#ilysm terra thank you for picking this one 🥰🥰

[backhurtyy]

hey ellen happy 400 followers!! you deserve all of them and so many more <333 how about 19 or 30 for the prompts :3c

19. “God, you are so fucking cute.”

Zuko was tired. Really, really tired. The sort of deep tiredness that he could feel in his bones, in the heaviness of his feet, in the consistent fluttering of his eyelids, in the weakness of his muscles… A deep rooted exhaustion that was overpowering, until it was the only thing he knew.

It wasn’t an unusual feeling, especially considering it was the middle of tech week- at this point, after nearly a decade of being a theatre kid, then undergrad student, and now graduate student, the late hours and accompanying exhaustion were familiar. But this show… This show was just in particularly rough shape, so with just two days to opening, their director had been keeping them later and later. Pakku was never a particularly kind director, with little regard for the fact that his students had things like other homework and basic needs like food and sleep, and Zuko never enjoyed working with him.

But as he dragged himself up the stairs to his and Sokka’s apartment at two a.m. for the fourth night in a row, he couldn’t help but find new hatred for the crusty old man.

He let himself into the apartment with a sigh, dropping his backpack by the door and toeing of his shows. It was dark in the main room, but he didn’t bother turning on the light- he didn’t need to, because the light spilling from under his and Sokka’s bedroom door was bright enough to guide his way.

He pushed the door open to find Sokka sitting in their bed with a book open across his lap and his glasses sitting low on his nose, using one hand to flip the pages while the other pet their cat, Foo-Foo, idly. He looked up when Zuko walked in, and smiled softly.

“Hey sunshine,” he greeted quietly, shutting his book and putting it on his bed side. “You okay?”

Zuko just groaned, crawling onto the bed and laying down so that his face was buried in Sokka’s stomach. “I’m tired,” he grumbled.

“I bet… Pakku kept you ridiculously late again tonight, huh?”

His free hand made its way into Zuko’s hair, scratching at his scalp lightly. Zuko sighed and went boneless, relaxing into the touch.

“Yeah. First the sound system wasn’t working, and so Teo had to do a full reboot and run diagnostics to figure out what was going on, which took a long time. And then when he was finally able to get it working again, Ty Lee fell during one of the numbers and skinned her knee pretty bad, so that was a whole thing too. And then he was unhappy with how Jin and Haru were doing a scene, and spent hours on it. Which is ridiculous, because their acting is spot on, as usual, and they have all the lines down. It’s not their fault that Pakku changed his mind about the blocking a week before opening, and now they keep doing the old stuff,” he complained.

“Ugh, that sounds awful, Zu, I’m so sorry. Did you at least get to eat anything for dinner?” He shook his head, and Sokka sighed. “Damn, I hate him. Do you want me to make you anything? Or I can just grab you an orange or something small like that and we can go to bed?”

He shook his head, burying his fingers into Sokka’s shirt to keep him from leaving. “Too tired to eat. I’ll get ready for bed in a minute, I just... Just stay here for a minute with me? You’re comfy.”

“God, you are so fucking cute,” he heard Sokka murmur, body shaking slightly as he chuckled fondly. “Yeah, of course I’ll stay with you, love.”

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