Chapter Text
The posters, unfortunately, do not spontaneously combust in Sokka’s fist, despite his most valiant efforts. He keeps them clenched tightly during the silent trek back to the campsite, and continues to squeeze them with all his might as he paces when they return.
He’s angry, and hurt, and miserable, and a whole host of other emotions that threaten to tear up his insides.
He’s mad at Fire Lord Asshole for calling for Zuko’s head. He’s pissed at the Fire Nation for taking his mother’s life and denying him the opportunity for revenge. And, most importantly, he’s fucking livid at the fact that Zuko and Katara still aren’t back.
Toph asks why he’s so depressed over dinner; well, more accurately, she asks if his bad mood is the reason why the rice is even shittier than usual.
“I’m fine,” he says, staring at the campfire as he eats mechanically.
She gives him her favorite line in response: “You know I can tell when you’re lying, right?”
“Yeah,” Sokka grumbles. “I know.”
“Is it because Sparky isn’t here?” she asks, a knowing grin spreading across her features. “What is he, your boyfr—“
“Toph,” Suki interjects. “I don’t think Sokka wants to talk about it.”
Sokka has never been more grateful for Suki’s presence in his entire life, especially when she somehow manages to get Toph, the most stubborn twelve-year-old on the planet, to actually stop teasing him about things he really doesn’t feel like sharing.
(It probably has something to do with the fact that she launches into the story of their misadventure with fire flakes, which Toph thinks is even better joke fodder.)
After her fifth wisecrack about their “delicate taste-buds,” Sokka announces that he’s going for a walk.
“I just need to clear my head,” he explains. “Don’t wait up for me.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Aang asks.
“I’m fine,” he snaps.
The frown on Aang’s baby face has him scrambling to apologize. “Sorry,” he says, sighing. “It’s just been a long day.”
“I understand.” The tinge of pity in Aang’s eyes stokes Sokka’s anger again, and he stands with a huff before he can say something else he regrets.
Sokka’s meander takes him along the nearby stream. It’s far away enough that he can no longer see the others, and the bubbling of the water skimming over the stones below is (hopefully) loud enough to drown his presence out from Toph’s all-seeing feet.
He kicks at the dirt along the shore as he walks, sending flurries of dried silt and pebbles into the water as though it will somehow quell the turmoil of emotions inside of him. It hasn’t even been a full day, but Zuko and Katara’s absence still fills him with a miserable blend of anxiety and fury. (He doesn’t know which is worse.)
He pulls the Tui-forsaken wanted posters back out from where he’d crumpled them in his pocket before dinner. The depictions are smudged, and the distortion of their faces is unsettling.
With a grunt of rage, he rips up the images of Aang and the Blue Spirit and tosses them into the water. He watches as they float away, mere strips of disintegrating parchment drowning in the power of the stream.
He wants to throw away Zuko’s poster, too, but can’t bring himself to. It’s stupid, and he knows it; it’s a form of torture, really, staring at the twisted image of his maybe-boyfriend. The wrinkles and blotched ink make his scar appear to stretch across his entire face, and it makes Sokka’s stomach churn.
(Is it morbid of him to be satisfied that at least now it’s also on the correct side?)
He stares at it as he begins to trudge forward again, the approaching darkness forcing him to squint until his eyes cross. He barely notices the change in terrain when he steps onto a dock, his body on autopilot and uncaring of the creaky wood.
He only jolts back into awareness when his foot crashes through the disintegrating boards, sending him toppling over as he slips on the wet rocks below. He curses as his ankle twists, and only manages to avoid breaking his leg by spinning himself parallel to the planks around him. He crashes onto his side with a grunt, praying that the rest of the dock doesn’t collapse and dump the rest of him into the water.
Miraculously, the ratty wood holds, and he’s able to pull himself back up from the crack. His ankle throbs with pain, and he nearly collapses when he tries to put his weight on it.
