Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The wind whipped around the hunters’ tents with the ferocity of a raging beast. It howled like someone had wronged it, like it was seeking vengeance in the relentless battery of the animal skins that served as the only divide between the huddling human forms and the assault of the blizzard. It was dark out, but that meant nothing, the antarctic winters devoid of light-- even if the sun had peeked its head above the horizon, its light would have been summarily executed by the cloud cover. 

Though there were three tents altogether, only one had been propped up, the men inside sacrificing space for essential body heat. A fire inside of a tent was a death sentence as much as braving the cold would be; the only choice was whether it would be a death by flame or by ice. The men simply moved closer together and hoped it would be neither. 

Sandwiched between his father’s fur-padded elbow and another man’s chest was eleven-year-old Sokka of the Water Tribe, just barely old enough to head out on his first winter hunting expedition. He’d been ecstatic to complete his first rite of passage in the tribe, but just as surely as the clouds had gathered in front of the navigational stars, his merriment had waned. As the first flake of snow landed on the packed, icy floor of the central South Pole, his father, the chief, ordered the tents be staked up. They’d only managed one before they’d realized that the wind would carry them away without second thought if they tried another. 

Even surrounded by the seven or so men that made up the hunting party, Sokka grew cold. He’d always been disproportionately affected by the weather that was common in his home, feeling sapped of energy even in the months where the sun didn’t set, sometimes needing as many as two or three parkas just to keep his teeth from chattering. Now, wearing two jackets, his only barrier from the ice being the two or three pelts they’d thrown on the ground, his nose pinked and his cheeks chapped. The latter was a sure side effect of having been out in the elements for so long, but they still stung as fiercely as if he weren’t sheltered in the tent. 

He began to shiver, and his father stopped his low murmurs to Bato to bundle his son closer. 

“You’re cold,” said Hakoda, worry tainting his voice. 

Sokka didn’t bother with a response-- it was a statement, not a question. As the hours wore on, and the storm did not abate, he grew colder and colder. His fingers began to purple, his nose became numb, and it seemed to Hakoda that no matter what, nothing could stop the slow progression of hypothermia. 

Somewhere around what must have been the fifth hour, Sokka stopped shivering. This was not a good sign, and Hakoda knew that. 

In a small voice, one that Hakoda wasn’t sure his son had used since he was seven, Sokka asked, “daddy? Why can’t I feel my feet?”

The distressed howls of the wind began to subside in the same way that an injured storm jackal would be silenced; plaintive, broken yowls in trails of red across the pure white of the plains until it succumbed to the cold and died, muzzle still open in a taxidermy figure. The cold, for Sokka, did not begin to fade, and for the first time that night, Hakoda allowed himself to wonder if the men would have to carry him back-- if he would have to send his own son to the spirit of the sea so soon after he sent the ashes of his wife. He cursed himself for being a fool; Sokka had always been fragile, though he never liked to hear it, and he should not have allowed him to come on this expedition. No matter that it was a rite of passage: if something didn’t change fast, the only passage he would be making would be from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead.

Pressed on all sides by the oppressive cold fronts, Sokka grew more and more desperate for warmth. He had never been so frozen or so tired in his life, and he wished he could shrink down to the size of the little warm patch behind his belly button that was being chipped away at by the cool. He focused on the sole source of heat, tried to make it grow every time he inhaled. It was usually so easy to do, but his skin felt five inches thick and the warmth kept hitting up against the wall, stopped in the middle of its growth. 

It had no choice but to travel up towards his head and down towards his feet. With every inhale it spread, with every exhale it was reduced, but it got bigger, and bigger, and bigger--

Eyes shut, Sokka didn’t see the minuscule puffs of flame that escaped every time he blew out, but Hakoda did. His worries did not cease: they changed. 

They’d all thought that Katara was the only bender in the tribe. Yet, just below his own nose, his son was touched by flame. Hakoda could only wonder if Sokka knew, but never said, or if he had considered himself as ordinary as the rest of them the entire time. 

When the blizzard finally let up, and the men unscrewed themselves from the tent, Sokka did not protest his father’s declaration that the hunting expedition needed to head back to the village, lest another storm catch them unawares when they were more than a day’s walk from safety. He allowed himself to be tucked under Bato’s arm, herded along while Yanikka, the group’s navigator, led them by the stars. 

A few days later, and it wasn’t as easy to keep Sokka from going on the trip. His father had told him under no uncertain terms that Sokka would no longer be permitted out on winter hunting trips, not now and not ten years in the future. Sokka took issue with this.

“I’ll be fine, Dad! I made it through last time!” Begged Sokka, tugging on the fur lining of Hakoda’s parka. 

“And what if you don’t make it through next time, what then?” Asked Hakoda, a set to his jaw that said he was worried. Softening his tone, he set his bundle of pelts aside and dropped down to eye-level with Sokka. “I can’t lose you, Sokka. You and your sister are all I’ve got. You’ve always been so sensitive to the cold.” He lifted his hand up to stroke Sokka’s cheek, but Sokka looked away. 

He knew that. He knew it just as intimately as he knew why he wasn’t allowed to go swimming for sea prunes and seagrass with the other boys, just as intimately as he knew why he was always given a spot closer to the fire than the rest of the village. It rankled, the care with which he was treated, how everyone always wore thicker mittens when handling him. He knew how it looked: the one time his father relented, the worst almost came to pass. But he was tired of it. Tired of being the sickly child.

He was afraid it was all he’d ever be. 

“I hate this,” said Sokka, stomping his foot on the floor. 

Hakoda sighed. “I’m sorry, son. It’s for the best.”

It might’ve made him a coward, but Hakoda had, after much deliberation, entrusted his mother-in-law with the duty of telling Sokka of his... abilities. In fact, it was more than a might-- running off on a hunting trip, a few last days of normalcy before he had to face his changed son-- it was cowardly. 

He only hoped his son wouldn’t hate him too much. 

“A man knows where he is needed the most. You are needed here, son, to protect the village.”

Sokka kicked up a pile of snow and clenched his fists. “ Nobody needs me here! I’m a burden! I can’t even go fishing without freezing!” 

Sokka’s relationship with his father had been strained since that hunting trip. Leaving Sokka behind just when he needed the support of his father the most-- it seemed, to Sokka, a recurring pattern. 

Firebending did not make Sokka any less of a burden, not that he’d expected it to. He was so weakened by the cold and the long months of no sun that the most he could do-- and only ever in the summer months-- was light the fires for the village, or perhaps serve as a candle. He was still so cold all of the time, and, if anything, the knowledge of what he was had made it worse-- now that he knew why he always felt so empty in the winter, he only ever felt emptier. It, to put it in the plainest terms possible, sucked. 

“You are not a burden, Sokka, listen to me,” his father got down on one knee, the way he always did when he wanted Sokka to understand him. Sokka turned away. “Sokka,” he was swiveled back to face his father. “Just because you can’t do the same things the other boys do doesn’t mean you are a burden.”

Letting out a cry of anguish, Sokka jerked his arm out of his father’s grip. “I’m sick and tired of being treated like a stinking girl! Katara gets to do all of the stuff I’m supposed to do, and I hate it. You never let me do anything, and now you’re leaving me here and you’re going someplace warm and you aren’t even taking me and I hate you! ”

Sokka stomped away, shaking with righteous anger. Hakoda wished his Kya was still here. 

The black dot steadily approached the village, the ashy snow a precursor to the death and destruction they would surely rain upon the only home Sokka’d ever known. 

He and Katara, as the most able-bodied members of the village, stood atop the packed snow that made up the village wall-- they were the first line of defense. The only line of defense. They were pathetic, and it was going to be a slaughter. Katara held her bone club in trembling hands, warrior paint disguising her features. Sokka had thrown his gloves off-- though it was unlikely his weak, substandard firebending would do anything of importance against a legion of well-trained Fire Nation stock firebenders, it would at least do something. Worst come to worst he could set his boomerang on fire and hurl it at as many Fire Nation soldiers as he could. Experience had shown Sokka that firebenders were not flame retardant.

They were lucky that it was only one ship and not a fleet. Though, as the ship cut through the ice shelf, resting just beyond the village wall that he and Katara had abandoned as soon as it became clear that the ship had no plans of stopping before it hit, Sokka thought that maybe it would be prudent for him to revise his definition of luck. 

The gangplank landed with a thunk, just barely missing the closest igloo, and a boy in a funny helmet descended, flanked by a few guards. 

“ Go, ” whispered Sokka, and he and Katara rushed the boy, weapons held aloft. It was a shameful testament to their inexperience when he simply cast them aside-- Sokka, as per his luck, ended up falling face-first into the pile of snow that was once the wall. 

He struggled to extract himself from the snowbank, pushing desperately against the chill that immediately threatened to set in. It was times like these he loathed the cold sensitivity of firebenders. 

“Where are you hiding him?” The Fire Nation boy asked, though his query was somewhat muffled by the snow around Sokka’s head. 

There was a firm tug on his ankle and he popped free, just in time to see the boy grab Gran-Gran by the collar and pull her out of the crowd of villagers. 

“He’d be about this age,” he shook Gran-Gran slightly, “master of all elements?” 

He let go of Gran-Gran; Senna caught her. The villagers looked on in incomprehension as the other boy grew steadily angrier. He drew his hand back, and Sokka expected fire to sprout from his fingers, but he simply swept his arm around in a grand gesture and nothing happened. 

“I know you’re hiding him!” 

Katara sprung up and ran towards the boy, bone club held high, but he easily ducked and she flew over him. Luckily, it gave Sokka just enough time to slide past the Fire Nation soldier and throw his boomerang. One of the children passed Sokka a spear, and he once again ran forwards, but his movements were easily predicted and the other boy simply grabbed the spear, snapped it in half, and poked Sokka in the head a quick three times with the butt of the weapon. 

(All things considered, it didn’t seem to be as much of a slaughter as Sokka had expected.) 

Victoriously, though, Boomerang swung back around, clipping the Fire Nation soldier on the helmet for good measure. As soon as he’d recovered, the other boy was getting into some sort of Stance-- Sokka didn’t trust Stances. So he readied his own, breathed deeply and allowed the warm spot in his gut to grow, flowing out through his palms until they developed into medium-sized (relative measurement, of course) infernos in his hands. 

The other boy’s eyes widened. His Stance dropped. “You’re a firebender? ”

And then Aang bowled him over on the back of a penguin. 

“Hi, Katara! Hi, Sokka!” He chirped, seemingly unable to read the room. 

“Hi, Aang,” Sokka responded, making sure to lace his tone with as much passive-aggression as he could muster on such short notice, “thanks for coming.”

Aang then sprung up, and the Fire Nation boy got back into a Stance. The other Fire Nation soldiers advanced, spears pointing at Aang, and with a couple of sweeping motions, Aang threw the soldiers to the side. 

“Looking for me?” He asked, tone uncharacteristically solemn. 

The Fire Nation boy looked positively incensed, swiping the snow off his head and shoulders. “ You’re the airbender? You’re the Avatar!?” He sounded like he didn’t believe it. 

“Aang?” He heard Katara ask from his left. 

Sokka couldn’t believe it himself. That boy? That childish, naive boy? “No way.”

The Fire Nation soldier and Aang began to circle each other, the older boy monologuing. “I’ve spent years preparing for this encounter. Training, meditating. You’re just a child!” 

Aang stopped circling, standing up tall (again, relative measurement) and taking an innocent expression. Absolute shit-eater. “Well, you’re just a teenager.”

The other boy didn’t seem to appreciate this answer. He swung his arm wide and brought it forward-- and pulled water from the ice below, bending it towards Aang. Sokka stared, dumbfounded, as Aang defended himself against the onslaught of water and ice. Next to him, one of the village children screamed as a stray icicle neared her head-- this seemed to be it for Aang. 

“If I go with you, will you leave this village?” He asked. 

“I give you my word,” the soldier said, and with a last suspicious glance at Sokka, towed Aang away by the arm. 

Chapter Text

“To the Northern Water Tribe!” Shouted Aang, unwisely, (because who was to say they didn’t have super hearing?) as soon as they were out of (normal, non-super) earshot of the Fire Navy vessel. 

“Yippee,” cheered Sokka, voice completely flat. “We’re going from one cold place to another cold place. I am oh so very excited.”

Katara scoffed and rolled her eyes. “Don’t be such a sourpuss. You will live. ” 

“I very much might not! Do you know how many times I’ve almost died in the past three years alone? ”

Katara turned her head away, jutting out her jaw and deeming the conversation over. Feeling exceptionally childish, accompanied by a soft touch of out-of-place vindication, he turned around to stare off the back of Appa and sulk. (Not that he would admit the sulking bit to anyone but himself.)

He couldn’t believe they’d gotten out of the skirmish with their lives intact, and (although he didn’t believe in their power, as such) Sokka wondered if they had some sort of spirit on their side. 

(About time, he figured.)

After they departed the island they’d spent the night on and he’d suitably recovered from the shock of fighting against a Fire Nation ship and living (how?), his thoughts were eventually drawn to the Fire Nation boy they’d faced earlier. Like himself, the boy-- Zuko, his uncle had called him, Zuko-- was an outsider in his home. A waterbender in the Fire Nation? It had to have been some sort of cosmic irony. 

They were almost like opposites, he mused. Like maybe there’d been some spiritual muck-up and they were meant to be each other instead of themselves. Sokka, at least, knew that he’d have been loads happier had he not spent fifty percent of his life nearly freezing to death and the other fifty percent being coddled to try and keep him from freezing to death. 

So high in the atmosphere, the air turned thin, seeming to suck the moisture out of their bones. The altitude and the whipping gales of southern wind served a wicked one-two punch to Sokka, and he found that even the double parkas and the sleeping bag were insufficient against the onslaught. 

“Wow, Sokka, are you okay?” Asked Aang, reclining on Appa’s head so he was faced towards the saddle. “That’s a lot of layers.”

“He gets cold really easily,” supplied Katara. “Some weird firebender thing that I don’t really understand.”

Aang nodded sagely. “Makes sense. Living full-time in the south pole isn’t good for firebenders. Too little sun.”

Sokka snorted. “You’re telling me. I’m just glad I’m finally going to be somewhere warm. ”

Aang grimaced a little. “The Southern Air Temple isn’t much warmer, sorry!”

Folding her arms over the edge of the saddle, Katara peered keenly at Aang. “Do you know anything else about firebenders?”

Sokka’s ears perked: growing up, there hadn’t been a wealth of knowledge on firebenders in the village. His great-grandfather (long dead) and his grandmother (also long dead) on his father’s side would’ve known, but as cited in the parentheticals-- they were both long dead. It was almost galling how little they knew about firebenders, outside of what could be inferred from Sokka (very bad with the cold, very bad with long periods of no sun)-- nobody in the tribe appeared to take the phrase know thy enemy very seriously at all. As such, he knew about as much about himself as he knew about gardens-- that was to say, that they both existed. (Theoretically, at the very least. He still wasn’t entirely sure that people weren’t joking about gardens. And sand, and the fact that the sun was apparently warm when it touched your skin (??), and places where it didn’t snow, etc. etc.) 

Aang considered. “Like what?” 

Katara shrugged. “I don’t know. Anything?”

Sokka moved closer. 

“Hmm. Well, I know that out of all four elements, fire is the most fueled by emotions, since you’re basically producing the fire yourself-- instead of bending something that’s already there. Honestly, I don’t know too much. I had a friend in the Fire Nation named Kuzon, but he couldn’t bend.”

Sokka deflated. That was marginally more information than he’d already gathered, but the keyword there was marginal. It was like saying to someone: oh, you know two facts about snails? (Which Sokka was sure were fictitious, no way could they be real.) Here is another fact: they have eyes. Which, although yes, was a fact (probably, if snails weren’t an old wives tale), it was a fact so inconsequential and easily inferred that it was hardly even a fact at all. Just because Sokka hadn’t inferred it didn’t mean that the inferences, had they been made, wouldn’t have been done easily. (Did snails have eyes…?) 

“Do snails have eyes?” 

Aang, taking the abrupt subject change in stride, nodded in affirmation. “Cave snails don’t, though.”

“What’s a cave snail?” Asked Katara.

Was she dumb? “It’s a snail that lives in a cave. Duh.”

“We used to get butterfly snail infestations in our gardens during the spring back at the temple. It was so bad one year that we didn’t have any lettuce at all. ”

Sokka didn’t know what lettuce was, but he figured that it was just one of those things that he-- who had never seen a garden, thank you very much-- wouldn’t know about. 

“How far away is this temple, anyways?” Asked Sokka. “I’m looking forward to getting back on solid ground. Warmer ground. That island we stopped at did not do it for me.”

Aang shrugged. “Maybe a half a day more? It’s not suuuper far.”

Sokka sighed. If there was one thing he’d learned about Aang in the past few days that he’d known him, it was that the boy gave no respect to things like goals and schedules and learning waterbending in order to eventually end the war. It was a skill, honestly-- with the ‘warriors’ (in the loosest sense possible) back at home he only had to remind himself that infanticide was not okay maybe twice a day, yet in the past two hours alone he had not only reminded himself of the fact no less than four times, but he had also actively had to subdue the urge to push Aang off Appa’s head. Not that it would achieve anything of import, since Aang could fly, but it was the sentiment that counted. 

Idly, he lit a flame in his palm and then watched the wind put it out. Though his firebending had never truly seen much practical purpose, it had served an excellent distraction in the Long Day, when sleep wasn’t as forthcoming as it was during the rest of the year. At some point he got quite good at those little magic tricks.

He took a deep breath and released a puff of flame on the exhale, catching it between his forefinger and thumb and using his other hand to make the fire dance. It licked the jutting bone of his wrist, slalomed through the gaps between his fingers, leaving a little trail of warmth as it went. Eventually, tired of making it emulate the Dance of the High Tide, he sent it up and watched the wind scatter it into nothing. 

When he’d first been told of his firebending abilities, his grandmother had consoled him. That firebending didn’t make him evil, that he’d been blessed by Agni, that he was a guiding light for the village even in dark times (which he took as a sick joke, because it was precisely in those dark times that his firebending always failed), that-- most importantly-- fire was not only destruction. And she was right, he supposed-- fire was light, it was life, it was warmth.

He still wished he didn't have it.

Aang and Katara looked on with wide eyes-- Aang had, at some point, migrated from Appa’s head to the saddle. 

“Wow,” he breathed. “I guess I know who’s gonna be my firebending teacher when I get to that.”

Though he valiantly tried to hold it back, he couldn’t dam up the peal of laughter that escaped him. “No way. I’m a horrible firebender. I can barely make my flame bigger than that.”

Aang scrunched up his nose. “Well of course you’d be a horrible firebender, if you lived someplace as cold as the south. And doesn’t the sun disappear for a couple of months in the middle of the year?”

Sokka didn’t believe him-- he was absolute polar-dogshit at firebending during the Long Day, regardless-- but the cold had sapped him of too much energy to put up a fight. “Whatever you say.”

And, finally, despite the sun sitting jauntily in the sky, he fell into an uneasy sleep.

“...Sokka. Sokka!” 

He opened a bleary eye, and then another. “Wha…?”

“We’re almost to the Patola Mountain Range; we’re almost there,” Katara said, hovering over him. “Come on, get up, lazybones.”

“I have a condition, I’ll have you know.”

She raised a disapproving eyebrow. “And what condition might that be?”

“Uh, firebending , idiot. Or did you forget the years of sickliness I endured?”

Rolling her eyes, she turned away from him. 

While Katara was busy trying to very subtly and very gently warn Aang about the total, brutal genocide of his people, Sokka rooted around for some blubbered seal jerky. He dropped the bag in dismay when it was empty. At least it was warm enough to shed the sleeping bag and the second parka. 

When the air temple came into view, it looked-- rough. Aang didn’t seem deterred at all, practically bouncing off Appa’s head, but Sokka couldn’t help but wince at how dull and lifeless it looked. Like something that had once been glorious, but had since fallen into ruin. 

Sokka felt a sudden flash of guilt, heavy and uncomfortable in the pit of his stomach. He knew, logically, that the Fire Nation weren’t his people (but weren’t they, though?), that he had no part in this slaughter (but didn’t he, though?), but he also knew that it was firebenders who did this. It was the same sort of guilt that struck him when he thought of his mom-- he didn’t kill her, his people didn’t kill her, but firebenders were, in a way, his people. To see what firebenders were capable of first-hand… it hurt, sometimes, to look at the innocent little flame skipping across his knuckles, so bright and full of life, and know that it could so easily turn into an inferno. A weapon of destruction. 

They landed, and Aang’s cheer seemed to abate a little, as he recounted how the place used to be crawling with monks and flying bison and lemurs. Everybody, every thing that the kid knew was gone. Sokka had to admire him for his optimism-- he knew that if he’d been thrust a hundred years into an uncertain, war-torn future, he’d have sat down and given up, duty to the world or no.

There was a scorch mark on the floor. As Aang talked about playing airball with his friends, Sokka squatted down and swiped his finger across the black spot. His finger came up stained with soot-- a hundred years gone and the Fire Nation (firebenders, the nasty side of his brain reminded him) was still leaving its ugly reminders of the type of atrocities it was capable of. 

He stood. “So, uh, this airball game. How do you play?”

Of course, airball was a game made for airbenders, and Sokka therefore got thoroughly thrashed at it. He’d expected to be-- the point of the exercise was to get Aang to stop being maudlin about the comprehensive extermination of his peoples, not to win. Though it would’ve been nice to be good at something for once. 

More to himself than anything, he muttered, “making him feel better is putting me in a world of hurt,” as he pushed himself up from the floor. 

Something red caught his eye, looking completely out of place in the largely blue and beige coloration of the air temple. He crawled towards it tentatively, unsure whether or not the Fire Nation had thought to leave booby traps like they had on the ship near their village. As he got closer, though, he realized it was worse. It was an old Fire Nation helmet, half-buried in snow. It knocked the breath out of him. He let it. 

“Katara,” he said, unable to look away from the helmet. His voice was thick when it fell from his mouth. 

Her footsteps approached, and she dropped down to survey the helmet with him. “Fire Nation.”

“We should tell him,” said Sokka, but his throat was hoarse and his tongue was heavy. 

With an unmistakable tremble, Katara called, “Aang! There’s something you need to see.”

Before Aang could see the helmet, though, Katara dropped a heap of snow on the helmet-- and, consequently, Sokka. The cold bit into his exposed cheeks. 

“You can’t protect him forever,” Said Sokka, as soon as Aang skipped off again. “He needs to know what the Fire Nation-- what people like me -- can do.”

She didn’t respond.

“Katara!” There was enough bite in his tone to get her to turn around and look at him. “Firebenders were here. You can’t pretend they weren’t. It’s not fair to him.”

Katara huffed petulantly-- it was times like these that Sokka remembered that she was just a child, much more so than him. Sometimes it didn’t seem like it. 

“If Aang finds out the Fire Nation invaded his home, he’ll be devastated.”

Sokka threw his arms in the air. “Duh! Everybody he knew--”

“Hey guys!” Chirped Aang, interrupting Sokka. “I want you to meet somebody.”

He was standing in front of a statue of a monk who bore the same arrow tattoos that decorated Aang’s scalp. He had a fond, almost reverent look on his face. 

“Who’s that?” 

“Monk Gyatso! The greatest airbender in the world. He taught me everything I know.”

Sokka had to turn away. 

“You must miss him,” he heard Katara say, behind him. There was a rustle of fabric. 

Aang’s voice, when it came, was heartbreaking. “Yeah.”

His footsteps began to move away; Sokka turned back around, but guiltily avoided the wise gaze of the statue of Monk Gyatso. 

They followed Aang to the air temple sanctuary, though Sokka was dubious that Aang would be able to meet whoever he was supposed to meet-- it’d been a hundred years, after all. And when the doors creaked open to reveal a room full of statues (creepy), Sokka wondered if Aang had ever learned that statues weren’t sentient. 

“That’s Avatar Roku,” said Aang, once he reached the last of the statues, “the Avatar before me.”

“You were a firebender?” Asked Sokka, and if his voice cracked-- he was going through puberty. It wasn’t his fault. 

Aang hummed in confirmation. “Yeah. I’ll be a firebender in this life, too. Just not yet.”

“Yeah, but,” Sokka reached out to touch the statue. It was dusty. He didn’t know why he’d expect anything different. “This guy was a firebender-- a firebender first. I guess I never thought…”

“That one in every four Avatars was a firebender?” Katara cocked an eyebrow. 

“Shut up,” he said, but it didn’t hold much weight. His fingertips were still on the statue. His eyes crept down to the bottom, and-- “hey, how’d you know the guy’s name? It’s not on the statue.”

Aang shrugged. “I just knew.”

Sokka rolled his eyes and finally removed his hand from the cold, smooth stone. “You just couldn’t get any weirder, huh?”

Something made a noise at the entrance, then, and Sokka pulled the three of them behind a statue. Whoever, or whatever it was, was casting a long shadow on the floor that concealed its true shape. 

“Fire Nation,” he whispered. “Nobody make a sound.”

“You’re making a sound!” Protested Katara.

“ Shhh! ”

Careful to keep the light hidden, flames sprung up from Sokka’s palms-- as big as he could make them (not very). He motioned for Katara and Aang to stay back, and stepped out from behind the statue, ready, for the second time in however many days, to face certain death. 

As soon as he saw the creature, he dropped his arms and extinguished the fire. 

“Uh,” he intoned wisely. 

Aang all but shrieked. “Lemur!”

Zuko was so pissed off. To imply-- no, directly state-- that Zuko’s father didn’t-- didn’t want him? To openly scoff at Zuko? If he’d been a firebender, Zuko would have challenged Zhao to an Agni Kai quick as a whip. 

(As it was, all he could do was sit in his chambers as the ship left the harbor and seethe.)

Sokka finally found Aang, crouched behind a decaying curtain. 

“Hey Aang! You find my dinner yet?” Aang didn’t respond. “I wasn’t really going to eat the lemur, okay-- oh.” Stepping into the room revealed the skeletons of Fire Nation soldiers, long dead, and another skeleton-- a monk. Monk Gyatso, probably. “Come on, Aang. Everything will be alright. Let’s get out of here.” He crouched down to Aang’s level and tentatively placed a comforting hand on his shoulder--

“Get away from me!”

He hit the wall with a discomfiting smack, driving all of the air from his lungs. Aang’s eyes and tattoos began to glow, just like they had when he and Katara had first freed him from the iceberg. Sokka didn’t know what to do. He clearly wasn’t welcome, his presence clearly hadn’t helped. Slowly, he gathered himself up and began to retreat. 

“Aang!” He shouted again, when the swirling tempest of air pushed him further back. “Snap out of it!” Nothing worked. 

His eyes shifted sideways for a moment as Katara pulled to a hasty stop next to him, the wind violently buffeting her hair. “What happened?”

The floor was a very interesting thing to look at, he decided. Weeds growing out of cracks… intriguing stuff. 

So quietly that the sound of air rushing past nearly swallowed it up, he said, “he found out firebenders killed Gyatso.”

(In his head, the unhelpful, terrible voice echoed: people like you, people like you, people like you… )

“I’m gonna go try and calm him down.”

He nodded. “Good.” A strong gust hit him; he had to grab onto a rock to keep from flying away. “Well, do it! Before he blows us off the mountain!”

He knew they should’ve told him earlier-- letting him find out this way? It was downright cruel. To find proof that the Fire Nation invaded your home and summarily killed everyone by finding your mentor’s corpse? It would be like coming back to the village and finding out that the Fire Nation raided it by finding his mom’s dead body--

“--you still have a family. Sokka and I… we’re your family now,” shouted Katara, over the noise.  

Finally, the wind subsided, and Aang descended back to the ground. Sokka and Katara walked up to Aang, one on each side. Katara grabbed Aang’s hand, but Sokka didn’t dare touch him. 

“Katara and I aren’t going to let anything happen to you.” He took a deep breath. “Promise.”

The light faded from Aang’s eyes, and when he looked up at Sokka, they were big and grey and sad. Sokka had to turn away, if only so he didn’t start crying at the grief that Aang wore-- too big for his body, ill-fitting like a secondhand parka. 

“I’m sorry--”

“It’s okay, it’s not your fault.”

“I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that. You didn’t do any of this. I know that. It didn’t-- didn’t give me the right-- ”

Sokka smiled, but he couldn’t pretend that there wasn’t something a little bitter hidden behind the curve of his lips. “I get it, okay? It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.” He pulled Aang into a hug, sandwiching the boy between him and Katara. 

Honestly, it stung when Aang shouted at him. But it was nothing he hadn’t heard from other people-- nothing he hadn’t heard from himself. So he wasn’t going to blame Aang, not right after seeing the proof of his losses firsthand. Even if Aang seemed uncommonly wise at times, he was still just a kid. 

So, yeah. It was fine. 

“Hey, little guy!” 

The lemur from the air temple had decided to join them on their journey. (Freeloader.) (Not really, though, because it showed Sokka where the fruit was.) 

Quietly, as if he hadn’t meant for anyone else to hear, Aang held out a crooked finger to the flying lemur and murmured, “you, me, and Appa-- we’re all that’s left of this place. We have to stick together.” He sighed, then looked up and brightened considerably. “Katara, Sokka! Say hello to the newest member of our family!”

(Was it customary to consider pets part of the family? The Southern Water Tribe generally didn’t keep personal pets, though they did have some polar dogs to pull their sleds… Sokka wouldn’t be surprised if this was just another one of Aang’s quirks.)

“What are you gonna call him?” Asked Katara. 

Ignoring Sokka’s pitched fruit-finder (good name, indicative of purpose and position in the group), Aang said, “Momo.”

That was a terrible name.

Chapter Text

‘ I want to ride the great koi ’ he said, ‘ please, Sokka, it won’t take too long ’ he said. Look where that got them! (The word look serving as a figure of speech, in this case, considering the fact that they were all blindfolded.) If he directed his breath-- no, his hands were bound, and it wouldn’t do to accidentally cause a fire. Well. They were going to die. 

A man’s voice sounded, muffled and distorted a bit by the blood still rushing through Sokka’s ears. “You three have some explaining to do.”

Sokka puzzled for a moment-- there were five of them. And then he realized that he was so used to referring to Momo and Appa as individual people that he’d totally forgotten that others didn’t view it the same way. (Besides, the very demand of explanation precluded Momo and Appa from the discussion. Well-placed looks, lows, and chirps did not constitute a sufficient grasp of human language.) 

A woman spoke, though she sounded young still. “And if you don’t answer all our questions, we’re throwing you back in the water with Unagi.”

Sokka shuddered, figuring that Unagi was that hell-beast Aang tried to hitch a ride on. He was beginning to grow uncomfortable with having one of his senses blocked off, unable to scope out the enemy and determine whether escape would be feasible. As it was, he didn’t even know how many of them there were.

“Show yourselves!” He cried, and he would’ve tacked on a ‘you cowards’ at the end, but figured it probably wouldn’t be prudent to insult people that had you at their mercy. 

His blindfold was ripped off (a little painfully, he might add, wouldn’t it do to have a softer touch?) and the light assaulted his eyes. He had to squint, initially, trying to fend off the ache that immediately settled in at the backs of his eyes. Shapes and colors began to form with some measure of clarity-- they were surrounded by close to twenty people, all dressed in green. They were all women-- girls, actually, the eldest looking maybe as old as Sokka, the rest looking closer to Aang’s age, some even younger. 

They all had the same look he’d seen on Katara’s face whenever they trained together: determination, the satisfaction of a clean win, brows brought low on the face and lips turned downwards into a mask of intimidation. It was obvious that they were warriors, but-- that a group of such young girls had managed to take them down? He didn’t know if he could believe it. 

“Who are you?” He pressed. “Did you capture us?”

The leader-- she had to be the leader, Sokka figured-- stepped forward and nodded. “Who are you and what are you doing here?” 

“Really? But you’re just a bunch of girls.”

The leader grabbed him roughly by his collar, jerking him forward. The fabric cut uncomfortably into his neck. “A bunch of girls, huh? Unagi is gonna eat well tonight.”

He backpedaled quickly, trying to rectify the situation before he turned into fish food. “I didn’t mean it that way! I didn’t mean it that way-- I know women can be capable warriors, trust me you, ha ha. But you’re all so… young. ”

Though the fire (heh) in the girl’s eyes did not abate, she released his collar and stepped back. “I repeat: who are you, and what are you doing here?”

Aang sighed. “It’s my fault. I’m sorry we came here. I wanted to ride the elephant koi.” He sighed again, and Sokka just knew that he was trying to look as mournful and pitiful as possible. He maintained that Aang was a conniving snake who knew exactly what he was doing whenever he pulled out those big pools of grey to do his dirty work. 

“How do we know you’re not Fire Nation spies?” The only man of the group accused, and wow. List of people unaffected by Aang’s polar puppy eyes: one. 

Sokka stiffened. He was sure he hadn’t firebended at all, not on this island. There was little point to it. So why would they assume…?

“Kyoshi Island stayed out of the war so far,” the man continued. “We plan to keep it that way!”

Aang visibly, audibly, and spiritually brightened. “This island is named for Kyoshi? I know Kyoshi!”

The man’s expression soured behind his wiry grey beard. “How could you possibly know her? She’s been dead for centuries.”

Sokka ran the math, and, yep-- no way could Aang have known her. Unless it was the freaky Avatar thing he’d done in the temple where he’d recognized Roku without being told. 

“I know her because I’m the Avatar,” said Aang. 

Needless to say, the Kyoshi people did not believe him in the slightest. Luckily, before he could be thrown to the Unagi, which would have been the stupidest way for an Avatar to die (excepting Shi-Wan, who tripped, and subsequently fell, off of a mountain. It was likely he’d have been able to save himself, but he was too preoccupied with trying to keep his jug of water aloft, hit his head on a tree halfway down, and then died at the bottom. Surprisingly, the death was not due to the fall, but because a passing caravan didn’t see his prone form on the path in time, and trampled him to death. Sokka didn’t know this, of course), he pulled off a couple of neat little airbending tricks and saved the day. Of course, he then proceeded to show off the marble trick to the gathered Kyoshi populace. 

At least they didn’t get thrown to the overgrown serpent-fish. 

Sokka wasn’t hungry. Aang was devouring the feast with zeal, and Katara was eating like a normal human being, but Sokka wasn’t hungry. 

It wasn’t that his pride was bruised by getting his ass kicked by a group of literal children. (It was, but bruised pride had never stopped him from eating copious amounts of food.) It was more so that he was unnerved that they could be bested so easily and quickly. Sure, this time around the belligerents had been friendly, but what if they weren’t, next time around? 

Sokka had never really had any formal training in fighting. His father had taught him how to use a boomerang for a couple of summers, but he’d never been able to train with the rest of the boys like he was supposed to. Katara had more formal training than he did, and she gave her best effort in teaching him what she knew, but the fact remained that Sokka wasn’t a good fighter. He couldn’t even rely on his firebending the way Aang relied on his airbending-- he had good control, he knew that, better control than Katara had on her waterbending, but the amount of fire he could produce was always lackluster. At most it could serve as a distraction. 

Mostly, he was worried about Aang and Katara. Katara was his sister (he didn’t know what he’d do if he lost her, too), and Aang was clearly precious cargo. Sokka should have to be the first line of defense, and he’d failed them on that.

“Sokka, what’s your problem?” Asked Aang, breaking him out of his stupor. “Eat!”

He huffed-- his stomach was still roiling from the defeat, churning with the knowledge that they were so damn lucky.

“Not hungry,” he mumbled. 

Katara prodded. “Upset you got beat by a bunch of girls?”

His head snapped up. “What? No.”

“No need to get defensive--”

“That’s not what it’s about!”

A puff of smoke escaped his mouth, and he took a bracing breath. He had to stay cautious. Showing off his firebending at home was fine-- those were people he’d known his entire life, people who trusted him (even if that trust seemed to be resting on three shaky legs after he'd awakened his flame). Kyoshi Island? Entirely composed of strangers-- strangers that were clearly mistrustful of the Fire Nation, and for all they knew, firebending meant Fire Nation.

“Then what?” Asked Katara, eyeing the air around his chin with trepidation. 

“What if the Kyoshi Warriors hadn’t been friendly? What if they were Fire Nation? Pirates? We got our asses-- sorry-- kicked. It wasn’t even a fight. It doesn’t sit right with me. You’re both too important.”

“If we hadn’t been surprised--”

“But we were , we were surprised. What, you think everyone who ever tries to kill us is going to march in with an announcement like Zuko did?”

Aang’s voice was garbled as he spoke through a mouthful of dumplings. “I was hoping nobody else was gonna try and kill us.”

Sokka sighed. Stupid kids. It was all well and good to look at the world through sun-goggles, but sun-goggles wouldn't keep an arrow from going straight through your skull. They were too naive. It was gonna get them killed.

He supposed, then, that all there was left to do was to do it himself.

“Uh… hi.” 

This was a bad idea. He stood rooted in the doorway of the (warrior training center? What did they call this place?) building, and all of the girls locked their eyes on him. The leader-- so he’d been right-- commanded them to stop and fold their fans. 

“What do you want?” She asked, eyeing him suspiciously. 

“I came to… ask if you could train me.”

“Oh, so now you’re crawling back to the little girls to beg for our help?” She mocked, sneer firmly affixed. 

His face burned. “I told you, I didn’t mean it that way! I just-- it’s really important I keep Aang and Katara safe. You guys beat our asses way too easily back there, and it’s lucky you guys weren’t Fire Nation, because we’d be dead otherwise, but… I need to learn how to protect them.”

The girl approached him, looking him up and down with a scrutinizing expression. “I don’t know. We don’t usually train boys.”

“I’ll do whatever you ask,” he said, fully knowing that open-ended promises were a dangerous game to play. 

She brightened, sending him a look that had his shoulders crouching up next to his ears.

“Alright, then. I’m Suki.”

The dress was deceptively heavy, and the warrior paint made him feel like all of his pores were choking. It was cakey, sort of like mud, where the warrior paint back home was made of oil. Suki told him, as she painted his face with a tapered brush, that the warrior paint was part tradition, part protection against being identified, and part there to keep sweat from dripping in the eyes. They apparently made it out of rocks, too-- ground up and mixed with water until it turned into a paste. It sure felt like rocks. 

It was only when they got to the gloves that they reached an impasse. 

“I’m not wearing them,” he insisted. “No way.”

“I told you: if you want to train, you have to do it the same way we do.”

Sokka shook his head. Keeping his hands free was a necessity-- he didn’t want to be unable to firebend in an emergency. He could do it with his breath, he supposed, but he liked to keep all three areas clear. “Can’t I just do it with everything but the gloves? Look, I’ve even got the warrior paint and the headband-- isn’t that enough?”

Suki pursed her lips and crossed her arms. “The gloves are a part of our uniform.”

“Just this one thing?” 

She huffed. “Why are you so dead set against gloves, of all things?”

He froze-- he couldn’t explain his real reasoning to her, he knew. “No reason.”

She raised an eyebrow. “No reason? Really? Because to me, it looked like just the mention of gloves had you shaking like a leaf in the wind.”

“I can’t-- really tell you.”

“If you’re gonna keep secrets, we won’t train you,” she said, chin jutting mulishly. 

He sighed. It was nice knowing you, Kyoshi Island! 

