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Zuko is tired. He’s so tired.
He can’t pretend he isn’t, even multiple years out from the war, with days and days of practice as Fire Lord adding up slow as dripping water. Pai sho tiles stacked on top of one another, proving his worth and his experience and his dedication to the cause.
There’s no hiding the sliver of exhaustion that’s visible in him at all times, even when he’s forced to get a full night’s sleep by the guards and advisors who actually care about his well-being. He can see it in the mirror, when he bothers to look.
Politicians eager to have Zuko lend them his ear, counselors angling for an opening of any sort to stick their feet into, years of finicky political fine print layered over and over each other. Blatant discrimination baked into the very core of their nation. There’s so much to do, to look over, to consider, even now with so much changed, he feels like he’s done nothing.
A last-resort child, second best but not even really second, banished and returned home again. Dressed in his father’s clothes and trying to outrun his father’s too-big shadow, sitting on a throne he didn’t want but is still honored to have.
One he tries to be worthy of, one that he can see—colors inverted behind his eyelids from looking at it so closely, so intently—when he closes his eyes at night.
Blinking at the report detailing appropriate seasonal farming practices on his desk makes the words swim and his temples ache. That, combined with the melancholy nosedive his thoughts have taken, are enough to persuade him to bed.
Toph always tells him to pack it up when he starts waxing maudlin about the throne, exhaustion making him pseudo-delirious and gloomy, thoughts of his sister and his father and his country swirling into something too big and too painful.
So he does. He packs it up. Tucks his farming papers into a neat little pile for tomorrow, twists his hair into a knot at the nape of his neck, halfheartedly tidies the tea cups leftover from this afternoon, and leaves his office.
Hearing Toph’s voice in the back of his head makes him smile a bit as he traipses the halls. Even if his mind-Toph calls him a series of increasingly less flattering names when she realizes how late it is and how long it’s been since he slept last.
Zuko should write to her.
He wants to write to her, even if he’s got no idea if she’s with someone she trusts enough to read it to her. He would regardless, if he had any clue where she was right now. Aang may know, he’ll have to ask in his next letter.
His friends orbit the Fire Palace like wayward planets, close for weeks at a time, entire seasons, and then gone again. Looping and turning on their own paths, cultivating their own moons and gravitational forces.
Zuko does his best to cherish the time that they’re here, to make the most of it. He skips meetings that his trusted advisors can attend in his place, ducking out of formal events early. He takes meandering walks in the garden and has dinner on time, soaking up their presence like a dried out sponge.
He misses them, like an ache that never fully heals. A bruise he presses on until it feels permanent.
But a recent development has sliced the longing in half, a neat cut all the way down the middle. All of his friends may not be in one place, but he can’t pretend that having one of them here full time hasn’t tipped the scales. The ache remains but the blow is softened.
Sokka is in his bed when he shuffles sideways into his rooms. Slung sideways across it lengthwise, wolf tail untied and hair spread across his shoulders. The ever present but always ridiculous boomerang is gingerly resting on the table across the room.
He’s wearing pajamas. A specific matching set that Zuko is fairly certain was in his own closet earlier this morning when he left for the day. They’re nice. Soft red silk with darker red edges.
Sokka looks good in them. Comfortable. Relaxed.
There’s always something simultaneously endearing and destabilizing about seeing Sokka in red. Half of Zuko’s heart warms, tinder cultivated into a tiny flame, knowing that Sokka is here. That he chose to be here, that he’s the Water Tribe liaison that knows Zuko and what he’s trying to do best. That he wakes up every morning and puts on his made-for-him red clothing, Southern Water Tribe style and all.
The other half mourns the lack of blue.
“What are you doing?” he asks, shuffling toward the ornate chair in the corner of his bedroom where his fancy Fire Lord robes live most of the time, much to the chagrin of his favorite dressing attendant. Tomorrow morning she’ll scoff at him, tutting and fluttering around him, muttering about wrinkles and unnecessary ironing and boy kings who don’t take care of their finery. He’ll hide his smile and press his lips together in order not to laugh and they’ll do it all over again the next day.
Shedding layers makes him feel better almost immediately. Combined with Sokka slumped in the unmade mess of his bed, he feels almost normal.
“Lying in your bed.”
“Not that,” he replies, tossing his hair pin onto the vanity next to the fancy chair. It makes a satisfying clacking sound against the granite top and skids a little farther than he meant to throw it. “The papers.”
“I’m reading. Reading the…thing. The thing. You know.”
Zuko doesn’t know. He does something with his eyebrows in the mirror that he hopes conveys that.
“You know, my job,” Sokka insists again, flopping onto his back and holding the papers above his head. He’s talking about his position as liaison, already taken to it like a dolphin fish to water. Sokka is good at it, innately fluent in politics in a way that Zuko has never been and is deeply grateful for.
