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The lease agreement sat between them on the kitchen table. Katara had signed her half an hour ago. Aang's brush hovered over the paper, and she watched the ink gather at the tip, threatening to drop.
"You don't have to do it tonight," she said.
"I'll be in the Fire Nation for six weeks." The brush met paper. "If I don't do this tonight, the renewal lapses, and you'll be renegotiating for a new clinic space."
He signed, on the guarantor's line this time, underneath her name instead of beside it. The brush made a soft scratching sound that felt louder than it should have.
The clinic was hers now, officially, and so was the apartment above it. The lease sat in her name alone with his signature below it as surety, which was, she thought, their whole arrangement if you stood far enough back: her life, in her name, and him underwriting it from somewhere else.
Aang would keep his room on Air Temple Island. That had been the setup in practice for over a year anyway, ever since the earthquake relief in Omashu bled into the trade negotiations in the Earth Kingdom interior, which bled into whatever was next. There was always something the Avatar needed to tend to.
She had fought it. That was the part people would get wrong later, when the story got told at a distance: they would claim she had let it drift, but she had never let anything drift in her life.
Katara had closed the clinic for a season and traveled with him, and spent it being politely useless in a dozen provincial capitals while her patients waited on Harbor Street. They had argued about it the way they had argued as teenagers, at full volume and with total commitment. They argued in Ba Sing Se in front of the embassy staff, in Omashu in front of Bumi's statue, and once at two hundred feet over the Mo Ce Sea on Appa's back, where neither of them could storm out and both of them tried anyway.
She had fought right up until the morning she woke in the apartment above the clinic and realized she had stopped waiting up for the sky bison's shadow to cross her window. Worse, she had stopped resenting that she'd stopped. The anger she could have lived with; its absence was the thing that finally scared her.
Katara had never once in her life run out of fight before, and she did not know what to do with a problem that could not be beaten by refusing to lose.
"I keep thinking," Aang said, and then stopped.
He was twenty-one and there were moments, like this one, when she could still see the twelve-year-old in him, the boy who had looked up at her after a frozen slumber and asked to go penguin sledding.
"I keep thinking that if I loved you less, this would be easier. I could just let the visits get further apart and pretend it was fine."
"It is fine," Katara said. "That's the problem. We're fine. We're fine the way Sokka and I are fine. You come home and I'm happy to see you and we catch up on three months of each other's lives and then you leave and I go back to mine."
She heard her own voice crack on the last word and hated it. "I don't want to catch up with you, Aang. I wanted to live with you. And I can't ask you to stop being the Avatar; you can't ask me to close the clinic and follow you around the world holding your bag. Neither of us is going to ask, so."
"So," he agreed.
They had had this conversation before, twice, at a volume the neighbors could have reported on. This was the quiet version. The quiet, more than anything either of them said, was how they both knew it was true and final.
They sat with it. Outside, a satomobile rattled past on the wet street, and somewhere in the harbor a ferry horn sounded, low and patient.
"I don't want to lose you," Aang said finally.
"You won't. That's the one thing I'm sure of." Katara reached across the table and took his hand. For a while, they just held on, the way people do at the rail of a ship pulling away from shore. "You're my family. You have been since I was fourteen. That part doesn't end."
He stood and she followed; they met at the corner of the table in an embrace that was meant to be the friendly kind. Her arms went around his neck while his hand found the small of her back the way they had a thousand times.
When Katara drew back just far enough to look at him, his eyes went to her mouth. She watched Aang lean in a fraction, the old road so familiar that neither of them needed light to walk it. Then she saw him stop himself, with an effort that moved through his whole frame like a bent bow easing slowly back to rest.
Whatever a kiss would have said in that moment, it would have been an argument, and they had finished arguing.
The moment passed. She felt it pass, the way you feel a wave decide against breaking. She turned her face slightly away from him, toward the dark window, before the tears could finish arriving. At that moment, he was kind enough (or wrecked enough) to pretend he hadn't seen them start.
Aang flew back to the island that night. Katara watched from the window after all, one last time, the pale shape of Appa climbing over the bay. Then she went downstairs and reorganized the entire supply room until four in the morning, because her hands needed something to do to keep from shaking.
For a month afterward, Katara kept catching herself setting out two cups. She never told anyone that. And she did not notice the morning she finally stopped, which was somehow the worst part of all of it.
The invitation had arrived on official Kyoshi Warrior stationery, which meant Suki had written it, but the margins were crowded with Sokka's handwriting. His contributions included a hand-drawn map of the island with an arrow labeled ceremony here pointing at the bay, along with three separate reminders that the toast speech should be "funny but also make people cry, in that order."
A postscript read: Katara, you're maid of honor, this is not a request, love you, bring the good tea.
She brought the good tea.
The village had changed since the war but the essence of it remained the same. There were more houses now, and a proper dock where the ferry from the mainland came in twice a week. The statue of Kyoshi had been repainted so recently that the gold leaf still caught fire in the afternoon sun. Children ran along the waterline the way children always had. One of them recognized her before her boots hit the dock, and by the time she reached the village gate, she had acquired an honor guard of seven-year-olds arguing about whether she or the Avatar was going to arrive first.
She was not the first to arrive, as it turned out. Appa was already grazing on the hill above the village, unmistakable and enormous, shedding contentedly into the wind. She had barely cleared the gate when something small and winged detached from the village rooftops, crossed the square, and hit her shoulder at speed. It chirped indignantly and patted her cheek with both paws, as if performing an inspection for damages accrued in his absence. Momo was grayer around the muzzle now, and he had grown, in his old age, more opinionated rather than less.
"Hello, you," Katara said, scratching the spot behind his left ear that had been his spot since the South Pole.
The lemur made a low churring sound and draped himself around her neck like a scarf that had decided the matter was settled.
