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Ahhh! No!
Zuko shoots up in a cold sweat, thick rivulets dripping passed his feverish cheeks and onto the mattress below. Screams ricochet off the walls, still filling his ears, and though he thought they were just an echo from his dreams, he realizes quickly that they are real.
Rubbing his eyes, Zuko sits up a little straighter, his stomach seizing painfully as he tries to move from the bed, biting back the pain as he pushes to a stand. How long had it been since he had walked? Weeks? Months? He couldn’t be sure at this point in time, but he was sure that those screams were coming from down the hall. And he was sure they were coming from Katara.
Her screams sounded as if she was suffocating— drowning in her own cries or terror but for what, he couldn’t be sure. Perhaps she was only dreaming; he was sure that had to be it or else the guards posted out front would be sending for him. However, the dimly lit hall remains quiet, and with one hand clenched around his stomach and his other palm flattened against the wall, he makes the trek down to her room.
Zuko all but stumbles into her door, almost losing his balance when he has to let go of the wall in order to open the door. But, once he was able to push inside, he loses complete control over his body and falls to his knees, landing upon the ground with a loud thud. It isn’t until moments later, after attempting to catch his breath, that he realizes that the screaming had stopped.
His head is spinning now, already feeling lightheaded when suddenly, he feels hands wrap around his arms, pulling him into a kneeling positing.
“Zuko?” The voice asks. It’s light and airy and yet filled with so much sleep that when he looks up, he sees the bright blue of a crescent’s eyes and Katara starring down at him. “Zuko— what were you thinking?” she asks, alarm and worry filling the void between them as he was just beginning to ask himself the very same question.
“I — you were screaming,” he manages to choke out.
Katara only shakes her head and sticks her arms beneath his own, helping him to a stand. He leans against her until she deposits him down onto her bed. He falls back, then, staring at the ceiling, his breaths coming out in short, labored puffs that he struggles even then to produce.
“It was just a nightmare — I wasn’t dying,” she bites, and out of the corner of his eye he watches her sit down beside him, the bed dipping right at the small of his back. “You shouldn’t have moved. You’re too weak to be— “
“Katara— “ he interrupts. “— stop. I’m fine,” he chokes, but by the look on her face he can tell that she isn’t happy with him.
“You’re not fine,” she whispers harshly, crossing her arms against her chest. He watches her fingers tap idly against her elbows before she stands back up, a rumbling crack of thunder and light rippling across the sky as she does so. The sudden crack of light through the room causes her to jump, and one of her hands goes to grab her belly as she rips head head in the opposite direction.
“Are you?” The words fall passed his lips in a question, his eyes holding a deeper kind of regret in his own belly as his chest begins to ache. Another streak flashes across the sky and her eyes seal shut.
He wants to reach out to her, to assure her that everything is okay, but she backs away even further instead.
“Do you get them too?”
Katara’s eyes open slowly, peering down upon him through those long lashes that just barely brush her freshly dampened cheeks. It isn’t until then, with the light from the storm stuttering in through the curtains, that he even notices that she had been crying.
“Do I get what?” Her voice is edgy, clipped, and yet he can hear the shakiness that he knows she so desperately is trying to hide.
“The nightmares. I get them too.”
There’s a pause, and her eyes flick around the room, settling anywhere but his own as her arms wrap tightly around herself. It was odd. He had never seem her quite so vulnerable before now, so withdrawn from himself and the rest of the world and yet here she was, fighting herself and her guard— the walls that he knew she was trying to brick back up.
She seemed to be thinking now, weathering within the silence as he watches her mind begins to race from across the room.
Another flash of light blisters the sky in two and her eyes squeeze shut that much harder. He wants to speak, to tell her that she didn’t need to be afraid, but it would be useless; Katara would deny any fear. So… he says nothing, and only looks at her back imploringly as to tell her that he was here, and he was willing to listen.
“You know…” he begins, slowly trying to sit up on the perch of her bed. “You don’t have to feel guilty.”
A breath, eyes flashing against the streaks within the sky as she finally meets his gaze. “It’s my fault you’re like this,” she whispers, low and gravely and he can hear just how exhausted she is. Her eyes glisten and her voice shakes and she looks nothing like the brave girl that he knew she had become in the short months that have followed the war.
She shouldn’t have had to do that; none of them should have had to do that.
“If I hadn’t been there, then — “
“— then I would be dead.” His voice is tight, and quiet and he knew she knew that he was right by the way she looks away. Her eyes stay transfixed upon the rivulets of rain that is drip, drip, dripping down the window before she pulls the curtains closed furiously, another flash bolting across the sky and illuminating her silhouette.
“You should get some sleep,” is her quiet response, ignoring what he has just said and in turn, moving back towards the bed before gently pushing him back down. “Stay. You’ve put enough stress on your body for one night,” she whispers, and he eyes her carefully because of the way she looks so torn up about it all.
“I can walk — I’m fine,” he all but growls, wishing she would just let him be but she wouldn’t, and she wasn’t standing down.
“My room is closer to west wing and it will be less walking time for you in the morning. Believe me, you won’t want to walk very far. We start your physical therapy back up tomorrow.”
Zuko groans, then, clenching his jaw as he falls back against the mattress and hums his dissent. He slings an arm over his eyes to block out the bursts of blue and white peeling across the room in a luminescent glow, only to remove it when he suddenly feels the bed dip.
“What are you doing?”
When he turns his head, her eyes are staring straight into his own. “Sleeping? Can I not sleep in my own bed?”
“I — um…”
Katara quirks a brow, her expression teetering on the edge of annoyance and exhaustion when she catches his tone. “We’re just sleeping, Zuko. It’s not a big deal. Go to sleep.”
He tries to; he tries to sleep, but the one thing keeping him from getting the rest that she so desperately pleads that he needs is herself— is the way her body seems to mold back into his own amidst the darkness and quiet that follows the sound of her breathing.