“Fuck,” he hisses, limping a few paces forward before the injury forces him to sit down.
He knows Katara could easily heal it, but, as his still-aching heart reminds him, she still isn’t back from her “life-changing field trip.” He misses her, not just for her healing abilities but for her presence in general. She’s his little sister, and he’s supposed to take care of her; instead, he let her go on a quest for revenge with the objectively least emotionally stable member of the group.
He’s an idiot. A stupid fucking idiot with a crush on an even stupider boy who’s taken practically the only family he has left on a joyride for revenge.
Tui and La, how can he ever call himself a strategist after this?
Whatever, he thinks, glowering back down at the poster in his hand. It’s even more warped, now, and Sokka knows he should tear it to shreds because the asshole used him, he used him for information to go behind his back and stab it in the process.
For some reason, he still can’t force himself to throw it away.
He doesn’t know how late it is when the massive, bison-shaped shadow passes in front of Yue, but his butt is numb and the temperature has dropped enough that he’s shivering (not that he was aware enough to realize it until now).
The moonlight illuminates Appa as he descends past Sokka’s limited field of vision, and despite his frustration, he still feels reassured by the fact that they made it back in one piece.
He’s petty, though, enough so that he doesn’t return to the campsite to greet them. If they want to talk to him—not that they did before embarking on their harebrained quest—they can find him themselves.
They do find him, some indeterminate amount of time later, though it’s wholly on accident. They don’t even notice his presence in the dark, but he can hear voices traveling down from the hill behind him. When he turns around, he can just barely make out the outline of three people. One of them appears to be seated, while the others stand to the side.
“Katara?” the shorter of the two standing figures asks. “Are you okay?”
He recognizes it as Aang’s voice, meaning that his sister is the one on the ground.
Meaning that the other, slightly taller silhouette belongs to Zuko.
“I’m doing fine,” he hears Katara say.
“Zuko told me what you did,” Aang says, and for a moment, Sokka is filled with the panicked thought that holy shit, Katara killed someone.
“Or what you didn't do, I guess,” he continues. “I'm proud of you.”
Sokka, for the life of him, can’t decide if he’s relieved or upset.
“I wanted to do it,” Katara says. “I wanted to take out all my anger at him, but I couldn't. I don't know if it's because I'm too weak to do it or because I'm strong enough not to.”
Would Sokka have done it, if he’d been in her shoes? Would he have dealt the killing blow to the bastard who tore his family apart?
“You did the right thing,” Aang replies. “Forgiveness is the first step you have to take to begin healing.”
Katara pushes herself up to stand, arms moving as though brushing the dirt off her pants. “But I didn't forgive him. I'll never forgive him.”
She turns to Zuko, stepping closer to him. “But I am ready to forgive you.”
Sokka’s heart fills with warmth as she pulls Zuko in for a hug. This is what he wanted, isn’t it? For his sister to forgive their former enemy?
(Why, then, in spite of the mushy relief, does he still feel so upset?)
He watches as Katara releases him and walks away, leaving Zuko and Aang alone.
“You were right about what Katara needed,” Zuko says after a moment. “Violence wasn't the answer.”
“It never is.”
“Then I have a question for you: what are you gonna do when you face my father?”
He’s right. He’s right, and it leaves a sinking feeling in Sokka’s gut because he’s known from the second Aang came out of that iceberg that he couldn’t harm even the vilest of living creatures (except he does, every time he airbends someone off a building or merges with a spirit to take down an entire armada of enemy ships—he just won’t admit it).
He’s also known, since the day he first learned of the Fire Nation’s cruelty, that the only way to truly end this war is with the Fire Lord’s head.
“I’ll figure something out,” Aang says. “Maybe I can talk to him.”
“Talk to him? What, just have a nice chat over a cup of tea?”
“Do you think that would work?”
Sokka face-palms.
“Do I think it would—for fuck’s sake, of course not!” Zuko snaps.
“Monk Gyatso always said that peace is always the best option.”
