exactly a day after the three of them gather to watch their youngest brother choke on the strings of their oldest, marvin sweeps into jackie’s room, a storm on his heels. he tells jackie of a sweeping wave of magical fury. he tells jackie of magic that tastes of desperation, and fury, and fear.
henrik doesn’t know magic, they both know. he might fear, rage strong enough to choke them, but magic does not pulse through him the same.
anti does not fear. anti rages. anti screams. anti does not, never has, and never will fear.
jackie’s hands are closing around his swords before marvin can finish his sentence. chase stands behind marvin, dripping with rage that hisses against the carpeted floor.
marvin leads them to their youngest.
they find henrik. they find their oldest.
if you ask jackie, later, he will not be able to tell you what happened. he will only be able to tell you of the single minded focus pumping through his head, of his fear that they would turn up just a minute too late to two dead brothers.
he would also be able to tell you of the two by his side. of how chase had shed every ounce of rage the minute he’d seen henrik, quiet and small and huddled into himself and broken into so many more pieces, and had pulled him close and held him there even as henrik roused for a fight with the glass in his hands and bones.
of marvin, the fury of a storm and a phoenix on his tongue, fire melting off of his hands and sparks flying from his teeth as he’d burned to the rotten, broken core of the demon that had risen to meet them.
most of all, though, he would’ve told you of jameson, of blue lightning wrapping around charred strings, of how he’d risen, porcelain grinding against porcelain, for a fight.
he pulls jameson close, the brother that he’d never gotten to say hello and happy birthday and welcome you will be so, so loved to, and holds him as marvin burns, and burns anti to the ground with him, flames leaping across the walls and ceilings and reaching for more.
by the time the ashes cool, they are sitting, outside on the cold pavement. chase refuses to let henrik go even as he tilts his head into fresh, cool air for the first time, and counts the stars with chase, oilslick tears shining on the glassy edges around his face.
jameson’s eyes do not leave them. there are many things he could ask, that he probably should be asking. jackie keeps a careful eye on him and a pen and paper nearby. (they had always kept it with them, waiting for the day that they could meet, and love, and cherish him. they had been waiting for the day that anti’s cruelty would slip and cut his own strings.)
jameson does not say a word. he curls close to jackie, porcelain resting against ivory, and watches them.
that’s alright, too.
they can wait for as long as they need to, to show him that it’s going to be okay.
for now, the night hangs heavy around all of them. for now, they wait for their magician to pull himself together from the ashes in a new form, with more eyes and less teeth and more arms to hold them close.
For some reason, Tseng hadn't seemed to want to trust Zack with this mission.
He couldn't understand why. It was an important task! The rebel faction outside Junon, known only as the Fireflies, was growing bolder and bolder, and they needed to be taken out. That much was fact. Shinra had thought the best way to take out the hidden leader, a woman named Tessa Roman, was to infiltrate the group, so naturally, they had turned to the Turks.
Except, then they'd lost contact with Reno. Tseng wanted to make sure his inside man was safe, and the only way to do that was to send someone else in. But if Reno had been caught, then that meant they would be wary of new recruits for a while. The only way to get someone in was to give them something they really wanted.
Like a SOLDIER second class.
No rebel group worth their salt would reject a mako enhanced super soldier. Yeah, he'd probably be watched carefully and not allowed near anyone of worth. Yeah, he'd probably be the last person they ever trusted with anything. But if they could get information out of him, or better yet, have him kill stuff for them...well, it'd probably be worth it. Right?
Tseng had thought so. Except he was wary about sending Zack, and Zack had no idea why! He was good at what he did! He almost always remembered his sword these days! And he'd remembered it this time, when he'd made contact with the Fireflies outpost and explained to them that he wanted to join their ranks. Tseng had coached him on what to say for like hours. He was so good at this.
Well. Maybe not quite as good as he had thought, he reflected as the tranqs they'd put in the drink they'd offered him wore off--probably sooner than they expected, sure, but it was still plenty of time for them to kick him around a bit and throw him into a cell.
