I've been listening to the new soundtracks since they dropped (ATLA Book 3 soundtrack!! Ah! The memories!!) and with the movie and then the trailer for the show... all I can think about is 'where's Suki?!' rn (To be fair, I haven't read the comics, so maybe it's answered there or in that movie I haven't watched yet?)
The royal dining room smelled like braised komodo turkey, warm spices, and impending chaos. That last ingredient was entirely Sokka’s fault.
He had arrived two days ago under the very reasonable pretense of a “diplomatic visit” which everyone in the palace understood to mean he had eaten all the sea prunes in the South Pole and needed a change of scenery. He had immediately made himself at home in the most aggressively Sokka way possible—reorganizing the palace kitchen’s meat storage, loudly critiquing the royal chefs’ spice choices, and staging what he called a “cultural exchange” that mostly involved teaching three Imperial Guards how to play Pai Sho wrong.
Zuko was handling it with the strained, tight-jawed dignity of a man who genuinely loved his brother-in-arms and also, genuinely, desperately wished he would go home.
You, on the other hand, were having the time of your life.
“The problem,” Sokka announced, gesturing with his chopsticks at nobody in particular, “is that Fire Nation desserts don’t hit right. Too much spice. Not enough—I don’t know—comfort.”
“They’re not supposed to be comfortable,” Zuko said flatly, not looking up from his bowl. “They’re supposed to be refined.”
“Refined.” Sokka repeated it like a curse word. He looked at you across the wide lacquered table. “Y/N, back me up. You’ve eaten in the North. You know what a good dessert tastes like.”
“I’m staying out of this,” you said serenely, pouring yourself a cup of jasmine tea.
“Smart woman.” Zuko reached for his own tea.
“Traitor,” Sokka said to you, but his tone was fond. He jabbed his chopsticks toward the small porcelain dish near the center of the table. It was a delicate Fire Nation layered cake, dark red bean paste between thin sheets of honey sponge, dusted with powdered cinnamon. “I’ll admit, though. That thing looks dangerous. In a good way.”
“It’s yuèbing-style,” you said, leaning forward slightly to inspect it. “Fire Nation adaptation. They bake it with dragon fruit reduction instead of lotus paste.”
Sokka’s eyes lit up with the specific enthusiasm he reserved for food and battle strategy. “Okay. Okay, that sounds incredible, actually—”
“It is,” you confirmed. You picked up a small serving spoon, cut a neat portion, and held it out. Not toward Sokka, but toward the man sitting directly to your left.
Zuko stiffened.
It was a nearly imperceptible thing. A millimeter of tension across his broad shoulders, a slight sharpening of his gaze as it dropped to the spoon now hovering in the space between you. The cake sat there, perfectly portioned, an earnest little offering from his fiancée.
He looked at it. He looked at Sokka, who was watching the exchange with the focused, calculating attention of a man who had once tracked a sea serpent across open water for three days on a bet.
Zuko looked back at the spoon.
“I have my own utensils,” he said.
You blinked. “I know. I’m offering you mine.”
“I can feed myself.”
“Zuko—”
“I’m twenty-eight years old.”
The silence that followed was exquisite. You held his gaze for one long beat. He held it back, expression perfectly composed, jaw set at the precise angle you had privately catalogued as his I am the Fire Lord and I am not flustered, what are you talking about, I am completely fine angle.
You lowered the spoon.
Across the table, Sokka made a sound that wasn’t quite a cough and wasn’t quite a laugh, but existed somewhere in the loaded territory between them. You caught his eye.
Something passed between you. It was wordless, instantaneous, and absolutely damning. It was the specific telepathy that develops between two people who both find the same man endearing in his mortifying stubbornness.
You looked back down at the spoon in your hand. Then, with the serene composure of someone who had absolutely no ulterior motive whatsoever, you turned slightly in your seat and extended the spoon across the table toward Sokka instead.
“Sokka,” you said pleasantly. “Do you want to try it?”
Sokka’s expression went from conspiratorial delight to the studied, innocent blankness of a seasoned chaos agent. He straightened in his seat. He placed a solemn hand over his heart.
“I,” he said gravely, “would be honored.”
He leaned forward. He accepted the spoon. He closed his eyes as he tasted it with the theatrical reverence of a man experiencing a religious event, and then he let out a low, appreciative groan that was at least forty percent louder than necessary.
“Oh,” Sokka breathed. “Oh, that’s—Y/N. Y/N, this is the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”
“Isn’t it?” you agreed warmly.
“I might have to move into the Fire Nation palace permanently.”
“We have a lovely east wing.”
“Perfect. I’ll take it.”
The temperature in the dining room had been climbing for approximately twelve seconds. You felt it before you looked. It was the specific, simmering heat that radiated off Zuko when his composure was being tested. The barely-leashed inner fire usually only made itself known when he was in the middle of a council session gone wrong, or when his fiancée had just deliberately fed another man dessert right in front of him.
Zuko was staring at Sokka with an expression so flat and so incinerating it could have stripped paint from the walls.
