Chapter Text
“What exactly am I looking at right now?” Mai hopes the corollary, and why is it my problem? is evident from her tone of voice.
Maybe it would be evident, provided she were talking to anyone besides Avatar Aang. Literally bouncing on his toes, he explains, “A proposal for all the schools in the country to enact lessons on traditional Fire Nation dances as a standard part of their curriculum! While we were travelling around the country before the Day of Black Sun, there was this one school I attended for a few days that made me think –”
“What.”
“Oh yeah, so in this one town we stopped in, I guess I accidentally stole a school uniform –”
“First of all,” Mai heads him off, rolling up the scroll as she talks, “I really don’t want to know. Second of all, please tell me your plan to present this to the Minister of Education does not rely on a charming anecdote about enemy insurgents infiltrating the Fire Nation’s school system undetected. His head might actually explode if you did that. Which could be fun to watch, except that I don’t mean that in a literal sense.”
Aang visibly deflates. He sighs – much more forlornly than Mai thinks this situation calls for – and settling down across from Mai says, “See, this is why I’m showing the draft to you and not Zuko. Zuko’s more of a big picture guy. You’re better all of the,” he wiggles his fingers vaguely, “little detail stuff.”
If “little detail stuff” means Mai has a functional sense of subtlety and knows enough to play the game of politics in a way that doesn’t get herself and everyone she – and, more saliently, Zuko – cares about killed, then yeah, she’s a lot better at the little detail stuff than Zuko is.
In this case though, she’s pretty sure Zuko would probably say the same thing she does.
“Educational changes aren’t a priority right now beyond the extensive measures we’re already taking to rollback wartime propaganda.”
That alone had taken over a week of non-stop meetings with the Education Minister and his staff. Mai hadn’t attended any of them herself – being the Firelord’s girlfriend doesn’t constitute and official position in the royal court – but Zuko had needed all the help he could get to workshop strategies for presenting his and Aang’s plans for changes without horribly offending the stodgy, traditionalist, grump of a man.
In the end, the minister’s sensibilities were only mildly ruffled and he’d ultimately agreed to most of the policy points proposed by the new regent; Zuko sensibilities, on the other hand, were deeply offended by the need to tiptoe around his convictions in order to actually make any progress on the matter. The whole process had been excruciating.
Aang puts on a wise Avatar face. Mai doesn’t know him well yet, but she still recognizes it as one he tends to put on for dignitaries and nobles at formal events. “You don’t have to read it right now, but I think this would be good for helping the fire nation reconnect with some of the cultural stuff you guys lost or forgot about during the war. One hundred years ago you guys had amazing dancers and musicians and all kinds of festivals all the time where that got to be celebrated.” He gets more excited as he talks, “And it’d be really good for morale! I mean, who doesn’t like dancing?”
“I don’t.” Mai says immediately, deadpan.
Aang somehow rolls his eyes with his whole body, “Oh come on, I bet you’ve never even been to a dance party! The school I was at for a few days didn’t even let you tap your feet in music class!”
Mai really, really doesn’t want to know. Instead of dignifying that with a response, she takes his proposal and tucks it into a far corner of her desk, well behind all of the more pressing projects she needs to get to.
Aang, inexplicably, doesn’t seem particularly disheartened by this. “I’m taking your lack of a defense as confirmation that you’ve never been to a dance party.”
Mai sighs.
A few seconds of quiet stretches between them, only just long enough to start to be a bit awkward. The background murmur of cicada-crickets – ever present this late in the summer – occupies the moment.
“So, uh,” Aang hedges, taking in the truly significant number of scrolls on Mai’s desk. “Is there that anything I can do to help you? You’re looking over all this stuff to help keep Zuko from putting his foot in his mouth in all his meetings with his councilors and ministers, right?”
The corners of Mai’s mouth twitch up, just a bit. “That’s not an inaccurate way of putting it.”
Aang grins at her – and for a moment Mai lets herself appreciate how deeply surreal everything about her current reality feels. A hundred years of war came to a screeching halt practically overnight, and somehow that’s landed her spending the better part of her days doing boring secretarial work. Boring secretarial work, moreover, that she volunteered to do, even if only to avoid being bored by her boyfriend spending every waking moment looking over paperwork. And now she’s being distracted from that work by a not entirely unpleasant conversation with none other than the Avatar who, incidentally, most had assumed was dead and long gone from this world up until not even a full year ago.
“Seriously though,” Aang says, “There’s not a lot for me to do right now.”
“You’re bored, so you want to help with paperwork?” Mai asks sardonically.
Aang laughs at that. He doesn’t leave though, so Mai thinks she might as well as take him up on his offer.
She rummages through some of the papers on her desk and produces a long scroll.
“Here,” she says, “you could help me review these spending records for the last few years – there’s a report summarizing them from one of the palace aides, but I want to double check and make sure nothing’s out of place–”
“Oh, uh,” Aang cuts in before she can get too far into her spiel, “I mean, I’d love to help with that, but Zuko told me that the Minister of Finance thought it wouldn’t be a good idea for the Avatar to be too involved in all the Fire Nation’s money or finance-y stuff.”
Mai narrows her eyes, taking in Aang’s perfectly innocent smile. He sheepishly rubs the back of his bald head.
A beat.
Under Mai’s continued scrutiny, Aang spreads his hands in a sheepish What are you going to do? gesture.
Mai genuinely can’t tell if he’s lying.
But even if he is, she doesn’t doubt that some of the more traditionalist nobles – the ones that see Aang’s presence here the other nations’ strategy for keeping the Fire Nation in line – will absolutely treat anything Aang touches as suspicious, budgetary or otherwise. Depending on how the court politics shake out in the next few months, it could evolve into a playing piece they can lay out whenever they want to stonewall any new policies Zuko tries to roll out.
Aang’s innocent demeanor doesn’t waver for an instant in the long moment Mai takes to contemplate all of this. Finally, she sighs, waving dismissively at him. “Fine. I have work to do. Find something else to do to entertain yourself.”
Aang makes what might be a suspiciously hasty escape. In the grand scheme of things, Mai doesn’t really care.
***
“No Aang, tonight?” Mai asks Zuko, finally joining him for supper later that evening. Amazing how hungry she gets after a day filled with little more than staring at accounting tables until her eyes are ready to bleed out her skull.
“Nah, I think being stuck in the palace all the time is making him feel antsy. He said he thought Appa was feeling neglected, but I think he might have just wanted an excuse to explore the city.” He looks thoughtfully at a dumpling. “Now that I think about it, I guess that might be an Air Nomad thing, you know?”
