Chapter Text
The resident headquarters of Wildfire occupied the forty-first floor of the Republic City Broadcasting Network tower.
Katara had been the show's senior guest booker for two years, which meant she had personally talked a celebrity chef out of quitting in a stairwell, coaxed a disgraced councilman into his first interview through his lawyer's voicemail, and once spent four hours convincing a novelist that Azula's smile was a normal human smile. She was good at her job because she believed in people. Sokka, who wrote segments down the hall and had known her his whole life on account of being her brother, called this her fatal flaw. Katara called it a work ethic.
The elevator doors opened that Monday and a mountain of white fur walked out first.
"Appa, heel," said the mountain's owner, without urgency or effect. The dog crossed the bullpen in an excited rush, put his head on Katara's desk, and sighed over her call sheet.
"Aang." She lifted the sheet, now damp. "There is a memo about this."
"There have been several memos about it."
Aang leaned on her cubicle wall, grey eyes bright, wearing the kind of smile that got him forgiven for things nobody else would even attempt. He produced the show's field segments, the four minutes of warmth Azula tolerated between interrogations, and he was famous on the floor for two things: first, his remotes made the whole crew cry at least once a season; second, no one had ever seen him date anyone for longer than three weeks.
"The vet's downtown. He hates the car unless I bribe him with an audience first."
"He's shedding on my booking notes."
"He's improving your notes." Aang stole a glance at the sheet. "Tell the ambassador's people she can have the second segment if she brings the sky bison rescue footage. Azula will pretend to hate it and then air all of it."
He was right, which was the annoying part. He was usually right about people, in the effortless way of someone who liked nearly all of them and needed none of them.
Katara learned the second part about Aang was true that same afternoon, entirely by accident, in the stairwell where she went to make calls. Two flights up, a soft voice she recognized as Onji from the art department was in the middle of something quiet and final.
"I'm not angry," Onji was saying. "I want you to hear this, because I don't think anyone tells you. You pack light, Aang. Even when you stay somewhere, you're already packed."
There was a silence long enough that Katara felt it in her own chest. Then Aang's voice, gentle and unarmored: "That's fair."
"It's not fair," Onji said. "That's my whole point. It's just true."
Katara took her calls elsewhere. Three weeks, she thought, almost to the day, and she filed it under things that were none of her business.
The new executive producer arrived that Friday. He came in from a prestige documentary unit in Ba Sing Se, wore his sleeves rolled like he'd planned it, and stopped the staff meeting cold by remembering every person's name from a single round of introductions.
When he got to Katara he said, "You're the one who booked the councilman. That interview was the reason I took this job," and the whole room turned to look at her.
His name was Jet.
Everyone saw it coming except the person standing in it.
Jet took her to a jazz cellar in the old Dragon Flats where the trumpet player knew him by name. Jet remembered that she took her tea with nothing in it and treated her coffee like a dessert.
Jet asked about her mother, and when she said the words she died when I was eight out loud in a bar to a man she'd known nineteen days, he didn't flinch or fill the silence. He just held her hand on the table like it was the most natural thing in the world. He said things like I've been waiting to feel like this and why would I want slow, when I already know, and every sentence landed exactly where a sentence should.
"He talks like a movie trailer," Sokka said at family dinner, arms crossed over Gran Gran's recipe apron. "Voice all low. Big promises. No actual footage of the film."
"You've met him twice."
"And both times he agreed with everything I said within four seconds. Katara, I once told him the moon was a government project to test people's gullibility and he said that's a really interesting framework."
Suki, who was going to marry Sokka and was therefore contractually present for these dinners, said nothing. Katara decided to take that for face value.
Four months in, Jet stood in her tiny apartment with its view of a brick wall and said, "Let this place go. Move in with me. I don't want to spend another season walking you to a door I have to leave you at."
So Katara gave notice on the lease she'd held for five years. She packed her mother's necklace in tissue paper and her books into boxes, and then on moving day, she sat on the floor of her emptied life waiting for a truck.
