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The Burden of Being - There was an Osamu who loved you once. Who loved Onigiri Miya so much he spent most of his waking hours there, supported loyally by the members of Hyogo Ward. A fire changes that and he and his twin brother adopt their old high school motto: we don’t need the memories. Now they’re gone and memories are all you have. So as an homage to the man you love, you reopen his restaurant back up for him.
Iwaizumi drabble - dropping off Oikawa at the airport means alone time. finally.
MENUS
main menu (haikyuu); happy hour (miya osamu); specials (other fandoms)
COMMUNITY ACTIVITY
Shanghai Girls by Lisa See. Love Quotes by Jenevieve. Murai No Koi.
in bloom
miya osamu/reader (haikyuu!)
word count: 2.8k
tags: established relationship, fluff, hurt/comfort-ish, grand romantic gestures, vague mentions of mental illness, osamu being The Best man on earth, osamu owning a pickup truck is canon and i refuse to elaborate on this
“Hey.”
Your eyes peel open slowly, your eyelids heavy with the weight of sleep you aren't quite ready to be torn from.
You blink once, then twice, and on the third blink your eyes flutter shut again—slumber calling you back too enticingly to keep them open.
“C’mon sleeping beauty, ya gotta get up now.”
You can smell coffee, the deep notes of the dark roast that Osamu prefers registering distantly in your tired mind. When you open your eyes again, the lamp on your bedside table has been turned on, and your slightly untidy bedroom is bathed in the light of the warm toned bulb.
“I’m tired,” you say weakly.
“I know baby, ya don’t gotta stay awake long—just need to getcha into the truck, alright?”
Osamu is seated on the edge of the bed beside you, fully dressed, staring down at you as you fight the pull to slip back into unconsciousness.
“What time is it?” you rasp out, rolling over a little more under the warm swath of blankets wrapped around you. The clock on your bedside table startles you, your eyes snapping to the boy watching your sleepy face placidly. “Samu, it’s four in the morning.”
“I know that,” he says with a light laugh, brushing some hair back from your face.
“Why are you waking me up?” you ask him, the grogginess of sleep still saturating your words, leaning into the warmth of his touch and resisting the urge to let your eyes shut again. “Thought you had the day off.”
“I do. We’re going somewhere.”
“At four in the morning?”
Osamu pats your cheek lightly. “Yep.”
Maybe it’s because you’re too tired to question it, or maybe it’s the way that Samu pries you up out of bed with careful, gentle hands. He passes you a pair of comfortable leggings that you pull on mindlessly, then one of his old Inarizaki VBC sweatshirts you like so much, and finally he bundles you into one of his own coats before guiding your teetering, dozy form out the door and into his truck.
It’s still dark out, and cold enough that you can see your breath under the streetlights as you crawl into the passengers seat and Samu shuts your door behind you. The truck is already warm and running, and there’s two cups of coffee waiting in the cupholders in insulated travel mugs.
“Put yer buckle on,” Osamu instructs you after taking his own seat, and you do as you’re told as he shifts the gearstick into drive.
You aren’t in the car for more than 15 minutes before you fall asleep again.
When you wake for the second time it’s lighter, though still not quite day break. It takes you a moment to realize where you are, and why.
You watch the scenery outside the window blur past, before sliding your eyes towards the windshield. The time on the dashboard reads 5:15.
“Samu, where the hell are we?” you croak, rubbing the sleep from your eyes.
“Mornin’ sunshine,” your boyfriend laughs from the driver’s seat, looking over at you with his eyes crinkling at the corner. His hair is bed-head messy, and he has a smudge of white on the corner of his mouth.
Toothpaste, maybe?
“Did ya sleep alright? Hit a pretty nasty hole a ways back but ya didn’t even notice. Snored right through it.”
“I don’t snore,” you lie, sitting up a little straighter in your seat. Your body hurts from sleeping in such a strange position, but you can’t really do anything about the lingering stiffness while you’re still trapped in the moving vehicle. “Where are we?” you repeat your earlier question which Samu had tactically avoided.
“About an hour outside Osaka,” Osamu says, completely unhelpfully.
You’re in the car driving, and the clock on the dash tells you it’s been about an hour since you started driving, so what he tells you is already a given.
“Where are we going?” you ask him.
He tuts. “‘Fraid I can’t tell ya that. Top secret.”
You furrow your brow.