“I’ll show you, if-- if you promise not to freak out.”

A spark of curiosity lit in her eyes, and she nodded. Reluctantly, he held out his palms-- and smacked her hands away when she tried to place them on his. 

“No touchy.”

He took a deep breath and pulled the fire from behind his bellybutton, letting it course through his veins until it began to burn, right where his heart line met his life line. 

Suki took a step back in shock; Sokka smiled nervously up at her, then allowed the flame to dance along his body before he extinguished it. 

“You’re a--”

“Firebender, yeah. But--” he rushed to explain, “I’m not Fire Nation. My great-granddad on my dad’s side was a firebender, that’s where I get it from. I’ve lived in the Water Tribe my entire life, and I promise I’m not with them.”

Suki’s expression relaxed a little, though she still looked dumbfounded. Almost weakly, she said, “I didn’t even know there were firebenders outside of the Fire Nation.”

Sokka shrugged. “Well, you figure there’d have to be. If not from a respectable union like my great-granddad and great-grandma, then at least from, uh--” he coughed, not really wanting to verbalize it, “you know. Pillaging, rampaging, etc. etc. It’s pretty rare, I think, but it still happens.”

“Oh,” said Suki. “So the reason why you don’t want to wear gloves?”

Sokka flushed, inspecting a warped floorboard instead of looking Suki in the eye. “Well, it’s pretty much useless in a fight-- the biggest I can make the fire is maybe the size of Momo-- but I always feel more comfortable with my hands bare, anyways. I mean, I can do it with my mouth, too,” he exhaled a plume of fire to demonstrate, “but I have more control over the fire from my hands.”

“Wow. Huh.”

“Yeah. I-- I’m not gonna firebend at any of you, don’t worry, but I mean-- who knows, you know? Anything could happen. Better to be prepared, I say.”

“Well then, Mr. Firebender,” Suki smiled and stood, “let’s go kick your ass until you can kick ours back.”

To say that Sokka’s entire body hurt would be a severe understatement. He ached in places he hadn’t known he could ache-- he didn’t even know that he had hip muscles until he woke up and it felt like somebody had taken a bone club to them. Of course, the fact that he’d spent much of his childhood doing, well, nothing much at all, wasn’t helping. He’d developed the muscles that came from punching a bone needle into tough hide and thick fur, that came from rubbing cloth against a ribbed board with fervor, that came from butchering huge tiger seals with an overly-dull Earth Kingdom imported meat cleaver. More recently, he’d begun to develop the muscles that came with chasing Katara around as they brawled, but his legs and his core were still underdeveloped and weak. 

His tendons creaked and groaned as he lifted himself from the embrace of the bed, protesting movement and urging him to stay exactly where he’d been. The walk to the training compound was painful, and he felt like a baby wolf elk tottering along after its mother. His thighs and calves screamed at him the whole way. 

“‘It’s not about strength,’” he grumbled, mockingly, “‘it’s about using your opponent’s force against them.’ My thighs have something else to say about that.” He huffed and walked into the dojo. 

All of the girls were already there, though he consoled himself with the knowledge that they had yet to don the uniform, so he wasn’t really late. 

If he wasn’t so focused on the way his abs flared with pain when he hunched over, he would’ve been embarrassed about stripping to his unmentionables in a room full of girls, but he was long past the point where he cared about getting ogled. (Not that any of them were ogling him-- a couple of them looked curiously at the burn scar on his shoulder (really embarrassing story, entirely his fault) before starting in on their armor, but for the most part they were just focused on getting ready.)

The armor seemed lighter than it had yesterday, once it was fastened and done up, which was a pleasant surprise. An unpleasant surprise, on the other hand, was how badly he did with putting his makeup on with a brush. It went on in clumps and the lines were shaky and uncertain. At some point, he gave up and just used his fingers, Southern Water Tribe style. Suki shook her head in amusement, but said nothing.

Training was once again grueling, but after a short warm-up (relatively-- they only ran the perimeter of the village that day, instead of the entire island) they did stretches, which were a novel and entirely satisfying concept to Sokka. Although it didn’t fully soothe his smarting muscles, it relieved the ache a bit-- Suki explained something about lactic acid to Sokka, and while he didn’t entirely understand her explanation (something about missing out on basic biological concepts) he understood to a point, and vowed to learn more later. 

All of the girls paired up eventually, like yesterday, and he was once again with Suki.

“It’s actually nice to have a one-on-one sparring partner,” she said, blocking his left fan while swept her leg towards his feet. He released his fan from her grip and ducked backwards, narrowly avoiding getting tripped up. 

“Yeah? I used to spar with Katara, a little,” he panted-- he wasn’t even going to pretend he was nearly as in-shape as Suki. “She was a bit better than me,” Suki spun away, and they stood a few feet away from each other. “I think that’s a theme, maybe.”

Suki chuckled. “We’ve had an odd number of girls ever since Wakai came from the mainland, so I always have to spar three-ways,” she lunged low, and he jumped out of the way, aiming fluidly at her back. “Or I have to trade off,” she rolled to her left, avoiding the blow, “the worst is when I just walk around and supervise.”

“Hmm.”

“Alright-- I’m gonna use the fans, now, and you’ll have to try and block me without them.”

Sokka was sure that he would be fully black and blue by dawn the next day, but he managed a few successful parries anyways. 

“Not bad,” Suki complimented, when he blocked the fan with his forearm. 

There was a great thumping, and both Sokka and Suki turned to see Oyaji standing in the doorframe, looking painfully out of breath. Sokka was alarmed, wondering what could get the man so worked up. 

“Firebenders have landed on our shores!” He gasped, and for a moment Sokka thought he’d been found out, before he realized that there was no way that Oyaji would warn the firebender about the firebender. (Besides, he’d said firebenders, plural.) “Girls, come quickly!”

Ignoring the fact that he was not a girl (he could see how one would make the mistake, all trussed up as he was), he picked up the discarded fans and followed Suki at a dead sprint out of the room. 

He quickly mulled over who it could be, but really, the only firebenders he’d ever had contact with were Zuko’s crew and the raiders when he was nine-- so, really, the only conclusion that he could draw was that it was either Zuko, or it was some other random fleet from the Fire Nation. 

(He didn’t know which would be better.) 

A distinctly familiar, raspy voice rang through the streets. “Come out, Avatar! You can’t hide forever!” 

Typical. 

He followed Suki, skirting the edges of the streets and trying to keep out of sight until the time was right. 

“That’s Zuko,” he whispered in her ear, as they crouched behind a garbage bin. “He’s a waterbender. Good at it, too.”

“How do you know him?” She whispered in return, slinking over to the next shadowed side yard. 

“He came to my village. Made us give him Aang-- he doesn’t seem too into destruction or murder, said he’d leave us alone if the Avatar went with him. Kept his word. We broke Aang off his ship. All his guards are firebenders. If one of them tries to burn you, step behind me.”

One of the warriors dropped off the roof in front of Zuko, then, and he and Suki ran forward to join her. 

Zuko had to have had a flask on him, or something, because water streamed from his hip and he snapped it in a low circle, aiming at the girls’ feet. Suki and Sokka managed to avoid getting swept off-balance, but the other girls, caught off-guard by the waterbending, weren’t so lucky. There was recognition in his eyes when he looked at Sokka, and he sent a funnel of water directly at Sokka’s face, but Sokka dove out of the way. A warrior swung off the rooftop and knocked Zuko from his komodo rhino; the animal ran away, spooked by the sudden movement. It stepped on Sokka’s foot as it fled, and he cried out in pain. Something in his foot cracked. He fell to the floor.

Zuko struggled upright, whipping his water this way and that, but he only managed to knock two out of the count before Suki felled him. She stood over him, fan at his throat, and he moved as if he was going to get Suki’s feet out from under her, but instead he turned and aimed at Sokka. 

Without thinking about it, Sokka lifted his hands and met Zuko’s attack (ice shards, fucking ice shards ) with an inferno. The fire was the size of a small child-- he widened his eyes in surprise. Zuko did, too, probably expecting the weak flame balls that Sokka had produced back in the village. 

Zuko relented, and Sokka collapsed back onto the floor, exhausted. His foot throbbed something fierce, and the rest of his body ached with overexertion. There were muffled thumps, some shouts, and a few jets of water that raced past Sokka’s limited view. 

He struggled to keep his eyes open, keep his mind alert, but in the end, the pain and the fatigue pressed in on him, and despite the sounds of battle in the periphery of his hearing, darkness claimed him. 

Sokka’s awakening was not as peaceful as his dip into slumber: he woke up with a start, mind still holding onto the tendrils of nightmares-- pressing, burning cold, fire so hot it made his skin bubble and spit, corpses of unnamed people, a saw to his leg-- and would’ve fallen off Appa’s saddle were it not for Katara’s tense grip on his sleeve. 

“Fuck,” he cursed, not minding the presence of a twelve-year-old and his little sister. 

Katara blushed a deep red, even though Sokka knew she’d heard the word before-- the old women of the tribe had mouths filthy enough to rival a sailor’s, when it was just them. 

“You’re awake,” she said. 

“No. I’m asleep,” he deadpanned, quirking an eyebrow at her as best he could without moving any other parts of his body. 

“How’s your leg feel?”

( Thank you for pointing it out! he wanted to say, because you just reminded me that it exists! And hurts! ) 

“Like shit. Komodo rhinos are heavy. And I’m still feeling muscles where muscles shouldn’t be. What happened?” He asked, finally remembering that he’d missed most of the battle. He assumed. Unless it stopped as soon as he drifted off into unconsciousness.

“There were a couple of stray fires-- not too many, thankfully, they mostly looked like firebending accidents-- but Aang put them out by manhandling Unagi,” she giggled. “It was really funny to watch. We retreated, and Zuko did too.”

“Oh, good,” he said, “good. No deaths?”

Katara shook her head. “None.”

“Alright, then,” he yawned. “I’m going back to bed.”

It was only when he was on the cusp of sleep that he realized he was still wearing the full Kyoshi Warriors uniform.

Chapter Text

Even after the shoddy patch job at Omashu (they could only do so much for broken bones), his foot still hurt if he moved it too much. The surplus of physical activity he’d had to engage in to break the earthbenders out of jail didn’t help in the slightest (in fact, he was certain he’d heard another bone crack); as a result, he spent most of his time on Appa, moaning and groaning when Katara or Aang urged him to get down and start the fire for them. 

“What do you think Zuko’s scar is from?” Asked Katara, idly looking up at the clear blue sky. The sun was warm on Sokka’s skin-- he understood what all the hype was about, now. 

Aang shrugged. “Training accident?”

“Whatever it was,” Sokka yawned a bit, the gentle rocking of Appa’s saddle and the pleasant heat of the sun entreating him to nap a bit, “he didn’t do it himself. Obviously, I mean, he can’t firebend.”

“It looks kind of like a handprint, doesn’t it?” Asked Katara, lifting her hand up and letting the sunlight filter through her spread fingers. 

“I guess. I wouldn’t know. It looks purposeful,” said Sokka, pausing from his carving to try and picture the wound in his head. “I doubt anyone, bar a little kid, would have that little control. Even then, it looks too controlled to be an accident. It looks,” Sokka grimaced a little, being forced into the unpleasant circumstance of viewing his enemy as a real person, “it looks like someone put their hand there and held it.”

“Who would do something like that?” Katara asked, sounding almost upset on Zuko’s behalf. 

Sokka could kind of get it. Evil bastard or not, Zuko was still a person-- he wasn’t even the evilest bastard out there, Sokka would bet-- and there were very few people that Sokka thought deserved to get burnt like that. Zuko wasn’t on that list. He dug his knife into the wood and watched a splinter pop free and land on Momo’s fur; the lemur looked up with bleary eyes. 

“Zuko’s a prince, right?” Asked Sokka, as if he didn’t already know. 

Katara nodded. 

“I doubt anybody could get into the palace to do that to him-- so it either happened while he was out at sea, or somebody who was already in the palace did it,” he twisted his knife around, “I’m placing my bets on his dad.”

Katara looked like she was about to retch; Aang looked green in the face. She shook her head, as if to rid herself of the possibility. 

“He wouldn’t,” Katara said, sounding mostly like she was trying to convince herself than anything else, “I know he’s evil, but nobody can be that evil.”

Sokka raised a single eyebrow and sheared a strip of wood off the side of his carving. “Somebody had to be, because somebody did that to him. If not the unequivocally evil genocidal maniac currently running the Fire Nation, then who? ”

Katara flopped over on her stomach to look down over the edge of the saddle. “Those clouds look so soft, don’t they? Like you could just jump down and you’d land in a big, soft, cottony heap?” 

Sokka understood the abrupt topic change for what it was. He snorted. “Why don’t you try it, then?”

She smacked him on the arm and he turned to glare at her. “I am holding a knife! ” He brandished it to demonstrate.

Then Aang jumped off Appa’s head, glider in hand, and swooped into the clouds. When he returned, he was drenched. (Maybe Sokka should’ve warned him that clouds were just evaporated water, but sometimes kids need to make their own mistakes.)

“How was it, waterboy?” Sokka asked, giving up on his carving and casting it, and the knife, aside. 

“That doesn’t even make any sense! ” Katara cried.  

Aang airbent all the water off his body. 

And that was when they saw the charred stumps of the forest.

“We’re not letting you go to the Fire Nation without us,” said Sokka. “Besides, you need a firebender on your side, don’t you?”

Aang’s expression, previously dismayed, brightened up a couple of notches. The villagers gave them some supplies for the journey, and then they were off. 

To the stupid Fire Nation.

(Sokka was beginning to think that maybe he should’ve just tried his luck in the South Pole for a while longer; at least there how he would die was obvious. Slow, painful, excruciating, being weakened little by little until even his inner fire couldn’t keep him alive-- okay, so maybe this was better. If he played his cards right, he could even live past twenty!)

And of course (it was getting predictable at this point, honestly) as soon as they were within sight of Crescent Island, Zuko (the guy did not give up, did he?) showed up and started shooting flaming balls at them. For fun, or something. 

Yippee. 

Zuko’s eyes widened at the sight of the blockade; it could only be Zhao’s doing. He expected the Avatar to stop, to turn around, to retreat-- but his beast simply ducked and wove around the projectiles being lobbed at them and they somehow, someway, made it through the blockade unscathed. 

Zuko ignored his uncle’s pleading and commanded the ship that they run the blockade. The engines were damaged, yet still, they forged on. And then, just as it looked like they were going to collide with two of Zhao’s ships, they slipped on through. 

“It’s a trap,” said Iroh, “he means to follow you to the Avatar.”

Zuko squinted. “You’re right, Uncle. Keep heading north. I’m following the Avatar myself.”

There was a good chance that Zhao would be able to spot a row-boat, so he would have to hedge his bets on his waterbending being powerful enough to get him to Crescent Island. He was always at an advantage over firebenders when he was at sea-- he was surrounded by his element. His Uncle said it made him arrogant. Zuko didn’t care.

He shed his armor and dove into the water.

Sweat poured off of Katara’s brow in buckets, and even resilient Aang had a few drops beading atop his bald pate. Sokka, on the other hand-- surrounded by fire, lava, and glorious, glorious heat-- had never felt more refreshed or invigorated. If he’d thought he’d felt energized in the Earth Kingdom, it was nothing compared to this. He wondered if this was how Katara felt, surrounded by water and ice. 

“Uh, Sokka?” Katara asked, bemused. “You okay there?”

“I have never been better. Is this what having energy feels like? I feel fantastic,” he ran through some of the basic stretches he’d learned in Kyoshi. 

Even having to walk all of the way up to the fire temple, there was something thrumming in his veins (blood?) that made him almost forget the pain in his foot. (Almost was the keyword: he remembered it, but it was pushed to the back of his mind for the first time since he'd been stepped on by the komodo-rhino.)

Encountering the hostile fire sages didn’t break his spirit, either. 

There were five of them that Sokka could see, but for all it was worth there could be more hidden around the temple. They were dressed in all red, with tall, funny hats, strange three-pronged pieces sticking out of the scrolled top. 

“We are the fire sages,” they said. “Guardians of the temple of the Avatar.”

Aang completely missed their ominous tone, because instead of backing away expediently, he simply bounced on the balls of his feet and chirped, “great! I am the Avatar!”

At which point the fire sages lobbed fire at him. Aang deflected three of the fireballs with his airbending, and Sokka took the third. (Although it wasn’t necessarily the right time or place, he’d been thinking about it and came to the conclusion that fire was fire was fire: if Aang bent the air around him, if Katara bent the water around her, if King Bumi bent the earth around him, then couldn’t Sokka, feasibly, bend the fire around him?) He planted his back foot (the injured one) firmly, turning his hips but keeping his shoulders square. He closed his eyes and stretched his arms out, extending his own fire to feel for the one approaching Katara. 

It was-- strange, to be able to grab someone else’s flame. It did not feel the same as his own, burning hotter, less controlled. He felt it somewhere at the edges of his reach, but when he latched on, it felt like something clicked into place, and suddenly it was fully in his grasp. Problem was, the fireball was bigger and more powerful than anything he was able to produce, and its upkeep not only drew frantically at the heat source in his guts, but also strained his muscles with the force of keeping it hanging in the air instead of progressing forwards. So he swept his arms back, tugging the ball with them, and then brought them forward, in a move he’d seen Katara make, shifting his hips and feet and lobbing the fireball back at its maker. The fire sages scattered. 

The three of them turned and bolted down the nearest corridor, Sokka guarding the rear, throwing fearful glances over his shoulder every few seconds. They made a few twists and turns that Sokka didn’t quite register, solely focused on making sure that the fire sages hadn’t caught up to them. 

They skidded down another hallway, but it was a dead end. They turned on their heels to go back the way they came, but a fire sage spotted them and ran down. Sokka’s heart pounded audibly, skittering across his chest while his eyes slowly grew wider and his thoughts more erratic as his fight or flight instincts kicked in. It was like that children's tale he learned from Gran-Gran and recited to the young warriors of the tribe: the red fox-wolf looked upon the rabbit-vole and bared its teeth, but did not howl. Then the red fox-wolf sat on its haunches and stepped into the skin of a deer. 

“I’m here to help you!” The fire sage cried, waving his hands in front of him as the three of them readied their stances. “I don’t want to fight!”

“We have no reason to trust Fire Nation scum,” Sokka growled, “you’ll just attack us the second we let our guard down.”

To his immediate surprise, the fire sage dropped to his knees and bent, prostrate, at Aang’s feet. Sokka had heard of it before, the nose-to-floor bow, a sign of ultimate respect. It was the type of bow a peasant gave to a king.

“You wish to speak to Avatar Roku,” said the sage, “I can take you to him.”

He looked up, eyes plaintive.

Aang looked uncertain. “How?”

Sokka's hackles rose with the fire sage, but the man simply turned and placed his hand on the wall. The surface heated under the firebender’s palm, and the wall slid open. Sokka wondered, briefly, at the mechanisms of the thing--he admittedly knew little of locksmithing, having little use for locks in a village like the one he'd grown up in, but he knew enough of the basic principles for the idea of a heat-activated lock to befuddle him.

“This way,” the fire sage said, interrupting Sokka's thoughts and urging the group forward.

Ultimately, it was not trust but the threat of the other fire sages closing in on their group that ushered them through the wall and into the passageway. Three-on-one was better odds than three-on-four. The fire sage and Aang discoursed about the Avatar; Sokka paid no attention to them, focusing on the make of the secret passage. It was dim, seemed like the fire sages made infrequent use of it, and smelled like fire-bat droppings. 

“You are a firebender?” The sage asked, startling Sokka. 

“What? Yeah.”

The sage-- Shyu, he’d introduced himself as-- Shyu hummed.

“That was an impressive display of control back there. You are skilled.”

Sokka snorted in disbelief. “Skilled? My fire’s barely warmer than a candle and barely bigger, too. When I’m not in mortal danger, that is.”

“Ah, but skill is measured not in power, but in control. Firebending children learn control first, and power second. It is not safe otherwise,” the sage chuckled, “I was going to ask the name of your master, but that you think you are unskilled is proof enough of what you lack.”

Sokka rolled his eyes. Forget colonialism: the Fire Nation could've met its evil quota for all of eternity through backhanded compliments alone. “ Thanks. ”

They reached the sanctuary, then, stepping out from the dim lighting of the stairwell and into a massive room, illuminated by large, almost floor-to-ceiling windows. Sokka’s eyes were quickly drawn away from the glass by the huge, fuck-off door in the center of the room, which was clearly meant to be the centerpiece. It was probably also the entry to the statue of Roku that Aang had mentioned. 

They were closed, though, which was apparently a problem. 

“Only a fully realized Avatar is able to open these doors alone,” Shyu said, mournfully. “Otherwise, all five fire sages must open the door at once, with five simultaneous fire blasts.”

“Five simultaneous fire blasts?” Sokka asked, “I can probably help you there. If you can do three fire blasts, I can do the last two, and--”

“Three? I can only aim with two at once, young firebender. I happen not to be in possession of a third arm.”

Sokka blinked. “Oh, I-- I meant your breath.”

The sage reeled backward. “Only members of the royal family are known to have mastered the Dragon’s Breath technique!” He cried. 

“Oh. I just assumed it was something everyone could do. I figured you’d probably be stronger at it, so… but I can do three, then, that’s fine. You aim at the first two, I’ll get the last three.”

Shyu looked like someone had just stomped on his isopuppy, but when Sokka stepped back and aligned himself with the last three fire tubes, Shyu followed his lead and settled in front of the first two. 

“Ready?” he asked. 

The sage nodded.

Breathing fire was completely unlike producing it with his hands. He didn’t usually use it to produce big blasts of fire, just to keep himself warm in the winter or to entertain the kids of the village (though he tried not to do it too often--as nice as it was not to be looked on with fear, he didn't want to desensitize the kids in case of another attack by the Fire Nation), but he’d practiced before, a few hundred feet away from the south wall of the village, where accidentally melting the ice below him wouldn’t amount to a quick dip in the freezing ocean. His breath was more powerful than anything he could produce with his hands, and during the peak of the summer months Katara would even sometimes swear that there was a tinge of blue at the very base of his plumes of flame. (He never believed her, knew it was just a trick from the blue of the ice around them.) 

Katara once asked him if it hurt his throat to breathe fire; if it burned the walls of his esophagus the whole way up, blistering his vocal cords. It didn’t. He’d explained that the fire that was always in him did not become flame until it touched the air around them, that it was simply possibility when it lay humming below his skin. 

“It’s not working!” Called Shyu. 

Sokka stepped back and let his flames snuff out. 

“Okay, new plan.”

A soggy Zuko stepped out from behind a column. “The Avatar is coming with me!” He shouted, grabbing Aang’s arms and pinning them behind his back. 

When the fuck did he get here? 

A fire sage tackled Sokka, manhandling him to a column and chaining his wrists. He couldn’t help but notice that they didn’t chain him next to Katara. He could hear the fire sages closing the doors-- the doors that they had worked so hard to open. Sokka could feel any and all hope he had leaving with his sweat. (All the fire in the room was starting to raise the temperature, and even firebenders could only withstand so much heat. Katara looked absolutely wrecked-- Sokka pitied her.)

Sokka didn’t get a view of anything but the lovely windows, but Katara informed him that Aang had escaped Zuko and made it into Roku’s sanctuary just on time. There was bird shit all over the panes. (Sokka wondered if anyone ever cleaned the windows, or if they just let it accumulate grime. It didn’t seem like several centuries' worth of grime, so he assumed somebody had to have taken a wet rag to the surface at some point in the last fifty years. He’d actually never really considered the implications of windows, having not had anything of the sort back in the South Pole, but they would have to be maintained, wouldn’t they? Otherwise they’d end up too dirty to see through--)

“Commander Zhao,” one of the fire sages said. 

Commander Zhao? He’d heard that name before, hadn’t he?

“Prince Zuko,” said who he assumed Commander Zhao was, “it was a noble effort, but your little dip in the ocean didn’t fool me. Tell me, what do you think the Fire Lord will have to say about his son being a waterbender?” 

There were a few gasps around the room, and a jangle of chains, as Zuko spoke again. “You’re too late, Zhao! The Avatar’s inside and the doors are sealed.”

Zuko was slammed into the column and shackled with the same intensity they’d shackled Sokka. Sokka raised an eyebrow. Wasn’t this kid a prince?

“You can’t do this to me!” Shouted Zuko, straining against his chains. He, like Sokka, had been chained facing away from the sanctuary, as opposed to on the side, like Katara. 

The Zhao dude, who Sokka was quickly deciding was a Dick (with a capital D, because man, if he’d thought Prince Wetwipes was bad…), chuckled. “Oh, but I can -- unless you forgot the terms of your banishment?”

Banishment? 

Sokka was learning too many things to keep up with. It was giving him a headache. The headache may have also been a consequence of hitting his head when the fire sage threw him to the floor.

“Fuck,” the prince whispered, clearly meant to only be heard by himself, but Sokka was at the column adjacent, and the din of the room was reduced by the column at his back. “I shouldn’t have swum over here-- too risky-- should’ve taken the boat and made a smokescreen--”

“Calm down, buddy,” placated Sokka. 

The prince turned red. “Don’t you tell me what to do!” He shouted. 

“Whatever.”

“Get in position!” Zhao shouted. The doors began to creak open. 

There was a bright, white light. As it faded, Katara screamed, “no! Aang!”

Sokka startled. “What? What’s going on?” 

Katara didn’t answer.

“Katara! What’s going on?”

Zhao yelled. “Fire!”

Shyu spoke up for the first time since the Prince had interrogated him. “Avatar Roku.”

“ What!? ” Sokka yelped. “Avatar Roku? What? Can somebody--”

“Oh, will you shut up? ” Prince Wetwipes growled, jerking in his chains, “just accept that we have no idea what’s going on. Or look in the reflections on the window,” he jerked his head at the pane, and-- huh. Well, that was convenient. 

The reflections only came in bursts, when there was a light brighter than the setting sun outside of the window, but the overall lighting in the room was generally dim, so his understanding of the situation was still patchy at best. 

There was a circle of fire, he could see, and then the fire was sent out in a quick burst. The blast was concussive, shaking the room and shattering the windows. Most of the glass fell off the side of the building, but some of it landed in a pile on the floor of the room. Sokka pitched forward as his bindings were melted off, catching himself with his hands. 

“ Fuck! ” He screamed, shards of glass digging into the soft flesh of his palms. Katara seemed to have no interest in helping him, as she stumbled out of her confinement and out of his peripheral vision. 

His blood was pouring down in torrents, the wounds deeper than they should have been. The fight raged on behind him as he pulled the strips of fabric desperately off of his forearms to wrap them around his hands. Hair tickled at his cheeks, between his chin and cheekbone. 

All was quiet by the time he’d managed to stifle his tremors in order to suppress the bleeding. And it was really, really hot. 

The room was filled with slow-moving lava, and had been completely abandoned-- where were Aang and Katara? The Fire Temple began to shake like it was going to collapse. 

It was then that he noticed Zuko slumped over, chains only partially melted, straining against the weight of his body. He was completely out for the count, blood seeping from a wound on the back of his head. 

Later, when asked, Sokka would say, “I didn’t think he deserved to die,” “I didn’t want his death on my hands.” But the truth was? As he rushed forwards and melted Zuko’s chains all the way, catching his unconscious body in his arms and carrying him out of the collapsing temple, he wasn’t thinking about anything. He was moving on pure instinct, his mind screaming that somebody he knew was in danger, and his body reacting. It hadn’t mattered that objectively, he and Katara and Aang would be better off with Zuko out of the picture-- just that there was lava creeping its way to a familiar face. 

His arms burned with all the extra weight (despite the training with the Kyoshi Warriors, he still wasn’t very strong) and even seized with adrenaline he could still feel the way it made his bad foot throb. Pausing for a moment, he shifted until Zuko was on his back-- arms thrown over Sokka’s shoulders, feet trailing on the floor. At the cost of his foot, it was faster than holding Zuko’s torso to his chest and hoping not to trip over one of Zuko’s limp ankles. 

“Aang!” he called, seeing the other boy pull up to the window on Appa. 

He eyeballed the distance-- he could probably make it on his own, but with a prince (banished! If he was banished, was he still technically a prince?) serving as dead weight on his back, he was more likely to turn into Sokka flatbread on the rocks below. 

“Aang!” he called again. “You’re gonna have to get a little closer, buddy!”

Now, Sokka wasn’t entirely sure, but he was reasonably fucking certain that what he heard the idiot say in return was, “I can’t!”

He gritted his teeth. “Go lower, then!”

As Appa slipped below his line of sight, he stood on the narrow window ledge. His center of balance was all off, but he only had to last (one yard, two yards, three--) a little longer. He pitched forwards (Katara cried out in fear) and pushed as hard as he could off the wall of the building. (If only he didn’t trust Aang so much, he would’ve hedged his bets on climbing down the wall of the temple before the whole thing collapsed in flames.)

Even with Aang’s hastily placed air cushion, the impact still knocked the air out of him. He rolled onto his back, trying desperately for a lungful of breath. After several seconds of fruitless straining, his lungs peeled away and inflated.

“Sokka, are you okay?” Asked Aang, concerned face appearing in his field of vision. 

“Yeah,” he wheezed, taking the opportunity to roll off Zuko, who he was probably crushing. (And he did not risk his life to save a guy only to find out he squashed him to death immediately afterward.)

“That was idiotic! ” said Katara, her delightful countenance appearing next to Aang’s. “You could’ve died.”

“Yeah,” said Sokka, “it started to lose its impact after, like, the third time I got hypothermia.”

Katara furrowed her brows angrily. “It’s not funny!”

Sokka opened his mouth to comment that yeah, it kind of was, but a groan to his right interrupted him. 

Both Katara and Aang looked like this was the first time they’d noticed their guest, because Katara got angrier and Aang went bug-eyed. Before either of them had a chance to say anything, though, Zuko stirred, cracking open his good eye (and maybe his bad eye, too, but it was always sort of difficult to tell). 

He didn’t register the situation, evidently, because instead of screaming at them, he simply sighed and closed his eye(s) again. 

“We have to get him back to his uncle’s ship,” said Sokka, in lieu of explanation.

“What!?” Screeched Katara.

“Look,” said Sokka, patience already thinning to dangerous levels, “unless you want to babysit the guy that’s been trying to capture us this entire time, I’d suggest we find his uncle’s ship and give him back. Unless you guys wanna keep O Venerable Sir Wetwipes hostage. Besides, I doubt the guy's gonna hurt us if we're just giving him back his nephew."

“No,” said Aang, voice cheerful, “but those Fire Navy ships surrounding his might.” Sokka followed where he was pointing, and sure enough…

(Sokka was really going to have a conversation with that kid about appropriate tone.)

“Let’s get some cloud cover before we decide what to do.” Sokka sighed and slumped back down. “I really don’t want to have to lug the prince of the Fire Nation around with us.”

Zuko chose this moment, precisely, to wake up fully. (He wasn’t too happy.)

“Where am I?” He asked, and then, having opened his eye, more angrily, “where are you taking me?”

He had recovered from his injury with remarkable speed and an exceptionally incensed vigor.

“Back to your uncle’s ship,” Sokka rolled his eyes. “Or, we were, but there’s an entire Fire Navy fleet surrounding him.”

“It’s my ship,” then, “ what!? We need to help him!” He crawled over to the edge of the saddle. The tops of the clouds didn’t agree with his stomach, it seemed, because after shrieking and scuttling away, he leaned over and vomited right there in the saddle. (Not even over the edge-- the boy had no common damn courtesy.)

“Get me down!” He shouted, and Sokka thought that might’ve been the first time he’d heard Zuko speak where the other boy didn’t sound even the least bit angry. 

“Relax, buddy,” soothed Sokka, sitting up and manoeuvering around the puddle of sick. “We’re just up here until we can think of a way to get to your uncle’s ship without being shot down.”

“I’d rather take my chances with the Fire Navy,” said Zuko, eyes screwed shut and gripping onto the leather saddle with white knuckles. 

“Really?” Asked Sokka, amused. He cocked an eyebrow. “Personally, I think that this is a lot safer. Never thought the great Prince Zuko would be afraid of heights.”

“I’m not ,” the prince protested, “this is just-- unnecessarily high. We are above the clouds. ”

“We need to go,” said Aang.

“So we just wasted all our time,” sighed Katara, “great.”

Appa lurched down, Zuko screeched, and they broke through the cloud cover. The ships had moved, and they were now close enough that it was only a matter of seconds before they were recognized and shot at. 

“Okay!” Shouted Sokka over the rush of wind past their ears. “Katara, Zuko, you two can waterbend the ships out of the way!” 

“No!” Shouted Zuko.

“I’m not powerful enough!” Shouted Katara.

“Okay, new plan!” Amended Sokka. “Try not to die!”

The first fireball came hurtling towards them. Appa deftly avoided it without so much as breaking a sweat. (Did flying bison sweat?)

Sokka was getting real damn tired of people aiming fireballs at them.

“If you drop me off on the ship and leave, my uncle will die!” Shouted Zuko.

(Sokka noted how Zuko failed to include himself in that statement, and filed it for later review.)

He could see the logic behind that, even if the trappings of the Fire Nation judicial system eluded him-- Zuko and his uncle were surrounded, and if Zuko was seen being aided by the Avatar, it would probably be considered treason (?) and would therefore probably get them executed. Which, all things (the fact that Sokka risked his ass for Zuko, like, five minutes ago) considered, Sokka didn’t want. 

“What about dropping in and picking your uncle up?”

Appa did a barrel roll to avoid one fireball, and Aang used his airbending to break through the second. 

“There’s my crew on that ship!” Shouted Zuko, and while he wasn’t actually biting his nails, his tone implied it.

“There’s vomit in my hair!” Screeched Katara.

“Get over it!”

“Can we focus!?” He screamed wordlessly into his hands for a few moments and then resurfaced. “Okay! We need to draw them away. Zuko, how much would you say that this Zao--”

“Zhao.”

“--guy wants to capture Aang?”

“Who’s Aang?”

“ The Avatar! ”

“A lot, probably?”

“Enough to draw his men away from your ship?”

“If you make a big enough ruckus!”

(Who the fuck even says ruckus?)

“Alright! Let’s drop Zuko off and wreak some havoc!”

They ducked and weaved their way through the constant barrage of projectiles. Getting to Zuko's ship was probably the easiest thing they’d done all day. (Which was saying something.) Zhao’s ships clearly hadn’t been arranged to stop incoming airborne vehicles: the circular formation meant that only about a fourth of the ships could fire at them at any given time, and the catapults themselves took a longer time to fire, as each ship had to winch their catapult around to face them every time they moved. 

They hovered a few feet over the deck of Zuko’s ship, and Zuko jumped down with ease. 

“Enjoy your new lives as traitors to the Fire Nation!” Called Sokka.

Iroh waved back cheerfully and Zuko looked like he was about to burst a blood vessel. Appa lifted off.

“Havoc wreaking time!” Aang cheered.

They lost Zhao’s ships midway to the Earth Kingdom. Zuko's vomit had begun to reek. Sokka was sweaty and exhausted. The adrenaline had seeped out of his pores, leaving behind only a sharp, throbbing pain in his foot, a deep sting in his hands, and aches all over his body. 

After the exhilaration of being surrounded by his native element, Sokka’s comedown was brutal. It hadn’t helped that so much had happened today. (He was also partially in shock over the sheer volume of stupid shit he managed to pull off.)

“What do you think’ll happen to them?” Asked Katara, once they’d cleaned themselves off and washed Appa’s saddle at a lakeside pit stop. (Katara had been alarmed at the cuts he’d received from the glass. “No thanks to you,” Sokka had grumbled.) They were in the air again, since Appa didn’t seem too tired, and they wanted to put as much distance between themselves and that shitshow as possible. 

“I’m pretty sure that it’s legally required for citizens of the Fire Nation to be melodramatic. They’ll probably be hunted down for meat,” quipped Sokka.

“I mean… you’re not too far off,” said Katara. “Maybe not the, uh, meat part, but the rest of it.”

“Maybe if he was just Prince Zuko, instead of banished Prince Zuko, they’d be fine. Or if his dad was decent…”

“You’re not still on about your theory about Zuko’s scar, are you?” Huffed Katara. 

“No, listen-- think about it. Who could possibly have the power to banish a prince?”

“A council?” Suggested Aang.

Sokka shook his head. “They rule by divine right, I know that at least. A council can argue all they want, but at the end of the day, what the Fire Lord says, goes. And who is the only person in the entire nation that has more power than the Crown Prince?”

“How do you even know all this?” 

“Did you seriously not pay attention in world history? Just answer the question.”

Katara blanched as she reached the conclusion that Sokka had reached almost immediately. 

“If Zuko’s dad banished him, who’s to say he wouldn’t do worse? And if he banished him, why would he welcome his son-- ostensibly a traitor-- back?”

Katara buried her head in her hands. Aang looked as ill as Zuko had when he’d just woken up. 

“I hate how much sense that makes,” she groaned.

“But… what could Zuko even have done to get him burned and banished?” Aang asked, aghast.

“We don’t actually know that the two events are connected,” said Sokka, “probably are, though."

He considered. “Zuko… I don’t know. I mean, he’s evil, but so’s his dad, so it stands to reason that whatever he did had to have been… not evil.”

Katara snorted. “If he’s even capable.”

Aang shrugged. “I can see the good in him. I mean, he’s just a kid, too, isn’t he?”

She conceded. “I just-- I struggle… to think that anyone could be that awful. ”

As much as her naivety had often frustrated him across the length of their journey thus far, Sokka had to admit that he was proud of his sister. It took... he was loath to admit it, but it took a monumental amount of strength and resilience to see all that they had seen and still remain optimistic about the state of the world. Agni knew Sokka hadn't managed.

Sokka gave her a comforting pat on the shoulder. “I know, Katara. Trust me, I know.”

“That makes me even more nervous to have to face Ozai,” said Aang, biting his nails. 

Sokka blinked. “...what?”

“Oh! I guess I forgot to tell you.”

“Yeah… that… that one sounds, uh, kind of important.”

“Well, basically… there was this comet a hundred years ago-- Sozin’s comet. It gave Fire Lord Sozin, and the rest of the firebenders, enough power to wipe… to wipe out... Well, basically, it’s coming back at the end of summer, and we need to stop Ozai before it comes.”

So now this saving the world stuff had a deadline.

“Great!” 

Chapter Text

After a few days of easy, uninterrupted traveling, they settled down by a waterfall. Although they’d been traveling along the coast, they’d been religiously avoiding settling near any waterways (for obvious reasons), but Katara insisted she needed to practice her bending (“You can do it whenever! It’s not fair!”) and Sokka agreed that it had probably been long enough.

“You just push like this--”

“Like this?” Aang asked. 

Sokka looked up from cleaning Appa’s toes to watch their waterbending practice. Aang was a quick study-- his wave was already twice the size of Katara’s. Then again, he had the advantage of already having mastered one element. (Could techniques from one form of bending effectively be applied to another? He had, after all, used a form of Katara's to redirect the fire sages' fireballs, so it seemed to work. He would have to get Katara and Aang to teach him some moves once he was done with the mats of fur on Appa’s feet.)

And then Aang washed all their stuff down the river. 

