" GRAPEVINE "

grape·vine - \'grāp-,vīn\ - noun - "an informal person-to-person means of circulating information or gossip"

The first time Mai heard the rumors, she'd shrugged them off due to how utterly ridiculous they had sounded. That's all they were, after all: rumors. And rumors, more often than not, held little to no truth to them. It was when the rumors became more frequent, however, that she began to feel the slightest bit concerned. When they rose to become the hottest conversation topic among members of the court soon after and even she started seeing the signs that could possibly make these rumors true, was when she finally felt compelled to do some investigating of her own.

At first, she didn't see it. The Fire Court seemed to have it in their heads that the Fire Lord, her boyfriend, was cheating on her with Katara of the Southern Water Tribe. The Avatar's girlfriend. And oh, how she stood back and laughed at the idea when alone with no one to see her stray from her notoriously aloof demeanor, but now...she wasn't so sure. She saw the hints, the clues and the connections, and hated herself for it. Was she merely catching on to the court's way of looking too deeply into things and seeing things that weren't there after years of successfully distancing herself from it, or was there really something going on between them?

They did spend a lot of time together. He'd vanish and disappear to who-knows-where when the attention that came with the crown and his position became too much for him and as she'd recently noted, so did she. Perhaps the waterbender's absence when Zuko was not present was merely a coincidence, but maybe it wasn't. Maybe he was using that as an excuse to sneak away and indulge in something that was forbidden, taboo, and wrong.

She tried to find a logical reason as to why he might be doing this to himself and to her. Was sleeping with Katara his way of rebelling against the position he had recently ascended? Mai knew better than anyone that Zuko felt he wasn't ready. Iroh had the utmost confidence in him, as did she, but when it came to Zuko believing in himself and his own abilities, that was an entirely different story. Did the fact that he was actually doing well bother him? Was he doing this so that he could find something legitimately wrong with the way he was ruling?

Mai hated that she didn't have any answers. She hated even more that she had become paranoid towards something she swore was non-existent.

He gives her gifts, they say and she is shocked to see one of the bracelets from the Amber Room¹ resting against Katara's wrists, the vibrant lapis lazuli standing out against the contrast of her dark skin. It makes Mai feel sick to her stomach to see such confirmation of the rumors after she had convinced herself she was getting worked up over nothing. Now, she felt as if she hadn't been worked up enough.

She felt terrible for spying on him, standing behind the long, dark drapes in his bedroom with enough of a gap between them and the wall for her to peer around and have a decent enough view without being spotted. Her dark clothing and hair help her blend into the shadows, waiting patiently, unmoving without a sound for him to enter. And, sure enough, he did.

With the waterbender in tow.

Her heart sank and she felt hurt, betrayed, wronged, angry, sad, and afraid all at once; but Katara did not go to him in the way she expected the younger girl to. Merely stood by the now-closed door with her arms folded against her chest--that bracelet still dangling from her wrist--and demanded, "Where is it?"

"I put it up," Zuko said, shrugging off the heavy layers of his outer robes.

It? What was it? Mai didn't know, but had a feeling she was about to find out as Zuko had moved out of her line of sight to, presumably, retrieve whatever it was.

"You better not have moved anything," Katara called out to him and Mai saw her move to the table by the window, clearing it off and setting the objects that were once upon it atop a near by cabinet.

Behind the curtains, her face contorted in disgust as her mind instantly showed her a dozen mental images of what the two could possibly do with a table and whatever Zuko was retrieving.

"It's exactly as it was last time we played," was Zuko's response. "I haven't moved a thing."

"Good," Katara said. "Else I might be inclined to demand another one of these." She held the wrist with the bracelet out and shook it a bit for show.

"For that, you'd have to beat me again," he said and much to Mai's surprise and extreme relief, he came back into view carrying a Pai Sho board. "See? I didn't touch anything."

Katara took the board from him and examined it herself, sighing and admitting, "I guess you didn't," in an almost disappointed tone and set it down on the table. She took one chair and Zuko, the other.

