Work Text:
Young Aang stood on the steps of the Air Temple consulate in a novice's saffron, head freshly shaved, fidgeting with the wooden beads at his wrist while the adults exchanged bows that seemed to go on forever. Monk Gyatso kept a steadying hand on his shoulder.
Aang was, by title, Lord of the Air Nation, the last living heir of a royal line that had ended in a single terrible winter when he was two years old. He had no memory of his parents beyond a portrait in the consulate's shrine room, a man and a woman painted mid-laugh, as if the artist had known there would be no second sitting.
The young lord fell under the protection and guidance of Gyatso, the elder whom the Council of Elders had named his guardian, and the monastery that came with him: bells at dawn, sky bison in the high stables, and forty monks who had collectively decided that raising a small lord was everyone's chore and everyone's joy. He ate what the monks ate, which meant no meat, ever. He learned what the monks learned, which meant that the wind was a language, that all life was borrowed, and that violence was a failure of imagination. In every way that mattered, he was one of them.
In one way, by decree, he was not. A royal line cannot end in a monastery, so the Council had formally released him from the vows of celibacy and detachment that bound every other novice that entered their institution. It was written into his name-scroll before he could read it. The older boys teased him about it without mercy. Aang, at eight, considered marriage a fate roughly equal to bland, uninspired vegetables, and had said so, loudly, during the rehearsal for his own betrothal.
Now the day itself had come. Across the courtyard, beneath a canopy of blue silk, stood Chief Hakoda of the Southern Water Tribe delegation, broad and warm-eyed. Beside him was a girl about Aang’s age in white furs who was very obviously trying not to fidget either.
She was losing that battle. Aang liked her immediately.
The betrothal itself was a matter of ink and seals, of trade routes and treaty language, of two proud nations knotting their futures together in the newest city in the world, the Republic. Aang understood almost none of it; only that the girl's name was Katara and she was going to be around a lot from now on. When the scribes finally rolled up their scrolls, Hakoda knelt down to the children's height and said something that made all the ministers frown.
"This paper binds our houses for the time being," the chief said, tapping the treaty. "It does not bind your hearts. When you are both of age, you will choose. Both of you, freely, or not at all. That is my condition."
Gyatso's eyes crinkled. "And mine. A promise made for someone is a cage. A promise made by someone is a home." His hand tightened, just slightly, on the shoulder of a boy who had lost one home before he could remember it. "We would rather build you a home."
The ministers muttered about irregularity. Hakoda and Gyatso shook hands anyway, and the clause went into the treaty in both languages: consent of both parties, given at the appointed time, or the betrothal dissolves without penalty or dishonor.
Aang, who had been listening for the important part, turned to Katara and bowed, then stuck out his hand the way he'd seen the other adults do.
"I'm Aang. Want to see the fountain? I can blow wind to make the water circle and splatter."
Katara looked at his hand, then at his grin, and something in her decided too. "Water is my element," she said, taking it. "I'll show you a circle."
Ten minutes later, both children were soaked to the skin, the fountain was briefly a spiral of laughing spray twenty feet high. Two grave old men on the consulate steps were pretending very hard not to smile.
That evening, in the strip of shared garden between the consulate and the Water Tribe residence, they planted a moon peach sapling that Gyatso had brought from the Southern Air Temple. Katara packed the soil down with bending, coaxing water gently through the roots. Aang breathed a warm current over the leaves so they wouldn't shiver in the sea wind.
"Now it's ours," he said.
"It's a stick," said Katara.
"It's a stick now."
She rolled her eyes at him, but she came back the next morning to water it and so did he.
They grew up in each other's pockets, which is to say, they grew up competing.
Katara could not simply learn calligraphy; she had to learn it faster than Aang. Aang could not simply win a race across the rooftops of the consulate district; he had to win it with a backflip off the bell tower while Katara shouted that gliders were cheating. She froze the pond mid-somersault once, just to watch him skate helplessly into a snowbank of her own making. He retaliated by air-scootering through her ice sculpture exhibition. The apology took a week; the rebuilding took two more, and somewhere in the middle of it, he decided her work was the most beautiful thing in the city.
He never told her that part. Words had a way of tangling in Aang's mouth right when they mattered. He could charm a room of diplomats with jokes, he could talk a street vendor into free egg custard tarts, but when he tried to say something true to Katara, the sentence would come apart in his hands like wet paper.
So he said it in other ways. He learned which pastry stall she loved in the Fire Nation quarter and had warm buns waiting after her healing lessons. When her mother's memorial day came each winter, he sat with her under the moon peach tree in silence. He'd figured out that silence was what she needed, and he shielded them both from the wind without being asked as they sat together.
Katara noticed. Katara noticed everything. She just wanted, someday, to hear it too.
