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𝖼𝗁𝖺𝗉𝗍𝖾𝗋 𝗈𝗇𝖾: "𝗆𝗂𝖽𝗇𝗂𝗀𝗁𝗍 𝗌𝗅𝗈𝗍"
───── 𝗍𝗐𝗈 𝗋𝖺𝖽𝗂𝗈 𝗁𝗈𝗌𝗍𝗌, 𝗈𝗇𝖾 𝗍𝗂𝗇𝗒 𝖼𝗈𝗅𝗅𝖾𝗀𝖾 𝗌𝗍𝖺𝗍𝗂𝗈𝗇, 𝗍𝗐𝗈 𝗉𝗋𝗈𝖽𝗎𝖼𝖾𝗋𝗌 𝗐𝗁𝗈 𝗋𝖾𝖿𝗎𝗌𝖾 𝗍𝗈 𝗅𝖾𝗍 𝖾𝗂𝗍𝗁𝖾𝗋 𝗈𝖿 𝗒𝗈𝗎 𝗌𝗁𝗎𝗍 𝗎𝗉 𝖺𝖻𝗈𝗎𝗍 𝖾𝖺𝖼𝗁 𝗈𝗍𝗁𝖾𝗋, 𝖺𝗇𝖽 𝗇𝖾𝗂𝗍𝗁𝖾𝗋 𝗈𝖿 𝗒𝗈𝗎 𝗐𝗂𝗅𝗅𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝗍𝗈 𝖺𝖽𝗆𝗂𝗍 𝗐𝗁𝗒 !
───── modern au! zuko x fem!reader 𝗌𝗅𝗈𝗐 𝖻𝗎𝗋𝗇, 𝖽𝗎𝖺𝗅 𝗉𝗈𝗏, 𝗆𝗎𝗍𝗎𝖺𝗅 𝗉𝗂𝗇𝗂𝗇𝗀, 𝗋𝖺𝖽𝗂𝗈 𝗁𝗈𝗌𝗍𝗌 𝖺𝗎, 𝖿𝗋𝗂𝖾𝗇𝖽 𝗀𝗋𝗈𝗎𝗉 𝗐𝗂𝗇𝗀𝗆𝖾𝗇, 𝗇𝗈𝗍 𝗉𝗋𝗈𝗈𝖿𝗋𝖾𝖺𝖽, 5.7k
───── this is an ONGOING multi-chapter fic! chapter two goes up once this one hits 50 likes + 10 reblogs, so reblog if you want more <3
───── once next chapters are posted, you may either view the tag #deadairbypoisonedkissez to view the different chapters, or check out my masterlist (and you might also discover some other fics or oneshots that r ur cup of tea, as uncle iroh would sayy)
enjoy!
there is a very specific kind of chaos that exists in the ATLA station office at 11:40 on a tuesday night, and somehow, two years into doing this, you still haven't gotten used to it.
toph has her boots up on the sound desk, which she is absolutely not supposed to do, flicking through a braille schedule with the bored efficiency of someone who has memorized this station's entire rundown a hundred times over and resents having to double check it at all. sokka is somewhere behind the recording booth glass, aang is on the floor with momo perched on his shoulder, trying, and failing, to keep the small lemur from climbing directly into an open bag of pretzels that belongs to somebody else. appa, the station's unofficial mascot — a huge, shaggy, endlessly good-natured dog that aang adopted from the shelter two years ago and who now spends more time in this building than most of the actual staff — is asleep directly in the one patch of floor everyone has to step over to reach the booth.
which wouldn't be notable, except zuko is never late — not once, not in two years, not even the week he had the flu and showed up anyway looking gray and miserable rather than miss a single slot — and you find yourself checking the clock on the wall for the third time in as many minutes, which katara, beside you, absolutely clocks.
"he'll be here," she says, not even looking up from the segment notes she's organizing for your show. katara's been your producer since sophomore year — steady, quick, endlessly patient with your tendency to over-plan segments you'll inevitably abandon halfway through — and at this point she can read your anxious clock-checking from across the room without needing to ask what it's about.
"you've checked the clock three times."
"i'm keeping track of the schedule. that's my job."
