A/N: Sorry. Still not finding Season 3 terribly inspiring. So I'm trying to still keep this fun (read: kinky/sexy) as it rests firmly in season 2, prior to nasty discoveries about the corrupt Earth Kingdom government. And if you think this is easy, well, by all means, feel free to take over! Read in these comments apologies for the delay in posting, content, etc. I, on the other hand, think the damn thing is progressing rather nicely.

Disclaimer: Hmm. No commercial content, blatent acknowledgment of prior ownership of characters and concept over the course of a year, and no orders to cease and desist? Looks like tacit acceptance and at least a limited publishing right to this unlicensed eye. And, since I'm STILL claiming nothing in the way of rights or remedies, I'm sure we don't need to look further into copyright infringment…

Chapter 18

Azula was a bit surprised. A fairly significant amount of time had gone by and, although she couldn't actually see them, she knew that Ty Lee and the prisoner were still up on deck, up at the bow of the ship. She idly wondered if Ty Lee had lost all sense of decorum and was assaulting the young man there and then. It would be a first, but Azula was quite aware that one of the driving forces behind Ty Lee's promiscuity was a sense of rebellion. She clearly got a sexual thrill out of challenging convention. Azula was convinced it was only a matter of time before her friend would lose much of her value at intelligence-gathering because discretion would cease to have meaning for her.

Still, she had to admit to herself finally that she would have been a bit disappointed if Sokka had been caught so swiftly by Ty Lee's lure. It wasn't that she doubted the other girl's attractions. Spirits no! Ty Lee couldn't walk into a room without drawing male eyes, even in the commanding presence of the princess herself, a sad truth she had been forced to acknowledge ever since Ty Lee hit puberty. There was an overt sexuality in her cheerfulness, her frank welcome of attention as merely her due, that held no element of slyness or calculation. Once Azula had figured it out, she thought she understood it completely, and equally understood that, for all her talent at deception, it was something she would never be able to emulate. While Azula could mask the truth among the lies – it was, actually, simply a matter of treating the truth as no more believable than a lie, quite the opposite of most people's attempts – she could not assume a mask of innocence.

Innocent appreciation came naturally to Ty Lee. While the girl obviously had nothing of innocence when it came to experience, somehow she still managed to remain innocent when it came to her expectations of other people. Although there were times when Azula had to wonder…

Of course, males seemed congenitally incapable of recognizing sexual duplicity in any case. And male egos were always caught up by that wide-eyed appreciation of… whatever it was that Ty Lee always seemed to find to admire in the male at question. Azula smirked to herself as she considered how many times the only thing she herself could find satisfactory in him was the young man's willingness to admire her friend.

Odd, then, that one of the things she found particularly satisfying in Sokka was his lack of willingness to admire Ty Lee. She seemed to be dragging him kicking and screaming to her thrall – or maybe a better term would be clutching and biting, given what she had heard of their interactions to date. Azula smirked. Still, it was a certainty that his ego would be swayed by the lure of a pretty face and a blatant sexual come-on. When at some point he would also see it for an opportunity, either to save himself or to attempt escape, the final impetus for him to succumb would be provided. Only a stupid barbarian with no balls would stand on his pride against the blandishments of a Fire Nation beauty given its potential for, at the least, subversion. And it was obvious to Azula that Sokka was far from stupid and possessed of, well, the impressive required nerve, in any case.

Her lip curled as the smirk broadened. As for the other aspects of his ballsiness, she would have to wait for Ty Lee to comment. And no doubt, she would comment. She always did.

The boomerang lodged itself in the torso of one of the targets across the room.

Mai would have been pleased if she had been aiming that direction, but she had released the weapon sooner than intended and the wild trajectory it took owed more to the power of her swing than any finesse or control. It had wobbled terribly as well.

She chewed thoughtfully on her cheek as she walked over to reclaim the boomerang. She recognized that there appeared to be an element of anger in her efforts that was impeding her progress. This surprised her. Mai had long years' practice in the fine art of sublimating emotion in physical exertion. It was a practice she owed to Azula's example and her goading. And aside from her relief at being rescued from the closely prescribed existence of the conquered Omashu's governor's family – make that New Ozai – she had found little to rouse her emotions beyond the mild irritation of Ty Lee's incessant cheerfulness and rampant bedhopping.

