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Sokka is an idiot.
Not in every way, to be fair. Considering his society-altering contributions to engineering, mastery of swordfighting and sailing, and demonstrated proficiency as an ambassador, he’s fairly confident he’s earned the right to be an idiot in some other areas of his life, and one of those areas happens to be certain people. Or, more accurately, one people.
Person. One person.
Zuko being that person.
He’d already been aware of this, of course, since meeting him. What had started out with idiocy in drastically underestimating Zuko’s skill in battle had later turned into idiocy with stumbling through the shaky, tenuous start to their friendship, and how many times he had nearly allowed his very stupid, very inconvenient feelings for Zuko to ruin that hard-won friendship.
But what he doesn’t become aware of until much later into knowing him— namely, that Zuko is half-deaf and half-blind— probably takes the idiocy cake.
----
The first time he’s oblivious to it, they’re in a war balloon heading to the Boiling Rock.
Zuko is a prickly person, and so it had been easy to assume that when Zuko hadn’t responded to Sokka’s mutterings on his deaf side, he had been ignoring him.
Sokka spends the first hour of the trip grumbling, still understandably not trusting the crown prince of the Fire Nation to be helping him break anyone out of a Fire Nation prison with good intentions, and Zuko spends the first hour not responding to his grumbling at all. The longer Sokka is ignored, the more bold his grumbling gets, shifting from his initial complaints about Zuko not knowing how to mind his own business, to his longstanding grudges against the crown prince. At one point, he starts listing every single night Zuko had cost him precious sleep in some way or another, which was one of his greatest crimes against humanity, in Sokka’s opinion.
And through all of it, every single item on that long list, Zuko is silent, merely doing his stupid jerkbending into the war balloon’s engine, filling the air with the loud crackles and pops of a well-stoked fire.
After that hour of grievance-airing passes, and he still hasn’t provoked a reaction, Sokka huffs a much louder, pointed sigh. Zuko turns towards him, confusion rippling across his features for a split second before he scowls at the glare and crossed arms he’s currently receiving, and he snaps, “What the hell is your problem?”
“I think I explained that pretty well,” Sokka points out.
Zuko’s scowl falters, and for a second, Sokka almost feels bad, before he remembers he’s supposed to be feeling annoyed.
“I know you don’t want me in the gang,” Zuko huffs, crossing his own arms and looking away. “But we already went through that with everyone. And I’m trying to help you. So either accept that, or don’t.”
“It’s a little too late for me to change my mind,” Sokka gestures around them. “I’m not Aang. I can’t just do some air magic and fly out of here.”
“Bending isn’t magic—,” Zuko starts to snap, then groans, pushing the heels of his palms against his eyes hard enough that he makes it look painful. A weird quirk he’s done several times since arriving at the Western Air Temple, among his plethora of weird quirks. It’s strangely endearing, which irritates Sokka, which is promptly added to his long list of grievances. “Nevermind.”
“Yeah,” Sokka sniffs, just a little petulantly, to keep Zuko from getting the last word. “Nevermind.”
Zuko fidgets in the silence that follows. Sokka does not care about this, obviously.
----
The second time he’s oblivious to it, he’s trying to extend an olive branch. Metaphorically speaking. Food, literally speaking.
The gang is nearing the end of their breakfast at the temple a few mornings later, and Zuko still hasn’t shown up. If he doesn’t eat soon, the remainder of the food is going to get cold, which would make Sokka grumpy, and so he assumes it would make Zuko extra grumpy, because Zuko is an even grumpier person than he is, and Zuko being extra grumpy would not be pleasant for anyone.
So Sokka, being the saint that he is, brings a plate to the bedroom Zuko is currently occupying.
It’s the furthest of anyone’s rooms, and the silence in the abandoned corridors here feels a little eerie. He knocks on Zuko’s door, then winces at the echoes that disturb the space, but steadies himself and slowly pushes his way into the room, praying that he doesn’t receive a fireball to the face as a good morning.
