LNYE Fic treat: People in the mirror are closer than they appear, for dancing_serpent

[whitelotusmods]

Title: People in the mirror are closer than they appear
By: unjapanologist
Recipient: dancing_serpent
Rating: mature (someone thinking about sexy things in somewhat explicit terms)
Length: 18k in total
Character(s): Jee/Zuko, hints of Zhao/Zuko, Iroh, various members of Zuko's crew
Content Notes: Zuko is fifteen here. Many thanks to my beta, and to the mods for giving me extra time when this treat got way, way out of hand. Avatar and its characters are not mine. The scene where (spoiler) Zuko tries to mimic Jee's facial expression was ripped off from “the Forbidden Friendship" scene from How to Train Your Dragon, which is also not mine.
Summary: Takes place almost a year before season one. Prince Zuko is growing up and discovering new ways to make Lieutenant Jee's life miserable. Just when Jee has had a bad, bad week of Captain Zhao popping in, an invisible thief stealing his things, his crew acting up, and an enemy bird invading his ship, Zuko brings matters to a head in bad, bad way.

---

Letter left at the bar of a very cheap inn at the edge of the royal port district, adressed to Lieutenant Jee Heng

Dear Lieutenant,

I hope this missive finds you well, and that you will forgive its brusque tone. I am very pressed for time.

Since you appear to be somewhat between engagements and a bit at odds with our good law enforcement officers, I trust you will consider accepting the following proposal. I find myself in sudden need of loyal and able-bodied men to crew a small vessel. I would like you to captain said vessel on a journey of as yet undetermined length outside of the Fire Nation. You would be responsible for outfitting the ship, gathering the rest of the crew, and assuming day to day command under my direction. We have only a few days to prepare for departure, I fear, but I hope you will still manage to track down some old and friendly faces from our time at Ba Sing Se. If you can find Cook, I will be eternally in your debt.

Please find enclosed documents detailing our budget (sadly limited), my basic requirements, and papers attesting to your captaincy of the vessel that should get you permission to board it immediately. Your new ship is named Yuan and moored at the third western dock. I will meet you there at sunrise tomorrow morning, together with my young nephew, who will be accompanying us on our journey. Zuko is thirteen and about as brash as one would expect anyone of that age to be, but he is a kind and caring boy. I trust you will find you have much in common with him.

I thank you for your service, also on behalf of my nephew, who is unable to write to you in person at this moment.

General Iroh

---

When Jee later complained to his crew about the General's gross misrepresentation of his nephew in that first letter, most of them nodded in sympathy. Cook disagreed and said there was definitely some truth in the General's words. Jee and Prince Zuko did have many things in common, Cook insisted, namely every single one of their many, many character flaws.

Jee opened his mouth to yell at the man, but snapped it shut again when he realized that yelling was what Zuko would do.

At least Jee was old, self-aware and sane enough to admit that he had character flaws. For instance, he knew he was very bad at doing what he was told, but couldn't be left to his own devices for a week without getting arrested at least. Most superior officers brought out the absolute worst in him, but General Iroh had always been the one shining exception. Jee had served at Ba Sing Se for the full six hundred days, and he'd had ample time to find out that the General was just, firm, and rather fun as commanders go. He'd been reassigned to Captain Zhao's ship after the end of the great Siege, and that had been a nightmare among nightmares by comparison. Jee was rather happy to have the General pick him up again, even if it was completely out of the blue and for nebulous purposes.

That was before he realized that the General considered himself retired and was no longer interested in commanding anyone to do anything. The child he brought on board, though, took over control of the ship from his uncle with horrifying speed and determination. Zuko was not a kind and caring boy. He was a self-centered little demon with a temper like five vats of blasting jelly, and from the very first time he opened his mouth, Jee knew that there would be no getting along with him.

Zuko wasn't worse than Zhao, but only because he was so much easier to dismiss. He would have been a contender if he'd just been bigger. Jee did try to take him seriously at first -because he was a prince, for the General's sake, and because that strange injury looked damned painful and Jee wasn't heartless. But he just couldn't do it. Zuko was patently ignorant about what it took to run a ship, barely competent at firebending, unbalanced, and phenomenally rude. Within a week, Jee gave up on him and did what he always did when settling in to survive a commander he couldn't respect. He did his job on the ship, ignored Zuko as thoroughly as he could, and coated his attitude with a layer of superficial politeness so that he couldn't be accused of outright mutiny. Zuko wasn't entirely stupid. He noticed what Jee was doing and tried to bring him under control again, mostly by yelling more and louder. Unlike Zhao, though, the brat didn't have the balls to follow through on his threats or the authority to make them sound even a little serious. Jee just wasn't intimidated by superior officers who couldn't look him in the eyes unless they stood on a bucket.

Zuko made himself extremely difficult to ignore, though. It didn't help that the General let his nephew get away with absolutely anything. Half of the men Jee had recruited for the Yuan's journey had served under the General before, and they didn't understand why he let Zuko run them ragged, insult them, and belittle them for trying to do their jobs in spite of a bratty prince getting in their way. They were used to the General giving a damn about the little people. Now the only thing he seemed to care about was drinking tea, playing pai sho, and staring at Zuko's back with an expression that was disturbingly reminiscent of how he'd looked at Lu Ten whenever the lad used to depart for battle.

After a while, though, even the General seemed to notice that morale on board was comparable to that on a very noisy graveyard. He picked himself up and became a little more like the cheerful man Jee remembered. The good old tradition of music night was reinstated. The General even dragged along his little demon nephew, who turned out to be a surprisingly good tsungi hornist. Zuko knew all the General's favorite songs, as did Jee, so they could play together without having to exchange words. It was oddly pleasant.

After a few weeks, however, Zuko seemed to decide that he hated fun and stopped showing up to music night. Jee went back to ignoring him. If only Zuko had done him the same courtesy, life on board could have been quite bearable.

---

Entry in the captain's log book of the light patrol cruiser Yuan

Sixth year of Suiseirei Era, seventh month, day 16.

On course to pass Chameleon Bay tomorrow. Will be giving it a wide berth because of unconfirmed reports about a fleet of Water ships patrolling in the vicinity. Weather still good. No incidents and nothing of note, save for observation from pikeman Shi that Prince Zuko has not said "Avatar" even once today and must be coming down with something. We can only hope.

The crew wants to throw a party to commemorate the second anniversary of our departure from the Fire Nation, but General Iroh has forbidden any and all celebrations. He does think that the ship needs more "beauty and cheer" and wishes to make port so he can go shopping. Stores of rice and dried fruit have been low since the minor rat plague we had two weeks ago, so we will lay anchor at the first colonial port we pass.

---

Jee wasn't sure if his ship needed any additional beauty or cheer. It was sadly lacking in beauty, that was true; over half of the men were downright old, and most of the handful of younger ones hadn't ended up stuck on the Yuan because of their pretty faces. Zuko actually wasn't bad, in profile and from his good side, but he seemed to go out of his way to scrunch his face up in the ugliest expressions he could manage.

Not that they really needed beauty on board. Cheer was more important to morale, but there was already plenty of cheer, in Jee's opinion. Maybe even a little too much.

"So I said, "Would you like to blow my tsungi horn?", and he..."

Jee slammed his hand down flat on the main table of the mess room, cutting Lei off in mid-sentence. "One more tsungi horn joke out of you and I'm banning you from music night for a month. Enough."

The helmsman pulled a face and took a very, very grumpy sip from his mug of paint stripper. It seemed to cheer him up immediately. He turned to Jee and held up a not very steady finger.

"Wait, sir. You'll love this one. It's about him."

Jee sighed. He held out his own mug to the left, and felt it grow heavier as either his first mate Haisu or Cook refilled it. "No. Shut up. Not one more tsungi horn joke, even if it's about Zuko."

Lei's eyes widened, and his finger came up again. He shook it in Jee's face in what he probably thought was a threatening manner. "You said his name, sir! You'll make him sneeze and he'll be mad. Madder."

Jee resisted the urge to blow a lick of flame at the finger. Agni, what had possessed him to bring Lei on board? Surely he could have found a better piece of drunken scum floating around in the royal harbor.

"Oh, not that again," Shi interjected from somewhere behind Haisu. "He doesn't sneeze when you say his name."

Haisu nodded sagely. "If people sneezed whenever someone says their name, the Avatar would come over here and make the prince cut it out already."

Jee snickered, but Lei's stupid finger was waving in the air again, this time poking dangerously close to Haisu's right eye.

"You can't say that word either! It summons him! I'm telling you, he hears it even when I'm up on the bridge and he's down in the hold, he hears it and..."

"Shut up," Jee snapped. "He doesn't. Avatar, Avatar."

"Lieutenant!"

Dead silence fell around the table. Jee closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and looked over his shoulder. He focused on the lintel over the door instead of on Zuko's nasty face. At least the lintel wasn't glowering at him.

"Yes, sir?" He put extra effort into sounding uninterested. He'd been enjoying his break, and if Zuko had anything he wanted to rant about, he'd just have to bother someone who was on watch.

"Straighten out this ship," the brat said. There was a tiny, peculiar note of panic in his voice, and it made Jee sit up straight and take a closer look at him. Zuko was in his sleeping robe. He looked mussed and angry. "The lookout just spotted Zhao's ship. He'll be here in ten minutes."

Jee swallowed a curse. He hated Zhao with a passion he rarely reserved for any superior officer, no matter how repugnant. Zuko didn't even come close. They'd run into Zhao's ship no less than eight times over the past two years, and Jee was beginning to think that the miserable bastard followed them around on purpose, just because he enjoyed wiping his filthy boots on Jee's deck and gloating at him about how low he'd fallen while Zhao kept climbing the ranks.

Actually, Zhao mostly seemed to be jumping on their backs at every opportunity because he loved baiting Zuko. He rarely spared Jee more than a supercilious greeting and a nasty little smile or two. But that didn't mean he couldn't take it personally.

"Yes, sir," Jee said, but Zuko had already disappeared, probably to his cabin to put on his armor. Raised voices and running feet sounded on deck. Cook knew the drill, and he was already gathering the mugs with one hand and wiping down the table with his apron.

"Haisu, Shi, get this drunken idiot into his cabin and make sure he stays there," Jee ordered, pointing at Lei. "Find Bao and Lin Wei as well. I want all five of you invisible for however long this takes. Haisu, you're babysitting."

They couldn't leave anyone or anything in view that might indicate weakness, because Zhao would notice and twist it into something he could mock Zuko, Jee, or the whole crew for. He always found something, of course, but Jee rather shared Zuko's desire not to give Zhao more ammunition than they could help. Lei was too drunk to leave in sight, and Shi, Bao and Lin Wei were the youngest of the crew after Zuko. None of them were very thick-skinned, and they looked it. Jee preferred not to expose his more vulnerable crew members to Zhao at all. Most of the time, though, Zuko succeeded in drawing nearly all of Zhao's fire without even trying. It was unsettling. Not that Jee didn't understand the urge to poke Zuko with a stick until his bald head popped; he felt it himself all the time. But something about the blatant, almost giddy delight that Zhao took in needling Zuko struck Jee as simply perverse.

But that was the way things were, and they wouldn't change until Zuko grew up a bit and learned to let mockery go over his head like the rest of them. All Jee could do now was get his ship in order. Haisu and Shi were pulling a protesting Lei out of his chair, and Cook had disappeared to the galley with the mugs and bottles. Jee stamped out of the room to take charge of the chaos outside. There was still time to clear the deck and the corridors of all ropes, loose pieces of equipment, obvious coal stains, and people who didn't look their best, but they were cutting it close already.

