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It’s 10:48 pm on a Thursday in December when someone chucks a rock at the window of Zuko’s childhood bedroom, effectively shattering the glass and pulling him out of his own spiraling thoughts. He lets his phone fall out of his hand and peers out to the rest of his room, taking in the heavy-looking rock and the small shards of glass littering the floor. Curious, Zuko skirts around the mess and pokes his head out the window.
Sokka stands just below it, somehow looking picture-perfect with a grocery bag in one hand and a second rock in the other. He smiles up at Zuko wearily, but years of knowing him tells Zuko it’s genuine all the same.
“What are you doing here?” Zuko calls out, brow furrowing. It wasn’t unlike Sokka to show up randomly during unexpected points in Zuko’s life, but he was supposed to be in Canada for another two weeks at the very least.
Sokka ignores him with a practiced smile, instead calling out, “Let me in!”
“Why’d you break my window?” The windowpane is generally free from glass and Zuko maneuvers his forearms to rest upon the wood. Sokka doesn’t look any different from what Zuko remembers—same dark hair, same big blue eyes, same swim team sweatshirt. Seeing him feels like looking at a photo in an album long forgotten, or at a headshot in a high school yearbook.
There’s a cheeky smile on Sokka’s face and he raises the hand holding the grocery bag. “I’ll tell you if you let me in.”
“The front door is unlocked.”
Zuko doesn’t know why he tells him that. This is a bad idea—to let Sokka into his house, into his space. It’s a bad idea no matter what angle he looks at it. He’s definitely not thinking straight, but there’s no point dwelling on it. Even if Sokka were secretly an axe murderer here to claim Zuko as his last victim, it wouldn’t even matter in the grand scheme of things. Sokka disappears from below his window and reappears in the doorway about a minute later. Zuko hadn’t even registered the lapse in time.
Sokka stands in his doorway like a vision of all the things Zuko wishes were his. The rock in his left hand had been abandoned somewhere between the front door and his bedroom, but it wasn’t like he was going to be tripping over a forgotten rock anytime soon.
“Wow, nothing really changed in here.” Sokka breaks the silence, tentatively entering Zuko’s bedroom. He had always valued his personal space, but Sokka was the exception for a lot of things. “Is that the same poster I got you for your birthday last year?”
He doesn’t need to follow Sokka’s finger to the wall above the bed to know which one he’s referring to. “Yeah.” He says, after a moment.
“You still have it?” He sounds surprised, as if he thought Zuko would discard anything Sokka gave him.
Zuko just nods. “Yeah. Why did you break my window?”
Sokka is wearing a pair of black and gray checkered pajama pants. They clash with the bright blue hoodie he’d gotten the summer before graduation, but Zuko supposes that there was no reason to try and match clothing anymore. Even still, Sokka looks beautiful. “Jeez, are you seriously mad about that?” He scoffs, venturing further into the room. Sokka’s acting as if he’d never seen the inside of his room before, even though nothing had changed since he’d left Zuko behind in August.
“Not really. Just confused as to why you broke my window instead of calling me.” His eyes follow Sokka as he moves around the room, inspecting his crowded desktop and the rumpled bedsheets and the overflowing laundry basket full of clothes he’d never gotten around to washing.
“I did try calling you,” He states plainly. “Check your notifications if you don’t believe me.” Sokka’s attention shifts from the laundry to the shattered glass on the floor to the half-eaten yogurt on his nightstand. Zuko is suddenly self-conscious of the state of his room.
“I believe you.” Sokka glances over at him and looks him up and down before grinning. Suddenly, Zuko is embarrassed to be dressed in a ratty old pair of sweatpants he’d stolen from his cousin and a t-shirt from a taekwondo tournament a couple of years back. But Sokka doesn’t seem to care about that, and simply looks at Zuko with some semblance of the care they used to carry between them.
His gaze burns through Zuko for what feels like forever, but must have only been a couple of seconds, before he lifts the grocery bag and jerks his head upwards. “Let’s go to our spot.”
Their spot, of course, was the flat portion of Zuko’s roof. It rarely snowed in their hometown despite the frigid air, so he had no qualms leading Sokka out the attic window and onto the dark tiles. Clad in his socks, Zuko can feel the uncharacteristic warmth from the roof beneath his feet. It hurts a little to navigate the bumpy tiles without shoes, but muscle memory carries him across the roof.
