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The MCAT prep book had ridden shotgun in Katara's lap for two hundred miles, unopened. Its spine was so new and pristine, it squeaked when she shifted it. Sokka's engineering acceptance folder sat casually propped on the dashboard, which meant he wanted their dad to keep glancing at it. Hakoda did, every few minutes, with the kind of smile he saved for things he didn't trust himself to talk about at highway speed.
Her phone buzzed against the book cover. The group chat, which Sokka had renamed dock rats (final name, do not change) in April and which Toph had changed four times since, was counting them in.
Aang: eta??
Toph: find a hobby while you wait, twinkle toes
Zuko: Patience is a virtue.
"Tell him forty minutes," Sokka said, reading over her shoulder.
"Tell him yourself, you're literally in the chat."
"It’s different coming from you."
She typed 40 min and put the phone face-down, and didn't think about why she was smiling at her phone like it had personally done something wonderful.
Out the window, the mainland thinned into salt marsh. Then the bridge rose up the way it always did, all at once, like the island had been waiting behind a curtain. The bridge was for cars; everything else came and went by the ferry, which ran from the landing by the square across the bay to the city and its bus terminals, and divided the island's arrivals into two honest categories: people hauling their lives in coolers, and people carrying one bag.
The Waters had always been a bridge family. Katara had crossed it every summer since she was six. At the crest, the whole of Ember Island laid itself out below: the pale crescent of beach, the country club's green terraces, the shingled roofs above the north cove where the Beifong and Sozin houses sat. Smallest and closest to the water was the weathered gray house, its long dock reaching into the cove off the back of Gyatso's sprawling garden.
Every year at the crest of the bridge, Katara's chest went light. This year it went light and then, without warning, tight.
Would this really be our last summer all together?, she thought, and made herself stop thinking it.
Aang was in the driveway when they pulled in, per their annual custom of meet and greets. Appa went up to the family first, as was protocol: a hundred and thirty pounds of white shaggy dog coming across the gravel, tail going hard enough to steer him, hitting Katara at the knees with a moan of pure grievance that she had been gone for nine entire months. She went down into his fur on purpose.
"He's been doing laps from here to the road since noon," Aang said, padding over barefoot. "I told him forty minutes was a lie and he agreed."
From the porch rail, Momo observed the entire spectacle without moving anything but his tail. Momo was the gray house's cat; while he technically belonged to no one and would come down to acknowledge the Waters in his own time, probably at dinner, probably by sitting on Sokka, whom he loved and who was allergic.
Aang had grown again. That was the first thing Katara noticed once she was vertical, and she was annoyed at herself for noticing, because it was the kind of thing aunties noticed. He was taller than her now by half a head and his shoulders had opened up like something unfolding.
"You're late," Aang stated with a bright and boyish smile on his face. It was the same grin he'd had at eight, at eleven, at fourteen: enormous, immediate, and aimed at her like she was the best news.
"There was traffic," Sokka said, unfolding items from the car, pretending to be more irritated than he actually was.
Aang hugged Sokka first, then Hakoda, and finally, Katara. It was the same hug it had always been: warm and slightly too enthusiastic, lifting her half off her heels. He smelled like sunscreen and cut grass. Entirely familiar, nothing new. She told herself that twice.
"Congratulations, by the way," she said into his shoulder. "Academy boy."
She felt the hug falter for a quarter of a second, so brief she might have invented it. Then he set her down and the grin was back. "You heard."
"You posted it, Aang. In March, remember? Dad was teary-eyed at the acceptance photo. Don't tell him I told you."
"I heard that," Hakoda said, hauling coolers.
"Air Temple Academy," Sokka said, whistling. "Flight school. Our little Aang, operating heavy machinery in the sky. The world is not ready."
"It's mostly physics for the first year. Physics and running... So much running."
"When do you report?" Katara asked, as casually as possible.
"September second," Aang said.
And there it was, the date, set down on the gravel between them like a stone.
Inside, Katara passed the hallway of photographs Gyatso refused to update or organize. There was Aang at seven, gap-toothed on this same dock, holding up a fish barely bigger than his hand, photographed in the two seconds between catching it and returning it to the water, which he had done his whole life with every fish, without exception; Aang, Sokka, and Katara at ten, buried to their necks in sand; Aang at twelve holding Appa the week he arrived, when Appa was a white handful with paws he'd need three years to grow into; and all five of them at thirteen, sunburned and blurry, Toph flashing a peace sign at nothing and Zuko smirking at the camera.
So many magical summers on one wall, and the wall was starting to run out of room.
Dinner at the summer house began the way it had for a decade: with the basket.
It lived on the sideboard, a shallow woven thing that had once held fruit, and every phone in the house went into it before anyone touched a chair. Gyatso had instituted the rule the summer the devices first arrived at his table, and he had needed exactly one sentence to make it law: Be where your feet are.
Sokka had negotiated a fireworks exception in 2019 and lost. Even Toph, whose phone talked to her and who could have argued accessibility with a straight face, dropped hers in without being asked. It had stopped being a rule years ago. Now it was just what the table was: the one place on the island where everyone you were with was all the way there.
Katara's phone went in on top of Aang's.
Gyatso made his announcement at that dinner, because Gyatso believed all important things should be said over food. The resident kitchen had been vegetarian since before any of the children were born; it was the house's second-oldest law, carried down through six generations of the Air Nation's diplomatic corps. Aang's family had been in politics for as long as there were records of it: professional guests of the whole world, fluent in everything, at home nowhere and welcome everywhere. The summer house was full of the evidence; gifts from the generations of postings were shelved casually as groceries.
Vegetarianism was observed by Gyatso and Aang as a matter of soul and by everyone else as a matter of deliciousness. It was also, as Hakoda told anyone who asked, the making of his career. Any chef on the coast could sear a steak; Hakoda had spent fifteen summers learning to make a table full of teenagers forget that this one didn't have any, and the island's wealthy families now fought over his vegetarian menus like they were waterfront property.
Over their seawood soup course, Gyatso began: "The club is holding the debutante ball again this August. And I have decided, after long reflection and no consultation whatsoever, that I would like to sponsor Katara."
Katara's spoon stopped. "Sponsor me?"
"I never had a daughter, or a granddaughter. I have watched every family on this island parade their girls down those steps for forty years. And I have thought, every single year, that not one of them holds a candle to the girl who taught my grandson to swim."
"But Gyatso, those deb balls cost..." She looked at her father, who was studying his soup with suspicious intensity. "You knew about this?"
"I negotiated," Hakoda said. "I cater the sponsors' dinner. It's a trade. We're even."
"You are not remotely even. Have you seen those dresses?"
"Katara." Gyatso set the soup ladle down, and his voice did the thing it did sometimes, going quiet in a way that made everyone else go quiet too. "Let an old man have this. There are not so many summers left where all of you are on this island at the same time. I would like this one to have an occasion in it, preferably something with music and dancing, an evening where everyone has to dress up for and remember."
The table was silent for a moment. Sokka broke through it first.
"She'll need an escort," he said. "Traditionally a gentleman of good standing. Athletic, devastatingly handsome, good with a frisbee..."
"I forgot tell you," Aang piped up. "You're escorting Toph."
"Since when?"
"Toph texted me, and I quote, 'tell Snoozles he's drafted.'"
"That does sound like consent to me," Katara said.
"Ok, fine," Sokka spread his hands, magnanimous. "So Katara needs someone else... Someone reliable, who won't step on her feet. Whoever could it be?"
Nobody said it but everybody thought it.
Katara watched Aang become very interested in his soup, ears going faintly pink. The feeling in her chest, she filed it under fondness, brotherly-adjacent, the same drawer she had been filing it in for ten years. But the drawer was getting full and she hadn't checked it in a while.
