Shortfic: Zone of Future Habitation
May. 26th, 2018 06:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
attackfishDisclaimer: I don't own Avatar: the Last Airbender. If I did, I would have to learn how to write a screenplay and probably how to draw.
Summary: Ozai might have been defeated, but the Fire Fleet still doesn’t have a home world, and they are living on borrowed time, unless Zuko can complete his old quest, and find them an uninhabited planet capable of sustaining human life. Mai wants nothing more for him to succeed, even though she knows it’s impossible.
Author's Note: Written for May Maiko Week 2018. Additional information about this universe can be found at my tumblr, where my screenname is Attackfish.
Zone of Future Habitation
Flight
The ship’s computer flashed out a warning. The planet below was unidentified, and the computer did not have geographic charts. Landing would have to be performed manually. Did the pilot understand?
The pilot understood, thanks. She hit the override, deciding there was no point in restraining herself from rolling her eyes if there was no one there to see her.
The planet’s atmosphere included high levels of gasses toxic to humans. A sealed suit with its own oxygen supply was essential for short term survival on the planetary surface. Did the pilot understand?
No, in fact she did not. She didn’t understand why Zuko would ask her to come to an uncharted, lifeless planet, far from the Fire fleet and swathed in toxic gasses. She didn’t understand at all. But of course all she could do was hit the override again, because it wasn’t like the computer was going to give her any answers.
Besides, she had to concentrate on landing the ship. The computer couldn’t help her because some idiot had picked an uncharted rendezvous point. As she followed a line of jagged stone spires jutting up from the grayish sludgy ocean, she eyed them with distaste. Zuko’s beacon blinked right in the middle of the mountains, and Mai couldn’t help but think he had planned it that way to throw just one more obstacle her way.
But that had never been Zuko’s thing. That kind of thing was Azula’s line, and it was only leftover paranoia. She had a space ship to fly and a Zuko to meet, and she didn’t have time for any of this. And part of her was furious for giving Azula any place in her mind at all.
Weaving through the forest of eerie rock towers, Mai brought her ship lower and lower, chasing Zuko’s beacon signal deep into the mountains. A strange sensation went though her as she switched on her floodlights, a sense of displacement. Those were actual floodlights. This wasn’t a simulation. This was an actual planet she was going to be landing on, and she had really switched on real floodlights to see through the gas clouds.
Her lights bounced off something metallic, glinting in the acrid haze. This her computer sensors were able to identify, displaying a readout of Zuko’s modified dragon class ship, small and sleek, with a sharp curved nose and long body serpentine body, almost as familiar to Mai as the sight of his face.
With a flick of a switch, she engaged the landing gear and started a long slow spiral flight toward the small island beach Zuko had chosen as his own landing sight. When she touched down, her ship spun like a top, around and around inside the curve of Zuko’s ship’s tail, until at last her momentum was spent, and her tiny one woman ship skittered to a halt.
Like the mouth of some enormous creature, a docking tube engulfed her ship. Mai waited for the safety light to turn green.
Focus
The hatchway opened with a gust of wind as the air around her adjusted for the minute differences in pressure between her ship and the docking tube. Once she stepped down out of her ship, there was only a thin layer of clear plastic between her and the planetary surface, between the sand and dust of an alien world. And wasn’t that a strange feeling. Aside from a few months when she was fifteen, dragged along by her father when he became the governor of some of the captured territory on Ba Sing Se, and then when she had been hunting Zuko with Azula in the Earth Fleet controlled zones, she had never set foot on a planet.
She hadn’t set foot on this one, she reminded herself. There was still a layer of plastic between her feet and the ground, and between her face and the toxic atmosphere. She was still walking through the same bubble as ever, the one that carried her drifting through space, like a seed on the wind of a living planet, far away.
Opening the door into Zuko’s ship was harder than she thought it would be back on her own ship, her hands stiff and cold, unwilling to bend to press the buttons. And when the door slid open, her feet wanted to stay planted to the tunnel floor. But she picked them up and stepped inside.
He was fiddling with something on a computer screen when she walked in, his eyebrows locked together in a frown of concentration. For a moment, Mai almost couldn’t believe he was there, not gazing at her from the surface of a computer screen, lightyears away.
