Chapter 46.4- And so the Dragons Danced

I could see the shock on their faces. I could see the anger appear on Katara’s while Sokka placed a hand on his sword. I just stop from my desk and began to arrange the teacups and prepare them to pour the tea.

“No tea. Lift up your arms now. We’ll be tying you up and taking you with us” Sokka said. I gave the boy a look.

“You would try. Like I said, we will discuss the terms of my surrender and if you don’t want to discuss then I will be resisting this silly attempt of an arrest and fighting my way out of here. Maybe he would beat me” I said pointing at Aang.

“But I could bet that I’d kill at least three of you before he could manage. This is a very small room, after all. And fire can be ohh so dangerous” I said. The door clicked to announce that it had been locked. I’d had the original vanity doors replaced with a set of heavy metal doors. Toph’s metal bending had proven useful in preparing them so quickly and ensuring that they were ready for use.

“So now we shall sit and discuss” I said, pouring the tea into my cup first and then one for each of them. There were only two chairs right in front of my table but I left the tea to cool as I walked around and picked up additional chairs from around the office. None of them even moved. This was the value in having a reputation for murder, mayhem, and chaos. I knew that they thought this was some sort of trap, but they could not just ignore me. And fighting me? Well, Aang would win. But he’d bleed for it. Maybe Kyoshi would have damned the consequences and fought either way, but Aang craved to solve conflict with dialogue. I just had to make him believe I was a kindred spirit.

Surprisingly, Jeong-Jeong was the first to sit. Aang joined him, and then the rest sat.

“So what do you want?” The Water tribesman asked.

“And your name?”

“Bato of the Southern Water Tribe.”

“Bato, then. I will surrender, I will ignore the murder of the rightful fire lord and recognize Zuko’s place on the throne that was never his to take” I began the negotiations by doing what you weren’t supposed to do in honest negotiations- lying through my teeth.

“In exchange for what, Natsu\>?” My old master asked.

“All I ask is the same. I ask you to give me nothing other than what I have taken. The Earth Kingdom is mine. I will even support your attempts to bring the war to an end. All you have to do is recognise my authority over the earth kingdom, and allow whatever elements of the Fire nation military wish to relocate here to join me to do so.”

“You have to be insane to think we’d agree to that” Katara shot out with such heat that I wondered which one of us was the fire bender..

“Do I? I hold the earth kingdom. If you want it, you’d have to take it, and considering you needed an Eclipse to beat Ozai, I’d give myself good odds” He said. This was another factor. They had the Avatar, but that was all they had. The Fire nation military would never listen to them. The Earth Kingdom forces had been put down, destroyed, and then scattered to the wind. The only army they could rely on was that of the Northern Water Tribe, and he’d eat those soft water benders for breakfast.

“And we can arrest you right here right now”

“Sure you can. But you must wonder. Where is everyone else? Toji, my second in command, and the Princess Azula are deep within the Earth Kingdom right now preparing my troops to resist you. Long Feng, my man, holds this city under his thumb. You can kill me now even, but I am nothing but one man, and you are beaten” I said grandly, before taking a sip of my tea. Perhaps sadly, none of them took sips of theirs. Aang moved a hand to it, but Katara slapped it away so quickly that it might as well have been a trick of the light.