"We'll figure it out," she said.
Ember Island Country Club hired its summer staff the way it did everything, with a strong preference for people it already knew. So Katara found herself in white polo and khakis at the towel stand, and Sokka behind the snack bar, where he immediately began a shadow war with the inventory system.
Jet worked the boathouse. Katara noticed him before she was introduced, because Jet was the kind of person you noticed, all forearms and easy slouch, a piece of wheatgrass forever between his teeth as if punctuating his status.
"You're the chef's daughter," he said, first day, leaning on her counter like the counter had invited him. "Hakoda's kid. My uncle worked a wedding with your dad once. Said he's the only honest man in a fifty-mile radius of this club."
"That sounds like Dad."
"So what's an honest man's daughter doing folding towels for these people?" He said these people with a little tilt of his chin at the terrace, at the linen and the sailing trophies and the members who signed for drinks without looking at the number. "You're not one of them."
"Some of them are my best friends."
"Sure," Jet said, smiling around the wheatgrass. "Rich kids collect a local or two. Makes them feel real." Before she could decide how offended to be, he pushed off the counter, walking backward. "I'm Jet, by the way. Boathouse. Come by if you ever want to take something out on the water that isn't a towel."
That night he followed her on everything at once. Three notifications in a row, all his name. Then a DM: found the towel stand's best feature today.
"Absolutely not," Sokka said the next day, materializing with a tray of frozen lemonades. "He followed you at 11 pm, Katara."
"He introduced himself."
"He’s a certain type of guy. Trust me, I’m a guy and I’m your brother."
"You've had four girlfriends in three years. You don't get to have standards for me."
"Three girlfriends," Sokka said with dignity, "and Suki and I were more of a mutual respect situation."
It was a slow day at the club, rain chasing the members indoors, when Katara learned the thing about Jet that complicated him.
She'd been sent to the boathouse with a delivery manifest and found him restacking kayaks alone, and when he lifted the third one she saw it: the brace on his left knee, serious hardware, and above it a surgical scar with the pale finished look of old news. He caught her looking at it. For once, he didn't perform anything.
"Rowing," he said. "I had a full ride at Piandao Prep. You know it?"
She knew it; everyone knew it; it was the kind of school the club members' kids treated as a birthright.
"Recruited at fourteen. Two years of five a.m. water, best times in the state." He set the kayak on the rack with exaggerated care. "Then junior year, one bad catch, one pop you can hear over the coxswain. And it turns out the scholarship was attached to the knee, not to me. They have a whole letter for it. 'Following a review of your aid eligibility.' My mom cried at the kitchen table trying to find the number that wasn't there. So now the Piandao guys sign for drinks on terrace four, and I fetch their kayaks, and everybody wonders why I've got a thing about it."
Katara stood in the boathouse doorway with the rain coming down behind her and felt the old vertical anger rise in her, the one her family teased her about, the one that came for unfairness anywhere she found it.
"A review?" she said. "Sounds more like a school deciding a sixteen-year-old stopped being useful."
"There she is," Jet said softly, and smiled.
She thought about that conversation for days. It moved him, in her private ledger, from a type to a person, and she was honest enough to know that when he asked her to the drive-in a week later, that afternoon in the boathouse was a full third of the yes.
Every Saturday, the farmer's market happened in the town square by the ferry landing. Going with Aang was less like shopping and more like walking a small parade. Katara had forgotten this over the winter, the way the island simply liked him, unanimously, as if it had voted him its mayor.
The mushroom woman saved him chanterelles. The bread man called him "flyboy" now, which meant the news had traveled, and slipped an extra roll into the bag. At the flower stall, the florist's granddaughter, whose name turned out to be Onji, lit up like the morning had finally started.
"Aang! We got panda lilies in. First of the season." She was already wrapping a bundle before any money changed hands, black-and-white petals nodding. "On the house. Grandpa says you're leaving in the fall so we have to be nice to you now."
"You're always nice to me," Aang pointed out, chuckling.
"Extra nice," Onji said. Then, she held up her phone. "Can I? For the stall's page. You're good for business."
He smiled obligingly at the camera with the lilies. Katara stood at his elbow holding a sack of tomatoes and observed the whole transaction with the detached interest of a scientist.
That girl has a crush, she noted. Obviously. Who wouldn't? Then a flat feeling moved through her, like a cloud crossing a sunny field, and was gone before she could name it.
Aang turned and handed her the panda lilies. Not just one, but the whole bundle without ceremony, already talking about using the tomatoes and chanterelles for a pasta dinner as he retrieved the groceries from her possession.
"They're yours," Katara said about the flowers. "She gave them to you."
"Yeah," Aang said, in the tone of someone explaining tides to a seagull. "And I'm giving them to you. That's how flowers work. Nobody gets flowers for themselves."
She carried the lilies home and put them in the blue glass jar on the windowsill above the sink, the one Gyatso never used for anything else. It wasn't until she was rinsing the tomatoes that she realized she had done all of it from muscle memory. The blue jar was the flower jar. It had been the flower jar for years, because this was not the first time Aang had handed her whatever the island handed him. Somewhere along the line, her hands had learned a ritual her head had never once examined.
She gazed at the lilies for a moment longer as the epiphany sunk in.
The stall's post went up that evening. Aang with the bundle, grinning, caption reading our favorite customer is LEAVING us this fall. pre-emptive mourning discounts apply with a string of little hearts, and Onji's own comment underneath: who's going to take all my free flowers now (sad face).
Katara read it twice from her bed. The lilies in question were sitting in a blue jar in her kitchen, which the comments section did not know. She found that this fact pleased her to a degree she declined to investigate.
She put the phone on the nightstand, face-down, with slightly more firmness than the maneuver required.
The Beifongs kept a small yacht on the lake in the island's interior, a glossy overpowered thing named Lady Beifong II that Toph's parents used twice a year and Toph requisitioned weekly.
The ritual never varied. Sokka captained, loudly and with a hat. Katara and Zuko fished the stern, which was serious business. Toph held the bow like a throne, tanning, sovereign of the playlist, issuing vetoes ("no, next, no, this one slaps, hold") with the authority of a small maritime nation. And Aang lasted roughly sixteen minutes with a rod before the stillness defeated him, at which point he'd surrender it and spend the day swimming, rigging the tow rope, or narrating the fish's side of the negotiations.
Appa came, obviously. Appa considered the boat his and merely on loan to the Beifongs, and spent the day stationed at the bow beside Toph, functioning as her backrest and occasionally launching himself overboard after Aang with a splash that reordered the lake. Momo did not come. He saw them off from the end of the dock like a lighthouse keeper with grievances.
"Your problem," Zuko told him, reeling in his third bass of the morning while Aang's line hung untouched, "is that fishing is a conversation with patience. You've never met."
"My problem is that you've turned relaxing into a sport."
"Everything is a sport if you're doing it correctly."
They had an old philosophical dispute underneath the rivalry, worn smooth with use. Zuko kept his catches, cleaned them himself at the stern with grim competence, and delivered them to Hakoda, who cooked them for everyone whose principles permitted. Aang, on the rare occasions the lake took pity on his sixteen minutes, unhooked whatever he'd caught with careful hands, said something to it too quiet for the boat to hear, and put it back into the water. He had done this since he was small. He would fish, in other words, but only on terms where nobody lost. Zuko maintained this disqualified the entire activity, and Aang maintained it perfected it.
This argument had been running for six years and was, everyone understood, the actual sport.
Katara loved boat days with an uncomplicated completeness she felt about almost nothing else. The lake was smaller water than her bay, tame water, but water was water. She fished with her father's patience and her grandmother's grip, and around noon she'd dive off the stern rail and swim until her arms sang.