Her phone rang at ten past nine. Jet's voice had a new cadence to it, careful and pre-recorded.
"Katara. I've been up all night. I think I let us go too fast, and I think if you move in today I'm going to fail at this in a way that hurts you worse later. I'm not ready. I thought I was ready and I'm not."
She stood among her boxes with the dial tone in her ear for a long time. The super knocked at noon, apologetic, because the new tenant's movers were downstairs.
She called Sokka first, who offered their place, except his one-bedroom currently contained a wedding's worth of seating charts and Suki's entire weapons collection. She called Toph second, and Toph offered her couch before the sentence was even finished. But the penthouse ran on the private forecast of Toph and her two boyfriends, Satoru and Kanto, three people with one rhythm, and Katara had spent enough evenings there as the included fourth to know the difference between visiting a home and camping in one.
Katra weighed out her options. She was sitting on the curb outside the building, boxes stacked around her like a small besieged city, when a familiar weather system crossed the street and put its enormous head in her lap.
Aang stood behind his dog, holding two paper cups from the tea shop on the corner, taking in the boxes and her face.
He didn't ask what happened. He handed her a cup and said, "So here's my idea. I've got a loft over on Harmony Street with a spare room I never use, above the best tea shop in the city. I rent month to month, like everything else in my life, so there's no trap in it. Stay a month, or stay six, whatever works. Appa has already agreed you would be an excellent roommate."
Katara looked at the dog. The dog looked back with the moral seriousness of a public monument.
"I'm a disaster right now," she said.
"Great," said Aang. "The place could use one."
The loft sat above the Jasmine Dragon. The landlord was a round, twinkling man named Iroh who left a pot of something new outside their door every Sunday with a note that said things like for the young lady, chamomile, for a restful sleep and for Aang, nothing, he sleeps too much already.
They wrote roommate rules on the back of a takeout menu the first night, sitting cross-legged on the floor because Aang owned one couch and Appa held title to it.
"Rule one," Katara said. "Rent and utilities split evenly and I do the grocery list because I have seen what you eat."
"Rule two," Aang said. "No feelings talks before coffee."
"Agreed. Rule three, the bathroom schedule is sacred, and violating it is a declaration of war."
"Rule four." He tapped the menu solemnly. "The Painted Lady mural on the stairwell landing stays uncovered and untouched. Iroh says she's the building's guardian spirit and I choose to believe him."
She looked at him over her tea. "You choose to believe a lot of things."
"It's cheaper than furniture."
The first weeks at the loft were simply coworkers with a commute in common. They rode in together and maintained a professional buffer of gossip and elevator small talk. At home, they orbited politely, two schedules sharing a kettle.
But apartments are honest places. She learned that he woke at dawn and did an hour of slow moving meditation on the fire escape in all weather. He learned that she cleaned when she was sad. Aang didn’t say a word the night he came home to find the oven disassembled at eleven p.m., he just picked up a rag. She learned that Momo, the ferret-thin rescue cat, hated everyone, and would sleep only on her laundry, which Aang clearly considered an endorsement. He learned that she sang under her breath doing dishes, old Southern Water Tribe songs, and he never once mentioned it, because he was afraid she'd stop.
Living together produced a vocabulary that was unique to them.
Aang liked to make tea at dawn after his hour on the fire escape. At some point, a second cup began appearing at Katara's place at the table, made her way, strong and plain, still steaming when her alarm went off, timed to the minute. He never mentioned it and never asked. On weekends the direction reversed, and Katara made his coffee sweet enough to alarm a dentist, because she had watched him doctor exactly one cup, once, early on, and had never needed to watch again.
Then Aang's animals reorganized themselves around her with frank opportunism. Appa's vet schedule migrated onto the fridge in her handwriting, and Sunday mornings became brushing hour on the fire escape, a full hour, because undercoat season on a dog that size was an agricultural event. On walks, he drifted to her side of the sidewalk and leaned, ninety pounds of casual allegiance, and Aang would say "traitor" with enormous warmth.
