Avatar: The Last Airbender - Zuko/Mai (alpha theme set)
Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Pairing: Zuko/Mai
Theme set: Alpha
Rating: PGish
Notes: Some of these have completely brutalized the concept of a sentence. Also, they don't go in numerical order. I hope that's okay!
--------------------------------------------
#26 - Forever
As a little girl, Mai wasn't terribly afraid of bugs, or snakes, or the monsters in stories, but the concept of forever was the stuff of nightmares, the endless procession of days with their dull, dreary sameness completely overwhelming; the notable exceptions were those rare instances when Azula's older brother happened to be around, carefully not noticing what the girls were up to, despite the slight flush of red in his cheeks when he caught her looking - then all those tomorrows didn't look so terrifying.
#41 - Completion
“Yup, went great,” she replies mildly, carefully avoiding Ty’s eagerly sparkling eyes lest years of friendship make it blatantly obvious that she can still feel the pressure of his hand around hers and that water dribbling from his hair and soaking through her clothes only made kissing him all the more perfect; “It really made the evening complete when his girlfriend showed up and he landed a fountain with a fish on his head."
#01 - Comfort
He wonders, annoyed, if she’s totally hijacked his concept of comforting, because I didn’t ask for your life-story probably shouldn’t have made him actually feel a little better.
#02 - Kiss
Although, admittedly, that could have been that new thing she’s started doing when she kisses him, because it’s hard to brood when you’re busy deciding that oxygen to the brain is overrated, or when you’re wondering, outraged, just who she’s been practicing on.
#05 - Potato
"With you, they're pretty much the same thing," she points out when he informs her grumpily that he wasn't angsting, he was thinking.
#11 - Name
"Come on, you two need smushy pet-names for each other," Ty Lee insists, before frowning sternly and continuing relentlessly as her friend makes a move to speak up, "and no, Mai, the things you call each other when you're fighting don't count."
#38 - Gift
"Wow, I can't believe you actually kept it," she comments when he shows her the tiny object, a smooth, black rock in the shape of a heart; and he'd be a little more annoyed at her brushing it off like that if this wasn't the first time in almost five years that he's seen her blush.
#06 - Rain
He really only suggested a long walk in a heavy downpour because he heard that girls like things like that, so he's kind of relieved when she looks at him like he's just sprouted a second head, and goes back to her book without a word.
#49 - Hair
“So, how did it go with Ty Lee’s braid?” he asks, shaking off his Azula-induced bad mood with surprising ease as she slips her arms around his waist from behind and rests her cheek against the back of his shoulder; and he can feel her laugh as she replies, "Well, it was touch and go for a while there, but we all lived to tell the tale."
#03 - Soft
"Ohh, don’t just use it on your face!" Ty Lee implores, and prepares to duck out of the path of a flying jar of lotion as she adds with a grin that challenges the boundaries of the human face, "You want your skin to be all nice and soft and smooth wherever Zuko's hands end up, don’t you?
#04 - Pain
Right now is one of the few times that she kind of wishes she could be high-strung and crazy like everyone else she knows, because common sense has its downside, and she knows even as she’s doing it, moping and yes, crying (she’s sixteen and newly dumped, okay, what’s she supposed to do, launch into a peppy musical number?), that she’s probably overreacting, and she’s going to feel like a moron in a week.
#08 - Happiness
Sokka finds it kind of hilarious, how even the mention of Azula's non-pink-and-bouncy henchgirl, pretty much the walking antithesis of happiness unless first impressions are really misleading, can make Zuko grin like that, because he likes the guy and all (the whole former enemies thing aside), but he's not exactly a perpetual ray of sunshine himself, and you'd think that they'd just bring each other down in a never-ending cycle of depression magnification; but hey, different strokes, right?
#21 - Life
When he notices the commotion back on the ground, the burst of knives out of nowhere taking out the men busily sawing through the cable, he has mixed feelings about it; admittedly, remaining alive is central to most of his current plans and boiling to death would kind of throw a crimp into things, but he kept her out of this to keep her safe, not so she could go and leap headlong into danger when he's in no position to help her.
