A/N: Things I lack: any form of discipline, organisational skills, and an update schedule.
Things I have: two jobs, a desire for external validation, and a new chapter for you.
Chapter 5
Zuko
Zuko hadn't necessarily been looking forward to Friday, but he hadn't been dreading it either. It was the kind of day which could be predicted to have certain lows - literature class, and whatever crazy thing Katara was going to say to him this time - and certain high points - it was a Friday, the high points were: it was a Friday.
(Thursday night had been quite pleasant actually, without the burden of cooking dinner and then cleaning up afterwards, Zuko had found a precious few minutes to recline on his bed with a book that was completely unrelated to schoolwork. His father had barely seemed to notice his presence other than to note the marks from his scuffle and ask who won, and then give a gruff grunt and a warning that he better not be hearing from the school about this, when Zuko informed him that he had, before retreating to the living room.)
He groaned at the alarm when it blared to life next to his head before the sun had fully risen like it had all week. He slapped at the clock to turn it off and hauled himself out of bed wondering why he did these things to himself… and then remembered the exact reason.
He needed practice.
He changed out of his pyjamas and went down to the dojo in the basement. He began meditating with a candle until he felt slightly more awake and then went through his katas. He started with the first one he learned, the most basic kata he knew, going through it again and again until he was satisfied it was as close to perfect as he could get it before he moved on to the next one.
He went through the first few katas fairly quickly, with not many iterations of each one, but as the katas started getting more complex, more technical and more physically demanding he started having to go through each of them more times before he was satisfied.
Like the rest of the mornings that week, he didn't manage to finish all his katas before he had to finish his practice and start getting ready for school. He sighed as he left the basement, sweaty and sluggish already, disappointed in himself. He had been trained in formal firebending since he could first produce a flame, and now he was seventeen and still, he couldn't perform all his katas as easily or as precisely or as powerfully as his younger sister.
He had two years on her and he was still lagging behind in all the ways that mattered.
He shook his head and carried on climbing stairs that seemed to grow as he climbed them until he reached his room and got his things for a shower.
After he showered, he made his way to the kitchen for a hasty breakfast. As he was munching steadily on his toast his eyes wandered aimlessly until they landed on the coffee machine in the corner and, after he had registered what he was looking at, he began to eye it with interest. (He had never really been interested in the dark, bitter liquid before, in fact, he found most of its qualities rather off-putting, but the way other people seemed to fawn over it and praise its ability to bestow energy like a benevolent spirit seemed now to be becoming more enticing than its less than alluring aspects)
He abstained, trying to acquire the taste for coffee just seemed like it would take too much energy that morning.
He was just making sure his school bag was packed for the day when he heard Ozai shouting from the middle landing, "Don't forget you're working tonight!"
Zuko scrambled to open the door to his room and stepped to the top of the stairs and looked down at his father, "what?"
"You are on shift tonight," Ozai enunciated disdainfully, "or are you incapable of understanding simple sentences now?"
"I have firebending training tonight," Zuko protested with great confusion.
Ozai rolled his eyes, "Only for two hours. You will start your shift straight after school and work until your lesson starts."
As Ozai turned to head downstairs, Zuko trudged back into his room and practically dropped to his hands and knees. With a huff, he stuck a hand deep into the shadows under his bed, and shortly his questing fingers met the thin, fraying canvas of his old bag. He hauled it out and dropped it onto his bed, next to the other two bags he had already packed that morning.
He took a moment to look mournfully at the array of bags that were the physical manifestation of his free time evaporating into nothingness, his good mood from the almost leisurely end to the previous evening dissolving along with it.
He stuffed his work uniform haphazardly into the other bag without caring about the creases that would cover it from seam to seam by the time he had to put it on. He zipped the bag closed and swung it onto his shoulder. He then picked up the other two bags he had to take with him and frowned at the extra weight. He better get moving if he wanted to get to school on time lugging all this with him.
When Zuko finally got to school he felt a little apprehensive that the teachers would have somehow found out about the fight the previous evening and would be lined up to turn him away with either a suspension or an expulsion. Either of which would result in Zuko's immediate future being filled with a lot of time spent in the immediate presence of his dad and being reminded of how much of a burden he was and how much shame he brought to the family. Verbally and physically.
Zuko didn't even want to contemplate what that would mean for his long-term future.
He put his head down and went straight to his locker and dumped two of his bags.
Zuko had been so paranoid about the teachers finding out, that it took him two whole lessons to realise that it was not the teachers, but the rest of the students who were giving him funny stares - even more than usual.
Somehow that little scuffle, that loss of control, was haunting him through the rumour mill. There were stares and there were whispers, and Zuko didn't know exactly what the rumour was, but he felt the weight of every pair of judging eyes and saw every flutter of tongues sending harsh hisses his way.