They were twelve when Aang earned his arrows. Mastery of airbending, the youngest in three generations, sealed by a week of ceremony behind temple walls that no outsider could attend. Katara waited at the garden gate every one of those seven mornings anyway, on principle. When he finally came out, bald head bowed shyly beneath its new blue arrow, she stared long enough that he began to squirm.
"Well?"
"They suit you," she said, and then, because twelve-year-olds are merciless, "Now everyone can see which way your empty head is pointing."
He chased her around the fountain for that. He never caught her, because he never truly tried. A monk does not strike, and Aang had won every spar of his life the way wind wins, by refusing to be where the blow lands. Katara, who fought like the tide, found this infuriating and, privately, in a locked drawer of herself she did not yet examine, rather beautiful.
Their conspiracies had two accomplices. Appa, the sky bison who had chosen Aang as a calf in the high stables when both of them were small enough to fit through doors, grew over those years into ten tons of flying loyalty, and learned to hover outside Katara's window on mornings Aang judged too beautiful to waste on lessons. Momo, a winged lemur who had adopted the consulate against the wishes of everyone but Gyatso, appointed himself guardian of the moon peach tree and thief of absolutely everything else.
Whole summer evenings passed above the bay, the city turning gold beneath them, Momo asleep in Katara's lap, and if Aang steered those flights longer than the route required, Appa never told anyone.
They were fourteen when Sokka caught them sparring in the garden at dusk, water against air, both of them laughing too hard to keep proper form. He watched Aang bend a gust that lifted Katara's stray hair out of her eyes instead of knocking her over, and watched Katara pretend not to melt over it. Sokka went inside to tell Suki, who was then only his very serious girlfriend from the Kyoshi honor guard, that he was going to need a strategy.
"For what?" Suki asked.
"For the day those two idiots figure it out."
They were fifteen when it stopped being a game and neither of them said so. Aang started carrying a small piece of unworked stone in his pocket, a smooth blue-grey pebble of Southern glacier rock that a Water Tribe carver had sold him with a knowing look. Betrothal necklaces were her people's tradition. He told himself he was just practicing his carving.
They were sixteen when Hakoda announced that Katara would spend two years at the Northern Academy for young women of rank, finishing school at the top of the world.
"Two years?!" Aang repeated, in the garden, under their tree.
"It's an honor," Katara said, chin up, eyes suspiciously bright. "Yugoda teaches there. I'll master healing forms nobody in the South even remembers."
"It's great, it's really great." He was proud of her and drowning at the same time, and what came out was, "Who's going to eat the second custard tart?"
Katara laughed, wetly, and punched his shoulder. She did not say I'll miss you, and Aang did not say don't go, and the moon peach tree dropped a single early blossom between them like a coin tossed into a fountain.
At first, he wrote her every week.
The letters were funny. He drew caricatures of the ministers in the margins and reported faithfully on the tree. Four blossoms this spring. Your side is growing crooked. It misses your bending. So does the fountain. So does
He crossed that line out. He always crossed that line out. The wastepaper basket in his room filled with almost-sentences: I keep turning around to tell you things. The city is quieter than the population numbers suggest. Gyatso says the heart speaks when the mouth gets out of the way, but my mouth has never once gotten out of the way of anything.
He sent instead cheerful yet hollow letters, and Katara, reading by lamplight in a dormitory carved from ice, learned to hear the hollowness. Her replies grew shorter. Elegant, precise, polite. The Academy was sanding her down into a lady, and Aang couldn't find his friend in the smooth lacquered lines of her letters, and she couldn't find hers in the jokes.
By the second year, they wrote once a season, like a treaty obligation.
Sokka proposed that winter. The letter announcing it reached Katara three weeks stale, and with it came Suki's postscript: the wedding would wait for spring and the first open water, because she refused to be married without Katara standing at her side. Katara read that postscript four times, alone at the top of the world, and wrote back the warmest letter she had sent in a year. Some kinds of family, it turned out, could reach through the ice.
The pebble in Aang's pocket, meanwhile, had become something. Late at night, alone, he carved. He was clumsy with a chisel the way he was never clumsy with anything else, and he ruined two stones before this one. But slowly, a design emerged: the Air Nomad spiral wound together with the ocean's wave, two currents in one circle, neither one swallowing the other. He worked on it the way other people prayed.
He never mentioned it in a single letter.
The ship from the North came in on the first warm tide of spring, and half the noble houses of Republic City turned out at the harbor because the Southern chief's daughter was coming home and everyone wanted to see what the ice had made of her.
Aang stood with Gyatso near the gangway, eighteen now, tall in formal saffron with the dark orange mantle of his rank, the one concession the monks made to the fact that they had raised a lord. The arrow on his brow caught the spring sun. He told himself his heart was beating normally. Then the crowd shifted, and it wasn't.
He would have recognized her anywhere, no matter how much time or distance separated them.
