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This is a robbery of everything you’ve ever been. Prince Zuko, stand and deliver.
A single point of light circles around and around, never stopping, never going out. It’s fitting, given the circumstances; there’s no choice available but to go along the same track over and over again.
As Joo Lee rises in the walled city of Ba Sing Se, he finds himself content with the routine. It’s calming, to know that the flame is a constant in his life. Even as the Dai Li come and go, as the people of the city stream by on the streets every day, as the faces of people he meets blur before his eyes, the comforting flame is always there in the back of his mind.
Long Feng is talking to another general today, and Lee stands on the side with a teapot, his smile stretched wide on his face. That’s one thing he can never forget: smiling is important to provide a welcoming and amiable environment for the people of Ba Sing Se, whether they stay temporarily or permanently.
Lee’s face stretches around his mouth, the skin pulling uncomfortably, as if he hadn’t smiled much before…what? A blink, and the thought is gone before he can chase it down. He was a grinning kid, and now a smiling teen; of course his face is accustomed to it.
Long Feng snaps his fingers, and Lee leans forward to refill his teacup. The general gives an ugly guffaw and slaps Lee’s back a little too hard. His hands shake, spilling boiling tea over his skin.
He can see Long Feng out of the corner of his eye, watching him sternly. His hands don’t twitch again. He finishes pouring and steps back, hot tea still stinging his fingers.
“How’d you manage that?” the general asks in disbelief. “Ashmaker didn’t even flinch!”
Lee feels a curl of distaste in his stomach at the slur. They do not keep in an environment dedicated to cultivating peace and coexistence within the walls.
A dusty town, a pair of swords among dancing flames. “Ashmaker!” someone shouts, and he turns to leave.
“…put up quite a decent fight,” Long Feng is saying. “But we got them in the end. Shame his father never replied to our ransom, but we have other ways of getting our worth.”
“Downright nasty business,” the general replies, shaking his head, “but I guess it’s what those bastards deserve.”
Lee is called away before the conversation ends, to wait on another noble family. No one looks him in the eyes, but that’s okay. His smile is more important.
--
“The Earth King invites you to Lake Laogai.”
I am honored to accept his invitation.
Lee awakens in a room with no door.
A lamp dangles from the ceiling, and a mirror hangs on the wall above a grimy sink. Lee turns on the water and splashes his face to wipe the last of the grogginess from his eyes. As he runs his hands over his face, he feels for the ridged, bumpy surface of his left side and-
it’s not there.
His fingers skim over a smooth, rubbery expanse. It feels wrong, but he doesn’t know why.
The steady rocking of a ship, the bandages falling to the floor, the shattering of a mirror and desperate clawing at reddened skin as if to peel it all off-
Lee catches sight of his face in the mirror. It looks like it always does, eyes soft and features sharp (“so handsome, my little turtleduck”), so he pushes aside the unsettling feeling and gets dressed with the robes piled in the corner.
He’s not sure why he was undressed. There’s a small cot set up in the corner, but he doesn’t remember sleeping, and there are no sheets but a bit of dried blood. Something about him feels off-kilter and wrong, but as soon as the feeling appears, it’s gone again.
Lee clings to the circling flame in his head and waits under the flickering lamp.
He’s not sure how long it is before they let him out. Three Dai Li come to clasp chains around his hands and lead him through the eerie green tunnels. He’s walked this route countless times before, subconsciously matching them step for step.
The shadows cast over the waiting Dai Li’s faces twist them into unnatural, grotesque caricatures, and Lee cannot help but shudder slightly despite keeping his smile fixed firmly on his face. As he enters, they unchain him.
“The Grand Secretariat implores you to fight for your country.”
I am honored to lay down my life for my king.
(Lee sometimes finds, instead of ‘king’, the word ‘lord’ about to slip out. He made that mistake once, and never again.)
The fight is tougher today. A dozen Dai Li converge on Lee.
He stands; he delivers.
He barely breaks a sweat.
After the Dai Li consider themselves thoroughly exhausted for the day, the chains return, fastened by calloused hands dotted with minor burns in the shapes of hands and fingerprints and nail scratches, still healing. Some of them are larger, pressed against forearms and the sides of faces and wrapped around throats. Lee doesn’t think about where those who never leave the Earth Kingdom city could’ve possibly gotten them.
Lee is led back to his room, except it’s not his room. The mirror and sink are on the opposite wall.
They leave him there, bending the doorway closed behind them. Lee sits on his cot with his circling flame, stares at the single hairline fracture in the mirror’s smooth surface, and waits.
--
“It takes seven months for a store permit to be processed,” Lee tells a merchant with a street cart. “You are free to apply for one should you wish to sell your wares in the Middle or Upper Rings.”
The man pleads with him, a nervous quaver in his voice. “I don’t get enough customers in the Lower Ring anymore, please,” he says. “My family is starving, I need to sell here-”
“You cannot sell here without a permit,” Lee insists firmly, cutting him off.
“Please, just for a little while! I promise I won’t break any other rules, I-”
A woman passing by stops and puts a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Don’t bother. Can’t you tell? He’s a Joo Lee. Dai Li’s servant. You can’t reason with them.”
The merchant slumps, dejected. Lee tries to stretch his smile a little wider in reassurance. “You are welcome to apply for a store permit to begin selling in the Middle Ring anytime at your local processing office.”
As he waves over soldiers to escort the merchant back to the Lower Ring, he feels a wave of guilt and shame crash over him, and his hands jump to his stomach as if he himself is starving. He isn’t, of course, and he has no memory of ever going without food, but the thought of it threatens to make him throw up.
He continues walking through the streets of the Middle Ring, his mind a staticky mix of walls and secrets.
--
Lee is sitting in the yard with his back to the wall when he meets her.
She plops down next to him, hands loosely bound in chains, and introduces herself as Ojia. Her voice is light and airy, lilting and high-pitched, not yet deepening with puberty.
She doesn’t expect him to speak, and instead fills their silence with talks of her home in the city. Like him - like everyone in the yard - her eyes are a deep gold-amber.
When the guards call them back inside, they are chained next to each other in line. Ojia is singing a song, a tune Lee faintly remembers (“Brave soldier boy, come marching home…still not asleep, Prince Zuko? You were so tired before dinner.”), softly enough that he feels like he is intruding.
He’s not the only one who hears. The guards pull her out of line with ugly growls. Her voice only grows louder.
She shows up to the yard a few days later with thick white bandages wrapped around her throat. Lee sits with her and teaches her the hand-signs he’d learned for fun as a child, fooling around in the dusty Middle Ring streets with kids he doesn’t know.
Nevermind that they are mostly commands for soldiers, archers, field reports, with sharp, concise snaps so different from her flowing melodies - she needs assertiveness more than comfort. He just wishes she didn’t have to learn that lesson so young.
--
The Avatar is in Ba Sing Se.
Lee knows because he’s staring at him from the back corner of the room, standing in the shadows as Long Feng tells him and his friends about the Dai Li’s maintenance of peace in the city.
The Avatar is upset about something, and so are his Water Tribe companions. The tiny blind girl seems a little unsettled, and her head is turned in his direction, like she’s looking at him.
Which is absurd, of course. She’s blind, she can’t possibly know he’s here when he hasn’t made a sound.
Then the Water Tribe boy says something about a war, and Lee can’t stop himself from saying, “There is no war in Ba Sing Se.”
They all fall silent, and the blind girl’s wary expression deepens into a scowl. Long Feng gestures for Lee to step forward into the light, and he does, letting the firelight wash over his face. Instantly, the children snap into familiar battle poses, and Lee is tempted to respond with one of his own.
“Prince Zuko!” the waterbender snarls, water raised from her waterskin in a threatening arc. “What are you doing here?”
Positioning the pot of flowers on the windowsill where it won’t fall, and there’s a knock at the door. “How may we help you on this fine day, gentlemen?” he hears Uncle greet them.
“By surrendering,” they reply.
There’s no time to climb out the window, and he won’t give up without a fight. He certainly won’t leave Uncle behind, no matter what he says.