Mai’s not sure she does. If the week of torture with the Education Minister taught her anything, it was what little she remembers from history classes – which didn’t exactly cover much on Air Nomads to begin with – is probably wrong.
Alleged Air Nomad tendencies aside, maybe Aang getting out among the people will help to ingratiate himself to the general public. Sure, he deposed their last Firelord, but he can’t be that bad if he also supports local businesses, right?
“You’re definitely right about him being bored,” Mai says instead of commenting on any of that, “he came by while I was working today and sort of offered to help with paperwork.”
“‘Sort of?’”
“He ran away as soon as I took out the scrolls from the Finance Minister.”
Zuko laughs at that, and Mai smiles a bit.
“Those all looked to be pretty much in order, by the way,” she tells him, “I caught a few arithmetic errors, but the ones I left on your desk should all be correct.”
Zuko groans, “I’m not excited for the budget meeting, Mai.”
Mai hums sympathetically through a mouthful of noodles and silently thanks the spirits that she will not be expected to attend said budget meeting.
“I have no idea how I’m going to convince them that we need to work some reparations into the budget. And that’s probably going to be the easy part, we basically need to restructure the entire economy. I don’t know how to do that! I don’t know if anyone knows how to do that!” He gesticulates throughout this tirade, nearly knocking over his tea.
“You’ve still got two days to pull it all together,” Mai points out.
“It feels like yesterday you were telling me I still had two weeks to figure it all out.”
“And you’ve come up with some solid ideas in that time. Tomorrow we can polish our plans for presenting them and work on your speech, you’ve got most of the day open.”
Zuko winces at that.
Mai sighs. “Who did you add to your meetings for tomorrow?”
Zuko looks sheepish. “You’re not going to be happy…”
Mai raises her eyebrows and makes a get on with it gesture.
“The Education Minister.”
“No.”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“Ugh, what does he even want to talk about? I thought we were done with him.”
“He said he had a few concerns about the proposals we’d agreed on, but didn’t say what. I guess I’ll find out.”
Mai puts down her chopsticks and buries her face in her hands.
“If you don’t want to have to deal with that again, Mai, I totally get it. Aang and I can figure it out; we’re the ones that wanted to make so many changes.”
Mai has to sigh again, because, well, of course she has a choice with Zuko. Unfortunately, that’s half the reason she isn’t willing to give up on helping him.
Looking at him, she says, “Tell me what he wants after the meeting.”
“Okay,” Zuko says, “if that’s what you want.”
“Oh, it’s really not,” Mai hastens to assure him. Reaching out to intertwin his fingers with hers she says, “But I care about you, and you care about this. So here we are.”
“As long as that’s what you want,” Zuko repeats, earnest. “You’ve been so helpful, and I can’t thank you enough for that, but I don’t want you to feel like you have to help me with this stuff just because you’re my girlfriend.”
Mai smiles at him, “I’m not just doing it because we’re dating.”
Part of it – a big part, really – is because she cares about Zuko. But it’s also because Zuko is one of the small number of people she’s ever known to be completely sincere about his intentions. If she can help him be successful in this brave new post-war political landscape – apparently that’s worth something to her, and she’s not willing to let that go.
She’s also not willing to let go of dinners with her boyfriend, which is where they’ll be if she doesn’t help him get through the mountains of paperwork that go along with being the new Firelord under the best of circumstances, much less when trying to reverse a century of wartime policy.
“Not just because we’re dating?” Zuko asks.
“No.” She leans in close. “It’s also because someone’s got to make sure you don’t get yourself killed.”
His breath tastes like garlic and spice when she kisses him.
“Okay, fine,” he relents as they pull apart. “As long as you’re happy making sure Aang and I don’t offend stuffy old ministers with over inflated senses of their own importance.”
“I am.” She says, because, mountains of paperwork notwithstanding, she is happy. Happier than she ever really thought she’d be able to be, if she allows herself a rare indulgence in emotional honesty.
Zuko looks thoughtful for a moment. “It’s probably bad that I didn’t think about this until now, but I don’t know if I’ve actually ever asked if there’s any policy you want to push through. You’ve been awesome about the stuff Aang and I care about. But we’ve never talked about what you care about.”
Earnestness really is a good look on him, Mai thinks.
“Prison reform.” She says dryly.
“Oh,” Zuko says, eyes wide. “That’s actually a really good point. We probably need to work some checks and balances into the justice system. I mean, members of the royal family shouldn’t just be able to throw people into prison without a least bringing in like, a local magistrate, or something –”
“Zuko,” Mai says, fond. She puts a hand on his cheek. “It was a joke.”
He blushes, “Even so…”
“Zuko!” She laughs. “I’ve had enough politics for tonight.”
“The last two weeks have been enough politics for a lifetime,” Zuko says, very sincerely. He pushes back his empty dishes – they’ve both finished eating. “Hopefully it won’t be too hard to find something more interesting to do with our time for the evening,” he says conspiratorially.
Oh no, Mai thinks, that doesn’t sound too hard at all.
Albeit, their options are limited by his still healing wounds. “Just as long as you also think losing to me at Pai Sho is fun.”
Zuko opens his mouth, indignant, but Mai cuts him off before he can get going with another kiss.
***
The next morning gets off to a decent start before stepping out to take a steep dive off of a cliff.
Per the new normal of the last few weeks, Mai wakes up early, and changes into something suitable for training down in the palace yards.
Coming down from her room – one of the palace’s many guest suites – she waves a good morning to the boys, who are similarly using the early hour to get in some fire bending training.
Well, Aang is training while Zuko coaches him, not yet cleared by the boys’ waterbending friend – Katara – to partake in any strenuous activity.
Mai’s been on the receiving end of at least four rants from Zuko about thinking he’d hear less of his friend’s continued nagging after she’d left with her brother and father for the South Pole, and they’d left not even two weeks ago. The palace physician presumably agrees with their friend’s assessment, but Mai has her doubts about his ability to convince Zuko to take some time to rest and heal absent the full force of Katara’s persistent badgering.
Mai enjoys an hour of actually getting to move – the rest of the day is undoubtedly going to bring hours of sitting behind a desk. She probably needs to put something up for target practice in the room that has effectively become her office to help manage the monotony.
A part of her longs for a hazy future, Zuko’s reign secure, Mai free to do… something. She hasn’t quite figured out what yet, but it will involve a lot more responsibility delegation and a lot less sitting behind a desk.
Her morning exercise complete, she returns to her rooms.
The day starts building its funeral pyre in the form of a letter.
The scroll sits innocently on her pillow, no doubt placed there by one of the palace servants. She picks it up and immediately recognizes the familiar seal.