Mai didn't really give a damn about either Azula's politics or her climb to power.

The run-ins with the Avatar and his cronies had been amusing, to her anyway. After all, it wasn't as if she herself had actually failed. Okay, getting swept upriver by that damned bison's beaver-tail had been annoying, but she'd been smart enough to avoid taking a dive in the sludge-soup with Ty Lee in her obviously hopeless chase through that stupid drill. Mai never doubted the final outcome of Azula's long pursuit. After all, Azula never gave up. She brought all the forces of her father's resources and her own formidable talents to every endeavor. She always won.

So the setbacks along the way had been, at most, tedious. Still, it had prolonged Mai's relative state of freedom as one of Azula's companions, so she saw no need to complain.

Was that it? Did she, deep-down, somehow believe that with Sokka's capture the Avatar's run of luck was at an end? And did that … disappoint her? Well, with the Avatar in hand, only Zuko and his uncle would remain of the Fire Lord's commission to his daughter. And much as Mai desperately wanted to see Zuko again she also feared it, and dreaded returning to her father's house.

Mai didn't much care for the answer her brain provided her to the question of her emotional disturbance. It smacked of unacceptable fear and, worse, potentially treasonous thoughts. Still, there were worse possibilities.

But none of this was helping her throw that damned boomerang.

As she stepped back into position behind the line she forced herself to focus on the memory of the Tribesman's hands correcting the positioning of her own hands along the boomerang, the press of his chest against her shoulder and his warm breath in her ear as he mocked her. She felt a responsive tingling shoot throughout her body as she let her hips shift, her arm sweeping sinuously back as she let her wrist flex and then snap.

The boomerang swept across the room in a graceful arc just above eye-level, not quite managing a tight enough curve to circle back to her before hitting the wall.

But oh! It was still incredibly beautiful!

She felt a heady sense of elation at achieving her best throw yet. A tiny voice at the back of her brain asked her if the warmth rushing color not just to her face and throat but also her extremities was born of triumph at her throw or something more closely related to the memories she had invoked to achieve it.

"All right, Brat," Sokka said, stretching one hand to curve around Ty Lee's waist and pulling her up against him. "You've got my attention, and no doubt we've both got Sparky's attention over there. Just remember that I'm a poor dumb barbarian Tribesman, so you're gonna have to spell out for me exactly what it is you're offering me."

As he spoke, it struck him that the whole thing verged on farce.

Ty Lee meant for him to have sex with her.

Wrack his brain as he might the reality was he could see no means around it. Nor, for that matter, could he find any particular reason, other than sheer nationalistic pride and a niggling moralistic sense that it could be considered a betrayal of his attachment to Suki, why he should not so indulge.

Face it. He was already a lost cause as far as clandestine operations went. While it might be morally repugnant, the simple reality was the girl wanted it and was prepared to play nice with him to get it. Possibly nice enough to present a means of escape, or at least to look the other way when he finally made an attempt. Why she wanted it was simply not his problem, so there was no point dwelling on it.

Which was a good thing, because the brat's hands had worked their way up under his tunic again and were playing havoc with the skin of his chest. They were doing strange things to his nipples that he had thought were supposed to be limited in their effect to females. Interesting, if not at all conducive to an objective analysis of the pros and cons of sleeping with her.

In lieu of groaning Sokka reached his other hand to cover one of hers over the fabric of his tunic with a hard squeeze, leaning his head down to rest against her forehead.

"Nuh-unh, Brat. Keep that up and my momma would be very unhappy with me. We Water Tribe boys are very fond of our mommas. I might be forced to do something rather ugly to avoid disappointing her, and then Sparky would probably get mad, and after him Azula. Do you really wanna go that route?"

Ty Lee heard dangerous Sokka lurking beneath these words, and despite herself she was sorely tempted.

"Momma wouldn't mind you doing something ugly?" she whispered breathily.

