Chapter Text
Maybe one day, Sokka thinks, he’ll be able to catch a fucking break.
He’d hoped, after staging an elaborate escape from a maximum-security prison and admitting his feelings for his former enemy, that he would get at least a day (La, just one fucking day) of peace and quiet before shit went sideways.
Instead, he wakes up to the ceiling collapsing around him.
He’s half-convinced it’s a nightmare, at first. But then Aang is whizzing past him on his glider and his dad is yelling and there’s a fucking bomb slamming into the Air Temple’s outer wall.
“What’s going on?” he asks, barely managing to avoid tripping on the blankets bunched around his legs as he stands.
He almost topples again when he sees three massive Fire Nation airships launching another wave of explosives straight towards them.
“Incoming!” Aang shouts as he lands, throwing his arms up and sending a gust of air towards the giant metal doors surrounding their campsite.
The squeaking of their hinges as they slam shut—not to mention the continuous barrage of bombs—is enough to shock the rest of their motley crew into action.
“Get a move on, everyone!” Dad orders, hurrying to help the younger members of the group catch their bearings. “This whole place is coming down!”
The walls tremble and groan as if to prove his point, shaking with a renowned vigor that sends debris tumbling from above.
Sokka realizes, far too late, that a crumbling patch of ceiling is about to crush his sister where she stands.
“Katara!”
The word has barely left his mouth, the rocks only just beginning to rain down from above, before Zuko is diving towards Katara and shoving her out of harm’s way with an aborted “Watch out!”
They land on the ground a few feet away, rolling over one another in a tangle of dust-covered limbs and pained grunts.
Sokka is so utterly relieved that Katara isn’t dead that he forgets, for a moment, that he lives in a world where his sister hates her savior’s guts.
“What are you doing?” she snaps.
Zuko, who landed on top of Katara in the tussle, manages to stay surprisingly calm when he answers. “Keeping rocks from crushing you.”
“Okay, I’m not crushed,” Katara huffs. “You can get off me now!”
She jabs her elbow back into Zuko’s chest and wriggles out from beneath him before stomping away without another word.
“I’ll take that as a thank you,” Zuko says, sighing as he stands.
Sokka can’t help but stare as Zuko runs a hand through his hair; it’s unfair, really, how attractive he is, even disheveled and sporting a bad case of bedhead.
“Come on!” Toph says as another bomb shakes the temple’s foundations. “We can get out through here!”
She points to a tunnel that she and Haru must have earthbent while Sokka was preoccupied mooning over Zuko and his stupidly gorgeous hair. Sokka quickly jogs over to her, chastising his brain and its godforsaken fantasies all the while (because now is not the time, get a hold of yourself.)
The group congregated by the exit, Sokka soon discovers, is missing two key members. He spots Aang attempting to drag Appa towards them by his reins, the bison digging his feet into the ground like a petulant child. (He remembers Appa’s fear in the secret tunnel to Omashu, and, considering the infuriating song now taking root like a parasite in his mind, he doesn’t blame the animal for his hesitancy.)
The other absent teammate, much to the chagrin of Sokka’s ever-mounting anxiety, is Zuko.
“What are you doing?” he shouts.
Zuko, who had been facing away from the tunnel, looks over his shoulder at Sokka. “Go ahead! I’ll hold them off.”
He turns back to the airships approaching them. “I think this is a family visit.”
He’s off before anyone can protest, sprinting through the doors and towards his certain death.
By the time Sokka’s brain catches up to his body, he’s halfway across the campsite himself, chasing after the flash of red fabric disappearing around the corner.
“Zuko!” he calls, urging his legs to move faster, come on, dammit.
He nearly slams into Zuko (and sends them tumbling into the canyon below) where he’s frozen at the edge of the temple.
“What are you doing here?” Zuko hisses.
“I could ask you the same thing!”
“I,” Zuko says, gesturing to the airships looming ever closer, “am trying to save all your asses!”
“By getting yourself killed?”
Zuko looks ready to retort, but doesn’t get the chance—the whirring of gears echoing around them is practically deafening.
