Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It was still warm in August, on New Student Day. Sokka couldn’t say he truly missed the summers on Amaknak, which rarely reached 65 degrees, but even so, the fact that he could have worn a tank top to school here and not gotten goosebumps bothered him. It just reminded him that ‘here’ wasn’t home. Sokka shrugged on a flannel in defiance of the temperate weather and unlocked the front door of his dad’s old truck, next to which Katara was waiting for him impatiently. Sokka opened the passenger door for his sister. When she was settled, her backpack between her feet and his slung carelessly onto the back seats, he pulled out of their parking spot and made his way uncertainly through Boston’s busy, winding roads, still unfamiliar to him. 

Back at home, Sokka could look forward to drives filled with two-story, pitched-roof houses surrounded by brown-tipped grass. He could always see the rocky tundra around him. The roads were wide and luxurious, and were often right on the fishing-boat-filled water; everything was open. Here, in Boston, the streets were narrow. He was surrounded on all sides by antsy cars and tall brick buildings, probably built before Alaska was even a state. Sokka wasn’t sure he liked the narrowness of Boston. He wasn’t sure he liked big cities at all.

The siblings were silent for a few minutes. Sokka glanced at Katara whenever they pulled to a stop. He didn’t want her crying before she went into school—middle schoolers would notice any small detail like redness rimming her eyes. But Katara looked stoic. She’d gotten good at that over the past year. She didn’t fight with Sokka as much as they used to, either. It was scary to think that your last memory of someone might be a pointless squabble. 

Katara plugged her phone into the audio hack of the pickup and started playing an NPR politics podcast. Sokka breathed a sigh of relief as the melancholy silence between the two of them dissipated. Soon, Katara began to make clever quips about the day’s news, and Sokka joined in. He always forgot how funny Katara could be. He never forgot how smart she was, though. She wouldn’t let him forget.

“I’m glad they’re covering these new climate policies so thoroughly but I wish they wouldn’t try so hard to be neutral. It’s clearly a good thing to create cleaner jobs. A few weeks ago, I saw this Vox report about an Appalachian mining town that was given money to educate coal miners and they were able to convert their main revenue source into—“

“Katara, I admire your passion, but I’ve been parked in the lot for a few minutes now and we really need to get out.”

“Sorry! Good luck at orientation, love you!” Katara shouted, hopping out of the car.

“I love you, too,” Sokka shouted back, grinning. They hadn’t always said that every time they parted ways. But ever since Mom died, they said it to each other every chance they got.

As Sokka locked the pickup and followed after his sister, he realized he was actually looking forward to orientation. He was ready to find friends here. The summer had kinda sucked without anyone but Katara, Dad, and occasionally Dad’s friend Bato to hang out with. He missed sailing and long hikes with Yue and the gang back in Unalaska. He couldn’t help but imagine the things he’d miss now that he was stuck living in Boston: Yue’s first facial tattoo (she wanted to get it on her twentieth birthday), seeing Gran Gran on Sundays at the Eastern Orthodox church, Katara’s visits to Hama at the nursing home to keep her company and learn a little bit of Unangam Tunuu, and late-night meetups with his friends at abandoned lots where they would graffiti and eat disgustingly sour candy.

***

After a big presentation in the auditorium on graduation requirements and student resources, the new students were split by grade. The hundreds of seventh graders were divided into groups of student volunteers, and then the other grades, each with significantly fewer new students, were assigned classrooms in which to meet their guides.

There were around twenty sophomores in Sokka’s assigned classroom and their guide was running late. Sokka chose a seat in the back of the room so he could doodle. He wasn’t embarrassed by his drawings—they were just abstract patterns—but he always looked silly while he drew, tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth, and he would rather not bring attention to that. As more students came in, they began to cluster near the front of the room. He was about to get up and join the chatter when someone sat down next to him, a bald guy in a red hoodie. Sokka did a double-take and realized the guy wasn’t bald, he was wearing a skin-tone balaclava. Sokka’s curiosity got the better of his politeness: he turned back to the kid in the mask, sort of staring and sort of wondering if he should introduce himself. 

“It’s for scars,” the masked guy said in a gruff voice, noticing Sokka’s gaze. 

“What?”

“I knew it would get stares. Might as well get it out of the way: it’s a compression mask for burns. I won’t need it by the end of the school year.” He enunciated his words a bit strangely with very flat and cut-off vowels as if English wasn’t comfortable in his mouth.