He doesn’t receive a fireball to the face, or any kind of greeting at all. Zuko is still asleep, lying curled in on one side, his unscarred eye smushed into his pillow, and his scarred side exposed. Feeling progressively weirder now that he’s watching him sleep, he clears his throat loudly, but Zuko still doesn’t stir.
“Hey,” Sokka whisper-shouts. “Zuko, dude, you’ve gotta get up.”
Nothing. Not even the faintest twitch. Sokka is starting to wonder whether Zuko is awake and simply fucking with him, because there’s no way he’s this dead to the world. Sure, he’s probably tired from training with Aang, but it’s not like he’s literally working himself to death.
“Zuko,” he repeats, louder. “Get up and eat your breakfast, or I’m going to eat it for you.”
Still nothing. Rolling his eyes, he sets the plate down, and he grabs Zuko’s shoulder to shake him. “Man, come on—”
A hand shoots up from the sheets to snatch his wrist, and Sokka flinches, but the death grip on him doesn’t allow him to budge. Golden eyes are wild with fear, then molten with anger. Zuko snaps, his voice rough with sleep, “Sokka, what the hell?”
“I was just trying to bring you breakfast!” Sokka defends, finally managing to extract himself. He shakes his wrist out with a wince, then gestures at the plate he’d left on the desk. “You overslept, and the food was getting cold—”
“You can’t just grab someone to wake them up,” Zuko admonishes him, stiffly pushing himself up to a sitting position on the mattress. His hair is sticking up from sleeping with it smushed into the pillow, which is yet another endearing thing that should not be endearing at all.
“It’s not my fault you’re a heavy sleeper!”
“I’m not a—,” Zuko starts, then quiets, looking down at the pillow, then absently brushing back the hair from the top of his scarred ear. A wave of unease ripples over his features. He doesn’t look back up when he mutters, “Just don’t do that again.”
Sokka raises his hands in a placating gesture. “Alright, man, geez.”
Zuko avoids eye contact when he emerges later for another training session with Aang, but he does give a gruff thanks in passing. Which feels like progress, kind of. And Sokka guesses that progress, kind of, is good enough.
----
The third time, they’re on Ember Island, and he finds Zuko out on the beach long after everyone else has gone to sleep.
He didn’t go looking for him out of worry, of course, because being good friends with someone is a prerequisite for worrying about them, and they’re only kind-of-friends. He simply happened to notice that Aang’s firebending teacher had gone missing, and had decided to track down that firebending teacher to make sure he didn’t bail on his teaching responsibilities.
It doesn’t take long to find him; the only light on the empty beach is a faint flickering further down the shore. As he approaches, he realizes that flickering is coming from a small flame Zuko’s holding in his palm, which is close enough to his face to make Sokka concerned that he’s about to burn his hair off and go bald again.
Not that Sokka would exactly care about that, either, even if Zuko’s hair has gotten fluffier as it’s continued to grow out, and it’s nice to look at.
Zuko’s head is tilted to one side, angling his scarred eye closer to the dancing flame and staring intently at it. It casts a glow over his features, warming golden eyes and illuminating the shine of his black hair, and Sokka absently thinks, not for the first time, that Zuko is pretty.
(Objectively speaking.)
The sight puts a lump in his throat, and cotton on his tongue. He’d intended to give him a lecture about maybe not just disappearing in the middle of the night whenever he feels like it, or at least point out that Zuko is very obviously pretending that he doesn’t notice Sokka when he’s well within his line of sight now, but the only thing Sokka manages is a blurted, “Whatcha doing?”
Zuko yelps, which is definitely not endearing, at all. The flame in his palm goes out, leaving only the moonlight to illuminate the emotions that always ripple over his features so painfully obviously— surprise, frustration, embarrassment. Sokka’s never met anyone who’s as much of an open book as Zuko, but he would never say it to his face. He’s pretty sure that if he did, Zuko’s head would explode clean off. Like a tiny, angry volcano.
“Practicing my bending,” he answers, stiffly.