Then, she was greeted by the bride herself, who was waiting for her arrival. “Welcome back to the island, Katara!” She hugged her future sister-in-law. Suki was radiant in the way of a woman who had planned a wedding down to the minute and then decided not to care whether any of it went to plan.
"He got in yesterday," Suki explained, glancing up at Appa from their place. "Fair warning, he brought about a dozen Air Acolytes. They set up a tent and there’s a schedule of some kind. Sokka is furious that the Avatar's entourage is better organized than his groomsmen."
"They're not an entourage," came a voice from the path above them.
And there he was, coming down the hill with his sleeves rolled and a crate of vegetables balanced on one shoulder (he had already found a way to make himself useful in someone else's village).
"They're volunteers. I told them a wedding wasn't an Avatar function and they still insisted. Suki, what was I supposed to do?"
He set the crate down. There was a beat, one that everyone present pretended not to notice. Momo, who had survived a hundred years of history by knowing exactly when a perch was about to become a situation, stepped off Katara's shoulder into the air and glided over to Suki with the grace of a creature discreetly excusing itself.
Katara crossed the distance and hugged Aang. He responded in kind, wrapping her up the way he always had, chin resting on top of her head.
He breathed in at the crown of her head, an airbender's breath, slow and complete. She felt the words leave him before he could audit them, murmured into her hair. "Snow and jasmine. Still the same."
There was a pause with a great deal happening inside it. The jasmine she could account for; it lived in every seam of the clinic, in the herb cabinet and the linen and, apparently, in her. Where he was still finding snow after ten years off the ice, she had no idea, and she did not trust herself to ask. She felt him go carefully still against her, the way he did when a treaty session took a wrong turn and he was recalculating his position.
"Hi, Katara," he added, in the voice of a diplomat.
"Hi, Aang." She gave him the mercy of the joke, because one of them had to be able to breathe. "You look well. Taller, for sure."
"I've been eating better. One of the acolytes is a chef. I'll ask him to make you something if you want. Ever try onion banana juice?"
Over his shoulder, Katara could see Suki watching them with an expression of badly concealed patience, like a fisherman who has felt the line twitch and knows better than to yank it.
That evening, the village hall filled with wedding party and warriors and half of Kyoshi for the welcome feast.
A village auntie came around with the vegetarian tray, which on Kyoshi Island meant pickled sea prunes, kelp rolls, and a bowl of fish-brined radish that was vegetarian in spirit only. Katara saw the polite disaster forming on Aang's face from a few chairs away and got there first.
"Auntie, no, not those. He's vegetarian." She turned the tray gently in the woman's hands. "He won't touch sea prunes, and anything pickled in fish brine counts as fish. Please bring him the mango rice, and a bowl of the braised cabbage if there's any left, he would eat cabbage straight off the back of a cart. And if there are any of those egg custard tarts from this afternoon, hide two for him or he'll be tragic about it all week."
"I would not be tragic," Aang said.
"Gaoling Gala ring any bells?"
"That was one time, and the tart had been promised to me."
The auntie, delighted, returned with mango rice, braised cabbage, and three tarts (one of which Momo stole off the table within the minute).
Aang made short work of the second tart, and a fleck of custard survived at the corner of his jaw. Katara was three sentences into a conversation with a Kyoshi elder when her hand moved on its own. A thin ribbon of water lifted out of her glass, crossed the table, and wiped the fleck away with the brisk efficiency of a gesture performed numerous times between the ages of fourteen and twenty. The ribbon was back in the glass before she caught up with herself.
"Oh," she said. "Sorry. Habit."
"I don't mind," Aang said.
He did not look at all sorry to have been tidied. He looked like a man who had spent three years being handed things by strangers and had just remembered what it was to be looked after by someone who did it without thinking. His voice came out warmer than the table strictly required.
"Thanks, Katara."
He gazed at her across the table for another moment, several seconds too long to not mean anything. Four seats down, Toph muttered something into her cup that made Zuko choke on his tea.
Weddings on Kyoshi Island took a week, by tradition. There were feasts to prepare, dances to relearn, a ceremonial spar between the wedding party and the Kyoshi Warriors. Sokka had been training for in secret for four months and lost in under a minute.
Zuko had actually beaten everyone to the island, arriving two days early with a modest Fire Nation escort and an immodest gift. He spent the night of the welcome feast being taught a Water Tribe drinking song by Sokka and getting every third word wrong on purpose. Toph had come in on the morning ferry ahead of Katara's, complained about the ship, the sand, and the humidity. Then she held Suki's hands and said something quiet that made Suki cry, and refused to repeat it to anyone.
Katara and Aang fell into orbit around each other in the group setting, close but never quite touching. They were good at it now, or they had been, before this week started sanding the practice off them.
He asked about the clinic and meant it; she had trained two waterbending healers now, and a third was starting in the fall. He listened with his whole face the way no one else ever quite did. She asked about the new air temple site and he talked for twenty minutes with his hands, sketching wind currents in the air. He stopped himself twice to say sorry, I'm going on, and both times she said no, keep going, and meant it.
The acolytes, meanwhile, had figured out who she was within an hour of her arrival, and the figuring out happened in two distinct ways.
Most of them treated her like a chapter of scripture that had unexpectedly gotten off a ferry. She was Master Katara of the Southern Water Tribe, who had found the Avatar in the ice, who had brought him back from the dead over Ba Sing Se, and who appeared in his teachings so often that quoting him meant quoting her secondhand.
A boy of about nineteen worked up the courage on the second day to recite one of Aang's standard lessons back to her, the one about how healing and fighting are the same water moved by different intentions.
He finished by saying, reverently, "He always says a healer taught him that," and Katara said, "She did, and she also dumped him in a river once for peeking at her scrolls." The boy looked like he had witnessed a religious event.
The chef acolyte had her tea ready the next morning, stewed dark with the leaves left in, the way Gran-Gran made it. Under mild questioning, he admitted that the Avatar had once described her tea preferences to the entire kitchen tent, apropos of nothing, and that he had simply retained the information in case it ever became relevant.
