Soldier's Boy
Three

Lee refused to black out himself until Jiro woke up and could assure him that he hadn't done any permanent damage by overextending. And because of the secret guilt — that somehow this was his fault, stupid as he knew that was, but he would never admit the reasons for the guilt. Not ever.

He was, therefore, still conscious (barely), when his brother woke up twenty hours later.

Jiro groaned and slowly uncurled. "Are you okay?" Lee asked immediately.

"Hungry," the boy replied, rolling over onto his back to look up at his brother. "Head hurts."

"Oh." The teenager probably wasn't hiding his near-frantic worry as well as he thought he was.

"Just overdid it," Jiro tried to reassure him. "Didn't want to stay in that stupid canyon. I'm fine, honest..."

"You're sure?" Lee asked, giving him a somewhat woozy searching look.

Jiro nodded. His brother relaxed, clearly relieved.

"Your turn to rest," the ten-year-old said then.

Lee looked like he was considering arguing, then looked down at his clothes, which had decidedly more dried blood on them than they had when they'd left the Freedom Fighters, gave a sheepish sort of half smile. "Yeah, okay."

"Does this mean he's going to let me clean him up now?" a rather annoyed-sounding Katara said from the other end of the saddle.

Jiro's eyes when wide in dismay. "Lee, you haven't—?"

"I'm fine, there wasn't any need to waste our supplies, I told you," he muttered in Katara's general direction. To Jiro, he just said, "I wanted to make sure you were okay."

The younger boy struggled to a sitting position. "Lee!"

"I'm not that badly hurt," the sixteen-year-old insisted.

"Let Katara help you, please?"

"Fine," he said.

Katara crawled over and pulled off Lee's shirt, to see how bad the damage was. There were several scabbed-over clawmarks, with corresponding bloody tears in his shirt. "Lee?" she asked, very calmly, "How is this 'fine'?"

"Oh, gods," Jiro whispered, going pale.

"It's not as bad as it looks," Lee tried to insist. "Didn't even hurt that much."

"Katara, do you need help with him?" the boy asked instead of answering.

"I might run out of bandages. Try and find a clean shirt to rip up," she said, before starting to clean the gashes.

"Right," Jiro said and did as she asked.

Between the two of them, they got Lee cleaned up — he had to borrow one of Sokka's shirts, as the canyon crawlers had ruined his last one.

When they were done, Jiro tilted his head and eyed Lee curiously. "He looks weird in blue," the boy said at last.

"Yeah, he really does," Sokka said. "Try not to get this one torn up."

Lee shot a glare at him.

"Will you rest now?" Jiro asked his brother.

"'Kay." He leaned against the back of the saddle and closed his eyes. Jiro ate fully half of their supplies before curling up next to Lee, his back pressed against the older boy's leg.

A couple days later, they stopped in another town to replenish their seriously dwindled supplies (and get Lee new shirts). Unfortunately, they quickly remembered that they'd been out of money since the day they'd picked up Lee and Jiro.

"I'll get a job," Lee said. "I can probably find someone who needs a day-labourer, and I'm the only one of us over sixteen."

Jiro didn't look particularly enthused over the separation, but nobody in their right mind was going to hire a ten-year-old, especially not one so small as he. Sure enough, Lee quickly got himself hired by a fisherman whose wife refused to go out with him, insisting that it was going to storm.

"Lee, be careful," Jiro said quietly, touching his brother's arm.

"I will," he said, smiling a little.

Aang, watching the horizon as Lee and the fisherman loaded the boat, noticed the storm coming in, and looked a little nervous. "Lee, maybe this isn't such a good idea. Look at the sky."

"I'll be fine," Lee assured him. "Don't worry."

"The boy with the tattoos has some sense!" the fisherman's wife snapped. "You should listen to him!"

The old man paused. "Boy with tattoos?" He turned around and studied Aang. "Airbender tattoos... Well, I'll be a hogmonkey's uncle. You're the Avatar, ain't ya?"

"That's right," Katara said, proudly.

"Well, don't be so smiley about it," he snapped, brow furrowing. "The Avatar disappeared for a hundred years! You turned your back on the world!"

Jiro sighed and tuned the fisherman out. Instead he wrapped his arms around Lee's waist. "Good luck."

