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There is no set moment he decides he wants to do it, but there was a moment he decided that he didn’t, on the day the sun’s light was snuffed by its own mirror.
He caught his father’s lightning, clutched it even as it writhed between his fingers. Untamed wasn’t a strong enough word to describe the wild exhilaration of holding the weight of his life in tendrils of spiraling blue heat. It was unlike any fire he ever called to him, any flame he ever held and any inferno he ever endured.
Zuko looked his father in the eyes and returned the lightning to him, and by the time the smoke cleared, Zuko was gone and Ozai had only just risen to his feet. He made a decision that day, a decision smattered in burns on the floor of the palace, scorched into the thread of Ozai’s throne and singed along the edges of royal tapestries. There was no need to vocalize it, but he told it to himself anyway, just in case, in tandem with the pounding footfalls and thrumming beat of his heart as he left long familiar corridors behind him.
I will not become you.
He stopped trying to bend lightning after that. Every ounce of fascination he had melted from beneath his fingertips and stayed gone. He had no use for a power so detrimentally undoable, so unstable. He intended to be the antithesis of Ozai's reign of terror, but on the off-chance that wielding that kind of power would warp him, change him, well. He wasn’t going to give it the chance.
He decided he didn’t want to bend lightning that day, and that should have been the end of it.
“I’ll cover you, Sparky!”
“There’s too many of them, we have to take out the catapult before it launches any more bombs!”
“Katara, behind you!”
“Be careful! Some of them are benders!”
These people who ambushed them, they aren’t trained soldiers. They weren’t hired, at least not by someone they have to worry about. But there are a lot of them, and there isn’t one among the soldiers who isn’t going for the kill.
And, Zuko’s mind never changed. He doesn’t want lightning, or the power to hold someone’s life in physical, crackling form, or the power to point, to release, to decide.
There’s no set moment he decides now. But there’s an electrical storm, and they were ambushed, and they’re outnumbered. Just being able to hold their own isn’t enough here because that’s all they’re doing. They aren’t taking ground, they’re standing it, and inch by inch their ambushers are taking that away from them, too.
And there’s an electrical storm. Thunder tumbles through black clouds, moonlight’s gentle sheet discolored by bursts of theatrical lightning, and the ambushers have a weaponized battleship armed with catapults, bombs, resources, nets, chains, and it’s so heavily guarded that no one can get close enough, or deliver damage strong enough, to dismantle it.
Sokka is leading the attack, barking their best strategic advances, but they don’t have many options. Toph’s vision is distorted by the sand. Aang keeps trying to land a hit on the ship to sink it, but the catapult ammunition is distracting and he can’t squeeze an attack in between knocking them out of the sky. Katara and Zuko are faring best, and Sokka’s strategies make sense, but it’s only a matter of time.
“Watch out!”
A bomb collides with the sand. There’s more shouting, more screaming, more calling each other’s name in the blinding haze of dust and debris. Armor clanks as the soldiers advance, and in the haze Zuko picks out his friends’ voices: Sokka, Toph, Katara, Aang, the very first people outside his family that treated him like a person, but beyond that, a friend. A comrade. An equal. They told them they loved him and he could believe it.
There is no decision. Just a conclusion.
Zuko can’t conjure lightning the same way Azula, Ozai or Uncle can. He isn’t at that point yet, hasn’t found that tranquility within himself. But he’s much closer, and with this much electricity in the air for the taking, it’s almost too easy.
He calls to it, finds it in the air around him, and pulls.
It’s worse than redirecting it. It’s a seared, mind-numbing agony like he’d thrown himself into the snapping jaws of hell, every muscle wrung so tight he can’t fit a breath between them. Whites, blues, crackling and hissing from beneath his skin and he thinks of his father, he thinks of how easy it was for Ozai to wrestle this and blast it into his son’s chest.
“Zuko!”
He snaps his teeth together and cracks his eyes open. Beyond a rapidly decaying world of searing white and electric blue is the silhouette of the battleship. Every bone and muscle burning, he levels his hand with the line where sky meets sea and enemy ship disrupts it, and with a heaving breath more choke than exhale, he lets it go.
If only you could be more like your sister.
The ship explodes, and Zuko sees white.
It was cruel and it was wrong.
It was cruel and it was wrong.
It was cruel and it was wrong.