(Well, not all of their stuff. Sokka and Katara’s clothes were safe, because it was laundry day, and Aang’s clothes were safe, because he only had one outfit, and their weapons were safe, because they never keep their weapons in their bags-- but the maps, food, basic necessities, etc. etc., were all swept away.)

At least Appa’s toes were clean.

“Are you--” Sokka grabbed his head with his hands. “Idiot! Go-- go put it back!”

“What!?” Katara yelped, “I need this! Aang needs this!”

Sokka groaned. “We need-- do you realize how-- pirates are dangerous, Katara. They do not care about your life. They will kill you for a scroll, especially if it was gonna get them a hundred gold pieces from some rich kid. We’re going north, anyways, that’s the whole point of this field trip.”

Katara huffed. “But you’re so-- you’re so good at firebending, and I can barely even make a wave, and--”

“You are such an--!” 

“Sokka!”

“I swear, I am the only one in this group who--”

“Sokka!”

“ What!? ” 

Aang pointed meekly at his mouth. “You’re sparking.”

He glanced down, and, sure enough, with every labored breath came a few bright sparks. 

He’d known that bending was tied to your emotions, to an extent, but he’d never actually firebent by accident before. Back home, in the South Pole, it had simply taken up too much energy to do-- he had to focus hard to produce a flame. Most of his firsthand experiences with accidental bending were when Katara would get angry and disturb the waves-- like when they broke Aang out of the iceberg because Katara was screaming at him for whatever it was she was pissed off about--or when she'd freeze him to the ground for being a 'spirits-damned idiot.' 

“Oh,” he said, simply. 

To say that the encounter at the Fire Temple had shaken Zuko would be an understatement. 

The events of the day (as far as he could recount them, at least-- he had sustained a head injury, after all) kept replaying in his head like a sick parody of those picture-scrolls for young children that they kept in the palace library back home. As all things did, when bouncing repeatedly from one corner of the brain to the next, the images eventually warped and shifted into something bigger and more gruesome than they had been. Zhao’s fleet, surrounding Uncle’s ship, went from twelve ships to sixty-three, and the ships themselves doubled in size. The waves that he swam through to get to the Fire Temple turned from gentle swells to the choppy white-capped mountains of a tempest. Zhao and the fire sages grew twenty feet tall, their faces thrown into shadow and their shoulders limned by the same ominous fire that characterized Zuko’s memories of his father. The firebending water savage spat fire the size of a particularly bodacious komodo-rhino with his every breath, and their flying beast ascended until Zuko could almost touch the edges of the sun with his fingertips. 

Despite his protestations, getting off that hunk of metal and into port was a welcome respite from his mind. There was precious little to do on the ship, and the particular dark grey steel that the Fire Navy used in many of their constructions was beginning to make him nauseous. 

“What do you think about this hat, nephew?” 

Zuko turned his attentions away from a broadsword that looked like it had been beaten into shape from the tin cans that held army rations (was that a bit of label residue on the tip?) to his uncle. Iroh was wearing one of the wide, conical wicker hats that he'd seen bobbing around rice fields and busy marketplaces in the Earth Kingdom. 

“It looks stupid,” he said, even though it suited his uncle just fine. It was just a hat, after all.

His uncle hummed, and promptly turned to the vendor of the hat to haggle the price down from two silvers to four bronze pieces. 

“I thought we were here to replace your missing tile?” Asked Zuko, rolling his eyes.

“If the red wolf-bear sets his sights only on the rabbit-vole, then he may miss the bushes full of thrushberries that he passes.”

Zuko groaned. 

“That proverb needs some work,” uncle muttered, “it’s a bit too obvious. Let us go to the docks-- I’m sure some of the ships will have something promising to offer!”

“Fath-- Uncle, those are pirates --”

Sokka was dutifully not paying attention to Aang and Katara as they ran through the forms on the waterbending scroll. He wanted to mention that before learning the water whip it would probably be prudent to learn the basic shapes that came together to compose the water whip, but he also valued his balls and their attachment to his body. So he sat in silence. 

Aang was exceedingly lucky that two bronze pieces was just enough to buy a few rolls of bandages, because if it hadn’t been, Sokka would definitely be re-evaluating the morality of beating twelve-year-olds to a pulp. (As it was, Katara was currently under consideration for getting her shit rocked. Who the hell steals from pirates? Sokka’s foot injury had already started to spread to his ankle, he couldn’t just be running for his life willy-nilly like that.)

“What about me?” He asked, once Katara had apologized to Aang for screaming at him and apologized to Momo for whipping him. 

“No more apologies!” She shouted.

“Personally, I feel like I deserve one,” he said. “Your stupid stunt almost got us killed, and running hurts. Or did you forget that half of the bones in my left foot are powder?”

Katara rolled her eyes. “You have to stop milking that--”

“I’m not milking it!” He gestured to his wrapped foot. “It’s a genuine handicap! It’s also something that should definitely not be walked or run on!”

“All you do is complain --”

“This is the first time I’ve complained about it in--”

“Guys! Can we stop fighting?”

“No!” Katara and Sokka yelled in unison. 

“Jump!” Sokka yelled, just as the boat started to careen over the edge of the falls. 

A lancing pain shot up his shin and ankle, tearing a scream and some flames from his lungs. 

Aang and Katara were saying something, and there were hands on his side, but his world had narrowed to the size of his leg below his knee. He vaguely registered puffs of heat skating along his chin and cheeks and cool wet trails from the corners of his eyes. 

(It hurt, it hurt, it hurt, it hurt, it hurt-- )

His lids were screwed shut and his teeth clenched as he tried to ride out the waves of agony that coursed up his leg, but it was almost unbearable. He took in a labored, ragged breath, and choked a sob out on the return. A cool hand was placed on his (burning, when did he get so hot? ) forehead, and he curled inwards on the touch and keened. His foot felt like it was on fire. 

...

“We’ll need to find someplace to help,” somebody said. “But I don’t know where we are, and I can’t read maps very well.”

“Maybe we should set up camp in that forest?” Another voice asked. “Is that what Sokka would say?”

“Probably? Uh--”

…

“Do you know how to start a fire?”

“No. Do you?”

“I think-- if we rub two sticks together? Or maybe it was--”

“Was it spark rocks?”

“We don’t have any of those. We just use Sokka.”

“Monkey feathers. I know we used to light fires without spark rocks somehow before we found out about Sokka, but I can’t remember anymore. Oh, I hope everyone in the village is getting along okay without us--”

…

“I don’t think I appreciated Sokka enough,” Aang chattered. “Even with my airbending, it’s cold.”

“This is terrible. I should never have told him he was milking his wound.”

“Where does that saying even come from? Like, what does it even mean?”

"It's kinda gross, now that I'm thinking about it."

…

“Ugh,” said Sokka, unpeeling his eyes. The sharp, burning twinges of pain in his leg had subsided to a manageable deep, unceasing, throbbing ache. (That was to say, it was still horrible, but he wasn’t half-passed out from it.)

“When do you think the fever will break?” Asked Katara, seemingly paying no attention to his awakened state. He’d probably ‘woken up’ plenty of times before this. She moved a cold cloth along his forehead.

“Where are we?” He asked. 

“Oh, Sokka!” Aang cheered. “Are you awake for good?”

“I think so,” he rasped, his throat hoarse. (From what? Lack of water? Screaming?) “Where are we?” He repeated.

“Um,” Aang looked contemplative, “well, we found out something really cool-- ”

“Just cut to the chase.”

“Katara and I can’t read maps!” 

Sokka thunked his head back onto the bedroll they’d put there. “Great. So we don’t know.”

“Nope. We mostly just went the same direction as the river, though.”

He sighed in relief. This would at least be a little bit salvageable. Ignoring how much it (holy fuck holy fuck holy fuck) hurt, he heaved himself into a sitting position, reclining onto the bags that Katara hastily pushed behind his back. He beckoned to Aang. “Bring me the maps.”

“Hm. Okay,” he said, tracing the line of the river with his finger. (He really had to wonder how bad Aang and Katara had to be at reading maps that they were unable to trace their location.) He glanced up from the map to check the location of the sun, then back down to the map. 

“We’re in this unnamed forest right here,” he pointed out their location to Aang and Katara, who leaned over him to look. “There’s an occupied Earth Kingdom village right here.” He slid his finger up the map to the village. “We can get help for my leg there.”

“But it’s occupied!” Protested Katara.

“If we dress in Earth Kingdom greens and give Aang a hat, we’ll blend in just fine. I’m more worried about the Fire Nation encampment I heard rumors of back at the market. We’ll have to walk; Appa’s too conspicuous.”

He generously ignored Katara mockingly mouthing conspicuous in his peripheral vision (sororicide was not a viable option, sororicide was not a viable option, sororicide--) and continued on. “My instincts say it’s not safe to fly.”

“Appa’s not too conspikikus, ” said Aang.

“Conspicuous. He’s-- he’s a flying bison, Aang. He’s like a homing beacon for the Fire Nation that says ‘here’s the Avatar! Ripe for the picking!’ How do you think Zuko keeps finding us? Not our big personalities, that’s for sure.”

Katara rolled her eyes. “Even if your instincts are telling you to walk, your foot is telling you not to, genius. What did you say yesterday? Half the bones in your foot are powder?” She raised her eyebrow.

He hated when she was right. 

“Fine. We won’t walk. Appa’s gonna have to stay below the treeline, though, I don’t want Zuko to spot him. And if we get murdered and/or captured? I was right.”

He hated when he was right.

Appa, beyond all expectations, somehow managed to make a decent landing. The jolt still sent his foot nerves into a frenzy, and his lungs expelled some more fire. 

When he looked up, it was to a group of kids beating the shit out of the Fire Nation encampment, and, given all of the blood-spurting and throat-slitting, killing them, too. Katara and Aang had slid off of Appa to help (he didn’t know how they weren’t seeing the absolute carnage these kids were wreaking, which Sokka was pretty sure went against Aang’s number one Moral Code, Thou Shalt Not Commit Murder). Sokka sat and pretended that his leg wasn’t screaming at him. 

“You just took out a whole army almost single-handed,” said Aang, and the amount of awe in his voice did not make Sokka comfortable in the slightest.

He stared down at the corpse of a Fire Nation soldier, half-hidden in a bush, and tried not to throw up. He wouldn't have cared otherwise, but the Fire Nation soldier’s helmet had rolled off, and even covered in blood Sokka could tell the guy was young. He looked like he was maybe Sokka's age. Probably not much older. If he thought about it too hard, he'd probably actually sick up all over the saddle. So he turned away.

“My name is Jet,” what an asshole name. Nobody nice was ever named Jet. “--and these are my Freedom Fighters: Sneers, Longshot, Smellerbee, The Duke, and Pipsqueak.” Did these guys just come back from a Shitty Idiot Names convention? Seriously? 

“I’m Katara,” said Katara, and the way she’d smoothed out and curled up the edges of her voice made Sokka even more uncomfortable than the way Aang wore his admiration in his eyes. “That’s Aang-- he’s the Avatar-- and that over there on the saddle is my brother, Sokka.”

Sokka grimaced when Jet looked his way. Jet didn’t seem too pleased, either.

“Your brother’s not a fighter?” He asked.

Katara somehow managed to miss all of the carefully-placed disdain and smugness that colored Jet’s tone, because she replied brightly, “oh, no, he is! He’s just hurt right now. Do you guys have any healers?”

“We do, but we can only help so much,” he didn’t even sound genuinely apologetic. What was this guy’s damage?

There was a peal of laughter from Aang, drawing Sokka’s attention away from Jet and Katara’s conversation. He’d already made friends with the Freedom Fighters, it seemed, as they started to root around the camp for supplies. Sokka lay back and tried not to cry. (Out of frustration, out of fear, out of--)

“Um,” Katara’s voice started, nearer to Appa than she’d last been. “Thanks for saving us, Jet. We’re lucky you were there.”

“I should be thanking you. We were waiting for a distraction all morning-- you guys were perfect.”

One of the Freedom Fighters called something to Jet, and his footsteps went away. Katara climbed up onto the saddle.

“I don’t like that guy,” said Sokka. “He gives me a bad feeling.”

Katara rolled her eyes. “ Everything gives you a bad feeling.”

“And? Name one time I’ve been wrong.”

She looked away from him, which was answer enough. “Whatever. You’re wrong this time.”

(It was only because he didn’t want his little sister to have to look at a corpse--more of them, that is--that he didn’t point out the one in the bushes.)

“I really-- I don’t have a good feeling about this, Katara. You trust me, right?” He pleaded, propping himself up on his elbows. 

“He’s a good guy!” She protested. “He and his Freedom Fighters have been fighting against the Fire Nation.”

“There’s more than one way to fight. They’re not doing it the right way.”

Katara didn’t respond. Sokka laid back down. 

“They have a secret hideout!” Aang crowed, jumping onto Appa’s saddle. “They’re taking us to see it. And Jet’s gonna get their healer to check out your leg!” 

Sokka harrumphed and rolled over so his back was facing Aang and Katara. 

“What’s his problem?” He heard Aang ask. 

Appa began to lumber off after the Freedom Fighters. The walk was pretty short, all things considered, but it dragged on and on when his leg protested against every tiny jolt Appa made as he traversed the ground. 

“We’re here!” Jet called. 

Sokka looked up. “Where? There’s nothing here.” 

One of the larger Freedom Fighters clambered up onto Appa and hooked one arm under Sokka’s knees and the other just below his shoulder blades in a bridal carry. To the guy’s credit, he handled Sokka with incredible care, trying not to jostle him in the ungainly slide off of Appa’s side. 

“Alright, don’t scream too loud,” the guy said. His voice was so deep that Sokka could feel the rumbling vibrations through his chest. 

He adjusted Sokka so he was holding him with only one arm, before reaching up and giving a sharp tug on a length of rope. Sokka almost shat his innards out.

Sokka noted with some dissatisfaction, as he was being carefully arranged on some sort of stretcher, that Jet came up with Katara wrapped around him like a limpet. (What a sleazebag.) Unfortunately, before he could reprimand Katara for her horrible taste in men, he was being carted off to whoever these kids could pass off as a legitimate healer. 

The healer, a young adult woman who introduced herself as Herb, took one look at his leg and told him that there was nothing she could do for him. 

“So this was a waste of time, is what you’re saying,” he said. 

“Well,” she hedged, “no. We’re having a feast tonight-- always do, when we win a fight. You and your friends can stay and fill up before you move on.”

Sokka grumbled. It was extremely brave of him to not be screaming his head off with pain.

“Sorry?” 

“Nothing.”

Herb sighed. “I’m sorry I can’t do much for you, kid. I can re-wrap your leg, but I don’t have the type of tech healers who don’t live in treehouses have.”

“Yeah, I get it. Just sucks. Hey, what do you think about that Jet guy?”

“Jet? He’s…” she glanced around furtively, “well, he’s about what you’d expect from a sixteen-year-old boy. Thinks the entire world has wronged him and is pissed about it. Probably because the entire world has mostly been wronging him up until now... He used to be a good kid. Real cute.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. The Fire Nation burned down our village, y’know? There were other survivors, but he and I, we’ve always stuck together. I felt pretty responsible for him, so I came along when he decided to start living in the woods and cutting off supply lines to the occupied village.”

He was edging a little too close to sensitive territory, but he soldiered on. “So you don’t approve of the way Jet handles things?”

Sokka couldn't say that he necessarily disapproved. At least, he didn't usually-- he hadn't, when the men of the tribe had gone off to war. But it was so much easier to stomach the concept of death than it was to sit right next to it. To see its blood-caked corpse stuck between the mangled branches of the underbrush. To see how young it was. To think that, maybe in another life, one without war, maybe they would've been peers. (Probably not, though.) 

“Hmm,” she opened a drawer and pulled out a roll of bandages. “I agree to an extent. The Fire Nation supply lines do need to be disrupted, and most of the headway made here in the Western front is guerilla warfare, like the type we do here. I mean-- it’s war. I hate the bloodshed, but that’s what happens in war. Blood,” she started unwrapping his foot, “sheds.”

Sokka clenched the edges of the cot in pain. “A lot of the guys he’s killing,” he panted. “Are just kids. Conscripts. I can't-- holy fuck, ouch-- I just don't know if..."

Herb sharpened. “Tread lightly, Water Tribe. Getting a little bit close to Fire Nation sympathy, there. Remember what those bastard ashmakers have taken from us all.”

He understood, and he remembered. He spent the rest of his time under her supervision gritting his teeth and biting his tongue.

“Katara,” he said, leaning heavily on the poorly-made crutch the healer gave him. 

“What?” 

He led her away from the dining area, over to a mostly-secluded ledge where any eavesdroppers could be spotted from a mile away. 

“We need to go.”

“What!? Why?”

He took a deep breath. Patience. “I need to get to a proper healer, and I don’t trust these guys.”

“You’re just angry I like Jet better than you," she said, aiming to hurt without knowing why or how deep.

Yes, he wanted to shout. Yes, I am. It hurt to see Katara falling all over herself for some guy who would probably kill Sokka without a second thought if he found out that Sokka was a firebender. It hurt to see his sister, who’d known him his entire life, choosing some guy she met five hours ago over him. It was like she completely forgot that Sokka currently couldn’t walk, all because some guy with shitty eyebrows had smirked at her. 

“You’re acting like a child. ”

Katara spluttered. “ You’re acting like a child! You just can’t stand having the attention off of you for two seconds, and your inflated male ego can’t stand not being the best in the room--”

“I can’t-- I can’t fucking walk! I am in pain! I need healer before it starts to set wrong! And,” he glanced around furtively, "who's to say they won't do to me what they did to those Fire Nation soldiers? I'm fucking-- it's not safe for me to be here, Katara."

"Jet wouldn't hurt you!" She insisted, still blinded by Jet's dubious charisma.

He only grew more frustrated. Her optimism, her foolish trust, would only hurt him. Too angry to open his mouth and yell, steam poured from his nose, accompanied by the slightest licks of flame. He had his jaw grit so tight that his teeth felt they would break.

Katara went silent, and Sokka turned to see the attention of all of the Freedom Fighters on them. 

“I knew it,” spit Jet. “I knew I wasn’t just seeing things back at the ambush. You are a firebender.”

“And? So what?” 

(His voice wavered in fear, his words overlaid by so much shaking anger that the terror was hidden from prying eyes.)

“Jet-- he’s not like that,” said Katara.

Jet shook his head. “I’m sorry you had to find out about your brother this way, Katara. It must hurt, to know he’s one of the people that killed your mother--”

“ DON’T say that!” Sokka roared, a great plume of flame illuminating the structure. “Don’t say that. I’m not Fire Nation--”

“You’re a firebender! ” Shouted Jet. 

“That doesn’t mean anything. ”

“He’s telling the truth!” Katara yelled. “He isn’t Fire Nation, he’s Water Tribe-- he-- he--” she struggled for something, “it’s not his fault! It-- he--”

Jet advanced, brandishing one of his hooked swords. Sokka hobbled backwards, unsteady, until he felt the edge of the platform he and Katara had been on with his heel. Katara jumped in between them.

“Jet, don’t --” 

Jet pushed Katara aside and lunged. Sokka started, losing his balance as he felt the sharp edge of the blade clip his upper arm. 

Then he fell. 

He woke up again on Appa, and the first thing he noticed was that his foot wasn’t in pain anymore. 

“Wha…?”

“You’re awake,” said Katara, looking sniffly. “Are you okay?”

“Uh,” he said, “sure.”

“Good,” said Aang. “We stopped off at the Gan Jin village and they fixed your leg up pretty well,” he sighed mournfully. “I wanted to cross over the Great Divide on foot, but we can’t do that.”

“It’s not very impressive,” Katara deadpanned.

Sokka leaned over the edge of the saddle. The Great Divide appeared to be a bunch of dust, and rocks. And dusty rocks. Not that he didn't have an appreciation for geology, but yeah. Not very impressive.

“Yeah. Doesn’t seem too fun. What, uh, what happened? Back at Jet’s?”

“Appa caught you, but I think the fall knocked you out. Then I flew me and Katara away.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you about Jet,” said Katara. “It was all my fault.”

“Yeah,” Sokka sighed, patting Katara on the hand. “Yeah. It was.”

Then he felt immediately guilty when Katara shrank in. He put his hand on her shoulder in what he hoped was a comforting gesture-- he was still a little hurt about the situation, but ultimately he couldn't blame her. Katara hadn't spent much time around boys her age that she wasn't related to, growing up: it only made sense that she fell for the wiles of the first boy that tried to charm her.

(He couldn't stop thinking about the dead boy in the bushes. In an alternate universe, maybe that would've been him. Taken from his home as soon as he turned seventeen, leaving Katara and his mom behind to fight for a man that didn't value him as anything more than cannon fodder.)

That night, when sleep finally claimed him, it felt grateful. 

(Here's some art I made for this fic! Let's pretend we live in a world in which I put effort into this and didn't give up halfway through. I'll probably make some better art for it later.) 

Chapter Text

“I think I need to tell you all a story.”

...

Prince Zuko of the Fire Nation was born without the spark. 

He was the first member of the royal line to have done so. The royal line were descendants of Agni, after all-- to be born without the spark was as heinous a crime as any. He was kept alive on the dubious mercy of his father and the desperate pleas of his mother alone--but though he lived, he was not blessed by Agni. He would never be permitted to claim the throne. At the time, this was the least of his mother's worries.

Fire Lord Ozai-- prince, at the time-- did not care for his son. 

…

“There is a storm coming, Zuko.”

…

He was thought to be a non-bender. Lucky, too, for if the truth came out, then the mercy of his father would not so much be dubious as it would be completely absent, and the young prince would surely be dead. 

…

Zuko liked watching the water. He loved the crests of the waves, the hushing of a stream, the clarity of a smooth river. Sometimes, on Ember Island, he’d sneak away from his mom and dad and Azula and just sit in one of the crystal clear creeks that webbed the island, up to his neck in crisp cool water and happy as a clam. 

“The water runs clear,” he sang, “in the nation of fire…” he hummed the rest of the tune, because he could never remember the lyrics properly. He didn’t have as good of a singing voice as his mom, anyways. 

“I wish I was a waterbender,” he said, to a frog-fish perched on a slick branch. “Water’s so nice. Better than fire, even,” he nodded assertively. “Don’t tell my dad I said that, though. I think he’ll hurt me if he knows.”

The frog-fish croaked in agreement. 

“If I was a waterbender, I could do…” he scooped up a handful of water, and splashed it on the frog-fish, “this!” 

The frog-fish closed its eyes, but didn’t otherwise seem bothered by the water. 

“Well, I guess I can do that whether or not I can waterbend. I couldn’t do that if I could firebend, though. You’d die. Unless I didn’t use fire,” he looked down contemplatively. “This is confusing. I’m Zuko. What’s your name?”

The frog-fish croaked. 

“Croaky! Good name. Your mom’s got good taste. Well, that is, if your mom named you. My mom says that moms usually name their kids, except in our family, it’s the dad. Except maybe my mom named me? She never actually said. Maybe I’m special…” he agitated the water with his hands. “I’m the only one in my family who can’t bend fire, you know,” he secretly took a measure of pride in it--he loved learning the blade, and Agni knew if he was a bender he'd never have the chance. Yet there was shame in his voice, too.

Croaky cocked its head inquisitively. 

“My uncle and my mom and my cousin say it’s fine. My dad says it’s really bad. My little sister doesn’t say much of anything. She’s only four. I’m six, so I can say a lot more. She takes my stuff a lot, though. My mom says that little kids are sometimes mean like that, but I don’t remember being mean when I was four. How old are you?”

Croaky didn’t respond.

Zuko sighed. “I get it. Everyone needs a little bit of mystery. My mom won’t tell me how old she is, either, even when I ask. Says it’s not polite. Adults are so weird. Hey, where are you going?”

He reached his arms out towards Croaky, but the slippery amphibian squirmed out of his grasp. In a last-ditch attempt to catch his new friend, he thrust his right hand out, and… bent the water?

He gasped, and the lump of water dropped and smoothed out, Croaky the frog-fish swimming away expediently. 

“Did I…?” He slammed his palm out again, and the lump re-formed. He scrambled out of the stream with a haste hitherto unseen. “I gotta tell mom.”

…

“Is that the water tribe boy? On that boat?”

“I believe it is.”

“The Avatar won’t get there on time.”

…

“I’ll admit,” said Iroh, hanging his head over his cup of tea, “I did not do right by my nephew. I helped him find a discreet waterbending master, yes, I did not punish him for his waterbending, but I often turned my head when he was in any sort of danger. It's the duty of the father to discipline his son, and it is not the duty of an uncle to intervene," he sipped from his cup, mouth suddenly dry. "Or, those are the words I chose to forgive my own cowardice."

…

There was a circle of knowledge in the capital city, at which Zuko was the center. There were those privy to the knowledge of his waterbending (the smallest circle: him, his mother, his uncle, and his cousin), those privy to the knowledge of his non-bending (the royal family, the servants on a need-to-know, threat-by-death basis), and those ignorant to either of those facts. For the most part, the royal family allowed others to maintain their assumptions that Zuko was a worthy candidate for the throne under the eyes of Agni. Ozai knew, after all, that his useless son, in the end, would be a non-issue.

It was such that, when Prince Zuko was told to participate in an Agni Kai against the General whom he disrespected, nobody batted an eyelash. 

(And when it was his father that he faced, and when he dropped to his knees and pleaded mercy, the onlookers sneered cowardice . A disgrace before Agni. When the Fire Lord grabbed his son by the ponytail and held him down, making the arena smell of cooking flesh, the onlookers cheered and looked away, in alternate measures. But nobody helped him.)

…

“Uncle, I need to help him.”

“His friends are already on their way, nephew. He will be fine. We need to get out of this storm.”

“He saved me! It is dishonorable not to save him in return!”

…

“The Fire Lord really challenged--” Boatswain Yokina was quickly cut off by an elbow in her side. 

“It is okay, Lieutenant Jee,” said the Dragon of the West, a twinkle in his eye. “She may speak her part. We are not in Fire Nation waters, and there is nobody here to care about treason.”

“He really challenged his non-bender son to an Agni Kai? That’s against the law, isn’t it?”

"Honorable Boatswain," spoke Private Nara, who was shy by nature and hadn't said more than three words in Iroh's presence in as many years, "what do you think the Fire Lord is to the law?"

…

“Thank you for meeting us, old friend," Uncle said, jovial. There was a twinkle in his eye, but then, there always was. Zuko didn't bother to examine why he and the water tribe man were so familiar with one another.

Zuko scowled, and then hissed when the expression bent his scar in uncomfortable ways. He didn’t want to learn waterbending. It was stupid. Waterbending was stupid. He wished he was born a firebender. He wished stupid Agni had blessed him, but he was lucky even to be born. Beggars couldn't be choosers.

He didn’t bother to let his uncle know when he got up and left the old men to their old-people-talk, choosing instead to wander the icy canals of the Northern Water Tribe. He didn’t even understand why they had to be here, when his mission was to find the Avatar, not the ancient old person society of geezers that thought slow-motion Pai Sho was a gripping use of their time. Experimentally, he bent the canal water into a sphere and dropped it on a passing canoe. 

The girl in the canoe looked up, indignant. “Who did that?” She called, “show yourself!”

Her white hair was blinding. He scurried away. 

…

“Look-- his friends have him. Let us get out of this storm.”

Zuko watched the Avatar’s beast fly off into the thick of the storm with a covetous eye, but then he thought of the helmsman, nearly slipping into the black, tempestuous waters, and he looked away.

“Head into the eye.”

…

Prince Zuko was not meant to survive the fool’s errand that was the search for the Avatar, but like a roach, he was unkillable. Iroh would swear that it was his journey to the Northern Water Tribe, and his treatment by the healers there, that saved him-- everyone else would swear that Zuko simply hung onto life like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood.

Even if he survived, his banishment was meant to be permanent. Though Fire Lord Ozai would eventually grow blinded by his greed for power, in the early days he still possessed a reasonably sharp mind. He knew that a simple, unconditional banishment would not be enough to eliminate his son-- his son would eventually grow resentful without hope, and Zuko was endearing and kind enough that he had managed to curry favor in the more belligerent corners of the court. 

(Lord Rokuyo, Lady Frit, Sir Uri, all the soft, weak-hearted noblemen and women. And yet even they did not step in to save their beloved prince-- their fear of Ozai’s might was greater than their mild affection for his son.)

With a task and a condition, Zuko’s potential threat was minimized. His mind was kept busy by the wild armadillo-goose chase, and his belief in and loyalty to his father were not diminished by his banishment. He would not have time to raise an opposing army, nor the desire to. And without him in the palace, stealing around the court and corrupting them with his weakness, there were no chances of him burrowing deeply enough into the wormwood to break it apart. 

(And then the Avatar returned.)

…

“What happened to Lady Ursa?” One particularly brave crewmember offered. 

“Ah…” Iroh grimaced, “that is as unsavory a tale as Zuko’s, yet more elusive. I admit I do not know the entirety of the story, but I will tell it as best I can…”

…

“You did well, not to go after the Avatar.”

“What? But I…”

“Tell me, nephew, do you value your honor over human lives?”

…

“Dad’s gonna kill you,” taunted Azula, jumping onto his bed. “I heard him say it.”

(In another universe, Zuko would not believe her. He would say that she was lying-- that she was wrong. That father wouldn’t do that. This was not that universe.)

He peered over the edge of his sheet with fearful eyes, using the red silk to cover the quivering of his lower lip. Azula only lied most of the time, and he could see the truth in the curve of her smile. 

“Why?” He asked, voice breaking. He shrunk further back into his pillows as she approached him. 

“Because you’re useless, and I’d be much better on the throne. Also, grandpa told dad that if he wants to be Fire Lord instead of uncle, he has to lose a son, like uncle did.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Just letting you know, older brother,” she bopped him on the nose. The contact felt evil. “Count your days.”

“Have you been crying?” He blurted, eyeing the red rims of her lids. They were a bit more swollen than usual, too. 

She jerked backwards, settling on her haunches. “What? No,” she laughed. It scared him how genuine it sounded. (Uncle said that people who can lie well either convince themselves of their own lies, or are otherwise so uncaring of the truth that they should be feared. Zuko had a good idea of which one Azula was.) “I’m just trying out a new makeup style.”

He decided to humor her, and told himself that her truths were lies. “It looks like you’ve been crying. So unless you want the whole court to think you’re a baby--”

She huffed and slid off his bed, stomping away. She paused at the threshold. “Goodbye, ZuZu.”

When his door slammed shut, it sounded like a death sentence.

…

“So she… disappeared? The same night the old Firelord died?”

“To hear my nephew tell it, yes.”

“So she’s… also dead?”

The general hummed. “Perhaps. She is dead, or she is alive, but either way, she is gone. To me, it makes little difference.”

“And to the prince…?” 

“It makes all the difference in the world.”

Zuko wasn’t sure if he was imagining it, but the crew began to look at him differently after the events of the storm. He wasn’t stupid, and he was fully aware that the crew didn’t like him before then, but… what had changed?

“I don’t understand, Uncle,” he said, cooling the tea enough so that it wouldn’t scald his tongue on the way down. “I messed up another chance for them to go home. They should be angry at me!”

“Why would they be angry with you? Had you continued to weather the storm, one of your crew might have been lost. Is that a better fate than returning home?”

“But…” out of words, he made intent eye contact with the leaves swirling around the bottom of his cup. He took a sip. 

“Zuko,” Uncle said, placing a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Many of our crew do not have good homes to return to. They were chosen for this reason. They do not mind being out at sea, seeing the world. Although they might be a little bit happier if you were kinder to them.”

Zuko tried very hard not to think of the reasons why a crew with no one to return to would be picked to man his ship. 

“I just… I keep failing everyone, over and over again,” he lamented, glancing up from his tea to meet Uncle’s eyes, for only just a second. “Maybe it would be better if--”

Uncle’s grip tightened, his fingers digging into Zuko’s shoulder blade. “Don’t think like that, nephew. You were born just fine the way you are now.”

Baby Zuko, as promised! I'll be posting it w the next posted chap (for the ongoing readers) but here he is in his rightful place.

Available in better quality on my Tumblr, vrnite.

Chapter Text

The mask was not a comfortable one to wear. It was designed to fit a different face-- the nose was too flat and the forehead too round, which meant that it pinched and squashed certain parts of his face while not even touching others. The hole for the mouth was placed just a touch too low-- which was actually a purposeful design choice-- which meant that his breath would hit the wood of the mask and the sour smell of spit would linger. 

By this point, he was practiced in ignoring discomfort, both because of the mask and because of other past tribulations. (Feeling the way his flesh deformed under the hand of his father, months and months of shooting pains as his skin reluctantly knit itself into scar tissue, a surprisingly unreasonable amount of papercuts.) So it was with ease that he scaled the wall of the stronghold, perching up by the officer’s club to see if he could glean any floating news from a lieutenant made loose-lipped by one too many drinks. And it was with an uncharacteristic luck that he happened upon Commander Zhao and Colonel Shinu in the middle of an argument. 

“News from Fire Lord Ozai?” Asked Zhao, after an arriving messenger hawk brought their argument to a close. 

Zuko’s breath hitched inaudibly. Colonel Shinu let out a displeased huff and there was the sound of paper ruffling, likely as it changed hands. Dread pooled in his gut in a disturbingly familiar way; this could mean nothing good.

“It appears I’ve been promoted to Admiral. My request… is now an order.”

Zuko cursed silently to himself. This really, really meant nothing good. 

Fire Lord Ozai had a marked disdain for Zhao, and rightfully so. The man was a pompous, self-aggrandizing fool, who only saw so far as his nose extended. He was a glutton for power, for control, and he would step on anyone to get it-- his respect and fealty to the royal family extended insofar as their ability to grant him more power. As such, Zuko’s father had allowed Zhao to claw and crawl his way up the ranks for years, giving him appeasement after appeasement until he became a commander. 

Zuko had been under the impression that the appeasement would stop there, and that if Zhao deigned to try and make yet another underhanded grab for power, his father would have him killed in a tragic engineering mishap on his ship. Admiral was the highest rank in the Navy, second only to the supreme power that the Fire Lord held as the Chief of All Military Operations. That was a dangerous position for a man as slimy as Zhao to be in. 

This meant one of two things, neither of them good: Zuko’s father had either turned a fool during Zuko’s absence, unable to recognize Zhao as the threat to the throne that he clearly was, or Zhao had provided him with something-- a military conquest, a piece of intel-- so valuable that the Fire Lord had been unable to ignore Zhao’s contribution. (Zuko feared that it might be both.)

As Zuko slid off of a gold balustrade and back onto solid earth, his mind was racing, flying through worst-case scenario after worst-case scenario.

The Yuyan Archers being under Zhao’s control was Not Good-- it was so decidedly Not Good that Zuko could barely wrap his head around it. 

The chain of command with respect to the Archers was a complicated one--they weren't technically under direct control like the Army or the Navy, as they'd started out a paramilitary force, then a group of contract mercenaries, and now they sat just under the wing of the Fire Lord but with one foot out the door. Though he was not destined to be Fire Lord, the highest office he could hold being Prince Advisor, he had still been schooled in all manner of military strategy and hierarchy. Much of it he'd forgotten in his three years away, but he remembered enough to know that giving Zhao command over the Yuyan was a decision headed for disaster.

With the Yuyan and their immunity under his greasy thumb, newly-minted Admiral Zhao could likely commit any number of treasonous acts underneath the Fire Lord’s nose. He was focused on the Avatar for now, but what would happen once the Avatar had been disposed of? Zhao disdained Zuko enough to hunt him down, and while Zuko could hold his own against a platoon of firebenders, he was no match for the Yuyan Archers. Nobody was, really.

He would just have to keep Zhao from getting the Avatar, then.

“You know what I hate most about getting sick?” Sokka asked, the wet rag on his forehead quickly warming under the waves of heat rolling off his skin. 

“What?” 

“That it happens so ffffucking often,” he slurred. “I thought this shit was supposed to stop when I left the tribe. Christ.”

“Who’s Christ?” Aang asked.

“Appa’s alter ego. He's my best friend for life.”

“I think he’s delirious,” said Katara’s twin sister who was also a rat, Rataka. Katara’s other twin sister who was also a cat, Catana, leaned down and replaced the raw yak heart on his forehead with a banana slug-beetle. 

His drooping eyelids shot wide open when he noticed the figure lurking in the corner of the pantheon. “Is that Gran-Gran?” He gasped. “And is she throwing Zuko off the side of the mountain? And nobody’s gonna help him? Wow. What a world we live in.”

Katara, Rataka, and Catana made eye contact with the dubiously real (he was banking on a fifty-fifty probability that the kid was actually the Avatar’s ghost) egg-headed kid that was standing off to the side and said something wobbly. 

“How did he stay alive but not age?” Sokka shook his head at the idea of somebody staying alive in an iceberg for a hundred years. “When you freeze, all the water in your body turns into ice, which crystallizes and kills you. The only known organisms that actually live through being frozen is this one type of frog from Kyoshi Island that hypersaturates its cells with glucose to keep the water from leaving and dehydrating them until they die. Or something like that, I don’t remember a lot from that lesson. Hey, it’s really cold in here, are we back in the village?”

That there wasn’t yet a warrant out for Zuko’s arrest was a pleasant surprise, but he wasn’t stupid enough to assume this meant that his father didn’t know of his abilities. More likely, it was a back burner issue, to be pushed forward only once the largest threat to the Fire Nation was contained.

“What do you think of it all, Uncle?” Zuko asked, once the soldiers finally cleared off the ship.

Iroh hummed and clasped his hands behind his back, trying to tamp down his surprise at Zuko asking his opinion for once. He took a certain amount of pleasure in watching the retreating backside of Zhao’s ship. 

“What do you think of it all, nephew?”

Because it wasn't that easy--people had been telling Zuko what to think for all his life. Iroh refused to continue to be one of them.

Zuko scowled. “Which part? Zhao’s promotion, or the fact that I’m not being hunted for sport?”

Uncle chuckled. “Both, I suppose.”

Zuko grasped the rail with both hands and looked over the side of the ship. The water that lapped the hull was the dark gunmetal grey of a recent storm, each choppy crest capped with foamy white lace. He hesitated.

"Go on. It is just you and I, nephew, and no matter what you say, I won't be cross with you for it."

Zuko opened his mouth several more times before he managed to fit the words on his tongue.

“I think promoting Zhao was a bad idea. He has too much power now, and he isn’t loyal to our nation. All he cares about is being on top.”

“Is that what you think?”

“ Yes. ”

“I agree,” said Uncle, almost startling him. “But, let me tell you something, nephew.

“Ozai was not raised to be a king. I was always meant to be Fire Lord, and it was almost guaranteed I would sire an heir. He was raised to be a prince, yes, but not a leader. He does not know how to grin and bear it; he is not accustomed to dealing with fools and civilians, or foolish civilians. He is not accustomed to making decisions with the nation in mind-- all he has in mind when he makes decisions is himself. Do not overestimate the mind of your father-- but do not underestimate it, either. My brother is greedy, Zhao even more so-- but Zhao is not much of a threat. Ozai is too covetous of his power to make a move that would endanger it.”

