A/N: I was reminded that I have no real clue as to what is appropriate for teenagers to read, so I've changed the rating on this to "M". Damnit, I don't want my 11-year-old speculating on the possibilities. (I still swear he'd be clueless)

Disclaimer: Blah, blah, blah. Just cuz I don't own the characters does not mean I can't speculate on their actions; although admittedly posting such speculations does present a conundrum at law. But, since I'm claiming nothing in the way of rights or remedies, I'm sure we don't need to go there…

Chapter 12

Azula ran through her memory of the interview with the Water Tribe prisoner one last time, gently inhaling the sweet perfume of the jasmine tea in the shallow cup before her. Uncle Iroh was, in many ways, a fool, but he had not been wrong when he'd explained how certain scents could assist the mind in seeking clarity, just as others were useful in providing a heady enhancement to those particular passions that served to focus attention elsewhere.

Her uncle, being something of a hedonist, had who knew what pleasures in mind when he'd mouthed this wisdom. Knowing her uncle, he'd also probably been perfectly aware that certain scents could also enhance fire-bending…

She ignored the momentary heightening of her heartbeat as she entertained thoughts of Iroh's possible inspiration, disciplining her mind to allow the slow wash of memory to permeate all of her consideration of the boy's words and body language…

With a sudden snort of irritation, Azula searched her perfect retention for the prisoner's name. Sokka.

Two meaningless syllables that served to bring forth a vision of an alien young man, his mocking smile and cold blue eyes. Azula was relatively pleased that she had managed to draw all this out from her memory even as some tiny part of her mind suggested that she couldn't recall the face, let alone the name, of the highly talented chef whose dessert creation that evening had left her almost moaning aloud her delight. In response, yet another part of her brain reminded her pleasure center how little such pleasure was dependent upon any particular individual.

An older, wiser individual, Iroh perhaps, would have been tempted to remind Azula that wasting the gifts of others rarely yielded any possible benefit, but even Uncle Iroh had long recognized the futility of bringing some aspects of wisdom to the young princess's attention.

In any case, Azula was almost purring. Rather than being enraged at the lack of discernible information she had gleaned from her interview with Sokka, she was well content. Admittedly, for the first half-hour or so she had merely pretended to be satisfied with the results of their encounter. But by dinner's end she had convinced herself that she had asserted the upper hand with the flippant peasant, and that all of his responses could be gauged in the context of his very real fear of her.

She sipped again at her tea.

When plotted against the "Y" axis of his anticipation of her response to the "X" axis of his or the Avatar's actions, Azula was confident that she could predict at least three appropriate attacks for each possible rescue effort on the part of the Avatar and his friends.

The only thing that gave her the slightest hesitation was the simple fact that when she had suggested but a few of these possibilities in her interview with him, Sokka's responses had been almost perfectly in line with her expectations.

Which should have been completely reassuring.

But there was something about this boy that raised her hackles. Those responses had been so perfect that, in fact, they had left no room for deviations within the margin of error.

Well, that was not precisely the case. Where his responses did not conform to expectation was, in fact, not only not within her predicted parameters, but sometimes seemed wholly out of proportion, and others purely quixotic. The randomness of this was clearly not random and, in fact, blatantly deliberate.

Azula considered again the bland darkness of those blue eyes, the curl of his lip as he mouthed responses to her questions and comments. Shit. How many times had he expected her to do this before picking up on his game?

Not that it mattered. The point was, she couldn't really trust anything he had said.

It was patently impossible.

This was an adolescent peasant from a near extinct culture. There was simply no possible way he had managed to outwit her. And yet…

…because he had made it so damned obvious he was also clearly laughing at her.

The pattern the tea-stain of a nearly full shattered pot against the tapestried wall might have been suggestively satisfying to the school of art espousing expressionism currently in favor in Fire Nation Academic circles. Alas, it would never see such light.

Upon recognition that she had allowed her temper to overcome her breeding during the ritual of evening tea, Azula had blistered the unhappy wall with a bolt of blue lightning. The left engine experienced a rough hiccough as the surge of sudden power interfered with the carefully calculated register of fuel to energy output, killing the engine even as current flowed down and out through the metal hulling. Those not touching the walls were favored with a lack of awareness of this event, thanks to the practice of loose deck riveting to allow for metal's shifting swelling and contractions as the ship entered seas with changing temperatures.