Before she dove, she reached for her wrist and found it bare. She turned and Aang was already holding out his own wrist, where a spare hair tie lived ever since he was twelve. It was a small navy ring he never referred to and never explained and replaced whenever she kept one. She accepted it wordlessly and worked her hair into its knot, never stopping to wonder why a boy with no hair carried one.
For the record, the arrangement ran in both directions. In Katara's boat bag, underneath the sunscreen, was Aang's baseball cap, faded orange, brim gone soft. She had confiscated it years ago after the summer his scalp burned so badly that Gyatso reported on the peeling every day for a week.
Aang forgot the cap routinely, so Katara carried it herself. At some point during their outings, she would reach over and put the orange hat on his head, and he would say "thank you" the way you thank someone for something that has never once not happened. Neither of them had ever discussed it, and it did not occur to him, either, to wonder what it meant that she packed for his head before she packed for her own.
Aang went in the water with her and they floated on their backs in the middle of the lake with the boat's music arriving in fragments across the surface.
"You're drifting," Aang said, close enough now to touch her.
"You're the one drifting."
"One of us is. We started almost boat-length apart."
Neither of them corrected the distance. And maybe it was the angle of the sun, or the particular blue-green of lake water, but the old summer surfaced in her, the way it did once a year, uninvited.
They were ten, and Aang had been island-famous for a month because he'd learned a back flip off the boat rail and performed it on demand, all day, for anyone. By late July, he was combining it with other tricks. On that afternoon, he'd combined it with the tow rope, mid-swing, showing off for a boatful of kids, and something went wrong in the air. He came down flat and wrong at the rope's far arc, forty feet out, and the sound he made hitting the water was different, and then he didn't come up.
The boat plummeted into panic in one second, with the other kids screaming. Katara didn't remember deciding; she remembered the rail under her foot and then the water, and the fact of her own body cutting the distance with a speed she had never produced before or, she sometimes thought, since. Gran Gran had taught her mother to read water, and her mother had taught her: the flat patch, the wrongness, where a person goes down. She found him four feet under, stunned and heavy and grabbing, and she did what Gran Gran's voice said to do with a panicking swimmer... It worked, and she got his face into the air. She held it there, kicking for both of them, saying his name in a voice she didn't recognize, until hands took him over the rail.
He coughed up half the lake. He was fine and by dinner, it became just a story. But Katara had felt his weight in the water, the whole heavy fact of him nearly subtracting itself from the world, and something in her had rearranged and never moved back. And Aang, who joked about everything, had never once joked about it. That was the tell, she'd think, years later. He turned everything into a bit, but never that.
"You just went somewhere," Aang said now, peering at her above the lake's surface.
"The rope swing summer."
"Ah." A long easy silence, the two of them rising and falling on the boat's far wake. "You know I never actually thanked you. There was a whole plan. I was ten and I'd seen a movie, so I was going to give a speech and possibly a medal."
"You gave me your dessert for the rest of the summer."
"That was my way of saying thank you, Katara."
From the boat, distantly: Sokka demanding they return because Zuko had caught something "frankly unconstitutional" in size, and Toph cranking the playlist to victory music she would later deny selecting.
Katara rolled over and swam, and Aang matched her stroke for stroke, because she had taught him, and because (though she would not assemble this thought for several more weeks) he had spent seven years making sure he never again added a single gram to the water's side of the scale when she was in it.
Dance practice started the last week of June, in the club's ballroom with the chairs stacked and the chandeliers off. Sun came through the tall windows in dusty gold columns. Eight debutantes, eight escorts, and an instructor named Madame Wu, who clapped on the offbeat purely to test them.
The whole group was there, which turned the sessions into something between rehearsal and circus. Sokka and Toph approached the waltz as a contact sport, each attempting to lead, arguing about it in whispers Madame Wu could hear from across the room. Zuko partnered Azula with the rigid correctness of a man handling something classified, and Azula critiqued his frame continuously, in a pleasant conversational murmur, the way other people hum. They danced beautifully and radiated mutual grievance, which was more or less the Sozin siblings in one image: alone together all summer in their father's enormous house, Ozai perpetually away on business, allied against an emptiness neither of them would ever name in public.
The waltz meant Aang's hand on Katara's waist. There was no way around this.
"Sorry," Aang said, the first time, placing it there like the small of her back was made of eggshell.
"You've thrown me off this dock a hundred times."
"That's different."
But his hand settled, warm through the cotton, and they started to move. Here was the thing nobody had warned her about: they were good at it without even trying. Countless summers of shared reflexes, of reading each other across water and bonfires and crowded kitchens, translated into three-four time without a hitch. Madame Wu stopped clapping traps at them by the second session.
Around them, couples counted under their breath and apologized to each other's feet. Aang and Katara just went, turn after turn, the windows wheeling past. Katara caught their reflection once in the dark glass of the trophy case and did not entirely recognize the girl in it, the one laughing with her head tipped back.
"You two have obviously done this before," said one of the other girls, a Bei Fong cousin, slightly accusing.
"Never," Katara said.
"Since we were six," Aang said at the same time. At her look: "What? Weddings, your dad's catering gigs... You used to stand on my feet."
"I never stood on your feet."
"You stood on my feet at the Pakku wedding and I was shorter than you then."
The Bei Fong cousin looked between them, and something passed over her face, a small knowing settling into place. Katara was starting to see that expression a lot. She elected not to wonder why.
It was at the third practice that Gyatso came to visit.
He had come to demonstrate, as promised, because Gyatso had won this club's dance cup in an era he refused to date precisely. For one song he was magnificent, sweeping Madame Wu around while the teenagers hooted and filmed.
Then the song ended, and he laughed and waved off the second one, and lowered himself into a chair by the window. There was a moment, brief, where the lowering took visible effort. His hand found the chair's arm and leaned on it in a way Katara had never seen Gyatso lean on anything.
She looked at Aang. Aang was already looking at his grandfather, and his face, for two full seconds, was a face she didn't have on file for him at all. Then Gyatso called out a correction to somebody's frame, delighted, entirely himself, and Aang's grin reassembled, and practice went on.
Later that night, a clip of Gyatso's one dance made the rounds of the island accounts. He was luminous in it. Aang reposted it with three crying-laughing faces and no other commentary. Katara, scrolling in bed, noticed what wasn't there; Aang captioned everything, and narrated everything else. Three emojis and silence was, from him, a whole paragraph.
She filed that too. The drawer was getting very full.
Jet asked her out on the Fourth of July, while the club's fireworks budget detonated over the bay and everyone's faces went red and gold and red again.
"Drive-in on Thursday," he said. "They're showing something old and terrible. I'll get the popcorn, you bring the commentary. I've heard you at the towel stand. You're vicious when service is slow."
And Katara said yes.
She examined the yes afterward, sitting on her bed with her chin on her knees, and found its components honest enough. Jet was handsome. Jet was interesting, in the way of boys who have decided the world is rigged and have three-fifths of an argument for it. And Jet had looked at her, from the very first day, in a way that nobody on this island had ever looked at her: more than the chef's daughter, not Sokka's sister, and beyond just being one of the dock kids. She felt like a girl, singular, worth crossing a room for.
She was seventeen and yet nobody had ever crossed the room for her.
That it felt less like wanting him and more like wanting to be wanted, she noted, but decided to set aside. She was allowed to have this: one date, one movie. This was standard teenage procedure, and none of it required a committee.
The committee convened anyway.
Sokka: SHE SAID YES TO WHEATGRASS
Toph: saw that one coming too
Zuko: Who is Wheatgrass.
Sokka: boathouse JET. tanned, floppy hair. motorcycle he doesn't technically own.
Zuko: How do you know he doesn't own it
Sokka: LOOK AT HIM
Aang, whose typing bubble appeared and disappeared three separate times over the course of the evening, contributed nothing.
