Chapter 23

"This is the stupidest idea you ever had," Sokka blurted without thinking upon hearing of Katara's plan for a group therapy session. "Do you think for a minute Zuko is going to do anything more than scowl at all of us?"

"No, I think all he'll do is scowl," Katara replied. "But hearing other people air their issues might open him up to at least thinking about his own."

"Again," Sokka repeated, "I want to go on record as saying this is the stupidest idea you ever had." Then he stalked off to play with his meteor sword again, a huge grin spreading across his face as he drew it from its sheath.

"I think it's a great idea," Suki said as she bent down to retie Toma's shoelaces. "We can just do a little catchup session. See where conversation takes us. If the rest of us are committed to being open, it'll encourage Zuko to be open."

"You people don't know him at all, do you?" Mai asked from the side. "Zuko's idea of openness is admitting that he can't remember your birthday. Even though you've told it to him at least twenty times," she added in a dry undervoice.

Katara adjusted the cooking pot on the grate over the fire and said, "I agree that it's a long shot. I doubt he'll say a word about what's bothering him so badly. But I do think we at least need to try."

Toph walked up to join them after having gotten Zuko comfortable again—and mostly dressed, considering that she didn't plan to have him out of her bendingsight again. She didn't want to have any thick walls to interfere, so she'd dropped her courtyard for the moment.

The others filled her in on the group session idea, which she accepted with a little nod of resignation. "Hey, I'll try anything at this point," she said, then asked, "So, what's going to start this whole conversation thing off?"

"I don't have any idea," Katara replied as she rolled some vegetables over in the coals. "We'll just play it by ear, I guess. Anybody got any thoughts?" she asked as she looked around the group.

Meanwhile, Jet spent the morning wandering around the campsite, trying not to have any thoughts. Unfortunately, with nothing else to occupy him, thinking was all he'd been good for.

The cave was one of his favorite hideouts, convenient to both Omashu and Ba Sing Se, very difficult to find, easily defended.

He knelt down to see if he could feel the earth again like he did in the cave, to see if it had anything to tell him. To his surprise, he could feel the camp, could feel the others there behind him. If he really concentrated, he could pick Mai out from the rest of them.

It was strange. This ability had seemed to come and go through the years, but ever since he'd found Sokka's sword and begun to use it to amplify the sensation, the feelings had grown stronger. In the cave just now, they'd been as strong as he'd ever felt—with the exception of the day the feelings had saved his life.

He remembered without wanting to. He tried not to remember, but the images came flooding back to him, images of fire and death. Finally he gave in. He sat down on the edge of the bluff and put his head in his hands and remembered.

After their escape from Ba Sing Se, Jet, Longshot, and Smellerbee had been serving with a group of Earth Kingdom guerrilla fighters, harassing any and all Fire Nation troops they'd come across. Most of the men in their company had been just this side of criminal, but their leader had been a good man—honest, direct, and loyal to the Earth King.

His name was Dae-Hyun and he had once been a member of the Dai Li.

Jet never knew why Dae-Hyun had defected from the secret police, but he did know that his captain had been a shrewd tactician, a ruthless disciplinarian, and a man of integrity. He, Longshot, and Smellerbee would have followed him into hell itself.

On the day of Ozai's attack, Jet believed they had done just that. The company was relaxing in camp when someone noticed that the sky behind them had grown red as if the sun were setting hours early.

Then little gray flakes of ash had begun to fall out of the sky. Dae-Hyun had realized something unusual was happening and sent Jet and another scout to investigate and report.

Jet and his companion had ventured back toward the red glow. On the far distant horizon, they could see a long line of what appeared to be floating warships of some kind pouring gouts of flame.

They'd tried to get back to warn the group of the impending fire, but were cut off by a huge herd of wildelope, all on the run from what they soon recognized as a gigantic forest fire—a fire that was moving at an unearthly speed directly toward them.

Too late, Jet realized that unless the flames were stopped, the company was doomed. The inferno stretched across the horizon as far as he could see in both directions. It was too wide to outflank and too fast to outrun.

They were all going to die.

Horribly.

His companion panicked and ran, leaving Jet to stand on a little rise and watch the flames come closer at an alarming speed. Jet had known there was no reason to run. In fact, apart from a gutwrenching sadness for Longshot and Smellerbee, he'd actually felt a measure of peace in knowing that his life would soon be over.