This isn’t like Osamu. He’s never pulled anything like this before. You don’t know what to make of it.
“Yer coffee’s still hot, and I got us donuts.” Samu takes one hand off the wheel to grab a paper bag from the floor by his feet. It crinkles noisily as he hands it to you.
Inside the bag are a few donuts, covered in powdered sugar. You suspect there are already a few missing from within.
That explains the smudge on his face.
You lick your thumb, reaching over the centre console towards him.
Osamu stiffens at the unexpected contact, softening as he realizes what you’re doing. You run the pad of your thumb across the corner of his mouth a few times until the traces of white are gone, pulling away to sit back in your seat.
You lick the sugar off your finger absentmindedly when you’re done, before reaching into the bag for a donut of your own.
“If we’re going to Tokyo, why didn’t we just take the train?” you ask through a mouthful of fried dough and sugar, noting a directional sign that the two of you pass along the highway indicating you’re travelling in the direction of the capital. You had suspected as much, given that the screen of the dashboard said you were travelling north east from your home in Osaka.
“Not goin’ to Tokyo,” Samu replies simply, reaching for his cup of coffee in the cupholder beside him. It’s empty, he seems to remember only seconds after picking it up, and he puts it back down without even taking a sip.
You lick the sugar off your fingers and reach for your own cup of untouched coffee, popping open the lid and holding it out to him.
He takes it from your hand, bringing it to his lips and tilting it back all without removing his eyes from the road. He hands it back to you after taking a long swig.
He winces a little after he swallows, watching from the corner of his eye as you bring the travel mug to your own lips. “Careful, s’still hot, babe.”
You hum, taking a trepidatious sip from the well-insulated cup. He’s right.
“So where are we going, and why did you feel the need to wake me up at the crack of dawn to get there?”
Samu shoots you a look—exasperated but loving—from his seat beside you.
“Can’t anything ever be a surprise with you?””
“Not if I can help it,” you reply back smoothly, earning you a laugh.
“I just… wanted to do somethin’ nice for ya,” he mutters, almost reluctantly. He takes an audible breath—in and out—before adding, “I know you’ve been feelin’ a bit… off lately.”
You stiffen in your seat, eyes fixed unseeingly to the lines of the highway as they flash past on the asphalt.
“-’s nothing wrong with that, but I know you’ve been havin’ a hard time ’n I just-“
“Samu.”
Your strained voice makes him falter, his sentence ending before he can say it in its entirety.
It’s quiet for a moment. A little uncomfortable.
“D’ya mind if I put some music on now that yer awake?” Osamu tries to ease the tension that has settled over the cab of the truck. You nod stiffly.
Osamu reaches to fiddle with the buttons and nobs of the radio, but in truth seems less concerned with finding something he likes on the air than just finding something that will distract from the borderline suffocating stillness in the car between you.
You feel bad.
For more reasons than one.
Firstly, because he was clearly just trying to do something nice to cheer you up. A sincere, heartfelt gesture blossoming from his desire for you to be happy and well. A deed sown, tended to, and grown from his love for you.
Secondly, because he noticed that you needed to be cheered up in the first place; noticed what you had been trying not to let sink its claws too deeply into you; noticed what so much of your mental energy had been going into covering up, pretending wasn’t there, pretending wasn’t sitting on your shoulders like a weight—impossible to see but crushing to bear.
You’d been trying not to let it show how much you’d been struggling lately. You’d been sleeping a lot. Usually in bed before Osamu made it home from work in the evenings, and sleeping in past when he woke up in the mornings. On the afternoons he made it home early (which he tried to do at least three times a week) you were usually too drained to do anything beyond make dinner, clean up, shower, and collapse into bed.
You thought you’d been managing it.
Suppressing it.
Concealing it.
Obviously you were wrong.
The song playing over the sound system is an old love song. One you remember your mom singing along to in the kitchen of your childhood home while she would cook dinner for your family. It was from the soundtrack of a romantic comedy that had come out when you were still too young to know what comedy was, let alone romance, but there’s something nostalgic and comforting about it. In any case, you appreciate the distraction, settling back in your seat and sipping the too-hot coffee for lack of anything else you’d prefer to do.
You drive for another hour, sharing your cup of coffee between you in place of conversation, listening to old love songs playing on the morning radio.
