A/N: I'm back to the land of consistent internet where I can actually post! I hate to have taken so long to post this, but don't worry, I've got lots more chapters in store for you guys and hope you enjoy this one! Thanks, RNR!

Ch. 3: Change

Her strides echoing in the marble halls, Mai sprinted, forgetting grace, forgetting restraint for just minutes, but longer than she had in years.

Zuko did have a way of doing that to her: making her forget her place, her many learned manners.

No, don't say his name. Not now.

Rounding a corner and skidding on the tile floor, Mai noticed the bitter sting in her eyes and tried to press the thoughts of Azula's tales out of her eyes but wiped away only tears.

As she neared the infirmary, Mai smelled over-brewed, forgotten jasmine tea as well as the sickly sweetness of pain medication and ointment.

Slowing to a walk up to a tired-looking table, she nodded to Iroh, whose knuckles were white and his face almost as pale as he clutched a cup of tea, hoarsely saying,

"Ah, Mai, it is good to see you. Would you care for...for some tea."

The aged man looked away as he bit back the stumbling in his voice.

Mai struggled not to scream to ask where Zuko was, her eyes frantically searching door after door; however, Iroh's visible sorrow lead to restraint winning the internal fight. Remembering her manners out of empathy instead of schooling, Mai took a seat, responding quietly,

"Sure, Iroh."

Sliding her a cup, his eyes were glassy as he stared at nothing in particular.

"So you've heard of all of this. You know, you're the first person to come to the infirmary, to see if my n-nephew, if he's...alright. Everyone's too busy talking of all this. But..."

Taking a long sigh as he continued,

"Zuko's in...in there, if you wanted to know."

Silently, he motioned toward a door to the left.

Looking up to the sage man, Mai realized that her parents probably would have preferred her to refuse and stay seated with her tea, and it would be much more polite for her to stay and talk with Iroh, but her instinct told her to go to her friend.

Iroh must have seen the conflicted look in her eyes, as he said with a hint of a sorrowful smile,

"It's alright, Mai, go to him. I'm sure you're the first person he'd want to see anyway."

Nodding gratefully to the old man, Mai rose from her chair and paced to the door, perhaps out of habit not making a sound.

Click.

When she entered the room, the door opened almost as subtly and quietly as Mai, much to her relief, as Zuko was asleep assumedly from heavy pain medication.

Approaching the firebender, Mai noticed first his tied-up, coal black hair, tousled from sleep, and one of his eyes drooped shut, giving an appearance of him simply being sound asleep.

It was cruel how much this contradicted with the bandage on his face, swollen with gauze and ointment. A large, stark-white patch on his face was secured to his head by a strap stretching around his head.

Mai gasped slightly at the dressing as Zuko rolled over and drowsily opened one eye in the haze of pain relievers. However, as soon as he saw a figure only a few feet away from him, he jumped and sat up as he realized it was his friend, rattling the iron bed frame, which Mai reached a slender hand out to steady and silence it. Both of them still had widened eyes and held breaths for a few beats before Zuko said shakily,

"Hi."

His voice rattled more than the rusted frame had, but Mai kept hers steady by speaking in a monotone.

"Hey."

In an odd blend of medicated stupor and shocked breathlessness, Zuko responded a little bitterly,

"So, you're here. Thought everyone was supposed to avoid me."

Mai's expression grew disbelieving as she cautiously asked, "Zuko, what exactly are you talking about?"

All was silent too long until, in a burst of anger, Zuko flat-out kicked the table at his bedside, making it scrape against the rough stone floor until hitting the wall with a heavy thud. Accompanying the outburst with his hands grasping at his hair, then at nothing, he muttered gratingly,

"I'm saying that I'm a traitor to my country, to my own father, so much so that I'm being shunned. And banished on a fool's mission. Or at least that's what I've heard, stuck in here."

His voice nearly broke with acridity even as he turned to look at Mai, who searched his face for any remnant of the boy she had known not so long ago, just yesterday.

She noticed herself always coming back to his eyes: one was a tiny world of gold flecks, and the other was hidden by a flat bandage.

Zuko always had such beautiful eyes.

In fact, they were the first thing Mai had noticed about the firebender when Azula had first demanded that she play with her at the palace. They had always shone golden, like the sun hanging low in the afternoon sky. But now his one un-bandaged eye didn't shine like that of the caring boy she knew; it burned with anger and shame.

Speaking as if miles were between each word, his face twisting with emotion, Zuko whispered as though his words were boiling, his voice rising with emotion,

"I feel like my father and the general were wrong to sacrifice people's lives as if they were some pawns in a sick game, but at the same time, I can't shake the thought that I've let down everyone. That I've lost everything because of my own arrogance. But the only way my father will let me get my respect, my place, and my honor back is if I...if I capture the Avatar."

Forcing herself not to scoff, Mai recalled tales she had heard from an early age of the Avatar, though most she now recognized as biased, such the tale of how Avatar Roku had betrayed the Fire Nation in his attempt to quell the divine conquest of the Great Sozin, how because the Fire Lord wanted him to, he was an considered an enemy to the country.

Just like Zuko.

Grabbing the firebender's arm with rare desperation to get him to listen to her, Mai cried, "For Agni's sake, don't be a big enough idiot to believe the propaganda! You're not a traitor or obstacle in some godly conquest or whatever they want to call it, you're Zuko."

Zuko's one gold eye seemed to flash with the intensity of both as he retorted angrily,

"What's that supposed to even mean? You're right, I am an idiot, and I don't even know why you came here. Why would you want to see me?"

Silent for a moment, she finally offered the truth:

"Because you're the boy who would jump for hatpins in the rain, who just doesn't have a talent for being cruel, who never stops trying at everything-"

Mai ended her sentence abruptly after noticing just how closely she had leaned towards Zuko; in fact, she was just a few inches away.

The prince must have noticed her widened eyes, because he jumped back a bit, saying cautiously,

"Uh, sorry, didn't mean to get so, um, close..."

Studying the firebender as he stumbled over his own unsteady words, Mai realized Zuko was himself, but he still had the look of a scared animal she had noticed minutes ago. He was already a different person from the boy she'd snuck glances at when they were small, tossing turdleducks crispy bits of bread.

Please don't change.

"I'm going away...for a while...but I will capture the Avatar. I have to...but I'll come back, you know. I'll earn back my people's respect and my father's...I just have to keep searching. To keep trying...like you said."

And so with a sad smile that made Mai feel as if her heart was being pricked by one of her pins, Zuko leaned in nervously and kissed her cheek, his face warm perhaps as a side effect of being a firebender.

Though more likely from embarrassment.

And though they talked for much longer, and the kiss shocked Mai as though she were pleasantly buzzing, she couldn't help the sinking feeling that everything was about to be altered, and not for the better. Both knew this, and yet both were unaware of just how much the world would transfigure itself and the two of them.

For they were children.

And this was goodbye.

Zuko left the next morning.