Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It all starts when Sokka’s having his nice, normal summer holiday in his nice, normal buddy Zuko’s big fuck-off palace.

It’s well deserved, Sokka reckons. He’s been putting in the hard yards advising on some new public infrastructure at Cranefish Town (or is it Republic City now? He can’t keep track) and well, where else to vacay than the land of eternal summer? Eternal summer and free swanky room service, whenever and wherever he wants. So Sokka’s sipping on some fruity iced tea affair, sprawled sweating over a bench under some pagoda while the sun beats down overhead, when he notices.

Zuko’s shifting. Like, a lot.

“Dude, you good?” says Sokka.

Zuko sighs. He shifts again, tugging at the front of his shirt as though it’s too warm for him. That’s weird, cos for as long as Sokka’s known him, Zuko—a literal firebender with the figurative sun inside himself—has never had a problem with the (excessive) heat (of his tropical homeland).

“Dude?”

Zuko sighs again. He scratches between his eyebrows with the end of his brush, props his glasses further up the bridge of his nose. The papers in front of him have barely been shuffled in the last few minutes. Beside him, Druk snorts a puff of steam and settles down to sleep in a different position. “There’s this thing in your culture, right?” he says.

“Sure,” says Sokka, who isn’t sure where this is going. Lots of things are in his culture. Ice fishing. Polar dog sledding. Hair loopies.

Zuko puts his brush down. His teeth worry at his bottom lip. “It’s a bit weird.”

“Probably no weirder than some of the shit I see in the Fire Nation,” says Sokka helpfully.

Zuko looks stricken. Druk, perhaps sensing his worry, puts his big lizard head on Zuko’s lap. It’s the size of two bitter cantaloupes, and probably weighs like six of them. Sokka’s not certain. He’s still a little wary of the baby dragon. “You know I was up in the North Pole a couple of weeks ago,” Zuko says.

Sokka nods. It was the tenth anniversary of the armistice, a whole decade since the bunch of them ragtag kids had dismantled the entire imperialist apparatus of the Fire Nation. Sokka was up in Ba Sing Se with Aang and Katara and Toph, but he knows Zuko went to pay his respects to the Northern Water Tribe.

Zuko lowers his voice. “We had this… ritual, when I was up there. To enshrine ten years of world peace.”

“And?”

What he doesn’t expect is Zuko to pull the fold of his shirt open. The only warning he gets is Zuko’s furtive glance at their surroundings—all leafy, tranquil garden, with only one guard standing under a tree some ways off—before the collar comes down. He catches only a glimpse before Zuko pulls the fabric back up, but it’s like the image is seared into his eyeballs. Framing the lightning scar, they flare in the sunlight.

“Weird, huh?”

Sokka’s mouth is drier than the air around them. It takes a while to get the juices flowing again. “Yeah. Haha. Weird.”

“They healed me right after they did it,” says Zuko, “so it didn’t really hurt at all. It’s meant to be some kind of spiritual connection. But they’re still… sensitive.”

“No way,” says Sokka. It takes a while to tear his eyes away from Zuko’s covered chest.

Zuko seems none the wiser to Sokka’s mental breakdown, which is just as well. He shifts once more then turns back to his documents, as though he hasn’t just shown Sokka a pair of brand-spanking-new piercings adorning his royal nipples.

So now Sokka, previously nice, normal guy, can’t stop having nasty, abnormal thoughts about his buddy Zuko’s new diplomatic nipple piercings.

Chief Arnook, that wily bastard, must be some kind of horny genius. It all has to be part of some decade-long ploy to get Sokka back for letting his daughter turn into the moon. Well, Sokka’s suffering. Are you happy now, Arnook? Are you?

Previously, like the average person in the world, Sokka never had occasion to ruminate upon Fire Lord Zuko’s nipples. Now, all of that has changed. It isn’t like Sokka’s never seen nipple piercings before. Zuko was right when he said it was a Thing in Sokka’s Culture. It’s just the sheer incongruity of seeing them on Zuko, who’s from the Fire Nation, where Sokka has never even seen a regular ear piercing—and Zuko has gone straight for the nips.

Then there’s the fact that it’s Zuko, Zuko, who broke up with Mai some seven years ago (that long, already?) and, to Sokka’s discerning eye, has not had a semblance of an erotic life since then. Prim, proper Zuko, who’s more of a monk than Sokka’s actual monk brother-in-law (who has recently proven his not-monkness by fathering a child with Sokka’s own sister), has gone and gotten himself these sexy, diplomatic, tantalising, ritual nipple piercings. He got them for world peace, and now Sokka’s world is falling to pieces.

“Say, Zuko,” says Sokka over breakfast, casual as you like, as though he hasn’t spent the whole night watching the replay flash and flare of those piercings against his backs of his eyelids, “tell me a bit more about getting those piercings.”

Zuko looks up from his chee cheong fun, surprised. Sokka’s about to take it all back, haha, just kidding buddy! Now let’s talk taxes, when he says, “What do you mean?”

OK, Sokka has an opening. He plunges right in. “I mean, how did it come up? What—what was the process like?”

“Oh,” says Zuko. He wets his lips with a sip of tea. Is Sokka hallucinating, or can he see the outline of the rings under the shift of Zuko’s shirt? “We were exchanging letters about the North Pole visit and it came up as a suggestion. I wanted to do something meaningful to mark the occasion and show my commitment to the deradicalisation of my country. You have this in the South Pole too, right?”

Look, yeah, technically, they do. But it’s not like Sokka sees them all the time, because the nature of the polar regions is that people tend not to traipse around boobs out—something about not freezing to death. As far as Sokka knows, piercing the nipples is about fostering a spiritual link through the heart and the gut, through the perfect balance of both nipples. Sokka’s never been a spiritual guy, but he’s feeling glad now that Zuko is.

“Totally,” says Sokka. There’s another part of him that feels a little guilty at all the—thoughts—he’s been having about those piercings now that Zuko’s expounded on his much-considered thought process, but that part is quickly banished when Zuko pulls his shirt open again.

Sokka didn’t get a good look yesterday, just a glimpse of metal, an expanse of flesh, a flash of light. Now, it’s hard not to gawk at them, glinting around the blushing buds.

“One’s a sun, one’s a moon,” says Zuko, pointing. The sun girdles his nipple in gold, rays splaying out, with a bar stabbed through the flesh; the moon is a thin silver crescent that encircles the other one. “It symbolises the connection between our nations and our elements.”

“They’re not ivory,” Sokka blurts, because yeah, that’s what his brain thought was important at this moment.

“They were commissioned in the Earth Kingdom,” says Zuko.

“Right,” says Sokka. He doesn’t want to look like he’s actively staring, but they’re just so gorgeous and he’s determined to commit every detail to memory. Say something, his brain urges, but it’s like his capacity for speech has gone on its own separate holiday to its own separate tropical island. “You said they were still sensitive?”

Tui and La. Kill him now.

“Yeah,” says Zuko. “It’s just a bit uncomfortable with the”—he tugs his shirt closed, and Sokka watches the nips disappear from view mournfully—“clothes.”

“I’m sure it’ll go back to normal soon,” says Sokka. He feels Druk’s big yellow eyes on him and pointedly does not meet them. “In the meantime, maybe you could wear like… lighter shirts? Y’know… thinner, softer material?” What the fuck? Stop talking, his brain demands, but he has to add, “So they don’t irritate!”

He holds his grin, which he hopes is more reassuring and less garden-variety creep. Zuko just blinks at him, all guileless golden eyes. “Thanks, Sokka,” he says as he tucks back into his breakfast. “I’ll give that a go.”

So. So now Sokka’s had a good look at them piercings. He knows what they look like. Thoroughly. Intimately. The little sun and moon haunt his waking moments. They’re so dainty, so intricate against the solid expanse of his muscled chest.

What’s more, Zuko goes and takes his shirt advice. Sokka crosses paths with him the next day, when he’s off to some calligraphy exhibit Piandao recommended and Zuko’s on his way to Council. Sokka stutters to a stop in front of him and his bodyguard.

“You’re wearing that?”

Zuko looks down. The tunic is opaque, sure, but the silk hugs and clings to the lines of his torso. And, Sokka is certain, to those little piercings. He swears he can make out the curve of that moon under it. “You were right,” says Zuko. “It helps with the…”

“Sure! Happy to help.” says Sokka loudly. He’s determinedly not making eye contact with the bodyguard, Osha, who probably has some kind of laser vision that can read all the horny, disgusting thoughts he’s having about her… bodyguardee. On the other hand, he has to make it look like he’s not full on eyeing the bumps where Zuko’s nips might be. “Look, I’m off to—”

He goes to the exhibit. Everything is an absolute mess of squiggles. It’s as though the ghost-print of that clinging red silk is lurking in between the strokes of ink. Sokka is a polar boy, and the heat of this fucking country is getting to him.

So Zuko gets experimental with his tops, and Sokka steadily loses his mind.

Zuko sports another clingy golden number the next day. Batik flames curl up his torso, and Sokka would bet real cash that the tips point right at the sun and moon. Zuko attends Council like that, which seems positively indecent. Zuko’s Grand Chancellor, an older gent whom Sokka’s always been too scared to talk to, sails past Sokka later in the hallways muttering to a fellow councillor, “Interesting shirt His Majesty’s wearing today.” Then Zuko pulls out some diaphanous thing made of a fabric that is distinctly sheer. Sokka confirms this when Zuko passes in front of a window, which lights up the fabric from behind and throws the fit shape of his body into shadowed relief. Busy as ever with his real job governing a whole country, Zuko whisks away before Sokka can get a good ogle in but he gets a repeat show the next day, when Zuko manages to schedule dinner with him. For once in their ten-year friendship, Zuko does most of the talking: Sokka’s too busy shovelling food and icy drinks into his mouth to disguise the drooling, eyes fixed on a pair of increasingly familiar outlines at Zuko’s chest level.

It’s an exquisite form of torture.

Sokka gets around. He knows nipples, but he’s never seen any as delectable as Zuko’s. It’s like they’ve put worms in his brain. Disgusting, pervert worms in his brain that writhe over the head of state of the Fire Nation. Thin shirts aren’t enough for a lecherous mind like his. No, he yearns to see those nut-brown beauties in their celestial cages again; he aches.

