It had to be said: Zuko was not good at chores. He wasn't good at cleaning tables, or doing laundry.
But that didn't stop him from doing those things. Just as it hadn't stopped him on his ship, where he learned everything he'd have to do to man any given position.
Something else Zuko wasn't good at? Flirting. Jet had mentioned that before, right? That Zuko wasn't good at flirting. He'd known that, really, but–
"This is painful," he muttered. "I am in pain ."
[Jin flirting with Zuko. Iroh still arranges the date.]
Out of sight behind closed doors, Zuko heated the water and Jet threw bath salts into the tub.
In the Fire Nation, makeshift bathing came in the form of soapweed and scouring rush. In the Earth Kingdom, it was soapstone and river sand. Even the rivers themselves were different. In the Fire Nation, the bottoms of rivers were lined with rich dark silt, from the fluffy, ashy lands prone to fires and floodplains. In the Earth Kingdom, riverbeds were made of sand and sometimes-dangerous, sucking clay and sticky mud, depending on the season.
When it came to less makeshift, for the Fire Nation, it was steam baths, with fragrant herb water poured over red-hot coals while everyone sat on benches around the pit. Here in Ba Sing Se, it was large communal heated tubs filled with bath salts.
[Jin kiss-ish]
The sparks she breathed into his mouth tasted unexpectedly like burnt sugar. So sweet it numbed his tongue. He wondered what the sparks popping against his teeth tasted like to her.
'You have a lack of social awareness,' was how Uncle would say it.
'I have no fucking clue what I'm doing,' was Zuko's own scathing assessment.
"And the conclusion?" Jet asked, at the end of the night.
"Spar with me?"
Jet caught the laugh behind his teeth, just barely. "Sword fighting?" he asked, with a useless waggle of his eyebrows in the dark.
Zuko grabbed his hand and pulled him close. "No."
"Companionship ends," Zuko said, out of nowhere, as all his best ideas came from.
Jet made the appropriate sleepy inquiring noise.
"If—If Fire kids want to make friends, they'll have to be friendly. Not like—"
Jet really, really wanted to believe that Zuko meant 'not like the way my psychopathic sister treated her quote-unquote 'friends''. Alas, he'd known the other boy for longer than two days and thus was left with the distinct impression that Zuko meant 'like me.'
Jet did not sigh. But it was a close thing. One trauma at a time. "Well, if we could figure it out, everyone else should be fine. You came friend-shaped to begin with." Oh, Zuko's turn to make the sleepy confusion sounds, then. "Fire Prince, you saw me for all of two seconds and immediately went 'I think the fuck not' and threw the power of the entire crown behind the decision to stop it."
x
[Jin continues to come to the tea shop and becomes friends with Zuko and Jet. An' yez, she is a firebender, because I love that trope. Pry it from my cold, dead hands.]
x
Jet could see what was happening and wanted more than anything to stop it in its tracks. Fuck, but just like Gaipan, Zuko was seeing the people around them as his people.
Jet couldn't put into words how incredibly dangerous that was for a banished treasonous prince of another nation in the middle of a bunch of commoners of this, refugee nation.
It was already bad and he could see the seams starting to show. To be honest, he'd seen the seams starting to show back in Onsenzakura. When Zuko looked at the things the Fire Nation had done and cried 'why? My nation, my people, why?'
But Zuko had been crying that for three years now and it couldn't surprise him after that first great betrayal.
Except it always did because somehow, somehow, Zuko still expected better of people. Still expected the best of people.
x
Jet looked at the flier. Zuko looked at the flier. Jet looked at Zuko. Zuko looked at Jet.
The bison flier. The flier for the Avatar's bison. The huge, ten-ton monstrosity of a bison who was apparently in Ba Sing fucking Se. And in Ba Sing Se, there was only one place it could possibly be.
Jet opened his mouth. Didn't speak. ' Are we really even thinking of doing actually doing this?' he didn't ask. Zuko's pained grimace answered him.
"You're not concerned about more treason?"
Because countermanding ships home was one thing. This was actively helping the Fire Nation's number one most wanted enemy. (Well, the help came from its number two most wanted enemy, o' Blue Spirit, so it did kind of track.)
"When have I ever been concerned about too much treason ?" Zuko asked, honest and blunt and ow. Then, fatalistically, "They can only kill me once."
Nope. Jet wasn't going to touch on that and the many many things a furious Ozai could do to Zuko to make him wish he was dead before killing him.
"So we're really doing this? Freeing the Avatar's bison?"
It was slow in coming, but come the nod eventually did. "Yeah. Yeah, we're really doing it."
Alright. "Higher Treason it is, then."
Zuko snorted. "It's not a hierarchy. There's no level above High Treason. There's no Highest Treason to aspire to."
"There's always higher treason to aspire to," he countered.
"Whatever you say."
"Alright, then. Full treason ahead. We're going whoring."
Zuko's amused snort was entirely worth it.
Jet sighed at the poster. "Let me guess, you have a plan?"
Zuko was quiet for a truly worrying amount of time and Jet was convinced he was literally coming up with his 'plan' as they stood there. But eventually, he offered, " Ninja in, grab the bison, and ninja back out…?" And he had the audacity to tack a question mark onto the end of that like it was a question. Good plan, Prince. Good plan.
"…Ninja out? With a ten-ton bison? From the creepy underground holding cells below the city? The city's 'disappear-people' secret police holding cells?"
Zuko shrugged, so nonchalantly Jet had to suppress the sudden urge to strangle him. "Not the most difficult thing we've ever done."
And damn it if that wasn't true.
"It is almost breakfast," Zuko added, with a tiny shy smile that had Jet thumping his head on the prince's shoulder and shaking in helpless laughter.
Impossible for breakfast. Difficult for tea. Right, he had said that. Should have known better. Didn't. "So it is. Hungry?" he asked.
"Famished."
Ohhh, Agni help me. "Me, too."
x
[Breaking into Lake Laogai]
"How… in the world… Do you do this? Fuckin' ninja shit."
"Practice. And bendiness."
"I am perfectly fucking bendy, thank you very much!"
"Well, I can think of one way to get their attention, but I don't think it'd go well for us."
"One of your plans, not going well?" Jet asked, keeping his voice as light as possible and twice as sarcastic for it.
"This is your idea of ninjaing?" Zuko asked, after the third Dai-Li-where-he-shouldn't-be was sent to an unwilling nap at Jet's tender mercies.
"It's a working definition," he shot back.
It was highly impressive, the way Zuko, even through his Blue Spirit mask, gave him a terribly unimpressed look as he strung up the third Dai-Li-where-he-shouldn't-be to dangle like an up-and-coming light fixture.
"Well, it is working."
Zuko's mask as he silently pulled the rope and his victim rose into the air was just. So unimpressed.
"Judgy spirit."
"Welcome to Ba Sing Se. I am Joo Dee."
"Well, that explains where they disappear people to. …gotta say, regretting my definition of ninjaing less and less."
X
[Zuko and Jet split up to rescue Appa and also the Joo Dees. Zuko gets out, but Jet doesn't meet up with him afterward. Zuko… does not take it well.]