Chapter Text
“Nobody in that village is innocent, Katara,” Jet says lowly, and she glares broken-hearted at him with ice on her hands and in her eyes and he thinks, wistfully, that it must be so nice to come from a place that actually loves you—a place that loves you enough that it doesn't even occur to you that maybe somebody else's place wasn't that nice.
“You're going to kill them because they can't throw out the Fire Nation?!” she demands angrily, ice freezing up to her wrists, and it's funny but he only really sees her as pretty now, when she's hurting him, when she's wide-eyed and dangerous and might just freeze that water all the way up his throat and over his mouth and nose if he says the wrong thing.
“No,” Jet retorts, baring his teeth, matching her bright fury with all his own. “I'm going to kill them for throwing us out.”
“—what?” Katara asks uncertainly, just barely faltering, and Jet feels the ice turn wet and weaken against his chest. Not enough, but some.
“What are you talking about?” Aang asks, frowning in confusion. Part of Jet wants to hit the kid. A hundred years in an iceberg, a hundred years safe while the rest of them suffered and died just for being the wrong thing at the wrong time or in the wrong place or just—everything.
“They threw us out,” he repeats, teeth still bared. Or maybe he's grinning now, he's not really sure. “Longshot grew up there, but when his mom died they took him out here and left him. And the Duke—his mom took him out here herself. You know how hard it is to feed a baby in a forest, Katara? You know how hard it is to feed a baby in a forest when you're ten?”
“That's . . . you're lying again,” Katara says harshly, but there's meltwater soaking into Jet's clothes as she takes a step back. “No one would do that.”
“They'd do it to us,” Jet says, grinning so hard it hurts and grieving. He misses his mom and dad, who loved him even though he was—what he was. Who loved him enough that he could actually not hate himself for being what he was, mostly. Almost always. “They did it to half of us. Why do you think we don't live down there, Katara?”
“Because the Fire Nation's there,” Katara answers abruptly, and Jet laughs as she looks back to the village like it'll tell her something, but Jet already knows everything those people have to say.
“Yeah. That's why half of us don't live there,” he tells her, and just can't stop grinning. He might scream, otherwise.
“But why?” Aang asks, so confused, the Avatar, the freaking hero of the world with this stupid look on his face like he doesn't even know what mixed blood looks like and can't imagine why anyone would ever do anything bad to anyone else.
“Figure it out, Avatar,” Jet sneers at him, and whistles the signal to bring down the dam.