Sokka, to his eternal credit, met that stare with the breezy, untroubled grin of a man who had survived a war and therefore had genuinely recalibrated his fear threshold. He set the spoon down on the table between you with a small, precise click.
“I mean,” Sokka said, in the tone of someone making a completely reasonable observation, “you did turn it down.”
You pressed your lips together very hard.
“You specifically said,” you added, with perfect innocence, “that you could feed yourself.”
Zuko turned to look at you. The flat expression had not moved. If anything, it had intensified. His golden eyes tracked from your face to the spoon to Sokka’s deeply satisfied expression and back to your face again, and you watched the precise moment he decided he was not going to dignify this with a response.
He reached across the table. He picked up the spoon. He cut himself a portion of the cake with the silent, deliberate calm of a man who was certainly not bothered. He ate it. He set the spoon down.
“It’s fine,” he said.
“Just fine?” Sokka asked.
“It’s cake, Sokka.”
“Y/N said it was incredible—”
“The conversation,” Zuko said, with a finality that had once ended full council meetings, “is over.”
You and Sokka thought it was funny.
Well. Your little prank is not so funny now.
Because right now, you are in the Fire Lord’s private chambers, stripped bare and face-down across his lap with the heavy silk sheets bunched uselessly beneath your palms, rapidly revising your opinion of the entire spoon incident.
He had been very calm about it. That was the most unnerving part. No raised voice, no dramatic declaration. Just the quiet deliberate efficiency of a man with a point to make and absolutely no intention of rushing. He walked you through the mahogany doors, turned the lock, sat down on the edge of the mattress, and looked at you. That was all it took. One look, and here you were: draped across his lap as his large calloused hand rested light and warm at the small of your back, the blistering heat of his thighs radiating straight through your bare skin, the horrible charged anticipation of waiting.
“You thought that was funny,” he said. Not a question. His voice was low, that gravelly unhurried register that did something catastrophic to your better judgment.
“A little,” you admitted, into the sheets.
His hand lifted. It came down with a sharp deliberate crack across the curve of your backside, and the sound that tore out of you was not dignified in any conceivable way.
“Zuko—”
“A little.” He repeated it perfectly even. His palm smoothed immediately over the sting, the scorching heat of his hand pressing into the bloom of warmth he had left behind. Your whole body clenched involuntarily at the contrast, the sharp bite of it dissolving almost instantly into a spreading maddening heat that pooled low and heavy in your core. “We’ll revisit that.”
He did it again. And again. Slow and measured, with that ruthless patience he applied to absolutely everything—council sessions, fire katas, and the systematic dismantling of your composure. Each strike was followed by the same soothing pass of his palm, his thumb tracing the flushed curve of your skin almost tenderly, and the combination of it was genuinely unhinged. Your fingers twisted into the silk. Your hips rolled without your permission. You heard the low dark exhale that came from him in response.
That was the thing about him. Zuko’s jealousy was a quiet, suffocating weight. He operated with the exact same obsessive, single-minded intensity that had once driven him across the globe for three years. Now, all of that relentless focus was trapped inside this room, directed entirely at stripping away your composure until you remembered exactly who claimed you.
You supposed that’s just how Fire Lord Zuko is. The jealous type.
By the time he finally stilled his hand, your skin was flushed a vivid burning pink, radiating its own warmth, every trace of your natural waterbender’s cold chased clean out of you. Your breathing was a wreck. The sheets beneath your palms were damp from the faint frost that had spiked off your overwhelmed skin and melted instantly against the furnace heat of his thighs.
“There,” Zuko murmured, his hand resting warm and still against your lower back. His voice had dropped into something quieter. Not soft exactly, but settled. Certain. “There you are.”
What came after was not gentle, and it was not quick.
He put you on all fours. His hands were sure and unhurried as he arranged you exactly where he wanted you, and the first stroke of his cock splitting you open dragged a completely ruined sound out of your throat that you felt no shame about whatsoever. He was thick and devastating at this angle, every thrust bottoming out so deep you felt it behind your navel, his hips snapping into the still-flushed spanked curve of your ass with a sharp filthy sound that filled the entire chamber. His long dark hair had come loose from its tie and fell around his face as he leaned over you, the ends brushing your spine, and even half-wrecked as you were the sight of him in your peripheral vision made it worse—that sharp jaw locked tight, those golden eyes dark with focus, the broad scarred expanse of his chest sheened faintly with exertion, lean muscle shifting with every drive of his hips.
He fucked you thoroughly. Properly. Deep hard strokes at a pace that left you completely incoherent, your arms trembling, your face pressing into the pillow as your own voice became entirely unrecognizable to you. Tears tracked silently down your cheeks, the bright overwhelmed kind that had nothing to do with pain and everything to do with the total dissolution of every last piece of your composure. You came with a broken sob muffled into the silk, clenching hard around him, and he followed close after with a low wrecked groan pressed between your shoulder blades, his hands gripping your hips so tight you’d feel it tomorrow.
For a moment, you both just breathed.
Then he drew you up.
