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Zuko has the patience of a saint, Sokka thinks to himself.
It’s an unusual thought, he realizes. A year ago, if you’d told Sokka that he’d come to think of the Banished Prince as ‘patient’, he’d probably have thrown his boomerang at you. A year ago, Zuko was one of the most short-tempered people he knew. A year ago, Zuko was the face of the enemy.
A lot changes in a year.
Sokka barely stifles a frustrated sigh. The attempt does not seem to go unnoticed by Zuko, who glances at him quickly before the corner of his mouth twitches with something like amusement. The meeting had been going on for hours, and Sokka can’t help but feel that very little progress on the treaty had been made. It wasn’t for lack of trying, Sokka knows, but war leaves messy problems in its wake. He knows that both the literal and metaphorical shrapnel left behind by a century of conflict can’t be swept away in a night or a week or a month.
It doesn’t make these meetings any easier to sit through.
“I want immediate release of all prisoners of war,” an Earth Kingdom ambassador demands.
“I second that,” Sokka hears his father--sitting across the table from him--add, a bit more calmly but no less firm. “I have men in those prisons that haven’t seen their family in a decade.”
“Of course,” Zuko replies at the same time a Fire Nation soldier snaps, “absolutely not.”
Zuko levels a hard look at him. “Admiral, people who were arrested as prisoners of war have no need to remain so after the war has ended.” He looks to Hakoda, then to the Earth Kingdom ambassador. “I’ll draft that mandate tonight and will ensure it’s circulation as soon as possible.”
“This is an outrage!” The slam of a fist against the table makes Sokka’s hand fly to the boomerang strapped to his hip instinctively. The admiral is on his feet.
“Admiral,” Zuko says, his voice steely as he rises from his own chair. The Fire Nation soldier cuts him off.
“Where is the justice for the Fire Nation families whose sons and daughters were slaughtered by those criminals?”
“Admiral--”
“I remember a time when you cared about Fire Nation soldiers! And it’s hard to believe you’ve forgotten, seeing as you ought to be reminded every time you look in the mirror--”
“Enough!” Zuko snaps. “You will watch your tongue or you will be escorted out. You approach insubordination.”
“You are a child,” the admiral sneers. “Though one that ought to know a thing or two about insubordination, given your father’s attempts to brand you with a permanent reminder of its consequences--”
“Warriors!”
“Then again, he always was twice the leader you will never be. Long live the Phoenix King!”
Sokka sees the warning signs—the slight shift of weight, the clench of the man’s fists—and leaps to his feet. “Zuko--!”
“Sokka!”
There’s a blinding light and scorching heat. Sokka feels something slam onto his shoulder and he dives instinctively for cover as the familiar roar of a fireball explodes in front of him. The flames are bright and lick around him, and Sokka throws a hand up to protect his face. He blinks the spots from his vision as he yanks his boomerang out of his belt.
Zuko is standing beside him, his stance ready and his hand outstretched, having evidently dispelled the fireball that had been launched at him. Sokka leaps back up to his feet and hurls the boomerang in his hands towards the Admiral, hitting his hand right as he moves to launch another attack and forcing it to go wide. A burst of flames slam against the wall to the left.
The room is in chaos.
Sokka barely hears the shouts of alarm and curses over the roar of dying flames. He sees his father, already on his feet, diving underneath a bolt of red fire. Across the room, the Earth Kingdom ambassador jerks their hand. There’s a rumble in the ground before it rises and anchors around the Admiral’s feet, holding him in place.
Sokka sees the admiral’s gaze meet his own and narrow. The Fire Nation soldier bares his teeth in a snarl, his fist shooting out. Before Sokka can blink, Zuko steps in front of him, dispelling the flames just as the door ricochets open. Two Kyoshi Warriors flood in and in a series of quick strikes, the admiral drops. Awake, but limp.
Sokka thinks idly that he’s grateful that Ty Lee taught them how to block chi.
“Your father should have killed you that day!” the admiral shouts as he’s dragged through the doors. “He showed mercy on your pathetic, worthless—” the door slamming shut cuts him off.