“Joo Lee,” Long Feng says smoothly, snapping him out of his lapse in concentration, “is one of Ba Sing Se’s cultural servants. He, among many others, work tirelessly to maintain peace and order in the city.”
“Greetings, Avatar and friends. I am Joo Lee. It is an honor-” His voice cracks, and he clears his throat quickly. “An honor, truly, to meet you.” Lee brightens his smile, hoping to relax their unease and brush off his slip-up before anyone comments on it.
It seems to work, because they straighten from their defensive poses in confusion. “Zuko?” the young airbender asks hesitantly, losing the hostile tone the name had held before.
Lee tilts his head. “I’m afraid I don’t know any Zuko.”
The Water Tribe boy points his boomerang (for a boomerang it must be, the same edge having made a resounding clank in the back of his helmet) at Long Feng. “What’s going on? Are you working with the Fire Nation?”
Lee resists the urge to lift his hand to the back of his head and instead clasps both of them in front of him. The waterbender, he notices, is still staring at him, but specifically at the left side of his face in a way he finds familiar but does not understand why. Uncomfortable, he chooses instead to focus on the flame in his mind, ever-circling.
He resurfaces to Long Feng snapping his fingers. “Joo Lee will escort you to your house. Let this be a reminder of what happens to dissenters in Ba Sing Se.”
Lee steps forward to guide them out, and one by one, the children file out of the room. The Avatar, however, stops at the door. He turns around to look at Long Feng and asks quietly but vehemently, “What did you do to him?”
His hands are wrapped in chains, connected to a long line of people in scraps of ragged clothing and pinched, haggard faces. The desolation threatens to choke him, but through it all, he has to remember to keep the smile on his face and the flame in his mind. It’s all he has left, now.
A line of people in chains are herded by where he sits. An old man breaks from the line suddenly, making a beeline towards him, and he looks up with vacant eyes to match the man’s amber gaze, so similar to the one he sees in the mirror. “Zuko, my boy,” he breathes, cradling his face in his calloused hands and brushing his thumbs over his cheekbones.
“Who is Zuko?” His voice is hoarse from days without water, the sounds stumbling in a mouth sore and swollen from beatings and sickness.
“Oh, nephew,” the man weeps, cradling him as closely as his chains will allow. “What have they done to you?”
Long Feng doesn’t respond, and Lee nudges the Avatar out the door.
--
The Avatar’s group is very quiet on the way back to the house.
Lee knows the way there like the back of his hand, a little voice in the corner of his mind whispering directions to him like he grew up learning these streets. Throughout the walk, the children keep shooting him strange looks.
About halfway there, the Water Tribe boy tries to engage him in conversation. “So, Zu- uh, Joo Lee - wait, that’s weird, I’m just gonna call you Lee,” he begins, and Lee snaps to attention.
“Is there something you would like to ask?” Lee prompts when the other boy doesn’t say anything else, smiling encouragingly.
The dam bursts. “What’s going on?” the boy bursts out. “Why are you acting so creepy and stiff - I mean, stiffer than usual? What’s with the weird smiling? Why are you with Long Feng? Is this a trap? What happened to your face? Do you have any connection to that Joo Dee woman who’s been following us around since we got here? How come you’re not going all ‘grr, argh, I’m here to capture the Avatar, I need to regain my honor’?”
Lee waits until the barrage of questions, fired from all of them, tapers into silence. When they finally conclude, staring at him expectantly, he begins.
“I am Joo Lee,” he reintroduces himself. “As Long Feng has said, I am a cultural servant of Ba Sing Se, and I help maintain peace and order in the city alongside other dedicated citizens. It is an honor to be of service to the Avatar and his esteemed companions.” He’s a little proud of himself for not stumbling on that one.
“Toph?” the waterbender asks, turning to the blind girl.
Toph scowls again. “He’s telling the truth, but his system is so weird,” she confirms. “It’s, like, perfectly in time. His breathing, his heartbeat, everything. His chi doesn’t even feel like a firebender’s - at least, not like Crazy Blue Fire.”
A cackle that’s filled with more delight than malintent, a twirl of fingers that aren’t even pointed at him this time, a wash of cool blue. “Zuzu, look!”
Lee’s breath hitches in his throat for a moment, barely noticeable. He swallows it down, and no one seems to catch it, so he moves on.
“The only benders in Ba Sing Se’s cultural service are the Dai Li,” Lee informs them. “It would not do to relegate the noble art of bending to day-to-day work such as ours. I am not a bender.”
The flame flickers in his mind like it’s about to go out. He almost recedes into his head to try to coax it back to life again; he doesn’t want to know what will happen to him if it goes out. He’s silent for some time as they walk, not reacting to the group’s hushed conversation as he tries desperately to maintain that circling flame.
He’s broken out of his thoughts a few minutes from the house, when the Avatar works his way next to Lee and tugs on his sleeve. “Hey, Zu-Lee…are you okay?”
Lee’s smile feels fake, but he injects as much sincerity into his response when he says, “Of course! How could I not be, in the wonderful city of Ba Sing Se?”
Lee brings them to the house and watches them all go inside, but he doesn’t follow. “I wish you all a wonderful night,” he says with a bow, just as deep as it should be with his hands in perfect Earth Kingdom style.
They’re all giving him weird looks, but he decides to abscond before it can get any worse. He turns around and walks down the street, then slips silently into the shadows as soon as they can no longer see him.
Long Feng doesn’t seem pleased when Lee returns to him. Lee, of course, suffers the fallout.
--
They send him back out a few days later, and he winds up on the Avatar’s doorstep again, shaking his bell sleeves down to his wrists to cover the bruises and scars laced up and down his pale skin.
“You again!” the Water Tribe boy growls as he answers the door, his eyes narrowed with suspicion and hostility. “What do you want?”
“I am here to be of service to the Avatar and his esteemed companions,” Lee responds jovially with a smile stretched wide, tucking his hands into his sleeves in a traditional pose.
“We don’t want anything you can give us,” the boy snarls.
“Sokka, let him in!” yells Toph from inside. Sokka splutters for a moment, finally settling on “Why?”
“They did something to him,” Toph answers. “We have to find out what.”
“And if he’s with the Dai Li, maybe he knows where Appa is!” the Avatar chimes in.
Sokka pauses, turns back to Lee, and says, “Wait here,” then closes the door in his face. Lee is unperturbed, content to let his eyes follow the woven cross-hatch of the door, a pattern so different from the smooth stone of his bedroom or the woven mesh of his cot. He reaches out to run his fingers over it, intending to feel the new texture under his fingers, and almost mourns the loss of the mesmerizing pattern when it swings open again before he can.
“So…” Sokka says awkwardly, stepping aside. “Come in?”
He does as the boy says, stepping over the threshold into the lavish house. “How may I be of service to you today? Is there anything you require? Places in the city you wish to see?”
The children are all watching him, shifting uncomfortably. “So, Zuko.” the Avatar says.
Lee just blinks at him in confusion.
“That’s you,” he clarifies.
“You seem to be mistaking me for someone else. I am Joo Lee,” Lee counters, perplexed. “One of Ba Sing Se’s cul-”
“Cultural servants, peace and order, blah blah blah, we get it,” Toph interrupts brashly, eyes pointed at the ground to his left. “Tell me a lie, Lee.”
“Pardon?” Lee asks after a beat of silence.
She stomps her foot. “You heard me. Tell me a lie!”
“I have green hair?” he offers. It’s the most mundane lie he can come up with. It does not do for Ba Sing Se’s keepers of order to lie about important things. It is the duty of those in power to be transparent and honest with their subjects; of this, Lee knows for certain, deep inside him.
That certainty is smothered quickly by the flame in the back of his mind. Sometimes it is necessary to supplement the truth with additional information, however contradictory or untrue it may be, to maintain peace within the walls.
“Wow, even as Lee, he’s a bad liar,” Toph snorts. “So what are you doing here?”