From their spot, they have the best view of the horizon line in the west. This portion of Zuko’s roof had become a staple for them during the later years of their friendship and was home to many a conversation about anything they could think of: from the best Studio Ghibli movie to criticisms of the most popular kids in school to a tear-filled goodbye, this roof had seen them through it all.
They settle into their usual places, Sokka taking the spot to Zuko’s left and setting the grocery bag between them. The stars still shine, the world still spins, and the two of them fit on this roof like puzzle pieces in their rightful places. The setting and characters are familiar, but the situation is so, so different. Zuko finds that he doesn’t mind it as much as he should.
He’s content with his place beside Sokka.
Brushing his bangs out of his face, Zuko warily eyes the plastic bag. “What is that?”
“It’s a cake.” Sokka reaches into the bag and produces a bulky white box—a staple for their local grocery store’s bakery section.
“When did you find the time to get a cake?” Zuko leans back on his hands and watches as Sokka fumbles trying to open the box.
Sokka’s tongue is poking out of his mouth and the whole scene is so mundane it hurts. It’s reminiscent of one of the last birthdays they’d spent together, when they’d run from Zuko’s birthday party and sat on his roof, sharing a slice of strawberry cheesecake. Sokka had leaned in like he’d wanted to kiss Zuko then—and Zuko would have let him, if it weren’t for their friends calling him down for presents.
“I was already at the grocery store when the news broke,” Sokka says in a tone too casual to be talking about their impending doom, “I asked the girl working the bakery if I could take a cake and she didn’t care—she even iced a message for me!”
“Oh, how sweet of her.” Zuko winces at his own sarcastic tone, the words coming off too abrasive for his taste. Sokka, to his credit, pays no mind.
The box opens with the sound of thin cardboard ripping and Sokka turns it towards Zuko. Written in red frosting on the top of a chocolate sheet cake are the words ‘Happy End of the World!’ complete with a couple of frosting roses lining the edges. Zuko wants to laugh and cry at the same time, but settles for a watery smile. “Isn’t it sick?” Sokka says in earnest.
“Yeah, sick.”
Sokka sets the box down between them and reaches for the bag, frowning when he realizes it’s empty. “Shit,” he mutters under his breath, “I forgot the forks.”
“That’s fine,” Zuko shrugs. “We can use our hands.”
As if to demonstrate his point, he digs his fingers into the corner of the sheet cake and ends up with a fistful of frosting and chocolate cake. He brings it to his lips and takes a tentative bite. It tastes like the best thing he’s ever had in his life, much better than the abandoned greek yogurt on his nightstands. He hums in consideration, swallows, then begins to lick his fingers clean of frosting.
From the other side of the cake, Sokka is watching him. When Zuko turns to meet his eyes, he quickly glances away and grabs his own fistful of cake. They chip away at the dessert, the frosting roses disappearing down their throats and the red letters staining their hands. It’s completely silent for a couple of minutes, until they decide they’re full and begin tossing fistfuls of cake off the side of Zuko’s roof.
Once they’re bored of that, Sokka begins to speak seriously—an action that Zuko had been dreading since he first appeared outside of his house. “I didn’t want to leave.”
“If you didn’t want to, why did you?” Zuko scoffs, voice filled with anger harbored over the months they’d been apart. After a moment, his shoulders sag.
“It was my family, you know? They wanted me to see a life outside of this tiny town.” A life outside of Zuko is what goes unsaid. They both know the implications, though. “It didn’t really work.”
“Clearly not, since you’re still sitting on my roof.” Zuko pulls his knees up to his chest and stares off into the distance.
He can feel Sokka tearing his gaze away from Zuko. “I always end up back here.”
It feels like there’s so much left to say, but the words don’t come. Zuko considers the curve of the mountains and the protruding tips of cellphone towers nestled on top of them in lieu of saying anything else.
“I came back for your birthday, you know.”
This is news to Zuko. The last he’d heard of Sokka was that he was off in Canada, making tons of new friends and living his best life. He’d seen the Instagram posts and ignored the tweets mentioning names of people that Zuko would never know. The neighbors all talked about Sokka, who made it out. Sokka, who was off forging his own path. They never talked about how he came back.