Only moments before Zhao's much taller ship drew up alongside them, Zuko finally reappeared. He still looked flushed and queasy, and he was fumbling with the left-hand ties of his shoulder guard as he walked. The right-hand ties were tangled in a hasty and inelegant knot. Jee was still so preoccupied with the need to straighten things out that he didn't even think before catching Zuko's arm and wrenching it up so he could reach the ties.

"Hold still," he snapped. "Sir."

Zuko did hold still, but only for a moment. Then the shock of getting manhandled seemed to wear off, and he jerked on his arm while shooting Jee an impossibly filthy glare. "Don't touch me!"

Jee ignored him, pulled at the left set of ties until they looked tidy, and moved to Zuko's other side to correct the right-hand knots. Zuko tried to hit him in the gut with his elbow, but it wasn't a very effective angle.

"Get off me!"

"I'm helping you," Jee grunted, not letting go.

"I don't need your help!"

"Lieutenant," said the General, suddenly appearing right next to them. "Calm down. Thank you. I'll take it from here."

He inserted himself between Jee and Zuko without waiting for either of them to react. Jee had to take a step back to avoid bumping into the General's ample backside, and he growled and threw up his hands in frustration. All right, maybe he'd been a little grabby there, but he'd been trying to help. Ungrateful little shit. He glared at Zuko, but the brat only had eyes for his uncle.

"Lieutenant Jee meant well, Prince Zuko. We are all just a little nervous." The General picked up the shoulder straps Jee had dropped and began tying them deftly. Zuko turned towards him, hunching in on himself. The General whispered something.. Zuko gave him a nod, lifted his chin, and squared his shoulders. He locked his legs so that he wouldn't stumble when the heavy gang plank of Zhao's ship crashed down and made the deck shake.

As Jee assumed a similar stance, he felt a brief, mad impulse to go stand in front of Zuko. The brat looked small. It didn't feel right to put a half-grown man-child in front and hide all the adults in the back when someone like Zhao came calling. Most of the time Zhao was only infuriatingly rude in a polite way, but he could turn cruel and downright brutal without the slightest of warnings.

Of course, sometimes he preferred to be openly instead of politely rude. The first time they'd run into him had been just after Zuko's bandage came off, when the scar was still a puffy mess of lurid colors. The first words out of Zhao's mouth had been "My, it looks even more ghastly than the day you got it".

When Zhao came striding down the gang plank, it was with his usual swagger, but his face was mostly expressionless. Jee watched as he exchanged bows and greetings with Zuko and the General. He wasn't raising his voice so that everyone on deck would be able to hear it, like he tended to do when voicing some particularly cutting insult, and he didn't try to loom over Zuko or leer at him. He just took a scroll from one of his guards, unrolled it, and held it up. It looked like a wanted poster. Jee couldn't make out the face on it from this distance, but Zuko and the General both glanced at it and shook their heads immediately.

When Zuko still wasn't showing any signs of anger after at least another minute of conversation, Jee began to relax. Apparently, this wasn't one of the social calls Zhao was so fond of. He had some sort of actual, official, pressing affair to discuss that had nothing to do with pestering people who were just sailing around and minding their own business. Hopefully that meant he wouldn't stay long, and that he'd refrain from winding Zuko up into a little ball of impotent rage that the brat would be taking out Jee and the rest of the crew for days afterward.

"Lieutenant!", Zuko called.

Rhino balls. Jee had been hoping he'd be kept out of it this time. He walked over to the little group, trying not to tense up visibly, but Zhao barely glanced at him.

Zuko handed him the poster. It depicted a shaggy-headed and not incredibly sharp-looking fellow. "This is Chey the Deserter. He abandoned his position in our army almost a year ago. He's still on the run, and someone saw him in Hokkyo ten days ago."

Damn it all. They'd made port in Hokkyo nine days ago.

"We need to make sure he isn't hiding anywhere on board," Zuko went on. He was clearly taking it seriously, but then, he took everything seriously. The fact that Zhao seemed to be doing the same was more alarming. "Have our firebenders escort Captain Zhao's men while they search the ship. The fugitive is extremely dangerous."

Jee frowned. He'd never heard of any Army deserters who weren't tracked down and dealt with in a matter of days, besides Admiral Jeong Jeong, of course. Jee was about as eager to let Zhao's men rummage through the Yuan as he was to let Zhao rummage through the contents of his underwear, but the idea of this desperate outlaw hiding out somewhere on his ship was even less appealing.

"Yes, sir," he nodded, rolling up the poster and casting a look around the deck to see which of their benders was already in earshot.

Two dozen of Zhao's firebenders were crawling all over the Yuan in minutes. Jee remained on deck and tried to ignore them. The General, bless him, had begun distracting Zhao with some kind of rambling story that involved expansive arm gestures and tiny smoke effects from his mouth and fingers. Judging from the look on Zhao's face, it was about tea, and monumentally uninteresting.

Zhao was glaring over the General's head to where Zuko was standing. He was obviously eager to get in a brief round of prince-baiting now that his official business was being handled, but the General was an immovable obstacle when he chose to be one. Zuko had removed himself from Zhao's immediate vicinity and taken several paces towards Jee. His eyes were glued on a flock of sparrow-gulls that was conveniently flying in a direction opposite to that where Zhao stood milling about. That was a rather good idea and Jee would have liked to ape it, but it was his job to keep an eye on any threats to his ship's commander, and Zhao was definitely that.

The General babbled on, and the corners of Zhao's mouth twisted further and further in steadily building annoyance. His narrowed eyes were now going from Zuko to Jee and back again. Jee realized he was standing exactly where Zhao wanted to be standing, almost right next to Zuko, and barely held back a grin. The obnoxious bastard was jealous.

Time to rub it in. Jee tugged part of his left sleeve out of its brace, pulled out a small bag, and warmed it with a quick burst of heat from his palm. The sharp, spicy smell of fire flakes filled the air. They were much better when eaten fresh at festivals, but Cook's recipe wasn't half bad.

Jee took a step closer to Zuko and held out the bag. "Fire flake, sir?"

Zuko shot the bag and Jee's face a suspicious look, but he reached out almost at once and plucked up a few steaming flakes. He didn't say anything. That didn't bother Jee; he'd decided years ago that the brat was probably just allergic to expressions of gratitude or appreciation. Besides, out of the corner of his eye, he could see Zhao's face starting to purple rather beautifully. That was more than reward enough for sacrificing part of his evening snack to the brat prince.

Zuko might have an absolutely boundless talent for making Jee's life miserable, but whenever Zhao came calling, Jee was always reminded that things could be so much worse. His two years on Zhao's ship had been far beyond miserable and down into absolutely hellish. There hadn't even been much camaraderie among the crew that could have eased the weight of Zhao's relentless lack of basic humanity. Zhao had come down savagely on any attempt at levity that sounded as if it might be at his expense.

The one time they'd succeed in making a laughing stock of him had also ended badly, but it was glorious while it lasted. It had started when one of the sailors made up a dirty poem that told the absolutely untrue story of how Captain Zhao had once tried to dishonor a Water woman, who had taken out a whalebone knife, cut his balls clean off, and made them into barbarian soup. Jee and a few other more musically inclined crew members had ended up rewriting the poem to fit the tune of "The Girls from Ba Sing Se", and that turned out to be a stroke of absolute brilliance. Every person in the world from the Fire Lord to the lowest fish-munching Water savage knew that particular melody, and in no time, the ditty was all over every Earth Kingdom port. Eventually, inevitably, Zhao heard it somewhere while on business off the ship. The face he'd been wearing when he came storming up the gang plank right afterward was burned into Jee's mind as thoroughly as if it had been done with hot irons.

It had been beautiful for a precious few seconds. But Zhao had rounded on Jee at once, probably because he was the only one on board who was both a musician and a known troublemaker. Since Zhao was obviously interested in violence rather than talk, Jee had assumed a dueling stance and waited for Zhao's forearm to hit his. Zhao had punched him in the face instead.

The scene had been followed by a month of total isolation in the brig and a discharge for bad conduct as soon as the ship returned to the Fire Nation. But the considerable shame of that had been nothing, nothing compared to being beaten like a common dog in front of half of the ship. Firebenders settled their disputes through proper duels, not fisticuffs. Jee was not only a bender but also a warrior. Zhao couldn't have heaped more insult and dishonor on him if he'd tried.

He never should have stopped spreading that song around. Why hadn't he taken advantage of his discharge to get the whole Fire Nation to sing it as well? Maybe it was time to breathe life into his most popular creation again. And there was no time like the present.

Jee began to hum, just loudly enough that the sound would carry to where the General and Zhao were standing. The General would just think it was "The Girls From Ba Sing Se". And if Zhao tried to shut Jee up, he'd end up dropping the topic of his perceived lack of balls right at the feet of the Dragon of the West and Prince Zuko.

"Hmm hmm hmmmm.... The balls of Captain Zhao..."

Zuko froze with his hand in the bag of fire flakes and stared at Jee as if he had two heads. Jee quickly went back to humming instead of singing, looking away to hide his grin. Perhaps he should try teaching the song to the brat one day. It might make him a little less nervous of Zhao.

The idea of teaching Zuko anything was a little absurd, in a sad way. As if the brat would condescend to learn anything at all from a lowly commoner like Jee.

Still, sometimes Jee wished he could just walk up to Zuko, show him what he was doing wrong, explain how it could be fixed, and have him accept the help in the spirit it was given. He wasn't going to try it when Zuko would just glower and snap at him, though. Normal glowering and snapping was just very annoying. But there was a deeply unsettling gleam of distrust and fear in the brat's eyes whenever people tried to offer him assistance, and Jee didn't want that look directed at him. It hurt in a way he couldn't quite put his finger on.

His thoughts were interrupted by an agitated shout from the doorway.

"Sir! Sir! The rhinos!"

It was Shi, looking flustered and absolutely furious. He ran straight up to them and didn't even seem to notice Zhao. Jee opened his mouth to tell the idiot to get the hell back inside -and where was Haisu, damn it? Jee relied on that man- and immediately choked on a fire flake.

Zuko ran right over him while he was still busy clearing his throat.

"What about the rhinos?"

Shi barely hesitated before addressing Zuko instead of Jee. He was panting a little, as if he'd been running up the stairs. "Sir, they're in the rhino hold! I keep telling them there's no fugitives there because the rhinos would crush them, but they won't listen, and they made the rhinos mad and one of them gave a little nip and then they burned it! On the snout!"

If Zhao's goons had really gone poking around among their komodo rhinos, Jee wasn't surprised they'd gotten a little nip or three. Rhinos liked very few humans at all. It made them rather inconvenient means of transport; they could be persuaded to carry people they didn't care for, but only when the person doing the steering was someone they did like, and even that trick only seemed to work on a case-by-case basis. Of all the people on the Yuan, the only ones who could approach the rhinos without having to fear for their extremities were Shi, two of the other pikemen, and oddly enough, Zuko. The General said his nephew was really very good with animals. Jee thought it was more likely that the stubborn and evil-tempered monsters simply recognized Zuko as a kindred spirit.

Shi was the rhinos' main hostler, so it only made sense that he got angry when his animals were harmed. The absolutely murderous expression that slammed over Zuko's face was a bit more surprising. The brat rounded on Zhao and jabbed him, actually jabbed him, in the chest with two fingers.

"Are you stupid? Tell your people to get out of my hold! If they don't know how to handle a rhino, they don't belong there!"

Zhao looked down at the fingers and sighed. "Prince Zuko," he began, slowly and clearly, as if talking to a five-year-old. "They are just beasts. You are young, so perhaps you cannot grasp that capturing a traitor to the Fire Nation is more important than keeping your pets happy. If animal suffering upsets you, perhaps you should go to your room until we're finished."

Zuko snarled and jabbed Zhao's breastplate again. Jee winced, but Zhao didn't retaliate; he still looked somewhere between indulgent and exasperated.

