250 word drabble: Social Caterpillar

Written for avatar_500 prompt #52, Party.

Summary: He isn't sulking, and she isn't bored.

Social Caterpillar

When she had been a child, her parents used to take her to the kind of parties where everybody was in constant danger, where a wrong word could end someone.  They would tell her to keep her mouth shut and then parade her around, and wonder why she wasn't charming and adorable like Ty Lee. That had changed.  There wasn't a party her parents wanted to go to that she wasn't invited first, and her words were the ones that could trap somebody else.

Glaze eyed introspection, the kind that had made the people her parents had tried to show her off to ask if there was something wrong with her was even less forgivable now.  She glanced sideways at her husband.  "Your sister warned me you sulked through these things."

Zuko jerked at the mention of Azula, she-who-no-one-mentioned, she-who-had-brought-them-together.  "I'm not sulking!"

"Whatever."  She rolled her eyes.  In the back of her mind, she wondered how many of the people below watching them so earnestly would think from that little thing that their marriage was on he rocks already, here at their wedding feast.  "It's not like I care.  It's the only thing I ever managed to do at these things."

"It's supposed to be for you too," he said, poking a bean curd ball around his plate with a chopstick.  "I mean, it's your wedding feast."

"That's big of you."

He ignored that.  "We can sulk together, if you want."

"I guess."  She put her hand over his.