[fic] Something to Hold Onto, Chapter 11: Cinematic, Razor Sharp
Title: Something to Hold Onto [11/13]
Word count: 4,800
Pairing: Jet/Zuko
Rating: A very hard R for language, violence and sexual content
Summary: Since the day the walls of Ba Sing Se fell, the Freedom Fighters have struggled to protect what remains of the city and its people. Jet and his second command, a mysterious boy named Li, have spent the summer piecing together an army, hoping for a chance to take the city back for good. But Li is also Zuko, and the time for that secret is quickly running out. Soon, he'll have to decide exactly who he is, what cause he's going to fight for and where his heart lies.
This chapter: Matters of honor.
Notes: You may have noticed that this fic now has thirteen parts instead of twelve - that's because what used to be Chapter Eleven became rather long and unwieldy, and at the urging of my betas I decided to break it in two. The downside is that this chapter is a little short; the upside is that the next chapter is already finished, and so I'll be posting it in a few days, followed by the epilogue in what I hope will be a reasonable timeframe.
I'm very sorry for the too-long gap between updates -- in addition to various real-life complications, these last sections have been much harder to write at all, let alone properly. To anyone who might be reading this, thank you SO MUCH for your patience with me! I hope it all ends up being worth the wait!
As usual, I owe the world to my betas, kittyjimjams and jlh, without whom I would never have finished any of this.
:: Previous Chapter ::
Zuko could do nothing but stand and watch, Jet's hand flat on his shoulder blade and his useless swords sheathed at his hip. Ping battered the iron door, pausing in his rhythm only to seal cracks in their defenses when they appeared, and Zuko felt sick with guilt and helplessness. He couldn't stop the soldiers from trying to break down the walls Ping had made. He couldn't force his way into this bunker, not before the flame was rekindled in General Zha's stomach, along with whoever else stood with him. Zuko watched as the gap between door and wall grew, steadily but much too slowly. And as he waited for the fire to flow back into his fingers, the fragmented shards of battle began to drift together, aligning into a pattern he did not want to see. But once noticed, it couldn't be ignored, the meaning of all that had happened as plain as written characters, stark and unambiguous.
Zha had surrounded this stronghold with half the non-benders in the city, a human wall of spearman and archers with no purpose but his defense, whose sole advantage lay in greater numbers. There was only one explanation for why a Fire Nation general would entrust his safety to such inferior forces, instead of the elite of his Firebending officers.
"He knew about the eclipse," said Zuko in the ringing pauses between impacts. "He knew he wouldn't be able to bend."
"Who?" Jet asked. "Zha?"
"He's in that room with his best Firebenders. All those men, everything we've fought through…it was only there to slow us down. He wanted to make sure we wouldn't have time to break through this door before the eclipse was over." Zuko's hands clenched into painful fists, fingernails cutting his palms. "All of that, just to save his own skin."
Zuko's body shook with a rage that had no outlet. He wanted to roar, to spit a column of furious heat toward the door that blocked his way, but all that passed his lips was a gray wisp of smoke. He glared up at the ceiling and the sky beyond, as if he could burn the shadow from the sun.
Then Jet turned Zuko toward him, hands squeezing his shoulders hard enough to be felt through the leather armor. "How many?" he asked.
"As many as he could fit. At least five, maybe more." Zuko shook his head. "The rest are probably dead. He probably didn't tell any of them. They just stood there while their bending disappeared, and then-"
"Zuko," said Jet, quiet and sharp as his grip tightened. "Breathe. You're no good to me like this. I need you to concentrate on what's waiting for us in that room and how we're gonna handle it."
Zuko grit his teeth and focused on Jet's face, dark and angular in the eerie green light. He swallowed through the tension in his throat, reached up to touch Jet's cheek and felt the warm, soft skin beneath his fingers; took a deep breath of Jet's scent, sweat and oiled armor and the lingering traces of smoke.
"They'll go after me and Ping," he said. "They won't see you as a threat compared to us." He looked past Jet, then - at the others as they waited in the dark, three points of glowing crystal and their faces above. Faces that Zha and his men would ignore, rabble whose chi wasn't powerful enough to be anything more than a distraction. He knew, because he had once felt that way himself, dismissing all contrary evidence as a sign of his own weakness - a fault of his, not a strength of theirs.
Smellerbee and Longshot. Jet and Xiao Si Wang. Zuko had seen their strength, in battle and in the time between. He understood what Zha and all the men like him did not. He felt his chi begin to flow again, the heat of it stirring in his veins, and knew it was no better or worse than the strength of sword or bow or word - only different. He leaned in for a kiss, brief but necessary; allowed Jet to pull their chests together, savored the familiar solidity while he could and then stepped back to turn to face the door. "I'll draw their fire," he said. "They won't even see you coming."
The candle clock guttered. And what had drained away eight minutes before returned in a dizzying flood, pouring back into him like water through chinks in a dam. The air around his hands shimmered with heat, and he said "Stand back" as he lifted them. The hunk of granite fell to the ground with a loud crack as Ping moved aside, breathing hard and shining with perspiration.
He could feel the slight weight of Jet's touch at the small of his back, behind the place where his inner fire was boiling to life once again. It sang through his veins and down the lengths of his arms, twin rivers that burst from his palms in a white-hot fountain and broke against the door. The iron hinges began to glow, deep red to orange to yellow, but even as waves of heat baked the skin of Zuko's face, the touch at his back didn't waver. He imagined the currents of their chi connecting, a stream that flowed from Jet's fingertips and into the knot below his navel. Jet's strength became his own, too much for any door to withstand.
"Now," barked Zuko, and Ping needed no further explanation. The granite lifted into the air once again, stretched into a wedge by one movement of his fingers and jammed into the gap between wall and door with the next. Ping set his jaw, pushed forward with splayed hands to fill the space completely and then crouched down with both fists raised in front of him. The assault on their defenses continued, but between collisions Zuko could hear Ping's low, labored growl as he pulled his fists apart, white-hot iron buckling as the stone expanded.