For example, the supposed war raging against the Fire Nation. The rumor mill can be fast, but we cannot allow a panic to fester or riots to break out among the millions in the city.
“I am here to attend to any needs of the Avatar and his companions,” Lee replies smoothly. This, at least, is familiar territory.
“No, I mean like, in the city.”
“I lived my whole life in the Middle Ring before serving the Dai Li.”
“Truth.” Toph doesn’t look happy about this. Lee finds himself carefully suppressing wonder at her ability to tell truth from lies; it doesn’t do for a nonbender to lust after abilities they cannot have. In Ba Sing Se, there is no reason to need bending to reach one’s fullest potential, after all, and Lee is already doing such great work in the service of the Dai Li.
“Except it obviously isn’t,” the waterbender finishes.
“Are you here to capture Aang?” Sokka challenges him.
Now that Avatar Aang has resurfaced, these whispers are more dangerous than ever. We must quell the brewing dissent and Fire Nation infiltration in order to keep the war out of our prestigious city.
For a moment, Lee is stumped - he’d always just called the airbender The Avatar - but the name Aang rises from the depths of his mind in response to the other boy’s question. “Why would I try to capture the Avatar?” Weirdly enough, the phrase rolls off his tongue easily. “That would be dishonorable to me, to my family, and to my country.”
“Riiiiight.” Sokka seems suspicious - of what, Lee doesn’t know - but accepts the answer, especially when Toph rings off another skeptical “Truth”. In the background, the waterbender snorts derisively.
She’s been popping open and recorking her waterskin repeatedly in some sort of nervous gesture, and each time it sounds, Lee has to suppress an automatic twitch. “What about the war?” she asks slowly, carefully.
You see, if we suspend all talk of this war, there is no related conflict remaining here. With no conflict, there is no war in Ba Sing Se.
“What war?” Lee questions.
Her voice hardens. “The war against the Fire Nation, outside the city! Against your family !”
“There is no war in Ba Sing Se,” Lee replies diplomatically. She still looks like she wants to tear her hair out. “And my family is not outside the city.”
“How can there be no war?” Sokka sounds confused. “Literally everyone knows there’s a war. It’s been going on for the past hundred years!” He throws his arms up in frustration and bewilderment.
The first step, of course, is to silence all mention of the war or the Fire Nation. The second is to remove the Fire Nation entirely from these walls; too many people who come here bear scars, physically and emotionally, from their time outside, and that makes them unpredictable when faced with foreigners. There are Fire Nation refugees in the city as well, ones we can repurpose for a better mission than their miserable lives entail.
“There is no war,” Lee repeats numbly. Fury races through his pounding heart, choking him in its magnitude.
The earthbender frowns. “Katara,” she begins.
If this fails, General Fong is always looking for more soldiers to stick on the front lines.
“Lee?”
He’s not sure who’s calling his name, or if it’s just in his own mind. It’s wrong somehow, right and yet so very wrong, and it leaves him gasping for breath. He feels the cold stone bite into his knees, somehow familiar - how did he end up on the floor? - and curls in on himself. Some part of him is dimly aware of how far he’s strayed from how he’s supposed to act. “There is no war,” he mutters again, trying to regain control, fooling no one. “I’m s-sorry. No war in-in Ba Sing Se.”
He pastes his smile back on his face, but in this state, he’s sure it only looks like a painful grimace. Someone is calling a name, the name of the person the children believe him to be, except now it is echoed by a hazy Prince Zuko in the back of his mind. “I’m sorry,” he repeats, but for what, he doesn’t know. “I am loyal…Meant no…no war. For my f-failure.”
A calm voice cuts through his thoughts. “It’s okay, Lee. There’s no war, we understand.”
He latches on to the voice desperately, like he’s drowning - and he may well be, for all he can tell - until he can feel the flame again, and he holds onto it. It goes round and round, and he follows it, tuning out the world until he feels back on track again.
“…back with us?” Sokka is saying when he returns.
The children look at him with varying levels of pity as he scrambles to his feet and straightens his robes. “I apologize for the…” He’s not sure what to call it. “…unseemly display,” he finishes with a restored smile. “It won’t happen again.”
“Are you okay?” the waterbender - Katara, he remembers - asks him, her voice laced with concern. It’s such a mimicry of the question Aang had asked him a few nights ago that he is tempted to laugh.
“Of course I am,” he says automatically instead. “How could I not be, in the wonderful city of Ba Sing Se?”
--
The rest of the day passes by in a blur. Lee remembers taking the children on another tour of the city, and he watches them delight in the trinkets sold in the markets and enjoy the myriad of diverse foods available on every street. He remembers the weird looks they shoot him throughout, the questions they ask that he can’t quite answer right.
Aang shoves a bowl of spicy noodles in his hands at one stall. “You like spicy food, right?” he half-pleads, while Sokka tears up behind him and fans his tongue. “My friend Kuzon’s parents made the best spicy food, I know there’s a lot in the Fi-I mean, in the place you’re from. Try it!”
Not one to refuse a request from his betters, Lee takes a bite. The flavors explode in his mouth, and it sets off a similar explosion in his mind, like he’s just been blown into a wall.
The flame in his mind flickers. Lee forces himself to swallow, then sets the bowl down. “I apologize,” he tells the young boy, who is now slumped in disappointment. “Spice does not quite agree with me.”
In the weapons shop, Sokka picks up a sword hanging on the wall and starts swinging it around, making fake “Hi-ya!” and “Wha-pow!” noises with each swipe. Lee winces, internally calculating the cost of replacing everything he might break, handling a sword so indelicately.
Aang hops forward, excited. “Ooh, I’ve seen this before! This is dual dao, it’s actually two swords.” He takes the sword from Sokka and pulls it apart to reveal two blades. “Zuko used swords just like these, when he-” he broke off, casting his eyes around to settle on Lee.
He holds them out to Lee wordlessly, ignoring Katara’s alarmed “When he what?”
Lee eyes them for a moment, unsure, but one look at Aang’s puppy-kitten eyes and they fit almost perfectly in his hands, callouses shaped around their handles. He can’t bring himself to do anything with them, but oh, does he want to.
“Speak, Joo Lee,” Long Feng commands him later. “What did the Avatar and his company do today?”
He stands; he delivers.
He tells them about their questions. The ones about his family, his life in the Middle Ring, the culture of the city. He sidesteps any mention of his loss of composure that morning, but Long Feng seems to be able to tell anyway.
--
The mirror on the wall is chipped. When the guards come for him, they find him staring at it blankly, lost in his head.
They bring him to the room with the circular track. Lee sits motionless in the stone chair and watches the flame before his eyes, going round and round. “You are a faithful servant of Ba Sing Se,” the man with the funny conic hat tells him. “Nothing can shake your unwavering loyalty to your country and people.”
There’s a shadow in the corner that he’s staunchly ignoring. “Your loyalty is faultless, that’s true,” it tells him. “But look where it’s gotten you. You were always too pathetic to be useful.”
He’s not sure who to believe.
--
When he wakes up in the morning, he goes over the questions the children had asked him yesterday. Now, though, he knows the answers to all of them, and they are painfully bland: a standard nuclear family, going to school in the Middle Ring, nameless parents and faceless friends. His heart aches with a longing he doesn’t understand, and he is consciously aware that his smile is forced.
--
The Avatar’s group sits down to lunch.
They had ordered in to their house, and Lee sits between Aang and Sokka as Katara serves plates of different Earth Kingdom foods. His hands settle in his lap, back straight, in perfect seiza.
“That looks painful,” Sokka remarks, somewhat muffled with a mouth full of food. Katara swats lightly at his head from across the mat and Sokka ducks unapologetically.
Five years old and trying to assemble his limbs properly. A resounding thwack echoes in the room as his tutor smacks the back of his left ankle with a ruler where it sticks out. With a whimper of pain, he tucks it under him. For hours he sits, waits, loses time.
Lee doesn’t respond and waits to be served.
Katara sets a plate in front of him, piled with the same amount as the rest of them. This is the logical conclusion, but Lee stares at it, unable to comprehend it. This food is better and more plentiful than anything he’s been given for as far back as he can remember.