The first time he watched his father bend lightning, Ozai had come to himself with a familiar smile, the one Zuko went on to fear.
When Azula bent lightning for the first time, she returned to herself beaming, giggling at her hands in awe of what she had done.
Zuko comes to himself screaming.
He chokes on it on the next inhale, chest seizing against rebounding echoes of the torture he put himself through. His heart throbs behind his eyes.
“Zuko!”
The clouds are fuzzier, darker than the sky beyond. The scent of smoke burns his sinuses and twists through his nerves like cursed embroidery, threading needles through the pads of his fingers and coiling around his ribs. Every breath is like swallowing glass, shards in his lungs and venom in his veins. He’d scream again, if only he could, if only to prove he could.
Somehow not being able to is worse.
Ow! Hey, don’t do that!
What? That didn’t seriously hurt you, did it? You’re joking.
It’s not funny! Uncle Iroh said you could really hurt someone with that—!
Haven’t you heard, Zuzu? Uncle Iroh is a coward.
Don’t call him that. Even Dad said—
You want to bring Dad into this now, too? Well, why don’t you go ask him? Go tell him what I did and see what he thinks. But chances are you aren’t going to like it.
I just don’t want you to hurt anyone, Azula. Not like this, not when you aren’t thinking about th—
About the what? About the consequences? I have thought about the consequences and, I’ll be honest with you, they aren’t worth my time.
His mother touches his face with a smile, a smile that’s been shattered and crudely stitched back into something capable of lying that everything is okay. And then he blinks and it’s Katara, eyes wide and hands pressed into his chest.
“Zuko?” It reaches his ears like there’s a wall between them, muffling clarity where it matters. “Can you hear me?” There’s noise behind her, clashes and shouts and explosions, but she’s the only thing that makes sense, the only thing he can latch onto, so he does.
Did you not hear what I just said, Zuko?
His fingernails dig into the sand.
“It’s going to be okay,” she promises, and wouldn’t that be nice, to be okay, as she meets his eyes and anchors him there. “We’ve got you, it’s okay.”
It doesn’t sound like a lie (Azula always lies Azula always lies Azula always lies) but she doesn’t sound convinced of it herself, voice broken and scared. There’s movement on the other side of her, explosions in the background; something shifts beneath him, pain spirals back and his scream is swallowed up by unconsciousness.
Haze. Trapped. Stuck. He thrashes and is held down; he kicks and someone kneels into his shins; he cries out and the hands clutch tighter, harder, and there isn’t a part of him that doesn’t burn.
You will learn respect.
“Zuko! Zuko, Zuko stop, it’s me, we’re trying to help you—!”
And suffering will be your teacher.
“Sparky if you don’t stop fighting us you’re really not going to like what I’ll have to do.”
“Sokka, hold his shoulders!”
Hands, grip tight as iron and hard like steel, vision hazed and white as his ears buzz and ring and voices fill his head, stuffing fear where clarity used to be and he kicks out again because it’s the only thing he can do, just make it stop, make it stop, make it stop—
I meant no disrespect.
He’s pinned, wrists and ankles shackled. Tears split down his face like knives, throat tight and charred and he can’t.
“I’m sorry, buddy, I’m so sorry, let her help you, just let her help you.”
It was cruel and it was wrong.
He doesn’t know where the noise is coming from anymore, or if it’s just his mind’s own noise. He twists his wrists, desperate to wrench himself from whatever has him pinned but he can’t pull away, they won’t let him go (let me go, please, I promise it won’t happen again, I meant no disrespect, I meant no disrespect, I meant no disrespect—) it hurts (please—) he’s trapped (please, Father—) he can’t
breathe.
The way he comes to is startlingly normal, a pat on the back compared to everything else. He’s caught wondering if it’d all been a dream until the pain returns, rushing up every inch of him, hanging off nerves and yanking his muscles taut. Even clenching his teeth so as to not make a sound hurts.
There’s nothing dramatic about coming to. He doesn’t shout or scream; he doesn’t lurch forward involuntarily; he doesn’t gasp for breath; he doesn’t cry, even though he wants to. If anything, what he feels is closer to compression. Like being trapped in a hingeless metal case, weighed down by padlocks and questioning one’s self into hysteric loops as the air disappears and one can’t be sure whether or not the box is shrinking. Any outward display of what he’d just weathered is trapped lock-and-key somewhere deep within himself. Maybe it’s habit; maybe that’s just how he is; or maybe it’s trained—making too much noise in the middle of the night never ended well for him.
