Dark Puck - Continuing On

The pursuit trip had been awkward, at best. Aang and Mai had had little contact over the years when they weren’t trying to kill one another, and the icy noblewoman didn’t exactly invite conversation to change this fact.

This, in addition to the Avatar’s vague annoyance that Zuko hadn’t let him know about the Róng Yào problem sooner, contributed to a very long, very awkward, and nearly completely silent journey.

Fortunately, Appa seemed to be travelling faster than Qiang (Kouji was probably pacing the adolescent dragon, afraid of overworking her), and they caught up just on the other side of the ocean.  When they did, Kouji was fighting someone who was more than likely his brother, given the insults flying between them.

“Kouji! Can you get out of the way? We’re trying to land!” Aang shouted down by way of greeting.

The younger man paused, and the elder took advantage of that to knock Kouji’s feet out from under him.  However, he did then drag Kouji out of the way.  Appa landed in the space the brothers had helpfully vacated, and Mai and Aang slid off, the latter running to help Kouji up and hug him.

Kouji hugged back.  “Aang!  Good to see you!”  He grinned at the Avatar, despite the undercurrent of anger to his eyes and words.

“Good to see you, too, Kouji. Zuko sent us to help out,” he said, indicating himself and Mai, by way of explanation.

“…he did?”  Kouji seemed a bit apprehensive.  “Was he angry?”

The elder brother merely rolled his eyes.

“I think he was more annoyed with himself for not being ready for something like this maybe happening,” Aang said in an undertone, frowning slightly. “I don’t even really know what’s going on, he gave me a really, really cut down version of what these Róng Yào people even are.”

“They’re warmongers and traitors,” said the elder brother.  “And they made a mistake when they grabbed my sister.”

The young Avatar grinned a little, fiercely. “Yep.”

Kouji coughed.  “Aang, Lady Mai, this is my older brother Ichiro.”

The golden-eyed man nodded to them.  “Charmed.  And you miss my point — there is not a person yet able to hold onto Yui when she doesn’t want to be held on to.”

“I like her already,” Mai said, evenly.

A corner of Ichiro’s mouth twitched into a smile.  “She’s rubbish at fighting beyond street brawling, but get her some hair pins and no lock can stand before her.  Hence our rush — if Yui gets loose in the Earth Kingdom, we may never be able to find her.”

“Maybe you won’t—” started Kouji, only to be cut off.

“Please remember that you were not the only male in our household ever to chase after her.”

“…Okay, arguing isn’t going to help anything,” Aang pointed out. “What’ve you two managed to find so far?”

“Not much,” sighed Kouji.  “But there are indications of the Róng Yào hiding out here, at least.  We just need to figure out where they are.”

“All right, so, how do we go about doing that?”

“We’ll probably need to split up,” said Ichiro.  “Flying is all well and good, but since this is probably a trap, having a dragon or a sky bison soaring around in the sky would probably alert them that we’re close.  I prefer having the element of surprise.”

“Agreed,” Mai said, and Aang reluctantly nodded.

Kouji nodded as well, leaning against his glaive thoughtfully.  “Did you guys see anything when you were catching up to us?”

“Nothing unusual,” the noblewoman told him. “And no Róng Yào crests anywhere, either.”

“Well, they’d have to be utter idiots to show them where they could be spotted from the air,” pointed out Ichiro.  “And grabbing Yui aside, they don’t seem to be idiots.  Pity, that.”

“They’ve made missteps before,” Mai said, carefully vague. “This is the first open move they’ve made in nearly five years, I don’t think this is the end game.”

“We can worry about that later,” Aang said firmly. “First, we get Yui back.”

“Yes,” Ichiro and Kouji said simultaneously, then glared at each other.  Kouji broke the glare first.  “We should probably eat.”

“Right,” Aang said.

Ichiro got a fire going, and rations were shared out, as well as some deerhare the older bender had caught earlier.

 

Not long afterwards, a pair of men in nondescript clothing stumbled across their campsite.

Mai was the first person to notice the Róng Yào insignia on one of the men’s belts. He was dead before he realized there was a knife in his throat.

Before the other could get far, Ichiro was on his feet, and his kusari-gama had gone spinning out after him, wrapping around his legs and bringing him down.  “Don’t kill that one yet!” he snapped at Mai as Kouji trapped him in earth.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” she snapped, already searching the dead man for anything he might’ve been carrying that could lead them back to wherever he’d come from.

Aang, meanwhile, had shot up on his glider to look and see if the two men had any reinforcements.

Together, the brothers got the man back to their camp — when not bitching at each other, they worked well together.

