Chapter Text
The water was taking ages to boil.
Zuko used the time to practice his breathing, the way his uncle had taught him — the same uncle who had taught him how to make tea in a shop a few blocks and a ring away from this very building, in what felt like another lifetime.
It was, in fact, only nine years ago.
He breathed out and measured out the tea leaves. He breathed in and tried to deter the headache that had been threatening since the third hour of the afternoon session. It lived behind his left eye, and announced itself whenever he spent too long in a room full of people who were deciding how much to trust him. It wasn't a new concept. It never stopped.
The flame beneath the pot was precisely where it needed to be. His hands knew how to do this even when the rest of him was still somewhere in that hall, listening to Ambassador Yura of the Northern Water Tribe explain, in exquisite and patient detail, all the reasons why the Fire Nation could not be trusted with a joint infrastructure agreement.
Against his instincts, he had not argued. He had listened. He had said, I understand your position, Ambassador, which he did, and, I hope to earn the confidence of your nation in time, which he meant. He had kept his face arranged into the expression his uncle called ‘the courteous wall. Zuko privately thought of it as ‘the face I make when I'm not allowed to say what I actually think. Sokka and Toph, both of whom had no respect for diplomatic terminology, called it his ‘constipated statesman’ face.
He had been making that face since he had taken the throne and realised that the Firelord cannot be a person. He must be a nation, and a nation must seem impenetrable. His Uncle would have said something about walls, their uses and changing the people's perception of him or the Fire Nation. Uncle Iroh was very good at that, sharing the right words with a lost boy, usually over tea, though those words were not always taken with comfort or understanding in his youth. Zuko missed him, and was glad he was retired and peaceful in Ember Island, but he missed him anyway and wished he could have some of that wisdom now.
The door to his private chambers opened without a knock, which meant it was either his personal guard coming to tell him something was on fire, or Sokka.
"You know there's a protocol," Zuko said, without turning around.
"There's definitely a protocol," Sokka agreed cheerfully, dropping into the chair nearest the low table like he'd been sitting in it for years. He had, in a sense. Four summits now– four years of the Festival of Restoration, Aang’s great experiment in making former enemies break bread before they shared a negotiating table. The formal sessions ran alongside it under the banner of the Inter-Nation Reconstruction Council, which was a very long name that Sokka was workshopping; it didn't yet roll off the tongue.
This chair, this table, Zuko's back turned to the door while he dealt with the tea. Some things became ritual. He already had two cups prepared in front of him.
"The protocol is that I knock and then you say enter in that voice you do, and then I say something about the voice and you tell me it's called proper protocol and respect blah blah, and we lose about four minutes. I'm saving us four minutes."
"Ambassador…"
"Sokka, please, no need for formalities, my dearest Hotman." Sokka stretched his legs out, crossing them at the ankle, looking deeply comfortable in a way that Zuko found both irritating and annoyingly charming.
"Where's Katara?"
"Aang's dragged her off to see the badgermole sanctuary in the lower ring.." Sokka paused and continued. "I also found Toph in a sparring ring somewhere in the merchant district and I've decided not to ask any questions."
Zuko chuckled, glad to have them close at hand during the days ahead.
"How was the afternoon session?" Sokka continued.
"You were there for the afternoon session."
"I was there for the afternoon session as Ambassador Sokka of the Southern Water Tribe and Informal Representative of the Northern." A pause. "Now I'm just Sokka, asking how you're doing."
Zuko turned then, because the tea was ready and because Sokka had dropped his dramatics into something gentler, softer. He had been doing it more and more in their shared time together, and every time it caught him unprepared, bringing a flush to his cheeks that he couldn’t explain.
He carried the two cups to the table and sat, and looked at his best friend, who was watching him with that open, questioning expression. Just waiting for Zuko’s response, not the Firelord’s words.
Zuko sighed. "Yura wants guarantees I can't give her in writing. She wants the agreement conditional on Northern Water Tribe approval at every stage, which means Earth Kingdom approval is also effectively conditional on Northern Water Tribe approval, which means if one delegate changes their mind we lose– "
"Zuko."
He stopped.
"How are you doing?" Sokka said again, slower.
The muscle behind his eye pulsed once. He reached for the tea.
"I'm fine."
Sokka made a sound that communicated exactly what he thought of that. He picked up his own cup, held it in both hands the way he did when the air was cold, though the room wasn't particularly cold. Old habit, maybe. Something from his colder home.
