ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬʸᴵᴺᴳ -> part four of things left unsaid
-> warnings/chap. summary: light angst, out of character taga again…is he ever in character? reader and zuko have an important talk…reader also talks to taga🤔 alsoo idk where the like actual fighting plot even went in this chapter put ill pick it back up in the next one😭
**not even a little proofread btw😭
The door doesn't open again.
Some part of you keeps waiting for it anyway- somewhat convinced he's going to come back in, say something, give the room permission to exhale properly. An explanation. A retraction. Anything that makes the last ten minutes feel less like something that can't be walked back.
The room sits in the quiet he left behind. Sokka is staring at the table with the focused expression of someone who's been told not to say anything and is finding it genuinely physically difficult. Katara has gone very still in that way she does when she's deciding what kind of problem she's dealing with. Aang keeps glancing between you and the door and back again with the helpless expression of someone who knows he started something and doesn't know how to finish it.
Taga reaches for something on the table beside you.
Unbothered. Composed. Like the last ten minutes cost him nothing at all.
You watch his hand and think about last night and the hollow unnamed thing sitting in your chest and you look away before you can finish the thought.
"So," Sokka says finally, with the energy of a man detonating something controlled. "The northern route. Very interesting stuff. Taga, what are we looking at timeline wise?"
Taga answers. Aang joins in. The conversation rebuilds itself slowly, testing each piece before putting weight on it, and gradually the room starts functioning like a room again.
You do not think about the door.
Although you do note it when he comes back in about twenty minutes later.
You feel it before you see it, that frequency you've apparently never stopped being attuned to no matter how many years you put between yourself and it. He crosses to the far side of the room, refills his cup, and takes his seat again like nothing happened- with his expression locked down completely. Whatever was fraying at the edges earlier tucked away somewhere inaccessible.
Which is fine. That's fine. You don't look at him either.
Across the room Katara catches your eye and you can tell she’s almost desperate to talk about what happened last night. You give her a gentle smile accompanied by a small nod that means I know.
You find Taga on the narrow side deck before Katara can find you.
You hadn't planned it. You were just walking and he was there, leaning against the railing, looking at the water with a quality of stillness that means he's somewhere far away behind his eyes.
He looks over when he hears you.
Something crosses his face when he sees you, warm and unhurried, like you're exactly who he was hoping would appear and he has no intention of pretending otherwise.
You lean against the railing beside him.
The water moves below, grey and endless, and for a moment neither of you says anything and it should feel like the comfortable silence from however many nights ago but it doesn't quite.
It's not bad. Nothing about this is bad. He's warm and present and he looks at you the same way he always has- steady, unhurried, like you're worth paying attention to. Nothing has changed on his end that you can point to.
That's almost the problem.
"Last night," he agrees, quiet and easy, like the words themselves are something he's glad to say.
"I don't regret it," you say. Simply. Because you don't and it's true and you're not going to dress it up or minimize it.
"Good," he says. And then, after a beat he responds, "Neither do I. In case that wasn't clear."
Something about the way he says it- dry, almost amused, like he's gently pointing out that his interest has been fairly obvious this whole time- makes the corner of your mouth twitch despite yourself.
"I just don't entirely know what I want it to be," you say. "Yet."
"That's alright," he says easily. "I'm a patient man."
The ghost of something plays at the corner of his mouth.
"I have some experience with waiting," he says.
"A thousand years doesn't count," you say.
"Give or take," he agrees.
A real one, short and surprised out of you, more genuine than you intended, and you feel him clock it the way he clocks everything, with that quiet satisfaction of someone who aimed for exactly that and hit it.
Which should probably be a warning sign.
"I like you," he says then, the amusement settling into something warmer and more direct. "I want you to know that. And, just so you know, I'm not saying it to make this less complicated. I'm saying it because it's true and you seem like someone who prefers directness."
"I know," he says simply. Like he's been paying attention. Like he's been collecting small true things about you since the moment he woke up in that tent and you stayed when everyone else left.
You're just not entirely sure yet what he's planning to do with them.
"So," he says, and his voice has shifted into something lighter, the warmth still there but threaded with something almost playful. "Are we going to stand here being serious about it or are you going to tell me what that look means."
"The one you've been wearing since you came around that corner," he says. "Like you came out here with something on your mind and now you're deciding whether to say it."
"I came out here for air," you say.
"Mhm," he hums, in a tone that means he believes approximately none of that.
"Okay," he says pleasantly.
"I just don't want it to be-" you start.
"I was going to say complicated."
"Ah." He considers that. "Is there a version of this that isn't complicated?"