Katara watched the bubble appear, hover, and vanish. Whatever those three drafts had said, she never got to read them, and the not-reading of them took up an unreasonable amount of her night.
Then the committee convened at dinner.
"A date," Sokka said, the word landing like a fish on the table. "With boathouse Jet. Wheatgrass Jet. Be serious!"
"He has a name."
"His name is a verb, Katara."
"It's fine," Aang said. Everyone looked at him, because his voice had come out sanded flat, a tone none of them had heard him use in possibly his entire life. He was rearranging noodles with his chopsticks, not eating them. "Jet's fine. Someone should pass the sauce."
Toph turned her head toward Aang with the slow precision of a lighthouse. She didn't say anything, which turned out to be the loudest sound at the table.
"It's one movie," Katara said.
"Totally," Aang said, to the noodles.
The movie was old and terrible, as promised.
Jet's commentary was funnier than hers, which she hadn't expected. His arm arrived along the back of the bench seat with a smoothness that suggested prior engineering. The popcorn was good and the night was pleasantly warm. Katara was having, by any reasonable measurement, a fine time, and was performing it with slightly more animation than she actually felt, laughing a half-second longer than the jokes earned.
She had just become aware of this gap between the evening and her experience of the evening when a horn went off directly beside them. Not a tap, but a full, sustained, single-handed blast; the kind of honk with a personality behind it. Katara knew the personality before she turned her head, because she had grown up down the hall from it.
Hakoda's sedan sat in the next spot. It had arrived at some point without her noticing, which meant it had been driven carefully and the honk was a choice. As she watched, all four windows came down together like a curtain going up: Sokka at the wheel; Toph riding shotgun, bare feet on the dash; and in the back seat, Aang.
"Oh, hey," Sokka said, projecting to the entire row. "It’s you two! Small world, small town."
There was no plan beyond that, as far as Katara could ever afterward determine. They watched the movie, loudly, three feet away: Sokka reviewing the lead actor's line readings at conversational-plus volume; Toph interrogating the audio ("is he fighting one guy or six, be honest, the foley is lying to me"); the two of them laughing enormously at things that were not funny. Someone asked Jet, across the gap, with elaborate courtesy, whether he'd pass the popcorn. It was warfare conducted entirely in the register of a picnic.
Aang contributed nothing, and his nothing was the loudest thing in the lot. He sat in the back with a churro he never touched going cold in his hand, and he was looking at Jet. Katara had known Aang's face for fifteen years and had never seen this one on it: long, level, and unfriendly. Jet met it once, lazily, and looked away first, and pretended he hadn't.
And then Aang's eyes moved to her, and the unfriendliness fell out of them all at once. What was left was so nakedly wounded, so how could you be here, that she had to look away from him, furious at being made to feel like the one who had trespassed.
Through all of it, Jet leaned back with his arms crossed, watching with an expression of confirmed satisfaction, as if her friends had arrived specifically to prove his thesis about them. Somehow, that expression was the thing that made her angriest of all.
She got out of the car. She crossed the gap and leaned into the sedan's open window, close enough that nothing had to be loud anymore. She looked at the three of them: her brother, mid-grin, the grin dying; Toph with her chin up and unrepentant; Aang in the corner, holding her eyes now, holding the cold churro, not even pretending to look innocent.
She said, with a calm that made Sokka sit up straight and reach for the ignition, "Go home."
They went, the sedan reversing out with funereal slowness, Toph's hand raised out the window in a slow regal wave the entire way.
Jet drove her back early, gracious about it in a way that banked coals for later.
At the drop-off he said, "Hey. For what it's worth. I doubt they do that to Sokka's dates."
Twenty minutes later, he posted a story from the drive-in exit, taillights and a caption: some people guard their toys. It got thirty-one views before midnight. Katara was, unfortunately, one of them.
She was still holding all of it when she found Aang waiting on the porch of the gray house, alone, churro long gone. The fight happened right there in the yard between the hydrangeas, in furious half-whispers because the windows were open.
"It was Sokka's idea," Aang said, which was true and also the worst possible opening.
"You're seventeen, Aang. Nobody drafted you. You saw Sokka pick up those car keys and you got in."
"We were just checking on you."
"Checking on me? I was at a movie, not lost at sea. You embarrassed me in front of..."
"He calls the members 'these people,' Katara. He thinks we're all a joke. He's been circling you since June like you're..."
"Like I'm what? Say it."
"Like you're something he gets to win," Aang said, and his voice cracked upward, out of the whisper.
In the streetlight, she could see that he wasn't wearing the grin, wasn't wearing anything over his face at all. It was suddenly like looking at a stranger who had her best friend's exact eyes.
"And you can't even see it, because he pays attention to you, and apparently that's all it takes. One summer guy with a piece of grass in his mouth, and you'll spend it on him. Spend this summer. On him?!"
"What is that supposed to mean, 'this summer'?"
Aang stopped. She watched him hear what he'd said. Emotion quickly moved through his face, a door opening on a bright and terrifying room and slamming shut again.
"Nothing. Forget it."
"No, finish it. This summer, what, Aang? What's different about..."
"I leave, Katara!" It came out of him like it had been under pressure for months. "September 2nd, remember? I get on a ferry and then a bus and then I'm gone. Training is three years with limited visitation and phone calls. And everyone keeps celebrating, and I keep smiling about it, and you all talk about it like it's this great thing that's happening to me instead of..."
He stopped, started again. "There's only one of these left. One last summer where we're all together." His arm swung wide, taking in the yard, the dock, the dark water, and her. "And you want to spend it at a drive-in with Jet?"
"That's not fair," Katara said. Her voice betrayed her, wobbling on the last word. "You don't get to... I'm not the one leaving. You don't get to be angry at me over one evening when you're the one who's..."
She couldn't finish it either. That was the discovery of the night, standing in the wet grass: her sentence had the same door in it his did, and the same bright terrifying room behind it. She could not go in there tonight, not with him watching.
So she turned and went inside, and cried in the shower where the water could take the blame. She was furious at Sokka and Toph, at Jet a little, at Aang enormously, and underneath all of it, in the drawer she was no longer able to fully close, furious at September.
Her phone stayed dark all night, with one exception. At 11:47, a single message from Zuko: For the record, they invited me. I said it was the worst idea I had heard all summer and hung up. It was, she reflected, the most Zuko possible way to take her side, and the only thing that made her laugh that night, briefly, into her pillow.
Otherwise, nothing. That was the strangest part.
So many summers of Aang and there had never been a fight that outlived his patience for it; his apologies usually arrived before the door finished closing. She checked at midnight, at one o'clock, and mildly at two am. Nothing from him.
What Katara couldn't know was that a mile up the beach, Aang had typed and deleted eleven different messages before finally put the phone in a drawer. Some things had a place, and the place wasn't a screen.
He was at the end of the dock the next evening. She knew he would be. That was the whole function of Their Spot. It had been settled the summer they were nine, without treaty or discussion, the way children settle their most permanent laws.
The summer they were nine, Katara's mother had been gone a year and a half, and Katara had learned to cry on a schedule, privately, in managed installments. One July night an installment escaped early, and she fled dinner and walked to the end of Gyatso's dock.
A few minutes later, there were footsteps. Aang sat down beside her without a word, which for Aang at nine was an athletic feat of restraint. He didn't ask what was wrong. He took a pebble out of his pocket and set it on the plank between them. Then another. Then another, building a small cairn while she cried.
When she finally wiped her face and asked what he was doing, he said, "Keeping you company where I can reach."
She had understood it completely then, and had never once been able to explain it to anyone since.
The dock became the place. Fights were suspended there. It was embassy ground.