Which, of course, is standard for the Upper Ring, especially for the Avatar and a Beifong, and it was familiar to him once too. But now, all he feels is a dull rise of fear, compressing his insides and making everything unappetizing.
“Why aren’t you eating?” Sokka asks. He turns to the rest of the group. “Seriously, why isn’t he eating? Is the food poisoned or something?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Sokka,” Katara sighs. “We ordered out for this, he didn’t even touch the food.”
“Lee?” The Avatar peers at him curiously. “You look a little sick. Is something wrong with the food?”
“No,” he forces out. “I was just…” he searches for a way to explain and comes up empty. You must not lie.
To avoid answering the question, he takes a spoonful of soup and places it in his mouth. The children regard him with some concern, but the conversation moves on.
He only manages to finish a quarter of his plate before his stomach begins to protest, and bile rises in the back of his throat like a warning. Too much, too much. This seems practiced. Lee sets the plate aside before he vomits.
“You hardly ate,” Katara frets, and Lee smiles at her.
“It’s okay,” he reassures her. “I normally have meals in the mornings and evenings at Lake Laogai’s health resort or with Long Feng at the palace, so I eat lightly at midday.”
It’s not a lie this time, but it was once. Lee remembers the stabbing pains of hunger, but that can’t be right; no one goes hungry in Ba Sing Se.
“Please, my family is starving-”
“Can’t you tell? He’s a Joo Lee. You can’t reason with them.”
“Still.” Katara bites her lip. “You’re so much thinner than the last- I mean, you’re so thin. I don’t mean to assume, but it just seems like you need a little more than that to be healthy.”
“I eat enough,” he says.
“What’s your definition of enough?” Toph asks. “Because I’m getting some weird half-and-half here, and I’m really not sure if you believe that.”
A bowl of rice kicked over onto the floor, moldy bread, a plate of meat upended on his shirt, hands holding him down as they pour near-boiling tea in an eye that won’t close.
Rooms laid out in perfect replicas of the palace, sitting down at his usual spot in the dining table and Fath- no, Long Feng, at the head. He has to struggle to remember the routine and the manners, and he doesn’t recognize the servants who serve their food. So many dishes he sees but cannot taste.
He reaches for one once. He requests extra concealer for the bruises on his face that night.
“Enough,” he repeats firmly.
They don’t believe him. No one ever does, so he doesn’t know why this disappoints him.
He takes a sip of his tea. Green, his favorite, but even that seems contradictory. It lacks a familiar undertone, but it’s better than the tea he’s had lately. The Dai Li, as magnificent as they are, do not have a teamaker’s skills. The strange aftertaste always makes him gag when they give it to him every night, and it leaves him so cold.
It feels absurd, to say a tea can make him cold, but it’s like it’s dousing something inside him, and he hates it. He drinks it anyway.
This one doesn’t do that. It streams down his throat and into his stomach, warming him up from the inside out. The flame in his mind gets smaller, but there’s a slight heat behind his ribcage, making his heart pump faster and stronger than before.
He lets go of the reedy, thin breaths he had been taking before and embraces the deep, gusty inhales his lungs now allow with minimum pain. His bandaged ribs are still bruised and broken, but he can hardly feel them in the wake of this change.
The children don’t seem to notice his newfound strength, and he finds himself glad. This is something of his, something to hold close to his heart and never let go of. He doesn’t have much of that left anymore, now that his soul has been bared repeatedly to everyone who has the means to cut him open.
--
He is waiting in the side room one night when a young boy is shoved in with him. For a moment, he wonders if this is a change in punishment.
“What’s your name, kid?” His voice is rough and gravelly. Don’t speak unless spoken to, whispers the flame, but for once, he ignores it and the ensuing headache.
“Xun,” he whispers.
“I’m Lee,” he says calmly, reassuringly. “How old are you, Xun?”
“I turned ten last month,” he says, shifting from foot to foot anxiously. Slowly, he creeps closer.
Lee is about to coax him further, to do - what? Hug him, maybe? Tell him everything will be okay, when it won’t be? - but he is interrupted by the door opening once more.
They stream in, watching Xun with the same hungry eyes they gaze at Lee with on these nights, in this room. Lee realizes with a sickening jolt that this is no change in punishment at all.
No.
This boy is far too young to suffer the horrors of this room. Lee lunges, trying to pull the kid behind him, and the Dai Li are on him in an instant.
It takes five of them to restrain him, and as Lee’s eyes lock with the little boy’s terrified yellow ones, he snarls and kicks and bites and fights as hard as he can, but he can do nothing.
They make him watch.
--
Sometimes the children just sit around in their house and do their own thing. Lee never knows what to do with himself during these times, so he just recedes into himself until one of them decides to interact with him.
Today they are scattered around the main room, working on different things. Katara is busy sewing clothes, while Toph has somehow acquired a pile of sand that she is molding into different structures and statues. Sokka is sharpening his weapons, and Aang…he’s not actually sure what Aang is doing. Something about spinning marbles in different patterns.
“Hey, Lee,” Sokka calls suddenly, and Lee startles to attention. “Do you know any firebenders? Specifically, any who aren’t all ‘Rahh, I have to fight the world’?”
“Sokka!” Katara admonishes him. “You can’t ask him that stuff, what if he reports it to the enemy?” It’s unclear who, exactly, she believes is their enemy in this instance.
Sokka just shrugs in response. “Everyone knows by now that Aang’s gonna be looking for a firebending teacher to finish his training. Might as well find out if Prince Jerkbender knows any that he’ll be willing to tell us as Lee.”
Everyone chained up in the tiny yard has some variation of golden eyes, pale skin, dark hair. When he brushes up against some of them, their skin is almost feverishly warm, but there is no illness in them save for the loss of their minds.
Lee’s smile becomes a little apologetic. “I do not know of any firebenders in Ba Sing Se.”
“Worth a shot,” Sokka sighs, then changes the subject. “Hey, Aang said the other day that you fight with swords - which is completely unfair, by the way, why do you get cool bending and cool swords? - so I was wondering, uh…” he trails off, taking a deep breath. “Could you teach me?”
Lee blinks in surprise. There’s a firm yes on his tongue, but the flame is loud again, screaming no no no. “I can’t fight with swords,” he rasps instead, and Sokka deflates.
“Okay, buddy,” he says, his voice a little strangled. “I get it. Thanks anyway.”
“Ba Sing Se has places to train, though,” he offers belatedly, wanting so badly to wipe that disappointed look off the other teen’s face. “Would you like to seek out a swordmaster to train with?”
“There’s not enough time,” Sokka groans. “We’ll be leaving the city soon, and I can’t exactly take a swordmaster with me from Ba Sing Se.”
“What about earthbender training grounds?” Toph gripes from the back corner, pounding her latest sand sculpture of herself back into a smushed pile. “The backyard isn’t nearly big enough or complicated enough for Twinkletoes’s earth sense.”
Lee stands, dusting off his robes. “I can show you that.”
--
Lee leads the Avatar to the most prestigious earthbender training grounds in the Upper Ring, and his earthbending teacher immediately declares it unsatisfactory.
“There’s nothing here!” she complains, toes digging into the dirt. “It’s just flat ground with a few boulders lying around. No tunnels, no animals, no obstacles, nothing! It’s almost worse than the backyard.”
“There isn’t anything like that in the city, though, is there?” Aang asks dubiously. “It’s pretty crowded, I don’t think they have all that stuff here.”
“I don’t want to make a life here,” he growls to himself as he swings out the window, a sword slung over his back. The rooftops, once a safe place, are invaded by figures hiding in the shadows, starting as he slips silently by. There’s a clearing, he knows, in a part of the Lower Ring that no one likes to talk about. Close to the wall, the customer at Pao’s had said, and it kept growing no matter how many times the Dai Li tried to get rid of it.
Eerie, silent, but buzzing with the comforting sounds of local wildlife he had become accustomed to while on the run. Too dense for fire, but perfect for sword katas.
