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How on God’s Green Earth did you end up in a gym class playing dodgeball against Azula and her team of freaky psycho ninjas?
You didn’t ask for this. Literally, you begged to get out of it. Anything but this. But the gym teacher’s a fat dick and “tournament rules are rules”, so you and your rag-tag team of band nerds are up against the varsity players. Literally everybody on the other side of the line is what, a foot taller than you? More? Azula’s scary enough on her own, but she’s got her team of those two other girls who have freakishly good aim and flexibility and just all-around athleticism you don’t have.
Worst of all is that her brother, Zuko, is on that team too. You probably wouldn’t mind getting your ass whooped if he wasn’t there to witness it. You weren’t sure how long you’d had this crush on him; maybe it started when he helped pick up your pencils after you tripped in third period and dropped them all over the place like a moron? Or when he complimented the hand-made scrunchy you’d made on your wrist, just out of the blue? He’s more than out of your league, so you felt totally safe having this secret thing for him. He’s cute and kind of dorky, but it’s cool, because you’d never have a chance with him. It wasn’t like you had to worry about what you’d do about him liking you back if you just assumed he didn’t remember your name. But now you’re about to memorialize yourself gloriously as the stupid loser who ate shit in a dodgeball match, and you are devastated.
Your team has already accepted defeat and is in the process of accepting death. You see one kid make a cross over his chest and mutter a rapid-fire prayer under his breath. You decide that because Zuko’s watching, you have to at least try a little bit and not deliberately put yourself out. If you did that, he’d definitely hate you. You might not want him to like you back, but you still wanted to be respected, goddammit.
The teacher blows his stupid whistle and you touch your hand to the back wall. Your heart sinks when you look up and notice it’s Zuko across from you on the other side. But unlike the other girls, he looks half-hearted about it, not gearing up to run like his teammates are.
After the next whistle blow, it happens in a blur. You don’t even get to the middle where all the balls are laid out before you hear screams of pain. It doesn’t count if it’s above the shoulders. Yet Azula is wicked cruel anyways and nails all of your male teammates in their jewels for no reason. What a bitch.
You grab onto a ball, your tense fingers sinking into their foam. From what you heard, everybody but one other girl is down. Whap! A whimper. Well, never mind then. Now it’s just you. Panicked, you accidentally make eye contact with Zuko, who had trudged up to the middle very slowly with the obvious intention of not taking any balls.
His grim expression is the last thing you see before a blue ball of foam wallops you in the nose, knocking you flat onto your back with the force of it.
Your face is numb at first but soon burns unbearably hot with pins and needles. Tears literally start streaming out of your eyes. You touch your nose when you taste the iron of blood. What the hell? Are these girls even human?!
“Zuko!” you hear somebody shout shrilly, distantly. Azula. “What are you doing? Lollygagging?”
“You didn’t need to do that! She’s bleeding now!”
Is it just a concussion coming on, or is his voice getting closer? Is that the thunder of God calling you home, or just the sound of footsteps jogging up to you? You can barely see through the tears swimming in your eyes, but you can tell it’s Zuko regardless. Somehow, you make out a concerned expression.
“Hey, can you get up? I’ll take you to the nurse. You’re bleeding a lot.”
This stuns you more than getting headshotted did. You barely notice, but he’s holding his hand out for you to take. When you sit there gaping for an uncomfortably long amount of time, he just grabs your arm himself and hauls you up with an easy gentleness.
“Alright, let’s go.”
“Zuko, get back here!” Azula all but whines. “She can go to the nurse herself—!”
But he ignores her, pulling you along. You have no choice but to follow, and you don’t have the courage to look back, already feeling the hot flames of Azula’s steaming fury as he takes you out of the gymnasium. He slows the pace once you’re both in the hallway. You’re silent as you shuffle along beside him. He’s let go of you now, but walks at your pace. If you said thanks, you know you’d sound like Squidward since you’re plugging your nose, so you don’t. After a little while he speaks up himself without any prompting.
“I’m sorry about her. My sister. She’s… ugh.” He groans, enough said about that. “Yeah, I’m just really sorry. Are you okay?”
Even though you’re clearly very far from “okay” with blood and tears streaming down your face, you nod rapidly. It just shocks you that Zuko’s caring about you this much. But you shake yourself out of it. He’s just being a nice guy. If it had been one of the other people on your team, he’d do the same to get out of the game he obviously doesn’t want to play in. That’s all.
“I’ll probably be okay now. You can go back,” you mumble once the nurse has sat you down with—you guessed it—ice. You press the cold pack to your face, the numbness bringing some relief to the dull pain that has started to set in. Your nosebleed has also thankfully stopped, but you still sound grossly congested.
“That’s okay. I think I’d rather camp out here for a bit. B-but only if that’s okay with you?!”
He flushes a bit at the end, shy and hasty about it. It makes your heart do cartwheels in your chest and reminds you that ah, yes, you do have a honking crush on him. You nod, not trusting yourself with the complex task of forming words.
He sits with you in the tiny room and it’s kind of nice, sharing silence. But after awhile you get a little too lost in your own thoughts. If you don’t say anything now, will you ever? Maybe it’s the adrenaline from the pain of taking one right in the schnozz from Azula herself, but you’re suddenly courageous. Before you can regret it, you blurt it out so it’s in the air:
“Hey, Zuko?”
“Yeah?” he replies, his head perking up in a way so that his jet black hair falls around his face. Even though he’s got that huge burn from something you don’t know about and don’t deserve to know about just yet, you can only focus on how gold his eyes look when they’re trained on yours.
“If you ever want to hang out like this again… I’d be cool with it. Only if it’s okay with you.”
You said it. Your heart is pounding, and it feels like you might just start gushing blood from your newly recovered nostrils all over again. He takes a second to process it, his eyes widening. You try very hard not to beat yourself up in your head for being so stupid. You fail miserably—God, you’re so stupid for saying that so suddenly! Have you gone clinically insane from a ball to the head? But Zuko comes to your rescue yet again by nodding, and then smiling. It’s a very little one, but he’s smiling at you all the same.
“Yeah. That’d be cool, [Name].”
He knows who you are after all. And he wants to spend more time with you. The fog of pain seems to clear up a bit as you smile right back to him, heart thudding in your ears. Okay. Maybe this dodgeball match hadn’t been so horrible after all.