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s nobody’s fault but mine.”

Sokka raised his eyebrows at that strange response. “Still sucks, though,” he said, trying to salvage the flow of their exchange.

The kid nodded and turned to face the front of the room, which was still guide-less, effectively ending their conversation.

Tapping a rhythm on his desk, Sokka belatedly tagged on, “You could…introduce yourself?”

“If you’re so insistent, then you go first,” the kid spat out, pairing his words with some serious side-eye game.

“Are you trying not to make friends?” Sokka said with a forced chuckle.

“No, I’m just an asshole.”

Sokka really did laugh at that, though he wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be a joke. “I’m Sokka. I just came here from Unalaska. It’s a city on the tail of Alaska,” he said, drawing a map in the air with his finger as he spoke, dotting the archipelago with his pointer.

The kid sighed in defeat. “My name’s Zuko.” 

“And where did you come from, Zuko?” Sokka prompted him, lilting his voice as if he was talking to a five-year-old.

“My cousin dropped me off in his car.”

“You really don’t want to tell me where you’re from?” 

“It’s complicated, okay? I used to split my time between school in Beijing and breaks in Bangkok. But I’ve been in Boston with my uncle for almost a month now.”

“Wow. So you went to boarding school? How many languages do you know? My sister wants me to start learning Unangam Tunuu with her but I think French would be way more usef—“

The door slammed open and in came their guide, ten minutes late. “Hello, new sophomores,” she said, organizing stacks of paper at the teacher’s desk. “I apologize for my tardiness. Momentarily, I’ll be passing out your temporary MBTA tickets, a print-out of your class schedules, and an attendance sheet I expect all of you to sign. Make sure you take the papers with your name on them.”

Sokka was sort of charmed by this rude stranger, though he didn’t know why. Maybe it was his golden-brown eyes or his husky voice. Or maybe his rudeness reminded him a little bit of a cat their family had when Sokka was a toddler. Whatever it was, Zuko was the most interesting person Sokka had met since his family moved down to Boston. 

“Well, nice to meet you,” Sokka whispered.

But Zuko gave him no response. Maybe the guy wasn’t so charming after all.

***

“Katara, Sokka! How was your first day of school?”

“It was just new student orientation, Dad!” replied Katara, always eager to correct people, “It wasn’t even the first day.”  Hakoda gave Katara a look and she actually answered him: “It was fine. I’m lucky the school starts in seventh grade, so everyone’s new in my grade.”

“But when I say it, you don’t believe me?”

Katara lovingly rolled her eyes. “I’m just nervous about finding my ‘people,’ you know?”

“Did you meet anyone at orientation? That goes for you, too, Sokka.”

“Not really,” Katara jumped in, “It was a big auditorium presentation and then a tour. Not much time to talk.”

“We were put in smaller classrooms,” Sokka replied to his father, “The guy I sat next to was really rude. Hopefully, that’s not an omen for the whole school year.”

Katara rolled her eyes again, this time acerbically. “Oh, please, you’ll make friends in the first week. Everyone always loooves you and you’re just put off that there’s someone out there who doesn’t.” There was jealousy in her voice, and Sokka wasn’t sure how to feel.

“Katara! Don’t say that,” Dad said, sighing. “It’s a fresh start, in a new place. Let’s just appreciate that.”

Outwardly, Sokka grunted in agreement, if only to take Dad’s side, vying for his favoritism at the expense of Katara. But he couldn’t help but mentally scoff at what Dad had said. Back home, their family had a real house and a grassy backyard where all of the street’s kids would gather to play after dinner. Dad had been a commercial fisherman on Dutch Harbor, which meant he woke before dawn but also meant he could pick up the kids from school while Mom was working her unpredictable hours at the hospital. Dad had actually gotten a degree in mechanical engineering in Anchorage before he settled on fishing. Fishing was what Dad’s father had done, and his grandfather before him, and in Alaska, fishing jobs were well-paying and well-regulated. Plus, living in Unalaska wasn’t too expensive and fishing in the same waters his father did had guaranteed that Dad would be able to take care of his parents. Once he met Kya, Sokka and Katara’s mom, the deal was sealed. He was staying in Unalaska. Together they built a nice life and a nice family together. 