#33 - Fear
It's probably a bad idea to think too hard about the multitude of things to worry about, particularly given that there's nothing she can do about any of them - like if she really bought the car enough time to get to the other side of the lake, if it'll make any real difference or just delay the inevitable, if Ty Lee is okay, if Azula's going to sleep on it and decide that her initial never-want-to-see-them-again impulse was a bit hasty and torture is the way to go after all; luckily, there's never a shortage of stupid, trivial things to ponder, like her brilliant plot to escape just long enough to strangle the guy whistling a few cells down, and whether Ty's fallen madly in love with any of the guards yet.
#07 - Chocolate
Her current favourite, however, is the fervent wish that she'd ditched a few knives and brought along a well-hidden supply of chocolate.
#09 - Telephone
Now, there's no way the message got there that fast, he thinks when she shows up approximately half an hour after he sent word giving the order for her release, among others; but oddly enough, he can't bring himself to be too upset over Uncle Angry Guy (labeled thus in his mind thanks to all the time he's spent around the Sokka School of Naming Conventions recently) taking the initiative in this case.
#20 - Freedom
She used to put a lot more stock in the idea of happiness as freedom from obligation or duty before she found him again, and she has this sickening fear that it's because he and his absolute need to have something worthwhile to do are starting to rub off on her.
#42 - Clouds
Given that it’s only the second time he’s met with his council since his coronation, she doesn’t think it went all that badly, but clearly he disagrees, because he’s been off brooding for the last two hours, which means that it’s time to hunt him down; and when he asks resignedly how she found him, she replies, moving to rub his shoulders through his robes, I just followed the thundercloud hovering over your head.
#13 - Death
"Did you know that Ty Lee threatened to kill me and dress my corpse in fuzzy pink scarves if I hurt you again?" he asks conversationally, and she shrugs, hiding a smile: "She probably picked it up from all your friends; apparently, even the lemur's going to stomp on the mangled, bloodied bits the rest them might leave if I ever hurt you.
#39 - Smile
"Yeah, no wonder it's nice," Sokka snickered into his drink in response to Zuko's waxing tipsily poetic about Mai's smile; "It's in mint condition because she's used it, like, twice."
#40 - Innocence
“Wow, he came to you for girl-advice?” Mai asks, eyeing Zuko incredulously as Aang hurries off to put his newfound knowledge to good use on the pretty blue-eyed object of his affections; “Talk about the clueless leading the clueless.”
#22 - Jealousy
She really didn't mean to laugh in his face when he tried to assure her that his friendship with Katara was just that, and there was no reason for her to worry, but it was just so stupid; of all the reactions she could possibly have to the girl who managed to patch him back together and expertly dodge the multitudes of complications that could have arisen from the injury after Azula blasted a hole halfway through his chest, why would any rational person assume jealousy?
#34 - Lightning/Thunder
And the more she gets to know the Water Tribe girl, gets to know her mind-boggling stubbornness, and her inability to not care, and her innate need to take care of people whether they like it or not, the harder it is to imagine not knowing her, and the more she’s grateful to Zuko for his quick thinking and sharp reflexes.
#18 - Speed
He's thrilled that Mai and Katara made it from wary acquaintances, to polite tolerance for his sake, to tentative friends in their own right so quickly, but it still makes him a little uneasy when they both fall abruptly silent and assume saintly expressions the second he and Aang walk into the room - just because he's kind of getting used to it these days, it doesn't mean girls aren't still crazy, and there's no telling what they've been comparing notes on.
#31 - Home
Of course she doesn't completely understand what he went through those years he was away from home (he seems to have serious problems with the concept of sharing), but she’s confident that if he ever needs her to know, she’ll know - even if she has to drag it out of him.
#12 - Sensual
"Yeah, that's a great idea," she agrees as Ty excitedly waves the little box of scented candles and orders her to use them tonight because nothing sets the mood like invoking all the senses; "you get to fumble around in the dark because half of them went out before you can actually get to the bed, you get to hear the wax dripping down the candle and ruining the carpet, and you get to smell your hair burning when you accidentally light it on fire."
