Chapter Text
‘The solstice?’
‘Maybe.’
‘You think the sun’s position in the sky could do this?’
‘It’s just a guess. Do I look like the damn Avatar to you?!’
It’s a rhetorical question but Katara answers anyway. ‘No, you don’t. But you sure don’t look like yourself!’
It’s strange, Katara’s intonation and Katara’s curled lip glaring out of his own face. It’s off-putting for more than the obvious reason (you know, the girl occupying his skin; that should be upsetting enough on its own). It’s off-putting because the scowl sits so easily, so at home, on his brow. He doesn’t like the way her expressions twist the heavy skin of his scar.
He sighs and the pretty sound that usually makes his insides melt with adoration issues from his own mouth— her mouth technically— and startles him. Get a grip of yourself. ‘Calm down.’
‘Calm down?’ she hisses, craning to glower at him. ‘I just woke up in my friend’s body! How am I supposed to be calm right now?!’
He watches her throw his hands into the air and they both flinch when flames flicker from her fingertips.
‘Yeah that’s why you need to calm down,’ he says flatly, crossing his arms over his—
Oh.
Oh.
‘But—but I wasn’t trying to bend!’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he tells her around the lump in his narrow throat and the heat in his cheeks. ‘Firebending is about control. When you’re feeling emotional, it reacts. Try not to feel so…much.’
Her glower on his face is really something. He swears she’s wearing lines into the skin over his brow. ‘So what? I can’t feel anything while I’m you?’
‘Try breathing deeply,’ he advises and searches for somewhere safe to rest his hands. Not folded across the chest, that’s for sure. On the hips? Hmm, they’re soft and warm and… nope not the hips either. ‘Yep. Let’s both just breathe for a second and just… figure this out.’
Katara breathes but exhales a flame. She yelps— Zuko prays he never hears that sound come out of his throat again— and holds a hand to her lip. ‘Ow! That hurt.’
He holds his arms awkwardly out away from the dangerous territory of the waterbender’s body. ‘I told you to calm down!’
His eyes— her eyes— start watering. Agni, no… Was she crying? ‘It really hurts, Zuko…’
‘Okay, okay, hang on.’ He looks around wildly, heavy chestnut hair flying with the movement, and spies the pitcher of water beside his bed. The two of them are secreted away in Zuko’s rooms for the time being, but any moment now someone is going to come looking for the Firelord and…
Shaking his head, Zuko reaches for the water the way he would his own element. Healing. How hard could it be? With one of those sinuous flowy gestures he’d memorised a hundred times over, Zuko called to the water. It explodes up out of the pitcher, shattering it entirely and sending shards out in all directions. Katara, still cumbersome with his body, barely dodges the knife sharp handle.
They exchange a wide eyed look.
‘What are you doing?!’ she screeches, throwing her arms in the air. ‘That could have killed us!’
‘You—I—’ He points at her lip accusingly. ‘You’re hurt! I was going to heal you!’
‘Heal me?! You can’t even push and pull the water how in the name of Tui and La did you think you’d be able to heal anything?!’
A hesitant knock at the door interrupts the argument.
‘Um… Firelord Zuko? Is— er, everything okay, sir?’
He opens his mouth to tell his guards to take a hike but Katara lunges for him, covering his mouth with her hand— his hand. Her eyes are golden and stretched wide as saucers, even the scarred one. ‘Shh,’ she whispers and, turning to the door, clears her throat. ‘Everything is fine, er, guardsman. Please cancel my next meeting. I have, um, business with the Water Tribes.’
‘My next meeting was with the Water Tribes,’ he hisses around the hot, very hot hand. She really needs to calm down.
‘With the Water Tribe Ambassador!’ Katara calls in a panicked tone. ‘There’s an um…’ Her face changes then. The anxiety replaced in an instant with a sly look that makes Zuko’s insides flutter. He knows that look. It is entirely Katara. ‘I’m having second thoughts about the limits of the Southern Sea trade routes that I need to run by the Ambassador.’
Suddenly she doesn’t sound out of control at all. He should have known. Katara would use a metaphysical crisis to push policy. Zuko levels her with a glower but she only winks, the fingers against his lips restraining his protest.
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘See we’re not disturbed.’
‘Of course, my lord.’
Katara smirks at him, tapping him on the nose once as she withdraws her hand. ‘Okay, Master Katara, let’s talk trade.’
‘Don’t you think there’s something a little more pressing than our nation’s trade routes right now?’