When Dad, still in mourning, decided they were getting a fresh start, he brushed off his degree and got a job in Boston that involved less being on boats and more doing math about boats. But a starting job still didn’t pay for more than a walk-up apartment in a neighborhood filled with college students talking loudly and drunkenly at 4 AM on a school night.

Sokka knew his dad well enough to know that Mom’s passing and maritime engineering opportunities in Boston weren’t the only reasons why Dad had chosen to transplant himself and his children to the east coast. But Sokka couldn’t read Dad well enough to know the full story and he wasn’t mad that he didn’t. Curious, maybe, but not mad. And as much as Sokka missed the simple, white house and the fresh tundra air and the smell of fish on his dad’s clothes, Sokka could feel what Dad felt: the need to start over, the need to become unknown, the need not to be defined by a tragedy. And if his late-night chats with Katara had been truthful, then she felt it, too.

“Won’t you miss it?” She’d asked Sokka once. They were lying on the ground of Sokka’s bedroom with their heads on pillows next to each other and their bodies in opposite directions.

“What? My friends? The harbor? Gran Gran?”

“Well, all of those things, of course, but won’t you miss the community ? What are the odds we’ll meet any Unangan people in Massachusetts? Or any natives at all?”

“I honestly haven’t thought about it much. I’m sure there are, like, organizations you can join.”

“You haven’t thought about it?” Katara pushed herself into her stomach with her elbows and looked down at him. “It’s all I think about. We’ll be distanced from our culture and… and the people who ‘get it,’ you know?”

“You’ll find friends who get you.”

“No, I mean, no matter how empathetic and interested the people we meet are, we’ll always have to explain our experience. It’ll never be an automatic. Like, with Yue. We never had to explain the deep stuff—how our identity affects us on a fundamental level. It immediately felt like she was my sister the moment I met her.”

“I guess…Are you mad Dad’s making us move?”

Katara sighed and rolled back onto her back. “Not really. I don’t like leaving this behind, but… I get it. This house is painful, sometimes. I just don’t understand why we couldn’t have moved to Anchorage or something.”

***

Lu Ten drove Zuko back to their townhouse just a block away from the Charles River. Like every home Zuko had ever had, it was old, beautiful, and the monthly mortgage payment was more than some people made in a year. But unique to this house was the coziness he felt whenever he stepped inside. Zuko had ended up in Boston for a myriad of reasons: it had some of the best pediatric burn centers in the world, some of the best public schools in America (his father had always planned for him to go to university in America, anyway), and most importantly, Boston had his Uncle, who was eager to pull Zuko away from his father.

“Welcome home, Zuko!” Uncle shouted from the kitchen when Zuko opened the door. “I made tea.”

“I’ll take you up on the tea, Dad,” Lu Ten shouted back, “Zuko?”

“No thanks. I need to get these fucking garments off,” Zuko said, stomping upstairs to do so.

The best and worst part of Zuko’s day was coming home and taking off his compression garments for half an hour. It was relieving for his left arm and face to be free, but it also meant he had to look at his burns. He had gotten used to his legs. They had some discoloration and a weird texture but his joints and muscles worked fine and had healed in just a few weeks with some treatment. What Zuko really dreaded was when Uncle Iroh helped him treat his face. The burns that covered the left side of his face, chest, and arm were third-degree, but his eyelid, eye, and ear were functional aside from some photosensitivity and slightly reduced hearing. He had needed skin grafting on all of his third-degree burn spots. The skin graft procedure was the second most agonizing experience of Zuko’s life. The first, well, that’s easy to guess.

Zuko hated treating his face the most because the scars were just so…obvious. The cleaning and lotions were a little painful, but that wasn’t why Zuko hated the process. It was the way Uncle had such concern and focus while he applied them, as if Zuko was fragile. And he hated looking in the mirror because it reminded him of the permanence of this whole thing. His face used to make his sister’s friends giggle shyly when they passed him, used to convince the headmistress not to call his parents when he got into a fight at school. But now, whether his compression mask was on or off, it would garner stares and double-takes and people talking at the ground instead of looking him in the eye. 

Today was the first time Zuko had been around anyone besides the doctors at the children’s hospital or Uncle and Lu Ten for any meaningful amount of time. The mask was frustrating in social situations, almost mannequin-esque in appearance. Zuko wondered what that annoying guy, Sokka, would think of his face underneath all the layers.