"your job is hosting the one to two am slot. checking on zuko's whereabouts is not technically in the job description." she says it lightly, but there's a knowing edge to it that makes you look away first, back down at your own notes, which you have very much not been focusing on for the last ten minutes.
the truth — the truth you've admitted to precisely no one, least of all katara, though you suspect she's guessed anyway — is that you and zuko have known each other for two full years now, ever since you both landed back-to-back graveyard slots your sophomore year, him at midnight, you right after. it started as nothing. professional. a handoff, a nod in the hallway, the kind of polite distance two strangers doing adjacent jobs maintain out of habit.
it did not stay that way.
somewhere over two years of overlapping fifteen-minute windows — him wrapping up, you setting up, both of you lingering a little longer in the shared space than either job strictly required — it turned into something else. late-night conversations that ran long. him showing up to your slot early sometimes just to keep talking. you learning the specific, dry rhythm of his humor, the low rasp his voice gets by the end of a two-hour shift, the way his whole face changes when something actually makes him laugh instead of just huffing out that controlled almost-smile he gives everyone else.
you know him. properly know him — his order at the campus coffee cart, the scar over his left eye that he got as a kid in a workshop accident with his father (a story he told you once, quiet and clipped, clearly still tender around the edges, and you'd never brought it up again unless he did first), the way he gets fidgety and short-tempered on exam weeks and needs someone to physically hand him food or he'll forget to eat entirely.
what you don't know — what you have spent an embarrassing amount of time not-thinking-about — is whether any of what you feel when he walks into a room goes both ways.
the door swings open. zuko, finally, hair damp from what was apparently a very late shower, bag slung over one shoulder, looking faintly harassed in the specific way he always does when he's run later than he'd like.
"sorry," he says, to the room generally, though his eyes find yours first, same as they always do, same as you'll never admit you notice. "car wouldn't start."
"we were about to send toph out looking for you," sokka calls from behind the booth glass, not glancing up from his cable situation.
"i can't drive, snoozles."
zuko huffs something that's almost a laugh, dropping his bag by his usual chair, and when he glances back over at you there's a small, private kind of warmth in it that has nothing to do with the room at large — the kind of look you've spent two years quietly convincing yourself doesn't mean what you desperately want it to mean.
"hey," he says, quieter, just for you.
"hey yourself. car trouble?"
"dead battery. i hope sokka's giving me a ride home tonight since apparently mine's decided to retire." he settles into the chair beside you, close enough that you catch the faint, familiar smell of his shampoo, and pulls his own show notes out of his bag with the kind of easy, practiced motion of someone who's done this a thousand times and will do it a thousand more. "you look like you were worried."
"i was tracking the schedule."
"sure." but he's smiling now, small and pleased, and you decide, firmly, to change the subject before your face gives away anything more than it probably already has.
he doesn't tell her the whole truth about the car.
the battery part is real — dead, unceremoniously, right as he was about to leave his apartment — but the reason he's fifteen minutes late instead of five is that he'd spent a solid ten minutes standing in his kitchen, phone in hand, trying to decide whether or not to text her about it (maybe ask her if they'd started without him, or if she'd do him a favor and pick him up) , before deciding against it and just running the rest of the way to the station instead, because apparently that made more sense to his brain than admitting he wanted an excuse to text her something, anything, outside of their usual shared hour.
it's been like this for a while now. longer than he's willing to properly examine.
he'd known, going into sophomore year, that the graveyard slot was going to be miserable — nobody wants midnight to one am, not with actual classes the next morning, and he'd taken it specifically because nobody else would, because it meant less competition for the spot, less scrutiny, less chance of anyone paying close enough attention to notice him at all. that had been the plan, anyway. keep his head down. do the show. leave.
then she'd shown up for the one to two slot right after his, and the plan had fallen apart somewhere around week three, when she'd stayed an extra ten minutes past her handoff just to argue with him about a song he'd played, entirely unprompted, entirely uninvited, and he'd found himself laughing — actually laughing, not the polite half-smile he gives everyone else — for the first time in longer than he wanted to think about.
two years later, he knows more about her than he knows about most people who've been in his life a lot longer. knows she takes her coffee absurdly sweet, knows she gets a specific crease between her eyebrows when she's nervous about a segment, knows the exact, unhinged way she'll defend a bad pop song on principle alone if she thinks someone's being unfairly dismissive of it.
what he doesn't know — hasn't let himself seriously consider, not really, not without immediately shutting the thought down — is what he's supposed to do about the fact that somewhere in those two years, this stopped being a coworker thing entirely, and became something he thinks about far more than is probably healthy, for someone he sees for exactly one overlapping hour, four nights a week.