#14 - Sex
On their wedding night, they made it their goal to be...active in every room in the palace within a year; then, after the third time they're nearly caught in the act, necessitating a mad scramble out a window and dressing behind a fortuitously placed bit of plant life, they came to a mutual agreement that okay, maybe they'd stick to the nice, safe, reliable bedroom and leave their experimenting for new, exciting positions or something.
#23 - Hands
"So, I guess we're even now," Sokka announces with a smug grin, content in the knowledge that he'll finally stop hearing about Sokka n' Suki's Tent of Loooooove at intermittent and particularly embarrassing intervals, because he's sure that even stripped down to his underwear and posing sexily, he didn't look half as silly as these two, tangled into some kind of human pretzel, Zuko too busy launching into an impassioned speech on the importance of knocking to disentangle himself from Mai, she in turn too busy resembling a small child caught raiding the candy cupboard to get her hands out of his pants.
#19 - Wind
Normally, waking up with her wound tightly around him in a state of undress would be the perfect start to the day, but it's going to be pretty much impossible to disentangle himself without waking her up, and waking her up this early puts him at high risk of resembling a pincushion in the near future.
#37 - Technology
"You can't get me untied?" he exclaims, slightly panicked, giving an involuntary tug at the vibrant silk wound around his wrists and binding him effectively in place as she works unsuccessfully and increasingly frantically at the knot, and finally gives up on saving the scarf and goes for a knife; "Come on, Mai, this isn't exactly complex technology!"
#44 - Heaven
She knows it's admirable, the way he can't enjoy the world the way it is because he's too focused on what it should be and what needs to be done to bridge the gap; still, she kind of wishes that he could give himself a break every now and again, because she hates to think that he's doomed to never be happy.
#45 - Hell
But then again, not everyone can take consolation in the considerably smaller gap between the way the world is and the way it could be if the worst had happened, and she supposes it's her willingness to settle that separates her from good people like him and those crazy friends of his.
#16 - Weakness
He's quickly developing a weakness for the nights that she pounces the second the door closes behind him, drags him off to bed, and demands her marital rights, because somehow, it's not exactly a hardship to comply when she's pinning him down and making short work of both their clothes.
#24 - Taste
She's been a germophobe for as long as she can remember, the tendency only intensifying as she's gotten older, so she can't figure it out, this intense, unnatural fondness she has for the taste of his skin when she finds and tackles him before he has a chance to wash up after training, the salt tang of sweat mingled with heat and smoke and ash; but judging by the way his hands tighten in her hair and pull her closer as she nips softly at his shoulder and licks wet trails down his chest and stomach, he doesn't mind all that much.
#10 - Ears
A letter just came from Suki, so they've spent the last twenty minutes in a heated debate over whose turn it is to cuddle Hawky to sleep - because they don't know how Sokka can tell, but he invariably can - and upon losing the argument when Zuko unexpectedly produces a pie chart detailing the entire history of their collective Hawky-duty, Mai reluctantly accepts the bird and starts halfheartedly patting it on its rather bewildered head, all the while muttering colourful descriptors for Sokka that are no doubt setting that young man's ears ringing.
#15 - Touch
Usually, she can ease him out of his stress-induced bad moods with simple common sense (and pointing out that not knowing everything there is to know about running a country at seventeen is kind of, you know, normal and doesn't make him hopeless or the other dozen or so unflattering adjectives he's thrown out), but that doesn't mean she's against a nice lap-dance every now and again to derail his more outlandish, worst-case-scenario worry-trains.
#32 - Confusion
Zuko has long since concluded helplessly that his wife must have a little-known ability to conjure throwing knives out of thin air, because no matter how intently he watches her prepare in the morning, carefully counts each one as she slips it into place, he always ends up with nine or ten extras when he removes and tosses them aside at the end of the day to reduce the risk of flesh wounds when they start shedding clothing on the way to the bed.
#48 - Waves
Learning to read each other’s moods has spared them a lot of the property damage and minor injury common in the early days of their relationship: she’s long since learned that when he brings an end to a heated argument by turning abruptly and walking the other way, it’s probably a bad idea to follow and push the issue; and he’s finally begun to realize that when she’s stubbornly not looking at him, radiating waves of hostility, he should probably wait until later to try and make up.