The noise appears to be coming from a strange platform rising out of the top of one of the airships; and on it, with what Sokka can only assume to be her signature, maniacal grin, is Azula.
“What are you doing here?” Though it’s the same question he posed to Sokka mere seconds ago, the hardness of Zuko’s voice is no longer one of protectiveness.
“You mean it’s not obvious yet?” Azula asks smugly. “I’m about to celebrate becoming an only child!”
She punctuates her words with a blast of fire, and Sokka barely has time to process that he may be meeting his maker before Zuko tackles him out of the way. It knocks the wind out of his lungs, and he tastes the ghost of flames in the air.
“You need to get out of here!” Zuko says, hauling Sokka to his feet and planting himself in front of him.
“I’m not leaving you here!”
The Sokka of just a few weeks ago would laugh at the mere notion of defending Zuko (even if he did already have the tiniest smidgen of a crush). Now, the thought of leaving him behind—especially now that there’s this... thing between them—is incomprehensible.
“Please,” Zuko says hoarsely. “I can handle this!”
He blocks Azula’s next attack with a grunt of exertion.
“I—“ Sokka closes his mouth. Opens it. Closes it again. He knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that if something happens to Zuko, the guilt will eat him alive. But he also knows that Zuko is fully on the defense right now, because Sokka himself is powerless against Azula’s flames.
“Fine,” he concedes. “Just—don’t die, okay?”
He grabs Zuko’s sleeve before he can think better of it, pulling him in for a rough kiss that he hopes conveys “if you die, I’ll kill you myself.”
Zuko’s eyes are wide when Sokka pulls away. (At least, his right eye is; the left is still stuck in its permanent scowl.)
“Yeah,” Zuko says, swallowing thickly. “I’ll, uh, try not to do that.”
With that stilted response that still leaves Sokka’s mouth dry, Zuko sends a wave of fire towards his sister and jumps towards her airship.
Sokka turns away; if he looks, he’s definitely going to be sick. Zuko’s fine, he assures himself as he scurries back towards the others. Everything’s fine.
Everything is, in fact, very much not fine. Aang, now with the help of Katara and Suki, is still trying to wrangle Appa into the tunnel.
“I can’t get him to go in there!” Aang says with another failed tug.
“There’s no way we can all fly out of here,” Katara replies, glancing nervously at the group huddled in the tunnel’s entryway.
She catches sight of Sokka when she looks back.
“What in La’s name were you thinking?” she yells, fists clenching around the reins she’s holding.
“I couldn’t let him run off by himself!” Sokka says.
“Why not?!”
Aang, still trying to tug Appa forward, looks nervously between the two siblings; Suki, on the other hand, smirks at Sokka with a sly glint in her eyes.
“He’s part of the team,” Sokka finally replies. “And—and Aang needs him to learn firebending!”
He cringes at the shoddy excuse; luckily, Suki swoops in to spare him from Katara’s withering glare.
“We need to split up,” she says.
She turns to the tunnel, directing her next words at his dad. “Take the kids and get to the stolen airship.”
“No!” Katara cries, hurrying to their father’s side. “The Fire Nation can’t separate our family again!”
Though the thought of leaving his dad behind sends a similar pang of sadness through his heart, Sokka knows there’s no other option.
“It’ll be okay,” Dad says, wrapping Katara in a hug. “It’s not forever.”
Katara sniffles as she squeezes him, and when she pulls back to return to Aang’s side, Sokka can see tears streaming down her cheeks. He forces back the wetness brimming in his own eyes as he throws his arms around his dad, relishing in the feeling of warmth, of love and support, that blooms in his chest. He holds onto the feeling as he forces himself to let go.
I’ll see you again, he thinks as Haru leads their splinter group through the tunnel. I promise.
“Alright, people, let’s go!” Toph says, her hand splayed on one of the temple’s deteriorating walls. “I can clear that away and we can fly out through there!”
“Um,” Suki says, eyeing the half-collapsed stones, “there’s an awful lot of fire in that general direction…”
She’s right: brilliant flashes of blue and orange clash against the expanses of exposed sky in a dangerous dance, and Sokka reassures himself that seeing Zuko’s flames at least means he’s alive.