Katara went out the back and through the garden, down the open path between the beach roses, and walked out over the water. The boards still gave off the day's heat through her bare feet. Aang was sitting with his knees up, and Appa was stretched along the planks beside him, taking up most of the embassy. The fireflies were out tonight, she noticed, though they were probably out last night too.
On the plank on Aang's other side, she saw as she got close, was a little stack of pebbles, three high. Her chest did something complicated and unlisted.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi."
She sat. The tide was coming in beneath them, patient, shouldering against the pilings.
"I'm sorry," Aang said, to the water. "For the drive-in. I told myself I was going along to keep Sokka from going alone. That was a lie, and I knew it was a lie while I was telling it to myself, which Gyatso says is the only kind of lying that really costs you." He turned to look at her. "You were right. You didn't do anything. You went to a movie. I made it about me, and then I yelled. I've never yelled at you in my life and I hated it the entire time I was doing it."
"You held the churro very menacingly."
"It was for you," he said mournfully. "It was a peace churro. It never made it out of the car. Sokka ate it at a red light on the way home. I was too sad to defend it."
The laugh came up out of her before she could decide anything about it, and with the laugh, the rest. "I'm sorry too. I said you didn't get to be angry, and that wasn't... everyone gets to be angry. And I've been thinking about what you said. About Jet." She pulled her knees up, mirroring him. "I don't really like him. I've been trying to. I think I liked that he noticed me. He looked at me like... I don't know how to say it without sounding pathetic."
"You couldn't sound pathetic if you tried."
"He looked at me like I was just a girl," Katara said. "Not just the chef's daughter, or Sokka's sister, or one of the pack. Nobody here has ever..." She gestured at the island generally, at fifteen years of it. "I'm furniture here, Aang. Beloved furniture. And he walked up on day one and looked at me like I was more than that. It turns out that's flattering enough to sit through a genuinely terrible movie for."
She pulled at a splinter on the plank, choosing the next part carefully, because it was the true part. "And it's not only that. The stuff he's angry about, some of it is real, Aang. What Piandao did to him was rotten, and I got angry right along with him, because it deserves anger. But I didn’t like seeing him observe you three like you were evidence. The knee gave him a real grievance, and he's decided it entitles him to a verdict on everybody. You all crashed one date, and he was pleased. It confirmed things."
Aang was quiet. The water folded and unfolded under the dock.
"You were never furniture," he said at last. "Not to me. Not ever." There was a weight under the words, a floor below the floor. If she stepped on it, it would hold. She suddenly knew it would hold, and she was not ready to know that, so she stayed where they were.
"The ball," Aang said, after the silence had aged a little. He was aligning his pebbles with great care. "If you'd rather have someone else escort you. Now that there's, I mean, if Jet, or anyone, I would completely underst-"
"Aang." She waited until he looked at her. "My first and only choice is you. I hope you haven’t changed your mind about being my dance partner…" She heard herself, heard how far past the guardrail the sentence had traveled, and grabbed the wheel. "You know, not even Sokka was in the running to be my escort. But don't tell him that, it would hurt his feelings."
Aang was looking at her the way you look at a horizon where you think you've seen a light.
"I won’t mention it to him," he said simply, in the way people accept things that matter. “And I’m honored you want me to be there next to you.”
She hugged him then. His arms came around her and they stayed that way, longer than the apology required, the tide filling in beneath the dock.
Over his shoulder, she watched the lanterns come on outside the gray house, one by one. She thought, with great firmness, my best friend. The thought stood there in her mind like a sign in front of a building that had clearly been renovated into something else.
The first dance practice after the drive-in should have been awkward. And it was, for about four minutes: both of them over-polite, his hand landing on her waist like a formal apology. Then Madame Wu started the music and their bodies remembered what their pride had forgotten, and by the second waltz they were themselves again, wheeling past the tall windows.
They never saw it coming. Sokka and Toph had turned their frame dispute into a velocity dispute, each trying to steer, and the resulting vessel came across the ballroom on a collision heading with the certainty of physics. There was a shout, possibly a war cry from Toph, and then there was Sokka's heel before all of Sokka.
Katara would recall how fast it happened and how calm he was inside it. Aang's arm went from her waist to fully around her, his other hand caught the back of her head instinctively, and he turned them in the air, a half-rotation that fit inside a heartbeat. By the time the floor arrived, it met against his back alone, hard, with Katara landing on the whole length of him, shielded, weightless, and unbruised.
The room made its noise. Madame Wu's whistle went off like an aggrieved kettle. Somewhere above them, Sokka was already litigating fault.
"That was a trip," Aang said, from the floor, slightly winded. His hand still cradled at the back of Katara's head as if the danger might return.
Her palms were on his chest. "Are you hurt?"
"This floor was pretty gentle breaking our fall."
She got up and helped him on his feet, wincing exactly once when he thought she wasn't looking.
Practice resumed and the waltz went on as before, except her hand now knew the exact rhythm of his heartbeat.
Mai came in on the mid-July ferry with one black suitcase and the expression of a person attending her own extradition. That, Zuko assured everyone, was her holiday face; her school had let out, the Sozin house had eleven thousand square feet of nothing in it, and she had been persuaded to spend the back half of the summer filling some.
What was unmistakable was the change in Zuko himself when she walked down the gangway. The permanent knot of him loosened a full turn. The scar-side of his face pulled into what he probably believed was a restrained smile, and it was in fact the least restrained anyone had seen him since June.
The group absorbed her the way it absorbed everything, immediately and without pretense. Within a week, it was as if she had always been there, a still black-clad point around which Zuko visibly organized himself.
The bonfire was a club-adjacent tradition, meaning the staff kids started it and the member kids migrated to it. By ten o'clock, the beach was a constellation of blankets with somebody's speaker losing a war to the wind, so Aang grabbed a guitar.
Zuko and Mai were there, installed on one blanket at the firelight's outer edge, having a long quiet conversation that consisted of four sentences an hour and total mutual comprehension.
Katara knew about the guitar the way she knew most Aang facts, ambiently. He'd picked it up two winters ago. He was, it turned out, good, which should not have surprised her, since Aang's hands had never met an object they couldn't befriend. What she had never asked was why? Why two winters ago, why the guitar? She was about to receive the answer in front of forty people.
"Play something," Toph commanded, from her throne of stolen cushions.
"Which one?"
"Surprise us."
Aang glanced, very briefly, across the fire at Katara, a flick of gray eyes she would have missed if she'd blinked. Then he began to play, and it took her four bars to recognize it, because she had never heard it on strings before.
It was her mother's song.
It was not written by anyone for anyone; older than writing down, probably. Gran Gran had carried it up from the south and sung it to her daughter, and Kya had sung it in the kitchen of Katara's earliest memories, at the stove and by the sink, at the edge of Katara's bed with the hall light on.
After, when the house went quiet in the specific way houses go quiet, it was Gran Gran who had put it back in the air, deliberately, all through that first terrible winter, and then handed it to Katara like a task. Songs die of silence, little one. Not of grief. So Katara sang it while doing dishes and the laundry. It was the closest thing her mother had to a place where you could visit.
She sang it into voice memos all winter, whole verses of the song, sent late at night without letting herself think about it, only to Aang.
He had translated them. He had taken her mother's song into some room four hundred miles away and worked out the chords alone, voicing them so the melody sat exactly where her voice would sit, where Kya's voice had sat before hers, where Gran Gran's had sat before that. He was holding three generations of her family in his hands and he was being careful with them. She sat very still while this landed.
He played it into the fire without announcing what it was. Only two people on the whole beach knew.
Sokka recognized it. He stopped mid-sentence and looked at the fire with a small, strange smile.
And Katara listened and felt a tide take out a piece of earth she'd been standing on for years.
Then it ended, and the beach applauded and asked for things it knew the words to, and Aang laughed and obliged.