She looks down at her hands, their pale, scarred skin, and grins. ‘Hang on, I want to try something.’ Without warning, she bends down and wraps her arms around his torso.
‘What— What are you doing?!’
She lifts him up, chuckling with his raspy laugh but Zuko is far from amused. He’s almost choking. This body is reacting. His nose is pressed into Katara’s neck, his neck, and the scent is doing things to this body. This scent… It isn’t something he’s smelled before, it’s almost fireflakes and whisky but smoky like the ocean fish the kitchen serve during the summer festivals. The scent sends his heart racing and the strangest full-body tingle from head to toe.
The press against this chest he was trying really hard not to think about isn’t helping either.
‘P—Put me down,’ he gasps but the sound of that breathless voice sends his brain haywire. Over the past few years, he’s come to crave that breathlessness in the waterbender’s voice. There were guilty nights alone when her voice, breathless in his memories of their sparring bouts, was breathless for a decidedly less innocent reason in his imaginings and now… How embarrassing. His mind is aroused by this throat, his own gasping. This body…
The strangest thought occurs to him: This body is aroused by his scent.
Interesting.
Katara lowers him with another laugh, ignorant of the complex series of fireworks short circuiting this body she was manhandling so casually. ‘Sorry, it just occurred to me that I could pick you up!’
If it wasn’t for the distracting flutter in his stomach, the strangely pleasant tingling in places he had too much honour to think about, he would have been amused. Instead, he takes a few moments to breathe, calming his prickling skin.
Katara peers down at him. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Fine.’ He glances up at her accusingly. ‘Your body is weird. And don’t pick me up again.’
Katara crosses her arms over her chest and scoffs. ‘My body is not weird.’
He smirks but finishes his breathing sets without voicing his suspicions. Sure. ‘Let’s sit down and try to work this out.’
‘Consider our place in the universe?’ she quips, grinning.
She’s teasing him. Great.
‘A few moments ago, you were so upset about this you burned your own mouth! Which, I want to remind you, is actually my mouth. So yeah, I’d like to consider why in Agni’s four hells this has happened!’
She holds up her hands. ‘Jeez, alright, I get it.’
Outside the bedroom window, voices trickle in from the garden below. Zuko hunches his shoulders. ‘This is bad.’
‘It’ll be fine. We’ll figure it out.’ The grim set of her mouth belies the confidence of her words. ‘We’ll write to Aang, he’ll know what to do.’
‘Are you two talking again?’
She levels him with a glare. ‘I think our spirits being in the wrong body kind of trumps an awkward break up, don’t you think?’
‘Right.’
‘We’ll write to Aang and…’ Her shoulders slump. ‘Even if he got a letter right now it would still take him days to get here. Who knows where he is.’
‘We could check the Fire Sage’s archives. They have accounts on every recorded phenomena in there.’
‘Zuko, I’ve been in that library. It would take us weeks. And wouldn’t it look strange if the Firelord and Southern Ambassador suddenly became obsessed with reading the old archives?’
‘Urg! I wish Uncle was here.’ He clenches his tiny Water Tribe fists around his long chocolatey hair and immediately became entangled. ‘How do you deal with all this hair? You make it look effortless but— ouch!— it keeps getting in the way!’
Katara favours him with a noise of disapproval and bats his hand out of the way, her own making quick work of the silky strands. ‘Try braiding it, it helps. Comb it first though.’
He looks at her like she’s suggested asking Sokka to perform at the upcoming Fire Festival gala. ‘Yeah, cause part of my education involved braiding my hair.’
He shoos her hands away and Katara gasps. ‘Excuse me! That’s my hair you’re pushing me away from.’
‘Well right now it’s my body and I’ll do with it what I want!’ A pregnant pause falls between them. ‘Just don’t touch my hair! Your weird body gets all shivery.’
Katara just snorts, a strange smile playing around her mouth. ‘What are you talking about? That feels great! Why do you think I’m always fiddling with my hair? It feels nice when someone plays with it.’
I can’t deal with how nice it feels when you touch me. ‘It’s annoying.’
‘You’re the one who was getting tangled in my hair!’
Zuko sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘I think we need to accept that we’re going to be stuck like this for the foreseeable future.’
She looks around the bedroom uncertainly. ‘How long do you think that will be?’
Zuko narrows his eyes, crossing his arms over his— nope nope, arms by sides. ‘How am I supposed to know? Why?’
‘I, ah…’ She points to the closed bathroom door. ‘You sort of pushed on my bladder just then—’
‘You invaded my space and picked me up without asking!’
