Only If For a Night(MxM)

Six Years Earlier

Six Years Earlier

Jet wasn't the only bodyguard in the room, and it didn't make him feel very secure. They have all dressed the same, black suits, earpieces, the whole bit. Jet wondered if clients would feel as safe if he showed up in jeans and a jacket. Probably not.

The Agni family had deemed themselves important enough to feel the need to have two security guards, so Jet shrugged off the nervousness of having to deal with other bodyguards and their, no doubt shitty, methods.

He went to the back of the massive theatre to find Zuko.

It wouldn't come as a shock to literally anyone to find out that Zuko played an instrument at a damn near-professional level. He could play the piano like a dream, but his true talent laid with the violin. He had been participating in recitals a decade before Jet came to work for the family, receiving lessons from a tiny Italian man once a week, every week, for years.

Zuko wasn't the only person performing that night; Jet had to weave his way through so many kids, so similar to Zuko that Jet wondered if he would find him. They were all deathly quiet, except for the jumbled noise of all of them playing their instrument at the same time. Fifty percent wore glasses, all of them had the same drab style in clothes, and the dead look in their eyes.

Ah, to be a teenager.

The theatre was old, old enough to smell. The floorboards groaned out their age with every step, the dampness of the night was spun lazily around the rooms with rumbling vents.

Zuko stood a little apart from the rest, up against a wall without windows, decades-old papers tacked to the bulletin behind his head. His shaggy hair fell in his eyes and covered his angry-looking scar that was eating his eye; lanky body curled in on itself to protect from whatever could come from the rest of the theatre.

Jet seamlessly stood next to him, not too close, but near enough to see the way his fingers tapped against the neck of the violin. It was a grand thing, that violin. Small and a deep mahogany color, curved wonderfully, the strings pulled into taut perfection. Jet had once heard Zuko and his instructor off-handedly mention how much the little instrument was, and Jet was shocked that he could be surprised anymore with the excess of money this family had. It was ridiculous, really, how much they had. No three people and an uncle should have more money than the entire borough of Queens put together.

The cat-gut bow in his hands was worried between long fingers. Jet felt the need to reassure Zuko that this was all going to be okay, but he didn't know how that would be received. He had been working for him for months now, and the two of them had three conversations that lasted more than four words.

Two of which happened to be about food. One about the plumber and his smelly feet, and the third was about superman. The fourth conversation occurred at four in the morning, Zuko bounced out of his room; pupils blown wide. He had made himself a cup of hot chocolate and paced on top of the kitchen counter, getting down only when Jet had asked him to. He then proceeded to speed walk around the whole third floor, prattling off questions about the man of steel, pausing hardly long enough for Jet to answer them.

The night, or morning rather, ended with Zuko sleeping in the bathtub for six hours straight and Jet finding the bottle of Adderal on the dresser and not so subtly flushing them down the toilet.

"I've heard you practice a hundred times, you sound great," He tried, not looking at his face for a reaction. He kept his position, hands clasped, eyes forward.

"But that was in front of you," He grumbled. "These are people that will judge me on how I dress, how I walk, how I manipulate the strings on the violin, how much my suit cost," with every word, it got faster. "They want to know how much everything costs, my shoes, my haircut, my pocket square," He ran out of breath before catching Jet's eye.

"There was a kid once that asked me how much I paid for you,"

Jet raised an eyebrow.

"He was obviously alluding to how much we pay you for a salary, but he still phrased it like that,"

"What did you tell him?" Now he was curious.

"That whatever it is, it's not enough,"

Jet barked out an involuntary laugh, trying to hide it into a cough in case anyone looked over at them. He didn't succeed very well.

This was the first time that Zuko got him to laugh, and it was also the longest that he held eye contact with the bodyguard.

"I really don't want to have to impress people like that, people who ask the price of another person,"

Jet didn't know how to approach that, how to reassure the kid that this wasn't going to be the last time that he gets comments about Jet like that. He had heard all of the jokes and jibes from the first family he worked with, from the IQ of his ethnicity to the validity of his citizenship status.

What he did know was that this isn't a conversation to be had in the back of a theatre. So he plastered on his biggest, shiniest grins and looked at him over top of his sunglasses.

"Then don't just impress them, kid. Knock their fucking socks off,"

Zuko nodded, suddenly not able to look him in the eye, a steady pink raising to his cheeks.

Jet had heard him play that same song over twenty times, from start to end, and he couldn't hear if he screwed up or not. It sounded exactly the same. They had sat in the back of the theatre, waiting his turn for another forty-five minutes in complete silence.

Now Jet stood well behind the curtains with the other kids waiting, having, of course, budged to the front of the line so he could have a clear line of sight to Zuko while he played.

It did echo a bit sweeter in here though, the wide-open space in front of him offered better reverberation, the pauses between sections hung in the air with more tension, the frenzy of his bow across the strings was more alive. Not once did Zuko open his eyes, not to look for his parents or his beaming uncle, not to look at the audience. He bowed politely when he got up on stage and when he got down, and that was it.

Jet didn't clap when he was done, because he had been sure from the beginning that all of this would be perfectly okay.

He justly calmly followed Zuko back to the little spot up against the far wall behind the curtain where his things were and watched him lovingly packed up the violin.

"Do you want to go sit with your parents?" Jet asked.

Zuko shook his head.

Jet acknowledged this and stood next to the slouching teenager, both listening to the symphony on the stage just behind the curtain.