Zuko blinks into the dim light of a dying campfire and tries to remember how to breathe.
He knows what happened; the sensations are familiar and the asphyxiation isn’t new. He’s braved lightning before, just never of his own volition before. This time he chose to do it, and…
And, it’s only cemented how much he never wants to do it again.
He takes a breath. There’s nothing dramatic about that, either: just an inhale, a moment where he closes his eyes for too long, then an exhale. The tightness in his chest doesn’t go away, but that too is typical (he isn’t sure it ever does go away, or if it’s only noticeable in times like these when it’s dark and he’s alone). It’s hard to word what he’s feeling and harder to relax his fingers from the blankets he’d twisted them into. He counts the microseconds between heartbeats.
I don’t want to become him.
His scar aches.
When he was younger and still chasing his father’s legacy, he used to brush those sorts of fears off because, no, everything is fine, he’s gonna be Fire Lord someday when his father welcomes him home (what an amazing lie that was), and he didn’t think those types of people were the same types of people who woke up panicked, unable to find the air in their lungs with bodies crumpling in on themselves like burning paper. He spent three years lying to himself, and now, alone with nothing to prove and no one to prove it to, the thought of doing it again is funny. It was cruel and it was wrong; he knows that, now. Maybe he always did and wasn’t ready to face the depth of his father’s lies.
When he’s sure he’s taken ample time to recover, he holds his breath and pushes himself onto an elbow. The regret is instantaneous. He can count on one hand the things he regrets more than this, with fingers to spare.
He thought the pain would be manageable. He was wrong. It starts in his chest and barrels into his head from there, careening to and fro in between his heartbeats. He clutches his head and realizes only then that he can’t feel his fingers, and that his arms have been bandaged, and that his chest has been bandaged, too, carefully and secure but restricting, his lungs pinch and his throat wrestles with the breaths trying to squeeze up it—
“Hey, Zuko! What are you d—whoa, hey, hey—”
Hands take him by the shoulders and he folds into himself, trying to breathe, trying to press away the stabbing in his head. Sokka is steadying him now; that helps.
“You aren’t supposed to move yet, buddy.” Sokka’s voice is steadying, too. It’s familiar enough and grounding enough to remind him that he’s here, on the run but more free than he’s ever been, and it’ll only be a matter of time before his father is gone for good. “You there?”
“Yeah,” Zuko croaks. He sounds (and feels) like someone strangled him. “S-Sorry.”
“Nah, you’re fine. Can you breathe? Katara was worried.”
“I—” He sucks in a breath, stifles the urgency to cough and lets it go. “I c—” The coughs bubble up anyway, and he stuffs them in the crook of his elbow, squeezing his eyes shut against the spiking pain in his chest.
“Easy, man,” Sokka says, and this time Zuko picks up on the worry in his voice, though it’s veiled by his usual lightheartedness and attempts to make bad situations not nearly as unbearable. Zuko keeps coughing, Sokka squeezes his shoulders. “Your voice is shot, you should probably think about saving it.”
Zuko eventually manages to take a breath that doesn’t propel him into another fit, but it’s only furthered the knots in his ribs, and trying to breathe against the sparkling aftershocks of pain appeals about as much to him as not breathing at all. Sokka pats him between the shoulder blades one more time before sinking down beside him.
“Thanks,” Zuko wheezes. The itch in his throat is back, but he swallows down the coughs before they have a chance to start again. “Sorry about that.”
Sokka gives him a puzzled look before heaving a sigh and shaking his head. “You took a bad hit for us. Katara said you’re gonna be out of it until your body’s gotten over the shock—” Sokka blinks, then sighs again. “Okay, normally the pun would be on purpose, but this time I feel bad for even noticing it.”
“It’s funny,” Zuko says, to console him.
“No, it isn’t.” For a while Zuko doesn’t think he’s going to continue, but then, “Listen, Zuko—You were hurt, alright? Really hurt. You still are.” He gestures needlessly and Zuko wraps the blanket around himself further so neither of them have to be reminded of the bandages. “I don’t think you realize how bad it got.”