The silence that follows makes Sokka’s ears ring. He can still feel stale adrenaline coursing through him, his heartbeat pounding in his chest. For a moment, nobody moves. Zuko awkwardly clears his throat.
“Apologies for the, uh, disruption. It shouldn’t happen again.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Firelord Zuko,” Hakoda assures him, but there’s something odd in his father’s expression when he looks at Zuko that Sokka doesn’t understand.
Zuko says something in response, but Sokka doesn’t catch it. As the adrenaline bleeds out of him, his muscles relaxing, Sokka realizes that his fists are still clenched. Sokka forces them to relax, and hisses as it sends a jolt of hot pain through his left hand. When he looks down, he realizes that the skin on the top of part of his hand near his knuckles is a blistering, angry red.
Sokka’s hiss doesn’t go unnoticed. Zuko looks at him over his shoulder, his brows drawn together in confusion before his eyes fall to Sokka’s hand. Then, they go wide.
Zuko turns back around suddenly to address the room, his back straighter. “We will adjourn the meeting for the afternoon. We will reconvene tomorrow.”
“Firelord Zuko—” an ambassador from the Northern Water Tribe protests, but Hakoda interrupts him.
“I think we could all use a breather, Kovrik. Coming back tomorrow with a clear head is a good decision.”
“Yes… yes, I suppose that’s fair.”
Sokka is finding it increasingly difficult to follow the conversation. His hand hurts, and it’s taking every last drop of his willpower and pride to grit his teeth and swallow back the whimper that wants to push up his throat. It’s not until Zuko’s face is taking up his entire field of vision that Sokka realizes everyone but the two of them and his father have left the room.
“Let me see,” Zuko says quietly, then curses under his breath when he looks at Sokka’s hand. “Where’s Katara when you need her.”
“Do you have anything that can help?” Hakoda asks from behind Zuko.
“Yes, sir,” Zuko replies, his brows still furrowed in concentration. “Though it’s not quite as immediate as waterbending healers. But it should help with the pain, and prevent infection. Follow me.”
Sokka feels Zuko take his elbow and guide him out the door of the meeting room and down the hall. He’s distantly aware that Zuko is moving quickly—not quite a jog, but only barely shy of it—through a network of corridors. His hand feels like it might still be on fire, and Sokka looks down at it again just to be sure that’s not actually the case. He tells himself that he’s endured injuries more painful than this. The broken leg was worse, he thinks, though it does little to actually help with the burning sensation in his hand.
He’s vaguely aware that Zuko says something quickly to two guards that are flanking a set of doors before he rushes in. Sokka looks up and realizes it’s Zuko’s chambers. He’d only been in here a couple of times before, largely while Zuko was still recovering from Azula’s lightning strike in the weeks following the end of the war.
“Wait here,” Zuko tells him before disappearing through another door on the far side of the room.
“You had good reflexes in there,” Sokka hears his father’s low, soothing voice speak up. He’d had almost forgotten he was there. Hakoda moves the chair that had been beside the bed closer to Sokka in a clear direction to sit down.
“Lots of practice,” Sokka replies as he sits. He hisses a little again as his hand flares and grits out a swear behind clenched teeth.
“Easy,” Hakoda says softly. He places a bracing, comforting hand between Sokka’s shoulder blades. It’s grounding, and he’s grateful.
“Wish Katara was here,” Sokka tells him, echoing Zuko’s comment from earlier.
“I know. Unfortunately, I don’t think she’s coming to Caldera for a while. She’s still in Ba Sing Se with Aang.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Her magic water comes in handy though.” Sokka gives his father a tight smile. “Get it? Hand-y?”
Hakoda snorts just as the door opens again. Zuko has his arms full of a large bowl, his hands fisting a few vials and some bandages. There’s something pinched about Zuko’s expression, and the way he doesn’t meet Sokka’s eyes as he kneels in front of him feels odd. The bowl is full of water, Sokka realizes, as he sets it on the ground and begins to empty the vials into it.
“Can I see your hand?” Zuko asks, and the question—for some reason—catches him off guard.