“We don’t have a choice,” Sokka says as he climbs onto Appa’s saddle. (He hopes Katara will interpret his steadfastness as an escape strategy rather than a desperate attempt to rescue Zuko from harm’s way.)
The blast of another bomb into the side of the rapidly crumbling air temple spurs the rest of the group to join him on Appa’s back. Toph links her arm with Sokka’s at Aang’s call of “yip, yip,” maintaining enough mobility in her hands to rip apart a hole for them to escape through. Sokka cheers; he doesn’t think he’ll ever get over the sickness of the whole metal-bending thing.
With their exit in place, Toph raises her arms—clenching Sokka’s bicep incredibly tightly in the process—and summons a barrier of rocks around Appa’s head.
It may be sacrilegious to his tribe (not to mention his boomerang and awesome space sword), but if Sokka was to gain control of one of the elements, he definitely wants it to be earth.
Case and point: when a blast of blue flames comes hurtling their way, it bounces harmlessly off of their makeshift shield.
Sokka cheers—take that, stupid princess—only for the sound to die in his throat as he spots Zuko leaping from one airship to another, landing on the raised podium by his sister.
Flames rage around them as they exchange blows, neither backing down. Azula sends a blast that misses Zuko by a mile; Sokka is confused for all of two seconds before he’s shoved out of the way by Katara, who sends a wave of water at the fire whip hurtling towards them.
Aang yanks on the reins to urge Appa to fly higher as Katara continues to deflect Azula’s attacks. Toph squeezes Sokka’s arm even tighter as the bison lurches upwards, her lack of sight leaving her as much of a sitting turtleduck as him and Suki.
Sokka is suddenly incredibly jealous of his companion’s blindness when the collision of the Zuko and Azula’s fiery punches knocks them both off the side of the airship.
“Zuko!” he screams, stomach rising into his throat as he watches him careen towards the abyss.
It’s like Boiling Rock all over again, Zuko jumping impossibly far towards the gondola; like staring at two ships on a collision course, unable to look away no matter how hard he tries.
Aang spurs Appa into a dive towards Zuko, who’s staring at the bison with wide eyes. And Sokka…well, Sokka refuses to let this be the end, because he knows the taste of Zuko’s lips and the heat of his body holding him close and he’ll be damned if he loses what has only just begun.
He pushes Toph towards Suki, hoping she has the sense to hang onto her as he leans over the edge of the saddle, arm outstretched.
A warm hand catches his, and despite the momentum now threatening to send him hurtling into the abyss himself, all he feels is an overwhelming sense of relief.
“I thought I told you,” he says, panting as he hauls Zuko onto the saddle, “not to die.”
“She’s,” Zuko gasps, crawling over to the side on shaky limbs, “not gonna make it.”
Sokka follows his gaze to Azula, who’s still falling, until—Tui and La—she shoots a blast of fire from her feet, propelling herself towards the cliffside and digging her hair piece into the rocks to stop her descent.
Zuko sighs. “Of course she did.”
Though he mostly sounds annoyed, Sokka hears an undercurrent of relief. She’s still his sister, Sokka thinks, glancing at his own sibling. Even if she is crazy.
As though reading his thoughts, Katara looks over at him, her eyes narrowing as she hones in on the way his hand is still intertwined with Zuko’s.
Zuko is quick to retract his arm, coughing nervously as he scoots a few paces away. Sokka frowns, but doesn’t say anything; Zuko, now seated by Suki, keeps his gaze trained on his feet.
They ride the rest of the way in silence.
Zuko is quiet as they set up camp, seemingly avoiding everyone as he tends to the fire. He doesn’t contribute as the rest of the group chatters, wordlessly staring at his bowl when they settle down for dinner.
He feels Suki nudge him, jerking her head towards Zuko with a questioning furrow in her brows. Sokka shrugs helplessly, because he, too, would very much like to know what the fuck is going on.
Zuko doesn’t look up as he mechanically eats a few bites of stew, even when Aang tries to break the heavy tension with a joke.