He'd also found a bitter comfort in knowing that whatever wrongs he'd done in this life, the violent manner of his death ought to help make up for them. So he'd knelt and made peace with the heavens, calling on the spirits as witness, calling on the earth to take him back into itself at the end.

It was in that final call to the earth that he heard something. He'd heard the earth answer him in a way he'd never felt before.

To his surprise, he could feel a narrow crevice in the rock wall that stretched down the hill below him. He could feel an opening in the earth that would shelter him. Somehow he'd walked straight to the spot, pushing aside scrubby bushes to reveal a hole just nearly large enough for him to crawl through.

Nearly.

As the flames drew closer and closer, the heat began to rise around him, sending the wind whipping back and forth. As the air grew hotter, he'd dug at the hole with both hands, trying to enlarge it enough for him to crawl into.

Ash choked the breath out of him as he finally managed to wriggle his way inside the narrow crevice, crawling deeper and deeper into the moist, dark, cool underground passage. Looking back, he could see the air outside the tunnel turn red and waves of heat began to beat at him.

But he managed to crawl far enough into the opening to sit out the firestorm. The air grew thin as the flames exhausted much of the oxygen in the narrow cave. The heat was nearly unbearable.

The fire probably burned only for minutes as it swept over, but it seemed like hours. All he could think was that Smellerbee and Longshot were out there somewhere, dying in this inferno. He wished he was at their side.

But he was alone. Without them, he was now completely alone. His family, his village, his friends—all gone. There wasn't a soul alive who cared whether he lived or died. Everyone he'd ever cared about was now either dead or long gone from his life.

He was completely alone. The Fire Nation had succeeded in taking everyone he'd ever loved away from him. But instead of anger, all he felt was an intense emptiness, a loneliness that had never really left him since that day. At that moment, a part of him felt like it died.

Once the ground had cooled enough to emerge from his hiding place, he'd gone to look for the company. To his dismay, the bodies were charred beyond recognition. There was no way he could find Smellerbee and Longshot—to give them the kind of burial they deserved.

So, he'd begun the laborious task of burying all of them, sometimes in sadness, sometimes in anger, sometimes in peace. When he'd finished, he'd been dehydrated, exhausted, and near collapse.

He thought of lying down on top of the mass grave and just giving up. But something spoke to him, encouraging him to keep moving.

He began to walk, his eyes on the burned ground.

It was on this walk that he found the sword. The leather had been burned from the hilt, but the blade itself was untouched by flame. At first he thought the peculiar black color had been from ash, but when he tried to wipe it clean, he realized that the metal itself was black. And sharp. Sharper than any blade he'd ever seen.

The metal was as black as his thoughts. It seemed to suit him. So he stuck the sword in his belt and continued to walk.

Only a short while later, he abruptly came to the end of the burned over section. It was as if the fire had just been cut off. In the distance around him, he could see the burned wreckages of the strange ships, now abandoned.

From where he stood there on the untouched green of the grass, he could just see on the horizon the hill that stood over the grave of his friends. They'd been that close to safety. The fire had ended only that short distance past them as they'd run for their lives.

This last bit of bitter irony pushed him over the edge. What was the use in caring about anything? About anybody?

When he'd reached a village a short while later, it had been thronged with people seeking refuge after the firestorm had destroyed their homes, their lives. Everyone wanted water and food and a place to rest.

But not everyone was armed.

In his dark state of mind, it had been all too easy to pull out that dark sword and demand what he needed. It had been all too easy to turn a blind eye to the needs of the people around him and satisfy his own.

Before long, he'd fallen in with another band of armed men, all of whom felt the same way—empty, angry, callous.

In the chaos that followed the Fire Nation's defeat, very little by way of true law and order was to be found. Villages paid mercenaries to protect them from roving groups of bandits, mercenaries who were just nearly bandits themselves.

For the better part of the next two years, Jet had been a common thief--taking whatever he wanted, never looking anyone in the eye, never talking unless absolutely necessary.

He did his best to insulate himself from the world. He never even looked at his victims or his cohorts. Nobody knew him anymore and he didn't want them to. If he knew them, he might care about them. He was tired of caring.

His life had begun a cycle of raid, run, and hide. Raid a village, run from the authorities, hide until they gave up looking for him.