"Fine!", Zuko snapped, whirling around. "I'll flush them out of there myself!" The amount of indignation in his voice was astounding. Jee wondered if Zuko would get this angry if Zhao's goons had burned one of his human crew members instead of one of the evil monsters.

"Prince Zuko, I'm sure it was just a small accident," the General began, but he might as well have tried to reason with the rhinos. Zuko ducked out of his uncle's reach and stormed into the superstructure, Shi right on his heels. The sound of their feet thundering down the metal stairway into the hold sounded very ominous. The General was obviously thinking the same thing, because he mumbled a quick “Excuse me" at Zhao and hurried after Zuko.

"Ah, children," Zhao drawled, looking at the door Zuko and the General had disappeared through.

Jee realized with a stab of real panic that the royals had just left him alone with Zhao. He tried to stare very hard at Zuko's flock of sparrow-gulls, and prayed that Zhao wouldn't notice him if he remained completely immobile. That sometimes worked on moose lions.

Zhao's footsteps came up behind him almost at once.

"Lieutenant. Such a pleasure. We haven't had an opportunity to talk since you were discharged from my ship."

"A pleasure," Jee repeated, taking care not to put any sort of intonation whatsoever in the word. If Zhao wanted to rile him up, he'd have to work for it.

Zhao smiled, relaxed his stance, and began to make a slow full body turn. His eyes seemed to linger over every inch of the Yuan, every bolt on the deck and every scratch on the plating and the walls. It made Jee's skin crawl.

"I do like your ship, Lieutenant. It's very quaint. And there is something to be said for vessels in modest sizes."

There was a double meaning in that sentence that he wasn't catching, Jee was sure of it, but he wasn't about to burden his brain with trying to figure it out. Zhao was infuriating enough when Jee wasn't aware of every single different insult that the bastard worked into his words.

"She's an excellent ship."

Zhao nodded. "It's good that you're content with your lot. Seeing as your quest is impossible, you'll probably be here for the rest of your life." He gestured towards the Yuan's superstructure without looking at it, as if the ship was too embarrassing to even glance at. Jee glowered at the hand. Even the way Zhao moved offended him.

"Prince Zuko would disagree. He's confident we'll succeed." Prince Zuko was also delusional, but Jee would burn his own eyes out before saying a single bad word about the brat prince to Zhao. Right now, Zhao was the enemy and Zuko was on Jee's team, after a fashion.

"Prince Zuko. Ah, yes. It's good to see that you two seem to be getting along better than you used to." Zhao's smile widened, and Jee tensed. "But perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. He has grown a bit. He's rather your favorite size now, isn't he?"

Jee felt his mouth drop open before he could catch himself. Oh, Agni, that was beyond disgusting.

All right, he'd thought about it. Who was he supposed to fantasize about, on a ship full of old people like himself? He'd thought about it rather more times than he cared to admit, maybe. But never for longer than two seconds. Zuko was a child. It was true that Jee liked his partners a good deal younger than he was, and he still cursed the day that he'd let Zhao find out anything at all about his preferences, but that didn't mean he was one of those degenerates who preyed on ship boys and anyone else too small and weedy to fight him off.

Jee enjoyed youth as much as any other man. But most of all, he wanted to feel the warm rush of satisfaction that came when a body moving under his hands suddenly got it -when someone figured out how to breathe with him and keep a rhythm, realized he could trust Jee enough to just shift and roll with the slightest nudge of his fingers, without thinking. Jee liked to feel people change and learn in the knowledge that it was he who had brought it about, and that was all there was to it.

Zhao was still grinning at him. Jee really didn't want to dignify this particular insinuation with an answer, but if he said nothing, Zhao would just assume that he'd hit a nerve. Jee glowered at him and tried to make it obvious from his expression that he thought Zhao was an affront to all living creatures. On a whim, he decided to let some smoke escape from his fists as a warning.

"That is disgusting, sir, and I'll take it as an insult to my honor if you suggest it again."

Zhao smiled wider, and Jee knew he'd made a mistake somehow. "Ah, yes. Of course an honorable man like you has standards, Lieutenant. Disgusting indeed. But really, if you bend him over, you don't have to look at that hideous face. Or perhaps you can put a helmet on him."

Jee gaped at him, absolutely speechless. He didn't have to concentrate to make his fists smoke anymore, but Zhao just kept talking. "It's really quite a shame. He used to be so much better looking, back when I used to visit the Fire Lord's palace. Very handsome lad."

"I wouldn't know," Jee growled.

"You don't?" Zhao paused, and then his oily smile suddenly took on a very, very cruel quality. "You don't know how he was injured, lieutenant?"

"No. We weren't told, and my crew isn't interested in gossip." That was quite possibly the biggest lie Jee had ever uttered in his life, and from the glint of victory in Zhao's eyes, he knew it.

"Ah, of course you weren't told. If I had done what he did, I certainly wouldn't want my subordinates to know. It was a shameful affair. He wouldn't have gotten burned at all if he hadn't been so incompetent. Weakness and cowardice are so hard to watch, and one expects better from a prince. If he'd even just refrained from begging and crying, but..." He trailed off. "He dishonored himself completely. Irredeemably, I'm afraid."

Jee had to work not to roll his eyes. Did Zhao really believe he could make anyone think differently about Zuko with such vague and completely ludicrous insinuations? Perhaps Jee knew next to nothing about where the brat came from or what went on in his head, but you learned a thing or two about a person's character during two years on vast and dangerous seas. Whatever else was wrong with Zuko, he was tough as nails, and absolutely fearless in times of crisis. Jee had never seen him shed a single tear, and the idea of him begging... The rhinos would sing harmonies before Zuko ever begged for anything.

That he knew it was all hogwash didn't mean he was going to let it slide, though. Jee turned so he was facing Zhao fully and took a long and very deliberate step forward into the man's personal space. Zhao's sneer evaporated instantly. The one nice thing about him was that he was so easy to anger; if you were a lowly subordinate like Jee, all it took was one gesture of clear and open defiance.

"Stop spouting filthy lies about my commander on my ship, or I'll shut you up myself."

Zhao was nearly spitting in Jee's face when he answered, but that was hardly the worst insult he'd ever inflicted on him. "Take my word for it, Lieutenant. Your high-born commander put himself exactly down on your level, and that's where he's going to stay." He sneered and drew away from Jee, as if he was contagious. "I'm surprised you're not rutting with him yet. You're the best he can get, and he's the closest you will ever come again to touching anything that still carries the slightest whiff of nobility to it. But maybe he just needs a little more time. He was always slow."

Jee bared his teeth, making sure Zhao could see the sparks in his mouth. Perhaps the bastard had forgotten that Jee had a short temper of his own, and that he had plenty of bending skill even if he lacked Zhao's raw power. "Pushing it, sir."

Zhao's scowl darkened, but before he could form a retort, one of his own firebenders appeared at his elbow.

"There's no sign of the fugitive, sir."

"Fine," Zhao snarled, and the man leaned backwards so quickly that he almost seemed to lose his balance. "Take everyone back to ship. Prince Zuko and his men have important duties to fulfill, and we mustn't waste their valuable time."

Jee said almost said something about what else Zhao was wasting. He contained it, but Zhao seemed to read his mind somehow and got in his face again.

"Make your move soon, Lieutenant. You're gray already. And that at your age. You don't want to become so ugly that even your grotesque little commander won't want you."

"Turned you down, did he?" It was out before Jee could even start thinking.

The fury that suddenly twisted Zhao's whole face was gone again almost the moment it appeared. But there was something so fierce about it, something so out of proportion with the jibe, that it came down on Jee's own anger like a wave of icy polar water.

No. That piece of rhino dung couldn't actually have tried to...

Zhao glanced at something over Jee's shoulder, and his smile returned. It was absolutely savage.

"I don't discuss my private affairs. But take it from me, Lieutenant." He raised his voice. "Prince Zuko looked perfect when he was on his knees. Like he was born to it."

Jee punched him. At least, he tried to, but his right arm was grabbed mid-swing and jerked to the side with enough force to make his shoulder scream. He caught a flash of a striped white face mask -one of Zhao's guards, of course, they'd have come closer as soon as Jee approached their captain, stupid- as he stopped resisting and rolled with the pull on his arm. It was that or dislocate something. He threw out his other arm just in time to break his fall and avoid crashing face first onto the deck.

The weight of another guard came down on him, hard, and his head was suddenly yanked up by the hair -Agni, that hurt. The deck receded all by itself and he knew what was coming, but one of his arms was stuck under him and the other was still being twisted backwards. He couldn't grab, couldn't spit flame, couldn't kick, couldn't do anything except watch the deck approach again, prepare for the familiar but horrible sensation of his nose breaking, and try to at least not pass out from the shock.

But instead of pain, there came a furious shriek and the roar of flames above. Close, less than an arm's length above his head, but just too far away to be dangerous, and not that there was anything he could do in this position anyway. But the weight on his back and the hand in his hair abruptly disappeared, and then only heat was slamming into Jee's back.

He tensed and prepared to roll away rather than get up, but when he turned his head to the side, he saw Zhao's boots standing right in front of him. Just in reach, yes, the stupid bastard had actually stayed in reach. He braced his arms and concentrated on pumping chi down towards his feet. Zhao was tall and heavy, but a two-legged kick boosted by some flame would be enough to sweep his feet right out from under him. Jee was far too old for bending acrobatics and spinning his whole body on his hands would probably pop his shoulder for real, but it would be worth it.

He was just about to heave his legs off the deck when he felt another burst of flame shoot over his back, too high to see more of it a fierce yellow glow. Zhao had to take a step backwards to deflect it. The fire was followed immediately by a whoosh of displaced air, and then Jee's vision was blocked by a new pair of boots. They were much smaller and pointed away from him, towards Zhao.

"GET OFF MY SHIP!"

Zuko. Jee cringed and shut his eyes as ripple of pure, bitter shame ran down his spine. Of course, of course Zuko had been standing right there, it had been so obvious just from the look on Zhao's face. Jee had been too busy mouthing off like a perfect idiot to notice that his own commander had come up right behind him. Stupid, stupid, useless.

"Ah, Prince Zuko. If you're finished cuddling your rhinos, I believe your sheepdog here also needs some petting." Zhao didn't sound very smug anymore.

Jee growled. He pulled himself to his feet, ignoring the popping of his knees and the ache in his shoulder, and looked around to take stock of the situation. Zhao, Zuko, one firebender guard standing up, one down but also moving to get up. There were no others anywhere near them, but he could hear the sound of many running feet coming up the stairs to the deck. The General was nowhere in sight. Jee kept his eyes on the two guards but didn't lift his hands. Now that he was no longer getting his face ground into his own deck, fighting sounded like a much less attractive option.

He glanced over his shoulder. Zuko was in a bending stance, but he wasn't making the proper challenging gesture with his left hand, and Zhao didn't look as if he was about to launch an attack. He looked livid, though.

"LEAVE!", Zuko roared. Jee couldn't see his face from this angle, but something told him that he didn't really want to know what the brat looked like right now.

Zhao tried to smile, but it looked more like he wanted to rip Zuko's head off. He straightened, brought his hands together, and gave Zuko every last inch of the deep bow that royalty was entitled to.

"Certainly, my Prince. We'll remove ourselves from your space now. Thank you for your forbearance."

Jee didn't take his eyes off Zhao's retreating figure until he and every last one of his men were back on their own ship, and he relaxed only after they'd pulled up their gang plank, started their engines, and were floating out of sight behind the Yuan's tower.

When he turned to Zuko, he saw that the brat was standing more or less where Zhao had left him. The fighting stance was gone. He was still looking away from Jee, though, and his whole posture radiated such a phenomenal amount of tension that he looked as if the breeze that was just picking up might be enough to snap him in two.