He found himself hurrying between classrooms and seeking refuge in the empty rooms for the few precious minutes he could find solitude before each lesson. In fact, he was trying to employ this tactic ahead of his literature class when Katara entered the room not long after he did.
"They're saying you beat up, like, six kids yesterday after school," she stated as she came to a stop just in front of his desk.
Zuko merely grunted and rolled his eyes in response.
"They're saying you had a psychotic break," she probed further.
Like with the coffee earlier, the prospect of a psychotic break, once completely unappealing, was now starting to lose the un in front of the word appealing.
"They're also saying you bit someone's hand off?" Katara's tone, which had previously been a tone that said: these typical school rumours, they're so silly aren't they? But you and I both know it didn't really happen that way, it couldn't have, now turned to one of confused amazement at the gullibility and the imagination of the general student population.
Zuko snorted.
Katara tried a different tack, "Teo seems oddly worked up about it." There was a twitch of Zuko's fingers and a momentary widening of his eyes which told Katara as effectively as if Zuko had erected a flashing neon sign above his head that she was onto something. She watched him carefully as she continued, "he seems really quite offended by all these rumours that have nothing to do with him..." With every word, Katara seemed to be turning a metaphorical key in Zuko's back.
She continued her musings, "he seems especially agitated when he hears the one about you having a psychotic break... And Jin is weirdly protective of you as well," she accused putting her hands on the desk and leaning over him, "what did you do?"
He glared up at her and hissed, "Nothing."
"Your knuckles are split and you have a bruise on your forehead," she declared, "you obviously did something."
"Why do you even care?" Zuko retorted as he pulled his hands deeper into his sleeves.
"Because it would help me sleep better at night knowing that I didn't have to work on a school project with some ...barbarian who just beats people up for no reason," Katara snarked back.
"I don't!"
"You don't what? Beat people up? Ha! Don't lie."
"I don't beat people up for no reason!"
The room was getting so heated it could have been used as a kiln, but Mr Pakku walked in like a wave of frigid water and Katara snapped straight to look over her shoulder at him. She promptly laid the argument down with all the care of someone ready to pick it back up at the earliest opportunity and with gusto, and sat down next to Zuko.
However factional and disjointed the student body was, there was no greater divide than the one between them and the teachers, and no shorter road to total ostracization, than involving teachers in matters that were strictly between students.
The lesson passed like most unpleasant things do, at the pace of a particularly stubborn and sadistic snail which, upon any entreaty to pick up the pace, polite or otherwise, will slow down even more.
But Zuko was like a coiled spring by the end of the lesson and was out the door with his belongings in record time. He made his way to the quiet corner of the school he usually claimed, sat down and fished from his school bag the sad little lunch he had managed to throw in his bag on the way out of the house that morning.
He set about eating it, his hands and mouth unconsciously trying to keep up with his still-whirring brain. And as soon as he had finished eating, he got up and made his way over to the library. Suck it up, he told himself as he sorted through the homework he had yet to do; suck it up, he told himself as he sat down at the school computer, intending to complete the research for three different pieces of homework because it was unlikely his father would let him use the home computer over the weekend; suck it up, he told himself as he saw out of the corner of his eye, Katara making a beeline straight for him when he was just finishing his last piece of research.
A sheepish Teo trailed behind her.
"This is where you spend your lunches?" She hissed, accusation colouring her tone. She came to a stop next to him and put her hands on her hips.
"Yeah, and?"
"Nevermind. What did you do to Teo? I can tell he knows something he's not telling me and I know you're the reason he's not telling me."
Teo leaned forward and tried to intervene, "Katara please-"
"Shut up Teo, I can handle myself. I won't let Zuko threaten you any more."
Zuko's eyes flickered over Katara's shoulder to the window in the library door, it was filled with the faces he'd seen with Katara at the gym the previous Saturday, plus that girl, Jin. She had been there the last time Zuko's temper had snapped like a dry twig.
"I'm not threatening anyone," Zuko protested with a frown.
"He's telling the truth Katara, he's not threatening me," Teo chimed in, leaning forward in his chair, trying to catch Katara's eye.
"Then what did you do to him?" Katara hissed, not taking her eyes off Zuko for a second and barely even acknowledging the fact that Teo spoke at all.
"Nothing," said Zuko dully, "Katara, I'll meet you at the gym tomorrow, same time as last week so we can work on the literature project together. Try not to explode in the meantime, okay?"
And with an inborn inclination for the dramatic that Zuko often attributed to his mother's genes, he grabbed his bag without waiting for a reply and left, swiping his papers from the printer tray on his way to the door. He pushed through the door and the small crowd gathered behind it with determination. But it was a vague determination that was powered more by from than to, and from, in this context, was not a very powerful motive - well, not a powerful motive for very long. He turned at the end of the corridor, and once his personal harpies were out of sight, he slowed his pace - aimless, being an accurate descriptor in more ways than one.