“By staring at fire?” Sokka raises his brows. “Won’t that, like, make you go blind?”
Zuko’s gaze sharpens to a glare. “That’s not funny.”
“Wasn’t trying to be,” Sokka raises his hands, confused. “Sorry. Just saying.” He seats himself beside him on the sand, which draws out another flutter of emotions over Zuko’s features— shock, uncertainty, fluster. Maybe just a little blush?
It’s kind of hard to be sure in the dark but. Huh. That’s a new one.
“What are you doing?”
“Finding you, obviously,” Sokka answers. “Which I did. Find you. So… mission accomplished.”
Yeah, good. Great. Tui and La, why the hell can’t he just speak like a normal, intelligent person around—
“You didn’t have to do that,” Zuko says, quieter. “I’m not going to run away.”
“I know,” Sokka responds, the words coming out before he even realizes he’s thought them, surprising Zuko almost as much as he surprises himself.
Zuko looks smaller, somehow, in the moment that follows, unable to hold eye contact, averting his gaze and fidgeting with his now-empty hands. Silence pools between them, heavy and awkward and maybe just a little electric, before he conjures another small flame in his palms, and that honeyed light falls over him again.
Up close like this, uncertain and awkward and shy and finally just a little vulnerable, he’s beautiful.
“It’s an old habit,” he mumbles at length. “Sometimes I just want to see something on that side, even if it’s tiny bits of light. I have to be really close to fire. Nothing else is bright enough. I know it’s… probably not good for my eye. So I don’t do it a lot.”
Sokka nods along, even though he’s picking up maybe one of every ten words at most. The remainder of his brain power is lost to the shine of black hair and golden eyes gone amber, and the urge to lean forward, just a little closer, for just a second—
“…Does that make sense?”
“Huh?” he says, intelligently. Then, “Oh, uh, yeah. Yes. Total sense. I get it.”
It seems like the right response, because it earns the tiniest, briefest smile, gone as quickly as it rose, like a flame barely sparked before being snuffed out, taking every last bit of air from Sokka’s lungs along with it. He’s accomplished a lot of things in his time exploring the world and working towards ending a war, but somehow, it’s this tiny thing, just making arguably the most grumpy person in the world smile, that makes him feel like he’s walking on air. Like he could take on anything if it meant getting to see more of Zuko like this, flushed, and pleased, and relaxed enough to show it.
All of this is a little too intense for what was meant to be a quick check of the beach before heading back to bed, and so he flops back on the sand, clears his throat, and announces, “The stars here are… nice. Very bright.”
A beat passes. Then, a quiet rasp, “Yeah. They are.”
The ocean paws at the shore, babbling softly against the sand. For a while, Sokka doesn’t speak, and neither does Zuko. He can’t bring himself to look up at him— knows that if he does look at him like this, while his heart is still racing and Zuko is still cast in that honeyed light, it’ll be like looking at the sun for too long, bright enough to scald.
But even though a comfortable bed is waiting for him back at the house, he can’t bring himself to leave, either. Scared, maybe, that if he walks away now, he’ll break whatever fragile thing has formed between them, and he won’t get it back.
And so he lays there, and he watches, out of the corner of his eye, as Zuko keeps staring at that flame like if he looks away, he won’t get it back, either.
----
At Zuko’s coronation, there are a lot of people vying for his attention.
The fact is an obvious and unavoidable one, but Sokka still finds it irrationally irritating. He’d spent the past three weeks at Zuko’s bedside, talking about everything and nothing to try to distract his friend from the giant lightning wound his sister had given him, which he’d gotten for saving Sokka’s sister. It had made Sokka feel like a failure of a brother and a friend, allowing Zuko to be put in that position in the first place, and so he had ignored his own exhaustion, and the near-constant ache of a broken leg, to try to make it up to Zuko, somehow. As though talking enough could heal him faster, or make him forget that yet another member of his family had nearly killed him.