‘—and now I need to um, water the ostrich horse. Well, your body needs to water the ostrich horse.’ He doesn’t like seeing his face blushing this hard. It is not a good look on him though from the odd tingling response in the waterbender’s stomach, her body doesn’t agree.
Zuko drops his head into his hands. ‘You need to pee?’
She doesn’t respond.
‘How, um, dire is it?’
She shakes her head. ‘Not, um, emergency level. But, ah… soon.’
He sighs. Loudly. ‘Here’s what’s going to happen.’ Katara peeks at him through her fingers. ‘First, we’re going to agree right now that we will never tell any of our friends about this. Ever. Especially Sokka and Toph. Deal?’
Katara nods fervently. ‘Deal.’
‘You’re going to go into the bathroom, stand in front of the toilet, close your eyes, and I’m going to do everything else. Okay? Stop blushing so much you look ridiculous!’
Katara shakes her head, her eyes wide. ‘I can’t help it! I’m embarrassed! This is embarrassing!’
‘For both of us!’ he retorts, glaring at her. ‘It’s my body! I don’t want you seeing my… you know.’
As though the thought has only just occurred to her, Katara looks down. Less than an hour ago, he had burst into his room to shake awake his own body so Katara only wore his silk sleep pants. No shirt. She stares down the flat chest and abdomen of his body at the outline of something. She didn’t usually have a something. Now there was—
‘What are you looking at?!’ Zuko demands, his own cheeks flaming red. He snaps his fingers under her nose. ‘Hey! Stop it!’
Katara looks up at him with wide eyes. ‘You’ve… I’ve… It’s…’ She buries her face in her hands again. ‘Urg, this is not happening. This is so not how I thought this would happen. Okay, okay. Let’s go with your plan. We go in, I close my eyes, you… position. We’re done.’
‘Maybe we should add to the deal that we never talk about this ever again afterwards.’ He sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. ‘Okay. We can do this.’
They both eye the bathroom with deep distrust.
‘I’m, um, I’m going to put a shirt on first,’ Katara says and stumbles across the room to his closet. ‘Tui and La, Zuko, you’re actually really clumsy.’
He trails her, pushing her aside to pick out a plain red shirt. ‘I am not. you’re just not used to a bigger body. Look, I’m perfectly coordinated in yours.’ He tosses the shirt from one hand to the other before giving it to her. ‘I bet I could even bend…’
Katara pulls the shirt over her head and shakes her head. ‘No way. Did you forget the pitcher? No bending!’
He eyes her, a smirk creeping up his cheeks. ‘What about those yoga stretches you do in the volcanic steam caves? I bet I could do that one where you touch your—’
‘You even think about touching anything and I’ll burn everything. Everything, Zuko.’
He bites back his growing smile but gestures her towards the bathroom. ‘Come on, let’s get this over with.’
Zuko opens the door and the white tiled room— usually a welcome escape from his ministers needing something from him— has never looked less inviting. They linger in the doorway, the privy, against the far wall, gleamingly clean.
‘Remember the deal,’ he mutters, leading the way to the toilet.
Katara stops in front of it, breathing out harshly, her face still beet red. She swings her arms nervously. ‘Should I undo the pants? Or you?’
‘Me. Definitely me.’ He glances at her face as he begins unbuttoning his favourite sleep pants. ‘Are your eyes fully closed? You have to keep them closed.’
‘Yes, yes of course they’re—’ She gasps and Zuko knows why. As he’d undone the third and final button his hand glanced against... There. If his body is reacting to Katara’s body the way hers was when she’d picked him up, he could only imagine what she was feeling now.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ he mumbles, checking her eyes are still closed before dropping the pants.
‘You know what? I, um, I don’t need to pee that badly. I really don’t. False alarm.’ She bends down, reaching blindly for the pants. ‘Can you— just pull them back—’
‘Katara.’
‘No, really, I—’
‘You’re going to have to go eventually. Do you really want to have to go through all this again?’
She stands hesitantly. ‘I’m not… not used to my, um, feelings being so… apparent.’
Zuko glances at the half hard cock, his own, and wonders if you could actually die from humiliation. ‘Hold… Just hold still okay?’
‘Zuko…’
But he takes his cock, ignoring the shudder that runs the length of her body, and aims it downwards. ‘Okay. You’re good.’
A hand comes up and grips his wrist, the one holding his cock. He watches the long pale fingers engulf the dusky skin of Katara’s wrist. In another life, in another place, he prays he is fortunate enough to be in his own body with the waterbender’s hand wrapping around his—
‘Zuko.’