"The session was hard," Zuko said, which was closer to true.
"Yura is a stone wall in a very nice robe."
"She has reasons."
"She has reasons," Sokka agreed, without any of the easy dismissal Zuko half-expected. That was the thing about Sokka; he always surprised you by actually meaning it when he said he understood something. "Zhao killed her princess. Her moon.” Sokka made a face then and Zuko remembered with a trace of guilt that he was close to Princess Yue too. “There's not a form of words you can put in a treaty for that." He paused. "Doesn't mean she gets to block the whole table indefinitely. But she has reasons."
"Which is why I need her to trust me, not just the treaty."
"Which is why," Sokka said, and pointed at him with his cup, "we're going to walk in tomorrow and you are going to be so reasonable and so specific and so clearly not Ozai that she's going to run out of objections before lunch. And I'm going to be there making the case for the Northern Tribe, which is not technically my role but I have leverage and I'm not above using it."
Zuko looked at him across the table. The lamp between them was burning low and orange, and Sokka had his sleeves pushed to the elbow, so casual and confident in his being in a way Zuko both admired and envied. There was ink on his wrist from something he'd been drafting earlier that he hadn't bothered to wash off. He looked like himself.
That was the thing about these stolen hours at the end of the day, when the summit chambers emptied and the delegations retreated to their separate quarters. The city outside this window went on being itself. Sokka stopped being the Ambassador. Zuko stopped being the Firelord. Not entirely, that wasn't something you could take off. But here he could be just Zuko with Sokka.
If he was terribly honest, these were some of the few hours in his day where he was not performing for someone. He didn't have to be the Firelord, confident in his decisions, reassuring delegations that just did not trust him. He didn't have to be patient and hold his tongue. Here, he was just someone with a hot tea and a headache, and he was sitting with best friend and that was enough. More than enough. He had been looking forward to them since the sessions started.
He missed his easy rapport with Aang, the steadiness of Katara’s company and the particular strength (and chaos) that came with Toph. But with Sokka it was always a bit different, maybe its because both of them came with fathers with high standards (though they were very different men) and had to work hard to be heard and respected, both in different yet similar ways.
"You have leverage?" Zuko raised an eyebrow.
Sokka squawked and smacked Zuko’s arm.
"I’ll have you know, I have tremendous leverage and influence. I have the Avatar's personal endorsement, I have the Southern Tribe's trade relationship with half the Earth Kingdom coast, and I have–" Sokka gestured at himself broadly, "–this."
"...this."
"The general. The strategist. The guy who helped end a hundred years of war." He said it completely without arrogance, which made it worse somehow, or better, Zuko wasn't sure. "They need me on board or the whole thing stalls. I'm on board. So." He tipped his cup slightly. "Use me."
"Well, it does help that you have the trust and respect of the White Lotus." Zuko paused. "I know you've been working very hard for this for the last three years. The Water Tribes reconstruction committee, the new plans for the harbour district, Republic City, the ice road engineering proposals– that all your work, not the committee’s alone, you put your weight behind them,” He stopped and looked Sokka in his eye, “you’re remarkable at this, Sokka, and I don't say it enough.”
"And it keeps working, and we will keep making it work." Sokka reached out across the low table between them and put his hand on Zuko’s, brief and gentle, a thank you without words. He squeezed his hand and drew it back, but Zuko feels the warmth of it for longer than is normal.
He’s right, it did work. That was the thing. Every summit, every stalled session, every morning where Zuko sat in a room full of people who were cataloguing every bad thing his nation had done to theirs and finding reasons not to believe him– Sokka showed up. Said what needed to be said. Made the case with a directness that Zuko couldn't use with his face and his name. I trust the Firelord. I've fought beside him. I watched him make a different choice than his father when it would have been easier not to.
And people listened to Sokka in a way that took the air out of the room. He was not the Avatar, reincarnated, bridge between the worlds, asking them to believe in peace for the sake of it. He was not a master waterbender, or the greatest earthbender alive, or a Firelord determined to right a century of wrongs. He was a man from the end of the world whose home had been raided, whos family had been torn apart, who had every reason to hate him and everything here, and had decided to be here instead.
Zuko owed him more than he knew how to say, which meant he usually didn't say it.
"You should get more credit for this," he said instead, which came out quieter than he intended.
Sokka looked at him. Something moved in his expression briefly– surprise, then something warmer.