Lee hugged him back. "I'll be fine, don't worry," he repeated, as Katara loudly and angrily defended Aang and the twelve-year-old snapped open his glider and shot away from the confrontation. The fisherman then snapped at Lee to get back to loading the boat, and the sixteen-year-old rolled his eyes. "I'll see you later," he said, disentangling himself from his brother and getting back to work.

Jiro nodded and ran back to Appa.

Sokka and Katara joined him. "Come on," she said, worried. "Let's go find Aang."

"Right," Jiro agreed, climbing onto the bison and scrambling to take Aang's normal seat. "Appa, yip yip!" he called when Sokka and Katara were settled. By the time they found the cave where Aang had hidden, it was pouring. All three of them hurried to get inside.

The Avatar was curled up in the middle. "I'm sorry I ran away," he said.

"It's okay," Katara assured him.

"Yeah, that fisherman was way out of line," Sokka agreed.

Jiro said nothing. Instead, he sat next to the other boy and put a hand on his shoulder gently.

"Actually... he wasn't," Aang said, pulling away a little.

"Aang...?"

"I don't want to talk about it," he said, his voice breaking a little.

Jiro immediately subsided, but he squeezed Aang's shoulder gently and then let go.

Katara wasn't willing to drop the subject so easily. "It has to do with your dream, doesn't it," she said, walking around in front of Aang. He looked away. "Talk to me."

"Katara, maybe it isn't a good time for this," Jiro said quietly.

Aang was silent for a long minute. Before he could agree with Jiro or open up to Katara, however, Appa rumbled and wandered into the cave.

"I'm going to try and get a little fire going," Katara said. They were all soaked and could use the warmth, after all.

Jiro's shoulders tensed. "All right."

It took her a while, but she finally got a tiny campfire started.

Aang stared at it for a minute, then started talking, telling them about when he learned he was the Avatar, and everything that happened in the weeks following — his friends not wanting to play with him anymore (his power made it hard for the games to be fair), and then the monks planning to send him away from his guardian to another temple, and how he ran away, and froze himself during a storm like this one, and waking up when Katara and Sokka found him in the iceberg.

The poor kid, Jiro thought, watching him. I just can't imagine it — to have everything that matters to you slowly stripped away through no fault of your own, and then in a single moment lose everything you know. Hesitantly, he reached out and hugged Aang.

Aang hugged him back.

"You ran away," Katara said, softly, when he was done.

"Yeah," he replied, not letting go of Jiro. "And then the Fire Nation attacked our temple," he went on, a little bitterly. "My people needed me, and I wasn't there to help."

"You don't know what would've — " Katara started, but the Avatar cut her off, jerking away from Jiro in his bitter guilt.

"The world needed me, and I wasn't there to help!"

"Aang..."

"The fisherman was right. I did turn my back on the world."

"No, he isn't," said Jiro firmly. "You're just a kid, Aang. There's no way you could have known that storm would come."

"Yeah," Sokka added, and Katara went on for them.

"You're being too hard on yourself," she said firmly. "Even if you did run away, I think it was meant to be. If you had stayed, you would've been killed along with all the other airbenders."

"You don't know that," Aang said, looking away.

"I know it's meant to be this way," she insisted. "The world needs you now. You give people hope."

"And if there's one thing this world needs," said Jiro, "it's hope."

Aang was silent for a minute, then looked up and smiled. Before anyone could say anything else, a bolt of lightning lit up the entrance, and the fisherman's wife came into the cave.

"Help! Oh, please, help!"

"It's okay," Katara said, running to her and pulling her over to the fire. "You're safe."

"But my husband isn't!"

Jiro went white. "Lee."

"What do you mean?" Katara asked, hard on his heels. "Where's Lee?"

"They haven't returned! They should've been back by now! And this storm is becoming a typhoon, they're caught out at sea!"

"I'm going to find them," Aang said, rising.

"I'm coming with you," Katara said, immediately.

Sokka nodded.

"You are not leaving me out of this!" Jiro exclaimed.

"I'm staying here!" the fisherman's wife said, flopping down crosslegged.

"Okay, fine, but let's go," Aang said, already leading Appa outside so they'd have room to get on.