Momo's situation required governance. The vet had used the phrase "trending rotund," so Katara moved the treat tin to the top of the fridge and taped a note to it reading THIS MEANS YOU. She still caught Aang mid-crime one day, cat on the counter, treat in the air, both parties frozen in the light of the open fridge like burglars.
"He manipulated me," Aang said.
"He's a cat. You're an adult."
"You didn't see the face he did."
They also began a tradition of movie night. It acquired a constitution: picks alternated Fridays, one veto each per calendar month, all amendments recorded in the margins of the original takeout menu, which had quietly graduated from roommate rules into a founding document.
Aang picked nature documentaries and teared at them with his whole chest, and Katara learned to have the tissues on the couch arm by the second hour. Katara picked courtroom dramas and argued with the verdicts out loud, and Aang learned to pause the film the moment she inhaled a certain way, because the objection was coming whether the court allowed it or not. Takeout came from the cart on Kwan Street, a standing order the owner knew by heart, the vegetarian half for Aang, dumplings and seaweed broth for her, and a double portion of the sauce they both defended from each other with chopstick swordwork.
The owner's son who delivered had been writing 4B couple on the bag for weeks now. Neither of them corrected him.
Other evenings became kitchen evenings. He would put the vegetarian five-flavor stew on the stove, Gran Gran's recipe by way of smoked mushrooms, which he had extracted from her early on of their co-habitation. Beside him at the counter, Katara rolled dough for small round fruit pies, working from a recipe Aang had recited from memory with his eyes closed, like scripture, and had declined to say one word more about. The not-saying had a shape she recognized from her own family's kitchen, where some recipes are heirlooms and some are graves, and you don't dig in another person's garden uninvited.
They worked shoulder to shoulder in the steam without the radio on and broke bread like found family.
The market run gained a fixed final stop. Whatever else was on the list, Aang came home with panda lilies for the table, every week, white and dark-hearted and slightly extravagant for a household of two people and two animals.
She asked him about it exactly once. He shrugged and said, "You like them."
Katara stood there holding the vase, unable to remember ever telling him so, because she never had. She had slowed down at the flower stall one ordinary morning, early on, for about half a breath, and somewhere behind her, apparently, a man had been paying attention with his whole life.
The girlfriends came and went at first, exactly as advertised.
A ceramicist named Aiko lasted seventeen days. She laughed at his jokes one beat late, which meant she was listening for the punchline instead of to him. A trapeze instructor didn't clear two weeks. She called Appa "the dog" for eleven consecutive days, an error of category so profound that Katara had to leave the room.
They got the charm, all of them, the full ninety watts, the invented customs, the swooping attention, and it was genuine as far as it went. Katara slowly assembled the observation that none of them were getting the other thing: the six a.m. quiet, the man on the fire escape in the rain, whatever lived behind the closed door of him that made a woman in a stairwell say you're already packed.
Katara watched the pattern from the couch with clinical interest. If she noticed that the intervals were stretching, that Aang stayed home on more Fridays with a movie queued and a second bowl of noodles already made, she placed it, again, under things that were none of her business.
The real gut punch came at the network's annual gala.
Jet arrived with a documentary journalist on his arm, luminous and laughing, and he crossed the room to Katara with both hands out like a man returning something borrowed. "You look wonderful," he said warmly. "I'm so glad we can be friends."
Behind him, the journalist wore the exact necklace-tilted-head expression Katara remembered from her own mirror, four months and a lifetime ago.
She held it together through the salad course. Aang found her on the loading dock afterward, sitting on a crate in her formal blues. He sat down beside her without a word, and they stayed there in the cold until she was ready to go home, which was, she realized somewhere on the walk, exactly what the loft had become.
That night she couldn't sleep, so she did the thing she always did with pain, which was to organize it. She sat at the kitchen table and started writing, and what came out was a theory.