He'd been on the run from one of the few active Earth Kingdom patrols when he'd found this place, high in the mountains. Following a botched raid of a little village, he'd been separated from the rest of his current group and had been trying to avoid capture by seeking a pass over the peak.

Instead of a mountain pass, he'd found this cave system, aided by the unusual properties of his strange black sword. He'd hid out there, drinking from the waterfall spring and eating whatever he could find. His sense of the earth had come in handy, helping him find small game and edible roots.

He'd spent that time in deep thought about his life, about what he'd become. Years ago, he'd been a thug as a misguided, angry teenager. What was his excuse now, he wondered bitterly.

He'd stayed in the cave for several weeks. He'd even thought about never leaving it.

But eventually the loneliness began to take its toll. Despite the fact that he rarely even spoke to his fellow gangmembers, he missed the company of other people. He wouldn't admit it, but he needed to have people around him to buffer the emptiness he felt, to take the edge off the aloneness that stayed with him at all times.

So, he'd finally left the cave and rejoined the gang. It hadn't been too long afterward that he'd stumbled onto Smellerbee and Longshot during a raid on another village. To say his heart hadn't been in it was no excuse. He'd known his path was wrong. He'd known he was betraying everything he ever said he stood for.

But when he saw the look of joy that he was alive turn into disappointment in their eyes, he knew he'd come to a crossroads he could no longer ignore. Angrily, he'd turned on the band he'd been leading, driving them singlehandedly out of town.

Then he'd gone to the little storeroom that the two had been staying in and crashed on the floor, sleeping nearly two days straight.

Once he'd awoken at last, they'd filled him in on the details of their escape. After Jet had gone scouting behind the group, the two of them had been ordered to scout ahead. They'd stood on the same hill he'd stood on and watched as the fire had overtaken the rest of the company, clinging to each other as the airships had crashed in the distance.

Afterward, Smellerbee told him, they'd gone time and time again into the burned over forest to try to find his body, but had finally given up their search as hopeless. While Jet had turned to the south with a gang of bandits, they'd gone north to try to make a new life together, just missing him in the mass of refugees fleeing the fire.

Jet could see that one thing good had come from the whole ordeal. In the aftermath of his disappearance from their lives, Longshot and Smellerbee had begun to look to each other, finally cementing the relationship that had been there under the surface for years. It wasn't too long afterward that they'd made it formal.

They'd been young, but Jet had known they would make it from the beginning. The two of them had an understanding he envied, a closeness he wished he could find for himself.

Now as he sat there on the bluff, overlooking the valley below, he thought about Mai.

What was it that drew him to her? Was it her composure? Her ability to stay just a little bit above whatever was going on around her?

He loved the fact that his presence, his touch, could shake the unshakable diplomat. He loved the way she responded to him, the passion she showed to him that no one else could see.

But there was no future it it. What did he have to offer to someone like her?

Then it came to him.

What if he took them up on their offer? What if he actually agreed to be the king of Omashu?

"I've gone completely insane," he said aloud. There was no way he could be a king.

Then he realized he didn't have to. All he had to do was hang in there long enough for them to figure out they'd made a terrible mistake and offer him some kind of runner up position, something he could actually do.

Like work with the city law enforcement on pursuing gangs of bandits. He'd been a bandit himself long enough to know all the tricks. Maybe with a real position of respectability in the city he'd have a chance at being the kind of guy Mai might be interested in for real.

Besides, as potential king of Omashu, he would probably have the power to cancel all his remaining outstanding arrest warrants. That brought a smile to his face. He hadn't been able to go within ten miles of Madame Wu's village in years, not to mention five or six other places that probably hadn't taken down his wanted poster from the village guard's bulletin board.

That settled it. He'd tell them yes.

At least for now.

He walked back into camp with a spring in his step, glad to see it was lunchtime. Everyone was gathered around the fire, looking at each other oddly. All but Zuko. He appeared to be eating his lunch.

"So," Katara said out of nowhere as Jet dished up a plate of food and sat down next to Mai. He gave her a smile. She just looked at him.

"So," Suki repeated after a long pause, "anybody got any good stories?"

"I do," Sokka began. "I would like to tell you all about a particularly painful episode in my past." Aang snorted with repressed laughter and Suki punched Sokka in the ribs—hard.