Katara came down the gangway in deep blue silk embroidered with silver kelp-scroll, her mother's necklace at her throat, her hair loops framing a face that had traded its roundness for something that made two dockworkers walk into a mooring post. She moved like water finding its level, unhurried and certain. When she inclined her head to the assembled dignitaries, the bow was flawless.
Then her eyes found Aang, and for one unguarded heartbeat, the princess vanished and the girl who had frozen him into a snowbank looked out instead, bright and asking. He grinned, helpless. Her mouth curved.
The heartbeat passed. She was gracious to everyone equally for the rest of the afternoon, and Aang stood in the receiving line like a stranger and hated every minute of it.
"You've gotten taller," she said when he finally reached her, which was true and safe.
"You've gotten," he began, and his brain presented him with radiant, luminous, I planted flowers the color of your eyes and then got embarrassed and told the gardener it was a soil experiment, and his mouth selected, "back. You've gotten back. Here. Welcome."
"Thank you," said Katara, princess again, and the line moved on.
Sokka, watching them from afar, put his face in his hands. Suki patted his back. Toph Beifong, heiress, menace, and self-appointed lie detector to the entire social season, cackled into her hand.
Sokka and Suki were married four days later, on Yue Bay.
Katara stood as maid of honor and Aang as best man. This meant they walked the processional aisle paired, her hand resting on his arm with ceremonial correctness while two hundred guests observed how well the couple looked together and said so behind their fans. Sokka cried first, before the vows had even begun, and denies it to this day. Zuko gave a toast so stiff that Toph led a standing ovation out of pure sarcasm, and it accidentally became the most beloved moment of the night.
Only once did the ceremony catch them. The officiant asked the old question of bride and groom in turn, whether this union was their own will, freely chosen and freely given. Suki said yes like a blade clearing its sheath. Sokka said yes on the second attempt, the first having emerged as a squeak.
And Aang glanced at Katara across the flower-strewn deck at exactly the moment Katara glanced at Aang, freely given hanging in the salt air between them. Both persons looked away so quickly that Toph, barefoot on the deck boards, felt two heartbeats trip over the same wave.
It took a week and a formal banquet to crack the lacquer.
The banquet was in honor of her return, held at the consulate, and it was long. Katara sat through four courses of being complimented on her posture and her cadence. Aang sat through four courses of watching ministers audition their sons at her anyway, betrothal or no betrothal, and discovered a new emotion that felt like swallowing hot coals politely.
Between the dessert and the speeches, he saw her slip out the garden door.
He found her under the moon peach tree. It was in full bloom, absurd with blossom, petals sifting down through lantern light, and Katara stood beneath it with her shoes dangling from one hand and her perfect posture abandoned, shoulders loose, face tipped up into the falling white.
"The crooked side straightened out," she said without turning around. "You kept watering it."
"Every morning." He came to stand beside her. "It's ours. That was the deal."
"I half expected you'd forget."
"I never forget deals involving fruit."
She laughed, and it was her laugh, the real one, unfit for finishing school. Something in Aang's chest that had been shut for two years swung open on its hinges.
They talked until the lanterns burned low. She told him about the Northern healing halls and the instructor who rapped knuckles for imprecise chi lines, and then, warming to it, about everything the letters had been too polished to hold.
"Two full terms on seating charts, Aang. There is a science. Precedence, bloodlines, feuds, which admiral cannot be placed within four seats of which minister's wife. I can seat a dinner of sixty people who all despise one another and send every one of them home flattered." She pulled a petal out of her hair and turned it in her fingers. "I graduated first in the discipline. I have honors in the practice of chairs."
"The Fire Nation has an entire ministry for that," Aang said gravely. "You could conquer it by winter."
"Don't tempt me."
But her voice changed when she came to the one classroom she had loved: a round room at the top of an ice spire, where a tiny ancient mystic called Sister Oomi taught spirit lore to girls who were supposed to be practicing their curtsies. Sister Oomi cast carved whale-bones across a sealskin and read the fall of them. She read tide-lines and the moods of the moon. Mostly she told stories, and Katara's favorite was the Painted Lady, the river spirit in the wide hat who walks the water at night and heals the sick of a poisoned village, asking nobody's leave and keeping nobody's ledger.
"Altruism," Katara said. "There's no pretense - she just helps." The petal stilled in her fingers. "I used to sit in that room and think, there is exactly one lady in the North who is allowed to be useful, and she's made of mist."
"You'd have made a good river spirit."
"I'd have made an excellent river spirit."
"And the bones? Did Sister Oomi ever read yours?"
"The night before I sailed," Katara rolled her eyes, but she was slow about it. "She said the tide gives you exactly what you ask of it out loud, and keeps everything you don't. Northern grandmothers, honestly." She flicked the petal at him. "Your turn. Two years is a lot of mornings watering a tree."
