[Avatar] pour me (Mai/Zuko, Sokka/Suki)

[storypaint]

Title: pour me
Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Length: 1484 words
Prompt: white_lotus fic for mazily
Pairing: Mai/Zuko; Sokka/Suki
Other n/a

Excerpt: "So," Mai said, and it was amazing how much inflection she could put into just one syllable. It certainly stopped Zuko in his tracks. He paused comically with one foot over the threshold of their bedroom, and had to mentally force himself to put it down onto the carpet. He was the Firelord here, after all.

"So," Mai said, and it was amazing how much inflection she could put into just one syllable. It certainly stopped Zuko in his tracks. He paused comically with one foot over the threshold of their bedroom, and had to mentally force himself to put it down onto the carpet. He was the Firelord here, after all.

The thing was, Mai was the Firelady, and that was, perhaps, a more senior position.

"I didn't want to wake you up," Zuko said. This has the benefit of being entirely true without admitting the guilt that had begun to roll down his back as he was becoming more sober.

"You came in like a herd of mongoose dragons. The quieter you tried to be, the louder you sounded," she said, with an edge of irritation to her voice.

"I told Sokka to keep his voice down," Zuko said, rolling his eyes. He heard the covers on the bed rustle and decided that perhaps it was better to have this conversation in the room with the door closed, rather than sharing their business with the entire palace. He shut it firmly behind him, enveloping himself in near-complete darkness. Mai must have drawn the curtains before she went to bed.

He could probably find his way in the dark, he decided, rather than lighting the lamps. Mai sounded sleepy and he hoped she would go back to her rest once she'd expressed her displeasure.

This might have occurred -- he could hear her small yawn in the dark, but when he thumped his shin on the bedside table, misjudging the distance, he also swore. And then swore again under his breath because he knew he'd woken her for good now. Mai sighed.

"What exactly are the two of you trying to prove, anyway? That you're still young? You're not young anymore, and that idiot will never grow up."

Zuko's first line of protest was very nearly, "I thought you liked Sokka!" but he swallowed that as slightly inane and not really relevant to the conversation. Mai didn't like anyone who interrupted her eight hours of sleep. And Sokka could be pretty silly, even now. The post-war years had provided him with a growth spurt and a scraggly beard (which seemed to be the style of the Southern Water Tribe, as much as Zuko could tell, so he tried not to comment on it), but not much of a change in mentality. Which Zuko appreciated, actually, because it meant that Sokka was still every bit the innovator. Zuko needed new solutions to long-standing problems, and Sokka was very good at those. Zuko had been glad when Sokka came to stay for a while, to work with their smiths on his ideas for new machines.

Or maybe he didn't swallow it. Mai huffed in amusement. "He doesn't lecture like his sister does. I'll give him that."

There was a hidden "but" in that sentence, and like one of Mai's knives, it had the potential to be sharp. Zuko sat down on the edge of the bed, taking off his boots and presenting his back to her.

"We're not trying to prove anything," he said, still honest. "We just--"

He hesitated, not sure how to explain. They'd go out, just for dinner, and they'd start talking. (There was a certain restaurant nearby that was rowdy enough that even the Firelord wasn't commonly noticed, not with his hood pulled up and a few coins for the privacy of a back booth.) Sokka would explain some ridiculous idea he had, and Zuko would be practical and poke holes in it, and Sokka would get indignant, and make a few changes. And then their voices would get hoarse and they'd call for more wine, and Sokka would get louder and louder as Zuko became more and more morose, until Sokka decided it was his duty to cheer Zuko up. By the time they reached that point, there was no way that Zuko would make it to bed at a reasonable hour.

"We're just friends," he finished lamely, pulling off his clothes, which smelled like old beer and pipesmoke. Luckily it was a warm night and he didn't need to go searching for something else to wear to bed.

"Your fidelity has not been called into question," Mai said, voice dry. "But I would mention that it is very difficult to run a country with a perpetual hangover."

A brief mental study of Fire Nation history provided the names of at least four Firelords (and one Firelady) who had done just that, but Zuko chose not to mention them, because he agreed. Morning policy meetings were completely excruciating with a pre-existing headache involved.

"I know," Zuko said. He lay down and shifted around, trying to get comfortable. He reached for Mai, but she turned her back to him.

"Your breath stinks," she announced. "And tomorrow night, I'm going with you."

Zuko hadn't realized how tired he was until he had lain down, and he was already drifting a little when Mai spoke.

"What?" he said, certain he had heard wrong.

"I like their shrimp," she said. "Go to sleep."

With a tinge of unease, he did.

*

It wasn't that Zuko didn't like Mai. In fact, he liked her a lot. He wouldn't have married her otherwise, no matter what he'd been advised. (Azula had laughed and told him he was too sentimental when he'd visited her. He was glad she was lucid, but her advice was as bad as ever.) It was more that Mai was terrible at group occasions. They'd burned down one party, after all. And she'd sneaked out of their wedding feast hours early; he'd resented it a little at the time, because he thought she should have sneaked him along too, but perhaps that wasn't particularly practical.

Okay, so they were both terrible at group occasions. But for some reason, double-dating with Sokka and Suki seemed like it would be more difficult than the annual address to the people. If his people didn't like his jokes, they'd laugh anyway out of loyalty. Sokka would just laugh at him, and that was embarrassing.

Zuko wasn't even sure how this had turned into a double-date, except that he'd mumbled something about Mai coming along for dinner and Sokka had said, "Brilliant idea!" and shown up with the Kyoshi Warrior on his arm.

Suki and Zuko had never had occasion to speak very much. He still felt guilty about Azula imprisoning her, and when he'd mentioned as much, Sokka had told him that she felt bad about it too, like she shouldn't have been captured at all. He thought that was a ridiculous idea, because even grown adults hadn't done well fighting Azula, but he didn't know how to tell Suki that without sounding condescending.

Zuko hadn't even known she was visiting. Apparently she'd been presented to the court, but that had been the day after he'd eaten the bad sea soup, and he hadn't been present in case his illness had been a sign of a botched assassination attempt. Suki had seen Mai instead, and greeted her with a friendly, if slightly guarded smile. Mai nodded back.

Everyone relaxed a bit once the food arrived, though, and the wine was passed. Zuko found that with Suki around, Sokka leaned on him fifty percent less of the time, although this also meant that he occasionally fielded compliments meant for her. Which was more than a little awkward, given that they looked nothing like each other, but Suki thought it was funny, at least. She and Sokka were comfortable with each other in a way that Zuko didn't quite understand They touched casually and finished each other's sentences and teased each other about old embarrassments. It was a sort of intimacy Zuko and Mai would never have shown in public. Cultural differences, he supposed (or perhaps he really was, as Toph sometimes suggested, a stick in the mud).

They had a good time, the four of them, even if Mai nearly got them all kicked out for ruining the dartboard. Apparently the owner would rather she use the darts provided over real knives.

The presence of the girls didn't mean that Zuko came to bed any earlier that night, although at least it meant that Mai was just as tired as he was when they did. She curled up with her back to him and grabbed his arm in the dark, folding it around her waist. He smelled the slightly sour scent of her shoulder, sweat and pipesmoke and beer. He didn't mind it at all.

"That was nice," Mai said tonelessly as he nuzzled into her skin.

He waited.

"Considering," she added.

Zuko smiled in the dark.