He can’t be just another person in the crowd, now. Not when he’s heard the frightened apologies Zuko mumbles in his fever dreams, not when Zuko spent those weeks in bed asking in every single moment of lucidity about Sokka’s health and whether he’d eaten and why he wasn’t resting too, not when he’s finally realized just how attached he’s allowed himself to become to Zuko, and not when he’s realized just how attached Zuko has become to him, too.
He’s given a spot at the front of the crowd of the coronation, but it’s not close enough. He feels ridiculously, idiotically jealous of Aang being the one up on stage with him, subtly supporting him every time he wobbles just a little on his feet, because Zuko had inevitably been rushed too soon into being crowned, and Zuko inevitably didn’t resist being rushed.
But as jealous and worried and frustrated and insane as Sokka might be, he still smiles and waves, because in this moment, there’s nothing else he can do to support his friend, and he does want to support his friend.
(And because maybe, just maybe, it might earn him another tiny smile.)
He would have been content with even a nod, but he doesn’t get either of those things. He gets nothing, even though he’s no more than a few feet from the stage, and Zuko’s looking almost directly at him, nodding at the people not far from Sokka’s left. Sokka waves again, perhaps just a little more dramatically, but Zuko’s eyes keep scanning the rest of the crowd, never once acknowledging him.
There are a lot of important foreign dignitaries and bending masters and rich people here, and Sokka is not one of them, and so he guesses he shouldn’t be surprised that Zuko spends his time on stage looking at practically everyone else. Even still, it does sting, just a little.
They don’t speak until the afterparty, when Zuko’s finally deigned to grant him his presence after mingling with half the room, and Sokka’s still feeling a little sore about being brushed off, and a lot sore from leaning on his crutch to keep his weight off of his stupid broken leg for so long, but then Zuko smiles at him, just a little, with a few strands of black hair loose around his face, and practically glowing in his formal robes, and all of the frustration that had been building up in Sokka is wiped out in an instant.
“Hey,” Zuko says, his voice raspier than usual from all of the talking he’s done with everyone, or maybe from simple exhaustion, or both. “I haven’t seen you all day.”
“Well, you’re the Fire Lord now,” Sokka points out. “You’ve got fancy Fire Lord-y things to do, and fancy people to talk to. And I’m, uh, not one of them. So it’s fine.” He’s trying to say it genuinely, but it comes out more deflated than he intends it to, and—
“That’s not true,” Zuko frowns slightly. “You’re important, too. And everyone here knows that.”
Either the room is getting hotter, or Sokka’s face is. He denies, lamely, “You don’t have to appease me. It’s fine. Seriously.”
“You’re insufferable,” Zuko grumbles. “Be my ambassador.”
“Hey, I’m not—,” Wait. “Wait, what was that second thing?”
“Be my ambassador,” Zuko repeats, as though he’d said something as obvious as the sky being blue. “I need ambassadors from every region. That includes your tribe.”
Sokka blinks. “I think you might still be a bit loopy from your pain meds, buddy.”
“Don’t call me that!” Zuko groans, smushing his hands into his face, which is honestly more than a little funny now that he’s wearing a crown and fancy clothing with jewelry draped all over him. And a little endearing. Just a little. “I called you buddy one time—”
“And you’re never living it down,” Sokka flashes a shit-eating grin, and it’s a little frightening, how mindlessly he can fall back into this easy thing between them. Whatever this is.
Zuko lowers his hands, and he huffs, “I haven’t taken any medication today, and I want you to be my ambassador.” His irritation falters, and he glances away. “I mean. If you want that. It’s okay to not want that.”
Sokka does want that. He wants it to a frankly frightening degree. Wants it far more readily than he should, just as readily as he had sat at Zuko’s bedside for weeks, watching him like a hawk, refusing to leave until he was certain Zuko would be alright, and then refusing to leave, still, beyond any coherent reason he could muster.
Zuko is still talking, he realizes. He’s awkwardly babbling something or other about knowing Sokka has a million other things he could be doing with his life, and that he understands the Fire Nation may not be the most fun place to live in, because it is ridiculously hot and humid here, and also needs a shit ton of work to undo a century of damage it had inflicted on itself and everyone else, and—
“Would I get a cool room?”