"If I told you how Momma died, you'd understand how Momma might find ugly on Fire Nation looks pretty good," Sokka's other hand had found its way to the hand still rolling his flesh between feverish fingers. He dug his thumb hard into the flesh of her inner wrist.

A part of him screamed at this deliberate effort to stop the delightful stimulus.

Sokka reminded himself that that part of his body's goals were purely personal and not even shared by the rest of his brain. Still, that part of him had resulted in some interesting successes as far as Pretty-in-Pink was concerned. Although, he had to admit, it was also responsible for his most egregious mistake.

Ty Lee whimpered. Again, he'd managed to corral both of her hands so she couldn't paralyze him. Again, there was a palpable threat in his voice. He could seriously hurt her long before the fire-bending guard could do anything about it.

The risk had been there all along. She had, in fact, courted it. And, as a shiver swept her body, Ty Lee molded herself against him, relishing the inflexibility and strength hinted by his initial refusal to relax against her. She let her hands fall limp within his grasp.

He shifted subtly against her, his forehead still heavy against hers, but now his eyes drilled into hers with an intensity she hadn't expected. Suddenly, he grinned. And a blankness seemed to mask those intense eyes.

"Damn, girl," he said, with a lilt to his voice that had been absent since his confrontation with Azula. "As I said before, you like this!"

Now Ty Lee squirmed in his grasp. "I rather thought I'd made it perfectly clear that I wanted you. Surely you're not attempting to play dumb on me?"

He shook his head. "Not that. I got it yesterday. No, I'm talking about this!" And he brought her hands together under his shirt, gripping the wrists together brutally as he pulled them down, out from under his shirt and then off to one side. His other hand snaked to the small of her back, holding her close against him.

It was an awkward position for her, one arm caught between their bodies just below her breasts and too far across to gain leverage to dig her elbow into his ribs. It was uncomfortable as well as awkward, although she was disinclined to complain. Still, it was one thing to thrill in the heat of a very masculine but rather mindless struggle for sexual dominance. It was something altogether different for him to realize that she enjoyed his exercise of dominance.

Now the scales had truly shifted, and she wasn't at all sure that she could continue to manage him.

From last night's encounter she was already thoroughly aware of the potential hiding within his deceptively angular adolescent form.

His body was hard. Long, lean muscles stretched taut over bones clearly still growing radiated a natural heat that had nothing to do with her appetite for him. Despite the awkwardness of youth he moved with an economy of motion she associated with wild animals. Ty Lee was more familiar with the aggressive and power-filled moves of her compatriots or Earth Kingdom enemies. No. There was a stealth and graceful strength in the Tribesman that was somehow inherent to him, just as darkness hid within the bland paleness of his blue eyes.

Ty Lee was reminded of the deceptive clarity of water in a glass, the deeper shades of a pool's still depths, and the shifting hues of the vast ocean. Again, no. No amount of Fire Nation brilliance would ever reveal the true depths of the Water Tribes.

Even so, his skin had responded to her touch in ways that reaffirmed her confidence as a woman. And while she knew he was far more clever than most of the men she had claimed, she also knew he was still just a man, and a very young man, at that. When his grip had crushed hers, and his voice had invoked family memories, she was sure she had still been well in control of the situation.

Mai could never understand, and Ty Lee doubted that even Azula could appreciate, the raw emotional response of a man who felt threatened when he had a woman in his arms. Simply put, the woman held all the control. Even if the woman were an enemy, she still had more control than he did.

Because, after all, a woman understood, and could thus use, the male's need to protect her. And the more noble he perceived himself, the more subject he was to such a need. Ty Lee had never had cause to doubt this belief, and she was absolutely certain that Sokka would not actually challenge that certainty.

Still, the risk that he might… added a pleasurable frisson to the whole encounter.

With every fiber of his being Sokka strove to avoid flinching away from Ty Lee. At the same time, he strove to quench the uncomfortable heat that had arisen in his belly at the confirmation of his uneasy speculation that the Fire Nation girl actually enjoyed his rough treatment of her. He assuaged his conscience with the notion that they were both much too young to discern the difference between passionate hate and passionate… he couldn't find the appropriate noun. It didn't exist in his lexicon, given the feelings he had to admit to his darkest self she aroused in him.