He knows he shouldn’t. The Avatar’s group shouldn’t be sullied by the riffraff of the Lower Ring. The state that some of the areas are in is appalling, and the Avatar deserves the very best for his training.
“I think I know a more natural place,” he finds himself saying.
--
As predicted, they are appalled, but not for the reasons he thinks.
High society, as he has always known it, prides itself upon their wealth, status, and appearance. The people of the Lower Ring have nothing but the clothes on their backs and each other, and yet somehow they seem more alive than those at the heart of Ba Sing Se.
Dulled eyes and desolation, yes, but a will to survive unlike anything he sees in high society. It’s the same look he sees in the mirror every morning, except his is lacking something very important.
Toph seems to appreciate the steadfast determination too. The rest, however, are looking around, distraught, at the people in the streets, begging or scuffling in the dirt or selling overripe fruit in baskets on the ground. Not disgusted, like Lee has so often seen, but despairing, as if the world is more broken than it should be.
The world will always be broken. Lee knows this, and that’s why he dedicates himself to the order of Ba Sing Se, in the hopes that he could fix at least one problem.
He just wishes it didn’t feel so wrong.
--
Toph declares the copse of trees something they can work with, and they begin.
--
“Ever been to the Fire Nation, Lee?” Aang asks him conversationally as he carries the group’s goods from the latest trip to the market. “I had a friend named Kuzon from the Fire Nation, a hundred years ago. Remember, his parents make good noodles?”
It’s kind of a blur among everything else, but Lee just nods with a smile and pretends he understands.
“I’ve visited him a bunch of time on Appa,” the boy continues. “The Fire Nation is so warm! I went in monsoon season, so it wasn’t that bad, but it rained all the time.”
“That sounds pleasant,” Lee agrees.
Aang seems to be studying him for a reaction. “Kuzon took me to this cool festival once. I don’t remember what it was for, but it was really fun! We played with these sparkler ribbons and had lots of street food, and there were these really cool dancers who played with fire on their skin.”
Hiding under his cousin’s long cloak, a girl on the older boy’s other side, as they sneak through a servant’s passage. Giggling excitedly, hands reaching for flames in so many different colors. A sparking stick and crispy fire flakes seared to perfection, leaving ashy spice powder all over his fingers. The girl steals a dumpling drenched in sauce from his plate, and his cousin laughs.
Katara shoves a glass vase in his hands from the next stall, and he promptly drops it.
The awful shattering sound snaps him back to the present, and he realizes everyone is staring at him. His breath comes quick and shallow, and he stutters out an apology, bending to scoop up the shards with his shaking hands.
“You’re bleeding,” Katara realizes suddenly, reaching for his hands. “Don’t touch the glass, it’ll cut you more. Here, let me see.”
She’s pushing his sleeves back before he can stop her, already drawing out water from her waterskin, and someone gasps. Lee shuts his eyes and braces himself for the inevitable punishment, for showing weakness.
He feels something light brushing up his arms. Tentatively, he opens his eyes to Katara running her fingers up and down his forearms, tracing over the cuts, bruises, and burn scars lacing across them.
Sokka grips his shoulder. “Where are these injuries and scars from, Lee?” His voice is low, gentle, but with a firm note to it that makes Lee want to answer him.
“I can be clumsy sometimes,” he says instead.
Toph frowns immediately. “That’s a lie. Where are they really from?”
Lee is dangerously close to blurting out that they’re lessons from the Dai Li, and from someone long ago that he doesn’t remember. Mortified, he presses his lips together in a smile and says nothing.
Katara heals his arms, but they’re all keeping a closer eye on him after that.
--
After a few days of tea - real tea - with the Avatar and his friends, Lee feels warmer than ever. The atmosphere is always loose at teatime, joking and relaxed.
When the agent sets a teacup in front of him at dinner that night, he tries to refuse. They hold him down as he struggles and force it down his throat, and the warmth is gone.
--
“You know, I’m starting to get used to seeing him without the scar,” Aang whispers a little too loudly one day, then winces.
Lee knows they’re referring to him - they’ve alluded to this mysterious facial scar often enough - but it doesn’t make it any less weird to hear the boy say this. He stubbornly resists the urge to reach up and pat his cheek again, knowing it will just be the same texture he feels every morning.
“But where did it go?” Katara asks for maybe the hundredth time. Lee knows now that this question isn’t really aimed at him, now that he’s answered it ninety-nine times before with “What scar?”
“Maybe the Dai Li have some magic scar-healing solution?” Sokka throws out half-sarcastically. “If they can mess with his mind, they could probably do that too.”
They continue discussing this in not-so-hushed conversation for a while, and Lee tunes them out in favor of focusing on the flame in his mind. For the first time, he tries to pay attention to the one in his chest as well, barely-there and flickering wildly.
“Katara?”
A brown-haired teen stands at the end of the alleyway. The group erupts into chaos.
The children, especially Katara, show the same visceral distrust they initially showed Lee when he first met them. Katara pins the boy, Jet, to the wall with ice, and they proceed to argue over whether or not they can trust him.
“I’m here to help you find Appa!” he says, clutching a poster of the sky bison. This prompts another round of arguing, before they finally decide to follow him to an old - empty - warehouse.
Lee finds his gaze drawn back to Jet over and over again. He’s not sure why, but something about him pulls at the corners of Lee’s mind, threatening to unravel something in him. A few times, he catches Jet leveling similar looks his way, glances of fear, hatred, and confusion hidden by a thin veneer of composure and confidence.
This wild goose chase goes on for a while before Jet’s friends show up. This, of course, makes everyone immediately suspicious.
“I thought you said you didn’t have your gang anymore!” Katara challenges.
“I don’t!” Jet yelps, confused and a little panicky.
The smaller girl runs up to give Jet a hug. “We were so worried. How did you get away from the Dai Li?” She turns to Lee, who is watching the whole exchange with well-hidden confusion. “And what are you doing here?”
“The Dai Li?”
“I don’t know what she’s talking about!” Jet exclaims.
“I don’t know!” he yells, writhing in the chair as they fasten a ring of stones around his head. “I’ve been banished, I don’t know, let him go!”
Uncle is lying in the corner, utterly still. He’s not sure if the old man is still breathing.
“He got arrested by the Dai Li a couple of weeks ago trying to fight that guy!” The girl points straight at Lee, and he straightens, peering at her in confusion.
“I don’t remember that,” he states, squinting in an effort to remember anything at all. “I’ve never seen this boy in my life. Why would he try to fight me, anyway? I am a cultural servant of Ba Sing Se.”
“You’re a- what?” the girl shakes her head. “No, we met on the ferry into the city, remember? We liberated food from the captain together? You and your uncle work at that tea shop in the Lower Ring!”
“None of that is true,” Lee states firmly. “You must be confusing me with someone else. I have lived in the Middle Ring of Ba Sing Se my whole life, and I don’t have an uncle. I certainly wouldn’t steal; I am a law-abiding citizen.”
Jet looks at him and his eyes narrow. “You’re Fire Nation,” he accuses, but it seems like it pains him to say even that much.
“No I’m not,” Lee refutes, and it feels just as wrong to say, even if it’s true. “I’m of Earth Kingdom descent.”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Toph mutters, brow furrowed. “They’re all telling the truth.”
“That’s impossible,” Katara replies, but Sokka has a pensive look on his face.
“No, it’s not! Toph can’t tell who’s lying because they all think they’re telling the truth. They’ve been brainwashed!”
“That’s crazy!” Jet immediately counters. “It can’t be!”
Brainwashed. The word tumbles around Lee’s mind, echoing off of every memory he has. His first instinct is to deny, to listen to the flame that croons that You are a dedicated worker and such a loyal asset to this city, Joo Lee, but he can’t. He can’t because of Ojia’s voice, because of Xun’s fear, because of the old man’s calloused hands cupping his face, because of the cracked mirror and the strange tea and the spicy noodles and the blood on his cot. He can’t listen anymore, and the uncertainty threatens to choke him.