Sokka leans back on his elbows, staring out at the same cellphone towers Zuko had been fixated on for the past minute or so. “You were off on your road trip with Toph and Aang, but I didn’t know that. I threw a rock at your window and it broke… Man, your dad was pissed.” He tries to laugh, but it ends up more of an exhale.
“I would’ve come back if I’d known you were in town.” He traces the lines of the mountains, then the city, then the chimneys on his neighbors’ houses, until he returns his eyes to Sokka, who is looking at him curiously. Beautiful Sokka, who had a penchant for breaking his windows.
“No, you wouldn’t have.” It goes silent again. The sky begins to lighten, despite the late hour. The stars begin to disappear behind it and both of them know there’s not much time left.
Maybe that’s why Sokka continues to talk, because he knows Zuko wouldn’t. “I was going to kiss you on that birthday. I was going to ask you to come back with me. I know you had the money for it, and what you didn’t have I would have helped and–”
Before he even realizes he’s doing it, Zuko reaches over and kisses Sokka. His lips taste like the cake they just spent the past couple of minutes devouring and Zuko finds solace in the fact that he can still taste the mango chapstick Sokka uses beneath all the buttercream. A hand reaches up to cup Zuko’s cheek and he squeezes his eyes shut, blissfully.
Behind his eyelids, he can see the sky lightening even more. When he opens them, Sokka is swaddled in the mid-afternoon sky. The blue beyond him is a brilliant shade, the same color as the eyes Zuko has loved his entire life. Sokka’s eyes, those beautiful blue eyes, stay shut for a few minutes longer before he slowly opens them and smiles.
“I wanted to kiss you before you left, but I was too scared.” Zuko finally admits. After months of pretending to be angry at Sokka, months of feeling abandoned and hurt, and every emotion that came with being left behind, he could finally admit to himself how he’d loved Sokka since the second they were introduced. “I love you.”
Momentarily floored, Sokka pushes forward and traps Zuko in another kiss. They both melt into it, knowing full well that this might be the last they would ever get. When they break apart, Sokka whispers “I love you too” against Zuko’s lips before resting their foreheads together.
They laugh, a sound too blissful and happy considering their confession came at the most inopportune time. Zuko can’t find it in himself to care, though. He wouldn’t have Sokka in any other way. Sokka, in his pajamas and his old swim team sweatshirt. Sokka, who challenged Zuko to a cake-throwing competition. Sokka, whose lips tasted like buttercream frosting and mango chapstick. Sokka, who always came back to him.
“There’s frosting on your cheeks,” Zuko whispers.
“I love you.” Is Sokka’s only response.
Both of their cheeks are rosy now, and Zuko can feel sweat beginning to form on his brow. He can’t tell if it’s from the rapidly rising temperature or the love he feels for Sokka.
“I’m glad that when we die,” Zuko braves the subject, “We’ll be together.”
Sokka’s smile turns sad, but he reaches up to trace the lines of Zuko’s face anyway. “I wish we’d had more time.”
“Me too.” Zuko closes his eyes, then bumps his forehead against Sokka’s.
“I love you,” Sokka brings both of his hands up to cup Zuko’s face. When he opens his eyes, Sokka is staring at him reverently, like he is the only thing in the world, the only thing that’s even mattered.
Zuko says “I love you.” like it’s the last time.
The heat is nearly unbearable now and the sky has turned nearly white. If he turned his face towards the sky, he knows that he would see the white-hot supernova that is going to take Sokka away from him. Zuko can feel it on his eyelashes before he can see it and in the instant before the pain erupts, he surges forward to kiss Sokka one last time.
He thinks of the frosting smeared on their faces. The mismatched pajamas they’re wearing. The cake with fistfuls missing from it abandoned between them. The last birthday party they attended together. He thinks of his family, on vacation thousands of miles away. He thinks of his friends, wherever they are. He thinks of the girl in the grocery store, who didn’t have to ice Sokka’s cake for him but did anyway. He thinks of his poor, shattered window. He thinks of the forks Sokka forgot. He thinks of Sokka, Sokka, Sokka.
When it all ends, the last thing he thinks of is Sokka and his beautiful blue eyes.