Laughed At, But Not Unkindly

[bungakertas]

Rating: PG
Warning(s): none
Pairing(s): none
Disclaimer: Avatar: the Last Airbender and all attendant characters and concepts are the property of Nickelodeon, Brian Konietzko, and Michael DiMartino. No money changed hands and no copyright infringement is intended or implied.
Summary: What if Jet hadn't realized Zuko and Iroh were from the Fire Nation? And what if he'd just happened to be able to "introduce" Zuko to the Gaang while they were both in Ba Sing Se.
Spoilers: the whole series is up for grabs

*~*~*

Zuko had spent most of his life thinking the spirits were laughing at him. His mother had told him that wasn’t true. Uncle had told him that wasn’t true. Lu Ten, when he’d been alive to tell him things, had told him that wasn’t true.

And this moment was when Zuko knew they were all wrong. The spirits were laughing at him.

“Katara!” Jet was saying excitedly, “Meet my friend Lee! We met on the ferry across the Eastern Lake!”

Out of everyone, in the world, Jet had called the attention of That Water Tribe Girl. Katara? She was staring at him in shock, those lethal fingers twitching.

Jet was oblivious to the disaster he was organizing and just carried on introducing people as if they were at a party.

“And this is her brother Sokka!”

The Boomerang Boy. Apparently named Sokka, and obviously they were just going to be on terms now. Sokka was sizing him up just like his sister had done. His ever-present boomerang was in that sheath on his back, but Zuko remembered just how dangerous he’d been in that shell of a town—Tu Zin?—when Uncle had been injured.

“And this—you’ll never believe it—is the Avatar! His name is Aang!” Jet said excitedly.

“I don’t believe it,” Zuko agreed in a very flat voice, staring at the boy he’d fought over and over and over and never managed to beat.

“I really am the Avatar,” Aang said, his usual upbeat demeanor had a steely undertone. Flaming Fire Ferrets, but he was young.

“And this is…actually, I don’t think I’ve met you,” Jet said, looking at the Earth Kingdom girl with the Avatar.

“Toph. Toph Beifong,” the girl replied.

Zuko was slightly afraid he might loose his remaining eyebrow if it went any higher. Not only had Jet managed to—entirely unwittingly—run a Fire Nation prince straight into the Avatar, but he did it with a member of House Beifong, who was almost certainly below twenty-five, possibly below fifteen, in the succession for the throne of the Earth Kingdom, standing nearby watching—or was she watching, because her eyes didn’t track the way everyone else’s did?—the whole catastrophe unfold and looking vastly amused.

“Toph Beifong,” Jet said.

The Avatar and his friends stared at him in a mixture of alarm and wariness. Jet stared at him in the breathless excitement of introducing one friend to others.

Well, Zuko had not been victim to ten thousand lessons in court etiquette to fail this test now. He offered the group a neat bow, the perfect greeting of two strangers of equal rank in a casual setting. “It’s a pleasure to meet you all.”

Boomerang—Sokka—took the measure of that statement and then said, “Don’t you mean it’s an honor?”

Zuko glared, wishing he could firebend out of his eyes.

Sokka grinned, entirely unrepentant.

“I wish I could stay longer, but I’ve gotta go find Smellerbee. She’s been at the market for ages today! I’ll catch up with you guys later!” And with that conversational bomb, Jet vanished into the crowd of Ba Sing Se.

Zuko looked back at the group on the street, gathered to face him. They looked back. For a long time, no one spoke.

“Everyone is very, very tense,” the Beifong girl finally said.

“Lee is actually Zuko, the firebender prince who’s tried to murder us ever since we met Aang,” Sokka explained. His voice was conversational, but Zuko didn’t miss that his casual stroking of his chin also put his dominant hand close to that boomerang, for a quicker draw.

“What are you doing in Ba Sing Se?” the Avatar demanded.

“We’re refugees,” Zuko said. Then he gave sincere thought to finding one of his swords and running himself through. Why, why, why had he blurted that out? Not that he wanted to lie, but telling these people the truth was just asking for them to use it against him. It could put Uncle in danger.

Katara started laughing. “Oh, really? The Fire Lord still won’t take you back without Aang?”

Zuko frowned. Not at her. But the answer to that question was so complicated he wasn’t sure how to pare it down to something that could be said on the street. So all he eventually said was, “No. He won’t. But we shouldn’t talk about it here.”