“Hey Osha,” says Sokka, when he caves to a couple more base desires, “know any good beaches?”

She glances up from where she’s sharpening her sword. Sokka plasters a reassuring smile on his face. Osha’s nice enough and he’s known her for years, but those were years in which Zuko’s pierced nipples were not parading through his brain. He’s seen her take down three assassins with her bare hands: he needs to tread carefully.

“Truth be told,” she says, “there aren’t that many around the capital. You could fly out to one of the islands, though. Ever been to Ember Island?”

That’s how Sokka ends up taking an airship over with Zuko at the end of the latter’s work week. The old royal estate where the bunch of them had stayed before Sozin’s comet has since been leased out and renovated into a beachy resort. Bookings are backed up for months, but royal privilege gets them a nice sea-facing room with two beds. Practically salivating with anticipation, Sokka watches the dark line of the beach from the window as Zuko putters around in the ensuite getting ready for bed. He’s gonna get that Fire Lord there tomorrow, tits out.

What Sokka doesn’t account for is his lineup of Shirtless Activities to be witnessed by half the known world. Sokka’s in the Fire Nation on holiday and it seems like everyone on the planet had the same idea. The beach attached to the old royal estate used to be private but no longer: the resort’s patrons are sprawled across it. The black sands are barely visible between the packed, reddening bodies. Sokka can barely admire all the lush, pillowy boobage on display because he’s fending off tourists with a stick.

“His Flameyness is on holiday,” he snaps to a honeymooning Earth Kingdom couple that’s creeping too close. “And don’t touch the dragon. He’ll snack on your fingers.” That one’s directed at a gaggle of kids pointing at Druk, who’s half buried snoozing in the sand.

Zuko, on the other hand, isn’t helping. “Yes, I got these in the North Pole,” he’s telling a gathering crowd of fellow beachgoers. “They symbolise an undying connection between our nations, etched into both the spirit and the body.”

Sokka clears his throat. “Zuko.”

He can’t even enjoy having his hand on the bare skin of Zuko’s back as he ushers him into the water, cos he’s too busy sending dark looks over his shoulder at the crowd. “You need to be careful,” he chides as they sink into the surf. “What if you get assassinated?”

Zuko blinks; he tosses his hair back in a flick of seawater and the piercings come back into view, dazzling under the sun. “Isn’t that what you’re here for?”

But Zuko’s fan club follows them into the water. It’s poor form for the Fire Lord to ignore his chattier subjects or something and Sokka has no choice but to bob stewing in the sea, cursing the obstructed visibility of Zuko’s chest. Some of these riffraff are getting premium nipple views, and they don’t even know how to appreciate them properly. He puts his foot down when he spots what looks suspiciously like a newspaper artist setting up watercolours on a jutting rock. Proprietary arm around Zuko, he pushes through the crowd and back up to the resort, where the staff have enough sense to give them a private room at the dining hall.

“Why did you lease the land out, anyway?” Sokka grouses as he glares out the window. All his beach plans have been dashed to dust, and he hates whenever that happens. It’s hot even indoors, like the frustration is getting to his head. “This was a perfectly nice beach house. Private beach house.”

A cold spoon touches his lip. “Open up,” says Zuko, and Sokka does, tasting sweet ice and red bean. Looks like their dessert arrived: a small mountain of shaved ice drizzled over with blue syrup, red bean, and neon green strands of cendol sits between them. Zuko smiles at him, and shit, has he always looked that sweet? “Isn’t it tasty? It’s called a South Pole.”

Sokka obliges to another spoonful. The ice trade between the South Pole and the Fire Nation in recent years has been a truly genius decision, if the explosion of icy desserts up here is anything to go by. Ais kacang, halo halo, che ba mau: it’s all happening here. There’s no reason to eat ice in the South Pole but here, where it’s always steaming, sweltering hot, it’s the only thing keeping Sokka alive. “I just don’t get why you’d let them all take over your lovely house.”

Zuko laughs, light and raspy. “This resort pays most of the bills of my estate. Plus, it’s a nice place. Better to share it with everyone than keep it closed off for someone who’s only going to visit once a year.”

It’s kinda thoughtful, actually, and Sokka has to crush a fizzling lightness that’s starting to gather in his stomach.

“I’m glad you took me out here,” says Zuko, taking a spoonful of South Pole for himself. “It’s nice to unwind for a bit.”

Sokka tears his focus from the window and back to Zuko. He’s sun-burnished, hair crisping with sea salt. Since getting out of the water, he’s only deigned to wrap a sarong around his waist and those generous tits are on display, jewels and all, though now with a smattering of sand still stuck to the skin. Sokka’s been entranced by his nipples, but the entire boob is plush and sexy too. An idle tongue darts out to lick away a bit of blue on his lip. Druk rubs against his leg and lets out a dragony grunt, coils of smoke drifting out of his nostrils. Fahhhck, he’s gorgeous. Does he even know? Sokka is so fucking gone.

Since all of Sokka’s Shirtless Beach Plans have been thrown in the bin, stamped on, and set on fire, he acquiesces to Zuko’s proposal of a hike the next day.

He fucking regrets it.

Up ahead, Zuko and Druk are taunting him—Zuko with words, Druk with general lack of sweat and ongoing motor functions. “Come on!” Zuko laughs. “I thought you were a powerful warrior or something.”

“In a polar desert, yes,” Sokka grits out as he trudges upwards. He’s wearing the widest-brimmed hat he could find and it’s still not enough to keep the evil, burning sun off. Zuko’s idea of going somewhere less crowded was to go on the most difficult hike on Ember Island. It’s not hard to see why the tourists avoid it. The Dragon’s Back snakes up up up the volcanic ridgeline, the path a slash of dirt through grass at its most merciful and at its least, a rocky scramble.

The only thing that keeps him going is that Zuko’s donned a tiny vest that doesn’t button up the front. His buff arms swing loose, veiled with the barest sheen of sweat. The nipples are covered but there’s some delicious lightning-scarred cleavage to linger upon and the occasional, tantalising glimmer of shadowed metal. But there’s no way Zuko’s going to let Sokka anywhere near them if he’s this disgustingly sweaty. The indignity of it all!

Sokka might acquiesce that it was all worth it when he descends from the final crest. Zuko and Druk are waiting for him but for once in the last week or so, Sokka’s attention is captured by something else: the expanse of the sea below glittering in fierce sunlight, dashing itself to foam upon columns of basalt. “Beautiful, right?” Zuko murmurs, and Sokka can only agree.

They sprawl on the grass. Zuko unwraps banana-lotus leaf packages of food and Sokka falls upon them, famished from the journey up.

“You been on this hike before?” Sokka asks between bites.

Zuko nods. “We used to come up here, when I was a kid.”

If Zuko’s been scaling this mountain since childhood, that explains the muscles. “Seems like a weird hike to take a kid on.”

Zuko shrugs. “My father said we’d do it, so we did.”

That’s depressing, Sokka thinks. Sokka’s dad never shied away from challenging him and his sister when they were kids, but he can’t imagine Dad ever shunting them up a volcano with a vendetta against calves out of senseless expectation. “Well, look at you now,” says Sokka.

Zuko ducks his head and looks out over the sea. “The view is worth it,” he says. Then after a pause: “You’re right, though. I can’t help thinking about all the ways I’ve cut what tied us together…”

“Deservingly so!”

But Zuko doesn’t seem to hear him. “The Fire Nation has so much reverence for its ancestors. We believe the body is the gift of our parents,” he says, idly slipping a chunk of otter-veal to Druk. “Cutting the hair, piercing the body, we see this like self-mutilation. But the forefathers that gave me this body were the ones to destroy the balance that all the nations had. I wanted to dedicate it to a cause that would mean something new.

“They did it at the spirit portal. I was kneeling there, in that place I had so foolishly attacked all those years ago, watching the Ocean Spirit and Moon Spirit swimming in perfect harmony in the pond. I was entranced…” There’s a faraway quality to his eyes and Sokka can see it too, Zuko with his top off in the nightless glow of the polar summer, kneeling at the pond as Arnook stands over him. “When I came to, it was finished. The waterbenders healed the wounds so quickly.”

“That’s amazing,” says Sokka. The way Zuko tells it, it honestly is.

“Enough about me,” says Zuko. A lock of hair slips out of his chignon to cover half his face. He touches the tattoos that adorn Sokka’s arm. “What about these? What do they mean?”

Sokka does not choke on his komodo chicken. “These?” he says. “Oh, the usual, you know.”

“I don’t,” Zuko chuckles. “Tell me.”

Sokka points. “This one means I’m sexy. This one means I beat five pai sho grandmasters in one game. They took turns stabbing me with the needle. This one means I have a massive cock.”

Zuko’s eyebrow goes up. “How big are we talking?”

“Druk-sized, definitely.”

Zuko guffaws. He flings himself over Druk to cover the dragon’s innocent baby ears, showering Sokka with imprecations. The vest flaps open: his bedazzled chest heaves with laughter. Tui and La. He is such a sight. All eighteen levels of hell are yawning open for Sokka for sexualising the Fire Lord’s spiritual nips and he doesn’t give a single shit.

Their two-bed room is a source of absolute suffering for Sokka that evening. When Zuko gets up early the next day to organise their flight back to Hari Bulkan, Sokka leaps at the chance to have a ginormous wank about it all.

It’s kinda sick of him but he steals Zuko’s pillow from the adjoining bed. He slicks his palm up with ointment and runs it over his cock in slow strokes. Zuko’s pillow smells a little spicy from his hair oil, and there’s that warm underlying man smell that makes Sokka’s cock jump in his hand.

He lets all the pent-up lust take over. He thinks of Zuko pulling his top down. Zuko with his skin glowing in the sun. Zuko’s eyes crinkling with an indulgent smile. Zuko blowing fire at Druk. Zuko’s bejewelled nipples, Sokka fitting his mouth around them. Maybe getting a hand around Zuko’s cock, which Sokka bets is cute and shapely as the rest of him. Tui’s gills, what would he sound like? Would he grunt quietly, bite his lips? Or would he moan, loud and wanton with that throaty voice, so responsive to any touch to his nipples? The smell on his pillow is heady as Sokka pants into it, tugs at his cock. Would he ever let Sokka touch him the way he deserves?