"Thank you, sir," Jee said to the back of Zuko's head. He meant it. The brat had probably just defended him for the same reason he'd defended his rhinos, but Jee was still grateful. He'd be standing here with a broken face if Zuko hadn't knocked that guard off his back.

Zuko didn't react. The absolute silence was rather alarming, and Jee let his eyes roam around the deck again in search of the only person who had a small chance of stopping whatever was brewing inside the brat.

Still no sign of him. Haisu was standing a few paces away, though, looking extremely sheepish and guilty. He was probably expecting Jee to chew him out for letting Shi escape. That would have to wait until later.

"Get the General," Jee mouthed. Haisu nodded back and disappeared into the hold again.

"What did he tell you?", Zuko snapped abruptly, without turning around. He still sounded furious and most definitely embarrassed, but something hysterical was bubbling just under the anger. There would be shouting soon.

The prospect didn't annoy Jee half as much as it usually would. He rather wanted to shout himself.

"Just lies, sir." He tried to sound convinced.

Apparently, he'd failed, because Zuko whirled around. His face was a picture of pure fury, but Jee had seen that particular expression on him so often that it had nearly lost all meaning. Jee resisted the urge to smile in relief. He didn't know what he'd been expecting, but this was familiar enough.

"Tell me what he said. He was talking about this, wasn't he!?" Zuko didn't point at his face, but he didn't have to.

Jee nodded. If he denied it, Zuko wouldn't believe him anyway.

“Yes, sir. But it was all lies." He thought for a moment, trying to find the right thing to say. “I know you'd never disgrace yourself the way he said you did."

He tried to make it sound reassuring, because he thought he had some notion of what the brat was going through right now. Accusations of dishonor hurt no matter the circumstances. To have them delivered behind one's back to a relentlessly disobedient and unfriendly subordinate, though... Zuko probably thought Jee was going to spread Zhao's drivel around the mess room first chance he got.

Not that he actually expected Zuko to believe any reassurances that came out of his mouth. Zuko never believed him on anything. Still, the brat had done him a good turn just now, and Jee felt like he had to make the effort. He kept his eyes on Zuko's face and prayed he'd see at least a small glimmer of acknowledgment.

Zuko maintained his furious glare. A few seconds went by and Jee began to hope, but then Zuko bared his sharp little teeth and opened his mouth. Jee just sighed very quietly and braced for impact.

It didn't come.

Zuko's mask of complete outrage wobbled, crumpled horribly, and for one hair-raising second, there was no doubt at all in Jee's mind that the brat was going to burst into tears right there and then.

But the nightmarish sight vanished as if it had been no more than a spirit trick, and all of a sudden Zuko was only a finger's length away from Jee's nose and snarling like a rabid tigerdillo. If Jee's firebending reflexes had been even a little slower, Zuko's breath would have cooked his face right from his skull.

“Repeat one word of this, and I will kill you."

And then he was gone, winking out of Jee's line of vision before Jee had even started understanding the words. He moved from right there to far away in the door of the superstructure so fast that he might as well have airbended himself, and disappeared into the darkness of the ship.

Jee gaped at the empty doorway. He knew he was disappointed, insulted, and far beyond angry, but his mind refused to settle down long enough for the emotions to actually take hold. That unbelievable little monster...

It felt like hours later when a warm, steady presence materialized at his side.

“Lieutenant? Is everything all right?"

Jee looked down. It was the General, finally, finally. Much too late, but Jee was so ridiculously glad to see the old man and the normality he brought that he didn't really care. He quickly straightened up and tried to make his face settle back into a more normal frown.

It seemed to be good enough for the General. He patted Jee's arm reassuringly.

"My apologies for leaving you waiting so long, Lieutenant. The situation in the rhino hold was a bit of a muddle. But no one is hurt, and it seems the poor animal that was injured will recover." He sounded dreadfully tired. "Do I hear a rumor that you almost hit Captain Zhao?"

Jee stood up a bit straighter. "I'm afraid so, sir."

"Why, if I may ask?"

"He was speaking ill of Prince Zuko." He couldn't believe he'd spoken up for the little shit. He couldn't believe it.

The General gave him a very doubtful look. "You speak ill of Prince Zuko. Frequently."

It took Jee a few moments to remember exactly why he'd decided not to let Zhao's slights against the brat slide. The old man would probably detect any untruths. He also wouldn't take kindly to being told that his beloved nephew was an ungrateful, crazy beast from the underworld that had shape-shifted into human form and had been fooling him for all these years.

"Not in the way Zha... Captain Zhao was doing, sir. He doesn't know the prince. He doesn't know what he's talking about," Jee ground out.

"Neither do you," the General sighed. "And neither do I, I'm afraid. Where is my nephew?"

Jee stared, puzzled. "He already went inside, sir."

"Very well. I'll go speak with him." Suddenly the General smiled, and Jee felt better right away. The old man had a rare gift for pulling everyone around him into his own mood completely unintentionally. It worked even on a sourpuss like Jee.

"I can't say I approve of inflicting violence on esteemed officers of the Fire Navy, Lieutenant. But thank you for defending Zuko in my stead. I'm very glad he has you to rely on."

Then he sighed again, although he didn't look quite as defeated as before. "I assume Zuko didn't appreciate your assistance, though. He must have been very cross with you. My apologies for his behavior."

“It's all right, sir," Jee said, but he must have pulled some kind of face, because the General gave him a tiny frown that was half exasperation and half rebuke. Jee had seen it before often enough to recognize it. The General turned it on anyone who complained about Zuko, even when the complaints were justified.

"Remember that Zuko is young, Lieutenant, and not yet very good at figuring out for himself how those around him should be treated. He mostly reflects back what others show him."

That was a nice excuse. Jee resolved to use it for himself the next time Zuko accused him of disrespect.

---

Various crude and inexpert drawings on the door of the latrines

A rhino and Captain Zhao in a compromising position
A rhino and Captain Zhao in another compromising position
Captain Zhao doing something unspeakable with a tsungi horn
Prince Zuko carrying Lieutenant Jee in his arms, one foot on a fallen Captain Zhao's head


Written with a sooty finger across the drawings

For the last time, that is not what happened.

I gave you lot permission to draw on this one door because you'll cover my whole ship in graffiti otherwise. If you're just going to abuse my generosity to spread lies and rhino pornography, I'll withdraw it entirely. One warning only. Keep in mind that an person who isn't of age also has to use this room.

Lieutenant Jee


Unsigned, written under Lieutenant Jee's note

I'm pretty sure he drew at least one of those pictures, sir.

---

Note attached to Lieutenant Jee's cabin door

Sir, could you please stop looking the other way whenever Prince Zuko yells at you to come over? It just makes him yell at other people instead. I know he's been shouting at you a lot more than before and I don't know why, and I'm really sorry he's being such a pain. But I don't think you're helping, and we, that is, me and everyone else except the General, are all really fed up with this. Even the rhinos are starting to get upset.

It's possible that he isn't actually trying to antagonize you, sir. I think he might just want attention.

Shi (and Haisu too)


Paper attached to the wall of the mess room, in the handwriting of several different people

Lost on the ship this week:

A new ink stone (Lieutenant Jee)
A razor (Lieutenant Jee)
Pair of gloves (Bao)
A wrench (Haisu)
The spare sextant (Lei)
One left slipper (Lieutenant Jee)
Half of the spoons in the galley (I swear, they were gone when I came in this morning. Cook)
A can of boot polish (Lieutenant Jee)
Two spare pipa strings (Lieutenant Jee)


Written at the bottom of the paper

This is more than we lost in the last two months put together.

To the indescribable moron who has taken up petty theft as a hobby: you have my full attention, and when I find you, I will whip you until you cry.

Lieutenant Jee

---

They made port at a good-sized colonial town three days south of Chameleon Bay. It turned out that decent pipa strings were some sort of exotic rarity in these godforsaken parts, and Jee ended up spending a ridiculous amount of money replacing the ones that had disappeared right from his cabin. After the dirt grubbers had taken most of his hard-earned wages, Jee returned to the ship just in time to be thrust in the middle of a completely ridiculous argument between Bao and Shi. Neither of them were benders, so the disagreement was being settled with a bloody fistfight rather than a civilized fire duel. When Jee stepped between them to break it up, Bao accidentally socked him in the eye.

The General walked up the gang plank moments later, back from his own shopping trip for some "beauty and cheer". He was carrying a mechanical wind-up bird.

If Jee had been paying attention, he might have found the General's beaming smile a tad alarming, but he was busy yelling. The rest of the crew on deck gave the strange bird no more than a few snickers and raised eyebrows. As soon as the General put it down on the deck so he could go make some tea, however, Zuko turned up. He gave the bird the evil eye for a few long moments and then began to circle it, from a distance, as if he expected it to pounce at him. Jee ignored the antics in favor of thinking up something disgusting that he could make Bao and Shi do.

Over the next few days, Zuko's paranoia turned out to be very regrettably justified. Not that the bird wasn't an admirable piece of workmanship. It was shaped like the hawk-penguins whose sharp beaks they had all learned to fear during their visit to the South Pole, back in the first year of their journey. It could move. The machinery inside was so fine that the whole thing was only knee-high. People would have been tripping over it all day long if it didn't announce itself with a constant stream of absolutely infernal noise. It produced a very loud and shrill bird call, over and over, all the time. The whole crew grumbled that the bird was unnatural and that the never-ending patter of its metal feet on their metal deck reverberated through the whole ship, from the bridge to the cabins to the very bottom of the hold. It waddled with astonishing speed, just like a real hawk-penguin when it smelled fresh Fire Nation fingers. Whenever it encountered an obstacle, it kept bumping into it until its momentum turned it in a more accessible direction before waddling on to spread its cacophony elsewhere.

The General was entirely alone in his adoration of his ingenious new toy. Zuko's good eye twitched madly whenever the bird was in earshot, which was almost all the time. Jee could commiserate with the brat prince -a strange sensation if there ever was one. His own fingers wouldn't stop jerking in time with the noise, and he imagined his facial expression was now permanently stuck on "kill". The General seemed to enjoy seeing the entire ship united in something for once, even if it was suffering. He only stopped winding the bird up when he was asleep.

---

Paper attached tot the wall of the mess


Monthly watch schedule:

Morning watch, 0400 to 0800: Red team (Peng, Haisu, Sen, Lin Wei, Bao, Kang, Bai)

Forenoon watch, 0800 to 1200: Black team (General Iroh, Cook, Lin Ming, Lei, Cao, Jiang, Tan)

Afternoon watch Screaming watch Afternoon watch Screaming watch Afternoon watch, 1200 to 1600: Gold team (Lieutenant Jee, Prince Zuko, Shi, Niu, Wu, Yuchi, Liao)

Dog watch, 1600 to 2000: Red team

Evening watch, 2000 to 0000: Black team (minus General Iroh)

Midnight watch, 0000 to 0400: Gold team (minus Prince Zuko)


Written at the bottom of the watch schedule in a different and much more elegant hand

Dear hard-working and justifiably annoyed crew. The afternoon watch may not be renamed to reflect the behavior of Lieutenant Jee and Prince Zuko. Please stop trying. I am aware that you only mean to be helpful and inspire your superior officers to treat each other with more kindness and respect, but you really are making it worse. The new watch teams will be decided by lottery in only one week. Let us have patience until then.

General Iroh

---

Six days after Zhao's visit and three days after the fateful morning when his ship had been taken over by a bird, Jee was enjoying a rare moment of pure and blessed silence. The midnight watch had just ended, and with the General having gone to bed four hours earlier, the bird had mercifully lost steam and had stopped its screeching and clattering.