“I was there,” Zuko says, “I think I know.”
The haunted gravity in Sokka’s face makes him second guess it. “Really?”
He trips over his words before he’s had the chance to say them. “I—” He doesn’t know what to say. And even if he did, he can’t imagine it would be something worth actually saying. While avoiding Sokka’s eyes, he takes in their campsite, makeshift with a dying campfire and startlingly empty. “Where’s everyone else…?”
Sokka rests his elbow on a bent knee. “They went to check the beach just in case someone followed us,” he says. “We made sure to put at least a handful of islands between us, but y’know, stranger things have happened.”
“Did we ever find out what they—” Zuko has to stop, stifling two more coughs into his elbow. “Did we find out who they were? What they wanted?”
“Just passionate haters, I think,” Sokka says. “Y’know. Ragtag group of people with a lot of personal beef toward us. Some of them were angry with you, some of them were angry with Aang, some of them were angry with Katara, some of them were angry with Toph—just a lot of angry people.”
“But not angry at you.”
“Nope!” Sokka grins, and it seems forced, somehow, in a way Zuko can’t reason. “I don’t mean to brag, but it would seem I’m the most likeable person in the group.”
“You’re also not a bender.”
“Okay, listen—”
Zuko exhales sharply, then flinches and winces against the stab of pain just below his chest. Sokka starts forward but, Zuko lifts a hand. “I’m fine, fine,” he wheezes, struggling to breathe again. “Breathed a little too hard.”
Sokka looks uncertain. “You sure? What you went through was nothing to sneeze at, you didn’t even know who—” Like he’d been physically restrained, Sokka jolts to a stop, and pointedly refuses to meet Zuko’s gaze. “Nevermind, forget I said anything.”
Zuko’s stomach drops. “What were you going to say?”
“It’s not important, seriously, just some stuff that happened while you were out of it and Katara was healing you.”
It rushes back all at once. His breath hitches, the cracks in his voice reach a point he can no longer ignore and the rest of the puzzle clicks into place.
“What did I do?”
Sokka slaps his knees and hauls himself to his feet. “Anyway! I’m gonna leave you to sleep, you look like death, sweet dreams, the others should be back soon—”
“Sokka.”
“No, seriously, you sound like someone tried to drown you, go to sl—”
“Sokka.” Against his abused limbs and every ounce of better judgement he thought he had, he snags Sokka by the wrist and tugs him. “Sokka, what did I do?”
The cheery exterior gives way, and Sokka sighs, tired and heavy. Zuko’s head spins from the effort of clutching Sokka’s arm, but luckily Sokka takes pity on him, and rejoins him on the ground.
“Look, Zuko—”
“No, Sokka. Just.” Zuko lets him go and sits back, already bracing himself. “Just, tell me what I did.”
Sokka isn’t looking at him again. “You… screamed. A lot. Katara was worried you’d choke yourself, but eventually you stopped on your own. And then you just… You kept begging us not to hurt you.”
It was cruel and it was wrong.
Zuko feels sick. “D—Please tell me I didn’t f—”
“No, no firebending,” Sokka assures quickly, waving his hands a bit. “You didn’t even try to hurt us, you just wanted us to let you go.”
The frazzled edges of Zuko’s fear recoil and so does he, resting his head in his hands and catching the breath he didn’t know he was holding.
“I know you weren’t seeing us,” Sokka says, “but for what it's worth, you know we’d never… We would never hurt you. You know that, don’t you?”
“Of course I know that,” Zuko says, digging his fingers into his temples. “I just, I wasn’t in my right mind.”
“Who were you seeing?” Sokka asks, tentative. “You said you weren’t seeing us. Who was it?”
“My father.” Zuko rounds his shoulders and curls fistfuls of blanket into his palms. “And my sister.”
Sokka nods, a bit stiff. “Lightning really didn’t agree with you, did it?”
Zuko exhales, forceful and hoarse. “No.”
Sokka doesn’t say anything. But it is Sokka, and Sokka isn’t necessarily the best at letting silence run its course. “Can I say something that might be intrusive?”
“Go for it.”
“You didn’t get your scar in a training accident.”
Zuko feels nothing. “No, I didn’t.”
Sokka scoots closer. He tries to be subtle, but that’s never been Sokka’s thing, either, and for now it’s better that way. The more blatant reminders Zuko has that he isn’t alone, the better. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, but I’m all ears.”