Following the previous evening's script, he maintained his hard grip on her wrists while letting his mouth roam over her lips, her neck and shoulders with deliberation. The hand on her back slid down to cup the swell of her hips, pressing her hard against the growing firmness at his groin. As he splayed his fingers across her lush bottom he angled his forefinger along the cleft between her cheeks.

It occurred to Sokka that a scant year ago he had yet to embrace a girl not related to him by blood. Memories filled him of Yue's frantic kisses, and his own desperate explorations of Suki's lips, the warm, welcoming cavern of her mouth and the easy, playful sparring of their tongues as they searched for dominance between them.

This is not the same thing, he reminded himself, pulling his lips away to both gather breath and search for a sense of calm and objectivity as he allowed his hand to continue kneading Ty Lee's ass. As her lips moved down his throat he noted the fire-bender guard's determined profile over by the trebuchet. Yep. The man was tense as hell. Sokka suspected that Sparky was no more comfortable as a voyeur than he was performing for an audience.

At least one of them was actually gaining some physical enjoyment out of the whole process, though. Even as he considered this, he noticed the guard's hand surreptitiously easing its way beneath the skirt of his armor. Aw, damn, he thought. And I thought this was farcical before!

The brat had bitten his nipple. Never mind the coarse fabric between his skin and her teeth, or his firm – hell, call it what it was — crushing grip upon her wrists be damned, she was fucking insatiable. A large corner of his brain vied between denying her the pleasure she obviously sought out of honor's sake and simply fucking her silly…

Sokka secretly thanked his guard for reawakening his sense of humor. Without it, he had a sneaking suspicion that Ty Lee's little nip would have driven him to forget he was a prisoner on the deck of a Fire Nation warship and push her up against the wall with her oh-so-flexible legs up over his shoulders while he tested theory against reality. It would probably have been embarrassing for all concerned. Perhaps especially so if she'd let him do it.

He pictured Azula sending blue lightning through the guard's crotch to sizzle his own backside for daring to deflower – but wait, that wasn't the proper term for a girl as obviously experienced as Ty Lee, now was it – her right-hand girl. No, Ty Lee generally appeared on Azula's left, didn't she, so that made Mai the dominant henchperson, a term that only made him want to laugh even as the image itself appalled him. And here Sokka's brain gave up attempting to supply narrative to the scene he'd conjured.

Ty Lee found herself surprised. The groan she'd elicited as she closed her teeth over the fabric of his tunic turned into a chuckle even as she continued to warm the area with her damp breath. She rather enjoyed the feel of rough cloth against her lips – it was all one with the harsh grip on her wrists forcing her arms at an increasingly uncomfortable angle as she attempted to move down Sokka's chest even as their hips shifted against one another in a pleasant friction. She'd entwined one leg around his in the process, and felt deliciously unstable and dependent upon his support.

The laugh was all wrong though. With a sudden start, Ty Lee remembered yesterday's kiss that had sent her careening along this trajectory. She had thought it had been harshly passionate – barbarians at the gate ravishing the inhabitants kind of thing. In the echo of that chuckle Ty Lee remembered how steady Sokka's gaze had been afterwards, how, in her later visit, he'd cradled her head in a deceptively loose grasp just far enough away from the cell wall to suggest the potential of cracking bone should he lose control of himself and slam her head against it…

A sudden fear gripped her heart. Ty Lee had been delighted to discover dangerous Sokka lurking in the Tribesman, brought out by her teasing sexuality in defense of his interested response to her. Dangerous Sokka was the warrior determined to prove himself above her blandishments. But no thinking man was truly above her blandishments, so she hadn't been truly frightened of dangerous Sokka, even though he had thrilled her.

Because no thinking man could continue to think once his attention was sufficiently focused to other parts of his anatomy.

And dangerous Sokka was as much a prey to his anatomy as any other guy.

So why the hell was Sokka chuckling when he should have been growling fiercely and readying to do the ravishment thing, anyway?