And Zuko splutters, “A cool— what?”
“A cool room,” Sokka repeats. “With a big bed. A really big, comfy bed. And a nice view. Do ambassadors get that?”
“They can,” Zuko answers slowly, still confused, the tiny crease in his brow unfairly adorable.
“Then I’m in,” Sokka says. “But it has to be a really big bed.”
“Sokka—,” Zuko shakes his head. “You should really think about—”
“I’ve done the thinking,” Sokka announces. “And you’re stuck with me now. No takesies-backsies.”
Zuko turns red enough that for a second, Sokka is convinced that his head is going to explode clean off, like a tiny, angry volcano.
But then he clears his throat, and he says, “Just— maybe go home first, for a little while. And— if you still want this, then I want you.” He flushes deeper, then waves his hands frantically to correct, “As my ambassador. Want you as my ambassador.”
Yeah, Sokka is never unhearing that.
----
Sokka tries to, in all fairness.
He spends two months back in his village trying not to think about that night. Spends three years at the palace trying not to think about that night.
Spends years accepting the measured portions of Zuko he gets. The easy friendship between them, still too easy, and still not enough. The friendship that has to be enough, because Zuko is the lord of an entire nation, and Sokka is an ambassador to a tribe that was one of the peoples most devastated by the war, and on top of negotiating and managing reparations, he has to navigate the political hellscape that is the Fire Nation capital.
That doesn’t mean he isn’t a little guilty of pushing the line now and then. At least a couple times a week, he spends his evenings in Zuko’s room, playing pai sho or sharing a drink or gossiping about the latest palace scandal, and he never cares what those evenings wind up being, as long as they mean being close to him, and watching him let his long hair down, and letting him just be Zuko again, for a few hours. Every smile still makes him feel like he’s walking on air, and when he manages to coax out a laugh, especially the kinds of laughs that are hard enough to make him squeak, he feels like the luckiest bastard alive, riches and status and magical bending powers be damned.
The measured portions he gets, little by little, grow more generous, and are given more freely. It’s a bad idea, he knows it’s a bad idea, that for the both of their sakes, this friendship has to be enough, because a lot of people depend on them, and Zuko has very few people he trusts to help him lead, and even fewer people he trusts enough to depend on, and putting any of that in jeopardy isn’t— it’s not an option, has never been an option—
And yet, seated at dinner just to Zuko’s left, watching those long strands of black hair fall in his face as they come loose from his top knot, his chest squeezes, and that big looming overwhelming feeling of too much puts a lump right back in his throat, and that lump decides to eject itself as a blurted, inevitable, terrible: “I think I’m in love with you.”
Zuko’s movement slows, but doesn’t halt. He’s looking straight ahead at an ambassador from Omashu, and he’s nodding along with the cross talk that flits around the table, and he slows, but—
But he doesn’t look at Sokka. Doesn’t say a single word to him.
And in a panic, Sokka amends, his voice low beneath the chatter, “I, uh— I mean, that’s— I’m not, like, trying to propose or anything—” Propose? Of course he’s not proposing, why would he even say that— “I just— thought you should know, so you can, uh, do with that. What you will do with that. Not that you have to do anything with that—”
Zuko is still not looking at him, still doing his best to ignore the babbling mess of a human being beside him, and Sokka can’t exactly blame him, but Tui and fucking La, this is not how he imagined this going.
“Nevermind,” he says, just a touch louder, and Zuko finally turns to look at him, a flash of surprise rippling over his features.
“Nevermind?”
“Yeah,” Sokka says, somewhat hoarsely. “Uh, nevermind.”
Zuko frowns, glancing back at the rest of the table, then him, his brow furrowing. “Nevermind what?”