"I get plenty of credit," he said lightly. "I'm very celebrated. Extremely beloved. My sister makes a face every time I mention it."
"She makes that face because she knows you're right and it bothers her. But I think it’s mostly because you keep leaving your things around her chambers."
"That's what I keep telling her! And those are shared chambers and I can leave my things anywhere I want to."
He was grinning now, easy and bright, and Zuko felt the knot in his gut loosen incrementally. This was also a thing that happened in these hours.
"Anyway. You look like you haven't eaten since the morning session."
"I ate at the state dinner."
"I watched you eat at the state dinner, which is to say I watched you moving the food around your plate. That doesn't count." He was already reaching for the bowl of something a servant had left on the sideboard. This was the kind of decisive helpfulness that had always characterized Sokka, and what made him such a fine Ambassador. He identified a problem and fixed it before you'd finished noticing the problem. He set it on the table between them. Zuko was hungry, but he was previously too tired to notice it.
"Eat. Talk to me about the Earth Kingdom angle.” Sokka leaned forward, elbows on the table, Ambassador Sokka was back in the room.
“The summit is not going to accomplish anything until we hear the Earth Kingdom speak, but so far, we have only heard the Yura of the Water Tribes. Ambassador Fang and the whole Earth Kingdom bloc is doing the thing where they wait to see which way everyone else moved before they commit to anything”
"Ambassador Fang has been doing that since the first summit."
"Ambassador Fang will continue to stall until the Water Tribes move, and then he'll pretend he was always going to agree." Sokka tilted his head. "If we get Yura, we get Fang for free."
Zuko nodded thoughtfully, "Yes. That's the shape of it, We finally have a plan for reconstruction and growth, but I need the Earth Kingdom to commit. The whole proposal hinges on the Fire Nation redirecting its manufacturing capacity from war into infrastructure contracts. For the last three years they’ve delayed for some stupid reason or another, and now even the supporters in the Fire Nation are getting antsy.." ”
Sokka stares at Zuko, some of his steel as the Ambassador coming through, “Yura needs the certainty of the Fire Nation commitment, and the Earth Kingdom needs to know that they can also lay down their arms, because right now, they all want the understanding we’re on the same page, their hesitancy is understandable.”
"Fact is, if I don't get Yura on my side I lose Fang’s support, and once again we’ve made no progress."
Sokka nodded, chewing thoughtfully. "What about the rest of the Earth Kingdom bloc? I think there are two or three others in that delegation who haven't said a word in two days. Not one question. Not one note."
Zuko had noticed the same thing. "Chouk's people. Eastern Earth Kingdom Provinces." He set down his cup and took down his hair. "I don't know what they want yet. They're not opposing anything directly, just watching and not outright saying anything of substance." He paused. "It’s weird..."
Sokka ran a frustrated hand through his hair and rubbed at his temples.
"Seems like they’re not that interested in the outcome."
"Something like that. Either that or they already know the outcome and they’re just sitting there to tick off a box,” Zuko felt his own frustrations bubble up dangerously close to the surface. “We’re out here to push for progress, but we’re stagnating in a sea of selfish disinterest."
"Could just be their style. Let the noisier delegates exhaust themselves, then swoop in when there's something to sign."
"Maybe." Zuko didn't think so, but he had nothing concrete, nd it was late and Sokka was here and he didn't want to spend the whole hour on things he didn’t know for certain. "We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it."
"If we move Yura–"
"Fang follows. And if Fang follows, everyone else has to decide whether they're genuinely opposed or just cautious." Zuko looked at him. "Which is why tomorrow needs to work."
"Tomorrow will work." Sokka said it simply, with the confidence of someone who had already thought it through from four angles and liked his odds. Then: "We should talk about the festival schedule too. I've got Aang doing a whole–" he wiggled his hands around and gestured you know how he is, "–cultural reconciliation programme. Shared meals, performance evenings, a market in the middle ring. The idea is a full lunar month of it, sessions in the mornings, common events in the evenings. Nobody leaves without it looking like they're walking out on the Avatar's peace initiative."
Zuko looked at him. "That was you?"
"Aang handles the spirit of it. I handle the logistics." A slight smile. "The key is making the social calendar dense enough that withdrawing from it is a political statement. A very specific ‘No we don't want peace’ in big red letters. It also means the delegations actually have to spend time in the same rooms outside of formal negotiation, which is where the real work happens anyway."