His fingers are long and thin, oddly delicate in the low flamelight of Zuko’s room. He’ll also drop the entire stack on his face in the next thirty seconds if he doesn’t shift again. He did it the night before last and the one before that, squawking and flailing and carrying on. “The thing. The important thing. With the stuff.”
A beat passes where Zuko says nothing, plucking at the fussy laces of one of his inner robes and trying to channel inner peace or whatever Uncle always says instead of torching the laces and the robe and throwing everything onto the floor.
Interjecting verbally is pointless, knowing like he does that Sokka will say something in the extremely near future.
“Actually I may not even know what this is about.” There it is.
“Figured as much.” Zuko finally gets the laces loose, wrenching them out of the eyelets and tugging the sleeves off his shoulders as fast as possible. If he doesn’t get out of everything he’s wearing and into his lounge clothes in the next thirty seconds he’s going to shoot a pillar of flames out the window and his guards will think he’s being assassinated and it’ll be a whole thing.
Sokka must sense the imminent meltdown, because he sits up straight, eyeing Zuko particularly.
It makes him flush, feeling a bit like a cicada cricket pinned beneath glass. He ducks to avoid it, fishing his loose pajama pants and plain sleep shirt out of the pile of clothing on the Fancy Clothes Chair.
“C’mere,” Sokka says, the second Zuko’s wrenched on his pajamas, tipping his handful of papers onto the frighteningly fancy bedside table that sits sentry next to Zuko’s ridiculous canopied bed.
Sometimes Zuko misses the less ornate bedrooms of his childhood, but if he even thinks about going into them or anywhere near them he’ll throw up and cry and he’s actively trying to do that a little less frequently.
Sokka opens his arms wide and the gesture is so welcoming and blindingly what Zuko needs that he almost does start to cry ugly, weepy tears. He doesn’t, but it’s close.
He isn’t even all that upset. Today wasn’t even that bad.
It’s just…a lot. He’s tired.
He’s exhausted and fragile feeling and his best friend is here and he isn’t leaving and—
Sokka reels him in tight, one arm around Zuko’s neck and the other looped around his waist. The touch is comforting, heavy enough to be grounding without being overbearing or making Zuko feel like he’s trapped.
He smells nice. The familiar woodsy, leathery scent layered with something musky. And the spicy, tangy soap he prefers from one of the markets they make covert day trips to when they aren’t terribly busy.
They tilt to one side, Sokka leaning left when Zuko tips right, his brain no longer sending the “stay standing” signal to his knees. Predictably, Sokka overcorrects and the two of them flop onto the bed in a graceless tangle of limbs.
Zuko is so tired he doesn’t even fight it, just goes limp and lets Sokka manhandle him into the most comfortable position possible. Which is still a graceless tangle of limbs, naturally.
They’re diagonal across his bed, Zuko’s head missing the pillow by a mile and Sokka’s pajama pant legs all rucked up to mid calf. But they’re pressed close and Zuko no longer feels like he’s going to shake apart.
Sokka sighs against him, the slow and satisfied release of a breath held all day. Zuko isn’t sure what he gets from this, from holding him until they both fall asleep, but he shows up every night without fail. Has since he’s been back, even though Zuko never asked.
But he isn’t going to look a gift dragon moose in the mouth. Especially since he’s been sleeping better than he has in actual years.
“Sorry.” The word is mumbled against the warm skin of Sokka’s neck, muffled and quiet but audible anyway.
“For what?” Sokka is already near sleep, his words slurred and his breathing slower. When Zuko wakes up in a few hours, stress and panic jolting him awake, the steady inhale-exhale next to him will lull him back to sleep.
“Being so on edge. Not sleeping enough. Being too busy.” It comes out plaintive, self-deprecating. But it’s all true.
“You’re alright,” Sokka says back, quiet like a secret with his mouth pressed right up against Zuko’s hair. The feeling tickles, sending little bursts of shivers up and down his spine. “The day’s over and you’re here, it’s over. You did good.”
Zuko’s a mess, he knows. A compilation of deep seated anxieties and trauma-induced insecurities and sheer stubborn determination held together by the decorative Fire Lord regalia. A child dressed up and playing pretend at fixing a nation.
He feels better here though. Even with the low simmer of guilt of Sokka having to do this for him, having to fix him like this, he feels better.
They breathe together for a bit, the weight of the day sinking into the mattress beneath them.
Minutes or hours later, Zuko can’t tell, Sokka nudges him in the ribs repeatedly with his pointy elbow until he takes care of the lamps spread across the room. Leaning up on his elbow and squinting into the distance, he dims them with a wave of his hand.
Next to him Sokka grumbles and shifts, flopping over onto his stomach, one arm grappling with one of the silk-covered pillows. He throws an arm back and pokes around until he finds Zuko’s hand. Threading their fingers together, he pulls Zuko’s arm around his own waist, settling in and sighing when he’s finally situated.
Zuko breathes deep, pressing his face even tighter in the dip between Sokka’s shoulder blades.
Sleep doesn’t always come easy, but it’ll come better like this.