She coughed. He looked up. “Mai!”
“I’m here,” she said unnecessarily.
“Yeah.” It had been almost three years since she had seen that smile in person, slightly lopsided from the way the scar pulled at his cheek, soft, and sweeter than almost anything in all of space. Mai couldn’t help it. She smiled back.
“Why am I here?” she asked, pulling the sides of her mouth down reflexively. “What’s so important you had to show me?”
He looked down and bit his lip, but his eyes quickly rose back to hers, head bobbing like he couldn’t stop it, like a lodestone spoon drawn to a planet’s magnetic pole. No, that wasn’t quite right. That implied that... No, neither one of them was the pole. they were both magnets swinging in space, circling closer and closer, until they met and crashed together, his north pole to her south pole and her south to his north. Mai tried to tear her eyes away, to look anywhere else, but it didn’t work. At last he spoke, and Mai wanted to yank herself away just to prove that she could. “I wanted you to be the first person to see what I found.”
Mai blinked, and then two words spilled out of her mouth, very softly and without inflection. “Oh no.”
Zuko rolled his eyes.
Opaque
“I know we’ve been talking a lot, but we aren’t actually dating again,” Mai said slowly.
“I know,” Zuko responded. “This isn’t about that. I’m not trying to get you back either. I mean I am, but this isn’t about... um...”
She pushed down her smile, and the bubble of laughter threatening to escape. She pushed down all of it and raised an eyebrow instead. “Okay.”
“Wait what?”
Mai breathed out through her nose.. “You’re going to try to explain why you think this toxic hunk of space rock is the perfect terraforming candidate, and I kind of would like you to get it over with.”
“How did you...Never mind.” He groaned and shook his head. “Did you figure that out when I asked you to come, or on the way?”
“Because I know you so well.”
They shared a small smile together at the memory. He ducked his head. “Yeah.”
“On my way.” She walked over to the viewport and looked out at the hazy, almost solid seeming clouds of gas outside. “You realize the atmosphere is poisonous, right?”
Zuko smirked. “I did notice that, yeah.”
Mai folded her arms irritably. “I’m just standing here waiting for you to tell me how you plan to work a miracle.”
“So like, before certain ancestors of mine decided they’d rather steal a planet than find their own, kids used to get lessons in school about what to look for in a potential terraforming candidate,” Zuko said with a shrug. “Uncle found a whole bunch of the old educational videos for me when I got banished.”
“So this planet meets the criteria that used to be taught to young children,” Mai said without enthusiasm.
“Well I mean you could put it that way.” Zuko scowled, and Mai resisted the urge to soothe it away. “Or you could say that this is the same kind of toxic primordial atmosphere that Earth had when life was formed, and we used to be better at teaching kids what that looked like.”
“This is like Earth,” she murmured under her breath almost soundlessly, disbelievingly. They had left Earth nearly ten thousand years before. What did finding a planet like Earth even mean? A planet with churning, dead, poisonous oceans, and churning, dead, poisonous air, full of potential and no way she could see to fulfill it.
Zuko jumped up, to hand her a computer map of the planet. “Right now about eighty-seven percent of the planet surface is covered by water, but with a fully terraformed atmosphere, my models say that should shrink to seventy to eighty percent.” As he spoke, the map changed to show ice caps growing.
“I haven’t gotten a single word out of you on how.” Mai sighed and sat down in the chair Zuko had just vacated. “And I need that information to decide how crazy you are.”
“You’re just hoping I have a plan at all.” Zuko said.
“Shh, you’re not supposed to know the bar’s set that low.”
Yearn
Zuko gave her a wry, knowing look, and she wondered for a moment just how much he had aged without her noticing, how much the computer screen had hidden from her. “I have a plan, I promise. A real one.”
“Uh huh,” she said when he didn’t elaborate.
He shot her a secretive little smile. “Follow me.”
Mai’s stomach flipped over before her mind could catch up. She wished, with a strange mix of resentfulness and longing, that he didn’t look so much like his sister, and that offering trust didn’t look so much like luring someone in.
