Work Text:
Glittery—that was the word, Mako supposed. The metal comb precisely fixed in his boss’s hair had three big diamonds in a triangle, distracting from the sharp steel points and razored edges. In the dim light from the streetlamps filtering through the car window, the diamonds glittered. Where does someone get something so perfectly designed like that?
The comb had one purpose: a ready weapon on this particular undercover job, to an underground shindig of Red Monsoons Mako had spent weeks finding tips on in the first place. The triad had moved into the Earth Kingdom upon its dissolution, making friends with sandbenders who took them into the desert for cactus juice—well, something like that. The details were a little hazy, but Chief Beifong was on a mission to stop it when they first found it in the city: an autopsy on a guy who had been thought to commit suicide turned out to have overdosed. Whether he meant to or not didn’t matter. Beifong wanted the drug out of her city.
The Red Monsoons had made cactus juice worse, too. They could evaporate the water off with their bending without touching the actual drug, which turned out to be a pink powder, which had a bigger effect than the natural form.
“Make money,” Chief had explained, when Mako asked why anyone would mess with something that literally killed people. “They’re addicted, and they think they need it, so they’ll pay any price—like if milk suddenly cost twenty yuans a gallon you’d still buy it, wouldn’t you?”
Mako left a couple thank you notes for the milkman after that.
He felt pretty good about staying on the case, because it wasn’t too far into investigations and Beifong took over, keeping the majority between her, Captain Saikhan, and him. Maybe she didn’t trust the rest of the force—maybe she just wanted it done right.
Saikhan flicked the blinker on in the car and slowed to a stop at an intersection. Beifong shifted in her seat a little bit, the light bouncing off the diamonds.
Maybe she didn’t want people to know she’d gone undercover.
Chief of Police probably shouldn’t do that sort of thing—she’d jumped through a lot of hoops to make herself look different. Dyed her hair black, for one. Covered her scars up. Those alone made her uncomfortable. He knew because she’d gotten short with Saikhan as he nit-picked the whole look. He’d worked with her for twenty years, of course he’d recognize her no matter what. Mako considered it a pass—he didn’t recognize her at first.
There was the dress, it was loose unlike her armor. It was blue, too, and Mako thought she looked nice but he also thought she’d look better in any other color. A fur stole that took away from her shoulders—the brooch pinned on it was also razor-sharp. The shoes were metal, like her boots, but they had a heel on them. Thick metal bracelets that wrapped around her wrists twice; Mako figured they were makeshift handcuffs. A thin metal chain loosely wrapped several times around her neck (“It’ll break,” Saikhan had complained until she took it off and made Mako try—and fail—to snap it in half).
Her hair was done, too. Not just with the comb. It had been tamed somehow, so it didn’t move when she turned her head. He caught glimmers of a few pins, but they didn’t seem numerous enough to immobilize her hair. It was parted differently, too, and the little pieces sitting on her forehead were perfectly still like they’d been glued down.
And she had make-up on—not just to cover the scars. Like eyeshadow, and lipstick.
“What?” she said, her eyes darting from the window to his for just a second.
Mako bit his lip as he formed his words first. He didn’t want to say she was pretty, because maybe she was, but it wasn’t real. Mako had been through news archives on long, slow nights at the station, and Lin Beifong was a common appearance in papers, and he had to admit, younger Beifong was very pretty. “I—I just don’t recognize you,” he said. “It’s weird.”
She pouted, which made it less weird in a way. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Hahn,” he said. “I’m from the south provinces. My parents died when I was fourteen in a house fire. I started moving cactus juice locally when I was sixteen to get out of foster care and fend for myself. You keep me around because I don’t ask too many questions.”
“And who am I?”
“Shouldn’t you be telling me that?” Mako asked.
Chief Beifong produced a cigarette from her purse—the purse was weird, too—and rolled the clean white stick between her fingers. “Misu Jiang. I took over the family business from my father and I want to proposition the Red Monsoons for a merger before they extend their own ring into my territory.”
Mako caught Saikhan’s smile in the rearview mirror. He seemed proud of her for her spiel, but she’d written the backgrounds, hadn’t she? Saikhan had his own file about his life as the driver for this Jiang family. Beifong would take no screw ups, and Mako was happy she considered him unlikely to screw up.