Some few who happened to be leaning against the outer wall experienced a shock that, if they were lucky, merely curled their hair, or less happily, upset their heart rhythms such that they experienced odd periods of exhaustion from time to time, even some years thereafter.

Only one poor sailor actually experienced heart failure.

Sokka was lucky. His cell was on the right side of the ship, and water-proofing practices in Fire Nation ship-building had resulted in an insulation material inserted between each side of the ship that happened to be non-conductive.

She had lifted her feet reflexively, even knowing that doing so at this time was evidence that the need to do so had passed. Mai was too much of a professional to fight her body's natural instincts, even as her mind processed the signs of another electrical fit by the princess.

Mai had taken the precaution of arranging for a thick coir-lined carpet running the length of her cabin within days of taking up abode on the princess's ship. She'd cared nothing for the color or pattern decorating the rug's surface, being more concerned with the layers of material insulating her from the current conducted throughout the hull on the side of the ship's living quarters that she'd shared with the princess. Azula's frightening expertise with the power generally granted only the heavens had given her pause only briefly, just long enough to consider means to arm against it. It wasn't her business to question the origin of her mistress's power. But only a fool would overlook the potential for her principal's strike against her, even accidentally.

Mai remembered singed bangs and soaked garments from being a fool around Azula.

As the hairs settled back down on her neck she wondered what new annoyance had been sufficient to concentrate Azula's energies into a crippling lightning strike. Not that it took much these days. Her highness relished unleashing this particular expertise, its newness still intoxicating. Mai shrugged as she considered her own exhilaration that time with the boomerang, despite the Water Tribe boy's hand at her elbow, his knee nudging her leg to bend for the proper flow of energy, and his other hand all too familiarly at her waist…

The exhilaration had been from the success of the throw.

She'd only been aware of, and intensely uncomfortable about, his proximity to her vulnerable points immediately afterwards. Well, and before, of course, because of how dangerous it was to allow an enemy to get so close and…oh, shit. Nothing was more stupid than trying to fool herself.

Mai had made a decision to trust Sokka as soon as he'd given her any indication that he would show her how to use the boomerang. Azula be damned, the cold steel of that oddly angled weapon had seduced her from the moment she'd seen it return to its master's hand, months back in Omashu.

That the master was an ocean-eyed stranger no older than herself added piquancy to the weapon's edge. But it would take more than odd blue eyes to make her heart quake the way a beautifully wielded weapon ever could. Mai deliberately turned a blind eye to the expertise of the wielding of a particular weapon by an individual with eyes coolly-pigmented.

She assured herself that the acknowledged taste of her partner in Azula's service for those cerulean eyes had freed her from any susceptibility to their charm. And he himself had seemed oblivious to the possibility.

Well, damn. It occurred to her suddenly that this probably wasn't such a good thing.

This really, really wasn't such a good thing.

"Opportunities come…," he thought, when he could manage coherent thought, and he fought a valiant battle with himself to maintain such while virtually every nerve ending suggested that this was exactly what was meant by some other generation's simply 'going with the flow'.

It could have been his father's generation.

Sokka cringed as it occurred to him that Gran-Gran may also have breathed the same at one point. And when these moments came, he told himself, ya gotta grab' em by the short hairs!

…or die, wishing you had had the courage to do so.

Even as each had verbally each fought for some form of dominance, the two had made the apparently open engagement of intimacy yet another battlefield.

The guard outside the cell had decided the situation warranted stepping well down the corridor, not wanting to embarrass himself with the scorn of being considered some kind of voyeur. After all, the Fire Princess herself had sanctioned her ladies' investigations into the Water Tribe prisoner. All in aid of final victory.

But damn it, lines needed to be drawn, for the sake of morale if not for decency.

It really didn't help that a couple members of the guard had experienced the pleasure of Lady Ty Lee's investigations themselves. One could not doubt her… thoroughness.

But these investigations did somewhat beg the question as to their ultimate effectiveness.

After all, while one's own loyalty was without question, one couldn't help but wonder how devotion to satisfying the expectations (one couldn't call such enjoyable requests demands, after all) of even someone so close to the throne, really alleviated any suspicions.

But then, it wasn't a soldier's lot to question such things, now was it?

Not being a soldier, exactly, she quarreled fiercely with the thought of succumbing to the force of an enemy onslaught.

