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Zuko has a collection of wanted posters.
Their gradual accumulation hadn’t started out as an egotistical hobby , and it still isn’t one — it just serves as a reflection of his adventures, mainly in the fray of mild treason and generally-questionable-activities. And as a record of which covers were still available for good use, and which ones were actually to be arrested on the spot, and which ones were decidedly accomplished according to the lengthy warrant detailing which law he bent (smashed with a chair leg) which time.
(They were useful, he insists by two-thirds of his three possessions. They’d prevented him from getting arrested a solid fifty-percent of the time, because not everyone has perfect memory, Uncle.)
Toph stomps around and brazenly crumples Zuko’s squashy-malleable door in half, inviting herself into his room because she can, and because she’s got no one left to harass other than Haru. (And Haru doesn’t come as a partially-packaged mess fueled on nervous breakdowns and spite — he’s kind of like a rock, but the sort of flat rock from the Earth Rumble’s carefully re-tiled arena, and rocks for bending don’t swear viciously and spit inflamed sparks of frustration at anything of the slightest emotional degree.)
The sound of Zuko shuffling with sheafs of scratchy, half-disintegrated paper in his hands hits her ears the moment his door becomes a puddle of metal on the ground, and his too-fast heartbeat rockets up another three notches at her unannounced entry.
“Whatcha got there?” she asks, instead of remarking on his audibly crippling anxiety, because that'd accomplish nothing further than Katara-concerning pulse palpitations.
“Um,” Zuko says, shifting his weight and carefully placing his papers on the ground. “... Wanted posters?”
Ah, Toph thinks. There goes the rabaroo heartbeat of Incriminating Activity I Should Not Have Partaken In From The Past.
“Wanted posters?” she echoes, tone flush with amusement. “Of who?”
Dead silence.
“C’mon, tell the blind girl what’s on the wanted posters. Like people with eyes and a sense of moral righteousness do.”
Zuko remains silent for a long, long moment, and she can almost physically hear the evening embarrassed flutter-bat thrumming in his heart. “Um,” he says again, voice almost strained. “Wanted posters I… acquired throughout the years?”
The sheer suggestion of itself is so absurdly laughable that Toph almost bends over into Zuko’s crumpled door as it clicks just as fast.
“Are they wanted posters of you?” she hedges gleefully.
(If she were Sokka, she’d be informing him of just how tacky it was to carry wanted posters of yourself around. She's not Sokka, but she’s inclined to agree with the envisaged statement, because why. )
“It’s not a hobby!” Zuko bursts out, mortification leaking into his protest. “I just use — used — them to, uh, to remember which disguises were still usable. Right.”
Toph doesn’t call him out on his half-lie of omission, because this is already too good. “So you’re a criminal?”
“I’m not a criminal!” Zuko objects, like a stunted boar-q-pine appealing under a badgermole’s big clawish paws.
“Right, and I’m a waterbender,” Toph agrees readily, erecting a slanted bench of stone from the scrapish floor and perching lazily on it. “C’mon, Sparks. Spill.”
She hears his hair brushing across the back of his neck as he turns his head; once, twice, and then he lets out a sigh of resignation, dropping to the ground beside her. “Alright,” he says dutifully. “Alright.”
[Exhibit 1: A poster with a depiction of a somewhat refined blue and white mask, with distinct resemblance to an oni demon. Its fangs are bared and curved outward from its grinning expression, eyes narrowed in by a dipping white brow. A three-pronged crown and dual horns adorn its crest, and the figure it obscures is dressed in shades of grey and black.
The printed caption below reads as such:
The Blue Spirit is a dangerous bounty hunter who has been traced as the assassin of several of the Fire Nation’s greatest military commanders, as well as the catalyst to a number of invaluable transport prisoners' deaths. Do not hesitate to report their presence to a local authority should you run across them; direct confrontation is not advised.]
Zuko is fourteen when his crew runs out of the paltry stock funds his father provided alongside his inferior metal ship, and he’s fourteen when he discovers that highway robbery and petty theft isn’t a convenient supply of money when supplying for a shipful of people — or, more specifically, a shipful of piratous, discharged sailors.
(“Wait a minute,” Toph interrupts. “How, exactly, did you figure out that highway robbery isn’t that effective?”