Toph Beifong ran The Metropolitan out of a corner office she'd redecorated by removing everything her parents' money had put in it. She read Katara's pages with her feet on the desk, and when she finished she said, "This is the meanest thing you've ever written. It's also the best. We're publishing it."
"I can't put my name on it. Azula reads your magazine specifically to find enemies."
"So we won't." Toph grinned the grin that had frightened three publishing dynasties. "Anonymous byline. Mysterious woman, sees through everybody. What's the name of your alter ego?"
The column ran the following Thursday under the title On Thin Ice, by The Painted Lady.
Its thesis was simple, and it was Katara's grief wearing a lab coat. Men in love, the Painted Lady wrote, are spring ice on a Southern lake: gorgeous, dazzling in the light, load-bearing in every test you can devise from the shore, right up until the moment you trust your full weight to the middle, which is the moment physics was always waiting for. The thaw is not a betrayal of the ice's nature, she wrote. The thaw is the ice's nature. The cold snap was the exception all along.
It went into the city's bloodstream in a weekend. Radio hosts fought about it, a councilwoman even quoted it on the record. Iroh, unknowing, left a copy outside their door with a sticky note reading this poor child needs better tea.
And on the forty-first floor, Azula put the magazine down in the Monday meeting, smiled her normal human smile, and said, "I want her. Whoever she is. Find the Painted Lady and put her in my chair, and I will personally melt her on air for sweeps week." Her eyes moved down the table and stopped, with the fine instinct of a predator, on the best booker in the building. "Katara. This is yours."
Katara came to the task of professionally hunting herself, filing weekly reports on her own trail, and lying by omission to an entire floor of people, including the man who now knew how she took her tea without asking, and who read the column that Thursday night on their couch with his eyebrows slowly climbing.
"This is brutal," Aang said. "Beautiful sentences. Completely wrong."
"Wrong how?" She kept her eyes on her book, her pulse loud.
"She thinks the thaw proves the ice was lying." He tossed the magazine on Appa, who accepted it as tribute. "Ice isn't lying. It's just afraid of overexposure to the sun, which can burn, same as anybody."
"That's very poetic for a man with a three-week warranty."
She regretted it before it finished leaving her mouth. And for the first time in their acquaintance, Aang didn't smile something away.
"Okay," he said, and set down his tea calmly. "Then let's talk about the warranty." His voice stayed level the whole way through, which she would learn was what his anger looked like, wind instead of fire. Three weeks was real, he said, and his to answer for, and he answered for it to the people it actually happened to. Then Aang pointed at the magazine on the dog. "But that woman took one man's cowardice and passed sentence on everyone she has never met. She wants to be right more than she wants to be fair, and it shows in every line. It's beautifully written cruelty, and I'd say it to her face."
"Maybe she's earned being right." Katara was on her feet now, and loud, because loud was what her anger looked like, and always had been. "Maybe she stood in an emptied apartment with her whole life in boxes. Maybe she's watched the pattern walk through this exact living room in seventeen-day installments. People like you are her footnotes, Aang. Ask Onji."
It went on longer than either of them was proud of, and it ended nowhere, with two doors closed almost politely and Appa lying in the hallway at the precise midpoint between them, declining to rule.
Katara lay awake with the specific insomnia of having told the truth unkindly and been told it unkindly right back.
The tea was at her place in the morning anyway, made her way, still steaming, timed to the minute, and the sight of it undid her more thoroughly than any argument had managed. She carried it out to the fire escape, where he was finishing his hour in the cold, and sat down beside him.
"I aimed that at you on purpose," she said. "The warranty line. I'm sorry."
"I earned a little of it." His eyes stayed on the skyline through the last slow movement of the form. "And I meant what I said about the column. But I delivered it like a verdict, and that's the exact thing I was accusing her of, so I'm sorry too."
They drank the tea. Nobody performed a reconciliation, nobody threatened the lease, and by the time the cups were empty the apartment had quietly ratified its first amendment: they would fight in the open, at full voltage, and the tea would arrive on schedule regardless.
