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February’s reputation says she’s the coldest month of the year.
It certainly holds true tonight. Zuko shivers under three layers, beanie pulled down tight, the frayed ends of his coat and the holes in his gloves an open invitation to the bite of winter. His nose is frozen solid, cheeks pinprick numb, feet heavy with cold.
He can’t hold back his smile.
Jet leaps back and forth across the empty grave, bobbing up and over the same way they’d hot-potatoed the molotov cocktail that started the blaze now quickly roaring to life in its morbid pit.
He catches Zuko watching him and smirks. With a flourish, he spins, runs, and flips over the empty grave as the flames lick at his edges. And, of course, he sticks the landing.
“Showoff,” Zuko says. Jet crowds into his space.
“As long as you’re watching, sweetheart,” Jet says. He wraps an arm around Zuko’s waist and they both turn to watch the fire.
///
Jet has always looked like the kind of trouble you want to get into, at least for a little while, at least for a taste, and Zuko always comes back for more. They’ve been dancing in and out of each other’s arms since they were sixteen and angry, crashing cars and breaking rules and bones and hearts. Usually their own. Ty Lee told him once that they were twin flames, whatever that means, but they aren’t really anything. They just are.
///
They sleep in Jet’s shitty van like they have a thousand times before. This one is, admittedly, one of the nicer of the shitty vans he’s burned through. They always feel the same, though, because no matter where Jet is, he’s there completely. He always inhabits a space like it was made just for him.
Photos of the Freedom Fighters and all the friends he’s made across the nation plaster the walls, stickers and spray paint and murals and pages of books interspersed throughout.
Zuko finds a familiar receipt, curled at the edges and yellowing with age, but Uncle’s heavy-handed script is still so distinct: 馬に寝て残夢月遠し茶の煙. The dragon at the top of the receipt has acquired an obscenely long dick and cartoonish eyes over the years, but it’s still here, still one of Jet’s prized memories. He’ll have to tell Uncle the next time he sees him.
The passenger seat visor is pierced with the shuriken Mai threw into Jet’s shoulder after he’d singed her bangs. A scarf Aang somehow cobbled together with Appa’s fur is wrapped around the headrest of the driver’s seat. Beads from Katara’s hair and one of Toph’s insanely expensive jade combs she gave away as a fuck you to her parents clink together beneath the rear view mirror. A photo of Sokka’s shocked face as Jet kisses him on the cheek, and one taken immediately after as Sokka chases him down, Jet’s blurry laughter demonic at the edge of the frame. A fan spread wide across the ceiling to display lipstick kisses from as many of the Kyoshi Warriors as could fit, the bright red of their lips slightly smudged in places but surprisingly well preserved after so many years and so many miles.
There are photos of people and places Zuko will never know, scraps of cloth and handwritten notes, trinkets and tokens, crystals and brightly woven bracelets and banners, talismans and cds, pressed flowers and broken things. Inscrutable, chaotic, and beautiful.
And then there’s the photo that presses in tight on Zuko’s ribs, a moment in time that he knows like the sun in the sky.
Jet leans back against a railing on the bank of a river in a small Earth Kingdom town. Buckwheat hangs askew from his lips, his skin glowing golden under the light of the setting sun. He looks at Zuko, who leans forward, both arms resting on the railing, his scarred profile facing the camera, his eyes just meeting Jet’s. He seems shy. Jet’s mouth is smirking, but his eyes—
///
Oh, Spirits, his eyes. No one has ever looked at Zuko so softly before. He’s looking at Zuko like he knows him. He’s looking at Zuko like—
“Holy shit,” Jet says. He’s sort of incredulous, which is a look Zuko’s never seen on his face.
Zuko leans closer. “What? Is something wrong?”
But Jet just keeps looking at him, his eyes unguarded, and Zuko feels like his heart jumped into his throat.
“You’re really something special, Zuko. You know that?”
///
For all of his quick caution and sharp senses, Jet is the kind of sleeper that may as well be dead to the world.
It always makes it easier for Zuko to leave.
Zuko pushes Jet’s hair off of his forehead and out of his eyes. He kisses the bridge of Jet’s nose. He looks at him, the first light of dawn creeping in at the edges of the makeshift curtains. A sleeping Jet is the only Jet that is ever really still.
Zuko dresses quickly. If he doesn’t move fast, he won’t move at all. He looks, again, at that photo that tears him up inside. Maybe one day he’ll make a copy of it, or take a picture on his phone.
But somehow, he doesn’t want that. He wants to keep finding himself here, within and without Jet’s arms, tying new knots in the threads of fate that bring them together over great distances and time. He wants to know that the compass of his heart will always have this magnetic pole.
///
When Jet wakes up, Zuko is gone again. He doesn’t have to check the passenger seat to know that his leather jacket is on Zuko’s back right now, shielding him from the weather and the wind as he rides away into nowhere, into anywhere, on the back of his motorcycle. He knows it will have a new pin or a new patch whenever he gets it back, all a part of the game they play.
He pulls Zuko’s jacket on, flips up the hood, and goes outside for a smoke. The sun is barely risen, and Zuko must already be an hour down the road. Jet searches Zuko’s pockets for a light, and instead, he finds a note.
Jet reads it, and he laughs. And he waits for Zuko to come back home.