Within two songs he had a semicircle. Firelight loved him, finding the clean line of his jaw and his light ease. Half the semicircle had phones up; one of which belong to Onji, who sand along, filmed, and glowed at him with the entire uncomplicated candor of her nice face.
The flat cloud-feeling from the farmer's market came back over Katara, and this time it did not pass over and vanish. This time, it stubbornly parked.
She got up and walked to the water line, where the sand went hard and cold, and stood with the foam finding her ankles.
Katara heard Toph arrive by the particular fearless drag of her feet. Sand was her element the way water was Katara's.
"You left during his encore," Toph said. "Rude."
"Just needed some air."
"You're a mile of air on all sides. Try again." Toph stood beside her, hands jammed in her hoodie pocket, sightless eyes on the black horizon. She let a wave come and go before she spoke again. "You know what I like about this summer? Nothing counts. Me and Sokka, whatever that is, I already told him: don't make it a thing. He's got his fancy engineering city and I've got a one-way ticket and a list of countries my parents have preemptively forbidden, which is my itinerary now, obviously. Everybody's pointed somewhere else. So nothing counts." Another wave. "It's the last thing I'd want. Something that counts, something you'd have to carry onto a ferry in September. Can you imagine?" Her voice was flat as a skipped stone. "Anyway. That's me. You good, sweetness?"
Katara stood there in the foam and understood that she had just been handed a message in a bottle. "Yeah," she said. "I'm good."
"Uh-huh," said Toph, who could hear a heartbeat through sand, and dragged her feet back to the fire.
When Katara followed a few minutes later, the beach had quietly rearranged itself. The blanket at the firelight's edge was empty. Zuko and Mai had evaporated at some unmarked point, in the way of couples who never announce anything, and were, someone said vaguely, "walking." Then, within the half hour, it happened again. She turned from the fire to say something to Toph and found the cushion throne abandoned, and Sokka's spot beside the cooler abandoned. The two absences pointed in the same direction down the dark beach, and nobody remarked on it.
So this was the essence of the bonfire at midnight: two by two, out into the dark, everyone paired and unbothered and resolved, while at the fire, on opposite sides of it, the only two people left of the original five.
Aang continued to play requests for a semicircle of strangers as Katara watched him across the flames with a brand-new feeling she had nowhere to put.
They caught each other's eyes exactly once through the heat shimmer, and both looked away as the fire popped, the distance measuring three meters and one important unsaid thing.
Onji's video went up that night. Forty seconds of Aang and the guitar, firelight, the caption ember island is going to be SO boring next summer and a comment section filling steadily with hearts.
Katara watched it at one in the morning with the sound low. Then, she watched it again. It was not the video of her song; Onji had arrived at the fire too late for that one, which meant the song existed nowhere except in the air it had been played into and in the phones of nobody. It belonged only to the people who had been there for it. Katara found she was fiercely, disproportionately glad about this, glad in a way that had claws.
She put the phone on the nightstand and stared at the ceiling for a long time, conducting an inventory of the drawer, which turned out, when finally opened, to contain one single thing of enormous size.
Oh no, she thought, with great and honest clarity. And then, testing it, the way you press a bruise: oh.
Iroh's Ice Cream Corner sat two streets up from the square, in the same spot it had occupied since before any of them could reach the counter. Iroh ran it the way some men run monasteries: with clemency and unfiltered joy, dispensing flavors and counsel in equal scoops.
There was jasmine soft serve that tourists drove across the bridge for. There was a wall of photographs going back decades, and on it, if you knew where to look, a thirteen-year-old Zuko in the shop apron, scowling magnificently at a waffle iron.
Because that was the other thing about the Corner: Zuko had worked there, three summers running, in the years when the Sozin house was emptiest. Iroh was his uncle, technically, on the side of the family Ozai didn't speak to, which was precisely why the shop had become what it was to him. Whatever steadiness Zuko had, whatever part of him knew how to be patient with a fishing line or a difficult sister or himself, everyone understood from where it had been installed, and it smelled like fresh waffle cones.
This particular ice cream visit had special weight: today, Zuko was bringing Mai.
"Uncle," he said, at the counter, with the formality of a man presenting credentials. "This is Mai."
Iroh came around the counter entirely. He took Mai's hand in both of his, studied her face with open delight, and said, "So you are the reason my nephew's letters got longer."
While this unfolded, Aang ordered at the other cashier without consulting anyone: "And a waffle cone, half jasmine, half sea-salt, extra napkins."
It was Katara's order. It had been her order for exactly two summers; she had changed it two Augusts ago, on a whim, from the plain vanilla of her entire preceding childhood, and had said nothing about it to anyone. Yet eleven months later, Aang had it filed under permanent record, napkin count included. She stood there holding the cone he'd known to get her and told herself that best friends memorize things.
The group gathered the corner tables and the afternoon turned to sugar and noise.
Aang had barely turned to respond to something of Sokka's when a hundred and thirty pounds of white opportunism rose briefly onto hind legs and removed the top scoop of his cone with surgical tenderness. Subsequently, the structural integrity of the remainder gave, and the whole thing went to the floorboards, where Appa, gracious in victory, handled the cleanup too.
"Unbelievable," Aang said, to the dog, with no authority whatsoever. "We talked about this, Appa."
"Here." Katara held out her waffle cone, already leaning in the heat. She meant it the way the group had always done it, the way food had moved between the five of them their whole lives, bites and fries and corners of sandwiches in constant circulation. "Before it's soup."
But Aang didn't take the cone. He steadied it, his hand closing around hers on the waffle shell, warm over her knuckles, and leaned in and took a bite from where it stood, in her grip. He looked up at her while he did this.
The shop went on around them. Katara stood in the middle of all of it with her hand held inside his hand with his eyes on hers, gray and steady, and her entire vocabulary left through a side door. It was three seconds of some gravitational pull, soft and unapologetic, like a tide drawing her in.
She tore her eyes away first and stared at the flavor board with tremendous interest while the heat climbed her face.
"It's good," Aang said.
"You've tried the flavors before," she managed.
"It's really good," he repeated, and released her hand, and the world resumed its ordinary rotation.
Katara surrendered it wholesale two minutes later, having lost her appetite for mysterious reasons, and Aang had enough grace not to say anything about it at all.
The dress fitting was in the second week of August, in the shop on the mainland side of the square. Toph transformed it into performance art, demanding the saleswoman describe each gown in tactile and emotional detail ("this one has, I would say, an optimistic neckline") and rejecting them on criteria she invented in real time.
Katara tried on five gowns. The sixth was blue, a deep changing blue with a shimmer that moved through the fabric when she turned, like the bay at dusk when the light goes under the surface instead of on it.
She came out of the fitting room to show Toph, which was objectively an absurd exercise, and Toph said, "That one."
"You can't even see it."
"The lady's breathing changed and did yours. That's the one." Toph pointed with terrifying accuracy at Katara's reflection. "Can't wait to witness Twinkle Toes' reaction when sees you in it."
The Sozin mansion was the biggest on the island and the emptiest, a cliff-top arrangement of glass and dark stone that Ozai had built after the divorce, allegedly as a summer home. He was, of course, away on business for most if not all of the summer. The children had stopped explaining it years ago; the group had stopped asking around the same time, in the wordless way the group metabolized each other's damage.
In practice, it meant that Zuko and Azula spent every summer alone together in eleven thousand square feet, allied against the silence, and once a year, in mid-August, they filled it with every teenager on the island.
String lights over the terrace, music through speakers built into the stone, and Ty Lee doing handsprings the length of the infinity pool's edge to screams of encouragement. It was always a good party. It was, everyone kept saying without finishing the sentence, better than the last one before, and then the music would swell and the sentence would get to stay unfinished.