“He--”

Uncle raised a quelling hand. Zuko fumed, but snapped his mouth shut. “Ozai ultimately holds more power than Zhao, and he is more feared. If Zhao were well-liked, he would pose more danger, but I have not met a single man under Zhao’s command that held even a trace of fondness for the admiral.”

“But he can command the Yuyan Archers.”

Uncle cocked a brow. “And where did you learn this?”

“Uh, I actually don’t think I got in enough bending practice this morning, I think I’m going to go spar. LIEUTENANT--”

The Sun smiled down at Sokka, resplendent in his robes of spun gold. “Sokka, my son.” 

“Sun?” he asked. He reached out a hand, just to check if the Sun was real, but snatched his hand back before his fingertips could brush the cloth that dangled over the Sun’s-- Agni’s, if he was using the Fire Nation name-- shoulder. 

The Sun chuckled. “No, you son.”

Sokka furrowed his brows in bemusement, but his face relaxed once he got it. “That’s really funny! You’re as good at jokes as Dad is.”

The Sun clasped his shoulder with his warm hand. “I am your father, Sokka, just as much as Hakoda of the Water Tribe is. You have been blessed by me, just like all of my other children.”

"Is this real?” Sokka asked, because the hand felt real and time seemed quite in order and nothing around him was shifting or stretching or spontaneously switching settings like things tended to in dreams, but the malevolent spirits that had haunted him when he contracted acute Midnight Sun Madness had felt real, too, and they hadn’t been.

“Yes, it is,” the Sun said. Sokka belatedly realized that one could not rely on a hallucination to assert its realness. 

“Then where are we?” 

His surroundings weren’t someplace he’d been before, even if they felt startlingly familiar. They were in a meadow, with tall, soft grass that looked like hair, flowers of all sorts of colors dotting the green. There was a strange creature drinking from a gold pond not too far away-- its antlers many-branched and draped with skeins of mossy vines, its pelt a supple, shining bronze, its muscles rippling with every minuscule shuffle it made. He found himself staring, only ripping his eyes away when the Sun cleared his throat.

“We are in a more forgiving corner of the spirit realm.”

“More forgiving than… what, exactly?” Asked Sokka, watching the jerky hops of a spirit that resembled a frog, a rabbit, and neither of them at all. It was hardly the size of a coin purse, and he wondered what purpose something so small could serve. 

“The spirit realm is not unlike your realm, my son. Creatures do not need to have use to be ; worth is not dependent on function. Everything in its right place.”

Sokka looked away from the not-frog-rabbit in surprise. “You can read thoughts?”

The Sun shook his head, wisps of a smile dancing over his face. “I cannot. I simply know you, and made a guess. It is good advice, regardless. Besides-- I am the Sun Spirit. What use would I have for invading one’s private thoughts?”

A snake with enough legs to rival a millipede lurched out of a tuft of unusually tall flowers and ran at the drinking deer, giving chase when its prey began leaping away. Every limb of the snake was from a different creature, and though it was swift, its gait was irregular and jerky. 

“I thought you just said that things don’t need to be useful to exist?” 

The Sun nodded, and when Sokka flicked his eyes to the side to glance at him, he was also tracking the snake’s pursuit. “That is true. But more often than not, our skills have use.”

“What about juggling?” Juggling was a bizarre activity that had been introduced to him on Kyoshi Island-- the Earth Nation did so many weird little things just because. Like circuses, or clothes with jewels and ruffles on them, or singing. At home, play had been mostly for little children-- Sokka remembered playing house with Arnuk and Beka before the older two boys grew out of it and into the role of a warrior. Clothing had been for survival, and any embellishments were indicative of one’s role, status, and life experiences. Singing had been for rituals and festivals-- praying for a bountiful hunt, for a forgiving winter, for a calm sea. Nothing had been without purpose. 

Being around Aang meant getting used to doing a lot of things just because. Riding elephant koi, or flying several leagues out of the way just to look at some weirdly-shaped rocks, or buying a whistle shaped like a bison. And while two out of three of those things had ended up proving useful, the fact of the matter was that Aang chose to do them simply because he wanted to. Katara was completely on-board with the ‘fun first’ mentality from the jump, but Sokka had felt differently. Still did. Survival had to come first in the Southern Water Tribes. 

“Juggling, and things like it, have use. Is entertainment not a use? Causing joy? Lifting spirits? Is happiness not a worthy pursuit?"

Sokka considered. He thought of the way he used licks of flame as little dancers, embellishing the stories he told the children of the tribe.

The deer aimed a kick at the snout of the snake, prompting the predator’s hasty retreat. It turned its antlers up to the sky, nose cocked proudly. In its hubris, it didn’t notice the rumbling of the earth nor the way the flowers jumped with the vibrations, and it was swallowed by a fish that jumped out of the ground in a clean arc, like an elephant koi. Sokka couldn’t help but feel like there was some sort of life lesson or metaphor hidden in there, but he also felt like said lesson or metaphor was aimed at someone other than himself. 

“Fire does not mean death alone,” intoned the Sun. 

“I know that. I use it to light fires and put on plays for Katara and Aang. The fire sages use it to open doors.”

The Sun patted his back. He seemed to jump between fatherly and wise-old-spiritly; it was sending Sokka's head in a loop. 

Sokka hummed. The deer re-materialized by the same pond it had been drinking from when he’d first seen it. “Why did you bring me here?”

“What makes you think I brought you here? You might’ve brought yourself here, or perhaps it was another spirit’s doing.”

“I don’t even really believe in the power of spirits,” Sokka shrugged, “so I don’t see why I’d bring myself here.”

“How can you not believe in the power of spirits, when you have visited the spirit realm before? When you have seen spirits with your own eyes?”

A wobble-legged fawn crawled out of the golden pool. The deer backed up a few paces. “I don’t remember my first visit to the spirit realm, but it's not that I doubt your existence-- I just don’t really think any of you are as powerful as people make you out to be.”

“You may be right. Sometimes I believe that we are just convenient scapegoats for humanity’s follies, or even for its successes. Perhaps it is not that we are less powerful, but that you are more powerful?” 

The fawn melted. 

“Sokka?” 

It was Katara. He blearily opened his eyes and looked over to the side. There were maggots where her nose used to be. 

“What?” His voice was pumice rasping against wooden decking. 

“I’m thirsty,” she said, her hair falling off in clumps. Homo the flying monkey had a wig. 

“Me too,” he responded, because the water was all outside, instead of inside. He went to scoop experimentally at the rising pond-scum water, but his arm was glued to his side. “The water’s too far away. Bend it.”

“There’s no water to bend,” she said, “just a whole bunch of mini-people. Hello, tiny Zuko-- oh. Momo squashed him. Oh! Momo!”

“His name is Homo.”

Katara, whose flesh was starting to bubble and liquefy, rotting and burning off of her skeleton in alternate measures, shook her head. Her eyeball flew out and landed several feet away. “It is not. Ho-Momo, get us water.”

Homo chittered from his on-fire branch, blood seeping from where he’d sewn Katara’s face on. 

“Water, Momo. Water.”

In pursuit of water, he forgot about the Sun.

Zuko woke up aching all over. There was a powerful throb in his forehead, and a crick in his neck, and his left leg felt like one giant bruise. 

“You know what the worst part of being born over a hundred years ago is?” 

The Avatar was sitting right next to him, an uncharacteristically solemn expression on his face. Zuko briefly tossed around the idea of capturing him, but the groan he let out as he slid into a more upright position told him that he was in no condition for combat. The Avatar (what was his name again? Ank? Ant?) spared him a brief glance before continuing on. 

“I miss all the friends I used to hang out with. Before the war started, I used to always visit my friend Kuzon. The two of us, we’d get in and out of so much trouble together. He was one of the best friends I ever had, and he was from the Fire Nation, just like you. If we knew each other back then, do you think we could’ve been friends, too?”

That the Avatar had been friends with somebody from the Fire Nation surprised Zuko. Though he knew the Avatar remembered a time without war, Zuko didn't. He couldn't imagine a Fire Nation that welcomed visitors, that held foreign dignitaries in its meeting halls. The Fire Nation was so insular, so isolated despite how far its fingers reached-- every nation was like that, really. There was some contact with the Earth Nation, but the only people who ever immigrated or came to visit were from the colonies, or otherwise rich war profiteers and aristocrats. Yet, a hundred years ago, an airbender had walked the basalt cliffs of the islands, attended festivals, eaten the same food Zuko ate today. He wanted to see it with his own two eyes, a sudden yearning that he couldn't explain. It was hard to think about. It hurt his head.

But that could also have been the concussion.

The Avatar sighed and made to leave. Something compelled Zuko to speak.

“I don’t know.” His voice was hoarser than usual. 

The Avatar sat down again. “You don’t know?”

“I don’t know. Probably not.”

“Why not?”

“Assuming I’d still be a prince-- because I’d be a prince.”

“I mean… we could still have been friends.”

“No. We don’t interact with commoners, except during military service.”

The Avatar furrowed his brows. “Then how do you rule?”

“What?”

“Well, if you never talk to your citizens, how would you know what’s best for them? Who do you even make friends with?”

Disregarding the first question, he answered, “we make friends with noblemen and noblewomen. At least, my sister did. I never had any friends.”

The sympathetic look that the boy threw him made Zuko’s stomach roil. “We can be friends!”

Zuko scowled. “I don’t need your pity.”

“Everyone needs pity sometimes. Pity’s not a bad thing.”

“Go away.” Zuko closed his eyes-- because he was tired, and his head hurt, and not because the upset look on the Avatar’s face made him want to break down in tears. (Which, even if he did, would have been a product of his exhaustion and possible concussion, and not any inherent compassion that he held towards the Avatar.)

If he felt almost disappointed with the sound of the Avatar bounding away, that was nobody’s business but his own.

When the ship began to move up the coast, away from Pouhai Stronghold, Zuko was not up on deck, barking orders as usual. He’d slipped away from his uncle’s interrogation to take refuge in his room. 

Do you think we could’ve been friends, too?  

Zuko’s heart beat thinly in his chest. The air in his room was neither cool nor warm, and even if the door had been open it would probably still feel stagnant. He’d found that there were many nights like this on his ship, where the temperature didn’t slip towards either extreme, settling so directly in the middle that it almost felt like you were spread out into the atmosphere. It made it hard to sleep.

He couldn’t keep his attention on any one thing for very long. He’d manage to tack his eyes to the dancing lamplight on his tapestries, before the tack loosened and he’d shift his gaze to something else. He couldn’t keep his mind on any one thing for very long. He’d replay conversations, think about the future, think about people, but none of them ever stuck around, choosing instead to flit in and out of his mind’s eye. 

Nothing felt appealing; not sleep, not having tea with his uncle, not staring at the sputtering lamp flame, not thinking. He felt hollowed out, alone-- saliva stuck in his mid-throat, mucus lingered in his sinuses, his kidneys and liver and spleen all sunk low in his torso while his heart and diaphragm caught on his collarbones like a clump of leaves bunched up against a root in a stream. Something behind his ribs ached. He almost just wanted to lie down and turn into a big, throbbing wound, let himself feel like a bruise. Almost.

He didn’t know why he felt like this. The conversation with the Avatar had thrown him off, clearly. He rubbed the rough, gapped surface of the Blue Spirit mask with his thumb and pretended he was somewhere else. 

Sokka didn’t remember very much about the day his mom died. It was a hectic day, filled with pain and fear and fury. One of the only things that stuck in his mind-- almost like an afterimage, burned onto his retinas in inverted colors-- was his mother’s dying body. He’d caught only a glimpse of it before he was being pulled away from the igloo by Nanuk, but a glimpse was enough. 

The thing about fire was that it took a very long time to burn somebody to death. The average firebender couldn’t produce a flame hot enough to burn somebody to death in under an hour. The majority of deaths by fire were actually caused by the infections after the fact; masses of burnt, mushy flesh were very difficult to keep clean and tended to be a breeding ground for all sorts of bacteria.

Sokka’s mother didn’t die from infection, and she didn’t die from the burn wounds, either. She died from blood loss-- ropes of red staining her throat, dyeing her teeth a pale pink, pouring out of her eyes like tears. She’d still been alive, then. Jerking horribly, letting out pained gargles. Sokka couldn’t be certain-- nobody’d ever told him for sure-- but he was reasonably sure that his father had ended his mother’s life, the mercy given to an animal with a broken limb. It was a kindness. 

Ever since that day, Sokka had had the very image of cruelty branded across the backs of his eyelids. Burning a woman, just to see her scream, slitting her throat, just to see her bleed. There were better ways to kill people. More honorable ways. 

Sokka didn’t remember very much of her funeral at all. It had taken place the day after the raid, and he’d been in a state of shock, rendered catatonic by the images flashing through his brain. All he could think, watching his mother’s concealed body be put into the ocean, was I wish I had known this would happen. I wish I could’ve prevented it. 

Yet something inside him shuts down when he hears about the fortune-teller. Perhaps it was one of those deep-rooted traumas that he hadn’t dug far enough down to uncover, to dissect and trace up the trunk to the branches, but he very decidedly did not want to learn about his future. Katara and Aang goaded him, teasing him with ‘but aren’t you just a little bit curious?’ And he was curious-- undeniably so-- but his apprehension trumped his intrigue in that instance. 

“Ah, hello, young man,” said the fortune-teller. “I see great trials and suffering-- mostly self-inflicted-- in your future. Come in with me.”

Despite his reservations, he stood and followed her into her spooky fortune-telling room. It was dimly lit and emptier than he’d expected it to be-- all of the old tales of witches spoke of rooms stuffed to the brim with dried vegetation and creatures preserved in orca-seal oil. Though, he supposed, Aunt Wu wasn’t really a witch. 

“What is your name?” She asked, “I can see you are from the Water Tribes. You must have traveled far.”

Sokka raised a brow. “Aren’t you supposed to know my name?”

She raised an eyebrow in response. “I am not omnipotent. I interpret and infer from data, and make my predictions thusly. Surely you are no stranger to the processes of science?”

“Science isn’t making correlations between things that have no connection! The lines on our palms can’t tell us our future, they’re just products of how we’ve used our hands through our lives!”

“That is true. But don’t you think that past behavior can predict something of the future? That is not to say that if you were unhappy yesterday, you will be unhappy tomorrow-- but if you have a history of making yourself unhappy when you could simply choose not to be, then you will likely have a future of it, too.”

Sokka scowled. “Not everybody makes themselves unhappy. I didn’t-- have a happy childhood.”

Aunt Wu nodded. “Ah, yes. I can tell from your stature that you were a sickly child. That does lead to much unhappiness-- but you are not sickly now, are you? What is stopping you from being happy?”

“I don’t know, ” said Sokka, miserably, “it seems like anything I try just doesn’t work. Like I’m stuck in a rut.”

“Perhaps that is something you should dig deeper on-- maybe there are parts of you you have not yet come to terms with, or aspects of your situation that displease you? If you try and find what it is you are unhappy with, it is much easier to fix that than simply trying to will an emotion into existence.”

Sokka sighed.

“You still haven’t told me your name.”

“Sokka.”

Aunt Wu nodded. She conjured a teapot from virtually nowhere and poured some steaming tea into the teacups. “Well, Sokka. Is there anything in particular that you can think of that’s been making you unhappy, lately?”

He frowned, trying to think. “My firebending? It’s been,” he sighed, “it’s been acting up a lot, since I left the south pole. Harder to control. It’s frustrating.”

Aunt Wu’s lips curled downwards, folding over at the edges. She set down the teapot with a delicate clink. “I can’t say I expected that of you. You do not have a firebender’s disposition. A firebender from the Water Tribes, huh?”

“Yep. Didn’t do much good.”

“I can see why not. I don’t know much about firebenders, but I do know that such cold conditions and so many months without sun can render even the strongest firebender weak. I understand, now, why you were a sickly child.”

“Yeah, everybody says that. The,” he waved his hand, “cold and sun bit.”

“Well,” she began, taking a sip of her tea, “it might well be that you are losing control because you are stronger now. The conditions you grew up in would’ve kept your inner flame weak, and so you wouldn’t have had to fight so hard to contain it. But now that you are up here, where it is reasonably warm and the sun appears in regular intervals, you might be growing stronger, and that barrier is crumbling-- and since you are unused to having to control that much flame, you simply cannot. That is all guesswork, though, even if it is my profession, so I would suggest you seek a master to help you control your chi. ”

“My chi? ”

“That is your inner fire.”

Sokka nodded and finished off his cup of tea. “I guess I’ll have to try and find one. It’ll be hard, though.”

“I am sure,” Aunt Wu said. “Now, I assume you don’t want me to make a prediction?”

Sokka shook his head. “I’d rather not know. Don’t believe in all that hokey stuff.”

Aunt Wu chuckled and gave a slight smile. “Leave, then, so I can tell your bald friend’s future.” Just as he reached the threshold, she called, “oh, and Sokka?” 

“Yes?”

“Remember what I said-- dig deep. Figure out what else does not sit right with you. You will be happier for it.”

“Thanks, Aunt Wu.”

She smiled, full and bright, even in the low lighting. “Of course.”

Chapter Text

Sokka had no idea how Katara and Aang managed to fall asleep. Well, he understood it on Aang’s part—the airbender had no personal ties to the Southern Water Tribe outside of Sokka and Katara. (That should be enough, the angry side of his brain said.) But Katara was just as Water Tribe as Sokka—more, even—and he just couldn’t fathom how she could simply lay her head down and sleep when there was a good chance that one of the men from the tribes, maybe even their tribe, was nearby. Likely injured, if he had been left behind. 

Poking at the fire with a stick, he picked up the charred arrowhead for the umpteenth time that night, turning it over in his hands like a worry stone. Sokka’s village wasn’t in the practice of using arrows—that was more of a staple of the nomadic inland tribes, who hunted more than they fished. That didn’t say much as to who was left behind, though, since it was clearly a relic of battle and not a weapon left on the sand to be later retrieved. 

Even though he was nearly certain that it wasn’t, he almost wished that it was his dad. (Almost.) They hadn’t parted on very good terms, and for the past several years it had sat in his brain like a weight, threatening to rip through the delicate membrane and crush his spinal cord all the way down. Sometimes he would indulge the worst parts of him and lay awake at night, imagining his father dying in battle, or from an infection, and knowing that his son’s last words to him had been ‘I hate you.’

I hate you. The words of a petulant child who didn’t very well know what they meant, and he still couldn’t believe that he’d been stupid enough at the time to let those words lie in the chasm that opened between himself and his father. He had been nearly thirteen, at the time, and well-educated in the brutal nature of warfare, of the Fire Nation, and, with full knowledge that it might have been the last time he would’ve been able to speak to his father, allowed himself to say I hate you. 

He tossed the arrowhead away in a pique, watching it kick up sand. He let his gaze rest on it for a few more moments, before turning his attention back to the fire. 

Aunt Wu had told him that his control was shot because he was stronger now, and he wasn’t used to controlling this much fire. His chi, she’d said. He stared at the fire and wondered what it’d be like to be able to produce the type of displays that some of the firebenders in the raids had produced, shooting enough fire from their hands to light the whole village up. (Even then, he had not been afraid of the fire. Of the men who produced it, most certainly, but not of the fire. He’d watched it skate over his head in great glowing sheets, boots locked to the ice from force of awe. One of the many signs he’d overlooked.) He doubted he’d ever be able to produce that much fire—perhaps he was like a malnourished child, growth stunted forever, even with enough nutrients later in life. 

A strange noise broke him from his thoughts. He was immediately on guard, grabbing his boomerang and snapping his head towards the source. 

“Who’s there?” He demanded, fearing the worst. 

A man stepped into the firelight. He was clearly Water Tribe from the jump, but the dance of the flames made it difficult to discern exactly who it was for the first few seconds. He felt winded when he made the final connection. 

“Sokka?” Asked Bato.

They were all sat in Bato’s little room at the abbey, eating stewed sea prunes and catching up. Well, it was mostly Katara—Sokka had been an equal participant in the conversation, and then Katara had brought up dad, and then that same guilt sunk into his every tissue.

“And you, Sokka? What have you been up to?”

Sokka looked up from his sea prunes in surprise. “Oh, uh. I—I developed this trick while you guys were gone. Check it.” 

Sokka spit out a flame, but put it out when he saw Bato draw back. 

“Sorry,” he said, dropping his hand to his side.

Bato smiled, but it was shaky. “It’s fine! You can show me your trick. It’s just been a few years since I’ve seen firebending used for something other than combat.”

And that was right, wasn’t it? He always forgot that aside from the Fire Nation, most people’s only exposure to firebending was when it was being used to burn down their village or kill their neighbors. He thought about Jet: so scared of firebenders and the Fire Nation that he became irrational and violent, and while he was one of the more extreme cases, there was a reason why people like Jet existed. 

Sokka’s village had been rather accepting, even if some of them had a knee-jerk fear reaction to his tiny wisps of flame. Suki had been okay with it, but Kyoshi was so sheltered that their first real contact with firebenders was probably when Prince Wetwipes’ men burned down their village. Nowhere else had been like that. 

(And Sokka had to wonder if Zuko was afraid of fire, too, or if growing up surrounded by it had desensitized him. Sokka would figure that anyone with a burn mark that bad would have to be at least a little bit scared.)

“No, it was my fault,” he said. “I should’ve remembered. You don’t have to tolerate it for my sake.”

The tension in Bato’s face released, his mouth curling into a relieved smile. It stung more than it should’ve; there was a part of him that had wanted Bato to protest, to insist that it was different when it was Sokka, that it had just been the initial surprise of it all that had gotten to him. (Assure him that he didn’t hate Sokka for who he was, what he was.)

What he said, instead, was: “you look a lot healthier, Sokka.”

Sokka packed away his hurt and grief (it wasn’t safe to do tricks like that anymore, anyways. The other night he’d been arguing with Katara and the fire had swelled perilously close to their bags) and sat forward. “Yeah, being out here where it’s warm and the sun is consistent is really nice.” He deliberately didn’t mention that his control was shot. “No idea how I’ll survive the North Pole,” he chuckled, “I think I’ll drop dead the moment we reach the borders.”

Bato laughed, reaching over the table to give him a hearty clap on the shoulder. “I’m sure you’ll do fine. How’s your foot, though?”

“Huh?” 

“Your foot. I noticed you limping on the way in but didn’t get a chance to ask about it. Do you want the nuns to take a look at it? They’re the ones that fixed me up.” He gestured to the bandages covering his burn. 

“Oh, uh, sure. I think I’ve had it looked at by all three nations and the spirits, at this point, but a six hundredth opinion wouldn’t hurt, right?”

Bato chuckled. “I’m sure it wouldn’t.”

The conversation drifted away from him again, and Sokka let Bato’s retelling of one of his and Hakoda’s escapades turn into white noise. 

A flash of movement in his periphery caught his eye, and he turned his head just in time to see Aang slipping out of the hut. Neither Katara nor Bato noticed, caught up in the story. 

“Hey, guys, I’m just gonna get some fresh air, alright?” He said. Bato and Katara nodded, and he went out after Aang.

Something had been bothering the other boy all night, Sokka realized, and he had just been too caught up in his own misery to really take note of it. He didn’t know what it was (he could take a guess) and Aang might’ve wanted to be alone (Sokka was pretty sure he didn’t) but Sokka wanted to check on him anyways. Therapist Sokka, at the ready. (And wow, it was really a testament to how shit he felt that even the jokes his internal monologue made fell flat.)

He finally caught up to Aang on the beach. The other boy was perched on the bow of Bato’s boat, looking like somebody had stolen Appa. 

“You alright?” Asked Sokka, sidling up next to Aang and leaning on the boat to try and alleviate some of the pressure on his bad foot. 

Aang looked up, but not at him. “Are you two gonna stay with Bato?”

Sokka furrowed his brows. “No? Why would we do that?”

“Well, you found somebody you know—which is great, by the way, and I’m not jealous at all—but… I mean, now you can maybe see your dad again.”

Sokka sighed. “Listen, there’s no guarantee that Bato will even be meeting up with my dad in the near future. And besides, Katara still needs to learn waterbending.”

“So you’re—“

“If you say that we’re doing it just because Katara needs to waterbending, no. We aren’t. Maybe that was it at first, but you’re our family now. Bato’s also family, sure, but you’re the one that needs us right now, not him, and not my dad.”

(Besides, Sokka had his doubts that he would even have a place by his father’s side, amongst his men. The men of other southern tribes, who didn’t know him well enough to trust him in spite of his firebending.)

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. We have a mission, Aang. We have to—save the world from the Firelord, or whatever. And we have to help our friend.” He gave Aang a friendly punch to the leg. “You’d never make it to the Northern Water Tribe without me, anyways. Remember all those times I was passed out and you and Katara got hopelessly lost? Knowing your luck, you'd end up someplace nobody's ever even been before. Discover a new species of fish-frog.” 

Aang let out a laugh, thick with lingering emotion. Sokka understood how Aang was feeling—that uncertainty, that otherness, that fear of being left behind. 

(The difference was, Sokka actually had been left behind. He knew how it felt. He wasn’t going to put Aang through that.)

They sat in comfortable silence for a few minutes, and Sokka was about to suggest going back and heading to bed when a man on an ostrich-horse approached the boat. 

“I’m looking for Bato of the Water Tribe,” the man said. 

At the same time, Sokka said, “who’s asking?” And Aang said, “uh, I know him.”

They glanced at each other before looking back at the man. 

“Make sure he gets this,” the man said, before shoving a scroll into Aang’s hand. 

Real secure postal system. Very fraud-resistant. 

“What is it?” Sokka asked, as the man trotted away. 

Aang dropped down from the boat, squinting at the paper. Sokka lit a flame in his hand (very far away from the paper, because more often than not his flames came out too big and too hot these days) so Aang and he could read it. 

“It’s a map,” said Aang, turning it over. “Doesn’t say anything else, just has a location circled.”

“Huh. Weird. Well, I guess we should get the map to Bato, then, shouldn’t we? I’m getting a little tired.”

“Doesn’t the map seem a little suspicious to you?” Asked Aang, narrowing his eyes at the offending scroll while they slumped back to the abbey. 

“Uh, no? Why?” It really wasn’t like Aang to be suspicious. Bato’s presence must’ve really gotten to him.

“Well, it’s just a map with a location circled. Nothing else.”

“Oh. It’s probably a message from the fleet, a pre-arranged meeting location. No need for a message.”

Aang drooped. “I guess.”

He was still feeling insecure, then. Sokka pulled open the gate to the abbey and they slipped into Bato’s room together. 

“You’re back!” Cheered Katara. “Sokka, listen to this.” She jerked her head towards Bato, who began to speak.

“I’ve been expecting a message from your dad for a few days. I’m going to be meeting up with the fleet again. You guys are both welcome to come with me.”

Aang drooped further. Sokka clapped a hand on his back and smiled apologetically at Bato. “It’d be nice, but we have to get Aang and Katara to the north pole to learn waterbending. Also, while Aang and I were out, I think we might’ve gotten the message you’ve been expecting.”

Aang handed over the map. Bato nodded. 

“Yeah, this is it. Are you sure?” He asked. 

“Positive,” said Sokka.

Katara looked unsure. “I don’t know, Sokka—we haven’t seen dad in two years, it would be nice to see him again…”

Sokka sighed. “I want to see him as much as you do, Katara, but—“

“Do you really?” She asked, suddenly sharp. “You never talk about dad, or, or mom. It’s like they don’t exist for you anymore. We’ll have plenty of time to fly over on Appa and see dad for a couple of days before moving on! It’s like you’re avoiding him.”

“Katara,” he bit, not wanting to argue with her. Not wanting to talk about this.

“No, Sokka. You don’t get to just say my name and then ignore me like always. Whenever I try to bring either of them up, you shut me down.”

“Shut up.” 

Bato and Aang inched towards the entrance. 

“If you want to sit here and be miserable and avoid dad for whatever stupid reason, feel free. I’m going with Bato to see dad.”

“Maybe you and Aang learning waterbending and saving the world or whatever is more important than seeing dad! You ever think about that?”

“Or maybe you’re just afraid! We can do both just fine and you know it! You’re just—“

“SHUT UP!” 

The fire in the middle of the room surged to the ceiling. Katara’s face dropped. 

Sokka fought to cut off the burning in his chi, but he couldn’t cool it down. It felt like there was fire coursing through his veins, and with every exhale there was a puff of flame. 

“Turn it off,” said Katara, “TURN IT OFF!”

“I can’t!” He shouted, doubling over and grabbing at his lower torso. Katara fled the room—Aang and Bato had already vacated—and Sokka followed. 

“Get away from me! Are you—“

He dropped to his knees in the middle of the courtyard, finally feeling himself disconnect from the fire in Bato’s room (and the fires in the rooms adjacent, which Sokka hadn’t even realized he’d been fueling). The stone quickly warmed under his hands, sparks shooting out from his fingertips. He tried to rein in his breath of fire, but it seemed like any attempts to quell it only made it grow. 

Distantly, somebody asked, “what’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” said Bato, and the fear in his voice made Sokka want to scream. The fire in his next breath was so violent it curled back up when it hit the floor and nearly singed his eyebrows off. (Or, it would’ve, if it hadn’t been his own fire.)

“I don’t know either. Something’s wrong,” said Aang, audibly chewing on his nails. Sweat dripped off of Sokka’s forehead.

Footsteps approached him, barely audible over the sound of his heaving breaths, and he scrambled back, careful not to come in range of the fires in the rooms again.

“Don’t—“ he panted, “you’ll get— hurt.”

The nun that had been approaching him put her hands up and backed away. In sight of the woman’s terror, everything else paled. Everyone was afraid of him. He didn’t register the tears that rolled down his face, sizzling into vapor halfway down his cheeks, or the way his hands shook, or how his hands stung, skinned from their impact against the stone of the courtyard. 

“Try holding your breath!” Called Aang, the only one that didn’t seem scared of Sokka’s display. Just worried. 

Sokka keeled over, resting his forehead on his curled-up fists, and did exactly that, taking a deep breath in and then holding it. His lungs immediately started to burn, and he gasped in another breath after only a few seconds. It was like something was eating up all of the oxygen in his lungs. 

Like something was eating up all of the oxygen in his lungs. 

He was burning from the inside out. Fire needed oxygen to burn. 

He didn’t bother with taking a deep breath this time, just shut his mouth and clamped his fingers over his nostrils. The burn was worse, this time, not wasting any time in setting in. It grew and grew, spreading up his throat and down through his toes, but slowly, slowly, it subsided. 

Unfortunately, so did his consciousness.

I’m getting really tired of this, was the first thought Sokka had when he finally came to. He peeled his eyes open, only to be greeted by total darkness—it made sense, though. It probably wasn’t good to let him be around fire, just then. 

“Sokka?” Asked Katara, voice shaky. “Are you awake?”

“Yeah. What time is it?” His voice was raspy, breaking on every syllable like he’d just turned thirteen, and skin was still hot to the touch.

“It’s the middle of the night. I,” there was a rustle, and her face was illuminated by the moon as she came in range of the window. “I’m sorry. For what I said.”

Sokka sighed. “I’m the one that should be sorry. I—I screwed up. Completely. I should be able to control myself, and I scared everyone, and… you were right. So.”

“Okay. Um. We don’t need to see dad, I guess.”

“We should. It’ll just be one tiny detour.” He winced. “We should probably stay away from the ships, just in case I burst into flames again.”

“Yeah. That’s a good idea.”

“I’m gonna go to bed now.”

“Okay.”

“Uh… okay.” 

They set out on Appa, first thing in the morning. 

Bato was in equal measures delighted and anxious with the flying—his grip on the edge of the saddle was as white-knuckled as Wetwipes’, but there was a massive grin splitting his face. 

(Sokka didn’t miss how he sat on the opposite side of the saddle from him. He didn’t blame him, either.)

The journey took a lot shorter than it probably would have otherwise, and they alighted on the rocky shore by the meeting point within an hour or two of departure. Sokka napped most of the time. 

The sight of the Water Tribe fleet sent his stomach tumbling. Something like guilt and anxiety crawled up his throat, and the soapstone he’d been whittling stopped resembling a fish as he just shaved away at the corners in order to stave off any potential fiery reactions. A fire-induced breakdown on land was better than a fire-induced breakdown on Appa, because he had somewhere to run on land. On Appa, his options were fall into the sea and turn into a pancake, or burn everybody, and himself, alive.

“I can’t believe we’re gonna see dad!” Katara said, breathless. She also put a healthy distance between herself and Sokka—really, the only person on the saddle that wasn’t wary was Momo, but Momo also feared very little. 

“Yay,” said Sokka, and he sure tried to sound enthusiastic, but his voice still sounded mangled and there was something sinister in his gut that he had to actively tamp down. 

“I’m excited to meet your dad,” said Aang from Appa’s head. “At the Air Temples, we were all community-raised, so everybody was my mom and dad. I can’t remember who my biological dad was… maybe he was from one of the other temples…”

Appa touched down on the shore in front of where the boats were anchored. They hopped off the saddle (Bato looking slightly off-kilter) and took in the familiar sight—the gleaming white-pine hulls, the curved bows, the otter-yak skin sails, slack for now, but come tomorrow would be stretched taut and proud, snapping smartly in the wind. For possibly the first time since he’d left, he felt almost homesick. He didn’t have the best memories of the south pole, but he’d always found a home in the ships, nestled in the warmth of crew at close quarters. He’d only been allowed on twice, because the second time he took ill. Again. 

The largest ship of the fleet—his dad’s, since dad was Chief Naval Officer for the Southern Water Tribes united Navy—dropped one of its rowboats. Bato jogged closer to the edge of the water to meet the parley designation. 

“Bato?” One of the warriors aboard the boat called, a man from one of the other villages that Sokka couldn’t remember the name of. 

“Panuk!” Bato called in reply, waving his good arm above his head. “Go back to the ship and get Hakoda!”

“Why?” 

Bato jerked his head back towards where Aang, Katara, and Sokka were stood. “I’ve got some people I think he’d like to see!”

Sokka fingered the edge of his tunic nervously, rolling up onto the balls of his feet and down again. (Why had he agreed to this? Agreements made after having recently passed out should be legally null. Appa was sitting right there, he could just jump on his head and go—)

“Sokka,” said Katara, snapping him out of his reverie. She looked pointedly at his hem. 

He glanced down. Ah, yep. It was on fire. 

“You’re just gonna stand there and do nothing about it, Miss Waterbender?”

She shrugged. “You aren’t doing anything about it.”

“I’ll put it out!” Chirped Aang, readying himself to blow an airstream at Sokka. 

“NO!” Sokka and Katara cried in tandem. (Did nobody teach their kids science anymore? First the fortune-telling village, now this?)

Sokka almost let him do it anyways, with how dejected he looked when he lowered his arms, but he also really didn’t want to be set on fire, and that outweighed the mild guilt he felt in face of Aang’s puppy eyes.

“It’s still on fire,” Katara pointed out, unhelpfully. 

“Thanks,” he said sardonically. 

He dipped his on-fire tunic into the incoming wave, and straightened up—only to find himself face-to-face with his father for the first time in two and a half years. 

“Sokka,” his dad breathed, like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. 

Even having known that he would see his dad, he wasn’t quite sure he believed it. Two and a half years of his life, his father had existed as nothing more than a fantasy that he tossed around in his head. Rarely even that--he'd spent a good amount of time trying very valiantly not to think about his parents, or rather their absence, at all. Now he was there, in front of Sokka—he could just reach out a hand and touch—and it almost felt too easy. Like there should’ve been more complications—Appa suddenly having a quarter-life crisis, Zuko showing up and capturing them all, being bashed over the head by a group of warrior girls on an island.  That they had simply left, flown, and arrived seemed implausible. (That his father, and the rest of the men, hadn’t died ten times over in a fight against the behemoth force of the Fire Navy seemed nigh impossible.)

Then his dad was hopping the bow of the rowboat and surging forward to take Sokka into his arms. 

The feeling wasn’t quite the same, but it was familiar. His father had leaned out during his time at sea, so the thin layer of soft fat that covered his muscles was noticeably absent. He smelled considerably worse. But it was still the strong, warm embrace of his father, an embrace that he had only allowed himself to miss during those miserable winter nights, tucked up against Katara and Gran-Gran and wishing for his parents. 

Dad pulled away too soon, holding Sokka at arm’s length to look him up and down. 

“You’ve grown,” he said appraisingly. “How did you and your sister get all the way out here?”

“We’re on a mission to help the Avatar save the world. We’re going to the Northern Water Tribe to learn waterbending on his flying bison,” he jerked his thumb back to where Aang was hanging awkwardly next to Appa. 

Dad stilled for a moment, before doubling over in laughter. Sokka urged him over to Appa with a gentle hand while he struggled to compose himself. He straightened up, wiping nonexistent tears from his eyes, and was nearly bowled over by Katara. 

“No, seriously,” he asked, Katara hanging onto him like a limpet-monkey, “how’d you get out here? Why?”

“I wasn’t joking, Aang’s the Avatar.”

“It’s true!” Said Aang, catapulting himself twelve feet in the air as a demonstration. 

“He was stuck in an iceberg for a hundred years, and me and Katara broke him out,” Sokka explained, before his dad could give voice to the question that was simmering in his eyes. 

“I see. I guess we’ve got a bit to catch up on, then? Why don’t we head on back to the ship, so you can say hi to all the men?”

Sokka grimaced. “Uh, not really a good idea. I’ve been having a lot of,” he lit a flame in his palm just to demonstrate, only for it to shoot up a good six feet higher than he’d meant it to, “sparky problems. The ships are basically kindling.”

Panuk and Bato jumped a little at the display, but his dad only frowned at Sokka’s palm—now empty of flame—like he was trying to figure something out. Given the last time he’d seen Sokka firebend, Sokka had been able to produce a flame maybe the size of his index finger, it was probably how the hell his son had managed to get that good that fast. (Or powerful, really—ever since the Fire Temple, it felt like he was only ever getting worse. He couldn’t even do his little spitting out a flame trick accurately, it always spluttering out midway to his fingertips or growing too large before he had to snuff it out.)

“Let’s sit down,” beckoned Dad, plopping down on one of the granite boulders that littered the base of the short cliff. “I think we’ve both got a lot to say.”

They’d gotten up through the approximate ninth time that Sokka had broken his foot (and later, ankle) when one of the warriors scrambled off of a rowboat and ran over to Hakoda. 

“Chief,” the man panted, “three people on a shirshu coming our way. Looks to me like two imperial firebenders and a woman.”

His dad nodded, rising. “Get back to the ships—the shirshu won’t reach you from there. We’ll see what they want.”

Aang, Katara, and Sokka all shared a look. “Do you think it’s Zuko?” Asked Aang. 

Sokka shrugged. “Knowing him, probably.”

Katara sighed. “This is getting kind of old.”

The watchman headed back to the ship, and the group retreated from the cliffs so they wouldn’t be directly in the shirshu’s line of fire. Not that Sokka knew what a shirshu was, other than that it a) existed and b) could carry at least three people on its back. And was likely fast, given the haste with which the watchman had come over to warn the chief.

They lined up—Aang to Sokka’s right, ready with his glider, Hakoda to Sokka’s left, ready with his bone sword, and Katara to his left, water whips— water whips? 

“Katara, water whips? Really?”

She scowled at him. “I’ve gotten really good at them!”

“No offense, but Zuko can waterbend you under a rock. At the very least, keep your knife in your holster instead of your boot.”