Mai bites her tongue on a litany of creative curses.
She skims the letter from her mother, skipping over empty pleasantries and flowery asides and oh, Mai, we’ve been so worried about you’s. The actual point of the letter, beneath all of that – Mai’s family is returning to the Fire Nation; they expect to be back in the capital in about two weeks.
“Ugh,” Mai bemoans to the universe at large. She’d known this was coming – ending the war means ending the Fire Nation’s occupation of the colonies, which means no more Fire Nation governors.
Which means Mai’s family isn’t going to be half a world away for much longer.
Mai stands statue still, considering the letter. She carefully does not rip it into a thousand pieces, instead placing it undamaged on the bedside table.
It’s a good thing she’s not a firebender – ashes would be all that remained of it.
Whatever. She’s got two more weeks before she has to deal with her parents.
The final death knell for the day comes with another visit from Aang, looking rather more dispirited today than he did the day before.
“Do I need to sit down for this?” she asks as he settles down across from her.
“You’re already – ohhh, ha, good one Mai.” Aang chuckles, the shadow hanging over his face briefly lifting.
“What’s going on?” she prompts.
“So. Zuko asked me to come talk to you.” Aang says, once again looking concerningly somber. Mai sits ramrod straight, waiting for the ax to come down. Aang takes a deep breath before continuing. “The meeting with the Minister of Finance and everyone else on that council got pushed up.”
Mai looks at him sharply, “When?”
“Uh, now. Right now.”
Mai’s halfway out of her seat before she realizes there’s literally nothing she can do. Well, nothing productive – bursting into the meeting isn’t exactly an option.
Her life would be so much easier if more of her problems could be solved with violence.
“Yeah,” Aang continues, “I guess someone had a family emergency or something come up and they wanted to squeeze in this meeting before they had to leave, I didn’t catch all of the details.”
Zuko can handle this, Mai tells herself, we had several solid plans in place, he’s got the corrected accounting information, he knows what his priorities are. He can handle this.
Having to sit on her hands though, while Zuko handles this without her, seriously sucks.
But if she can’t do anything, why did Zuko send Aang up to tell her this?
“Is there anything else Zuko wanted me to know about?” Mai asks.
Aang nods, still looking very unhappy. Mai braces herself.
“So, the meeting with the Education Minister,” Aang starts.
Mai groans, feeling the beginnings of a headache coming on.
“Well, the good news is, he’s going along with most of our proposals with corrections on how the history of the Fire Nation is taught. Zuko had some old scrolls from the Fire Sages that he said, uhm, something about being a verifiable and trustworthy primary source or something.”
“Okay,” Mai says, finding herself again waiting for the hammer to fall.
“The bad news is, he said he’ll need more than the word of an 112 year old kid to update the curriculum on the history of the Air Nomads,” Aang says bitterly, screwing up his face a bit and fixing his gaze at a spot on the floor as he finishes.
Mai takes a moment to process this. “So… I’m guessing he wants a ‘primary source’ then.”
To update a curriculum that currently says that a pacifist culture had an army that was so big of a threat, Sozin decided to –
Mai strangles that thought in its tracks.
“Yeah, that’s exactly what he wants.” Aang sighs deeply. “He actually had a halfway decent rationale for wanting it too – said that having primary sources before making curricular changes would make a good precedent.”
Mai huffs. “Well, that’s certainly a different tact than what he was trying a week ago.”
“Zuko said the same thing. He was pretty mad about it all. Honestly, so am I.”
Mai likewise feels that strangling the Education Minister would be more fun than anything she else has planned for the rest of the day. But possibly for different reasons than Zuko – it’s eminently frustrating that after a week of going back and forward with the man, he’s figured out Zuko’s idealism well enough to play at something like this. And to do so, unfortunately, very effectively.
“So,” Mai says, pushing that all aside, “I’m guessing Zuko wants us to brainstorm some ideas for how to tackle this.”
“Actually, we already came up with an idea for where to start. Some of the air temples have libraries that are really, really hard to get into.”
“Really hard to get into, as in…” Mai gestures for him to elaborate.
“As in Zuko tried to get into these libraries back when he was, you know, trying to track me down three years ago, and it super did not work.”
“I feel like there’s some very obvious problems with this plan.”
“Well,” Aang draws out the word, very transparently aiming for a dramatic effect, “These libraries are next to impossible to get into… unless you’re traveling with a master airbender.”
Mai rolls her eyes.
Aang smiles, “So, yep. That’s our plan. Appa and I are going to head to the Western Air Temple first thing tomorrow; we’ll spend the night there and hopefully be back late the next day.”
Mai ponders this for a moment. Replays the last few minutes of conversation in her head. Considers all the implications of the Education Minister’s demands.
“I think,” she finally says, reluctantly, “that I should probably come with you.”
“Oh.” Aang says, “Wait, really?”
“Unfortunately. If you go without any witnesses… well, I’d rather head off any arguments the Education Minister might make on that front.”
“Oh.” Aang wrinkles his nose – Mai’s pretty sure his grimace is for the Education Minister, and not the thought of having to travel with her.
This is confirmed when Aang's face abruptly brightens and he says, “Well, Mai, I hope you’re ready for a life changing field trip with the Avatar! Zuko went on one with me earlier in the summer. This should be fun!”
Mai is certain there will be nothing fun or life changing about hanging off of a fluffy flying monster for the better part of the day, snooping around a dusty old temple, and then making an hours long return flight on the same fluffy monster. She decides to go the tactful route and not say any of this.
Aang makes to take his leave. Halfway out the door, he pauses to call over his shoulder, “Hey, I’m sure the budget meeting is going fine – you and Zuko have been prepping for like a week and a half.”
Mai groans. “Thanks for reminding me that I really don’t have anything better to do than worry about that for the rest of the afternoon.”
“You’re even more pessimistic than Sokka. It’s really very impressive.”
Mai, a porcelain image of poise and maturity, does not stick her tongue out at him until after he’s closed the door behind him.
***
The rest of the afternoon is spent wishing she had something in this little office that she could use for target practice.
She also discovers that agricultural reports are the absolute driest reading material in all of existence and thus downright terrible at effectively distracting her.
Zuko finally comes in close to dusk. He works on pulling his hair out of his top knot out as soon as he crosses the threshold, his hair flopping down unceremoniously. He collapses down opposite her, completing his entrance by throwing his head back with a truly melodramatic groan.
“Was it that bad?”
“Ugh,” Zuko replies.
Mai laces her fingers together atop her desk. “Zuko.”
He sighs. “It could have been worse. But who decided it’s acceptable for these meetings to last so long.” He looks up at her to say that, and his anguish is clear on his face. “There’s no way anyone actually enjoys that. And we barely got through an eighth of the stuff we need to figure out, if that.”