Katara found Aang, or Aang found her, or the party's current simply deposited them both, around 11 pm, on the dark lower terrace where the noise arrived pre-softened and the sea worked at the rocks below.
This had been happening since the bonfire. They kept washing up next to each other in quiet corners and then staying there, conducting whole conversations an inch closer than they used to stand, and neither of them had acknowledged the new physics, and everyone else had.
"Hiding?" she said.
"Recovering. Ty Lee taught me a handspring. Several of my organs are still up on the pool deck."
She laughed, and leaned on the balustrade beside him. For a while, neither of them said anything, which was new, and enormous. Their silences used to be rests between talk. Lately, they had become the main text.
"Katara." Aang had turned to face her.
The string lights from the upper terrace caught the edge of him, and he had that look, the one from the yard, the door open on the bright terrifying room, except this time, nobody was yelling and nobody was leaving. The door just stood there, open, warm light coming out of it.
"I keep meaning to tell you something, and I keep deciding the moment's wrong, and Gyatso says a man who waits for the perfect moment is really just hiding behind a schedule, so."
Her heart had gone very loud and very still at the same time, a wave standing up without breaking.
"So," she said.
He was close. When had he gotten close to her? His eyes went, briefly, helplessly, to her mouth, and hers, treacherous, answered in kind, and the whole summer leaned in on its hinges.
Which was exactly when the fireworks went off.
Azula's fireworks, an unannounced professional-grade barrage from the upper lawn, because Azula did not do parties by half. The lower terrace lit up white and gold. Forty people screamed with joy directly overhead.
Ty Lee's voice sailed down the stairs, "THERE you are, you're MISSING it, come UP," followed by Ty Lee in person, seizing one hand of each, towing them into the the crowd and noise.
The moment, the enormous open-doored moment, was left standing alone on the terrace below.
They didn't revisit that moment that night. Katara and Aang stood in the crowd watching the sky burn, an inch apart, not touching, and Katara felt the not-touching like a hand on her spine.
Across the lawn, Toph tilted her head toward them, reading heartbeats through the flagstones, and smiled like a woman watching her investment mature.
The group chat that night was all fireworks videos. Aang posted nothing, Katara likewise shared nothing. Between the two of them: a silence with a pulse in it, eight days long, that would last exactly until the bottom of a staircase.
A few weeks later, Zuko found Katara lingering by the restrooms, both of them escaping a few minutes of the final rehearsal dinner. They leaned against opposite walls in the easy silence of two people who had spent years being rumored about and had long ago found it funny.
"You know the summer everyone decided we were secretly in love," Zuko said. "The aunties. That whole thing?"
"The regatta. Someone saw you lend me your jacket."
"You were cold. I had a jacket." He shook his head. "Mai heard about it before I'd even told her your name. I had to explain that you were basically the sister Azula declined to be."
He glanced at her sideways. Zuko's sideways glance was a blunt instrument; he had never learned subtlety and had stopped apologizing for it.
"It was never going to be me. Everyone knew that - everyone's always known who it was going to be. I think even you know, now. You've got the same face I had the summer I figured out about Mai. You're bracing for a wave you can already see."
"Is it that obvious?"
"I watched you two at my party," Zuko said. "On the lower terrace, right before the fireworks. I was coming down to hide from my own guests and turned right back around. I'm sorry Azula's fireworks interrupted such an important moment." He let that land, unhurried. "Whatever it was that almost happened down there, finish it. Take it from someone who wasted two years being a coward about Mai. The waiting doesn't make it safer, it just allows more time to pass."
That same evening, Gyatso asked Katara to help him hang the last of the paper lanterns along the dock. This was a fiction, because the lanterns were already hung. She came anyway. He was sitting in the old cane chair at the dock's end with a pot of jasmine tea and two cups, so it had never really been about lanterns at all.
"Tomorrow you will be very busy being looked at," he said, pouring. "So I wanted you tonight, while you are simply Katara."
The tide was going out. The lanterns swayed in a line above them, warm cells against the dark.
"I never told you the real reason for all this," Gyatso said. "The sponsorship. I gave you the pretty reason at dinner, and it was true, but it was the lid, not the box." He held his cup with both hands."When Aang came to me, he was five years old, and he had lost everything a person can lose and still be alive. His parents were in the service, as I was, as my father was, all the way back; they were six weeks into a posting when the call came, from a country whose name I could not pronounce that morning and have never once mispronounced since.
This island put him back together. Your family put him back together. You, specifically. A little girl who bossed him into the water, and refused to let him be sad forever, and once, even saved his life." He let that sit for a moment. "I stood on a dock that day and watched a ten-year-old do the bravest thing I have ever seen a person do. I decided something about you then, and I have never once revised it." He smiled at the lanterns. "I have watched him love this place for twelve years. I have watched him love you for at least eight of them. No, don't do that, don't make the polite face. I'm old. Time spent on politeness is deducted directly from my account now."
Katara laughed, and it came out with water in it.
"He'll go in September," Gyatso said. "He should go. The sky is the right place for him; I've known it since he was small. Six generations of us crossed the world at ground level, smiling professionally the entire way. He will be the first of us to go over it instead. I consider this progress, and I have told the ancestors so, and they may take it up with me directly. But he is going to get on that ferry one way or the other, Katara, and there are two versions of that boy on that ferry. There's the one who leaves wondering. And there's the one who leaves knowing."
He looked at her then, and his eyes were the same eyes as always, merry and bottomless. "I have no instructions for you. I'd never presume. I only ask this: whatever it is you have to say to him, whatever it turns out to be, don't let the calendar say it first. That's all. An old man's whole speech."
Gyatso lifted the pot. "More tea? And then you'll tell me what this dress does when you turn, because Toph's description used the word 'weaponized' and I've been worried since."
Katara would keep the evening afterward in pieces, the way you keep any night that changes the address of your life. Her father was dressed up his one good suit, misty-eyed at the foot of the staircase with zero shame. Azula executed her promenade like a hostile takeover while Zuko, escorting, wore the face of a man defusing ordnance. Ty Lee applauded at everything and Mai applauded at nothing and enjoying it more. Sokka and Toph turned their waltz into a low-grade competitive event that Madame Wu pretended not to see. Gyatso sat in the sponsor's chair by the tall windows, lit gold.
And Aang at the bottom of the staircase.
She came down and watched it happen to him. That was the vertiginous thing. She had spent a summer covertly cataloguing her own symptoms, and now she got to see the condition from the outside, in real time, on the most legible face she knew. He looked up, and everything on it changed. The trained smile, the escort posture, the boy who chatted all throughout his breakfast, lunch, and dinner: gone, wiped. What remained was his awe-struck gaze, open and unarmored and years deep.
The ballroom noise slid off the sides of the world. From the fourth step she thought, with tranquil acceptance: oh. There's the architecture of us. I've misread the signs long enough.
Sokka, naturally, filmed the whole descent. The video would circulate through the group chat within the hour, mostly for the frame at 0:04 where Aang visibly forgot how elbows work. Toph would demand a full audio description and receive one from Mai, of all people, whose deadpan narration ("the boy has died. the girl is descending toward the body") would be quoted at weddings for years.
"You," Aang said, when she reached him, and appeared to run out of language entirely. "That dress. On you." He tried again. "The bay does that. At dusk."
"I know," Katara said. "That's why I chose it."
His bow tie was crooked. Sokka had tied it, over Aang's objections, invoking older-brother jurisdiction, and it sat a few degrees off true. Katara reached up and set it right without deciding to, the way her hands did things around him now. Aang stood absolutely still for the three seconds, the way you stand still for a bird. They were so close.
Of course, they danced beautifully together for the entire evening. They were, Madame Wu announced at her table in a whisper that carried, the only couple all season who had never once needed her direction.
