Work Text:
He meets Jet in a server for school, and that is the first warning bell.
It’s a chat he was added to ages ago, just a general server for everyone who had Mr. Piandao for history, regardless of whether it was AP or honors. They kept using it when midterms started, of course, using it even more frequently if that was possible.
Jet hadn’t even been in the same class as him, either. Zuko was in Piandao’s fifth period APUSH. Jet didn’t even have Piandao (and Zuko still isn’t sure why he joined the server in the first place).
Regardless, two months into the new year, when Zuko’s emotions were strung thin by both anxiety about the ever-looming AP exams and his family stringing his nerves up like a wire, Jet DMed him.
hey
Simple enough. Zuko has assumed he merely wanted help on an assignment, so he replied.
Hey
what do you want help w?
It’s a moment before Jet responds, and when he does, Zuko slams his computer closed and has to stare at the wall for a long, long moment. The moment passes, and he finally gets up the urge to open his laptop again to double check that he didn’t hallucinate the message.
checking if you really do work out even during the winter ;)
Shaking, he forces himself to breathe. Of course I do. Some of us want to keep this type of muscle
Before he can think it through, he switches to his phone, flexing an arm and snapping a picture before sending it to Jet.
And then the moment hits him, full-on.
...what.
Has he done.
Is he flirting?!
ngl that’s pretty good
think you could show me some tips?
Show him some tips? Zuko can give him some, sure. That’s all he meant, right?
It is not all he meant, he realizes, as Jet pushes him back against a wall and kisses him hungrily. And Zuko...Zuko doesn’t fight back like the good, righteous son he should. He doesn’t pull away and tell him, “No, I don’t. I shouldn’t. Not with a boy.”
Instead, Zuko kisses back.
And it tastes like euphoria.
Zuko is supposed to be studying for the slew of tests he has next week. Supposed to be keeping himself locked away from the world until he can recite vector formulas in his sleep. For Jet, however, he forgets all about any kind of formulas, besides the one of their chemistry.
A simple text: just got off work, meet me behind the McD’s? ;)
And then Zuko is replying, telling him, ill be there, and he is there and Jet’s mouth is on his and Zuko’s falling apart as Jet whispers, “You’re so perfect, you know? So beautiful,” because no one has told him to his face—much less his lips—he was anything but a disgusting, disgraceful mistake of a creature for months now.
And even if Jet never tells him I love you in words so plain, Zuko allows himself to pretend.
And eventually, he grows bold enough to be the one to text first, to say, can we meet behind that big business complex off of Sailors?
It’s his way of telling his father that if they find him, he doesn’t care—even if he does—because he loves who he loves— even if Jet doesn’t love him back.
His house of glass and cards comes crumbling down the day Father slides him a series of grainy surveillance photos printed on run-of-the-mill 8x11s. They’re of the parking lot behind the office building Sozin Corporations is based out of, but he’s not sure why. Zuko stares at them for a moment, trying to comprehend them, before it hits him all at once.
Oh.
“Who is he?” Father asks, voice dangerously even.
“I don’t know, sir.” His voice is shaking, and so is the rest of him.
“I will ask you once more, Zuko, and then you will wish you had never been born. Who. Is. He.”
“I don’t—“
“Are you gay, Zuko?”
His chest seizes up.
Yes.
I don’t know.
“N– no, sir.” He tries in vain to keep his voice steady, but he knows it doesn’t work.
“Based on those pictures, I don’t think you’re telling me the truth.” Father rises from the table, and Zuko shrinks back. Father follows him, forcing him to retreat from the kitchen into the laundry. “Tell the truth, and maybe I won’t kill you where you stand,” he snarls.
“I’m not—”
Father throws a fist, and Zuko ducks back, crouching beside the washer. Father grabs something this time and swings it towards him.
Everything is white for a long, blinding moment.
Zuko can’t feel anything, can’t hear anything, can’t see anything for a long, long moment, and then he hears the wailing. It sounds like a dying animal, the death cry of a hunted deer, and his instincts are shoved into a higher gear. Azula?!
But no, he realizes only seconds later. The source of the cries is not Azula.
It’s him.
And he can’t see.
Zuko can see—and hear—by the time he goes back to school, but only out of his right side. He’s self-conscious about it—how could he not be, when half his face is smothered under layers of tightly wrapped bandages?—but by the time he gets to school, he’s almost able to forget it.
Almost, because the minute he walks in the door with a quiet, “Hi,” that makes Sokka jump to his feet with a shout of, “Zuko, you’re back!” until he sees Zuko’s bandages and his face falls. The rejection hits him like the final nail in his coffin.
“What happened to your face?” Aang’s voice calls from the table they usually sit at in the mornings.
Sokka’s eyes are tracing the bandages, hand half-raised and hovering above them as if he wants to touch but is too hesitant to. Zuko wants him to, though. He needs him to.
He needs to feel the pain to feel alive, to feel real, because a part of him is still kissing a boy behind the McDonald’s who doesn’t even know the price of his interest.
“I was messing around with the fire while I was camping with Iroh,” he lies. “I stoked the flames a bit high.” He laughs awkwardly at that, and Aang joins in reluctantly.
Sokka’s eyes are still perturbed, though, his hand still hovering over the bandages, and for a moment, Zuko wishes Jet were here to brush away the reluctance with the subtlety of a hurricane.
But when he sees Jet later that day, the other teen doesn’t even acknowledge him.
And now even the foundations of his pretense at happiness are gone.
And then, the next day, a Saturday, he hears the announcement.
The county has forty new cases of coronavirus, almost overnight. And to prevent the spread?
They’re going into lockdown.