It was exactly the kind of thing that worked; it had worked because Sokka had looked into a stuffy room full of people who came here with a specific worldview, determined to stay within their parties, say their piece and go. This was set up so that they were forced to mingle with the other people from other nations, see that they were not so different from each other.
Aang had mentioned that the idea stemmed from their adventures together, a motley crew that worked together to end a war.
So Sokka took that and formalized it, and then it just grew.
Three years of summits and Zuko had long since stopped being surprised by how Sokka's mind worked. He had watched Sokka sit down with different people and talk through a problem, while everyone else usually got stuck on complaining about how something was broken. He was also doing this all informally; his mind worked too fast to sit down and twiddle his thumbs, He would be a terror as a stateman if he chose to take that path.
"You built in the month long itinerary deliberately, didn't you?," Zuko asked. "So nobody can leave early without insulting the Avatar’s initiatives.”
"Nobody can leave early without outright saying they don't want work towards peace," Sokka confirmed. "We've got a bit more than three weeks left on the calendar. That's our window. Plenty of time to get this done."
They talked through it the way they had for years, picking over it until there was nothing left that needed saying. After that, the conversation loosened, slipping into everything else that had been waiting in the gaps. Sokka filled him in what was happening between the water tribes, his adventures, and all the many, many duties that kept the whole gang apart for months at a time. Zuko slowly breathed out. The lamp burned lower. The city outside quieted.
"Can I ask you something?" Sokka asked, his voice quieter, setting the joking tone aside.
"You're going to ask it anyway."
"Rude, but correct." He set his cup down.
Zuko looked down at the teacup in his hands, internally bracing.
"I heard," Sokka said, and his voice was careful now, the way it got when he was handling something with more attention than he wanted to let show, "about you and Mai."
Zuko barely managed not to splutter into the last bit of the now cold tea, and set down the cup.
“That’s technically not a question.”
“Zuko, I swear to–”
"It's fine," he said, an edge to his voice.
"That's the second time you've said fine and meant something else."
"Sokka–"
"I'm not going to push," Sokka said, which was almost true, "I just– I wanted you to know that I know, and that it's okay if it's not fine. You don't have to do the face."
"I'm not–"
"You're doing a version of the face."
He was possibly doing a version of the face. Zuko set his hands down on the table and turned them palm up to study them and looked at the wall past Sokka's shoulder, which was easier.
"It was–" He considered the right word. Mutual wasn't right. Inevitable was truer, but more than he wanted to say out loud. "It wasn't working. For a lot of reasons. Neither of us..." He stopped.
"You don't have to explain."
"I know."
The silence sat between them, not uncomfortable. Sokka had always been good at silence when it mattered, which people who didn't know him tended to find surprising. The ones who talked the most often knew when to stop.
"She's–" Zuko tried again, because something in him felt the need to be fair. "She's not wrong about the reasons. She's…"
"Zuko." Sokka's voice went very quiet and serious. "I like Mai. She's terrifying in an excellent way and I have a lot of respect for her. But you are…", he stopped himself, seemed to recalibrate, and then continued.
"You are genuinely, terrifyingly good-looking. I don't say this lightly, I've known you since you were a teenager doing the brooding villain thing, the scar and even then I thought, objectively, that you had an unfair face."
Zuko stared at him.
"And now you're—" Sokka gestured at him, a little helplessly, taking him in from head to toe in a way Zuko could feel somewhere in his sternum, "—you're built like the outer wall of Ba Sing Se—" he added, holding his hands apart, "broad shoulders and all, and you've got the long, flowing hair thing going, and you're the Firelord trying to fix a hundred years of damage, and you're funny when you let yourself be, which doesn’t happen enough, and it’s–" he seemed to be running slightly out of breath and had gone, Zuko noticed with some private bewilderment, distinctly red about the ears, "–her loss. That's what I'm saying. Genuinely, her loss."
There was a silence.
"I'm–" Zuko started.
"You're going to tell me that's not helpful."
"It's–" The thing happening in his chest was warm and confused and he was becoming aware of the heat in his own face in a way that had nothing to do with the lamp, the tea, or any other reasonable explanation. "I wasn't going to say that."
"Well, what were you going to say?"
He had absolutely no idea. He fidgeted slightly with his empty cup as he made a valiant attempt to gather his thoughts. "So the afternoon session…," which was not what he had been going to say. but this was a safer topic.