Jee bid his fellow watchstanders a good night, left his armor in his cabin, and took off along the dark corridors in the direction of the shower room. The Yuan's showers were simple but ingenious contraptions. Water was pumped up along the ship's main boiler, and by the time it reached deck level, it was so piping hot that the non-benders on crew often complained that they were cooked like sharklobsters every time they washed. It was still sea water, but hot sea water was sheer bliss as far as Jee was concerned. Few people in the Fire Navy appreciated just how precious on-ship plumbing really was. Jee had seen the inside of many Earth Kingdom junks and even a few captured Water Tribe sloops, and he could compare. Of course people survived in whatever way they could on the ocean, but the sheer primitiveness of those floating heaps of planks was absolutely breathtaking. Never mind their general lack of sophistication or even anything resembling engines; junks and sloops were about as comfortable as wet fish crates. They were cold and they stank. They didn't have a proper galley that allowed for proper cooking. Everyone had to sleep in sacks that dangled from the ceiling instead of in warm bunks with sheets and a mattress. The latrines were just stinking holes at the bow of the ships, right on deck, fully exposed.

There was such a thing as bearing the normal amount of discomfort that came with living at sea, and then there was crapping outside in the middle of a screaming gale with waves like liquid ice tearing the skin right from your ass. Complaining about anything and everything was one of Jee's favorite pastimes, but he knew he had it good. That was, most of the time and in comparison with most people in the world. The past week had been nothing short of horrible. First Zhao, then the thief on board, then Bao rattling half of his teeth loose, then the thrice-cursed bird, and always, non-stop, night and day, Zuko. At this point, five minutes in a hot shower sounded like an eternity in paradise.

Jee turned the last corner before the shower room and almost yelped when something sharp knocked him very hard and very painfully in the shin. He fell into a bending stance out of pure reflex, dropping his towel, and stared down his outstretched arm.

It was the mechanical bird. Jee goggled down at it for a moment before he remembered that the shower room was on the same level as the deck, meaning there were no stairs that could stop the creature from navigating around this part of the ship. It was standing in the middle of the corridor. Its beady glass eyes were fixed on Jee's legs, which were protected only by the thin and faded cotton of his sleeping pants. He briefly, desperately wished for his boots.

Then he looked from his still-clenched fist to the bird. It was immobilized and trapped, and its only ally was snoring away in a cabin far above this corridor.

Water was running behind the door of the shower room just a few steps ahead, but whoever was in there wouldn't know a thing if Jee destroyed the bird quickly and maybe stuffed the evidence out of sight in the air duct up ahead. He wasn't likely to get another chance like this before the creature drove him to murder. The idea of destroying something the General liked didn't sit entirely well with Jee, but the old man was easily amused. He'd find another game or loud trinket to bother the rest of them with soon enough.

Decision made, Jee punched out a slow but intensely hot sheet of flame. It enveloped the bird like fiery wrapping paper, and after a moment, the fire began to seep into the metal. It glowed bright red before the bird began to shrivel and collapse in on itself with a loud and almost musical sizzling noise.

Ten seconds later, it was no more than a hissing, smoking lump of scrap on the floor. The head with its staring eyes was still eerily intact.

Jee smiled down at his handiwork. Now that was how it was done. If Zuko had been trying to do this, he'd have used some flashy blast that would have made the bird and half the corridor explode in an inferno of hot, molten metal. Granted, making the bird explode would have been incredibly satisfying, but this way was much neater and more practical. It was also more difficult than any bending Zuko could hope to manage. Stupid little brat.

The water in the shower room had stopped running.

Jee turned on his heel and began to stride towards the nearest corner, trying to run without looking like he was in any hurry. He wasn't fast enough.

"Lieutenant!"

Of course. Who else. The brat prince was excused from night watches by virtue of his station and had a spacious private officer's cabin to mope around in, but he hated being comfortable and happy and well-rested, so he wandered around at all hours of the night like a crazy little insomniac.

Not that Zuko's nocturnal habits were to blame for this situation, really. Jee had been careless enough to get caught, pure and simple, and he'd just have to face the consequences. They were hardly likely to be dramatic. Destruction of royal property was a serious crime in theory, but he was needed on this ship. At worst, he'd have to stand still and undergo Zuko's signature shouting act. Maybe he'd do some kind of demeaning task like scrubbing the latrines afterwards. The Yuan had a prison hold, but even Zuko had never actually ordered anyone to be thrown in there. He probably wanted to keep it free in case they came across the Avatar floating around in a dinghy.

Well. The sooner he got the shouting part over with, the sooner he could go to bed. Jee tried to arrange his face in a politely neutral expression, and turned around.

He looked at Zuko while still in motion, and almost lost his balance.

The brat was leaning out of the open door of the shower room, a long slash of shockingly white skin against the dark plating of the corridor. From the odd way he was angling his upper body, keeping everything below his navel out of sight behind the door jamb, it was obvious that he didn't have a stitch of clothing on. One bare foot curled over the door's raised threshold for balance. Most of his right leg was showing.

His mismatched yellow stare was fixed not on Jee, but on the smoking remains of his uncle's beloved bird. He was dripping wet.

The part of Jee's mind that always made him say very unwise things to the wrong people wondered if Zuko was going to step out of that doorway entirely and do his shouting act buck naked. He might. Royalty wasn't shy, not after being raised with servants to dress them and wash them and probably wipe them down after nature had come calling. Not to mention that after two years on a very small ship, everyone on the crew had seen everyone else in an advanced state of undress dozens of times. Showering and shaving next to the Dragon of the West and his hissy little relative had been a little surreal in the beginning, but Jee had gotten used to much stranger things during a good two decades in the military.

All right, three seconds was already far too long to spend in contemplation of Zuko being naked. Jee tried to think of something else.

It didn't work.

Zuko still wasn't moving or speaking. Jee stared so hard it made his eyeballs hurt, and he realized with a thrill of horror that he couldn't have looked away from the brat even if ten Water savages had suddenly turned up and tried to club him over the head.

There was no end to the expanse of skin in front of him. Zuko definitely hadn't been this tall or this well-muscled the last time Jee had bothered to give him a sideways glance in the showers. Since when did the brat have calves that looked as if he could probably kick right through Jee's cabin door? Since when did he have shoulders? How old could he even be, fourteen? No, he'd had a birthday not long after they left the Fire Nation, and they'd been at sea for over two years -he had to be fifteen at the very least. Almost sixteen, if he wasn't already. Unbelievable how time could fly.

Wait.

The brat prince actually was of fuckable age?

Zuko's head snapped up entirely without warning, as if he'd heard the thought. Jee made the mistake of looking at his face and -holy Agni in his heaven.

If Jee were the all-powerful Avatar, he'd have started running.

"Stop!”, Zuko barked when Jee actually took a step back.

He stopped. Blinked. The brat prince had just managed to scare him into obeying an order. Oh, this was bad, but at least Zuko seemed just as surprised as Jee. He looked dumbfounded instead of completely terrifying for just a moment, and Jee quickly tore his eyes away and fixed them on a much safer point slightly to the left of Zuko's good ear.

It didn't help at all. He could feel Zuko boring a hole through his forehead and straight into his brain. He held perfectly still and tried not to think or even breathe, but his mind didn't need air to keep dwelling on the novel and frightfully tantalizing concept of Zuko being naked and so very obviously not a child anymore and right there. He was close enough for Jee to distinguish his body heat from the almost oppressive warmth of the summer air that filled the corridor. Jee tried to stop sensing it, he tried as hard as he could, but it was laughably useless. He couldn't turn off his bending.

Zuko might as well have been plastered all over him. Every square inch of Jee's skin itched to get closer to the heat that was making it crawl, to touch it and rub it and grab it. He couldn't stop it. He'd have to jump overboard in order to make it stop.

Over a minute passed with no sound except for the steady plick-plock of water dripping from Zuko's long unbound hair onto the floor. Jee could barely hear it. He was breathing hard, and his ears were full of the roar of the countless small torrents of inner fire that were being fanned by so much displaced air. The energy had to be snuffed out or released soon. Neither of those things seemed likely to happen while Jee stayed rooted to the spot here to let himself be stared at, though. He had no idea why the brat prince seemed to have frozen up, but Zuko didn't look like he was about to make up his mind about how he'd make Jee suffer for the bird's demise.

It was high time to gamble. He needed to get out of here and reach the safety of his cabin, and he had to go now. Jee was far too old and experienced to lose control of any kind of inner energy, but he wouldn't be able to keep any outward signs of it from showing. The sleeping pants he was wearing didn't hide a thing, and he knew with horrifying certainty that he was about two more inappropriate thoughts away from popping wood at Zuko. Agni only knew what that would earn him.

Probably swift immolation. He might do it to himself if Zuko didn't beat him to it.

He cleared his throat. Zuko started; the movement drew Jee's attention to the shoulders again, and to the biceps under the shoulders, and then he needed a moment to recall what he'd been about to say.

"It was an accident, sir. The machine surprised me.”

He knew it was a pathetic lie. No trained bender reacted to a poke in the leg by immediately hurling a fireball. The charred lump of metal at his feet looked perfectly, beautifully deliberate, and he'd been caught running away in the bargain. All he could hope for was that Zuko was as discombobulated by this standoff as Jee, and just as desperate to break it.

There was a different gleam in Zuko's eyes now, one that Jee was completely unfamiliar with. The brat could be surprisingly hard to read sometimes, on those very rare occasions when the right half of his scarred face attempted an expression that was very different from the permanent glower of the left half.

Zuko glanced over his shoulder, as if to make sure no eavesdroppers had materialized in the corridor, and nodded slowly.

"Right. An accident."

He gave the pitiful remains of the bird and the puddle of water that had gathered under his own head a long, considering frown. Jee took advantage of his distraction to watch a drop of water slide over one shoulder and down, down, down towards a nipple. The sight was beyond mesmerizing.

When the drop was just a thumb's width away from its destination, it suddenly evaporated, going from a thick pearl of liquid to not there at all in a heartbeat. Jee felt his eyes bug. The General had once demonstrated to him how to heat things up with just a look, but it was a very advanced technique that required absurd levels of concentration. The trick had been eluding him for years. Now he'd just done it, and he couldn't even go and brag to anyone about it.

Zuko's eyes shot up again, narrowing in suspicion. He raised a hand and absently rubbed the spot where the drop had sizzled out.

"Clean up this mess. I'll tell my uncle there was an accident,” he said.

It took Jee a long time to digest that. He'd been too busy noticing that Zuko had been brushing his nipple with his pinkie.

"Yes, sir," he finally managed, stunned. Of course Zuko had hated the stupid bird as much as anyone else, that had been obvious. But was he really so relieved that someone had eliminated the menace that he was prepared to lie to his uncle?

Zuko gave another nod, as if he'd been reading Jee's mind again. His lopsided gaze traveled down with the movement of his head, and kept going until it stopped dead at a point just below Jee's navel.

Oh, yes. He'd forgotten he wasn't going to do that. He really should have left that drop of water alone.

The gaze lingered.

Jee was overcome by a ridiculous urge to stand at attention, to suck in his stomach and square his shoulders and look as tall and impressive as possible.

But then he really thought about the impulse. He looked at the brat who despised him, the brat who treated him and all the rest of them like pieces of equipment every day, the brat who was now studying his groin as if it was some kind of amazing new toy, and his blood began to run cold.

Jee sucked in a breath and had to ball his fists to keep sparks from escaping. In a heartbeat, all of the confusion and tension and bizarre wonder of the last ten minutes coalesced into black rage.

That little shit.

He could have kicked himself. When was he going to learn? He just couldn't win with these people. Thirty-eight years of being sat on and stepped on by nobles who thought they could do anything they pleased to the son of a fisherwoman. Twenty-two years in the army, being passed over for promotions over and over. Finally being promoted, and then being laughed at by his new so-called peers because of his lack of knowledge, pedigree, and social graces, or because his hair looked wrong, or because he frowned too much, or just because he existed. Demoted for something that had barely been his fault at all, and being mocked even harder for it by Zhao and the hundreds of others just like him.