"Ping and I go first," said Zuko as Ping ripped more granite from the floor, shoved it in place and hunkered down for the next big push. He looked at Wang and Longshot and Smellerbee and finally Jet in turn, pausing at each to wait for an answering nod. "We'll clear a path for you."
"Almost," Ping grunted. Zuko sank into a ready stance, hands up and feet set. He heard the metallic slide of drawn blades and the creak of Longshot's bowstring. "There," Ping snarled, his arms pistoning out to either side, and the door was finally torn free.
Zuko's foot was on it almost before it hit the marble floor. For an instant he could feel the hot metal through his boot, but then he was over and past it and the heat came from up ahead, a wall of fire that roared toward him in this tight box of a room. Zuko brought his palms together and dived through it, the flames a liquid that splashed against the walls to either side of him, his friends safe in his wake. His vision swimming with dark afterimages, Zuko glimpsed the outlines of armored men - six he thought, maybe seven - and as the next wave coalesced before their fists Ping swept around and past him, hands sheathed in rock and a wave of rubble dragged across the iron floor behind him. Ping crouched beneath a wild arc of flame, and with a quick jerk of his arms two Firebenders were knocked off their feet and against the wall, the impact of their skulls against the metal sickening to hear. But the third was faster, one fireball shattering Ping's attack and the next driving him back toward the door again, a hasty shield of rock brought up to protect his face.
These men were not foot soldiers. They were elite, any one of them a challenge on his own. Together, they were almost too much for Zuko to track, asynchronous balls of flame coming from all directions with no time to recover in between. Offense was out of the question. He could barely see, an already too-hot room growing warmer with every attack, making his head spin and his breath dry and shallow.
He extended his arms, reached out with his spirit and felt the flames around him. The fire wasn't his, had been conjured by other hands and directed by other minds, but once it left their fingers and palms and the soles of their feet it belonged to the world. It became part of the room around him, and as he reached out he found he could take hold of it. Wrenching it out of their grasp was too much - they sensed what he was after, dug their heels in and pushed back. He couldn't own the fire, but he could influence it. He could calm the burning air. He could redirect the currents, pull them toward himself and then past, away from his skin and Ping's as well. He was a swirling eddy. He was a rock in the stream.
When the others slipped into the room they did so as shadows, pendants tucked back into their clothes and footsteps masked by the roar of Firebending and the thundering impacts of stone. He chanced a closer look in the glow of the next attack, red light catching on blades and arrowheads in the moment it took him to shift the flames into the wall. He ducked and ran to the center of the room, dropped to the ground and whirled his legs to kick up flashy banks of fire. Look at me, he thought, flipping back onto his feet again to dodge a fireball aimed at his head. For a moment Ping was beside him, a ring of stone whirled around his torso and shot out at eye level, enough to get the attention of every bender in the room; to draw their eyes and their ire toward him. We're who you want, he thought as Ping was sent flying, shards of his blasted defenses stinging Zuko's cheek.
Zuko couldn't see Jet or the others anymore, so he played it safe and bent the next wave straight up, into the ceiling where it couldn't hurt anyone. It burst in a shower of sparks as a stone fist whistled past his ear, shattering against the chest of a Firebender who couldn't dodge quite fast enough. Older, Zuko now saw, his armor shining with gilt scrollwork and dragons. He grunted but didn't go down, and flame licked at his fingers as he brought his arms around.
Zuko caught that first assault like he would a ball, gathering it up in his hands and bending it into a dense sphere that scorched his palms before he cast it aside. But in that sliver of time the other man surged forward, snarling as fire leapt from his palm and poured from his mouth, too close to dodge and too much to contain.
Then a dark silhouette moved between them, hardly more than a blur and a flash of metal, and the attack went wild as the Firebender's wrist was jerked violently to one side. The man - who Zuko was now certain had to be Zha - stumbled in his surprise, but the imbalance was short-lived. He wrenched himself free of the hook that had caught him, already bringing his other arm around with a corona of hot light around his fist. Zuko glimpsed Jet's angular profile, his white teeth and wide grin, and then he'd dropped below the path of Zha's fire and Zuko was reaching out toward it, wresting the flame from Zha's control.
Zuko had a vague awareness of the rest of the room, the other bodies twisting around each other and the staccato bursts of heat and light. Unfamiliar screams were a grim but deep satisfaction; a startled shout of pain in Xiao Si Wang's high voice was something to be endured, a reason to fight harder and faster and better so he could get her out of this place. He heard a grunt that may have been Smellerbee, the whistle of arrows and loud cries when they found their mark, bones cracking and armored men hitting the iron floor.
All of this was on the fringes of his perception. But the heart of it was here in front of him: his partner in all things, lithe and quick and always moving, and the man they had come here to subdue. Zha was slow with age and his much greater size, but Zuko could feel the crackling power of his chi, the heat of flame that burned white and long and tirelessly. He could smell his own hair burning as he channeled that river of fire, his body a levee against the flood. And he could see Jet, melting from shadow to stark contrast and back again, his blades flickering out to snatch at wrists and ankles and his leg sweeping around to knock Zha's out from under him.
But Zha was a true son of the Fire Nation, a Firebender in all the expected ways. To him, Jet was the distraction, swatted at halfheartedly between more serious assaults. When Jet's foot connected with his stomach, Zha grunted in annoyance as he stumbled and tossed a handful of careless fire back at him. Jet dodged it without trouble, but Zha's eyes had already returned to Zuko. He snarled, "Fight me, you coward!" and the words became flame in the air. Zuko moved a handbreadth to one side - no need to even bend so careless an attack - and Jet flew into the void between them with a bark of adrenaline laughter.
