Work Text:
We won, or we think we did
When you went away you were just a kid
And if you lost it all and you lost it
Well, we'll still be there when your war is over
--
Zuko jolted awake, a jagged shout dying in his throat. For a moment, the room around him was bright with electric blue light, ozone and smoke filling his flaring nostrils, and the shuddering breath in his chest seemed to retrace the path of the lightning through his body as he tried to slow his racing heart. The light was gone in an instant, darkness and silence surrounding the young prince once more, but as he sat upright in bed it was all Zuko could do to keep from shouting again.
Oh, I’ll show you lightning!
Though Zuko was exhausted by the events of the past few days, he knew he wouldn’t be falling asleep again anytime soon. Azula’s eyes, wild and violently confident, stained the insides of his eyelids whenever he closed them. The phantom pain of the strike itched under his skin, coursing down his arm into the still-tender scar on his abdomen. The scar, a closed wound, healed but for discomfort, should’ve reassured him that the worst was over, that the Agni Kai was over, but his subconscious mind wasn’t as sure.
“Zuko?” A quiet voice said in the darkness near his door, and he flinched in spite of himself.
“Katara?”
The voice snorted. “Try again, Sparky. Though if you were dreaming about Katara, I’m not surprised you were screaming. Makes me want to scream every time she opens her mouth.”
Zuko groaned and buried his face in his hands. “What are you doing here, Toph?”
Even in the darkness, Zuko could imagine her exaggerated shrug. “Suki, Katara, and I were sitting up talking when we heard you shout. Could pretty much feel your heartbeat from down the hall, too, so I figured I’d check on you. Make sure you weren’t fighting off assassins or taking off on an adventure without me.”
He sighed. “No such luck, Toph, I’m fine. No life-changing field trip tonight.”
She snorted again, but less convincingly. “Disappointing, but not as disappointing as you not remembering I can tell when you’re lying. What’s wrong, Sparky?”
Zuko frowned, holding the twisted bundle of his blanket close to his chest. “It’s really not a big deal, Toph, just a nightmare. I’ve been having them all week, I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
Toph hummed in a tone that on anyone else might’ve sounded thoughtful. “Right. Stay here, I’ll be right back.” He heard her take two steps, then pause. “And maybe turn on a light if you haven’t already. That’ll help.”
Her footsteps echoed away down the hall, and Zuko quickly bent small flames into his bedside lamps. The low light cast wavering shadows on the walls of the room, turning strange what should’ve looked familiar. He settled back against the headboard, unsure of Toph’s plans.
He didn’t have to wait long. Within moments, Suki and Katara appeared in his doorway, each looking as tired as he felt but wearing small smiles. Suki jumped unceremoniously on the foot of the bed, bouncing as she did so. “Wow, and I thought our beds were nice! This level of finery should probably be illegal, Zuko.”
He tried to smile, he really did. “I’ll keep that in mind, Suki. But what are you guys doing here?”
“Toph said you weren’t sleeping well. She’ll be back with Sokka and Aang in a second. Now scooch over.” Katara replied, rounding the bed and joining Zuko against the headboard. She sat close enough that their arms almost brushed, but not quite.
Zuko frowned at the two girls. “I told Toph it wasn’t a big deal; you didn’t have to come down here. And why aren’t you asleep?”
“Why sleep when we could pile in bed with our favorite almost-king?” Sokka said with glee from the doorway, barreling into the room and jumping over Suki to land between her and Zuko’s feet. He quickly gathered her into his arms and pressed a wet kiss to her forehead as she swatted at him.
“Besides, none of us were asleep yet, and probably for the same reason as you.” Aang shrugged, hopping onto the bed on one side of Zuko’s legs while Toph took the other. There was a beat of silence in the half-lit room before he continued. “Sokka, you were in the middle of telling me something about your nightmare.”
Zuko’s breath caught in his throat as Sokka grimaced. “Oh, yeah, right. I’ve been having this dream almost every night. I’m back on the airship, holding on to Toph while trying to fight off the soldiers, and then…it all goes wrong. Sometimes one of the soldiers slices me open. Sometimes I drop Toph – actually, a lot of times I drop Toph. Sometimes Ozai flies up out of nowhere and burns us all to a crisp. Not my favorite dream I’ve ever had, I’ll be honest.”