And then there was Yee-Li, who ran Aang's schedule with the devotion of a lieutenant and the handwriting of a court scribe. She was, with Katara particularly, impeccably, arctically polite. She said Master Katara with every correct honorific and none of the warmth, and she informed her twice on the first day that the Avatar's afternoon was fully committed. On the morning of the garland climb, she developed a sudden pressing schedule conflict that would, regrettably, require Avatar Aang's presence elsewhere, a conflict Suki resolved by looking at her.
Katara recognized the condition immediately and could not even summon irritation about it. She had been fifteen once, on this exact island, watching a crowd of girls in silk fan over a boy with an arrow on his head. Back then, she had informed anyone who would listen that she was not jealous, in a voice that had convinced no one, least of all herself. The universe, she reflected, keeps immaculate books.
"The scheduling one is in love with him," Toph said that evening, without preamble, falling into step beside her.
"I know."
"He doesn't."
"He never does," Katara said. "There were girls on this island who fed him dessert off their plates when he was twelve and he thought they were being generous."
The yearning ran mutually, and was concealed with very unequal skill.
Zuko took the measure of it during one afternoon when, mid-conversation about southern trade routes, Katara laughed at something Suki said across the room. Aang lost his own sentence wholesale, in the middle of a word.
The Fire Lord waited. The laugh faded. Aang blinked at him like a man surfacing from deep water.
"Tariffs," Zuko fibbed. "You were telling me something about tariffs."
"Right. Yes. Where was I?"
"Nowhere near tariffs," Zuko said. "For three days now."
The acolytes had noticed something as well, and were too disciplined to mention it. Their teacher, who could feel a change in the wind before it arrived, always seemed to know exactly where in a crowded square Master Katara was standing, and was very often, by some accident of posture, facing her.
Aang's own habits ran the other direction of being discreet: entirely public, and entirely unrepentant. The wind around Katara was unusually helpful that week. When she carried the washing basket across the square, a helpful gust took half its weight. When she hauled a sack of potatoes up from the feast cellar, it arrived at the top of the stairs mysteriously lighter than it had left the bottom. Breezes came out of perfectly still afternoons to lift her hair loops and set them down again, gently, like someone turning the pages of a favorite book. She eventually stopped pretending not to notice.
"Your weather is following me around," she told him, in front of half the wedding party.
"The wind just likes you," Aang said, with the serene dishonesty of a man who was, for all practical purposes, the wind.
He did not apologize then or afterward, and behind him a second sack of potatoes drifted up the cellar stairs like a witness declining to testify.
What they had missed about each other, they mostly did not say. It showed anyway.
On the second morning, Sokka limped into the healing hut after his minute-long defeat at the hands of the Kyoshi Warriors. Katara sat him down, rolled her sleeves, and scolded him through the entire treatment in the old cadence: hold still, you lunged with your shoulder wide open, you are a grown man, honestly.
Aang arrived in the doorway with a basket of bandages nobody had asked for and did not come further in. The water glowed under her hands. Two strands had escaped her hair loops and she was humming under the lecture without knowing she did it, the way she had hummed over every burn and sprain from the South Pole to the Fire Nation throne room.
He stood there holding his bandages and smiled like a man standing in front of a fire in midwinter. Suki, passing behind him, patted him once on the shoulder and kept walking.
Katara's came at dusk the next day, when she climbed the hill to return a borrowed kettle and found the village children mobbing Aang for air scooter rides. He was taking them up two at a time, narrating every flight like a ferry captain, and thanking each child by name for choosing to fly with him. He laughed before his own jokes finished, which had driven her quietly mad at twenty and had turned out, at twenty-six, to be one of the things the apartment above the clinic was too quiet without. She stood at the fence for a long while, smiling at nothing anyone could have pointed to.
The trouble with the laughing was that she knew, with a healer's anatomical precision, exactly what it turned into up close. She had spent years of her life kissing that laugh. It had a habit of arriving mid-kiss and breaking the seal of it, so that half her memories of kissing Aang were really moments of him grinning against her mouth, like the whole enterprise delighted him too much to conduct it properly.
She was, she realized, standing at a threshold, holding a kettle, staring at a grown man's mouth.
Toph found her there eventually, took one reading of the situation, and, mercifully, for once, said nothing at all. Katara went back down the hill and inventoried the herb tins twice, alphabetically, and then a third time by ailment.
It did not help in the slightest.
Kyoshi Island had its own versions of the send-off rites. The warriors took Suki for theirs, a private affair with no outsiders and no explanations; she was returned at dawn looking serene and faintly singed, and never spoke of it. Sokka was offered the traditional groom's night of drinking with the village men and declined, on the grounds that every one of his best friends was also the bride's. He opted instead for one more outing with all of them.
Suki proposed the warriors' zipline course: eight lines strung platform to platform through the interior jungle, high over the green, with the sea nowhere in sight.
While the villagers honored Sokka's refusal of a night out drinking, they did insist on going into the surf that morning before the course opened. Katara had grown up around men in cold water. She had spent a decade patching, healing, and lecturing the specific torsos presently on display. She noted Zuko's, which was, objectively, a monument to Fire Nation calisthenics, with the complete clinical indifference of a physician reviewing a chart. Scar tissue mobile, shoulder fully recovered. Next!
Then Aang came up out of a wave, laughing at something Sokka had done wrong, and hauled himself onto the rocks with one arm. The air felt suddenly warmer.
He had been a reed of a boy and then a wand of a teenager, and at some point in the last three years, without filing any paperwork with her whatsoever, he had become this. A long, carved economy of a man, the arrow running down between his shoulder blades, everything in him built the way airbenders were built, for speed rather than show…
She was aware that she was staring with the same distant awareness with which one notices a kettle boiling over. Heat arrived in her face with an efficiency her own bending would have envied.