His cock isn’t helping the situation. It’s hard, harder than it has any right to be. Zuko swallows thickly and silently asks Agni what he has done wrong in his twenty two years to warrant this fate.
‘I’m going… I’m going to open my eyes.’
What? he thinks.
‘Why?’ his mouth says.
‘Just… please. Let me.’
No, he thinks.
‘Okay,’ his mouth whispers.
She blinks down at him, her cheeks still stained red, but there’s something else in her flush other than humiliation. She swallows and glances down to where he still holds her, where her hand holds him. For a long moment she only looks but then his cock twitches and she gasps, her hips pressing involuntarily forward into Zuko’s hand.
He lets go, stumbling backwards into the sink. For all the grace and control he thought he’d had over her body moments ago, now he has nothing but racing, tingling veins and a breath he can’t catch.
‘Zuko…’ Katara approaches him slowly, biting her bottom lip, his bottom lip.
Something pulses low. And again.
She crouches down before him, her eyes over bright, a shy smile in the corner of her mouth. ‘I want to try something,’ she says in a deceptively innocent tone. Zuko has mixed feelings about that tone. Even in the cadence of his own rasping voice, he knows that tone has the power to destroy him.
He wets his lips, keeping his shaking hands in his lap so they won’t do something stupid like touch his own cock again with these fingers, these powerfully curious fingers. ‘What?’ he asks but it comes out nearer a squeak. ‘What do you want to try?’
She cups his jaw in her hand and sparks jump between their skin. They each draw in a breathless gasp at the sensation. ‘Do you trust me?’
‘Always.’ She knows now, right? She must.
He doesn’t move but she says it anyway. ‘Hold still, okay?’
The last thing Zuko feels before his eyes slide closed is the cold tiles beneath him and the burning palm on his cheek. The last thing he sees before his eyes slide closed is his own face, leaning forward.
When their lips touch, fireworks couldn’t have produced a more combustive explosion. For a dizzy, sickening moment, Zuko thinks he is seeing double but Katara’s gasp and the urgency of her kiss drive everything but her lips from his mind. These lips he’d spent years becoming distracted by in meetings, distracted by when she was away and he read her letters, imagining how she would have spoken the words to him.
These lips.
He doesn’t realise he’s groaned it aloud until she shudders and reaches up to drag him closer, her breathless chuckle staining the air between them. He follows her down, the hand on her cheek running down her neck, pulling her closer. His cock aching, straining—
Wait.
He pulls back suddenly, blinking down at the waterbender frowning up at him, her lips gleaming and swollen. Her lips. Her chestnut hair. Her blue eyes. Her. ‘Zuko…’
He laughs and it’s his own throaty laugh. Pulling her to her feet, he lifts her and presses her back onto the lip of the counter. ‘Good idea, waterbender,’ he mutters into her lips as he kisses her again. Deeply. He wants her to not forget this. If this is all he ever gets of her, the only moment between them of passion and intimacy of the kind he’s craved ever since Mai told him he was in love with another girl and to just admit it already… If this is all they get.
He wants her to know. He wants her. He wants her to understand. Just this once.
He’s surprised by her tongue. He’s never been met like this, matched like this. He plunges forward, licking into her like he’s the desert and she’s the rain and she, in turn, blazes past his lips.
When she moans, the sound vibrating from her lips to his, he snarls and presses his hips into the cradle of her thighs.
Katara gasps like there’s lightning in her veins. ‘Mm…’
He’s breathing heavily, breathing like he’s just completed a set of advanced bending forms he practices each morning. Zuko presses his forehead against Katara’s, forcing himself to give her space, leaning back enough that she can get away. If she wants.
Once more he kisses the corner of her mouth, her closed eye lids, her temples, her… He presses his mouth into the hair by her temple and whispers, ‘Keep your eyes closed.’
She nods. She’s trembling, her whole body, everywhere it’s touching him, is trembling. It takes all his strength, all the hard sought control he learned in firebending to kiss her one last time and step away. He’s unsteady when he bends to pick up his pants, slides them on, buttons them over the painful straining of his cock.
He takes a moment, one more, to take her in. Her chest is rising and falling quickly, her lips are the colour of his nation. Zuko exhales sharply, running a hand through his hair. ‘Okay,’ he croaks.
Blearily, she opens her eyes.
They’re still blue but her pupils are so wide they’re closer to midnight than daytime skies. ‘What’s wrong?’
