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He sees Jet around the tea shop sometimes. Maybe more often than Zuko would like. Jet always takes a table in the corner underneath the window and only ever orders a single green tea, the cheapest item on Pao’s limited menu, which he nurses for hours. Zuko’s convinced it has to be a ruse, but every time he stops by his table to stare suspiciously into Jet's tea cup, there’s always a splash of ice-cold tea left.
Today Jet smirks up at him. “See? I’m a paying customer, Li.”
“Hmph,” Zuko says, sour-faced, and stalks off to the kitchen to hassle Uncle over next week's tea orders. When he returns, he finds that Jet has slipped away.
Good riddance, thinks Zuko grimly. He grabs a cloth and the little pitcher of jasmine tea that Uncle brews for him to clean with and goes to wipe down Jet’s table. And that's when he sees it.
There’s a small yellow flower on the table, the color of the sun, encircled by a row of fat, ruffled petals. Zuko stares and stares. He doesn’t know what to do with it. If the flower had been wilted at all, he would have just tossed it out the open window into the street to get trampled by the carts and rickshaws without a second thought. But this flower isn’t wilted. It’s fresh.
It must have been an accident, Zuko argues with himself unconvincingly. Maybe the flower fell out of Jet’s pocket, maybe it was dropped by some other customer entirely.
But this was Jet’s table. Zuko slowly picks up the flower, thinking even as his hand is reaching out, This is absurd. It can’t be for me.
Uncle’s bustling up behind him. “What do you have there, nephew?
He doesn’t know what to do with it, doesn’t know how to explain this extraordinary event to Uncle. He stands there, frustration building inside his body from sheer uncertainty, and simply holds out the flower for Uncle to inspect.
Uncle breaks into a beaming smile. “Oh, how lovely,” he hums. He likes it. Of course he does.
Zuko still doesn’t have words. He just shakes his head, his mouth opening and closing jerkily. Uncle waits patiently.
“Someone left this,” he manages eventually. The yellow flower dangles limply from between his fingers. Uncle gives him an inscrutable look.
“Yes, someone did,” Uncle says, almost gently. “I believe it's for you.”
And Zuko just keeps standing there like a fool, still holding the flower that someone maybe left for him to find, unwilling to believe it but unable to throw the damn thing away.
Uncle finds a chipped porcelain cup in the back room and fills it with water. Then he tucks the flower inside it, leaving it on the counter for everyone to see. Zuko has to look at the stupid thing for the rest of his shift.
Not that he does.
Zuko’s not looking. He’s not looking.
But sometimes it catches his eye, when he’s stacking up empty tea cups or wiping down a table, that bright flash of yellow right in the corner of his vision.
Not that he’s looking.
Zuko doesn't look at Jet’s lop-sided grin the next afternoon, or the way he lopes out of the tea shop at closing time with his thumbs tucked into his belt loops and his hooks slapping against his legs. And for the same reason, he refuses to look at the pale pink peony or the odd little arrangement of wildflowers that Jet leaves two days later, but he still keeps them. Flowers cost money. And that’s one thing he’s sure Jet doesn’t have much of. But the idiot keeps spending all that he’s got on Zuko. And Zuko can’t make out why.
“I don’t need any of these things,” he snaps as he throws the wildflowers into the cup Uncle has taken to keeping on the counter, completely outraged. Why, why won't Jet stop?
Uncle touches an appreciative finger to the petals of one tiny red poppy. “Well, nephew, that’s not the point,” he reflects.
“Then what is ?” Zuko demands.
Uncle just chuckles and shakes his head, saying in that placid manner that Zuko hates so much, “Ah, nephew. You’ll find out one of these days.”
Tonight Jet’s looking rougher than usual, shivering slightly in the early spring breeze coming in from the open window. Well, it’s his own fault. He’s the idiot who keeps choosing the draftiest table in the tea shop. If he didn’t want to freeze, Zuko tells himself grimly, then all he has to do is use his own two legs and move across the room to somewhere warmer.
But Jet doesn’t. Zuko stalks around the tea shop, growing angrier and angrier and not knowing why. Finally he marches up to Jet’s table. Jet grins up at him, cocky as usual despite the fact he’s wrapping his arms around his middle for warmth.