The room turned past in colorful streaks. His hand was in its place on her waist, where it had spent a summer learning to be. Near the end of the last waltz, they came around the floor's long curve, and both of them in the same moment, caught sight of Gyatso by the window. He was watching them with his hands folded and his whole heart undisguised on his face.
The house afterward was complete with the sound of a party shedding its skin: showers running, Sokka complaining about his blister situation, hangers, laughter, and closed doors.
Katara lay in the dark in her pajamas for eleven minutes, listening to the house go quiet. Her phone lit once on the nightstand: a second group chat, one she had never seen before, to which someone had finally, treacherously, added her. Its name was a betting term; Its member list was everyone she loved. She didn't open it. Some things had a place, and the place wasn't a screen.
She left the phone on the bed and got up to look out her window.
He was at the end of the dock. Just as she knew he would be.
He was in pajamas too, the ancient plaid ones, sitting under the paper lanterns with his knees up. Appa lay along the end of the dock behind him like snowdrift. Beside Aang on the plank was a pebble cairn, three high, and on top of it, absurd and perfect, a churro wrapped in a napkin, which Appa was watching with the fixed dignity of a dog who has been told no once and is choosing, for now, to honor it.
"Replacement," Aang said. "For the other one. I've been holding it since the drive-in. Metaphorically. This specific one is from tonight's dessert table."
She sat down beside him. The tide was full beneath them, the highest it had been all month, black and silver and patient. Down the dock, the lantern light lay on the water in long unstable coins.
"September 2nd," Katara said.
Aang went still.
"You think I haven't been counting the days," she said. Her heart was going like halyards in a squall, hardware ringing against the mast of her. She kept on. "Someone told me there are two ways you can get on that ferry. And I realized tonight, on the staircase, watching your entire face transform, that there are also two ways I can watch you go."
He had turned to look at her somewhere in the middle of that. The lantern light moved on his face, on the gray eyes that had been aimed at her like good news since she was six years old.
"Katara," he said carefully, like a man setting the last pebble on a very tall cairn, "what happened on the staircase?"
"You know what happened on the staircase. Sokka filmed it. There's a whole betting pool, Aang."
"I know about that," he said, and the grin was arriving now, breaking through the carefulness like sun through a marine layer. "I bet against myself, four years ago. Fifty bucks on 'never, are you kidding, she thinks of him as family.'"
"You're about to lose fifty dollars."
"Best money I ever-" he began, and she kissed him.
It was clumsy for exactly one second, the second it took two people who could waltz blind to realize this too was a thing their reflexes had been rehearsing for years. Then it wasn't clumsy at all. His hand came up to cup her face as Katara adjusted her lips slightly to fit into the warmth of his mouth.
The tide moved under the dock. Somewhere behind them, in the dark house, a window that had the curtains open the whole time was quietly, tactfully shut. Neither of them heard the cries of victory.
Eventually, they did hear the sound of a churro being eaten, at the far end of the dock, by a large white dog with impeccable timing who had correctly judged that no one was going to stop him now.
"Worth the wait," Aang said, against her cheek.
By morning, Toph would collect her winnings with the tranquility of a woman who had never doubted, and the group chat would be renamed, by Sokka, dock rats: mission accomplished (final name, do not change).
September 2nd was clear and golden, one of those mornings the island produces at the end of the season like an apology.
They had agreed to do the goodbye in two parts: the dock at dawn was theirs; the ferry landing at nine, with everyone, was everyone's farewell.
She came out over the water and he was there in the early light, duffel already by the house door, Appa lying across his feet like a last-ditch legal injunction. She sat down beside him and put a small cloth bundle on the plank between them, on the exact spot where a cairn had stood twice. Aang looked at it, then reached into his jacket and set a small cloth bundle beside hers.
They stared at the two bundles. Then at each other.
"You first," they both said, and then, "no, you," and then Appa sighed like a collapsing tent, and they laughed. They opened the bundles at the same time, which was somehow the correct ruling.
Hers, to him: a braided bracelet, flat and close-woven the way Gran Gran had taught her, in Water Tribe blue, and worked through the center of it a single thread of deep changing blue that shimmered when it turned. He saw what it was almost at once.
"That's the dress."
"One thread to always connect us. It's regulation-safe, I checked the academy handbook, section four, 'plain wristbands permitted.'"
His, to her: a small pendant on a waxed cord. A fish, carved in pale driftwood, no longer than her thumbnail, its body curved mid-turn the way a fish curves at the exact moment it's released, when it realizes it has its life back and hasn't finished being surprised. The carving was patient, careful work, hours and hours of it, sanded to the softness of something handled.
"You made this."
"All summer. I took Toph's advice and got a hobby? Sokka thought I'd taken up whittling as a personality and honestly I let him think it." He turned it over in her palm with one finger. "It's the moment they go back in the water. It's my favorite thing that happens on the whole lake, and nobody ever sees it but me, so." He shrugged. "Now you have one that will always stay."
The ferry landing at nine was as scheduled. Toph punched Aang's arm at a strength she billed as affection. Sokka's hug lifted him off the ground and included several claims about visiting that were financially unsound and completely sincere. Zuko shook his hand, then abandoned the handshake mid-execution and hugged him, briefly and gruffly, and walked away before it could be discussed. Hakoda shook Aang’s hand too before giving him a paternal hug. And finally, Gyatso held his grandson's face in both hands and said something in the old language, three words, that Aang would not translate for anyone until the following summer.
Appa was not permitted past the gangway. This had been explained to him. He sat at the exact legal limit of the gangway with the dignity of a dog observing an unjust law under formal protest, and howled once, briefly, when the horn went. Then, he leaned his entire weight against Katara's legs for the rest of it, which was either him comforting her or the other way around, and that did not need to be settled.
The ferry pulled out of the island. Aang stood at the stern rail, getting smaller, with one hand up, the bracelet on the wrist of it. Katara stood between Gyatso and a hundred and thirty pounds of grieving dog with a driftwood fish at her throat, and watched the water widen for Aang's journey.
The first letter arrived on the eleventh, at the mainland house, in an envelope so thoroughly stamped it looked like it had bribed its way through customs.
The handwriting was, true to Aang form, terrible. She read it at the kitchen table with a cup of Gran Gran's tea going cold beside the open anatomy and physiology textbook. Beside her, Momo, who wintered with the Waters, was asleep.
She read all six pages, front and back. It contained: a diagram of his dorm room with the bed labeled bed and the window labeled sky access; a full accounting of the phone-locker ceremony, which he described as "a funeral, weekly"; confirmation that the bracelet had survived uniform inspection, the officer having examined it for a long moment while Aang stood at attention "sweating like the guilty," before ruling it a plain wristband, section four, permitted; Aang reported that he had never respected a document more than the handbook in that moment.
He asked about updates on Appa and Gyatso. Appa was holding down the gray house with Gyatso, and Gyatso's flip phone produced photographs Aang described as "two white pixels and a feeling." There was also a report that he had played her song for exactly no one (and intended to keep it that way) but he practiced in the stairwell on Tuesdays because the stairwell had the acoustics, and a second-year had asked what it was... He had said, it's my girlfriend's family's, and then had to sit down on the stairs for a minute because of how the sentence felt in his mouth.
It contained, at the end, below the signature, a postscript.
P.S. Forty-two days until the October ferry.
P.P.S. And then I get to kiss you again, my forever girl.
Katara read it twice, one hand at her throat, thumb moving over a small driftwood fish caught forever in the moment of being given back. Then she went upstairs, took out paper, and uncapped a pen, and sat for a while looking at the blankness the way you look at open water before a long swim you already know you can make.
Dear Aang, she wrote. And was, entirely, where her feet were.