Chapter Text
His name is Sokka, no last name to speak of, and he is of the Southern Water Tribe.
And today, February eleventh, his sixth birthday, he feels pain like he never has before.
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“Mom,” Sokka gasps suddenly at the fire. It is not yet noon, and the birthday celebrations have yet to begin. The child holds his hand to his throat, his eyes wide and teary, and he chokes out a sob.
This, of course, alarms not just his mother but everyone within view, and the kid is surrounded in seconds.
“Sokka? Baby, what’s happening? Can you talk?” his mother asks, setting a hand on his shoulder.
Sokka lets out another cry, shakes his head. “Burns, mom, it burns so bad, I—” he gasps, breathes deep. She instructs him to show her where it burns, and he shakes his head. He won’t take his hand off of his neck for several minutes, until eventually the burning calms.
When he stops crying, he lifts his chin to reveal his neck and the angry red splotch covering his skin.
“Nothing happened,” he admits later, in the dark of night, “it just suddenly felt like I put my neck on the fire.”
It keeps happening throughout the next few days, and by the end of the week his body is covered in pink marks. It doesn’t happen again for months, and the pattern continues for years.
When he is thirteen and a half years old, he receives the first phantom injury that causes real damage beyond pink marks and burning pain.
It is morning, so early that the sun has yet to rise, and Sokka wakes up screaming bloody murder. His skin is practically melting off of his eye and ear and—
He can’t hear or see on his left side at all for weeks, and it barely goes away even after two years. The scar doesn’t, either.
He misses his mom. He worries about his soulmate.
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Zuko doesn’t think he has a soulmate. Six, eight, ten—he hasn’t felt a thing.
When he’s twelve and (almost) a half, his leg stops working. He doesn’t feel pain, it just stops. He wastes the next three hours sitting in bed staring at his nonfunctioning leg.
He finds out from his uncle that evening that his soulmate must’ve broken a bone. That is also the day that he finds out he does in fact have a soulmate, and the reason he didn’t feel pain was because his soulmate felt more emotional pain than physical—thus, the reason for constant heart pain and stomach aches. His leg is better the same night, it starts to hurt but it works, and.
Zuko cries for the first time since his mother disappeared that night, remembering all the pain his father put him through. He remembers being six, months after his birthday, and the first day of school. A boy kissed him, that day, because he thought Zuko was fun, thought Zuko was cute, and Zuko remembers getting pulled out of school the very same day and the fire that had come from his father’s lips when he was being scolded. He remembers the first burn, the first hurt his father put him through, and he can’t breathe because he’d put another person through that, he’d put another person through the punishment that only he should receive because he went and kissed a boy.
He doesn’t eat for a week after that.
When he is burned in the Agni Kai months and months later, the pain goes away faster than a burn ever has before. Almost like being healed, he thinks, and he doesn’t tell a soul. His soulmate—Zuko closes his working eye and tries not to cry because tears have salt and salt burns and imagine burning a burn. He aches and he aches and, and he wonders how different his life would be if his father loved him.
He was supposed to die in the Agni Kai. He was fated to die. Agni saved him, and Zuko just wishes he was dead.
(His uncle tells him that what doesn’t kill him makes him stronger, and he just wants to scream—if it’s supposed to make him stronger, why does he feel so weak?)