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It’s a full moon; it hangs above them, her stars and her spirit brightly dusking them in the silver light as it bleeds into the inky twilight. Even the grass beneath them, sodden and waning and achingly soft, seems to reach out towards it as it sticks into her back.
She thinks about asking him. She weighs her options on wether or not tonight would be the night that she builds up the courage. It took humility and strength, it took something deeper, more powerful to pull the question from the depths of her mind. And as her head rolls to the side, as her eyes catch the subtle flutter of his lashes that indicate that he has let the lull of the moon tug his own eyes closed, the words roll off of her tongue and into the wind before she can stop them.
“Can I ask you a question?”
He doesn’t open his eyes when he whispers, “Yeah.”
Perhaps it was the way the crickets sings into the night, or the way that the winds billow their hair through the grass, but the silence that stretches between them becomes increasingly too heavy to ignore. “How did you get that?”
Zuko turns his head in the grass, but only barely, and the eye closest to her pops open. “My scar?”
At the hollow of his voice, at the way it falls beneath the realm of a whisper, she fumbles to apologize before he beats her to it. “It’s fine,” he tells her, but she knows that it is not by the way that he turns away. He holds his face up towards the sky, up and into the cloudless and starry night, and lifts his hands as he always does when he was speaking about something that made him nervous.
“Well, uh… I kind of fucked up at a meeting when I was thirteen,” he starts, and he keeps his eyes straight up. “I spoke when I shouldn’t have. I disrespected my father. I was supposed to fight him, but I refused.”
Zuko’s eyes fall closed once more, and she watches a million expressions smatter his face before the corners of his lips tug down. Something about the entire thing cinches her heart, and she pushes against the ground, the grass and dirt digging into her fingertips before she is able to fully sit up. She doesn’t think she can fully grasp the weight of what he has just told her, or the way that this has lived with him for so long without it breaking him.
Or, perhaps it has broken him; a long time ago— a whole life ago— perhaps it had defined him.
“Then he did that.”
His voice is so deep, so finite in the way that he says this, that she cannot stop herself before reaching out to turn his face in and up towards her own.
When she looks into his eyes, when her fingers curl delicately into the marred skin of his cheek, all she can do is let him know, without a shadow of a doubt, that he would never hurt like this again. Because he was good; he was sunlight. He was everything that he has ever wanted to be— and then some. She would spend the rest of her days here, in his home and in his arms, reminding him that his past does not define him. That his fears will not become him— that he is worthy of love .
“I’m really sorry,” she rasps, because she does not know what else to say— she does not know what else there was to say. Because the way that he was looking at her tells her that he is okay, that he would be okay, that he has survived this despite it all. So when she kisses him, she does so with a purpose to make him forget. She wants him numb; breathless. She wants his thoughts all too consuming with the touch of her soul— the breadth of her heart— as she would surrender herself to him fully, wholly, completely forever.
Zuko only pulls away when she was sure he could taste the remnants of her pain mixed between their lips as it has rolled down her cheeks.
“Don’t worry— it doesn’t hurt anymore,” he whispers, and he does so so quietly, so reverently, so painfully raw that she barely catches the way the words fall from his tongue.
“Your scar?”
“No,” he sighs, and he catches her hand and tugs it down against his chest. “My heart.”