And here was another little Zhao-in-training, peering at Jee like he was some kind of funny curiosity. Of course Zuko got to hide himself behind a stupid door jamb while Jee had to stand in the middle of the corridor and get ogled, unable to even turn away, because he'd been ordered to stay put. What did Zuko think Jee was? Some thing to prod and stare at and have a good laugh about later? Or a good sneer. Zuko never laughed.

Jee felt the corners of his mouth pull down in a vicious snarl. Zuko didn't even notice, because he was still pointing his ugly mug at Jee's groin as if that was a perfectly normal thing to do to a person. The brat probably thought it was his Agni-given right to play with a low-born lieutenant. Any second now, he was going to command Jee to pull down his pants so he could have a better look. Maybe he'd make Jee hop around a bit too.

Enough. He'd had a horrible, bad, atrocious week, in between Zhao and Zuko and that thief and that miserable bird. He'd been having a bad two years, a bad damned life, and he was done with letting Zuko make it worse. If Zhao was even half right about how unlikely it was that the Fire Lord would ever allow his brat to come home, they were all going to be stuck on this ship for the rest of their days. Zuko was just too stupid to give up on his Avatar, ever.

If Jee really had to spend decades more on this floating scrap heap with these people, he was going to change things around here. He wasn't going to let one little piece of noble shit continue ruining every other moment of every single day with his selfish entitlement. How exactly he was going to change things, Jee wasn't sure yet, but he could think it through later. The first thing he had to do was get himself out of the absolutely humiliating position the brat was keeping him in right now.

Jee was about to open his mouth and blurt out something, anything, whatever would make Zuko stop, maybe even something horrible like If you're such a big boy now, come out here and show me. Zhao says you're good.

But then Zuko shivered a little and seemed to curl up against the door jamb, as if he was trying to make himself smaller, or maybe contain something. When he ducked his head, the marked half of his face disappeared behind the metal edge.

Jee stared. Without the scarred eye warping the whole picture, the brat's face was suddenly absurdly normal, as readable as an open scroll. There was no hint of malice in the way he was staring down at Jee. No mockery. Not a shadow of a sneer. His visible, normal eye was open as wide as it would go. The slight furrow of his brow now looked like a sign of concentration rather than anger. His lips were parted, just a little, leaving no more than a hint of white teeth visible in the dim light of the corridor. There was a very obvious blush on his cheek.

He looked embarrassed, almost shy, but mostly just wondering. Interested. The brat was curious. Honestly, genuinely curious, and nothing worse than that.

Jee took a deep breath. Maybe Zuko wasn't such a big boy after all. He'd have to be deaf and blind to still be completely innocent after two years among sailors, but that didn't mean he had any experience with sex beyond hearsay and his own hand. Where would he get it? Who'd want to touch him? He spent all of his time on a tiny ship full of people who spent most of their energy trying to avoid him. Zuko never accompanied the crew when they went to explore some port town's more lively district; he never seemed to leave the ship if he could help it, and really, Jee probably would have done the same if he had a face that every lowly dirt grubber felt entitled to gape at. If the General had ever smuggled any ladies of the night onto the Yuan, Jee would have heard about it.

The brat really didn't have the slightest notion of what he was doing. He was just standing there, naked, obviously aroused, and with ten different sorts of desire competing for room on his flushed face. He looked as hapless as a child with its first piece of hand-held fireworks. Did he have even the slightest idea how much he was giving away? How vulnerable he was making himself by stripping naked in every sense of the word? And that in front of someone who was absolutely not his friend, someone who had reason to wish him harm and wasn't afraid of him. He must have been an incredibly sheltered child, to come out of the Fire Nation court and still be this naive.

All rage seemed to bleed out of Jee like muddy water running off his body, but the slow realization that rose in its place was worse. Like the dirt wasn't gone but had just gotten stuck under his skin, where he could feel but not see it, instead of washing away.

Someone was putting himself on display here, but it wasn't Jee.

He'd wanted a way to change things? A way to make Zuko just shut up and let him be? Here it was. Zuko was pointing out a dozen of his tenderest, newest, most breakable places to him. He was even standing perfectly still so Jee could concentrate on hitting hard instead of aiming.

Jee could say crushing things to him about this. Things that would make the brat so sick with shame that he'd stay far, far away from Jee for a very long time -maybe forever. It would be disgustingly easy. Jee had never managed to say the right thing at the right time in his whole life, but he was a champion at finding the exact wrong thing to say, the words that would hit and hurt like a knife in the gut. He knew how to pound someone into a miserable ball of humiliation with nothing but words. It had been done to him often enough. All he had to do was conjure up Zhao's voice, Zhao's ugly sneer, think of what he would say, and the words came pouring into his head fully formed and ready to leap off his tongue.

Looks like Zhao was right about you. Did you know he wants to fuck you? I bet you want him to. How about I tell him the next time he comes calling?

Do you have no shame? No honor at all?

A descendant of Agni, offering his body up to his inferiors like that of a common whore. No wonder the Fire Lord banished you.

I wouldn't touch you if ordered me to. You're too ugly. You disgust me.

The brat would take every word to heart, no matter how absurd it was. He just didn't have the experience to realize that whatever Jee told him about his desires wasn't necessarily the truth. Nobody would ever tell him it was all ludicrous garbage, unless he found someone he trusted enough to repeat it to. Jee could make him believe he had no one like that.

Does your esteemed uncle know that he's raising a cocksucker?

It would be as easy as charbroiling a rat-roach trapped in a crate. The brat would survive, of course, just like a rat-roach. If Jee understood one thing about him, it was that he was simply indestructible. But it would hurt. He'd learn a valuable lesson about this world and the sort of people that lived in it, and he'd definitely learn to leave Jee alone.

No more yelling. No more insults. No more threats. No more biting his tongue and swallowing his pride whenever the brat walked all over him. No more being woken up in the middle of the night to get ranted at about places where the Avatar might be hiding. No more having his life and sanity risked for the sake of a myth. Some well-deserved peace.

The brat looked up.

He blinked, and the curiosity on his face began to melt into confusion. He knew something had shifted -he could see the challenge on Jee's face, and he could see Jee wetting his lips.

Good. Jee wanted him to see it coming. He was no backstabber, and he always gave a sporting chance to idiots who came to him and begged for a fight. This particular idiot had been begging for a fight since the day Jee met him. He was finally going to get it, but he'd have to do without all the unfair advantages he got from his undeserved station and the General's backup. Jee tensed and slid his feet apart a little more so he could drop into a bending stance faster if things actually got physical. He kept his eyes fixed on the brat's face and waited, patiently, for the shock of realization to appear. His mouth opened as his mind replayed the words he was going to say.

But when the brat's expression did change, after a long and tense silence, it wasn't in the way Jee had expected. He pulled his mouth into a determined line, furrowed his brow in an almost comical display of concentration, and began to breathe in and out very, very slowly, all without taking his eyes off Jee's face for a second, not even to blink. He looked exactly as if he was about to try out a new firebending form the General had just explained to him. Like he was going to do something new and difficult, and was determined to get it right or die trying.

The foot he'd been curling over the door's raised threshold lifted, rose, and came down again to rest flat on the plating of the corridor. He was facing Jee head on now, but in a position that was ridiculously unsuited for either attack or defense. With one foot inside and one foot outside the shower room, the threshold could easily trip him up if he tried to move. The door jamb still bisected him from shoulder to thigh. His right hip was in plain view, but he was still hiding his groin, as if there was any point to that now.

Jee watched, completely befuddled, as the brat stopped even breathing and seemed to tense every muscle in his body, still not moving, still doing absolutely nothing. At least, nothing beyond extending the tip of his tongue and running it across his upper lip. The movement was oddly, almost endearingly clumsy. It reminded Jee of the way his nieces used to grimace when they were drawing pictures in the sand outside the house.

It took Jee several very, very confusing seconds to realize that he was still licking his lips as well.

Zuko was mimicking him.

He'd cocked his bald head. He was mirroring the movements of Jee's tongue, mirroring them exactly, purposefully. He was focusing on Jee's mouth like a cat-owl keeping an eye on prey. There was a ridiculously precise quality to the way he was moving his tongue, as if he was doing his utmost to execute the movement perfectly.

As if there was any right way to lick your lips. But if there was one idiot in the whole world would assume that there was, it would be Zuko. And now he thought that Jee was showing him how to do it. There was no other explanation for whatever the hell he was trying to do there.

He thought Jee was trying to teach him.

Jee snapped his mouth shut. His teeth slammed into his tongue, hard, harder even than when Zhao had punched him years before. The pain was like a kick, or perhaps more like falling out of a dream and hitting the bed. Zuko would see the blood on his teeth if he tried to say anything now, but Jee couldn't have squeezed out a single word to save his life. Everything he'd been about to say had vanished from his mind like smoke. He didn't have the air to speak anyway. Things were constricting deep in his throat, almost down in his chest, like when he was about to vomit.

If only Zhao were here to see what Jee had almost done. He'd be so proud.

Jee was about to vomit. It took every ounce of willpower he had to force the bile back down, and he squeezed his eyes closed until they pricked and teared up, taking in great lungfuls of air through his nose and willing his throat to clear. He had to, needed to say something. He had to tell Zuko to go back inside that room, barricade that door, and not come out until Jee had had a few hours to stick his head in a bucket of cold water and remember that he was a human being.

"Lieutenant."

It was a command, a question and a plea all rolled in one. Jee opened his eyes helplessly.

Zuko hadn't moved from his position. But he was leaning forward now, straining forward so hard that the skin he was pressing against the edge of the door jamb was even paler than the rest of him. His poor cock had to be nearly crushed against the metal. His left arm was hidden, but the hand was curled into a tight, white fist on top of his head. The right hand was floating uncertainly down at his hip. He was frowning, but just a little, more in confusion than out of any kind of displeasure.

He was no longer mirroring Jee's expression, but he might as well have been.

Jee looked at the mix of desperate uncertainty and determination and want in the lopsided eyes, really looked at it, and wondered if this was what a father felt like when he found something of himself in the face of a child. He had been here before. He had been like this. He'd been exactly this naive, exactly this far away from home with no hope of returning, exactly alone enough to start doing stupid things just so he wouldn't be alone anymore. He had needed some things badly enough that he'd asked them from people who didn't care about him, with all the risks that entailed, because there was no one else to ask.

Of course Zuko still had the General. But somehow, Jee doubted that the old man had ever looked into his nephew's face and seen anything he recognized. The General and Zuko were as different as night and day. Different generations, different faces, different eyes, different personalities, different fighting styles, different likes and dislikes, different favorite foods and favorite ways to pass the time, different everything. They didn't have a thing in common, except that they loved each other, even if Zuko forgot to show it from time to time. But even if the General cherished Zuko like no father had ever cherished a son of his blood, he'd never be able to provide his nephew with everything he wanted or needed, because he just wouldn't be able to guess what some of those things even were. Jee had been there a couple of times when Zuko did or said something the General honestly didn't seem to understand, and the look on the old man's face in those moments had been beyond heartbreaking. On some level, he knew Zuko wasn't his and never would be.

Jee was starting to get why not understanding Zuko could be so wretchedly painful for the General.

He cleared his throat. It hurt. "Sir, I..."

"I'm not too young," Zuko blurted out. "I'll be sixteen in two months."

Ah. Well. Good to have that cleared up.

"Two months," Jee repeated. His voice was remarkably steady. "Sir," he added, belatedly, and immediately felt like a complete idiot.

A brief shudder went through Zuko. He narrowed his eyes and scrunched up his mouth for a moment, like he was trying to swallow something too big for his throat.