"you're staring," sokka says, low, appearing at his elbow with an armful of cables he apparently gave up untangling.
"you're staring at her reading your notes."
"that's not — " zuko stops, aware he's not going to win this one, and settles for a flat look instead, which sokka meets with an entirely unbothered grin.
"i'm just saying," sokka continues, unhelpfully, "for a guy who's supposedly 'just coworkers' with someone, you sure do a lot of staring."
"uh huh. sure. that's why you rearranged your entire work schedule around a fifteen minute overlap with her two years ago and have somehow never once been late to it until tonight."
zuko doesn't have a good response to that, mostly because sokka isn't wrong, and he's spared having to come up with one at all when katara calls both of them over to sort out the night's rundown, sokka shooting him one last knowing look before finally, mercifully, dropping it.
the show goes the way it always does — easy, familiar, the two of you falling into the same rhythm you've built over two years without needing to think about it. his slot wraps at 12:58, same as always, and instead of leaving right at the handoff like the schedule technically dictates, he lingers, same as he's done for months now, perched on the edge of the desk while you cue up your first track.
"you're staying again," you say, not quite looking at him, though you're smiling and he can probably tell.
"toph doesn't need me for anything else tonight. figured i'd hang around."
"you say that every night."
he huffs a laugh, low and warm, and the two of you fall into easy conversation while your first segment plays, katara half-listening from the producer's chair with the specific patient amusement of someone who has watched this exact scene play out roughly four hundred times and is still waiting for one of you to actually do something about it.
it's during the second song break, phone in hand while you check tomorrow's rundown, that zuko clears his throat, a little more deliberately than usual.
"hey, so," he says, not quite meeting your eyes, which is unusual enough that you look up properly. "i don't actually think i follow you on instagram."
"i don't really use it much. but i was thinking about it. following you. if that's — if you're okay with that."
it's such a small thing. objectively, ridiculously small — a follow request, nothing more — and yet something about the careful, deliberate way he asks it, like he's crossed some invisible line he's been standing in front of for a while now, makes your pulse do something embarrassing.
"yeah," you say, maybe too quickly. "yeah, of course. i'll follow you back."
he pulls out his phone right there, and you watch, feeling strangely nervous about something so small, as he searches your name, hits follow, and you feel your own phone buzz half a second later with the notification. you follow him back before you can overthink it — @/fp.zuko, a profile picture of him and what you assume is his uncle at some restaurant, a grid that's mostly sparse and unposted, a few photos, one of which, you note, with an unreasonable amount of interest, is a picture of the harbor near campus, captioned nothing at all.
"you don't post much," you say.
"i don't really see the point most of the time." he glances over, something a little self-conscious in it. "i liked yours, though. from a while back. i saw them when i looked you up the first time. that's — that's actually part of why i finally decided to just ask."
"i was curious." he says it plainly, like it isn't a big deal, though the faint color at the tips of his ears suggests otherwise. "sue me."
you don't push it further, mostly because you're not sure your voice would come out entirely steady if you tried, and instead just smile down at your phone, at the small, new notification confirming @/fp.zuko is now following you, feeling absurdly, embarrassingly pleased about something so objectively minor.
katara, from the producer's chair, says nothing at all — but the look she gives sokka through the booth glass, when he wanders back in a minute later, says more than enough.
he doesn't mean to stay as long as he does.
it's nearly 1:40 by the time he actually gets up to leave, waving off sokka's ride offer in favor of walking — the night's clear, cool, and he tells himself he needs the air, though the truth is he mostly just wants a few extra minutes to replay the last hour before he has to actually process any of it.