He wondered what made him the bodyguard, why couldn’t Saikhan be the bodyguard? He was strong and intimidating. They could pass as husband and wife if they wanted to. Maybe he was less likely to screw up than even Beifong’s right hand—he highly doubted that.
Saikhan had to bring the squad cars in though, when they were ready. He was more trustworthy for that than Mako.
“There,” Mako said, where a pair of large-shouldered, dark-skinned men were standing under a streetlamp. One had the Water Tribe insignia tattooed to his bare bicep. They smoked cigarettes. He thought he should repeat the passcode, but he knew she knew it. Beifong focused on the seat in front of her as Saikhan pulled the car up to the corner. When the car stopped, she leaned back and cranked the window down.
Did she know how to smoke? Mako asked himself as she held up the hand with the cigarette. At least enough to not start coughing immediately? Would she even be required to—it was just a passcode.
“Can I get a light?” she asked, tipping a pair of fingers with the cigarette balanced between out the window.
Mako sat back in the seat, hand on the seatbelt latch. She barely sounded like Chief Beifong. The words came out sultry, like she was more interested in flirting with the bouncers than actually getting into the party. Well, she wasn’t on the list. The bouncers had to like her to let her in. Mako knew why Saikhan couldn’t play her husband—she had to be single or they wouldn’t get past the front door.
Mako saw the tattooed one pull a box of matches out and strike one for her. She put the lit cigarette to her lips and took a slow inhale.
“Name?” the second bouncer asked. He had gold rings on seven of his ten fingers.
“Jiang,” she said, the white wisps escaping her red lips. Mako tried not to cringe—it was all so wrong.
“Not on the list.”
“Are you sure?” she said, her other hand slipping into her purse. “I have a very important business proposition for your boss,” she continued. She pulled out two hundreds and offered them to the bouncers.
Mako pretended not to see her arm press up against her chest.
Beifong took another long drag from the cigarette as the bouncers mulled over the hundreds in their hands.
“What was that name again?” the tattooed bouncer said.
“Jiang,” she repeated.
Mako could hear the ruffle of papers. “Right here,” he heard the other one said. “Sorry about that, ma’am.”
Mako unbuckled his seatbelt and set his hand on the door handle. The tattooed bouncer got the door for Beifong, and Mako was at the other side of the car before they could offer to help her out. He held out his hand, and she looked at it for a second like she was mad someone thought she needed help. But she remembered who she was supposed to be and set her hand in his, although there wasn’t much weight put on him as she stepped down from the town car. Asami should’ve been the bodyguard, Mako thought. He asked to borrow a car for an undercover thing and she threw him a pair of keys and never said anything else.
The bouncer with the rings opened the rickety wooden door for them, and the tattooed one led them down a dim hall. “Welcome to the party, Ms. Jiang,” he said at the end of the hall. He pushed open a much nicer door to reveal the smoky, basement bar packed with people. In the window of time between the door closing and anyone realizing someone new had shown up, Mako leaned down and whispered, “When did you learn to smoke?”
“My thirties,” she breathed back.
Mako stood back straight and stared into the haze for a second. Beifong began to wander from the door towards the bar, and he trotted after her. Thirties? Had she quit and picked it back up for the sake of the mission? Was she just really good at hiding the habit? She had a hint of smoker in her voice now that he thought about it.
He stood behind the barstool she decided to sit on. She jabbed the cigarette out in a glass ashtray on the bar. A roundish man with a roundish face was drinking a beer in the seat next to her. He looked familiar—probably from the mug book. “Look at you,” he said, turning in the barstool to face her.
Mako folded his hands behind his back. He didn’t like this. The way they looked at her, talked to her, and she didn’t clock them for it. The guy didn’t even seem to care she was completely new to the Red Monsoon scene, just that she was pretty, just that she’d let him buy her a drink. It was an act, he reminded himself, watching his boss set her hand on the man’s arm because he said something mildly funny.
He glanced around the room for Typhoon Tang, Red Monsoon boss, who had evaded arrest for the simplest things for nearly a decade. There was a whole drawer of his unpaid parking tickets at the station.
“You don’t look like you’re from around here,” the man said, catching Mako’s attention. “You Zhi’s new wife?”