She huffed and rolled her eyes, but Sokka noticed she did as he said. (Which was good, because Zuko could, actually, waterbend Katara under a rock. Where did the guy even learn how to waterbend? Who taught him? Sokka didn’t think there were an abundance of waterbending masters in the Fire Nation. Maybe it was whoever he’d inherited waterbending from—)

Sure enough, Prince Wetwipes, his weird uncle, and some tall goth chick pulled up on what Sokka assumed was a shirshu. (Unless he was mistaken, in which case there were another two imperial firebenders on their way, which was a bigger fucking problem than the current big fucking problem. He knew the reunion had gone too smoothly.)

“Hand over the Avatar,” said Wetwipes. 

“Wow. Not even a hello or anything.”

Zuko rolled his eyes. “I don’t have time for your games, Water Tribe.”

“Do you even know my name, Wetwipes?”

(In the background, the prince’s weird uncle was dismissing the woman and her shirshu—with great regret, it seemed.)

“Do you even know mine?”

“Zuko.”

Wetwipes faltered. 

“Go on, say it. What’s my name?”

“…Chalky.”

“No. You seriously think my dad sat down and named me Chalky?”

“Socky?”

“Closer, but still horrible.”

“QUIT STALLING!” Wetwipes shouted, pulling out a water whip worlds better than Katara’s. It snapped across his cheek, leaving a stinging cut that felt wet and warm to the touch.

“Yeesh, touchy—“

Dad was suddenly standing in front of him. “Don’t touch my son,” he growled. 

Sokka peeked around his dad’s back in time to see Wetwipes’ face harden. He hit dad with a move that sent him sprawling. Sokka saw red. 

“What the hell was that for, Wetwipes? He didn’t do shit to you!” He ignored the fact that the puffs of flame that were escaping with each breath were, in fact, much larger than puffs. Probably nearing the size of a feral pygmy-puma.

Zuko didn’t even try to justify himself. He just sneered and went, “will you stop calling me that stupid name?” Then he paused, considering. “And hand over the Avatar!”

“He’s already gone,” said Sokka, pointing to where Aang was escaping with Katara on Appa. (They’d be back for him, he was sure. Right?)

“Sucks to get left behind, doesn’t it?” Zuko taunted. Sokka seethed. 

“Shut the hell up, idiot.”

Then Zuko went rooting around in his pocket for something (a murder weapon, maybe?) and triumphantly pulled out a familiar blue ribbon, one he'd recognize anywhere.

Sokka lunged, shouting incoherently. He had nothing to say, at least not in words, but what he was saying with each poorly-aimed blast of fire was fuck you, give that back, it's ours.

Zuko stepped back, just barely avoiding an arc of flame from Sokka’s fingertips.

"That all you got?" He sneered. Stupidly.

The familiar burning sensation in his chi returned, the type he’d felt the night before, and why had he thought this was a good idea—

Zuko encased his left hand in ice—

He melted it off without even thinking about it—

Aang and Katara looped back around on Appa—

Dad was up again, but hanging back on the fringes, watching Zuko and Sokka shout and dance around each other as Sokka tried to get his mother’s necklace back from that dirty bastard—

“Go ahead,” smugged Zuko, “keep shooting your little flames at me. See if the necklace doesn’t burn with me.”

“I can’t stop them!” He shouted, because it was true. 

The burning sensation was worse than it had been yesterday. Sweat sizzled across his brow as soon as it left his pores, the tips of his hair were getting singed—he wasn’t supposed to be able to burn himself with his own fire, why were the tips of his hair getting singed?—and his throat ached with every breath. If the night before had felt like a metaphorical internal combustion, this one felt literal. Smoke and soot blackened the backs of his teeth and his lips started to blister.

Zuko had stopped fighting him—how long ago? Eight, nine, ten heaves of his fiery lungs?—and was now standing to the side, shellshocked. 

(Sokka felt like fire was coming out of his eyes and ears and nose— could fire even come out of his eyes? Was he dying?)

Holding his breath had worked last time (even if it had also resulted in his passing out) but when he tried it, his vision immediately started to go black. His dad made to step towards him (and seriously, what was it with people trying to approach an actively volatile firebender? First the nun, now his dad?)

“You need to calm yourself!” Shouted Crazy Uncle, “take deep breaths on a count of four and hold them—“

He stopped listening, staggering back towards the shoreline as his father approached—slowly, like he was trying to quell the bleating of an injured fox-deer. 

The water. The water. 

Sokka took another few shaky steps back, then another few—each movement felt starved of oxygen, the way he’d felt after training on Kyoshi Island. He stopped when the water had reached just above his knees, and flopped back. 

The last thing he heard before he went under was someone shouting a panicked no!

Zuko couldn’t believe what an idiot Socky was. Nobody had been able to stop him—the boy had been jetting out flames like a performer at a festival—but it was still idiotic. (He saw Socky go down, and he panicked—) He stepped past the boy’s father and reached out, feeling where the boy was in the water (being tossed around by the waves, getting farther and farther from shore with each pull out to sea) and waterbending him out, making sure that there was a cool sphere of water encasing the boy (holy shit, ouch. It sure wasn’t cool anymore). He froze the sphere of water, and by the time he’d set Socky back down onto the rocks, the water had melted. He refroze it. Socky was still breathing fire like he was the Dragon of the South. (Which was a good name, should the boy try his hand in vigilantism.) 

Whatever water had been in Socky’s lungs had been evaporated out, which had the bonus of him no longer drowning, but had the minus of him boiling the inside of his lungs. Zuko could see blisters forming on the corners of the boy’s lips, and the corners of his eyes were starting to redden. (He was so glad he’d bullied Yagoda into instructing him on the basics of healing—)

“Water Tribe,” he said. Four heads turned his way. “Girl,” he tacked on, to clarify. “Do you know how to heal? I can only do so much for him.” He tried very desperately to stay calm, but he had never tried to heal somebody who was still actively self-immolating.

“What?” 

“Do you know how to heal?”

“No, I heard you, just— what?” She sounded frantic.

“You know,” he said, bending a ball of water out of his flask and placing it over Socky’s mouth, channeling his chi into the healing properties of the water, reviving dead flesh. 

Water Tribe Girl’s eyes widened to saucers. “You can do that?”

Zuko frowned. He bent his water into the boy’s lungs, which was harder than it should’ve been considering he kept evaporating the fucking water. “All waterbenders can, to an extent. Men don’t normally learn, but I felt it was necessary. Who taught you, that you don’t even know this?”

The girl turned sour. Zuko finally finagled his water in, by freezing it to where it was nearly permafrost, so that by the time it reached the lungs it would be liquid again, and he could work his magic. “Nobody taught me,” she said, “I’m the last waterbender in the south pole.”

“Oh,” said Zuko, running his hands efficiently over Socky’s body, using a thin layer of water to try and target any more injuries. There was an immensely complicated fracture in his foot and ankle that Zuko couldn’t hope to fully heal, but the ankle was a clean enough break that he could heal it. The biggest problem was that the boy was so desperately oxygen-starved that what little oxygen slipped past the fire in his lungs was being redirected towards his brain. 

“Avatar,” he said, because quite frankly, he would be the shittiest person alive if he let somebody die under his watch just because he couldn’t cooperate with his enemies. He’d chase the Avatar down again—he always did. It was a non-issue that he had to skip out on this opportunity.

(He owed Socky a life debt, besides. Tit-for-tat.)

“What?” The Avatar asked, suitably apprehensive.

“Are you good enough to airbend oxygen into his bloodstream?”

“Um, uh—“ the boy faltered, “I’m not well-versed on airbending healing practices. But I can try?”

“Is what you’re doing dangerous?” The boy’s father asked. 

“We’ve got two options,” Zuko snapped, “either he dies, slowly and painfully, because nobody taught him how to control his fire, or Aang tries to give him enough oxygen to live. Maybe successful, maybe not. But it’s our best option.”

“I could try something,” Uncle said, kneeling next to Socky and putting one leathery hand on the boy’s belly button, the other resting on his forehead. “I have never done it before, but failure has fewer consequences than the young airbender attempting an advanced healing technique that he has not been trained in. If I focus my chi on his, I might be able to calm his flame enough for him to live.”

He looked towards Socky’s father entreatingly; the man answered with a terse nod. Uncle closed his eyes. 

The resulting action was underwhelming, looking from the outside in. He was sure it was all sorts of exciting if one was doing it, but what it looked like was Uncle breathing very slowly and deeply, and then eventually Socky’s breathing evened out to match his, his breath of fire finally abating. Uncle sat back and released his hold on Socky (but not before surreptitiously brushing some stray hairs from the boy’s forehead) and opened his eyes, looking around. 

Water Tribe Girl still had tears streaming down her face. Zuko deliberately ignored this fact, but her father didn’t. Zuko tensed as the man advanced on his daughter, but it wasn’t his place to interfere with whichever punishment he would mete out for weakness. Just like it hadn’t been anybody’s place to interfere with his father’s punishment during the Agni Kai. 

(Hadn’t it been, though? Shouldn’t Uncle have spoken up? Even Azula, cruel as she was, had promised, long ago, to protect her ‘non-bender’ older brother from their father as best she could—and yet, when he had nightmares of the day, his sister’s laughter rang as loud and clear as Fire Lord Ozai’s threatening timbre.)

But Water Tribe Girl’s father didn’t bring his hand up to strike her, or twist her arm until the tendons in her elbow snapped, or—

He simply took her into his arms. An embrace. They sunk to the floor in tandem, the girl sobbing into her father’s shirt like she was still a babe, like nobody had beat her until the tears simply didn’t come anymore. He was saying something to her, over and over, in a low voice, but from this distance, and with his poor hearing, Zuko couldn’t make the words out at all. 

(To him, it sounded something like he’s okay, he’s okay.)

He felt like he was intruding on something intimate, and he tugged at Uncle’s sleeve to go and leave, but Uncle shook his head.

“What?” 

“Didn’t you hear the young firebender? That necklace belonged to their late mother—you must return it, nephew.”

“Oh,” he said, staring down at the piece of blue fabric that he’d wrapped around his wrist after dangling it in front of Socky. 

(“My connections to my Water Tribe heritage are weak,” admitted his mother, bouncing him on her knee as she explained to him the origins of his bending. “But I still have a few things.

“This was my grandmother’s— it’s a betrothal necklace,” she presented the necklace to him. It was a depiction of a fish and the moon, poorly hewn from ivory, but a recognizable image nonetheless. It hung from a piece of silver fabric—the type of fabric that Mom and Azula’s dresses were sometimes made of, but that he and Father never got to wear. Velvet, he thought. He ran his fingers over it with reverence.

“What’s a betrothal necklace?” He asked. 

“You know how, when two people are going to get married, they wear special hairpieces on their top-knots? In the Northern Water Tribe, instead of hairpieces, the man carves a necklace to give to his bride-to-be.”

“What if a man wants to wear it? And marry another man?”

His mother grew sharp. “Do not speak that way, Zuko. Men marrying men and women marrying women is unnatural. It goes against the path of the spirits. 'Man and wife are to join and bear child,'” she recited.

He feared his mother in that moment. He had feared his mother before--she had a temper on her, and she was quick to reprimand him for his wrongdoings--but he had never feared her as he feared his father. Right then, though, all he could feel was her tightening grip on the bones of his wrist.

“I'm sorry, mother," he said, and she relinquished her grip.

“Now look here at this bone dagger…”

He couldn’t remember where the necklace was, now. If his mother had taken it with her, or if it was sitting in his room in the palace, collecting dust. He wished he could remember.)

Giving the necklace back to the girl was a non-option, right now, because she was still having a class-A breakdown into her father’s chest, and the boy was passed out and couldn’t adequately guard a necklace. (Also, the two Water Tribe men were kneeling by Socky and staring quite threateningly at him and Uncle.) That left one option. (His stomach was really not too pleased by the amount of times he’d been forced to cooperate with the enemy this afternoon.)

“Avatar,” he sighed, “give this back to your girlfriend.” He unwrapped the necklace from his wrist and held it outstretched towards the bald boy.

The Avatar turned bright red and started stuttering. “I’m— she— she’s not my—!”

Zuko rolled his eyes. “I don’t care. Just take it.” He dropped the necklace into the boy’s upturned palm and turned to leave. 

“Wait!” He called. “Wait.”

“What?” He snapped, turning back around.

“What— I mean, what was— that?”

“Uh, me giving you the girl’s necklace?”

“No! I meant Sokka’s— fire explosion. It happened last night, too. It’s been getting harder for him to control his fire, and he talked to a fortune-teller woman about it, but she didn’t know very much—“

“I believe I can answer that,” said Uncle. “Severe emotional distress or conflict can cause disturbances in the chi, especially if one is unsure of themselves.”

Water Tribe Girl sniffled and looked up from her father’s tunic. “Why didn’t any of this happen-- before?"

“The conditions your brother grew up in weakened his chi, providing an illusion of control—in a firebender with more practice and greater command of their element, this conflict often presents itself as nothing more than a high fever. Your brother, unfortunately, is unused to having this much power, and so his case is more extreme,” Uncle sighed. “He must learn control, and he must master his inner conflict. Whatever it is that is plaguing him, he must confront it. I cannot be the young firebender’s teacher, unfortunately, but I can guide you to a man that can.”

“What’ll happen if he doesn’t get control? Or if we don’t make it on time?” Asked the Avatar, looking concerned. 

“He will die.”

The silence on the beach was stony.

“So we’re just going to follow what Crazy Uncle told us to do?” Sokka asked, from his corner of the saddle. Aang and Katara were giving him a wide berth—even encased in ice (thanks, Katara!) he was still releasing a tiny spark with every breath. At least he wasn’t running a deadly fever anymore. (He was running a fever, but it wasn’t so hot that he was just melting through the ice immediately. Instead, it melted the ice directly in contact with his skin, which meant that he ended up sitting in a full-body shackle of soggy-ass ice, which was incredibly uncomfortable. He was trying valiantly to ignore the discomfort. He was also failing.)

“It’s our best bet, Sokka,” Aang said, uncharacteristically somber. Both he and Katara had been uncharacteristically somber since he woke up. Out of kindness, he did not mention that both of their eyes were as red and swollen as if they’d smoked a bushel of glass-weed. 

“You almost died,” said Katara, voice wavering. Sokka also diplomatically didn’t mention the catch in her throat. He was being so benevolent this evening.

“What’s another near-death experience under the belt, hey?” He joked. The effect was opposite the one he desired, as their frowns turned so far downwards they nearly ran off their faces.

“You never take anything seriously! This isn’t a joke! Your life isn’t a joke! You were— you— Zuko had to heal you!”

That surprised Sokka. He widened his eyes, and if he had agency over his limbs, he would have sat up further. “Zuko healed me?”

“It was some kind of waterbending trick,” Aang interjected, “he put water over your injuries and it went all blue and glowy.”

“Huh,” he said. “Waterbending can do that?”

They ignored him. 

“His uncle saved your life, too. He did some— some sort of thing with your chi. I trust that he’s not sending us into a trap.”

“So that makes us even, then.”

“This isn’t some sort of tally!” Katara shouted, hackles raising like a pissed-off hyena-slug (which were horrifying, and which he never wanted to see again). 

“Katara. Please do not yell at me,” he tried to measure his breaths, “if we get into another argument, I think I will become a human explosive. Do you want my chunks all over the floor?”

That shut her up: she snapped her jaw closed with a click of her teeth and looked away. 

The conversation faltered after that, Sokka having reached the (non-verbal) concession that it would probably be a good idea to visit this firebending master guy and the other two realizing that any heated arguments would likely land them with a broiled brother. 

As time went on, the ice, and furthermore, the windchill, seemed to be doing their jobs in cooling him down. Unfortunately, Sokka was still feverish, so he had that really exciting feeling where he was both excruciatingly hot and unbearably cold. Not for the first time, and most certainly not for the last, he cursed having been born a firebender. 

Sokka woke from his uneasy, feverish sleep to find that they were no longer in the air, and that he was no longer in Appa’s saddle. The ice block he was in felt a little less melty, so Katara must’ve re-frozen it. He no longer produced a lick of flame with every exhale, instead just sending out a tiny little thing of smoke. (He wondered if he could blow a smoke ring. He couldn’t, but he attributed that less to the quality of the smoke and more to the fact that he had absolutely no clue how to blow a smoke ring.) 

He surveyed his surroundings as best he could—Katara had mercifully trapped him in a sitting position, so he could see things better, but he couldn’t turn to see behind himself. Luckily, all the action seemed to be happening only slightly to his left. 

“…the boy encased in ice?” A tall, white-haired man asked, sounding disproportionately angry from what Sokka understood of the situation. 

“I told you! He’ll die if he isn’t!”

“And how am I meant to help him? If releasing him from the ice kills him, I cannot teach him how to control his element.”

“Iroh said something about meditation and breath control. He can do that in a block of ice, can’t he?”

The man paused. “General Iroh sent you?”

“Uh, yeah?” 

“I will refrain from asking how you met him and managed to acquire his recommendation. I get enough headaches as it is.”

“Well his nephew—“

“I just said I will refrain from asking.” 

“So you’ll do it?” 

The man sighed. “Very well. But he must be dedicated to his studies. Fire is volatile, and dangerous—to himself and others.”

Trust me, Sokka thought, I know. 

“So, am I going to be learning some of those crazy moves that Crazy Uncle pulls?” Sokka asked. Jeong-Jeong graciously didn’t ask who Crazy Uncle was, because Sokka was unsure of what the penalty for besmirching the good name of the royal family was. 

“No. First, you will stay in that ice block of yours, and you will try to control the strength of the flames with your breath. There are fourteen candles, one for each tongue of Agni.”

“Agni has more than one tongue? When I met him in my dream he was just a normal dude.”

Jeong-Jeong looked like he wished homicide was legal. “Agni has two heads, one male and and one female, with seven tongues each. Thus, when we meditate or pray, we use fourteen candles. Ladies of the Sun and Fire Sages use only seven.”

“Why?”

“They are devotionals to either the male or female head of Agni.”

That made no sense. Sokka didn’t say so. 

(Sokka thought the Fire Nation would be decidedly disappointed to find out that the Sun spirit was just a regular dude, with only one tongue. A bit taller than average, maybe, but that wasn’t a credit to his otherworldly quality.)

They started the meditation exercise inside. Jeong-Jeong’s tent now had fourteen holes in the canopy, and they finished it outside. 

…

“Now that you are no longer bound, we will begin other exercises,” Jeong-Jeong said, not shortening his stride for Sokka’s wobbly doe-legged convenience. 

“Oh, cool. So what’s first?”

“Praying to Agni.”

“Um. Why?”

If there was one thing that Jeong-Jeong was good at other than firebending, it was making Sokka feel extraordinarily stupid with just one look. 

“Every firebender is Touched by Agni,” said Jeong-Jeong, audibly capitalizing the T, “we are Blessed by Them. If They are dissatisfied with you, They might Curse you.”

Sokka really, really didn’t believe that. He really doubted that Agni—if They (fuck, now he was capitalizing things too) even paid attention to mere mortals at all—gave a damn whether or not Sokka prostrated himself before Their Spiritliness every morning at the ass-crack of dawn or not. It felt like a sort of non-issue. 

“We do not have a proper temple,” monologued Jeong-Jeong, pushing open the tent flap for Sokka as he entered, “so we make do. Do not be afraid of fire while you are in here—if the flames of the candles jump too high, it is Agni granting you power; if the altar is burnt down, it is Agni expressing Their displeasure with the altar, and so we must rebuild anew.”

Sokka nodded, taking in the contents of the Prayer Tent. Across from the entrance to the tent was the altar—it was admittedly more modest than Sokka had expected. When people talked about the Fire Nation he always thought of riches and gold and also an unprecedented amount of incense. The last part was as expected but the first part wasn’t—the altar was a simple wood bench with a depiction of Agni on it (and Agni, no wonder the Fire Nation war-mongered—their depiction of Agni was easily one of the top ten most horrifying things he’d seen with his own eyes. It was narrowly beat out for spot number one by Aang flirting with Katara), fourteen candles, what looked like a few personal items, and indeed, an unprecedented amount of incense. Just walking into the tent made his brain go numb with the overpowering scent. 

“So how do you do this praying business?” Sokka asked, rubbing his hands together. 

“First of all, stop that—that is representative of greed.”

Sokka grumbled, but dropped his hands. As if the Fire Nation weren’t greedy. Hypocrites.

“First, you must purify your hands,” said Jeong-Jeong, “you dip your hands in the water, and then dip your hands into the bowl of flame. This keeps you from desecrating the offerings to Agni.” 

Reluctantly, he followed suit, dipping his hands in the water before dipping them in the bowl of fire. It seemed almost like the flames jumped up to meet his hands; Jeong-Jeong saw this, and nodded in approval. 

“That is a sign that you are Blessed by Agni. So you are not Cursed as I feared—it truly was a matter of poor circumstance. Now, we kneel side by side on the prayer rug. When you pray in an official manner like this, you must always do it in twos or sevens. I hope I do not have to explain that to you.”

He did, but Sokka really wasn’t sure if he wanted to bear the explanation and also the look of long-sufferance. “No, sir. I got it completely.”

“Good. So you understand the severity of the consequences if you do not. Next, you clasp your hands like so:” he folded his hands together demonstratively and leaned forward, “and you say: ‘Agni, may your hand guide my flame true.”

Sokka imitated him, and felt undeniably foolish doing it. Maybe it would feel less weird if he’d grown up doing it—but then again, he’d grown up doing spirit rituals and going to spirit festivals between the twelve southern tribes all his life, and none of it had ever sat quite right. Maybe he just wasn’t built for this stuff. 

“Now, I light these seven candles, and you light those seven.”

Surprisingly, the candles were all lit without consequence, although the canvas of the tent on Sokka’s side had a bit more charring than on Jeong-Jeong’s. 

“See, there, Agni guided your hand true. Now we go into the prayers, which are traditionally said in the High Spiritual Tongue, but since you do not know it you may simply speak in your mother tongue. Many people do this. Ah, but first, we must don the prayer shawls.”

The prayer shawls were a sort of silk material, longer than they were wide but not quite as thin as the scarves that Gran-Gran made. They went over the head and the shoulders like a hood. 

Then Jeong-Jeong bowed, over and over again, each dip towards the altar accenting the cadence of his voice. It was a slow, measured movement, like the rocking of a boat. 

“Um—“

Jeong-Jeong opened one eye and paused his rocking. “What is it?”

“What exactly am I supposed to say?”

“You’ve never prayed to a spirit before?” Jeong-Jeong asked.

He thought back to watching the women from the twelve tribes dance around the bonfire at the end of the Long Night, chanting things that Sokka never quite internalized. He thought of Gran-Gran, muttering blessings from the sea over their cups of mashed purlwort and otter-penguin milk that they drank before ceremonial meals. He thought of standing by his father’s right side as the second Village Elder gave his mother her last rites, and absorbing none of the words as his mind fixated on the smooth way the fabric fit over his mother’s face, no bump where a nose should be—the sight of a charred lump of flesh in place of the smooth slope from bone to cartilage. 

“I’ve seen others pray. I never really absorbed any of it.”

Jeong-Jeong shook his head in exasperation. “You say anything you like, really. There are set prayers for certain events, but daily prayer is simply a time to talk, to ask. To connect, on a deeper spiritual level, with your inner fire and They who gifted it. I would suggest you ask Agni for the gift of greater control—perhaps They will grant it to you.”

So he rocked, and he closed his eyes, and he talked about never having to see a burn in place of a nose ever again. 

…

“You will sit here and try to keep the flame from reaching the edges of the leaf,” said Jeong-Jeong, handing him a leaf with a slowly-growing hole in the middle. 

Sokka grabbed it. It immediately burst into flames.

…

“Now we will learn how to fire squat.”

“Um, is that, like, actual squatting, or…?”

Jeong-Jeong gave him that you are an idiot and I wish I never agreed to take you on as a student look that he’d used probably a million times in the last few days. “Yes.”

“Oh. I probably can’t do that, then.”

Jeong-Jeong pinched the bridge of his nose. “Please tell me why you cannot.”

“My foot is broken in, like, twelve places.”

Jeong-Jeong simply turned and walked away.

“So is that a pass on the squats, then?” Sokka called after him.

…

Did the leaf somehow combust faster than before? He could’ve sworn the flames started to jump even when his hand had yet to touch it…

…

“When you need a bit of extra luck—before a battle, an Agni Kai, an important event—you might choose to offer Agni a personal item as payment. I always prayed, the day before a battle, and never once did I lose.”

Sokka looked at the personal items scattered across the wooden bench: a piece of embroidered silk, a ring, an Earth Kingdom-made pocket watch, a necklace inlaid with nephrite jade and a soapstone carving of a turtleduck. And maybe he still felt foolish kneeling and bowing and saying Agni, may your hand guide my flame true, but he was starting to find comfort in the slide of the shawl over his neck, muttering prayers to keep his family safe. 

Even if it didn’t really work, if Agni wasn’t actually answering his prayers, perhaps it was like putting on grey warpaint, or rubbing the pendant of a necklace, or… 

…

The hole stayed the same size for a whole seven seconds before bursting into flames. Jeong-Jeong said he was ‘a man of extremes.’ Sokka didn’t know if that was an insult or not.

…

“What do you think about your firebending?” Asked Jeong-Jeong, after Sokka’s two-hour prescribed meditation was through. 

“Uh—I’m not sure.”

“Then that is part of the problem. Think: do you believe fire is inherently destructive?”

Sokka furrowed his brows. “…No.”

Jeong-Jeong raised an eyebrow. “That did not sound sure.”

“It was. I just— well, it—“ Sokka sighed, “almost everybody in this world has only experienced firebending in a,” he waved his hands around, “violent context. I don’t… really want to be part of that. But I’m also weaker without firebending. I’m decent with a boomerang, but that’s sort of a one-hit-wonder, and I’m good with the fans and passable with a sword, but really my firebending is better in combat than all of those. Because it’s… more destructive.”

Jeong-Jeong hummed. He began packing up the candles from the meditation, methodically placing them into their ornate red and gold lacquer box. 

“So you are facing conflict because you do not know for which purpose to use your bending. But why not both?”

“Yeah… I just, I don’t know how I’d do that.”

“That, you must think on. But remember this: we should not ignore the parts of ourselves we deem bad. If we do not acknowledge our fire’s power to destroy, then we will not know how to control it when the time comes. Even if you show only one face to the world, do not hide the second face from yourself. Think on these things when you meditate, and you will, in time, come to a resolution.”

“Uh… yeah, sure.” He sat and fidgeted quietly. 

“But that isn’t all, is it?” Jeong-Jeong asked. 

“No. Growing up, nobody hated me for being a firebender—maybe they were nervous at first, but they got over it. Now, out here, people learn that I’m a firebender and automatically hate me—even, even though I’m not even Fire Nation.”

“If I may give you a word of advice, young Sokka?” 

“…Sure.”

“That is one of the masks it may be better to keep private.”

Somehow, Sokka wasn’t quite satisfied with that answer. 

…

“Do you wanna join, Aang?” Asked Sokka, staring very intently at his leaf. The fire was not spreading. The fire had not spread for several minutes. The fire would not spread. 

“Nah,” he said, “you can teach me firebending once you’re a master.”

“Uh,” said Sokka, dubiously. 

“Or Iroh can teach me, once we get Zuko on our side.”

Sokka raised his eyebrows. “That’s optimistic.”

Aang shrugged. “I see good in him. Can’t you?”

(Had they had this conversation before?)

Sokka sighed. The fire remained stagnant. “I guess.”

...

Then Zhao found them, and Sokka’s stupid leaf crumbled into stupid ashes.

Chapter Text

Zuko watched from the docks as Zhao’s ship departed—he’d donned Earth Kingdom garb in order to better blend in. 

His uncle was on that ship, and even though Zuko knew Uncle could take care of himself—he was the Dragon of the West, after all—he was still worried. Partially worried that his and Uncle’s scheme would get found out, partially worried that Uncle wouldn’t be able to gather enough information to help save the Northern Water Tribe. But Uncle was discreet (much more so than Zuko could ever be) and Zhao, despite all appearances, respected Uncle—every self-respecting officer did. 

He was planning on making it to the Northern Water Tribe a week or two before Zhao’s fleet did: though Fire Nation ships were fast and efficient, and didn’t need to make use of the wind to move, a small canoe driven by a competent waterbender was faster. The tides were in his favor, but even if they weren’t he would still make it at least a week in advance. 

He turned away from the Fire Nation ship before it had even come close to disappearing over the horizon, and walked to the well-stocked canoe that he’d bartered some of the surviving artifacts from the explosion for. (It had given him great pleasure to finally see that La-forsaken tsungi horn traded away for something useful.)

It was time to pay a visit to some old friends.

Their welcome to the Northern Water Tribe was… lukewarm. Sokka said this because Aang and Katara’s reception had been warm—Sokka’s too, at first—but then Aang had opened his big mouth and blurted that Sokka was a firebender and it suddenly turned much, much colder. For Sokka, specifically, because instead of getting to finish what looked like a fantastic feast, he was being marched away for ‘standard procedural questions’ for a firebender—Sokka wanted to laugh. As if they even got enough firebenders washing up on their shores to possibly have any sort of ‘standard procedural question.’ Idiots. He hated them all already. (Except that nice princess girl whose name he hadn’t quite caught before he was being carted off, who hadn’t reacted unfavorably to the announcement of his firebending like everyone else.) He was even feeling borderline on Aang right now, for obvious reasons. Even if the kid had looked really sorry. 

“Our apologies for dragging you away from the feast, Prince Sokka,” the guard leading the party said. “We just have to ensure the safety of our tribe.”

(First of all, he’d been joking about the prince bit.) He bit back a scoff—sure they were sorry. Probably sorry for not throwing him into their prison the moment he landed on Appa. Instead, he said, in his most diplomatic voice possible, “of course I understand. I would do the same.” 

Maybe he would. He actually wasn’t sure. Their tribe didn’t have a prison—nobody really committed crimes. If they did commit a crime, it was usually a crime bad enough that throwing them out into the tundra was a proportional punishment. (Some died, some got picked up by one of the inland tribes.)

“Please,  sit,” beckoned the guard, motioning to a block of ice fashioned into a chair. Sokka pulled his anorak closer around his shoulders.

 The Northern Water Tribe was slightly offset from the pole, so its Long Day and Long Night were significantly shorter than in the Southern Water Tribes. They were hanging off of the tail-end of constant darkness, the sun peeking above the horizon for a few hours at a time before disappearing again.

The guard sat directly across from Sokka after they clasped each other’s forearms in greeting, removing his helmet and leaning his spear up against the corner wall. A clerk entered the room and sat next to the guard, shuffling around a sheaf of papers, pulling out a brush and the unmistakable reddish-black color of viper-squid ink. 

The guard cleared his throat. “Let us begin. This formal interrogation is being conducted by Chief of Royal Guard Kaanak, first of his name, resident of Pakkanen City and citizen of the Northern Water Tribe. Second Notary Le is transcribing,” Kaanak cleared his throat, “please dictate your name and position,” he nodded his head in concession to Sokka.

(And, okay, maybe they did have an actual procedure for firebenders. Who would’ve thunk?)

“Sokka, uh, second in line for the chiefdom of the Fox-Tail Tribe.”

Kaanak raised a brow. “Residence? Citizenship status? Title?”

Sokka was getting the sweats. “Resident of the Saddle of the Flying Bison, nominally Appa, former resident of the Fox-Tail Tribe, no formal citizenship status, no formal title.”

Kaanak sighed. Le scribbled furiously at his parchment. 

“Very well. Parents?”

“Chief Hakoda of the Southern Water Tribe of the Fox-Tail Moon, Chief Naval Commander of the conglomerate Southern Water Tribes. Mother Kya of the Southern Water Tribe of the Fox-Tail Moon, deceased.” 

They went through a few more boring questions—age, formal accomplishments, etc etc.—before they got to the meat of the issue. Sokka’s ass was starting to freeze off.

“Is your Fire Nation lineage traceable?” Asked Kaanak, in a matter-of-fact tone. 

Sokka nodded. “My great-grandfather on my father’s mother’s side was a full-blooded firebender.”

“And this was a respectable union, recognized by one of the two sovereign Water Tribes?”

“Yes.”

“Have you claimed your right, as a firebender, to full citizenship status of the Fire Nation?” 

Le flipped over the parchment. 

Sokka raised his eyebrows. “I wasn’t aware that was a thing.”

“His status as a Fire National has not been formalized,” he dictated. More quietly, he turned to Le and asked, “got that?”

Le nodded mutely. 

Sokka fidgeted—he was getting really cold and uncomfortable, and he needed to warm himself up, but he wasn’t sure if he’d be jailed on the spot for using his Breath of Fire.

“Do you mind?” He asked, gesturing vaguely with his left hand, “I need to warm myself up a bit.”

Both Kaanak and Le leaned forward with notable curiosity. “Go ahead, we can take a quick recess. You’re not hungry, are you?”

“Uh, a little bit?”

Kaanak nodded towards one of the guards standing stiffly by the entrance, “go get us something to eat, maybe to drink, too.”

While the guard took his leave, Sokka cupped one hand over his mouth, not wanting to startle the men. After the bit with Jet and the scare with Bato, Sokka had taken to keeping his firebending less obvious—he hadn’t revealed himself to anybody at the Northern Air Temple (though his knowledge of heat was helpful in the construction of the hot air balloons). Neither Kaanak nor Le seemed deterred, though, and he spotted the remaining guard trying to do an inconspicuous lean-around to catch a glimpse at his flame. On his next breath, he took his hand off of his mouth. 

“Fascinating,” said Le, the first Sokka had heard him speak. He had a deep voice, as smooth and easy as warm yak’s milk. “I wasn’t aware that any but the royal family could breathe fire.”

Sokka shrugged, “I don’t see why not. It was actually the first thing I did, completely by accident.”

Kaanak barked out a laugh, leaning back in his ice chair. Now that he’d unfolded himself, stopped sounding so official and robotic, Sokka noticed that the man looked to be in his late twenties, maybe early thirties—pretty early to be Chief of the Royal Guard. Without the veneer of formality, he and Le leaned together like close friends, though Sokka had caught little intimations of the idea during the interrogation. 

“So, not a prince, huh?” Asked Kaanak, drumming his fingers on the tabletop. “Don’t worry, this is all off-the-record. Just curious. You seem like you’ve lived a pretty wild life.”

Sokka snorted. “I wouldn’t say that. It’s been pretty exciting the past few months, sure, but unless you count nearly freezing to death every winter wild, it used to be pretty boring. But yeah, not a prince. That part was a joke. I guess I’m the nearest thing to a prince we’ve got, down there, since my dad’s not just chief of the tribe but also chief of our navy.”

“How many southern tribes are there? I wasn’t aware there was more than one,” Le said, graciously accepting the bowl of seal stew he was offered. “They don’t teach us much about you guys, other than that our tribes split into two several centuries ago when a few explorers simply went down and never returned.”

Sokka laughed around his stew. It was under-seasoned. “That’s what they teach you guys? They teach us the exact same thing, saying that some explorers went north and stayed there,” he put down his bowl. “There are twelve tribes in total, one for each moon of the year. Ours was established third, hence,” he spread his hands, “Tribe of the Fox-Tail Moon. Fox-Tail Tribe, if you want to be quick about it.”

“Wow,” said Le, “so you’re second in line for the Chiefdom?”

“Yep,” said Sokka, popping the ‘p,’ “right after Katara.”

Kaanak raised his eyebrows. “Your sister? She’s younger than you, right?”

“Yeah. We’ve got male primogeniture, too, so technically I should be first, but,” he shrugged, “my dad wasn’t gonna pass the mantle onto me when I wasn’t expected to live past the age of ten.” He grinned toothily, trying to push back the insistent images of picking his funeral furs out when he was only five. (He’d unearthed them when going through some stuff the year before last—they were so small. They wouldn’t fit him anymore.) 

“Sickly kid, huh?” Asked Le, “Kaanak was the same way.”

“Hey,” protested Kaanak, “just because you’ve never once gotten sick doesn’t mean I’m the abnormality.”

“Yeah. The lack of sun and the cold was really bad for me. Firebender thing.”

“That’s pretty interesting,” said Kaanak, “I don’t know anything about firebenders. Well, other than that they breathe fire,” he chuckled at his own joke. “So being up here must suck, then?”

Sokka shrugged. “Not so much. I think it’s because I spent some time where it was sunny and warm.”

Le hummed. “In my memory, we’ve only ever had contact with one other firebender—who was it again? Couple years back, some old guy who was friends with Pakku?”

“Spirits be pressed if I know. You’re the one with the freaky memory.”

Sokka shook his head in amusement—the two reminded him of Katara and himself. “You two seem like close friends,” he said. 

Kaanak smirked. “Born on the same day, eight minutes apart. I was first, of course.”

“Naturally,” Le rolled his eyes. “As if it makes a difference.”

“It’s a relevant statistic, little guy. When I was your age, we were still interrogating the prince.”

“Not a prince,” Sokka reminded.

“Close thing, though, isn’t it? Chief’s children around here are princes or princesses. Besides, I think it fits you.”

Sokka feigned bashfulness. “Aw, shucks, Kaanak. You’re making me blush.”

Kaanak laughed. “You know, we still need to finish that interrogation. We can probably slide with just a few more questions and a note of off-record trust, right?” 

Le grunted. “Ayasa probably won’t be thrilled about it, but it should be fine.”

“Right, then.”

The interrogation resumed, conducted in the same formal tone as the first half. ‘A few more questions’ ended up lasting a good twenty minutes, and Sokka was stiff and cold by the time they filed out of the door, Sokka with a piece of unyielding paper that labeled him as not-a-threat in the official capacity and a set of directions back to the festival hall.

Kaanak landed a slap on his back, as friendly (and winding) as Bato’s. “Listen, kid, give us a holler if you ever get in any trouble. We’ve got your back.”

Sokka smiled and thanked them when Le backed up his statement, and even the two nameless guards nodded briefly at him as he walked away. He left feeling warmer than when he arrived. 

Zuko stared up at the familiar packed-ice walls, leagues better than that shoddy construction of the Southern Water Tribe’s. It was cold up here, and despite wearing three jackets—of Earth Kingdom make—he was still shivering. He mourned his anorak (which Teta had dyed red for him, citing that as much as he was Water Tribe, he was also Fire Nation, and that he needed to honor that), which had died a gory death along with most of the things on his ship. (Aside from that damned tsungi horn, which had proven useful, but also proved that Zuko was haunted.)

He wasn’t powerful enough to open the walls on his own—he wasn’t sure if there was a waterbender on the planet that was. It took a team of several waterbenders to pry apart the several-ton walls. 

None of the waterbenders were posted right now, which was typical. They didn’t expect many visitors.

He melted a small section of the wall, which was laborious after three days of tirelessly shifting the currents in his favor. He pushed through with his paddle and re-froze the ice. 

It was dark out, but the sun had only just dipped under the horizon when he’d first spotted the familiar speck of white on the dark ocean, so people were probably still out and about. He drifted forwards idly. When the city guards pointed their spears at him, it was expected. 

“Papers and identification!” One of them shouted, a fresh-faced recruit barely older than Zuko. 

