Chapter Text
When next Zuko comes to, he doesn’t open his eyes. For a moment, thinking on his Uncle’s sage meditations, he lets himself be mindless, weightless, the world around him still yet a haze of relative peace. If he doesn’t open his eyes, he doesn’t have to think about the ambiguity of what comes next, only that there is a cool, wet cloth upon his browline. It’s a gesture that makes him feel very young, makes him think of his mother, who used to tell him stories when he was sad or couldn’t sleep and who would brush the wild hair out of his eyes, or his Uncle, back when Zuko was in that awful feverish state at their apartment in Ba Sing Se, his soft words and aromatic tea and the gentle nature of the hand that wetted a cloth against his forehead back then.
It’s a gesture that makes him feel loved.
Something catches in Zuko’s throat. It’s a strange, vulnerable feeling, and if he’s not careful, confused, hurt anger will catch on the kindling of it.
“You had a fever,” Katara supplies in answer to a question he hasn’t yet asked. He finds himself unsurprised that she already knows he’s awake. She’s had a good read on him for a while. Maybe before he had one on himself. That shouldn’t be quite so infuriating, but both her care and tone make him want to bristle. “I don’t think you had one at first,” she says, tone clipped. She is still angry as well. Angry, and still taking care of him. “But then you did, and then it got worse really fast.” He can hear a clock ticking. She is awfully, deliberately silent in the breath that follows.
Zuko winks his good eye open and looks to the sky, still an inky shade of dark. The moon has barely shifted. He can only have been asleep inside of an hour. Really fast was… fast.
“It’s going down now, I think.”
“Why are you doing it by hand?” he asks, perhaps a little too dryly. Opening his scarred eye is a struggle, especially with the call of sleep still heavy against it, but he manages. Katara's own eyes widen slightly, and her hand stills a fraction. “Not—I didn’t mean that how it sounded. Just thought it’d be easier for you to…”
“Bend it?”
Zuko shrugs and tries not to wince when the movement shoots an electric pain through his core. He knows she’s exhausted, and another healing session right now might deplete resources she doesn’t have left. He’s certainly not about to encourage that, whatever else is going on between them.
Katara is silent for a long moment. “Some things, you do by hand. Because… “ she trails off, but it reminds him of something in one of those old Fire Nation plays his mother used to read him, written before Sozin’s time. The words echo dangerously in his mind, the long-ago memorized quotation perched on the tip of his tongue but stuck there without momentum.
Some toils we endure by mortal hand because perhaps our love, grand as it feels, means more by show of simple, earthly affections.
Katara shakes her head, as though banishing an unwelcome thought from her mind. He gulps down the hopeful words in his memory. He's not sure they're fair of him, considering.
“Just because.”
“Well,” Zuko clears his throat lightly. “It feels nice. Thank you.”
The glint of her smile is that much easier to catch in the dark, but it melts away quickly, as though she’s caught herself. Whatever anger he was feeling simmers down into dried-out embers. He doesn’t want her to stop smiling because of him.
"About earlier. I'm—"
Katara shakes her head, the motion so abrupt and sharp, it's difficult to tell if it's born of mere anger or embarrassment or something else, something sharper, more panicked.
"Not now." Her clipped tone brooks no disagreement, though now Zuko’s a little more awake, he can hear it for what it is. It sounds so forced and unnatural, unlike the usual timbre of the girl he's come to know, that Zuko can tell that there's something more just under the surface of it, that she's grasping firm at a too-measured, even tone because if she doesn't hold on that hard, her voice may waver.
He wonders again about the fever. It must have scared her. He must have scared her.
Panic, then, though probably still anger as well. Zuko feels his brow scrunch in a frown, but he doesn't try to ask after it. Much as he wants to clear the air between them, to know he hasn’t messed things up completely, to get back on even footing, she's being clear about what she needs right now, and he—he can at least give that to her.
"Okay," he says softly. “The others?”
