that stubborn, stiff-necked git would just accept that the Fire Nation deserves to be beaten into the ground. Aagh." Sokka buried his face in his hands.
Why was it that he was the one who always ended up having to talk to people from the Fire Nation? He hated the Fire Nation, always had. Hell, they'd killed his mother, stolen from him the first love of his young life. He didn't want to talk to Fire Nation people – he wanted to bust their heads! He wanted Aang to go into scary glow-it-up mode and mow down the legions of fire-benders like a farmer winnowing hay!
Until he remembered the sickening crack his war-club had made on the skull of one of the invaders blocking his and Yue's way back to the Oasis all those months ago, or the metallic tang of blood in his nose and the way it had soaked his clothes, staining the blue first bright red then dull black, as he had tried to hack his way through the soldiers that finally overwhelmed him the day that had resulted in his imprisonment. How he'd worn those clothes, stiff with the caked and dried blood, for days before this girl now facing him with those accusing eyes had brought him a blanket to wrap around himself while she washed those clothes clean. Or when he remembered the anguish in a twelve-year-old's eyes as he contemplated the sheer magnitude of destruction he had brought to the Fire Navy, aided by the Ocean Spirit. And then? Talk seemed infinitely preferable.
Ling-Ling appeared to withdraw within herself, an effect Sokka sensed even with his head lowered and his mind consumed with his own thoughts.
"Look, I'm sorry. I didn't really mean that. I mean, I did, about Ozai and Azula, but not about you. Not about your people. Not really." He looked up at her, drawn back into a corner of the bench and the growing shadows. She didn't move, and he wasn't sure if she was paying him any attention now or not.
"Okay, then. Well. I don't know about you, but I'm hungry," he attempted a grin, which came out rather lop-sided, "So I'm gonna go see if I can come up with something to eat. I'll bring back whatever I find. If you're here, fine. If not, well, that's okay too. I mean, you do whatever you need to. We're good, as far as I'm concerned."
As he walked away he thought about what he had just said, and how stupid it had sounded in his own ears. And it did not occur to him to wonder why it mattered anyway.
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She followed him with her eyes until he disappeared around a corner, noting the hunched shoulders even as he attempted to hold his back straight and tall.
There had never been any question in her mind of leaving before his return. Certainly not now, now that she had disarmed his lack of trust in her through a simple display of obsession with the Fire Prince.
Ling-Ling allowed her lip to curl in satisfaction once he was out of sight. It was impossible luck to run into him again. How could she not take every advantage of the opportunity, once it had been given her? After all, there were interesting layers to the Water Tribe boy that fascinated Ling-Ling. His outburst had not really surprised her; she had been attempting to provoke it, in fact.
She knew he was capable of violence. She remembered how very much blood had washed out of his clothes, how many times she had had to change the water in the basin. She remembered how it had streaked his face days later, and his total lack of awareness of it. She also remembered how his hand had trembled when she had brought him a damp cloth after that first particularly brutal session with her father - he had brought the cloth back to his face to look at it after first wiping what he had obviously only expected to be sweat and grime from his brow. He'd known the blood was not his own.
That had been before Prince Zuko had arrived, of course, when her attention was still wholly focused on the new prisoner and his possibilities. She had been thrilled to learn that the grim-faced warrior so covered in blood was one of the Avatar's companions. At first he had seemed in a bit of a daze, but once the interrogations started that had disappeared, to be replaced by a hostility exhibited through biting wit and otherwise studious ignoring of everyone who approached his cell, for whatever purpose.
She had noticed his eyes taking in everything and everyone, though. And she had wondered how long it would take for him to become desperate enough to notice her. After all, eventually, they all did. And that would be the beginning.
When the Fire Prince had arrived her attention had been distracted, and for some days she had found herself unable to choose between them. She had even wondered if she should let fate decide for her.