But she followed. He led her deep into the dragon ship’s body, though a narrow access corridor, past the small living quarters, and into the storage compartments. The lights did not burst on as Zuko opened a pressure door. “The lights are broken,” Mai observed, keeping her unnecessary foreboding to herself.
“No they’re not,” Zuko murmured almost reverently, waving her in. “I turned them off so you would get the full impact.”
Mai brushed past him, painfully aware of every brief point of contact between their two bodies. The air inside the storage compartment has hot and moist, like the reverse of a refrigerator, a hotroom. But the oppressiveness of the environment almost didn’t register, because along the wall were clear tanks filled to the brim with glowing liquid, each tank a different color, from bright yellow down through orange and red, to blue, and finally a shining, phosphorescent green. “What is this?” Mai asked, but she suspected she already knew.
Zuko looked down, suddenly bashful. “Microbes. The bioluminescence is color coded. They make the atmosphere breathable in stages. I’ve been down here a month making sure the whole thing works.”
“And does it?”
“Yeah.” The myriad colors of light bounced off his teeth as he shot her a shy grin. He laid his hand gently on one of the tanks. “No one else has been down here yet. I brought samples to the White Lotus, and they sent me back with the microbes to test out, but no one else has been to this planet yet except me. And you.”
“Why?” But she knew why. In the yellow glow emanating from the closest tank, Mai could see the longing in his face, and his futile attempts to suppress it. “I know we broke up after you left,” again, she didn’t say. “But we did break up.”
“Yeah,” he said reluctantly. “But your still the best friend I’ve got in the Fire Fleet. You’re the person I wanted to see this first. The White Lotus are sending ships down here in two standard weeks, and I was hoping we could... They've got enough of the first stage of microbes to start the process off planetwide, but I was wondering if before they got here, you would like to help me release the first batch?” He gave her what he obviously meant as an enticing smile, but it just made him look terrified.
Wait
Mai remembered when Zuko had first been sent away, listening to the whispers and the laughter, trying to piece together where he had gone, when all her parents would say was that she needed to stop asking. In the end, it was Azula who told her, because of course it was. And Azula had sounded so smug, so self-assured, but in retrospect, Mai knew it must have scared her badly. But it was Azula who told her all about how Zuko had disgraced himself, and about how their father had told him that if he objected so much to how the Fire Fleet used troops to secure a planet for their people, he could go find a planet for them himself, uninhabited and capable of sustaining human life.
Azula had laughed at that. How was Zuko ever going to do such a thing? He was gone for good. Mai had turned that over and over in her mind, trying to grasp it. Zuko wasn’t coming back.
But he did. He helped them capture Ba Sing Se and bought his way back into his father’s good graces. He came home. And then he left again. When he was captured, he told her what his father and sister planned to do with the planet he helped win. As she watched him escape, and waited to be locked away in his place, she hoped so hard she thought it would break something inside her that he would come back.
And he did. And he won. And Iroh was their lord now, and Zuko left again, but this time everybody knew he could come back any time he wanted. And everybody knew that if they just waited long enough, he would have to, because Iroh was not a young man, and Zuko was his chosen successor, and after what had happened with his father and sister, no one was going to challenge him.
But Mai knew when he did eventually come back, she would just be waiting for him to leave her again. After he left, when she was only just getting used to saying at least to herself, in the privacy of her own mind, that she loved him, she wanted to scream, or cry, and throw things at the wall until they broke. But somewhere along the way, she had forgotten how to do any of that. So she did the only thing she could do. She told him if he did come back, it wasn’t going to be to her.
And now he was smiling at her like he thought she was going to say no, and that scared him more than anything. And all Mai wanted was to say yes, yes to everything, yes to him coming home, yes to him staying, yes to waiting for him if he left again, because it wasn’t like saying she wasn’t going to wait for him had stopped it from happening.
So she did the only thing she could do. She said yes.
Intimate
All at once, Zuko’s smile lost that frightened edge. Without his anxiety to hold him taut, he slumped with relief. “I guess we better get the space suits out then.”
Mai made an indistinct sound of agreement as Zuko heaved open the sliding door to a small storage closet. Two space suits leaned out of the gap without the door to hold them upright. “You have two space suits ready and waiting down here. How long have you had this planned?”