Brainwashed. How apt. His brain feels empty now, washed out of everything he might have been.
He follows the children because he has no other choice. Inevitably, he knows, he will end up at Long Feng’s feet again, but he can at least savor some moments of clarity before they take him again.
They reach the house, but it is late. As much as Lee wants to stay, the flame is becoming too strong, almost overpowering, and he feels the pressure in his head to go back go back go back.
So he leaves, silently, slipping away when their eyes are not on him. Even Toph is too focused on Jet to notice until he is too far away for her to discern him among the dozens of footsteps that pitter-patter down the streets.
When he reports to Long Feng, he manages to maintain his normal cadence and grotesque smile, but his throat closes up when he reaches the part with Jet. “They ran into an acquaintance of theirs on the way back to the house who tried to help them find their bison,” he says instead. “They didn’t find it, though.”
If Long Feng can tell he is lying, he doesn’t say anything. That night, he can’t force himself to eat, sickened with thoughts of lie lie it’s all a lie.
--
He punches the mirror, watches the shards cut into his skin and crash to the floor. His knuckles drip blood into the sink, the bright red liquid staining the shards of glass in the basin.
When it finally stops, he wipes what’s left on his pant leg and runs his fingers through his hair. It’s longer than when he first entered the Dai Li’s service, but not long enough to do anything with yet, not that he would know what to do if it was. The Earth Kingdom braids down his back just don’t seem right.
--
“The Earth Kingdom needs your diligence.”
I am honored to serve my people.
Long Feng doesn’t send him back.
Lee spends days and nights in his cell, tangled up and lost in his own mind. Things don’t make sense, not anymore, and he is fragmented, slowly drifting apart from himself.
Sometimes they bring him to the training room, and he wipes the floor with a dozen more Dai Li. Sometimes it’s the side room, but mercifully alone, so all he has to do is try not to think about what his captors are doing to him. Sometimes they bring him to the room of an old man who looks at him with undisguised pain and his guards with undisguised rage. Lee is sure that the man - a dragon, his mind supplies - would be roaring and snarling, tearing this place apart stone by stone, if they hadn’t crushed his hands and given him cold tea.
“Comply with our demands,” the agent gripping his right arm like a vice growls in his ear. “Or you’ll find out how much worse it can get for your dear uncle.”
“I don’t have an uncle.” Oh, how his words come to haunt him now. All the brainwashing in the world wouldn’t make him forget this, not now. Not anymore.
Sometimes he hears a deep lowing rumbling through the corridors, the distant rattling of heavy chains. He doesn’t know what to do with this information, but he wishes it was something, anything.
--
The next time they lead him through the hallway, they run into a pair of little kids, a boy and a girl, unbound and unsupervised.
“They’re escaping!” one agent barks, and the rest spring into action. Lee should be staying silent and out of the way, but he can’t.
He sees red. In an instant, all four agents are on the ground, groaning in pain or dead. The kids look at him with wide eyes.
“Let’s go,” he says, slinging a pair of swords from a dead agent’s back.
None of them know where they’re going, but Lee follows the insistent, unmistakable grumbles of the sky bison chained up in the heart of the prison. It doesn’t take long at all, when you put a killing machine together with two kids he’s determined to protect with his dying breath.
His first thought upon seeing Appa is that the bison is dirty. His fur is matted and clumped with dust and mud, and lines of singed fur score across his sides. He watches them with mistrustful eyes as they approach.
“Hi, Appa,” Lee says softly. The bison lows in response, and Lee reaches out a hand tentatively to pat his head.
When he receives the bison’s acceptance, he directs the children to do the same while he slashes at the chains with his swords, breaking away at the metal bit by bit while murmuring reassuringly to the spooked animal.
He’s almost done when more agents burst through the door. With a muffled swear, Lee lurches forward to block the stones flying at the twins.
His blades are a whirlwind as he fights the Dai Li, but they’ve learned. They’ve brought more, far more than he can handle alone, much less with two defenseless kids at his back. They have two choices now: flee, or surrender.
Lee had wanted to find the old man they said was his uncle, if only to spare him the punishment of his actions. He can hear a distant thundering in that direction, though, like the lake is crashing down on the prison, and he knows it’s too late. Still, he hesitates.
It’s enough to give the Dai Li an opening. Before he knows it, he’s flat on his back, watching a blade sing through the air towards the boy, who gasps in pain as it slices open his stomach from sternum to waist.
Time slows down. The boy freezes in horror, hands braced in front of him, as his blood spills out onto the stone floor. The incision is large enough that something else starts poking out, and Lee nearly loses what little he downed the night before right then and there.
Cursing his inaction, he leaps to his feet and buries his sword deep in the agent’s throat, then turns to swing the girl onto the bison. She’s kicking and screaming and sobbing for her brother, but she stays on the bison as Lee picks up the boy’s limp body and hands him up to her.
As he bends his knees to leap up himself, another manages to catch him with a stone hand wrapped around his bicep, dragging him back. In a last-ditch effort, he slashes at the last chain, feeling it give way under his sword. Appa rears into the air and snarls, clearing his own path to the large door.
The Dai Li are already recovering. “Go!” Lee yells hoarsely. “Get out of here!”
The girl is crying as she reaches for him, but he won’t take her hand (“Take my hand!” resonates in his head, but it’s really not the time to remember that, thank you). Instead, he twists as much as his stone restraints will allow, and he snatches a green torch off the wall to wave at Appa.
The beast roars in fear and bolts with the kids on his back, flying off to who-knows-where. Lee just hopes it’s safer, where they’re going.
--
They bring him to the throne room.
The Earth King isn’t there, but the Kyoshi Warrior is all bite and shock and sharp angles, and she watches him with calculating eyes as the Dai Li force him to his knees in front of her. “So this is what you’ve been beaten down to, Zuzu,” she sneers, finally.
He dares not speak. The chill of the marble seeps through his robes, and he suppresses a shiver - not of cold, but of fear.
“Are you really so pathetic that you’re just going to sit there and take it?” She’s prodding his face with her fingers, and wow her nails are pointy.
“I don’t understand,” he says, and his voice grates against his ears, rough and gravelly. “I’m…not Joo Lee?”
She laughs then, a cruel sound that pierces his ears just as badly as his own harsh voice. “You really don’t know who you are. Imagine what Father would say if he saw you like this. He might just kill you on the spot for being so weak as to fall to…” she waves her hand at him. “…whatever you are now. Some sort of lowly servant.”
“Do we know each other?” he asks, dazed. He feels like he should recognize her, but her name is always just on the tip of his tongue, dancing ever out of reach.
She lights a bright blue flame on the tip of her finger. “Does this jog your memory?”
“His chi doesn’t even feel like a firebender’s - at least, not like Crazy Blue Fire.”
“Or this?”
Her hands are back on his face now, her nails digging into the left side. He flinches, expecting a flash of pain, but he just feels something pulling at his skin a little as she pries the rubbery covering off.
“They really thought they could hide that disgusting thing with these flimsy cosmetics,” she says, dangling a skin-colored rubber mask in front of his face. “Nothing will rid you of Father’s lesson, Zuzu. I thought you’d have learned that by now.”
He doesn’t respond, breath caught in his throat. “What scar?” became that scar.
The girl’s face twists in disgust, but deep in her eyes, there’s another emotion Lee can’t name. “Throw him in the catacombs,” she orders, turning away. “He’s not worth my time like this. Maybe I’ll figure out how to play with him later, when I no longer have more important things to care about.”
He almost wants to protest, to struggle, to tell everyone not to trust her. There’s something in the way she moves that tells him she’s dangerous - not just for her firebending power, but for her words, her silver tongue, twisting around everyone she talks to. He wants to spill all this to everyone in the room, but he can’t trust anyone, and he can’t bring himself to open his mouth.
They bring him away, and all he can think is that the city will fall tonight.
--
Old Ba Sing Se is damp and musty and Lee feels like he can’t breathe.
