A/N: Hey everyone! Long time, no see. I've actually moved myself over to AO3, but I'd like to still post on here for at least my next few fics just so anyone who follows me can transition over to AO3 with me, or something. My username there is "eighteenavenues," and most of the work I have published there has already been published here.
In any case, here's some Zutara. I anticipate that there will be at least another chapter (two?) to this fic! It certainly isn't complete as is.
He is not in love with the Waterbender. He's not, he's just intrigued by the way her silk soft body moves under his fingers, how her the color of her eyes ripple more like a puddle than a storm. She's all movement, motion, measure, and always with this impossible grace.
He's not in love with Katara, he just has a lot to learn from her.
Her voice is like liquid running down his spine, pooling by his tailbone as she whispers, "hello," and then pauses.
And if he had an ounce of sense, he'd turn and kiss her now, he'd knot his fingers in that waterfall of hair and pull her closer, closer.
"Hi," he responds.
Her fingers probe at his shoulders, releasing tension with gentle massage. "What's wrong, Zuko?" she asks, and he can't very well say "nothing" because those damn healing hands are currently working on the evidence that everything is wrong. Nothing is right. It's midnight and he's been sitting out here for hours, half waiting for her and half praying she'd stay away.
Her thumbs continue their circular motion, pushing into hardened tissue and loosening the knots slowly. "What's wrong?" she repeats.
He pulls away from her sharply. Her hands fall, useless, to her sides and she mumbles a cry of surprise before she is able to collect herself. He gets up, all rigid power and brittle anger. "Don't-" she starts, but he already has, so she doesn't finish the sentence.
Don't leave me, she wants to say, or, don't be like this. Maybe: don't forget that I'm here for you.
But he's walking away, exactly like he always does, consumed in his own thoughts.
"Zuko," she tries to say in an even tone, but the wavering edge of her voice betrays her, "please."
His back is to her. He's not walking anymore, he's just standing as if waiting for the next burst of angst to propel him further away from the girl slumped over scorched ground, arms stretched towards him as if she never learned not to touch the glowing fire.
He squares his shoulders and tries to keep from his mind what a disappointment he's being to her, "I have a nation to run, Waterbender," he says, "I don't have time for…" but he doesn't finish the sentence because his lips can't exactly remember the tightness of his schedule. She's danced her way towards his back, her arms wrapped around him and he can feel the hot dampness of her cheek against his shoulder blades.
"We can go slow," she offers, her mouth full of red fabric. She pulls him around, a slow arc that somehow ends with her nose brushing his, her mouth freed from is shirt and aiming for his lips.
"I love," he says, his voice catching, "I love," and the look in her eyes, something like hope combined with something like forgiveness, the look in her eyes is about to kill him. "I love Mai."
Their noses are still touching, but now she's bristling with rejection and hurt, "that's not," she spits, "what you said last night."
"It's the truth," he raises his voice to match her anger.
She could move her hand an inch and have a dagger at his throat, the cold point of it could stab him straight through before he could even blink. This occurs to her and her fist clenches, but then she decides to speak her daggers instead, and the water she collected in the interim moments dissipates. "Then why'd you kiss me?" He doesn't have an answer. His silence pounds against her and she's moving the water from the lake without meaning to, a rhythmic sway in time with her pounding heart. "Why'd you tell me I'm beautiful?"
And he has to bite back the answer of "because you are." He has to clamp his jaw shut to avoid saying the wrong thing. Instead he says, "This kiss didn't mean anything. Nothing I said meant anything. Don't read too much into it," and he prays that she's too busy getting her heart broken to hear the obvious tone of his lies.
There are tears in her eyes and he stares at the ground to escape their accusation, "you're lying to me, stop lying," she mumbles. All the water she was controlling slaps to the ground. It's a sudden movement, all stumble and no grace, the opposite of her bending usually. "You're lying."
He walks away, this time making it inside the palace before turning back to see the silhouette of the Waterbender, her body shaking in the moonlight. Even from a distance, he can hear her sobs.
He doesn't know if he whispers or just thinks it, but his mouth tastes like "I'm sorry," and regret for the rest of the night.
:::
In the morning, she's all icy stares and brittle words. He can't look at her without feeling his cheeks heat from embarrassment and she can't stop looking at him with the express purpose of his humiliation. He has half a mind to tell the palace guards to remove her but that would feel like admitting defeat, or something, so he doesn't.
Mai kisses him good morning, her lips dry against his and her hand brushing the hem of his shirt as if she could strip him of it right here and now. The Waterbender's look of contempt burns something in the pit of his stomach, so he pulls his girlfriend closer and kisses her back just hard enough to forget everything that isn't red and hot and fire.
"I love you," Mai says flatly, which is honestly the only way Mai can say anything and it strikes him as strange that he never noticed that before.
He feels her eyes, those blue, blue eyes, and they melt the words off his lips. He can't say anything at all anymore, or at least anything right, so he offers Mai orange juice and hopes she doesn't notice his silence. Of course, his bad luck holds, and he ends up accidentally dumping the juice down her chest. "I'm sorry," he tells his girlfriend. It's the first honest thing he's said to her in a long time.
The Waterbender wordlessly pulls the orange juice from Mai's blouse, tugging away the dripping stain. Mai smiles in thanks, and he would as well if not for the small flick of her fingers that sends the sphere of juice splattering on his pants.
"Oops," she says.
:::
The afternoon arrives and with it comes the nagging feeling that he should've left Azula with the crown. It's not that she would've been a good Fire Lord, he thinks, but that he doesn't particularly care to be the Fire Lord at all. He reminds himself that he is thankful for his title, that assuming it meant foiling his father's plot to destroy much of humanity. He reminds himself of the time spent in Ba Sing Se, the humiliation of living without servants and the tedium of more normal careers. Still, the lifestyle from the Earth Kingdom city has a certain simplicity he now craves.
Leave the complexity for Azula, he thinks, leave the scheming and the fighting to her. Leave the two women, both of whom own a little piece of him, both of whom have been promised his love- but Azula can't take that, not even if he crowned her Fire Lord.
He's gotten himself into this mess, he thinks, and it's his job alone to get out of it.
The person he was supposed to be listening to coughs slightly, awkwardly waiting a response. "Um, yes," Zuko says, shaking his head as if he could clear his muddled mind through force, "yes, the Fire Kingdom will pay you reparations for your destroyed cabbages."
The man thanks him profusely and Zuko smiles a little. At the very least, being Fire Lord isn't as thankless a job as trying to destroy the Avatar.