“Where should we talk about it, then?” Aang asked.

“My apartment. My Uncle will be happy to have guests,” Zuko said.

“Yeah, I’ll bet he would,” Katara snapped.

“No, not like that,” Zuko sighed. “For dinner. He likes entertaining.”

And then, in a weird unison, Katara and Aang and Sokka all turned to look at the Beifong girl.

And then, in a weirder moment, Toph Beifong shrugged. “He’s telling the truth.”

Which seemed, in the weirdest twist of all, to be sufficiently authoritative for her three friends. Zuko scowled at the girl. What was her story?

“What’s your address?” Aang asked.

Zuko rattled it off, and then, belatedly said, “But we work at a tea shop. We won’t be home until after it closes.”

That statement got another group glance to Toph, who nodded. So they all agreed to a time and then went their separate ways.

So Zuko returned to the shop for the afternoon hours. And, when he got a chance, while he and Uncle were at the well in the back, drawing more water to boil, he told Uncle what had happened.

“I met the Avatar at lunch today,” Zuko said, casually.

Uncle dropped his water bucket back into the well without the hook. “You what?!?” he demanded, face going a weird mix of pale and purple.

Zuko frowned at the water bucket now floating unhelpfully in the well. “I met the Avatar. At the market. Jet introduced us. Jet from the ferry.”

Uncle stared at him in shock, digesting this information. “What did you do then?”

“I invited him and his friends to dinner tonight.”

“You did what?!?”

“Jet introduced us. We know they’re here. They know we’re here. If we don’t talk to them, they’ll come find us. A confrontation would be unavoidable, and that could expose us all,” Zuko said, now trying to catch the bucket in the well with the hook. “This way, they can come meet us. There are more of them, but it will be in our territory. We can talk to each other. Maybe we won’t need a confrontation.”

Uncle stared at him, thunderstruck. Zuko hooked the bucket and began drawing it back up.

“What exactly prompted this unusually calm display of diplomacy?” Uncle asked suspiciously.

“If we can’t go home, then maybe we should make peace with our former enemies. Maybe it will be…better for us that way,”

Uncle frowned. “Making peace is rarely so straightforward.”

Zuko took the bucket and handed it to Uncle. “We have to start somewhere, don’t we?”

Uncle cast his eyes skyward, as if a helpful spirit would appear with some sort of guide on how to advise wayward nephews. “So you chose to begin by inviting the Avatar to dinner? A boy you have tried to kill or capture several times?”

“I didn’t say it would be a comfortable dinner,” Zuko shrugged.

Uncle groaned.

They left the tea shop promptly at the end of the day, returned home, and began preparing the meal. The Avatar and his friends arrived promptly at the agreed-upon time, and entered their little house without a fight occurring in the street.

They took off their shoes and set them neatly by the door. And Zuko led them to the table, where they each made a neat bow to Uncle and then took their places, cross-legged, on the floor around the table. He and Uncle had prepared a simple meal of pig-chicken and rice. Except that for Aang, Uncle had put together a vegetable bowl, and ensured absolutely no meat had come close to that dish while they prepared it. With tea to drink, of course.

For the first several minutes, everyone ate slowly, prepared to leap into combat should anyone else attack, eyeing everyone else carefully. Every hand movement was slow, deliberate, and followed by all eyes at the table. Finally, after some time of silence, Toph turned to Uncle, “I am glad to see you again, sir.”

“It is always good to meet a friend again,” Uncle agreed, in absolute sincerity.

“You two know each other?” Zuko had said it, but much to his shock, Aang had too. At the same time, and in the same tone. They exchanged a glance that was…not quite displeased, but not quite pleased either.

But Toph and Uncle were explaining how they’d met the day Uncle had been injured at Tu Zin, and had tea together.

“You knew Prince Iroh this whole time!” Sokka burst out in shock.

“It’s just Mushi now,” Uncle said.

Sokka opened his mouth, closed it, frowned, and finally said, “Why Mushi?”

Zuko huffed a laugh and reached for his tea to cover it. Uncle finally said, “It is not a name under which my brother will look for me.”

“…That is true,” Sokka agreed.

“So you’re here,” Aang said. “In Ba Sing Se. Hiding from the Fire Lord and Azula, with her two creepy sidekicks.”

“Creepy sidekicks?” Zuko asked.

“There’s one girl who…she took my bending away. For a little while,” Katara admitted.