Something is wrong with him, so very wrong, and it scares him. Something that has made people reject him time and time again. His life, false; his family, strangers; children he almost called friends, gone.
He punches a large crystal jutting out of ground, over and over and over again. It’s not as satisfying as shattering the mirror, but the bruises on his already scabbed knuckles and the sharp pain lancing through his fingers keeps him grounded. This, at least, is something he understands.
“Stop, you’re hurting yourself!”
Surprised, he actually does pause for a moment and turn. Katara stands a few feet away, concern plain on her face and her hand reaching for a waterskin she doesn’t have. He tamps down on a reflexive Joo Lee smile and, subsequently, an absurd desire to laugh.
“Katara,” he says. “What are you doing here?”
She flinches a little when he says her name, but he cannot imagine why. He thinks it may have something to do with this Zuko person they kept talking about before.
“I should be asking you that question,” she retorts lightly, hands on her hips. “Azula and her friends are in the city, disguised as Kyoshi Warriors. I thought they were our friends and went to ask if they could help us find you, but Azula threw me in here instead.”
“Azula.” He sounds out the name, and it, like many other things lately, comes easily to him. “I think I know her, from before I was…” Brainwashed.
Katara’s eyes soften. “You did. She’s your sister.”
Lee thinks about the disgust, plain on Azula’s face. Pathetic, she had called him. Weak. She told him their father would kill him.
He thinks of the old man, his uncle, cradling his face with such gentleness. He remembers another man doing the same, not so gently.
The rest of Katara’s explanation catches up to him. “Wait, you were looking for me?”
She seems almost near tears now. “We broke into Lake Laogai to find Appa, and we ran into your uncle. We tried to find you and Appa, but Long Feng and the Dai Li were too strong, and we couldn’t get out. Appa and this little girl came flying in, though, and helped us get away. Now that Long Feng’s in jail and the Earth King knows about the war, we were hoping to find you…but not like this!”
“Hold up.” Lee pinches the bridge of his nose in a known gesture, trying to sort it all out in his head. “First things first. What happened to the twins?”
“Th-the little kids?” Katara sniffles, and oh no she is definitely crying now. “Mari said she and Ling were escaping the Dai Li and got caught, but you saved them and freed Appa. We can’t thank you enough for that.”
“And Ling?” Lee whispers, already dreading what she will say.
“I tried to save him, but it was too late.” Katara pushes her hands against her eyes in an effort to stem her tears. “He didn’t make it. Th-they cut through his organs and-” she breaks off with a strangled noise.
Lee closes his eyes and turns his head, trying to brace himself against the rush of grief. He may not have known them long, but Mari and Ling were two more victims of horrific treatment that he couldn’t save them from. Just like with Ojia, just like with Xun, Lee could do nothing to stop it.
The silence drags on as they both take a few minutes to compose themselves. Finally, Lee brings himself together again enough to ask, “What did you mean, about Long Feng being in jail and the Earth King knowing about the war?”
Katara draws herself up a little proudly. “Long Feng was manipulating King Kuei into believing there was no war against the Fire Nation. We revealed the truth to the king, and he put Long Feng in jail!”
Long Feng is imprisoned. The thought wrapped itself around Lee’s mind, strangling him, seizing his body in a tight fear. Long Feng is imprisoned, but he will escape, and Azula has the Dai Li.
He swore loudly, shocking even himself with his slovenly (no, the sailors he learned them from never felt the need to censor themselves) outburst. “That’s how Azula took power,” he muttered. “A natural power vacuum like that in the Dai Li would be a perfect opportunity for her to swoop in and bring the whole city under her heel without anyone even knowing enough to stop her.”
Katara’s face falls, and Lee is hit with the stark reminder that she is young, a child thrust into another world’s war. “We didn’t want any of that to happen,” she says, devastated. “If we’d just checked, instead of splitting up…”
Lee sighs. “She would’ve found another way in anyway. Don’t beat yourself up over it; better men have been fooled like that before. It’s better to just move on. How do we get out of here?”
They begin casting their senses around the large cavern, searching for anything - drafts, light, holes - that could lead to a way out. It takes a long time to search the walls, and they make small talk all the while.
Lee learns that his uncle - Uncle Iroh - joined the children when they rescued him under the lake, but was too injured to go anywhere, as much as he wanted to. Katara quietly confesses that his anger and desperation to find Lee had intimidated all of them a little bit, something none of them had expected from the kindly old man. Privately, Lee wonders what it’s like to have someone who cares so profoundly about him; his sister doesn’t seem to care, and from her (lies lies lies) words, his father doesn’t either. He remembers his uncle, though, where he can’t remember Azula or his father. He remembers the hands holding his head softly, the sweet whispers and lullabies, the clear fury on his face. He’s glad now, so glad, that his uncle could escape with these children and live to fight another day. He’s sacrificed so much already for a boy who does not remember him, and Lee knows he couldn’t possibly ask him for more.
Lee learns that she lost her mother to the Fire Nation in a despicably brutal show of power. He learns about the dwindling population of southern waterbenders, that Katara is the last. He learns that her father has been fighting for two years, away from home and away from them. He learns each tradition Katara speaks so fondly of, all the ones she lost to the endless cacophony of conflict and loss.
In return, he tells her about the lost looks in the eyes of refugees on the street. He tells her about the girl with the stolen voice, the boy with the stolen innocence. He tells her about the broken mirror and the sink on the wrong side of the cell and the training room he now sees in his nightmares.
They share the same haunted look in their eyes when their exchange finally dwindles to silence. Katara dares to break it.
“Your scar’s back,” she says, half in question.
Lee raises a hand to his face. “I don’t know why the Dai Li tried to cover it up,” he says, though he has an idea (in the back of his mind, screaming important important important). “I guess it was too horrifying for nobility to look at,” he huffs self-deprecatingly. “I know it was a punishment for-for something. But I can’t remember what. Azula pulled the fake covering off my face before she threw me down here.”
Katara’s face twists into a scowl, much akin to the face she wore when she first saw him behind Long Feng, but for once it wasn’t directed at him. Lee hadn’t been able to see her face in the darkness of the cavern as he told her his story, but he imagined it would have looked a lot like this - tight, furious, ready to tear the world apart to make things right.
“I can heal it,” she says suddenly, her face smoothing out.
“It’s a scar,” Lee responds, shocked. “It can’t be healed. And you don’t have any water here.”
She fiddles with a chain around her neck and pulls out a small vial. “This is water from the Spirit Oasis in the North Pole,” she tells him. “It has special healing properties. It might even break the brainwashing, so you can get your memories back.”
For a moment, Lee is tempted. A world in which he did not have to cower in fear, hide his face from everyone who would gaze upon it. But as Joo Lee he wore a mask, a fake cover for a fake person, and he never wants to go back. The scar, at least, reminds him of who he is, even if he can’t remember what he fought for.
“You travel with the Avatar,” he says simply instead. “Save it for an emergency. I don’t deserve it, not now.”
She, ever the kind soul, objects. “You don’t get to decide whether or not you deserve it,” she protests. “You’re a human being, too. You deserve it just as much as anyone else.”
“Katara,” he says softly but firmly, and now he knows her twitch has some history behind it. “It’s a little complicated. But trust me when I say there are more important things you might need that water for. This scar, at least, reminds me that I’m not Joo Lee. I’m not perfect, but I am free to choose my own destiny.”
She bites her lip hesitantly, clearly not liking it, but slips it back under her shirt.
“I just.” He stops, runs his hands through his hair. “You knew me before, I know you did. So, please, if you can tell me…who was I?”
She opens her mouth to respond, but is interrupted by a resounding crash as one of the walls bursts open.
“Katara!” Aang calls, running over to hug her tightly. “I was so worried. I had a vision that you were in trouble, and- Zuko?” Aang glances over Katara’s shoulder at Lee, so startled that he calls him by the wrong - no, the right? - name.
“Avatar,” he rasps.
The young airbender’s eyes are suspiciously misty. “We thought you might be dead when we saw that the Dai Li sank the prison under Lake Laogai, but I’m glad you’re okay.”