“Yeah? Well, I hate to break it to you, but Gyatso and all the other airbenders are dead.”
Sokka winces, and forces himself to stand; even if Zuko has a point, Aang doesn’t deserve that. (He still remembers his scream of anguish at the sight of Gyatso’s bones, the terror as he went into the Avatar state.)
“And if we don’t stop this war, my father will wipe out the Earth Kingdom, too.”
Aang begins to back away, slowly at first, then all-out sprinting. Sokka hobbles up the hill even faster, busted ankle be damned.
“Come back!” Zuko shouts at Aang’s retreating figure.
He screams in frustration when it’s clear Aang isn’t returning, falling to his knees and punching out twin bursts of fire.
“Why the fuck would you say that to him?” Sokka wheezes as he nears the top of the hill.
Zuko doesn’t acknowledge him, simply staring at the slowly dwindling flames in his hands.
“Hey, asshole,” he snaps, now almost at Zuko’s side. “I’m talking to you!”
Still no response.
“What the fuck is your problem, man?”
He moves to shake Zuko’s shoulder, because the bastard still won’t so much as glance at him.
But the second his fingers make contact, Zuko leaps to his feet and into a bending stance, summoning two fire daggers. He’s glaring—an expression which immediately morphs into shock when his flames illuminate Sokka—but the look in his eyes is almost...afraid.
“Sokka?” he asks, frowning as he extinguishes his fists.
“The one and only,” he replies, crossing his arms over his chest. “Thanks for ignoring me, by the way. Great for a guy’s self-esteem.”
“You’re the one who snuck up on me!”
“I did not! I called your name like fifty times, but you…” he trails off, suddenly realizing just which side of Zuko he’d approached. “Oh.”
“Yeah,” Zuko scowls, clearly tracking the way Sokka’s gaze moves to the left side of his face, then slides to the edge of the mangled ear peeking out from beneath his hair. “Oh.”
“So you’re…”
“Deaf?” Zuko finishes for him. “Clearly.”
“Well, how was I supposed to know?” Sokka says, throwing his arms up in frustration.
He doesn’t miss the way Zuko flinches.
“That tends to happen when half your face melts off,” he says bitterly.
Sokka gulps at his words, unable to look away from the mottled skin, the eye slitted in a permanent glare.
“Can you see?” Sokka asks before he can stop himself. “Out of that eye, I mean.”
“Not really,” Zuko admits. “Some shapes, but that’s it. Why do you care, anyways?”
“Because I care about you. You’re my…”
Zuko narrows his eyes. “Your what?”
“I don’t know. Friend? Boyfriend? You tell me.”
Zuko takes a small step back. “Sokka, I don’t—“
“What?” Sokka interrupts. “You don’t know? Was this just some scheme to get my sister on your side?”
“Of course not!”
“Then tell me,” Sokka snaps. “What are we?”
Zuko flounders for an explanation, but Sokka has never been one for patience, least of all for tact. “At least tell me the truth. Do you even like me?”
“I—“ The muscles in Zuko’s throat tense. “Spirits, Sokka, obviously I do.”
“Yeah?” Sokka mutters. “Because you don’t fucking act like it.”
Zuko seems to fidget under his gaze, not meeting his eyes. “This isn’t easy for me, you know.”
“No, Zuko, I don’t know.” He can’t keep the anger, the all-consuming hurt, from bleeding into his voice. “Because you refuse to tell me anything!”
Zuko laughs, the sound caustic and just on the wrong side of wheezing. “What do you think my father would do,” he says with a twisted sense of amusement, “if he found out his son preferred the company of men?”
Suki’s words come back to him in a sickening rush: “Homosexuality has been illegal in the Fire Nation since before Sozin’s time.”
“I don’t know,” Sokka says, a disconnected echo of his previous rage.
Zuko grins, the curl of his lips sadistic and full of harsh loathing (whether at his father or himself, Sokka doesn’t know). “He’d do far worse than give me another scar.”