Mai and Aang joined them not long after, the former with the contents of the dead man’s pocket and her knife, and the latter with the report that there weren’t any more Róng Yào coming.

“Too bad,” Ichiro said before turning a piercing golden gaze onto their prisoner.  “You.  The more we like your information, the more likely we are to let you live.  Talk.”

The captive spat in his face.

He didn’t even blink.  “Well, we could always send the youngsters away and let you have a chat with him, milady.” he said to Mai.  “I’m sure your knives are very eloquent.”

“I’d rather not sink to their level unless I have to,” she replied coolly. “But if I have to, I will. And please,” she said, now turning to the prisoner, “Recall who I used to travel with. I assure you, I’m better at this than your experts were.”

Kouji pushed past his brother.  “Where’s Yui!?” he demanded, grey eyes blazing anger.

The captive remained silent, glaring sullenly at the four of them.

“Kou-kou, go for a walk, will you?” Ichiro asked him.

Kouji sulked.  “We could just feed him to Qiang.”

“Yes, but then we wouldn’t get any information.”

Qiang snorted, as if to say she wouldn’t deign to swallow the captive anyway.

Ichiro squatted next to their prisoner.  “You’re screwed either way,” he said gently.  “You might as well tell us what we want to know.  What did you do with Yui?”

He glared defiantly up at the other man, and, deliberately, spat in his face again.  Ichiro sighed.  “What are you, six?”

No response.

“Lady Mai?” he asked now.  Interrogations weren’t really his style.  He was a damned farmer.

She nodded, sat crosslegged in front of the bound prisoner, inches away from him, and began speaking, conversationally, too quiet for the others to hear.

Ichiro went to clean his face while Kouji tried to eavesdrop.

Aang pulled him back, gently. “You probably don’t want to hear this,” he said, quietly. Just because he’d never witnessed or participated in a formal interrogation didn’t mean he didn’t know what might end up going on.

The sixteen-year-old scowled.  “Then what can I do?”

“…You can help me unsaddle and brush Appa?”

“…sure.  Could you help me with Qiang after?”

“Sure!”

The two teenagers went about that task eagerly while Ichiro returned to lend Mai whatever assistance she might require.

She seemed to have things well in hand, still sitting inches from the prisoner, just having a conversation. She hadn’t yet gone for her knives — that was crude and, hopefully, unnecessary.

Smiling slightly, Ichiro took a seat and waited patiently.

Several hours later, Mai stood up, stretched and walked over to the others. “He didn’t tell me much, just that Yui escaped a day or two ago. And that she stole something from them. He wouldn’t tell me what.”

“Yui?” asked Kouji, blinking.  “Steal?”

“It’s called ‘taking trophies’, little brother,” Ichiro said.

“I can keep questioning him, if you want, but they don’t know where she is any more than we do,” she said, getting a glass of water.

“They wouldn’t.  Yui doesn’t leave a trail.  Which means we get to rely on Kouji now.”

“So, what do we do with him?” she asked, jerking her head in the direction of the prisoner.

“Kill him?” suggested Ichiro.

“All right,” she said, then stood up, walked over to the prisoner, and cut his throat.

“Ichiro!”

“What?  This way he can’t go back and tell them what happened.”

“…On the downside, my dress is now completely ruined,” Mai said, with the air of one commenting on the weather, and dug up a change of clothes.

Aang looked faintly sick.

“I’ll take care of the bodies,” volunteered Ichiro.  “Better to have them vanish without a trace.  You might want to go upwind.”

“Or you could drag them downwind,” Mai pointed out. “Which would probably be easier, especially if I help.” She wandered over to the first man she’d killed, and started dragging the body.

“That too.”  Ichiro grabbed the second man and followed her.

Kouji stared after the two of them.  “…it’s like I don’t know him any more.”

“Five years is a long time,” Aang pointed out. “I mean, think how much you’ve changed since the last time you two saw each other.”

“Yeah, but…”  Then Kouji considered how angry he’d been when Zuko had been kidnapped by the Róng Yào.  “…point.”

Aang smiled a little at him, then frowned at the ground. The quick, easy, matter-of-fact murder he’d just witnessed would be even harder to forget than some of the heat-of-the-moment deaths he’d actually participated in.

Fire flared a quarter-mile away, and Kouji leaned against Qiang.  “Now to figure out where Yui’s probably headed.”

“Yeah. And what she stole,” Aang said, absently playing with Appa’s fur, braiding it.

Kouji closed his eyes, thinking.  “She’d probably head for somewhere they’d never think to look.  Which rules out the old colony.”

“Right.” Aang frowned, thinking.