“I lost them in an explosion,” he said, calmly, trying not to lose his cool. 

They neared his canoe and stopped it, and an older man—likely the head of the squad—asked, “do you have proof of Water Tribe heritage, or somebody in the city that can vouch for you?” 

Zuko nodded and waterbent some of the canal water into a sphere, the same trick he’d pulled on the white-haired princess from those few years ago. (He couldn’t remember her name, but he remembered that she’d been kind. The white hair had been the most remarkable thing about her.)

“Very well,” said the leader, “you may pass through. Head left at the first bend, the notary’s immigration office will be the second building on your right. May you be blessed by Tui and La.”

Zuko inclined his head, “and you.” 

He climbed off of his canoe at the immigration office, tethering it to one of the posts and tugging his hat on a little further over his ears. Earth Kingdom clothes really weren’t suited for this kind of weather, even with as many layers as he had on. 

The immigration branch of the notary public was small and sluggish, a two-story thing with ice that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since the last time Zuko’d been there. It was manned by two people: a stern middle-aged woman with her hair in a clean part and deep creases where she wore her frown, and a pimply-faced young girl who looked like sitting behind the desk was torture. 

The woman looked up when Zuko entered. “Welcome to the immigration office,” she said, voice monotone, “what d’you need?”

“Aw,” said Zuko, affecting his best Azula-slash-Socky voice, “not even a hello from my favorite old bat?”

If Lellaa was surprised at his sudden appearance, she didn’t show it. “Didn’t recognize you without that awful red jacket. You look frozen half to death.”

Zuko darkened. “It got blown up.”

Lellaa sighed. “I don’t suppose your papers survived whatever explosion killed Teta’s beautiful creation?”

“You just said the jacket was ugly,” pointed Zuko. 

“It is. But Teta is a master of her craft, blessed may she be by the spirit of the moon.”

“Is she blackmailing you?” He asked, sliding into the seat opposite hers. The cushion on the chair was old and lumpy. 

“Immigration don’t pay much, and this one,” she motioned to the pimply teenager next to her, who huffed and rolled her eyes, “shattered my last anorak in an ice incident. Had to suck up to her. Advertisement’s part of the deal, not that any sane person would get theirs from anyone but her. That’s common sense speaking, not the deal.”

Zuko nodded. “Who is she, anyways?” 

Lellaa shuffled through her drawer until she found whatever she was looking for. She slapped a blank passport down onto the desk. “Don’t you remember Etna? My sister’s girl—she’s a lot bigger than when you last saw her, so it makes sense.”

“Why’s she here, instead of at Yagoda’s?” The girl had been studying under the healer two years ago.

“She got in trouble again, so she’s suspended from the healing tent ’til she apologizes.”

“I’m not gonna apologize!” The girl shrieked, voice so shrill it almost broke the walls of the room. “It’s unfair! Why should all the boys get to do the fighting!” She kicked at the leg of the desk. “I hate it here.”

Lellaa gave Etna a light cuff on the back of the head. “Reminds me of you, she does.”

“I do not act like that!” Zuko cried. 

Lellaa looked at him pointedly. He huffed and sunk low in his seat. 

“Whatever.”

“So,” said Lellaa, turning her attention to the papers in front of her, “I’m not legally allowed to vouch for your entry. Teta, Pakku, or Yagoda?” 

Zuko shuddered in memory of his two waterbending instructors. “Teta.”

She laughed. “S’what I thought. Etna, slide over to Teta’s, will you?” 

“Ugh,” Etna intoned, standing up and promptly stomping out of the room. Zuko swore he heard the ice crack below her feet, despite the ice that the Northern Water Tribe sat on being nearly a quarter mile thick. 

“I don’t act like her,” Zuko said again, as Etna left. 

“The lack of self-awareness you have astonishes me, Zuko. Now, tell your dear auntie what you’ve been up to these past two years.”

One of the conditions of Sokka’s stay in the city was that he would not—excepting special circumstances, i.e. meditation or self defense—firebend. This meant that he was bored. Excruciatingly so. 

The daylight had already faded, leaving him a little bit shaky and weak, as if he had low blood sugar. He was wandering around the city—Aang and Katara had received the Grand Tour after the celebratory dinner the night before. 

The construction put his ramshackle village to shame. He was almost angry at it, for daring to be so beautiful, so tall and strong and bounteous, when his own people down south were suffering—barely scraping by, dwindling in numbers until there were hardly more than two hundred people in total on the entire continent. Sokka knew that they hadn’t had contact with their sister tribe in several decades, but surely the news of their slow decline had reached them somehow. There were villages in the Earth Kingdom that had heard about the south. It wasn’t a state secret.

It left a bitter taste in his mouth as he walked the even, smooth canals, this neglect. Neutrality was a sham. Inaction was complicity. 

Stupid war, he thought, stomping through the streets and breathing fire through his nose like he was the damn Dragon of the South. (That would be a good name, he thought, if he ever needed to take on a secret identity. Perhaps masked vigilantism, like that Blue Spirit character. He wondered if the Blue Spirit was a waterbender.)

He was stomping and seething so furiously that he turned the corner without looking, only to stomp directly into another person. They both jumped back at the same time. 

“Hey, watch it!” He cried, flame dancing off of his tongue. (It felt different when he was in control—warmer, softer, not the so-hot-it’s-cold way it burned when he lost his grip on his bending.)

“No, you watch—“ she cut herself off, eyes going wide. “Are you a firebender?”

He’d been stopped no less than eight times by the guards patrolling the streets. “I’m allowed to be here,” he said quickly.

She scowled. “I didn’t say you weren’t. It’s just weird. And cool.”

Her mannerisms reminded him of someone. Who was it, though?

“Are you Water Tribe?” She asked, eyes narrowed in calculation. 

“Yeah.”

“Cool.”

“Etna,” the woman next to the girl—Sokka hadn’t even noticed her until now—said. “Stop stalling.”

“You can go down there yourself! I’m only even doing this because that idiot Pakku won’t teach girls. Sexist jerk,” she scuffed the ice with her boot.

It clicked. “You know, you remind me of my sister,” he said appraisingly. “And Prince Wetwipes. You’re like Prince Wetwipes, if he was also my sister.”

The girl was a few years younger than both of them, though. Sokka would peg her at around eleven or twelve, maybe a young thirteen. She looked about Aang’s age. 

Etna broke into peals of laughter, prompting the woman next to her to sigh and glide (legitimately glide) away. Sokka patted the girl on the back tentatively as she hooted. 

“Oh,” she giggled, “oh spirits. Who’s Prince Wetwipes?”

“He’s this guy that chased me and my sister and the Avatar all the way up from the south,” he crossed his arms and leaned up against the wall of the nearest shop. “I’m not entirely sure if he’s on our side or not. He keeps trying to capture Aang, but then he keeps helping us, too. He healed me when I almost died, which— I mean, I’m not complaining about it, but it’s still weird.”

She finally calmed down, though her breaths were still escaping in huffs. She was clutching her stomach like it hurt. (It probably did. Sokka didn’t think that Prince Wetwipes was that funny a name.)

“He’s a waterbender?” She asked, perking up. 

“Yep. He’s like me, kind of. Waterbender from the Fire Nation, firebender from the Water Tribes. Like opposites, except also the same.”

“Like Tui and La,” she said, wisely. (Sokka knew the names of the moon and the ocean spirits, but he also didn’t know what that had to do anything.) Then the girl’s expression faltered, morphed into one of consternation. “Wait, are you talking about Zuko?”

It was Sokka’s turn to be confused. “You know him?”

“Yeah. You know him?”

“Yeah. Wait—how?”

“He came here a couple of years ago to learn waterbending,” then she grumbled something inaudible. She looked up again and crossed her arms. “He’s a stupid idiot that wouldn’t teach me any waterbending moves, said Pakku would kick him out if he tried to break our stupid traditions.” She kicked at the wall and winced when the hard ice connected with her soft boot. 

“Small world, huh?” 

“No, it’s comparatively large,” she scratched at a bleeding pimple. It bled more. “He’s back, though.”

“He’s—what?” 

“Yeah,” she shrugged, “he’s in the immigration office right now. Idiot got his shit— uh, his stuff— blown up,” she rolled her eyes. “He’s useless.”

“Take me there,” he said.

“Why?” She asked voice full of suspicion. 

“I need to know what he’s doing here.”

“What’s in it for me?” She asked, idly inspecting her nails. They were jagged, bitten to the quick. 

“Uh, entertainment?” 

She tilted her head, considering. “That tracks. You and Zuko both seem comically overdramatic.”

“Big vocabulary for an eleven-year-old,” he said, trailing after her as she set off at a brisk stroll. 

“Call me eleven again and I’ll freeze your balls off. I’m twelve.”

“Duly noted.”

Once all of the paperwork was squared away and the copies were sent to the head office of the notary public, Zuko asked, “so what’s with the vouching stuff? I didn’t have to do it last time,” he couldn’t help the bitterness that lined his tone. Paperwork was one of his top ten mortal enemies, only barely beat out by Zhao. 

Teta wiped the blue ink off of the pendant on her bracelet. “Just a new law, I think.”

“Yep,” confirmed Lellaa. “One of those arbitrary things. Extra step of protection—helps prevent fraud.”

“But what if somebody enters the country and they don’t know anyone here?” Zuko asked, tilting back in his chair. He snapped back to the ground at Lellaa’s glare. “Like those peasants from down south.”

Lellaa shrugged. “Not my business. First-timers are handled by the higher-ups, now. Does it look like business is booming?” She asked, gesturing around at the room.

“Business was just as limp three years ago,” said Zuko, dryly.

“…limp.” 

“I— you know what I mean. The opposite of blooming.”

“Huh. What is the opposite of blooming?”

“WETWIPES!”

“No, that’s not it.”

“Socky!?”

Etna broke into full-bellied guffaws. 

“Etna told me you were here,” Socky said, pointing an accusing finger at Zuko. Zuko envied him his… did he have two parkas on? Who was letting this kid run around in two parkas?

“I am,” he confirmed.

When no more information was forthcoming, Socky shifted on his feet. “…why?”

“Oh! Yeah, Zhao is planning on attacking the Northern Water Tribe for some reason. I came here to warn them?”

“He’s what?”

“Who’s Zhao?” Asked Etna, through wheezes. 

“Dickhead Fire Nation dude,” said Socky, at the same time as Zuko said, “the bane of my existence.”

“Number one enemy of the state,” clarified Zuko. 

“Which state?” Asked Lellaa. 

“All of them,” Socky and Zuko answered. 

“This is serious,” said Teta, “we need to warn the Chief so we can get preparations underway.”

Lellaa nodded. “It is. We’ll need all hands on deck. Kid, do you know when this invasion is happening?” 

Zuko wiggled his hands to indicate sort of. “One to two weeks, depending. They’ll probably consolidate for a day or two outside of the wall before they attack—my uncle’s on the inside, so I’ll get the details from him when the fleet arrives.”

They all stood in an uncertain silence. 

“Okay, idiots, are we doing this, or are you just gonna stand there like dead fish?”

“Dead fish can’t stand—“ Socky protested, but he was already being dragged out of the immigration office by the world’s worst twelve-year-old. 

(Someone in Gaoling was laughing.)

They trooped through the streets, like the world’s worst army platoon, or the set-up to one of Uncle’s jokes. A Fire Nation waterbender, a Water Tribe firebender, a seamstress, a notary clerk, and a twelve-year-old walk into an immigration office. They leave to try and stop a massacre. It wasn’t very funny, but he could workshop it. 

Lellaa snapped her fingers. “It’s wilting!”

“No, you tell him—“

“You tell him, you’re the one that came all this way—“

The immigration clerk smacked them both upside the head and stepped forward, clearing her throat. “Chief Arnook, I am sure you remember our esteemed guest from three years ago?”

Chief Arnook looked like he very much did not, but he nodded nonetheless. “Of course. What brings you before the council?”

“Our esteemed guest has brought us certain concerning news… he tells us that the Fire Navy is mobilizing forces to breach our walls.”

Chief Arnook turned toward Wetwipes. “Is this true?”

Zuko nodded. “It is.”

In a very un-chiefly move, Arnook pinched the bridge of his nose and said, “fuck.”

Growing up with firebenders had taught Zuko a lot about them. 

They ran hot, for starters; spectacularly so. You could fry picken on Azula when she was angry, the surface of her skin skillet-hot and distorting the air around her body. (The more powerful benders, even those that couldn’t control lightning, would get staticky, and touching their skin made sparks of electricity jump and dance.) The palace was always as hot and humid as a sauna, and being in a crowded room was feverish. One of the things he remembered best about the Agni Kai was the oppressive heat of so many bodies piled together, even as isolated on the stage as he was. (Many people assumed that the sear of his flesh would be branded into his mind as it was to his face, but the memory evaded him like his hands were covered in oil. He remembered the flames only in his dreams.)

Sometimes firebenders would glow. One of his earliest memories of his cousin was at night: Lu Ten was talking about something that Zuko had long since forgotten, stressing his vowels with a passion unusual for the clipped speech of the royal family. He’d been staring up at the stars, but Zuko had been fixated on the arc of his hands as he told his story. The flesh glowed like embers, a bright, saturated red, as if the sun had been shining behind them. At such a young age—four, maybe, long before Azula had learned how to torment and Lu Ten had grown serious and obsessed with his duty—it was the only thing he’d envied about firebenders. (As he grew older, and his family began to fall apart, he had envied everything about firebenders—perhaps if he had been one, his mother wouldn’t have had to leave, Azula wouldn’t have had to bear the brunt of his father’s expectations, Ozai wouldn’t have taken the throne, Zuko wouldn’t have been banished. Even today, he entertained fantasies like that, where everything was alright and his life wasn’t in flames.)

(But then again, you couldn’t put out fire with fire.)

Most importantly, he’d noticed that firebenders were uncommonly in-tune with their chi. Chi was important for every bender—it was the source of their bending, after all—but none so much as a firebender. It seemed almost like fire flowed through their very veins, like they’d be bereft without it. Many firebenders interned in high-security prisons had died from lack of sun exposure, and from the bitter cold conditions down where they were kept. 

Zuko was surprised that Socky had survived in the south pole for so long. That he had even been able to firebend when they’d first met was remarkable, given the sub-zero temperatures that persisted even during the summer. Zuko had little doubt that had he paid visit to the tribe in the winter, the boy wouldn’t have even been able to greet him. (He had almost gone down there during the winter, actually, but Uncle had protested, citing that most of the crew would get sick. Zuko couldn’t procure an argument, so they sulked around the southern isles of the Earth Kingdom until summer turned.)

Equal to his surprise was the fact that he wasn’t surprised at all. Socky had shown himself time and time again to be a powerful bender—one of the most powerful that Zuko had seen outside of the royal family. He connected to his element in a way that so many others spent years trying to achieve. In the most literal sense, he lived and breathed fire. Trying to imagine him as a non-bender, or even as a waterbender, felt impossible. 

He had control issues, sure, but he’d recovered from bursting into literal flames. Zuko had seen a similar breakdown only once in his life, on a trip to Ember Island, in the middle of the marketplace. They hadn’t needed to cremate the body. 

Putting a powerful firebender with control issues in a city full of ice, though, was probably not the best idea. He skimmed his finger through a patch of soot sitting on the wall of Socky’s guest apartment, noting the slight concave of the otherwise straight surface. He turned and raised his eyebrows. 

“You really thought that it would be a great idea to go to a city made out of meltable material right after having one of the worst firebending breakdowns I’ve ever seen?” 

Socky didn’t even have the decency to look guilty. He shifted from foot to foot, clearly uncomfortable with Zuko’s presence in his room, but didn’t make any moves to remove him. (Or the twelve-year-old that had made herself into a limpet-like attachment on his side.)

“I can control it now.”

Zuko huffed angrily. “I’ll kill you if you burn this place down.”

“Aw, after all that trouble you went through to save me?”

Zuko looked at him with murder in his eyes. Socky didn’t even look suitably cowed. Had Zuko lost his intimidation factor?

“Seriously. It isn’t safe for anyone for you to be here.”

“Well, I’m here, and I’m not leaving. My sister needs to learn waterbending.”

Etna huffed and looked up from her history scrolls. Zuko couldn’t read upside-down, but he could tell that her handwriting was atrocious. “Well, your sister won’t get to learn waterbending. Not the cool kind, at least.”

“What do you mean?” Asked Socky, settling down onto the nest of blankets with her. He snatched the history scroll from out of her hand. “All of your answers are wrong—seriously, am I the only one who’s ever paid attention in school?”

Etna and Zuko shared a look and shrugged in a way that said yeah, probably. 

“Girls can only learn how to heal,” said Etna, “and guys can only learn how to fight. Well, mostly. Wetwipes learned how to heal because he threatened Yagoda until she agreed to teach him.”

“I did not threaten— it was gentle, slightly ominous cajoling!”

“If you call telling her that you’ll sic your grandpa—“

“Uncle.”

“—on her ‘gentle, slightly ominous cajoling,’ then sure.”

“You threatened to sic the Dragon of the West on a lady because she didn’t want to teach you healing!?”

“Hey, you should be thankful! You’d be dead if I hadn’t!”

“Your grandpa—“

“Uncle.”

“—is the Dragon of the fucking West!?”

Zuko turned red and pointed at Socky. “He’s the Dragon of the fucking South!” 

“Did we seriously both think of that nickname independently? Now it’s lame, thanks for ruining it.”

Zuko groaned and tried his level best to tug on his hair in anguish (it was kind of hard to do with his hair all contained to one patch of his head). “Can we focus? We’re supposed to be discussing what the hell we’re supposed to propose to the council.”

“Hey!” Etna protested, “I’m studying my history scrolls.”

Socky scoffed. “Yeah, real help those are, when I don’t think you wrote a single true word on them. The Northern Water Tribe Navy didn’t drive out the invading Fire Navy at the Battle of the Blue Moon—Firelord Kuzon recognized that the waterbenders were at a distinct advantage on the full moon and pulled his troops back. It’s pretty clearly recorded in both Firelord Kuzon’s personal diaries, and the general conjecture made by most historians of the War of the Goat was that neither belligerent nation achieved a decisive victory. And then here you write that the remaining Fire Navy fleet, after getting driven out, returned and tried to lay siege to Pakkanen—also untrue. Firstly, the Northern Water Tribe capitol was on the other side of the continent prior to the year 376 B.G., and secondly, siege warfare wasn’t used by any nation until the Siege of Omashu during the eighth Earth Kingdom civil war in 110 B.G.. They actually—“

Etna screeched. “This is what they taught us, okay!? I was just taking notes!”

Socky looked appalled. Disproportionately so, Zuko thought. “You’re telling me they just feed you this blatant propaganda!? None of this is even, like, just a biased way of saying the same thing—they’re just lying to you! How is anyone supposed to be a productive member of society if—“

“I’m skeptical of how important you think history is,” Etna said. 

“History is pretty important, you know,” said Zuko, because he wasn’t about to let history slander slide— “You know, in the Fire Nation, we’re taught that the massacre of the Air Nomads was a fair fight, and that we only killed them all because they were a threat to the Fire Nation? It wasn’t until I went to the Air Temples and read what remained of their scrolls that I found out the truth. If I hadn’t gone on my… uh… little trip, I would’ve lived the rest of my life thinking that the genocide of the Air Nomads was a justifiable tactical decision. Turns out my great-grandfather was just crazy.”

Socky coughed out something that sounded suspiciously like ‘so’s the rest of your family.’ Zuko gave him a courtesy water whip for his troubles. Socky singed the fur of his temporary anorak. (Teta was making him another red one.)

“I don’t understand why it’s so important,” Etna groaned, “isn’t the whole point of fighting to be the best at it?”

“Strategy is important,” said Socky. Zuko nodded in agreement. (Not that he ever used strategy. His favored way of things was the same as Etna’s—charge in, flasks filled, head empty. He thought strategy was a good idea in theory, though.)

Zuko let his mind wander while Socky gently explained the importance of a Good Education to an Etna who looked very acutely like she wanted the ability to set things on fire. 

He still remembered the Air Temples—it was impossible to forget. He hadn’t exactly known what he’d been expecting, once he’d left the Northern Water Tribe, but it wasn’t piles upon piles of skeletons. Somehow, he’d thought someone would’ve disposed of them. (They hadn’t.)

Possibly the most startling thing had been the sight of dead Fire Nation soldiers. Some skeletons were indistinguishable from each other—having been reduced to a formless pile of bones, with no trace of their heritage sitting nearby—but some skulls had Fire Nation helmets on—outdated, but clearly recognizable. It was mostly Air Nomads, of course, but some of the Air Nomads had fought back. 

(Even though the sight of his people dead and trapped on the mortal plane without proper funeral rites made his chest tighten and his gut roil with anger, disgust, sadness, he couldn’t help but think good for them. Good for them, for having fought back, for having tried to save themselves and their people. Pacifism was was worthless if people ended up dead anyways.)

Though he knew it wasn’t the Air Nomad way, trapped souls were trapped souls, and he’d given as many of the skeletons as proper a send-off as he could—Uncle cremated the Fire Nation soldiers, and Zuko had crushed up the Air Nomad bones and let them off into the wind. (None of the surviving scrolls had detailed the funeral traditions of Air Nomads, so he’d improvised. He hoped it worked, and that they were finally in their resting place.)

Zuko tuned back in, catching only the tail-end of Socky’s tirade. 

“…so you need to think critically, use unbiased sources, and make connections with modern events in order to build a strategic mind.”

“Sigh,” said Etna, in the heavy-hearted I hate that you’re right because it makes my life a lot harder way that only people between the ages of eleven and eighteen seemed to have perfected. “I guess. Are you seriously telling me that you did all of that every time you learned something new?”

Socky looked like he’d been shot clean through with a trebuchet. “Yes! Good note-taking is an important skill! And if you don’t question what you’re told, how are you supposed to learn anything?”

“Socky has a point,” said Zuko, “he’s smart. You should listen to him.”

Socky looked almost flabbergasted. “What? No, I’m not smart. I just like school.”

Now it was Etna and Zuko’s turns to be stupefied. “I—“ said Zuko. “We—“ said Etna. They looked at each other, back to Socky, back at each other. 

“You—“

“He—“

“Uh, I’m really loving the refresher course on personal pronouns, guys, but can we get a move on? Talking about why learning things is important is fun, but I think it’s time that we get down to the actual learning of things.”

“Sure,” said Zuko, still lightheaded from the whiplash of learning that Socky—who, as Zuko was getting to know him better, he was quite sure was the smartest person he’d ever met—didn’t think that he was smart. 

“Alright, then. Etna, could you get me some maps, and Wetwipes, you…”

“Teach me how to fight.”

“No.”

“Teach me how to fight.”

“No.”

“Teach me how to fight.”

Sokka groaned and tried to tune them out, but they were a lot louder than the schematics detailing the sewer system that ran through the city. Eventually, after the nine hundred and eighth time Etna demanded that Zuko teach her to fight, and the nine hundred and eighth time that Zuko didn’t capitulate, Sokka slapped down the scroll and said, “I’ll do it.”

“You will not!” Protested Wetwipes, looking red in the face. The boy had anger issues to put Katara’s fits of rage to shame.

“Sorry, did we enter an alternate universe where I actually listen to you? Listen, I don’t care about this backwards tribe’s stupid sexist traditions. There’s a, you know, Fire Navy fleet heading this way, and I’d rather hurt Master Pakku’s fragile wittle feelings than leave Etna to die. It’s a completely unsustainable model! Why did anyone ever approve this! If all the men get killed, the rest is a slaughter!”

“…you make a compelling argument,” said Zuko, “fine, I’ll teach you how to fight.”

Etna perked up. “You will!?” 

“Sure, if you teach me some more advanced healing.”

Studying with Etna and Wetwipes was akin to studying on his own, except an isopuppy was barking very loudly in his ear every several seconds. (To be fair to them, they’d focused quite admirably for all of twenty minutes, before declaring themselves bored, hungry, and in desire of something more stimulating to do.) There were several problems with this: one, there was a lot of material to go through, two, there was a lot of thinking to be had, three, getting into the Zone was near impossible. Without the Zone, focusing was near impossible. Hence: staring at the same sewer schematic for twelve minutes and still not managing to absorb any pertinent information. 

“I mean, I guess I could. I only just started on skeletal systems, and I’m not very good at it. Waterbending isn’t very good for stuff like that.”

(Could other schools of bending have healing applications? Surely they had to—he made a mental note to look into that after this whole shit show was through.)

“Uncle has been trying to teach me how to use basic firebending katas with my bending, but it’s kind of boring…”

Sokka stared mournfully down at his scrolls and his half-finished notes and decided that he wasn’t going to get anything else done today. He stood and stretched, stowing everything away carefully. 

“I’m going for a walk,” he said, looking at Etna and Wetwipes, sprawled as they were across his (his!) bedroll. 

“Sure, have fun,” Etna said absentmindedly. “So I punched him in the face, right? Then…”

“Right,” Sokka muttered, slipping out of the doorway, “just stay in my room, don’t mind at all. Make yourselves right at home!” 

He wandered aimlessly through the streets, alternately marveling at the architecture and getting pissed off that they had such nice architecture. (Lazy, complacent bastards didn’t deserve nice things, and Sokka had half a mind to let them burn, the mean part of him said. He told the mean part of him to shut up, but only after idly entertaining the fantasy of letting the sexist bastards drown as their entire city sank below the sea.)

One moment he was relatively warm and dry, and the next he was up to his neck in water so freezing he could physically feel the retreat of his testes. There was a high-pitched giggle from somewhere to his left. 

He looked over to see the white-haired princess from the feast, covering her mouth with a delicate hand, trying to appear as if she hadn’t been laughing at him. She stopped and turned bashful when she realized he was staring straight at her. 

“Sorry,” she said. Sokka felt frozen in place. 

“U-uh,” he stuttered, teeth chattering. 

“Do you need some help?” She asked, voice kind. Sokka nodded rapidly—the cold had been such a shock to the system that his fingers could hardly move. 

She motioned for the boatsman to guide the canoe over to where Sokka stood, hefting him up into the boat with a surprisingly strong arm. Sokka glanced around, and briefly thanked any spirits that were listening for having him embarrass himself in front of only two people, and not the crowd that he’d had to weave through earlier. 

“We’ve already been introduced, right?” She said, shedding her parka and offering it to him. It fit almost embarrassingly well. 

“Yep. Princess Yue?”

She giggled again, taking his parka and letting it hang over one of the unoccupied benches in the canoe. His pants were still wet and cold, but he’d probably live. 

(He’d seen Jeong-Jeong dry his clothes with firebending. When he subsequently tried it for himself, he was down one shirt and up one pile of ashes. He was not going to try it again for quite a long time.)

“I see that you were cleared for safety by the guards, Prince Sokka.”

He turned red and flapped his hand in her direction. “Oh, you don’t— don’t need to call me that. I was just joking.”

Yue pouted. “I thought it was clever.”

Sokka’s voice pitched up about ten octaves, “well, you can call me that if you’d like!”

It was probably a weird thing to think, but Yue had the whitest teeth Sokka’d ever seen. They were eerily glowy, almost luminescent. In contrast to her brown skin, they were even brighter. It was almost as if her hair and her teeth had coordinated efforts. 

(He wouldn’t draw the connection until much later, but the way she glowed was reminiscent of the image of Agni when Sokka had visited him in the field with golden pools.)

“I think I will. What have you been up to?” She asked.

“Oh,” he said, sighing in relief at finally entering a comfortable realm of conversation. “Me, Etna, and Wetwipes have been working on plans to propose to the council.”

“Wetwipes?” Asked Yue. There was curiosity glimmering in her eyes, but she was clearly tabling it for a few moments. 

“Zuko.”

Yue let out a peal of laughter, high and clear as bone chimes. “Our esteemed guest from a few years ago?”

Sokka nodded. 

“Oh, that’s hilarious. You know, he dropped a ball of water on me his first day here? He thinks that I didn’t see him, but it isn’t hard to notice somebody in all red and black running away from you.”

Sokka grinned. “He chased me and Katara and Aang all the way up from the south pole. We’re calling a truce right now, for the sake of the Northern Water Tribe, but he was really determined about it.”

“So what are you three proposing to the council?”

Sokka startled. “Your father didn’t tell you?”

Her brow furrowed. “No, why would he?”

“You’re his heir…? Never mind. War plans. We’re proposing war plans, since me and Wetwipes have got the best intel on the Fire Nation—can you believe that your most experienced general thought that the Fire Navy still wears those ugly shoulder spikes from the mid-tens? Anyways, uh, yeah.”

Yue looked duly alarmed. “War plans? What for? Is the Fire Nation attacking us?”

Sokka nodded solemnly. “A week or so, Zuko said. Maybe two. I can’t believe your dad didn’t tell you about this—I mean, I guess he only found out this morning, but…”

Yue shook her head. “He wouldn’t have told me until the last possible moment. Women aren’t supposed to involve themselves in war or politics.”

“That’s… idiotic.”

“It’s the way we do it. The way we’ve always done it.”

“Well, the way the Fire Nation does it is genocide, so.”

“Are you really comparing genocide to this?”

Sokka raised his hands placatingly—the princess was looking a little steamed. “All I’m saying is just because something is done, doesn’t make it right. We did that in our tribe, too, until my sister came along.”

Yue had a peculiar set to her mouth, like she was simultaneously trying to smile, frown, and hold back some choice words. Sokka ignored the expression and asked, tentatively, “listen, this is important stuff for you to know, if you’re gonna be chief one day.” Yue looked dubious at the idea of being chief. “And we could use all hands on deck, so if you want to come back and help us workshop some ideas by the end of the week, you can?”

Several moments was all it took for Yue to deliberate. “I’ll go.”

(Katara was going to be so proud of him.)

Katara was not proud of him. To be fair, she hadn’t even attempted to listen to him. It had gone like this:

The stomping was audible from miles away, and it was a distinctly Katara stomp. (He had nightmares about that stomp. He’d had a knee-jerk reaction to the phrase ‘stitch length’ for two months when he was ten.) 

“I cannot believe that nut-brained, sexist pig!” She shouted, and though she wasn’t a firebender, it was a near thing—Sokka thought that if he squinted, he’d be able to see the slightest threads of yellow flame riding on the tailwinds of her projectile spittle. “‘Go to the Healer’s tent,’ he says, ‘women don’t belong in combat—‘ I swear I’ll—“

“I’m teaching Etna some moves,” Wetwipes said idly, clearly not realizing that drawing attention to himself was not the greatest idea. “I could teach—“

Sure enough, he was promptly encased in a block of ice. 

“Spirits be pressed, Sokka! I leave you alone for a few hours and your bring back a hunting trip worth of idiots—“

“Hey, Sugartits, I resent the implication that I’m an animal—“

“Etna, really not the time,” Sokka whispered, failing to see how Katara wasn’t inspiring the fear of Agni, Tui, and La in her. Seriously, how did anyone look into those crazed, feral eyes, and not fear getting some sort of horrible disease? 

“I was offering to help you!” Barked Zuko, quite quickly catching up to Katara in terms of how rabid he looked. “And then you just put me in a box of ice like I’m your brother!”

“Don’t involve me—“

“I have had a horrible day, Sokka, and I wanted to come back to the apartments and get some sympathy and instead I come back to a nine-year-old—“

“Hey!”

“—Prince Wetwipes—“

“THAT’S NOT MY NAME!”

“And the PRINCESS of the NOR…” she blinked. “The princess? What are you doing here? Why aren’t you arresting him?”

Yue looked bemused. “Arresting whom?”

“Uh, Prince of the Fire Nation?”

“Why would I do that?” She sounded genuinely confused, bless her heart, “he’s a law-abiding citizen.”

“He burned down a village,” said Sokka, more as clarification than to incriminate him. 

Zuko nodded, “several, actually. Not on purp— ARE YOU TRYING TO IMPLICATE ME?”

Yue briefly acquired a thousand-yard-stare far enough to rival even the most traumatized of soldiers before her expression cleared. “Technically, burning down Earth Kingdom villages is not against Northern Water Tribe law, and he cannot be persecuted.”

“I feel like maybe it should be?”

“I didn’t even really burn the villages down, it was mostly accidental, and nobody even ever got hurt—“ he paused, contemplative, “I think.”

“ENOUGH ABOUT BURNING VILLAGES!” Katara shrieked, “I am going to force Pakku to train me, if it’s the last thing I do.”

“…I could just teach you.”

Katara spun on Wetwipes, “and why would I do that?”

“I’m willing to help, I learned from Master Pakku, I’m already teaching Etna anyways—“

“It’s not the same! Something here needs to change—learning waterbending vigilante-style won’t help if all of the other girls and women are defenseless.”

“And if the men can’t heal!” Provided Yue.

“Sure, that. I need to do my part to dismantle the established structures—“

“Have you actually been using the word-a-day calendar I gave you?” 

Katara looked disgusted. “What? No. I froze that into the village wall back at home.”

“Can we get back to war plans?” Groused Etna, “this is exciting and all, except it’s not, and I say the same exact thing like every day and nobody ever listens, so can we please get back to war plans?”

At this, Katara looked alarmed. “War plans?”

“Oh, Agni, how many times am I gonna have to explain this to people? Does your chief not do public service announcements?”

Zuko sat on the roof during what was, ostensibly, morning. The sky was black as pitch and twinkling with millions of stars, the half-moon slipping below the horizon to signify the end of the night. The day-night cycles at the poles always threw Zuko off, but the darkness was almost a comfort. The last time he’d been here the city had been in the throes of summer, sun always perched jauntily in the middle of the sky, only daring to darken with a passing cloud or the slightest dip of its toes into the ocean. It was too bright, then—the sun searing into his sensitive left eye, the white snow and packed ice burning impressions into his retinas. (It reminded him too much of something he only remembered in broad snatches, too bright, too hot, too close to his face—) It was strange, how both hot and cold were blinding and brilliant. 

Zuko had always wondered after the stars. When Azula was seven, and he was nine, and she already had that same cold spark in her eye as their father but she didn’t wear it always, they’d sit on the roof, like he was now. The nights were sometimes cold in the caldera, and those were always his favorite, but Azula hated them, so he’d pull her in close, and he’d only end up with a scratch or three instead of a burn scar. They would sit there, brother and sister, sister and brother, and they could both pretend that the stars washed away all of the conditions, addendums, and complications that made their love for each other sit uncomfortably in the mind. 

“What do you think stars are made of?” He’d ask, pretending to be smaller than he was. 

“Wondering is for fools,” said Azula, “act only on what you know.”

And her voice would sound so much like Ozai that they’d both still for a few minutes, letting the last of their masks and pretenses fall away like waves whisking sand from beneath their feet. The silence would be stony, but it would slowly lighten, and then Azula would speak again—as herself, this time, not a puppet.

“I think they’re made out of jewels,” said Azula, “or white flame.”

“If anyone could make white flame, it would be you, ‘Zula,” said Zuko, tucking her in even tighter. “I think that they’re spirits,” then he would pause, and look up at the way the full moon glowed, as beautiful as the sun but not so hard to stare into. “Or maybe they’re just tiny suns, millions and billions of miles away. So far away that we’ll never even be able to get to them.”

Azula would then say, “don’t be silly, Zuzu. White flame is impossible.”

She’d gotten close, though, last Zuko remembered. Some stars were almost blue. 

Zuko wasn’t entirely sure if he’d imagined those memories, if he’d fabricated them out of some twisted need to remember his sister as a human being. Maybe they never happened, maybe they did, but he clung to those mangled, paltry strips of cloth like they were the only clothes on his back. Sometimes he could imagine that Azula had only been who she was on the rooftop, that her masks weren’t as many and varied as Koh the Face-Stealer’s. 

(He had visited her in a dream, she once told Zuko, and had told her that he would take her face from her. She’d told him—a spindly, many-legged spirit, who made a raspy sound when he moved—that she would simply turn around and put on another.)

He missed her, sometimes, as fiercely as he missed his mother. He’d missed her even longer than he’d been gone, had missed her the first time she had a nightmare and didn’t crawl into his bed, the first time she cast him out of her room with flames when he’d entreated her to join him on the palace roof. Azula had so many masks that she’d forgotten how to wear her true face with pride. 

The stars were different in the north. An unfamiliar pattern. The Martyr was not splayed across the sky in her dying repose, The Dragon did not slither dutifully across the western horizon, The Deer did not drink from her heavenly watering hole. If he looked southerly, there were a few familiar stars, but their configurations were hard to make out without the context of the rest of the constellations. 

He wondered if Azula ever looked up, anymore, or if their father had turned her gaze so far inwards that she could barely keep her eyes from staring at the back of her sockets. If she sometimes shed the skin that marked her as Princess Azula of the Fire Nation, Daughter of Firelord Ozai and Lady Ursa, first of her name, and was just Azula, alone. 

Azula and Zuko, together on a rooftop, letting each other take peeks past the thick crust that coated their hearts and trusting one another not to cut out a pound of beating flesh to present to their father on a silver platter. The stars had a certain way of making people feel bare. 

“Oh,” someone to his right said, softly and quietly. The city was still asleep, and to put any force behind the air that flowed through one’s throat felt like a sin. “Sorry, Wetwipes, didn’t know you were up here.”

Sokka made to leave, and Zuko almost let him, but—something in him felt too hollowed out and solemn, and it wasn’t his sister (Azula had stood on the docks as his requisitioned ship peeled out of the harbor. Zuko had been unconscious below decks, but people talked, and it was easy to eavesdrop if you knew where to hide) but it was someone. 

“Stay,” he said, managing to keep his voice flat instead of pleading. 

“Alright,” said Sokka, mirroring his position as he pulled his knees up to his chest and rested his head there. There were a few inches between them, but it felt like a chasm. 

(There were nearly five thousand miles between himself and Azula, but each one of those miles hurt less than the years that separated them.)

“What are you thinking?” He asked Sokka, because if he kept sitting and being maudlin he would start to think that there was some kind of relationship to save with Azula, that there was some way he could bring the old her back. 

(She said she’d protect him, but Azula always lied.)

“Nothing much,” the boy answered. “I’m just worried.”

Zuko hummed. He could make an educated guess at what he was worried about. 

The plan wasn’t airtight. Of course it wasn’t—the Northern Water Tribe was at a natural disadvantage. Their war technology was years behind the Fire Nation’s, they had no standing Navy, and their board of experts was a group of teenagers who had to fight the council every step of the way. Sokka had yelled about teaching men to heal and women to fight until he was red in the face and smoke was pouring out of his nose like a smokestack on a factory yesterday. 

“It’ll all work out,” said Zuko. “And even if we fail—“

“If we fail, it’s on my shoulders. I’ll be responsible. People will die.” 

(“People die, Zuzu, it’s war. What did you expect?” 

Zuko found a bitter taste in his mouth every time he thought about war from then on.)

“That’s not true,” said Zuko, putting a tentative hand on Sokka’s shoulder. He’d never been good at comfort, never had many good role models for what it should look like. Somehow, he didn’t think that Sokka would like being yelled at for being a wimp, or burned until he cried. “It’s on our shoulders.”

“Thanks,” Sokka said, wetly. 

“Sure.”

“I was being— never mind.”

The horizon was beginning to grow light around the edges, signifying the sun’s daily foray into the sky. Today it would last longer than it had the day before, and the day before had been longer than the day before that, and so on. There was something comforting about the slow build, about the predictability of the day’s length. 