Sokka’s great at sex, good enough for a monarch. He’s low maintenance. Zuko could stick him in a harem and feed him nipple jewellery every two weeks. He’d be so happy.

After he cums, Sokka feels contrite. What kind of friend is he? Wanking over the piercings Zuko got to show his commitment to the spiritual balance of the world? They’re just tiny little things. Nipple piercings are normal! Katara was meant to get some as the South’s last waterbender, before his nephew happened—and nothing Katara touches is sexy, obviously. Sokka needs to get a grip. Get over them. He can. He SHOULD. Zuko’s been his friend for ten blissful, wank-free years. He can stop thinking about them. The piercings. The sun and moon piercings, Zuko’s culture entwined with Sokka’s on his body. Gold and silver… Those gorgeous, delicate piercings… Those blushing nipples… Sokka just cannot wait to get his hands on them. The softness of his skin against the unyielding metal. What if he got dangly ones, maybe they’ll sway and sparkle as Zuko thrusts above him, Sokka stuffed full on one end with the tantalising filigree swinging just out of reach of his hungry mouth…

Shit. Sokka has to reach for his ointment again.

Chapter Text

Back at Hari Bulkan, Zuko’s whisked back to Council at once. Wistfully, Sokka watches him go in a swirl of chiffon. “Just you and me now, Druk,” he says to the dragon Zuko’s left with him.

Ember Island’s left him feeling curiously dissatisfied, like a cog out of joint. It must be all the Shirtless Activity plans he had to scrap. He wants badly to chat to someone as a sounding board for all his brain flotsam and his first thought is Toph, but she’s in Ba Sing Se and she can’t read. Osha’s right here in the palace but he strikes her off at once. He doesn’t want to be filleted. That leaves, well… his sister.

He finds a shady spot beside a turtleduck pond in the palace garden. Katara, it must be said, could fillet him too—except she’s too far away and has a nine-month-old attached to her, which’ll make it harder for her to catch him.

Sister dearest, he begins, because he ought to butter her up for the rest of it.

Hope you and Aang are doing well. Getting sleep and stuff. How’s my favourite NEPHEW?

That’s out of the way. Now onto the serious business.

The Fire Nation is great. Very hot. Lots of nice icy drinks. Good thing Dad signed that ice trade agreement!

Anyway, Zuko’s got nipple piercings now.

He chews on the end of his brush, petting the sleepy coils of dragon beside him. Now that he’s here, it’s actually hard to commit his thoughts to the page. He gives it as good as he’s got.

Has he always been hot? Am I dying? What does it mean? What does it all MEAN?

HELP!!!!!!!!!!!

Love and kisses,
Your older, taller, & hotter brother

Sokka gives it a read over, in case anything’s missing. Ah, there is. He scrawls it in: Your older, taller, smarter, & hotter brother.

Perfect. He gives Druk a scratch behind the ears for being a great writing companion, rolls up the letter, and totters off to find a spare hawk.

In a nation full of earlybird firebenders, Sokka is a late riser. He blames that on why it takes him about a week to realise that Zuko engages in a Shirtless Activity of his own almost every day: training.

It’s a testament to Sokka’s doggedness that he manages to get up at the asscrack of dawn. One of the servants has, at his request, bustled in to drop a tray of breakfast beside his bed so the scent might waft him awake. By the time he makes his way to the training grounds, a cup of strong tea cooling in his hands, he can follow the sound of clashing metal.

Sokka watches from the sidelines, half shadowed by a pillar. He’s here for the view and man, what a view it is. As anticipated, Zuko is shirtless, torso gleaming in the morning sun. The piercings sparkle as the muscles in his chest twist and shift with each lunge and slash. What’s more, he’s accessorised further: two gold bands span the bulging breadth of his biceps. It’s practically Sokka’s birthday.

Osha, observant as ever, spots him first. “Hi Sokka!”

“Morning,” Zuko calls. He swings the dao together and approaches before Sokka can rally his wits against the full force of bare nips heading his way. He’s so close. Sokka can practically count every manly sweat drop. Unbidden, Zuko touches his cup of tea, which heats against his palm. Druk lumbers over too blowing smoke, which seems to be his way of showing affection. “You’re up early.”

Sokka takes a sip of his tea—partly because he needs his faculties caffeinated, partly to hide the open leering—and it’s the perfect temperature. Every itty bitty cell in Sokka’s body swoons. “Yeah.” His tongue and his larynx are working overtime to get these words out. “Thought I might… ah… get back into training.”

He didn’t bring his sword.

Osha, eyebrows raised, tosses him her own. Sokka snatches the hilt out of the air and swings it, feeling its heft. It’s not balanced to his body the way space sword is, but it’ll do.

He drains his tea. Zuko, grinning, roves backwards. He pulls the dao apart, tendons standing out as he flexes. The sun and moon wink dangerously.

Sokka gives it as good as he’s got. But if he’s honest with himself, he didn’t come out here intending to fight anyway. The sword whirls through the air, thrusts between the dao. Zuko doesn’t even attack. Block, block, block: the dao hardly leave any gap for an intrepid blade. Sokka’s blows cut down heavy. He presses close but the dao hold him back. He reels to the side, prying for a gap in the defence: to no avail. It’s rock solid. The twin blades shield Zuko hip to shoulder.

It doesn’t take long for Sokka to exhaust himself upon the siege Zuko lays. That’s when he springs. The dao swing out. The nipples, hitherto so jealously shielded, blaze into view like beacons of war. The assault is complete before Sokka can even begin to fortify his position.

Zuko stands over him. The morning sun limns his frame. He’s hard to look at. “You’re rusty.”

Ass in the dirt, Sokka can’t find it in himself to feel put out. Zuko’s tits are swaying above him like one of his sordid fantasies come true. Piandao always said to press every advantage, and an unwitting Zuko has done just that. Nonetheless Sokka pleads his case: “The sword’s unfamiliar.”

“No problem,” says Zuko. “We can fight empty handed.”

Empty handed. Skin on skin, without even the veneer of modesty a weapon might lend. Sokka abandons the sword. Zuko watches him rise, a challenge in his grin. He crooks his hand.

Sokka fights dirty, like his mind. Zuko’s pectoral muscles flex. His elbows are tucked close the way martial artists are taught, and his strong forearms bar Sokka’s grasping hands from approaching. A swipe at the arm, a retaliating punch that burns even without the press of fire. He grapples. When Zuko moves, it’s a wonder in so many ways. Sokka’s lost in it before he fully realises what’s happening.

Zuko’s chest slams into his back. Sokka hits the ground, the second time in as many minutes. He feels the inexorable crush of hard metal into his back, where it must be embossing twin solar and lunar prints into his skin. He swears he can even sense the softer squish of the nips themselves, like the world’s most unchaste dry kiss.

Sokka’s not proud of what happens next. He passes out.

Just a little!

Seriously! No big deal!

He wakes up to Zuko patting his cheek, which is of course an ideal way to regain consciousness.

“Oh good, you’re alive,” says Zuko. “Are you OK? Sorry. Just got a bit enthusiastic.”

He’s still plastered to Sokka’s back.

Sokka’s dick is hard, mashed into the dirt. It got hard so fast it’s a wonder the both of them didn’t get catapulted into the sky from the recoil. Tui and La’s weeny fucking koistaches.

Zuko gets off him. Sokka grunts, relieved and bereft all at once. “Let’s wrap up there,” Zuko says. “Gotta get to Council anyway.” He holds a hand out for Sokka.

“Nah,” says Sokka. “I’m just gonna stay here for a bit.”

Zuko quirks an eyebrow. “In the dirt?”

“In the dirt,” Sokka confirms. “Love to be. Ah. At one with nature.”

He holds his grin as Zuko leaves, shooting him bemused looks all the while. The second Zuko’s out of sight, he collapses back facedown into the dirt.

Perfectly mortified, Sokka successfully avoids Zuko all day. There’s a cave adventure he signs up for that turns out to be boringly safe (there are handrails! Stairs! Everyone has to wear hard hats! The other tourists are families with small children!) and boring’s bad, because without adrenaline his brain just circles back to Zuko. Poor bastard must be holed up in some dry post-lunch meeting with the tax bureau. It’s a damn shame that a man as fine as him has to be shut indoors all day, deliberating over affairs of the state instead of flexing his body around for public enjoyment.

By the time Sokka noodles back to the palace (he combed the cave gift shop thrice to fritter time away and ended up buying a sad singular keyring of a rock shaped like an otter-puffin), he’s wracked with jittery guilt. He’d really gone and avoided Zuko all day. Getting over hot nipples aside, it’s no way to treat his friend.

The sky purples above in anticipation of dinnertime. Should he find Zuko? But would he be ensnared by the nips again? There’s a grisly execution method Chin the Conqueror was reportedly fond of—an unfortunate victim dismembered by five careening horses—and Sokka’s starting to understand what that feels like. But it would be weird not to see him. Zuko is his breast friend. So he tells himself sternly, No nipply thoughts, and perches in Zuko’s sitting room to wait for His Flameyness to show up.

“Heyyy, buddy,” he says in his brightest, normallest tone when Zuko appears at the doorway with Druk. Blessedly, he seems to be wearing a normal shirt, something printed all over with snazzy yellow diamonds. That’s cool. That’s super cool. That means Sokka can act like his brain isn’t controlled by sex-crazed parasites.

“Sokka,” says Zuko. He doesn’t sound as though anything is amiss about Sokka’s daytime no-show. “We were just having dinner. I can call for another serving.”

Sokka follows him deeper into his chambers. There’s a desk stacked high with scrolls and paper; across from it is a low table with a zillion tiny bowls clustered on top. “Sit, sit,” Zuko urges, pulling a spare cushion out and puttering off. Sokka folds himself onto it. It’s a nice room arranged to feng the shui up: a few ink landscapes, a nice vase or two—look, Sokka’s no interiors guy but he can tell it’s tasteful. Druk comes up and nudges his big reptile face into Sokka’s hand, issuing a low rumble from his throat when Sokka starts to scratch.

Zuko comes back arms loaded with lamps, which he proceeds to set about lighting. “It’s a little dingy, sorry,” he says as the fire casts a warm glow around the room. “Didn’t realise it’d grown so dark. Oh—” He sets down the final lamp and turns to Sokka and Druk. “Oh, he likes you.”

“I’ve been around for a bit, I guess he’s used to me?”