She turned and became fascinated by the horizon, which was empty.
"Chart's on fire, huh," said Toph, who could not see the horizon, the ocean, or the torso, but had excellent access to Katara's pulse.
"I will drown you where you stand."
They went inland after that, up into the green. Katara noticed the part about the sea while they were climbing the first tower, and filed it away as a coincidence.
She was last across the long line, the one that sagged over the ravine, and was most of the way through congratulating herself on her form when the trolley seized. It did not slow; it seized, with a small metallic cough, forty feet short of the platform.
Below her, hung a canopy of nothing she could bend. There was no stream, no rain in the sky, and the water in her waterskin was enough to discipline a houseplant.
"I'm fine," she called, because it was important to establish that first.
"You're stuck," Toph called back from the platform, sounding pleased. "I can hear the pulley. It's dead. It's so dead."
"I can shimmy the line."
"It's forty feet and you're wearing borrowed gloves," Suki said, in the reasonable voice of a woman whose equipment failed with suspicious precision. "Or, alternatively, we happen to have brought the one person alive who commutes by air."
There was theater then on the far platform: Sokka cupping his hands to announce that the Avatar's services had been formally requested, Zuko muttering something about time, and the approach of another body on the line.
Aang pulled up beside her in a soft stall, hanging on the air the way other people lean on doorframes. "Ma'am. We've had reports of a stranded master waterbender."
Relenting to his humor, she said, "Took you long enough, Avatar."
"There was a headwind." He was grinning, and under the grin was something more careful, a question his hands were already asking as he unclipped her from the dead trolley. "Hold on to me?"
"If you drop me," she said, transferring her arms around his neck, "Toph inherits the clinic."
"Noted." He settled his arm around her waist with a thoroughness that had nothing to do with safety. Something flickered at the corner of his mouth, the particular flicker she had spent ten years learning to suspect. Then, with the serenity of a man committing a crime, he unclipped his own trolley.
They dropped. The free-fall lasted perhaps half a second, measured, she would understand afterward, to the exact length required for her to grab him and not one heartbeat longer. It accomplished precisely what it was engineered to accomplish: her arms locked around his neck, her face pressed into his shoulder, and whatever she said into his collar was not repeatable during a wedding week.
Then the air caught them. It rose under his feet in a slow spinning column, steady as a staircase, and he stood on it the way other people stand on solid ground. With both arms entirely free, one under her knees and one at her back, Aang carried her over the ravine like something precious in a story while the wind supported them.
"You did that on purpose," she said, once she had reassembled her dignity.
"Did I?”
Aang took the long way around the ravine, an indefensible route on a column of wind that could have gone straight. Katara, who navigated by the sun out of lifelong habit and knew exactly what he was doing, didn't protest to it.
His heart was beating strongly under her ear, and hers was answering.
He set her down on the next platform gently, letting her feet find the boards before he let go, and did not quite let go even then. His hand stayed at her back a moment past necessity while she pretended to check her harness.
"My hero," she said dryly.
"All part of the service," he said.
Suki looked at the dead pulley in her hand, the one she had absolutely not filed halfway through the night before, and said, mildly, "Equipment failure. Terrible luck. Who's next?"
Two nights before the wedding, the whole group drifted down to the beach after dinner for a bonfire. Driftwood was stacked high, chestnuts and sweet potatoes were buried in the coals, and the tide was coming in silver under the moon. That was when Sokka stepped in it.
"Oh, that reminds me," he said, gesturing with a half-peeled sweet potato. "Katara, did you ever write Haru back about the stonework for the clinic? Because if that's weird now, since the spring, I can ask him. He doesn't hate me."
The fire popped. A breeze came off the water that had not been there a moment before, sharp enough to gutter the flames sideways. Everyone around the circle watched Aang become very interested in the coals. His jaw did one small thing and then undid it.
"It's not weird," Katara said evenly. "It ended fine. We're friends."
"Haru's a good man," Aang said, and the remarkable part was that by the second word he meant it again; you could hear the effort land and then dissolve. "He rebuilt half of Senlin province with his own hands. If he's doing your stonework, it'll outlast the city." He smiled, and it was a real smile, arriving perhaps a half-second later than his smiles usually did. "You should write him to ask."
"Thank you," Katara said, "for the professional reference."
"Any time."
Toph tilted her head at the pair of them like someone listening to two drums fall out of rhythm, said, to no one, "Unbelievable," and went back to cracking chestnuts.
Suki, who had been watching the fire with the expression of a general reviewing terrain, chose that moment to advance. "Well, since Sokka's already opened the subject with a shovel. Katara. Is there anyone? It's been since the spring."
"There's Kanto," Toph piped up immediately.
"There is no Kanto," Katara said.
"He's her adjunct at the clinic," Toph informed the circle. "Tall. Deep and articulate manner of speech. Objectively gorgeous. And I'm saying that as someone working off bone structure through a wooden floor, so you know it's not the face doing the work."
"He's terrified of me."
"Everyone worth anything is terrified of you. That's not a disqualification, it's a screening process."
Across the fire, Aang had gone very still over his tea, and the flames leaned, just slightly, toward the sea.
"There's no one," Katara insisted. "The clinic keeps me busy. And if you find him that compelling, Toph, ask him to dinner yourself! He's on shift every day but except for the weekends."
"Maybe I will," Toph said, filing it somewhere.
Sokka, emboldened by surviving his earlier gaffe, swung the shovel the other way. "What about you, buddy? Biggest fan club in the four nations. Acolytes weeping over your tart preferences. You ever graduate from the bossy types? You know the ones. Know-it-all's. Confiscate your dessert, lecture you about sleeping, throw you in a river for reading their scrolls."
The fire crackled. Everyone waited for the joke, because Aang always had the joke; it was one of his diplomatic instruments, well maintained and always within reach.