“Wow, camping,” he says, the grin on his face unbearably forced. “Really seems like old times again, doesn't it?”
“Sure,” Toph replies. “But the fire’s way nicer now that Sparky’s here.”
She elbows Zuko, whose lips curl into a small smile before falling flat again. It hurts Sokka’s heart more than he cares to admit.
“To Zuko!” he says, raising his cup. “Who knew after all those times he tried to snuff us out, today he'd be our hero?”
“Hear, hear!” the rest of the group says, lifting their glasses as well.
Katara, however, says nothing, and her glower only hardens at the blush rising to Zuko’s cheeks.
“I’m touched,” he says, sending a whirl of contentment through Sokka’s chest before he speaks again. “I don’t deserve this.”
“Yeah,” Katara says bitterly, “no kidding.”
She slams her plate down before standing and stalking away with a huff of annoyance.
“What’s with her?” Sokka asks.
Sure, Katara could have a temper; but in all the years he’s known her, he’s never seen her this continously upset.
“I wish I knew,” Zuko mutters, setting his mostly untouched meal on the ground. “I’m going to go talk to her.”
Confronting Katara has “bad idea” written all over it, but Zuko has disappeared after her before Sokka can dissuade him from heading towards certain doom.
They still aren’t back, even after everyone’s plates are scraped clean and the younger members of Team Avatar have settled into their bedrolls for the night.
Suki looks ready to do the same, but Sokka catches her arm. “Can we talk?”
Suki nods, allowing him to lead her into his tent and sitting down beside him.
“So, that was weird, right?” he says as soon as they’re situated inside.
“You’re telling me.” Suki’s eyes shimmer in the lamplight as she rolls them. “What the fuck is going on with the two of them?”
“I don’t know!” Sokka says, throwing his arms up. “Katara’s still mad at Zuko, even after all the times he’s saved our lives. I just don’t get why she can’t forgive him!”
“Maybe because she isn’t dating him,” Suki teases.
“Yeah, well,” Sokka mutters, looking away, “neither am I, apparently.”
“I thought you talked to him last night,” Suki says, frowning.
“I did! But then—well, you saw what happened on Appa.” Sokka groans and drops his head into his hands. “I just don’t get it! Is he embarrassed by me?”
Suki purses her lips as though deep in thought.
“Sokka,” she says slowly. “Do you know if Zuko’s...out?”
“What?”
“You know,” she prods. “Do people know he’s interested in men?”
It’s Sokka’s turn to stare in confusion. “Does it matter?”
“Does it—of course it matters!”
“Why? People like who they like; it’s not a big deal.”
“Maybe not in the Water Tribe,” Suki says. “But in the rest of the world...”
She trails off, but Sokka gets the picture. It hits him like a stab in the gut.
Her next words only twist the dagger. “Sokka, some of the people in the Boiling Rock were there on charges of sodomy.”
He doesn’t understand. The pieces of the puzzle are slotting together, but the picture they’re forming is incomprehensible.
“I don’t understand,” he says. (He does, though, and he knows it—he’s just clinging to some last hope that Suki will deny it.)
“Homosexuality,” Suki says, bitterness on her tongue at the disgustingly sharp syllables, “has been illegal in the Fire Nation since before Sozin’s time.”
It makes a sickening amount of sense, now, why Zuko shys away from his advances; why his words seem like they’re being forced through a wringer whenever he talks about Mai; and why he looked ready to grovel at Azula’s feet when she accused Sokka of being his boyfriend.
“Oh.” His voice sounds small, even to his own ears.
“Look,” Suki says, edging towards the flap of the tent, “I’m going to give you some time to think things over, but you should really talk to him tonight.”
“And say what?” Sokka asks.
Suki shrugs. “You’ll figure it out.”
She crawls out of the tent before Sokka can beg for more of her wisdom, of which he is clearly in extremely dire need.
He thinks, when the tarp over the entrance rustles again, that Suki has taken pity on his poor, tortured soul. Instead, he finds himself face to face with Zuko.
“Uh, hi,” he says. “Can I come in?”
“Yeah,” Sokka says, attempting not to stare too obviously as Zuko takes a seat beside him.