But Zuko’s crouching down, scritching in concert with Sokka. Druk squirms in delight. “Good boy,” Zuko coos, and wow. It takes every ounce of Sokka’s willpower not to melt.

They’re interrupted by Sokka’s own zillion tiny bowls arriving. Druk headbutts Sokka when he stops petting and Zuko tuts.

“Druk, come to baba.”

Right. Wow. It’s a testament to Sokka’s strength of character that his nose does not start gushing blood at that. Druk goes. Baba, Sokka thinks, brain whirling free into the aether. Babaaaaaa.

“Sorry about that,” Zuko’s saying while Sokka’s brain hurtles into space, flinging off cells as it spins. “He’s still a juvenile, so he’s pretty mischievous. They live for longer than humans, so he has a while until he reaches maturity. Druk, aren’t you going to say sorry to Sokka? For not letting him eat?”

Druk sneezes a ring of smoke in Sokka’s direction which, for all that it makes him cough, is admittedly endearing. “It’s OK, Druk,” he wheezes. He chopsticks himself a tofu puff from one of the tiny bowls, waving it at the dragon. “Got my food! Haha.”

He cringes inside. Zuko must be judging the fuck out of him. Or he would, if he were not fondly rubbing Druk’s chin, apparently transfixed by his dragon baby.

“You really treat him just like your kid, huh,” says Sokka.

Zuko ducks his head. “I do indulge him,” he admits. “But look at him! Could you resist?”

Sokka watches him. Resistance is out of the question when it comes to everything about Zuko, as he’s rapidly discovering. Far from getting over the nipples, Sokka’s now becoming steadily beguiled by what a sweet dad Zuko is to his pet dragon. They eat, Zuko natters on about Druk, and Sokka makes a number of valiant attempts to evict the phrase father my children! from his brain.

But then.

But then.

“We could get dessert?” Zuko suggests.

Sokka’s usually quick to agree. But there's a telltale flash at Zuko’s chest when he gets up to flag a servant down. Sokka narrows his eyes. What the hell? But no, but surely, but he has to be mistaken—

Zuko comes back after a minute or so. No, Sokka isn’t mistaken: as Zuko folds himself back onto his cushion, Sokka once again catches that sparkle.

The fucking diamonds on his fucking diamond print shirt are fucking see through.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck fucking fuckity fuck fuck fuck.

It’s a fucking disaster. Sokka needs to get the fuck out of here.

“I don’t wanna mess up your evening plans,” says Sokka. He’s hyperaware of the sun and moon peeping at him from behind the sheer panels.

“Don’t be silly,” says Zuko. “Stay. I’d just be working otherwise, ugh.” He affects a little eyeroll and curse the spirits, it’s cute.

“I shouldn’t interrupt that!” says Sokka in a panic. La’s fins, is his casual dinner going to collapse the entire bureaucratic network of the Fire Nation? He gets up in a rush, nearly smashing the zillion tiny bowls into a squillion tiny shards. He can’t stay. He can’t. It’s a cool evening but he’s breaking out in a cold nipple-induced sweat. He’d been doing so well. So well, until the see-through diamond shirt.

In the safety of his room, Sokka suffers a howlingly hot wank sesh. He writhes on his sweat-soaked sheets, fingers buried in his ass. The Zuko in his mind is in blue, undoing a fur hood and peeling off a sealskin parka to reveal bejewelled nipples peaking in the cold. He’s boobalicious against his backdrop of glowing blue ice. It’s too damn cold down in the South Pole for metal jewellery, but so much of Sokka’s horniness is riding on that little, glittering detail.

Sokka himself’s lolling starkers on a pile of furs, big ivory necklaces clattering at his neck, cock (may the audience note: throbbing and veiny and turgid) jutting between his legs. “It’s good doing… niplomacy with you, Fire Lord,” leers Fantasy Sokka.

Fantasy Zuko giggles and blushes down to his great big honkin’ badonkers. Sokka wants to suffocate between them. “You’re sooooooo funny, Chief!” he simpers. “Fuck me with your massive boomerang!”

“Well, Your Fiery Majesty,” says Fantasy Sokka in a deep panty-ruining voice. He rubs his spread thighs. “Your throne awaits.” And Fantasy Zuko clambers on.

Sokka needs to get it together. He needs to use his BRAIN like the rational, scientific man he is. He needs to facts-don’t-care-about-your-feelings his way out of this whole forsaken nipple ordeal for real, for the last time. So he goes to the best thinking spot in the palace: Zuko’s nice, zenny, sun-drenched garden.

Sokka’s flung himself over a bench, taking idle sips of his latest fruity iced concoction when he hears a sage voice: “...and in those days Azulon kept his twin favourites in the grandest rooms the palace could offer, gilt walls and bedposts of jade…”

Shielding his eyes from the sun, Sokka peers around. There’s nary a person in sight, just elegant shrubs and aggressively manicured trees. He closes his eyes, but the voice in the shrubbery starts up again. “You would do well, young sir, to study those histories as you tread down the same paths they trod…”

Sokka blinks. He props himself up on an arm. “You speaking to me?”

A rustle. The speaker emerges from the shrub. Sokka jumps. He looks for something to cover himself with but alas, he’s left his shirt inside. He holds his drink in front of his chest. “Grand Chancellor.”

Some time ago, Zuko promoted one of his councillors to Grand Chancellor, a figure second only to the Fire Lord. Now, this man—in the full regalia of his office, hat towering, belt toggles swinging, hu tablet quivering—sweeps before Sokka. “Have you visited the harem chambers lately?”

Sokka looks around in confusion, but it really seems like the man is talking to him. “Um… no?”

“They’ve been empty for some time.” The Grand Chancellor scratches his beard with the tip of his hu tablet. “Over a decade, in fact.”

“I…?” says Sokka, who is at a complete loss for words.

“Yes, you.”

Sokka swallows. “Yeah, um. Azulon sucks. Sucked. Sir.”

“You do treat him well, of course,” says the Grand Chancellor.

“I… Azulon?” Sokka stutters.

The Grand Chancellor looks down at him with beady eyes. Sokka feels like a tiny insect being inspected and deemed worthy of getting swatted. “Hmm,” says the Grand Chancellor, more to himself than to Sokka. “Perhaps his intellectual prowess was somewhat… overstated.”

The next day, Sokka finds a note tucked into his bedsheets. In Zuko’s spidery handwriting, it reads:

Let’s go out for dinner. There’s a great market I want to show you.

They end up at the harbour. Out here, a little humidity touches the air and keeps it warm. Delicious smells drift upon the breeze. The market jangles brightly around them. Druk trots happily at their feet, coughing up joyous sparks of every colour. Zuko’s wearing—well, Sokka cannot think of a single word to describe what the hell it is—two lengths of fabric crisscrossed over his torso. The entire nipple kisses the cloth and not in a polite peck kinda way; no, nipples and piercings alike full on tongue the silk.

“Here!” Zuko’s saying, flourishing a big ball of puffy yellow something at him. “Grab some.”

Sokka snaps out of his papillary trance in time to see Zuko grabbing a soft hunk of the puff and dipping it in his sauce. He eats it with gusto, a little mm! that rearranges some of the organs in Sokka’s tummy region, licks his fingers. “Have some!” he urges.

Sokka copies him, but Zuko pulls the bright red sauce back when Sokka reaches for it. “Nuh-uh. You can’t handle that.”

Sokka says, “I can eat chilli.”

Zuko’s mouth twitches. “No you can’t.”

“Uh, I’ve been eating in your palace for weeks. I think I’d know.”

Zuko opens his mouth again, but Sokka slams his hunk of egg—it feels like egg—into the sauce and stuffs it into his mouth.

“How is it?” says Zuko.

Sokka—um, Sokka can’t speak. Fuck. Is that crab? It’s delicious. It’s delicious but his entire mouth is on fire. None of the palace meals were this bad. His eyes water. “Good,” he garbles.

“I told the kitchens to reduce the chilli in your meals,” says Zuko, the picture of cringing apology.

“What do you mean, bro?” Sokka manages. “I love spice.”

“You’re crying.”

“Tears of joy. You’ve robbed me of the chance to build up my tolerance for weeks.”

He takes another swipe of the crab omelette. It is good, genuinely, under the flavour of the chilli, which is also good. Chilli is so delicious. It’s so hot. His taste buds just have to deal.

Zuko gets summer rolls next, and Sokka berates him for getting mild food while his tongue cries out in relief at the burst of mint and vermicelli. He also buys a coconut that’s been sitting in a pool of ice, nudging the straw indulgently to Sokka’s lips.

When Sokka’s tongue recovers enough for speech, he blurts, “Your Grand Chancellor came up to me yesterday.”

“Kang?” Zuko recoils. “By the spirits. What did he say?”

“Um…” Sokka takes another long slurp of chilled coconut juice. “Something about your grandfather? Azulon? And ummm… a harem?”

Zuko looks… flustered. “Oh no. Don’t mind him, please. I’m so sorry about him.”

“Don’t apologise, dude!”

“No, really, I’m sorry.” Zuko sinks a pair of flaming cheeks into his hands. “He’s just… like that. I’ll talk to him.”

Druk loops his way up his baba’s legs as though sensing his embarrassment. Zuko hoists him up, absently pecks the top of his head. His biceps flex poetically. “You don’t have to talk to him,” Sokka says quickly. “I just don’t know what he meant?”

“Don’t,” says Zuko, “worry about it.” Which obviously makes Sokka more worried about it. “Look, Kang just… cares, in his own weird uncle way.”

The Grand Chancellor cares about… what? But there’s a steady hand at his elbow and Zuko (still festooned with cuddly dragon) leads him away from the stalls, towards the main harbour square. It pumps with life. Music weaves through the crowd and a troupe of dancers twirl in bright costumes. Novelty firebenders conjure animals out of flames, and they leap over the crowd before bursting apart in the night. Sokka finds himself bobbing to the rhythm. Beside him, Zuko melts into the crowd. He lets a kid pet Druk’s tail, he helps an elderly man step over a gutter, pins up a falling banner for a stallholder. The newly crowned Fire Lord watched his back for years for assassins; this Fire Lord is one with his people.