Jee blinked, and then almost smiled when he realized that he'd just seen a laugh. He'd made the brat prince laugh. Zuko had forgotten to add the appropriate sounds, but for him, it had been a rather good try.

They could work on that, maybe. Later.

"Sir...", he tried again.

The shudder came back at once, longer and more vehement. It rippled across Zuko's ribcage like a very quick series of hiccups. He ducked his entire head behind the door jamb while riding it out, but he still didn't make a sound.

This time Jee did smile. Then the taste of bile rose in his mouth again, so suddenly that his eyes watered.

He could have destroyed this. If Zuko had taken five more seconds to step out of that room, five more seconds to decide that he was going to trust Jee and take what he thought was being offered... Ten seconds at the very most, and Jee would have started saying things.

If he hadn't realized what Zuko was trying to do, he would have started talking no matter what, and without even the faintest idea of how deep he was cutting. He could have torn the brat to shreds while convinced he was just scratching him. He would have spent many more quiet years on this ship, pleased with himself at the way he'd gained some peace and freedom. He would have been pleased at finally having managed to teach Zuko something of value, even if it was that life is cruel and that what goes around comes around. He would have continued to exist alongside this person, seeing his face every day, sharing his food and his ship and his life, never realizing that he hadn't driven him away so much as murdered half of him. Zuko would have taken it and hidden it and never told a soul.

It hadn't happened. Somehow, by the grace of Agni or the mercy of the spirits or an insane stroke of luck, he hadn't done it, and now he had to make sure Zuko never found out what he'd just escaped. He had to make up for it. At least he had some inkling of how he could accomplish that, now.

Jee waited until Zuko was looking at him again, and made a great effort at twisting his face into its usual scowl.

"Stop laughing at me."

Zuko was very pink all of a sudden, but his nod was steady enough. His face went completely blank before Jee's eyes. It was almost creepy, but Jee had seen him do it several times before, and the General as well. It was probably something royals were taught to do from childhood.

Jee nodded back. "Think about it until you come of age, sir. About this."

That earned him the familiar frown of disdain he'd expected.

"I don't need to think for two months. I already know what I want."

If the brat understood any part of himself bigger than his thumb right at this moment, Jee would eat his pipa, but it probably wasn't wise to argue the point. He needed to convince Zuko to mull this over for a bit longer, though. Jee had no idea how much thought the brat might have put into the concept of asking him for sex before tonight, but given how impulsive he tended to be, it might not be very much. Jee wasn't going to take advantage of Zuko's own restless nature and let him rush headlong into something he'd regret later. Whatever he did from now on, he wouldn't go about it like Zhao would. And not like the General would, either. If they were going to do this, Zuko would have to start listening to him. No doubt total obedience was too much to ask, but Jee had to be sure he'd be able to stop Zuko if the brat tried to go too far too fast.

"Then use the time to make a long list of everything you want, sir. It wouldn't be honorable for me to approach anyone who isn't of age."

That was true. It was also a reason Zuko could obviously respect, because he nodded almost at once.

"Very well. Two months, but then you're going to teach me... this.”

This, he said. This. If that was the extent of what he was comfortable putting into words, he definitely needed some time.

Jee just nodded. "Yes, sir.”

"And you'll also show me how to punch people. Like you did Zhao.”

The change of topic threw Jee completely for a second. "What?”

Zuko glared, maybe because of the lack of a proper address or because Jee was being annoyingly dense. "I want to know how to fight with my bare hands. You can do that.”

Jee could, but not all that well, to be honest. He hadn't even managed to hit Zhao at all, but apparently Zuko considered that a moot point.

Best to just agree for now. It was an odd request, but he owed Zuko a lot more than a few boxing lessons after today.

"I'll try, sir. But fighting without bending is hard to learn. And messy.”

Zuko shrugged. "I don't know how to punch people, but I can already fight without bending. I have swords.”

The ones on the wall of his cabin? Jee had seen them, but if Zuko had ever used them on board the ship, he'd done it without anyone noticing. The brat prince waving large and sharp swords around would definitely have been treated as news in the mess room.

"You can? Where did you learn that?”

"I taught myself. I practice in the rhino hold at night.” Zuko looked decidedly shifty for a second. "Don't tell my uncle.”

Fat chance of that. If the General ever caught wind of what had happened here, Jee had no doubt he'd be going the way of the mechanical bird faster than he could say "Forgive me”.

"I promise, sir.”

"Good,” Zuko said. There was something new and warm in his raspy voice, as if after his discovery of the silent laugh, he was now trying out the invisible smile.

Zuko shifted his weight from foot to foot a few times. His eyes darted away from Jee and to the inside of the shower room, and he suddenly looked very, very uncomfortable. Jee didn't have to see what was behind that door jamb to guess why. His own erection had wilted entirely, but whatever Zuko had been fantasizing about earlier, he hadn't had his train of thought interrupted by the realization that he was a monster.

Jee was about to say something encouraging, but then Zuko seemed to remember that he was the Prince and didn't need permission to end a conversation so he could go wank.

"Dismissed, Lieutenant,” he said, not quite unkindly.

With that, he vanished back into the shower room. The door slammed shut, and the sound of flowing water resumed almost at once. He'd disappeared so fast that Jee needed a few moments of furious blinking to clear away the afterimage of long white limbs.

He wasn't sure, but under the noise of the shower, he thought he heard something like a fist thudding repeatedly against a metal wall.

Jee stood in the corridor until the puddle on the floor reached his feet and began to soak into the bottom of his slippers. The sudden cold wetness against his soles jolted him like a bolt of lightning. He barely remembered to grab his towel and the molten lump of metal before he turned and escaped. Fortunately, the latrines were close to the shower room, and he made it there before being sick.

Once he'd gotten that over with, he felt much better -clearer, emptier, not quite that full of ugly and foreign things anymore. Still, there was thinking he had to do, and he couldn't do it on his knees in a smelly little room while badly drawn Zhao faces and horny rhinos stared down on him from the door. He went by his cabin to grab a tunic and walked out onto the deck.

It was too warm out here as well, but right now, he'd prefer it above any cooler but darker place. Everything on deck was dyed in an almost luminous pattern of white and grayish blue. They relied on the moon for illumination while they were at sea, rather than lighting fires, to make sure everyone's night vision remained sharp and any obstacles in the ship's path could be spotted in time.

The sight of his ship at night never failed to make something catch in Jee's throat. It was hardly appropriate or even normal for a firebender to be this fond of the sea, and the moonlit sea at that. But he always felt homesick when he had to spend more than a few days on land. He'd hated Ba Sing Se for many, many reasons, but mostly because it had been so far away from the beauty and peace of this.

He returned the murmured greetings of the men on morning watch, found a secluded spot by the railing behind the boiler, and sent the remains of the bird to a watery grave without any further ceremony. Then he sank down into a crouch and just watched his men go about their work. Lin Wei and Bao were putting a new coating of no-skid and fireproof paint over the space where bending practice took place. Off to the right, the large, comforting bulk of Haisu sat hunched over a neat circle of planks coated in gently smoking tar. It would be a bucket by the time he was through with it.

Jee let his eyes drift back to the foredeck and thought of bending practice. He wasn't really involved with Zuko's training, but that was because they never managed to have practice duels without their sparring turning vicious. Perhaps they could give it another go now. He suspected that Zuko might like to learn a few high-level leap-and-kick bending combinations, the kind that used to be Jee's specialty when he was younger. The brat would probably love practicing something that was more fun than those basic arm blasts that seemed to frustrate him so much. The General was a good teacher, but he was an upper body fighter, someone with an immensely strong torso and arms who was almost unbeatable once he'd settled into a firmly rooted stance. That style didn't suit Zuko, really. He was a natural kicker, like Jee, or at least like Jee had been when he was still limber enough to do aerial acrobatics and spin on his hands five times in a row. Maybe Jee could show him a trick or two when the General wasn't looking.

Now that he was thinking about it, plenty of things that he could teach Zuko came to mind. He could teach him how to suck cock. Grab that ponytail like a handle and guide him, tell him what do do with his hands and that tongue and...

Zhao, Zhao! Jee rubbed his face furiously and gave his sideburns a painful yank. He really was going to wait for Zuko to come of age before he let his mind wander any further down that particular track. Not that he'd be robbing the cradle any less by waiting a few more months. Actually, he was more than half furious with himself when he thought about how he could have been in that shower room right now with a cock in his mouth and an ass in his hands and Agni only knew what else later. But even though he didn't believe in self-flagellation, he did feel like he deserved to be made to wait a few months. He hadn't done much to earn it today. He'd been a perfect monster today, really. Zhao would be delighted to know he'd made an impression.

Jee was going to find out if Zhao had actually tried to get anywhere with his brat prince. And if the walking sack of pus had so much as breathed on Zuko, Jee would tear him limb from limb and eat his charred flesh with noodles.

Was the General teaching his nephew how to fight dirty? Not very likely. Jee could do that. He could show the brat how to take advantage of the few weak points that standard Fire Nation armor had in the groin area, just so he'd be able to give Zhao a kick in the right spot if the ugly old bastard ever tried anything.

Or he could teach Zuko to just hum "The Girls from Ba Sing Se" at Zhao. In fact, he could do that right now. The red-tinted window of Zuko's room was perfectly visible from where he was sitting, and it was aglow with candlelight. The brat was awake. He was listening.

Someone stepped up to the railing next to Jee.

"Sir? No sleeping tonight?"

Ah. Haisu. Just the man Jee wanted to see, actually. Like about half of the Yuan's crew, Haisu had been with Jee and the General at Ba Sing Se, but he was the only one who had also stayed at Jee's side during his two years in the purgatory that was Zhao's ship.

Jee looked up at him. "I'm not tired. Can you still sing "The Balls of Captain Zhao"?"

Haisu gave him a slow, filthy leer that was ridiculously unsuited to his placid face. "Every word, sir."

"Get your drum. It's music night," Jee said, grabbing the railing and pulling himself to his feet with a grunt. "Fetch my pipa while you're at it."

Haisu disappeared into the ship, still grinning. He returned not only with his drum and Jee's pipa, but also with Shi, Lei, Bao's set of drums, and Cook bearing mugs and paint stripper. Good man, Haisu.

"The Balls of Captain Zhao" was one of those special songs that got twice as hilarious with every repetition. Jee spent a very relaxing few hours fine-tuning the words and the arrangement, had a little more paint stripper than usual while making sure Lei had absolutely none, pretended not to notice when Shi stuffed his hand down the back of Haisu's pants, and sang far too loudly so that his voice would carry all the way up to the officers' cabins.

---

Folded note attached to Lieutenant Jee's cabin door

Lieutenant, I was passing by Prince Zuko's room this morning and I could swear I heard him hum "The Girls from Ba Sing Se". It's wonderful that he's taking an interest in music again. Do you remember where we packed away his tsungi horn?

In the interest of encouraging this happy development, please make sure that helmsman Lei stops asking people to blow his tsungi horn whenever he's had a few too many drinks. Prince Zuko finds it terribly offensive, and I'm starting to believe that the continuing popularity of that particular joke is one of the reasons why he's refusing to take up the instrument again.

General Iroh

---

Comments

[elsane]

oh oh oh. amazing. and your worldbuilding.

/rereads

[unjapanologist]

Thank you so much! *chuffed*

[dancing_serpent]

*speechless* I'm at work right now and can't read it right away, but I'll come back as soon as possible! (Means, as soon as I can sneak into the net again while nobody's looking over my shoulder!) *shivers in anticipation*

ETA: several hours later...

Thank you, thank you, thank you! *happy dance* That was absolutely brilliant! I love it so much, it totally made my day!