It was, though neither of them said so, the safest fight either had ever been in.
Movie night had run long with another nature documentary. Sleepily, Katara got up to go to bed and detoured past the folded laundry on the dryer and pulled his oversized yellow sweater over her tank-top and sleep shorts. A simple act of casual theft that was met zero protest. The sleeves swallowed her hands to the fingertips and the hem giving up somewhere around the top of a very long stretch of bare leg.
"Night," she said, padding down the hall.
Aang, mid-sentence about tomorrow's call time, lost the sentence entirely. He also lost the mug he was holding, caught it against his chest, and could not for the life of him have explained what had just occurred, because he was smooth, famously smooth, and this was only his own stolen laundry walking away on somebody else's legs.
"Low blood sugar," he offered, to Appa and Momo, who were sole witnesses to the mouth agape.
He then sat through the entire credits and a studio logo without registering either. Appa eventually had to come stand on his feet to remind him that doors existed and that dogs used them.
The ledger balanced itself on a Sunday. Aang had violated the bathroom schedule by four minutes, and he came out of the shower with a towel around his neck and no shirt anywhere on his person, steam off his skin. Katara, watering the panda lilies, looked over and then looked very quickly back at the flowers, which did not require this much watering.
"Put a shirt on," she said, to the vase, in a voice pitched slightly above regulation.
"Yes, ma'am," he said, already turning back, ears going pink.
He put on a shirt like a gentleman. If he stood grinning at his own reflection for a moment alone in his room, quietly pleased about Katara’s flustered state, that was between him and the mirror.
People at work began to notice their growing closeness.
In a pitch meeting, Aang was selling a segment on the sky bison sanctuary upstate and lost his thread for a second, and Katara, without looking up from her call sheet, supplied "the calf they hand-raised gets released in the spring." He pointed at her and said "released in the spring," and the two of them went on tag-teaming the pitch like a relay team with years of training.
Sokka watched this with the expression of a man witnessing a slow-motion accident involving his own family, and cornered Aang at the kitchenette afterward with the word "so" deployed as a complete interrogation.
Aang didn't answer right away. He was distracte by Katara across the bullpen, where she was laughing at something Suki had said, one hand pressed over her heart the way she did when a laugh got away from her. He wore the expression of a man listening to a favorite song through a wall.
"Buddy," Sokka said.
"Hm?" said Aang. "Sorry. What?"
It went on like that all winter. Ty Lee took to sighing "you two" at them in hallways with no further syntax. Toph on her calls with Katara said, "I'm blind, and I genuinely cannot figure out how you can't see it." Zuko, who was Aang’s best friend and therefore could speak on the matter, said only one thing on the subject, to anyone who asked: "I don't remark on the obvious."
Katara handled all of it identically, with the brisk unbothered air of a producer closing a segment. They were roommates, just friends. It was a good apartment above a good tea shop, everyone should be so lucky, and could the meeting please return to the run-down.
And every Thursday, the Painted Lady published another column about the treachery of ice, across the table from a man who had made her tea without being asked, in an apartment where the evidence against her was piling up in daily invisible layers, and holding weight.
The storm came off the bay on a Friday night and took the whole grid of Harmony Street down at nine p.m.
They ended up on the fire escape because the loft got stuffy with the fans dead, wrapped in the duvet from her bed, passing a thermos of Iroh's emergency blend between them while the city lay dark and rinsed below and rain rattled the awning of the tea shop like applause. Appa and Momo lay across both their feet as occupational forces. Candlelight came through the window behind them and did generous things to everyone involved.
"Okay," Aang said. "Blackout rules. One question each, any subject, full honesty. It's an ancient Air Nomad custom."
"You invent an ancient Air Nomad custom every time you want something."
"That is also an ancient Air Nomad custom." He passed the thermos. "I'll go first. The night of the gala on the loading dock. What were you thinking about? I've always wondered..."