“... Math?”
Toph snorts. “Sparky, I can feel you counting on your fingers when it comes to basic addition. You stole from random people for, what, a year?”
“I mean,” Zuko says, “kind of, yeah. But not necessarily on the road, ‘cuz most people don’t carry a shit ton of money on their person while traveling. Except rich people.”
“How many people did you have to rob trying to supply for a whole fuckin’ boatload of pirates?”
“...”)
Zuko is fourteen when his crew runs out of the paltry stock funds his father provided alongside his inferior metal ship, and he’s fourteen when he shows up in an Earth Kingdom harbor bustling with fulgurating money and imported koala-sheep and people /massive jerks.
Zuko scowls down at the fancy gossamy wallets he’d snatched from various important-looking townspeople strutting throughout the cramped salty streets, standing on the knoll of a hill winding down to a wide hut of finer thatch than the main port. Briefly, he contemplates the practicality of breaking into this building and checking its money cache, when the door slams open and a smug-ass, crackly, deeply annoying voice floats along to his ear. He drops to the ground between the grass weaves, flattening against the scratchy turf and narrowing his eyes thoughtfully at the emerging pair.
“Come back when you’ve got the money to pay for her medicine,” the owner calls pompously after a woman who steadily gazes forward and a waifish girl clutching her hand.
Zuko has located a jerk, and a well-off one at that.
Jerk-Face Medicine Man keeps the windows to his medicinal hut screwed shut and his doors closed, but closed doors have never stopped Zuko. He surveys the perimeter, the flat moon-washed horizon and uneven hill crests dotting the surface, before reaching in and pulling heat towards the room to verify its vacancy (because he really does not need to knock out some random shithead who decided to idle around); and so, sidling up to the barred entrance, Zuko presses his fore and middle finger against the wood, testing its strength.
Then, he steps back in a half-crouch on his right leg, pivots 90 degrees outwards, and snaps his left foot forward into an arcing kick that sends the door crashing to the ground with a dulled thump.
He invites himself into the pitch-dark room, hurriedly shoving the door back upright, and nearly trips over his face on a protuberance in the groundwork in the action. Hastily, he conjures a controlled, staining flame in his palm, sending flickering edges curling across speckled adobe walls and illuminating shelves of vials and crushed herbs in partially-filled clay jars. Zuko sweeps his eye and light across the immediate surroundings, before stepping past them and into the backroom.
Huh, so maybe people are getting smarter, even if they’re massive jerks.
Zuko drops to one knee and raps gently on the floorboards, unscarred ear sharply attuned to the fluctuating quality in the sounds that echo through, eventually coming across a hollow that takes several moments of scuffling at its fringe in a very tigerdillo-esque manner before it snaps open with an audible scrape.
And there’s a fucking lock on the dented metal safe. Of course there is, because just like Father’s ability to give two shits about anything in regards to his firstborn, it’s locked.
Whatever. Unlike honor, Zuko’s in possession of a wrench, and a very multi-purposeful one at that.
(A very, very small part of him questions just how honorable it is to be fucking with a jerk-faced healer’s medicinal hut in the dead of the night through breaking down his lousy door and stealing half his money, but his crew’s broke , and they’re not going to be happy if they don’t get their spirits-damned alcohol.)
By the time Zuko’s wrestled the safe open, his attention isn’t so focused on his vicinity anymore, and doesn’t notice when a ripple of heat creeps up to his smashed-in door.
Him being caught unaware doesn’t mean his ear doesn’t work , and he whirls in time to see a gape-mouthed woman — who looks vaguely familiar — standing in its entrance.
They stare at one another for a long, long moment, and Zuko’s kind of glad he wrapped the entirety of his left eye in the same cloth as his tucked-up futac.
“It’s not what it looks like?” Zuko finally manages, voice squeaking to an abnormally high register and wrench lowered carefully beside the safe.
“I —”
Zuko moves before she can finish that sentence, fluidly unsheathing a dao and crashing its braided hilt into her left temple. Her green eyes widen minimally before rolling back in her head, and she slumps over, avoiding further alarm only through Zuko’s desperate scrabble at the back of her shirt.
People here are tall and heavy.