Mai watched them as they played, feeling guilty for having doubted Zuko to the point that she had spied on him. It was the only way she would get the answers she craved, for she wasn't about to confront him about something she'd heard through the grapevine. Now, she had them and realized that she had been right all along: nothing was going on between them. When the two vanished, they were here, playing Pai Sho and talking about the war, Zuko's uncle, Katara's father and brother, both their mothers, and ironically, their respective significant others. She was a little surprised to learn that the hairpin Zuko had given her recently had been an idea of Katara's, as the waterbender asked if she had liked it, then smirked triumphantly and told Zuko not to doubt her understanding of the female mind.

She understood now how the court had gotten the wrong idea; the dual vanishings, the bracelet, and the convenient view they had of them while they sat at the table near a window that overlooked a section of the gardens that were open to the public. Zuko, in all his infinite wisdom, probably hadn't put two and two together yet and she doubted the waterbender was around the courtiers enough to have heard the rumors about herself and someone Mai now understood was just a friend to her.

The game didn't last long, for Zuko had to return to his duties and Katara wanted to see if the Avatar had been able to tear himself away from earthbending practice with the blind Bei Fong girl and King Bumi. And as Zuko returned the Pai Sho board to its hiding place, pulled back on his outer robes and followed Katara out the door, she made a mental note to suggest he move that table away from the window.

It was almost amazing how quickly the court forgot about the most talked about set of rumors since Zuko had left the Fire Nation to join the Avatar; the false tales of Zuko's fling with Katara being replaced with an even less fathomable rumor about a torrid affair involving one of the sages and not one, but two of the ministers. Honestly, Mai couldn't understand why things that were so obviously made of fabricated nonsense were so fascinating to people who could be doing so much more with their time than fueling the flames of something that didn't have a spark in the first place.

They tried to draw her into their conversation about just that and Mai pulled herself away, claiming she promised Ty Lee, who was visiting from Kyoshi, that she'd meet her in the gardens. She hadn't expected to find Ty Lee when she began wandering the flower-lined path, of course, and was a bit surprised to see Katara leaning on a section of the vine-covered wall that overlooked the area of the gardens that was only accessible through Zuko's rooms.

Mai hesitated, then moved to join her. Peering over the wall's edge, she could see Zuko and the Avatar practicing their firebending. "He's improved," she offered after a moment.

Katara seemed a little confused about being spoken to, but turned to her and offered a kind smile, nodding. "It's almost hard to believe that a few months ago, he could barely bend sparks."

"He's the Avatar," Mai said. "He was bound to figure it out sooner or later."

The waterbender shifted so that her sleeve slipped down past her wrist enough so that the bracelet Zuko had given her was now exposed.

"That's a nice bracelet."

"Huh?" Katara started, then lifted up her wrist, almost as if she'd forgotten all about it. "Oh. This."

"It looks like one of the pieces I've seen in the Amber Room," she said carefully, casually.

"It is," the girl admitted, much to Mai's surprise. "I won it. Let's just say that your boyfriend's not as good at Pai Sho as he thinks." Katara grinned and laughed a bit, her eyes darting to Zuko's form below them, before settling back on Mai. "We play a lot and I usually let him win--don't tell him, though."

The fact that Katara was speaking about her so-called secret meetings with Zuko in such a casual manner only made her feel sillier about how worried she'd been the previous week. "He thinks he's inherited his uncle's flair for the game," she said knowingly.

Katara nodded. "Yeah, but he's horrible. I don't have the heart to tell him he's bad at it." The waterbender looked back to her friend and boyfriend and said, "You should play with him. I think he'd like that."

It was then that Mai decided once and for all that the grapevine was full of nothing more than delusional fools who made speculations about 'evidence' they hadn't bothered to look further into. And perhaps the waterbender wasn't so bad, either.

END.

"Avatar: the Last Airbender" is © Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko.

¹ Amber Room - nod to the Baroque room designed by Andreas Schlüter that was originally part of the Ekaterininsky Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, Russia

A/N: The ending is a bit abrupt, but felt like the right place to end this one-shot. I apologize if I've butchered Mai, for she's not within my usual range of characters whose point of views I usually write from--nor is writing an Avatar tale that isn't Zutara-centric and stands against it. This was written mainly as a challenge to myself to write something outside of the box that contains my writing comfort zone. A sequel/spin-off/more chapters probably won't be written in addition to this, though I may try my hand at something similar once I finish out a few of my other currently in-progress tales.

9/23/2008