“…she always did want to go to Omashu…”

“So we try there first?”

“We’d probably beat her there,” mused Kouji.  “She’s on foot, and we have Appa and Qiang.”

“So we keep an eye out for her while we make our way there,” the older man said decisively.

“Definitely.”  Kouji smiled grimly.  “And while we’re here, we can try and find out how widespread these Róng Yào are.”

“And why they’re keeping important prisoners over here, when they’re supposed to be xenophobic warmongers,” Aang added.

“That one’s easy,” said Kouji.  “Who’d expect it?  I only knew ‘cause…”  He hesitated.  “Yui told me.  Kinda.”

“…Right, that makes sense,” he said, after thinking a moment.

The younger teen grinned.  “I must really drive ‘em crazy.  Being so close to Zuko, Fire Nation born and bred — and an earthbender!  The horror of it all!”

“Well, they don’t seem to like Zuko that much, either,” Aang pointed out, also grinning. “I mean, between me, you, and Katara, he’s the exact opposite of what they want in a Firelord.”

“Oh, yes.  Consorting with foreigners and pacifists.”

“How dare he.”

“The pride of the Fire Nation is at stake!” Kouji cried, stroking an imaginary beard.  “We must reclaim our honour!”

Aang had to laugh at that.

Kouji abruptly sobered.  “I just have to wonder… if they’re starting to move now, what were they waiting for?”

“I wish I knew,” Aang said. “I mean, I can see why they’ve laid low the last five years, but… why now?”

“Maybe because Zuko married Lady Katara?” suggested Ichiro, joining them with Mai.

“…that makes sense,” Aang admitted.

“But it’s almost been a year,” Kouji pointed out.

“Maybe they needed the time to finalize their plans. Or adapt something they were planning to put in play years from now,” Mai pointed out.

“Also, if they hit right away, it would be way suspicious. Maybe they waited to throw us off,” Aang added.

“That could do it,” Ichiro admitted.  “And since somebody never goes home, they probably figured our family would be the easiest to target.”

“Oh, yeah, Zuko said to apologize for that, that he should’ve thought of it earlier,” Aang said. Zuko hadn’t specifically said to give the message, but he’d clearly been furious with himself for the mistake, and it couldn’t hurt.

“To be fair, it didn’t occur to me, either,” Ichiro said.  “Not until I was in a world of pain and Yui was gone, anyway.”

Kouji blinked.  “Wait — they attacked you too?”

A small smile.  “More like I attacked them.  They just happened to outnumber me.”

“What a mess,” the Avatar sighed.

“Coups are like that.”

“They’re not stupid enough to pull that,” Mai said. “If Zuko dies without an heir, that means the Seven try to kill each other for the throne. The Róng Yào want a war of conquest, not a civil war.”

Ichiro stopped.  “What if he already has one?”

Aang shook his head. “Not yet.”

“And not soon, according to Katara,” Mai added.

“Not by Katara,” Ichiro replied.  “We already know that the Róng Yào were waiting for something.  What sort of claim might an illegitimate child have to the throne if Zuko dies without an heir by his wife?”

“…If they can prove, beyond any doubt, that the child is his bastard…” she replied. “But I can’t see how Zuko could possibly have a bastard. Not without recognizing it, anyway.”

“He might not know.”

Kouji’s eyes widened, and he coloured red.

“How could he not know?” Aang asked. “I mean… don’t you sort of… have to?”

“…I can’t see him having a one night stand and never bothering to contact the girl again, either,” Mai said.

“Um, actually…”

Mai and Aang both turned to Kouji, who had become roughly the same colour as a tomato.

“Five years ago, after Azula was… executed… Iroh strong-armed Zuko into taking a vacation because the work was exhausting him,” Kouji admitted.  “Um.  I saw one of the women who worked there leaving his room one morning.  And she wasn’t there when we came back six months later.”

“…There could be a hundred different explanations why she left,” Aang insisted.

“There could. But… a secret bastard fits the best, given everything else.”

“…I think I know what Yui stole,” said Ichiro slowly.

“…you don’t think…” Aang started, then Mai cut him off.

“The bastard.”

Ichiro nodded.  “Yui likes kids.  She may not even realise what he is to them.  But if she thought he’d been taken prisoner, she’d’ve brought him with her.”

“…Suddenly this gets a lot more complicated,” Aang muttered.

“And dangerous,” Mai said quietly. “As many people as want the bastard on the throne want the child dead. And if they figure out who the child with your sister is…”

“…sleep is for the weak,” declared Kouji.  “Anyone up for some night-flying?”

No one objected.