He told her how he had filled the empty seasons: a winter at the Beifong estate, where Toph had buried him to the neck in her mother's prize rock garden until he stopped dodging and learned to listen the way earth listens, and to hold his ground while holding his peace. A summer at the Fire Nation court, where Zuko drilled him in the breath of fire at dawn until an airbender who would never raise a flame could carry his own warmth through any storm.
"Earth taught me to wait," he said. "Fire taught me to want something and say so." A beat. "I'm still in training on the fire part."
Then he told her the story her letters had carried only the official version of: how Sokka had appeared at the consulate gates days before the proposal, grey with terror, armed with a speech in eleven parts and a chart of supporting arguments; how the two of them had rehearsed in the bison stables past midnight, three nights running, Aang standing in as Suki while Momo served as an unimpressed audience as Appa snored in his slumber; how, on the day itself, Sokka had frozen solid at part one, and Suki had said yes out of mercy before he could reach part two.
Katara laughed until she had to hold the tree. "You played Suki?”
"I wore the fans! Sokka called it method rehearsal."
"And what did my brother's great campaign teach you?"
Aang considered the question with the gravity of a scholar. "Have a plan."
She smiled fondly. "I missed this," Katara said softly. "Up North, everything I said had to be correct, but not necessarily true."
"Say something true, then. No one's grading you here."
She looked at him for a long moment, pink and white petals caught in her hair. "I read your letters so many times the paper wore soft," she said. "And I kept feeling like there was another letter underneath the one you sent. Like you'd written it in invisible ink."
The garden went very quiet. The fountain murmured. Aang's hand, in his pocket, closed around a carved stone circle two currents wound together, finished months ago, carried everywhere, shown to no one.
Tell her. The words were right there, enormous yet simple. I love you. I have loved you since we were children flooding a fountain. The invisible letter says your name a thousand times.
"Katara," he said, and his voice came out low and sure, and her breath caught. She turned to face him fully, and the space between them was suddenly very small and full of falling blossoms.
A servant's lantern bobbed down the path. "Lord Aang? The speeches, they're asking for the households."
The moment broke like a soap bubble. Katara moved back, cheeks dark, and laughed a little. She put her shoes back on, and the princess reassembled herself piece by piece.
Walking back to the formal festivity, Katara took his arm, her hand warm through his sleeve. Aang floated into the banquet hall approximately one inch above the floor.
Which is the only explanation for what he did next.
He didn't sleep that night. He lay on his roof watching stars wheel over the bay and replayed the garden until the memory wore soft, the way she'd said his letters had.
She had almost kissed him. He was nearly sure - no, he was certain of it. The betrothal appointment was set for autumn, but why wait for autumn, why wait a single unnecessary day, when everything was finally, obviously, inevitably falling into place?
There was a word working on him already, if he'd been listening. But he wasn't listening, he was lost in his own bliss. Have a plan, Sokka's great campaign had taught him, and by the time the moon set, he had one.
It was magnificent. It had exactly one part.
At breakfast, with both households assembled and Hakoda visiting the consulate to review trade schedules, Aang stood up so fast his chair skidded. He proceeded to beam at the entire table, and announced, "We should hold the wedding next month."
Spoons stopped. Gyatso's eyebrows achieved altitude.
"The wedding," Hakoda repeated.
"Ours. Mine and Katara's." He remembered his manners. "Next month, not sooner. This month belongs to Sokka and Suki, and it wouldn't be right to crowd it." He said this with the earnest air of a man presenting his one act of consideration as proof of many. "But after that, the garden's in bloom, the treaty's ready, everyone we love is in the city."
Aang turned to Katara, glowing, certain she'd see the garden in his eyes. "Why wait?"
He had imagined several reactions. He had not imagined her face going carefully, completely still.
"You've thought of everything," she said quietly. "My brother and Suki, the treaty schedules, the blossom season... You're announcing our wedding to our families at breakfast, and the one person you didn't think to ask is me."
"I, well, I-I'm asking you now?"
Around the table, ministers were already murmuring happily about arrangements, and something cold slid down Aang's spine, ten years too late.
Katara set her cup down without a sound. That was the frightening part, Sokka would say later. "Then ask me properly. Why, Aang? Why do you want to marry me?"
Everything he felt rose up at once, ten years of it: the fountain and the letters and the stone in his pocket and her laugh under the falling petals, a flood of true things, and every single one of them jammed in his throat like logs in a river. The ministers were watching, Hakoda and Gyatso were watching.
Her eyes stayed on his, open one last inch, waiting.
"Because," Aang said, and heard himself reach for the nearest words instead of the truest ones, "it's, Katara, it's inevitable. It's what everyone expects of us. The treaty, our houses, it's always been the plan. You and me - it just makes sense."
The inch closed.
"I see," said Katara. Her voice was Academy-smooth, and that smoothness was the worst sound Aang had ever heard. She rose, and bowed to Gyatso, and turned to her father. "Then I invoke the condition of the betrothal, the one you and Monk Gyatso swore on the day it was signed: consent of both parties, freely given, or the betrothal dissolves." Her hands were shaking but her voice was not. "I do not consent to marry for inevitability. I withdraw from the contract."
