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Katara’s stomach grumbles as she hops off the trampoline right behind Sokka. She’s in desperate need of some greasy pizza from the snack stand, but her limbs feel strange and leaden after a good hour of bouncing around the platforms with her friends. The trampoline park had been Aang’s idea, a way for all of them to relax after a stressful semester, and despite her earlier skepticism, Katara is having a great time. There are children all over, squealing with unbridled joy as they bounce around, and the feeling of soaring through the air had made her feel just as young as them. She sees why the most free-spirited of their friend group was a regular, and Katara thinks she wouldn’t mind coming back herself.
She’s definitely going back for a second round after lunch, so she leaves on the grippy socks they’d given her and grabs for her Docs when she sees them, shoving her feet into the boots. They feel enormous and heavy as cinderblocks when she tries to walk in them. Next time she decides to experience weightlessness, she’s going to wear something lighter.
Trudging after Sokka and Suki, she slides into the booth where Toph has been avoiding the trampolines in favor of demolishing more chicken wings than should be possible for a person of her size. “My legs feel so weird,” Katara tells them, lifting her feet again experimentally. “It’s like my whole body is made of cement.”
“Yeah, it’s freaky,” Sokka says. “I feel like I just got back from the moon.”
“You know, you might not feel quite so strange if you weren’t wearing those clown shoes, Katara,” Suki says, nodding at her boots.
“What?” Katara asks, offended and confused. Suki always says how jealous she is of Katara’s boots. She was planning to order Suki a matching pair for her birthday.
“I think you got the wrong ones, babe.”
Ducking her head under the table, Katara’s eyes go wide. Her feet are not that big. She shakes her feet and suddenly notices the difference. These shoes are massive on her. “Shit, I stole someone’s shoes!”
Toph snorts derisively, “Only Sugar Queen would rob someone on accident.”
“I’ve gotta go find them,” she says, quickly untying the boots. When she pulls them off, she finds thick socks stuffed in the toes, which must’ve been what fooled her in the first place. “I just hope mine are still there.”
//
Never a good deed unpunished, Zuko thinks, scowling down at the empty cubby where his shoes once were. Kiyi looks up at him from where she’s struggling to tie her light-up unicorn sneakers. There have to be fifty other pairs of nearly identical kid shoes, but of course hers are exactly where she left them, and his are nowhere to be found.
“Agni damn it,” he mutters, and Kiyi’s eyes go wide.
“You said a bad word.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose. “Just don’t repeat it and don’t tell Mom, alright? Someone stole my shoes.”
Her little mouth falls open in an “o” of shock and she pats his shin. “I’m sure they’re just misplaced,” she parrots their mother perfectly. Zuko bites his tongue to keep from snapping that six year old’s stuffed animals get misplaced, but grown-ups nice boots get fucking stolen. He closes his eyes and wonders what to do next. Even his socks are gone now, so he’s going to have to walk through the parking lot in the stupid grippy socks from the trampoline place, and then drive in them, and then walk through his apartment building in them. “Found ‘em!” Kiyi chirps, and Zuko sighs with relief.
“You’re the best,” he tells her, dropping to his knees to hug his sister. Until he sees the shoes that she’s holding out to him: an exact copy of his Docs, but significantly smaller, a pair of socks with little cat ears flopping over the top of one. Well, he thinks, at least I wasn’t robbed on purpose. Out loud he just asks incredulously, “Who doesn’t notice they have the wrong shoes?”
//
The good news is: Katara finds her shoes pretty quickly.
The bad news is: Katara finds her shoes in the hands of a very attractive man, and she still looks like a fucking clown.
“Who doesn’t notice they have the wrong shoes?” she hears him ask, and she feels a shameful blush creep up her neck. The man whose shoes she’s stolen looks somewhere around her age, with long dark hair tied in a ponytail as dictated by the massive sign behind the check-in desk. With his hair up, his high cheekbones and sharp jaw are on display, a kind of starkly beautiful that doesn’t seem like it should be allowed to exist in fluorescent lighting. His biceps strain at the sleeves of a soft-looking t-shirt.
But the real kiss of death, sure to turn Katara into a blushing puddle of thirst, is the gentle smile on his face as he sets the boots aside and reaches to help a tiny little girl tie her shoes. Katara is but a simple girl, who maybe has a bit of a thing for cute guys who are nice to children. Unable to avoid the inevitable any longer, Katara clears her throat to draw attention to her presence. The guy doesn’t look up from the tiny shoelaces he’s fiddling with, just scoots to the side. The little girl does look though, and sees Katara sheepishly eyeing the other pair of boots. She lightly kicks the guy in the shin.
“Ow, Kiyi,” he says, rubbing at the spot, frowning. “What was that for?” Kiyi points at Katara, and the man finally looks up at her. She flinches under his gaze, the slight furrow of his brow made all the more intimidating by a reddened scar swallowing up the left side of his face.
“I didn’t notice I have the wrong shoes,” Katara confesses.
//
Zuko is struck a little stupid when he looks up into the eyes of the shoe thief. The size of the shoes and the cuteness of the socks had led him to expect a woman, but when he actually sees her face, he realizes he hadn’t at all considered what he would do if said woman was unbelievably beautiful. A tragic oversight it seems, because his tongue refuses to unstick from the roof of his mouth, and the woman is staring down at him with increasing anxiety the longer he just glares up at her in silence. He knows what he looks like, and he really doesn’t want to scare her, but he can’t form words with those big blue eyes staring at him.
“Here’s your shoes,” Kiyi says to the woman, hefting the boots again and offering them to her. It seems to shock both adults back into motion. The woman shakes off her own daze and crouches down to accept the boots.
“Thank you,” she tells Kiyi, and then to him, she says, “I’m so sorry. I feel like such an idiot.”
A tiny sneaker whacks him in the shin again, and he blurts, “It’s okay.”
“No, really, I should’ve paid more attention.” She parks her butt on the foam mat beside him, and starts to unlace the stolen shoes, which are comically large on her. It makes him laugh a little. “I know, I look ridiculous,” she admits, “These things are like clown shoes.” She freezes as soon as she says it, and he can see the regret he has so often worn flash across her face as she realizes she might’ve just insulted him. “I mean I’m sure they look great on you!” she rushes out. “I’m sure your feet are very…proportional?” The woman looks like she wants to dig a hole and crawl inside of it.
Zuko finds himself laughing again, so loudly he surprises himself. “Thanks. I’m sure yours are too.”
“Here,” she tells him, handing over the boots now that her (yes, very proportional) feet are free of them. They both pull off their grippy socks and pull their proper socks and shoes on. The woman sighs with relief when she stands up. “Much better.”
“Yeah, I was worried I was gonna have to go home barefoot.”
She blushes again, and offers a hand to help him stand up. Her fingers are cool and strong as they wrap around his, and the impression of her touch lingers on his skin as they stand facing each other in silence, the screams of the trampoline park only serving to emphasize how little they are saying. Eventually, the woman shifts her feet awkwardly, and just when he is expecting her to make her excuses and leave, she asks, “Would you maybe like to get some apology pizza with me?”
Zuko’s eyes widen, because despite her words, her prettily flushed cheeks and hesitant smile bely ulterior motives behind the invitation, but this is not the kind of luck he has. He is once again left staring in disbelief, only to be saved by Kiyi, who understands only pizza and says, “Yes!” before dashing off towards the food court, sneakers blinking cheerfully.
“Well,” Zuko says, “I guess that’s a yes.”