He just scooted over a little and continued, "When Katara first learned to bend ice, she delighted in freezing my feet to the ground. One time she did that and I twisted my knee so badly I limped for a month." Then he looked over the fire at Katara and added seriously, "I've never quite gotten past that. You were pretty mean sometimes."

Katara just glared at him over the fire.

Suki spoke up in Katara's defense, "Come on, Sokka, I meant any good true stories."

"I think he's probably telling the truth," Jet interjected. "Katara froze me to a tree once. It took a good hour for me to thaw loose."

"She froze me to a wall of ice once," Zuko added with a laugh. "It took me all night to thaw." He shivered a little. "Man, it was cold in there."

Katara couldn't help but snap back at them, "Well, I had to do it. If you two will remember what you were up to, you'll agree that being frozen to something was probably the best thing."

"You're right," Jet said with a playfully sheepish drop of his head. "Thank you for freezing me to a tree, Katara."

"You probably should have froze me to something way more often than you did," Zuko added. "It would have saved everybody a lot of trouble. I caused you guys some major grief."

Everybody perked up to see what he'd say next but he just picked at his lunch casually.

"You've got nothing to be ashamed of," Katara said soothingly. Aang just rolled his eyes at her.

"How can you say that?" Zuko asked lightly. "At one time or another I think I probably tried to kill everyone here."

"You never tried to kill me, Sparky," Toph said sweetly, giving him a kiss on the cheek.

"Or me," Mai added, then she gave it more thought and said, "I take that back. I'd like to count the time you set my hair on fire as attempted murder."

"There," Zuko concluded with a laugh, "at one point or another I tried to kill everybody here but Toph. Her I married."

"But you know," Aang said seriously, "you didn't succeed. In fact you even rescued me once. I think if it had ever come down to it for real, you wouldn't have gone through with it."

"Yeah," Sokka interjected, his mouth full of food, "you might have been an angry jerk at times, but you were never a killer."

"Thank you for the vote of confidence," Zuko said with a little bow of his head, "but can we talk about something else? What's done is done. We've all moved past those days, haven't we?"

"Of course we have, sweetie," Toph spoke up at last when no one else would answer.

"All the same, it's good to get stuff out in the open, you know," Katara added in a leading tone.

Zuko didn't say anything. He just continued to eat his lunch.

Jet couldn't help but wonder what was going on here. So he turned to Mai and whispered, "What's going on?"

She gave him a totally blank stare and said, "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Yes, you do," he replied. "Something's up."

She gave him a warning glance and mouthed, "Later."

He just nodded at her and tried to eat while simultaneously watching the rest of the group for clues.

Everyone ate in silence. Katara darted glances at everyone in an attempt to spark more conversation, but everyone just looked at her and shrugged.

Finally, Zuko put down his plate and spoke up. "So, Jet, are you going to take the job?"

Jet looked up at him and replied, "Yeah, I think so. I'll give it a try at least." To say the rest of the group was dumbfounded at the casualness of Zuko's question and Jet's announcement was an understatement.

"Good," Zuko stated firmly. "I think you'll do a great job. I've got a few suggestions for you that might help you transition into the role if you want to talk this afternoon."

"Sure, sounds good," Jet replied, rising to wash his plate in the camp dishpan. For some reason, he was glad lunch was over. Everyone seemed a little weird.

Zuko slowly stood and walked back to his lounge in the sun. Toph took care of their lunch plates and walked out to join him.

"Do you need anything, baby?" she asked, sitting on the edge of the lounge beside him.

"No, I'm just going to rest here a little while," he replied in a tired voice.

"How are you doing?" Toph asked, reaching out to stroke his arm.

"I'm okay," he assured her. "Whatever Aang and Katara did to me helped some."

"I'm glad," Toph said to him in a soft voice, leaning down to give him a kiss. "But sooner or later you're going to have to deal with whatever is bothering you. It's keeping you from getting better."

"Was that what all that strangeness at lunch was about?" he asked suspiciously. "I knew you guys were up to something."

"Aang said that your energy is blocked by something you're not dealing with. The physical can't heal unless the emotional heals too," Toph answered. "You know you can tell me anything," she added. "Anything at all."

"I know I can," he responded a little testily. "But really there's nothing to tell. I'm fine."

Toph could tell he was lying, but chose not to call him on it. When he was ready, he'd talk. And she'd be there.

"Then you just rest for a while," she said sweetly.

And he did just that.