Rubbing his aching head, he groaned under his breath and opened one eye. Yeah. He was definitely in a cell. They hadn't trusted him, apparently. Oh, and they'd taken his sword, his PHS, and the super secret microphone Tseng had hidden in his collar. Huh.
But apparently, he wasn't alone in the cell. As he slowly sat up, he was aware of a flash of bright red hair just out of the corner of his eye. The man sitting across from him looked very similar to the photos of Reno Zack had seen, although he was sporting quite a few cuts and bruises.
“You Reno?” he asked, abruptly cheerful. “I'm here to rescue you!”
So i have an A on my barbecue plate in cooking and now we are on break outside and we still have 5 hours to go so me and my friend are considering to run away
Once safely out in the hallway, Jet started chucking off the blasted storm trooper uniform. Smelled like fucking shit. It was probably going to take weeks of scrubbing to get this infernal smell off his body. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Katara doing the same.
The prince’s lips thinned out into a scowl and Jet jerked his eyes away from them, before he started getting ideas. Again.
They really needed to get out of here so that Jet could have time to figure out exactly what he wanted to do about these wandering thoughts, for a fucking prince of all things. Spirits damn it all.
Wiping down her hair, Katara only snorted and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, let’s get moving. Come on.”
Longshot was still staring intently at the door to the garbage compactor and suddenly there was a large racket from inside as a tentacle reached out into the hall, searching for a new victim.
With a sigh, he faced the door and yelled, “Move out of the way!” As he raised his blaster to shoot, he could see Zuko rushing at him in a huff.
“Stop! They’ll hear us!”
Too late, the shot was already ricocheting down the hall and the tentacle fled back into the safety of the trash. It wasn’t that loud.
Okay, maybe it was, but it was hardly a big deal. Idiot, know-it-all princes, he grumbled to himself.
Zuko was in his face now, sneering at him and waving his hands. “Listen. I don't know who you are, or where you came from, but from now on, you do as I tell you. Okay?”
Feeling his jaw drop, Jet watched in shock as the prince turned and stalked away. Oh hell no, Jet did not take orders from any royalty. Even if they were right, which Zuko clearly wasn’t; Jet had everything perfectly under control, thank you very much.
“Look, Your Worshipfulness, let's get one thing straight! I take orders from one person! Me!” he growled, chasing after the prince. Bastard walked like he had a stick up his ass and he couldn’t help but snort when he noticed. Not that he was looking at his ass, because he wasn’t, at all.
Zuko only rolled his eyes and huffed more at this. “It’s a wonder you’re still alive.”
Glaring at the prince’s back, he saw Katara laughing mockingly at him and snapped at her exasperatedly, “No reward is worth this.”
When the walls started closing in on them, Jet was ready to shoot that stupid pout right off of the prince's face. This was just fan-fucking-tastic. Really, this day couldn't get any better.
"Are they? I hadn't noticed!" Jet retorted. He was so, so done with these idealistic idiots. How the fuck had he ever let himself be talked into this?
The prince began to yell, "Don't just stand there! Try to brace it with something."
Well, maybe his holiness wasn't completely useless; although this was all his damn fault anyway, and Jet had no intention of forgetting that. Groping through the foul muck, he searched for whatever steel pipes or other pieces of metal he could find; but with each squelching footstep that seemed to suck his feet farther and farther down, he felt his anger and frustration grow.
The compactor rolled through the metal they jammed against it so efficiently, creaking and banging along with no problems whatsoever, and the filth just kept crawling higher and higher up his chest. They were completely fucked.
And he didn't even have his stalk of grass to chew on anymore. How the hell was he supposed to concentrate on an escape plan?
Glancing at Zuko from the corner of his eye, Jet seethed while he watched the prince huff and frantically throw whatever he could at the wall. Oh yes, if they survived this, he was going to shoot that mouth right off. Or something. Something involving that mouth. Dammit Jet, focus. Now's not the time to be thinking about pouty, huffy princes with perfect mouths.
