BA SING SE
"Uncle!" Zuko called. "We're leaving."
Iroh's head popped out around the corner. "Where are you two going off to?"
"We're gonna see if there's some trouble or a whore we can get into," Jet threw cheerfully over his shoulder as he dragged the prince away.
"Jet," Zuko got out behind him, voice rough with suppressed laughter.
He paused to look back. "What?! What do you think two unsupervised teenage refugees should do left alone in a big city like Ba Sing Se?"
Zuko gave that the half-second of thought it deserved before he smirked. "Go whoring," he replied, finally losing hold of the laughter.
The gossip of the whores of Ba Sing Se was as varied as the brothels themselves were, but all of them shared a singular word of advice.
'Beware the Dai Li.'
x
[S2 BSS]
Surprising as it was, Zuko was a good worker. He wasn't unused to hard work or heavy tasks, though he struggled with simple 'peasant' things like dishes and laundry, because he hadn't been taught, but he could move crates and find things easily and arrange them even easier, and he was surprisingly able when it came to taking and relaying orders. As long as he could frame it like a command chain, Zuko was a font of brisk military efficiency.
Unfortunately, brisk military efficiency wasn't quite in demand in sleepy little tea shops, and Zuko's attitude couldn't be seen as anything less than blunt to the point of insult. It was always when he had to engage with people on a human, social level that it all fell apart and he sputtered and flared like a campfire filled with festival day sparklers.
Zuko didn't do small talk, he did incident reports. Zuko didn't do customer service, he did damage and cost assessments.
And above all, Zuko did not do flirting. He extra especially did not do flirting for discounts do you really think you're that special?
Zuko could not explain to a customer that, no, they didn't do that here with anything beyond because no. Or, if pressed, because that doesn't even make sense, are you really that much of a blithering idiot don't answer that.
So it was especially surprising when Zuko paused in front of the one woman at the table in the corner and went, "You. You get free tea."
She blinked at him. "Ah?"
"You have that customer service face. You get free tea. What's your name?"
"I am Joo Dee."
"Just give them your name at the counter when you order."
"We're no longer on a ship at sea," Jet marveled when Zuko made his way back over. "We're in the middle of Ba Sing Se, the heart of the Earth Kingdom, as refugees, literally as far away from our previous life as it's possible to be."
Zuko's shoulders got tighter and tighter with every word. "And?"
"And somehow," Jet emphasized. "You're still shouting orders and watching people scurry around you." Granted, they were tea orders, but Zuko managed to shout them exactly as if he were a surly commanding officer. It was almost impressive.
It was statistically improbable for that many different women to share the same name. Ever? Maybe. In the world currently? Possible. All in Ba Sing Se? Highly unlikely.
It was probably just a bunch of women using the same name to get free tea since, of course, Zuko had superficially said to give that name to get free tea.
But they also all shared the same customer service expression on their faces. So. Zuko was disinclined to call them out on it.
x
"You what," Jet asked flatly.
Zuko startled, visibly unsure. "I just told you—"
He pinched the bridge of his nose to keep his building aneurysm from making his brain drip out his nose. "And now you're going to tell me again."
Again, Zuko explained how he'd found an endangered animal trafficking ring (what?) and then found the Dai-Li (what?) and then taken down said trafficking ring with said Dai-Li (WHAT?) and now said Dai-Li was impressed with him ( ?)
Jet took another deep breath. Held his nose tighter. "Again," he ordered.
"What?! I— You—! Argh!" Zuko snarled at him, and Jet just looked at him. One tense stare-off later, Zuko took the deep, calming breaths, and it didn't escape Jet's notice that every light in the room breathed with him.
And he. Explained. Again.
It wasn't any better the third time.
"We've been in Ba Sing Se for two weeks. And you somehow managed to get scouted by the city's secret peace police? Fire Prince, how?"
Zuko squirmed in place, very visibly uncomfortable, but Jet couldn't exactly bring himself to feel much sympathy at the moment. The firebender cleared his throat, never looking him in the eye, and hummed a few bars.
Jet's eyes narrowed. Was that…?
The cavalry reinforcement call.
"I was—on the rooftops. Just. You know, scouting." His face looked almost hot enough to firebend on its own. "There were pygmy pumas. In cages. They were crying. They were going to eat them!"
His hold on his nose had come and gone, now his hand covered his whole face. Why am I even surprised? He held his fingers up a bare hair apart. "I'm this close to assigning you homework and making you write up a report about every possible thing that could have gone wrong on your solo adventure."
Zuko blinked at him. "You hate reading reports."
"The only thing saving you from a strained wrist right now."
"Look, I realize I—" Zuko's face went through all kinds of expressions as he was cut off by the strange sound. Already placing bets in his head, Jet followed him to the window and they looked down together.
"Mew," cried the trio of pygmy pumas.
Zuko made a sound not terribly different. "I didn't— I mean—"
Jet eyed him heavily before giving in with a sigh. "If they say 'Oniichan has swords,' I'm leaving you," he warned.
Zuko made another miserable sound and hid his face in his hands.
x
It started like this.
They were on their way back to the little hole in the wall they called home, after Zuko had infected him to help on his little animal-saving crusade—because Jet had nothing better to do and not because Zuko had looked at him with begging golden eyes shut up—when a woman shouted loud enough to be heard even outside of the bar she was inside.
Naturally, they took a small detour.
Zuko took one look at the guy holding a woman by the arm as she struggled to get away, and grabbed the asshole by the wrist.