Zuko went red. “The ship’s got ten. I just moved two down here this morning.”
“Face it Zuko, you’re a hopeless-”
“I know,” Zuko muttered. “I know I’m hopeless. You don’t have to remind me.”
Mai didn’t bother to say she had been about to call him romantic. She just sighed.
Mai had only ever had to put on a space suit twice, both times while serving Azula, and both times, the claustrophobic sense of being shut away had left her feeling even more trapped. The ghost of that feeling crept up her spine as she stepped into the suit and waited for the outer shell to shrink and mold itself to her shape. The way Zuko scrambled into his own suit made her realize that he must have done this hundreds, maybe thousands of times, in his exile and after. This was boring to him, routine.
She carried her helmet under one arm as she followed Zuko out of the makeshift laboratory, his arms full of the microbe tank, his helmet already in place. He led her down to airlock at the tail of his dragon ship, and it was only when he was about to open the outside door that Mai at last put on her helmet. Once it was on, the world around her was at a distance, unable to touch her, eerie and unacceptable except that there was no other choice.
“Mai?” Zuko asked, the microphone picking his voice up and projecting it straight into her ear. Everything was at a distance except for this, his voice, uncomfortably close, surrounding her.
“Yeah?” She wondered if it was the same for him.
He swallowed, sending a burst of static over the microphone. “I’m really glad you're here.”
“Where else would I be?” Mai asked deadpan. “Let’s go bring life to a lifeless world together.”
Zuko hoisted the tank higher on his shoulder, his suit’s boots making crisp footprints in the wet sand as he methodically made his way down to the shore. “Yeah, let’s.”
“You really are a hopeless romantic.” She held back her laughter, but not the smile he couldn’t see with her helmet on. “That’s one really loaded metaphor you have us playing out.”
“Uhhhhhh...” he said, as she followed him down, graceless and lumbering in her own suit, grateful that it obscured her face, hiding her expression, letting her keep something back, letting her drop her mask and keep her secrets.
“I won’t tell if you won’t,” she said, stepping into the water.
Stars
Zuko gave a last tug to the lines securing them to the ship before following her. She took one side of the tank without comment and walked with him out into the ocean.
The suit, which had been so heavy on land dragging her down and slowing her steps, in the water billowed her up, forcing her to concentrate on ensuring that her feet touched the sand below. It was a battle against the poisonous seas to reach the end of the lines, where the water reached up only to their chests.
She glanced at Zuko, but of course she couldn’t see his face though the helmet. At her movement, he held his end of the glowing tank up out of the water. “You ready?”
“Are you?” she shot back.
He huffed out a laugh. “Yeah okay, fine I’m ready.
He punched a button on the side of the tank, and the lid popped off to swing downward. They tipped the microbes out, into the ocean, where they spilled out on a shimmering cloud, floating on the waves like the moonlight they might have seen if the toxic gasses hadn’t hidden the universe beyond from view.
Mai let go of the tank as Zuko hooked it to his line, and let herself float upwards, until she was lying on her back in the luminescent water. “What’s this planet of yours going to be like? Do you think we'll be alive to see it?”
“My models say it’ll only take about ten years, so I hope so.” He picked up his feet, the water shifting around them both as he rose to float beside her. “About a quarter of it will be land, but there aren’t going to be any big continents, just a whole bunch of archipelagos. We’re on one right now. There are probably going to be houses right where we’re floating.”
The distant memory of lessons on the history of the Pan East Asian fleet, and the bit that became the Fire Fleet came back, the names of the island chains of old Earth, the near-mythical names of the places they were from echoed around her mind, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines... For a moment, Mai thought her suit had failed. She could barely breathe. “Ten years.”
They could stop worrying about the fleet falling apart around them, stop worrying about the way the end of the war meant they would never have Ba Sing Se. They could stop looking to the future and seeing only an end. He had really done it. He had found them a home.
“I never stopped loving you,” she confessed. “That was never the problem.”
“I know.”
“Will you stay this time?”
“Yeah.”