After he got his compression garments back on, Zuko would do physical therapy. He tried to do his PT alone, but Uncle and Lu Ten loved to pop in and remind him about it as if he couldn’t handle himself. Zuko usually met his Uncle’s nagging with “If you come into my room one more time I’ll never drink your tea again,” and met Lu Ten’s with “I can’t wait ‘til Harvard starts move-in so you need to drive a few miles to bother me.” His family’s concern was tooth-grindingly annoying. Sometimes he’d scream into his pillows when it—the coddling or his own insecurity, he never quite knew which—became too much to bear.

But the truth was, Zuko might have hated needing special care, but he loved that there were people who cared about him. Uncle Iroh’s luxurious townhouse was full of more love than Zuko’s Beijing dorm, Bangkok home, and Phuket vacation house combined. And certainly more love than in his father’s highrise offices in Tokyo, San Francisco, Seoul, Mumbai, Shanghai, New York, Ho Chi Minh City, London, Berlin, and Zuko needed to stop thinking about his father. About his father’s absence. About his anger, his cigarettes, his fiery glare. The scorching vacations in Phuket were the only times he ever saw his father. Zuko also shouldn’t think about Phuket and the old vacation house that was far too flammable for a father who, just one time, put out those expensive cigarettes on his wife’s skin. The wife who ran out of the house in horror, but not surprise. And the father who dropped that weaponized cigarette and stormed after her. But skin doesn’t really put out cigarettes. And their teenage son was asleep on the couch, and their daughter was at the beach with Mai and Ty Lee, and their son was asleep on the couch and fuck. Zuko hated crying, especially since he had just replaced the dressings and garments on his face. Fuck.

One day, crying would be easier. Going to Uncle’s arms might feel allowed. Looking in the mirror might reveal only faded memories and new beginnings. But it was so fresh right now. And Zuko needed to release his anger, this rage he had contained within himself far before that day at the beach house. So he went out into the back of the house to the floral bushes lining the small grassy yard and started shouting and thrusting his fists into the honeysuckle and tangling his arms in the thin, delicate branches, and all he could think about was how when September comes next week, the flowers will start to brown at the edges and fall off, so what does it matter if he breaks off some branches now?

Chapter Text

As September neared, the air started to feel more like home. Sokka’s cheeks and nose numbed in the harsh breeze. 

“Kataraaaaaaaa!” Sokka shouted, fighting the urge to honk the truck’s horn, “Get out here! You could never live down the embarrassment of being late on your FIRST DAY at a NEW SCHOOL!”

Katara sprinted down the stairs and out of the building, throwing herself into the passenger seat. “Sorry,” she said, breathlessly, “I couldn’t decide if I should wear Mom’s necklace.”

“Katara,” Sokka replied, turning the key and shifting to drive, “It looks great on you. She would have loved to see you in it.” And he meant it. He tried not to tear up, since driving requires clear vision.

Sokka remembered Mom in that necklace. It had belonged to Gran Gran, and it had been a wedding gift to Mom when she and Dad got married. He remembered playing with it as a toddler while Mom held him, and her scolding him.

“You’re going to choke me if you keep tugging it like that!” She would say. But dad would laugh, and then mom would laugh, and he would realize she wasn’t really mad.

Sokka remembered her soft, low voice and her hair which always smelled of vanilla-scented shampoo, always styled to be half-up, the way Katara does her hair now. Even a year ago, when his growth spurt had made him taller than her, he would hug her the same way he did as a child, feeling her heartbeat and getting a whiff of her hair. As a kid, he used to put his ear to her heart. When had grown to a head taller than her, he felt it in his sternum. A year ago, she was still alive. A year ago, Sokka didn’t know he was going to lose her. As he stared down the road, eyes fatigued, he realized she hadn’t even seen him get his driver’s license.

***

Zuko had not realized how unprepared he was for his first real day at this new school until he was in the drop-off line, suffocating in Lu Ten’s shiny car.

“You gotta get out,” Lu Ten said, nudging his cousin with his forearm. “I can’t hold up the line forever.”

Zuko snapped out of his spiraling for long enough to growl, “Don’t fucking touch me!” and then he returned to his oncoming panic attack. He could see himself in the side view mirrors and he was freaking out. Why did his garments have to be skin-colored? Isn’t that weird? Could the kids walking by the window already see him? Were they staring? Or laughing? And Zuko felt a suctioning breeze as Lu Ten opened the passenger door and pulled Zuko out of the car.