“Everything,” Sokka says. “All of that. That was— I mean—”
Which is the precise moment that a servant drops a glass of wine, and the resulting shatter makes her dive to the floor in a bow to plead for forgiveness, and a very distressed Fire Lord is forced to console her until she’s finally convinced that she won’t be punished for the mistake.
Dinner wraps up shortly after, with everyone leaving on a tense note, and before Sokka can try to reaffirm that what he said does not need to be a thing, Zuko is already retreating to his rooms, a pinched look of pain on his features that he does a terrible job of even remotely hiding.
And for the next hour, Sokka can think of nothing but an internal, earnest chant of shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.
He paces his own bedroom over, and over, and over again, pouring back over that pained look, then at the confusion beforehand, fumbling uselessly for any insight into exactly how much of that had been Zuko panicking about that idiotic admission. He hadn’t seemed to react in horror at first, but maybe the glass incident had sent his nerves over the edge, because Zuko can be like that, simmering about something serious until the little things finally set him alight, and—
And Sokka knows this is yet another impressively bad idea in a string of impressively bad ideas, but he speedwalks to Zuko’s rooms as fast as he can without breaking into a run, because running towards a Fire Lord’s rooms seems like a good way to get a fireball to the face from every guard within a five-mile radius.
There’s a split second, once he gets to Zuko’s door, when he almost decides to go back to his own room, or maybe all the way back to the South Pole and bury himself under several tons of snow, but he’s here now, and his father didn’t raise a quitter, so he knocks, and calls out softly, “You still up?”
A pause, then a barely audible set of footsteps padding towards the door before it creaks open. Zuko is dressed down in his sleeping robes, and his long hair is completely loose where it spills past his shoulders and over the deep red fabric, and for a hot second, Sokka forgets how to breathe entirely, let alone that he’s a functioning human being that can understand and respond to speech.
But then he processes the confused, softer than anticipated Sokka?, and he’s finally brought back down to reality with a crushing force, and all he can manage is a wheezed, “Got a second?”
“Of course,” Zuko says, the words coming without hesitation, even as his movements are a little too stiff, and his breathing just a little too shallow, and Sokka isn’t sure anymore whether he feels like the luckiest or most evil bastard alive.
A little bit of both, probably.
“I just, uh… wanted to apologize,” Sokka elaborates once Zuko shuts the door behind them. “For that thing. At dinner.”
Zuko’s brow furrows. “Why would you apologize for that?”
Sokka blinks. “Why?”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Zuko frowns. “It wasn’t anybody’s.”
A confused, exasperated, slightly hysterical note slips from Sokka. “I mean— yeah, it’s not exactly like I’m trying to feel this way, but talking about it was definitely my fault, and the timing wasn’t exactly the best, but it just kind of—”
“Sokka,” Zuko interrupts him more firmly. “What are we talking about?”
“What are we—,” Sokka echoes, intelligently. “What I said… when we were having dinner and…”
And I was sitting right next to you.
He trails off, glancing at the hair tucked behind Zuko’s scarred ear. The same side that had faced him on the war balloon, and in the bedroom at the Western Air Temple, and when he’d startled Zuko on the beach, and in the crowd of the coronation, and when he said the most idiotic thing of his entire stupid life at dinner.
And he points at the left side of his own face, and he says, “You’re… deaf. And blind. On this side. Aren’t you?”
For a second, all of the confusion and exasperation drains from Zuko’s face, leaving his expression utterly blank.
“Sokka,” he answers slowly. “You’re the first person to notice that.”
“Wait—,” Sokka exhales a quiet, relieved breath. “Really?”
“Of course not!” Zuko snaps, making Sokka shrink backward with a yelp. His hands wave wildly, first gesturing to nothing in particular, then at his scar. “Sokka— my eye got cloudy and parts of my ear are completely burned off. Did you seriously think they were in perfect working order?”
He’s not wrong— the gold of his left eye is slightly obscured by a milky haze he’d never noticed before— but Sokka cries, “I didn’t know! I try not to look that hard!”