The crowds push him back to Sokka’s side. He presses close to murmur into Sokka’s ear, under the noise. “In the darkest years after my accession, my Council stood steadfast by me. Together, we achieved great things…” He gestures at the bustling harbour facilities, returned to his people after being exploited for a hundred years of war.

When Sokka first came here during that failed invasion on the Day of the Black Sun, the harbour was all heavy gates and imposing, empty avenues. “It feels so alive now,” he says. “You brought the beauty back here.”

Zuko ducks his face into Druk’s loops. “Not only me.”

“You’re at the centre of it all,” says Sokka. He hadn’t thought about it before, not consciously, but he knows it’s true when he says it out loud.

“I know the responsibility I carry,” says Zuko, quiet. He smooths a hand over the crisscross fabric, over the place where his nipple squooches itself up against the silk. “That’s why I got these.” These? “They remind me of the work I have left to do for this nation. The unending work, and my life as the sacrifice.”

The piercings. Sokka could put a satay skewer through his eye. Of course it always comes back to the fucking piercings.

Terrorised by the twin attack of chilli in his intestines and being down bad for Druk’s dad, Sokka sleeps fitfully that night. He slips into wakefulness with ease when a servant pushes into his room at dawn bearing a breakfast tray.

“I didn’t request this,” says Sokka blearily.

“His Majesty did,” says the servant.

Sokka fights his way out of his tangled bedsheets and patters over to the tray. There’s a little note tucked under a sweating cup of iced beige liquid.

Morning! Come spar! The ca phe will wake you up, no excuses.

Sokka downs the meaty congee and eyes the ca phe. It smells fragrant and sweet, stronger than tea. He takes a sip. The flavour is strong—bitter, sharp, rich, sweet—but by the second sip it’s growing on him.

By the time he drains the cup, he’s jittering.

He jitters out of his room and jitters over to the training grounds. Zuko—lovely, sexy, nipply Zuko—is shirtlessly twirling through his dao formations with his bodyguard. Sokka jitters up and waves jitteringly.

“Look who’s gotten off his sleeve,” Osha says. Maybe it’s too early, but Sokka has no idea what the fuck she means.

“You came!” says Zuko. He bows to Osha and jogs up, golden and buxom. The sun and moon are so exposed. So shiny. “Ca phe working, then?”

Sokka nods frantically. “Hell yeah,” he says. His eye jitters.

“Is that his first time having it?” Osha comes up to peer at him, fascinated. “He looks twitchy as hell.”

“I’ve never felt more awake,” Sokka declares. He pulls space sword out for good measure.

“And you remembered to bring it,” says Zuko, and brings the dao down.

Sokka puts up a fight, certainly better than the one last time. His insomnia and the pumping caffeine have somehow tangled together to give him an out-of-body experience, where his brain is registering one thing and his limbs are responding to another. It’s not that Sokka’s unaware of the nips now. Hell no, he’s hyperaware of them, but he’s also hyperaware of everything else. There’s sun-flashing nips, there’s blade and blade and blade, there’s Osha hollering on the sidelines, there’s the scrape of dust at their feet, there’s Zuko’s little puffs of exertion…

He realises too late when Zuko tangles his sword between the dao and wrenches sideways. All three blades clatter to the ground.

The sound makes Sokka wince. The exhaustion comes tumbling back, like a dragon falling out of the sky on top of him.

Osha, ever tactful, comes up to offer Zuko a sweeping bow. “I’ll inform your secretary you are on the way to Council, Your Majesty,” she says. She shoots Sokka a look, eyebrow raised and everything, then spins on her heel.

Sokka, discomfited, is reminded of her opening remark. “Why am I getting off a sleeve, anyway?” he asks Zuko.

Zuko shrugs on a—is it even a shirt? The neckline plunges from collarbone to navel, leaving a swathe of cleavage and abdominal exposed—and sips some tea. “What sleeve?”

“You know, what Osha said earlier. Me getting off my sleeve.”

Zuko snorts. “Don’t you know the story? The king who cut his sleeve.”

It doesn’t ring a bell. “Enlighten me.”

Zuko leads them back into the palace’s cavernous hallways. Druk ambles in their wake. “It’s an old Earth Kingdom legend. King Ai was resting with his lover; when he awoke, the king was called to a meeting. But the lover was still asleep on the king’s sleeve…” Zuko sighs, looking past Sokka into the middle distance. “And what did the king do? Took a knife and cut his own sleeve off, so as not to disturb him.” He shakes out one of his sleeves, a billowy thing that explains where all the chest fabric went. “Isn’t that so romantic? Such a simple gesture, but it speaks volumes of the king’s love for him.”

“Right,” says Sokka, “but what does that have to do with me getting off it?”

Zuko blinks at him. “It means you woke up, Sokka.”

They shore up at the opulent entrance to the Council chamber; Sokka didn’t even realise they were treading the path here. “Well, this is me,” Zuko says, and slips behind the door.

Before Sokka can scuttle off to do his own thing, Osha comes out of the chamber. “Hey Sokka,” she says. “Not been up to your usual form.”

“Hah.” Sokka scratches the shorn back of his head. “Yeah, just out of practice.”

“Understandable. You’re so busy now! It’s nice you found time to see His Majesty. You’re a good friend.”

Tui’s gills. Sokka could die. A good friend wouldn’t be luring Zuko into nip-baring activities on the reg, but he can’t even fucking help himself. “No way,” he says weakly.

“I’m serious!” Osha presses. “He’s so happy to have a friend around. He gets lonely. The past few weeks, he just seems—refreshed. Rejuvenated.”

Sokka just gives her a thin smile. Osha waves before marching off to attend to the Fire Lordy duties of the day. He watches her go with a sinking feeling. That’s the thing about Zuko. He’s so fucking earnest. This is a guy that believes in true love à la Love Amongst the Dragons, à la sleeve-chopping kings. And Sokka’s doing nothing but gratifying his own dirty fantasies all over him.

Set the scene. It is the inside of a dome of ice. A fire crackles dying within. By its dim light Sokka can see on the walls: a club, theatre masks, bronze lamps (snuffed), a tapestry woven from whale sinew. On the frozen floor is a strange creature: large, scaly red, looped upon itself and issuing smoke. Someone shares Sokka’s pile of furs. He emits a gentle heat. He is asleep, this one whose chest has been marked with the sun and the moon. But Sokka cannot see the marks. They are pressed against his own skin and he stays awake in the unending night watching his companion, brushing back his long hair, and kissing his forehead.

Katara’s reply, when it finds him a week after his first letter, doesn’t help.

It begins without preamble: Zuko’s nipples?!

I can’t believe you, Sokka. He got those to show his commitment to peace with the Water Tribe, so we’ll never have to endure the pain of war again. And what did you do? I can’t believe you would go and objectify our most virginal, chaste, and CELIBATE friend. Are you physically unable to get your mind out of the gutter for once in your LIFE? You’re SICK!!!

You want to talk nipples? Mine have been CHAPPED RAW by Bumi for MONTHS.

Ew. If nipples were a spectrum, then Zuko’s would be on one end and sister nipples would occupy the other. There’s a lot of text after that. Sokka skims it, then finds Aang’s patient little post-script:

Tread carefully! Zuko is our bosom friend.

Sokka rolls up the letter. Damn. He’s suspected for a while, but his sister has confirmed it. He really is an abomination that deserves to be obliterated from the face of the planet. He’s tried everything he can, but Zuko’s nipples will not budge from his mind. There’s only one thing left for him to do, and as Sokka strides grimly down to the aviary, he realises he doesn’t really want to do it at all.

Chapter Text

“What’s this?” says Zuko.

They’re in his office. Zuko’s sitting at his desk, Sokka’s standing over him while his intestines tie themselves into tassels. “New job,” says Sokka, affecting a smile over the more trembly bits of his voice. It’s stupid that he’s… emotional about this, and all the more reason for him to get out of the Fire Nation ASAP. He needs to reassert normality over his life, and being near Zukonian nipples is antithetical to any of that. “Omashu wants a hydraulics advisor. Heading out in a coupla days. Just wanted to say, uh, thanks for hosting me and all.”

Zuko blinks at him, the guileless gold of his eyes framed by his delicate gold wire glasses. He looks fucking hot in them. It took a lot of calming breaths before Sokka could work up the courage to come into the office, knowing he would be wearing them. His lips part, a hint of tongue darts out to wet his lips. “Oh,” says Zuko. “That felt very… quick.”

“I’ve already been here a couple of weeks.” Sokka kicks the toe of his shoe into the rug. “Overstaying my welcome, haha.”

“You never do, Sokka,” says Zuko. “You’re always welcome.” He breaks eye contact with Sokka, who releases the breath he didn’t realise he was holding. Zuko rolls up the letter Sokka showed him and presents it back with both hands. There’s a smile on his face that seems to stretch too tightly. “We should do something before you go.”

“Boys’ night?” Sokka hedges.

“Yeah.” Zuko’s hands dart back into his lap when Sokka takes the letter. “Boys’ night.”

Sokka shows up to boys’ night pacing tracks into the timber floor of Zuko’s sitting room.

“You’re here.”

He jumps only the teensiest bit, but even that isn’t the biggest shock. Zuko’s got a hand on the doorframe and draped across his solid shoulders is the most obscene shirt he’s sported by far. Sokka, who’s becoming the authority on scanty Zuko shirts, is floored by this one. The gauze shimmers translucent red over his chest, a hopeless excuse for a cover. And it’s not only the piercings that shine out from behind the flimsy mesh: gold glimmers too at his throat, across his biceps, around his wrists.

Sokka swallows. You’re SICK, echoes Katara’s voice in his mind.

“Sokka?”

He starts. “Hey buddy,” he says, voice only a little too loud. “Brought us some sugarcane wine, haha.” Sokka holds the jar in front of his body like a shield.

Zuko cocks his head. His long hair is pinned into a messy chignon at his nape, and the escaped strands tilt with the movement. “What are you standing there for?” he says. “Come on through.”

Sokka tumbles in his spice-scented wake. Dinner awaits them, not in a zillion tiny bowls each but meaty sharing plates stacked high with seafood. Sokka, drooling already over Zuko (against his will, Katara!), drools harder when he smells it. Druk comes up to rest a hot, heavy head in his lap as he settles onto his cushion while Zuko pours them tiny cups of wine.