Toph nodded. “I’ve been dreaming you drop me too, Snoozles, and I gotta agree that it’s not great.”
“I’ve had a lot of dreams about my time a prisoner.” Suki said quietly. “When Azula and them first captured us, we were all still together, and sometimes I’d dream that she’d start picking us off one-by-one and make the others watch – she threatened to do that, by the way, I’m not just inventing things. Once I was in the Boiling Rock, I mostly just had nightmares about fights ending badly, watching my friends get hurt and then waking up alone in a cell and not being able to do anything about it. As a rule, I try never to feel helpless…but that was pretty close.”
Sokka rubbed his girlfriend’s shoulder soothingly as she shut her eyes tight against the memories. With his other hand, he reached out and found Toph’s, giving it a reassuring squeeze.
Aang flipped onto his stomach, kicking his feet over the edge of the bed with feigned nonchalance. “My dreams lately have all been about fighting Ozai. It feels like every time I close my eyes, I’m there again. Earlier tonight I dreamt that my final chakra never unblocked, and I couldn’t reach the Avatar State to stop him. He trapped me in a cage of fire so hot there was no water in the air to put it out, and then he took this huge deep breath and spewed fire across the whole Earth Kingdom, right from there. I know he couldn’t actually do that, but it was still pretty scary.”
The group gently murmured in response, half sad and half understanding. Beside Zuko, Katara shifted, leaning into his shoulder just slightly. It felt like a position of comfort, but he wasn’t sure whether it was for his benefit or her own as she exhaled firmly.
“I’m not sure I can remember the last night I slept without some kind of nightmare. It used to be simple things – memories of my mother being taken, or the warriors coming home without Dad – and then it became dreams of being captured by the Fire Nation.” She glanced sideways at Zuko, smiling tightly but wryly, and he looked away, embarrassed. “But now it’s all Azula. I think I’ve relived the lightning strike a hundred times now. Even looking at my blue clothes makes me flashback to how blue everything became when she shot the bolt at me.”
Katara’s hand found Zuko’s where it rested in the blankets between them. “Last night, Zuko didn’t stop the blast in time, and the lightning hit me instead. The night before, Zuko caught the blast like he actually did, but Azula fired another and got me, too.” She half-chuckled, a little too wetly to believably pass for mirth. “I didn’t want to fall asleep tonight because I didn’t want to see what would happen this time.”
His throat felt tight as he gave Katara’s hand a gentle squeeze. They held each other’s gaze for a moment, the silent understanding they had cultivated since confronting Yon Rha taut in the air between them, before Toph’s arm smacked across Zuko’s shins.
“Alright, Sparky, your turn. What’s been in your head tonight?”
Zuko pursed his lips, looking down. “I appreciate you all telling me about your dreams, but— I still don’t know how to…I’m not…good at this.”
It was Katara’s turn to squeeze his hand, and when he raised his eyes to his friends around him their expressions were earnest and understanding. He exhaled heavily and tried again.
“It was…sort of like what Katara said. Azula, and the lightning. Everything flashing blue. And I can feel the panic again, and the feeling of the electricity under my skin—” His free hand absently moved to his chest, lightly pressing on the scar to feel the half-ache. “—but the panic is never that I’m going to die, it’s that Azula will win, or hurt Katara. And that feeling – that as long as I can stop her, it doesn’t matter if I live or die – that’s the feeling I keep waking up with. Everything else is hard enough to deal with, and yeah, sometimes the dream changes and I don’t catch the lightning in time, but…”
Zuko dropped his head back onto the headboard, avoiding his friends’ eyes. “I know I didn’t die. I’m right here, and my chest hurts and I’m exhausted and I know, I know that I’m alive. But that feeling, of being ready to die…I hate it. And I don’t want to remember how it felt, because…because I’m not ready.” The future Fire Lord’s voice grew very small. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be alone.”
The silence stretched out in the room, punctuated only by the muffled sounds of cricket-frogs outside the bedroom window. For a moment, Zuko would’ve welcomed any distraction from what he’d just admitted, even a sarcastic barb from Toph. What he got instead was the Avatar crawling up to his side and pulling him into an uncomfortably tight hug, closely followed by the sound of a distinctly Sokka-like sniffle.