Zuko’s expression shutters, and he crosses his arms, and he turns away from him. “I know. I know being disfigured makes me hard to look at, and it’s uncomfortable for everyone, because I see it in everyone’s faces all the fucking time—”
Before Sokka can think better of it, he grabs his shoulders to spin him back around, pushing on through the startled note he gets, “Zuko— you are the most beautiful person I’ve ever known, and there’s pretty much nothing I want to do more than look at you forever, but I didn’t want you to ever think I was staring at your scar when I just wanted to stare at you. All of you. So I never focused on that.”
For a second, Zuko almost looks like he’s about to cry, the waver in his expression there and gone again, replaced by widened eyes and a stillness so absolute he’s barely breathing. “What are you saying?”
“What I already—,” oh. Oh, “—shit. You didn’t hear me. Uh.” He clears his throat, straightens his posture, and removes his hands from Zuko’s shoulders, even though the loss leaves his hands buzzing and painfully empty. “…I’m saying—”
He can’t do this. This is a fantastically bad idea, and he cannot do this. But Zuko is looking at him with every last ounce of his focus now, pinning him in place without the slightest touch, and there’s zero chance in hell that Sokka can worm his way out of this.
“…I’m saying I’m in love with you. And I have been for a long time. But I never wanted to screw things up with you. I still don’t want to screw things up with you. So I tried not to think about it. But I can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t stop thinking about you. And so it just— came out.” Now, it’s his turn to look away, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. “But if you want to banish me, like, immediately, I would totally get that. Or feed me to your turtle ducks. That would be fine too—”
Arms loop around him, squeezing him so hard he wouldn’t be surprised if he bruised a rib or two, and he thinks for a second that maybe he is getting fed to those turtle ducks before a forehead presses into the crook of his neck, and black hair spills over his chest, and Zuko mutters, “You are genuinely fucking insufferable.”
Sokka blinks once, twice, before he hesitantly pats the top of Zuko’s head, then immediately recoils as though scalded by his own idiocy, ready for Zuko to shove him back, but all Zuko does is squeeze him tighter as he continues, “Why do you think I trust you enough to let you sit on my bad side? Why do you think I see you every fucking second my schedule allows me to? Because I want to feed you to my turtle ducks?”
Well. He kind of has a point, but—
“Why do you think I spend half of every fucking meeting looking at you— just looking at you— why do you think I begged you to stay here in the first place? Because you’re my buddy?”
Either the night is getting unbearably hot, or he’s actually going red, which would be embarrassing if Zuko wasn’t already an impressive shade of scarlet himself when he pulls back to look up at him, infuriated and mortified and enamored and soul-crushingly beautiful.
“I mean,” Sokka says, because he’s an idiot, and he can’t help himself, “that is rough—”
And then Zuko lets out a huff that’s so enraged Sokka swears he sees a tiny bit of smoke leave his mouth, and that tiny volcano leans up to kiss him.
It’s fumbling, and uncertain, and warm, and perfect, and Zuko’s looking everywhere but him when he pulls back, scarlet and shy and literally steaming.
“Sokka,” he grumbles. “If you say that one more time while I’m trying to tell you…”
“Tell me what?”
Sokka puts on his best innocent smile, and Zuko somehow turns more red than he already is, and he snaps, “You know what.”
“I don’t think I do,” Sokka grins, more shit-eating than innocent now. “You have to use your words.”
Zuko is glaring at him now, or at least trying to glare at him, but it’s not very effective when he’s blushing so hard it looks like he really is about to erupt. He hisses, low enough to almost be inaudible, “I love you too, idiot.”
“What was that?” Sokka leans closer. “I didn’t catch that.”
“I’m going to feed you to the turtle ducks,” Zuko snaps. “That’s what I said.”
“Didn’t sound like it.”
Zuko smushes his face back into the crook of Sokka’s neck, groaning so loudly the noise ends in a rasp, and he’s blushing so hard Sokka can feel the heat of his face through his shirt, but there’s still just a tiny bit of that smile pressing against the fabric, too, and yeah, he’s pretty sure he can get used to this.