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Katara traced over the lines of the map with her finger and tried to look engaged. She didn't really understand what she was looking at. Sokka was the map person, not her. And Ang's excited ramblings didn't exactly help her focus.
"And then he said, 'sorry little lady,' and I said, 'Oh—it's no problem, I'm the one who wasn't looking where I was going,' and then I noticed he had really pretty hair and in his hair was this amazing dragonfly charm and so I told him and he—"
Katara looked up, frowning. "You came back without groceries to tell me you flirted with some guy?"
"Oh, no, Katara that's not what I—flip over the paper and you'll see what I was getting at."
Katara obeyed, flipping over the piece of paper. It was a handbill, printed on pale vermillion stock in the Fire Nation style—curling phoenixes along the border, red ink on red paper, so the design was only visible if you tilted it toward the light. In faint, clever lettering she made out: The Dragonfly & Lotus.
"It's a bar, Sugar Queen," Toph interjected from where she was sprawled across the mat in the corner, apparently having been listening the whole time. "A bar that we're going to. Tonight."
"He invited you to a bar?" said Katara, shrill. "Ang, you're sixteen!"
"So?" shrugged Ang. "That's an adult in most of the world, including the Fire Nation."
Katara pinched her brow. "So when I say you shouldn't run off chasing elephant koi, I get the whole speech about I need to enjoy being a teenager—but when you want to chase some man out to a bar, you're suddenly an adult?"
"Exactly!" grinned Ang. "Well—no, not exactly. I'm not chasing him to the bar. I'm chasing—uh, well..."
"What?" asked Katara, noting the way the younger girl's ears had gone pink. "Ang, what?"
"Er—"
"We're looking for girls, princess," said Toph flatly.
What.
"What."
"It's a gay bar, Katara," said Ang, finally finding the words. She pressed her hands together the way she did when she was trying to be very earnest about something. "That's what the dragonfly meant—it was code. So when I was asking him about it, well, I’m sure exactly what I said but it must’ve been some kind of password, ‘cause he gave me this." She gestured to the handbill, which Katara was now holding at arm's length like it might bite her. "It's not a big deal. Well—it is, kind of. The good kind."
"Why would you invite me?" Katara asked, her voice cracking.
Ang and Toph exchanged a glance—which Katara found impressive, given that Toph was blind and therefore technically shouldn't have been able to participate in the glance, and yet somehow she always managed.
"Look, 'Tara," Toph said, sitting up. "Before you two, I'd never met a girl my age who wasn't being paid to be my glorified babysitter. And Twinkle-toes here—"
Ang went a brighter red. "It took me a while to realize that being gay was...stigmatized now. In the Air Temples, it was—" She paused. "Well. It gets a bit lonely, is all. We wanted you there because you're our friend, Katara. Not because we think you're like us."
Toph nodded sagely. "Also, someone has to make sure we get home alive."
"Toph."
"It's true!"
Katara deflated. She thought about the small room, the hideout, the constant low-grade tension of living in enemy territory. She thought about the way Ang had smiled when she'd said the good kind. "You're right. I—I'm sorry. Of course I'll come." A beat. "One of you is going to have to convince Sokka."
⪩༏⪨
Convincing Sokka took the better part of an hour and involved, at various points: a detailed strategic argument about the intelligence value of local gathering spots, an appeal to his love of exotic food and drink, Toph threatening to earthbend his sleeping mat into the river, and finally Katara simply saying "Ang really wants you there."
He'd grumbled all the way through getting dressed in his Fire Nation cover clothes. His fake name was Lee. Katara's was Sapphire, which Ang wasn’t entirely sure was an actual Fire Nation name. Toph had declared she didn’t need one, as she hardly intended to do much talking. Ang, who could not in any reasonable universe pass as a Kuzon, had landed on Kuzona instead, which no one had the heart to tell her sounded stupid.
The four of them filed out into the fire-lit streets of the lower city at the hour of the dog, Ang bouncing on her heels like she'd swallowed a hummingbee, Toph with her hands in her pockets and her face arranged in aggressive nonchalance. Sokka had his arms crossed and his mouth set in a line that Katara recognized as I'm going to complain about this but I'm secretly a little excited.
Katara just—walked. Tried not to look at the back of Ang's head, where she'd done something new with her hair for the occasion, a loose braid down the side with little flame-shaped pins in it. Someone had lent them to her, probably. Or she'd bought them at the market. Katara hadn't noticed before.
She noticed, now.