Zuko… still feels nothing. Except, maybe disgust; it’s a disgusting thing to vocalize, the story behind the scar. From any point of view, it’s disgusting. It was a disgusting injury for a disgusting cause upheld by a disgusting person.
That isn’t the only reason why he hasn’t told the others the truth yet. Aang is already struggling with the decision of what to do with the Fire Lord, Katara is still struggling with baggage from when she faced the man who killed her mother, but for the rest of them, and the group overall, Zuko doesn’t want to say it. They’re like brothers and sisters to him, younger brothers and sisters, and, at least until the worst of the war is behind them, he doesn’t want to give them yet another burden to bear.
But Sokka is closer to his age, and more than that, he and Sokka really hit it off at the Boiling Rock, far more than Zuko thought he could. Toph was the first to accept him, but it was Sokka who helped him feel like he was a part of them, and not just ‘Aang’s obligatory firebending teacher.’ The others will know eventually; for now, Sokka knowing is enough. Zuko takes a shallow, hissed breath through his teeth.
“There’s a longer, more depressing version of it. But the gist is I spoke out of turn, I accepted the call to an Agni Kai on the assumption that I would be facing the general, but it ended up being me and my father.”
He waits for Sokka to react, but won’t watch him. When nothing happens, Zuko steels himself—even now the memories are as hard to recall as they were to endure—and continues.
“I said I wouldn’t fight him and that I was loyal to him and our—my nation. Whether to teach me respect, teach me a lesson or make an example of me, he grabbed me by the face, and…”
It was a pain that ran deep enough for his tormented mind to try and forget. Either the lightning equaled that agony, or brought back its echo. He doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter. It was cruel and it was wrong.
Zuko pulls his knees to his chest, suddenly conscious of his face, of the bandages around his chest, of the way the dying campfire scatters embers into the chilly air. “I know it’s messed up now, but back then I thought I deserved it.”
“Zuko—” He hears Sokka shift and instinctively looks at him, but the grief in Sokka’s face makes him turn away. “I didn’t know, that’s—nevermind, can I hug you?”
“Why?”
“Just answer the question.”
Zuko’s heart throbs an indent against his ribs, and he clutches the blanket like it’s all he has. “I guess… if you want to.”
Sokka reaches for him, arms wrapping around his shoulders, and, it’s more than just a hug. It’s an embrace, enveloping and warm and, yeah, it hurts, it hurts because there isn’t a part of him that doesn’t hurt right now, but this is worth it, Sokka is hugging him, and—and, with exception of Mom and Uncle Iroh, no one has ever done that before.
Zuko presses his forehead into Sokka’s shoulder, too weak to hug him back but desperate to do something, just to let Sokka know he wants this. And Sokka doesn’t let him go, just squeezes his shoulders a little tighter and it makes Zuko want to cry.
“You sure you don’t have a fever or something?” He can feel the vibrations of Sokka’s voice against his collarbone. “You’re like, really warm.”
“I can breathe fire, Sokka.”
“Okay, so maybe that’s all it is, but—”
“Forget it.” He doesn’t feel sick, just tired and in pain. Less pain than before, but still unignorable and sharp if he tweaks himself wrong. “How long do hugs usually last?”
“As long as you need them to. And you kinda seemed like you needed a long one.”
He’s suffocating again, but it isn’t the same kind of suffocation as being unable to breathe while the world blisters and burns around him. It’s depletion, like he’d exhaled everything in his lungs and is ready to inhale as though for the very first time. Tight as his chest is, breathing has never come easier.
Sokka pulls back eventually, but steadies Zuko with both hands on his shoulders. “I know my chances of actually getting to see the Fire Lord face to face are slim—”
“He would kill you.”
“If I do,” Sokka cuts, sharp, “and I have the chance to—I don’t know, land a hit on him, I’ll be sure to throw in a little something extra, just for you.”
“Like what? A haiku?”
“Haikus have their own special kind of fire to them, my uncultured friend.”
“I’m sure he’d never know what hit him.”
“I’m trying to be nice to you.”
“You’re wasting your time.”
“I’m not. Trust me, I’m not.” Sokka’s features soften. “I won’t ask why you didn’t tell us before, because I have a couple ideas and either way it doesn’t matter. But I’ll keep this between us.”