In their suits, they couldn’t hold hands, but she could clasp his wrist, and he could clasp hers. It was almost the same as they held onto each other and watched the glittering cloud of microbes disperse in the current and scatter like stars in the water around them.
Summary: Ozai might have been defeated, but the Fire Fleet still doesn’t have a home world, and they are living on borrowed time, unless Zuko can complete his old quest, and find them an uninhabited planet capable of sustaining human life. Mai wants nothing more for him to succeed, even though she knows it’s impossible.
Author's Note: Written for May Maiko Week 2018. Additional information about this universe can be found at my tumblr, where my screenname is Attackfish.
Zone of Future Habitation
Flight
The ship’s computer flashed out a warning. The planet below was unidentified, and the computer did not have geographic charts. Landing would have to be performed manually. Did the pilot understand?
The pilot understood, thanks. She hit the override, deciding there was no point in restraining herself from rolling her eyes if there was no one there to see her.
The planet’s atmosphere included high levels of gasses toxic to humans. A sealed suit with its own oxygen supply was essential for short term survival on the planetary surface. Did the pilot understand?
No, in fact she did not. She didn’t understand why Zuko would ask her to come to an uncharted, lifeless planet, far from the Fire fleet and swathed in toxic gasses. She didn’t understand at all. But of course all she could do was hit the override again, because it wasn’t like the computer was going to give her any answers.
Besides, she had to concentrate on landing the ship. The computer couldn’t help her because some idiot had picked an uncharted rendezvous point. As she followed a line of jagged stone spires jutting up from the grayish sludgy ocean, she eyed them with distaste. Zuko’s beacon blinked right in the middle of the mountains, and Mai couldn’t help but think he had planned it that way to throw just one more obstacle her way.
But that had never been Zuko’s thing. That kind of thing was Azula’s line, and it was only leftover paranoia. She had a space ship to fly and a Zuko to meet, and she didn’t have time for any of this. And part of her was furious for giving Azula any place in her mind at all.
Weaving through the forest of eerie rock towers, Mai brought her ship lower and lower, chasing Zuko’s beacon signal deep into the mountains. A strange sensation went though her as she switched on her floodlights, a sense of displacement. Those were actual floodlights. This wasn’t a simulation. This was an actual planet she was going to be landing on, and she had really switched on real floodlights to see through the gas clouds.
Her lights bounced off something metallic, glinting in the acrid haze. This her computer sensors were able to identify, displaying a readout of Zuko’s modified dragon class ship, small and sleek, with a sharp curved nose and long body serpentine body, almost as familiar to Mai as the sight of his face.
With a flick of a switch, she engaged the landing gear and started a long slow spiral flight toward the small island beach Zuko had chosen as his own landing sight. When she touched down, her ship spun like a top, around and around inside the curve of Zuko’s ship’s tail, until at last her momentum was spent, and her tiny one woman ship skittered to a halt.
Like the mouth of some enormous creature, a docking tube engulfed her ship. Mai waited for the safety light to turn green.
Focus
The hatchway opened with a gust of wind as the air around her adjusted for the minute differences in pressure between her ship and the docking tube. Once she stepped down out of her ship, there was only a thin layer of clear plastic between her and the planetary surface, between the sand and dust of an alien world. And wasn’t that a strange feeling. Aside from a few months when she was fifteen, dragged along by her father when he became the governor of some of the captured territory on Ba Sing Se, and then when she had been hunting Zuko with Azula in the Earth Fleet controlled zones, she had never set foot on a planet.
She hadn’t set foot on this one, she reminded herself. There was still a layer of plastic between her feet and the ground, and between her face and the toxic atmosphere. She was still walking through the same bubble as ever, the one that carried her drifting through space, like a seed on the wind of a living planet, far away.
Opening the door into Zuko’s ship was harder than she thought it would be back on her own ship, her hands stiff and cold, unwilling to bend to press the buttons. And when the door slid open, her feet wanted to stay planted to the tunnel floor. But she picked them up and stepped inside.
He was fiddling with something on a computer screen when she walked in, his eyebrows locked together in a frown of concentration. For a moment, Mai almost couldn’t believe he was there, not gazing at her from the surface of a computer screen, lightyears away.
She coughed. He looked up. “Mai!”