By the time Zuko’s gotten back to his ship, the town guards have come to investigate the various thuds that’d ensued throughout the night. They find a splintering door, an empty safe, half a dozen vials missing from their designated spots on their display case, and an unconscious woman laid neatly in the backroom.
“It wasn’t me! ” the woman insists with a barely-contained levelness when she’s awoken by the patrol. “There was — there was this kid, maybe ten or eleven, and he was just there picking at Healer Muxiang’s charity funds.”
(They don’t listen, especially since Healer Muxiang doesn’t have charity funds.)
The next morning, right before the crew departures with their newfound stash of insufficient money that’ll provide for nothing further than maybe a fortnight’s drinks, Zuko runs down the gangplank, making his way to the crumbling housing of the steady-eyed mother and frail girl to deposit six vials and a handful of herbs. He’s not entirely certain the purposes of the stolen offerings he’s got, but he hopes that they’ll be enough to help with the cure Jerk-Face Medicine Man had denied them.
The mother isn’t home, but leaving medicinal bottles in people’s windowsill is usually a pretty reliable way of transferring gifts.
[Exhibit 2: A rough sketch of a hooded figure whose face is almost entirely shrouded by crossing black fabrics, illustrated to be winding across the right eye and lower features. Two ragged lines resembling twin swords are pictured beside it, labeled as dual knives, identically colorless beyond smeared black ink.
The flustered, hardly legible caption below reads as such:
I caught this burglar in Healer Muxiang’s office in the middle of the night. He knocked me out before I could sound the alarm and left me to be the presumed implicator of the crime, leading to my unjust arrest. My daughter is sick and needs medicine that I cannot provide for her behind bars. Please join me in my appeal to the mayor.]
(Toph wheezes. “Do you steal solely from jerks, or what?”
Zuko goes horribly, tellingly silent, and Toph tilts her head accordingly.
“Uh,” he starts. “Like, half the time?” He pauses. “Does being rich automatically classify you as a jerk?”
“ I’m rich,” Toph points out, feigning insult. “And you’re literally a prince.”
“Was,” Zuko corrects absentmindedly, crinkling the fraying corners of another poster. “So I might’ve stolen from a few not-jerks?”)
A woman armed with an edged katana and plated sage clothes lingers uncertainly on the outskirts of the dusty remote colony.
“I’ve got a carriage in need of immediate repairs, on the wheels,” she calls desperately to its half-dozen residents milling in her presence, hand fiddling with the threads in her armor.
No one responds.
Zuko considers his crew’s intense affinity for dragging him into their regular drunken gambling convocations, and considers his poor decision making in that regard alongside his emptied personal funds (because the damned helmsman wouldn’t stop lying and ending up with all his money ). Thus, with that consideration in mind, he strides forward with his hands carefully kept away from the hilts of the dao sheathed at his hip, stepping up to her burly frame.
“How much do you pay for service?” Zuko asks.
The woman squints down at the somewhat-presentable teenager standing at around two-thirds her height, uncannily resembling a dragon-moose questioning why she's been hitched to a human child. “Enough copper,” she responds twitchily.
Zuko estimates the cost of his money bartering, and shrugs mentally to himself. “I’m an apprentice blacksmith,” Zuko lies through his teeth. “Name’s, um — name’s Mushi. ”
(If Azula could see him, she’d never let him down for that improvisation. Mushi? Seriously?)
His new hirer raises an eyebrow.
Shit, that’s a rich person’s carriage.
Zuko leaves the unfulfilling job with a handful of dingy coppers scraping against the rough of his palm, and the burning knowledge that he can do better than this.
Because, as it turns out, rich people tend to make good victims of robbery — especially those traveling on the road.
Look, Zuko’s not a jerk , so he’s not going to make a habit of stealing from people on the road; that is, unless they’ve got enough money to warrant a whole fucking carriage and an escort of four extremely tall, stony-faced guards who glare into the flat of the woods like constipated badgerfrogs who’ve got nothing better to look at.
He perches in the swaying shadow branches of stretchy oaks along the half-assed pavement meandering down the copse of emerald foliage, weighing Lieutenant Jee’s rust-tipped gambling knife in his left hand and narrowed eyes cut on the visible rotations of the unguarded spoke at his vantage point.