"Right behind you," Jiro said, running up Appa's tail to get a good launch into the saddle.

Katara and Sokka were right behind him.

"Yip, yip!" Aang called, and they flew out into the storm.

"Where are they?" Katara shouted over the storm after a few minutes.

Aang couldn't answer, just called encouragement to the bison.

Finding some rope, Jiro tied himself to the saddle and then leaned as far over as he could, trying to find the boat. "Lee!" he shouted into the storm.

"The boat! It's there!" Sokka shouted, pointing, just after they ploughed through a huge wave.

Aang immediately steered Appa right over the boat, then jumped down onto the deck. The mast broke, nearly crushing Lee and the fisherman, but Aang slowed it and Lee dragged the old man out of the way. No one was hurt. The Avatar tied Jiro's rope around the two of them, told them to hang on, and, holding onto the other end, leapt back up onto Appa, pulling the two of them behind him and whipping them onto the saddle, where they landed with a solid thunk.

Jiro promptly attached himself to his brother and clung. Lee clung back, shaking a little. A massive wave rose up behind them. Appa couldn't outrun it. They were all plunged under. Startled, Jiro tried to yell, but his mouth and nose filled with water, and he started to choke. No! I can't die like this...!

Lee slipped out of his grasp, then the water around them swirled and started glowing, and they were moving, very fast.

They burst up in the middle of the eye of the storm, all of them safely on the saddle again. Aang directed them above the storm, in a horseshoe, landing at the mouth of the cave where they'd left the fisherman's wife, who instantly ran forward to first embrace and then berate her husband.

Jiro was still coughing when they landed; he'd inhaled a lot of water. Lee, shaking even harder now, pounded on his back, trying to help him get it all up.

Sokka made sure they got what Lee was owed — which turned out to be a fish, dropped right into his hand. He yelped a little.

Finally, Jiro stopped coughing and leaned into his brother. "Y-you okay?" he asked Lee, worried.

He nodded. "Y-y-you?" he stammered out.

"Am now."

"G-g-g-good." He frowned a little. "Y-you sh-should g-g-go ins-side. S-still r-r-raining."

"I don't care," Jiro whispered, burying his face in Lee's stomach.

"I d-d-do. P-please." He was worried.

"Then you come too," the boy said stubbornly.

"Y-you g-g-go 'head. I'll c-come i-in a f-few m-m-minutes."

"...all right," Jiro said doubtfully. He hugged Lee again, then slid off the bison and moved into their shelter.

Lee huddled there, shivering and staring off into the storm, for about ten minutes, before sliding down himself and coming in, as promised. Jiro was waiting for him with the warmest blanket they had.

He gratefully let his brother wrap him up in it, then curled up, shivering, next to the remains of Katara's fire. Jiro hesitated, then moved to lay down beside the older boy, sharing his body heat with Lee. "You take cold like Ichiro does...," the boy whispered, his voice low enough so that only Lee could hear him.

"H-huh?" he replied, brain a little numb and waterlogged, and curled a little closer to the heat source.

"My brother," Jiro explained, snuggling closer to Lee. "Ichiro. He hates being cold too..."

"O-oh."

None of the others overheard this, or it might've led to some awkward questions.

As soon as Lee stopped shivering, they loaded up onto Appa, and took off again. Still cold, the teenager curled up even tighter under his blanket, next to Jiro, and drifted off to sleep.

"G'night, everyone," Jiro murmured, and then practically crawled inside Lee's tunic before falling asleep himself.

When he woke up the next morning, Lee was coughing. He tried to hide this from the others, but wasn't having much luck. Of course, having his brother practically inside his skin didn't really help with pretending that he was fine. "Lee's sick!" the little boy reported to Katara.

"M'fine, Jiro," he mumbled, then started coughing again.

"No, you're not," Katara said, hearing that. She came over and checked his temperature, then called forward, "Aang, we need to land, Lee's burning up."

Surprisingly, the teenager jerked away, looking slightly panicked. "Not burning anything," he rasped insistently.

"She means your temperature," Jiro said quickly. "You have a fever."

"Oh." He relaxed a little, then started coughing again.

Sokka and Katara exchanged a bewildered look, while Aang looked for a good place to stop.