“So the silver lining is that this counselor’s ‘family emergency’ means it will be awhile before you have to do this again?”
“Small mercies,” Zuko agrees.
“Did that seem…”
“Legitimate? I honestly don’t know. She was really apologetic about it. I tried to say if she needed to leave now, we could try to push stuff back, but I guess the ferry to the island her family only comes and goes twice a day, so she was going to be stuck here until the evening. Supposedly the consensus was to get started while we can even if we have to table the discussion for a week. And I feel like I have to assume it’s real so I don’t come off as a huge jerk if it is.”
Mai pulls a face at that, but grudgingly agrees. “I guess. How was the initial reception to what we put together?”
Zuko considers. “Lukewarm? I could tell no one’s excited about making sure there’s funds left over for reparations, but most of this meeting was figuring out strategies to keep the economy afloat as we shut down wartime industries. I think we made some progress. And now we’ll have plenty of time to run the numbers before the next meeting.”
“Joy.”
“I know. They were glad you caught the errors in the initial accounting sheets, by the way.”
“I’m so glad your ministers are impressed by my ability to do simple math.”
“You’re probably better at math than me at this point. You know, missing like three years of math tutoring.”
The fact that he hadn’t had any tutoring during his three years in exile is just as much a confirmation as anything else that Ozai had never intended for him to return as the crown prince, much less the Firelord.
“Doesn’t sailing involve all kinds of math?” Mai asks, eyebrow raised.
She internally winces as soon as the words leave her mouth – she still doesn’t know much about that chapter of his life, hadn’t asked when they’d dated while he was still playing at being a loyal son. She’d been too eager to enjoy being together and hadn’t wanted to bring up anything that might remind them how tenuous his position – and, by extension, how fragile their happiness – was.
Now, on the other side of the war, they’ve been too busy. Finding out what Zuko’s life had been like while he was gone hadn’t been at the top of her priority list.
But Zuko apparently doesn’t register her question as tactless. He just looks a bit bemused. “Oh, yeah…” He appears to consider this deeply for a moment, the idea that sailing involved practical mathematics experience apparently an entirely novel concept.
Mai can’t help but let a small smile creep onto her face.
Zuko pulls himself out of his contemplations. “That reminds me. I asked Aang about him wanting to help you yesterday, and he tried to convince me that Air Nomads don’t believe in math. Or no, wait. He wouldn’t want to, uh, not uphold the Air Nomad belief… Ugh, it was funnier the way he said it.”
Mai takes pity on him. “It was still kind of funny.”
Zuko looks utterly exasperated with himself, but visibly relaxes after a moment. He looks much less tense than when he walked in the room.
Mai doesn’t really want to say anything that will remind him of the weight of all his responsibilities, but better to go over everything now and then try to enjoy the rest of the night.
“So. Aang told me about the Education Minister.”
Predictably, Zuko groans. “Would it be so much to ask that one of my ministers was totally on board with – not even everything we’re trying to do here, but more than what we’re currently getting?”
“I wish. At least the Fire Sages are backing you. Anyways, Aang and I are going to leave tomorrow for one of the Air Temples tomorrow to try to get something that will appease him.”
“Oh,” Zuko says, surprised, “You’re going too?”
“I don’t want to give the Education Minister room to, you know. Question something Aang brings back.”
Zuko frowns, “Oh,” he says, thinking it through, then with more understanding. “Because it’s Aang, and he might think...” He pulls a deeply bitter face. “Yeah, I wouldn’t put something like that past him.”
“And, as the new Firelord, you can’t leave the palace. And I don’t trust anyone else.”
Zuko nods tiredly. He glances up at the room’s window, and Mai follows his gaze so that they simultaneously realize how dark it’s gotten outside.
By wordless mutual agreement they stand up and head out of the room to get a late dinner. They make their way down to the lower levels of the palace, crossing through the courtyards first to see if Aang’s around and wants to join them.
Stepping out into the twilight, Zuko comments, “I think it will be good for Aang to have someone to go with him; I’m starting to be a little worried about him. He’s been… so quiet lately.”
Aang chooses that moment to pop in out of the blue – in the most literal sense possible; he must have been flying around the palace grounds and seen them walking out – so Mai doesn’t get a chance to ask for Zuko to elaborate on what he means by that.
As it is, Aang is as chatty as Mai has ever known him to be during dinner, providing commentary on some trouble his lemur had gotten into with the turtle ducks that afternoon. Said lemur snoozes, picture perfect hedonism after stuffing itself with the entire contents of a plate of fruit prepared by the kitchens.
Zuko is too prone to worry for her to always worry by proxy, Mai decides.
A pleasant evening comes to an end with an improbably deep yawn from Aang.
“Welp, Momo,” he directs at his reluctantly roused lemur. “Probably a good idea to get to bed early. Mai and I have an early start tomorrow and you’re going to be in charge of keeping Zuko out of trouble while we’re gone.”
Mai can’t help but smirk at Zuko, who’s apparently too bewildered by the harmless teasing to get in a rejoinder before Aang has finished waving them a cheery goodnight.
***
The sky is an endless blue overhead, and the ocean below does a good job of pretending to be an equally endless blue. In Mai’s opinion, It’s horribly monochrome.
All things said though, the trip isn’t quite as tedious as she’d thought it would be. She’d worried flying in the open saddle would be too windy to be conducive to getting much work done, but had been pleasantly surprised to find it to be not much of a problem at all. A constant gentle breeze, but not enough to get in the way of reading a few reports, provided she keeps the ones she’s not looking at tucked away.
Mai catches herself thinking, Ty Lee would like this.
Forcing herself to focus back on her agricultural reports, Mai discovers that they are still incredibly boring. At least she’s making progress.
Able to better focus on them today, Mai notices that the reports don’t seem to be telling a consistent story. Two months ago, one of the southern provinces was reporting concerns that the harvest would not yield much this year. Then, two weeks ago, the same province suddenly has no concerns. It takes her the better part of the afternoon to figure out how to interpret the data that’s included with the reports, but once she’s got a handle on it, the numbers from two months ago seem to bear out the concerns; the ones from two weeks ago, if anything, seem to promise an unusually fruitful harvest. A similar pattern is present when she looks at the reports from the eastern island chain.
Ugh. She’s going to have to go through every set of reports from every province with this level of detail to figure out exactly what’s going on well enough to put together an accurate summary.
For his part, Aang seems content to let her work. He lounges behind the bison’s reins, seeming perfectly at home in the sky.