“You’ll draw attention to yourself if you come into class late.” He said, leaning on the hood of the car, “And I know you don’t want that.”

Zuko had to admit Lu Ten made a good point. He stepped out of the passenger side, shoving past Lu Ten, clutching his backpack straps like a lifeline. Unfallen tears prickled in his eyes and he walked through the big glass doors of the school as quickly as possible, hoping if he moved fast enough, no-one would have the chance to look at him.

***

Suki liked to get to school at least thirty minutes early, grab stuff from her locker, and head to the bench in the main hallway, the one painted with Artemis shooting a stag (all of the benches had paintings of mythological scenes on them; they were an alumni gift). This was where her friends, all of whom she had met either through aikido or freshman choir, gathered every day. 

As soon as Suki came into the main hallway, Mingxia leapt from the bench and waved her down. “Suki, please help me! Would you rather sleep with a super attractive person who sounds like Jar Jar Binks or someone ugly who sounds like Ewan McGregor as Obi Wan Kenobi?” She asked the question frantically, like this was a life-or-death scenario.

“I…plead the fifth?”

“Please, Suki, I need this. Meilin would rather fuck someone hot who says ‘meesa horny’ than someone with the smooth, buttery voice of Ewan McGregor and I need to know I’m not crazy for thinking Jar Jar is the worse option.” 

“…would he talk while we have sex?”

“YES! Imagine what a Jar Jar moan sounds like and evaluate for yourself.”

“Euuugh,” said Rickie, walking up to Suki and Mingxia. “Ugly but with Obi Wan’s voice for sure. I can close my eyes.”

“THANK. YOU.” Mingxia shouted, startling half the people in the hallway.

“Okay, I’m too disturbed by your life choices to continue this conversation. Go harass Rickie while I wipe my memories of this conversation.”

AP US History was Suki’s first class of the day and thanks to Jar Jar Binks, she was fifteen minutes early to it. This was actually beneficial: get to class early, chat with the teacher, next thing you know they let you turn in an assignment late because they trust you. 

A few other students were already in the classroom, too. A bunch of girls carrying swim bags were gathered around their friend’s desk, talking about their first swim and dive meet of the season. Two guys in the back of the class were airdropping deep fried memes to every nearby iPhone. After receiving one too many Megamind screencaps, Suki switched her AirDrop settings to “Contacts Only.” Before Suki could get fully freaked out by the way the eyes of the George Washington portrait above the teacher’s desk were following her, someone walked up to her.

“Hey, is this seat taken?” a boy asked, gesturing to the desk next to hers. He was a scrawny guy with an undercut and a resting happy face.

“What? Uh, sure.”

“Good seat choice, by the way. Center of the third row is the place to be.”

“Too far away to be scrutinized, but close enough not to seem lazy.”

“Great minds think alike! Uh…I’m Sokka, by the way.”

“I’m Suki.”

“Is it just me, or are George Washington’s eyes following me?”

“I was just thinking the same thing! Why is there even a portrait of him up here? Seems sort of worship-y. I bet you he’s gonna wax poetic about Washington’s farewell address in about two weeks.”

“‘Washington was such a great leader because he chose the future of the country over his own ego. And he even let his slaves be free after he died! Wow, how brave.’ Or something like that.” They both smiled at each other, silently laughing.

“This might be a weird question,” Sokka said, “but are most of the classes this big? This room must fit, like, forty people.”

“Honestly, yeah, except for the less popular classes like AP Chinese or Ancient Greek.”

“It’s still insane to me how many course options there are here.”

“I mean, the alumni donate tons of money and the school is just massive.”

“Yeah, before today I couldn’t even imagine what a high school with thousands of students looked like. My old school had, like, 200 people tops.”

“You’re new?” Suki asked. “Do you happen to have second lunch?”

“Yeah.”

“Any lunch plans?”

“Nope.”

“Perfect! None of my friends are in second lunch with me. Mind if I join you? Let me see your fourth bell classroom and I can meet you there, if you don’t mind.”

“I definitely don’t mind,” Sokka said, grinning. Suki caught his eyes and his smile was contagious. So was the warmth she felt in her cheeks.

***

Zuko was in English class before the bell rang. He’d thought he had read his schedule wrong when it said the class they had during the lunch bell was 15 minutes longer than every other bell. But that was how fourth bell actually worked, inexplicably, so he had 55 minutes to count down until lunch, where he could look forward to sitting alone and hoping nobody looked at him. 

