Chapter Text
“Honey, I’m home!” Suki called out as she slammed the door shut behind her with relish. Seventeen hours after she left for work this morning, she’d never been so happy to return to her quarters after a long day of standing at attention at the Fire Palace.
“Hey, Sukes,” came a slightly-distracted acknowledgement from the kitchen. “You made it back okay?”
“Just about,” she muttered, rubbing tiredly at her eyebrow and rolling her shoulder. “Sorry I’m so late, Zuko’s finance minister just would not shut up. Did you manage to stay out of trouble?”
“Just about,” Sokka responded. Suki had known what her boyfriend’s response would be before she heard it, but his dry response put a smile on her face all the same. “No arrests, jailbreaks, Agni Kais, coups, or any other shenanigans to report.”
“Just thought I’d check, you can never be too careful with these Water Tribe warriors.”
“Yeah, well, turns out that when I’m not being dragged into shenanigans and hijinks by waterbending masters, hyperactive monks, or eccentric heiresses, it’s actually pretty easy for me to stay out of trouble.”
“Please,” Suki snorted as she stepped out of her boots. “That’s not what I heard from Bato.”
“Bato’s a liar!” Sokka’s voice took on a rather endearing note of aggrieved offense. “How was I supposed to know that Gran-Gran kept jasmine tea in her jewelry box?”
Suki had almost cried with laughter when Bato had told her about Sokka’s eleventh birthday party, but Bato hadn’t mentioned anything about Gran-Gran’s jasmine tea. She wondered whether it would be better to write to Katara or Hakoda for ask for the story. Katara would only have been eight at the time, so maybe she wouldn’t be able to remember it as well as her Dad would, but if she did remember it, she would definitely be happy to share the details.
“Sorry I couldn’t show you around the city today,” she apologized sincerely as she walked into the kitchen. “But I managed to get Ty Lee and Ming to swap shifts with me, so I’ve got tomorrow off if you wanted to go down to the docks or the market?”
As Sokka turned around and gave her a smile that made her feel all warm and gooey inside, Suki couldn’t help but let out a girlish sigh. She hadn’t seen her boyfriend in ages, what with all the work he and Katara were doing to rebuild the Southern Water Tribe, and it seemed like rotten luck that the week he decided to be romantic and surprise her by coming to the Fire Nation for a week was the week that every politician in the Fire Nation decided that they needed to meet with the Fire Lord and send the Palace Guard into a frenzy of security precautions. She was really looking forward to tomorrow.
“That sounds good,” her sweet, smart, highly-talented boyfriend nodded. He was holding a letter in his hand, and Suki tried not to smile at the thought that Katara was already writing Sokka a reminder of something he’d forgotten or left behind at home. “Last time she was here, Katara sent me this, like, crazy-long letter about how people were selling ‘authentic Water Tribe tiger-monkey statuettes’, and I wanna see if there’s any, like, ‘authentic Earth Kingdom polar-bear dog statuettes’ I can send Toph.”
“Not quite sure that’s the response Katara was hoping for when she wrote you a letter about how the Southern Water Tribe’s culture has been appropriated and commercialized, babe,” Suki pointed out as kindly as she could, before gesturing at the letter in his hand. “Speaking of letters from Katara, is that news from the South Pole?”
“Not really,” Sokka said, which was hardly an answer in Suki’s opinion, it was either from the South Pole or it wasn’t. “More from the Earth Kingdom.”
“Oh,” Suki brightened up. “Is it from Toph? How’d her fight with King Bumi go?”
“Nah,” Sokka shook his head. There was a slight crinkling noise as he turned the letter over in his hands. “That’s next week.”
“Master Iroh, then?” Suki tried to think of who else Sokka regularly wrote to in the Earth Kingdom. “Are you still chatting with Haru?”
She leaned across to peer over his shoulder at the letter, but his fingers twitched and the elegantly-printed characters blurred before she could get the chance to read them. She looked at Sokka in surprise, but he was looking down at his lap with a determinedly-unexpressive expression on his face.
“Sokka?” she prompted.
“Hm?”
“What’s it say?”
“It’s fine, Suki, don’t worry about it,” Sokka shook his head and cleared his throat before continuing on in a forcibly-cheerful voice. “So, yeah, I was thinking it would be cool to go to the market, check out the local kitsch, and then, I dunno, see if there are any poetry scrolls or hangings? I was thinking it would be kind of cool to have one to take back home, hang it up in a tent or on an igloo wall –”
“Sokka.” Suki took his hand in hers as she cut him off, giving it a gentle squeeze and giving him a gentle smile. “We’ve talked about this, sweetie.”
Sokka held her gaze for only a moment or two before his eyes flicked away. He muttered a few half-hearted complaints under his breath before he looked back at her, and she tried to make her expression as open and encouraging as she could.
“I got rejected by that publishing house in Omashu,” he finally informed her, setting the letter down on the table with a rueful shrug of his shoulders. “It’s not that big a deal.”
“It is,” Suki disagreed. The vehemence in her voice surprised even her. “That’s the fifth company that’s turned you down this year!”
She regretted her words as soon as she saw Sokka wince.
“So you’ve been keeping count too, huh?” He asked. It hurt Suki to hear the false lightness in his voice, and she rushed to placate him with her actions as well as her words.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she apologized, running her hand across her shoulder and draping her arm around his chest.