Sokka blinks. “Yeah. Sure.” He grimaces as he places his hand in Zuko’s, but the excessive gentleness surprises him so much that Sokka almost forgets that his hand hurts.
Zuko was many things, but Sokka can’t remember a time—even after he started to get along with the Fire Prince—that he would have described Zuko as gentle. But his grip on Sokka’s hand is careful. Almost excessively so.
Zuko hums in the back of his throat as he inspects the burns. “I don’t think it’ll have permanent damage,” he says quietly. “But I still need to treat it so it doesn’t get infected. It… might hurt, a little. But then it should feel better.”
“No permanent damage. That’s good,” Sokka says. He swallows, and nods. “Okay.”
For a long moment, the only sounds that fills the room is the quiet splash of water in the bowl as Zuko submerges the cloth rag again and wrings it out. Sokka lets his gaze float around the room.
Zuko has left it mostly bare. There’s a portrait of Iroh and a woman that Sokka remembers being the Fire Lady—Zuko’s mother—hanging on the wall near the headboard of the bed. On the dresser beside it is a drawing that Sokka did of the group of them months ago. He sees a pile of papers on the desk across the room. He thinks one of them has Aang’s signature at the bottom, but it’s too far away for him to know for sure.
Bright, painful heat searing his hand slams his attention back to Zuko in front of him and Sokka yelps, yanking his hand away. Zuko grimaces, retracing his own hand.
“I’m sorry,” he says, sounding more earnest than Sokka expects. “This part is painful, but it’ll stop hurting in a minute.”
Sokka fights to pull his breathing back under his control. In through his nose, out through his mouth. “Right,” he manages, his voice tight. “Right, sorry.”
“Don’t be. I know it hurts.”
Something about that line—and about the fact that Zuko still hasn’t met his eyes since returning from the other room—drags Sokka’s thoughts back to the conversation in the treaty meeting. There were several things that the admiral had said to Zuko that Sokka didn’t quite understand. He could only remember pieces of things said, but they repeat in Sokka’s head like disjointed pieces of a puzzle that he can’t quite make fit together.
seeing as you ought to be reminded every time you look in the mirror… insubordination… your father’s attempts to brand you… consequences…
Sokka’s gaze falls back to Zuko, dutifully bowed in front of him. There had long been pieces about Zuko that Sokka had found puzzling. Things about him that didn’t quite fit together. Sokka considers himself a person pretty good at figuring out how things worked together, and that extended (with less success) to figuring out how parts of people make up the sum of their whole.
Zuko, though… Zuko had always been something of a mystery. But as the words of the admiral ricochet in his mind, there’s a picture beginning to come together that is still just a little too hazy, a little too out of focus, to fill in the spaces that Sokka felt were missing.
“What did the admiral mean,” Sokka blurts out without really thinking about it, “when he talked about insubordination?”
Zuko freezes, the rag half-out of the bowl and his other hand still bracing Sokka’s (not quite holding it… far too gentle to be holding it). “What—uh. I, uh.” Zuko stops. Takes a breath. Tries again. He still doesn’t look up at Sokka. “When I was younger, I spoke out at a meeting.”
Sokka’s brow furrows as Zuko presses the rag to the back of his hand again. Sokka realizes that his hand has stopped hurting, but he’s too preoccupied with what Zuko said to pay it much mind. “After the stuff at Ba Sing Se? When you went home?”
“No, I, uh.” Zuko clears his throat. “Before that. Before… yeah. Earlier.”
Your father’s attempts to brand you…
“What happened?” Sokka asks. The way Zuko’s shoulders seem to tense doesn’t escape his attention, and there’s a part of him that wonders if perhaps he shouldn’t have asked. But it also feels like a question that once asked, is too late to take back.
Zuko pats Sokka’s hand dry with another towel and begins to gingerly wrap a bandage around it. He keeps his gold gaze steady on the work. Sokka keeps his gaze steady on Zuko.
“My uncle allowed me to attend a war meeting where they were talking about some battle strategies to use against an Earth Kingdom battalion. There was a general that wanted our newest fleet to serve as a distraction while we mounted an attack from the rear,” Zuko begins. There’s something off about his voice, though. Something detached and careful. He keeps wrapping the bandage. Around and around and around.