Zuko saw the crescent of Jet's hilt thrust forward; braced himself for the hot splash of liquid across his face and the gurgle of air escaping torn flesh. But Jet's knuckles were what connected, knocking Zha's head back with a loud click of teeth, and as he reeled from it Jet dropped back into a crouch. One booted foot shot out, and with a wet crunch Zha's knee bent in a way it wasn't meant to, Zha screaming as he dropped to the ground and curled in tight around it.
Jet hauled him up by his hair, pulled his head as far back as it would go and pressed one lethal crescent to his neck. "Gimme some light," he said quietly. Zuko held out his hand, palm-up, and conjured a little whorl of flame, incongruously cheerful in this place. Zha's face shone with sweat, features screwed up with pain and anger.
In the new and steady glow, Zuko could see the rest of the hot, metal room. Xiao Si Wang had wedged herself into a corner, one arm cradled against her chest. Three bodies lay prone on the ground, limbs splayed at unnatural angles and one hand crushed and bloody. Three more surrounded Ping, Smellerbee dancing between them and Longshot taking careful aim from near the wall. As Zuko watched, an arrow caught one Firebender in the shoulder, sliding neatly between the armored plates and deep into his joint.
"Surrender now or I cut his throat," said Jet, loud but calm and wholly straightforward. The soldiers faltered, glancing between each other and Zha's prone body, and in the lull Zha choked out some wordless growl of protest. Jet pulled his head even farther back, leaning in close to murmur, "Zuko here wants you alive. But give me one fucking reason and I'll take it."
"Zuko?" Zha's eyes rolled up toward Zuko's face, widening as they settled on his scar. "The princess told me you were dead."
"That's another thing she's wrong about," said Zuko. Then, to Ping, "Get them all in cuffs. We'll have to carry him," he added with a nod toward Zha.
"Prince Zuko," said Zha, strangled and indignant. "Dressed like a barbarian and fighting your own father's army."
Zuko watched Ping move between the other Firebenders, those standing first and then the ones on the floor, stone flowing from his forearms to twist around their wrists like chain. "I don't want anything to do with that uniform as long as men like you wear it," he said.
"Treason," Zha spat. "Have you no honor at all?"
Zuko looked at Zha and thought of all the things that he could say. You're a general with no respect for his soldiers. You're a Firebender with no respect for your people. You're a man with no respect for the world. You don't know what honor is. But he knew Zha wasn't worth the breath it would take to say those things. That he wouldn't hear them, besides.
Then Ping was beside him, and Jet moved a little - his grip on Zha's hair as tight as ever - so Ping could do his work. "We'll have to tunnel down into the catacombs," Ping said as he fastened Zha's arms and ankles together, paying no mind at all to the crippled knee and eliciting a small whimper of pain. "But it will take some time. I'll need to tend to this first." He gestured to the place where the arrow had hit him before, and Zuko gave the flame in his palm a little push, brightening the light it cast. A dark red stain had soaked through the cloth on Ping's leg, covering most of his thigh.
Longshot had already torn a length of fabric from his shirt, and knelt to bind Ping's wound as Zuko went to check on Xiao Si Wang. She had pushed herself to her feet, using the wall for support, and was examining the damage to her arm as Zuko and his light approached. Armor had protected her forearm, which she'd removed and dropped to the floor, but an angry red burn stretched from her elbow to just above her bicep, wet and blistered and raw.
"Does it hurt?" Zuko asked softly. She nodded, her bottom lip between her teeth. "Good. That means it'll heal. But you'll probably have a scar."
"At least it's not on my face," said Wang, wearily pragmatic, and Zuko surprised them both by laughing.
"We need to get a bandage on it, though," he said. "So let's-"
"Quiet," said Ping, sudden and severe. Zuko shut his mouth and watched as Ping straightened and looked toward the door. He realized, then, that he could no longer hear the impact of a battering ram on the wall Ping had made. It had stopped at some point during the battle, when he had been too distracted to notice.
He lacked Ping's sensitivity, but the next sound was unmistakable - a rumble of Earthbending, just outside the room.
"Dai Li," Jet muttered.
"There's only one door," said Ping, quiet and grim, fragments of stone lifting up from the floor to cover his hands and forearms again. "I'll try to draw them away, but you'll have to-"
A young, clear voice cut through his words, echoing off the walls. "Captain Ping! Do you require assistance?"
Ping's arms dropped a fraction. "To whom am I speaking?" he asked, with an authority that made it sound more like an order than a question.
Zuko moved a few, silent steps toward the center of the room, and saw that a rectangular window had been opened in Ping's barricade. "This is Captain Chen of the sixth division," the voice continued. "Do you require assistance?"
Ping looked at Jet, who shifted his grip from hair to armored collar and nodded. "We've captured General Zha and his guard," said Ping, his voice still perfectly calm. "The bunker is ours."
The barricade sunk back into the floor. The doorway was too narrow to afford much of a view, but Zuko could see that a line of Dai Li had formed just outside of it, so close to one another that their shoulders nearly touched. The one in the center, whom Zuko assumed to be Chen, gestured to the others and stepped forward into the room.
To the Dai Li, Chen said, "Tend to the wounded. Secure the prisoners." Then he scanned the faces of those who were still standing, settling finally on Jet's. "Commander. Captain Quan-"
"What?" said Jet, almost a laugh.
"You're Commander Jet of the Freedom Fighters, yes?"
Jet's eyebrows shot up into his hair, and he glanced sideways at Zuko before replying. "Yeah, that's me."
"Captain Quan is waiting for you at the main entrance of the palace. We have secured the throne room, and will escort your men and your prisoner there to meet him."
"Secured?" said Smellerbee.
Wang had left the wall behind to stand next to Zuko again. Now she leaned in to whisper, "What's going on?" She had listened to all of Ping's curt, haunted stories about the Dai Li and what they did to their prisoners, and her eyes were wide with alarm.