Iroh's letter had me very excited already. I love pre-series stories even more than post-series fic. If you can find Cook... made me grin, same as the remarks about Zuko and him having a lot in common with Jee - and oh, the paragraphs following immediately were simply hilarious. The snarky tone of Jee's thoughts, his perspective on things and his opinion of Zuko - funny, annoyed and biting all in one, with a good portion of resigned cynism on top. Awesome!

And, oh the crew's superstitions! He sneezes when you say his name, you summon him when you say "Avatar"...and then it really does seem to happen like that! *snicker* Also, both Jee's perceptiveness of Zuko's moods and insecurities and his protective instincts towards Zuko despite being irritated by him are totally adorable.

Zhao as an enemy/nuisance for both Jee and Zuko - and OMG that confrontation between them - was awesome! Zhao was a perfect bastard, Jee pretty much trying to fight for both of his and Zuko's honour...squee! Also, Jee having already fantasized about Zuko? YES!

The latrine door drawings and the notes...*snickers helplessly*

and he knew with horrifying certainty that he was about two more inappropriate thoughts away from popping wood at Zuko.
The whole situation was scorchingly hot and funny and extremely painful at the same time with all the rapidly changing emotions between them, the hints at Jee's past and everything being so close to explosion/destruction for sheer endless moments. I ached for both of them and my heart skipped a beat at the narrow miss, and oh Jee ♥ trying to be as honourable as possible here.

...and back to humour after the tense situation is diffused. *g* but then Zuko seemed to remember that he was the Prince and didn't need permission to end a conversation so he could go wank. Precious!

I love how the tone of Jee's thoughts changes after that. How he conjures up Zhao as a negative example and warning to himself when he thinks he's going too far in his imagination. How Jee's possessiveness and protectiveness towards Zuko aren't just unconscious reactions any more.

So, soooo many precious funny moments in this fic. The rhinos tolerating Zuko because they recognise a kindred spirit? I could so see that! The Balls of Captain Zhao? I'd love to imagine the whole text. *g* And the whole "blowing his tsungi horn" thing!

What a wonderful, wonderful fic! Thank you so much for writing and sharing &hearts

[unjapanologist]

I'm so glad you enjoyed it! Since I'm only just starting actually publish some of my scribblings, I was pretty unsure of how it would go over. Your comment totally made my day.

And thank you so very much for asking for this pairing. I'd been wanting to write some Jeeko for months, and you finally made me pull my notes together and actually finish something. After a fashion. If this piece felt kind of unbalanced story-wise, that's because it's actually the first two chapters of a WIP rewritten to work as a standalone :) The whole thing was just too long to finish in time for the fest -sorry about that! Real life is crazy busy at the moment so I don't know if I can work on it again soon, but I still owe you a pretty heavy amount of text.

[dancing_serpent]

And thank you so very much for asking for this pairing.
I can't tell you how ecstatic I am about your fic. As a fan of (Zuko-centric) cross-generation pairings it's a dream come true for me, and I've wanted to read Jeeko the moment I watched them together in The Storm. I love that episode and the tension between them so much.

The characters were so perfect and I really really liked your OCs. And it didn't feel unbalanced to me at all, but OMG, I'd love to read more! Because I'm greedy and it was so so good and I'm so curious how both Jee and Zuko get closer. And about Zuko's list of things he'd like to try, of course. *g*

[unjapanologist]

The Storm is my favorite S1 ep. I don't understand why there's so little Jeeko. Really, that little arm-crossing they were doing there was pretty much the most obvious "slash us, fangirls" scene in the whole series. They were signaling it right there, damn it ;) I love Iroh, but curses on him for breaking up that duel.

Great, I'll work on the rest as soon as I have time to breathe again. There might be an additional 36k of vaguely connected scenes scattered across bunches of chapters on my hard drive right now. If you have any requests for things you'd like to read in there, shoot! Can't promise anything, of course, but Zhao did end up in the story because you mentioned him. He'll be back.

The characters were so perfect and I really really liked your OCs.
That's such an immense relief. I can't avoid OCs in this context -Jee needs people to interact with about Zuko, and it can't very well be Iroh. That would, erm, not work for so many reasons.

[dancing_serpent]

Mine, too! And I totally agree with you on that scene. I mean, being a slasher my first thought wasn't "yay, duel" but "yay, angry sex". Smoking hot character dynamics, in the truest sense of the word. There should be thousands of Jeeko fics out there!

I'd worship at your feet for that! There might be an additional 36k of vaguely connected scenes scattered across bunches of chapters on my hard drive right now. Just the thought makes me makes me drool already.
I adore what you did with the story, so I'm not really sure about making any requests, but I loved all the little nods at canon episodes - like the search for Chey the Deserter. Things like that make me happy, and if they fit into the story I'd love to read Jee's thoughts about them. *g* I don't know - maybe a brief mention of the Yu Yan archers or of Piandao or something like that. Or rumours of the Blue Spirit...

Yeah, sometimes a story doesn't work with OCs. Especially when we know so little about the crew except how some of the guys look. And I love the idea of Jee and his merry band of misfits. *g*

[unjapanologist]

Jee had too little screen time, perhaps. We should fix that. Look, I made an icon!

The Blue Spirit will be much more than a rumor. Jee is going to have a lot of "Wait, you did what? You what? No, seriously, what?" moments :D One thing I'm really stuck on is that Jee disappears after the Siege of the North. I don't want to leave it at that, but any ending I think up feels kind of tacked on because there's such a long time between the end of S1 and the first canon moment where Jee and Zuko might meet up again, after the end of S3. I'm wondering if I should just go AU entirely and have them reunite somewhere in S3. What do you think? I've this image in my head of Zuko running into that prison during the Day of Black Sun and finding Iroh gone but Jee there, but I'm not sure I could ever make that make sense.

Piandao, hmmm, yes. I do love me some Piandao. (Damn, I'll end up writing him in instead of mentioning him.) Most of the OC's are based on pics of recurring crew members in the show. I might have taken this fic a bit too seriously :P

[dancing_serpent]

That's an awesome icon! ♥

The Blue Spirit will be much more than a rumor.
YES! Oh, I'm already trying to imagine Jee's face here *snicker*

Jee disappearing gives you all kinds of possibilities, though. I mean, it's never said that he's dead, right? Maybe he's still with the Fire Navy, maybe he and his merry band of misfits deserted, too, and so on. And if you're going AU (no complaints from me about that, I love to play with all possible options) there are still lots of other opportunities to let them run into each other. Why wait for the Day of Black Sun? Let them meet at the Boiling Rock and have them escape together. Or maybe Jee happens to be one of the regular customers in Pao's tea shop in Ba Sing Se?

I might have taken this fic a bit too seriously :P
No complaints from me about that, either. *g* I know I crowed my happiness about this fic all over the office and told my 50+ years old stamp-collecting conservative family father of a colleague all about why it was the best gift I got in a while.

Also, *headdesk* - of course I meant "sometimes a story doesn't work without OCs." in the comment above.

[unjapanologist]

Feeling an urge to make more icons. I should really learn some mad photoshop skills some day :P Oh, Jee definitely survives the Siege of the North. The fate of the merry band is still undecided. Not looking awesomely good right now, though.

Haha, I bet Jee would like to see Zuko in his bus boy apron. And in nothing but the apron. But I'm leery of re-inserting him into Zuko's story that early on -there would be a lot of stuff to change in Crossroads and suchlike, and I don't want to concentrate on rewriting the whole Avatar storyline. I think Jee will be spending the whole of S2 doing things that would get him imprisoned in the Fire Nation :D Desertion to start with. He needs to kick some ass. Kill some pirates, maybe.

Day of Black Sun does take place before Boiling Rock ;) I'm considering Boiling Rock as well, but the reason I have a slight preference for DoBS is that at the time of BR, Zuko is already well on his way to becoming one of the gAang. At the end of DoBS and during WAT, he's entirely on his own. It's when he most needs a friend/someone to angst at, and when I think Jee might make an impact. And perhaps the reunion would be more fun if the gAang and a whole prison full of people aren't right there, being distracting and meddlesome. Does this make sense?

Zuko: Hello. Zuko here. I'm good now, and I think it's time I joined your group and taught the Avatar firebending.
Toph: Okay, he's not lying.
Zuko: And this is Lieutenant Jee, my, erm, subordinate...
Toph: BEEEEEEP

LOL stamp-collecting colleague. I hope you told him it was a story about... loyalty among military men! Yes. That.

[dancing_serpent]

I should really learn some mad photoshop skills some day :P
I hear you. My own icon making skills are pretty much nothing but cropping and fiddling a bit with the colours. More Jee or Jee/Zuko icons would be great, though.

I don't want to concentrate on rewriting the whole Avatar storyline.
I totally get that. And Jee kicking ass is something I'd love to read very much.

Argh, what a rookie mistake. That's what I get for being too eager and not taking enough time to think. And yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Also...choked on my coffee at the BEEEEEP. *g*

I hope you told him it was a story about... loyalty among military men! Yes. That.
Hahaha...oh yeah, that's perfect. Good thing my dad knows all about fanfiction and slash. He's visiting with me this weekend and I want to squee at him, too.

[unjapanologist]

Gah, I've been making notes for this AU thingie and I might have to change my mind, it'll take forever and a day to finish at my speed :P Writing Toph is such fun, though. There will be Toph somehow. And Katara *hearts* Having Jee and Zuko join up again does force me to make a clear-cut decision about where I want things between them to go -stopping at Siege of the North is kind of handy and laziness-enabling because things can remain open-ended :D Well, I know where Jee's going, or at least where he'd like to go. Zuko's harder to figure out.

But I need to work on some much less exciting RL deadlines first. Ow, they are close.

BTW, would you mind if I friended you? I kind of heart you for talking about Yami no Matsuei, among other things. The memories...

[dancing_serpent]

Whatever you decide, I'm looking forward to it. (Jee! Toph! That would be a very interesting encounter...) And yeah, RL...sometimes I like to bitch about it interfering with fandom life. *g*

That would be cool! I went ahead and added you a moment ago.

[gigerisgod]

ok. this is brilliance!

[unjapanologist]

Thank you!

[willidan]

Wonderful! Really quite brilliant.

[unjapanologist]

Thank you!

[hokuton_punch]

This is a good fic and you should feel so, so good about it. ;o; SERIOUSLY. I just want to roll around in it and read it five times, it is fantastic. ♥ ♥ ♥ JEE YOU ARE AWESOME and a little evil BUT MY KIND OF EVIL and also ILU for not being *that* evil and trying to punch Zhao, who deserves many punches.

Mmmmmf I just love this so much. ;o;

[unjapanologist]

Thank you so much for the lovely comment! Please feel free to roll around in this all you want.

Jee isn't all that evil. Just bad at being good :D

[chagrined]

I loved this so much. Wow! Such a great minor character POV, and just, everything here was wonderful. ESPECIALLY THE SHOWER SCENE. A+++ FOR DAYS

[unjapanologist]

Thank you so much! I'm glad you liked the minor character POV, they're kind of tricky and we don't know that much about Jee anyway.

[jin-fenghuang.insanejournal.com]

/Sixth year of Suiseirei Era, seventh month, day 16./

Things that make my nerdy heart happy :D and yes, I accept full blame

Great story, I like your Jee, even though I have the urge to smack him more than a bit for even thinking about being that mean.

[unjapanologist]

:P Thanks!

Jee didn't end up where he is now because he's a fluffy cuddlebunny with excellent judgement. And he may be a tiny bit inclined to maul whoever's closest if the real object of his anger is out of reach. But this will be a learning experience, promise ;)

[zing_och]

Wow! This is so great! I confess that I didn't quite remember who Jee was when I started reading, but now I love him to bits. *g*

[unjapanologist]

Then my work is done! Thank you ;)