More chuckles bubble out of him, sharp and pained and stabbing into every fiber of Sokka’s being.
“So it was him.” He’s barely conscious that he’s speaking, his mouth moving on autopilot as his body scrambles to simply remember how to breathe. “Your...” he gestures to the left side of his face.
“Obviously,” Zuko scoffs.
“Tell me,” Sokka says before he can stop himself. “Tell me what happened.”
Zuko eyes him warily. “Why? So you can throw it back in my face?”
“Fuck, Zuko—when will you get it through your head that I don’t want to hurt you?”
Zuko recoils at this, hunching further in on himself. “Why wouldn’t you? I chased you all around the world. I used you for information about your mother. I- I almost killed you.”
“But you didn’t. And you’re with us now; that’s all that matters.”
Zuko purses his lips, as though trying to parse out any sort of deception; Sokka, not for the first time, wonders just who taught Zuko not to trust.
“I was thirteen,” Zuko says, so quietly that Sokka’s half sure he imagined it.
“My father…” he swallows, closing his eyes before tilting his head up to stare at the stars. “I just wanted to impress him. But I- I was a fool.”
Sokka knows the desire to impress one’s parents all too well; he knows the drive to prove his worth, even if (especially because) he isn’t a bender. He knows frostbitten toes from desperate hunts in the middle of blizzards, scarred fingers from shaky attempts to thread fish hooks. He knows the certainty with which he’d do anything, anything, for just a hint of his father’s pride.
(He also knows, with a sinking feeling, that bandages and lectures that end in teary hugs because “Tui and La, Sokka, you scared me,” are not what Zuko received for even his best efforts at approval.)
“There was this war meeting, and Agni, I wasn’t even supposed to be there! And then this general said—and I questioned him and—and Uncle told me not to speak, but I did anyways!”
The words are rushed and stilted, his tongue tripping over itself and spinning a story just short of incoherent.
“I was challenged to an Agni Kai,” he says, glancing wildly at Sokka and adding at his undoubtedly confused expression, “a firebending duel.”
Sokka tries to offer an encouraging nod, but the nauseating loop of “my father” and “Agni Kai” and “thirteen” in his brain leaves the motion awkward at best.
“I thought I was fighting the general,” Zuko says, breath hitching. “I should have known better.”
He clenches his jaw and exhales a cloud of smoke. “I didn’t fight him. He told me to, but I- I just couldn’t. I was weak, and I begged him, and there were so many people, and Uncle says it wasn’t my fault but I know it was, I know it. ”
Zuko’s body begins to sway slightly as though he’s no longer in control of it; as though the gentlest breeze, the quietest word, will send him toppling over.
“He burned me, and then- then he sent me away.”
It’s barely a whisper, the slightest hint of an admission that shouldn’t have needed to be uttered in the first place.
“I’m sorry,” Zuko says. “He told me I could come home if I found the Avatar, and it was—I wasn’t supposed to, and I’m- I’m so fucking sorry for making your lives miserable and—“
He cuts off with a small gasp as Sokka wraps his arms around him, crushing him with an impulsive guilt and protectiveness so strong that he fears his muscles may tear. Zuko’s body is frozen, limbs stiff and unsteady. He trembles when Sokka releases him, hands shakily running over his shirt as though to convince himself he hasn't disappeared.
And Sokka...Sokka falls to his knees, looks up to Yue, and screams.
He screams for the injustice of it all, for the neverending war and everything it’s taken from them. He shouts until his throat his hoarse, sobbing for the child sent on a fool’s errand and conditioned to think that the fault of his father’s cruelty was his own.
“Sokka.” There’s a warm hand on his shoulder, a familiar rasp behind him. (A boy who pleaded for mercy and was met with fire.)
“Sorry,” he says, sniffling and wiping at the wetness on his cheeks with the back of his hand.
“Why? I’m the one that should be sorry.”