Zhi. Mako knew that guy. Tall, thin, a chip in his ear. He’d been arrested once, his wife testified against him for abuse. Five years in prison, released last year not too long after Mako was hired. Someone wanted to marry that guy?
“No, I’m Misu,” Beifong explained. “I’m from the Hei-Bai Province down south—I run a ring there.”
Somehow a glass of scotch had appeared in front of her, and she picked it up and took a drink.
“We’re that far south now?” the man asked.
“Not yet,” she said.
The man reached for his belt, and Mako caught him wrap his hand around the cork to a water pouch strapped on his back. “You’re not a Monsoon?”
Mako unfolded his hands and set them at his sides. No bending. No one bends until Beifong does. He put a hand on her arm.
“I want to be,” she said. “I’d like to merge my operation with yours—make us both a better profit.”
The man tightened his hold on the water pouch. “Tang’s not big on ladies in charge of things.”
She suddenly look sad. “You sure I can’t get a word with Tang? I run the whole show in the province—I’m sure he’s interested in the territory.”
Zhi came from the haze and set a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Who’s this pretty thing, Hu?”
“Misu Jiang,” the man—Hu—said. “Wants to talk to the boss about expanding the trade south into Hei Bai.”
Zhi nodded. “That so, little lady?”
Beifong nodded. Her jaw seemed tight, like being called little and thing got to her. Maybe Zhi alone got to her. Mako tightened his hand on her arm, ready to pull her away the second someone touched her. She took another sip of her drink. “You can get me in with him, right?” She still looked hurt by their hostility.
Zhi tugged on Hu, and the roundish man got up. “Let me see what I can do, doll,” Zhi said before they both wandered away.
“You can let go,” she said, shaking her arm free of his hand. “I don’t need to be protected.”
Mako set his hand at his side. “It’s my job,” he reminded her.
She took a drink from the glass, more substantial than the ones she had before. “I call Zhi,” she whispered. “No one calls me ‘doll.’”
Mako nodded. “Are you sure you should be drinking?”
“I know how to drink,” she growled.
“Alright.”
Zhi reappeared and motioned his arm across his body towards the south end of the room. “Right this way, Ms. Jiang.”
A smile returned to her face and she thanked the asshole with a gush even he had to know was fake. They followed him through the crowd to a door with two more big-muscled guys on either side of it.
“Got a dame to see the boss,” Zhi told the door men.
“Dames don’t come until eleven,” one said.
“This one’s a different kind of dame.”
Dame was worse than doll. Mako would only touch Zhi if he was holding him so Beifong could punch.
Zhi whispered something to the big man, and he opened the door for them. Zhi seemed pleased with his display of power, and he smiled a toothy, sly grin as Beifong walked past him while he held the door open.
He turned and set a hand on Mako’s chest. “You’ll have to stay out here, kid,” he said, acid in his words.
Mako was about to protest when Beifong turned back and set a hand on her hip. “Is there a problem?”
“You have to understand, doll, we don’t like to share our secrets,” Zhi said, never taking his eyes off Mako.
“Then I hope you’ll understand I don’t like going places alone,” she insisted. “Hahn doesn’t ask questions, do you, Hahn?”
Mako nodded. “No, ma’am.”
“Let him through,” Mako heard from the back of the room. Tang.
Zhi took his hand off Mako and let him in, but not without a stone cold glare.
He decided he should stand at the back of the room where he could see everything. Beifong could protect herself no doubt. The room was a square, with a round table in the middle. No windows. It was hazier than the bar, and the men smoked cigars. Glasses of scotch on the table. Cards and chips. Zhi pulled out a chair for Beifong, then sat next to her. Hu was on her other side. Four other familiar faces sat around the table, with Tang—a small but broad-shouldered man with salt-and-pepper hair, blue eyes, and dark wrinkled skin—at the far end of the room. His chair was padded, the rest were regular wooden ones.
“Why don’t you play a few games with us, Ms. Jiang, before we talk business,” Tang said. It wasn’t a suggestion, and Beifong didn’t argue. She had a hand of cards, exchanged another three hundred yuans for chips, and a glass of scotch without saying a word.
Triple Threats didn’t do this sort of thing—Triple Threats were petty thieves compared to the infrastructure of the Red Monsoons.