The room detonated into ministerial noise. Hakoda silenced it with a raised hand, looking at his daughter with pain and pride fighting openly on his face. Gyatso closed his eyes briefly, an old man watching a lesson arrive by the hardest road.
"The clause stands," Hakoda said quietly. "We will honor it."
Katara left the room with her spine straight and her steps measured. Only Toph, arriving late for breakfast in time to feel the whole thing through the floor, knew that she made it exactly as far as the second corridor before her heartbeat fell apart.
Aang stood at the head of the table amid the wreckage of the happiest morning of his life, one hand in his pocket, holding a circle of carved stone that had two currents on it and no words at all.
The break was handled with diplomatic delicacy, which meant everyone in Republic City knew by Thursday.
The official line was that both houses reaffirmed their friendship and the young people would follow their own paths with their families' blessing. The unofficial line, traded over tea in every noble parlor, was that the Water Tribe princess had refused the Air Nation heir to his face, and wasn't it delicious, and didn't he look grey lately.
He did look grey. Aang performed his duties flawlessly and smiled at all the correct moments and it was the eeriest thing his friends had ever seen. He stopped going to the garden. A gardener reported, worriedly, that the young master had asked whether moon peach trees could survive being transplanted, then gone quiet and never raised it again.
Katara, for her part, threw herself into the healing clinics of the lower wards with a ferocity that frightened the senior healers. She worked until her hands pruned. In the wards, they began to tell stories about her, the way dockworkers will: the chief's daughter who came at all hours, asked nobody's leave, and kept no one's ledger. They began to call her the Painted Lady of Republic City. It stuck, and she pretended not to love it.
She was gracious, tireless, and completely unreachable; for when Suki gently said Aang's name over tea, Katara's cup froze solid from the inside.
"So that's going well," Suki reported.
The bill for the broken betrothal arrived within the month, itemized. The Air Nation's trade ministers, robbed of a wedding, reopened the tariff schedules line by line. The Northern delegation cooled by two full degrees of formal address. And then the offers began.
The first came from the Earth Kingdom, from the mining house of Tyro: his son Haru, gentle-eyed, famously decent, and unforgivably suitable. The second arrived on the letterhead of the Freedom Fighters' merchant league, whose young commander Jet had parlayed a war hero's fame into a fortune. Jet had admired the chief's daughter from across three separate galas, it was said, with the smile of a man who had never once been told no.
Hakoda read each offer twice, then summoned his daughter instead of his ministers.
"I'll decline them both today if you say the word," he told her. "Or hold them unanswered until the ink fades. Nothing about your life gets decided at a table you're not sitting at. That promise didn't dissolve with the betrothal."
"It's costing you." Katara had seen the tariff schedules on his desk. She had seen the new silver coming into his beard.
"It cost me a fleet of headaches to marry your mother against the old families' advice," Hakoda said. "Best trade I ever made. I've checked the economy on this one too."
He kissed her forehead and returned to his ledgers, and did not tell her that a Northern envoy had used the word 'headstrong' about his daughter within his hearing, or what he had said in reply, or precisely what that had cost the fishing accords.
The gossip reached Aang the way gossip does: sideways, at a reception, one minister to another behind fans that hid nothing. Haru of the house of Tyro. Jet of the merchant league... A short list, they murmured, and growing. Aang stood very still, holding a cup of tea he never drank, and understood that the world would not wait politely while he failed to find three words.
The war council convened the evening the second offer became public knowledge, in Sokka and Suki's new house on the bay. They were barely six weeks married and already hosting refugees of other people's romance. Toph sprawled across two cushions. Zuko, in the city for the season's diplomatic rounds, stood by the window looking like a man attending his own trial.
"Why am I here? I'm terrible at this."
"You're here because you once got a girl to forgive you after you burned down her village's trust in you," Sokka said, "which makes you our expert in groveling. I'm strategy, Suki's operations, and Toph is surveillance."
He produced, from a satchel, a bound folio labeled OPERATION MOON PEACH in Suki's handwriting, his own having been ruled illegible at the planning stage. There were copies for everyone: detailed diagrams, a fold-out map of the consulate gardens with sight lines inked in red, a chart titled Historical Almost-Kisses, Annotated, and an appendix on custard tart procurement with three sub-headings.
"I have been preparing this since they were fourteen," Sokka said with tremendous dignity. "Marriage merely provided a co-author."
Toph turned her copy upside down. "Gripping stuff."
"Your raised-ink edition is at the printer's," said Suki, and Toph, ambushed by her own grin, allowed that the operation showed promise.
"Why are you like this about them?" Zuko asked, leafing through his copy.
Sokka set down the folio. "That man spent three nights in a bison stable wearing my wife's fans so that I could propose without fainting," he said. "I pay my debts, Zuko. With interest."