He positioned you with those large certain hands, your back against his chest, his legs bracketing yours, the scorching wall of him solid at your spine. You were facing the mirror at the foot of the bed. You understood immediately, completely, why it was where it was.
You looked absolutely catastrophic. Your hair was a total wreck, dark strands plastered to your flushed tear-damp cheeks. Your lips were swollen. Your eyes were glassy, pupils blown wide, the look of someone who had been thoroughly taken apart and hadn’t been put back together yet. Your cool skin was flushed with heat and steaming faintly where it pressed against the blistering heat of his chest, the fire-and-ice contrast rendered almost obscene in the amber glow of the hearth.
And then there was Zuko behind you, which was a genuinely unfair thing to have to look at in this particular state. His dark hair was fully loose now, falling in thick dishevelled waves past his jaw and brushing his scarred collarbone. His chest was bare, broad and heavily muscled with the lean hard lines of a man who had trained every day of his life, old battle scars mapping his torso in silver and pale gold. His jaw was tight, a muscle feathering in his scarred cheek. His golden eyes burned steady in the low firelight, fixed entirely on you. He looked like something forged from fire and focused want. You looked like you’d been hit by a wave and hadn’t surfaced yet.
The contrast was genuinely criminal.
His chin hooked over your shoulder. His golden eyes found yours in the glass and held.
“Don’t look away, princess,” he said quietly.
His hand slid down your stomach.
You were already so sensitized that when his fingers found your clit, your whole body jolted on pure reflex. His other arm banded across your ribs immediately, dragging you back flush against him, keeping you exactly and inescapably in place.
“Zuko—” His name fractured in your throat. “I can’t, I’m already—”
“I know,” he said. He didn’t stop.
His fingers worked your clit in tight relentless circles, the direct pressure against something so oversensitized from everything before that every stroke felt like too much and not enough at the same time. His other hand slid up to cup your left breast, squeezing the soft weight of it before his fingers found your nipple and pinched, sharp enough to make you gasp and clench and dig your nails into his forearm hard enough to leave marks.
“Look at the mirror,” he said against your ear.
You looked. You wished briefly that you hadn’t. Your face was a complete disaster, mouth open, eyes wet, cheeks scarlet, expression stripped down to pure sensation with nothing held back at all. The image of you coming apart while he remained so devastatingly composed behind you, his dark eyes tracking your every reaction with that consuming focused attention, was enough to make your thighs shake all over again.
His fingers tightened on your nipple, a rolling pinch that sent a sharp spike straight down to your already screaming clit. Then the hand at your core shifted, two fingers curling inside you while his thumb flicked directly over your swollen bud, and you actually sobbed. Loud and undignified and completely beyond caring.
“Still think it was funny?” he murmured against your ear, low and dark and almost conversational. His fingers never lost their rhythm for a single second.
You opened your mouth. You were going to say a little. You had fully intended to say a little, purely on principle, right up until his thumb pressed down firm and his fingers curled deeper and his other hand delivered one sharp stinging flick directly to your clit. Your entire spine arced off his chest.
What came out instead was his name. Just his name, over and over, increasingly incoherent.
“That’s what I thought,” he said, low and rough against your temple.
The orgasm hit so hard your vision went white at the edges, your whole body shaking, thighs clamping shut around his hand. His arm was the only thing keeping you from sliding completely off the mattress. He worked you through every convulsing shuddering second of it without mercy, fingers pumping steadily through the clench of your walls, thumb drawing slow circles over your hypersensitive clit until the sounds you were making were mostly just breath and the occasional broken fragment of please.
He finally, mercifully, stilled.
The room was very quiet. The hearth crackled. Your chest heaved. His chin was still hooked over your shoulder and in the mirror his expression had shifted into something quieter. Still dark, still certain, but underneath it the faintest trace of the thing he could never quite say out loud in dining rooms and corridors. The thing that only ever came out like this.
A thin curl of steam rose where your sweat-damp skin pressed against the furnace of his chest. The hearth fire guttered once, sympathetically.
He lowered you both down onto the mattress slowly, tucking you against his chest the same way he always did, with that quiet absolute possessiveness, like the decision had been made a long time ago and he had no interest in revisiting it. His hand settled heavy and warm at the curve of your waist. His thumb began its slow idle circle.
You lay there completely and entirely destroyed, listening to his heartbeat gradually decelerate against your cheek. The burn of him had faded from overwhelming to something grounding, a steady bone-deep warmth seeping into places the cold had lived for years.
“For the record,” you said, into the quiet.
“Mm.”
“You could have just eaten the cake.”
A beat. Then, low and dry, his voice rumbling against your cheek. “I’m aware of that.”
“Would have been easier.”
“I said I’m aware, princess.”
You smiled against his skin. “I’m just saying. For future reference. If I offer you a spoon—”
“I’ll take the spoon.”
“Good.”
“Don’t test me again.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” you murmured, partially lying as you pressed a soft kiss to the scar over his eye.
prologue ⧽ read more
this is actually a bonus chapter from the main ‘sublimation’ universe ;)