"No," Aang said, to the fire, and did not reach for it. "Still my type."
Nobody said anything for a moment. Katara became extremely interested in the surface of her tea.
Later, when the fire had burned down and people had drifted, Toph dropped onto the log beside Katara. "You know I can feel your heartbeat, right. I just want you to know that I know."
"Toph."
"And that thing just now, when Snoozles brought up Rocky? Twinkletoes spiked so hard I thought we were having a tremor. Then he complimented the guy's masonry. Who does that?"
"He does that," Katara said. "He's always done that."
"Yeah," Toph said, quieter than usual. "It's the most annoying thing about him. And since we're out here being honest under the moon or whatever, here's something you maybe don't know, because everybody was very careful not to tell you.
After you two ended it, he disappeared. Zuko couldn't get him to a summit for the better part of a year. He was doing glacier surveys nobody commissioned and blessing fishing fleets at the edge of the map. Everyone back home kept saying how well you were both handling it." She cracked a chestnut. "One of you handled it. The other one flew from it."
That night, in the guest house, Katara lay awake listening to the acolytes' evening chant drift down from the hill, and discovered she could pick one voice out of the dozen without trying. She fell asleep doing it.
Up on the hill, long after the chant had ended, the Avatar sat outside his tent facing the village, ostensibly meditating, with his eyes open.
The messenger hawk found the island the next morning.
It came down out of a clear sky onto Aang's shoulder with the terrible ordinariness of all its predecessors, and the whole breakfast table watched him read the scroll. A river had jumped its banks in the western Earth Kingdom. Two towns were cut off, and the provincial governor was asking, in the polite language such letters always used, for immediate aid, from the only person these letters were ever addressed to.
Katara knew the posture before he finished the first line. Shoulders settling under an old weight, thumb moving to the edge of the page, the apology already assembling itself somewhere behind his eyes. She had watched that posture across a breakfast table for years, and her body remembered the drill even now: brace, smile, help him pack, wave from the dock, reorganize a supply room at four in the morning.
"I'll get your maps," she said. Her voice came out level and pleasant and completely dead, and she was gone from the table before anyone could see her face.
She was in the healing hut rolling bandages with unnecessary violence when the numbness wore off enough to hurt. It was not even his fault. That was the oldest part of the ache. Somewhere, people were standing on rooftops watching the water rise, and they needed him more than a wedding did, more than she did. The logic had never once been wrong in ten years, and she had never once stopped hating it.
The door opened. She did not turn around.
"Your escort ship leaves within the hour, I imagine," she said. "Tell Sokka and Suki before you go. Don't leave a note. Tell them yourself."
"The ship left ten minutes ago," Aang said. "It's Zuko's. He offered it before I could ask. Jinpa and Ryo are aboard with my seal and full authority. The letter I sent with them says that the Avatar's healers and engineers are coming and does not state the Avatar is coming." He paused. "I'm not going, Katara."
The bandage stopped in her hands.
"You're always going." She said it to the shelf in front of her, and it came out smaller than she meant it to. "It's fine. It's who you are. I have never once asked you not to."
"I know you haven't." His voice stayed where it was, quiet, by the door. "That's why I get to be the one who says it. Not this week."
She did turn around then, and whatever was on her face made him look, briefly, as though the letter had hit him after all. No other words were exchanged.
Outside, the world carried on being the world, one room over from where it had just quietly changed.
The rest of the day was given over to errands, among them the rehearsal of the processional, which was where the noticing evened its own score. His was worse, because there was a witness with a mouth.
The maid of honor walked the platform steps ahead of him, formal robes traded that afternoon for the island's practical wrap, and the wrap sat interestingly. Katara climbed the steps, and the line of her, the long legs and the geometry above them that his eyes traced from heel to hip with the thoroughness of a cartographer mapping a coastline he once held claim to, was suddenly the only architecture on Kyoshi Island.
"Buddy," said Sokka, directly into his ear.
Aang snapped out of his trance.
"That's my sister," Sokka continued, in the mild, pleasant tone of a man who had been waiting years for this exact leverage.
"I was checking the steps," Aang said. "For stability."
"The steps."
"It's a safety concern."
"Uh huh." Sokka patted him on the shoulder, twice, with terrible warmth. "Three years, huh, airhead."
Aang exhaled a very old breath. "Three years," he agreed, and gave up the defense entirely.
It was nearly dusk when Aang found her on the guest house porch, sorting dried herbs back into their tins. He had his hands behind his back, his ears already going pink, with an expression she had not seen on him in three years, the one he wore before negotiations he actually cared about.
"So," he began, clearing his throat. "I had an order I was going to say this in."
"Aang?"
"I made you something." He produced it from behind his back too fast, and it slipped through his fingers. He caught it on a small hiccup of air an inch above the porch boards, where it hovered, rotating gently, while they both looked at it. "It does that," he said. "I mean, I do that. Here."
It was a bison whistle, carved from island cedar, small enough to close a fist around, sanded smooth everywhere except one place on the flank where the knife had slipped.
She turned it over in her palm. She was a healer, and she had been watching his hands all week the way she watched everyone's hands; she had catalogued the nicks on his thumb days ago and assigned them, wrongly, to wedding chores.
"There was a custom," Aang said, to the porch rail rather than to her, having apparently recovered the order of things. "At the temples. Gyatso told me about it when I was ten. When one of my people wanted to say something they weren't ready to say out loud, they didn't say it. They made something with their own hands, over many days, and gave it away, and the sky was trusted to do the rest. If the person kept the thing, that was considered an answer. Nobody ever had to speak at all."
The evening went on around them, gulls and supper smoke and someone's borrowed laughter down the lane.
"I'm not asking for the answer now," he added. "The custom doesn't come with a deadline. That was the point of it, I think. My people were patient, and there's only me left to keep the custom, so I get to say how it works."
"Aang."
