For Zutaraang Week - Day 3 - Myth / Mythology
Aang traces his fingers along the edge of the mask. "Woah." His eyes are wide and Zuko notes, not for the first time, that they are deceptively young.
"This is it, isn't it?" He breathes new life onto the old relic, fingers rising across the blinding white grin – grimace – to the jutting brow. The wood fashioned into exaggerated features is splintered, but the memory suddenly, startlingly clear.
Zuko nods, arms crossed at the edge of the cavernous room. It's too cold in here - appropriate for a museum, a mausoleum. Exactly the place where that mask belongs now. Somewhere in the years, in the scraps of recollections of that time, he only managed to associate that thing with humiliation. Scavenging, petty justice, petty revenge. The most alone he's ever been.
His uncle's words ring like they're stamped across the peeling paint on its forehead. Who are you, and what do you want?
Aang continues his inspection, and Zuko wishes he would stop touching the thing, expression awestricken. It's a dime a dozen theatre mask, for goodness' sake.
"You rescued me." His voice too full and overflowing with wonder, just like his eyes, like his heart. He takes one glance back towards Zuko. "I mean, you were terrifying, but still. You remember, right?"
Do you think we could have been friends, too?
"Of course I remember." Of course I remember. Of course I remember, you idiot. Who looks the person hunting them down in the face and says that? Aang is still looking at him now, still looking through him now.
Zuko returns the stunned, stunning smile.
Aang being Aang, he has to ruin the moment. A flighty half-shrug. "You did also put your broadswords to my neck."
"You did what?" Katara's head snaps up from where she has been observing the glass-encased strategic maps in the centre of the room. Those relics can definitely stay relics.
In a swift glide of steps, she's next to him (sometimes she acts like him, and he like her, and Zuko thinks untangling it would be like trying to unpick his heartstrings). Katara's hands on the mask lack the intimate knowledge, but not the delicacy, the kind he still can't quite tell himself he deserves.
"Don't worry," Aang says, looking at him over her shoulder. "We got out. Zuko couldn't beat me."
Katara sniggers. "Couldn't beat a twelve-year-old?"
Zuko gives her his most searing glare before turning to Aang. "...back then. I couldn't have beaten you back then."
"Whatever you say, Your Fieryness."
Katara interrupts them, and turns to gaze from one to the other, eyes shining pale in the light of the sconces. "Do you know about the legend of the Blue Spirit?"
Zuko frowns. There isn't a legend: that was the point. Unless you counted the hit on him the Fire Nation put out; an unknown, a dangerous criminal aiding the Avatar. But Katara knows all that, and her simmering smile says she knows quite a bit more.
Aang walks over to Zuko and slides one gangly arm over his shoulders to listen, deliberately close and deliberately loose. "I don't."
"Well, there's a few versions of the story…" Zuko bites back a smile; her teacher voice comes so easily these days. "According to some of the kids I've met in the bending schools, it's a benevolent spirit. One that's the embodiment of justice, that came to right even the smallest wrongs, but who was also destined to help end the war. It fled back to its realm the moment its job was done."
Aang tilts his head towards her; nuzzles it in the crook of Zuko's neck. "They're really telling stories like that?"
Katara nods, stepping closer in reply. Zuko's always noticed how they draw each other physically in conversation sometimes, moon to tide. "And of course, there's the version suggesting it was a handsome, brooding master swordsman, a one-track-mind hero that needs no recognition and no reward." She draws out the word handsome, exaggerating it only to show how much she means it.
Aang laughs happily at her, "Yeah, you would know all about sexy benevolent spirits, wouldn't you?"
They share between them a look and Katara, a girlish flush, that Zuko can't read, decides he doesn't need to read. His mind is whirling around the way she said legend: around how easily and quickly every thread of every event from the end of the War can become stories.
"I think I prefer the first one," Katara decides, the wishful lilt of her voice echoing the hollow room; audible moonlight though they're well underground, and for a moment Zuko believes just that version of events.
Aang sighs, long, surprisingly wistful. "Yeah," he says. "Me too. Destined to end the war. I like that."
Katara gives it thought. "Still definitely sexy, though."
"Well, that one's non-negotiable."
Zuko looks at the mask again so he has a good reason to ignore their words. The swirling rage of his youth, the confusion, the anger, the shame that led him to put it on in the first place – all trapped behind it, behind the years that have pummelled those feelings until they are the size of the pin that mends the mask to the wall.
Katara laughs, takes his hand, then takes his waist. She does that a lot. Her arms encircled like an enclosure of calm, the eye of the hurricane of his busy world. The first time Aang had babbled to him about that effect of hers, Zuko, equally drunk and teenaged, hadn't thought he could ever picture Katara's spitfire nature in that way.
She murmurs, "What's your version of those events?"
No one knows except him and Aang and Uncle.
(Who are you, and what do you want?)
And Katara, evidently, because Aang's knowledge trickles and pools to her, always. Safekeeping. He could interject and disrupt the path of this conversation, he could object to its fancifulness. But maybe it's better to put on a face, sometimes.
Who are you?
"It doesn't matter," he says. "I mean, that's not important anymore, is it? It's a story," he amends, laughingly, when Katara raises sceptical eyebrows at him, a brief comical shadow on her clear features. He basks in the strange newness of their shared, full attention and memorises it for later. "I'm not the Blue Spirit," he says with mischief.
What do you want?
"You're Zuko," Katara says, sunny smile. (Stunning smile.) Zuko pulls her closer, chest to chest and cradles the back of Aang's neck with his free hand (a motion that Katara nonetheless beats him to.) He kisses them in turn, Katara first and fond and fierce, then Aang, mellowed in that mutual memory. He decides not to give his truest attempt at a reply, to save his most honest contribution for himself, this time: I think you rescued me.