***
Dusk has nearly given way to night by the time they reach the temple. It’s difficult to make out the shape of the temple until they’re close to it. Mai admittedly hadn’t expected it to be so –
Well, the hanging off the side of a cliff is definitely a surprise. And, with her previous experience with temples mostly limited to ancestral shrines, the Western Air Temple is much bigger than she had expected.
She’s internally debating how much of a reaction to let Aang see, but he doesn’t seem to expect one from her. Upon landing, he murmurs a thanks to the bison and floats down from his perch on the bison’s head.
Stretching out the kinks of a day of flying, he turns to her as she makes a passably graceful attempt at dismounting from the bison’s saddle. “So, the library we want to get to is in this part of the temple. Feel up to getting in there and getting what we need? That way we’ll be ready to fly back first thing in the morning.”
Mai nods her assent.
Turning to the bison, Aang says, “Appa, you can just focus on getting a good night’s rest. We really appreciate how hard you work, flying us around all day.”
The bison snuffles affectionately at Aang’s collar and Aang pats him back before letting the bison pull off to find a place to rest for the night.
Mai must be more tired than she’d realized after flying all day because she’d swear, as the bison shuffles away, that it gives her a wary look. The look seems to say that she’s proven herself trustworthy for this long, but she’d better not get up to any funny business while she and its human go do something where it can’t keep an eye on them.
Shaking herself into something resembling alertness, Mai shoulders her pack and says, “Let’s get this over with.”
They set off, Aang holding up a small handful of fire to light their path as they walk into the building they landed by. He sends a smile back at Mai as he leads the way. “Thanks for coming with me to do this. As much as I wish the Education Minister wasn’t making everything so complicated, it’s nice to have an excuse to get out of the palace.”
“Don’t let any of the royal advisors hear you say that. They’d find some way to use that to discredit you and Zuko,” she says, watching her step carefully enter the building.
“That’s exactly why I’m happy to be away from the palace!” Aang gesticulates broadly, the light in his hands casting strange shadows as he moves it about. Then he sighs, cupping the flame closer to his chest again. “I guess I just thought things would be easier after ending the war.”
Mai tactfully doesn’t point out the war won’t technically be over until a treaty with the Water Tribes and Earth Kingdom is finalized and signed. That’s on track to happen after a delegation of representatives meets to hash out the details and then everything is signed at a ceremony in Ba Sing Se. As it is, she’s pretty sure Aang knows all that, it’s just immaterial to his current point.
Instead, she says, “That’s politics for you. Unrepentantly soul sucking.”
“Tell me about it,” Aang says, deeply aggrieved.
He leads the way through the temple, sure footed. Mai finds herself wondering how many times he’d been here before.
With a forlorn sigh Aang goes on, “We’re just kids. Who thought we should be the ones in charge of figuring out how to put the world back together?”
“I think most of Zuko’s councilors would vastly prefer if you guys weren’t so insistent that you know better than them how to do that.”
“Yeah,” Aang agrees easily. “Still, it’d be nice if some of them would decide to be helpful.” They step into a stairwell deeper inside the building and start working their way up. He heaves another sigh, “And it’d be nice if more of our friends had been able to stick around and help with all of the messy Fire Nation politics stuff.”
Their footsteps make clattering echoes throughout the stairwell. The temple doesn’t necessarily feel creepy. It’s definitely old and it's more than a bit unnerving to think too long about how high they must be suspended above solid ground. But something about it also just feels… empty.
Mai doesn’t love idle small talk, but right now it seems preferable to silence, so she asks, “Have you heard from any of your friends lately?”
Aang nods. “I get a letter from Katara almost every day, but we’re always a little out of sync, you know? Like, I’m responding to what happened three days ago for her, and she’s doing the same for me. I guess that’s just how letters work, but it’s weird to get used to. Sokka also writes pretty often, but sometimes his handwriting is really hard to read.”
Mai laughs. “Zuko complains about that too after he gets letters from Sokka.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty bad.” Aang says, sounding fond. “But between the two of them it sounds like stuff at the South Pole is going pretty well, and there’s enough folks down there from the Northern Water Tribe that rebuilding efforts are going reasonably smoothly.”
“And your earthbending friend?” The words are out of her mouth before she remembers the girl is blind. “Oh, I guess she probably can’t write…”
“No, she doesn’t know how. But Zuko’s Uncle’s written a couple to me for her, and I guess he reads her any letters she gets from us. Ba Sing Se’s still not Toph’s, uh, favorite place in the whole world. But it sounds like she likes getting to yell at all the politicians and generals.”
Reaching the top of the stairwell, they start making their way down a wide hallway.
“I take it Earth Kingdom politics require less… subtlety than Fire Nation politics do right now?”
“Well, probably. But I think that might just be Toph.”
Aang stops in front of two elaborately carved doors, the exact details of which Mai can’t make out in the dim light. Their destination evidently reached, she pulls out a lantern from her pack for Aang to light, freeing up his hands for the next part.
He takes a few steps back. Closes his eyes. Takes a deep breath. In. And out.
Then, cycling his arms, he summons gale force winds that threaten to extinguish the lantern even as Mai shields it.
Through squinted eyes, Mai watches as the wind precisely knocks at a series of at least twenty pegs comprising an intricate locking mechanism hidden in the door’s carvings, the design portraying a trio of sky bison.
There’s a quiet cacophony of simultaneous clicks as each peg moves into place, followed by a louder thunk. At this, Aang stops his airbending, and the doors slowly start to creak open.
Nearly impossible to get into without a master airbender, indeed, Mai thinks. She certainly can’t think of any other way to work the complicated locking mechanism.
Aang glances over, nodding for her to follow him. Together they step over the library’s threshold.
Mai hoists the lantern and Aang does the same with a newly summoned tongue of flame to shed some light over the interior.
The library fills a huge space, probably at least two times as large as the royal palace’s library.
“Oh,” Aang says. His voice is impossibly small and sad.
The shelves that once filled this must have held hundreds of thousands of scrolls. All that remains of them now is splintered wood and ash.
Nearly impossible to get into without a master airbender, echoes in Mai’s mind.
Of course, once the doors are open, it’s easy enough for anyone to walk in. Mai’s presence here is proof enough of that. Her imagination conjures a terrible series of images – airbenders opening the library’s doors, perhaps hoping for a place of refuge in the heart of their temple. Soldiers catching up to them before they can close the doors, burning it all down.
Aang walks forward a few steps, looking around, eyes wide and shining with tears that haven’t quite shed yet. He stops halfway down the entryway and drops to his knees, back curved underneath the heavy burden of grief. It’s a weight around his shoulders that Mai’s never noticed before.