The welled-up anxious knots in Zuko’s heart disperse, the ones he didn’t even know were there until they’ve been undone. “Thanks.”
Sokka’s fingers dig into his shoulders. “It was messed up.” His face is set, eyes firm. “I know you said you know that already, but I wanna make sure you really do. It shouldn’t have happened. He shouldn’t have done it. And you didn’t deserve it.”
Zuko’s eyes sting. The next breath he draws is a trembling one. “Thanks.”
Sokka responds with a gentle smile and a gentler pat on the shoulder. “Now.” Completely uncalled for, he yanks the blanket up and over Zuko’s head. “Rest. I get the feeling you need it a lot more than you’re letting on.”
It’s not that sleeping isn’t appealing, because it is; but he doesn’t trust his subconscious mind to leave him be, and on the off-chance he couldn’t control his firebending, and he lashed out thinking he was somewhere he wasn’t with someone he wasn’t—it scares him. It’s the one thing that scares him more than his father hurting them.
“I will,” Zuko says, already tripping over the words he wants to say but doesn’t know how to find, “but, I’m worried I—”
“Sokka! Zuko!”
Saved by the bell, Katara, Toph and Aang announce their return with all their usual fanfare. Sokka starts hard, but bursts into a relieved smile when he realizes who it is.
“Welcome back!” Sokka waves them over. “Guess who rejoined the land of the living.” The hand he still has on Zuko’s shoulder squeezes, and Zuko understands. There’ll be time to talk later.
“Zuko!” Aang hits the ground skidding. “You’re awake!”
“I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“How’re you feeling?”
“How hard would it be for you to launch me into the sun?”
Aang tilts his head. “Uh, not hard. Why?”
“Because I will pay you to launch me into the sun.”
Toph’s hand shoots in the air. “I’ll do it for free!”
“No one’s launching anyone into the sun,” Katara says. Toph opens her mouth. “Not even if they ask for it.” Toph shuts her mouth. “How are you feeling, Zuko?”
What a question. Zuko’s head does a few circles. “Better,” he settles on. “Not great, but, I’ve been through worse. It’s better than before.”
Katara’s hands, already doused in water, settle on either side of Zuko’s face. He tries to read her face—lips pressed thinly, brows knitted, eyes focused—but he’s admittedly not as fine as he said he was. His perception is down.
“It doesn’t look like anything’s infected yet,” Katara says, lowering her hands and guiding the water back into her waterskin. “We’ll keep an eye on everything, but you should be okay. You’re lucky I got to you when I did.”
“I didn’t even know you could bend lighting,” Aang says; he’s seated himself nearby, hands in his lap and legs crossed over each other. “Isn’t it one of the hardest firebending forms to master?”
“No one masters lightning.” Even just the thought releases a chill down his back, and he pulls the blanket closer to himself. “You’ll hear people say they have, but no one has that much control over something so unstable.”
Toph sinks to the ground, stretching out her legs and leaning back on her hands. “Yeah, I can see that,” she says. “Even after yours and Aang’s dance lessons with the dragons—”
“They weren’t dance lessons.”
“—Okay, whatever, but even after all that insight to firebending, the lightning got you real good. You actually stopped breathing for a while. Oh, yeah.” Her eyes widen. “While we’re on the subject, don’t ever do that again.”
“I don’t plan to.” It brings a sour taste to the back of his throat, one Zuko tries to swallow down with debatable success. “Sokka more or less filled me in, about the stuff I said while I was—out.” He watches their faces change into a mangled collection of all the emotions he never wanted to put them through. “I… I’m sorry I put you through all of that. I wasn’t in my right mind, I didn’t mean to—”
“Zuko, we get it,” Aang says gently. “You were hurt and scared, and you reacted. It’s not your fault.”
“Yeah,” Toph says. “Besides, you’re doing better now thanks to Sugar Queen. You’ll be good as new so long as you take the time to rest; that’s all that matters.”
Zuko swallows and has to take several breaths before he can bring himself to speak. “I don’t actually know how to bend lighting. That was my first time.”