The hand disappeared from his, and Katara’s arms came around him from the other side, joining Aang. He again felt the pressure of Toph’s arm across his shins, gentler this time, and it was soon joined by other hands, which he assumed belonged to Suki and Sokka. Each touch felt like an anchor, holding Zuko steady against the shuddering in his chest, and he pressed his eyes tightly closed as he felt tears begin to rise.
“You’re not alone.”
Later, if pressed, Zuko might’ve attributed the statement to Katara, or possibly Suki – a quiet, feminine voice coming from somewhere next to him. But in the moment, it felt like the words came from everywhere and nowhere, everyone and no one. They echoed through the dim room, pulsed from the hands of his friends and settling deeply into his bones, chasing away the skittering feeling of lightning and grief and fear. Distantly, he felt the arms around him loosen, felt his own hands tangle in Aang’s and Katara’s, felt the quiet murmurs as the group shifted into more comfortable positions around him, felt the whisper of Aang’s airbending extinguish the lamps and settle darkness around them once more. But thrumming through his blood, he could only hear the steady and comforting refrain – You are not alone. You are not alone. You are not alone.
--
Zuko’s eyes cracked open as soon as the dawn light spilled over the horizon. He was used to waking at sunrise with an aching neck and tired eyes, and the apparent peace in his bones briefly disoriented him. Anxiety began to spike as he realized that he couldn’t move any of his limbs, but before he could cry out a soft, vaguely familiar snore came from the end of the bed. Cautiously, he raised his head to look.
His friends – his stubborn, kind, impossible friends – were all still piled in bed around him, sleeping in positions that ranged from haphazard to downright absurd. Toph was folded around Zuko’s legs like a pretzel, one of her own legs looped through Aang’s like she was trying to trip him, even in sleep. Sokka and Suki had somehow switched positions overnight, and despite his tight grip on his girlfriend Sokka looked one deep breath away from toppling off the end of the bed altogether. Aang’s head was atop the prince’s arm but fully underneath his pillow, the foot not tangled in Toph’s still dangling in the air like it had been during their late-night confessions.
Only Katara maintained a somewhat normal pose, curled into Zuko’s side tightly with her head on his shoulder, their hands still interlaced where they rested above her hip. Her thick hair spread around her face like a thunderhead, dark and billowing, barely hinting at the immense power hidden beneath her closed eyes, and for the thousandth time Zuko was struck with awe at how that power coexisted with such kindness and loyalty (and beauty, his mind said treacherously, though he quickly dismissed that last; it wasn’t the time for such thoughts).
Perhaps he made a sound, or his heartbeat quickened, for his amber eyes were soon caught in her blue gaze, still half-lidded in sleep. A slow smile spread across her face, beaming up at him with a pull as strong as the sun outside the window and twice as radiant.
“Good morning.”
Zuko felt his lips quirk upwards in spite of themselves. “Good morning.”
“Are you feeling any better?”
He shrugged beneath her head. “I didn’t have another nightmare, so that’s an improvement.”
Katara hummed, but otherwise stayed quiet, seeming to know that he would say more when he was ready. She could read him like a book, and they both knew it. He sighed.
“I’m grateful that you all stayed with me last night, to help me. I…I don’t always know how to ask for help. And I don’t want to be weak. The Fire Nation won’t want a weak Fire Lord, and they probably already don’t want me.”
Katara looked like she was about to protest, so he quickly continued. “But you all make me feel stronger, like I really can do this, bring the nations into peace again. I know that after the coronation you’ll all probably head back to your own homes, but I’m really glad we’re all together now. I— it means a lot to me.”
A quiet smile rested on her face, and she squeezed his hand. “I’m glad too. And don’t worry – the war might be over, but I think we all know that you’ve got a long fight ahead of you to get the Fire Nation back in order. We’ll still be here, as long as you need us—no, as long as you want us. You won’t have to do it alone.”
Zuko’s eyes felt suspiciously prickly as he hugged Katara closer to his side. She snuggled in willingly, her free hand lightly tracing patterns on the fabric above his scar. The room was peacefully silent, save Sokka’s occasional snores, and though the bright sun outside tugged at his blood Zuko found himself stilling back into slumber under Katara’s soothing touch.
--
His friends would stay, though the war was over. They would figure things out together, as they had been doing for months. And his people would finally know peace, if it was the last thing he did – but he knew it wouldn’t have to be anymore.
--
Here it comes, here comes the first step
It starts up in our bedroom after the war