Mako wasn’t big on card games, but other officers were always in the break room playing—Beifong among them when she had the time. They always played with copper pieces though.
He knew she was losing on purpose. One, their money was stolen money and she didn’t even want to touch it. Two, there was something about losing that made them like her. She could be played, he supposed—at least Ms. Jiang could be played.
She sipped at the glass of scotch. Sometimes, he thought she brought it to her lips and didn’t actually drink any.
“You’re awfully shiny for a dame,” Tang said before folding his hand for the round.
Mako shifted his weight. Tang wasn’t wrong—any movement Beifong made, and her jewelry caught the ceiling light. He didn’t get out too much, but no woman he ever met wore that many reflective things.
“What can I say?” Beifong answered. “I like my silver.”
Tang nodded. “My boys told me you’re from Hei-Bai,” he said, flipping a chip over and over in his hand. His eyes trained on his cards. “What brought you all this way to Republic City?”
Beifong pushed her cards together and fanned them back out. “I figured you’d be knocking on my door soon enough, so I might as well come to yours first,” she said. Then she folded her hand.
“I’ve never had anyone offer to sell out before,” Tang observed.
“I’m not offering a sell out,” she said. “I have an opportunity for you—I’ve been hearing rumors among my boys that you’ve got something new.”
Tang looked up from his hand of cards. “And if we did have something new—what’s your proposition?”
Beifong ran her finger around the rim of her glass. There had to be proof, first of all, before they could make arrests. There had to be some kind of confession. Mako could see the words form in her mind, trying to make one of those two happen. “I have forty counties in Hei-Bai under my control—what do you have?”
The guys around the table all seemed to shift in their seats and look to Tang for an answer. The round they were playing had halted.
Tang took a long drink from his glass. “Tai, show her.”
Tai, a younger man directly to Tang’s left, bearing a very strong resemblance to his boss, retrieved a small, silk pouch from under the table. He slid it over to Beifong.
She carefully loosened the drawstring on the pouch and opened the bag, keeping the whole thing pretty far from her face. Mako couldn’t see what was in it, but she smiled pretty big, so it must have been the pink powder that had been popping up around the city. Evidence. She shut the bag and slid it back to Tai. “I didn’t think it was possible,” she said. “How strong?”
“They get hooked after about two hits,” Tai explained, returning the bag to where it’d come from under the table.
“And how did you come about this?” she asked, leaning forward to set her elbows on the table. She seemed focused on Tai. He couldn’t have been much older than Mako if at all.
“Our own little discovery,” Tang answered before Tai could.
“And you make a better a profit?” she said.
“They’ll pay just about anything,” Tai said. They admitted to selling it. Who to wasn’t that important.
“What do you want with it?” Tang asked.
Beifong set her chin in her hand. “I’ll let you sell in my territory,” she said. “But I want forty percent of the profit.”
The men at the table started shifting again. Zhi leaned away from Beifong so he could turn in his chair and look at her.
“And why would we do that?” Tang asked. “When we could get one-hundred percent?”
“I don’t want any bloodshed, Mr. Tang,” Beifong said very sweetly. She almost sounded like Opal when she wanted Bolin to rub her shoulders.
“Ladies never do,” Zhi said.
“Now Zhi, she has a point,” Tang said. “But saving bloodshed is hardly worth forty percent.”
This guy would kill his family for the right price, Mako decided. Beifong seemed to decide that, too, because she pouted a little bit.
“How much is it worth?” she asked.
Tang and the men exchanged looks around the table, and all of them seemed to nod before he answered, “Twenty-five percent.”
Beifong let that number fester in the haze for a moment. “Mr. Tang, I’m trying to make money here. Surely we can settle for thirty percent?”
Mako watched the men fidget in their seats. Hu dabbed at sweat beads on his forehead with his jacket sleeve.
“Sorry, Ms. Jiang, it’s twenty-five or nothing,” Tang said with a little shrug, like he was really sorry.
Beifong smiled. She slid her hand into her purse. “That’s okay, Tang,” she said, bringing a fist back to the table. “I don’t need your business anyway.” She unfolded her hand, and slid the golden police badge across the wooden surface. “You’re under arrest for possession of illicit drugs and drug distribution.”