"I'm the only one who can tell when either of those two disasters is lying," Toph said. "Which is always. He lies that he's fine, she lies that she's angry."
"She's not angry?" Zuko asked.
"Oh, she's furious. But that's the crust. Underneath, her heartbeat does the same sad little stumble his does. They match. It's pathetic," Toph flexed her toes. "Twinkletoes loves her so much it's basically a seismic event, and what he said at that table was 'it's what everyone expects.' If I had eyes I'd have rolled them out the door."
Suki leaned forward. "Then the mission is simple. Aang already feels everything, we just have to get the words out of him, in front of her, before the inquiry list on my father's desk drawer stops being gossip and starts being a wedding."
The first operation was the Fire Nation embassy's garden party, and it failed with distinction.
Sokka engineered a seating chart that placed Aang and Katara alone at a table for two beneath a flowering trellis. Katara, formally accredited in exactly this discipline, identified the amateur hand behind the placement before the soup arrived. She stayed anyway, which the conspirators would have found extremely encouraging if any of them had known.
They sat in silence for six minutes. Aang opened with a compliment about the weather, and Katara replied that it was seasonable. Aang agreed that seasons were, in general, reliable, and then a passing minister recognized them and the whole table calcified into protocol.
Toph, listening from three tables away, quietly banged her forehead on the tablecloth.
The second operation was subtler. Suki asked Katara to help select a gift for Hakoda's birthday, and steered her, entirely by accident of course, into the harbor market street where a certain pastry stall stood.
The vendor's face lit up. "Lady Katara, back from the North! Your young man never stopped coming, you know. Every week, two custard tarts, and he'd only ever eat one, said the other was tradition."
Katara paid for her father's gift with hands that weren't quite steady and said nothing at all. Suki, wisely, let the silence do its work.
The third operation belonged to Toph.
Toph announced over dinner with the confidence of a field marshal: "Sunset flight on the fuzzball. All six of us. Even I'm going, and I hate flying, that's how committed I am. It's a group outing. Nobody can object to a group outing!"
Nobody did. Katara accepted because refusing would have required an explanation.
And then, at the bison stables at the appointed hour, the group evaporated precisely on schedule: a note from Sokka cited an urgent emergency involving tide charts; Suki's summons to a guard drill that she herself had scheduled; and Zuko sent regrets on account of a last-minute treaty meeting that any calendar would have exposed as fictional.
Toph delivered her own excuse in person, yawning theatrically. "Turns out I'm blind in the sky. Who knew? You two go ahead. The bison's already saddled."
So it was just Aang and Katara and ten tons of overjoyed bison.
Appa took one look at her and moaned from somewhere near the center of the earth, pressing his great head into her hands. He had missed her with his entire enormous body. Katara laughed into his fur while Momo landed on her shoulder like a returning ambassador. Aang stood holding the reins, forgot to be careful, and felt the air between them go soft as a summer evening.
"The saddle still has your rail," he said. "The one you made me install because of the loop-the-"
"Lord Aang!"
The Air Lord Appreciation Society arrived in a flutter of fans and ribbons, six members strong, led by a young lady who had once written him a fourteen-verse ode rhyming arrow with marrow. They had heard there were rides. They were confident his lordship would never refuse. Two of them began complimenting the bison. One of them complimented his tattoos in a manner that made the arrow in question feel distinctly unsafe.
"Excuse me," said Katara, in flawless Academy, to no one in particular, and was gone before Aang could extract himself from a renewed discussion of marrow. Appa groaned. Momo bit the poetess.
Behind the stable wall, Toph ground her teeth to powder. "I planned for weather, I planned for ministers, I planned around Sokka's big mouth. But I did not plan for deluded fans."
The fourth operation was Zuko's, and no one had assigned it to him.
He found Aang alone on the consulate roof at dusk, sat down beside him without ceremony, and stared at the bay for a while.
"When I lost the person I cared about," Zuko said finally, "it was because I chose what my family expected over what I knew was true. I told myself duty was the same as love because it was easier to say." He paused. "It cost me three years and almost everything. Mai took me back the day I finally said the true thing badly instead of the easy thing well."
Aang turned the carved necklace over in his fingers. He'd taken to holding it openly now, since there was no longer anything to hide and nothing to hide it for.
"Every time I try," he said quietly, "it's like the words know how much they matter and they panic. I can talk to anyone about anything. Just not to her about her." He looked down at the stone. Two currents, one circle. "I carved it because my hands could say what my mouth couldn't. But she can't hear my hands, Zuko."
"No," said Zuko. "So say it badly. Trip over it, say it wrong, out of order, too fast... She isn't waiting for a poem." He stood, awkward as ever, and put a hand briefly on Aang's shoulder. "She's waiting to find out if the invisible letter was real."
Aang's head came up. "How do you know about the invisible letter?"
