Icarus and the Sea. It does a really good job of portraying Varrick and Zhu Li's relationship which I think is pretty impressive since Varrick especially seems tricky to write well since he's funny but really weird and kind of a jerk. The prose is good, and the dialogue is well-written.
Synopsis
A practical and respectable university student meets a disreputable man who wants to fly.
The ending is obvious to anyone not distracted by their own genius, and it's a little further off than it probably should have been.
Excerpt
Chapter 1: Broken Wings
Zhu Li Moon was on her way to the university when Varrick nearly killed her.
It all happened very fast, which she would later learn was how things tended to happen with Varrick. One moment she was walking, and the next there was a lot of yelling and she was on the ground with a man on top of her. It wasn't something she'd had to worry about much since leaving the Lower Ring, but old habits die hard, and so she'd used both legs to kick him off with enough force to send him sprawling into the wall of an adjacent building. Him, and the strange contraption on his back.
Only after did she notice that he'd smelled like peppermint and beeswax, wondered why she'd noticed at all.
"Well that didn't work!" said the upside-down pile of man, sounding very enthusiastic and not at all offput by their mutual near-death experience. He barely seemed to have noticed her at all, in fact. He was wearing finery all in green, but he wasn't from the Earth Kingdom. He looked like what she'd been told a member of the Water Tribe looked like, though she'd never seen a picture of a Water Tribesman with quite that style of moustache. With a great deal of wiggling he detached himself from the thing of wood and paper he'd been wearing, and rolled into a generally upright position, dusting himself off.
She was still sitting on the cobblestones, glasses askew, staring.
Were they all that tall in the Water Tribe?
"More height," he said, and he didn't seem to be talking to her as much as to himself, bending at the waist to examine the mangled mess, "that's what I need." She found herself tilting her body to the side to see past his, to see what exactly he was looking at. They looked – if she didn't know better – like wings. Ruined, now, but wings.
Some people thought that she was quiet because she was polite. Those people were incorrect. She was quiet because being quiet was easier than learning social graces. It was one thing when there were rules of etiquette that she could follow, and quite another when she was expected to make spur-of-the-moment interaction decisions.
It seemed like he had been trying to fly. She could ask him if that was what he'd been doing, but that would either be stating the obvious, or insulting his intelligence. So she said nothing, as she slowly brought herself to her feet, put her dress back into something resembling order.
"You!" he said, spinning on his heel with enough rapidity to send his robes in a sweeping circle, jabbing a finger in her direction. The widening of her eyes was her only concession to her alarm as she adjusted her glasses. "What's the tallest building in Ba Sing Se?"
Whatever it was, he was going to jump off of it. She was sure of this. "The Royal Palace," she said, "but you're better off using the Outer Walls."
He narrowed his eyes and came closer, which appeared strange when his hand remained exactly where it was, a fixed point as he came nearer. Uncomfortably near, in fact, face almost touching her own. She didn't try to get away from him, even though that was her instinct, because she hadn't made it to Ba Sing Se University by backing down when it was expected of her. It may not have even been intentional on his part. Maybe they didn't have the concept of personal space in the Water Tribe. "What makes you say that?" he asked, and she wondered what smelled like peppermints when his breath smelled like green tea.
"Less bureaucracy," she said, "and if that's not high enough then your design isn't practical." There was more she could have said, better explanations, more questions. But they were the only words that felt necessary.
His eyes narrowed further, that finger he'd been pointing at her finally moving as if he was going to poke her in the chin with it. "That," he said finally, "is a very good point. Let's do that."
Let's. Let us. Us. She had, inadvertently, become part of an us. This was not a thing that usually happened. Quite the opposite, in fact. Had her offering of information volunteered her?
"Come on," he said, suddenly withdrawing with such haste that she was practically drawn into the vacuum his absence created, "we're going to need to fix this before you can take me to the Outer Wall."
She had not agreed to any of these things. She had a lecture to attend. He was gathering his broken wings in his arms, and it felt like she'd been trapped in some strange bubble, that no one else was acting as if what was happening was strange. If she'd seen a man flying into a woman on the street, she liked to think she would at least have stopped to make sure everyone was okay.
Her back hurt. Her hipbones hurt. Her hands were calloused, but she'd scraped them on the cobblestones anyway, bruised her elbows. If he'd been injured similarly, he didn't show it.
"Here," he said, handing her the mess, "carry this for me, wouldja?"
Strangely, inexplicably, she did. And she followed as he began to walk away, a long-legged stride that suggested he had not even considered the possibility of her not following. She was being swept up in something, pulled along by his gravity, and she was not a woman who was often swept.
Or ever.
Extended Edition
There is an extended edition of this fanfic available as an ePub, which has additional material and is much more NSFW. The official soundtrack to Icarus and the Sea is Wings of Wax. Enjoy!