#50 - Supernova
But today, he just wasn’t in the mood to avoid conflict, and happily let the argument escalate into bursts of fire and flashes of steel and finally a clumsy wrestling match amid the innards of several brutalized pieces of furniture, until they were both streaked in sweat and breathing heavily, and the room looked decidedly like the sun had meandered over for a visit and promptly blown up.
#27 - Blood
"So, what's it like to actually like someone you're related to?" she asks with genuine curiosity one evening when he comes to bed nearly glowing in contentment after an evening with Iroh and his Pai Sho board and his years of wit and wisdom and strength and warmth.
#30 - Star
It figures, he thinks hazily between smacking into an extremely solid marble wall and trying to blink the stars out of his vision, that she’d spring news like this, oh yeah, by the way, I think I might be kinda pregnant on him out of nowhere.
#28 - Sickness
"As soon as this kid comes out, I'm grounding it until it's twenty," she declares weakly around another wracking shudder of morning sickness, and he can't help but agree that it's tempting, because not only is the near-constant nausea starting to make her really grumpy, but it's left her too exhausted to jump him the second he gets in the door each night, which is starting to make him really grumpy, and between the two of them, someone's going to lose an eye soon.
#36 - Market
“I don’t exactly have a lot of marketable skills, you know," she points out sulkily when she finds out about the extra security he's ordered posted in the hall outside their bedroom - a completely unnecessary measure, just because she got up to investigate a suspicious noise last night and ended up hunched over a particularly unfortunate potted plant for half an hour; "If I can't protect you, I'm pretty much down to looking good and deflating your ego every now and then," she adds with a mournful sigh, although she's slightly mollified when he grins and reassures her that she does both of those things very well.
#25 - Devotion
Neither of them is much for expressing things like love you and forever in words; she learned at a young age that words are usually worth slightly less than nothing, and if she'd wanted to spend her life offering meaningless reassurances of devotion, she wouldn't have gone to the trouble of finding someone she actually liked; and even though words still mean something in his world, he's a lot better at doing than saying, because the latter generally leads to nervous rambling, which rarely leads to anything good.
#47 - Moon
He’s proud of how she’s borne up under the strain of eight-and-a-half months pregnant; she’s even (mostly) stopped waking him up to share the misery of sleep deprivation since the little bruiser growing inside her has turned getting some sleep while the moon is still out into a crazy pipedream.
#46 - Sun
But that doesn't mean it isn't still cutting into his sleep: this morning, for example, he was jolted awake a few hours before sunrise by her muffled shout of pain, and dragged himself upright to find her addressing her midsection, kindly informing their beloved unborn offspring that if it didn’t stop kicking happily away at her insides, she was going to start hitting back.
#17 - Tears
"Okay, cut it out," she orders with a glare that doesn't come anywhere near genuinely annoyed as he pulls her and the tiny squalling bundle in her arms closer and she hears a faint sniffle where he's resting his cheek at her hair; "You're not the one who just shot an eight-pound kid out of your gut."
#29 - Memory
“Someday we’re going to look back on this and laugh,” Mai grumbles, holding up a long, loose sleeve now adorned with a diaper pin and diaper; and Zuko, looking from his wife’s disgruntled expression to the happily babbling infant who narrowly escaped bouncing to the floor thanks to Mommy’s quick reflexes, decides that it’s actually pretty funny now.
#35 - Bonds
"Do you still have the leash you used to put your little brother on when you had to watch him?" he asks, muffled by her shoulder where he flopped exhaustedly the second they sat down, after a hectic hour searching frantically for Ren, and the unpleasant revelation that toddlers can apparently walk through walls and vanish at will as soon as Mommy and Daddy take an unfortunately coordinated second to moisten their eyeballs.
#43 - Sky
Every now and then, when the hectic pace of their lives makes it feel like it's been weeks since they've so much as spoken, they make a point to spend a night getting reacquainted - talking about everything and nothing until sunrise fills the sky.