"It's all right," said Zuko, his gaze shifting back to Jet. The other boy was already watching him. Jet frowned, eyes indicating the doorway and a quirk of one eyebrow asking a question. Zuko nodded, and the other boy fell in beside him as he stepped over the broken door and out into the throne room.
It took Zuko a moment to absorb what he saw. Sunlight spilled through what had been the skylight, the hangings jewel green where it hit them and the throne itself glittering with shards of broken glass. The floor was a mess of buckled marble, waves and walls of stone abandoned in odd places - an offense frozen in time. But there was a clear, flat space at the center of the room with a Dai Li agent stationed at each corner, standing at attention as they waited for their next order. Between them were neat rows of battered Fire Nation soldiers, their heads bowed and their wrists cuffed behind their backs.
Zuko felt Jet take his hand, the filthy bandages rough against his palm, and laced their fingers together. For a few seconds, they stood beside each other and stared.
Zuko looked at Jet's face. Brown eyes darted between the men, his mouth very slightly open and his face slack. "I know what I want this to mean," he said quietly. He didn't say the rest, but Zuko understood. He felt the same way - like none of this could actually be happening; like it would fall apart at any moment, revealed as some cruel manipulation. The worst kind of joke at all of their expense.
The minutes that followed had the dream-like quality of a paradigm just shifted, Zuko's surroundings filtered through a haze of shock. Such a short time ago, they had run the whole length of the palace rooftops, a storm of arrows and walls of men between them and their goal. Now they walked along its cavernous hallways with Captain Chen ahead of them, carrying Zha over his shoulder like a sack of grain. Some corridors were lined with more Dai Li and ranks of captured soldiers, their battered armor incongruous beside marble panels and gilt molding. Chen set a gentle pace for the sake of Ping's leg, and the Fire Nation men had ample time to gawk at their broken general, who moaned in pain with each of Chen's footfalls.
They turned a final corner and a pair of massive bronze doors came into view. They had been hauled open, and Zuko could see a broad swath of pale summer sky, the palace walls and the courtyard and the porch of the entranceway all layered beneath, stripes of yellow and brown below the blue. A little closer, and dark smudges resolved themselves into men. Captain Quan stood just beyond the doorway, a steady stream of lesser Dai Li running up to consult with him, then darting off just as quickly to carry out whatever orders he'd given.
A few yards further, and Zuko could see that the courtyard was filled with soldiers, the Dai Li among them distinguished by their broad, flat helmets. Just as it had been in the throne room, but on a massive scale. Looking at them now from this height and distance, a thousand human shapes in ragged formation, he would not have believed so many men could be pushed through had he not done it himself.
Then he and Jet and Ping were standing in a line, their friends behind them as they faced the Dai Li and the first among their captains. Chen took his place beside Quan's elbow, and at the bottom of the wide, stone steps, an army watched as their general was roughly lowered to the ground. Zuko wondered how many of them could hear Zha's cry of pain, or could tell when he finally passed out from it, limp and defeated at the feet of his captors.
For several seconds, Jet looked between the stern faces before him, lips pursed in consideration. His eyes on Quan, he dug his fingers into the space beneath one arm guard, rooting around for a moment before producing a battered stalk of grass gone to seed. Zuko couldn't help but chuckle as Jet made a show of dusting it off, straightening imaginary kinks and then placing it carefully in the corner of his mouth.
"So," Jet drawled, informal and unhurried. "Nice of you guys to show up."
"We reconsidered our stance," said Quan.
Jet arched his eyebrows. "You mean you pried your heads out of your asses and did the right fucking thing for once," he said amiably.
Quan scowled. "Characterize it that way if it pleases you. It makes no difference to me."
"Sure," said Jet with a little shrug of his shoulders. "So. Business, right? That's why you called us out here." He nudged Zha's body with one foot. "We don't have room for prisoners and I hate keeping them besides. If you want this piece of shit, he's yours. My only condition is that you keep him here in the city. No trading him back to Ozai; I don't care what he promises."
"I can accept those terms," Quan rumbled. "But I have a request of my own."
"Yeah?"
Quan squared his shoulders, and when he spoke again his voice was raised to a volume meant to carry. "Commander Jet. On the behalf of the people of Ba Sing Se, I ask that you return control of this city to the Dai Li. We have been its guardians for centuries. We wish to reclaim that role."
Jet chuckled, to the obvious surprise and irritation of Quan and his men. "You know…I think I'm gonna have to turn you down, friend," he said, just as loud. "Sorry. We'll hold the city until the Earth King returns and the government's been put back together. You helped us, so I'll trust you with our prisoner. But you sold us to Ozai one time already, and you've got a long fucking way to go before I give you that chance again." He flashed a smile, white and a little dangerous. "But you're right, this isn't my city. So."
Jet turned to Ping, the grin softening into something more genuine. "As of right now, you're the leader of the Freedom Fighters." He laughed and rubbed the back of his neck. "But I kind of like being a commander, so that makes you, what? General Ping?"
Watching Ping's reaction now, his face uncharacteristically open in those first seconds of disbelief, Zuko felt a swell of affection for his friend. Ping had never asked for anything but a place to sleep and a chance to help restore his city. He had never disobeyed Jet's orders, however suicidal, and questioned them only in private when no one but Zuko would hear. He had fought alongside boys half his age, honed a team of Earthbenders from five strangers and answered every one of their questions. He had taught them to fight the only family he'd ever known and not once had he complained.
"Are you certain?" he asked.
Jet's smile somehow widened. "Yes."
"Then I accept."
They bowed deeply to one another, the first time Zuko had ever seen Jet do such a thing. Zuko looked to Quan, expecting anger or confusion. But the older man's lips were curved into the shadow of a smile. He bowed as well, his braided queue of gray hair slipping over his shoulder.
Zuko looked out at the courtyard and the countless rows of soldiers and wondered what they felt; what they saw as they watched this scene unfold. He hoped that a few, at least, felt the weight of it as he did, and that someday, the rest would understand.