It spins around and around, until Zuko whips his arm back and lodges the stolen knife at its progress.
He’d forgotten how easy it was to bendlessly take out people who aren’t Master Piandao.
Two one-sided duels (is it a duel if it’s three on one?) of profanities and sparkless swords later, Zuko smashes the carriage roof in with the back of his heel and drops with a neat flip into its rocky interior. Nobleman stares at Zuko, plastered up against the left end of the transport and practically vibrating with fear. Zuko stares back at Nobleman, both swords pressed tightly against each other in his right hand.
“I might have to knock you out, too, if you can’t help me find your money,” Zuko informs the man informatively.
So rich people value their consciousness more than their money.
Zuko saunters off with heaping bags of tacky jade jewelry and singing gold coins and four unconscious bodies in his wake.
It turns out that the guard did remember him, because while typical nobles don’t have any reason to remember random people they’d hired on a sudden need, guards are more recollectful to those who pose a financial threat to their financially-exceeding masters.
Zuko peels the poster off the lumpy meshing wall, and takes note that Mushi probably isn’t a very good name for use in the future — at least, for the time being.
[Exhibit 3: A rudimentary outlining of a relatively unremarkable figure clad in green, with a splash of red rippling across the full left of his visible face. His expression is simplistically rendered, unhindered by the colors with a sharp downward crescent of a mouth. Two broadswords dangle loosely in his hands, and his stance is wide and dangerous.
The warrant is calligraphic and polished, reading as such:
Mushi, proclaimed apprentice blacksmith, assaulted and purloined the esteemed Yuan Guangli in the mid-afternoon after being an unsuspecting service to the reparation of his transport’s wheels. Incarcerate this thief immediately for the potential threat he poses to our citizens.]
(“Mushi’s a shit awful name,” Toph concurs, blindly flinging her feet on the top of his head. “Where the fuck did you get that from?”
Zuko swats her dirt-encrusted toes away from his hair, because while his dao-cut, finger-singed hair might look like actual shit by the standards of royalty, it is not the footrest for a loud, stompy dirt-child. “Improvisation. Never trusting it again, either,” he vows.
“Did you get any further use out of your improvised name, at least?”)
Uncle knows a lot of people.
“We kind of need passports to get into Ba Sing Se,” Zuko grumbles irritatedly, crossing his arms and not reaching towards the dao strapped at his hip, Earth-Kingdom style. Because he is not contemplating fighting all the green-uniformed guards stationed throughout the unideally crowded ferry pass, Fire-Nation style. (Or maybe it’s just Zuko style; as far as he’s concerned, never giving up without a fight is a national — and maybe cross-national as well — concept.)
“You needn’t worry, nephew,” the sole member of the imperial family to passingly breach its walls promises placatingly, reaching into the folds of his satchel and, with a flourish, procuring a pair of passports that look suspiciously real.
Zuko swipes them out of his uncle's hand and squints down at their neatly printed script. “Did you — did you just forge these?” Something horrible settles into his sea churning thought process. “Wait, no, don’t fuckin’ tell me. It was your spirits-damned cryptic ass Pai Sho friends, wasn’t it.”
“It was my Pai Sho friends, yes,” Uncle affirms solemnly, deliberately not remarking on his nephew’s unnecessary use of language.
“You let them use Mushi?” Zuko all but squawks, finger lingering incredulously on the offending characters.
“Was it not you who invented that alias?” Uncle questions mildly.
Zuko suppresses a shrieking scream by scowling. “It was shitty. You shouldn’t have just gone with it. Now you’re — you’re stuck with it!”
(He’s more mortified by Uncle’s uptake than he’s willing to let on, because that’s the improvised name deviating from a bad case of stuttering two years ago, and the same one he’d sworn off two years ago.)
Still, they board the ferry under the guises of Lee and Mushi with forged passports, an impressive arsenal of varying blades (on the traitor fire prince's person), and half a dozen exquisite teas of unknown origin (on the Dragon of the West's person).
And then Zuko gets roped into liberating (breaking in and stealing) steaming bowls of barley-rice and congee with a(n undeniably attractive) boy named Jet. He’d forgotten how liberating the whistling blue night gales and humming exhilaration of twisting the unpreferable rules in itself is.
