#she and iroh are totally splitting oversight of zuko's spies tho

[whetstonefires]

atla flashfic that got over 1k so it gets a readmore!

Pu-On woke up in the middle of the night to a cloaked, masked figure with a naked blade.

"Oh spirits," he squeaked, after a second spent realizing that it wasn't a cast member trying to be funny, and pulled the bedclothes up under his chin like that would help. "I-I'll--" He wasn't sure whether threatening to scream or offering not to was more likely to work out.

"Pu-On Tim?" the figure asked, in a hushed voice that made it hard to tell anything about it except that it wasn't a bass-baritone and it was probably from around Caldera City, or trying to sound that way, which a lot of people did. "Staff scriptmaster with the Ember Island Players? Writer of the play 'The Boy In The Iceburg?'"

"Y...yes?" He hoped that was the right answer. Trying to lie about it didn't seem wise, considering they'd already found his bedroom.

"We're here on behalf of the Fire Lord."

The 'we' made Pu-On take his eyes off the figure at his bedside and realize there was another masked, cloaked figure lurking behind them. Oh, spirits.

"Listen, he wasn't written like that in the previous draft!" he blurted. "I know what you probably heard about the performance version, but that was just a matter of political exigency! I have nothing against Fire Lord Zuko!”

This was a slight exaggeration.

Zuko had figured in the earliest stage of the script as a quixotic, mildly absurd sympathetic figure, only to have to be rewritten with a character arc leading him toward betrayal after the great Tragedy of the North, and then rewritten again as the main hero of the piece, after he redeemed himself at Ba Sing Se.

Then not two weeks from opening night, on the Day of Black Sun, he'd turned on his father and joined forces with the Avatar, and Pu-On had had to hurriedly dig through his old drafts to restore less flattering dialogue, to spare himself having to fully rewrite all Zuko's scenes again. Shun had barely slept for three days getting the rewritten part down. Pu-On had begun to feel personally martyred by Prince Zuko of the ever-changing allegiances.

He might have made him a little more ridiculous than he’d had to, out of aggravation, but mostly in hopes of managing to get a watchable play in the end. A work focusing so much on enemies of the state had had to be the broadest of comedy to begin with, and making the brooding Zuko character fit into that on short notice hadn’t been easy.

And then Sozin's Comet had come, and they had a new Fire Lord.

He'd be lying if he said the possibility of reprisal hadn't crossed his mind, but the new Fire Lord had by and large shown considerable restraint about actions performed under his father's regime, even when he didn't like them. On the other hand, none of that had been personal.

"It was just a matter of political exigency," he wheedled the two masked agents in his bedroom. "The Fire Lord knows his father's laws, whatever I write has always had to conform with national policy."

"Lord Zuko knows," said the agent standing further back. "We're just here to ask you a few questions."

It was more than a few. The questions started on the subect of his loyalties and political opinions, quick darting things trading off quickly from one interrogator to the next, clearly designed to push him past the usual mealy platitudes and into sincerity. Pu-On has always been careful not to have too many sincere political opinions, since they tend to seep into your work and that's how you get dragged off to the coal and sulfur mines, but they wring a surprising amount out of him.

Then without his quite catching the instant of transition they were asking him about the research he did for 'The Boy In The Iceburg,' the various sources he listed as part of the script and how he tracked them down and what he did to get accounts from them, as well as which of a long list of inaccuracies in his script were intentional rhetorical devices and which the result of bad or no information on his part.

Toph the Earthbender's height and gender were bad information he recognized as such by comparison to other sources and used anyway; the mechanism behind her blindsight was pure supposition based on a text about bats. The agents were taking notes now. He found himself flattered, even though he knew this was unwise of him.

Pu-On had always been enthusiastic about his research process. He would have liked to go to university in his youth, if it were achievable for someone from his station of life, and he'd cribbed what academic tricks he could to bolster the story-collecting he'd started as a child haunting wineshops with a notebook of his own.

So he almost forgot to be frightened at some point in this stage of the discussion, sitting fully upright in bed with the bedclothes pooled into his lap and gesticulating for emphasis. “Prince Zuko’s hair!” he said. “Oh, that was a dramatic saga in the version that had to be scrapped last, the information I’d put together on his movements after the Siege of the North showed he was growing it out for the first time since he was thirteen, after obviously cutting his phoenix tail to go into hiding. The…well, anyway, we had to make all new wigs for the actual performances.”

He remembered himself suddenly, clutching the edge of the blanket again. “I didn’t mean any harm,” he added. “Please, tell the Fire Lord…would he like another rewrite? I’d be happy to—” He wouldn’t, he tore that play apart and cobbled it back together again so many times he’d prefer never to look at it again in his life.

In a few years he might go back over his notes and write something entirely new, but he was going to wait for the dust to settle first. Fire Lord Zuko had disrupted his work with dramatic upheavals enough times already. If only current events weren’t so irresistibly exciting; history was so much more accommodating.

(Although even history was currently being heavily rewritten. School curricula were among the many things the new Fire Lord was overturning.)

“Maybe he would,” said the agent in the middle of the room. “You can ask him yourself.”

“I can?”

The agent beside his bed nodded, stuck their knife into what must be a hidden sheath at their hip (note: find out how that’s done, the effects crew would love a new technique for fake stabbings) and reached up to take their mask off.

Revealing a round-faced girl with grey eyes, currently grinning widely at him. “Hi! I’m Ty Lee, and you’re invited to join His Majesty’s intelligence service!”