Chapter Text
It all started with a perfectly legal—okay, somewhat-illegal-but-also-partially-sanctioned—kidnapping of the Firelord.
Zuko wasn’t the most enthusiastic about the location of his kidnapping.
Sokka thought he’d gotten way too used to being pampered if he thought he could voice his opinion about the location of his kidnapping.
Besides, it’s not like they were trying to severely damage international relations. It was just a weekend trip! Teenage world leaders such as they deserved a rest! And they’d only picked Ember Island because it was the best option his personal guard was willing to allow.
And hey, they’d made some better memories there alongside Zuko’s undoubtedly crappy preexisting ones here before, so why not continue to make some more?
Aang, Katara, Toph, and Suki were already down by the beach, and Zuko and Sokka had only been held up by digging the old net and wooden poles out of the attic.
Apparently, there was a game Zuko wanted to show them—kuai ball—which sounded vaguely reminiscent of airball, except way more friendly for non-airbenders and non-benders in general, so Sokka was already a fan.
Then Zuko had joked about setting the net on fire if you wanted to make things interesting, and Sokka was less of a fan. He’d reassured him, however, that usually no bending was required.
Then he’d gotten a weird, kind of sad look on his face, and Sokka wondered if flaming nets of danger were an old sort of family friendly fun for him before things had turned legitimately deadly and decidedly not fun in the royal family. If they had ever had fun. Guy was certainly less emo than he used to be, but sometimes (okay, a lot of times), Sokka wondered about Zuko and his very…unhealthy? Scary? Weird-sounding? Upbringing.
He supposed he’d never know if the royal family had ever merrily cackled about fiery fishnets-turned-ball game-divider thingies together, though, since when Katara asked Zuko about it and said they didn't have to if it brought back bad memories, he shook her off and insisted that he still wanted to show them the game. So, show them he would. As soon as they lugged these two annoying poles and the ungainly net between them over to where the others had set up camp.
“Usually there’s a case for this,” Zuko grunted as he hefted his pole up while he clambered over some precariously angled rocks.
“So you’ve said,” Sokka returned, hopping to a lower rock with only slightly less grace and slipping off it to faceplant into the sand.
“Ow,” he said—or tried to—around a mouthful of sand. He spat it out. “Nyeh, phlew, blegh. Real helpful, that case of yours is being right now. So glad we found it.”
Zuko scoffed and landed lightly on his feet next to Sokka’s prone form, the gloating ninja bastard.
A pale hand stuck in front of Sokka’s face, making him go cross-eyed to focus on it.
“Stop being so dramatic,” Zuko said, and Sokka swore he could hear both the grin and the eye-roll. Those things were audible, man, and right now they only served to irritate him more.
He pushed the hand away with deliberate scorn and an upturned nose dusted with a very flattering smattering of multicolored sand, thank you very much.
“How can I, when I was born for the stage?” he said with a dramatic hand placed over his heart in a direct imitation of one of the Ember Island players.
Zuko’s annoyed groan was music to his ears.
“I cannot believe you guys got me to go to one of their shows again.”
“It’s because you secretly love it.”
“I do not. The only reason I haven’t formally disbanded them by royal decree is because it’s so far down my list of priorities right now I actually forgot they existed for almost a year. And you ruined that, so thanks for that.”
“You’re welcome,” Sokka granted magnanimously.
Sokka juggled the pole in his hand to twirl his Wang Fire mustache, in spirit even if it was not physically present.
“Perhaps there is now incentive to do something about this most egregious of ensembles?”
Zuko stopped in place, yanking Sokka around by the net when he tried to keep walking.
“Did you seriously arrange that nightmare to get me to do something about them? You could have just asked!”
“Au contraire, my fiery friend, this was much more amusing, I assure you.”
Zuko looked half a breath away from violently facepalming if it weren’t for the pole and net in his hands.
Briefly Sokka wondered if he should fear for his life as he considered the decidedly spear-like grip the Firelord had assumed with the pole.
“You,” Zuko pointed the pole at him, “are ridiculous.”
“At least they’re not doing gross Sozin-style propaganda stuff anymore?”
“One could argue anything they do is gross, even if it’s not propaganda.”
“Oof, cold words from the king of the Fire Nation.”
“Not a king,” Zuko sighed with the air of someone who had said this a million times. And he had. Sokka hadn’t counted, but he was sure it was close.
“And yet, you used to be a Fire Prince.”
“Only the Earth Kingdom calls their leader a king,” Zuko said.
“Sure, your majesty. Your royal pain-us in the anus.”
Zuko looked like he’d have swatted Sokka if he wasn’t carrying a net. Instead, he settled for rolling his eyes. Hard.
“Pain-us isn’t even a word.”
“Sure it is! It’s what you do to us all the time!”
Hey, look at that! Zuko found a way to facepalm while carrying his half of the net. What an innovative guy.
Or at least he thought so, until Zuko’s shirt got caught in the net and in a fit of good old Zuko rage he dropped his half of the equipment, ripped off his shirt, wadded it into a ball and threw it in Sokka’s face.