The animosity between the two young men was confusing; hadn't the Fire Lord declared his son a fugitive because he believed the prince had allied himself with the Avatar? That instead of capturing him Prince Zuko had aided him to evade the Fire Nation? But there was no mistaking the angry glances or harsh words the two traded.
The prince had been indifferent to the beatings taken by the Water Tribe boy during interrogation. Instead of ignoring the prince, as he had ignored everyone and everything else, the warrior had watched with disdain as the prince took his own share of abuse, taunting him at any given opportunity in ways often not clear to the observer, but clearly telling by the prince's reaction. No, these two had not been allies.
Perhaps, instead, they were competitors? It was a question she never did resolve, but the fact that they had escaped together and brought utter mayhem to the prison on just the vague basis of her scattered warnings, had assured her that some sort of truce had been brokered. And it was the mayhem that convinced her that the warrior had somehow assumed some kind of ascendancy over the prince. That and the element of calculation she had caught in his gaze in those last days, the underhanded and not subtle blackmail he practiced upon her.
All of which, of course, had drawn her eye back to him.
There was a ruthlessness to the foreigner that appealed to her. A ruthlessness that ran totally at odds with the young man that had come to the aid of an enemy national, an apparent stranger. Whereas that act resonated with the hand that trembled at the sight of another's blood, that took her own hand when she appeared distressed just now. Oh yes, he was fascinating!
Ling-Ling stretched herself, considering her next moves carefully. There was no cell to keep him captive, and she knew better than to think she could charm him with graceful moves or coy glances. And there was so little time! Perhaps even only the next few hours. Surely it simply wasn't possible to reap any particular victory from meeting Sokka again, beyond the hollow knowledge that he acknowledged a dept to her and that, yes, he recognized some little claim she had on Fire Prince.
The plain-featured girl closed down with an almost audible snap, the smile gone as if it had never existed. She hadn't spent the better part of the last three years worrying about the possible! What was merely possible held no meaning for her, since she had long ago left it behind her.
Sokka had been perfectly accurate in his assessment of her, and she was not blind to the essential elements of that assessment. She felt no particular loyalty to the Fire Nation, hadn't for years. Not since words like "loyalty" and "honor" had ceased to have concrete meaning to her, along with the words "piety" and "fealty" or "family".
Nor did she feel any particular loyalty to anyone else, for that matter. Except for her little adventures, her games with selected prison inmates, Ling-Ling had been no more than numb for so many years. Despite the very real life-or-death aspect of those games for the characters involved, only recently had it even occurred to her that anything she could do would have any impact on anyone else, let alone the world at large. Ling-Ling would never admit, to herself or anyone else, that she had been living her life as if, for the most part, she were merely sleeping and waiting to wake up to a new reality.
As such, her special prisoners were almost creations of her own mind, and so of no real import.
Had she truly imagined that the warrior and the prince would take her comments on the prison's tense atmosphere and use them to destroy it? Surely not. Surely she had merely meant to warn them to be careful in making their escape, and had never intended to hint to them at the possibilities such a situation offered. It would have taken an extraordinary lack of morality to imagine such a thing, to hope for utter chaos to bloom from the seeds of dissention. Seeds that she had planted.
The shock of prison guards laid out in rows with wounds to be dressed, limbs hacked and faces gouged, and still others similarly displayed but merely for identification and record-keeping, of buildings blackened and ruined beyond repair, of complete upheaval of all that she had ever known in life, all resulting from her own half careless words, had ripped the veil of unreality from her consciousness in a way that personal pain and, yes, pleasure, and not sufficed to do.
Had she really crossed the river from the safety of the Fire Nation to the Earth Kingdom, dressed in blatant red, truly oblivious to the risk she was exposing herself? Of course not. Ling-Ling was seeking out life as she had only ever understood it, in risking all for the moment. Did she honestly expect she would meet again either of the two who had brought life so vigorously back into her life? Again, of course not.
But there was no way that, having done so, she would let him slip away again too easily.