That thought probably wasn't helping either.
Katara began to bang on her comlink, desperately trying to get in touch with t0f, as the walls slowly crept closer. Furiously running through any possible means of escape, Jet looked back over at Zuko.
Fuck.
The prince was being pulled down into the sludge, steam rolling off his body while the liquid around him began to boil.
“Get to the top!” he shouted down at the other man, who only glared back.
“I can’t. I would if I could, but I’m stuck!” Zuko huffed, flailing his arms around and accidentally setting some sort of gunk on fire.
Reaching down, Jet grasped the prince’s hand roughly, yanking him up as hard as possible. Damn, he really was stuck. Looking into the wide, gold eyes staring back at him, he felt something lurch deep inside of him and, setting his mouth into a firm line, he heaved with as much force as he could muster.
They were all getting out of this alive, dammit, if only so he could figure out what the hell that clenching feeling in his stomach was.
Finally, finally, the prince jerked free of the debris holding him down and barreled straight into Jet’s chest. Quickly wrapping an arm around the other man’s waist, Jet secured the prince with him at the top of the pile. When he felt the hot breath panting into his neck and slim hips pressing into his own, he couldn’t stop himself from flushing.
Oh.
Well then. They were definitely surviving this; anything else was just unacceptable.
By this point the walls were so close, they had to begin using their own bodies to brace against them. With a tense smirk, he quipped, “One thing's for sure. We're all going to be a lot thinner!”
Somehow Zuko managed to huff out a laugh, grabbing onto Jet’s hand and groaning at the pressure ripping through his body.
When Katara was finally able to reach t0f and get them out of there, Jet didn’t think he had ever been more relieved in his life.
"Garbage chute. Really wonderful idea." Jet glared at Zuko. "What an incredible smell you've discovered!"
The prince just huffed and crossed his arms. Typical, stuck up royalty of some dumb system.
"Let's just get the hell out of here." Jet fumbled around for his blaster, picking it up delicately from the pile of shit it landed on. "Longshot, get away from there."
Longshot turned away from the door and gave him a look I really don't think you should do that, boss. Katara and Zuko both started to yell something at him, but Jet wasn't going to listen to those idiots again. That's how he wound up in this mess in the first place. So he jutted his chin out at Longshot to say I do what I want.
Jet fired his blaster at the door.
The laser rebounded. Everyone ducked, smushing down into the reeking muck. Jet smelled something burning, so he opened his eyes to see a lick of flame crawling up the stem of the grass stalk clenched between his teeth.
"Fuck!" He spat it out. It sank into the bilge with a sizzle. Jet whipped around to scowl at the other two. "Dammit! You two are useless."
Zuko scoffed at him, but Katara just shouted at him. "If you had listened, I was telling you we already tried that. It's magnetically sealed, jackass!"
Jet sloshed forward, waving his blaster at her, but Zuko cut him off before he could retaliate properly.
"Put that thing away, you're gonna get us all killed!"
Jet managed to turn on his heel. Oh, hell no.
"Oh, absolutely, your worship," Jet sneered at the prince. "Look, I had everything under control until you led us down the fucking garbage chute. It's not gonna take them very long to figure out where we went. Spirits, don't you think things through?"
Zuko gave him the sourest of looks, pursing his lips and exhaling a trickle of steam from his nose. Jet let out a mental whoop of victory. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Longshot trying to tell him that now really wasn't the time to be flirting. Jet waved him off. He wasn't flirting, he was educating these never-left-their-fucking-systems-before, ass-backwards yokels.
"Well it could be worse," the prince replied primly.
The whole room shook, and something metal shrieked loudly. Jet and Zuko both looked to Katara. All three of them looked back at Longshot. His friend shrugged, saying something like don't look at me, I didn't do anything.
A metal crate rolled down one of the piles of junk, splashing all four of them with muck. Katara groaned, wiping whatever that was out of her ridiculous hair.