Sokka batted it aside with a stuck-out tongue. “Now who’s being dramatic?”
“You are,” Zuko said petulantly.
And after an awkward two seconds of staring at his shirt on the ground and then the gang still a ways away, stomped over and snatched up his shirt again like the dramatic king he was.
Then he flung it over his shoulder, grabbed his pole, and marched off at a dragging-Sokka-by-the-net pace.
Something tickled Sokka's brain, and it took him a stumbling few steps before it clicked, and he raced to catch up to Zuko.
“Whoa, hey, wait, what happened to your scar?”
Zuko’s sudden stop almost made Sokka fall over, but he skidded to a stop before the net pulling taut could jerk him around again.
See! He learned. He was an adaptive warrior like that.
Meanwhile, Zuko was looking at Sokka as though he were tripping on cactus juice.
Which he most certainly was not! He hadn’t touched the stuff since the Si Wong Desert, despite what his unruly, lie-spreading little sister would have people believe.
Little sisters aside, Zuko continued squinting at Sokka like he wasn’t sure if he was serious, or seriously ill.
“Uh…nothing?” Zuko finally ventured. “It’s right here on my face? Like it’s always been, since I was thirteen?”
“No, not that one—wait,” Sokka choked on his own spit, “Since you were thirteen?”
It had never occurred to him that his friend must have gotten that scar at a pretty young age.
It had just always been a part of him. He’d crashed—bulldozed, more like—into their village, a fully formed angry prince with an angry red scar to match, and he had never thought too deeply about it. But if it had looked old even when they’d first met…huh. Thirteen.
Zuko rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly with one hand. “Uh, yeah?”
Sokka shook his head. “Okay, we’re so coming back to that one later—but I meant the one on your chest. Where your crazy sister blasted you full of lightning powered by a comet that boosts firebending power like a thousandfold? How on earth did that not scar?”
He squinted at Zuko’s chest as if that would help him make out the old wound. It didn’t, and as far as he could tell, it looked as if it might as well have never happened.
Tui and La, how was that possible?
Zuko shifted the net and pole to block his bare chest with an embarrassed look, sticking it in the ground to stand between them, but Sokka just kept talking, mind a-whir.
“You know Katara freaked out even just telling me what happened that day? She thought you had died at first. And then that you were going to die immediately after she realized you were still alive.”
Zuko shrugged, uncomfortable. “Like you said, she was there. Helped heal the worst of it, and I had access to the palace’s healers afterwards, unlike… Anyway, maybe the most helpful thing was that the same comet powering Azula’s lightning also powered my fire-resistance.”
Ignoring the fact that Zuko just shrugged off a direct lightning strike by his crazy powerful sister on the day of the crazy powerful comet—
“What the La is this fire-resistance and where can I get some of that?”
Zuko rolled his eyes. “It’s a firebender thing, Sokka, so unless you’ve secretly been one all along, I can’t help you there.”
“But what is it?”
Zuko uncrossed his arms.
“I mean. You’ve noticed that our soldiers have metal armor, right? Wearing what’s essentially a fifteen to thirty-four jin oven would be a spectacularly bad idea for people who regularly wield fire and have higher body temperatures if we didn’t have some kind of resistance to it.”
“Huh. So you, like, never get sunburned, even though you’re paler than snooty Earth Kingdom nobility?”
Zuko snorted, visibly easing. “No, Sokka, I don’t. Past childhood, you only see non-benders get Agni-kissed. Natural fire-resistance increases with age and training. So a lasting burn scar is a massive shame because most people assume untrained incompetence. And really, anyone with more than a year or two of firebending training should be able to stick their hand into an open flame and be fine.”
Zuko was so focused on his explanation that he didn’t notice Sokka staring.
Because he was. He never had before, but now he couldn’t take his eyes off the very vivid, very deep, very mottled and leathery and bright red burn scar. On his friend. His very competent and trained friend.
A vague uneasiness settled in his chest, the same internal alarm bell ringing that had told him something wasn’t right as they chased Azula the day of the eclipse.
Swallowing, Sokka cleared his throat. “So you only started learning to firebend when you were thirteen, then?”
Zuko scoffed so hard it sounded like a cough. “Agni, no, are you kidding? My father assigned me private tutors as soon as I showed any sign of a spark when I was five, which was embarrassingly late compared to Azula’s burning down my bed curtains at two years old.”
Sokka blinked. He could definitely imagine that, unfortunately.
He shook his head to banish the image of a cackling toddler version of Azula. Then tilted his head at Zuko, considering.
“So…”
If five year old Zuko was unscathed from his baby sister’s fledgling murder attempt—okay fine, her most likely an accident incident, but he wouldn’t put premeditated murder past even a two year old Azula.
But anyway, if pre-conspicuous-sparking Zuko was fine after perhaps the first attempt on his life…
“So…what?” Zuko prompted.
Sokka frowned and gesticulated vaguely. Smacked himself with part of the net because he forgot he was still holding it.