“I’m here,” she said unnecessarily.
“Yeah.” It had been almost three years since she had seen that smile in person, slightly lopsided from the way the scar pulled at his cheek, soft, and sweeter than almost anything in all of space. Mai couldn’t help it. She smiled back.
“Why am I here?” she asked, pulling the sides of her mouth down reflexively. “What’s so important you had to show me?”
He looked down and bit his lip, but his eyes quickly rose back to hers, head bobbing like he couldn’t stop it, like a lodestone spoon drawn to a planet’s magnetic pole. No, that wasn’t quite right. That implied that... No, neither one of them was the pole. they were both magnets swinging in space, circling closer and closer, until they met and crashed together, his north pole to her south pole and her south to his north. Mai tried to tear her eyes away, to look anywhere else, but it didn’t work. At last he spoke, and Mai wanted to yank herself away just to prove that she could. “I wanted you to be the first person to see what I found.”
Mai blinked, and then two words spilled out of her mouth, very softly and without inflection. “Oh no.”
Zuko rolled his eyes.
Opaque
“I know we’ve been talking a lot, but we aren’t actually dating again,” Mai said slowly.
“I know,” Zuko responded. “This isn’t about that. I’m not trying to get you back either. I mean I am, but this isn’t about... um...”
She pushed down her smile, and the bubble of laughter threatening to escape. She pushed down all of it and raised an eyebrow instead. “Okay.”
“Wait what?”
Mai breathed out through her nose.. “You’re going to try to explain why you think this toxic hunk of space rock is the perfect terraforming candidate, and I kind of would like you to get it over with.”
“How did you...Never mind.” He groaned and shook his head. “Did you figure that out when I asked you to come, or on the way?”
“Because I know you so well.”
They shared a small smile together at the memory. He ducked his head. “Yeah.”
“On my way.” She walked over to the viewport and looked out at the hazy, almost solid seeming clouds of gas outside. “You realize the atmosphere is poisonous, right?”
Zuko smirked. “I did notice that, yeah.”
Mai folded her arms irritably. “I’m just standing here waiting for you to tell me how you plan to work a miracle.”
“So like, before certain ancestors of mine decided they’d rather steal a planet than find their own, kids used to get lessons in school about what to look for in a potential terraforming candidate,” Zuko said with a shrug. “Uncle found a whole bunch of the old educational videos for me when I got banished.”
“So this planet meets the criteria that used to be taught to young children,” Mai said without enthusiasm.
“Well I mean you could put it that way.” Zuko scowled, and Mai resisted the urge to soothe it away. “Or you could say that this is the same kind of toxic primordial atmosphere that Earth had when life was formed, and we used to be better at teaching kids what that looked like.”
“This is like Earth,” she murmured under her breath almost soundlessly, disbelievingly. They had left Earth nearly ten thousand years before. What did finding a planet like Earth even mean? A planet with churning, dead, poisonous oceans, and churning, dead, poisonous air, full of potential and no way she could see to fulfill it.
Zuko jumped up, to hand her a computer map of the planet. “Right now about eighty-seven percent of the planet surface is covered by water, but with a fully terraformed atmosphere, my models say that should shrink to seventy to eighty percent.” As he spoke, the map changed to show ice caps growing.
“I haven’t gotten a single word out of you on how.” Mai sighed and sat down in the chair Zuko had just vacated. “And I need that information to decide how crazy you are.”
“You’re just hoping I have a plan at all.” Zuko said.
“Shh, you’re not supposed to know the bar’s set that low.”
Yearn
Zuko gave her a wry, knowing look, and she wondered for a moment just how much he had aged without her noticing, how much the computer screen had hidden from her. “I have a plan, I promise. A real one.”
“Uh huh,” she said when he didn’t elaborate.
He shot her a secretive little smile. “Follow me.”
Mai’s stomach flipped over before her mind could catch up. She wished, with a strange mix of resentfulness and longing, that he didn’t look so much like his sister, and that offering trust didn’t look so much like luring someone in.
But she followed. He led her deep into the dragon ship’s body, though a narrow access corridor, past the small living quarters, and into the storage compartments. The lights did not burst on as Zuko opened a pressure door. “The lights are broken,” Mai observed, keeping her unnecessary foreboding to herself.