-----------------------------------------
Pairing: Zuko/Mai
Theme set: Alpha
Rating: PGish
Notes: Some of these have completely brutalized the concept of a sentence. Also, they don't go in numerical order. I hope that's okay!
--------------------------------------------
#26 - Forever
As a little girl, Mai wasn't terribly afraid of bugs, or snakes, or the monsters in stories, but the concept of forever was the stuff of nightmares, the endless procession of days with their dull, dreary sameness completely overwhelming; the notable exceptions were those rare instances when Azula's older brother happened to be around, carefully not noticing what the girls were up to, despite the slight flush of red in his cheeks when he caught her looking - then all those tomorrows didn't look so terrifying.
#41 - Completion
“Yup, went great,” she replies mildly, carefully avoiding Ty’s eagerly sparkling eyes lest years of friendship make it blatantly obvious that she can still feel the pressure of his hand around hers and that water dribbling from his hair and soaking through her clothes only made kissing him all the more perfect; “It really made the evening complete when his girlfriend showed up and he landed a fountain with a fish on his head."
#01 - Comfort
He wonders, annoyed, if she’s totally hijacked his concept of comforting, because I didn’t ask for your life-story probably shouldn’t have made him actually feel a little better.
#02 - Kiss
Although, admittedly, that could have been that new thing she’s started doing when she kisses him, because it’s hard to brood when you’re busy deciding that oxygen to the brain is overrated, or when you’re wondering, outraged, just who she’s been practicing on.
#05 - Potato
"With you, they're pretty much the same thing," she points out when he informs her grumpily that he wasn't angsting, he was thinking.
#11 - Name
"Come on, you two need smushy pet-names for each other," Ty Lee insists, before frowning sternly and continuing relentlessly as her friend makes a move to speak up, "and no, Mai, the things you call each other when you're fighting don't count."
#38 - Gift
"Wow, I can't believe you actually kept it," she comments when he shows her the tiny object, a smooth, black rock in the shape of a heart; and he'd be a little more annoyed at her brushing it off like that if this wasn't the first time in almost five years that he's seen her blush.
#06 - Rain
He really only suggested a long walk in a heavy downpour because he heard that girls like things like that, so he's kind of relieved when she looks at him like he's just sprouted a second head, and goes back to her book without a word.
#49 - Hair
“So, how did it go with Ty Lee’s braid?” he asks, shaking off his Azula-induced bad mood with surprising ease as she slips her arms around his waist from behind and rests her cheek against the back of his shoulder; and he can feel her laugh as she replies, "Well, it was touch and go for a while there, but we all lived to tell the tale."
#03 - Soft
"Ohh, don’t just use it on your face!" Ty Lee implores, and prepares to duck out of the path of a flying jar of lotion as she adds with a grin that challenges the boundaries of the human face, "You want your skin to be all nice and soft and smooth wherever Zuko's hands end up, don’t you?
#04 - Pain
Right now is one of the few times that she kind of wishes she could be high-strung and crazy like everyone else she knows, because common sense has its downside, and she knows even as she’s doing it, moping and yes, crying (she’s sixteen and newly dumped, okay, what’s she supposed to do, launch into a peppy musical number?), that she’s probably overreacting, and she’s going to feel like a moron in a week.
#08 - Happiness
Sokka finds it kind of hilarious, how even the mention of Azula's non-pink-and-bouncy henchgirl, pretty much the walking antithesis of happiness unless first impressions are really misleading, can make Zuko grin like that, because he likes the guy and all (the whole former enemies thing aside), but he's not exactly a perpetual ray of sunshine himself, and you'd think that they'd just bring each other down in a never-ending cycle of depression magnification; but hey, different strokes, right?
#21 - Life
When he notices the commotion back on the ground, the burst of knives out of nowhere taking out the men busily sawing through the cable, he has mixed feelings about it; admittedly, remaining alive is central to most of his current plans and boiling to death would kind of throw a crimp into things, but he kept her out of this to keep her safe, not so she could go and leap headlong into danger when he's in no position to help her.