"Probably not," you admit.
"Then perhaps," he says, "we stop trying to make it something simpler than it is and just let it be what it is."
You look at him sideways.
He's looking at the water, that ghost of a smile still at the corner of his mouth, completely unbothered by any of this in a way you can't decide is deeply attractive or slightly unnerving.
"You're very calm about this," you say.
"One of us should be," he says.
He turns to look at you then, fully, and the playfulness settles into something steadier underneath.
"I meant what I said," he says quietly. "I'm not treating last night as something to move past. And I'm not going anywhere. Whatever you decide to do with that."
You hold his gaze for a moment.
He holds yours back. Patient. Warm. Not pushing.
Whatever you decide to do with that.
Like he's genuinely leaving it up to you. Like he has enough confidence in whatever this is to just… wait. Let you come to it on your own terms.
Which is either the most attractive thing anyone has ever said to you.
You can't quite tell yet.
You're not sure you're supposed to be able to.
One corner of his mouth lifts.
You stay at the railing for another few minutes, the water moving far below you, the silence between you comfortable in a way that almost completely papers over the small unnamed thing sitting slightly off in your chest.
Katara finds you twenty minutes later.
She appears beside you with two cups and the expression of someone who has been waiting patiently for exactly this moment.
You take the cup she offers.
The two of you stand at the railing on the other side of the ship without saying anything for a moment, basking in the silence.
"He talked to me this morning," Katara says. Carefully. "Before breakfast."
You look at your cup and have to hold back an eye roll.
"He came to find me specifically," she continues. "Said he had concerns about Taga. The storm, the thing with the Denied's ship. Said he didn't think we were being careful enough about trusting someone we'd known for like a week."
"He's not wrong," you say flatly. "About the storm."
"No," Katara agrees. "He's not."
"He's also not entirely talking about the storm," she says.
"I told him you were allowed to make your own choices," she says. "Whatever they are." A pause. "He didn't really have an answer for that."
Katara is quiet for a moment.
"Are you okay?" she asks. Just that. No preamble, no angle.
You open your mouth to say yes automatically and stop yourself.
"I don't know," you say instead. Which is more honest than you meant to be.
"The Taga thing," you say, before she can ask. "It's not… I don't regret it. I want you to know that. I made that choice and I'm not going to pretend I didn't." You exhale. "It's just. I don't know what I thought it was going to feel like."
You stare at the horizon.
Katara doesn't say anything.
"Good, even," you add, slightly defensive. "It was good."
"I just-" you stop. "Nothing. Never mind."
Katara hums softly. She doesn't push. That's why she's your favorite person, she always knows when not to.
"I'm still angry at him," you say, after a moment. Not clarifying who. You both know who.
"I have every right to be."
"Whatever he's doing now, the looks, the- all of it… it doesn't erase twelve years of nothing."
"No," Katara says quietly. "It doesn't."
You take a sip of whatever she’d put in these cups.
The blue hues of the ocean move below you.
"He asked about Taga," you say eventually. "Not about me."
"He asked about Taga because he couldn't figure out how to ask about you," Katara says simply. "You know that."
You hate that you know that.
"I'm going to go help Sokka with something," you say, pushing off the railing.
Katara lets you go without comment.
You've made it four steps when she says, quietly, not quite aimed at you.
"He looked terrible this morning."
The afternoon passes in that particular airship way; slowly, with too much time to think and not enough space to put any distance between yourself and anything.
Aang and Taga spend hours on the upper deck. Their voices drift down occasionally, fragments of something that sounds almost ceremonial, and you watch them through the glass for a moment before you make yourself stop.
You help where you're needed. Find corners where you're not. Try very hard not to track Zuko's movements around the ship.
But it just so happens that your eyes linger a bit longer on him than necessary, trailing his whereabouts every now and again.
He's quieter than usual. More contained. He does his share of everything without being asked, stays on the opposite side of whatever room you're both in, and says exactly as much as is required and nothing more. The specific behavior of someone who has made a decision and is executing it carefully.
It's what you wanted. Space. Distance.
You don't know why it's sitting so wrong.
You’re in the storage corridor in the late afternoon, reaching past a row of bags on the upper shelf to get to your own stuff when your elbow catches something and the whole shelf tilts and two bags slide off and hit the floor with a thud.
"Perfect," you mutter, crouching down.
You start picking things up. A bag. A rolled map that's come loose. A water canteen that's rolled halfway down the corridor. You're reaching for the last item- something that fell furthest, slid half under the lower shelf- when your hand closes around it and you realize it isn't yours.