“No word yet,” she sighs, and the sinking ache in his chest matches the sound of it. It could still yet be, then, that all of this was for nothing, or it could even be that the war is won but their friends lost in the winning. Their future holds no certainties, but the present makes one thing clear: right now, all they have against the dark is each other.
Things are tense and strange between them, and in the morning proper, perhaps they’ll go back to arguing. Yet still, they are each other’s anchors for the time being; they are what each other has. So, he won’t abandon her care, either. He won’t allow her to so selflessly tend to him, even as part of her would probably rather like to shout profanities at him, without returning the favor. When she reaches again for the basin, he touches a gentle hand to her wrist to halt her. She huffs out an annoyed breath.
“Katara.”
“Zuko,” she replies, the lilt of her voice a clear imitation as his name rolls off her tongue, almost a little mean.
He fights the urge to roll his eyes. Whatever. He can handle it.
“You need rest.”
For a moment, she stares at him searchingly, ocean-bright eyes shining in the dim of his room. As ever, he doesn’t know what she hopes to find, but it’s hers for the taking if she manages it.
“You’ll wake me? If you’re in pain?”
In answer, Zuko nods once and does not remark on the pain he’s in now, his chest and stomach still heavy with ache, his muscles twinging with sharpness, the whole of him fatigued. But he's better off now than he was mere hours ago, and she’s done more than enough to help him for tonight. The kind of pain that wracks his body is not something a healer can erase in a day, even one so gifted as her.
In any case, it’s something of a miracle that he’s alive to feel the pain at all.
After staring at him heavily for another moment, Katara acquiesces and sits down on the bed, still in her day tunic. It’s no matter, though, since he’s still in his own ruined dayclothes, a rip tearing clean through the middle of his shirts. If tomorrow—well, later today, actually—arrives with good news in tow, then the sheets will need to be washed of the grime and sweat of battle. If not, they’ll have decidedly different concerns to attend to.
Perhaps it should be an alarm that she agrees so readily, silently reaching to set the cloth next to the basin after climbing into bed. But all Zuko can find it in him to feel is relieved.
“Do you want under the covers?”
Katara peers at him through the tresses of hair she’s now unpinning so that the loops she normally wears it in fall, and she hums her agreement. He pulls them back.
For a long few moments, Zuko wonders if he’ll be able to rest again with such little space between them. With Katara angry at him, with Katara caring for him, with Katara right next to him.
Zuko doesn’t know what to do with any of this. He can feel his own heart skip a few beats, and he doesn't think that has anything at all to do with lightning.
This could spell trouble. He finds himself unsure if he minds. It would be selfish not to mind, he thinks. And yet.
Under the blanket, he feels the ghost of warmth, her curled fingers just a heartbeat away.
Another moment’s hesitation pulses. He remembers his dream. Remembers his fear, like the one thing he knew in the world, that his fire would lick at her until she was destroyed whole. How does he avoid that? How does anyone manage to avoid that?
Yet he knows exactly what Katara would say to that.
That's not a choice you get to make for me, he hears the faint imitation of her voice.
In the morning, then. They will talk in the morning.
Feeling reckless, and brave, and scared, he inches his own hand closer before wrapping it around hers. Their hands were once their chosen battle weapons against each other, and now, even a glancing touch feels a little like salvation.
Katara is so still for a moment, and Zuko tenses, wondering if she is asleep or else about to shout and burst out of his room again, if he’s corrupted their uneasy truce, this may have been a great trespass, what was he thinking—only then, she squeezes his hand once, and it feels like the warmth of forgiveness, makes him light up the way her embrace did on the pier at Ember Island several weeks and hundreds of lifetimes ago.
Hand in hers, Zuko exhales and allows himself to fall into dreamless, simple sleep.
Against the dark, is the last thing he thinks before falling out from under the dropping off point of unconsciousness. The thought is hazy and haphazard. We’re all each other has against the dark.
I told you 'bout all those fears
And away they did run
Your shore must be strong
And you feel like an ocean
Made warm by the sun