"It's also functional," he said, in a rush, as though outrunning the moment. "It's tuned a little sharp, but Appa forgives it. If you ever blow it, anywhere in the world, on any night, he'll hear you. And where Appa goes, I go. That part isn't in the old custom. I added that part."
Katara looked at the whistle for a long time. Then she closed her hand around it, and did not give it back.
That was her answer.
Meditation, the monks taught, was the practice of watching thoughts arrive and letting them leave without offering them tea.
That night, up on the hill, Aang sat outside his tent in the dark and watched one particular thought arrive for the ninth time, accept the tea, remove its boots, and settle in beside the fire of him like it owned the place.
It was not even an ambitious thought. It was one specific kiss, years old, from an autumn morning on the clinic stairs. At the time, it was so unremarkable that neither of them had bothered to count it. Her mouth had tasted of jasmine tea. Her hand had rested flat on his chest, not pulling him closer and not pushing him away, just resting there, like a signature.
He had been twenty and drowning in larger things, and he had let the moment file itself away as ordinary. The great spiritual joke of his life was that he could now recall the exact weight of that hand more precisely than he could recall entire treaties.
Down in the village, a light was still burning in the guest house window.
An hour past midnight, there was a knock at the guest house door.
She knew before she opened it. She knew from the weight of the knock, two soft taps, the way he knocked on doors he was afraid of. He stood on the step with the lamplight on him with none of the week's composure anywhere in evidence.
Wordlessly, she stepped back and he stepped in.
The door had barely closed before her hands were at his collar and his had come up to cradle her face like something lifted out of water. The first kiss missed slightly, hurried, and corrected itself, and after that they stopped being countable. He tasted like the night air. She walked him backward into the room, or he walked her, and their accounts would have differed. Her braid came loose in his hands the way it always used to. He laughed once against her mouth, low and disbelieving, and she felt three years close behind them like a door.
That, at least, is how it went in the mind's eye of Katara, who laid alone in the dark with her eyes open, one arm across her forehead, listening to the surf.
On the hill, it went almost identically, allowing for small differences of authorship. In his version, she said his name first, and he never got the chance to knock twice. In both versions, nobody apologized, or flew anywhere, and the lamp burned itself out unnoticed.
In the world where things happen, he did make it a third of the way down the path at one point. Then he stood a long time between the tent and the village lights, a man exactly halfway between his two educations, and climbed back up, because the custom he had revived that very evening said the answer could not be asked for.
The whistle would sound, or it wouldn't.
In the guest room, Katara's hand found the carved bison on the bedside table and closed around it, and stayed closed until morning.
There is a tradition on Kyoshi Island older than the warriors themselves. The night before a wedding, the two witnesses, the ones who will stand beside the couple, climb to the cliff meadow above the bay at first light and cut the flowers for the marriage garland. They weave it together, alone, and hang it over the threshold of the ceremony hall before the village wakes.
The saying goes that the garland holds only if the weavers' hands are honest, and that whatever is spoken in the meadow stays in the meadow.
"It's a beautiful tradition," Suki said the night before, with a face like polished stone, "and it is absolutely mandatory.”
So they climbed in the grey before dawn, the two of them plus Momo, who brought it upon himself to keep them company. The sea below them was the color of unpolished silver. The meadow at the top was thick with fire lilies, white kyoshi asters, long ropes of morning glory, all of it wet with dew.
For a while, they worked without talking, cutting and sorting, while the lemur systematically raided the discard pile and ate the sweetest stems. The silence was the comfortable kind, right up until it wasn't.
"Your necklace," Aang said. She had her arms full of asters and had been trying to fix the clasp against her shoulder with two fingers for the better part of a minute. "The clasp catches on the left side. Here."
He set down his shears and fixed it without looking at it, by muscle memory alone. His fingers were warm at the back of her neck and gone again almost before she registered them.
"Thank you," she said.
"You'd have gotten it."
"I'd have gotten it in twenty minutes." She knelt back down over the flowers. "Suki wants fire lilies at the crown and the asters trailing. Sokka wants, and I quote, 'the manly flowers,' whichever those are."
"There's a blue thistle on the north edge of the meadow. That's as manly as this island gets." He began the base braid, three stems, over and under, and his hands knew it; the monks, after all, had woven prayer garlands every solstice for a hundred generations. She fed him stems and he wove. The garland grew across both their laps, tying them loosely together at the knees, which was, she suspected, the entire point of the tradition.
"Can I ask about Haru," he said, to the flowers. "You don't have to."
"You can ask."
"Why did it end?"
She was quiet long enough that a gull crossed the whole bay below them. "He ended it. He said he didn't think it was him I was thought about in the quietest moments of the night." She passed him a fire lily. "I couldn't argue with that without being dishonest to him, so we parted friends. I part with everyone as friends. It's apparently the only way I know how to do it."
Aang wove the lily in. His hands did not stop moving, which she understood, because if his hands stopped moving then something would have to be done with the moment.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"Are you?"
She watched him reach for the gracious answer, the Avatar answer, the one that would be kind and wise and mostly true.
"Before you say it," she said, "you should know Toph told me where you were for a time after we separated. A glacier survey in the far south, in winter. Nobody commissions a glacier survey in winter, Aang. You didn't set foot in Republic City for eight months after we ended it. You missed Toph's promotion and the clinic's second room and my birthday. Instead, I got a letter from the edge of the map about acceptance and open palms, and I read it standing in my kitchen and nearly put it in the stove. I know you. I know the difference between letting something go and running from it, and that letter was written at a dead sprint." She drew a breath. "And yesterday you stayed. I watched you stay, and I know what it cost you, and I am still angry about the glacier. Both of those things get to be true at once."
The shears were still in his hands. He set them down in the grass with great care, the way he did when he was buying time. She knew that too, because she knew everything about him, which was the entire problem and always had been.