Sealed. The edges worn slightly, like it's been carried for a while. Like it's been taken out and put back more than once.
You're crouched on the floor of the storage corridor with the envelope in your hand and the ship humming beneath you and everything has gone very, very quiet.
Sealed. Addressed to you. Worn at the edges.
I thought about writing, he'd said on the deck of the ship what felt like a lifetime ago. More than once.
You put it in your pocket.
You finish putting the shelf back in order, pick up your own bag, and begin to walk briskly towards your room.
When you make it to your designated room, you rush into the area before you sit on the edge of your cot. And for a long time, you just hold it.
Turning it over. Feeling the worn edges. Thinking about the fact that it's sealed, which means he wrote it and kept it and carried it and never sent it, and you shouldn't open it, it's not yours to open, he never gave it to you-
But your name is literally on the front.
It isn't long. A page and a half, adorned with that slightly cramped handwriting you recognize from a hundred strategy meetings a lifetime ago. It seems to have been written recently; the ink looks fresh, the paper inside is completely unworn even if the envelope isn't.
I don't know why I keep doing this. Writing things I'm never going to send. I think I just needed somewhere to put it.
Things have been good here. The eastern reconstruction is almost finished. Took longer than expected but the results are worth it. I heard from Sokka you've been well. I'm glad.
He was checking on you? Through Sokka. Keeping track from a careful distance like that was the only option available to him when it wasn't, when it was never the only option, when he could have just-
I've been thinking about what I should have said. The night you came to my door. I've been thinking about it for twelve years and I still haven't figured out how to say it in a way that-
One clean line, and then another over it, and another, until the words beneath are almost completely gone.
You tilt the page toward the lamp on your nightstand.
You squint, to the point that you’re almost straining your eyes.
Fragments bleed through the ink, making it barely legible.
-not what I meant when I-
-should have said that I-
The letter continues below like the crossed out section never happened.
I'll see you soon. There's a mission… something Aang needs help with. I imagine you'll be there.
I've been trying to figure out what I'm going to say when I do.
I'm sorry. For what it's worth after this long (which I’m sure isn’t much) I'm sorry.
You sit on the edge of your cot with the letter in your hands and stare at the wall.
You feel it. You can’t even pretend that you don’t - the letter moving through you like something warm and unwelcome, loosening things you’d had carefully secured, making your chest fill with emotions and feelings you didn’t give it permission to.
And then you fold the letter.
He wrote it. He kept it. He carried it onto this ship with him. He was sorry. He'd been trying to figure out what to say for twelve years.
Matter of fact you’re pissed.
And you have every right to be.
You've read it twice now, sitting on the edge of your cot with the lamp turned low, and it still doesn't feel entirely real. A page and a half of his handwriting, that slightly cramped script you'd know anywhere, sitting in your hands like something that was never supposed to exist outside of his bag.
I heard from Sokka you've been well.
You stop on that line the third time through.
I heard from Sokka you've been well. I'm glad.
You sit with that for a long moment.
Then you fold the letter, put it in your pocket, and go find Sokka.
He's in the narrow corridor near the supply room, doing something with a rope that stopped making sense twenty minutes ago by the look of it. He glances up when he hears you coming and immediately reads something in your face that makes him set the rope down entirely.
"Hey," he says. Careful. Quizzically.
You lean against the wall across from him. Arms crossed. Contained. And truthfully you look far more intimidating than you’d even intended to.
"He mentioned you," you say. "In the letter. Said he heard from you that I'd been doing well."
Sokka goes very still, and a trace of guilt begins to shadow his face.
"How long has that been happening?"
"Define happening," Sokka says.
He exhales. Long. Leans back against the opposite wall and runs a hand over his face in the specific way he does when he's been caught doing something he can justify but doesn't want to explain.
"He asked about you," he says finally. "After you left. Just… casually, at first. How you were, whether you seemed okay." A pause. "And then it just kept happening. Every few months he'd find a way to bring you up and I'd tell him what I knew and it never felt like a big deal because it was just- it was just information. You were fine. I'd say you were fine. He'd nod and we'd move on."
"For twelve years," you say.
"For twelve years," he admits.
"And it never once occurred to you to say something."
"To who?" he says, and he's not defensive; he sounds genuinely tired, like he's asked himself this before. "Tell him to reach out to someone who left without looking back? Tell you that your ex best friend kept asking about you when you'd made it pretty clear you were done?"
"Yes," you say simply. "Either of those things."
"I assume he told you about the letters." you state.
Something shifts in his expression. Subtle. But you've known him long enough to catch it.