Sokka watched him for one more second, that thoughtful look that made Zuko feel far too cracked open, and then the corner of his mouth moved, easy and warm.
"Yes, the afternoon session," he agreed, and let him have it. They talked far too late into the night for people who had to be up early the next day.
The morning session opened well, which should have made Zuko suspicious.
Ambassador Yura had taken her seat with the particular stillness of someone who had decided, if not to trust, then at least to listen. He had noticed it when she walked in– the set of her shoulders, slightly less armoured than yesterday.
He didn't know what had changed between last night and this morning and he was not going to ask, because some diplomatic shifts were best accepted quietly before they could be reconsidered. Looking gift ostrich horses in the mouth, and all that.
Sokka caught his eye across the table and gave away absolutely nothing. A perfectly neutral expression, like he hadn’t spent any of his morning talking to the Northern Water Tribe delegation on his own time. Zuko had looked back at his notes and held back a smile.
The Great Hall was the neutral ground that Ba Sing Se's council had offered for the talks, high ceilings, pale stone, long windows looking out over the upper ring. Neutral, except that nothing in Ba Sing Se was truly neutral. That was one of the things these sessions danced around. The Earth Kingdom hosted, but the Earth Kingdom had opinions about what hosting meant, what debts it created, what was owed in return. Ambassador Fang sat at the far end of the table with the patience of a man who had long ago decided that if he waited long enough, the answer would come to him.
At the corner of the table, slightly set back from the main delegation, Minister Chouk made no notes. He watched. His face was arranged into polite attention, his hands folded in front of him, and he had not said a single word in last two days of sessions that had passed. Zuko had been watching him as he watched everyone else, and thinking about what it meant to listen that carefully to what wasn't being agreed to.
Zuko made his opening remarks.
He kept the subject specific. Sokka had told him to be specific, so she would run out of objections or pointless clarifications. Zuko broke the reconstruction proposal down to its bare bones. Everything was already set out on the placards in front of them, but he wanted them to hear it from him directly.
So he laid it out. The resource-sharing framework, modelled on what they had built in Republic City. The shipping routes. The proposal to redirect Fire Nation manufacturing capacity, the foundries, the ironworks, the infrastructure built for war, towards rebuilding, education, and agriculture. Contracts that would span all the nations. And he was careful to state, plainly and without room for doubt, what each nation would keep, and what it would not be asked to give up.
Then Sokka spoke.
That was the other thing. When Zuko spoke, even now, even three years into these talks, there was a room that was measuring him against a hundred years of history, against his father's voice and his grandfather's wars, against every reason they had to doubt. When Sokka spoke, the room just listened. He had this quality, a directness, which was its own kind of skill.
We're not being asked to forget, Sokka said, leaning forward slightly, his voice carrying to the back of the hall. We're being asked to decide what we build on top of what we remember. The South didn't forget. We're here anyway. Because the alternative is staying exactly where we are, and I don't think that's what any of our people want.
Yura looked at him for a long moment.
The Ambassador speaks with considerable confidence on behalf of a tribe that is not his own.
I speak, Sokka said, without missing a beat, as someone who was at the North Pole when Zhao came. I was sixteen. I watched what happened to your sky, to Y- Princess Yue. A beat. I'm not here to tell you what to feel about that. I'm here because I think you deserve better than a world that stays broken when we have a way to rebuild for our future.
The room was quiet.
Zuko did not look at Sokka. He looked at Yura, who was very still, and at Chouk, who for the first time had unfolded his hands. He was very still too, but a different kind of still; Zuko couldn't put a finger on why it made him uneasy.
The session broke for the midday recess in a state that Zuko would cautiously have described as progress. Not fully an agreement. But Yura had asked two questions that were not challenges, which was new. Ambassador Fang had leaned forward at one point and made a contribution, his first sensible one for the sessions. And Chouk had spent the last twenty minutes of the session watching Yura rather than Zuko, which meant he had noticed the shift too.
Sokka POV
He was thinking about the harbour district plans, the revised load calculations he had sent to the Southern reconstruction committee three weeks ago and still hadn’t heard back on, and also about lunch. Specifically, whether the Ba Sing Se kitchens had the spiced pork buns again, because he had been thinking about those pork buns since breakfast. Katara had asked him to lunch, and despite arriving together, they had yet to share a meal. He should swing by the kitchens.
He had been here often enough to use the shortcut through the narrow north servants’ corridor. No other delegates used it. He was used to slipping away from meetings this way.
