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Entry tags:
- !location: obs deck,
- !status: open,
- allenby beardsley,
- azula,
- barbara wright,
- beastboy,
- cedric diggory,
- clef,
- diana ladris,
- elisa maza,
- faiza hussain,
- goliath,
- hana asakura,
- hiccup,
- hit girl,
- hououji fuu,
- howard bassem,
- jamie mccrimmon,
- jinx,
- kanoe zouichi,
- kaya,
- kon-el,
- lash,
- lord zetta,
- mordin solus,
- morgan knight,
- n'tho 'sraom,
- nightwing,
- orc,
- ranulf,
- ruffnut thorston,
- sakura haruno,
- sandy marko,
- sarah kerrigan,
- sensor,
- simon,
- sirius black,
- stature,
- the tenth doctor,
- tim drake/red robin,
- zuko
Buy a Little Mercy [Open; Potentially Graphic Material]
Less than an hour after the ship leaves Agrestic's orbit, an announcement is broadcast throughout Stacy.
|| Attention, crew. Your crewmates, Howard Bassem and Charles Merriman, have been apprehended attempting to desert. They will now be given Punishment. According to established guidelines, you are all requested to report to the Observation to witness the Punishment. Attendance is not mandatory, but highly suggested. This will serve as a reminder of the consequences of treason and desertion. ||
On the observation deck, Archon Yavek, Archite Rekkti, two other Daligig and a handful of Kessek soldiers stand outside a spherical force field. Inside the bubble, Orc and Howard are suspended by tentacles looping around their wrists. Orc's ceased thrashing around and struggling against his restraints; rust-colored fissures have developed around his shoulders and forearms from the strain, but now he simply hangs there, looking defeated. Howard's nose is bleeding, and every time a drop falls to the bottom of the forcefield there's a small sizzle. He's weeping and begging the Daligig with every plea possible, but they act as if they aren't listening. Instead, they wait for an audience.
|| Attention, crew. Your crewmates, Howard Bassem and Charles Merriman, have been apprehended attempting to desert. They will now be given Punishment. According to established guidelines, you are all requested to report to the Observation to witness the Punishment. Attendance is not mandatory, but highly suggested. This will serve as a reminder of the consequences of treason and desertion. ||
On the observation deck, Archon Yavek, Archite Rekkti, two other Daligig and a handful of Kessek soldiers stand outside a spherical force field. Inside the bubble, Orc and Howard are suspended by tentacles looping around their wrists. Orc's ceased thrashing around and struggling against his restraints; rust-colored fissures have developed around his shoulders and forearms from the strain, but now he simply hangs there, looking defeated. Howard's nose is bleeding, and every time a drop falls to the bottom of the forcefield there's a small sizzle. He's weeping and begging the Daligig with every plea possible, but they act as if they aren't listening. Instead, they wait for an audience.
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It was. Warm and cushy and just so perfect, having his every little need attended to, like he was some sort of higher creature not fit to be touched by mortal ground.
"I hated it."
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Zuko shifts in his seat, unconsciously trying to make himself comfortable before he remembers the reason for his discomfort - he's covered with puke - and groans again.
"After you've crossed a desert on an ostrich-horse with no food and no money, the people who say you can't walk across the street without being carried because you're too high and mighty to walk like a normal human being sound kind of stupid."
And then you wake up on a spaceship without a country, surrounded by peasants who throw up on you but who you can't seem to really get mat at, and hot towels and a palanquin start to look pretty nice again. Just like they did on that ostrich-horse in the desert.
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"Not many people have ever treated you like just-Zuko, have they."
Prince or pariah. Too-good-to-set-foot-upon-the-ground or not-good-enough-to-live (at least as far as Ozai had apparently been concerned).
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And of course they should have, is implied in his tone. They were servants. And peasants. Whether they knew him was not important. He was Prince Zuko, descended from the long line of living gods that were the Fire Lords. They were obligated to give him respect, meant or not, no matter how selfish and spoiled he ever was. And there was a large part of him that still believed this.
"You're a Chief's son, right?" a paltry, peasanty title, but a title nonetheless. "Didn't your people do the same thing?"
It's unthinkable in his monarchistic worldview that any born leader should not have their people kowtowing at their feet.
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"No, they didn't, they didn't respect my dad blindly or me just because I was next in line. Survival where we lived wasn't the easiest, especially when we were at war with the dragons and my dad wouldn't have been respected if he wasn't such a good warrior and a good leader, if he hadn't gotten us through so many hard winters. They didn't respect me for the longest time because they didn't think I'd measure up, that I'd be able to take care of the tribe like my dad when it was my turn."
He tried to find the right words, which was a monumental task when he was that concussed. The fact he could even string so many words together was pretty impressive and a testament to how good he was at chattering away in general.
"It sounds like your nation treats everyone like cogs in a siege weapon. Every piece is expected to work a certain way and has to fit into its place. My tribe was more like a--a garden. Everyone was different and everyone else appreciated how each flower stood out in their own way, but still fit into the same garden patch. Only they thought I was a weed. But then I showed them all I was a flower, too."
