ZERA'S TALE » Sokka x OC

1.11

A/N: me? going awol and returning with a 7k+ chapter?

Also i love y'alls comments so much, they make my day ✨ sorry for the wait on this part, I've been working my regular shifts plus extra training shifts lately and it's been a one way ticket to burning out.

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It had been a few weeks since the big storm that nearly drowned everyone, and they were all getting tired of traveling. Sokka had gotten sick about a week ago, followed the next day by Katara, and then Zera. All three of them had been huddled up together on Appa when Aang left for a remedy to their fevers. Sokka had absolutely refused to lay near his sister, so Zera was involuntarily stuffed between an incoherent, clingy Sokka and a sweaty Katara, who wouldn't stop babbling about where Aang could be.

Zera didn't seem to be as affected by the illness as the Water Tribe siblings, leaving her to drag her aching body out from her warm cocoon of body heat and multiple blankets to water to take care of them. Katara would groan and insist that she was fine before dissolving into a coughing fit, and Sokka, well... Sokka called her Zuko the whole day and tried multiple times to 'earthbend' her off the cliff face below the abandoned temple they were staying at.

That night hadn't yielded much rest for any of them, between Katara's coughing fits on one side of Zera and Sokka's deluded fever dreams on the other. She half wished she was as sick as Sokka seemed to be, just so she could hallucinate the hours going by quicker.

By the time the sun was thinking about rising the next morning, Aang returned with a cache of frozen wood frogs— Zera had opted to stay sick rather than suck on one—  and the wild tale of his capture and eventual escape from Zhao and the Yu Yan archers. The young monk explained how a man he'd dubbed the Blue Spirit had snuck into the fortress he was brought to and helped him escape with nothing more than dual swords and some quick thinking. Zera interrogated Aang about how the pair had escaped the Yu Yan archers, but he clammed up and hedged a vague answer about hiding in the forest. Zera had a nagging suspicion on who the man under the Blue Spirit mask was, but she didn't want to bring it up unless Aang asked for her opinion.

All she knew was that she had grown up watching Zuko train with dual swords while she was specializing in unarmed combat and knife skills. She also knew that the description Aang gave of the blue mask the mystery man wore was a dead ringer for the one Zera remembered seeing hanging on Zuko's bedroom wall of their ship. Pair these facts with the tales of a blue faced vigilante that sprung up at every port of call their ship stopped at, and she thought she had a pretty strong case for her suspicions.

She wouldn't share her theory with Aang or the others, though. These three didn't know Zuko like she did. They hadn't seen the sort of person he was under the layers of trauma and years of abuse after their mother had left. Somewhere, buried deep down, was the same boy who loved turtle ducklings and reenacting scenes from plays with his sister; Zera reasoned the Blue Spirit was his way of holding on to that part of himself, if it was in fact him.

Buried in her conspiracies over her brother's possible alter ego, Zera was startled when Katara jumped up from her seat on a log and pointed out to the lake they were camping by.

"Look!" The Water Tribe girl shouted, signaling to a large fish disrupting the calm surface of the water.

"He's taunting us! You are so going to be dinner!" Sokka threatened the fish, scrambling to grab his fishing rod before it could disappear. He tried to cast the line a few times, dumbfounded at the sight of it missing. "Hey! Where's the fishing line?"