He became aware of the second set of footsteps half a second too late.
It was wrong. If it had been a servant, they wouldn’t have tried to muffle their steps, and Sokka had spent enough years in enough bad situations to know the difference between someone walking with purpose and someone stalking him. He was already turning when the figure came out of the alcove.
He got a hand up. Got one good hit in. When he wasn’t spending hours with musty committees, he was still practicing with Swordy 2 (RIP Swordy 1, you’re missed), and his elbow connected with something that produced a very satisfying oomf from his opponent. It didn’t stop the blade from finding the gap in his guard. The cold spread from his side outward in a way that was distinctly not good.
The figure ran as they both heard other footsteps coming their way. Sokka put his back against the wall and pressed his hand over the wound, and thought, with the sharp clarity pain brought, that Katara was going to be pissed, and Zuko was going to do that face.
Zuko was collecting his papers, the hall thinning out around him, when his aide Jin appeared at his elbow.
"Firelord." His voice was wrong. That was the first thing. Jin was young and earnest and slightly too eager, so the deliberate carefulness of his tone was immediately alarming.
Zuko looked up.
"There's been an incident, sir. In the northern corridor." A pause "Ambassador Sokka—"
He was moving before the sentence finished.
The corridor was too narrow for the number of people in it. Zuko registered them in quick succession; two of his own guards keeping everyone back, a Water Tribe attendant pressed flat against the wall, Jin somewhere behind him talking to the two more guards (building security, his mind supplied). And on the floor, Katara kneeling, her hands blue-white with healing waters.
He stopped himself from running the last few steps. He didn't know why. Some instinct that said: if you run the last four steps it is because you are afraid, and you cannot be afraid in front of these people. So he walked them, and hated that he still needed to be the Firelord with all that was going on.
Sokka was sitting, slumped against the wall.
Not unconscious, his eyes were open, fixed on the ceiling with the focused expression of someone who was concentrating very hard on not making any noise. There was blood at his side, dark against the blue of his outer robe, and his arm raised awkwardly as his sister healed him. He was breathing shallow.
That was the thing Zuko catalogued first, before anything else: he was breathing, the breaths were short but they were there.
Katara looked up at Zuko's approach, and her face was doing several things at once, fear and fury both held down hard under the precision of someone who could not afford either right now.
"Fire Nation poison," she said, low and clipped so only he could hear it. "The blade coating. I can feel it."
Zuko crouched on Sokka's other side, brushing past the guards and aides hovering protectively. This close he could see the line of tension in Sokka's jaw, the effort the controlled breathing was costing him. He could also see the way Sokka's eyes moved when Zuko came into his line of sight, something in them loosening fractionally.
"Fancy meeting you here," Sokka said. His voice was remarkably even for a man bleeding on a corridor floor.
"Sokka–"
"You're doing the face." A short exhale. "I'm fine."
"You're on the floor in a pool of blood."
"I'm on the floor temporarily, a minor change to my itinerary, I might have to miss the afternoon session." His joked but the tightening around his eyes indicated the pain he was in.
"Whoever it was moved fast. Came from the eastern alcove. I didn't see them before–" He stopped, thinking. "He caught me off guard but I got in a hit or two."
Zuko looked at the blade, already being handled with cloth by one of his guards. It was short, flat, entirely unremarkable except for the dark residue coating the edge. He knew that residue. He knew it the way he knew a dozen things from his father's palace that he wished he didn't. From being an observant child in rooms where certain doors were kept locked and conversations stopped when he walked in.
Shirshu-spit extract. Distilled and stabilised. Not something you sourced quickly from a marketplace.
This required a supplier with specific knowledge, a network that had survived the armistice. One of the old channels that ran through the shadow economy he'd been trying to dismantle for the last nine years without being able to see all its roots.
The blade could have been Fire Nation. The poison was definitely Fire Nation. And whoever had done this had left both. Had not retrieved it, had not attempted to conceal the evidence, had run and left behind the one thing that pointed most clearly back to his nation.
It didn't make sense, Zuko thought.
It was sloppy, panicked even. The only inciting factor he could point to was the session itself. This felt like the work of someone who had watched the talks go well and moved, probably earlier than planned. The presence of a rare Fire Nation poison, used here within the bounds of the Earth Kingdom, pointed to premeditation. But whoever had planned this had not expected Sokka. That much was clear. He was resilient in the way of something deeply inconvenient, like a badgermole that dug in and refused to be dragged out.
