Chapter Text
A rap of brass-enhanced knuckles on the wall. Azula unplugs the cord connecting her laptop to a plate in the back of her skull, hidden underneath her hair, and looks up.
“How’s it workin'?” Her boss asks, grinning down at her, the cigarette clenched between his yellowing teeth unmoving as he speaks.
Azula rubs the back of her neck. “Makes my head a little sore. But it works fine. Just need to remember to unplug it before I get distracted.”
“Knew you’d take a shine to it.” Jet exhales a long plume of gray smoke through his nose, and it billows upward lazily, toward the mess of ducts and cables that make up the ceiling of Covent’s headquarters. Jet’s been warned by Maintenance not to smoke indoors—something about the chemicals interfering with the building’s anti-surveillance mods. Jet, of course, can’t be bothered.
“So anyway.” He leans against the partition, his face turning serious. “About your latest report.”
“Yes.”
“The Garden, huh.”
“Yes.”
“Lucky for us, it isn’t an overly exclusive club. Just an entrance fee, an ID check, some pretty run-of-the-mill rules.”
“Uh huh.” Azula narrows her eyes at him.
“Only thing left," Jet says slowly, in his you're-not-gonna-like-this tone, "is to find you a dance partner."
Azula puts down the cord. "Excuse me?"
"Think of this as a reward. You found that the fat bastard Zhao frequents the Garden. Now, you get to go to the Garden and surveil him in person."
"The Garden is a femdom club," Azula hisses. "I have zero experience in that, Jet. And I thought you wanted me to stay out of ground ops?"
"Well yeah.” Jet grins, weirdly nostalgic. “When we first hired you, you clearly weren't a professional. You weren't trained. You weren't ready. You are now."
"What makes you think—"
"Plus, as you keep pointing out, you are the only lady on this floor."
"So hire one."
"You wanna make Zhao an outside job?" Jet huffs indignantly. "You'd trust some third party slacks to take on the Kingpin of the Underground, after all the time you’ve sunk into this case?"
Azula looks down at the carpeted floor. She thinks of the last time she saw Zuko and Iroh, decades ago, as they slipped into the night to escape her father's wrath. She thinks of her mother's face, a hazy memory of restless beauty, the details long since lost to time. She thinks of the Sunday morning when she walked into the dining room to find her father sprawled across his prized mahogany table, naked, choked to death on his own blood, with Zhao’s insignia branded crudely across his face.
When she looks back up at Jet, his face breaks into a smile.
"There's my Raiko."
---
At the end of the workday, she jacks into her mods and chooses random hair and eye colors, before securing the cover over her plate. Pulling her hood over her hair and her mask up over her nose, she heads out into the humid, overcast night, merging her steps in with the swarm of commuters leaving the corporate sector of the Fifth Ring for the day. The tops of the buildings are swathed in smog, and rain is heavy on the air.
The subway station stinks to high heaven, a dizzying cocktail of body odor, feces, stale weed. Azula swipes for a ticket and jumps aboard a train heading for the Fourth Ring.
Few who work in the Fifth Ring can afford to live in the Fourth Ring, so the train is relatively empty. Azula kicks her feet up onto the seat across from her and watches the concrete tunnel through the grimy window as the train rapidly gains speed.
---
The central station of the Fourth Ring is emptying out for the night by the time she arrives. The stink of this station is slightly different—still sweaty and shitty, but with varying overtones of cologne, mid-tier gasoline, the faintest trace of cleaning chemicals.
Azula sidesteps the bright underground lights, moving along the lopsided tile walls, and runs up the escalator two steps at a time, brushing by blank men and women in cheap suits, emerging into the summer night. From here, the glittering envirodome of the First Ring is just barely visible through the smoggy night, like a false sunset.
Azula turns her back on the First Ring and hurries down the crowded street.
She's only been to the apartment a handful of times, and the streets of the Fourth Ring are convoluted to say the least, but she finds her way without issue, sticking close to unlit walls, dodging strangers, giving patrols a wide berth. She dons a thin pair of gloves, swipes into the building, and keys into the dark, empty, eerily dustless apartment. Locking the door behind her, she immediately shoulders off her backpack and digs a well-used bugsweeper from a side pocket. She turns it on, sets it on the ground, and crouches on the ground with her back against the door, listening to one neighbor playing a shooter game with the volume cranked up, another neighbor having enthusiastic sex with what sounds like at least two women.
Eventually, the bugsweeper trundles back to her with a docile chirp, indicating that nothing out of the ordinary was detected. She powers it down, stows it back in her backpack, and pushes up from the ground onto her feet. She double checks that the place is empty, and triple checks all egresses to ensure they're still locked. Satisfied, she pulls her mask down with a sigh.