She watched the rain for a while. "I was thinking that Jet remembered everything about me and understood none of it. And that I'd walked home without noticing, because home had moved." She felt more than saw him turn to look at her, and pressed on before the silence could get expensive. "My turn. Onji."
"You heard about it." It wasn't an accusation. He sounded, if anything, relieved.
"I heard the conversation first-hand in the stairwell. She said you're always packed. Is she right?"
Aang was quiet long enough that the rain filled in for him. "I grew up with one person," he said finally. "Gyatso. He raised me after my parents, and he was my whole family, my whole faith, and my whole address. He used to say attachment is a rope you tie to a moving thing." A breath. "He died my second year of college. And I got very, very good at his lessons. Better than he ever meant me to be. If you never fully unpack, the moving thing can't take the room with it when it goes."
The thermos had gone cold between them. She hadn't noticed when their shoulders had come to rest against each other, only that the whole warm length of her arm now knew about it.
He turned his head, and the candlelight caught the grey of his eyes and made it silver. Katara was suddenly aware of the exact distance between his mouth and hers, which was miniscule and shrinking.
His gaze dropped and came back up and he said, quietly, "Katara," in a voice she had never heard him use on anyone in three weeks or less, and she leaned in-
and her phone went off between them like a fire alarm.
They jolted apart. Appa woofed at the ringtone on principle.
Toph's voice came through at a volume that reached the street: "SUGAR QUEEN. The column just got picked up nationally. Also why do you sound like that? What are you doing?"
"Nothing," Katara said, at the rain, at the dog, at the man beside her who had turned to study the skyline of his own darkened city with tremendous interest. "Absolutely nothing."
The flu arrived with the first hard cold of the season and accomplished what nothing else in Republic City had managed, which was to stop Katara.
She denied it for a full day at the office, on the grounds that she had a councilwoman to confirm and no time for biology. Aang caught it anyway. He caught it from across the bullpen, from almost nothing, from the fact that her phone voice had dropped half a step and her laugh had a scrape in it, because at some point he had learned all of her sounds the way he'd learned her tea, without meaning to and past all recall. He said nothing at work. He quietly moved her afternoon calls onto Sokka's desk under a forged sticky note and turned the loft's radiator up before she got home.
By morning the fever had won. Katara, horizontal and gray around the edges, still attempted to run the Thursday booking sheet from bed with three devices and no shame, which produced the apartment's second real argument, a far smaller model than the first. He confiscated her phone. She informed him that she had survived twenty-six winters without a supervisor. He agreed with her completely and kept the phone.
There was some heat in the argument and no burn anywhere, two people pulling hard on the same rope from the same side of it. They settled the matter like diplomats. She dictated from under the duvet, and Aang made her calls verbatim, charm deployed on request, including one full impression of her booker voice, warm and unbudging, so accurate that she laughed herself into a coughing fit and had to hit him with a pillow from a range of four feet.
The household closed ranks around her. Appa relocated onto the bed and became an immovable fixture, radiating heat like a municipal project. Momo, who loved no one, slept on her feet for three consecutive days. Iroh sent up chamomile with a note reading for sleeping, and tell the boy the soup needs more ginger. Sokka delivered Gran Gran's remedy soup, which contained approximately one entire seal, and Aang heated it for her without a word of comment.
Being sick in front of someone is its own kind of confession. Katara was a mess for four days, unlovely and short-tempered and needing things. He took care of her without ever making it a favor, and she let herself be taken care of, which anyone in her family could confirm was by far the harder trick. Somewhere in the middle of it, she noticed that even flattened and feverish she was listening for his key in the door, and that the sound of it landed somewhere in her chest like good news.
On the third night, Aang was changing the cool cloth on her forehead. She was mostly asleep, fever-loose and unguarded, and she said, with perfect clarity, "You smell like wind. It's my favorite," and was gone again before the sentence finished landing.
