Rebecca Hb. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beckyh2112) wrote2010-04-04 12:36 pm
beckyh2112) wrote2010-04-04 12:36 pm
Entry tags:
[Jeeko Week] Fic: Hope
Jeeko Week begins today!
Title: Hope
Word Count: 400+
Rating: PG
Summary: After the Siege of the North, Jee needs some hope.
Hope
***
Jee fingers the strings of his pipa. It sounds wrong; no matter how much he retunes it, the sound won't come back. The long soak in saltwater killed it.
He sighs. This one lasted him a good four years. Longer than some, shorter than others. He'll have to get another, but tonight all he's got is this one. So he adjusts the tuning again, trying to get it close enough to right.
He's a musician. Been one all his life. He's also a Fire Nation officer, which he feels like has lasted longer than his whole life. If he'd ever had a choice, he doesn't think he'd be here now.
But he's a firebender, too. Firebenders don't have choices.
Neither do princes, it turns out.
The pipa is close enough to tolerable. Jee plucks a melody, no piece in particular in his head. It's the red moon, instead, the biting cold of the North. The ice and snow dyed Fire by the moonlight. The collapse of the waterbenders.
The death of the moon.
He takes a breath, lays his hands over the strings to silence them. No. That's not where he wants to be right now. He's only just gotten someplace safe and dry in the Earth Kingdom. He's got a long walk ahead of him. He needs... hope.
Jee doesn't hope in the Avatar. He understands why the dirtgrubbers and fishfuckers do. He understood why Prince Zuko and the other crewmen hoped to capture the boy. They're good men, mostly, and they just wanted to end that tour of duty. They have lives to get back to. Most of them don't know about living with disgrace and people who remember too well.
Even the prince still wears his hair long enough to put up, even if he wears a boy's phoenix-tail rather than a man's topknot.
Jee strokes the pipa strings and remembers a gold eye in burned skin. Defiance. That's what the prince had. Defiance. He'd take on the world if he thought he had to. Alone.
The melody is different now. Harder.
Jee hasn't worn a soldier's mask in years, but he never lost the habit of looking through the eyeholes to see who was who.
You can't hide scars like the prince's, not behind a soldier's mask.
General-Prince Iroh and Admiral Zhao said Zuko was dead. Jee's been lied to enough by higher-ranking officers not to hold it too personally against them.
The prince was alive. Even when the ocean rose up to strike down the Fire Nation, Jee knew that wouldn't kill the boy. The only thing that could was Firelord Ozai, of that he's certain.
His music is bright and full of life, but it's a killing life.
Zuko's alive.
-End-
Title: Hope
Word Count: 400+
Rating: PG
Summary: After the Siege of the North, Jee needs some hope.
***
Jee fingers the strings of his pipa. It sounds wrong; no matter how much he retunes it, the sound won't come back. The long soak in saltwater killed it.
He sighs. This one lasted him a good four years. Longer than some, shorter than others. He'll have to get another, but tonight all he's got is this one. So he adjusts the tuning again, trying to get it close enough to right.
He's a musician. Been one all his life. He's also a Fire Nation officer, which he feels like has lasted longer than his whole life. If he'd ever had a choice, he doesn't think he'd be here now.
But he's a firebender, too. Firebenders don't have choices.
Neither do princes, it turns out.
The pipa is close enough to tolerable. Jee plucks a melody, no piece in particular in his head. It's the red moon, instead, the biting cold of the North. The ice and snow dyed Fire by the moonlight. The collapse of the waterbenders.
The death of the moon.
He takes a breath, lays his hands over the strings to silence them. No. That's not where he wants to be right now. He's only just gotten someplace safe and dry in the Earth Kingdom. He's got a long walk ahead of him. He needs... hope.
Jee doesn't hope in the Avatar. He understands why the dirtgrubbers and fishfuckers do. He understood why Prince Zuko and the other crewmen hoped to capture the boy. They're good men, mostly, and they just wanted to end that tour of duty. They have lives to get back to. Most of them don't know about living with disgrace and people who remember too well.
Even the prince still wears his hair long enough to put up, even if he wears a boy's phoenix-tail rather than a man's topknot.
Jee strokes the pipa strings and remembers a gold eye in burned skin. Defiance. That's what the prince had. Defiance. He'd take on the world if he thought he had to. Alone.
The melody is different now. Harder.
Jee hasn't worn a soldier's mask in years, but he never lost the habit of looking through the eyeholes to see who was who.
You can't hide scars like the prince's, not behind a soldier's mask.
General-Prince Iroh and Admiral Zhao said Zuko was dead. Jee's been lied to enough by higher-ranking officers not to hold it too personally against them.
The prince was alive. Even when the ocean rose up to strike down the Fire Nation, Jee knew that wouldn't kill the boy. The only thing that could was Firelord Ozai, of that he's certain.
His music is bright and full of life, but it's a killing life.
Zuko's alive.
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Incoherency is all right. Getting little bursts of the cool things makes me smile. ^_^
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remembers a gold eye in burned skin
I believe that's one of my favorite lines. As well when he mentions that he's been lied to enough to not take it personally. Also, his views on Zuko and how Zuko won't be killed and the only one who can do that is his father.
Again, I love this fic! :) They way you've ended it makes up an eerie mystery even though we already know what happened.
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Jee's an interesting character to write. He's blank in a lot of ways - you get edges of who he is, but not a lot. Fortunately, Transformers fandom taught me a lot with taking little bits of characterization in canon and spinning it into someone real.
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I always hoped that at least some of Zuko's crew survived the Siege of the North. Firelord Zuko could use some military people who actually respect him.
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Jee is one of the very few Fire Nation adults we see with hair that can't be put up in a topknot. I find that very interesting, especially when combined with Zuko and Iroh cutting off their ponytail and topknot when they're exiled and on the run. Big mark of shame, it seems to be.
I always assume at least Jee survives. If any of the other members of the crew had names or personalities in my headcanon, they would also survive. I'm terrible about killing my characters.
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I'm glad someone else noticed the age differences in hairstyle. By S3 I really wondered what was going on in S1 Zuko's head.
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Jee's a decent man. By Fire Nation standards. By the standards of the rest of the world, well, he's a career Fire Nation soldier. Says something about him, doesn't it?
S1 Zuko is the Zuko I find hardest to grasp in terms of me being able to nail down in concrete terms what's going on in his head. But I think he stuck with the boyish hair style on the assumption that he wasn't a man until he regained his honor. Then his hand was forced with cutting off his 'tail in S2.
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-nods-
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TY!
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Ooh, he comes across as having age? Score one for me then! *very, very pleased* (I swear, I need to just make a file of racial slurs like I keep a file of Transformer curses.)
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I did make note of your racial slurs, too, and they'll probably be creeping into my writing somewhere. Especially flint'n'tinder.
Oddly, the racial slurs seem to please people the most. *grins*
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That was fantastic. Seriously interesting setting in the timeline, and I loved how very in character it seemed.
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It's an interesting time to be Fire Nation, really, but I figure it's doubly interesting with any survivors of Zuko's ship.
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I'm not sure if he thinks Iroh and Zhao are in league together, or if he's just "fuck y'all" to both of them. In my version of canon, he and Zuko do meet again but their relationship is largely past the point of sex by that time.