Sokka frowns, turning around and using Zuko’s sleeve to tug himself up to face him. The chill of damp, muddy earth clings to his shins, grass and dirt and other particulates no doubt staining the fabric of his pants. But Sokka doesn’t care, Katara’s future wrath be damned.
All he can see is Zuko.
“It’s not your fault.”
Zuko moves to look away, but Sokka brings a hand up ever-so-gently to cup the right side of his face. His eyes go wide, but he doesn’t pull back.
Now, inches from Zuko’s face, Sokka can make out the faint outline of a handprint over his slitted (unseeing) eye. The way the scar is darkest in the center, spreading out across his cheek and beyond his hairline in an array of five eerily identical tendrils.
“I know it’s horrible,” Zuko says, his gaze tracking between Sokka’s wrist and his eyes.
Sokka doesn’t answer; instead, at a pace slow enough to telegraph each movement, he presses his lips to the edge of Zuko’s scar. The breath on his cheek is hot and uneven, but when Zuko doesn’t push him away, Sokka begins to kiss the outline of the burn. It’s rough, uneven and stiff in a way that no skin should ever be. He wonders how long Ozai had to hold his son, his own fucking son, in place to leave a mark so deep.
(He wonders if Zuko thought, just for a moment, that the hand on his cheek was just a tender caress.)
Smooth hair tickles the edge of Sokka’s nose as he continues to trace his lips across the ridge of what was once Zuko’s brow, down the corner of his damaged cheekbone and around the warped wreckage of his ear.
He stops only after he presses a final kiss to Zuko’s lips, leaving his hand on Zuko’s unblemished right cheek as he pulls back.
“It’s not disgusting,” he says. “It’s actually pretty badass.”
Zuko snorts, then winces at the noise; Sokka can feel the already-warm skin beneath his palm heating further as he blushes. He doesn’t want to move—in fact, he’d be perfectly content to stand here forever, pressed close to Zuko and soaking in his “internal flame”—but his eldest-member-of-Team-Avatar instincts are telling him that a certain airbender needs a bit of a pep talk. (That, and he doesn’t want Toph—or, La forbid, his sister—getting any ideas.)
“Come on,” he says, lowering his hand from and intertwining it with Zuko’s. “We should get back to the others.”
“Okay.” Zuko allows Sokka to tug him back in the direction of the campsite, making it all of two steps before Sokka’s ankle buckles beneath him.
“Fuck!” he curses, shifting his weight to his non-busted leg and leaning into Zuko’s side for balance.
“What happened?” Zuko asks, lighting a small flame in his free hand and holding it near Sokka’s ankle.
It’s swollen, now, red and angry-looking in a way that leaves Sokka’s measly dinner threatening to reappear.
“So, funny story,” Sokka says, praying that Zuko’s too preoccupied by his injury to notice the flush creeping across his face. “I may have fallen through the boardwalk.”
“You what?”
“It was old!” Sokka says. “It wasn’t my fault!”
“Agni help me,” Zuko mutters, closing his fist to extinguish it. “Get on.”
“What?”
Zuko groans, bending his knees slightly and leaning forward, his back to Sokka. “Get on.”
Sokka’s face splits into a grin as he clambers onto Zuko’s back, feeling more than hearing Zuko’s grunt of exertion as he hoists him up and begins to walk.
“You know,” Sokka says, “this isn’t exactly how I imagined riding you for the first time.”
Zuko makes a choking sound and stumbles.
“Careful,” Sokka teases. “If you trip, then Katara’s gonna have to come get us.”
“I hate you.”
“No you don’t,” Sokka says, tightening his arms around Zuko’s neck and burrowing into the heat of his skin.
“No,” Zuko sighs, his body somehow flushing even warmer as he shifts Sokka’s knees to rest above his hips, “I don’t.”
“I knew it,” Sokka says, grinning and pressing a kiss into Zuko’s hair. “Now, mush, polar bear-dog, mush!”