"He mentioned writing things," Sokka says carefully. "He didn't go into detail. I knew he… I knew it was a thing he did. I didn't ask questions."
"You didn't ask questions," you repeat.
"It didn't feel like my place-"
"Sokka." Your voice comes out quieter than you expected and sharper for it. "You've been in the middle of this for twelve years without being in the middle of it. You knew he was writing to me. You knew he was asking about me. And you just-" you stop. Exhale. "You just kept passing information back and forth like none of it meant anything."
"I didn't know the extent of it," he says defensively. "I knew there were letters. I didn't know… how many. Or what was in them."
"You still don’t know how many?" you say. "Roughly."
"A lot," he says quietly. "It's been a long time. There are a lot of them."
The corridor is very quiet.
You stand there and let that land properly.
Not one. Not a handful. A lot. Years worth. Twelve years worth
"I'm not trying to make you the bad guy," you say after a moment. "You're not the bad guy."
"I know," he says. Quietly.
"Did he seem…" you start. Stop. Try again. "When he asked about me. Did he seem like he was just- checking in? Or did it seem like something else?"
Sokka looks at you for a long moment.
"I think we both know the answer to that," he says simply.
You go back to your room.
You sit on your cot for a long time.
The letter is in your pocket. The lamp is low. The ship hums beneath you with that constant rhythm you've stopped noticing except for moments like this when everything is quiet and you need something to focus on that isn't the thing you're actually thinking about.
You take the letter out. Read it again.
I've been trying to figure out what I'm going to say when I do.
I'm sorry. For what it's worth after this long- I'm sorry.
You think about seventeen years old. About walking down a hallway in the Fire Nation with your heart in your throat. About standing at his door and saying the thing you'd been holding for years, and the way his face had looked- not cruel, not cold, just -startled. Uncertain. And then…
No. I haven't thought of you in that way before.
You'd run before he could say anything else. You remember that. You remember the exact moment you stopped listening and just… moved. Turned away from the door and his voice and whatever came after because you couldn't stand to hear it.
You fold the letter and stand up before you can even fully process what you’re about to do.
You find him on the deck as the sun is going down.
Not by accident- for the first time in what feels like forever.
He looks up when he hears your footsteps and something moves across his face- surprise, then something more careful sliding over it. He's sitting on one of the low supply crates near the railing, a cup going cold in his hands, the sky behind him bleeding orange into deep blue.
You sit down on the crate across from him.
He looks at you. Then at the envelope.
"It fell out of your bag," you say. "In the storage corridor."
You look at him steadily. "Were you ever going to give it to me?"
"Were you ever going to say any of it?"
His jaw works. "I don't know."
Something ignites in your chest.
"Twelve years," you say. Flat. "I've been carrying this around for twelve years. I built an entire story about what happened- about what kind of person looks someone in the eye and says what you said and then just disappears. Goes completely silent." You pause. "And now you're sitting here telling me you don't know if you were ever going to say anything."
"It was exactly that simple." The words come sharper now, the ones you've been holding since the storage corridor, since Sokka, since all of it started shifting underneath you. "You say something or you don't. You show up or you don't. You had twelve years, Zuko. Twelve years of every possible opportunity and you wrote letters you kept in your bag and apparently called that enough."
"I didn't know if you wanted to hear from me-"
"I left because you rejected me," you say. "So what was I supposed to do? Stay? Make it weird? I left because it was the only dignified option available to me after what you said and you-" your voice does the thing you don't want it to do. You pull it back under control. "You let me go. And then said nothing."
"And stop saying I know," you say. "Stop sitting there agreeing with everything like that makes it better. Give me something real. Tell me something true for once instead of just absorbing everything I say like you deserve it."
"I do deserve it," he says quietly.
"That's not what I mean and you know it."
His jaw tightens. Something working through his expression.
"What do you want me to say?" he asks, and his voice has an edge now, something finally fraying at the surface. "That I was an idiot? That I handled it badly? That I should have-"
"I want you to tell me what you were going to say," you say. "That night. You said… you said you'd never thought of me in that way before, and then you opened your mouth again and I-" you stop. "I didn't let you finish. I know that. But I've spent twelve years filling in what came next and I need you to tell me if I've been right."
"What did you fill it in with?" he asks quietly.
"That you were letting me down easy," you say. "That there was nothing there and there never had been and you were trying to find a way to say that without making it cruel."
He looks at you for a long moment.
"That's not what I was going to say," he says.
Your heart does something inconvenient.
"Then what," you say. "What were you going to say?"
He looks away. At the horizon. At the water. At anything that isn't you.
