Chapter Notes: These chapters are title-free because honestly they're so short I barely feel like they need them. Only four pages? Pfft. And, quick answer to the reviewer from Chapter 1 (and anybody else who's wondering): events are not quite going down in the same order they did in the show! So there is no Momo yet, and there won't be in this story ... but there may be in a future sequel which I may or may not have started. :D
Chapter Two
Zuko glowers down at the bowls left over from lunch, and wishes he had just a little more conviction, enough to throw one at Uncle's head.
Nothing about any of this is going right, not one single thing in the last three years. In the entirety of his life, to be brutally honest. Perhaps before Azula was born, things had gone well for him; but somehow he doubts his father liked him even then, though of course he doesn't remember.
His father may be Lord of the Armies of the Galactic Confederation of United Systems, but even he couldn't declare Zuko a criminal for simple stupidity that had broken no laws. So he hadn't. The table had been very cold on Zuko's cheek, the whine of the laser charging very loud in his ear; Zuko supposes he should have been grateful that his father had aimed the shot down and forward. It only seared his eyelid, instead of cooking his eyeball in the socket.
Zuko left Huojia of his own volition; he knew his father would grant him no opportunities to compensate for his moment of weakness at home, so his best chance was, and still is, to try another star system. If he can win some great glory nearer the rim, perhaps his father will take him back.
Uncle had offered to come along, and much as he sometimes irritates Zuko, it is pleasant, to feel a little less alone.
Precisely the kind of weakness Father hated him for, Zuko thinks angrily, scrubbing at a particularly stubborn grease mark. He should know better, by now.
The other passenger, Yue, is cleaning the floor of the mess; she swept it first, but wasn't satisfied, and now she's rubbing a wet cloth over the thin wooden boards that cover the metal plating beneath, and humming gently to herself. She comes to the sink to refill her basin with clean water, and Zuko shifts aside grudgingly to give her space.
"Where are you from?" she says, holding the basin under the tap.
"Near the core," Zuko says, brusque; he's learned that if he's sharp enough, people stop trying to talk to him.
But Yue only smiles a little. "Me too," she says. "Tarrisiku. I am traveling out to marry."
She doesn't say it the way he's expecting, like she thinks he owes her a reply in return now that she's told him something. Which is why he says, "To marry?" instead of ignoring her.
"I have never met the man," Yue says, glancing at him a little somberly. "His name is Hahn. There is a hypertunnel between his homeworld and mine - very fast, living things cannot stand the compression, but we trade in other goods. Our marriage will make our people very happy."
Zuko stares at her as she reaches to shut the tap off, basin full once again. "So it is your duty," he guesses; she doesn't look happy at the idea of it, and yet she talks about it like there's no other option.
"It is the right thing," Yue says, "which makes it my duty. If my father told me to marry a man so that many people could be killed, it would likewise be my duty to refuse. How could I do otherwise?"
"How indeed," Zuko makes himself say, and keeps scrubbing.
Jet might be trouble sometimes, but he's a pretty good cook, and with the mess freshly cleaned and all the dirty dishes finally out of the sink, dinner feels more like a party than like being stranded in the middle of nowhere.
Well, stranded is a bit of an overstatement; their sub-light engines are working just fine, and Toph's got them headed toward Pohuai. Of course, at lower than light speed, it's going to take them a while to get there. They'll have time to bond emotionally, Katara thinks wryly, and smiles to herself.
"Come on, hand me the dumplings," Toph says, making grasping motions over the table. "I know they're out there somewhere, I can smell them."
Jet snorts, and picks up the basket of steamed buns instead; but Toph barely touches it before yanking her fingers away and putting her hands on her hips. "I said dumplings, Jet, you got water in your ears or something?"
"How'd you know?" Jet says, shaking his head.
"You gave me a basket, not a bowl, and it weighed about half as much as it should have," Toph says. "Plus, it's you."
Aang laughs and passes the dumplings over, nudging Toph's arm with the dish, and she grins, takes the bowl, and sets it in her lap protectively. "But they're all mine now," she says to Jet triumphantly, and then, to Aang, "Thanks, Twinkletoes."
They eat until they're just about bursting, and Iroh plys them all with drinks - he makes a mean cup of tea, Katara has to admit. By the end of the night, even his nephew - Zuko, Katara remembers - is almost smiling, eyes crinkling at the corners. They dim the lights, and Suki does an exercise with her laser fans in the open space next to the table, wide green blades blazing in the dark.
Finally, Katara stretches, and ticks through her mental list of things she needs to do before she can let herself sleep. "System check?" she says to Aang quietly, and he smiles at her and steps over to the nearest console, which is hidden behind the panel in the wall.