“Cheers,” says Zuko. He holds out his cup. The liquid, if it’s not too cheesy to point out, is the colour of his eyes. Sokka hurries to clink the porcelain together. When Zuko takes his small, polite sip, his eyes hold Sokka’s. The wine flushes warm down his throat.

Zuko fills Sokka’s rice bowl with gravy-rich cockles and some jellyish substance sprinkled generously with coriander. By some miracle that must touch every Fire Nation royal, the draping sleeves manage not to dip into all the sauce between them. “Omashu, huh?”

“Yeah,” says Sokka around a mouthful of rice and seafood. “It just came up, haha.” In fact, Sokka sent a dozen letters off to his contacts across the four seas, begging them to alert him of any upcoming jobs. Not that he’s going to tell Zuko.

Zuko takes another minute sip of his wine. His breath comes out fogged when he puts the cup down and, Sokka realises, it’s his bending heating up the wine. He shifts. He’s only ten minutes into boys’ night. How the fuck is he going to survive?

“What’s the jelly thing?” he says, trying to divert the topic.

“Spoonworm-cucumber,” says Zuko breezily, taking a bite out of his own chunk. “Do you like it?”

Sokka liked it more before learning the name. “It’s a worm?”

“It’s seafood,” says Zuko.

“Mollusc?” Sokka holds another globbery slice up, turning it this way and that before a critical eye.

“I don’t think so,” says Zuko, beatific. “That’s the best part, see—” And then he leans over the table to slurp it from Sokka’s chopsticks.

Sokka blinks rapidly as the globbery worm bit schloops saucily into Zuko’s pursed mouth. “Mm!” says Zuko. “No, I do think the chef has excelled on this one. Or you could try the oyster, it’s cooked in tongkat ali. This one’s very good.”

He holds one out. Sokka, feeling foolish, eats it. The oyster is smooth on his tongue, the sauce so bitter Sokka’s mouth puckers. “Um… yummy.”

“It is,” says Zuko. He piles more into Sokka’s bowl with relish, topping it off with yams. “I asked the kitchens to prepare a special meal tonight knowing my friend would be leaving. They’ve exceeded expectations.”

Sokka eats his oysters and spoonworm-cucumbers wretchedly. He’s never been a veggies man but the yams are an actual saving grace. It’s by far the most bizarre meal he’s ever eaten at Zuko’s, a potpourri of questionable delicacies that Sokka hopes he didn’t spend too much money on for a simple farewell. The easy way out would be to slip bits to Druk but Sokka has always been one for self-flagellation. If Zuko knew why he had to leave, then he’d be glad to see the back of Sokka. Probably forever.

Dessert is served in dinky lidded cups, a sweet soup with chunks of a kind of ribbony cloud floating within. Zuko slurps joyously. “Birds nest soup,” he says. “Made of swallows’ nests.”

“You mean,” says Sokka, “the bird that makes nests out of their own spit?”

“That’s the one.” Zuko beams. “It’s very healthy. Good for circulation. A rare delicacy.”

Sokka’s faced more daunting things: punting airships out of the sky while airborne, for one. He eats the damned soup. The nests slip about on his tongue, flavourless save for the ginger from the soup. Bird spit is touching his own spit. He can’t decide whether he likes it or not. When a servant comes to clear the bowls, Sokka asks for a fandango of a fruity iced tea and sucks it down gratefully. He needs to cool his brain down enough for whatever else Zuko has in store for him.

As it turns out, it’s poetry.

“I never took you for a poetry man,” says Sokka in surprise when Zuko spreads the scrolls before him.

“These were gifts,” says Zuko. He traces the edge of one sheet with a gentle finger. “I wanted to put them up in my chambers, but I thought I might get your advice first. Since you’re the expert.”

Sokka inspects the sheaf on top. The paper is creamy, speckled with thin grass fibres. In swishy calligraphy it reads:

I’ll never be that kind of cat—
passionless and mummified,
dozing off while you undress
or offering to turn my head
when you remove your blouse
and reveal your mounds of jasmine.

“What do you think?” says Zuko, a little breathless.

“Who’d you get them from?”

Zuko moves the sheet so Sokka can see the second poem. “One of the local writers’ guilds. The poet is an older man, but he writes with such a fresh sensuality. I find myself so fascinated…”

Sokka turns his attention to it.

No ripe breasts, black or white,
are devoid of a sign of my conquests.
There remains no crevice within a fair lady’s body
that lacks my trail marks.

“I think this one is beautiful.” Zuko presses against his arm, leaning over to point. “No ripe breasts… my conquests… It’s evocative, such a potent image.”

Sokka takes a noisy sip of his drink. He’s more fixed on the fair lady’s body line, and there’s a sourness in his throat that has nothing to do with the fruits in his beverage. “Hmm,” is what he has to say before flipping to the final poem.

I inhale deeply,
exhale,
massage my body with violet oil
and jump from the precipice
of your right breast
to the precipice of your left…

“So?” says Zuko. He’s quivering in his seat, the hand stroking Druk arrested in motion. “What do you think?”

“The calligraphy is”—Sokka clears his throat—“really subpar.”

Zuko stills. “Sorry?”

Sokka sighs and riffles through the sheets again. “It’s not your fault, really,” he says, “but if you wanted to display these, I can’t in good conscience let you put up such poor penmanship on your walls. Look at this.” He points at one of the lines. “This isn’t calligraphy, it’s just messy handwriting. They aren’t following any of the writing forms. Or this one”—he flips to another poem—“the proportions here are just poor. I can’t believe they’d send something this uncouth to the Fire Lord. It doesn’t do the poetry justice at all.”

There’s a beat. Sokka hedges a glance at him, worried that he might’ve offended Zuko there, but then Zuko says, all sincere, “Won’t you show me how it’s meant to be done, then?”

Thank the spirits. “Of course,” Sokka gabbles. He moves the poems aside, clearing space for Zuko to lay out a fresh sheet. He copies the first poem out again in his best cursive, letting the flow of the ink direct his brush across the page.

Zuko’s leaning up against him again, stray hairs tickling Sokka’s cheek. It makes writing a little hard but Sokka perseveres. If Katara could see him now, she’d be proud. Self control, motherfucker. “You write more beautifully,” says Zuko. “I see that now.”

“I thought you studied with Piandao,” Sokka says. “He would’ve taken you through the fundamentals.”

Zuko shrugs. “I was a kid. Don’t remember much, and I never practised after.”

So Sokka hands him the brush. “I can’t,” says Zuko, astonished, and Sokka wants him to try anyway.

To be honest, he isn’t great. He pushes his delicate glasses on and squints hard as he forms the characters, hand trembling with concentration. There’s something endearing about perfect, serene Zuko, shapely of boob, worrying over his calligraphy. “Looser,” Sokka says and adjusts his pose.

“I feel silly.”

“You have to feel silly before you improve,” Sokka tuts.

Zuko wobbles his way through another character. It looks like if the ink passed through a cuttle-jellyfish. “I can barely—”

“The point isn’t legibility, it’s the artistry.”

Zuko holds out his brush hand. “So show me.”

Bewildered, Sokka says, “I did.”

“No.” Zuko grabs his hand, places it over the one on the brush. The skin is so warm, like clutching a steamed bun in the middle of a Ba Sing Se winter. Sokka gulps. Is his palm too sweaty? But Zuko doesn’t seem to care. “Show me how. The artistry.”

So Sokka guides his hand. Zuko, hard flesh against his arm, presses heat into the line of his body. The characters swirl to life beneath their hands, not quite perfect with the weight of two hands on the brush, but a heck of a lot better than whatever Zuko was trying to churn out earlier. “Feel the movement? The flow of the character?”

“I didn’t really get it before,” says Zuko, “but you’re such a great teacher, Sokka.”

Sokka clears his throat, trying to clamp down on the heat rising on the back of his neck. “Haha, totally!” He lets go of Zuko’s hand before he can do anything stupider. “OK, show me what you can do now.”

Zuko complies. Sokka should be watching him write but as he leans back, it’s hard not to take in, instead, the flex of his biceps, the elegant sweep of his hair, and sun nip winking into view as Zuko’s arm moves back and forth across the paper. And the squirm.

Wait. Squirm?

Zuko moves his brush to the new line, and there it is again: the minute hitch of his shoulders, the squirm. His lips are parted as he writes, a small frown pressing a divot in his brow. And when Sokka’s eyes trail down, he sees the way the limpid silk caresses the tips of Zuko’s nipples, the way they shiver.

It’s like his brain whites out.

“How’s thi—”

“You’re still… sensitive?” Sokka says all at once.

He’s mortified the second the words leave his mouth. Zuko just pulls at the flimsy shirt and sighs. “Yeah,” he says, and the poor thing sounds genuinely miserable. He must’ve been holding it in. So fuck Katara and everything, but after a whole evening on his best behaviour Sokka says:

“I have this—ointment.”

Zuko looks up. To Sokka’s ear, it’s the most pathetic, skeevy thing ever committed to the human voice, but Zuko looks interested, as though Sokka were actually offering to help. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” says Sokka. “I put it on my tatts and piercings too, when they’re fresh.”

That’s not strictly false, though Sokka is omitting the fact he’s used that ointment for everything else from chapped lips to sunburn to—most recently—his ramped-up masturbation efforts. Zuko looks so hopeful, Sokka feels like the world’s biggest sicko.

“Can I borrow it?” Zuko says.

It’s hard for Sokka to drag himself away when he looks like this, barely-there shirt with the rings winking at him from behind the gauzy fabric: forbidden to touch, so infuriatingly present. It takes the strength of Aang in full Avatar mode for him to stumble back to his rooms and grab the little jar. In spite of Sokka’s punishing wank schedule, there’s still a few swipes of ointment left, to his relief.

But nothing could’ve prepared him for the return to Zuko’s office. Sokka nearly faceplants over the threshold when he takes in the sight.

Zuko, reclining shirt-open on the couch, seems oblivious to Sokka’s plight. “You’re back.”

Sokka holds up the little jar, as though it can enforce some sorely-needed propriety between him and Zuko. He pops it onto the low table along with Zuko’s documents. The glasses are folded up there. Druk is nowhere to be seen. “Right,” he says, voice a little pitchy. The piercings glimmer in the firelight. “I’ll, ah, leave you to it.”

“You’re leaving?”

“Um, I—”

“My arms are tired,” says Zuko.