:: Next Chapter ::
Word count: 4,800
Pairing: Jet/Zuko
Rating: A very hard R for language, violence and sexual content
Summary: Since the day the walls of Ba Sing Se fell, the Freedom Fighters have struggled to protect what remains of the city and its people. Jet and his second command, a mysterious boy named Li, have spent the summer piecing together an army, hoping for a chance to take the city back for good. But Li is also Zuko, and the time for that secret is quickly running out. Soon, he'll have to decide exactly who he is, what cause he's going to fight for and where his heart lies.
This chapter: Matters of honor.
Notes: You may have noticed that this fic now has thirteen parts instead of twelve - that's because what used to be Chapter Eleven became rather long and unwieldy, and at the urging of my betas I decided to break it in two. The downside is that this chapter is a little short; the upside is that the next chapter is already finished, and so I'll be posting it in a few days, followed by the epilogue in what I hope will be a reasonable timeframe.
I'm very sorry for the too-long gap between updates -- in addition to various real-life complications, these last sections have been much harder to write at all, let alone properly. To anyone who might be reading this, thank you SO MUCH for your patience with me! I hope it all ends up being worth the wait!
As usual, I owe the world to my betas, kittyjimjams and jlh, without whom I would never have finished any of this.
:: Previous Chapter ::
Zuko could do nothing but stand and watch, Jet's hand flat on his shoulder blade and his useless swords sheathed at his hip. Ping battered the iron door, pausing in his rhythm only to seal cracks in their defenses when they appeared, and Zuko felt sick with guilt and helplessness. He couldn't stop the soldiers from trying to break down the walls Ping had made. He couldn't force his way into this bunker, not before the flame was rekindled in General Zha's stomach, along with whoever else stood with him. Zuko watched as the gap between door and wall grew, steadily but much too slowly. And as he waited for the fire to flow back into his fingers, the fragmented shards of battle began to drift together, aligning into a pattern he did not want to see. But once noticed, it couldn't be ignored, the meaning of all that had happened as plain as written characters, stark and unambiguous.
Zha had surrounded this stronghold with half the non-benders in the city, a human wall of spearman and archers with no purpose but his defense, whose sole advantage lay in greater numbers. There was only one explanation for why a Fire Nation general would entrust his safety to such inferior forces, instead of the elite of his Firebending officers.
"He knew about the eclipse," said Zuko in the ringing pauses between impacts. "He knew he wouldn't be able to bend."
"Who?" Jet asked. "Zha?"
"He's in that room with his best Firebenders. All those men, everything we've fought through…it was only there to slow us down. He wanted to make sure we wouldn't have time to break through this door before the eclipse was over." Zuko's hands clenched into painful fists, fingernails cutting his palms. "All of that, just to save his own skin."
Zuko's body shook with a rage that had no outlet. He wanted to roar, to spit a column of furious heat toward the door that blocked his way, but all that passed his lips was a gray wisp of smoke. He glared up at the ceiling and the sky beyond, as if he could burn the shadow from the sun.
Then Jet turned Zuko toward him, hands squeezing his shoulders hard enough to be felt through the leather armor. "How many?" he asked.
"As many as he could fit. At least five, maybe more." Zuko shook his head. "The rest are probably dead. He probably didn't tell any of them. They just stood there while their bending disappeared, and then-"
"Zuko," said Jet, quiet and sharp as his grip tightened. "Breathe. You're no good to me like this. I need you to concentrate on what's waiting for us in that room and how we're gonna handle it."
Zuko grit his teeth and focused on Jet's face, dark and angular in the eerie green light. He swallowed through the tension in his throat, reached up to touch Jet's cheek and felt the warm, soft skin beneath his fingers; took a deep breath of Jet's scent, sweat and oiled armor and the lingering traces of smoke.
"They'll go after me and Ping," he said. "They won't see you as a threat compared to us." He looked past Jet, then - at the others as they waited in the dark, three points of glowing crystal and their faces above. Faces that Zha and his men would ignore, rabble whose chi wasn't powerful enough to be anything more than a distraction. He knew, because he had once felt that way himself, dismissing all contrary evidence as a sign of his own weakness - a fault of his, not a strength of theirs.
Smellerbee and Longshot. Jet and Xiao Si Wang. Zuko had seen their strength, in battle and in the time between. He understood what Zha and all the men like him did not. He felt his chi begin to flow again, the heat of it stirring in his veins, and knew it was no better or worse than the strength of sword or bow or word - only different. He leaned in for a kiss, brief but necessary; allowed Jet to pull their chests together, savored the familiar solidity while he could and then stepped back to turn to face the door. "I'll draw their fire," he said. "They won't even see you coming."
The candle clock guttered. And what had drained away eight minutes before returned in a dizzying flood, pouring back into him like water through chinks in a dam. The air around his hands shimmered with heat, and he said "Stand back" as he lifted them. The hunk of granite fell to the ground with a loud crack as Ping moved aside, breathing hard and shining with perspiration.
He could feel the slight weight of Jet's touch at the small of his back, behind the place where his inner fire was boiling to life once again. It sang through his veins and down the lengths of his arms, twin rivers that burst from his palms in a white-hot fountain and broke against the door. The iron hinges began to glow, deep red to orange to yellow, but even as waves of heat baked the skin of Zuko's face, the touch at his back didn't waver. He imagined the currents of their chi connecting, a stream that flowed from Jet's fingertips and into the knot below his navel. Jet's strength became his own, too much for any door to withstand.
"Now," barked Zuko, and Ping needed no further explanation. The granite lifted into the air once again, stretched into a wedge by one movement of his fingers and jammed into the gap between wall and door with the next. Ping set his jaw, pushed forward with splayed hands to fill the space completely and then crouched down with both fists raised in front of him. The assault on their defenses continued, but between collisions Zuko could hear Ping's low, labored growl as he pulled his fists apart, white-hot iron buckling as the stone expanded.