Zuko slams a cup of hot tea on the table in front of him. Black tea, with steam still rising from the rim. Jet’s grin falters.
“I didn’t order this,” Jet says.
“Nope,” Zuko agrees.
Jet winces. “I can’t pay for it,” he admits.
“It’s on the house,” Zuko says darkly, and whirls around and stalks back to the table by the counter, where Uncle’s old ladies are waving at him to come refill their cups of matcha. Out of the corner of his eye, he can tell that Jet’s still staring at him. Well, let him. Jet's not the only one who can be mysterious.
And when Zuko goes to close the shop that night, there’s a handful of pale blue flowers with bell-shaped petals, all tied up with brown string, left on the table by the window.
He doesn’t throw it away. Instead he tucks the bouquet in the pocket of his apron. In the city, he’s learned, even flowers aren’t free; even a common leopard-violet that he might’ve seen growing in a field back home costs two coppers from the girls who carry their baskets of blossoms through the streets, peddling limp nosegays and wilted bouquets.
You can’t just give away a flower, not for free. This cost someone something, Zuko knows. And knowing that, he can’t toss it aside. He’ll bring it home tonight to decorate their dinner table. It’s the kind of domestic touch that Uncle will enjoy.
Jet comes and goes and more things get left behind. There’s a tiny scrap of calligraphy once, lines from an ancient poem that Zuko remembers reading once, about a pair of lover who had gone missing at sea. Another time he finds a set of silk scarves for his broadswords in brilliant shades of yellow and green, and one day, there's a small bird, carved roughly out of fragrant cherry wood.
“I think you have a secret admirer, nephew,” Uncle says, picking up the small bird and peering at it closely. “Isn’t that nice?”
Zuko keeps his back turned to Uncle, focusing intently on the bucket of dirty water he’s slowly swirling around the tea shop floor with his mop. Uncle’s wrong, of course. There’s nothing admirable about him.
But Jet keeps pursuing him anyway, even though Zuko's not interested at all. And that's what it is; Zuko knows a chase when he sees one. It's odd. Zuko's always been the pursuer, never the pursued. If it was anyone other than Jet, it'd be...well, nice. To finally be the one who’s wanted, instead of always being the one doing the wanting.
I don't know what he even wants from me, Zuko thinks exasperatedly. But this really isn’t anything new. He thinks that about almost everyone he meets.
But he brings home the gifts anyway—if that’s even what they are. He hangs the scrap of calligraphy by his futon, sets the wooden bird on the windowsill.
And if he happens to glance at them as he is falling asleep, well. There’s nobody to know except Uncle, and he is already snoring.
For the first time in three years, Zuko doesn’t chase the Avatar in his dreams.
“Your friend is here,” Uncle says, looking up from his cup of ginseng one afternoon when Zuko returns from his break. “Why don’t you go and take his order?”
“He is not my friend!” Zuko snaps, entirely from reflex.
“All right, all right,” Uncle says mildly. “He’s not your friend. You should invite him over to the apartment someone, your not-friend. He looks like he could use a hot meal. A little spread thin, you understand.”
This startles Zuko enough that he spares a glance Jet's way as he's unloading a tray of lychee teas for a table of six. For the first time he looks, really looks at Jet. Uncle’s right. He’s got that pinched, hollow look Zuko’s gotten accustomed to seeing on the street kids that hang out in the alleys near his and Uncle’s tenement apartment. Too thin, skinny all over, from his bony wrists to his narrow shoulders, hungry for more than just a bellyful of warm noodles and dumplings.
It’s too much like looking in a mirror, so Zuko looks away. He knows that bleak expression on Jet’s face all too well. But he lets Jet finish his green tea and leave the shop anyway.
Jet can take care of himself, Zuko reminds himself harshly, and tries not to look over at the corner table. He doesn’t want to know if there’s anything there.
But when the tea shop is empty and Uncle is happily on his way back home, Zuko takes the forlorn little panda lily left behind on the chair Jet had been sitting in, and puts it in the cup.
Jet doesn’t come in the next day, or the next. Zuko keeps half an eye on the door, feeling more agitated than usual, waiting for him to strut through the door and drop into his favorite chair and rakishly prop his boots up in the way that forces Zuko to go over to his corner and knock his filthy boots off the table.