Osamu turns off the highway at an innocuous looking exit, a few minutes past a sign that had told you Tokyo was still more than 400 kilometres away. There’s nothing outside your windows except countryside—no city or town or other civilization to be seen. It’s only seven in the morning, and you pass just a handful of other vehicles on the winding rural roads as you make your way along them.
“Samu, where the hell are we?” you ask at the very moment Osamu turns up a dirt road—a driveway of some sort.
“D’ya remember back when we started dating?” Osamu asks, eyes fixed too concentratedly on the road outside the windshield to be natural. He’s nervous, you can tell.
“Uh, yeah. It was five years not fifty years ago,” you joke, but there’s an undercurrent to it, the implication that you feel like you’ve loved him forever. You know he feels it too.
“I wanted to buy ya flowers,” he ignores your jibe, though not without peeking at you pointedly from the corner of his eye, “spent ages in the flower shop down the road from our first apartment trying to pick them out. I had almost no money to spend and that nice lady that owned it sent me home with a bouquet worth three times what I paid her for it.”
You remember it all. The flower shop; the terrible one bedroom apartment that was all the two of you could afford back then, when you were still a student and Onigiri Miya was just a food stall on a busy road; the bouquet so large you didn’t even have anything big enough to put it into when Osamu brought it home to you, and you’d had to break it up between four different receptacles to house it: a narrow vase, two empty sake bottles, and an over-sized coffee mug. It smelled so nice that every corner of your dingy little apartment was filled with the scent of the flowers for days.
“Ya hated it.”
“I did not!” you gasp, jaw dropping at the accusation, and you turn in your seat to face your boyfriend defensively.
“Ya told me that flowers are a waste of money and that a nicer gift is something you can eat!” Samu laughs as he says it, tossing his head back against the headrest of his seat.
You purse your lips, scratching the back of your neck sheepishly. You don’t remember speaking those words exactly, but it does sound suspiciously like something you’d say.
“I told you I loved them,” you mutter. And you did. You even pressed some of the blossoms between the pages of your heavy text books to save, and now they hang in frames on the wall of your current (and much less austere) apartment.
“I asked what yer favourite flowers are. D’ya remember whatcha told me?” Samu asks, finally turning his head to properly look at you.
You wrack your brain for a moment, and then shake your head. The memory evades you.
“Strawberries,” Samu says. “Ya told me yer favourite flowers are strawberries.”
You blink.
You notice for the first time that the truck has slowed to a stop, idling in park at the end of the driveway. Outside the windows of the truck you see a modest little house, a shed of some sort, and a row of greenhouses dotted along the lush green fields of the property.
“One of my suppliers told me about this place, apparently they grow the best berries in Japan. They sell some of ‘em fer like fifty-thousand yen. The ojisan who runs it’s a nice guy though, invited us down for the day to check it out.”
You blink again, only this time your eyes go a little blurry as you peel them open, something hot slipping down your cheeks.
“I know ya don’t like to talk about it when yer going through stuff,” Samu says quietly from the seat beside you, but you can’t bring yourself to look at him. He reaches over and places a hand, warm and comforting, on your knee. “But I want ya to know that I love ya, and I’m always here, s’all.”
Your throat feels tight and dry, and suddenly you wish you had some of that coffee left in your empty travel mug.
“I-“ you choke a little on your first attempt to reply, swallowing hard. “I just know you have so much on your plate already. I never wanna add more to that just because I’m…” you don’t know how to finish your thought.
“Hey.” Samu’s fingers tighten a little on your knee, not painful in any way, but enough to tell you he needs you to look at him, to be there with him right now.
You look at him sheepishly, eyes struggling to meet his level, resolute gaze.
“Lovin’ someone is work. Life is hard, and sometimes it’s ugly, and things aren’t always just gonna work themselves out easy all the time. But I wanna share that with ya: yer whole life, not just the good stuff. So ya can’t just go and decide on yer own what things yer goin’ through you gotta keep to yourself or do alone, because I’m right here. I wanna work on it with ya. Because this is worth it.”
You’re openly crying now, in the passenger seat of Samu’s beloved truck, in the driveway of a strawberry farm in the middle of nowhere, an empty paper bag filled with donut crumbs and powdered sugar under your feet.
Samu leans across the centre console of the truck, wrapping you in his arms as best he’s able to in the slightly awkward confines of your respective seats. He smells like laundry detergent and coffee. He’s warm and solid and right where you need him, like always.