Seeing it now so plainly she wonders how she possibly could have missed it.
The room flashes suddenly with a bright, blue white light; Mai realizes after a moment that it’s coming from Aang’s tattoos. A breeze cycles through the enclosed space and begins to pick up threateningly. Mai unconsciously takes half a step backward.
Then, just as quickly as the strangeness started, it abates. A candle lit and snuffed out in quick succession.
Aang remains alone with his grief in the center of the room.
“Do you want me to…” Mai hesitates, not knowing what to do.
Aang is silent for a long moment. The quiet reverberates horribly in this huge and utterly empty space.
“I need to be alone for a little bit,” he finally says, voice hoarse but steady.
Mai, guiltily, feels relieved at being given an out from witnessing his grief. “I’ll be outside with the bison.”
Making her way back down the stairs, no chatter to distract her this time, Mai focuses instead on the sound of her footsteps.
***
Mai sleeps horribly that night.
She’s never been one for camping. The ground is too hard, she’s cold, and the sounds of nature are entirely too loud to allow for anything vaguely resembling peaceful rest.
It takes her what feels like hours of tossing and turning to fall asleep only for her to wake up too early, the temple’s courtyard half visible with a predawn light. Across the space, she can make out Aang curled up asleep on one of the bison’s front legs.
Searching in vain for a position comfortable enough to let her sleep just a bit longer, Mai rolls onto her stomach. Then her left side, then her right. Repeat.
The sun is half risen when she finally resigns herself to being awake. She pins her hair up and makes her way to a corner of the courtyard. Pointedly not looking over the side to confirm how far up she is, she quietly practices some simple calisthenics in lieu of her typical morning training while she waits for Aang to wake up.
She doesn’t have to wait that long. Aang wanders over her way as she’s finishing up a set of pushups.
“I’d ask how you slept,” Aang pauses for a jaw creaking yawn, “but it looks like the answer is not very well.”
“Camping’s not really my thing,” she says dryly.
Aang acknowledges this with a nod. “I’m sorry this trip didn’t get us anything useful.”
Mai grimaces. “It’s not your fault.”
Aang shrugs, like that’s immaterial. He gazes out across the courtyard. A pair of white birds of some sort lazily fly past, interrupting the view of open sky and the cliffside on the opposite part of the canyon. Mai is uncomfortably reminded of how far up they are.
“Before we go,” Aang says, “Could I show you a part of the temple I’ve always liked?”
Mai would honestly rather leave as soon as possible. Everything about this trip so far has served only to dig a pit of existential discomfort deep into her soul. The sooner they leave, the sooner she can work on figuring out how to ignore it and go on with her life.
Unfairly, in this particular moment, Aang’s soulful gaze is nearly as effective as Ty Lee’s eager pleading at convincing her of things she’d really rather not do.
“Sure,” she says, aiming for nonchalant neutrality, not sure if she hits the mark.
***
Whatever he wants to show her is apparently in another part of the temple, so they pack up and load everything onto Appa before flying over.
The sun is properly up now, and with proper lighting, Mai sees that the temple is even bigger than she had appreciated the previous night. In addition to all of the hanging buildings, including the one they spent the night at, there’s a network of outcroppings and statues visible a bit further below as well.
Mai catches herself wondering how many people once lived here before sternly redirecting her train of thought somewhere else.
Their destination is apparently not far from one of these outcroppings. Aang pats Appa a thank you for the short jaunt over before leading Mai down a short hallway to a small room, well-lit by the morning sun coming in through an open window.
“This is the room they taught lessons in,” Aang explains, disconcertingly chipper, “I only came to this temple a few times – usually when I was in the area after visiting some of my friends in the Fire Nation.”
Mai starts to think, Oh, friends that are probably also long dead, before mentally slamming the door on all of the increasingly depressing places that would go if she followed it any further.
She forces herself to glance around the room. All things said, it’s fairly plain – one might say monastic – with the exception of a mural on the far side of the room.
The mural – a relief carved into the teal-gray stone of the temple’s interior – depicts a grand tree growing on what appears to be a cliff’s edge.
On one side of the tree, a woman stands – despite the simple, impressionistic style, she clearly has arrows in the same style as Aang’s. She appears to be encouraging a smaller figure, this one sans arrows and holding a glider. She must succeed – the mural depicts snapshots of a whimsical flight path taken by the smaller airbender. Off the side of the cliff, looping up and around the highest branches of the tree, and finally landing back on the other side.
On this side of the tree, what looks to be the same woman waits, arms open to embrace the smaller figure as they land.
The child airbender in the mural has no defining features, no arrows. But looking at it, the whimsy of their flight…
A solemn echo of Aang’s lost childhood rings through the simple stone carvings.
Aang watches Mai take it in. “Zuko liked it too, when I showed him,” he says.
Mai hadn’t known they’d both been back at this temple together at some point. She looks away from the mural for a moment to meet Aang’s eyes. Reflected in them, she catches a glimpse of a loss so immeasurably huge, she can’t even begin to fathom how to make sense of it.
How on earth does Aang manage to hold all of that inside him? She can barely stand this small glimpse of it. How, she wonders, does he not burst from the weight of it all? Shattered into a million pieces to be scattered in the wind, just like the ashes of his people.
Mai is less productive than she’d like to be on the long trip home.
***
They get back late enough that Mai doesn’t get a chance to see Zuko that night. Bidding Aang a good night, she makes her way back to the room she’s been staying in for the past three weeks.
She’s briefly tempted by the notion of sneaking into Zuko’s rooms, but discards it as the product of a sleep deprived brain. While she has no doubt she could get in undetected, no doubt a servant would discover them together in the morning, and a scandal like that is the last thing they need to deal with right now.
Be nice if the court cared more about important things than who the Firelord sleeps with, she thinks bitterly before getting some much-needed restful sleep after nearly two days of nonstop travel.
***
She’s in the middle of trying to put together a summary of the agricultural reports the next afternoon, having finally gotten through a first pass of them all that morning – the pattern of ‘suddenly it looks like the harvest will be good, actually,’ has borne out, so it should be a straight forward summary at least – before she gets to see Zuko.
“Mai!” he greets her, poking his head through the door. “Will I be interrupting if I come in?”
Mai feels a huge amount of tension released at the sight of his smile. “Get in here.”
She meets him halfway across the room with a hug.
“Miss me that much?” he asks in a voice he probably thinks is smooth. It’s absolutely not, but that doesn’t keep Mai from grinning like a fool.
“It’s good to see you.”
“It’s good to see you, too,” he says, pressing a quick kiss onto her forehead that makes Mai feel momentarily at peace with the universe. Hand in hand, they both start to migrate towards her desk.