"Ping and I go first," said Zuko as Ping ripped more granite from the floor, shoved it in place and hunkered down for the next big push. He looked at Wang and Longshot and Smellerbee and finally Jet in turn, pausing at each to wait for an answering nod. "We'll clear a path for you."
"Almost," Ping grunted. Zuko sank into a ready stance, hands up and feet set. He heard the metallic slide of drawn blades and the creak of Longshot's bowstring. "There," Ping snarled, his arms pistoning out to either side, and the door was finally torn free.
Zuko's foot was on it almost before it hit the marble floor. For an instant he could feel the hot metal through his boot, but then he was over and past it and the heat came from up ahead, a wall of fire that roared toward him in this tight box of a room. Zuko brought his palms together and dived through it, the flames a liquid that splashed against the walls to either side of him, his friends safe in his wake. His vision swimming with dark afterimages, Zuko glimpsed the outlines of armored men - six he thought, maybe seven - and as the next wave coalesced before their fists Ping swept around and past him, hands sheathed in rock and a wave of rubble dragged across the iron floor behind him. Ping crouched beneath a wild arc of flame, and with a quick jerk of his arms two Firebenders were knocked off their feet and against the wall, the impact of their skulls against the metal sickening to hear. But the third was faster, one fireball shattering Ping's attack and the next driving him back toward the door again, a hasty shield of rock brought up to protect his face.
These men were not foot soldiers. They were elite, any one of them a challenge on his own. Together, they were almost too much for Zuko to track, asynchronous balls of flame coming from all directions with no time to recover in between. Offense was out of the question. He could barely see, an already too-hot room growing warmer with every attack, making his head spin and his breath dry and shallow.
He extended his arms, reached out with his spirit and felt the flames around him. The fire wasn't his, had been conjured by other hands and directed by other minds, but once it left their fingers and palms and the soles of their feet it belonged to the world. It became part of the room around him, and as he reached out he found he could take hold of it. Wrenching it out of their grasp was too much - they sensed what he was after, dug their heels in and pushed back. He couldn't own the fire, but he could influence it. He could calm the burning air. He could redirect the currents, pull them toward himself and then past, away from his skin and Ping's as well. He was a swirling eddy. He was a rock in the stream.
When the others slipped into the room they did so as shadows, pendants tucked back into their clothes and footsteps masked by the roar of Firebending and the thundering impacts of stone. He chanced a closer look in the glow of the next attack, red light catching on blades and arrowheads in the moment it took him to shift the flames into the wall. He ducked and ran to the center of the room, dropped to the ground and whirled his legs to kick up flashy banks of fire. Look at me, he thought, flipping back onto his feet again to dodge a fireball aimed at his head. For a moment Ping was beside him, a ring of stone whirled around his torso and shot out at eye level, enough to get the attention of every bender in the room; to draw their eyes and their ire toward him. We're who you want, he thought as Ping was sent flying, shards of his blasted defenses stinging Zuko's cheek.
Zuko couldn't see Jet or the others anymore, so he played it safe and bent the next wave straight up, into the ceiling where it couldn't hurt anyone. It burst in a shower of sparks as a stone fist whistled past his ear, shattering against the chest of a Firebender who couldn't dodge quite fast enough. Older, Zuko now saw, his armor shining with gilt scrollwork and dragons. He grunted but didn't go down, and flame licked at his fingers as he brought his arms around.
Zuko caught that first assault like he would a ball, gathering it up in his hands and bending it into a dense sphere that scorched his palms before he cast it aside. But in that sliver of time the other man surged forward, snarling as fire leapt from his palm and poured from his mouth, too close to dodge and too much to contain.
Then a dark silhouette moved between them, hardly more than a blur and a flash of metal, and the attack went wild as the Firebender's wrist was jerked violently to one side. The man - who Zuko was now certain had to be Zha - stumbled in his surprise, but the imbalance was short-lived. He wrenched himself free of the hook that had caught him, already bringing his other arm around with a corona of hot light around his fist. Zuko glimpsed Jet's angular profile, his white teeth and wide grin, and then he'd dropped below the path of Zha's fire and Zuko was reaching out toward it, wresting the flame from Zha's control.
Zuko had a vague awareness of the rest of the room, the other bodies twisting around each other and the staccato bursts of heat and light. Unfamiliar screams were a grim but deep satisfaction; a startled shout of pain in Xiao Si Wang's high voice was something to be endured, a reason to fight harder and faster and better so he could get her out of this place. He heard a grunt that may have been Smellerbee, the whistle of arrows and loud cries when they found their mark, bones cracking and armored men hitting the iron floor.
All of this was on the fringes of his perception. But the heart of it was here in front of him: his partner in all things, lithe and quick and always moving, and the man they had come here to subdue. Zha was slow with age and his much greater size, but Zuko could feel the crackling power of his chi, the heat of flame that burned white and long and tirelessly. He could smell his own hair burning as he channeled that river of fire, his body a levee against the flood. And he could see Jet, melting from shadow to stark contrast and back again, his blades flickering out to snatch at wrists and ankles and his leg sweeping around to knock Zha's out from under him.
But Zha was a true son of the Fire Nation, a Firebender in all the expected ways. To him, Jet was the distraction, swatted at halfheartedly between more serious assaults. When Jet's foot connected with his stomach, Zha grunted in annoyance as he stumbled and tossed a handful of careless fire back at him. Jet dodged it without trouble, but Zha's eyes had already returned to Zuko. He snarled, "Fight me, you coward!" and the words became flame in the air. Zuko moved a handbreadth to one side - no need to even bend so careless an attack - and Jet flew into the void between them with a bark of adrenaline laughter.