#33 - Fear
It's probably a bad idea to think too hard about the multitude of things to worry about, particularly given that there's nothing she can do about any of them - like if she really bought the car enough time to get to the other side of the lake, if it'll make any real difference or just delay the inevitable, if Ty Lee is okay, if Azula's going to sleep on it and decide that her initial never-want-to-see-them-again impulse was a bit hasty and torture is the way to go after all; luckily, there's never a shortage of stupid, trivial things to ponder, like her brilliant plot to escape just long enough to strangle the guy whistling a few cells down, and whether Ty's fallen madly in love with any of the guards yet.
#07 - Chocolate
Her current favourite, however, is the fervent wish that she'd ditched a few knives and brought along a well-hidden supply of chocolate.
#09 - Telephone
Now, there's no way the message got there that fast, he thinks when she shows up approximately half an hour after he sent word giving the order for her release, among others; but oddly enough, he can't bring himself to be too upset over Uncle Angry Guy (labeled thus in his mind thanks to all the time he's spent around the Sokka School of Naming Conventions recently) taking the initiative in this case.
#20 - Freedom
She used to put a lot more stock in the idea of happiness as freedom from obligation or duty before she found him again, and she has this sickening fear that it's because he and his absolute need to have something worthwhile to do are starting to rub off on her.
#42 - Clouds
Given that it’s only the second time he’s met with his council since his coronation, she doesn’t think it went all that badly, but clearly he disagrees, because he’s been off brooding for the last two hours, which means that it’s time to hunt him down; and when he asks resignedly how she found him, she replies, moving to rub his shoulders through his robes, I just followed the thundercloud hovering over your head.
#13 - Death
"Did you know that Ty Lee threatened to kill me and dress my corpse in fuzzy pink scarves if I hurt you again?" he asks conversationally, and she shrugs, hiding a smile: "She probably picked it up from all your friends; apparently, even the lemur's going to stomp on the mangled, bloodied bits the rest them might leave if I ever hurt you.
#39 - Smile
"Yeah, no wonder it's nice," Sokka snickered into his drink in response to Zuko's waxing tipsily poetic about Mai's smile; "It's in mint condition because she's used it, like, twice."
#40 - Innocence
“Wow, he came to you for girl-advice?” Mai asks, eyeing Zuko incredulously as Aang hurries off to put his newfound knowledge to good use on the pretty blue-eyed object of his affections; “Talk about the clueless leading the clueless.”
#22 - Jealousy
She really didn't mean to laugh in his face when he tried to assure her that his friendship with Katara was just that, and there was no reason for her to worry, but it was just so stupid; of all the reactions she could possibly have to the girl who managed to patch him back together and expertly dodge the multitudes of complications that could have arisen from the injury after Azula blasted a hole halfway through his chest, why would any rational person assume jealousy?
#34 - Lightning/Thunder
And the more she gets to know the Water Tribe girl, gets to know her mind-boggling stubbornness, and her inability to not care, and her innate need to take care of people whether they like it or not, the harder it is to imagine not knowing her, and the more she’s grateful to Zuko for his quick thinking and sharp reflexes.
#18 - Speed
He's thrilled that Mai and Katara made it from wary acquaintances, to polite tolerance for his sake, to tentative friends in their own right so quickly, but it still makes him a little uneasy when they both fall abruptly silent and assume saintly expressions the second he and Aang walk into the room - just because he's kind of getting used to it these days, it doesn't mean girls aren't still crazy, and there's no telling what they've been comparing notes on.
#31 - Home
Of course she doesn't completely understand what he went through those years he was away from home (he seems to have serious problems with the concept of sharing), but she’s confident that if he ever needs her to know, she’ll know - even if she has to drag it out of him.
#12 - Sensual
"Yeah, that's a great idea," she agrees as Ty excitedly waves the little box of scented candles and orders her to use them tonight because nothing sets the mood like invoking all the senses; "you get to fumble around in the dark because half of them went out before you can actually get to the bed, you get to hear the wax dripping down the candle and ruining the carpet, and you get to smell your hair burning when you accidentally light it on fire."