“So, uh,” Zuko coughs apologetically, “At the meeting with the Fire Sages this morning, Aang mentioned that your trip didn’t go as well as you’d hoped.”
Mai sighs, and decides this is a conversation that she’d rather have sitting on top of her desk than sitting properly in chairs. She moves a few stacks of scrolls around to make room, hops up, and pats the spot next to her, motioning for Zuko to follow suit. He does, looking a bit bemused. Mai, leaning her head against his shoulder, figures the palace can handle them using the furniture not exactly as intended.
“It did not go as well as we’d hoped,” Mai confirms. “What did Aang tell you?”
“Not much, we were pretty busy getting through all the stuff we needed to with the Fire Sages, and then he said he had to go check on Appa and Momo when we were done.”
Mai grimaces. She’d been half hoping she’d be able to get out of this.
“Everything in the library was destroyed. Burned.”
“What?!” Zuko pulls back to look her in the eye. Mai mourns the loss of her comfortable headrest.
“It probably happened, you know. When the temple was attacked.” She mulls over her phrasing for a moment, then corrects herself, the words bitter in her mouth, “When we attacked the temple.”
Zuko looks away, curling a fist in his hair, disrupting his already precarious top knot.
“This is why the Education Minister makes me so mad!” he bursts out. “I want to take his smug face and –” Zuko completes this with noise that, while not eloquent and in fact rather reminiscent of an enraged turtleduck, perfectly communicates the horrors he would like to inflict upon the Education Minister’s face.
“It’s a pity that the current political situation precludes us from doing anything to his smug face or otherwise inflicting bodily harm,” Mai agrees.
“Sorry,” Zuko says, deflating slightly. “This is just such a stupid thing for him to be stubborn about. The honorable thing for us to do is to acknowledge the horrible things we’ve done as a nation! That way we can start building the foundations for peace and a world that we can be proud to pass onto future generations!”
Zuko’s many political ramblings of the last few weeks have had the tendency to evoke a deep fondness in Mai. It’s, well, nice to see him so… self-assured. It reminds Mai of when they were kids. Before, it had felt like something that had been lost during the long three years of his banishment.
“We’ll figure something out,” Mai says, pulling her legs up to sit cross legged. “If nothing else, you can fire him in a year or two when your reign is more secure.”
Zuko doesn’t look completely satisfied by this, but nods. “We might have time to look around the other temples as well after the peace treaty is finalized.”
Mai inclines her head in agreement, but shudders to think that they could visit all of the Air Temples only to find the same thing, all records of the Air Nomad’s culture – Aang’s culture – lost forever. But that’s a problem for another day.
They sit together for a moment. Not for the first time, Mai considers how much they’re trying to change. It feels a potentially insurmountable challenge. Then again, she’d also thought Zuko was chasing a foolish and misguided pipe dream, going on about “saving his country” not even two months ago, and look where they are now.
“Since we’re already depressed,” Mai starts, feeling uncharacteristically brave.
Zuko looks at her. “I already love where this is going.”
Mai rolls her eyes. “I’ve been realizing,” she holds her breath for a moment, then pushes forward, “we’ve never really talked about what happened or what it was like during the three years you were gone. Banished.” The word tastes faintly of taboo, a reminder of something she’d decided was more comfortable to forget up until now. She feels Zuko stiffen slightly as she says it.
“I guess… we really haven’t,” sounding like this might be a completely new revelation for him.
“I mean, you’ve apparently been to all of the air temples, and I only found that out in a passing conversation.” Mai aims for a lighthearted tone but isn’t sure if she quite hits it.
Zuko looks pensive at this. Then with a teasing grin he says, “I mean, I do kind of remember you saying something about not wanting to hear my whole life story.”
Back then your whole life story seemed to boil down to being worried that your dad didn’t love you, Mai thinks, but very deliberately does not say. Even now that Zuko’s so completely moved past the need for validation from Ozai, it feels like it would be crossing a line to discuss it so callously.
“I guess I want to know now,” Mai says simply.
Rubbing the back of his head awkwardly, he says, “There’s not much to tell for most of it. A lot of sailing around the world chasing hundred-year-old leads. It’s weird to think about. I was so… naïve back then.”
Mai hums. She feels naïve now – she hasn’t travelled nearly as much as Zuko has, but she has been halfway across the world and back again in the past few months – the Caldera, Omashu, Ba Sing Se, then back to the Caldera again. But it hasn’t been until the past few weeks that the world has seemed so impossibly huge, so full of possibilities – both good and horrible – that she’d never thought to imagine before now.
She’s startled out of her reverie by Zuko standing up, grabbing her hand, and pulling her up off the desk after him. “Actually,” he says by way of explanation as he leads them out of the room, “Aang was there for a lot of the parts that weren’t boring. You know, chasing him and all of that. We can tell you all about all that stuff over some tea.”
***
“So there I am, chained up, no hope of escape, and my frogs are melting…”
“The frogs!” Zuko interjects, “I can’t believe I completely forgot about the frogs! I wasn’t able to figure out what they could possibly be for, I thought that was the weirdest thing!”
Mai is a lot less concerned about the frogs and a lot more concerned about how on earth Zuko got to be involved in this story. Aang is a decent storyteller – certainly not as prone to jumping around and leaving out important details like Zuko can be – but he has a tendency to go on tangents. Mai was hoping this one was one of those, but –
“I also thought they were weird, but they totally worked! Who would have thought? Anyways, my frogs are melting, and then I hear fighting outside of my cell. And then the doors open, and there’s this guy with swords and a creepy blue mask –”
“It was a Blue Spirit mask!”
Oh no, Mai thinks.
She says, “A Blue Spirit mask? Tacky.”
“Okay, this guy comes in in a ‘Blue Spirit mask,’ and he runs at me with his swords! But instead of killing me, he cuts me out of the chains!”
Mai sips on her tea, wishing it were something much stronger, as Aang details a daring escape. She’s long since known that Zuko has essentially zero self-preservation skills, but it’s faintly terrifying to think all of the ways this stunt could have gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Zuko lounges next to her, looking very relaxed and perfectly content to listen to Aang’s animated recounting of their misadventures. Mai isn’t sure whether his unconcerned attitude should make her feel fond or annoyed.
She did ask for this. And at least she’ll be around for any future ridiculous situations he gets himself into to watch his back.
She’s enough of a realist to realize that’s probably the best she can hope for – it would be beyond her capacities as a mere human being to actually prevent any of his life-threatening stunts. Or, apparently, terrible fashion choices.