Leaving the blade with the poison was a mistake. It was the mistake of someone who had needed to silence the Water Tribe ambassador quickly, someone who had been unsettled by the morning’s progress.
"Zuko." Katara's voice pulled him back.
"How is he."
"Stable. I got to it fast, we were supposed to meet for lunch, so I found him just in time." Her hands didn't stop. "The poison is slowing his blood. I need to finish this somewhere that isn't a corridor floor."
"My chambers." He stood. "I'll send the others ahead." He looked at Jin, who was hovering with a look of terrified uncertainty. "Nobody leaves the summit complex. Get me the head of building security. Quietly."
He looked back down at Sokka, who was watching him and winked at him.
"I didn't do this," Zuko said. He said it to Sokka specifically, To Sokka. It felt important to say out loud. It was such a childish thing, he had stopped trying to kill the Avatar and his friends more than a decade ago, but he felt unmoored.
"I know, I know." Immediately with no hesitation
Zuko had spent more than a decade of his life being the son and a symbol of a nation known for violence and death. He had leaned to wait for the moment of suspicion, where someone considered the possibility that he was the source of their pain. Even if Sokka was his friend, he couldn’t help but steel himself to the possibility.
But Sokka, Agni, Sokka, he looked at him with such openness and trust that his words caught in his throat.
"The blade – I'm so sorry."
"Zuko." Sokka's hand moved, reaching, briefly, and his fingers caught Zuko's wrist for just a second before letting go. "I know. And don't be."
If Katara looked at their hands and looked away with a smile, neither of them noticed.
The Northern Water Tribe delegation requested an immediate explanation.
Zuko stood in the anteroom outside his chambers with his hands clasped behind his back. He knew he wasn’t projecting the expected impenetrable regality of the Firelord. That would have been wrong here, and he couldn't by any means conjure up that mask right now even if he wanted to.
"Ambassador Sokka is being treated. He's going to be fine." He looked at Councillor Eska, Yura's second, sharp-faced and somehow even colder than her superior. He continued, "I know what the blade coating is. I know it comes from within my nation. I will find out who ordered this and I will not protect them because they are Fire Nation. That is my word to you. Ambassador Sokka has always been an advocate for peace, an attack on him is an attack on all that we have been working towards."
Eska looked at him for a long moment.
"Words," she said, "are what we have had from the New Fire Nation for years. And before that it was only fire."
"Yes," Zuko said. "They are and they were. And I understand why that isn't enough." He held her gaze. "Tell me what would be."
A silence.
"A joint investigation," she said finally. "Not led by Fire Nation interests."
"Agreed."
Something shifted in her face; clearly not expecting immediate agreement. She recovered quickly. "The Avatar as neutral party."
"Agreed."
"And Ambassador Sokka–" she paused, "–when he is recovered. He leads."
Zuko thought of Sokka on the corridor floor saying I know without hesitation.
"Agreed."
—------------------
He made the tea himself.
There were people for this; attendants, staff, a whole apparatus of care that surrounded the Firelord's chambers, and which Zuko had been navigating his entire adult life with varying degrees of patience.
But Katara had finished healing Sokka and gave him a look that meant I need to speak to you privately later before leaving. The attendants had hovered at the doorway, caught between staying and leaving. Sokka was propped against the headboard of Zuko’s guest bed, pale, stubborn, and very much awake.
Zuko did not want an audience for this. So he dismissed the attendants and settled into the familiar rhythm of preparing the tea.
"You don't have to–" Sokka started.
"I know I don't have to."
Sokka watched him work. The room was quiet enough that Zuko could hear him breathing, steadier now. Katara had done what she could, and she had explained in plain terms how close it had been, how easily Sokka might not have been breathing at all.
Zuko kept his attention on the tea. Measured the leaves, poured the water, watched the steam rise. His hands were steady. He made sure of it. The lump in his throat was harder to ignore, heat pressing behind his eyes, something sharp and unwelcome trying to break through if he let himself think too much about what Katara had said. He didn’t. He focused on the next step, and then the next.
Outside, the city carried on with its afternoon, unaware of what had happened in the corridor.
"The Northern Water Tribe is going to use this," Sokka said.
"Eska already did. Joint investigation, Avatar as the neutral party, you as the lead. I agreed."