#14 - Sex
On their wedding night, they made it their goal to be...active in every room in the palace within a year; then, after the third time they're nearly caught in the act, necessitating a mad scramble out a window and dressing behind a fortuitously placed bit of plant life, they came to a mutual agreement that okay, maybe they'd stick to the nice, safe, reliable bedroom and leave their experimenting for new, exciting positions or something.
#23 - Hands
"So, I guess we're even now," Sokka announces with a smug grin, content in the knowledge that he'll finally stop hearing about Sokka n' Suki's Tent of Loooooove at intermittent and particularly embarrassing intervals, because he's sure that even stripped down to his underwear and posing sexily, he didn't look half as silly as these two, tangled into some kind of human pretzel, Zuko too busy launching into an impassioned speech on the importance of knocking to disentangle himself from Mai, she in turn too busy resembling a small child caught raiding the candy cupboard to get her hands out of his pants.
#19 - Wind
Normally, waking up with her wound tightly around him in a state of undress would be the perfect start to the day, but it's going to be pretty much impossible to disentangle himself without waking her up, and waking her up this early puts him at high risk of resembling a pincushion in the near future.
#37 - Technology
"You can't get me untied?" he exclaims, slightly panicked, giving an involuntary tug at the vibrant silk wound around his wrists and binding him effectively in place as she works unsuccessfully and increasingly frantically at the knot, and finally gives up on saving the scarf and goes for a knife; "Come on, Mai, this isn't exactly complex technology!"
#44 - Heaven
She knows it's admirable, the way he can't enjoy the world the way it is because he's too focused on what it should be and what needs to be done to bridge the gap; still, she kind of wishes that he could give himself a break every now and again, because she hates to think that he's doomed to never be happy.
#45 - Hell
But then again, not everyone can take consolation in the considerably smaller gap between the way the world is and the way it could be if the worst had happened, and she supposes it's her willingness to settle that separates her from good people like him and those crazy friends of his.
#16 - Weakness
He's quickly developing a weakness for the nights that she pounces the second the door closes behind him, drags him off to bed, and demands her marital rights, because somehow, it's not exactly a hardship to comply when she's pinning him down and making short work of both their clothes.
#24 - Taste
She's been a germophobe for as long as she can remember, the tendency only intensifying as she's gotten older, so she can't figure it out, this intense, unnatural fondness she has for the taste of his skin when she finds and tackles him before he has a chance to wash up after training, the salt tang of sweat mingled with heat and smoke and ash; but judging by the way his hands tighten in her hair and pull her closer as she nips softly at his shoulder and licks wet trails down his chest and stomach, he doesn't mind all that much.
#10 - Ears
A letter just came from Suki, so they've spent the last twenty minutes in a heated debate over whose turn it is to cuddle Hawky to sleep - because they don't know how Sokka can tell, but he invariably can - and upon losing the argument when Zuko unexpectedly produces a pie chart detailing the entire history of their collective Hawky-duty, Mai reluctantly accepts the bird and starts halfheartedly patting it on its rather bewildered head, all the while muttering colourful descriptors for Sokka that are no doubt setting that young man's ears ringing.
#15 - Touch
Usually, she can ease him out of his stress-induced bad moods with simple common sense (and pointing out that not knowing everything there is to know about running a country at seventeen is kind of, you know, normal and doesn't make him hopeless or the other dozen or so unflattering adjectives he's thrown out), but that doesn't mean she's against a nice lap-dance every now and again to derail his more outlandish, worst-case-scenario worry-trains.
#32 - Confusion
Zuko has long since concluded helplessly that his wife must have a little-known ability to conjure throwing knives out of thin air, because no matter how intently he watches her prepare in the morning, carefully counts each one as she slips it into place, he always ends up with nine or ten extras when he removes and tosses them aside at the end of the day to reduce the risk of flesh wounds when they start shedding clothing on the way to the bed.
#48 - Waves
Learning to read each other’s moods has spared them a lot of the property damage and minor injury common in the early days of their relationship: she’s long since learned that when he brings an end to a heated argument by turning abruptly and walking the other way, it’s probably a bad idea to follow and push the issue; and he’s finally begun to realize that when she’s stubbornly not looking at him, radiating waves of hostility, he should probably wait until later to try and make up.