“Ty Lee was clever to learn to use chi-blocking when she fights,” Uncle told her.

“And that other girl who never smiles and throws knives at everything,” Sokka said.

“Mai,” Zuko breathed, recognizing that description immediately.

“You know them?” Katara said in shock.

Zuko frowned. “Azula is my sister. I grew up with these girls. I also knew Zhao personally. And many other people you’ve met and would consider enemies.”

Uncle raised a hand. “The question is not whether we are familiar with your enemies. The question is, can we live in the same city in peace? Even one so big as Ba Sing Se?”

There was a long silence at that. Finally, Aang said, “It doesn’t matter. If you’re not going to interfere anymore, then as soon as we find Appa, we’ll leave, and you can stay as long as you want without worrying about us.”

“Your sky bison?” Uncle asked.

Aang nodded.

“A magnificent creature,” Uncle said. “He is missing?”

That prompted a lot of significant looks among the group of guests until they finally reached an unspoken agreement, and Aang said, “He was kidnapped. We think he’s here, in Ba Sing Se, but we’re having trouble searching the city.”

“The Dai Li will never permit a thorough search,” Uncle said with a nod.

At that, Aang, Katara, Sokka, and Toph all turned to focus on Uncle’s face.

“You know what the Dai Li are up to?” Sokka demanded.

Uncle laughed. “Not specifically, no. But they are clearly the power here, and power does not like competition.”

“How do you know that?” Katara demanded, seeming to be perversely angrier that the dinner had not erupted into a brawl yet.

“Because we’ve lived through it,” Zuko shrugged. “Court politics are the same in the Fire Nation. Someone always tries to take more power than they should, and when they have it, they are fierce to protect it.”

“My brother and Azula,” Uncle agreed.

Zuko nodded.

“I’m very confused,” Sokka said.

Now it was Zuko’s turn to exchange significant looks with Uncle. And their unspoken agreement was to be honest as well.

“I am the eldest son of Fire Lord Azulon,” Uncle said. “I was born crown prince, and the heir to the throne.”

Toph gasped. Zuko should’ve known that a Beifong would see the significance of that admission immediately.

“I did not question my destiny until it brought me to the walls of Ba Sing Se, where my siege was broken with the life of my son, Lu Ten. I found my appetite for war had died along with him, so I set to return home. Shortly after I arrived, still in my grief, my father died suddenly and in a very unlikely way, my brother was made Fire Lord, and Zuko’s mother had disappeared,” Uncle told them, a very simple recounting of what was most likely the second worst day of his life.

“Father had been ordered to kill me,” Zuko added. “Azula told me. She was very pleased. That night…Mother told me she loved me, and I have not seen her again. The next day, the Fire Lord was dead, Mother was gone, and Father was the new Fire Lord.” As he said it, he realized this was the first time he’d ever admitted to anyone, but particularly himself, what he always had known deep down. His father had been prepared to murder him. To save his life, his mother had murdered his grandfather first.

Aang, Sokka, Katara, and Toph were all staring at Zuko and Uncle in shock.

“You were banished after that?” Sokka finally managed.

“Not immediately,” Zuko said. “That part came several years later.”

“And the burn?” Katara pressed, nodding at Zuko’s scar.

“My father,” Zuko said, simply.

She gaped.

“These memories are dreadfully unpleasant for dinner,” Uncle broke in. “We will simply say, the Fire Nation holds little sway on either of us now, but has taught us very costly lessons on the nature of power and the danger of possessing it.”

There was a quiet moment. Finally, Aang said, “I think I know what you mean. I tried to learn firebending once. I was so excited to be able to do it that I didn’t think about the harm it could cause. I burned Katara. Power is dangerous.”

Zuko exchanged a glance with Uncle. This was the first he’d heard of the Avatar learning firebending.

“Firebending is not all destructive, Avatar,” Uncle replied, and Zuko noted he deliberately called Aang by his title, not his name. “And the power it carries is that of brute force, which has natural limits. You need not fear your ability, so long as you pay it proper respect. Perhaps we might help each other.”

“Help each other how, exactly?” Sokka asked, face calculating.

Yes, he was the smart one of the group. Zuko had suspected it before, but there was no doubting it now. Aang might be the Avatar, but Sokka was the leader. His voice was the guide. But he held his power lightly, and possibly by mistake, so it was easy to miss.