His large hand cradles the back of your head as your tears soak into the flannel shirt he’s got on, letting you cry it out for as long as you need to. When you finally pull yourself together a little bit, he withdraws, wiping at your tears and snot with the soft edge of his sleeve.
“Ya feel a bit better now?” he asks gently.
You nod.
“I love you,” you whisper.
“I love ya too,” he grins, toothy and boyish. “Now are ya ready to go and pick some flowers or what?”
“Strawberries aren’t technically flowers,” you sniff, but you’re smiling.
“Who cares,” Samu laughs, and the sound is as warm as the early morning sunlight breaking over the fields and streaming into the widows behind him. “I wanna see what’s so good about these ones that he’s chargin’ an arm and a leg for ‘em.”
“Bet I can pick more than you can,” you say, scrunching your nose up challengingly.
Osamu scoffs, reaching for the handle of the truck door and throwing it open.
osamu climbing into bed late after a long day onigiri miya. surrounded with an air of guilt and dark hour. his hair is still damp from a shower that’s washed off a hard day’s work and his skin is still warm to touch, having not bothered to put a shirt on. why when there are desires in his belly that yearns to be fulfilled without it?
his knee presses into the bed gently, your body dipping. his body glides across the bed to press perfectly against yours, molding just as perfectly as he does the onigiris he makes by the hundreds every day. it’s thoughtless, effortless, engrained in his identity.
that’s what he wants. so he shakes you lightly and asks for permission.
“baby,” he says in greeting. it’s whispered in reverence, a nighttime wish that only you can grant. “baby. i’m home.”
you mumble and fidget under his touch. but it also move towards him. your body turns to face him like a sunflower seeking its light. reverence is not only for those of the lowly. it can be found on equal footing, two pedestals. and he knows that though he holds you high, you will raise him with you always.
“you’re home,” you say back with a smile on your face.
gratitude fills him. and need. “i am. missed ya.”
“me too.”
he moves closer to press against you. hip against hip, nose pressed against yours and tracing the edges of your cheekbones before dipping into the taste of a shallow kiss.
“been thinking of ya all day.”
“yeah?”
“yeah. all day.” he reminds in between the presses of lips. “mind if i have ya?”
when you consent, he’s in no rush. he’s missed you after all. all he wants is to press into you, mold into your body, be one. it’s a slow descent of ecstasy, into sleep and into you. not an centimeter of space as he takes you lazily from the side, one arm across your chest and hugging you close, and another digging into your hips to keep you no further. you stay like that for the rest of the night.
if you’re in a situationship with isagi and you let him go out and play in the world cup without locking him down first, brooooooo. the temptations, the monster is no longer just from within! you’re fighting against the whole world girl (gn). like lock it down frfr you cannot unleash him unchained
osamu’s beige flag is that after taking your convo out of the dms and giving him your number, you’re immediately greeted with a pickup line. which would have been sexy had it not been surrounded by a green bubble
how easy it is for osamu to move into your place. he can sleep over with just a quick run to the konbini for a pack of underwear since he’s got an extra set of his uniform in his backseat for emergencies.
and oh? it’s a pack of underwear so he can stay over for another day at least which means he should buy some groceries to repay you. oh and a toothbrush.
the cycle repeats, worlds colliding without either of you noticing, until somehow, it’s a life shared.
This is flirting. He's flirting. It's not overly obvious, but he keeps glancing at your lips every now and again, and he's eager to make jokes, even if it means holding up the line. The old man behind you is standing so close you can almost feel his breath.
'That's all,' you say. 'thank you so much for helping me pack these.'
'Anything for a pretty lady.' And you hear the older gent behind you snort and mumble under his breath. To which the cashier shakes his head, a red tint rising on his skin.
You smile, because it's the correct response and shows him - and everyone that see, you're in on it too, and it's all good. You're not going to throw a fit over it but you do know that it's not going to go any further. 'Well, thank you. You have a good day now.' You hurry off without asking for the receipt and join Hanma where he's standing at the cigarette kiosk, pocketing a pack of Marlboro reds. (He hates them but a small supermarket definitely doesn't have the good stuff).
He wordlessly takes the bag and begins walking, a little too fast for your comfort and that immediately is a bad sign.
And he refuses to make any quip as you exit the supermarket and make the walk back to your house. (Your house mind you, not the both of yours. You're not even sure why he insisted on coming with you today anyway - he was supposed to have left in the morning )
And when you open the door, he takes your bag straight to the kitchen, his spine straight, lips a thin line, eerily quiet as he deposits the milk and butter in the fridge.