This absence isn’t like him, Zuko has to admit. He’s been regular as clockwork the past few weeks. Even Uncle notices.
“What has happened to your friend?” Uncle wonders aloud two evenings later as they are closing up the shop. "He's been gone quite a few days now."
Zuko shrugs and keeps on sweeping, determinedly casual.
“He’s not my friend,” he repeats. He’s not worried. He’s not.
But.
Jet’s been spending money on those stupid flowers, even though he’s been going hungry himself. Zuko is sinking in a growing cloud of despair. It’s not right, he tells himself fiercely. He shouldn’t have done that. Why’d Jet go and do such a stupid thing anyway?
He doesn't want to acknowledge it. But Zuko knows .
He can’t help but look at the panda lily taking up residence on the tea shop counter. It’s a pathetic-looking thing by now, having lost half its petals and drooping sadly. But it had been the last thing Jet had given him.
He strips off his apron and hands it to Uncle. “I’m going out for a bit,” he says. “Don’t know when I’ll be back.”
Uncle looks at him with knowing eyes. “I’ll finish up here. Good luck, nephew.”
Zuko’s always looking for something, doesn’t even know who he’d be if he wasn’t.
This time, he’s looking for Jet.
Zuko tucks the panda lily inside his tunic, careful not to rumple the last remaining petals. And goes.
It’s easy to get lost in a city as large as Ba Sing Se; that's the trouble. It's also, Zuko knows, what Jet happens to like about living in Ba Sing Se; one of the only things he does like about city life. There's no one to miss you, he had explained to Zuko once, and laughed. But there had been a crack in his voice as he said it, and Zuko thinks maybe he doesn't like being one of the lost things as much as he pretends he does.
But even in a city as large as Ba Sing Se, there are ways to be found. Zuko asks around at the market that he knows Jet hangs around sometimes, waiting for whatever odd jobs might float his way. He prefers not to have a steady job anywhere, Jet says; it’s not his style to answer to someone else day after day. He's a free spirit, he'd told Zuko once. Well, Zuko's been a spirit before, too.
Zuko spends the evening lurking in ever-widening circles around the market, looking for any kind of hint: The flash of steel hooks under the green light of the street lanters, or the dark blue of Jet's tunic, so rarely seen away from the coast of the Earth Kingdom. Then, walking through a rough-looking neighborhood on the east side, he sees a burnt-out building, only one strong wind away from crumbling to the ground. No one in their right mind would try to live in such a place, but Zuko takes one look at it and knows .
He nimbly scales the walls and, carefully climbing through a broken window, finds himself in a tiny room.
And sees him.
Jet is looking rough, even rougher than when Zuko had seen him last. He’s huddled up in a meager stack of hay, wrapped up in a single thin blanket. Jet looks stunned to see him. Well, Zuko is surprised to be here himself.
“Li ?” Jet asks incredulously, and starts coughing.
Zuko waits for him to finish. “You didn’t come,” he says. It’s the only thing he can think of to say. He’s almost overpowered by the sheer relief he feels that Jet isn’t hurt, isn’t dead, isn’t gone forever where Zuko could never find him; and he’s a little angry too, at all the worry he’d gone through, and all because of Jet.
Maybe the words come out a little more snappish than he intended. But Jet grins anyway. Like just the thought of Zuko searching the city on his account is enough for him.
“Didn’t think you cared if I lived or died, to be honest," Jet says hoarsely. "Sure didn't expect you to come looking for me."
“Didn’t know that I was looking,” Zuko says, gruff. “Not for a long time.”
“But you found me,” Jet says. It’s a question.
Zuko knows that he has a talent for finding lost things. Uncle’s perpetually lost apartment key or the misplaced canister of ginger root hiding at the back of the tea shop pantry; he can figure out a way to sneak past the defensives of any Fire Nation stronghold and he can find boys who’ve been missing for over a hundred years. And now he’s even found someone to care about, though he had never been looking for or expected to find such a thing.
Zuko hadn’t been looking for love.
He’d found it anyway.
“Yeah,” Zuko says. “I found you.”