He meandered slowly down the hall, the few students he passed staring at him like he was some tigerdillo about to charge. He kept his eyes on his feet, but through the window he saw out of the corner of his eye, more students enjoying the fresh air while the weather was still clement enough to allow it. He sighed and felt even more cut off from the rest of the students and the nagging feeling that there was some nebulous, repulsive quality about him that everyone else apart from him could sense tugged once again at the back of his mind.
If only he knew what it was...
It couldn't just be about his lacklustre firebending because his dad had barely shown anything other than contempt for him even before anyone discovered his most obvious deficiencies.
He headed for his next class, desperate for somewhere to hide and unable to think of anywhere else to go.
Teo
"Can you believe that guy!?" Teo heard Katara scoff a little distantly as he watched Zuko disappear. Teo hadn't been able to take his eyes off the large, purple bruise which had fully bloomed across one-half of his forehead overnight. He also noticed the blotchy, cracked knuckles barely peeking out from the dark hem of his hoodie, all of it contrasting starkly with his alabaster skin, and Teo felt another nugget of guilt drop like an anvil to the pit of his stomach. Zuko had gotten hurt, and now he was getting harassed, all because of Teo. "Anyway, you gonna tell me what happened now?"
"I can't," he said, looking up at her with large, pleading eyes.
"Of course, you can. I don't care what that jerk said or did to you, we're your friends and we won't let him do anything to you," Katara scoffed while gesturing to where Teo could see four pairs of curious eyes through the window in the door.
"He didn't threaten me," Teo insisted yet again, "but I did promise to keep quiet about it."
"Teo?" Katara's concern was rapidly scaling up from friendly straight to motherly.
"Please Katara, just leave it?"
"I don't like this. And I don't like that you feel obligated to keep a promise to Zuko of all people. Are you sure you aren't being pressured in any way?" Katara said sternly, putting her hands on her hips and fully embodying the motherly aura that she was giving off.
"I swear, he only asked. He didn't even try to threaten me or blackmail me. And I said yes because I wanted to."
"Fine," Katara huffed and pointed a finger at Teo, "but if Zuko has been threatening you in any way, I will personally make him regret it, okay?"
Teo smiled fondly. "You won't have to make Zuko regret anything," he said and watched as Katara relaxed a little. There was still some tension in her shoulders and some uncertainty in the tilt of her head and the swing of her arms as she turned to leave the library.
At that moment, Teo ached to tell someone. He wanted to talk about the cruelty of the kids that cornered him, he wanted to get off his chest the lingering fear from having his wheelchair, the very thing that enabled him to get around weaponized and turned against him. To talk through his remaining emotions about having his personal space flagrantly disrespected and his agency taken away and ignored.
He wanted to find comfort in his friends.
He also wanted to tell them about how Zuko came to his defence immediately after he had asked, even though begged might have been a more accurate word. He wanted to regale his friends with the (heavily abridged, since he had shut his eyes as soon as the fight began in earnest) tale of Zuko stepping up to four students, and none of those kids could be described with any degree of accuracy as small, with nothing but righteous fury in his eyes. To explain how Zuko had somehow managed to win in a fight against all four students by using the element of surprise.
He also wanted to tell maybe only some of his friends that he thought Zuko was actually quite handsome if you looked past the scar and the hair and the huge hoodies he seemed to want to drown himself in every day. He wanted to tell them that maybe Zuko wasn't as much of a weirdo as everyone seemed to think. He wanted to tell them about the overwhelming rush of gratitude he had felt the previous evening and about the guilt he had felt upon hearing the rumours and seeing the bruises.
He also maybe wanted to tell them, or at least some of them at any rate, about the strange new attraction he had felt towards Zuko.
But they didn't really like Zuko and he didn't know what they would say to his confession, so he kept silent.
The bell rang, and Teo was nudged back into reality by a concerned-looking Katara, flanked by the rest of his only slightly less concerned friends, but that was only because Katara was a seemingly never-ending well of concern.
"I'm fine," he assured them ineffectively. But they all had classes to go to and so began reluctantly dispersing.
Teo grabbed Katara's hand as she made to walk off, but she turned around and looked at him questioningly. "Would you be able to heal him?" Teo asked hesitantly.
"Who? Zuko?"
Teo nodded.
"A bruise and some cracked knuckles?" Katara scoffed, "They're hardly serious injuries, and from what I gather, he brought them on himself. He deserves to keep them."
She turned and pushed open the door and they joined their friends in the corridor.