'Shuji.' You say, your hands on your hips in the kitchen doorway.
He mumbles a response, something like a hum as he bends down towards the fridge.
'Are you going to tell me what's got you like this?'
'Not sure what you mean.' but still hiding behind the much smaller fridge door.
'You know exactly what I mean.'
He straightens then, a can in his hand, a surprisingly blank look on his face, facing you as he clicks it open. 'Don't play dumb, you know exactly what it is,' he says, and it dunks you entirely in cold water as he stares at you, blank and open. 'Why'd you let that guy flirt with you, huh?"
Ah. You thought it was this. You were prepared to be wrong though.
You frown, dumbfounded but also defensive, teetering on the edge of the kitchen. 'What does that have to do with you?'
'You're acting obtuse on purpose. There's no way you're being this naive and deliberately dense.'
A hole sinks in your chest. 'Excuse me? What's that meant to mean?'
He chuckles. Empty, low. Dangerous. 'Oh come on, you're a smart girl, we both know it.' He steps forward, hip skimming the edge of your countertop, filling the room , filling the space, swallowing the light entirely. 'You shouldn't have let him flirt with you like that. The only reason I even let it happen was because I didn't have enough bullets on me to shoot up the entire store.'
You huff out a frustrated breath, incredulous rage simmering in your stomach. 'Shuji,' you say, measuring each word slowly. 'I can flirt with whoever I want. We're just fucking, aren't we? This is not exclusive.' (A rule he made himself, that you kept to despite everything, despite how bad- and how much you've already broken it. In various ways. The only reason this arrangement has gone on so long is because you kept your feelings to yourself. And buried them. If it meant keeping him in your life, you could keep pretending it was just sex)
He steps forward, a muscle twitching in his jaw, feathering in his cheek. 'Is that what it is? Huh? Just fucking?'
You measure the words carefully, taste the bitterness of them. 'Shuji,' you say, aching in your chest, a confusion clear on your face. 'I don't understand, seriously. You can't get jealous over me flirting with another man when you're the one who said we couldn't have any real feelings involved. You're the one who reminds me that fucking is all it is. That we could never be together for various reasons, and who I barely see other than to have sex with.' You shake your head, your ache deepening. 'You don't get to go back on it just because you're having feelings you didn't account for now.'
'Why not?'
'Why not?' you laugh, hollow. 'Because I've been pining for you for months is why. Because whenever I even considered the possibility of anything more with you, you were quick to remind me that it was just sex, that we weren't exclusive, that we were both seeing other people. I don't have to concede for you just because your other girlfriends aren't giving you attention anymore'.
Heat simmers in his blood, indignation, anger flaring to life but more than that.... Regret. Maybe.
'You think I said it because I've got other girls? Is that what you think it is?'
You rub your temples and on instinct, turn back towards the front door, opening it wide and standing between, watching him follow you with indignation in your periphery.
'I don't care, that's just it. Whether you have or you haven't, it doesn't matter anymore because i've grieved what could've been and have accepted it now. I'm not going to go back on it so quickly just because you're only now realising that it doesn't feel like just sex anymore.' Quieter, a whisper. 'And it never was, not for me.' .
You flick your eyes up, to him standing unmoored in your living room. His jacket still on but hurt written clear across his face, the fine lines and full lips turned down, a frown worrying at his eyebrows. 'Then why did you stay? After all this.'
'thats obvious, isn't it? I knew telling you would mean I'd lose you entirely. I was fine with you using me if I kept you for a little while longer.' You avoid his eye, kick absently at the carpet. 'I thought with enough time you'd come to love me, as much as I've always loved you.'
The shock is palpable, a flash of white hot heat across his face. A slap, a punch to the cheek. 'Sweetheart...'
'And now I'd like you to leave.' You gesture to the open door, hold your arms to your chest, close your fists to hide the trembling, the rim of your eyes stinging.
'Leave?'
You almost think he'll refuse. Had it been any other day he would. But the naked hurt is burning his cheeks and he'd like to get to his car and you're shaking visibly, unshed tears thick on your lashes and he doesn't have the energy to play right now.
He stops, abruptly on the doorstep, turns to you. 'There's no other girls. And the only reason I said couldn't - we couldn't - was because you do not want this life, sweetheart. You do not want to walk around with a target on your back for being around me.'