the instagram thing had not been part of the plan. he hadn't planned much of anything tonight, if he's honest — had shown up late and rattled and fully intending to keep tonight exactly as normal and contained as every other night — but somewhere between her laughing at something he said and the particular, easy quiet of sitting beside her while her show played, the impulse had just slipped out before he could properly stop it.
he'd looked her up months ago, actually — an embarrassing amount of time ago, if he's being honest with himself, late one night after a shift when he couldn't stop thinking about something she'd said and had, in a moment of weakness, searched her name just to see. he hadn't followed her. hadn't wanted to seem — he doesn't even have a good word for what he'd been avoiding. obvious, probably. transparent. the kind of guy who gets a whole crush on his coworker and doesn't have the nerve to actually do anything about it beyond scrolling through two-year-old photos at one in the morning like some kind of coward.
tonight he'd just asked. no plan behind it, no careful rehearsed line — just the plain, unvarnished truth, more honest than he usually lets himself be with her, and she'd said yes so easily, so quickly, that he'd spent the rest of her show fighting the specific, stupid urge to smile at absolutely nothing.
"you're thinking about her, aren't you?" sokka says, falling into step beside him on the walk to the parking lot, having apparently abandoned the idea of driving zuko home in favor of walking with him partway instead.
"i don't know what you're talking about."
"zuko. i watched the whole thing happen through the booth glass. katara and i had a whole silent conversation about it. she thinks you're going to tell her before the semester ends. i give it another few months, personally, but i'm not opposed to being wrong."
"there's nothing to tell."
"uh huh." sokka claps him on the shoulder, entirely unbothered by the flat look zuko gives him in response. "for what it's worth, man, i think you should just say something. actually say something, not — instagram-follow-request something. she'd probably say yes."
zuko doesn't answer that, mostly because he doesn't trust himself to, and sokka, mercifully, lets it drop, peeling off toward his own car with a final, unsubtle grin thrown over his shoulder.
zuko walks the rest of the way home alone, cold air sharp in his lungs, phone still warm in his pocket from checking it twice more than necessary — once to see her most recent photo, once just to see the follow confirmed, still there, real, undeniable — and thinks, not for the first time, that sokka is probably right, and that knowing that doesn't make it any easier to actually do anything about it.
you tell katara everything on the walk to your dorm, because katara is, and has always been, entirely incapable of letting something like tonight pass without a full debrief, and because you're not sure you'd be able to keep it in even if she weren't asking.
"he asked to follow you," katara repeats, delighted, "like it was a big, meaningful thing."
"you're glowing. it was a big thing."
"you're glowing, and appa agrees with me," katara says, entirely unhelpfully, gesturing at the enormous dog trotting along beside you both, tongue lolling, offering no actual opinion on the matter whatsoever.
"appa doesn't know what glowing means."
"appa knows love when he sees it. don't you, buddy." katara scratches behind appa's ears, and the dog, predictably, offers no rebuttal.
you let the teasing wash over you without much real protest, mostly because you don't have the energy to argue the point, and partly because some small, stubborn part of you doesn't actually want to argue it — wants, instead, to sit with the small, warm fact of tonight a little longer. the follow request. the way he'd said i was curious. sue me. the particular softness in his voice when he'd said your name, low, just for you, in a room full of people who weren't supposed to be listening.
"you should just tell him," katara says, quieter now, as you reach your dorm building, more gentle than teasing. "for what it's worth. i think he'd say it back."
"i've watched that boy fumble every single interaction with you for two years, and tonight he specifically asked to follow your instagram like it was a marriage proposal. i know a lot of things."
you don't have a good response to that either, so you just hug her goodnight instead, and head up to your room with your phone still open to his profile, one single photo of a quiet harbor at dusk, no caption, nothing given away — and think, a little helplessly, that you'd very much like to know what he was thinking about when he took it.
you don't message him. not tonight.
but you don't stop thinking about it either, long after you've turned off the lights, phone charging on your nightstand with his name still sitting, new and warm and real, near the top of your followers list.
reblog + like if you want chapter two !! (goal: 50 likes, 10 reblogs) next chapter: reader's birthday, and a certain someone shows up with a gift he definitely overthought