⪩༏⪨
The Dragonfly and Lotus was wedged between a tea house and a apothecary at the end of a narrow lane, marked only by a small carving of a dragonfly over the door. Inside, it was warm and dark and smelled like plum wine and smoke, and the music was low and fast enough to feel in your teeth.
It was also, Katara registered with a slightly delayed jolt of understanding, extremely gay. There was a girl with her head on another girl's shoulder at the bar. A pair of broad-shouldered women sharing a pipe in the corner. A boy in elaborate face paint dancing with another boy with his hands in the air.
"Oh," said Katara.
"Yeah," said Ang warmly.
Sokka made a small, strangled sound. Katara elbowed him.
"Don't," she warned.
"I wasn't going to say anything," he hissed back.
Toph was already moving toward the bar with the confident stride of someone who owned the building and all adjacent buildings. "First round's on Sokka," she announced.
"Why is it always—" Sokka began, and then a Fire Nation boy with elaborate painted eyebrows bumped into him, grabbed his arm to steady himself, said "Oh! Sorry, friend—you look a little lost, first time?" with a very warm smile, and Sokka's complaint evaporated completely.
"I—uh. First time. Yeah. Hi. I'm, uh, Lee." He stuck out his hand. The Fire Nation boy took it with both of his.
"I'm Ren." He did not let go. "Funny, Lee—you don't look Fire Nation."
"I'm from the colonies," said Sokka, very fast, which was their cover. Then: "You have—very nice—eyebrows."
Katara watched her brother's face cycle through at least four distinct emotions in about two seconds. She filed this away for later.
"I'll get the drinks," she said, more to herself than anyone, and went after Toph.
The drinks were sweet and strong and came in tiny cups, and Katara had two before the knot in her shoulders properly loosened.
Ang had been absorbed into the crowd on the dance floor almost immediately—there was something about her that drew people, always had been, some quality like sunlight on water that made strangers want to stand near her. She danced the way she did everything: a little chaotic, entirely committed, completely unself-conscious. A girl with a shaved head was teaching her a Fire Nation step. Another girl, pretty and laughing, had taken her hand to spin her through a turn.
Katara watched from her seat at the bar.
"You're staring," said Toph pleasantly, from two seats over, not looking up from her drink.
"I'm watching. Making sure she doesn't get into trouble."
"Right." Toph sipped her wine. "The way you've been watching her for the last twenty minutes while turning that cup around and around in your hands."
Katara put the cup down.
Toph grinned. Then a girl materialized at her elbow—stocky, dark-haired, smelling of cedar smoke—and said, low, "Hey. You want to dance?" and Toph's grin became something different, less sharp and more pleased, and she said "Absolutely," and vanished into the crowd.
Katara was alone at the bar. She ordered a third drink.
Out on the floor, the girl with the shaved head had leaned in to say something in Ang's ear. Ang threw her head back and laughed, and the girl smiled like she'd done something incredible, and Katara felt a sharp, irrational flare of something move through her sternum.
She told herself it was protective instinct. Ang was sixteen and in a bar in the Fire Nation and somebody needed to be responsible. That was all this was.
She ordered a fourth drink.
⪩༏⪨
By the second hour, Ang had danced with approximately seven different girls, which Katara was not counting. She was definitely not counting. She had simply noticed. The way you noticed things. As a responsible older friend.
Toph had reappeared briefly, face flushed, and declared "I'm extremely gay, in case anyone was wondering" to no one in particular, and then vanished again with the cedar-smoke girl and a second girl with a nose ring who had appeared from somewhere.
Sokka was still in the corner with Ren, and based on the body language—shoulders turned fully toward each other, laughing, Sokka's hand now resting on the wall near Ren's head in a move he absolutely thought was casual—he was having some kind of experience.
Katara had become the lone sentinel at the bar.
She was on her sixth drink, which was probably one too many, and she was watching Ang dance with a tall girl in a red qipao, and she was fine. Totally fine. Except that the tall girl's hand was on Ang's waist, and Ang was smiling up at her with that particular open smile she had, the one that meant she was genuinely delighted by whoever she was talking to, and something in Katara's chest was doing something uncomfortable that she was going to attribute to the plum wine.
It wasn't jealousy. It couldn't be jealousy. Katara was straight. She liked boys. She had liked Jet, briefly and disastrously. She had liked Haru, in theory. Thought he was brave and that his hair was pretty. She had thought Yue was beautiful but that was just—girls could think other girls were beautiful. That wasn't a thing.