The man turned away from the woman with a sneer on his face, caught sight of Zuko, and something in his expression slipped.
Something else in Jet's stomach twisted. The look in those eyes as they caught the scar was the same disgusting glint he'd seen in Zhao's eyes for years and Jet hated it.
"Let her go," Zuko ordered, with all the authority of a crown prince behind the words.
"You offering yourself in her stead, pretty thing?"
Zuko's cheek twitched and Jet stepped forward. But his Fire Prince didn't let go of the guy's wrist, and that something in his gut twisted tighter. Don't. Zuko, don't do it.
"If you can out-drink me, you can have me."
Challenge. That same spark that had caught Zhao—fuck, the same one that caught Jet, too—caught Asshole, like a buttermoth to the flames, drawn like so many before, drawn like the fucking Fire Lord, to try and stamp out the defiance in that golden gaze.
"Darling, you're on."
It ended like this.
The guy did not win. The guy wound up drunk and passed out in the alley. If he wound up drunk and passed out in the alley without any money or ID, well, he was drunk and passed out in an alley in Ba Sing Se.
The woman walked away with a double escort and a coupon for tea.
x
So.
Somehow—and for the life of him, Jet couldn't figure out how—Zuko rescuing a trio of pygmy pumas from animal smugglers turned into Jet and Zuko rescuing other animals from other smugglers, turned into Jet and Zuko rescuing a woman who happened to be Fire Nation one night and giving her a coupon for tea, turned into rescuing more Fire Nation people and giving them coupons for tea, turned into helping Fire Nation people get around via fucking tea shop.
And before he knew it, they had started their own underground smuggling ring and Jet couldn't figure out how the fuck they'd done it even when he was looking at a clear-cut list of events he'd written himself. Somehow Kittensanimalsone Fire Nation ladyevery spirit damned Fire National in Ba Sing Se just didn't damn well track. There was something fucky with the math here.
How the fuck had they managed to mess up 'help out some helpless animals' this damn badly? That was like trying to board a ship and getting hit by a train how'd they even do that?
Even knowing everything he knew about the Fire Nation and the Fire prince, Jet still wasn't quite sure how Zuko did it.
Jet knew how he did it. Managed to constantly find trouble and people who were in trouble and people who were trouble.
It was how he'd found Zuko, after all.
He didn't know how Zuko did it, though. But he knew it happened.
Like their namesake, the people of the Fire Nation were fire. And fire, wherever it was, spread. Zuko dropped into the unsuspecting city of Ba Sing Se like a hot ember and spread fire everywhere he went.
After that first woman, they started showing up at the tea shop. In ones and twos and threes. People with eyes a little too gold, hair a little too dark, skin a little too pale. For tea.
Spiced tea was surging in popularity, apparently.
But more, they showed up for talk, and conversation with the friendly old tea server.
For warmth.
The warmth that fire so easily provided.
Jet had no idea if they knew exactly who sent them. Or if they saw the scar on Zuko's face and what it meant for him to be here and Fire Nation hurt by the Fire Nation and still saving Fire Nation. But they saw that scar and they never once doubted him. And they came to the tea shop.
Shops. Pao's was small and couldn't really afford to hire more than two or three workers for the sheer lack of size. But Longshot and Smellerbee were just as good at tea as at least Jet, and Pao's wasn't the only tea shop on the block.
And the fire spread.
Slow, quiet, unnoticed. A ground fire creeping along the root systems of Ba Sing Se.
And somehow, the cold stone fist of There Is No War In Ba Sing Se felt more like the toasty warmth of a hearthfire whispering it's safe here, and here, and here. Safe to stop in and grab a sip of pure homesickness and talk to others who knew what it was like to burn and be burned and crave the warmth of fire still.
Not that Jet had a leg to stand on, what with his growing army of refugee orphans taking up jobs in a variety of tea shops. But that was what earth did: rumble and tumble together. Jet always had been the pebble to start the avalanche.
The fire spread, and the smoke swirled in the air, and the earth tumbled together.
X
[EXTRA]
Also who'd been coming in for tea? That one fucking Dai Li agent.
There was one of those That One Damn Customer that had been there all day, ogling. Ogling other customers, ogling Jet, ogling Zuko.
Shitty, but typical.
And then he got handsy.
And Zuko, casually, calmly, walked behind the counter. And Ogley followed him up. Waited. Ogled. Reached out—
Zuko turned around, and with the same authority and casual violence with which he handled rowdy komodo-rhinos, he slammed a chef's knife into the countertop so hard it buried the tip several centimeters in.
To the stone countertop.
"Anything on that side of the counter is yours," Zuko informed softly, sweet as cyanide. "Anything on this side of the counter is mine, and I'll do whatever I want with what's mine."
Ogley suddenly had something else he needed to be doing anywhere else that wasn't here.
From the shadow beside the doorway, a Dai Li agent walked up to the counter, and Jet gave up on the order he was taking. Only to be met with a stare-off between the two.
"Agent Yin Yue," Zuko said, with that same poison-sweet voice, giving that reckless challenge-glare, daring the Dai Li agent to arrest him. (Jet was already mentally preparing for a prison break.)
A pause. A nod. "Li," the agent replied. With equal casual calm, the man reached out and smoothed his hand across the countertop.
When he walked away, the counter was as good as new.
(Jet hated that Dai Li agent. For entirely non-Zuko related reasons, of course.)
X