"You're right," he said. "I ran. I told myself I was giving you room. I did the breathing, I did the mantras, I wrote you that letter, and all of it was a costume. Monks' robes over running shoes."
He picked the stem back up and turned it in his fingers.
"It's the first thing I do. It has been since the temple, since the storm, since the iceberg. I run, and then eventually I sit with what I ran from, in that order, every time. The sitting took longer this time. About two years, if I'm honest, and I'd mostly convinced myself I'd finished. Then Sokka's letter put your name next to Haru's, and I found out exactly how much sitting I had actually done." He met her eyes. "Which was none."
The anger went out of her like tide off a flat beach. It always did, with him. That was the other entire problem.
"The meadow keeps what's said in the meadow," she said. "That's the tradition. So tell me the true version, not the gracious one. Are you sorry it ended? Haru and me."
The over-and-under of the braid, twice, three times.
"No," he said. "I tried to be for a year. I meant it for whole minutes at a time. But no."
Momo had fallen asleep in the flower basket sometime during the conversation. He opened one eye, confirmed that the world was as he had left it, and went back to sleep.
They finished it as the sun came up out of the sea, twelve feet of garland, and it held, exactly as the tradition promised, without a single stem slipping.
For a moment neither of them moved. The garland lay across both their laps, tying them loosely together at the knees, and the light was coming up gold over the water.
He looked at her the way he had looked at her across a hundred campfires. She felt herself lean, some small treacherous degree, and watched him lean to meet it, slow, both of them arriving at the same conclusion by the same unhurried road. Soon she could feel the warmth coming off him in the cold morning air, and the world had narrowed to the last inch of it.
The dawn bell rang in the village below.
It rang three times, bright and merciless, the signal that the household of the bride was waking, and that by law and custom the garland had to be hung over the threshold before Suki's foot touched the floor.
They froze, an inch apart. Aang closed his eyes and exhaled a laugh through his nose, and the breath of it stirred the loose hair at her temple.
"Of course," he said. "Of course there's a bell."
"There's always something." Her voice came out less steady than she would have liked. "A messenger hawk, a summit, an invasion." She smiled, bittersweet.
"One of these days," he uttered to himself, and did not finish it.
He gathered up his end of the garland instead, and she took hers, and the rest of the sentence stayed in the meadow with everything else. Momo woke, judged the situation with one long unimpressed look at each of them, and led the way down.
The ceremony was held at midmorning, under the garland, which had not slipped a single flower.
For the binding blessing, the wedding party stood shoulder to shoulder while the elder spoke. Aang's hand hung beside hers. It was an old reflex with a decade of precedent behind it: at ceremonies, on the deck of every ship they had ever shared, whenever the world grew large, their hands had simply found each other, without instruction, the way water finds low ground. The backs of their fingers brushed once and drifted apart, and brushed again, two hands negotiating in their sleep, each arriving at the very edge of taking hold and stopping there, out of respect for a treaty their owners had signed without consulting them.
The elder spoke on. The garland held. Their knuckles rested against each other for the length of one entire verse of the blessing, touching without holding, and when the party bowed, their hands parted with the reluctance of something being peeled.
Toph, four positions down the line, heard both heartbeats and rolled her eyes at the sky.
The toasts came at the feast that followed. Aang spoke about a fifteen-year-old with a boomerang and a ponytail who had appointed himself the protector of everyone he had ever met, and about Suki, who had knocked that boy flat on his back in this very village and thereby begun the world's longest and most successful strategy meeting. He said that the war had scattered all of them from the places they were born, and that they had learned to build home out of each other instead, and that nobody he knew had built better than these two.
Her own toast was shorter. She told Suki that when a Water Tribe woman gives you her brother, she is trusting you with the person who taught her how to love unconditionally, and that there was no one alive she trusted more.
Between the toasts and the dancing came the long table hour, wine and lamplight and the wedding party crowded onto benches, and the conversation did what wedding conversations do: it turned to futures.
Sokka and Suki went first, since it was legally their night. They were moving south in the spring. The Southern Water Tribe was a city now, or becoming one, harbor cranes and new districts rising where Katara and Sokka had once known a huddle of tents. Hakoda wanted his son on the rebuilding council, and Suki, it turned out, had already been asked to found a warriors' academy there.
"Kyoshi training, southern conditions," she said. "The uniforms will need rethinking. Something warmer to face the winters and snow."
Zuko's future was the Fire Nation and, to no one's surprise, Mai, whom he mentioned with the particular softness he kept for her alone. She was recovering well, he reported. The healers were pleased, and she had been furious to miss the wedding and had channeled the fury into selecting the gift, which explained both its extravagance and its precision.
"She said if she couldn't attend, she would at least dominate the registry," Zuko said.
Then, Toph, who announced, "I'm going to seduce Kanto." She added, "and have his babies."
"Should someone warn him?" Zuko asked.
"Absolutely not," said Toph and Katara together.
And then the conversation arrived, the way a tide arrives, at the two people at the table who had not spoken. Somebody ought to have asked the maid of honor and the best man about their futures but nobody did.
The honest answer, and every person at that table knew it without asking, was that neither Aang or Katara had ever successfully imagined a future without the other. Every version either of them had built, in ten years of building, had the other one standing somewhere in it. Three years of practicing otherwise had produced, on both sides, nothing anyone would call sustainable.
"Anyway," Sokka said, with the gallantry of a man throwing himself on a small explosive. "The fan toss?”
"The fan toss," Suki agreed, rising.
So came the throwing of the bride's fan, which is what Kyoshi Island has instead of a bouquet: a war fan wound with flowers from the marriage garland. The tradition holds that whoever catches it will be the next to stand where the bride is standing.
The unmarried guests gathered, some eager, some conscripted. Suki stood with her back to them all, weighed the fan once in her hand like the weapon it was, and threw it backward over her shoulder with the flat, unerring snap of a warrior who has never once missed anything she aimed at.