Ty Lee giggled, the onslaught on her person consisting of one personable young man's lips tracing perhaps previously explored but unmapped trails across her person with the lips and diligence of an engineer – or perhaps a lover, but that's a tale untold.

When he abruptly paused, citing teasingly a snafu in border negotiations she laughed outright.

As part of these unsanctioned explorations he had ceased to clutch her near hand in a crushing grip, moving instead to gently tease at the fabric covering her breast, raising a tiny but perceptibly swollen peak. At heart, neither had been surprised when her freed limb, finally regaining its own sense of touch, had chosen to linger like some mindless puppet across the tendons tracing his own fingers.

Mindless, except that as her tiny hand closed, intertwining fingers among his much larger and longer ones upon her breast in a grip surprisingly hard, she moaned deeply. And Sokka's fingers trembled, without clutching.

Ty Lee seethed. Sokka's "snafu" in negotiations had refused to be resolved, for all her teasing blandishments. The Water boy's jaw had clenched, and he had suddenly released every grip upon her body, challenging her to defy his resolve.

Her own jaw initially clenched, she had remained in his lap, trailing one hand down his chest and along his groin, her lips and tongue tracing erotic patterns not just across his angular face but down his throat and along his chest, bared by the questing fingers of one hand. She'd felt his heart race and the firmness beneath her thighs assert itself with prominence, but those muscled arms hung slack across the cell bench, and those alien blue eyes that had so fascinated her darkened yet more deeply, in a way she had earlier interpreted as mere lust but now also hinting of marine depths inhabited by grim-toothed monsters.

She knew he was aware of her, knew she'd promised full access to her person and knew he was not indifferent to the promise. And equally she knew he'd evaluated her promise and found it lacking.

What good was threatening paralysis in the face of studied indifference?

Sokka burned. His chances of surviving this whole affair were nil, and thanks to nothing more than his own stubbornness he was going to die a virgin.

This bizarre Fire Nation girl apparently was looking for someone new and different to get her jollies from – he simply couldn't imagine why the hell else she kept finding her way to his cell – and for all his nasty threats and physical abuse still seemed interested. Out of some misguided sense of his own prowess as a spy he had had to push it by insisting on an upgrade in accommodations before he'd put out.

What a dumbass. He had more than a sneaking suspicion that he should be thanking the water gods for this opportunity. Like he was gonna get another elsewhere…

There were, of course, worse things. One could die babbling like an idiot betraying every secret. Or spouting righteous truths that would be ignored or, worse yet, stomped in the dirt by his killers as they wrenched dying screams from his protesting body.

He could die stoic and useless as a prisoner of war. If he was damned lucky.

Or he could, perhaps, seed all kinds of misinformation among the elite of the Fire Nation on the way to his demise, and perhaps enjoy a little physical gratification along the way.

Hell, there was even the off chance he might find a way to escape death altogether. That was probably pushing things – he had a strong memory of a fortune teller dooming him to a life of self-induced misery, and gods knew this was a fair description of his life to date. So he could see no reason why fate would choose to extend things, unless maybe he wasn't yet miserable enough?

Sokka grinned. He wasn't dead yet, so it was still possible that his would-be lover was still considering his demands.

He could have killed her.

He'd made that abundantly clear as he'd dragged his hand down along the back of her head to close around the nape of her neck, those fingers dancing lightly as they mapped tendons and arteries, pressing just hard and long enough to assure her of their strength and promise, or threat.

His smile acknowledged his acceptance that he wouldn't have survived the encounter, and an upward lift of one brow questioned her ability to disable him before he'd dealt the killing blow.

The heat in her soul was largely a result of this unanswered question for Ty Lee, pulling herself reluctantly from his embrace to stand before him.

"Shit, brat. I'd like to see what I'm doing, wouldn't you? Some moonlight would be nice, and fresh air, don't you think?" He hadn't otherwise moved, hadn't protested, and his suggestion was more of a challenge than a hope.

She'd smiled in response, shrugged and left the cell without a backwards glance, heaving open the door on her own since the guard had seen fit to move well down the corridor at some point since she'd first entered. It probably wouldn't do to assume that Sokka hadn't noticed. Sokka had proven himself quick to think on his feet, for all his initial confusion, and Azula had not, after all, given her leave to lose their prisoner.

Would she even consider moving him to more "comfortable" accommodations?