Zuko left his hand on Sokka’s shoulder until the sun reached its zenith. The loss of a firebender’s warmth was familiar when he finally took it off. His palm stung with the cold, and his heart ached. 

Chapter Text

Time, distance, and difference had rendered the dialects of the Southern Water Tribes and Northern Water Tribe quite separate. Sokka found that he could actually understand the dialect of the Fire Nation—slow, even, and measured—better than he could the Northern Water Tribe dialect. For instance, there were seventeen different words for snow in the Northern Water Tribe, as opposed to the eleven in the south. In the north, they referred to almost all plants as one of four things: flowers, leaves, trees, or roots. In the south, their healing relied on the local flora and fauna, so the distinctions were many, between wormwort and white-pine, blue seagrass and caribou fern. Northern Water Tribe syllables were as measured as in the Fire Nation, and as quick as in the Southern Water Tribes, until all of their words melted together in a steady metronomic beat. 

Which was why Sokka was certain he’d misheard the Chief, that his words must have been lost in translation. Surely Chief Arnook, with whom he’d been working on war plans for the past week, hadn’t looked him in the eye and said: ‘you will not fight. You will be kept in the prisons, for our safety.’

And yet, the reaction of the council seemed proportional to the words that Sokka had interpreted: grim faces to Arnook’s left and right, and an outcry from the floor, where Sokka and his peers stood. 

“If I may, Chief Arnook,” said Kaanak, kneeling on one knee and placing his closed fist to his heart.

“Guard Kaanak,” nodded Arnook.

“I believe, having spent a good deal of time with young Prince Sokka, and being as loyal to the Northern Water Tribe as I am, that I am ideally situated to speak on behalf of his character. He has no malevolent intentions, nor does he have any latent ties or loyalties to the Fire Nation.”

“Yeah!” Cried Etna, who had taken to diplomacy and bureaucracy like a fish to a tree. “Socky’s cool! He’d never betray us to the Fire Nation! He—“ She was mercifully cut off by Lellaa’s glove to her mouth. 

“If I may,” said Wetwipes, bowing to Arnook, but not kneeling like Kaanak. He straightened up and didn’t wait for the chief’s acknowledgement. He was slightly better at the whole ‘speaking to authority’ thing than Etna was, but it was by a slim margin. (Were things less stiff and formal in the Fire Nation? Sokka pondered it for a moment before coming to the conclusion that Wetwipes was probably just an aberration from the norm.) “Sokka—“ (So he did know Sokka’s real name!) “—has fewer ties to the Fire Nation than I do, having been raised in the Southern Water Tribes by two Southern Water Tribe parents. He will also be an asset, should Zhao succeed in killing the moon, as he will still be able to bend while we waterbenders won’t.”

Arnook steepled his fingers. “The moon’s death is a non-option. It would wreak havoc across not just the tribe, but the entire planet.”

“As has been well-established,” Wetwipes grit out, annoyance sharpening the edges of his voice. “I wish the moon’s death no more than you do, Chief Arnook, and yet, we must prepare ourselves—mentally, for I doubt there are any contingencies that could possibly accommodate for such a devastating calamity—for the eventuality. Nevertheless, Sokka has proven himself time and time again to be a sharp thinker and a capable warrior, and keeping him in a prison for the duration of the battle will prove to be a grave mistake. I have said my piece.” He bowed again and retreated to his previous position. 

(And, okay, maybe the guy was good at court politics, when he wasn’t seething and raging and raring at the bit. Sokka had no idea that Wetwipes had that level of eloquence hiding up in that noggin.)

Arnook looked skeptical. “And how do I know, Prince Zuko,” he spit the name like a curse, “that you are loyal to the Northern Water Tribe? How do I know that you will not turn your back on us?”

Wetwipes stepped forward again. This time, he completely forwent a bow. “All due respect, Chief Arnook, but the people of the Northern Water Tribe are as much my people as the people of the Fire Nation, and I do not wish death on either side. Zhao’s plan is folly—the repercussions will be felt around the world. He will be condemning people from all nations to death, and I cannot abide by that.”

“He’s also a terrible liar—mmph,” Etna called, having briefly freed herself from the confines of her aunt’s mitten before being silenced once again. 

“We need to stop stalling,” said Pakku, to Arnook’s left. “Prince Zuko and Sokka’s loyalties should not be the question that we are asking right now. The moon is the most important thing, and I have no doubt that there is not a single person in this room idiotic enough to want the moon spirit dead.”

There was a general hum of acquiescence, and the council moved on.

…

“Absolutely not!” Cried Councilman Houkka. “To entrust the firebender with the protection of Tui and La—!”

“It is the only way!” Shouted Councilman Makee, who’d been one of their most vocal proponents throughout this assembly. “If Zhao is as capable a bender as we are told, then having a firebender to go up against him would be—”

“But is the firebender even skilled?”

(Sokka thought it was really dehumanizing to be referred to as only ‘the firebender.’ He had a name, guys.)

“He can breathe fire!” Le said, a hint of anguish belying his stoic facade. “That is a skill that only members of the royal family have been known to possess.”

“Well, I feel like that’s overblowing my prowess a little—“

Zuko, Le, Kaanak, and Katara all turned on him. “SHUT UP!”

“Chief,” said Aang, “Sokka’s a great guy, and he’s an awesome bender.”

“Father,” said Yue, “Councilmen. Sokka has many—“

“Women have no place at a war council!” Roared Councilman Harukka, a broad man with thin grey hair to offset his dark, leathery face. He looked like he smelled of stale sweat, dried meat, and old, dusty furniture. 

“You dare cut off the princess of your nation?” Said Wetwipes, in his most leaderly voice yet. His voice rang through the icy chamber like he was commanding Councilman Harukka to walk himself to the gallows, and Councilman Harukka looked like he would willingly do so. “Such disrespect towards your own leaders? Is it not you with the doubtful loyalties, Councilman? Should Princess Yue wish to speak her piece, she may speak her piece, and it is beyond your station to demand she quiet herself for your comfort.”

Councilman Harukka, who had risen to his feet in his passionate declaration of sexism, sunk shakily back down to his seat. “Apologies, Princess Yue,” he nodded in deference to Wetwipes, “Prince Zuko.”

Yue took on her haughtiest look possible, “I know that it falls outside of tradition, men, but this is a legitimate threat to our nation, and we cannot spare a single mind in our efforts. As I was saying before, should you wish to see a display of Sokka’s might, I am sure he will be obliging.”

The council members’ heads turned to face Sokka, who quailed under the combined weight of their eyes. Nevertheless, he nodded. 

“Well, show us, then! What’s all the hang-up!” Bellowed Councilman Makee, who possessed an unexpected set of pipes. He was Harukka’s almost polar opposite: smooth, tan skin that belied his youth and leisurely position, hair so dark and thick he could almost be mistaken for a Fire National, and a lanky frame. He towered above the rest of the council, even while sitting, but he shrunk himself down to their size. When they’d all been milling around the floor at the beginning of the day, Wetwipes had only stood at waist-level with Makee. 

Sokka stepped forwards, bowing deferentially to the Chief, and performed his Breath of Fire. It was large; larger than he’d ever been able to achieve back at home, but smaller than it had been when he’d lost control of his bending. He had to aim it up at the ceiling in order to avoid singeing any of the people on the floor (or, indeed, any members of the council). He released it after a few seconds. 

“I see— assessments of your skill are indeed truthful,” mused Makee. 

Of course, the assessments of Sokka’s skill weren’t truthful. He was still a crappy bender, with only a few basic katas under his belt (courtesy of Wetwipes), and if he didn’t meditate for two hours a day, his control would still slip sometimes. 

Nevertheless, he was confident he would be able to take on Zhao. According to Zuko and Aang, Zhao was as hotheaded and reckless as Zuko, but with the added itch of fire beneath his skin, aching to be let out. 

(“All fluff and no substance,” Zuko had said. “He didn’t bother enough with the basics, and now he’s got too much pomp and not enough skill to back it up. You should be able to beat him easily, at your skill level. Remember: break his root.”)

Besides: Zhao was hated by even his closest advisors. Sokka had people at his back. 

…

“—you idiotic, foolish, nut-brained, son of a—“ Lellaa’s hand once again went to cover Etna’s mouth, but her next word was clear regardless: “bitch!”

Councilman Tunut looked like he’d just been slapped across the face with a dead fish. 

Etna pried Lellaa’s mitten off of her, and Lellaa dropped her arm, conceding the fight. Her eyes said if my niece is sentenced to death for treason, so be it. Sokka felt a deep, intimate kinship with her, hoping and praying that Katara and Etna tag-teaming the council didn’t get them both kicked out of the nation. 

“Surely you will not stand for such a, a, a desecration of our traditions, Chief Arnook?” Cried Councilman Tunut, his voice higher than Etna’s. 

Arnook opened his mouth to say something, but was cut off by the princess. 

“A wise man once told me that just because something is done, doesn’t make it right. Not all of our traditions should be upheld, Councilman. Some, for the welfare of our tribe, must be overturned and eradicated. Should women wish to fight, that should be honored. Should men wish to fight, that should be honored,” there was an unhappy downturn to her mouth, but her voice was measured and kind. 

“But our culture—!”

“We aren’t saying to eradicate culture!” Cried Katara, throwing her hands up in the air and not realizing the jets of water that followed the movement. “But if all the men are killed—“

“Which won’t happen—“

“It’s still an eventuality—“

…

“Thank you for your summary, First Notary Pinut,” sighed Arnook, deep bags impressing themselves above his cheekbones, an exhausted slump to his shoulders. The seal fat in the lamps was beginning to run out, and the room was growing dim. They’d been at it for hours. “Generals, ready your troops—we predict that the Fire Navy fleet will attack at first light. We must fight not only to defend, but to win.” He rubbed at the corners of his eyes before casting his gaze over the assembly. He stood. All of the councilmen followed suit. 

“Tomorrow, we fight. Tonight, we pray.”

Prayers could be heard throughout the city, that night, but they were not joyful. As their party—the special task force assigned to the protection of the moon spirit—trekked through the shining streets, there were women weeping, children making queries in light, innocent voices, men—boys, some of them—receiving their last rites, because people were hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. 

Even as skeptical as Sokka was in the might of the spirits, he could acknowledge that it would be wise to cover all of his bases. So he prayed twice: once with the group, clutching Aang and Etna’s hands to the mournful beat of Katara’s wolf-skin drum—a rhythm as familiar to him as his own heartbeat—and once with just Zuko, blankets serving as makeshift prayer shawls, facing east. 

He’d only muttered pleas to Agni for a few minutes, that second time, but had stayed long after he’d finished, listening to Zuko beg for the safety of the men and boys who had no choice but to be on those iron ships, for the men and boys who had no choice but to defend their families and their homes, for his Uncle, for the moon and the ocean, and even for people that Sokka didn’t know—a girl named Azula, a woman named Ursa, a ghost named Lu Ten. 

It didn’t matter. They needed all the help they could get. 

The first blast came when the horizon was just beginning to pale. The sound came first, but the tremors ran through second, chasing on the heels of the percussive boom. The leaves on the bushes quivered. 

“I hope they’re alright,” fretted the Avatar, sitting atop the square archway. 

“Some of them are gonna die,” said Etna, hurling water back at Zuko. He deflected it with ease. 

Zuko sighed. It was true, but it also wasn’t something that he liked to be reminded of. 

(He could almost imagine himself when he was young, when the stories that Lu Ten fed him of glory and conquer and heroes of war still enraptured him, still put such a spark in his eye that he could almost imagine himself a firebender, still blinded him from the harsh truth. There were no heroes in war: just victims and casualties and body counts. 

Yet, as often as he craved that youthful naiveté, he was still glad that the veil had been lifted from before his eyes. He knew, now, that as much as light could illuminate, it could also grow too bright, frying the retinas beyond repair.)

(That last sentiment was something his uncle had said once, more or less—he’d definitely taken some creative liberties with the phrasing. That proverb actually stood strong as one of the few that Zuko had ever managed to understand.)

“People die in war,” said Zuko. “It’s naive to think otherwise.”

The Avatar’s bottom lip was almost fully trapped between his teeth, like he was trying his level best to gnaw all of the skin off of his chin. “I know. Still…”

Socky’s boomerang made a metallic schick as it scraped against the whetstone. He was sitting cross-legged across from the princess, who was being guided through basic combat forms by Kam— Kas— Ta… water girl. 

(He really had to get better about remembering names.)

“Nobody likes the idea of anyone dying,” he paused his ministrations to look upwards in consideration. “Well, maybe Zhao? And the Firelord—uh, no offense, Wetwipes. Your dad’s just kind of,” he gestured vaguely with his free hand. “Psycho? Bloodthirsty? Hm…”

Zuko shrugged in response; Socky wasn’t exactly wrong. He couldn’t help the way that his hackles rose slightly at anyone slandering his family (they didn’t know them, they had no idea what any of his family were like, they weren’t all bad, they had good in them too—), but he purposefully ignored his offense in favor of the dreaded D-word. 

(D*plomacy.)

(Uncle would probably be so proud of him for holding his tongue.)

The conversation petered out, but the oasis wasn’t silent. There were the constant booms—almost metronomic in their consistency—forming a dull backbeat, the susurration of Socky sharpening his boomerang, Water-girl’s low murmurs to the princess, and whispers of cloth against cloth as the Avatar shimmied nervously. 

Royal Guards lined the oasis, watching the entrances—and the gaggle of teenagers at the center—with stony faces. (Though Zuko caught what he thought might’ve been an amused quirk of the lip on a few of the guards when Etna fumbled and dropped the glob of water on the return.)

Etna stomped off in a huff, claiming ‘better things to do than play catch with some washed-up nobody prince’ (unnecessarily harsh), and Zuko spent a good minute in undisturbed peace before sheer boredom caught up to him and he had to beat back the urge to juggle the moon and ocean spirits with a weak, rotting stick of mental fortitude. (Water-girl, as if sensing the cast of his covetous eye upon the spirits, raised an eyebrow in his direction.) Zuko wandered over to where Socky was, hoping that maybe the boy would be up for some good- or bad-natured bickering. This special assignment was beginning to feel a lot less special. 

(It reminded him of when he was six, waiting for the royal boat to finally depart for Ember Island. He’d stood on the deck with Azula’s pudgy hand clasped in his own, the wind tossing his ponytail around. Boredom had been his only worldly problem that day, before he learned of empty temples awash with blood, thousands of boys cut down in their prime by the cruel hand of a man who viewed people as nothing more than pieces in a game of pai sho.)

“Why do you have to sharpen that thing?” Demanded Etna, showing up out of nowhere and making Zuko practically shit his pants out of fear. “Can’t you just,” she shoved her hands forward and whooshed demonstratively. 

Socky looked up from his diligent work (the edge of the weapon looked plenty sharp, Zuko thought… had that thing really hit him in the head? It looked like it could slice through steel like butter) and took on a disgruntled expression. “You do know how long it takes to cook someone alive, right?”

Zuko did not miss the implication that Socky would be taking lives, should it come to that. He just wished that he could’ve pretended otherwise for a few more paltry hours. 

“Uh,” Etna lifted her talons towards her weeping pimple. Zuko smacked her hand away. “No? It’s not like they taught us that in science class. That’d be awesome, though—“

“Burnt bodies aren’t a pretty sight,” Socky let out a shuddery sigh, “I’d rather not see any more.” He took a dagger out of his boot and took it to the edge of the sharpener, stowing his boomerang back into its holster on his back. 

Etna bounced on her haunches. “But how long does it take for someone to burn to death?” 

“Um, I really don’t think that this is good pre-battle talk—“ started the Avatar, only to be shushed by an acerbic glare from Etna. 

“Most people die from infection,” said Socky, in the same matter-of-fact way one might say ‘it’s dinner time’ or ‘this is the Northern Water Tribe’. “If not from infection, then from smoke inhalation—if the flame is applied long enough. It’s a long, painful way to die—“

“Sokka,” warned his sister. 

“So then why do so many people die because of—“

“Okay!” Cried the Avatar, looking shaky and pale. 

(Too late, Zuko would remember that the boy’s people had all been burnt to death. That perhaps he might’ve found solace in the idea of quick and painless deaths, that to have that ripped away from him might be too painful to bear.)

“That’s enough of that,” Water-girl said firmly, hands on her hips, the very picture of motherly disappointment. “Let’s talk about something less gruesome, or let’s talk about nothing at all.”

(Too late, Zuko would remember that neither Aang nor Etna had yet to be exposed to war, that Zuko and Socky were the two oldest people in the clearing, that they had a responsibility to these children.)

The door to the spirit oasis sprung open, and everybody immediately sprung into defensive positions, but all that it revealed was a message-runner, sweating and panting from exertion. He shoved a slip of paper into the closest guard’s hand before turning and propelling himself away again. 

“The westernmost point of the wall has been breached,” read the guard, “no foot-soldiers have made contact. Prepare for potential blockage of message routes.”

The news felt disturbingly empty, like there should’ve been more. The silence at the end of the missive felt like an ellipsis. 

All they could do was sit and wait in the spaces between the dots.

The booms had let up as soon as the sun had slipped back into its watery grave. Approximately four hours of battle. The clearing lay in tense silence for hours afterwards, no light besides the faint glow of the spirit water and the shine of the moon. 

Zhao, in a move so completely idiotic that Sokka began to wonder how the man was able to move around without a brain rattling around his skull, arrived at the spirit oasis at the zenith of the full moon. 

The zenith of the full-fucking-moon. In a city full of waterbenders. Sokka was actually sort of impressed him and his entourage even managed to get to the spirit oasis, guarded as it was sure to be. 

(He bit back the nausea that threatened him if he thought too long and hard about the bodies that Zhao had likely left behind. The man was as ruthless as Wetwipes had said.)

The battle itself was anticlimactically quick. It went like this:

Zhao burst into the spirit oasis with far too much vigor, slamming the door open like it presented a meaningful obstacle to him and wasn’t just, like, a piece of wood that he could open gently. Roughly a half-dozen firebenders followed in his wake, one of whom was Commander Yu, a friend of General Iroh’s—who, as next in command, would order the fleet’s retreat following Zhao’s (disgraceful, emphasis on that) death. 

Before Zhao could even take a breath, he was being rounded on by the most skilled warriors in the North, and the most skilled firebender in probably the entire world. 

“This is a fool’s errand, Zhao,” said Iroh, and the absence of the Admiral before his name spoke more for the meaning of the sentence than any of the words actually present did. 

(“Uncle always calls everyone by their proper titles,” groused Wetwipes, “it’s annoying.)

Skirmishes promptly broke out across the clearing, sounds of water hissing against fire and the clang of weapon against weapon as loud and sudden as a clap of lightning.

“I will bring glory to the nation, to my name,” growled Zhao. In light of the sudden chaos, he made a quick dart to the left and somehow managed to skirt around Iroh’s considerable form. 

Sokka suddenly found himself face-to-face with the practically frothing general. 

(He’d hoped that he wouldn’t have to be the one to kill Zhao, but life had a habit of dashing Sokka’s hopes before they could bloom to anything more than a flower bud.)

He ignored the sting of flame against his forehead and moved to swipe out at Zhao’s legs—to break his root—but Zhao stepped back. The man clearly wasn’t skilled at combat—his footsteps were audible even above the waning din of battle. Another stroke of luck had Zhao narrowly avoiding the glinting blade of Sokka’s dagger. 

Zhao hit him with another powerful blast of flame, and Sokka distantly acknowledged that his clothing was on fire, but he was too focused on his goal to really care. After a split-second of calculation, he lobbed his boomerang at Zhao’s head—Zhao laughed cruelly when it appeared to bypass him. He surged forwards, then, driving Sokka back, and unless Sokka could push him back into his previous position—

He aimed his fire at Zhao, hoping that Zhao would step back to avoid being burnt and in turn step into the trajectory of the boomerang. 

The boomerang missed, bumping sadly at Zhao’s ankle. The fire did not. 

Sokka maintained his flame until the lining beneath the flame-retardant armor ignited. Zhao became a contortionist figure, clawing desperately at clasps that would not come undone. All fighting in the clearing stopped, friend and foe alike turning to watch as Zhao gave his best impression of burning alive from the inside-out. Sokka felt frozen, and entertained the tea that Wetwipes was actually on Zhao’s side and had encased Sokka in ice. 

He urged his muscles to move, to cut off the all-too-familiar screaming before it made a home in his mind as easily as did his mother’s mutilated corpse. He took one step forward, then another, sending Zhao’s writhing form to the floor with nothing more than a gentle push. Flames began to lick up towards Zhao’s beard. 

When the screaming stopped, it was almost worse.

(Sokka wanted to scrape his ears off, scrape the insides of his brains out, because that piteous gurgling was like an echo.)

Just like that, it was— over. It felt unreal, like the two weeks of buildup should’ve led him somewhere other than here, still straddling Admiral Zhao’s dying body. 

He wondered if the red of Zhao’s blood was the same as his mother’s.

Zuko watched Sokka unsheathe his dagger from the meat of Zhao’s chin with numb eyes. He didn’t watch the rest. 

He kept his eyes trained on the revolving forms of Tui and La instead. He listened for the rustle of fabric and the faint thump of booted feet against soft grass that came when Sokka stood from Zhao’s form. He saw Etna slide to the ground, pale and shaking, but he heard the hush of a blade through Zhao’s topknot. He felt a hand of a familiar weight land on his shoulder, but he did not turn, he heard the thump of bodies hitting one another and the shouts of an unexpected Zhao loyalist being subdued by the royal guard. 

“You did the right thing, Zuko,” said Uncle, over the sound of Sokka stumbling away from the spirit pool to heave wretchedly. 

Zuko wondered if Uncle thought that that was why Zuko couldn’t bear to turn and face the carnage, if he thought Zuko still lingered in doubt. 

(He didn’t. He knew that it was the right thing, that Zhao was a tyrant, a despot, cruel and unjust. That if it hadn’t been Zhao, then it would’ve been someone more innocent bleeding out on the floor. 

Zuko only wondered why the right thing felt so horrible, why enacting justice was a vice grip over his stomach and his heart, squeezing, squeezing—)

“I know,” said Zuko, quietly. He let his uncle keep his hand on Zuko’s shoulder. 

Careful to keep his eyes above ground level, he looked towards the sky. It was dark still, and would be for several more hours. He thought that something like a sunrise would’ve been appropriate. 

Though he knew it was impossible, he couldn’t help but think that maybe Agni had finally grown tired and decided never to rise again. 

That seemed fitting, too. 

Goodbyes were made with little fanfare. Wetwipes and his uncle left first, as agreed upon, and Sokka found himself almost sad to see the idiot go—which was stupid, because Wetwipes had spent the past couple of months consistently making himself a hindrance and a nuisance. 

(…and also he helped sometimes, but he was still a jerk.)

Sokka watched the Northern Water Tribe get smaller and smaller as Appa flew away—he’d lost sight of Yue and Etna quite some time ago. They’d be alright, for now. They would. 

(Thirty-seven dead on the side of the Fire Nation; fifty-three on the side of the Northern Water Tribe. He’d caused one of those.)

He leaned back in Appa’s saddle—a familiarity he hadn’t even known he’d missed—and wondered what would become of Wetwipes and his uncle. The plan meant that they would take the fall for the defeat in the north, Commander Yu claiming that the losses were too heavy (untrue) for the siege to possibly continue and that the prince and the general had gone rogue and thwarted his plans. 

They’d be fugitives now for certain. Sokka almost felt for them—he couldn’t imagine being unable to ever return home again, even if just for a visit. They’d probably be alright. Yeah, they’d be alright. 

“Guess it’s off to the Earth Kingdom to find an earthbending master,” Aang said around a yawn. 

Katara nodded sleepily. Sokka hummed in acquiescence. 

Life stretched on, he supposed, up until the point that it didn’t. He couldn’t tell if that bothered him or not. He turned over onto his front, deciding that that was a problem for later. 

When he opened his eyes, he found that the Northern Water Tribe had already disappeared over the horizon. 

Even if they weren’t yet, they’d be alright. 

They would. 

END BOOK 1

Chapter Text

The two weeks that Zuko had spent on the Water Tribe vessel had been pleasant. There was something preferable about wooden ships: the organic way they cut through the currents, the brisk snap of sails, the creak of the hull with every swell of waves. The Northern Water Tribe’s boats looked a little different from those of the Southern Water Tribes— the rigging more closely resembled Earth Kingdom galleys than schooners, and the bows had a more gentle curve to them. 

Being on Earth Kingdom soil made Zuko nervous. They were lucky to be near occupied territory, so their pale complexions and gold eyes didn’t stick out as much, but they were technically considered enemies of the state. Worst case scenario, should they be caught, was getting their hands crushed and then being levied for a ransom. Best case scenario would be execution without trial. 

(Zuko knew that there wouldn’t be a trial either way, but he would rather have his death be ordered by strangers than by his own father.)

“In here, nephew,” urged Uncle, waving him into what looked like a brothel. (Those were usually the cheapest places to stay the night, and Zuko had grown well-acquainted with the loose lips of sex workers during his time searching for the Avatar. They were all notorious gossips, and tended to take in stray teenagers like that was their real calling.) 

(He wondered if his search for the Avatar would continue, now that he was an indisputable traitor to the Fire Nation. He wondered if his father would forgive him for his heritage if he delivered the Avatar directly to the man’s feet. He wondered if he even wanted that, any more.)

Zuko pulled his conical hat tighter over his head—though he knew it was probably time to cut off the phoenix tail, he couldn’t bring himself to do it yet—and scurried through the beaded curtain that separated the brothel from the outside world. He was immediately hit by the cloying scent of perfume that was meant to mask the underlying human musk.

The matron of the brothel stood in front of Uncle, her arms crossed over her chest and her left foot tapping away at the bamboo floorboards. Uncle had that disgusting grin on his face again, the one that meant he was either about to charm his way into the establishment or get thrown out into the dirt. Judging by the reedy woman’s cocked eyebrow, he was nearer to the second option than the first. 

“Ma’am,” greeted Zuko. 

“You’re too young to be here,” said the woman, not bothering to return his greeting. 

“My uncle and I are simply looking for a place to stay the night,” said Zuko. Uncle opened his mouth to say something gross but promptly closed it again in response to Zuko’s insistently sharp elbow. 

“There’s an inn down that way,” she jerked her head to the west, “we’re not a halfway house, kid.”

“Just one night,” he said. 

“Fine,” she said, “you’ll have to earn your keep—“ Uncle quailed, and the matron rolled her eyes. “Not like that. Kid’s too young, you’re too old. I’ll put you to work with the washing and the mending.” 

Zuko was mildly surprised she’d relented. They’d been turned away more than once, and usually it was only the promise of gold that got recalcitrant matrons to accept. Washing and mending were a more common exchange rate for gossip than for room and board. 

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Zuko, bowing minutely and towing Uncle away before he got the woman to rescind her offer. 

“World travelers, huh?” Asked Meng, elbow-deep in soapy water and scrubbing at silk in a way that silk was not meant to be scrubbed at. 

“You’ll ruin the silk,” said Zuko, snatching the slip dress away from her instead of answering her question. “How does anyone allow you to do the washing up?” He pushed the fabric into the water gently. 

Meng pouted. “Better than grandpa,” she said, inclining her head towards Uncle, who was pouring tea for a gaggle of giggling girls instead of working. Lazy old man. 

Zuko rolled his eyes. “I’ve taught him how twenty times over and he always conveniently forgets. He just likes to worm his way out of responsibility.”

Meng giggled in a way that set his teeth on edge. He was sure it was a genuine laugh, but did it have to be so high?

“That’s what my older brother used to do. My younger brother and I always had to do the chores around the house. ‘Course, I don’t have any brothers or a home anymore, but,” she shrugged, “a lot of the girls here are like that too.”

Zuko stiffened, always uncomfortable with the knowledge of how many families his own had ripped apart. 

“Oh, relax,” chuckled Meng, “it was a long time ago, and besides, it was the fish flu that got them, nothing to do with the Fire Nation. I lived too far inland for anything like that.”

That did nothing to comfort him. How did she—?

“How did you—?”

“Your eyes. Kid, nobody mixed has eyes that gold. Besides, your water’s steaming, and I know for a fact that it should be getting you close to frostbite right now.”

“I’m not a firebender,” he blurted, like an idiot, and he was sometimes surprised that he’d managed to keep that a secret for sixteen years. 

(But now that it was out in the open, there was no point hiding anymore, was there? Every time he said it out loud it felt like some burden had been lifted off of his shoulders.) 

“Kid—“

“No, really, I—“ giving up on the fickle nature of words, he simply opted to swirl the water into the air.

That seemed to throw Meng for a loop. She stared with raised eyebrows for a few moments, before her expression crumbled into pure fascination and she leaned towards his bucket with sparkling wide eyes. “A waterbender? So you are mixed?”

Zuko nodded, an uncomfortable twist to his mouth. He let the water drop back into the bucket. “My great-grandmother was a full-blooded waterbender.”

“Huh.” Meng leaned back on her stool. “Didn’t know it could skip that many generations. So you’re, what, one-eighth Water Tribe?”

“Yes,” he waterbent the silk dry and folded it into the basket before starting on a rougher cotton overdress. 

“That’s crazy. Did you grow up there?”

“No.”

“But you’ve been?”

“Yes.”

Meng hummed thoughtfully. “You must’ve come with the Water Tribe ships that docked here this morning. What’d they cast you off for? Committed a crime, or something?”

“Um, well. Nothing that I could be punished for by the tribe. It was just,” he waved his hand vaguely, “arranged that they would be dropping us off.”

“Crazy.”

They worked in silence for a little longer before Meng spoke again. 

“Wait, so you’ve committed crimes?” 

Took her a while to catch on. He didn’t answer, opting instead to shift nervously and move on to the next garment. (A silk robe with gold embroidered birds.)

“Ah, I see. You know, you looked sort of familiar to me when I first saw you, and I think I know why. You’re that— the traitor on all those Fire Nation wanted posters, aren’t you? What did it say again?”

“Uh!” Zuko’s voice raised a couple of octaves, “you really don’t need to think too hard about it! I’m nobody at all! Ha, ha!” 

“Ignoring the fact that that was entirely suspicious—“

“I’ve never been suspicious in my life—“

“Have any of you seen this boy recently?” 

Oh, fuck. 

“Oh, fuck.”

He would recognize Azula’s voice anywhere, even if it had deepened slightly since he’d left the palace. The mean-spirited, girlish tilt to her words was unchanging. 

“He is wanted for treason by the Fire Nation,” said Azula. Zuko buried his head in his arms. The matron replied inaudibly, muffled by the wall that separated the reception room from the courtyard—Azula’s voice was only clear because she lacked the ability to speak in an indoor voice. 

“Really, are you sure? Maybe this will convince you.”

The matron replied slightly louder, but the only words that Zuko caught were: “…really going to threaten… I care?… buildings…” and while that wasn’t a particularly revealing sentence without context, Zuko had known Azula for eleven years of her life, and he figured that she’d done something like threatening to burn the building down. 

Zuko groaned as he stood. 

“That you she’s talking about?” Meng asked, attention fully away from the washing. 

Zuko set his mouth in a grim line. “She’s my sister.”

“Tough luck, kid.”

Zuko turned to confront Azula, but he caught Uncle’s alarmed stare on the way around. Uncle asked nothing, but Zuko shook his head in answer: he didn’t want Uncle putting himself in any danger on Zuko’s account. 

(Besides, Uncle had no idea how to deal with Azula. He’d sent her a doll. A doll. There was no way he’d be able to reason with her. In fact, it was likely that the sight of his face would inspire her to commit some mild arson, and he didn’t want to put the brothel into danger like that.)

“Azula,” he said, passing through the curtain (this one was un-beaded). “What are you doing here?” 

Azula straightened herself up, though the effect was lacking when she stood a good three heads shorter than the matron. Zuko often forgot that she was just a child. “A brothel, Zuko, really? Where is Uncle? Schmoozing up the whores?” She peered around his shoulder, like she would find Uncle hiding behind Zuko’s shoulder. 

“I don’t know,” Zuko lied, “we were separated.”

“You’re a bad liar, you know that, Zuzu? Doesn’t matter; either you bring me to Uncle, or I burn this place down and find his body in the ashes.” 

Zuko felt like it said something about their relationship that the threat didn’t perturb him. He wasn’t sure what, exactly, but it did say something. 

“Go ahead and try,” he said, suddenly weary. “I’ll just put it out.”

Azula laughed. “You think you, a pitiful non-bender, could put out my flames?”

She—what?

“Did father not tell you?” Zuko was honestly surprised: if there was anything he could count on, it was his father giving Azula any opportunity to exploit and mock him for his weaknesses. 

(His father was many things, but he was never unpredictable. Cruelty was his constant, and every burn and bruise had a precedent.)

Azula’s smirk and snide tone didn’t falter, but something like doubt flashed through her eyes—so quick that Zuko would’ve missed it if he hadn’t been looking. “Tell me what? Father tells me everything.”

Zuko pulled some water from his flasks, bending it into a simple sphere. A flicker of surprise crossed Azula’s face before she once again schooled her expression. “He must not have known,” she said. 

“He lied to you,” said Zuko. “Zhao would’ve told him. I don’t know why he didn’t tell you, but—“

“Zhao must not have told—“

(And he may not have, it was true, but this was the first opportunity in years that Zuko had had to loosen their father’s iron grip on Azula. He wasn’t going to squander it.)

“—he wouldn’t— father wouldn’t lie to me.” 

Their father’s foundation was slipping from beneath her feet, and Zuko leaned forward to catch her—

“Don’t touch me,” she spit, and Zuko recoiled when he felt something sharp and hot make contact with his cheekbone. “You’re lying—mother must’ve put you up to this.”

So Azula had finally learned lightning bending, like she’d said she would. 

(Cold fire, they called it. White like the stars.)

“Mom didn’t put me up to anything, Lala,” said Zuko, trying to channel his inner—Uncle, Mom, Yue, whoever. “I wouldn’t lie to you.” A betrayal from their father was too much, too soon. He eased up the pressure. “Maybe I’m wrong, and Zhao really didn’t tell father.”

“You are wrong,” Azula said, with enough conviction that Zuko wasn’t sure if he was who she was trying to convince. 

They stood at a stalemate for several painful seconds. 

“Who else knows?” She asked, finally. 

“Uncle. Mom. The crew of the Wani. Um—the Northern Water Tribe, and a lot of other people since after my banishment.”

Azula grew angry. “So you kept it from me?”

“Lala, you have to understand—“

“You promised,” she cried, voice a broken growl, “you said you’d never lie to me. You’d protect—“

So she did remember. 

“And you promised too! You were the first one to break that promise—“

“I don’t mean to interrupt your family quarrel, but you’re on fire, so could you argue about this outside?” 

They swiveled their heads to look at the matron; her eyebrow had grown so sharp that even Azula decided that it would be wise to step outside. (Zuko was sure that if anyone could weaponize an eyebrow, it was the matron. Now that he thought about it, it sort of resembled the form of Socky’s boomerang.)

The argument picked back up as soon as they exited the establishment. 

"You would’ve told father if I told you, ‘Zula.”

Azula remained quiet. 

“He would’ve killed me. If you told him.”

“I promised to protect you.”

“And you had already broken that promise twenty times over before you were old enough to keep a secret.”

Azula sneered and turned away. “So you knew before we made that promise? And you still didn’t tell me?”

“I was going to tell you that night, I was—“ Zuko faltered. “But—Mom told me not to tell you. Told me that you couldn’t keep a secret.”

At that, Azula grew angry. “I knew it. Mother’s been trying to conspire against us this entire time—“

“It was Dad’s fault, always telling you how worthless I was—“

“Maybe it was both of your parents,” said Meng, who Zuko hadn’t noticed creep up behind them. 

“You know nothing,” snarled Azula, setting her hand aflame. 

“Azula, no—“ 

“You kids think you’re the first two people to have shit parents?” Meng snorted. “Try talking to any of the girls in here about their home lives—a good three-quarters of ‘em hardly remember their parents at all.”

Azula seemed to realize herself, then, because she straightened up and wiped the angry expression from her face. She must’ve already had doubts about both of their parents, if she allowed herself to get this worked up about them. “Our parents have nothing to do with this. I am under orders from the Firelord to deliver you back to the Fire Nation so you can await trial.” She snapped into parade rest. 

“I’m not going,” said Zuko, eyes locked onto the creeping figure in his periphery—it was Uncle, sneaking out of the brothel’s side entrance. “Sorry, Lala. Nice to see you again.” 

Before she could realize what he was doing, he locked her feet in place with a block of ice and ran. 

(Azula stood and wondered if the sight of her brother’s back would ever stop feeling like abandonment.)

Sokka shook his hand out as if that would help him firebend and tried again. What he meant to be the size of a torch was only the size of a candle flame, weak and flickering. He sighed. It would have to be enough. 

Jeong-Jeong had warned him to be careful who he revealed his bending to, but all but one of their torches had been crushed by the rubble from the cave’s collapse and the nomads sounded too baked to have any qualms about him firebending. 

(He wondered if they’d let him try any of their stuff: it must’ve been pleasant getting to skate through life that happily idiotic.) 

“Whoa, dude, are you, like, a firebender?” Asked Chong, getting uncomfortably close to the open flame that was coming from Sokka’s hand. 

“No,” said Sokka, dryly, “I’ve just mastered the art of glowing yellow waterbending.”

“Really?” Asked Chong, awed. 

“No. Of course I’m a firebender, who else can produce flames from their bare hands?”

“Not much of a flame, dude. That thing’s kinda puny,” said one of the nomads, whose name Sokka did not know and had no desire to learn. 

“Yeah, well,” Sokka snapped, “can’t do much about it, I guess.” He let the flame flicker out, frustrated with his lack of success. 

It wasn’t quite the same way it had been back at home—he didn’t feel cold or sick, and his inner fire didn’t feel small, but more… dim. Like rumbling embers on a dying fire, instead of a tiny patch of fierce heat. But his flame output was about the same as it usually was about six moonrises into the Long Night, and now that he knew he could be better than that, it just… sort of pissed him off. (Like, a lot.)

(He kept waking up from nightmares that he couldn’t quite remember, but that lingered behind his eyelids like fire and made everything smell like burning flesh for the first few moments. He was beginning to consider the merits of vegetarianism, when every roasted weasel-squirrel started to reek like—)

“Whoa, dude, you sound like you need to chill out. Don’t worry,” Chong laughed, a lazy sort of chuckle, “Kidney here was the same at first. Have some of this and you’ll mellow right out.”

Sokka ignored the fact that one of the nomads was named Kidney and instead inspected the pipe and horaceweed that Chong had pulled out of seemingly nowhere. 

“We really need to get out of these tunnels,” Sokka said dubiously. 

(Chilling out sounded really, really nice. There’d been a massage parlor near one of their stops. The masseuse had told him that his back felt so much like a sheet of rock that an earthbender would have no trouble bending his muscles.)

(Could earthbenders bend bones?)

“We’ll never get out if you keep stressin’, man.”

“Well…” Hadn’t Agni told him essentially the same thing? That entertainment was a valid purpose for something to have? “Sure, alright.”