“No they’re not,” Zuko murmured almost reverently, waving her in. “I turned them off so you would get the full impact.”
Mai brushed past him, painfully aware of every brief point of contact between their two bodies. The air inside the storage compartment has hot and moist, like the reverse of a refrigerator, a hotroom. But the oppressiveness of the environment almost didn’t register, because along the wall were clear tanks filled to the brim with glowing liquid, each tank a different color, from bright yellow down through orange and red, to blue, and finally a shining, phosphorescent green. “What is this?” Mai asked, but she suspected she already knew.
Zuko looked down, suddenly bashful. “Microbes. The bioluminescence is color coded. They make the atmosphere breathable in stages. I’ve been down here a month making sure the whole thing works.”
“And does it?”
“Yeah.” The myriad colors of light bounced off his teeth as he shot her a shy grin. He laid his hand gently on one of the tanks. “No one else has been down here yet. I brought samples to the White Lotus, and they sent me back with the microbes to test out, but no one else has been to this planet yet except me. And you.”
“Why?” But she knew why. In the yellow glow emanating from the closest tank, Mai could see the longing in his face, and his futile attempts to suppress it. “I know we broke up after you left,” again, she didn’t say. “But we did break up.”
“Yeah,” he said reluctantly. “But your still the best friend I’ve got in the Fire Fleet. You’re the person I wanted to see this first. The White Lotus are sending ships down here in two standard weeks, and I was hoping we could... They've got enough of the first stage of microbes to start the process off planetwide, but I was wondering if before they got here, you would like to help me release the first batch?” He gave her what he obviously meant as an enticing smile, but it just made him look terrified.
Wait
Mai remembered when Zuko had first been sent away, listening to the whispers and the laughter, trying to piece together where he had gone, when all her parents would say was that she needed to stop asking. In the end, it was Azula who told her, because of course it was. And Azula had sounded so smug, so self-assured, but in retrospect, Mai knew it must have scared her badly. But it was Azula who told her all about how Zuko had disgraced himself, and about how their father had told him that if he objected so much to how the Fire Fleet used troops to secure a planet for their people, he could go find a planet for them himself, uninhabited and capable of sustaining human life.
Azula had laughed at that. How was Zuko ever going to do such a thing? He was gone for good. Mai had turned that over and over in her mind, trying to grasp it. Zuko wasn’t coming back.
But he did. He helped them capture Ba Sing Se and bought his way back into his father’s good graces. He came home. And then he left again. When he was captured, he told her what his father and sister planned to do with the planet he helped win. As she watched him escape, and waited to be locked away in his place, she hoped so hard she thought it would break something inside her that he would come back.
And he did. And he won. And Iroh was their lord now, and Zuko left again, but this time everybody knew he could come back any time he wanted. And everybody knew that if they just waited long enough, he would have to, because Iroh was not a young man, and Zuko was his chosen successor, and after what had happened with his father and sister, no one was going to challenge him.
But Mai knew when he did eventually come back, she would just be waiting for him to leave her again. After he left, when she was only just getting used to saying at least to herself, in the privacy of her own mind, that she loved him, she wanted to scream, or cry, and throw things at the wall until they broke. But somewhere along the way, she had forgotten how to do any of that. So she did the only thing she could do. She told him if he did come back, it wasn’t going to be to her.
And now he was smiling at her like he thought she was going to say no, and that scared him more than anything. And all Mai wanted was to say yes, yes to everything, yes to him coming home, yes to him staying, yes to waiting for him if he left again, because it wasn’t like saying she wasn’t going to wait for him had stopped it from happening.
So she did the only thing she could do. She said yes.
Intimate
All at once, Zuko’s smile lost that frightened edge. Without his anxiety to hold him taut, he slumped with relief. “I guess we better get the space suits out then.”
Mai made an indistinct sound of agreement as Zuko heaved open the sliding door to a small storage closet. Two space suits leaned out of the gap without the door to hold them upright. “You have two space suits ready and waiting down here. How long have you had this planned?”
Zuko went red. “The ship’s got ten. I just moved two down here this morning.”