Their knees are practically touching, and even though it’s mainly due to the cramped quarters, it still sends Sokka’s heart rate skyrocketing.
“I saw Suki leaving your tent,” he says, glancing nervously at Sokka. “I hope I didn’t, um, interrupt anything.”
“Don’t worry,” Sokka says, waving him off. “We were already done.”
It’s only at the furious flush rising on Zuko’s unscarred cheek that alerts Sokka to the actual implications of Zuko’s statements—implications that his omission of the word “ talking” in his reply only heightened.
“Oh, wait, I didn’t mean like that—“
“It’s fine,” Zuko says in a tone that projects anything but that sentiment.
“No, really,” Sokka assures. “We were just talking, I swear!”
Zuko frowns, a guarded confusion in his features.
“I’m serious,” Sokka continues. “We’re friends, we weren’t... doing anything.”
“Right,” Zuko says, swallowing thickly.
The bob of his Adam’s apple is mesmerizing, and Sokka can’t tear his gaze away from the pale expanse of his throat.
“But us?” he says, inching closer to Zuko with the confidence imbued by his raging hormones. “We don’t have to just be friends.”
He lays a hand on Zuko’s thigh, feeling the warmth of the leg practically trembling beneath his palm.
“I think,” Zuko says, tentatively placing his fingers on top of Sokka’s, “I’d like that.”
It’s almost involuntary, the way he leans forward to kiss him. Like his body knows what it wants, what it needs, before his brain even has a chance to keep up. Zuko’s lips are rough against his, insistent and perfect, and Sokka would have zero complaints about doing this until the end of time.
Zuko kills that lofty dream when he pulls back moments later, stilling Sokka with a shaky hand as he tries to follow his mouth.
“I,” Zuko starts, clearing his throat awkwardly, “I, uh, actually had a question for you.”
“Is it ‘can we make out again’?” Sokka says cheekily. “Because the answer is yes.”
“No. Well, yes, that too, but—but something else, right now.”
“Okay,” Sokka says. “So what’s on your mind?”
“Your sister,” Zuko says, scowling. “She’s always arguing with me!”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed.”
“She hates me,” he continues, “and I don’t know why I care, but I do, and I just want us to, I don’t know, get along?”
His statement turns into more of a desperate question as he speaks, and Sokka finds his hurt expression incredibly painful to look at.
“First of all, Katara doesn’t hate you,” he says. “I don’t think she hates anyone, except maybe some people in the Fire Nation.”
He freezes as he realizes what he’s just said, scurrying to backtrack. “I mean, not people who are good, but used to be bad. I mean, like, bad people; Fire Nation people who are still bad and have never been good and probably won’t be, ever!”
“Okay, stop,” Zuko says, and Sokka’s never been more grateful to be interrupted in his life. “Listen. I know this may seem out of nowhere, but I want you to tell me what happened to your mother.”
Sokka’s brain short circuits. “What?”
Is this some sort of cruel joke? Some bizarre form of payback for the (wholly unfounded) claim that he and Suki had been hooking up?
Zuko must see the twisted anguish on his face, because he hurries to explain. “It’s just, Katara mentioned it before when we were imprisoned together in Ba Sing Se, and again tonight when she was yelling at me. I think somehow she's connected her anger at that to her anger at me.”
Sokka sighs; it makes sense, but his mother’s death isn’t exactly a memory he enjoys reliving.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Zuko says, resting his palm on Sokka’s knee and squeezing lightly. “I just don’t want there to be this rift between us anymore, you know?”
“Being on Katara’s bad side sucks, huh?” Sokka says, trying for a smirk.
“Yeah,” Zuko says ruefully. “I know I’ve made mistakes, but I wasn’t trying to- to manipulate her!”
Sokka’s knowledge of the catacombs is limited to Katara’s cries of grief over Aang’s small, lifeless body. He knows something happened, but...
“What did you say to her,” Sokka asks, “back in Ba Sing Se?”
“She didn’t tell you?” Zuko may be keeping his expression carefully neutral, but he can’t hide the way his hands begin to shake with nerves.