There was something almost freeing in getting rid of his phoenix tail, watching the currents sweep the clump of hair away. 

“This does not erase your heritage,” said Uncle. His topknot got caught up against a root some ten feet downstream. Zuko’s evaded the root and continued to travel. Zuko felt like that would make an adequate metaphor, or proverb, or something, but he wasn’t good enough at either of those things to make it into one. Maybe if he mentioned it to Uncle…

“I know,” said Zuko, even though it felt a little bit like it did. Uncle scraped the knife across his scalp, shaving off the last of the uneven patch of hair that sat at the crown of Zuko’s head. Zuko leaned down to look at his warped reflection in the water. 

Bald wasn’t really his look. 

“I’m glad, nephew.”

“Why did Sokka kill Zhao like that?” 

Uncle reeled back, composure slipping with the seemingly random question. He looked at a loss to answer. 

The question wasn’t random, really. It had been on his mind constantly since the night it had happened, but their days had always been busy and the question felt heavier at night. 

“Sokka was just doing his duty to protect the moon spirit,” said Uncle, finally. The words resonated wrongly in the clearing. 

“Duty? That wasn’t duty. That was cruelty.” 

(He wondered if all of the victims of the Fire Nation screamed like that, if they all writhed across the floor, trying to escape the flames—)

For whatever reason, even if he knew that death by fire took a long time, he’d never imagined it as such. He hadn’t pictured much of anything, really—whenever he thought of their soldiers conquering another village, another swathe of land, he’d pictured a well-aimed jet of fire and an instant death. He’d been lying to himself. 

(Seeing Zhao die had forced him to be honest. He wanted to cower beneath the covers of willful ignorance again, but hands shrouded in flame kept ripping them off of his head.)

Uncle didn’t respond, so Zuko asked again: “why?”

This time, Uncle didn’t try to feed him the lies of duty. (A gear in the back of his mind whirred, unconnected to anything.) “People do many things when they’re scared for the ones they love, Zuko. Fear and love are both powerful motivators.”

Sokka was going to pee his pants. He was seriously, seriously going to pee his pants. 

“You tried to milk a bull? Did it—“ he tried to catch his breath and failed. “Did it— was it—“ He couldn’t finish the sentence. 

“My eyes are peeing!” Exclaimed Chong, making Sokka laugh harder. 

“That’s just crying!” 

“I— you’re right, man, this tastes nothing like pee!”

“My mom named me Kidney because she hates children,” said Kidney, using a rock to pillow his head. 

Sokka nodded gravely. “My mom is dead,” and then he started laughing again. 

“Me too, man!” 

Zuko was legitimately going to kill his uncle if he survived this. Who takes one look at a plant that has equal chances of making a decent tea or being a deadly poison and thinks huh, I’ll try it. His uncle, that was who. 

They were lucky there was a healer nearby, because it would’ve been a real fuckin’ bummer if his uncle died. 

“Okay, bed, wed, behead: the Firelord, King Bumi, the Prince of the Fire Nation.” 

The torch was on its last embers, and Sokka and the nomads were no closer to finding the exit. Sokka would normally be freaking out about this, but he was blasted out of his absolute mind and couldn’t find it in himself to care. 

“I’ve never seen the Firelord before but he seems like a dick, so: behead. King Bumi’s crazy but I would not take that man to bed, so wed. I think I’d bed the prince,” said Sokka, after some deliberation. 

Chong started howling. “You’d bed the prince? Dude.”

“Hey! No slander. He’s got great… cheekbone.”

“Cheekbones?”

“I mean you can really only see one of them—“

…

The torch went out, and the ceiling lit up. 

“Hey, would you look at that,” said Sokka, “they’re telling us where to go!”

…

Katara took one look at Sokka’s red eyes and decided it wasn’t worth talking about.

Okay, so, Omashu was occupied by the Fire Nation. This was workable. Sokka, for his part, had suggested turning around and leaving. He was sure there were other, equally capable earthbenders for Aang to learn from that weren’t living in dangerous territory and/or very deceased. Aang, for his part, had insisted that King Bumi was the only person he could learn earthbending from. 

As per usual, of course, Katara and Aang’s insistence on doing things that were a) completely unnecessary, b) excessively dangerous, or c) all of the above, ended up affecting Sokka the worst. First he was covered in sewage, and now he’s got a baby attached to him. 

Unfortunate stuff, really. 

There were more immediate problems than the baby, he’d argue, but the fact remained that there was a baby and it was attached to him and while he considered himself to be pretty good with kids from the ages of two to eleven, infants made him uncomfortable. 

“Hand over the baby,” said the stoic girl with the impressively shiny black hair. 

“Oh spirits please take it—“

…

Was it just him, or did the firebender girl look a lot like Wetwipes, if Wetwipes was fifty percent more sadistic and a hundred percent more female and less burnt? They even carried themselves the same way… they had to be related. 

The girl sneered when he shot a minuscule puff of flame from his mouth trying to avoid the knives being hurled his way. 

“So you’re like my idiot brother,” she taunted, and yep. Definitely Wetwipes’ sister. Only far, far scarier. 

…

Blue flame holy fuck holy fuck holy fuck holy fuck h—

Zuko was having a pretty relaxing time. He and Uncle had come across a group of friendly nomads who hadn’t seemed to mind whether they were Fire Nation or not, and had decided to travel with them for the time being. It was actually the least stress he’d felt since— well, since he was born, probably. 

“Are you the Fire Prince?” Asked Chong, suddenly and without preamble. Zuko stopped mid-sip of his berry stew. 

“Uh… no?” 

“Don’t sound so sure, dude. I’m just askin’, man, ‘cause I met this kid like a day ago that said he knew you—“

That gave Zuko pause. What kids did he know? Etna, the Avatar (in a loose sense), Water Tribe Girl (again, in a loose sense), Azula (would not talk about him in any identifiable manner, probably referred to Zuko as her idiot brother exclusively)… Socky? It would have to be him or the Avatar. 

He tuned back into Chong’s monologue, only to hear “…he called you hot, said you had good cheekbone—“

Zuko resisted the urge to cast himself into the ocean. 

They parted ways the next morning. 

Chapter Text

“Could you light the fire for me?” 

Sokka didn’t look up from his scroll. “…the light of the panda lily—no, that’s stupid. Panda lilies don’t have light—“ he crossed the characters out. 

“Sokka.”

He hunched further over his work, deliberately ignoring Katara. “Softly over the still pond…”

“Sokka!”

“What?” He snapped, eyes still glued to his scroll. “I’m busy.”

“I was asking if you could light the fire.” 

Reluctantly, Sokka set his scroll to the side and clambered up. He trudged the five feet that it took to get from Appa to the circle of stones that delineated the fire in the middle of the clearing, taking steady, deep breaths all the while. The embers in the pit of his stomach glowed dimly, sending warmth shooting to his palm. 

The tinder caught, but just barely. Sokka turned to leave—

“What was that?” Katara demanded. 

“What do mean?” Asked Sokka, knowing exactly what she meant.

“You haven’t firebent more than a spark since the battle! It’s like the South Pole all over again.”

Sokka grit his teeth, digging his fingernails into the meat of his palm. “It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.” 

There was a pregnant pause, the air weighty between the two of them. Her grinding teeth sparked and snapped, and tears began to pool in his tear ducts. His nose ran. 

He didn’t want to talk about it, he really didn’t. He wouldn’t.

(But the last time he’d bottled things up, he’d almost died—)

“I’m scared, okay?” Said Sokka, voice small. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, which served to do little but smear his snot all over his cheek and his hand. He swiped again. 

“Of what.”

“I’m scared that I’ll lose control! That I’ll do to someone what I did to Zhao! I didn’t even mean to burn him, I, I just did and he looked so much like—“ his throat caught. He started over. “I just don’t—“

“Zhao deserved what he got,” said Katara. “He was gonna kill the moon spirit, he—“

“But I didn’t have to do it like that! I didn’t have to kill him like that. It was cruel.”

“Zhao’s cruel.”

“I agree with Sokka,” said Aang, sounding timid from where he was playing with Momo’s ears. “All lives are sacred. I know that justice had to be served, but I wish we could’ve done it without killing Zhao.”

Sokka shook his head, “killing Zhao was the only way. I just didn’t have to—“

“I just— yeah, it was gory, but why are you so hung up on this? I mean, people are going to have to die for us to save the world, it’s inevitable—“

“He looked like mom, okay? He looked like mom when he died. That’s why it bothers me so much. Because I’m no better than the man who killed our mother.”

This time, as he stomped away, he let the silence hang. 

Things on Appa were tense the next day. Sokka kept his nose buried in his parchment, Katara and Aang kept bickering over small things like where they should set down for the night, and there was so much pressure hanging over them all that Sokka wondered if Appa wasn’t actually flying lower every second. 

Oh. He was. 

“Uh, Aang, where’s your bison going?” Sokka asked, pointing down to indicate their trajectory. 

Aang stopped mid-sentence to furrow his brows and purse his lips. He peered over the edge of the saddle and then up to the sky. “He must be getting tired.”

As if to be contrary, Appa chose that moment to make a steep ascent. He was making little whuffs all the while, though—as if it took him extra effort to do. As if something was pulling him down. 

Aang chewed his lip nervously. “Maybe we should just stop here for a bit—“

“No,” Sokka looked down at the thick blanket of trees below. “Absolutely not. There are probably a bunch of man-eating bugs or something.”

“I’ve heard this swamp has a close connection to the spirits.”

Sokka rolled his eyes. “I couldn’t care less.”

“You’re being really rude right now,” informed Katara. 

“I was joking, actually, and I could’ve cared less. Now I really don’t.”

“I’m not really sure what that means, but I think we should set down—“

“No.”

“You know what, Sokka?” Katara inflected on his name like it was an insult. “We should. And now it’s two to one, so—“

“Since when was this a communal decision?”

“Since ever, you’re not a freaking despot, you aren’t the Fire Lord—“

“Uh, guys?”

“Oh, so now we’re comparing the firebender to the imperialistic tyrant king of the Fire Nation? Real fuckin’ unprejudiced of you, Katara—“

“Okay, and that was just you twisting my words—“

“Guys.”

“You always have to be right, don’t you? You always have to be Miss Perfect—“

“Is that what this is about? Really? This has nothing to do with—“

“Guys! Seriously!”

“You think you can tell me how, how to feel, and be, and cope with all of the shit that gets thrown my way because nobody can ever give me a break—“

“Guy— AAAAH!”

Sokka was entirely unclear on what happened next. He boiled it down to two options, as he was falling: either Appa suddenly forgot how to airbend, or there was a decidedly unnatural and scientifically implausible tornado that suddenly appeared, flung them about, and then disappeared. (It wasn’t even a cloudy day, and tornadoes really only occurred in the flat plains of the northeastern Earth Kingdom.) Regardless of which method flung him clean off of Appa’s saddle, the fact remained that he had been flung clean off of Appa’s saddle and was now plummeting towards the swamp at speeds entirely too fast to be comfortable. 

He really hadn’t been joking when he said that nobody ever gave him a break.

Zuko staunchly refused to do any of the following activities: beg, grovel, panhandle, plead, scrounge, bum, and any other words that implied ‘sitting on the street and asking others for money.’ He simply would not do it. He respected his uncle’s decision to debase himself in front of random Earth Kingdom peasants (he very much did not), but it simply wasn’t for him. 

“We need to get jobs,” he insisted, firm and unyielding in his conviction as he thumped his fist down onto his open palm. “We can do that. I know how to wash and sew, and you know…” he considered for a moment what his uncle’s employable skills might be. “You know how to make tea.” Which was considerably less of an employable skill than anything that Zuko knew how to do, but different strokes for different folks, right? 

Uncle was a proper prince. He’d been raised to be the leader of a nation, but that wasn’t all that different from Zuko’s education, in the end. The major difference between them was that Uncle was good at being a prince, and Zuko was horrible at it. (Which was a good thing for Zuko, out in the poor Earth Kingdom towns, because nobody ever looked Zuko in the eye and thought huh, he looks sort of like a prince.) But regardless of however princely Uncle was, he’d always preached humility, humbleness, acknowledging the labors of the working class and not elevating oneself above the average man. 

So it really, really surprised Zuko when Uncle fought back. 

“A job?” Uncle queried, like he’d never thought of such a thing before. “Nephew…” 

“What? Are you saying we’re too good for jobs, but we aren’t too good for begging on the streets? Really?”

Uncle’s eyes widened. “No, no, no… it’s just… a job?” 

That wasn’t a valid argument in the slightest, and thus Zuko concluded that he had won the battle and proceeded to march to the nearest ramshackle business that looked like it might need an extra set of hands. 

Sokka was alone. Sokka was in a swamp. The swamp was creepy. If one combined these three distinct ideas, one would see that Sokka was alone in a creepy ass swamp. That really didn’t sit right with Sokka. 

“Aang?” He called. “Appa? Momo?” More reluctantly, he added, “…Katara?”

To his left, an insect buzzed ominously in response. And although the wide-set eyes and excessive length of the bug’s neck did bear a striking resemblance to Katara’s ugly mug, the bug most certainly was not his sister. (Though it might’ve been equally as capable of intelligent thought.) 

“Guys, seriously,” he said, not even trying to mask the quiver of nervousness that colored his tone. “This isn’t— funny. Haha, I get it, let’s show Sokka what’s up, but I seriously don’t like this…”

He stepped forward through the murky water, instantly wincing at the twinge that shot up his left leg. It wasn’t anything like the pain he’d gone through before the Northern Water Tribe had healed it, but he was still more than mildly disgruntled at the fact that less than a month after finally getting that nuisance fixed, it was hurting again. Seriously, fuck his life. 

He made the executive decision to blame Katara. Little sisters truly were the scourge of the earth. 

It wasn’t long before he found himself unrooting from the spot and beginning his trek through the underbrush of the swamp. He stuck to the slight clearings that the waterways allowed, only striking through a stray vine or two when needed. 

Being alone was—even while disregarding the creepy swamp factor—not ideal. Loneliness bred Horrible, Unfortunate Thoughts, and he had much to feel horrible and unfortunate about lately. 

He tried, instead, to imagine Katara buzzing around like those bugs. 

It worked only a little. 

The random ramshackle business was a tea shop. 

Because of course it was. 

Zuko hadn’t been aware that towns this small—not quite a village, but most certainly not a city—even had tea shops. He had to assume that it lay along some sort of frequented trade network, because otherwise the presence of a tea shop would be suspicious. 

The moment he entered the tea shop and registered what it was, he was ready to beat a shameless retreat. Unfortunately, Uncle was right on his heels, and the moment he thought about exiting the establishment was the same moment the other man entered it. And Zuko was many things, but he was not a coward. 

He was also not a good tea maker. 

Nevertheless, he collected all of the gumption he had and marched himself up to the counter. 

“Sorry,” the matron said, in response to his query about day servers, “I don’t need any help there. One of our brewers has been out sick for the past couple of weeks, though, so if either of you are any good…”

Now, Uncle wasn’t the type to be smug, but the unsettling glint in his eye implied that were he the type to be smug, he would most certainly be smugging to the highest degree. Zuko held nothing but hatred for the old man. 

But pride be damned, Zuko knew for a fact that any of his attempts to brew tea would leave the establishment’s fair reputation in tatters, so he admitted defeat, letting Uncle take the job and resolving to move onwards to greener pastures. 

Sokka was unable to outrun the unease of the swamp. Onwards he forged, and yet it tagged along behind him, nipping his calves and brushing up against his ankles. It made him light-headed (though he quickly found out that that was because of the fat elbow leech suckling at his elbow skin), invaded his lungs with every breath, and sent his senses jittering in every direction. 

There was something wrong with this swamp, beyond even the birds with human screams and the Katara bugs and the elbow leeches. He couldn’t figure it out, but it made him feel off-balance, dislodging his consciousness from his body just enough that he kept tripping over nothing. 

As night fell, so did his will to move forwards. He climbed onto the trunk of a massive, fallen tree, nestling in between two branches. It didn’t really conceal him, but it felt more secure, like maybe nobody (or nothing) would see him if he just had something at his back. 

His sudden stillness meant that his mind had become a free-for-all for any unsavory thoughts that might’ve wished to slip through. He didn’t know how to counteract this, never had. 

Zhao’s dead, his brain mocked, and his last moments were spent suffering in the same way your mother did. 

It was such a straightforward thought that made him feel so many straightforward emotions. He almost felt like it should’ve been more complicated, more nuanced, like so many other things he’d felt in his lifetime. Usually, once he figured out an emotion, it made that emotion easier to cope with. He didn’t have any idea what to do now that he knew what he felt and why, and it still felt this bad. 

Trying to keep himself from thinking and feeling these things was sort of like transparently trying to change the subject within his own brain. Murderer, he thought, and then so, swamps, huh? And that second point was redundant enough that beginning his mental complaining anew held no water to the first point, and so—in the futile way that Aang tried to intervene when Katara and Sokka fought—the second point conceded easily. 

On Appa and when bedding down for the night, he’d been using poetry to distract himself these past few days. It was effective, because it was concrete, because the brush had a tangible form and so did the parchment or silk of his scrolls—but trying to distract himself by thinking up poems wasn’t working. It wasn’t working, and he felt his eyelids press ever tighter up against each other, felt every individual muscle in his arms and his back begin to tense, felt his fist begin to knock almost painfully against the meat of his thigh as he tried to fight back against the intrusive thoughts. 

It wasn’t working. 

“There was a—“ he started, trying to remember a story, any story. Anything. “There was a boy. There was a boy, and his name was—“ he bit his teeth together, trying to think of any words beyond murderer. “His name was Zuko, but people liked to call him Wetwipes.

“He was… he was a waterbender, in a great big palace of firebenders, but nobody— nobody hated him for it. Because in this world, there was no war, and nobody ever needed to die in combat. There were no armies, and no generals, and certainly no admirals, especially not admirals named Zhao—“ he sucked in a deep breath. “Okay, yeah, no, not going there, Sokka. Not going there!” 

Was he really the bad guy? His mind asked, not with the innocence of inquiry but with the marked cruelty of a taunt. Or was it you who was at fault, you who was evil, you who was in the wrong?

He grit his teeth, and pointedly scratched at his knee. “Zuko was a waterbender, and he was— he was pretty cool, when he wanted to be, even if he kept trying to capture a twelve-year-old pacifist. NOT— because of any kind of war, or any kind of evil tyrant, but because the twelve-year-old pacifist had the coolest flying bison in the whole world, and Zuko was really, really jealous—“

None of this was very engaging storytelling, at all. Intrusive thoughts continued to slip in behind the cadence of his voice. Something wet trickled down his leg, and when he lifted his hand from his knee, the open wound stung. 

“Nothing bad ever happened in this world, and everyone was funny all of the time and nobody was ever sad and—“

He banged the back of his head up against the branch behind him, as if that would knock the thoughts out of his head. 

“He— he— he—“

Images of Zhao’s corpse wormed their way up to the forefront of his brain. 

Zhao’s body was sweaty and hairy when it fell, lifeless, into Sokka’s arms. Sokka cried out, scrabbling at Zhao’s back. The flesh yielded and parted and burned under the press of Sokka’s fingers—

Sokka wrenched his eyes open, but the feeling of the nightmare chased after him even as he awoke. It was a feeling that he’d never been able to put a name to, something less frantic than panic, more insistent than sadness, less encompassing than terror. 

It turned his breaths heaving, made them stutter and skip like a pebble rolling down a mountainside. Tears squeezed from between his clenched lids. 

“T-there, there was a boy named Zuko…” he sobbed, trying desperately to distract himself. But he was alone, all alone, and he was a murderer, and the last few seconds of his nightmare kept flashing in his mind’s eye, tearing new sobs from his throat every time he thought they’d finally subsided. 

“A girl, a girl—“ he curled into himself, wished he had his scrolls, or somebody to tell him a story, or his mother— his mother. 

“Named Kya—“ he cut himself off, gasping for air like a fish out of water. But he wasn’t drowning in clean air, he wasn’t dying—and that was the problem, wasn’t it. He wasn’t dying. Dead men don’t consider the other men they killed. Zhao had a clean conscience, nothing but ashes in one of those peculiar Fire Nation urns by now. Sokka did not. 

(Who really lost?)

It was war, he tried to justify. It was war, it was war, he was going to kill thousands, millions, it was war—

None of those held up in the court of his head. Emotion was a cruel mistress, tossing logic to the side like it was nothing more than an irritating insect, gripping her hands around one’s chest and squeezing. Emotion didn’t care about war, about good men or bad men. It just took, and took, and seized the reins and pressed onwards. He had burnt a man, let him suffer, and then buried a dagger into the man’s chin. He had felt Zhao’s pulse stop, heard him draw his last breath. 

He thought none of these things, not in so many words. He didn’t have space for them. He was otherwise occupied—flashes of corpses, strings of accusing words, trying fruitlessly to fight back. A warfront. 

He wished he could fall back asleep, but he couldn’t. Every sucking breath brought him further from dreamland. He trembled like a cold isopuppy. If only he could take his thoughts and make them physical; then he’d have something to run from. 

“Sokka.”

His head snapped up at the voice—kind and smooth and familiar, even after so many years. 

“Mom?”

“It’s me,” she said, and her face was shrouded in shadow, but Sokka was sure she was smiling. He just couldn’t picture it, not without seeing the burns—

“Why are you— you’re dead.”

“Am I?” She asked. “I’m sorry about that.” 

He hiccoughed, wiped the tears from his face like it would do anything. “Mom…”

“It’s okay, sweetie. I took care of him for you. You didn’t have to do it. It wasn’t your responsibility.”

“Wha— what are you…?”

His mom laughed again, and the hood of her parka slipped just that much backwards, casting a thin line of light onto blistered flesh, so much like Zuko’s scar. Then she pulled up a body and dropped it into the muck, though the water didn’t splash on impact. “You didn’t have to kill him, sweetheart. I protected you. I did it for you.”

He peered at the body, lying face-up in the swamp. It was Zhao, face contorted into the vicious snarl he’d worn when he lunged towards the spirit pool. The burns that marked him were still fresh and gaping. There was a red smile drawn on his throat. 

“You— how did you— I didn’t kill him?”

“You did. Of course you did. You’re a monster. You did exactly what that bastard did to me—“

He scrambled up and ran. 

After a failed foray into a blacksmith’s, a butcher’s, two fabric stores, and a bakery, Zuko had only two options left: the farm on the outskirts of the town, and the massage parlor. (Brothel, he knew. Massage parlors were never just massage parlors.)

Zuko and Uncle had slept in an empty barn, a couple of days ago, and— they were cute, but there was no love lost between himself and pickens. 

He headed to the massage parlor. Might as well get some decent gossip. 

This brothel was different from the one he’d fought Azula in in several ways. For starters, his little sister wasn’t there. Most notably, though, it seemed to actually follow through not the front of being a massage parlor. There were a couple of people lying on mats off in half-curtained rooms, though they were a bit too naked and a bit too oiled for there to be anything other than an erotic undercurrent to the actions. 

“Hello,” he said, which was usually the only word he got right in any verbal exchange. “I’m looking for a job for the day, and someplace to stay the night.”

The madam looked up from her scroll. She was beautiful in the way that older women sometimes were, severe cheekbones and upturned eyes, wrinkles lining the skin instead of forming deep valleys and high crests. Her hair was neat and as elaborate as a peasant could achieve, an emulation of nobility rather than a true understanding of it. It was brown, leaning towards red, with salt and pepper roots fanning out from her scalp. 

She leaned forward to scrutinize him. “Just today and tonight?”

Zuko nodded, gulping despite the desert dryness of his mouth and throat. He hadn’t had enough water lately. 

“How old?”

“S-sixteen.”

She leaned back, considered him, and nodded. “You got anything to prove that?”

He dug his Water Tribe papers from his pocket, presenting them to her with steady hands. 

“Water Tribe?” She asked, tone incredulous and expression inscrutable. 

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You’ve got Fire in your blood, kid,” she announced, as if he wasn’t already aware. 

“I, ah—“

“War bastard, then?”

“Sure,” he allowed, not wanting the inevitable distress that would come with correcting her assumptions. 

She hummed. “Makes sense. Dunno why you’re so far out here, but… I’ll get you set up in a room in the back—“

He startled. Oops. Maybe he should’ve seen it coming when she asked for his age. 

“I didn’t— not that kind of— I meant, I could wash clothes, or fix them, or clean, or something—“

Her brows raised. “Pretty little thing like you, I’m sure you could make double just from tips—“

He yelped. “No! Thank you. No, I am. Nope.”

“Well, alright, then. I’m sure there’s plenty to be done.” 

He followed her out of her office, and imagined that his face was half as red as it probably was. 

“Oof!” 

Sokka was stopped short by a body—an alive and upright body, to be precise—and he barreled them over, landing them both fully in the swamp water. He righted himself with haste. 

“Sokka?” 

Sokka sighed with relief. “Aang.” 

Then he tensed up again, because maybe Aang was also a hallucination, borne of his crippling terror. Then he relaxed, because he’d touched Aang, and hallucinations weren’t solid, so…

“We’ve been looking for you!” He chirped, eyes bright like he hadn’t just seen his dead mother dragging the corpse of the man he killed. Which. He hadn’t, so it made sense. 

“We?” He asked, glad that the raggedness of his breath concealed the fact that he’d been sobbing uncontrollably not five minutes ago. He was also glad that it was dark enough that the tear tracks down his face and redness of his eyes probably weren’t visible. He would rather join the Fire Navy before he let Aang and Katara see him snivel like a little kid. 

(He ignored the fact that they’d seen him snivel like a little kid before. That was in the past. He’d moved on. Also, he was incredibly unstable and fragile at the moment, and if either of them did something like ask if he was okay or point out the clear signs of distress on his face, he would burst into tears all over again.)

“Katara and I!”

He looked in the direction that Aang was pointing. Katara was asleep, draped across two branches like it was a hammock. 

“She doesn’t seem to be looking very hard.”

“Ah, well. We took a break.”

“I see. Why are you awake?”

Aang shrugged. “I was chasing this little girl,” his face screwed up into confusion, or at least that was what it looked like in the dim lighting. “She was giggling and running away from me. I was just coming back after I lost her. I don’t…”

“Know if she was real?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’s Appa and Momo?” Sokka asked, very much not wanting to think or talk about hallucinations. 

“I don’t know. We all got separated, I think. Katara and I bumped into each other only a couple of hours before sunset,” Aang gnawed on his bottom lip. Sokka resisted the urge to pull his lip out of his mouth. “I hope they’re okay.”

“I’m sure they are,” consoled Sokka, placing a hand on Aang’s shoulder. “How about we head back to sleep? We can look for them again in the morning. No point worrying ourselves now.”

“Alright,” conceded Aang, letting Sokka steer him over to where Katara slept. 

Sokka listened until Aang’s breath slowed and evened out, and then he let himself cry. 

There was a courtyard. Zuko wondered if that was a constant between most brothels; he’d spent many hours in a brothel courtyards. 

Unlike the courtyard at the last brothel, this one didn’t have cobble lining the floor, shoots of green peeking between the cracks. Instead it had a packed earth floor, a layer of dust sitting on the soles of his feet as he toiled over the day’s laundry. 

Despite it being early spring at best, the sun was hot on his back, and even hotter on his black hair. It was a consolation, at least, that the water for the washing was cold. He was sweating through the cotton of his shirt, which he was heavily considering peeling off. 

A girl, laden with another bucket of clothing, walked into the courtyard. “Hot out today, huh?” 

He grunted in affirmation, wringing a skirt out over the tub. It barely had enough fabric on it to clothe a baby, much less a grown woman, but that was sort of the point, wasn’t it? It would probably have been a fashion statement back in the Fire Nation; Zuko had always been thoroughly baffled by the modesty of other nations. (The poles, he could understand, but there were regions of the Earth Kingdom where it could get as hot as the Fire Nation, and even there they were averse to showing even a hint of ankle or collarbone—much less the bared midriffs that came in droves back home.)

It was at this thought that he decided there was no real point in keeping his shirt on. He was three seconds away from dying of heat stroke, and what was it to him if he offended somebody’s delicate sensibilities by daring to expose his stomach? What a scandal. 

Unfortunately, he failed to consider that he might do the opposite of offend someone’s sensibilities, which he discovered when the other occupant of the courtyard wolf-whistled at his shirtless back. 

“You work out?” She asked, shaving a couple of pieces of lye soap off the bar and letting it dissolve in the water. 

“Yeah,” he responded. 

“Wish my clients could look like you,” she sighed. 

Zuko hung the skirt up to dry, and moved onto a piece of fabric that could be described as ‘two triangles and some string.’ He could not, for the life of him, figure out what it was supposed to be. 

“That’s a top,” the girl nodded at the thing in his hands, having taken note of his constipated expression. 

“How.”

“The triangles go over the breasts like this—“ she demonstrated with her hands. Zuko looked pointedly away. “And then you tie one of the strings behind your neck to keep it up, and then one of the strings behind your back to keep it on.” She shrugged. “Some clients like that kind of stuff. I’m Lee, you new here?”

Zuko nodded. “Just doing day work. My uncle and I— we’re travelers.”

Lee’s face contorted into a sympathetic grimace. “Dragged you along, did he? Doesn’t happen too often, but—“

Zuko turned an unattractive shade of puce. “Nope, no, nu-uh. He’s doing day work at the tea shop, so I came here.”

Lee laughed. “Oh, man, you should see your face. You look like a red monk spider.”

“Don’t call me that—!” Zuko turned back to his tub of water, scowling. He figured he’d spent more than enough time on the stringy top and threw it over the line. 

“So, what’s your name? You a refugee? I know a lot of those. I heard it’s tough to get into Ba Sing Se—is that where you’re headed?”

Was this girl averse to asking one question at a time, or something? 

“Lee, sort of, I don’t know.”

“That’s funny,” she laughed, “both of us are named Lee!”

“It’s not that funny. I’m pretty sure half of the kingdom is named Lee.”

“You know— did you ever hear about the three Lees?” 

Zuko shook his head. 

“Oh, man, well. It was this crazy funny story that my ma used to tell me, like, every night—because I’d always ask her to tell it, you see, even though I could probably recite it word for word—about these three dudes named Lee. This was back when Tu Zin was still standing, and the kingdom only had three kings. So King Lee of Omashu, right, he…”

Sokka was reasonably certain that the swamp was actual, literal hell. That he had died taking a tumble from Appa’s back, and was now stuck in the Spirit Wilds, but not the good part with golden pools and Agni. There were several points to support his thesis. The first being the freak tornado that had come out of nowhere and was clearly the work of some nefarious being (Aang had confirmed that it was, in fact, a tornado that had brought them down—Katara and he had just been so absorbed in their argument that they hadn’t noticed it). The second, and most obvious, being the terrifying visions of dead people. There were several other points, too many to possibly be enumerated, but to illustrate Sokka’s overall claim: he’d spent the majority of the night trying to fend off these disgusting creatures that resembled snails without shells, if snails without shells had altogether too many legs to possibly be comfortable. Shell-less centipede snails. Add that to the general strife and anguish that had been far harder to bat away than those monstrosities beneath Agni’s light, and it was safe to say that he had not had a good night at all.

It was times like these that Sokka wished he’d stayed in the south to die a peaceful, ignorant death at the age of seventeen—living really wasn’t worth it if it involved shell-less centipede snails. Actually and for the most part, his general experience with Living Life to the Fullest hadn’t gone so well for him thus far. Really, he should’ve died when he was ten like the healer predicted. 

Damn quack. 

(He sent a mental apology to the healer—who happened to be gran-gran—he didn’t mean it and she was a very good and scientifically sound healer.)

(Even though she hadn’t gone to school for it or anything. She was good at what she did.)

Regardless, hell. Hell was where he was, and if Agni had any modicum of love or even slightly positive inclinations towards Sokka, then Agni would get him the hell out of there and put him back in that weird place with the golden pools. Even if that deer had been sort of creepy, at least it wasn’t shell-less centipede snails or Katara bugs or birds with human screams. Or cat-gators, one of which had nearly taken Sokka’s leg off at the knee. 

It would’ve solved the slight twinge that still persisted in his left ankle, at least. 

(Though, if that was how Sokka viewed solutions to his problems, maybe there was a reason why he spent most of his life suffering. Something to consider.)

“I saw this little girl, she was giggling—“ said Aang to Katara, both of whom were unfairly chipper. Blinking felt like rubbing sandpaper all over his eyeballs.

“Really?” Katara asked, “I thought I was just going crazy. I saw—“ she sent a glance backwards at Sokka. “I saw my mom.”

Sokka stiffened, but didn’t break his stride. “You saw her, too? Are you okay?”

Katara sighed. “It made me miss her again. Just… I really thought she was real for a second, you know?”

Sokka deflated. Of course Katara probably saw the intact version of their mother, and not whatever demon had graced Sokka with her presence last night. Because Sokka unfailingly drew the short stick in life. Perhaps it was just an off day, but he was seriously beginning to consider the merits of no longer even bothering to participate. 

“You said you saw her too?” Katara asked, concern knitting her brows. 

Sokka tucked his lips into a straight line. “Yeah.”

Katara blessedly took the hint and didn’t ask, but she kept throwing unsubtle glances at him when she wasn’t fully focused on Aang chattering away like a parrot-monkey.

Fuck this swamp, honestly. 

At risk of sounding redundant, fuck this swamp, even more this time. First of all, no natural, reasonable thing should operate the way this swamp did. Second of all—and this was absolutely a critical statement, one that Sokka felt so deeply that it resonated in his very bones—no, absolutely not. Sokka, upon hearing the explanation for the killer vines and the crazy tall tree and the fucking hallucinations, made the executive and unchallengeable decision that any and all swamps, bogs, fens, and other assorted wetlands were henceforth struck from their list of visitable locations. 

He’d never been this thankful to be in Appa’s saddle before. 

“We are never going back there—“

“I kind of like—mmph.”

Sokka valiantly ignored Aang’s wet tongue swiping at his palm and reasserted his position on the matter. “Absolutely—pardon my language—fucking not. There is an extensive list of things I would rather do than step foot in that swamp again, not least of which being death, gruesome torture, becoming the Fire Lady, eating actual feces—“

Katara rolled her eyes. “We get it, you don’t have to be such a dick about it. You had a bad time there—“

Sokka’s voice rose maybe seventeen octaves. “I don’t think you quite get it, no! I’m pretty sure that gave me more trauma than I already had.”

“Whatever. Has your bending gotten any better?”

Oh. In between the visceral horror, complete solitude, and physically attempting to run from his problems, he’d completely forgotten about that particular problem. He focused, briefly, on his inner fire. 

“Nope.”

“Great.”

Chapter Text

Lightning flashed above his head, purple-white through the clouds and lancing across the sky in great serpentine bolts. Thunder joined the arcing dancers with a chorus of baritone, rolling across the prairie in great booms, shivering up his heels and joining his heart as it beat. 

 Sokka stood some distance away from where his sister and the Avatar were hunkered under a low, scruffy tree, in loving embrace with the weeping mushrooms that ringed the trunk. His feet were planted firmly in the quickly-softening ground, shoulder width apart, and he had his arms raised to his sides, palms face up. The lightning was far enough away that he didn’t need to worry about getting struck. 

 Growing up, he’d always loved thunderstorms, as much as but in a different way as he’d loved fire. His parents had worried, urged him to stay inside so as to not risk electrocution, but it was one of the pure freedoms he felt. He wouldn’t let anyone take that away.

 Now that he understood how lightning was related to fire—its colder, deadlier cousin—he understood, too, why he’d always been so enamored. It was a thrill to be so close to his element, to watch it take the skies in massive luminous cracks. It was this heart-pumping giddiness, one that forced laughter up through his throat and caused his head to buzz as if filled with static.

 He wondered what it would be to bend lightning. Such a fleeting thing, next to fire that could burn eternally should it only have enough fuel to do so. 

 A thought crossed his mind, brief as a moment, and he just barely managed to snag it with the edge of his pinkie fingernail, to reel its struggling body back to the forefront. 

 Firebending felt an awful lot like, well, fire. It was as captivating to produce as it was to watch, a sinuous dance of flame that warmed Sokka from the inside out. Perhaps lightning was the same—perhaps bending it would be like a bubble that grew in his chest, would be like spinning circles in the mud, barefoot, like tossing laughter to the sky and crying out in exaltation of the heavens. 

 He had to try it. 

 He squatted down, dizzy. Brought his hands up near his face so that his palms faced each other, engaged in a dialogue that only he could understand. Focusing on that feeling, that joyful delirious hysteria, he began to pull from his inner flame, trying to let it race and tumble from his palms rather than flow outwards in strands. Time passed without his notice, and the sky flashed uncountable times, and he pulled and pulled and pulled until he stopped grasping at open air and instead caught on something in the pit of his belly. 

 A spark—just one, blue like static, but a spark nonetheless—hopped from his left hand to his right. He whooped, and stood, exhilarated—the spark had been measly and barely there but he’d seen it and felt it and most importantly, it had been him who made it. 

 He tried again many times, but couldn’t recreate his first success. He wouldn’t let it get him down: he understood now how it felt, and in time, he was sure he could do it again. His smile felt permanent, like his muscles had stretched so far that they would never return back to their previous state. 

 In that moment, it seemed almost ridiculous to him that he’d ever been afraid or ashamed of his bending. Even more than that, he balked at the idea of something so pure being used for something as soiled as war—when soldiers turned their violent hands on innocent people, how did they not realize it as an insult to the gift they had been given? 

 He shook his head, trying to break himself from his thoughts. If he let himself think about all the evil things in the world, the magic would break and he would be stuck back in the ever-familiar mires of misery. So he didn’t think about it, and he let himself be swept up in the arms of the wind and rain and let the thunder sweep him into the sky. 

 It was mostly dry, though still exceptionally damp, underneath what Aang had called a pumice tree—or, at least, it would have been, if not for Katara deftly waterbending the encroaching moisture away from where they’d set up emergency camp when the massive towers of cloud had appeared on the horizon. Momo was curled in one of their bags, sheltering from the rain, and Appa was languishing in the downpour, occasionally airbending the water from his fur in great puffs that sent vapor out from his body in a misty halo. 

 She watched, with amusement and a faint tendril of nostalgia, as her brother whooped and danced and spun himself in so many circles that he fell to the ground, dizzy from the movement. Thunderstorms gave her peace, too—she liked to feel the water’s descent, trying to focus on individual raindrops from as far out as she could sense them to when they hit the ground and splattered—but they exhilarated nobody the way they did Sokka. She remembered the many arguments that had surrounded thunderstorms in their childhood, Sokka insisting on watching the cells pass by and their overprotective parents worrying themselves to death. 

 She leaned back until she made contact with the tree. Tilting her head up, she watched droplets filter down through the blue-black berries and the oblong, waxy leaves, their free-fall stopping when she curved them away from their encampment until they landed just outside the wide reach of the branches. 

 One drop fell straight through, landing right at the crown of Aang’s bald head. She laughed when he took no notice: he was too preoccupied with the dried mango-apples gifted to them by the swamp-benders. She should’ve been reprimanding him—they were running out of food, and they didn’t know when the next stop would be. But it was late, and she was getting tired, and today was a day for indulgence.

 She closed her eyes and promised herself she’d tell him off in the morning.