It struck Katara in the sternum, and her hands closed around it by pure reflex.
"Shocking," said Toph, from the edge of the crowd. "Incredible. Who could have foreseen!"
"I wasn't even standing in the group," Katara said.
"The universe works in mysterious ways," said Suki, walking past her to the dance floor, entirely satisfied.
The band was three Kyoshi elders and a drum, and the acolytes joined in with instruments they had inevitably brought, and the square filled up under strings of lanterns. Zuko danced with Toph, who stepped on his feet with intent. Sokka and Suki danced the first dance and then flatly refused to dance with anyone but each other for the rest of the night, which was, everyone agreed, correct.
The whistle rode at Katara's sash, where it had hung all day. Aang had first noticed it there during the vows and had, according to witnesses, briefly forgotten how the platform steps worked.
Aang found her at the edge of the lantern light, where she had gone to catch her breath, the fan still in her hand because no one would take it back. He held out his hand with a formality undone entirely by the fact that he was grinning.
"Master Katara. Shall we dance?"
She took it.
They had danced together at a hundred functions, and none of those nights resembled this one. This was the cave under Omashu again, half a lifetime ago: two kids in torchlight, moving like the music was a secret they were keeping together. He was taller now and she was surer, and the steps were Kyoshi steps neither of them fully knew, and it did not matter in the slightest.
The song ended. They didn't step apart right away.
"I'm in Republic City through the winter," he said. His voice was easy, but she could feel his pulse in his palm, quick as a bird's. "The council sessions. I'll be on the island until at least the spring thaw."
"That's a long time for you."
"It is."
"And in the spring?" She said it gently, but she said it, because one of them had to, and it had always been her. "You'll still be the Avatar in the spring, Aang. The world won't need you any less because we miss each other. We tried outlasting that once, with a shared lease and everything, and it took a few years and somebody else's wedding to get us standing this close again."
He didn't look away, which was itself new. "I know. I've thought about very little else since the meadow."
He glanced up the hill, where the acolytes' tent glowed like a paper lantern against the dark. "Three years ago it was all me. Every convoy, treaty, flooded village, me personally, because I was the last airbender and I never learned how to be anything less than everything. There are twelve people on that hill who can run a relief mission without me now, and a woman with a scheduling book who could probably run the Fire Nation. I built all of that without ever admitting to myself what I was building it for. The world can keep most of me. It stopped being entitled to all of me somewhere around the second glacier survey, I just hadn't told anyone yet."
He turned back to her. "And I'm not asking you to give anything up. That was our old mistake. We thought the only options were all or nothing, so when we couldn't have it all, we signed the paperwork for the latter."
"What are you asking for now?"
"A place to start. Before neither of us would ask, remember. I'm asking now."
"One dinner," she said slowly, testing the weight of it. "For what it's worth, I have three healers now who can hold the clinic without me for a week, which is a sentence I couldn't have said back then either. Apparently, we both spent time building escape hatches and calling them institutions."
"One dinner," he agreed. "And we'll see."
The whole three years held out plainly between them.
"The clinic's still on Harbor Street?"
"Where it's always been," she said. "We do dinner on the last night of every week. My students, the neighbors. There's always an extra bowl."
"The last night of every week," he repeated, like he was writing it somewhere permanent. "Should I bring anything?"
"You hate sea prunes and you're tragic about tarts. Bring tarts." She paused, and then, because the fan was still in her hand and the lanterns were kind and courage is easier at weddings, she added, "And Aang. There's no bell on Harbor Street."
He went still for a moment, the way air goes still before it chooses a direction.
"The last night of every week," he said again, and this time it sounded like a vow.
The first snow came to Republic City in the tenth week of dinners.
The dinners themselves had become a community ritual with a speed that surprised no one. Aang arrived every last night of the week with tarts from the bakery by the ferry terminal, never once late. Toph appeared when she felt like it and had, on her second visit, asked Kanto to dinner in front of everyone (and it went extremely well). Momo attended weekly and had established territorial rights over the third windowsill. Appa's arrivals could be felt through the floor.
On the night of the first snow, the last guests left early to beat the weather and the students went up to their rooms. It was, quite suddenly, just the two of them in the clinic kitchen with the dishes done and no reason for him to still be there.
"It's really coming down," Katara said, at the window. The harbor had gone soft and grey. Snow was settling on the rail of the outside stairs, the clinic stairs, the ones from an autumn morning he had never told her he thought about.
"I should get back before it's worse," Aang said, and did not move.
"You should," she agreed, also planted where she stood.
Out in the harbor, a ferry bell rang the late crossing, three bright strokes carrying over the water. Both of them would think, later, that it was extremely funny of the universe to try the bell again. Neither of them so much as turned their heads.
"Aang."
"Hm."
"I never used the whistle." She was still looking at the snow. Katara hand had found the cord at her neck, where the carved bison had lived since the summer, warm from her skin. "That's because I haven't gotten the chance to miss you long enough. You kept showing up and being here without my call. I didn't have to beg."
Aang closed the remaining distance between them and up close, he smelled of cedar shavings and incense. She thought: we have been so careful, and so brave about being careful, and I am done.
"Say the thing," she said. "The one from the meadow. The sentence you didn't finish."
"One of these days," Aang told her, "I am going to kiss you again."
The ferry bell rang once more, far away, and lost.
Aang was smiling when their mouths met; Katara felt three years and eleven weeks and one interrupted dawn close behind her like a door with the latch turned.
When she finally drew back an inch, she found she was crying, in the way of something being set down after being carried a very long distance. He brushed the tears away with his fingertips, one cheek and then the other, as though this were a task he had been holding a post open for.
"I love you, Katara, now until forever. I never stopped loving you, and I never will."
"Me too, Aang. I love you too. Always."
Their love and bond had proven to be faithful, the way the tide returns and the wind always comes home.