"Zuko." Your voice cracks slightly on his name and you hate it but you don't take it back. "Please. What were you going to say."
The sky has gone almost completely dark now.
He exhales. Long. Unsteady in a way you've never heard from him before.
"I was going to say-" he starts. Stops. His hands tighten around the cup. "I was seventeen years old and I had spent my entire life being told I wasn't enough. By my father. By the Nation. By every standard I was supposed to meet and kept failing." His voice is low now. Rough at the edges. "And then you were standing there at my door telling me you felt something and I just… I panicked. Because I hadn't let myself think about it. I'd been not letting myself think about it for a long time because if I thought about it then I had to think about what it meant that someone like you could…" he stops.
"Someone like me?" you say carefully.
"Someone who actually saw me," he says quietly. "Not the prince. Not Ozai's son. Just me. And I didn't know what to do with that. I didn't know how to-" he exhales. "I said the first thing that came out and it was wrong. And what I was going to say after was…" he pauses. "I was going to say that it wasn't that I didn't feel anything. It was that I didn't think I deserved to."
The words land somewhere deep.
"I was going to tell you," he says, and his voice has gone very quiet now, stripped of everything careful, "that you were too good to want someone like me. That whatever you thought you saw- you were wrong. Not because you were wrong about me. But because I was so convinced that I was wrong about me that I couldn't-" he stops. His jaw works. "I couldn't let you be right."
The silence that follows is enormous.
You think about seventeen years old. About running down a corridor with tears on your face, filling in the blank with the worst possible version. About twelve years of believing you were never even considered, never even on his radar, never enough to be thought of.
And then you think about a boy who'd been told his whole life he was a disappointment sitting across from someone who looked at him and saw something worth loving and not knowing what to do with that except push it away.
You have every right to still be angry because even the real version of what happened hurt you. Even well-intentioned self-destruction leaves damage in its wake. Even if he was protecting himself he was doing it at your expense and twelve years of silence doesn't become okay just because you understand it better now.
But it's a different kind of anger.
"You should have said that," you say quietly. "That night. You should have said that instead."
"I would have-" you stop. "I don't know what I would have done. But it would have been different."
"And the letters," you say. "All of them. That's- Sokka told me. That it wasn't just one."
He closes his eyes briefly. He’d talk to Sokka about that later.
"How many," you say. Quietly this time. Not demanding. Just asking.
"Enough," he says. "Enough that I lost count after a while."
You look at him in the dark.
At his face which is doing nothing to hide any of it right now. Twelve years of letters and one night of a sentence he never finished and all of it sitting right there on the surface of him, visible, finally, for the first time.
"I didn't think I deserved to," he'd said earlier.
About a person who had been told so many times he wasn't enough that the only place he could safely feel something was in letters he never sent. About the specific tragedy of someone who had finally found a person worth feeling something for and didn't believe he deserved to say so.
You're furious and it moves you anyway and you hate that both of those things are true simultaneously.
"I'm not ready to forgive you," you say finally. "I want you to know that. Whatever this is. I spent twelve years thinking I wasn't even worth considering to you," you say. "That's what I carried. Not just that you didn't feel the same way. That I never even- that it never even crossed your mind."
Something breaks open in his expression.
"It never left my mind," he says. Raw and quiet and nothing like the careful measured voice he came onto this deck with. "That was the problem. That was always the problem. I couldn't- you were the only person who ever looked at me like I was worth something and I didn't know what to do with that except-"
"Except push it away," you finish quietly.
"Yeah," he says. Just that. Just, yeah. Like he's too tired to dress it up anymore.
Something in your chest pulls tight.
"I'm still angry," you say.
"You don't get to just-" you pause. "This doesn't fix anything tonight."
"I know," he says. And then, quieter… "I'm not asking for it."
You look at him for a long moment.
At the cup still in his hands. At the sky completely dark behind him now. At the person who has apparently been writing you letters for twelve years because he had to put it somewhere and couldn't put it where it actually belonged.
"Goodnight, Zuko," you say.
He doesn't try to stop you.
"Goodnight," he says quietly.
- I said I’d update before the end of may and here we are, may 31st at 10:50pm at least in my time zone!!😭😭
- but otherwise I have so many thoughts omgggg
-And this is kinda me glazing myself but goodness me I love how different Zuko and taga are like Zuko takes forever and is emotionally constipated but taga is like “I have a feeling u like directness” like yes dada i dooooooo🤤🤤🤤
-poor zuko. He gets five big booms
-zuko is not is my good graces yet. whatever call me petty 🤷♀️
Comment pls love talking to y guys!!
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