"Good." His voice was slightly rough. "She's going to be a nightmare to work with. I'm surprised they didn't suggest someone else from the Water Tribe."
"She was always going to be a nightmare to work with, and personally I think no one in that delegation actually wants to work with me or the Fire Nation." Zuko carried the cup to the bedside table, set it down, pulled the chair close and sat. "Drink it slowly. Katara said your system is still–"
"Zuko. I've been poisoned before." At Zuko's stricken expression, "Not, like, often. Just – it's come up. You haven't eaten Katara's cooking." He reached for the cup. His hand was steady, which Zuko watched and noted. "You're doing the other face now."
"I don't have another face, Sokka."
"Uh, yeah you do, that’s the one that means you're thinking something very hard and biting your tongue." Sokka looked at him over the cup. "You've had it since the corridor."
He had.
"The blade coating," he said. "It's specific. Not everyone can source it. I know the networks that still exist from before. From my father's time. Most of them I've dismantled. Some of them I haven't found yet." He paused. "But this wasn't planned. That's what I keep coming back to. It was sloppy. Hasty. The blade was left, Sokka, nobody who planned this would have left the blade. Someone watched this morning's session, saw Yura reconsidering, and panicked."
Sokka was quiet, processing.
"Which means it was someone in that hall," Zuko said. "Someone who couldn't afford progress. Not a random Fire Nation loyalist— they wouldn't care specifically about Yura. Someone who needed these talks to fail and needed them to fail today, before the momentum built." He looked at his hands. "Someone who has more to lose from the framework passing than from the political cost of a clumsy, obvious attack."
Sokka was quiet for a moment. Then: "Chouk."
Not a question. Not a theory. Just a name, flat and certain.
Zuko looked at him.
"He unfolded his hands," Sokka said. "When I moved Yura. I saw it from across the table. He'd been perfectly still for two hours and the second she started listening he shifted." He paused. "I didn't know what it meant then."
"We don't have evidence," Zuko said. "We have a man who just moved his hands and didn't take a single note in two days of sessions."
"No." Sokka held his gaze. "But it's somewhere to start."
"I have to find out who sourced the poison," Zuko said, with no small amount of trepidation. "I need to know more before I'm in a room being asked to prove my nation didn't order this." He paused. "There are people who might know it. Old loyalists. Some in custody. Some–" He stopped.
Spirits of the Islands, was he really about to go there?
“There’s someone I can ask.” Zuko paused. What he was considering was not going to go over well. There was someone he could reach out to, someone he had been, slowly, trying to rebuild something with. Someone who had stood on the other side of everything and had more reason than most to understand what and why this had happened. He would have told her anyway, eventually, over a game of pai sho and jasmine tea.
“It’s complicated,” he said finally. “I’ll explain on the road.”
Sokka waited.
"I trust Aang with the investigation. I trust Katara. I trust Toph to find things that nobody else will find. But I need to follow the other thread myself."
"I'm coming with you," Sokka said.
"You were poisoned this morning."
"I'll be recovered by tomorrow."
"Sokka–"
"Remember what you literally just agreed to?" He raised an eyebrow. "I’m leading the investigation."
Zuko looked at him for a long moment. The afternoon light was coming through the window in a long bar of gold, and Sokka's expression was entirely unreasonable and completely immovable, and–
Her loss, Zuko remembered without meaning to, that bright helpless quality from last night throwing him for a loop again. He looked away.
"Tomorrow," he said. " Only if Katara says you're ready."
Sokka settled back against the headboard with a satisfied expression. He drank his tea. Zuko stayed in the chair, because someone needed to make sure he actually rested. The attendants were giving the room a wide berth right now, and he didn't trust anyone outside of the gang.
Katara had said she would find Aang and Toph before coming back, fill them in, and keep them close. She had added, I won’t let them hear it from someone else, and he trusted her to do exactly that. They would do everything to make sure Sokka was safe.
Outside, the city continued. The festival lanterns that Sokka had arranged to hang along the middle ring thoroughfare were being readied to be lit for the evening, bright orange and gold against the Ba Sing Se dusk, and the sound of the market setting up drifted up through the window. Proof that the world Sokka had spent three years helping to carefully build the conditions for was still there, still moving.
Sokka's breathing evened out slowly, easier and easier, and Zuko sat in the chair by the window and kept watch and did not think about how it had felt to walk down that corridor and see him on the floor.
He had a lot of practice not thinking about things.
It was getting harder.