Zuko saw the crescent of Jet's hilt thrust forward; braced himself for the hot splash of liquid across his face and the gurgle of air escaping torn flesh. But Jet's knuckles were what connected, knocking Zha's head back with a loud click of teeth, and as he reeled from it Jet dropped back into a crouch. One booted foot shot out, and with a wet crunch Zha's knee bent in a way it wasn't meant to, Zha screaming as he dropped to the ground and curled in tight around it.
Jet hauled him up by his hair, pulled his head as far back as it would go and pressed one lethal crescent to his neck. "Gimme some light," he said quietly. Zuko held out his hand, palm-up, and conjured a little whorl of flame, incongruously cheerful in this place. Zha's face shone with sweat, features screwed up with pain and anger.
In the new and steady glow, Zuko could see the rest of the hot, metal room. Xiao Si Wang had wedged herself into a corner, one arm cradled against her chest. Three bodies lay prone on the ground, limbs splayed at unnatural angles and one hand crushed and bloody. Three more surrounded Ping, Smellerbee dancing between them and Longshot taking careful aim from near the wall. As Zuko watched, an arrow caught one Firebender in the shoulder, sliding neatly between the armored plates and deep into his joint.
"Surrender now or I cut his throat," said Jet, loud but calm and wholly straightforward. The soldiers faltered, glancing between each other and Zha's prone body, and in the lull Zha choked out some wordless growl of protest. Jet pulled his head even farther back, leaning in close to murmur, "Zuko here wants you alive. But give me one fucking reason and I'll take it."
"Zuko?" Zha's eyes rolled up toward Zuko's face, widening as they settled on his scar. "The princess told me you were dead."
"That's another thing she's wrong about," said Zuko. Then, to Ping, "Get them all in cuffs. We'll have to carry him," he added with a nod toward Zha.
"Prince Zuko," said Zha, strangled and indignant. "Dressed like a barbarian and fighting your own father's army."
Zuko watched Ping move between the other Firebenders, those standing first and then the ones on the floor, stone flowing from his forearms to twist around their wrists like chain. "I don't want anything to do with that uniform as long as men like you wear it," he said.
"Treason," Zha spat. "Have you no honor at all?"
Zuko looked at Zha and thought of all the things that he could say. You're a general with no respect for his soldiers. You're a Firebender with no respect for your people. You're a man with no respect for the world. You don't know what honor is. But he knew Zha wasn't worth the breath it would take to say those things. That he wouldn't hear them, besides.
Then Ping was beside him, and Jet moved a little - his grip on Zha's hair as tight as ever - so Ping could do his work. "We'll have to tunnel down into the catacombs," Ping said as he fastened Zha's arms and ankles together, paying no mind at all to the crippled knee and eliciting a small whimper of pain. "But it will take some time. I'll need to tend to this first." He gestured to the place where the arrow had hit him before, and Zuko gave the flame in his palm a little push, brightening the light it cast. A dark red stain had soaked through the cloth on Ping's leg, covering most of his thigh.
Longshot had already torn a length of fabric from his shirt, and knelt to bind Ping's wound as Zuko went to check on Xiao Si Wang. She had pushed herself to her feet, using the wall for support, and was examining the damage to her arm as Zuko and his light approached. Armor had protected her forearm, which she'd removed and dropped to the floor, but an angry red burn stretched from her elbow to just above her bicep, wet and blistered and raw.
"Does it hurt?" Zuko asked softly. She nodded, her bottom lip between her teeth. "Good. That means it'll heal. But you'll probably have a scar."
"At least it's not on my face," said Wang, wearily pragmatic, and Zuko surprised them both by laughing.
"We need to get a bandage on it, though," he said. "So let's-"
"Quiet," said Ping, sudden and severe. Zuko shut his mouth and watched as Ping straightened and looked toward the door. He realized, then, that he could no longer hear the impact of a battering ram on the wall Ping had made. It had stopped at some point during the battle, when he had been too distracted to notice.
He lacked Ping's sensitivity, but the next sound was unmistakable - a rumble of Earthbending, just outside the room.
"Dai Li," Jet muttered.
"There's only one door," said Ping, quiet and grim, fragments of stone lifting up from the floor to cover his hands and forearms again. "I'll try to draw them away, but you'll have to-"
A young, clear voice cut through his words, echoing off the walls. "Captain Ping! Do you require assistance?"
Ping's arms dropped a fraction. "To whom am I speaking?" he asked, with an authority that made it sound more like an order than a question.
Zuko moved a few, silent steps toward the center of the room, and saw that a rectangular window had been opened in Ping's barricade. "This is Captain Chen of the sixth division," the voice continued. "Do you require assistance?"
Ping looked at Jet, who shifted his grip from hair to armored collar and nodded. "We've captured General Zha and his guard," said Ping, his voice still perfectly calm. "The bunker is ours."
The barricade sunk back into the floor. The doorway was too narrow to afford much of a view, but Zuko could see that a line of Dai Li had formed just outside of it, so close to one another that their shoulders nearly touched. The one in the center, whom Zuko assumed to be Chen, gestured to the others and stepped forward into the room.
To the Dai Li, Chen said, "Tend to the wounded. Secure the prisoners." Then he scanned the faces of those who were still standing, settling finally on Jet's. "Commander. Captain Quan-"
"What?" said Jet, almost a laugh.
"You're Commander Jet of the Freedom Fighters, yes?"
Jet's eyebrows shot up into his hair, and he glanced sideways at Zuko before replying. "Yeah, that's me."
"Captain Quan is waiting for you at the main entrance of the palace. We have secured the throne room, and will escort your men and your prisoner there to meet him."
"Secured?" said Smellerbee.
Wang had left the wall behind to stand next to Zuko again. Now she leaned in to whisper, "What's going on?" She had listened to all of Ping's curt, haunted stories about the Dai Li and what they did to their prisoners, and her eyes were wide with alarm.