Annoyed, he planted his end of the pole in the sand like Zuko had.
Zuko was still waiting. Was Sokka’s train of thought not obvious? Based on Zuko’s perplexed look, the answer was no.
Sokka sighed, and gestured more emphatically with his recently freed hands.
“So, then how’d you get that at thirteen? I’ve seen you, you’re definitely not incompetent, and you just made it clear you weren’t untrained, so what gives?”
Sokka could have sworn Mr. I-Don’t-Sunburn was looking awfully Agni-kissed right about then, face a light pink as he shifted awkwardly, digging his feet into the sand.
“I was basically untrained,” he muttered. “I always struggled, even with the basics.”
Sokka raised a scrutinizing eyebrow.
You gotta be kidding me.
Did he, like, magically forget he was the Avatar’s firebending master? At sixteen? That he helped save the world? Danced with dragons? Was the actual Firelord now?
He guessed it was possible Zuko really had been seal pup dung at bending when he was younger, but he had a strong suspicion that if his basis of comparison was his one-in-a-million Crazy Blue Fire prodigy of a sister, his scale was almost certainly skewed in an unfavorable and unrealistic direction.
“Okayyy, sure,” he said, drawing it out long enough that even Zuko couldn’t mistake his skepticism. “But say, hypothetically, one wasn’t undertrained nor abysmally incompetent—what else could make a firebender burn bad enough to scar?”
If even freaking comet-powered lightning from a firebending prodigy is apparently not up to snuff.
Zuko scanned the horizon, evidently nonchalant but for the way he swallowed.
“Other than that, the only other way a firebender can really burn badly enough to scar is if they deliberately bend to reduce their fire resistance.”
Sokka frowned.
“Skilled firebenders can sense when another's defenses are lowered like that,” Zuko said, gesturing to his head and body with a kind of elliptical motion, “and it’s usually done as a show of trust and respect. Traditionally, it’s done at coronations and other formal engagements to demonstrate loyalty and subservience to the Firelord by having them literally place their lives in the hand of their new ruler.”
Sokka took a moment to let that sink in, mulling it over slowly. It can’t have happened at some coronation or formal function, so it had to have been the first example that he said.
“So you…lowered your defenses to show you trusted someone and…you trusted the wrong person?”
A wry and mirthless smile flitted across Zuko’s face.
“Yeah. You could say that.”
His voice came out raspier than normal, and Sokka swallowed thickly.
A parrot-gull flew overhead. Zuko watched it dive for something in the ocean. Sokka watched Zuko, wondering if he’d pushed too far.
“That sucks, man.”
Zuko shrugged one shoulder.
And because Sokka was incurably curious, he couldn’t help but push further.
“Was it…was it Azula then, too?”
The parody of a smile dropped.
“No. It wasn’t Azula.”
Zuko’s expression was indecipherable, gold eyes full of something intense and unnamable. Sokka’s stomach churned.
Before Sokka could begin to process Zuko’s expression or what it meant, Zuko had already picked up his half of the net and pole and started walking again.
Sokka barely managed to unearth his own pole from the sand before Zuko was half dragging him across the beach.
After scrambling to catch up, Sokka huffed at him. “One day I’m gonna be taller than you, you know. Then you’ll rue the day you used your longer limbs in such a malicious way.”
Zuko looked back at him with a smirk, but slowed down slightly.
“Finally!” Toph yelled from the beach. “What took you bozos so long?”
And like the very mature world leaders they were—
“Somebody misled me about a phantom magical case that never appeared nor helped.”
“This idiot decided to try eating sand.”
“Um, why did you carry it like that?” Katara asked. “Couldn’t either one of you have carried both poles?”
Zuko and Sokka stared at each other.
Sokka had the distinct and sudden desire to relive the day he sank into the ground and almost got trampled by a saber-toothed moose-lion.
Aang leapt and airbended to land next to them, scattering a swirl of sand. “Because teamwork, Katara!”
Zuko and Sokka shared a glance and turned to Katara with a firm nod.
“Because teamwork,” Zuko said.
“There are important international relations at work here,” Sokka added. “What—you thought this was a vacation or something?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Suki said. “Now get your tangled international gift over here so we can set up for a round of cultural enrichment.”
“Or aggressive negotiations,” Toph said, cracking her knuckles.
“Or maybe,” Zuko grabbed the kuai ball and spun it in his hands, causing unnecessary, dramatic flames to bloom from the bottom and lick off the sides of it with a grin. “Some good old-fashioned Fire Nation schooling.”
“Yay, school!” Aang cheered.
Toph made a gagging noise. “I call the team Twinkle Toes isn’t on.”
Katara held up a limpet-crab shell. “Maybe we can flip a seashell to determine what team people should be on?”
And as they dissolved into bickering about how to split up and eventually ended up in some semblance of an order, Sokka couldn’t help but think about the way Zuko’s flames had danced over unscathed hands, harmless as water, as he’d spun the kuai ball.