"Suki knows everything and Sokka has a briefing packet," Zuko said, already leaving. "There are diagrams. Don't ask."
Katara dreamed of the garden and hated herself for it.
Awake, she had her reasons lined up like soldiers. She had not endured two years of ice-carved etiquette, had not held her tongue through a hundred dinners of being praised for her silence, to come home and be scheduled. Announced, like a shipping manifest.
Inevitable.
Of all the words in all the languages he charmed people in, he had chosen the one that made her a foregone conclusion.
Asleep, her reasons deserted their posts. Asleep, she was under the tree again and he was saying her name in that low sure voice, and she woke each morning with the ghost of blossoms in her hair and her mother's necklace cold against her throat.
Suki found her at the clinic on a grey afternoon, elbow-deep in the work of mending a dockworker's wrist, and waited until the patient left.
"I'm not going to defend him," Suki said, sitting on the cot. "What he said was thoughtless. You were right to hold the line. I would have."
Katara's shoulders lowered a fraction. "Thank you."
"I married Sokka," Suki went on, "who once proposed to me by explaining the tax advantages." Katara barked out a laugh, surprising them both. "I'm serious. There was a chart. And I looked at this ridiculous man holding a chart with his ears turning red, and I realized the chart was the love declaration. He'd stayed up for several nights making a fortress of reasons because the feeling underneath was too big for him to hold with bare hands." She tilted her head. "Some people say it in words, some say it in charts. The question isn't whether Aang said the wrong thing - he did. The question is what he's been saying, all these years, in his own language, and whether you were listening."
"That isn't fair," Katara said, low. "I shouldn't have to translate. Just once, I wanted the words said out loud to my face with no ambiguity. Is that so much to ask?"
"No," Suki said gently. "It's exactly enough. So don't settle for less than the words." She rose and paused at the door. "But Katara. When it happens and it comes out clumsy and probably at the worst possible moment, because it's Aang, just make sure your armor is off enough to hear them."
That night, Katara walked home the long way, along the harbor, past a pastry stall shuttered for the evening, and stood for a while at the sea wall. The tide was coming in.
It occurred to her, unwillingly, that the tide was also inevitable, and that no one had ever once accused the ocean of not meaning it.
The equinox festival was Sokka's masterpiece and last resort: lanterns on the bay, both households invited, the entire fleet of Republic City society afloat on decorated barges. His plan involved a shared lantern-lighting, a strategic fireworks delay, and, in his words, "romantic infrastructure."
The storm was not part of the plan.
It came off the sea an hour after sunset, fast and mean, one of the spring squalls the bay was famous for. Lanterns tore loose, barges scattered for the docks.
In the chaos of ropes and rain, a child's cry cut through the wind: a little girl from the flower-sellers' barge had gone into the black water, and the current was dragging her toward the pilings.
Two people moved before anyone else understood what was happening.
Katara hit the harbor in a dive, silk and all, the sea answering her before she even called it, a road of stilled water opening ahead of her. Above, a grey shape cut through the rain on a glider, spilled the wind, and dropped. Aang caught the current of Katara's wave without a word passing between them, air bracing water, the old sparring rhythm awake in both of them after all these years, two currents in one circle.
The waterbender reached the girl as Aang flattened the chop around them into a disc of calm; she lifted the child on a rising swell straight into his arms, and he skimmed her to the dock and into her weeping mother's grasp.
Then he turned back for Katara. The sea, having granted its one favor, shrugged them both onto the harbor steps in a heap of soaked silk and tangled glider.
They sat there in the rain, breathing hard. Neither moved.
"You still drop your right shoulder before you lift a swell," Aang said.
"You still trust me to catch your weight before you've checked the water," Katara said.
"Yes," he said. "I do."
The rain filled the pause. She turned to look at him, and he was already looking at her, water streaming off his ridiculous formal collar. The indescribable expression on his face made her breath go still; for once, he didn't look away and he didn't reach for a joke.
"Katara. I'm going to say this imperfectly." His voice shook and he let it. "I've been trying to say it right for ten years and 'right' is the wall I keep building it behind, so I'm just, I'm going to say it wrong, and you can grade it after."
He pulled in a breath. "I love you. I’m in love with you. I would be in love with you without a treaty, or anyone's imposed expectations... I love you because you rebuilt your ice sculptures with me for two weeks and never once made me feel small for wrecking them. Because you sit with grieving people the way you sat with our tree, patient, every day, until things grow. Because you froze me into a snowbank when we were ten and I have compared every day since to that day and most days lose. Because when you came down that gangway looking like the moon decided to walk, the thing that wrecked me wasn't how beautiful you were, it was that you found me in the crowd first. I saw you."
The words were tumbling now, sideways and too fast, exactly as promised. "When I said 'inevitable', I meant me. Loving you has been inevitable to me since I was eight years old and you told me water was yours. I just, I thought if I said it was fate, I'd never have to risk hearing that it wasn't yours too, and that was my cowardice.