Jet is, apparently, a massive fan of the Blue Spirit.
He sees Zuko’s swords, and draws his own conclusions — that being, that Zuko is a massive fan of the Blue Spirit
Oh fucking Agni no.
“Yeah, didn’t they break into Pohuai Stronghold and singlehandedly free the Avatar?” Jet tips his head back against the low curving overhang in the cellar, almost stiflingly close to his companion but somehow not to the point of discomfort, radiating a sort of smoldering temperature that burns like gently sparked fingertips pressing into the bleeding edges of his heart.
Zuko grits his teeth and suppresses a snort. “Fascinating,” he grinds out, though with no real bite behind it because they’re so closely pressed up next to one another and he’s tired.
(He almost says it out loud, too.)
Jet eyeballs him lazily. “You seem to know your way around the dual dao pretty well,” he remarks, drawling, as he takes a swig from his drink and grimacing at the taste.
“I know them well enough,” Zuko mutters, taking the proffered bottle and downing half its remaining contents.
“Yeah,” Jet says, softer, rougher. “War does that.”
Zuko swallows, and like Uncle, looks away.
“War does that,” he echoes.
It sounds hollow, like the empty bottle sitting between them in the low-lit sake cellar.
Jet is, apparently, not a massive fan of Tea Server Lee.
Zuko stares at the poster.
[Exhibit 4: A splotchy streak of ink shaped into a crude approximation of a young boy with a sectioned-off portion on his left eye, and a wide-set man holding a cup of tea. Their three unoccupied hands flares distinctive flame crests in their palms, accompanied by off-put aggressive expressions. Jagged shapes resembling fire spread across its background.
It has a brief caption that looks to be copied off of varying stylistic sample scripts, reading as such:
Firebenders. Pao’s tea shop.]
Jet isn’t even literate, and, by the looks of it, has never navigated his sword-hook hands in the gentle sweeping motions of a fine inking brush.
Zuko watches as the boy’s sword-hook hands get wrestled behind his back with the cold stone cuffs of Earth Kingdom cities, his bitter brown glare piercing into his gold, gold eyes; feels that hollowing funnel of shame and bleeding smokey hearts dipping out his soul. His choppy fingernails dig half-crescents into his palm.
Zuko takes the poster anyway.
(This one is a reminder.
Toph doesn’t need to know that.)
Toph is disconcertingly quiet for a long moment.
“Are you not going to add underaged drinking to your rap?” she ventures eventually.
Zuko, still caught up in thought, snaps back at her abrupt prompting. “Huh,” he says. “I guess you’re right. Drinking at thirteen is kind of questionable, isn’t it?”
Drinking at sixteen is kind of questionable, neither of them say.
[Exhibit 5: Extreme underaged consumption of — including but not limited to — sake, umeshu, whiskey, soju, and rum.]
“You know,” Toph continues, “that, of itself, includes…” She tilts her head in contemplation. “Forgery, breaking and entering, theft, underaged drinking, tresspassing, unpermitted distribution of unauthenticated accusation, and homosexuality.”
“Huh,” Zuko says, again. “I guess you’re right.”
[Exhibit 6: Forgery, breaking and entering, theft, trespassing, and —]
… “Wait, did you just say homosexuality?”
Toph just cackles. “Tell me about more of your posters another time,” she offers, “and help me scam some shitheads while you're at it.”
She splits into a sort of untamed puma-cat grin as she squash-stomps her earthen stool back into the ground, stands with a distinct crack of her steady short earthbender joints, and irons the pooling metal puddle back into an unflinching flattened stake door.
Zuko sits alone, surrounded by a collection of wanted posters, and regards the other fourteen untouched papers scattered on his bedpost.
It just so happened to be the circumstances, and the context, and okay maybe he illegitimately borrowed a pair of swords and used said pair of swords to borrow unoffered money and teapots but that was one time .
He's not a criminal .
The Fire Lord has a collection of wanted posters.
“Do you think it’s breaking in if you’re the Fire Lord?” Zuko asks Toph, who has refused to leave the palace since his coronation’s affair.
Toph tilts her head, considers. Sticks her finger in her nose, leans her dirt-encrusted hands back on silky red sheets, wiggles her toes in his face.
“Nah,” she says.