notes: i have a thing for these two doing each other's hair, and the comics made me sad.
He feels like a child, playing dress-up in his father's clothes; months of intermittent starvation have hardly given him the figure to fill out ceremonial robes, and he's afraid that he'll trip over the hem right on the dais. Who in seven hells designed this thing, anyway? It hangs heavily from his prone limbs, a stifling cage during the torrid midsummer.
"Stop squirming," Mai chides as she sweeps the hair off his neck. Preparing him should be work for a retinue of servants, but Azula banished them all during her mercifully brief rule, and this moment seems to necessitate the intimacy of her hands on his scalp, tying a ribbon around his topknot. Agni, he's missed her, more than he can express; owes her more than he can ever repay. "There," she says, triumphant, "at least you don't have that mop hanging in your face anymore."
"It's not a mop," Zuko counters indignantly, then softens his voice. "Do you think... I'll do a good job? Being Fire Lord?" It's his greatest fear— failing to meet his people's expectations, failing the way his father always predicted he would. He's so young, barely more than a boy, untrained for the role and unsuited for politics. A desire to restore the nation's greatness is all he has.
"You can't do a worse job than Azula," she reminds him, fiddling with the sash at his waist. It's such a wifely act he almost smiles— the prospect of marrying her, sometime in the near future, is just about the only thought that brings him joy lately. "Or Ozai, who let the peasants die from crop failure while he bought enormous new military machines and commissioned fire-breathing statues of himself."
"That's true," he admits, feeling a little heartened. He does have an absolutely terrible string of dictators for relatives. As long as he refrains from invading nearby principalities, burning continents to the ground, or challenging hapless teenagers to Agni Kai's, he'll be the best ruler in the past hundred years.
"Besides," Mai says, "I'll be by your side, you idiot. I'm not leaving you here to mess things up alone." She touches cool fingers to his scar— to him, the height of Ozai's reign— and kisses his shriveled ear. He does not flinch, and kisses her back hard, drinking in her pliant, needy mouth for an all-too-brief moment. "Go," she rasps, finally disentangling herself. "The avatar's waiting behind the curtain."