"It's all right," said Zuko, his gaze shifting back to Jet. The other boy was already watching him. Jet frowned, eyes indicating the doorway and a quirk of one eyebrow asking a question. Zuko nodded, and the other boy fell in beside him as he stepped over the broken door and out into the throne room.
It took Zuko a moment to absorb what he saw. Sunlight spilled through what had been the skylight, the hangings jewel green where it hit them and the throne itself glittering with shards of broken glass. The floor was a mess of buckled marble, waves and walls of stone abandoned in odd places - an offense frozen in time. But there was a clear, flat space at the center of the room with a Dai Li agent stationed at each corner, standing at attention as they waited for their next order. Between them were neat rows of battered Fire Nation soldiers, their heads bowed and their wrists cuffed behind their backs.
Zuko felt Jet take his hand, the filthy bandages rough against his palm, and laced their fingers together. For a few seconds, they stood beside each other and stared.
Zuko looked at Jet's face. Brown eyes darted between the men, his mouth very slightly open and his face slack. "I know what I want this to mean," he said quietly. He didn't say the rest, but Zuko understood. He felt the same way - like none of this could actually be happening; like it would fall apart at any moment, revealed as some cruel manipulation. The worst kind of joke at all of their expense.
The minutes that followed had the dream-like quality of a paradigm just shifted, Zuko's surroundings filtered through a haze of shock. Such a short time ago, they had run the whole length of the palace rooftops, a storm of arrows and walls of men between them and their goal. Now they walked along its cavernous hallways with Captain Chen ahead of them, carrying Zha over his shoulder like a sack of grain. Some corridors were lined with more Dai Li and ranks of captured soldiers, their battered armor incongruous beside marble panels and gilt molding. Chen set a gentle pace for the sake of Ping's leg, and the Fire Nation men had ample time to gawk at their broken general, who moaned in pain with each of Chen's footfalls.
They turned a final corner and a pair of massive bronze doors came into view. They had been hauled open, and Zuko could see a broad swath of pale summer sky, the palace walls and the courtyard and the porch of the entranceway all layered beneath, stripes of yellow and brown below the blue. A little closer, and dark smudges resolved themselves into men. Captain Quan stood just beyond the doorway, a steady stream of lesser Dai Li running up to consult with him, then darting off just as quickly to carry out whatever orders he'd given.
A few yards further, and Zuko could see that the courtyard was filled with soldiers, the Dai Li among them distinguished by their broad, flat helmets. Just as it had been in the throne room, but on a massive scale. Looking at them now from this height and distance, a thousand human shapes in ragged formation, he would not have believed so many men could be pushed through had he not done it himself.
Then he and Jet and Ping were standing in a line, their friends behind them as they faced the Dai Li and the first among their captains. Chen took his place beside Quan's elbow, and at the bottom of the wide, stone steps, an army watched as their general was roughly lowered to the ground. Zuko wondered how many of them could hear Zha's cry of pain, or could tell when he finally passed out from it, limp and defeated at the feet of his captors.
For several seconds, Jet looked between the stern faces before him, lips pursed in consideration. His eyes on Quan, he dug his fingers into the space beneath one arm guard, rooting around for a moment before producing a battered stalk of grass gone to seed. Zuko couldn't help but chuckle as Jet made a show of dusting it off, straightening imaginary kinks and then placing it carefully in the corner of his mouth.
"So," Jet drawled, informal and unhurried. "Nice of you guys to show up."
"We reconsidered our stance," said Quan.
Jet arched his eyebrows. "You mean you pried your heads out of your asses and did the right fucking thing for once," he said amiably.
Quan scowled. "Characterize it that way if it pleases you. It makes no difference to me."
"Sure," said Jet with a little shrug of his shoulders. "So. Business, right? That's why you called us out here." He nudged Zha's body with one foot. "We don't have room for prisoners and I hate keeping them besides. If you want this piece of shit, he's yours. My only condition is that you keep him here in the city. No trading him back to Ozai; I don't care what he promises."
"I can accept those terms," Quan rumbled. "But I have a request of my own."
"Yeah?"
Quan squared his shoulders, and when he spoke again his voice was raised to a volume meant to carry. "Commander Jet. On the behalf of the people of Ba Sing Se, I ask that you return control of this city to the Dai Li. We have been its guardians for centuries. We wish to reclaim that role."
Jet chuckled, to the obvious surprise and irritation of Quan and his men. "You know…I think I'm gonna have to turn you down, friend," he said, just as loud. "Sorry. We'll hold the city until the Earth King returns and the government's been put back together. You helped us, so I'll trust you with our prisoner. But you sold us to Ozai one time already, and you've got a long fucking way to go before I give you that chance again." He flashed a smile, white and a little dangerous. "But you're right, this isn't my city. So."
Jet turned to Ping, the grin softening into something more genuine. "As of right now, you're the leader of the Freedom Fighters." He laughed and rubbed the back of his neck. "But I kind of like being a commander, so that makes you, what? General Ping?"
Watching Ping's reaction now, his face uncharacteristically open in those first seconds of disbelief, Zuko felt a swell of affection for his friend. Ping had never asked for anything but a place to sleep and a chance to help restore his city. He had never disobeyed Jet's orders, however suicidal, and questioned them only in private when no one but Zuko would hear. He had fought alongside boys half his age, honed a team of Earthbenders from five strangers and answered every one of their questions. He had taught them to fight the only family he'd ever known and not once had he complained.
"Are you certain?" he asked.
Jet's smile somehow widened. "Yes."
"Then I accept."
They bowed deeply to one another, the first time Zuko had ever seen Jet do such a thing. Zuko looked to Quan, expecting anger or confusion. But the older man's lips were curved into the shadow of a smile. He bowed as well, his braided queue of gray hair slipping over his shoulder.
Zuko looked out at the courtyard and the countless rows of soldiers and wondered what they felt; what they saw as they watched this scene unfold. He hoped that a few, at least, felt the weight of it as he did, and that someday, the rest would understand.
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