You whisper, a tear making headway across your cheek, a quick sniffle that does nothing to bely your true feelings. 'That was my decision to make baby, and you took that from me.'
He looks down, then up at you, so pretty still, always obviously, because you are. 'I know. But I don't regret what I did.'
And he steps out, the sun clear on his skin, pale yellow against his brown curls, holding your face in his mind as you close the door.
osamu’s son spends a lot of time at onigiri miya during his formative years. this also means the little man has watched plenty (maybe too many) of uncle mumu’s games because imagine osamu’s horror when he sees his own kid, his very blood, hold his fist up the same time his brother does on tv.
the little man does it with less seriousness, feet kicking out from under his high chair and unfettered joy from mimicking the miya on tv. osamu’s got to admit it’s cute, if it wasn’t for the fact that it feels like pure betrayal and he’s immediately changing the onigiri miya tvs to paw patrol bc who the hell cares what the other patrons want.
there’s an au in my mind where ushijima falls in love with a ballerina. which no one would have ever guessed with his detached demeanor during the first performance of yours he witnessed. but you develop a relationship anyways that’s indefinitely long distance. both of your jobs have you working in separate cities, only keeping contact in fleeting text messages sent an hour too late past one of your bed times due time difference.
you think ushijima prefers it this way with his stoic personality even if it leaves you wanting. so when you find that your schedules collide finally, you have to tell him.
you: i’m performing in madrid the same time you’re there!
an hour after, your phone still lacks a response from him. it’s not abnormal but excitement has you double texting.
you: someone booked us for a special event i think
ushijima catches you before you fall asleep this time. instead of a text, he calls.
“it was me,” he says without greeting.
your puzzled response has nothing to do with being drowsy.
i don’t often entertain the idea of the miya twins falling for the same person, but if you were their childhood friend, man.
as the three of you age, the twins begin to favor you for more than just friendship. change becomes obvious in body and mentality. the ever observant osamu notices his brother’s new interest in you and despite himself and his own feelings, he bows out regardless of any competition beginning. because he thinks atsumu loves you just a little more than he does.
thinking about firelord zuko who very quickly discards tradition as soon as you’re married.
he never walks ahead of you, always a few paces behind like he has a better view or he’s appreciating a sight only to be seen once in a life time. your fingers stay interlaced beneath heavy cloaks that bare the emblem of his home nation, but nowadays yours is stitched into the fabric with threads imported from your own. right above his. right above his heart.
zuko who’s shadow takes shape in the darkness, allowing your light to filter through a room full of opinionated others. he knows the extent of your capability extends beyond the wildest dreams, far greater than those who stand around you waiting for the crack in your visage. you’re strong, even if you stand a few heads shorter than him, your voice is loud and oftentimes the most correct in a room full of static and noise. he’d never let you feel less than, he never speaks for you, lips only parting to clear the buzz in the air and to allow attention to fall to you.
fire lord zuko who insists on being your right hand at every table — leaving you to take a seat at his head. he can’t stand the thought of eating meals at opposite ends — where the distance makes him feel lost, too far from home. he eats to your right where he can listen to the mundane up close, watch the way your lips curl around bites of food or a the words that make up tale from your tribe. he listens like the world has stopped for the two of you, like a nation in need of rule can wait another day for its lord and his princess.
in a similar fashion, he tends to you like a devout follower. even if there are handmaids and tailors and people to help. every door you’ve ever walked through is held open by him. for you. he lifts the straying edge of your train with a certain reverence, treating extra fabric like it’s an extension of you. zuko twirls the braids into your hair in the fashion that you like, undoes the lacing strings of your attire with fumbling fingers that only know the roughness of flames after a late night — because even though his mess of your garments is embarrassing, it makes you laugh in a way that warms him like honey notes in milk before bed.
zuko preps the water that laps at the tension in your shoulders and eases it away with hands that move like molten lava. rose petals bob along the surface, perform twizzles in the ripples of water that ebb around the lines of your body. worn down by work, diplomatic duties but tended to by unspoken love and adoration. zuko sinks into the tub behind you, bare and warm — his chin on your shoulder and face in your neck because that’s the only place he’s found safe enough to call home.
when you’re married to zuko, life is not instantly easier and the traditions of others still find their way into your relationship as performative duty… but he carries part of the load. he makes it simpler for you, because loving you, is simple too.