#50 - Supernova
But today, he just wasn’t in the mood to avoid conflict, and happily let the argument escalate into bursts of fire and flashes of steel and finally a clumsy wrestling match amid the innards of several brutalized pieces of furniture, until they were both streaked in sweat and breathing heavily, and the room looked decidedly like the sun had meandered over for a visit and promptly blown up.
#27 - Blood
"So, what's it like to actually like someone you're related to?" she asks with genuine curiosity one evening when he comes to bed nearly glowing in contentment after an evening with Iroh and his Pai Sho board and his years of wit and wisdom and strength and warmth.
#30 - Star
It figures, he thinks hazily between smacking into an extremely solid marble wall and trying to blink the stars out of his vision, that she’d spring news like this, oh yeah, by the way, I think I might be kinda pregnant on him out of nowhere.
#28 - Sickness
"As soon as this kid comes out, I'm grounding it until it's twenty," she declares weakly around another wracking shudder of morning sickness, and he can't help but agree that it's tempting, because not only is the near-constant nausea starting to make her really grumpy, but it's left her too exhausted to jump him the second he gets in the door each night, which is starting to make him really grumpy, and between the two of them, someone's going to lose an eye soon.
#36 - Market
“I don’t exactly have a lot of marketable skills, you know," she points out sulkily when she finds out about the extra security he's ordered posted in the hall outside their bedroom - a completely unnecessary measure, just because she got up to investigate a suspicious noise last night and ended up hunched over a particularly unfortunate potted plant for half an hour; "If I can't protect you, I'm pretty much down to looking good and deflating your ego every now and then," she adds with a mournful sigh, although she's slightly mollified when he grins and reassures her that she does both of those things very well.
#25 - Devotion
Neither of them is much for expressing things like love you and forever in words; she learned at a young age that words are usually worth slightly less than nothing, and if she'd wanted to spend her life offering meaningless reassurances of devotion, she wouldn't have gone to the trouble of finding someone she actually liked; and even though words still mean something in his world, he's a lot better at doing than saying, because the latter generally leads to nervous rambling, which rarely leads to anything good.
#47 - Moon
He’s proud of how she’s borne up under the strain of eight-and-a-half months pregnant; she’s even (mostly) stopped waking him up to share the misery of sleep deprivation since the little bruiser growing inside her has turned getting some sleep while the moon is still out into a crazy pipedream.
#46 - Sun
But that doesn't mean it isn't still cutting into his sleep: this morning, for example, he was jolted awake a few hours before sunrise by her muffled shout of pain, and dragged himself upright to find her addressing her midsection, kindly informing their beloved unborn offspring that if it didn’t stop kicking happily away at her insides, she was going to start hitting back.
#17 - Tears
"Okay, cut it out," she orders with a glare that doesn't come anywhere near genuinely annoyed as he pulls her and the tiny squalling bundle in her arms closer and she hears a faint sniffle where he's resting his cheek at her hair; "You're not the one who just shot an eight-pound kid out of your gut."
#29 - Memory
“Someday we’re going to look back on this and laugh,” Mai grumbles, holding up a long, loose sleeve now adorned with a diaper pin and diaper; and Zuko, looking from his wife’s disgruntled expression to the happily babbling infant who narrowly escaped bouncing to the floor thanks to Mommy’s quick reflexes, decides that it’s actually pretty funny now.
#35 - Bonds
"Do you still have the leash you used to put your little brother on when you had to watch him?" he asks, muffled by her shoulder where he flopped exhaustedly the second they sat down, after a hectic hour searching frantically for Ren, and the unpleasant revelation that toddlers can apparently walk through walls and vanish at will as soon as Mommy and Daddy take an unfortunately coordinated second to moisten their eyeballs.
#43 - Sky
Every now and then, when the hectic pace of their lives makes it feel like it's been weeks since they've so much as spoken, they make a point to spend a night getting reacquainted - talking about everything and nothing until sunrise fills the sky.
-----------------------------------------