Summary: Prince Zuko's been busted out of his cell, but Jet and Katara never thought about how to get him off the station. Whoops.
*
She was shit with a blaster. And that was all that really counted.
Longshot gave Jet his look that meant oh fuck, and Jet gave him one back that said yeah no shit, and Katara just glared.
“There isn’t any other way out,” She yelled, glaring at Jet, who continued to fire his blaster at the advancing troops. Jet tried not to roll his eyes at her, backed against a wall, and tried to hold them off. But there were so many of them, and his arms were getting tired. He told Katara this.
“I can’t hold them off forever!”
Zuko continued to huff about.
In the time he had known him, which wasn’t incredibly long thus far, Zuko had managed to do two things- huff, and pace. Oh, and complain. You aren’t tall enough. You aren’t quiet enough. You aren’t rescuing me well enough. It was really extremely annoying, and Jet was starting to consider dumping him on Katara and just leaving; surely the girl would be okay with that, it wasn’t like she hadn’t been constantly ogling him ever since they busted him out of his cell.
“This is some rescue,” he complained, pacing back and forth. “When you came in here, didn’t you have a plan for getting out? Didn’t you think this through?”
Jet didn’t care for being scolded by a prince, no less a Fire System prince, so he kept his back to him and kept shooting, nodding his head to Katara. “She’s the brains, sweetheart.”
Jet nailed another stormtrooper in the head, and Zuko yelled. “Don’t call me that!”
Katara, like Jet, elected to ignore Zuko and turned to look her companion, who was steadily backing further down the narrow hallway. Shit, this was getting bad. Even Longshot seemed pretty worried about it.
With a great, royal and obviously practiced huff, Zuko stormed up between them and grabbed Katara’s blaster. He shot at the grate and then turned around to look at the two of them like why the hell did no one think of that before, you idiots.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jet asked him, even though he knew exactly what the prince was doing- being a hothead. Typical of someone like him.
“Someone has to save our asses,” he snapped, and shoved Jet towards the chute. Jet nearly gave him a comment about how he didn’t care to be handled, but Zuko had already slipped through the grate. Jet looked at Longshot.
I think it’s our best option, he said with a look, and Jet slapped his forehead.
“Just get in there,” he said, pushing his friend toward the chute. “I don’t care what you smell.” Longshot looked at him like I was already going to go in, I don’t know what you’re talking about, and Jet nudged him with his foot.
“Great guy, the prince,” Jet said to Katara, covering her as she clambered into the opening. “Either I’m going to kill him, or I’m starting to like him.”
“I’m so glad you’re coming around,” she deadpanned, ducking a blast and making a face.
“Get in there!”
She did, and Jet picked off one, two, three more troopers before finally getting in himself.
Katara ran down the corridor, scanning each door for the right number. No. That wasn't the prince's room. Just a few more.
A figure swathed in a long white robe lay on a metal bench. His dark hair was loose and unkempt, spilling out messily along the edges of something wrapped around his head. He rolled over, revealing a bloodstained bandage covering the left side of his face. The one eye she could see pierced right through her.
Katara's heart jumped into her throat.
The prince (spirits, she hoped he was the prince) sat up slowly, rubbing the right side of his nose.
"Aren't you a little short for a storm trooper?" His voice rasped like he'd been yelling recently. It was soft and hard and turned her insides into mush all at once. Oh boy, she was in big trouble.
"Huh?"
He frowned. "And… girly?"
"Oh!" Katara pulled her helmet off, shaking out her hastily braided hair. "I'm Katara Icewalker, and I'm here to rescue you!"
"…you're who?"
"Katara. I'm here to get you out of... well, here," she repeated, raising an eyebrow. "You are Prince Zuko, right?"
His reply was lost as Jet yelled something down the hallway. Blasters zapped and a flash of red zipped past the doorway. Katara ignored her fluttering heart and grabbed his hand.