"We should get to class," Jin said firmly before Katara could say anything else, "Come on," she added as she ushered a reluctant Sokka and Aang down the hall, quashing mumbled protests as she went.
Teo turned and began to wheel himself towards his next class as well, but before he was too far away he heard Suki ask Katara, "So what do you think?"
"I dunno," Katara murmured back, "Teo says everything is fine, but I'm just having trouble believing it. Zuko's gotta be up to something, otherwise, why would he swear Teo to secrecy?"
Teo sighed as he rolled away from them. Yes, it was a little odd, but there could also be a perfectly reasonable explanation.
Zuko
Zuko walked into the gym straight from school, pretty sure that he was well on the way to forgetting what his own room looked like. He had barely spent any time there that he wasn't unconscious since the school term began.
Not, he thought, that his room was particularly memorable. He walked into the staff room and grabbed one of the bags that had been sitting in his locker all day, pulling from it his work uniform, and then going to find a suitable place to change. He returned to the staff room to put his school clothes away and turned to look at the duty roster, groaning when he saw that he was on cleaning duty.
Zhao loved giving him cleaning duty.
Zuko would love to clean that smug smirk off the bastard's face.
Grumbling darkly under his breath, Zuko went to fetch the cleaning cart. He started with the corridors because they only needed a hoover and a bit of wiping where there was a door or a sign. And then, as the studios and elemental dojos began to spill into the halls like cracked fish tanks, Zuko began to clean those too. There were floors to mop, fixtures to dust, apparatus to wipe, and a lot of mirrors to clean.
And then, once Zuko had exhausted all the more palatable cleaning jobs, there were the showers.
Hair, Zuko decided, had a dark side. Oh, when it was attached to a head, adjectives were often used such as lustrous, shiny and soft. But as he fished large, wet clumps of it out of the drains, wearing gloves that Zuko felt in his heart and in his stomach, weren't quite thick enough, the only descriptors that sprang to mind were of a more pejorative nature, such as slimy, repulsive and nauseating.
And once that ordeal was over, it was almost time for him to get ready for firebending practice. He stowed the cleaning cart away and wandered back to the staff room, he plucked a banana from the wire fruit bowl in the corner, dropped into the nearest chair and slowly began to peel the fruit, munching tiredly on the exposed flesh.
He had hazy memories of flinging the peel into the bin and then resting his head on the desk before being shaken awake.
"Zuko, why the hell are you in uniform? Have you just been working?" Lu Ten asked in outrage.
Zuko blinked up at his cousin, "hey Lu Ten, how was college?" he greeted mildly.
Lu Ten frowned, "don't try to change the subject. Your dad is going too far with this."
"I'm fine," Zuko insisted grumpily.
"You're not! Look at you! You're exhausted! You can't keep this up, I don't care what Uncle Ozai thinks you did or what he thinks of your firebending, this has to stop."
"I can handle it! Stop trying to baby me."
"I'm not babying you! I'm concerned about your well-being."
Zuko scoffed, "You've been babying me ever since..." He took a deep breath and forced himself to complete the sentence, "Ever since the night my mom left. Ever since I got my stupid, ugly scar."
"Zuko! You know that's not true. I wish-"
"You wish what? Wish you didn't have such a weak, pathetic little cousin? I told you, I'm fine!" Zuko exploded, the force of his outburst propelling him to his feet.
Lu Ten assessed Zuko for a moment with the most exasperated glare he could muster. (Although there was not actually much mustering involved, the expression in this situation, as it had in many others involving Zuko, came quite naturally.) "I wish you weren't so damn stubborn sometimes," he muttered with no real censure.
"I should just send you home," Lu Ten continued slowly.
"You can't," protested Zuko. "If you won't let me into the lesson then I'll just practise on my own."
Lu Ten assessed his cousin carefully, as he watched the determined fire that burned fiercely behind Zuko's eyes flicker and twist into a dim glow of despair, he quickly changed course, "Fine. I'll let you in, but only as long as you promise not to push yourself too hard."
"I won't," Zuko hastily agreed and rushed to grab his gi out of his locker.
Lu Ten shook his head as Zuko hastened out the door, not believing for a second that he wouldn't push himself. It wasn't that Lu Ten thought his cousin lacked self-control or was undisciplined, it was just that Zuko's will only seemed to flow in one direction, and the direction it unerringly gushed towards, like a tidal wave of lava, was to the benefit of his father.
He began mentally rearranging his lesson plan to help rein Zuko in. The breath of fire would be a good alternative, he thought, it didn't need huge amounts of power but it did require a lot of concentration and control… and persistence - which Zuko had in spades. It wasn't an easy skill to even get the hang of, let alone master, and even after dedicating the whole lesson to it, Lu Ten was doubtful anyone in the class would achieve any sort of success with it. But it was good practice.
Firebenders needed control.
