Burnt Out - Zuko x OC

Double Date Pt. 2

"It was strict. Father expected a lot of us." Zuko replied bluntly. It was hard to think of his father these days.

Kai gave him a moment before asking slowly, like sticking your hand out to a starved dog that you were fully aware could bite right through your flesh if you moved too quickly, "Do you want to tell me what happened?"

For a moment she sounded meek, like a scared little mouse. But then Zuko understood that it wasn't meekness at all, it was respect she was showing him. It told him that if he was ready, she wanted to listen to him. She wanted to hear what he had to say.

He sucked in a deep breath and for the first time said it out loud, "I refused an Agni Kai with my father, the fire bender equivalent to a duel. I spoke out of turn and was punished accordingly for it."

Kai felt all of the blood drain from her skin. When Zuko looked at her, she looked as if she'd just seen a spirit in the flesh. Her jade eyes now a sickly green color, they looked far too big for her face as they'd widened in disbelief.

"What? What's wrong?" Zuko asked.

"It's nothing. Just —" She stood from her seat on the fountain's edge and wandered a few feet in front of him just to make sure she could still walk at all, scoffing as she continued, "That's why I was banished. To a fucking T."

She could still smell the dinner that sat uneaten on her plate that night, cabbage and turkey. She could hear the rowdy clanking of forks against plates piercing her eardrums and feel her father's hand pulling her braid, ripping her from her chair at the head of the table. That's why she'd started wearing her hair in a braid in the first place, because it hurt so much worse when it hung loosely over her shoulders.

"I objected to my father's military plans at an important dinner with his men and when he tried to punish me, when he tried to make me duel him.." Kai was talking a thousand miles a minutes as the memories flooded every sense but she gulped hard before finishing, "I wouldn't. I couldn't."

Zuko watched her from behind, her hand lifted to her quivering lips as she fought back tears. She has to be a spy, he thought. Everything was too.. coincidental. A honey trap set up by the Dai Li — or more likely, his sister, to prove that he really was a traitor. He felt his body heating up with old rage, rage like he felt when he'd first started his search for the avatar. He started across the grass, stomping to where she now stood. Zuko wouldn't be tricked, not ever again, and not by some girl. He grabbed her by the shoulder and forced her to face him, grasping the wrist of her hand that she'd lifted to her face.

And as if in slow motion, he saw that she wasn't in her own body. He saw her eyes far off in another land, in another time completely. Zuko saw the tears that teetered on the brim of her eyes and watched the very first one spill over. But all she saw in him was anger, just like her father had shown her during their last night together.

Before she could snap out of her trance like state, she bended the earth below him. All of it. It separated and left no leg room for his boots to grasp, a hole that his entire body slipped so easily into. He fell instantly, pulling her down with him.

The feeling of Kai's body hitting the hard ground snapped her back to life. She looked down into the abyss, at Zuko's dangling body that was hanging on by just her straining wrist.

"I'm so sorry!" She apologized over and over again, stretching her other arm out over the edge. Kai didn't have to guess how far down that hole went, she knew that it very well may not end at all.

"Take my hand!" She yelled, and Zuko grasped it like his life depended on it. She lifted herself onto her knees and back, pulling him up until she knew his own body weight was no longer a threat to himself, "I'm so sorry, I didn't mean do that. I didn't know who you were, and —"