“Wh-where’s your dragon?”

“Out.” Zuko’s mouth is parted, his tits distractingly flushed. “Aren’t you going to help me?”

Sokka is dead. Sokka is dying, and despite the last few weeks of nonstop dirty fantasies the spirits have somehow deemed that he’s lived a good enough life to be rewarded with whatever this is. “Yeah,” he manages, “OK. I can. I totally can.”

He scooches beside Zuko on the couch. There isn’t much room. Zuko doesn’t move to accommodate him, so Sokka has to either fall off his perch or press his hip into the bare flesh of Zuko’s waist. He does the latter. Zuko’s eyes, heavy lidded, follow him as he hems and haws. “Let me get the—” he says, wiping his sweaty hands on his tunic before thumbing the jar open. “There we go! Um.” He needs to be sure. “I’m gonna rub this ointment on your”—titties—“piercings for you.”

And to that Zuko gives a little wriggle of the shoulders and says, “Get on with it.”

La’s fins, and he’s bossy too. Who is Sokka to refuse His Majesty? He rubs the ointment between his fingers and runs them over the nipples.

This is everything he’s dreamed of for the past few weeks. The buds are warm to the touch, the natural heat Zuko emanates. They’re held upright by the bars running through them but they perk up even more under Sokka’s fingertips. Zuko gasps, a barely-there sound as soft as the gossamer he’s wearing. Fuck, Sokka thinks. He wasn’t lying about the sensitivity.

“Good?” Sokka manages.

Zuko closes his eyes. “Mm.”

Here’s what Sokka does: he swipes the barest amount as neatly as he can over each of the nips, trembling as he does. It’s insane, literally insane that this is happening—that Zuko’s letting him do this. That he asked for it. So he pulls back before he oversteps.

“Rub it in.”

“Wh-what?” Sokka gibbers.

Zuko cracks open an eye. The lashes sweep heavy over his pupil. “You have to rub it in for the ointment to work.”

Sokka does it. He circles the nipples, thumbs the ointment into flesh. There’s poetry in this too, the way he applies pressure to the skin, the way he has to work it into the yielding skin knowing that anything too rough would bring Zuko discomfort. He maps their scanty topography, skirting around metal. Zuko’s muscles hitch under his touch, reaction without thought.

When Sokka’s done, Zuko is an absolute sight to behold. His hair is slipping out of his chignon, breath coming out in little puffs of steam, glassy eyes tracking Sokka’s lean backwards with the slightest delay. The nipples, those gorgeous things, are flushed and glistening around the hardware, brown blossoming into pink. Sokka is human. He’s hard. He licks his lips. “I’ll—ah. I’ll leave you to it, then.”

He makes to get up, trying to hide his awkward boner. And then a firm grip arrests him.

“If you think you’re going anywhere without finishing what you’ve started, you’ve got another think coming,” says Zuko.

Sokka’s heartbeat rabbits. He chances a glance back—and sees Zuko’s own hard-on tenting the silk of his pants, a dark bead collecting where the tip strains against the fabric. Oh.

“You were planning this,” Sokka breathes.

“Oh very well spotted, Sokka,” says Zuko acidly. “What was it that clued you in, may I ask? Not the weeks of skimpy shirts, not me feeding you a table full of aphrodisiacs, not me asking you to rub my nipples for ten minutes?”

Well—! Sokka splutters, and then he puts together the two brain cells that survived the nipple massage and—ah. Feeding him the South Pole, back on Ember Island. The sleeve story. Taking him to the harbour market. The Grand Chancellor. Now Zuko’s mentioned it, the spoonworm-cucumbers were kinda… phallic. Sokka could facepalm. There were just… extenuating circumstances, OK? Nipple-induced tunnel vision.

“I’ve seen you looking,” Zuko adds, a little reproachful.

Sokka kneels before him. Zuko is watching him, aroused annoyance written all over his pretty face. “OK,” he says. “I’m sorry.” Zuko lifts his chin imperiously. “And I’m going to make it up to you by putting my mouth on your nipples.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” says Zuko, and that fucking mouth on him. It’s gratifying, then for Sokka to hear it give a stuttering moan when he kisses the moon nip. It’s a revelation. If Sokka’s not careful, he’s going to start believing in the spirits. He licks then rolls the nub against his tongue, admiring the give of flesh juxtaposed against the hard metal. Everything he’s dreamed of for weeks, and reality as ever is profane in its glory. The ointment has left a thick, oily layer, but it melts away under Sokka’s tongue and then it’s just the warm, musky taste of skin. Zuko’s eyes flutter shut, his tit arches into Sokka’s mouth.

“Good?” Sokka manages. Zuko whines in response, which, wow. Sokka’s hard, in case anyone needs the reminder.

He dips his tongue under the crescent of the moon, skirting along the areola, its pebbled texture like the skin of an ocean kumquat. Zuko shivers. “More.”

So Sokka applies his fingers to the sun nip, nothing like his previous, gentle ointment-application ministrations. No, now he pinches it hard and is gratified by the wrecked noise it pulls out of Zuko’s throat.

“Fuck,” breathes Sokka. “You are so thirsty for this. I thought you got these for world peace.”

“Fuck world peace!” says Zuko and then because he’s Zuko, he looks immediately contrite. “I didn’t mean that. I mean, I did get them for world peace but…” His unscarred eye grows big. “Isn’t a well-fucked Fire Lord world peace too?”

Isn’t it indeed. Sokka happily lends his services to global disarmament as he sucks the nub, adoring the way Zuko sobs. The other one is rolled between two fingers, bullied by a rough thumb. Beneath him Zuko squirms, like he can’t figure out whether he wants more of the touch or to shy away from the sensitivity.

When Sokka surfaces the sight that greets him is Zuko’s cheeks fervid with red, more beautiful than anything his perv brain could’ve come up with. He tells Zuko as much, and Zuko’s hand comes up to grasp his chin, to lodge his jaw open. Then his eyes slide to fix upon something behind Sokka.

Sokka follows his gaze to the low desk with the abandoned poems, the abandoned glasses, the abandoned iced tea—

“Oh Zuko,” he breathes. “We all thought you were some kinda maiden; Katara sent me this letter—” He lunges for the sweating cup and scrabbles inside. Zuko looks cross-eyed at the cube of ice Sokka holds up triumphantly before him.

When the ice touches the blushing nub that boasts the sun, Zuko’s back curls right off the couch. The noise he makes is feral. “Oh I know,” says Sokka, “I know,” when he’s not sure that he does, when Zuko thrashes from side to side, cushions ruining his pretty hairdo, the scant fabric twisting under him. Sokka weighs him down with an arm, as best as he can; he squeezes and boob flesh swells in the gaps between fingers. He moves the ice to the moon and the fat nipple there pinches against the cold. Zuko’s beautiful, a fucking vision, big man succumbing to a little chip of cold that his hot skin is turning to rivulets that trail down his chest. It takes a while for Sokka to register he’s talking his mouth off, a litany of nonsense praise and wonder as Zuko writhes: “You’re unbelievable… You don’t know how long… If only they could see you like this… But it’s only for me right? I wish I could… Your tits…”

“Touch me,” Zuko chokes out, then again: “Fucking touch me!”

Sokka moves as if through agar. The ice flake ribbons away, his cold fingers quest down the heaving planes of Zuko’s body to press his cock through the silk. It’s hard for Zuko to stay looking bossy when the pleasure suffuses into his features like this. Sokka palms the length, mapping its shape and losing his mind a little at the way the silk slides under his hand. Then he nudges the pants past Zuko’s hips, easing his pretty (he knew it!) cock out.

“Look at you,” says Sokka in wonder. “Dribbling so much just from the touch to your titties.”

Zuko just bites his knuckle, whines around it when Sokka swipes more ointment out of the jar and smears it over his cock. Sokka puts his face into Zuko’s neck, breathes the headiness there. He feels the gulp of Zuko’s throat. “You have no idea how many times I jerked off with this ointment. Thinking about your delicious nips. Rubbed myself raw thinking of you, thinking of doing everything to—”

“I had some idea,” says Zuko, determined to have the last word.

“Oh yeah?” says Sokka with teeth, and in revenge he let his slick hand trail down between Zuko’s legs, dip between his glutes to his—

“No way,” Zuko sniffs abruptly. “I don’t use that crap.” He pushes Sokka’s hand away and sits up, nips shining wetly in the lamplight. “Come on.” He says it the way he might say it to Druk, like Sokka’s a pet at his beck and call. And maybe he is, the way he follows as Zuko steps out of his pants entirely and flounces to the door that leads to his bedroom, flimsy little negligee floating behind him.

Sokka’s never been inside Zuko’s room. He realises that now, stepping into this unfamiliar space that Zuko lights with a casual flicks of fire to the lamps. Sokka catches glimpses of shadowed, lacquered furniture and scrolls of calligraphy hung on the walls before Zuko shoves him onto the expanse of his bed and climbs on top. He rips the hairpin out of what’s left of his chignon and the strands spill luscious over his shoulders.

“Oh hello,” says Sokka, hands trailing up Zuko’s (hard, muscled) sides, before Zuko shuts him up with a kiss. It sears hot on Sokka’s mouth, too far gone to be anything sweet: tongue swiping like a flame, teeth nipping sharp into Sokka’s lip. Fingers fumble at the ties of his shirt. He thrusts against Sokka’s erection. Before Sokka can deepen the kiss, he lifts back up and twists away. That’s when Sokka sees the setup on the stand beside his bed: a porcelain jar and a few suspiciously familiar square, wax-paper envelopes fanned out below, like they’re in a honeymoon suite instead of a bedroom.

“You prepared,” says Sokka with some wonder.

Zuko swipes the jar and dribbles its contents over Sokka’s fingers. “Only for the last fortnight or so.”

It’s lube. Fancy lube. Of course Zuko would insist on fancy lube. Sokka rubs it between his fingers. It’s plush as fuck, fit for His Majesty’s asshole. Half an hour ago, Sokka didn’t even know Zuko fucked; now, he knows Zuko indulges in fancy lube. He flings Zuko’s sheer top to the floor and tips him over so that he’s flat on his back, hair flowing like tendrils of ink over the pale gold of his sheets, sun and moon winking in the warm firelight. “You look amazing. Fucking delectable,” says Sokka. “Your muscles, Tui and La, big as melons. You’re so fucking hot. Arnook knew what he was doing.”