“The Avatar needs firebending teachers. I have some skill in this area. You need to find the sky bison. My nephew, whatever else you may think of him, has some skill at tracking the Avatar’s bison,” Uncle said.

Zuko blinked. Aang was looking right back at him with the same shocked expression.

Finally, Aang took a breath. “There’s nothing you can say that would make us trust you.”

“I can never go home again. My best chance to survive the war, and Uncle’s, is if you defeat the Fire Lord,” Zuko said, then thought about kicking himself. Why was he trying to argue in favor of this plan?

“He’s telling the truth,” Toph put in.

Zuko turned and narrowed his eyes at her. After a moment, he said, “You’re blind.”

“What gave it away?” she returned sarcastically.

“How can you tell if I’m being truthful?” Zuko demanded.

There was a long quiet, finally Toph said, “I am the greatest earthbender in the world. And don’t you two dunderheads forget it.”

Uncle threw back his head and laughed. “Then we have decided. We will not be friends. But we will be allies. Help each other, and keep the peace. Do you agree?” He looked to Aang.

Aang looked at the table, and he seemed mostly thoughtful. But there was something lurking at the back of his expression that seemed so, unspeakably, sad. Zuko thought back to a long night, lying in a forest, a little cold and very confused, where Aang had asked if there was any world where they could’ve been friends. A hundred years was a big gap to bridge, though, so he settled for a less complicated subject.

“Even if you can’t trust me,” Zuko said quietly, “you can trust Uncle. He…helped you try to protect the Moon Spirit.”

At that, Sokka got a strange look on his face. “You did. I remember.”

“You helped us with the pirates, too,” Katara said.

“You helped us that day Azula nearly killed Aang,” Toph added.

Zuko frowned, realizing that had been the case. “And you tried to talk Zhao out of attacking the North Pole.”

Everyone at the table was now staring openly at Uncle.

“Have you been helping us all along?” Aang asked quietly.

Uncle shook his head. “For some time now, I have seen that the world is not in balance. It is the Avatar’s job to restore that balance. But that is a big job for a boy so young, and I have helped where I could. But only where I could. If we have crossed paths more often than you have with others, well, that is the work of my estimable nephew. He is truly excellent at tracking.”

Zuko blushed.

“So, you see, Aang. We do not need to resolve all our differences in one dinner. Our agreement is a small one, and it brings us all some peace,” Uncle said.

Aang looked down the table. “Katara?”

She hadn’t spoken much, Zuko realized. And she had been the most openly hostile in the marketplace. The one seeking to wound the deepest. She carried her anger deep, where it would hurt those around her the least, but where it would also be the most protected from healing.

He knew what that was like.

“It’s important for you to learn firebending, Aang,” she said quietly. “I don’t want you to give that up for me.”

Not precisely a full-voiced endorsement, Zuko thought to himself.

“We can work together to find Appa,” Aang said. “And I’d be honored for you to teach me firebending. But if Katara has a good reason for us to stop, then the deal is over.”

Uncle nodded his head. “You are wise to listen to the council of the ones you trust. My nephew and I accept your terms.”

The rest of the dinner passed in an awkward silence that, if it was less hostile then before, was a little more empty. It seemed that, once they had ceased to be enemies, there was nothing left between their two sides.

As the Avatar’s little group went to leave, Aang got caught in the hallway with Zuko.

“If we’d known each other, a hundred years ago, could we have been friends?” Aang asked.

Zuko looked at the boy in front of him. Really looked. He was young, his eyes wide, face clean. He was too young to even need to shave. And despite being at the center of a war, somehow he was still innocent and hopeful.

“Aang, if we’d known each other a hundred years ago, we wouldn’t be us,” Zuko said, though he made sure not to say it angrily. “It isn’t your fault that I see you and think of all the reasons I can never go home, but…I do. It is my fault that you see me and think of all the terrible things I’ve done to you, but I can’t change any of it. So maybe this is better. Maybe you’re safer like this.”

Aang frowned deeply at that. Finally, all he said was, “The Fire Nation took my home away. It’s hard to know I can’t go back. I’m sorry it happened to you, too.”

Zuko blinked. After everything, Aang was still trying to find a way to make peace with him? “Then maybe we’ll both find new homes.”

THE END

*~*~*

Author's Notes: Inspired by this post on Tumblr.

Also, this is genuinely all I've got for this one. The direction this story would take from this point would diverge so wildly from the show that it would take ages to write the whole saga out, and I've got too many irons in the fire as it is.