Stop Hiding

summary: Jet just wished Li would stop trying to hide his face.

The first thing Jet had noticed about Li was that he was a fighter. He had seen the swords the boy carried with him. He stood strong, unlike so many other refugees on the ferry. Li hadn't given up, he was still fighting. The second thing Jet had noticed about the pale teen had been the scar. It was hard to miss, impossible really. You had to be completely blind if you wanted to miss it, because even if you were sight impaired, which the eye surrounded by the scar tissue had to be, or standing very far away you would still be able to see it staring at you in an everlasting glare.

One of the things that didn't take Jet long to notice but did say a lot about the pale boy was the way Li moved. He walked like a noble. His stride was full of pride and arrogance. It was so prominent that Jet was sure Li wasn't from any ordinary family, but that he came from money that had held power.

At times it looked ridiculous, really. Mostly when he was working at the tea shop. Li walked around the place like he was an honorary guest in the Earth Kingdom's palace, yet he was serving people whose social status couldn't go any lower.

As Jet spent more time around Li the Freedom Fighter noticed that Li wouldn't always look right at you. The pale boy didn't do it to hide his scar, on the contrary, he'd turn the scarred side of his face at you.

At first Jet thought it must be a reaction to people staring at the scar. Jet thought that when the pale boy had received the injury he had had to keep himself from flinching away when people stared at the wounded flesh, and that in doing so he unconsciously turned his scar to them to tell them that they could stare all they wanted. Only Jet realized that that wasn't the case at all after some time.

Li used the scar as a mask.

Jet had always been good at reading people, but Li was just so easy to read. You could see almost anything he felt on his pale face. But only on the flawless side. His left eye was pulled in a permanent glare by rough scar tissue, making it unable to see what the golden eyed boy was feeling.

When Jet asked about the scar, Li put on the mask the disfigured flesh provided. They were on Li's bed, the pale boy lying on it while Jet sat on his right. Li turned his head to bury the right side of it in the pillow underneath it. "If you don't want to talk about it, you don't have to." the Freedom Fighter said quietly. "Just… You should know that it wasn't you fault." He didn't want the younger boy to blame himself for what the Fire Nation had done to him, something too many of his Freedom Fighters had done.

"What would you know?!" There was anger in Li's voice, along with something Jet couldn't place. If Li just wouldn't hide his expression from him, he would know what the boy was feeling. "For all you I tripped and landed on the fire Uncle used to warm his tea!"

"If you did, you wouldn't be acting like this." Jet responded. "Aside from that, it doesn't look like an accident."

"That doesn't mean it wasn't my own fault. It was all for nothing anyway, I ruined everything." There was less anger in the younger teen's voice, resentment taking its place.

Jet reached to Li's face and laid his hand on a pale jaw line and damaged check. "Look at me, I want to see your face."

Li turned his head, only to slightly turn the left side away this time. Jet felt something tighten in his chest, but ignored it to look at Li's face instead. Sadness, anger, fear and doubt were spread in a mixture over his face. Jet turned Li's head slightly with his hand so the boy's face was looking straight at him, no longer trying to hide any part of it. "I want to see your whole face, including the scar." the tanned boy said. "It's a part of you. A part that I love just as much as the rest of you, and how you got it doesn't change how I think about you. Do you understand?"

Li nodded lightly. "Yeah." There wasn't much conviction in his voice, but Jet would take what he could get.

"Good." Jet said and he leaned down to place a kiss on Li's lips. He would leave the subject alone for now and worry about it a different time.