Sokka frowns. “That’s not fair,” he says. “Your newest recruits? They’d be slaughtered by an experienced battalion like that.”
Zuko sighs, his lips pressing into a thin line. “Exactly,” he says in a low voice. “And that’s what I told them. I wasn’t thinking. I just… yelled at him.” Sokka opens his mouth to disagree—it sounds like Zuko was thinking, unlike anybody else at that meeting—but Zuko cuts him off as he secures the end of the bandage to Sokka’s palm. “My father didn’t… take it well. I was challenged to an Agni Kai, and I thought I would be facing the general in it, so I accepted.”
Zuko gathers the bowl and empty vials as he stands, crossing the room to set them on the edge of his desk. Sokka stands up slowly as Zuko does so. The pieces that had been out of focus for so long are starting to come together, and Sokka feels his stomach rolling with a leaden weight against what he can sense is coming.
“No…”
“It wasn’t the general,” Zuko continues, his voice so quiet that Sokka is sure he would have missed it if it hadn’t been dead silence around them. “It was my father.”
“You faced your father in an Agni Kai?”
“Not exactly. I…” Zuko stares down into the bowl of water beside him, his gaze distant. “I couldn’t fight my own father. Instead, I begged him for forgiveness. I was met with a fistful of flames.”
Zuko gestures vaguely at his face, and Sokka’s blood turns to ice.
“He…” Sokka’s throat closes, cutting off the rest of that sentence. All this time being chased by Zuko—all this time being friends with him—and he’d always assumed that the scar was the result of a training accident, or a fight with a firebender he lost. Sokka thinks bitterly and viciously that the second assumption wasn’t far off but his own father—
“I was banished after that,” Zuko says, and his voice is hollow and empty and wrong. And he finally, finally, meets Sokka’s gaze. “I was told to bring the Avatar back and all would be forgiven, or to not come back at all. That was before you and your sister woke Aang up from the iceberg.”
Sokka stands very, very still. He glances down and realizes his hands are trembling. He curls the non-bandaged one into a fist to get the shaking to stop. “How old were you?” he asks, and he doesn’t know why—of everything he could say—that’s the question that tumbles past his lips, but he feels like it matters.
“Thirteen.”
“Thir—” Sokka cuts himself off, scrubbing a hand across his mouth and swallowing hard. “Thirteen. Tui and La, when I was thirteen—”
Sokka breaks off again, his throat closing, his gaze falling to his father. When Sokka was thirteen, his father had left to go fight in the war and told Sokka he couldn’t come along. He’d protected Sokka, and though Sokka had found his way into fighting in the war regardless a few years later, he knows his father had only been trying to keep him safe. The idea of his own father striking him—let alone with a fist full of flames to his face—was incomprehensible.
Hakoda doesn’t look back at Sokka. His gaze is trained on Zuko, and there’s something in his eyes that Sokka doesn’t quite understand. But he’s seen it before. It was the same look Hakoda wears when he hears other water tribe soldiers recount war stories. The late-night ones. The ones where their voices betray the weight on their shoulders and tremble with the generations of nightmares on their backs.
Sokka takes a sudden, faltering step forward, and Zuko instinctively tenses. Sokka freezes. “Zuko…”
Zuko shakes his head. He coughs a little, as if trying to clear his throat. “Anyway. That’s—that’s what the admiral was talking about.”
“You…” Sokka tries again, his voice carrying just the barest hints of hysteria. “You were his kid.”
“Yeah, well.” Zuko’s gaze meets Sokka’s again. “He spent most of my life wishing I wasn’t.”
“Zuko,” Hakoda speaks up, his voice a low, soothing rumble to Sokka’s trembling nerves. “I… hope you understand that you didn’t deserve that.”
“I know, sir,” he replies, sounding steadier than Sokka feels. Sokka feels a little like the ground has shifted beneath his feet as he stares at his friend across the room. Zuko continues, frustratingly calm. “It… I didn’t at first. It took me a long time to understand that it was wrong of my father to do that. But I know now.”
“Where is he?” Sokka demands, flushing with a sudden and intense fury.