There was a momentary pause and then he went on fuzzily, "Only flowers are a really bad analogy because it's Vikings we're talking about, but I can't think of any plants that are tough enough, so maybe it was a patch of weeds and they thought I was a flower, only then I turned out to be a weed, too. Like a really spiny one with really impressive burrs."
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He really doesn't have to ask the question. He saw the Kessek land the smack, and part of him is surprised Hiccup is still talking at all.
The idea of a society where everyone, even princes, are expected to prove their worth, not just to act on their worthiness, still sits unhappily with him. Azula would still have been considered the more capable sibling. His father probably would have selected her as his heir straight away, if the tradition of sons ruling hadn't been so firmly engrained.
"If you hadn't been fighting for survival every day your tribe might have been a little more like my nation." Not nearly as great, of course, but more similar in their worldview. "Things worked because the Fire Lords had been ruling it well for so long." He pauses before adding, "A nobleman does have a reputation to think of. You couldn't just sit around your palace all day not doing anything with your time, or people would start saying you were as lazy as you were but . . ." but it wasn't a matter of proving one's worth. It was a matter of meeting everyone's expectations.
"The noble firebenders, the really good ones, used to prove their skills by going out and killing dragons." He's mentioned this before, but never quite in detail, but surely this will be in Hiccup's interest and distract him from uncomfortable questions about how a prince proves his worth in Zuko's hometown. "Not dragons like yours. They were . . . longer." A lot longer. "And bigger. But they hunted them to death before I was born."
He smirks suddenly, remembering that that's not quite true.
"Almost to death. My uncle tricked everyone into thinking he'd killed the last one, to spare the last two."
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He didn't always use the words he'd picked up in places like Fairplay and the ship because they sometimes sounded a little too alien in his mouth, but sometimes his usual vocabulary just wouldn't do.
"You're sidetracking, though. You always do that." Of course, he kept sidetracking, too, but he had a head injury and that was a good excuse. Zuko always did it just because he didn't like certain subjects. "I was trying to say... what was I trying to say?"
Oh yeah.
"I was trying to say the reason you're tolerating getting thrown up on by a peasant is because..."
Because why?
"You've always...when you were little because of that clock, you kept talking about how Azula was better, and your dad was awful and I hate him and I don't hate many people, and now you're saying that people either put you on a pedestal and didn't recognize you were tough or your dad was...your dad, but you're just Zuko. You used to have a ponytail and be a jerk--well, more of a jerk--and I think sometimes you're the best person in the world, and you're my friend."
Apparently, he was in the "I love you, man," stage of being concussed. Or maybe...
Maybe his face creased up a little bit in an unhappy expression.
"I hate that it sounds like you've always been unhappy, no matter what."
Maybe it was that.
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He says it so dryly that he could be joking, or he could be saying it because, no matter how jesty it is, it could also be entirely true, the only thing he can think to respond to any questioning of his happiness. Much less a declaration of bromance.
He shifts in his seat again, no longer out of physical discomfort, but because Hiccup's right - he's been sidetracking, and he wants to do it again, because he doesn't want to examine himself this way, doesn't want to be unhappier than he is in general by going into the many reasons for his issues with this kind of depth.
"Look, just . . . don't fall asleep until a doctor looks at you, okay? I'm just trying to keep you awake but I'm not here to talk about feelings."
The other side of his discomfort is that Hiccup's right - nobody's ever really been his friend, or thought of him as a good person, except maybe his mom and Mai, and moms and girlfriends are a different story. Even the Avatar and his friends know Zuko the Villain too closely to look at him and never see the guy who used to hunt and attack and imprison them. And burn down villages.
Nobody's been his friend just because they liked the person he was. And that's frankly too touching to look into when you're always an unhappy dude.
"I don't want you to die, that's all."
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Over time, Hiccup had started to see what kind of person his sifu was, and that meant he now noticed all the little flaws and quirks and delusions, and every since the thing with Ozai, he'd been trying to figure out a way to deal with those.
Staying and throwing a rock at Ozai's head probably had helped communicate some of how he felt about it, but sometimes he wondered how tenuous their friendship was when a fight like the last one had happened at all--or at least he wondered how tenuous it was on Zuko's end. On Hiccup's, he could forgive the short-temperedness and the impulsive anger. That was all part and parcel of entire Zuko package.
His father and Gobber'd were battle-brothers, though--they had a sort of inherent understanding of each other, Hiccup had that kind of understanding with Toothless, and it was something he found himself wanting with Zuko, too.
So Hiccup tried to couch his sincerity in a way that he hoped Zuko would understand, deep in his bones. He came up with the supremely touching:
"I'm just...I'm just trying to say that I'd let you throw up on me, too."
It was the sort of thing he felt like saying every time Zuko was grumpy, though he definitely probably wouldn't have used that precise wording, even though he fully acknowledged it probably wouldn't ever make him not-grumpy, and even though he liked Zuko even when he was grumpy, anyway.
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He pauses again.
"Obviously I would too." And he chuckled, once, at his comment.