Zuko’s first three classes had all been the same: he shuffled into class, the students glanced at him awkwardly, he explained he had moved to Boston to be treated for burns, and he said it all in the angriest possible way he could manage without offending his teachers. It was a solid method so far.

Zuko bent over to open his backpack. When he looked up, someone familiar was sitting next to him. More specifically, Sokka from orientation. 

Sokka’s bright grin was already irritating Zuko’s eyes as he said, “Hi, Zuko! Nice to see you again!”

“Hi.” Zuko pulled himself up and pretended to look at his planner. Sokka turned to the girl behind him and began to introduce himself with a charisma most people could only dream of. By the time the bell rang for class to begin, Sokka had everyone in the desks around him leaning in as he made a joke. “Jesus,” Zuko muttered to himself. This was going to be a long year, and those extra 15 minutes were going to add up.

***

Over in the cafeteria, Katara was having her first day of school, too. 

Katara liked to think she was a pragmatic girl. She knew she wasn’t going to make a new friends off the bat. She wandered into the lunchroom with no expectations, gripping her collection of Emily DIckinson poems as a lifeline in case she needs to eat alone. This turned out to be unnecessary when a small boy sprang up seemingly out of thin air beside her. He had messy black hair and huge, gray, puppy-dog eyes. 

“H-Hi,” the boy said. “Sorry. My–...sh-she…this isn’t…Uh, I’m Aang. My name is Aang”

Aang glanced behind him at a girl a few yards away. The girl was cackling almost maniacally at Aang’s bumbling, and it registered in Katara’s mind that she might have shoved him toward her.

“I’m Katara. Are you also–”

“Seventh grade? Yeah.”

“Cool. Me, too.”

“Uh, i-is that Emily Dickinson? She wrote ‘Hope is the thing with feathers,’ right? That’s a nice poem.”

“Yeah! My favorite poem right now is ‘I dwell in Possibility.’ I could find it in the book if you want to read it.”

“Sure, let me grab Toph first.” Aang ran over to the girl who was laughing at him. Katara’s cheeks heated up–she had forgotten she was being watched. Not watched, she realized as Toph got closer, but more listened to, since Toph held a cane with a visual impairment indicator. 

After the trio had gotten themselves situated at a lunch table, Katara properly introduced herself to Toph. Aang and Toph were a bit of an odd couple. Aang was bright and friendly, while Toph was blunt and acerbic.

“How did you two meet each other?” Katara asked. They must have been childhood friends to be so different and yet so close.

“Twinkle-toes?” Toph clarified, “We met, like, two seconds ago, when I pushed him into you.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I almost tripped over him while he was frozen in the middle of the hallway, rehearsing what to say to you.”

Aang was pointedly looking anywhere but at Katara. Toph whispered, “What’s he doing?”

“Pretending you didn’t tell me that embarrassing story,” Katara fake-whispered back. The girls started cracking up. Aang ate dumplings silently, his face turning violently red. Not that Katara noticed.

***

Zuko left for lunch with an American Literature syllabus ( The Scarlet Letter, Walden, The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, A Catcher in the Rye, House Made of Dawn , and A Raisin in the Sun were all now laid out for the year) and a bubbly teenager tagging behind him, along with a girl said bubbly teenager had met in AP US History, or APUSH, as they called it. Apparently America spent a lot of time teaching about America.

The bubbly teenager, who preferred his given name, Sokka, had insisted Zuko sit with him. Zuko suspected Sokka was doing this more because he refused to be disliked than out of any real interest in Zuko. 

“I’m Suki,” said APUSH girl once they were seated.

“Zuko,” he replied acerbically.

“You seem like a fighter. Know any aikido or jiu jitsu? I just recently picked up jiu jitsu.” She asked this question with a barely-contained smile. She was hoping, he realized, she was about to find a kindred spirit.

“No.” This was not a lie. Zuko did pointedly avoid the fact that he had taken kickboxing classes (Muay Thai, mostly) since he was 7 years old.

“Suki invited me to come to the gym with her on Friday. You could come with! I don’t have much experience, either,” Sokka said as they found a small table to sit at in the caf.

“No.”

“Damn, okay then,” Suki muttered under her breath. “Don’t have to be so rude about it.”

“What did you say?” Anger boiled up inside of Zuko.

“Nothing.”