Zuko blinks, looking taken aback by the vehemence charged through Sokka’s voice like a steel rod. “Where’s who?”
“Ozai.”
“Sokka, what are you gonna do? Fight him? He already lost.”
“Against Aang, not against—did Aang even know?”
Zuko’s brow furrows and he rubs the back of his neck. “Um. I guess I don’t know. I never told him. I… never told any of you.”
“Yeah—and what’s that about, huh?” Sokka demands. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Sokka,” Hakoda warns, but Sokka’s words are already bubbling up throat and spilling past his lips, hot and bitter and angry.
“What, did you think we wouldn’t care? That it wouldn’t matter?”
“It doesn’t matter!” Zuko waves a hand towards the window that overlooks the courtyard. “My father already lost to the Avatar, Sokka. The war is over. The fighting is over. Aang took his bending. And that—I don’t know about you, but that’s the best, most justified end to his legacy I can think of.”
Sokka is still shaking. He can’t explain why. He knows, logically, that Zuko is right. He’s right. But Sokka can still feel his hands shaking, can still feel his heart hammering in his ribs with the urge to run something through with sword, can still feel the way his eyes sting with tears he won’t let fall. Sokka clenches his jaw and rips his gaze away from Zuko out towards the window, where he can see the sun setting on the horizon and painting the palace courtyard in an orange light.
“Wherever he is, I hope he rots,” Sokka says finally, and yet it still doesn’t feel like enough. “He deserves worse.”
Sokka looks back at Zuko, whose gaze is a little wide. He looks… taken aback. Sokka cocks an eyebrow.
“Don’t tell me you disagree—"
“No,” Zuko replies, shaking his head. “I just… Nothing.” The corner of his mouth tugs upwards in the barest hint of a smile. Sokka doesn’t understand why, just like he doesn’t understand why it uncoils the tight knot of burning anger in his chest.
Sokka takes a deep breath. Wills himself to relax. It helps… a little. There’s a beat, and then Sokka hears his father take a step forward. “Thank you for helping Sokka’s hand, Firelord Zuko.”
Zuko blinks, and Sokka swears his cheeks take a faint pink tint as he rubs the back of his neck. “Oh. Uh, of course, sir. And… just Zuko is fine.”
Sokka glances over and sees Hakoda smile, inclining his head. “Understood.” He looks to Sokka. “I should draft a letter to Bato tonight to update him on the treaty. Will you be okay without me?”
Sokka rolls his eyes teasingly. “Yeah, dad. I think I can manage.”
Hakoda squeezes his shoulder, nods to Zuko again, and quietly slips out of the room. The silence afterward seems to stretch, and Sokka feels the lingering tension bleeding out of him as he looks at Zuko, who quietly shuffles through the papers on his desk. Sokka watches him for a beat, his gaze lingering a little on the scarred tissue across his face. Sokka swallows.
There are other questions Sokka thinks he could ask. Like why—after doing that—Zuko was still so bent on returning home to his father. But there’s a part of Sokka that thinks he maybe understands.
Spirits know that he understood what it was like to crave the approval of your father.
“Hey,” he says, and Zuko’s gaze snaps over to him. “I… thank you for telling me. I… know that wasn’t easy, and… it means a lot that you trust me with that.”
“It… it wasn’t a question of trust, you know,” Zuko replies quietly, averting his gaze. “Not telling you, I mean. It was just—”
“I know,” Sokka says, and means it. “But I also know what it’s like to have things you don’t necessarily… want to relive. So it means a lot that you told me.”
The corner of Zuko’s mouth twitches again. He takes a deep, slow breath. “Thank you for listening,” he says.
“I like to think I’m a pretty good listener,” Sokka teases, shrugging.
“You are,” Zuko says, with far more sincerity than Sokka felt was warranted for what he’d meant to be a joke. Sokka blinks at him, and Zuko clears his throat, ducking his head a little. “I was thinking of getting some tea. There’s a place just outside the palace. It’s not as good as Uncle’s, but um. Did you want to come?”
“Yeah,” Sokka replies with a small smile. “I could use a cup of tea.”