Sokka leant into her touch with a heavy sigh. He tried so hard to make it seem like he wasn’t affected by criticism, acting like it was just water off a turtleduck’s shell, but Suki knew that he would be more hurt by this rejection than he let on.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she repeated quietly, pressing a contrite kiss to the side of his head. “I meant – like, there’s gotta be a point when they’re just being deliberate about it, Sokka!”
“I don’t know if it is, Suki,” Sokka mumbled. “I mean – they’re not going to be interested in printing it if nobody’s interested in reading it, right?”
“You know that’s not how it works, babe,” she argued softly, running her fingernails up and down his arm in a slow, soothing rhythm. “Of course people are interested in what you’re saying. You remember how many people attended that lecture you gave at the Fire Palace?”
Sokka made a sound that roughly translated to Your point is logical and well-made, but it doesn’t fit my narrative, so it sucks. Being captain of the Fire Lord’s guard meant that Suki dealt with a sulky, petulant teenage butthead on a regular basis, so she was familiar with the sound.
“Come on,” she prompted him. “I know you know, because Katara didn’t shut up about it for weeks afterwards.”
His voice was delightfully rumbly, and she could just picture the way his lips pursed in a pout. “Si’sow’s’n.”
“Hmm?”
Sokka heaved another put-upon sigh before speaking up a little louder. “Six thousand.”
“Six thousand,” Suki repeated with satisfaction. “Six thousand people came to your open-air lecture at the Fire Palace, and it was raining.”
“It wasn’t raining, though,” Sokka argued stubbornly, as if that was the point he was meant to be focusing on right now. “Katara and Aang were there to waterbend the rain away.”
“Yeah, but they didn’t know Katara and Aang were going to be there, did they?” Suki pointed out knowingly. The way Sokka turned his head slightly away from her told her she’d scored a point.
“So, to recap,” she said. If she sounded a bit smug, she figured she was allowed it. “Six thousand people came to an open-air lecture, in monsoon season, to hear you talk about your theory of the structural model of the slight key –”
“Psyche –”
“Slight key,” she repeated just to annoy him, before continuing. “And you think people aren’t interested in what you’re saying?”
At his stubborn silence, she leaned in again and shook her head, letting her nose drag back-and-forth against his skin to show him just what she thought of that theory. “Babe, come on.”
“I’m not saying that people in the Fire Nation aren’t interested,” Sokka grumbled huffily. “What I’m saying is that people in the Earth Kingdom aren’t interested – or the people in charge of deciding what people in the Earth Kingdom get to be interested in aren’t interested, anyway.”
Rather than try and wrap her head around what Sokka might have been trying to say in that particularly confusing sentence, Suki sighed and leaned a little further into him. As she rested her forehead against his warm, heated skin, she grasped for something to say that would reassure him.
“Green, green grass, spreading out everywhere,” she pronounced carefully.
She wasn’t nearly as good with poems or quotations as Sokka, but she was relieved to feel his shoulders lift slightly under her hands, and she knew that a small smile would have flickered across his face as his features softened slightly. She was happy to remind him that he had readers and students everywhere who appreciated his work wherever it was circulated.
No matter how many stupid hun dan publishing companies turned him down, the green, green grass would grow.
“Okay.”
Suki tried not to smile into the back of his neck. “Okay?”
“Okay,” Sokka repeated, taking hold of her hand and giving her fingers a squeeze. “You’re right. Just because some Earth Kingdom publishers don’t want to hear about it, that doesn’t mean Wang Fire doesn’t have something to say.”
“Wang Fire?” Suki repeated, drawing back and giving Sokka a Look as he twisted round at the sound of her raised voice. “You mean Wang Jingwei?”
Sokka blinked twice and mouthed the name back to himself before blinking again for good measure. “Who?”
“Sokka,” Suki gritted her teeth. “Please tell me you didn’t pick a Fire Nation collaborator’s name for your pseudonym.”
“A collaborator?” Sokka looked totally lost. “Is that someone who sails around the world?”
“No, that’s a circumnavigator,” Suki said, because she was someone who felt the need to correct people whenever they made an innocuous mistake instead of just leaving well enough alone. She was working on it, okay?
“A collaborator is someone who made a deal with the Fire Nation when they invaded,” she elaborated. “Like Wang Jingwei, the guy in charge of the Wei Xinhai provinces during the Third Wei Xinhai Campaign. He was one of the first generals to defect and collaborate with the Fire Army.”
Sokka looked utterly flabbergasted. It wasn’t an uncommon state of affairs in Suki’s experience, but she wasn’t usually the one responsible. “So for the past three years, every time I’ve submitted a journal article on the unconscious mind for publication, the academics at Ba Sing Se University have been thinking it was written by some traitorous Earth Kingdom general?”
He sounded so stricken by the thought that Suki didn’t have the heart to stay mad at him. She felt kind of guilty for flying off the handle at him, so she reached out to tentatively pat his hand. When he didn’t shrink away, she laced her fingers through his and gave him another comforting squeeze.
“Quite possibly,” she confirmed his summary as gently as she could. “Sorry, babe.”
He was silent for a moment before making a thoughtful huh sound. “No wonder I’m more popular in the Fire Nation.”