“Touch me,” Zuko whimpers.

He can’t not, not when Zuko’s begging so prettily. He gives that drooling, neglected cock a rub, then reaches between those powerful thighs.

The way he squirms on Sokka’s fingers is a wonder. He takes them so well, one after the other. Zuko’s asshole blushes the same pink as his cheeks, the tips of his nips, the head of his cock. Sokka wants to render him in watercolour.

“You’re opening for me so well,” he murmurs, and Zuko snipes, “I prepped, dipshit.”

The dipshit presses up against Zuko’s side and runs his tongue over the closest nipple, lets the metal clash on his teeth. “Are you still mad?” he implores. “I’ll make it up to you, I swear.” He finds the bump inside Zuko’s asshole and fucks his fingers against it. It’s beautiful and sloppy. Zuko’s thighs quiver with the effort to hold still.

Sokka holds the nipple between his teeth and Zuko writhes hard, almost like he’s going to jolt off Sokka’s fingers. He’s strong; it takes all of Sokka’s strength to keep him pinned down. Sensitive, his ass. Zuko’s nips are on a hair trigger.

Sokka works one of the condoms onto himself—again, fancy, Sokka didn’t know condoms this fancy could exist, cos what’d it be made of, the sheepgut of some qilin-ram fed on spirit world meadows?—slathers even more lube, and nudges Zuko upright. He doesn’t wanna, he’s so pouty about it. “Come on,” Sokka chides. “Come sit on my cock, baby.”

When he does it’s a wonder to behold: Zuko propping his pleasure-limp torso up with two hands that burn on Sokka’s chest, head thrown back with the eyes screwed shut, mouth slack and steaming. Sokka holds him by the tits, thumbs rubbing soothing circles over the nipples. “There we go,” he coos as Zuko slides himself down inch by agonising inch, burning hot around his cock. “You’re doing so well. Look at you.”

There’s something to be said about the way Zuko wrests his body to his will: muscle mass, nipple piercings, bottoming. Sokka would say it, but he’s busy admiring the squeeze around his cock and the big hunk of Fire Lord bouncing on it. “Look at you,” he says again. “Aren’t you pretty? We got here in the end, huh? You got my hands on your nips, my cock in your ass.” His hands ghost over those generous pecs again, drawn there as though magnetised. “Look at these babies jiggle.”

Zuko doesn’t respond; maybe he doesn’t hear, lost in his head, or maybe he can’t even string together a reply. Sokka meets his thrusts, adoring the wet sound of lube, the slap of skin on heady skin. The way his arms are posed in front of him pushes his titties together, making him look bustier than ever. And Sokka needs to get his tongue on them.

So he sits up. The movement makes him slip out of Zuko who makes a choked sound, like the loss of Sokka’s cock physically pains him. “Oh baby,” Sokka breathes, feeding himself back inside. It slides back in so smoothly, an arrow finding the red dot of the target, a sword clicking into its scabbard. Now they’re pressed chest to chest, the hard piercings digging hot into his pecs. He reaches up to smooth back Zuko’s hair where it’s sticking to his damp brow. “We good?”

Zuko leans into his touch, open mouth dragging sloppy-hot against his palm. Sokka thrusts experimentally—there isn’t much room to go, with Zuko bearing down heavy on his lap—but it pushes a soft sound from his mouth anyway.

Sokka dips his down into that hot valley between their bodies, pressing open-mouthed kisses along the path. When his lips find their target, Zuko keens. He throws his head back, thrusting his tit up hard. The metal slams against Sokka’s lip, so hard he can practically taste the iron burst of blood. Zuko's fingers bite into Sokka’s shoulders. Trapped between Sokka’s arms, feet planted into the mattress, Zuko begins to move. And in spite of all the whimpers and all the begging, his cock stays untouched, trapped between them and smearing wet over Sokka’s abs.

Woozy, Sokka lifts his mouth from the bud with a filthy sound. “You have no idea how much you titillate me,” he slurs.

Above him, Zuko rolls his eyes. “Did I say you could stop?” he snaps, and forces Sokka’s head back down.

Sokka has entertained fantasies of suffocating in boob and they look ready to be fulfilled. Zuko grinds down at a punishing pace and he rubs his tits all over Sokka’s mouth like he can’t decide which stimulation he needs more. His moans gain a rhythmic quality—uh, uh, uh—buzzing through his diaphragm against Sokka’s spit-slick lips.

“Tui and La,” Sokka murmurs, voice mangled by the nipples he can’t take his mouth off, “are you close? Are you close, baby?” He runs his teeth over the nip, savours the stuttering wail the action incites. The hand twisted in his wolf tail tugs, pain glitters at his scalp. Sokka bites down. He feels limitless, doped up on endorphins or worm aphrodisiacs, or both. “Yeah, baby? You gonna use me as your fucktoy?”

Sokka feels the vice grip of his ass, sees a flare of light in his periphery. Did Zuko just breathe fire? And then he feels the hot liquid ropes still spurting onto his skin. He looks down. Zuko’s made such a pretty mess, pearly white all over their stomachs. Shit. Zuko just came from the stimulation in his ass, on his titties. When Sokka meets his gaze, those slits of amber look so smug Sokka just has to kiss him.

“Having fun?” he murmurs against the plush of Zuko’s bitten-red lips.

“I’ll have more fun if you—” says Zuko, then sweeps his fingers invitingly over his tits.

Sokka’s mouth waters. Chaste, virginal, and celibate his ASS. “Yeah?” he growls. “You want that? All over your tits?”

Oh, he does. Zuko sprawls on the bed when Sokka pulls out. He’s a picture of rose on gold. The nipples are bitten raw and red as hawthorn berries, caged in gold and silver. The bite mark glows beside the moon. Sokka gets on top of him, knee-walks up to his chest, while Zuko looks lazily up at him through those heavy-lidded eyes. “Aren’t you gonna give it to me?”

Sokka strips off the condom and flings it somewhere. He’s so fucking turned on it doesn’t take long before he’s painting those damn nipples and the naughty fucking spiritual jewellery that’s been haunting his mind for weeks with his own cum.

Zuko in the afterglow is adorable, if Sokka says so himself. He melts into his bath and the water starts to steam around him. When Sokka sloshes in, he lays back in Sokka’s embrace to let him thumb the cum off his chest. His nipples are oversensitive now; Sokka avoids them and pours handfuls of water over them while Zuko gasps and twitches. Tendrils of his hair float in dark loops on the water’s surface.

“I hope you’re happy now,” says Sokka.

“Could say the same about you,” is Zuko’s content reply.

Sokka holds him for a while, then after some thought he nudges his nose under the sheet of Zuko’s hair. He presses his lips under the scarred ear. Zuko shivers in his touch. He nuzzles closer. “You’re telling Omashu you’ll be there in a week,” Zuko says.

It isn’t a request. “OK,” says Sokka, and kisses lower.

Zuko tilts his head and the line of his neck lengthens. Sokka mouths it diligently. Callused fingers trail over his arm. “So what do these mean?”

Sokka lifts his head; he meets the hazy amber of Zuko’s eyes before turning to the place where his fingers point. The time for subterfuge is over, he thinks as he leans in to press his mouth to Zuko’s, as he swallows a happy gasp and touches his tongue to Zuko’s. “There isn’t a single thing they mean,” he says. “It’s a number of things. I’ve come of age. I hunted my first tiger-seal, my first whale. I can protect my tribe. I am…”

“Hmm?”

There’s a gentleness to it, unexpected after a night of being bullied by the bossiest incarnation of Zuko. Maybe that’s why Sokka says it, even though he didn’t quite believe it while the tribeswomen were sticking the sooty needle into him, even though he still doesn’t quite believe it. “Worthy.”

“Mm.” And Zuko turns in his arms, and he just lays his head upon Sokka’s shoulder. After weeks of seeming so untouchable, it’s surprising how easy it is to gather him closer, press a kiss to the crown of his head, rest an idle hand against his pec.

“All the ointment’s gone now,” Sokka observes.

Zuko slants a look up at him, heated through the haze. “I guess you’ll have to rub it back on.”

Sokka gusts into Hari Bulkan on a favourable jetstream. Everything about the flight was impeccable: the meal, the service, his cushy seat with enough legroom to do a jig. He could get used to the first class treatment, he thinks, as he breezes through immigration and emerges from the airship port to bathe in the blinding eternal warmth of the equatorial sun.

He shields the rays with a hand. When they disappear, a figure comes into view, and the wind trails red silk from his body.

Sokka runs. Zuko reels him in. He lets Sokka press his nose against his cheek and leans his forehead against Sokka’s when he’s done—skirting the edge of royal propriety. Druk winds around their legs, thrumming happily. Sokka breathes them in, the smell of spice warming him more than the sun.

“Missed me?” says Sokka.

“I know you did,” Zuko says. He makes it sound like an accusation. “I know you can’t get enough of—” Sokka hums and goes in for a second kunik; he settles his hands on Zuko’s waist, even dares to skim a little under the fabric. Osha, standing some ways off, sighs and plonks herself in front of them.

“Thought about you a lot,” Sokka admits. He hauls Zuko closer, savouring the soft sound of surprise he makes. For good measure, he sneaks a titty grope in there. Through the silk, a familiar hard circle digs into his palm. “Every night. And during the day too. Going around the markets in Omashu…”

“Tell me you like them less than our markets here.”

“I don’t know if you’d agree. Lots of goodies on sale. Got my imagination going.” Sokka slips a hand into the fold of his tunic and pulls out his souvenir. He dangles it before Zuko who gazes, lips parted in wonder, at the delicate gold chain that glitters before his eyes. “I was thinking,” Sokka says, “we hook this onto the sun on one end, the moon on the other…”

Zuko snatches it. Before Sokka can react, the chain is looped around his neck and the ends are in Zuko’s hand. The metal bites into Sokka's skin as Zuko drags him to the waiting palanquin. Sokka, tripping a little over the dragon, follows laughing. “Well,” says Zuko sweetly, “I can’t wait for a physical demonstration.”

Fuck. Sokka lets himself get tossed inside, cheeks hurting from the force of his grin. He’s done being nice and normal. He’s diving headlong into demented titty land. Happily ever after, bitch.