“Wait, what?” It’s Sokka who whips toward him this time, wide-eyed. “Wait—Wait, you did it without knowing if you could? You just up and snatched yourself some lightning—”
“I didn’t think I had another choice,” Zuko says, “and I’ve redirected lightning before, so I sort of knew what to expect.” It hadn’t prepared him for the excruciation, but they don’t have to know that. “The day of black sun, I confronted my father on my decision to join you, and he used lightning to try and kill me.”
“Your father did what?” Toph’s voice reminds him of an earthquake, rattled and still rattling, strong enough to topple cities. “He tried to—with lightning?”
Katara is looking at him as though for the first time. Aang’s face is wan. This is why Zuko didn’t tell them about the scar. He gulps down whatever it was creeping up his throat.
“My father isn’t exactly a good person,” he says. “I thought everyone knew that.”
“You didn’t say he tried to fill you with lightning!” Sokka strains, reeling back. “Is that why your body freaked out on you so much after you bent it?”
Zuko blinks. “... Now that you mention it, probably.” It’s hard to tell the difference between gut-reaction and trauma these days, but it’d make sense. “I’m not sure.”
Toph’s fingers curl into fists. “That’s worse than sick, that’s—I don’t even know if there’s a word sick enough to describe how sick that is.”
“It just gives us one more reason why we can’t let the Fire Lord’s reign of terror go on,” Katara says. She has fire in her eyes now, too, the same fire as when Zuko told her he knew who killed her mother, but it’s restrained this time. Thinly restrained, but restrained anyway, because unlike then, there’s nothing immediate she can do about this. “But right now we need to focus on your recovery. We’ll deal with the Fire Lord later.”
“She’s right,” Aang says. He too is shaken, though he does a thinner job veiling it than Katara. “We’ll have the chance to make things right, but for now Zuko needs to get better.”
Toph crosses her arms with eyes curdling rage and defiance, and Sokka is equally dour, but nods with Aang and his sister. Zuko doesn’t know how he should be taking it, but it is nice that they’re all on the same page about this. Just like with the Agni Kai, there were those who agreed with Ozai; it’s reassuring to know those people are on the opposing side of him and his friends.
“Even with my best efforts, it’s going to take time before you’ve fully healed.” It takes Zuko a moment to realize she’d been talking to him, and by the time he does, she’s already turned to Aang. “I know we’d wanted to keep moving, but…”
“If we need to wait an extra day, we’ll wait an extra day,” Aang says. Then, at Zuko, “With the condition you’re in, it’s not worth the risk to travel.”
“Besides,” Toph adds, “we’re gonna need all hands on deck once we hit the Fire Nation, and Sparky’s one of our best assets. Someone’s gotta bring the heat, and now that we have an actual firebender, Sokka can finally stop.”
“I told you,” Sokka gripes, “my jokes have plenty fire to them!”
“Maybe,” Toph says, “but nothing beats fire like, y’know. Actual fire.”
“So we’ll camp one more day here and see how Zuko is tomorrow,” Katara concludes. “With rest and a couple more healing sessions, he’ll probably be alright. I can keep healing him while we’re flying there, too.”
Zuko’s pain-hazed, exhausted mind finally catches up with the conversation, and the pit in his stomach expands.
“I’m fine,” he says, lurching forward and biting his cheek to keep from wincing. “And I’d be fine whether or not we camped here for an extra day.”
“Yeeeaaah.” Toph crosses her arms. “You say that, but your heartbeat’s a lot faster than it should be. I’d bet good money you’re still in a lot of pain.”
“My pain isn’t important right now,” Zuko claps back, ignoring the traitorous stab in his chest. “This isn’t about my pain, this is about taking out my father before the comet hits.”
“And if Aang was out of commission via some out of nowhere human lightning rod stunt,” Sokka says idly, “you’d have exactly the same argument, right?”
Zuko reels. “What?”
“It’s not just that we need your help to deal with the Fire Nation,” Toph says. “We want you to get better either way. I’m only going to say this once, but, when you went down…” She lowers her head, squeezing her forearm. “It was scary. We thought you’d… y’know… We didn’t think you were coming back.”
“Yeah, I’m with Toph,” Aang says. “Close calls are kind of a given in situations like this, but that was one of our closer ones. We want you to recover.”
“You need to recover,” Katara says authoritatively. “If you think we’re going to let you undo everything we did to save you, just because you can’t take a breather, you’ve got another thing coming to you.”