"You'll be okay," Jiro promised, reaching out to touch Lee's cheek.

"Right," he said, smiling a little, trying to be reassuring.

Aang landed Appa in the vine-covered ruins of some kind of building. They hadn't even finished unloading when Sokka started coughing, too.

Jiro and Katara exchanged a look, then each moved to their respective brother to try and get them to lie down.

Neither seemed to be getting better — within a couple hours, Sokka was rather amusingly delirious (he seemed to think he was an earthbender), and Lee was coughing even harder and more frequently.

Then, as if the universe seemed intent on making all their lives miserable, Katara started coughing, too.

"You lie down too," Jiro said decisively, looking over at her.

"Yeah, definitely," Aang said, then frowned at the map he'd found. "I'm gonna go to that herbalist to find some medicine. Jiro, keep an eye on them?"

"Right." Jiro nodded.

Aang spun his glider open and started off, then stopped when lightning flickered in the distance. "...Maybe it's safer if I go on foot," he said, putting the glider away. "I'll be back as soon as I can," he promised, then shot off.

Jiro sighed, then busied himself with tending to the sick teenagers.

After a few hours, Katara sent him off to get water.

When he got back, Lee was gone.

"Where's Lee?" Jiro demanded worriedly.

"Left a few minutes ago," Katara mumbled. "Said he was going to find Aang."

"Aang still isn't back?" Jiro frowned, then gave Katara the water. "I'm going after them both. Something's not right."

"'Kay," she said, then gulped a few mouthfuls of the water before helping Sokka do the same.

The earthbender ran. After awhile, he recognised where he was, and he paled. "Sozin's balls," he whispered, then doubled his speed.

He found Lee crouched outside the fortress, studying it and trying to muffle his near-constant coughing.

"Lee, we have to go," he said, voice urgent. "Now."

"Aang's in there," his brother rasped. "Some admiral caught him, think his name's — " He broke off, coughing. When he caught his breath, he continued. "Zhao. M'going in to rescue him."

"...he's an admiral now?" Jiro shook his head, then eyed his brother. "Lee, I don't think—"

"You really want him to stay captured?"

"No, but you're still sick. I should go."

"No," Lee said immediately. "You're good at what you do, but you're not very sneaky." He coughed again.

"Lee, you're sick. And you have a fever."

"Went down after you left." He coughed harder.

"You can't be sneaky when you're coughing," Jiro argued.

"I'll hold my breath," Lee replied, irritated. "...We don't have time to argue. We'll go together. I think we can get in through the sewers. This way."

"Okay," Jiro gave in. He followed Lee without even looking around, trying to conceal his growing apprehension. Zhao... not again.

Together, the brothers snuck in through the sewers. The Admiral seemed to be giving some kind of speech, causing a very nice distraction for them to get into the fortress proper. There were only four guards on Aang's actual cell, and Lee took care of them quickly. He paused to catch his breath after beating them up before breaking down the cell door.

"Lee? Jiro? What're you two doing here?" the chained child asked. A half-frozen frog wandered over one of Jiro's feet.

"Rescuing you," Lee rasped, irritably. "What d'you think?"

Jiro nodded. "We have to get you out of here before Com— Admiral Zhao stops talking. He should keep going for awhile; he's a drama queen."

"Yeah, no kidding," Aang muttered, as Lee cut his chains. "Wait! The frogs — "

"Come on," the older boy said, impatiently, tugging Aang towards the sewers.

Following them, Jiro bounced the frogs into his hands one after the other with some quick earthbending. They'd just made it to the outer wall when the alarm started going off. "Oh, no," Jiro whispered.

Lee used several words he'd never used in front of his brother before, then drew his swords again. "Come on!" he said, and led them to a door across the courtyard.

Aang quickly told the others to stay close, and blasted the first line of soldiers who came to intercept them aside with a gust of wind. They didn't manage to reach the gate before it shut.

"Keep them off me!" Jiro yelled, running for the first gate — or rather, the wall beside it. With a yell, he slammed his fists into it and made a hole barely big enough to accommodate the taller Lee. Racing through, he bolted for the next one.

Lee shoved Aang ahead of him — after all, he was the one they were supposed to be rescuing — and covered their retreat. He was starting to get lightheaded, every breath burned.