Azula approaches the dining room window and unfolds the folding chair leaning against the wall—the only piece of furniture in this place. Opening a kitchen drawer, she begins pulling out the pieces of a disassembled camera, and begins slotting the pieces together, locking them into place.
After unfolding and attaching the tripod, she sets the camera to point out the window across the street, in the direction of the Garden. Sitting down cross-legged in the folding chair, she plugs the power cord into the wall, attaches the camera mem cord to the plate on the back of her skull, waits for her visual implants to sync up, and powers the camera on.
---
Jet's busy for the next few days, juggling federal contracts, and she's fine with that. It gives her the silence she needs to piece together a loose network of the clients that enter and exit the Garden when Zhao is in attendance. She mulls over photographs, trying to put names to faces, trying to decide who to hone in on, who to weed out.
The silence is shattered one day when someone knocks on her cubicle wall. It lacks the characteristic ring of Jet's brass implants, which makes Azula's spine straighten with alertness.
She looks up, and frowns.
"Hey," Sokka says, offering her what he must think is a winning smile.
"What do you want?" Azula asks, pushing away from her desk.
Sokka says nothing for a moment, eyeing her cubicle with open curiosity. She gets very few visitors; her cube is in a secluded corner up against the far wall from the elevator, and she is infamous among her fellow investigators for emphatically not being a 'team player'.
"I've always wanted to ask," Sokka says, his blue eyes drifting back to her. "Are your eyes naturally gold?"
Azula stands. "What do you want? "
"Jet wants to see you." Sokka looms over her even when she's standing at her full height, his teeth bright white in his impetuous face.
Without a word, Azula steps around him and stalks down the hallway to Jet's office, Sokka loping along behind her. When she reaches Jet's open door, Sokka, to her surprise, lingers behind her.
"You don't normally send a lackey to fetch me," Azula observes primly.
Jet runs his fingers through his uncombed hair, huffing a tired laugh. "Found you your dance partner."
Azula wrinkles her nose. "Who?"
He juts his cigarette in Sokka's direction. When she whirls around to glare at Sokka, he's looking back at her with guarded interest.
"You can't be serious," she fumes, still addressing Jet.
"You were going to say that regardless of who I chose," Jet points out.
"What about Haru?"
"You think Haru can play something like this?"
"Bato, then?"
"Too old, and busy with the White Lotus."
“Duke?”
“Too young.”
Azula purses her lips, still glaring at Sokka. He displays no reaction to the other men she'd suggested, his posture entirely relaxed.
"Literally anyone else, Jet."
"Why? What's wrong with Sokka?"
Azula crosses her arms, and Sokka mirrors her, smirking.
According to Toph, a datajockey from the cybersurveillance team and the only other woman in this building that Azula speaks to on any kind of regular basis, Sokka has slept his way through most of the womenfolk of Covent. Toph is admittedly not the most reliable of sources, but she did give Azula unforgivably graphic descriptions of Sokka's…tools. And Azula is wary of male coworkers who might think she's nothing more than an airheaded, deadweight dalliance.
But Azula isn't one to air rumors in front of her boss. So she simply says, "You're too green. Plus, physically you're just too big."
He leans down toward her, his eyes glittering with amusement. "So what?"
"So," Azula continues, "there’s no chance you’ll convince anyone that you're my sub."
"Yeah?" He snorts, leaning against the cubicle wall, his earring catching the light of the naked bulb overhead; she has to tilt her chin back to look him in the eye.
"Shows what you know about kink," he finally murmurs.
"Hey," Jet says lazily, waving a slender hand. "Save the foreplay for later. We don't have the people to spare for you to take your pick, Raiko. Sokka is the one you're getting, and you're going to have to deal."
“What if I contact Jeong Jeong over at Arco? Maybe he can spare a guy?” Azula demands.
“What is your problem with me?” Sokka cuts in. “We’ve never worked together before, and we’ve hardly even spoken to each other.”
“I won’t risk some amateur egomaniac bungling the mission.”
“Wow. You know, I've heard the rumors about you, but I didn’t want to think they were all true.”
“Guys!” Jet snaps. “Foreplay later. Planning now. You have a lot to figure out in a small window of time. We can’t risk Zhao getting wind of what we’re up to before you've figured your shit out.”
Azula bows her head, chewing her lip. She can feel the eyes of both men on her.
“I’ve worked out a loose schedule of when Zhao shows up at the Garden,” she offers after a beat. “He doesn't have a set schedule, of course, but he usually attends on Thursday nights with a particular dominatrix."
"Perfect." Jet claps his hands. "Then you've got until Thursday night to prepare. Now get out of my office."