“No, because I’m pretty sure you said something . You’re so fucking stupid—you think I can fight in these?” Zuko growled, gesturing to his garments.

“Geez, sorry.” Suki said, sounding more resigned than sorry.

“I have to wear these fucking things 23 hours a day and I can’t even eat fucking lunch without being reminded of this bullshit.” Zuko was definitely shouting now, but he couldn’t bring himself to be embarrassed. His blood boiled. “Bitch.”

Zuko stormed away, grabbing his lunch box violently.

“What the hell, dude?” Sokka shouted after him, holding Suki back from getting up to land a punch.

Zuko didn’t look back. He ate lunch next to his locker as regret sank in.

***

The last thirty minutes of English were incredibly tense. The class did an icebreaker that consisted of filling out a bingo sheet of classmates’ traits (someone who wasn’t born in Massachusetts, someone who has a dog, someone who is vegetarian). Zuko and Sokka stuck to opposite sides of the room.

***

When Zuko got home, he didn’t want to talk to Lu Ten or Iroh. For the first time, possibly ever, the only person he wanted to talk to was Azula. He wanted to vent in his native language to someone who would understand the boiling anger inside him. Unfortunately, it was 4 AM in Beijing, where Azula still went to school, so he pulled up LINE and settled for a multi-paragraph text. He knew she wouldn’t respond, but he also knew she would read the whole thing. Somewhere on the other side of the world, she would understand him.

Zuko felt the sudden and urgent need to rip his skin off. To tear out his hair and grind his teeth into stubs and crack his rib cage in half right through the middle and turn himself inside out. It was like a beast inside of him, clawing at his bone and muscle and so close to breaking through the skin but never quite reaching. An inability to fully release. An inability to express it to anyone. It was tense and jittery and internal and external and he didn’t know how to make the feeling go away. He punched and kicked the air. He bent his nails as he tried to rip apart his pillows. He clenched his abdominal muscles so hard it felt like his intestines would burst. And none of it released the tension. So he just cried and screamed and cried. What else was there to do?

***

Sokka still took Suki up on her offer to do some aikido on Friday afternoon.

“I gotta warn you,” Sokka said with unearned confidence. “I may not have much experience but I am bigger and stronger than you, being male and all, so I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Ding ding ding! That’s my misogyny bell, and you just set it off.”

“Okay. Let’s settle this on the mat, then.”

“If you have the balls, go for it,” Suki said with a smirk. 

Needless to say, Sokka had his ass handed to him.

“First lesson,” Suki said. “Never underestimate your opponent.”

“Touché.”

“Alright, let’s start with how to fall properly. I don’t want to see you hit your head on the ground again"

***

"You need to think of your opponent as a source of energy. The conflict points where they touch you are your opportunity to redirect that force by taking the path of least resistance. Here, grab my wrist. I’ll show you what I mean.” Sokka lightly tugged Suki by the wrist. She stepped to the side, pulling Sokka out of balance immediately. “See?”

Suki eventually proposed a water break. Sokka put in his earbuds and started listening to some music as they did stretches.

“Hey, I’m still sorry about Zuko. It’s my fault for introducing him to you. He really shouldn’t have called you that. I’ve been trying to talk to him but he avoided me all week.”

“It’s fine, Sokka. Ooh, what are you listening to?” Sokka linked up her airpods with his phone and let her scroll through his playlist. Sokka mainly listened to rap and R&B--pretty much all of To Pimp a Butterfly and Tupac’s greatest hits were on there.

“This is solid.”

“Thanks.”

“But you need to get some more female artists on there. Little Simz, Lauryn Hill, noname, Princess Nokia. You’ll thank me.”

“I think my sister, Katara, would love you,” Sokka said, grinning and leaning in towards her. “Here, I’ll add you to the playlist and you can put some stuff in.”

Sokka scooted closer to her and he turned the phone towards him. They were both holding his phone, his hand over hers. Their cheeks were practically brushing. He could feel her breath against his skin. As Sokka took his phone, added Suki to the playlist, and pocketed it, they looked into each others eyes for a second too long. Sokka glanced away. Did he look down at her lips? Shit. Probably not, right? His heart was pounding in his ears and he knew it wasn't just from working out. Sokka began to glance around the room, suddenly not sure what to do with his hands. Or his eyes. Was it weird to stand up now?

“Um. Wanna practice defending against an attack from behind?” Asked Suki, abruptly.

“Sure.”