What’s wrong? ‘Nothing. I feel amazing.’ He laughs shakily, nervous now that she knows. She knows how he’s been hungering for her. ‘Great actually. Are you okay?’
She’s still frowning. ‘Why are you over there?’ Her eyes trail down his body and Zuko pulls the hem of his shirt a low as it will go. ‘Why are you wearing pants again?’
His brain is functioning at half capacity. Less. A fifth, an eighth. Systems are offline. Error… ‘We… We’re us again,’ he says stupidly, unnecessarily. She can see that. She can see.
‘I know.’ She sits up, slips down off the counter, takes a hesitant step forward. ‘I thought…’ Her face falls like snow melting into water. Then she’s forcing a smile onto her face and Zuko doesn’t understand. What’s wrong? he wants to ask. How can I fix it?
‘What’s…?’
She’s squinting at him, her cheeks flushed and Zuko takes an involuntary step forward. ‘I just… I thought…’ She gives a nervous laugh. ‘I was just wondering why you stopped.’
‘Why I stopped?’
‘Kissing. Why you stopped… kissing me.’
He glances out the window, back at her, up at the pressed metal ceiling, back at those probing blue eyes… ‘I didn’t want to, um, take liberties. With you. If you didn’t… want. To.’
Katara laughs and even Zuko cracks a smile. ‘Was I not clear enough? Do you want explicit consent, Firelord?’ She drifts a step closer. Her fingers trailing up his red cotton shirt. He catches them when they reach his chest and her grin broadens. ‘Yes, Zuko, I want you to keep kissing me.’
He doesn’t remember deciding to but he’s kissing her again and she’s climbing him, her hands twisted in the soft hair at the back of his head while his slide down, grip her round, fleshy arse and press her closer. More.
‘Kissing?’ he manages to ask when she breaks from his mouth long enough for him to form words. ‘Just kissing, right?’
The Southern Water Tribe Ambassador looks at him and presses her hips into his, grinning when he snarls out an expletive. ‘For now.’
She takes his hand, pulling him after her back into his bedroom. ‘For now?’
Zuko stiffens when she turns to him and grips him through his sleep pants. ‘Is there something else you need right now, Zuko?’
He can’t think. He’s darkly delighted at this side to her, this teasing, confident way she sketches the shape of him with soft touches then purposeful strokes and he can’t think. ‘Mmph.’
‘What was that, Firelord?’ she whispers, biting her bottom lip and he’s captivated. No wonder he’d never been able to capture the Avatar, not when his companion was the dictionary definition of captivating. He couldn’t have moved away if he tried. ‘What do you need?’
Control. He used to be good at it. Before he knew what Katara tasted like, what her hand around his cock felt like. She was all around him, like the tide. He was drowning. She was drowning him.
He grabbed her hips, pulling her flush against him, trapping her hand between them while he sucked kisses into her neck—
A brash knock at the door.
Zuko would burn the guard who interrupted him now.
‘Zuko? You feeling okay, buddy?’
Their faces fall at the same time. They can’t jump apart fast enough. ‘Sokka?’ Zuko calls, clearing his throat.
‘Yeah, can I come in? The Tribal Council is confused about why you had to cancel our meeting this morning only to meet with our Ambassador. You know what they’re like. All heartbroken, thinking the Firelord is playing favourites with the Southern Water Tribe. Is Katara in there?’
The Ambassador in question points at the closet. ‘Pants! Proper pants!’ she whisper-commands before turning to the door. ‘We’re just in the middle of something, Sokka,’ she calls, brushing her hair back and approaching the door. Zuko hid behind his closet door, yanking stiff sparring trousers up over his sleep pants. ‘It’s the South Sea trade routes again. We’re nearly done.’
‘Uh huh,’ the Water Tribe warrior drawls and Zuko’s face is flame red. ‘Well when you two finish nailing out the details, the Council are convening, and you should both be there.’
Katara whispers something that sounds like, ‘I’m going to kill you, keep your voice down.’ Sokka, however, sounds concerningly chipper. That’s not good. For anybody. Especially me, the Firelord thinks.
‘I’ll let them know you’ll be there in five,’ the Water Tribe man hollers and they can hear the satisfied, triumphant footfalls as he marches away, down the corridor.
Zuko feels a little queasy. He peers around his closet at the waterbender, rigid and clenching her fists by the bedroom door. ‘Katara?’
‘I’m going to kill him,’ she decides, yanking open the door and marching after her brother.
Snatching his formal robes from their hanger, Zuko follows her at a sprint. Either he’s about to cause an international incident or prevent one, either way, he better be dressed to do it.