***
It’s several more days after that before Mai works up the bravery to talk about the Air Temple again.
She almost doesn’t. But Aang leaves his pet lemur with Zuko and Mai one night after dinner. Ostensibly because the creature enjoys spending time with them. In reality, Mai’s pretty sure it stuffed itself on mango slices it had swiped from the table when no one was looking during dinner and had promptly decided to sleep off the overindulgence. Aang had been too soft hearted to wake it up when he left.
Mai had made the mistake of contemplating what a strange creature the lemur was – watching it snore and snuffle in its sleep, one of its abnormally human-like animal hands resting on an overstuffed belly. She’s literally never seen an animal quite like it before. Racoon squirrels come to mind as something halfway similar – they at least have the same weirdly human hand thing going on. But they definitely are neither capable of flight nor domesticated.
Her brain had then helpfully popped in with a reminder that there are so few flying lemurs – and flying bison too for that matter – because Firelord Sozin had decided a hundred years ago that razing Air Temples would make a fun summer hobby for the army.
It’s been over a week since she and Aang traveled to the temple – she should really be better at curbing these depression spirals before they happen at this point.
Whatever. If she’s managed to so heartily tank her mood for the night, she may as well ask the questions that've been on the tip of her tongue for the last few days.
“Zuko,” she starts, so that he stops what looks like his own deep contemplation of lemur napping habits and meets her eyes. “When you decided to leave, you know, to help the Ava- to help Aang a few months ago. Was that… because of what we did to the Air Nation?”
Based on the slightly bewildered look on his face as he processes this question, it is immediately clear that Zuko’s parallel deep thoughts on sleeping lemurs had not led him down the same depressing paths hers had.
He takes a moment to think before answering. “Probably not as much as it should have been? But kind of?”
He pauses for long enough that Mai is trying to figure out how to politely ask him to elaborate, please and thank you.
He starts talking again without her having to prompt him. “I think I’d mostly figured out that the war wasn’t justified before I came back with you guys earlier in the summer. So, a lot of my time here I was either trying to figure out how to justify it or just ignoring how… guilty and ashamed I felt for being complicit in allowing it to continue. For my role in helping Azula conquer Ba Sing Se.” He glances at Mai here. “You know that she wasn’t actually lying when she said she killed the Avatar, right?”
Mai glances at the door that Aang left through a few minutes ago in confusion. “He seems… like he’s doing pretty okay despite that?”
“Katara had some… spirit water or something? I never actually asked for the details.” He frowns. “I’m realizing my communication skills with my friends could use some work.”
“I mean. It’s not every day you have to walk up to someone and ask them why they aren’t dead,” Mai offers.
Zuko laughs. “You’re not wrong. Asking them to let me join their group was already so awkward, there definitely wasn’t a good place to throw that in.”
Mai is absolutely curious, but they’ve gotten a bit off what she was hoping to figure out with this conversation. “So the reason you left,” she prompts.
“Oh yeah. Well, the main thing was definitely my dad’s plan to use Sozin’s comet to burn the Earth Kingdom to the ground.”
Mai blinks. She had completely missed that detail. The retellings of Zuko’s friends’ victories from that day had mentioned a fleet of airships. The phrase “airship slice” had been liberally thrown around. But Mai had kind of assumed that they’d been deployed to brutally put down some sort of rebellion in the Earth Kingdom or something.
“You may have a point about communication skills,” she says faintly.
Zuko’s eyes widen – comically, Mai would think given any other topic of conversation. “If it makes you feel better,” he says awkwardly, “I didn’t tell Aang or the rest of our friends about that until like three days before the comet?”
Mai stares at him incredulously.
“I thought it would make them over-worried!”
Mai tries and fails to find an appropriate response for that. “I don’t know what to say to that.”
“I’ve been told my judgement isn’t always the best.”
Mai sighs. “I think your judgement – or at least your instincts – are fine. It’s your planning that needs work. Okay, so a horribly misguided plan to destroy valuable farmland aside–”
“Those agricultural reports have gotten to you, haven’t they?”
“I thought I was done with them days ago and somehow there’s still more for me to read on crop rotation cycles. We’re definitely not discussing them right now. You said that was your main reason – were there other reasons too?”
“I mean, I guess also just realizing that my dad is a jerk. And my uncle had given me the notion that it was my destiny to help the Avatar.” Zuko gives her a considering look for a moment, “Is there a reason you’re asking about all of this all the sudden?”
Mai grimaces. She’s been curious about this for days but she has carefully avoided thinking about why. “My really depressing trip with Aang – and I cannot emphasize enough that it was really, really depressing – made me curious.” Zuko’s bared a lot of his soul tonight, so Mai reluctantly makes an attempt to dig a bit deeper than that. “I’d never really… thought about that before. Even knowing it’s something you and Aang feel strongly about.” She huffs a sigh, and confesses, “I’m asking you now because I was thinking about how our country’s the reason there aren’t more flying lemurs in the world.”
The only flying lemur she knows continues to snore loudly on the table as they both turn their attention back to it for a moment. Zuko gives it a few scritches behind its ears. It opens its eyes for a moment to peer at him and promptly rolls over and falls back asleep.
“Thanks for telling me,” Mai says.
“Thanks for asking. I forget who was around for what, the past few weeks have been so crazy. Was there… anything else you wanted to know about?”
Mai thinks about it for a moment. “Was there a reason you left on the Day of Black Sun? It seems like it almost would have been easier to sneak out another time when the city wasn’t on a lock down. Oh wait, was it so you could track Aang afterwards?”
Zuko clears his throat. “Well that. And I was planning on breaking my uncle out of prison, but he did that on his own without my help. And I figured it was a good time to tell my dad I was leaving with getting… you know, barbequed?”
Mai blinks. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Uh, which part was confusing?”
“The part where instead of sneaking out like any sane person would have done, you told your dad to his face that you were leaving?”
“It seemed appropriate? At the time?”
“Why didn’t you just leave him a letter!”
“Uh…”
Mai glares at him for a moment. In return, he offers nothing but a stupidly befuddled, albeit slightly apologetic, look.
“Zuko,” Mai takes a deep breath. “I am begging you. Please, please come find me the next time you have the urge to do something impulsive. I’m not saying I’ll stop you, but I’ll at least help you come up with plans that have a lower probability of horrible death.”
Zuko, to her horror, has the gall to look horribly sappy at that. “Are you saying you care about me?”
“I’m saying I prefer you alive,” she says, perfectly level. Zuko looks even more smitten at that. She gives up. “I hate you.”
“No you don’t,” he says.
“Unfortunately,” she sighs, permitting him to steal a kiss that proves his point entirely too well.