The tall girl said something to Ang, and Ang's smile shifted—warmly apologetic—and she stepped back, shaking her head. The girl accepted this with a good-natured bow, and Ang turned and began picking her way back toward the bar.
Katara did not feel relief. She definitely did not feel relief. There was nothing to feel relieved about.
"Hey!" Ang dropped into the seat Toph had vacated, slightly out of breath, hair escaping the braid. A couple of the flame pins had come loose and were dangling rakishly. She looked—
She looked like she was having the time of her life, was what she looked like.
"Hey yourself," said Katara, aiming for easy and landing somewhere slightly clipped.
Ang noticed—she always noticed, the infuriating girl—and her smile softened with concern. "Are you doing okay? You've just been sitting here for a while, we could go if you're not—"
"I'm fine," said Katara, sharper than she meant to. "I just—I'm making sure nobody gets into trouble. Someone has to."
Something flickered in Ang's expression. "I'm not going to get into trouble, Katara."
"You got invited to an underground gay bar by a stranger."
"And I didn't get into trouble."
"Yet."
"I'm sixteen, not six," Ang said, and now she was starting to sound frustrated, which she almost never did, and which meant Katara was pushing on something real. "You don't have to watch me like I'm going to—what? What exactly do you think is going to happen?"
"I don't know! You're dancing with strangers, you're—" She stopped. The words in her mouth felt wrong, like they didn't fit, like she'd reached for something and grabbed the wrong shape. "You're being reckless."
"Dancing is reckless now?"
"With girls you don't know—"
"You're upset about the girls?" Ang's voice dropped, gone careful and a little hurt. "Katara—are you...is this about—" She chose her words gently. "Are you actually okay with this? Because you said you were, but if you're not comfortable, that's—I want you to tell me, we can talk about it—"
"I said I'm fine."
"Okay," said Ang, and pressed her mouth closed, and Katara could see the effort it took not to push back further. "Okay. I'm sorry. I just want you to be having a good time."
"I'm having a great time," said Katara, and took a pointed sip of her drink.
Ang watched her for one more moment—and then something in her face went small and a little sad, and she said "Okay," again quietly, and stood and went back to the dance floor.
Katara watched her go. The tight uncomfortable thing in her chest was still there, and it had now acquired an additional companion feeling that she identified, eventually, as guilt.
⪩༏⪨
She found Toph behind the building, in the little alley that smelled of river water, sans both of her companions.
"Where's—"
"Said goodbye. I'm not that kind of girl." Toph was leaning against the wall with her boots off, pressing her feet against the packed earth, her collar was stained with four different shades of lipstick. She cracked one eye. "Why aren't you inside?"
"I needed some air."
"You blew up at Ang."
Katara opened her mouth. Closed it. "How do you do that."
"There's a really big, really sad heartbeat out here and a really confused, kinda hurt heartbeat in there." Toph tapped her foot against the ground. "Also you're loud when you're spiraling. I could feel you vibrating from the dance floor." A pause. "What happened?"
"I—I don't know." Katara sat down on a nearby crate. The night air was cool on her face. "She was dancing with all those—and I just started—I think I said something about her being reckless but that's not really—and she thought I had a problem with, with her being gay, which—Toph, you know I don't have a problem with that."
"Obviously." Toph was quiet for a moment. The sounds of the bar filtered through the wall—muffled music, laughter. "So why were you sitting at the bar for two hours watching her dance?"
"Because someone needed to—"
"Try again."
Katara's mouth closed. She looked at her hands.
"I don't know," she said finally. "I just—every time one of those girls—there was this tall one in a red dress, and she put her hand on Ang's waist and I wanted to—I wanted to—" She stopped. "I don't know what I wanted to do."
Toph was very still.
"Katara," she said.
"What."
"You have a crush on Ang."
Katara made a sound like she'd been hit with something. "I absolutely do not—"
"You have a massive, painful, very obvious crush on Ang," Toph said, with the calm of someone stating an established fact, "and you've been sitting with it in your chest all night without knowing what it was, and instead of figuring it out you picked a fight with her." She tilted her head. "Which is, honestly, very on-brand for you."
"I'm not—I'm straight, Toph."
"Okay."
"I like boys."
"Sure."
"I'm not—this isn't—" Katara's voice came out high and strange. "I've never—I don't—"
"Have you ever looked at a boy the way you were looking at Ang tonight?"
Silence.