He does his usual thing - sets his hand against it and stares out into the middle distance, and his eyes fog over with blue. He's got tattoos, on his arms and legs and head, blue arrows; traditional on his old homeworld, he told her once. They get a funny shine to them when he's talking to computers, and it's a little more obvious than usual with the lights turned down.
"The platter, Zuko?" Iroh says behind her, and she glances over her shoulder; Zuko is looking back at her, eyes startled, before he abruptly turns back to his uncle.
"Yes, Uncle," he says.
She frowns a little, but then Aang pulls his hand away from the console, shaking his head as his eyes clear back to brown, and says, "All set for the night; shouldn't be any problems," and, in the end, she thinks nothing of it.
Zuko manages to keep his reaction down to a little tremor in his hands until he's back in his quarters, and then he slides the door panel shut and slams his fist into the wall at exactly the same time, so that the sound is covered up.
The Confederation government's been hearing rumors coming in from the rim for years - people call them all kinds of things, technopaths and wirewitches and codebenders, but what doesn't vary is their ability to manipulate technology directly with their minds. It was one of his father's side projects, trying to hunt one down; the odds were incredibly low, his father told him once, but if even one of the rumors were true, it would be an unimaginable advantage. Rebel worlds' own weaponry arrays turned back on them with a single thought from high orbit, armies of mechsuits brought down with a quiet twist to their programming - it had been his father's secret dream to have someone who could do such things under his control.
But he's not sure yet, Zuko reminds himself. He hardly saw anything. It was dark, there was a little glow; he can't be certain it was the kind of thing his father was always looking for.
It'll be days before they get to Pohuai Station, and for the first time, Zuko's glad of it. He'll have plenty of time to catch the guy doing it again.
Katara sighs, and flips the switch that activates the ansible. Suki's right, of course she is; but Katara's still not going to enjoy this.
The video link lights up, and she enters the Taikong Jian's code designation into the query field. It's not the most impressive ship in the world; but Sokka got it dirt-cheap and fixed almost the entire thing up himself, piece by piece. And, most importantly, it's on the larger end of midsize, which means it has a hyperdrive.
It takes a minute, but the connection goes through instead of making her record a message, which means he must be relatively close by - if he were too far away, it wouldn't even try for face-to-face, because the lag time would make a decent conversation impossible.
When Sokka's face finally comes up on the screen, she makes a note of the time in the little box in the corner: twenty-four seconds for the one-way trip, which is on the long side. He must be at least a handful of lightyears away. "Hey, Sokka," she says right away, and waits out the forty-eight seconds.
"Hey, sis," Sokka says, and laughs. "Got dumped out of hyperspace, huh?"
Katara huffs a breath out her nose and scowls. "Yeah, well. Not our fault, Toph says; something went wrong on the other end."
Another forty-eight seconds; she scrapes a little crusted dirt off the frame of the video link with her thumbnail.
"Mmhmm," Sokka says, mock doubtful even though Katara knows he's not stupid enough to not believe Toph. "Well, you know the drill: you have to say it."
Katara sighs. "I knew it," she says, "I told Suki you were going to be like this." She grits her teeth. "Fine, okay; I need your help."
Forty-eight seconds later, Sokka's unfocused, patient expression twists into a grin, and he laughs again. "See, that wasn't so bad," he says, and then, a little awkwardly, "So, how is Suki, anyway?"
Katara's halfway through saying, "If you just come and get me, you can see for yourself," when Song, the Taikong's medic, comes up behind Sokka on the screen and rolls her eyes, and Katara has to finish the second half of the sentence through her giggles. Sokka tries pretty hard to pretend he's not utterly gone on Suki, but it really doesn't work very well - not on Katara, and evidently not on Song, either.
Song sweeps away past the range of the screen, and Katara laughs a little harder, because by the time Sokka sees her giggling, twenty-four seconds from now, Song will be long gone, and Sokka will have no idea what she's laughing at. Thinking about ansible lag makes Katara's head hurt sometimes.
And, sure enough, after forty-eight seconds she sees Sokka's expression turn puzzled, and he shoots a suspicious look over his shoulder at the now-empty corridor. "Yeah, all right, fine," he says, "no need for that. You should be glad we're so close. We're between systems, we were just getting a couple small repairs done at an intersolar outpost. Haru's good, but he's not Toph, I'm not going to tell him to aim for you guys; but we can meet you at Pohuai no problem."
"Great," Katara says, and she doesn't have to make any effort to get her voice to sound relieved. "Perfect." She smiles at the screen for a second, at Sokka's blankly waiting face; as much as she might groan about it, it'll be good to see him. She was almost as proud of him as he was of the Taikong Jian when he finally got it spaceworthy, but she misses him now that he has his own ship. "Thanks. I owe you one," she admits grudgingly.
"Yeah, you do," Sokka says forty-eight seconds later, and grins.