“Face it Zuko, you’re a hopeless-”
“I know,” Zuko muttered. “I know I’m hopeless. You don’t have to remind me.”
Mai didn’t bother to say she had been about to call him romantic. She just sighed.
Mai had only ever had to put on a space suit twice, both times while serving Azula, and both times, the claustrophobic sense of being shut away had left her feeling even more trapped. The ghost of that feeling crept up her spine as she stepped into the suit and waited for the outer shell to shrink and mold itself to her shape. The way Zuko scrambled into his own suit made her realize that he must have done this hundreds, maybe thousands of times, in his exile and after. This was boring to him, routine.
She carried her helmet under one arm as she followed Zuko out of the makeshift laboratory, his arms full of the microbe tank, his helmet already in place. He led her down to airlock at the tail of his dragon ship, and it was only when he was about to open the outside door that Mai at last put on her helmet. Once it was on, the world around her was at a distance, unable to touch her, eerie and unacceptable except that there was no other choice.
“Mai?” Zuko asked, the microphone picking his voice up and projecting it straight into her ear. Everything was at a distance except for this, his voice, uncomfortably close, surrounding her.
“Yeah?” She wondered if it was the same for him.
He swallowed, sending a burst of static over the microphone. “I’m really glad you're here.”
“Where else would I be?” Mai asked deadpan. “Let’s go bring life to a lifeless world together.”
Zuko hoisted the tank higher on his shoulder, his suit’s boots making crisp footprints in the wet sand as he methodically made his way down to the shore. “Yeah, let’s.”
“You really are a hopeless romantic.” She held back her laughter, but not the smile he couldn’t see with her helmet on. “That’s one really loaded metaphor you have us playing out.”
“Uhhhhhh...” he said, as she followed him down, graceless and lumbering in her own suit, grateful that it obscured her face, hiding her expression, letting her keep something back, letting her drop her mask and keep her secrets.
“I won’t tell if you won’t,” she said, stepping into the water.
Stars
Zuko gave a last tug to the lines securing them to the ship before following her. She took one side of the tank without comment and walked with him out into the ocean.
The suit, which had been so heavy on land dragging her down and slowing her steps, in the water billowed her up, forcing her to concentrate on ensuring that her feet touched the sand below. It was a battle against the poisonous seas to reach the end of the lines, where the water reached up only to their chests.
She glanced at Zuko, but of course she couldn’t see his face though the helmet. At her movement, he held his end of the glowing tank up out of the water. “You ready?”
“Are you?” she shot back.
He huffed out a laugh. “Yeah okay, fine I’m ready.
He punched a button on the side of the tank, and the lid popped off to swing downward. They tipped the microbes out, into the ocean, where they spilled out on a shimmering cloud, floating on the waves like the moonlight they might have seen if the toxic gasses hadn’t hidden the universe beyond from view.
Mai let go of the tank as Zuko hooked it to his line, and let herself float upwards, until she was lying on her back in the luminescent water. “What’s this planet of yours going to be like? Do you think we'll be alive to see it?”
“My models say it’ll only take about ten years, so I hope so.” He picked up his feet, the water shifting around them both as he rose to float beside her. “About a quarter of it will be land, but there aren’t going to be any big continents, just a whole bunch of archipelagos. We’re on one right now. There are probably going to be houses right where we’re floating.”
The distant memory of lessons on the history of the Pan East Asian fleet, and the bit that became the Fire Fleet came back, the names of the island chains of old Earth, the near-mythical names of the places they were from echoed around her mind, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines... For a moment, Mai thought her suit had failed. She could barely breathe. “Ten years.”
They could stop worrying about the fleet falling apart around them, stop worrying about the way the end of the war meant they would never have Ba Sing Se. They could stop looking to the future and seeing only an end. He had really done it. He had found them a home.
“I never stopped loving you,” she confessed. “That was never the problem.”
“I know.”
“Will you stay this time?”
“Yeah.”
In their suits, they couldn’t hold hands, but she could clasp his wrist, and he could clasp hers. It was almost the same as they held onto each other and watched the glittering cloud of microbes disperse in the current and scatter like stars in the water around them.
