Chapter Notes: This one's a talky chapter, but I couldn't help it - especially the middle, I have always always wanted Yue and Iroh to interact.
Chapter 5
It takes nearly a full day before Aang wakes up, and Zuko can't spend the whole thing standing over him dourly in the infirmary, even if Suki seems willing to let him. He needs to stop talking to Yue, because every time he does, she says quiet, innocuous things that hit him like a slap in the face; and she isn't even doing it on purpose like Azula would, she's only telling him what she thinks is the truth. His muscles are still aching from his first round with Suki; there's no way he's going to talk to Jet on purpose after that little display last night; and Uncle's calm stare is wearing on his nerves.
Technically speaking, they've never been told that, as passengers, they should stay off the bridge, but Zuko still feels a bit like he's trespassing when he walks by the crew's quarters and up the stairs.
Of course, that feeling pretty much goes away when he realizes that the curtain that forms the door is patterned with giant fluffy mole-monsters.
"Badgermoles," the pilot says - Toph, that's her name.
Zuko looks up, and blinks; the pilot's turned her head to the side, over her shoulder, but she's not looking at him. Can't, judging by the pale film over her eyes. "How did you-"
"You walk loud," she says. "Or, you were; and then you got to the top of the stairs and moved the curtain, and then you stopped. It was just a guess that you were looking at it - but it was a pretty good guess, huh?"
Zuko frowns. "Why are you - I mean, they've got optic implants on your world, don't they?"
"Sure, sure," Toph says, "and they work great for a lot of people." She shrugs, pressing a finger to the little gadget clipped to her ear and typing something on the keyboard with one hand. "But I don't need them."
"Don't need them?" Zuko says, unable to keep the doubt out of his voice.
Toph turns and grins in his general direction, sunnily. "That's right," she says. "I listen." She reaches out and slaps a hand against a box wired to the back of the console, unerring. "Set this up myself, for the sensors. The screenreader's pretty good, but sensor displays are usually pretty pictures, and it's not as helpful as you might think, having this thing read off constantly changing coordinates for ten little dots at once. And speakers are no good; no sound in space. But Huisheng here," and she pets the box fondly, "she takes the raw data and matches it up with a noise - something appropriate to the size and composition, or ship type, whichever it is, and modifies it to account for speed and distance."
Zuko gives the little box a dubious look; somehow it doesn't seem impressive enough to handle something so complicated.
"It took a lot of experimentation," Toph admits, "but I've got her running pretty smooth now." She smiles. "So I hear everything." She strokes the box - Huisheng, Zuko reminds himself - again. "Sweet rig, huh?"
Zuko looks at her, and tries to imagine what his father would have said to a blind daughter, one who insisted that she didn't need optic implants, didn't need to see, because there were other ways. And then he tries to imagine what Toph would say to his father in response, and has to work to strangle the urge to laugh. "Yeah," he says, clearing his throat. "Sweet."
"I hope I'm not interrupting."
Iroh lets himself take the time to lay one more tile before he looks up; it's Yue, not the captain, who's standing over him, and she looks faintly concerned. He moves to stand, but she sits before he can so much as get a knee under himself.
"No," she says, "please, don't bother." She glances over the pai sho board. "May I?" she says, and when Iroh nods, she reaches over to the sack of tiles on her side of the board and places one.
It is a fine move - a lily tile next to a white dragon tile is a nicely harmonious combination. Iroh smiles down at the board, and then looks up at her again.
"I only wished to ask whether you are well," Yue says, a little shyly. "The malfunctions must have woken you, but I didn't see you upstairs - I trust that if you'd been hurt, you would have gone to the infirmary."
"I would indeed," Iroh assures her. "I remained in my quarters - there were things there that I did not wish to leave at the mercy of last night's whimsical gravity." Specifically, the beautifully glazed tea set that was the last gift Lu Ten ever gave him - but Yue doesn't need a old man maundering at her about things he cannot change. Iroh managed to save the cups from an untimely death; that is the best he can do now. He considers the pai sho board, and places a tile himself.
Yue smiles, beatific. "I'm glad," she says. "I think it would have been very difficult for your nephew - not to say that it wouldn't also be unpleasant for you, of course." She slides another tile onto the board; a boat. Neatly done. She has pushed one of Iroh's jasmine tiles into a disharmonious pairing with a rose tile. It will take several moves to fix.