Sokka shakes his head.
“Oh.” Zuko exhales sharply. “She, uh, told me that the Fire Nation took your mother.”
Zuko looks up with concern as a shudder runs through Sokka’s body, but he waves him on.
“I told her,” he says softly, “that the Fire Nation took mine, too.”
He takes a deep, choked-off breath before speaking again.
“Then she offered to heal my scar,” he says, “and I betrayed her.”
Sokka can’t help the way his eyes are immediately drawn to the left side of Zuko’s face, the angry patch of leathery, disfigured redness against his otherwise pale skin.
“My father gave me this,” he’d said yesterday, “for speaking out of turn.”
“Your scar…”
Zuko must see the question on the tip of Sokka’s tongue, because he curls further in on himself, angling his mottled skin away from him and beginning to inch towards the exit.
“Wait!” Sokka says, grabbing Zuko’s wrist. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
Zuko’s eyes are like molten amber as he stares at him, caught somewhere between suspicion and hopefulness.
“I’ll tell you about my mom,” Sokka says. “Just don’t leave. Please?”
“Yeah,” Zuko says quietly, settling down at Sokka’s side. “Okay.”
He takes a deep breath before beginning, trying to keep his voice from warbling too badly. “Katara and I were having a snowball fight.”
Sokka’s never told this story before, in so many words, but the chill of ice packed tightly in his small gloves seems like the right place to start.
“She was kicking my ass, of course.”
He smiles wryly, thinking of magical spheres of slush splashing onto him and his sister’s childish laughter.
“But then the black snow started falling.”
Ash and soot, floating down from the heavens. A sick perversion of their element, flakes of holiness sticking to his eyelashes like an omen. The frantic crunch of the ice beneath his sister’s boots as she ran to their home, leaving Sokka to stare at the sky.
“Many of the other warriors had seen it before,” he continues, “and they knew what it meant: a Fire Nation raid.”
He subconsciously runs his fingers over the edge of his boomerang, feeling the ghost of the path it took from his small hands towards the back of the soldiers’ heads. (He hadn’t managed to actually hit a firebender with it until Zuko had crashed onto the shore six years later.)
“We were badly outnumbered, but somehow, we managed to drive them off. As quickly as they came, they just left. I was so relieved when it was over, but that's because I didn't know yet what had happened.”
He hears the phantom echoes of Katara’s wails, of his father’s stifled cries as he covers the corpse inside their home.
“I didn't know we had lost our mother.”
It’s only when he stops to finally take a breath that he realizes he’s crying.
“I’m sorry,” Zuko says. “Can I…?”
He holds his hand up hesitantly, waiting until Sokka gives a slightly confused nod to gently brush away the tears tracking down his cheeks. His fingertips leave trails of warmth buzzing on the surface of his skin, and Sokka feels a bone-deep sense of tenderness, an aching familiarity to the time he wiped Zuko’s tears just days before.
“This may seem weird,” Zuko says once he’s ridden Sokka’s face of tears, “but can you remember any details about the soldiers who raided your village? Like what the lead ship looked like?”
“Yeah,” Sokka says; when he blinks, he sees sickly black creatures curled in the center of blood-red fabric, billowing from metallic masts behind his eyelids. “The main ship had flags with sea ravens on them.”
“That’s the symbol of the Southern Raiders,” Zuko says. “Thanks, Sokka.”
He makes towards the edge of the tent again, and Sokka frowns. “What, that’s it?”
“There’s some, uh, stuff I need to figure out,” Zuko says, scratching the back of his neck.
His gaze meets Sokka’s for a moment before he darts in for a kiss, brief and chaste and over before Sokka even realizes it’s begun.
“Goodnight,” is all Zuko says as he slips away into the dark.
Stupid firebender, Sokka thinks with a scowl.
But when his thoughts soon wander to the feeling of said stupid firebender’s lips, he decides now would be the perfect time to go to bed before he does something embarrassing (like dragging Zuko back into his tent and tasting more than just his mouth).
Sleep, he orders his brain. You’re going to need it.
It’s a curse, really, how right he is all the time.