"Maybe you like boys and Ang," Toph said. "Maybe you just like Ang. I don't know, I'm sixteen, I'm not an expert on your love life." She shrugged. "But I know what jealousy feels like on a person, and you felt like a thunderstorm for two hours."
"I'm not gay," Katara said, and even as she said it, she couldn't remember why she was so sure. "I think. I don't know. Maybe I'm—" She pressed her palms against her face. "Oh no."
"There she is," said Toph.
"Toph, this is—this is terrible—"
"It's really not."
"I may have just realized I have—feelings—for my best friend in a bar—"
"First of all, I'm Ang’s best friend."
"Toph!"
"Go talk to her." Toph pushed off the wall and found her boots by feel, shoved her feet into them. "You already made her feel bad. Go fix it, and then—I don't know. Figure out the rest. That part's on you." She paused. "But for the record, Ang has been quietly going moon-eyed about you for months, so you know. Just in case that's useful."
Katara's head shot up. "She has—what—"
But Toph had already pushed back through the door.
⪩༏⪨
She found Ang near the edge of the dance floor, sitting on a low bench by herself, watching the room with an expression that was trying very hard to be peaceful and mostly just looked tired. The flame pins were fully out of her hair now; she was holding them in her palm, turning them over.
Katara sat down next to her.
Ang looked up. Said nothing.
"I'm sorry," said Katara.
Ang was quiet for a moment. "You don't have to—"
"I do. I was—what I said was unfair, and it wasn't about you being gay. I know you know that, but I needed to say it." Katara looked down at her own hands. The truth she was carrying felt huge and unwieldy and terrifying, and she was not—she wasn't ready—she couldn't—
"Katara," said Ang softly.
"I think I was scared," Katara said. The words came out before she'd finished deciding to say them. "I think being here, and—watching you, and thinking about how—“
Ang looked at her, eyes wide and shining.
Katara cleared her throat. “—how we're in the Fire Nation and anything could happen, and—" She stopped. "I keep thinking about Ba Sing Se."
Ang stilled completely.
"When I lost you," Katara said, and, well, she was partially telling the truth. "For that moment, before I brought you back, I—I know you're okay now. I know that. But sometimes I look at you and I just think about how that was real, and it was close, and—" She exhaled. "I think when I'm scared, I get controlling. And I'm sorry I took that out on you."
It wasn't the whole truth. It was a true thing, a real thing, something she genuinely felt—but it wasn't the whole truth, and Katara felt like a coward.
Ang turned to look at her. Her eyes were very dark in the low light.
"I know," she said. "I know you're scared sometimes. I am too." She reached out and took Katara's hand, just—simply, naturally, the way she'd always done. "But I'm here. I'm still here."
"I know," said Katara, and squeezed her hand.
They sat there for a moment, in the warm dark. If Katara leaned forward just a little—
"Katara," said Ang. "Do you want to dance with me?"
Katara blinked. "I—I don't really know the Fire Nation dances—"
"Neither do I, mostly." Ang was smiling now, small and real. "I've been making it up all night."
And with that, she pulled Katara up onto her feet.
The dance floor was warm and close and smelled of incense and bodies and plum wine, and Katara did not know the steps but it turned out it didn't matter, because Ang danced the way she moved through everything—generous, adaptable, happy to go wherever the music led—and Katara found herself following without deciding to.
Ang had her hands. The music was slow and fast by turns, and the lights from the lanterns overhead swayed in a draft, and Katara looked at her—really looked, without the haze of the evening's confusion, without the sharp defensive edge she'd been carrying around like a weapon—
And thought: oh. Oh, she's lovely.
And thought: I am so far from figuring this out.
And thought, underneath that, something she wasn't ready to say yet: but maybe that's okay.
"You're smiling," said Ang, sounding pleased.
"You look silly."
"We look silly." Ang spun her, easy as breathing, and Katara went with it and didn't stumble, and when she came back around Ang's face was close and warm and she was laughing a little, and Katara—
Katara held on to her hands.
And thought: okay.
And thought: later. She could figure it out later.
For now there was just the music and the warm dark and the girl who was still here, who was always still here, spinning her in circles in the middle of a city that was trying to swallow them whole.
For now that was enough.
Somewhere behind her, she heard Sokka say, in a voice an octave higher than normal, "I—I'm from the colonies—" and a boy's delighted laugh, and Toph somewhere nearby making a gagging noise.
Katara laughed into Ang's shoulder.
And held on.