"Of course, of course," Iroh says, and ponders for a moment. She is a friendly girl, open - she does not have Zuko's well-earned tendency toward distrust, and she has no reason not to answer his questions. "My nephew has spoken to you, then?"
"A little," Yue says, sheepish. "Mostly I've been speaking to him. He's not very talkative, but he always looks so-" She searches for a word. "Uncomfortable. Like if I let him, he'd just stand there glowering, and never relax."
Iroh can't help chuckling. "An apt description," he says. "He must say something to you."
"He told me you were from near the core," she says. "We talked about where I'm from, and duty-"
"Duty?" Iroh says, surprised. The subjects don't strike him as intrinsically related.
"I'm - not traveling only for my own sake," Yue says, fiddling with a white jade tile. "He asked whether I thought of it as my duty."
Iroh leans forward, intrigued, instead of placing his next tile. "And what did you tell him?"
"That it was my duty to do things I thought were right, and to refuse to do things I thought were wrong," Yue says, shrugging a little; and then she looks at him, uncertain. "Was that - stupid?"
Iroh realizes that he is staring at her, a smile somewhere in his head instead of on his face, and shakes his head gently. "It was the truth, wasn't it?"
"Well, yes," Yue says, "but sometimes the truth can be stupid." She rubs a thumb over the carved face of the tile in her hand. "Wood is wood, but that doesn't mean it sounds especially wise to say so."
"Unless you're saying it to someone who has never touched a tree," Iroh says, and laughs.
"I don't like him."
Katara sighs and pushes the panel closed. "You said exactly the same thing about Suki," she says. "Confederation! Can't be trusted! She'll turn us in!" She levers herself up, and her knees both pop at once. All consoles should be at chest height, she thinks grumpily. "And look how that turned out? You beat each other up, and now you're best friends."
"Are not," Jet says, "she's just less stupid than most," but he doesn't argue the rest of the point.
Because he can't, because Katara is totally right. She turns to face him, and folds her arms.
"Look," Jet says, "I'm just saying. Something's off about that guy."
"Okay, and I'm just saying, don't do that thing with the shock hooks again. I know this is the first time we've ever taken passengers on, but I didn't think it needed saying before this: we don't attack people who are paying us. He hasn't done anything wrong."
Jet twirls a hook resentfully. "The time to put a hook in his head in the middle of the night is before he does something, not after."
Katara leans forward, into his space, so that he has to take a step back. "This might be Aang's ship," she snaps, "but I'm the captain. You kill one single person on this boat, and you're asking to take a walk outside with no suit."
Jet goes away grumbling; but at least he knows the score now. She likes him pretty well when he's not being a paranoid jerk, but right and wrong have never been his strong suit.
But, in the end, he's crew, and Zuko's not. As far as she knows, what she told Jet is true: Zuko hasn't done anything to hurt anybody. But she supposes it can't hurt to keep an eye on him - if nothing else, it'll help her argue Jet out of doing something irrational like installing a camera in his quarters.
She's not going to stalk him all day - he spends a fair amount of his time sparring with Suki, anyway, and it's not like he's going to start causing trouble if he's hanging out in the practice room. But she makes sure she ends up next to him at dinner, and sets the steamed buns on her other side. It might not make a huge difference, but if he interacts with her first, maybe it won't be quite as suspicious when she starts talking to him.
Suki's gone to check on Aang, but everybody else is there and hungry, so they start eating; it only takes about ten seconds for Zuko to turn to her and ask her to pass the bread.
"Sure thing," she says, and holds out the basket. "So, you're from the core, huh?"
He shoots her a wide-eyed look, like he's expecting to get zapped again, but she keeps her expression on the friendly side of neutral, and after a moment he takes the buns. "Huojia," he says shortly.
Katara blinks. That's not near the core, that is the core - not in a literal, astrometric sense, but certainly in a political and military sense. Huojia's star system is close to the center of the galaxy, and neighbors the star they built Lianmeng to orbit, so the Galactic Senate could meet somewhere no one had any particular claim to. It's one of the most powerful systems in the Confederation; it might be second to Ba Sing Se, but Ba Sing Se lies a little further out, and Katara's heard rumors that it's starting to lose touch with the Senate.
"Wow," she says succinctly, and tilts her head. "So what are you doing buying passage out toward the rim?"
"Just traveling," he says, which is not at all an answer.
She's just opened her mouth, ready to pry a little further, when Suki hurtles up the steps and says breathlessly, "Aang's awake."