Zhi grabbed Beifong’s arm and pulled her up with him.
Mako stepped away from the wall, but he didn’t bend anything. They seemed to have forgotten him because no one grabbed him. He still had to wait for Beifong.
“How did you get in here,” Zhi snapped as the rest of the men rose from their chairs except for Tang.
“Ask your bouncer, doll ,” she said, tugging her arm from him.
He raised a hand to slap her, but she grabbed his wrist and twisted his arm behind his back.
Hu shot the water from his pouch at her, wrapping her arm and tugging. She let go of Zhi with a shove into the guy next to him and pulled the comb from her hair. She threw it, making sure it cut through the water between Hu and her, and bent it back into her hand.
Mako punched a fire blast at Hu. Don’t touch Zhi.
Of course, he then had to fight Hu, Tai, and another guy. All waterbenders. The haze made it hard to watch Beifong and the three guys, and he reached for the handcuffs in his jacket. Beifong already lost both bracelets. She’d bent the chain to break it and was using it to wrap wrists together.
Mako ducked to avoid an ice blast from Hu—sliding under the ice and coming up right in front of Hu, knocking him hard in the gut. He doubled over, and Mako got the cuffs on, then shoved him to the ground. Tai and the third man, a tall guy with thin limbs, kept at him.
Zhi was still up, somehow, and Mako could see him get into a fistfight with Beifong. Was he not a bender? He pushed her against the wall and held her with an arm across her shoulders.
Mako steamed off a blast of water and jabbed a guy in the ribs. Grabbed the guy—Tai—by the wrist and snapped cuffs on. He glanced back to Beifong, shaking her hand out. Zhi was on the floor. Mako smiled.
The third guy landed a cold, wet punch to Mako’s jaw, and he stumbled back. He grabbed his stinging jaw and punched pretty blindly with the other hand. A weak fireball, but enough to make the guy step back. Mako reached for his third pair of cuffs, rushed past the guy on purpose to get behind him. Grabbed a hand, snapped one cuff, snapped the other.
He looked up to find Beifong had used all her chain on the remaining guys. The dress had ripped up the side a bit. Tang was trying to slip out a hidden back door, and Beifong threw both diamond clips, pinning him to the wall by his coat sleeves. Mako grabbed his last pair of cuffs and tossed them to her.
“Thanks,” she said, catching them before wandering over to the wall. She yanked his arm off the wall and snapped one cuff on, yanked the second arm off and snapped the second cuff.
Tang was pissed, to say the least. Beifong walked him out. The rest had scattered or been caught by Saikhan and the squad cars down the street. All the men from the back room were led out by Mako and Saikhan, and Beifong after she’d personally locked Tang in car.
She grabbed Zhi up off the ground. His nose was gushing blood, and he was pretty woozy-looking. He didn’t fight her. With no one left to lead out, Mako walked the room for evidence, finding Beifong’s comb on the ground. He bent down to pick it up.
“Careful,” Beifong said. He looked up to find her with a palm out. Little red lines drawn across her palm, cuts from the edges.
He nodded and scooped it up quickly, holding it by the middle.
Her hands had only a few cuts on them from handling the brooch and comb. Nothing more serious than a paper cut, just several of them slowly but steadily oozing.
She leaned on the side of their borrowed car. Mako hoped the beads on her dress wouldn’t scratch the paint.
“You got that one guy pretty good,” Saikhan said, taking her wrist in one hand and dabbing at her open palm with a wet cloth in the other. “I think you broke his nose.”
“That was a little bit personal,” she admitted.
“Called you doll?”
She nodded, then winced as he pressed the cloth into a cut across the top of her palm.
Mako stood next to her, watching the flashing lights dance on buildings. Officers put cuffed Monsoons into their cars. He smiled as Hu looked over his shoulder before a cop pushed him into the backseat. He glanced back to Beifong, happy the fight had washed off most of her make up. Blue still wasn’t a good color for her, but she was prettier with her own face. The stiffness in her hair had been rinsed out as well, the black curls brushing her shoulders and pieces hanging in front of her eyes.
Saikhan switched hands, and she took her clean one to swipe the hair off her face. “You did good, kid,” she said, focused on the cloth pressing into her other palm.
“Thanks, Chief,” he said.