On the other side of the wall was another courtyard, and another wall. "Aang, stay between us," Lee muttered, as they started their headlong rush across the second courtyard.

Now things were beginning to get messy. The soldiers were coming, and ten years old or not, Jiro was very obviously the one making the exits. It was the boy they were aiming for. Fortunately, he was faster than they were, dodging spears and swords, and then he was at the second wall. A hole was blown through, and he began the third dash.

By the time Lee and Aang joined him there, the three boys were completely surrounded. Even if they could all get to Jiro's final hole, they'd be killed before they got through. The younger boy made ready to fight his way out, but then one of the firebenders let off a warning shot over their heads.

Jiro screamed.

Lee quickly jerked his brother behind him, shielding him. The next burst — stronger and wider — Aang dispersed with his airbending.

Jiro continued screaming, wrapping his arms over his head and curling up on the ground. "No, Dad, stop!"

"It's okay, Jiro, it's okay," Lee rasped. Aang had to disperse the next blast, too.

The younger boy didn't seem to hear him, caught in a waking nightmare.

"Hold your fire!" an older man — Admiral Zhao — ordered. "The Avatar must be captured alive."

Lee's eyes widened, and he shifted position, crossing his swords at Aang's throat. "Grab Jiro on the way out," he whispered into the younger boy's ear.

There was silence for a long moment, broken only by Jiro's whimpering, as Zhao stared deep into Lee's eyes. "Open the gate," he growled at last.

"Admiral, what are you doing?" one of the men beside him asked, incredulous.

"Let them out. Now!" Zhao snapped.

The gate swung open, and Lee backed the Avatar out. Aang grabbed Jiro's collar as they passed him.

"Please," Jiro whimpered, still trapped wherever his mind had taken him.

"What now, Lee?" Aang asked, more than a little nervous to have those blades at his throat.

"I don't know, I don't know, I — " An arrow shot over Aang's shoulder, into Lee's, closer to his neck than the pirates had gotten. He cried out and fell backwards. Aang yelped and called up a dustcloud. "Lee!"

"Hate getting shot..." the older boy mumbled, then blacked out. Aang looked from Jiro — still out of it — to Lee, to the fortress, made the dustcloud bigger, then grabbed his friends and fled. He'd barely managed to get out of sight when the cloud disappeared and the soldiers got to where they'd been stopped.

Halfway to where they had left Katara and Sokka, Jiro snapped out of whatever he'd gone, and helped Aang drag his brother back to the others. "I still have the frogs...?" he offered quietly.

"We'll have to get new ones," the Avatar said, resignedly. "Those've thawed." He scooped up six more — an extra for each of their sick friends, just in case — then led the way back to the shelter they'd found. He slipped a frog into each of the Water Tribe siblings' mouths. Lee was a little more problematic, since he was still unconscious.

Finally, Jiro prised Lee's mouth open and let Aang slip the frog in. "There," he said quietly, then retreated to hide under Appa's tail.

"...Jiro?" Aang asked, then paused, and decided not to ask. Lee could, when he woke up.

Which he did, moments later, spitting out the frog in mild disgust. Ignoring the arrow in his shoulder, he spotted his brother under the tail and crawled over to join him. "Hey."

The younger boy looked back at him. "Hi...," he said listlessly.

The teenager hesitated a moment, then crawled a little closer and pulled him into a one-armed hug.

Jiro briefly stiffened, then let out a quiet sob and turned into his brother, hiding his face in Lee's good shoulder and starting to cry.

Lee just held him, rocking back and forth lightly, absently humming a lullaby his mother used to sing when he was distressed. Unconsciously, he tightened the hug.

"Why?" Jiro whimpered after a moment. "Why? I'm his son, why did he... why...?"

A thought immediately jumped to Lee's mind, but he didn't voice it. "Dunno, Jiro." The boy didn't speak again, simply clung to Lee and quietly cried until he fell asleep.

The older boy just kept clinging to his brother even afterward for several minutes, then shifted and was reminded of the arrow in his shoulder. It took some painful contorting, but he managed to raggedly break off the feathered end, and then jerked the rest of it through.

Then he blacked out again.

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