“Besides, we’ve needed a day to just kick back and breathe for a while anyway,” Sokka says. “It’s not like this is super out of the ordinary for us.”
Zuko splutters on something. He doesn’t know what that something is, if it’s words he couldn’t find or the strength he couldn’t muster, but in the end it doesn’t amount to anything. If there’s one thing he knows about these people, it’s that once they’ve got their mind made up, there’s little to be done to dissuade them.
And, his skin is still too-tight and his chest is bound, and he’d be lying if he said the prospect of rest and recovery wasn’t appealing.
“Fine,” he relents, letting his shoulders sag, “but we move as soon as I’m fit to travel.”
“And as soon as I say you’re fit to travel,” Katara tacs on in a tone that in and of itself adds no exceptions. “For now, I think we should all try and get some sleep. It’s been a long day.”
“I call dibs on Zuko!” Just like that, before he knows what’s hit him, Toph is tucked into his side with her knees in his stomach, solid but thoughtful enough that it doesn’t hurt.
“... Why…?”
“Because you’re warm,” Toph answers like it’s something he should have already known. “Isn’t it obvious? It’s way too cold to sleep alone tonight.”
“It’s… It’s really not—”
“Oh no!” Sokka slaps a hand to his forehead with an… unusual amount of theatrics. Which is saying a lot, considering this is Sokka. “I seem to have misplaced my blankets!”
Zuko blinks. “But they’re right over—”
Sokka hurls the bundle across the campsite. “I said, I seem to have misplaced my blankets!” And then he, too, is at Zuko’s side opposite of Toph, and Zuko isn’t surprised anymore.
“Toph’s right, it is too cold to sleep by ourselves!”
“Not you too, Aang—”
“Lay down, I’ll go grab what’s left of the blankets and we can have a dogpile!”
“Can’t you regulate your own temperature with airbending?”
“Be right back!”
Zuko’s chest is tight for reasons unrelated to injury. “You guys don’t have to—”
Sokka shushes him and holds up a finger. “We thought you died, let us have this.”
“Got the blankets!” In no time at all the three of them are covered, Aang has joined them and Katara spends a final minute putting out the campfire before she joins them, too, slotting against Sokka’s side.
“Everyone good?” Sokka asks. He’s met with no rebuttal and a few satisfied thumbs-up of approval. Zuko doesn’t know what to think.
“I’m fine,” he says, dumbly.
“Maybe so,” Toph says, “but that doesn’t mean we can’t dogpile you.”
“This is a little cozy to be a dogpile,” Sokka says. “Maybe something more like a turtleduck pile.”
Zuko does that spluttering thing again.
“Exactly,” Aang says, unperturbed. “Except turtleducks still have that really hard shell.”
“That part can be Toph— OW.” Sokka starts hard, like he was bitten. “TOPH.”
“What?”
“WHY.”
“What are you talking about? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“YES YOU DO.”
“As fun as this is to listen to, Zuko needs to sleep,” Katara reminds. “But I definitely want an encore tomorrow.”
Toph salutes widely. “Absolutely.”
Sokka gives Toph a sour look, which she returns with a beaming grin.
After that, everything settles. The campfire is out, the night is still aside from the typical small creatures moving about—even Appa’s snoring eventually fades into the background with everything else, and so does the throbbing pain in Zuko’s skull and the impending fear of lashing out in his nightmares. He wonders what his father would think if he saw him like this, wrapped in the arms of the ones who’d been deemed dangerous threats to the Fire Nation. He wonders what Mom would think, if she’d be happy for him. Proud of him. The part of him that was closest to her says she would be.
And someday he’ll open himself up to Aang, Toph, Katara and Sokka completely. Someday he’ll let them see his pain and someday that pain will be easier to bear. Maybe someday it’ll even start to fade. But for now he has this, and he has friends who understand he doesn’t want to talk about everything, who understand that he trusts them, who understand that he needs time. One by one they fall asleep, nestled against him or draped over him, and before long he, too, lets himself rest.
His mindset toward bending lightning is the same it always was. He wants little to do with it—and, in an ideal world, nothing to do with it at all. But he thinks, if it were to save a part of this ragtag little gaggle of a family pieced together from heartbreak and loss and a mutual desire to mend, he’d do it again.
He’d bend heaven and earth to keep these people safe, and he knows now more than ever that they’d do the same for him in a heartbeat.