Azula storms out without another word. Sokka doesn’t follow.
---
He gives her until after lunchtime to cool off. She hears the elevator doors ding open, and his footfalls stroll evenly in her direction. She unplugs the cord in her skull plate and looks up just in time to see him appear by her cubicle. He offers her another winning smile, although his eyes are a bit cool.
“I was hoping you could clear some things up for me,” he says, in a peacemaking tone.
“Clear what up?”
“Well, for instance, what we’re actually trying to do.”
“We’re infiltrating a BDSM club to spy on Zhao.”
Sokka dips his head, and she glimpses metal beads and rings glinting in his hair. “No, I get that. But what intelligence specifically are we trying to collect here?”
Azula stands up, pushes her chair out of the way, and unfolds her laptop all the way, laying it flat on her desk. With a few keystrokes and a wave of her hand, she brings up a holographic diagram.
Sokka steps into her cube, and his sudden proximity makes her inexplicably uneasy. She edges aside to give him more room as he leans against her desk, examining her diagram.
“Holy shit,” he says.
“I’ve been on Zhao for awhile,” Azula explains, unnecessarily—everyone at Covent knows that Zhao is her pet project—before zooming into a particular section of the diagram.
“My latest project has been mapping out Zhao's business arrangements with various megacorps.” Azula gestures at different areas of her diagram. “So far, we know that he’s providing ConAgri with human fodder for their plantations as well as their labs; he's feeding a steady stream of intel to SzetoSec on the goings-on of other criminal organizations, spanning multiple Rings; he's supplying Yosor Energy's security division with essential armaments and security mods; and he’s lining the pockets of AirComm for their silence on the involvement of his Underground with legitimate corporations.”
"All right," Sokka says, nodding as he scans the details. "Those I know about."
"The remaining unknown is which pharmacorp he's in bed with. There is a pharma-shaped hole in our estimates of his books, and at this point in the growth trajectory of the Underground, it would make sense for him to dip his toes in global pharmaceuticals."
"And you think his pharma bedmate will be at the Garden."
Azula nods. "Either they’ll be at the Garden, or they’ll have an underling at the Garden. According to the data we've collected so far, I'm ninety percent certain it's SingPharma. I just don't know which C-suite suit he's working with."
"They sure don't make it easy," Sokka muses.
"No." Azula sighs, leaning against her desk as well, opposite Sokka. "Like the leaders of all other megacorps, SingPharma's leadership is pretty much impossible to research. Their public data sanitizers must be paid in solid gold."
"Huh." Sokka sighs, rubbing his close-cropped beard. "So we've got our work cut out for us."
"Yep." Talking shop calms Azula down. Zhao's operations are about the only thing she can discuss fluently these days. "Imagine if we can ID a pharmacorp C-suite.”
“Oh, I’m imagining.” Sokka grins at her, and she almost smiles back.
“Anyway,” Azula says, focusing her gaze back on the diagram and pointing at the giant hole she’s left for Zhao’s pharmacorp connections. “That’s what we’re trying to fill in with the Garden job.”
“Got it. Thanks for explaining all of this to me.”
Azula considers saying something mean about Sokka being new. She meets his wary gaze, and decides against it.
“I was thinking,” Sokka says, shifting his weight and looking away, “about what you said earlier.”
“I said quite a few things.”
“The bit about neither of us knowing what we’re doing.”
“What about it?”
“You’re right.” Sokka rubs the back of his neck with long fingers. “Neither of us know what we’re doing. So we’re going to have to get our act together.”
Azula scowls at him openly. “And what do you suggest?”
“I suggest,” Sokka says, lowering his voice as he leans toward her, “that we figure out what you’re going to do to me.”
Azula takes a step back instinctively. “I don’t think that’s necessary.”
“Look at you,” he scoffs, teeth flashing. “You can’t stand to be around me. You’re visibly uncomfortable when I’m in your personal space. I might not be a convincing sub, but you’re panning out to be one shitty domme. We need to prep, both of us.”
Azula digs her nails into her palms. He’s right, and she knows it.
“Do you have experience in…in this sort of thing?” She asks slowly.
He crosses his arms, leaning against her wall. “Nah. But we’ll figure it out.”
She releases her fists and looks down at her hands. After an awkward beat, he clears his throat quietly, and she looks up at him again.
“Why don’t I come over to yours? Or we can meet at mine? After work,” he says, and she wonders if this is how he propositions all of his other girls. “We can talk through some ideas.”
“Fine. At yours.”
He leers at her. “I’ll send you my address.”
“Fine.”
“I’m usually home by eight.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
He watches as she minimizes her holographic diagram and plugs her cord back into her skull plate. She ignores him completely, delving back into her work.