And I'm sorry. Katara, you only ever received half of every letter I wrote you. The other halves are in a box under my bed. Two years of them. Every draft I was too much of a coward to send, and I went through them once, all of them, and every single one ends the same way: your name and three words. I have been writing you the same letter since I was fifteen years old." His voice dropped. "This is it. This is the letter."
He ran out of air. The rain was easing. His hand was already moving, pulling the carved stone from inside his soaked collar where it had hung, unribboned and secret, against his heart.
"I made this when I was sixteen," he said, holding it out on his open palm. "My hands knew before my mouth did."
The lantern light found the carving: the airbender's spiral and the ocean's wave, wound into one circle, neither swallowing the other.
"You don't have to take it. You never had to. That was the whole point of the promise, and you were right to hold me to it. But you asked me why, and this is why, and I'd rather say it wrong to your face for the rest of my life than say it perfectly to a wastepaper basket."
Katara looked at the necklace for a long moment. Then she looked up at him, and her eyes were doing what the rain had been doing, and she was smiling in a way finishing school had definitely never sanctioned.
"That's all I ever wanted to hear from you," she said, and her voice broke in the middle of it, and she didn't care. "Ten years, Aang. I've loved you for ten years, and I could hear the invisible letter, I could always hear it. I was so tired of being the only one reading it out loud." She reached out and closed his fingers around the stone, then kept his hand. "Ask me now, properly. Please?"
He laughed, wet and cracked and radiant. "Katara of the Southern Water Tribe. Will you marry me?" He turned their joined hands over. "Would you choose me now, freely, to become your husband and lifelong companion?"
"Yes," she said.
He fastened the necklace at her throat with hands that shook, beneath her mother's pendant, two heirlooms now instead of one. Then, Aang kissed her in the last of the rain while the harbor lanterns guttered gold around them and Katara held him in a sweet embrace.
Up the dock, four extremely wet conspirators huddled under one salvaged awning. Toph, feet bare on the boards, broke into a grin. "Festival drums," she announced. "Both of them. Matching."
They were married in the garden, of course, in autumn, at the appointed time after all, beneath a moon peach tree heavy with late fruit.
The consent clause was read aloud as part of the ceremony, at the couple's insistence, and Hakoda's voice went rough on the old words.
Gyatso officiated in his simple traveling robes, having declined all finery, and told the assembled nobility of two nations that he had once promised to build the children a home instead of a cage, and had then watched them, with some detours, build it themselves.
The traditions braided together like the carving at Katara's throat. Air Nomad chimes hung in the branches beside Water Tribe banners. Appa wore a garland the size of a rowboat and received tribute from a procession of awed children with the gravity of a visiting king. Momo had his priorities straight, having stolen a custard tart before the second vow.
Katara wore blue silk with a mantle of white like sea foam; Aang wore a monk's plain saffron by choice, his royal mantle by obligation, arrows bare to the sky. When the vows came, Aang took a breath so deep the wind chimes stirred.
"I wrote this down forty times," he said, "and I'm not going to use any of them."
Laughter rolled through the garden. Katara's eyes shone. He said it wrong, out of order, too fast, and perfectly: the fountain, the tarts, the letters underneath the letters...
Katara's vows were short. She had always been the better speaker. She said that some people fall in love and some people grow it with water and patience, season after season, and that she had planted hers with a young Air lord at eight years old and had simply never stopped tending it, even when she tried.
After the vows, Hakoda embraced him, and said something quietly against his ear that no one else caught. Guests speculated for years. Only Aang knew, and kept it, the way he kept the portrait of two people painted mid-laugh: You were an orphan the day we signed that treaty, son. You haven't been one since. The Lord of the Air Nation, master of four winds and forty monks' worth of composure, had to be steadied by his best man.
Sokka predictable cried during the ceremony while Suki patted his back through the entire ceremony with the serene patience of a woman who knew exactly whom she was marrying. Mai, attending on Zuko's arm, caught the ceremonial garland without looking up from her cup. "Hm," she said. Zuko turned the color of his own banners, and Toph's cackle set the wind chimes ringing. Hakoda and Gyatso stood at the edge of the lantern light like two old gardeners at harvest, and clasped hands, and said nothing, because everything had already been said, eventually, out loud, by the right people.
The party ran until the lanterns were embers. Long after, when the last guests had gone, two figures lingered under the tree that had been theirs for a decade. Her head rested on his shoulder and his cheek pressed lightly against her dark hair, a plate between them holding one custard tart split precisely in half.
"You know," Aang murmured, "the ministers are already asking about heirs. They say it's inevitable."
Katara laughed against his neck, and the sound scattered a late blossom loose above them.
It drifted down through the dark and landed on their joined hands like a coin tossed into a fountain. This time, both of them together, wordless and fluent, made their wish.