“I’m glad you’re okay too,” he offers awkwardly. “Katara told me that your bison made it to you safely.”
Now Aang does hug him, a quick squeeze around the middle before Lee can react. “Thank you,” he gasps. “You freed him, thank you, thank you!”
Lee offers him a half-smile (not a full one, no, he can’t, not yet). Aang beams at him, surreptitiously wiping his eyes dry.
“We have to go,” he says, and he leads them through the tunnels that twist and turn, breaking through walls to find new areas of the catacombs. Old Ba Sing Se is just that - old, and Lee tries not to look at the half-buried skeletons, the rodents scurrying in the corners, the musty smell pervading the air that serves as an uncomfortable reminder of his cell under the lake. He vaguely wonders if the sinkhole that swallowed the first city would ever make a reappearance; he’s heard rumors in the city that it was a vengeful spirit angry at the handling of their land, and Lee wouldn’t be surprised if it decided to return. Given his luck, it probably would.
They burst into another wide cavern, a waterfall cascading down the far wall into a pool that stretched to the center. Lee’s heart skipped a beat and he froze as they came face-to-face with two dozen Dai Li and Azula herself.
On a good day, he could take out the entire company of earthbenders singlehandedly, but today is not a good day. Azula is eyeing Aang like a piece of prey, and Lee will be damned before he lets another child fall to this horrible war.
Her eyes flicker to his. “Zuzu,” she says, her voice sickeningly sweet, and something trips in the back of his mind like danger danger do not trust . “I expected this kind of treachery from Uncle. But Zuko, Prince Zuko, you’re a lot of things, but you’re not a traitor, are you?”
Prince Zuko. The name leaves a bitter taste in his mouth.
“You left me to die,” he says.
“I would have done something with you eventually,” she sniffs. “Just because you’re honorless now doesn’t mean you have to stay that way.” Her voice softens, almost sentimental. “It’s not too late for you, Zuko. You can still redeem yourself.”
She can see the hesitation on his face, so she continues, clenching her hands. “I’ve plotted every move of this day, this glorious day in Fire Nation history, and the only way we win is together. At the end of this day, you will have your honor back. You will have Father’s love. You will have everything you want.”
But will you? his mind whispers. What do you want?
Katara is glancing at him pleadingly out of the corner of her eye. “You don’t have to listen to her,” she whispers to him. “They’ve hurt so many people. You don’t have to be a part of that!”
When Azula looked upon him in his broken state, she cast him aside. When Katara saw him, truly saw him, she offered to help, instead of ripping open the wound.
Lee breathes, and the flame in his mind gutters until it is barely more than a single glowing ember. He breathes, and the flame in his chest expands, filling every inch of him with warmth, his hands itching with fluid movements long out of practice.
There is no honor in someone who stands back as their people suffer around them. They wanted everything he’s ever been, and they’re about to get it.
He stands; he delivers.
--
The cavern is split by blue fire and waves of earth, and if Lee hadn’t spent hours and hours sending Dai Li to the floor every week, he would be burned to a crisp right now. As it is, he’s barely able to keep up with the firebending prodigy, and Azula is ruthlessly beating him back.
There’s a tightness to her face that wasn’t there before, though. She definitely isn’t happy about how close he’s coming to matching her.
“Joo Lee!” someone yells at him, and all Lee can think is not now, not anymore. “The Earth King has invited you to Lake Laogai!”
“I-” the words stick in his throat, and he swallows them. “Lake Laogai is gone,” he roars back, “and you’re going to follow it!”
And then Lee has the unfortunate opportunity to witness the full throes of the Avatar State, and he’s so glad he’s not this kid’s enemy. Time stands still as he rises in the air.
Azula seems to have no such reservations, and Lee sees her shift in the corner of his eye. “No!” he yells, lurching forward.
No more children torn apart by this war. He refuses to let it happen again.
He slams into Azula’s side, forcing her off-balance, and the sparks of electricity forming between her fingers explode in a startled burst. She claws at him, dragging her ouch sharp hot nails across his skin, leaving blood and light burns across the pale surface in an attempt to push him off. He holds her down just barely as Aang - no, the Avatar - rages above them. The Dai Li never even stood a chance.
Lee thinks even Azula recognizes that she can’t survive this one her own, because she goes limp under him until the Dai Li are all gone and Aang is falling back in Katara’s arms, exhausted. “Zuko!” Katara yells across the cave, and Lee wants to scream that it’s not his name, it’s not him. “We have to get out of here!”
Lee relaxes, about to get up, when Azula lurches upward and throws him off. She’s stronger than she looks, and Lee finds himself scrambling to get away as she straightens her robes and comes after him with a relentless fire in her eyes.
He stumbles over to the other teens bit by bit, warding off attacks, but his moves are only half-complete, remnants of a past long forgotten. Azula is miles ahead of him in terms of firebending prowess, and they would be overpowered if not for Katara’s waterbending and Lee's unconventional swords.
Katara steps into the pool with Aang half-hanging off of her. “Come on!” she urges Lee, ready to waterbend out. “We have to go!”
Azula chooses that moment to launch another bolt of lightning at him - a finishing move, she wants him dead - and Lee finds himself instinctively sliding into a pose he’s never practiced, catching and guiding-
In, through his core, and the lightning streaks out his hands, flung high over their heads. Lee wants to savor every line of shock in Azula’s face, but there’s no time. As black spots crowd at the edges of his vision and Katara prepares her waterspout, he lunges towards her.
Azula’s quick to recover. Her manicured hands close around his ankle and drag him down, away from Katara’s and Aang’s anguished cries and back down into the pool (they look so small up there, like Mari and Ling, and he will make sure they survive this if it’s the last thing he does). He smacks into the water, the back of his head scraping against the rocky bottom, and Azula’s furious gaze appears above him, her hair scattered around her face and her eyes ablaze with something manic.
“Father will be furious,” she says, almost gleefully but with a touch of terror, as she kneels on top of him and presses his head under the surface of the water.
He thrashes, feeling the water rush into his nose and mouth. Coughing and spluttering, trying and failing to push the younger girl off, his exhaustion rushes in all at once. The cavern rumbles, falling apart under the pressure of earthbending in the fight, and Lee is filled with fear at the thought of being buried on top of drowned.
For one final moment, everything goes quiet, and he savors this moment of peace before everything goes black.
--
They try to force him back into the chair with the spinning flame in front of him, but this time he refuses to go down without a fight.
They strap him in anyway, even though he puts three Dai Li in the medical wing in the process. He doesn’t even know where he is now that the prison under Lake Laogai has been flooded, but his best guess is somewhere in the palace. He’s really not sure why he’s not dead yet.
A single point of light circles around and around, never stopping, never going out. It’s fitting, given the circumstances; there’s no choice available but to go along the same track over and over again.
“The Grand Secretariat implores you to fight for your country,” they tell him, and he loses it.
The flame can’t go out, but it can get stronger.
The glass lamp shatters as the heat flares higher, glass flying everywhere, and Lee doesn’t even flinch as it cuts his skin. Summoning a burst of short, stuttering flame to his hands, he weakens his flimsy bonds and snaps out of them, enraged.
It takes less than a minute for him to drop everyone in the room. “Mercy, please,” the last man blubbers, lying on his back with fear written all over his face. A sick satisfaction curls in Lee’s stomach as he watches this man cower the way he has made so many others cower for decades.
“Mercy,” he chuckles darkly, and the agent flinches. “Where was your mercy when you burned a girl’s vocal cords out for singing a lullaby?” he growls, planting a boot on his chest and forcing the agent back against the stone. “Where was it when you beat and violated a ten-year-old into submission? Where was it when you split a little boy in half in front of his sister and let his insides spill out onto the floor?”
The man whimpers, concerned only for himself. Disgusted, Lee swipes his blade across the man’s throat and turns to leave. It was time, finally, to end a era of torment.
This is a robbery of everything you’ve ever been. Dai Li, stand and deliver.