Aang stood up with great composure, carried the bowl toward the kitchen, and walked directly into the doorframe. He then stood at the sink for a long while, a man of famous composure with hot ears, while Momo observed him from the counter with the expression of a creature who had worked all of this out long ago.
She was well by the weekend, and the loft returned to its usual rhythm.
The movie was somebody's third-string romance, kept on purely for the pleasure of heckling it, and Toph's assignment was the reason Katara brought the subject up at all.
"She wants a positive column for once. Apparently the readers are tired of drowning. She wants the Painted Lady on what the ice would have to be, if it held. Load-bearing qualities." Katara had the notebook out and everything. "I need material. You're a demographic."
"You're asking my dream person," Aang said, from his end of the couch, one hand working Appa's ears. "For science."
"For journalism."
He gave it real thought, which she had not expected, and then he answered the way people answer when the question feels hypothetical enough to be safe.
"Someone who argues with the television," he said. "Someone with a temper that's about something. The real kind, anger that shows up because she can't stand a thing being unfair, even a fictional thing, even a rigged fictional court. Bossy, probably, but bossy in the way that means she's already carrying your half as well as hers and just wants you to keep up. Good with animals. Or, more precisely, animals decide about her instantly, and animals are correct. Somebody who fixes things quietly, so you find out weeks later that a seam was mended, a schedule kept, a whole small life maintained around you while you weren't looking. And she'd hum when she thinks nobody's..."
He stopped. He became interested in Appa's ears at a professional level.
"That's a composite," he said. "Anyway."
Katara had written down none of it. "Anyway," she agreed, and would have left it there, except he turned his head against the cushion and said, "What about the columnist. Off the record."
She should have deflected. Instead the list arrived on its own, assembled somewhere below her editorial control.
"Somebody who doesn't perform," she said. "Who remembers what you like without reciting it back like a receipt. Patient, and I mean the kind of patient that gets up before dawn to practice being it. Someone who makes room without announcing that room is being made, so you look up one day and there's a shelf that wasn't there before, and he never..." She adjusted course. "Someone steady with animals. Someone who would buy the same flowers every week because..."
She stopped. On the screen, the third-string lovers were kissing in third-string rain.
"Because they hold up well," she said. "In vases."
"Naturally," Aang agreed.
They watched the movie to the end of the credits, both of them, every name, the caterers, the second unit. If either of them noticed that the two composites had addresses, current addresses, extremely nearby addresses, they declined, in the established tradition of the household, to file a report. Appa looked from one of them to the other and sighed like a municipal employee watching a form being filled out wrong.
Toph called the next day for the copy. Katara told her the positive column was postponed, pending further research. Toph laughed for a full minute, said "sure," and hung up without asking a single follow-up question, which was far worse.
The invitation went out from both of them, which neither of them noticed until later. One thread, one message, game night at our place Saturday, bring nothing, Sokka that means you, and the small word our sat there in seven phones all week, doing quiet work.
They cooked all afternoon the way they always cooked, shoulder to shoulder, his stew going on the stove and her pies going in the oven, panda lilies moved to the windowsill to make room on the table.
Sokka and Suki arrived first, Sokka carrying, despite instructions, a homemade strategy game called Boomerang, complete with laminated rule sheets and a founding philosophy. Zuko came with Mai, who surveyed the loft once, said "cozy" in a tone that could have meant anything on the spectrum of human feeling, and then ate three pies. Toph arrived flanked by Satoru and Kanto, and the three of them came through the doorway like one system, Satoru describing the room's layout to her out of long habit, Kanto steering her elbow past Appa with the settled amusement of a man who found nearly everything funny and said so nearly never.
Boomerang lasted forty minutes before collapsing under the weight of its own appendices, with Sokka defending the rules from their sole surviving copy while Mai, who had read the appendices once, dismantled his entire strategy without changing expression. They switched to charades to save the friendship.
Charades was where the trouble started. First round on the same team, Aang stood up, raised one eyebrow, and Katara said "lion turtle," and it was, and the room revolted. They were banned from partnering by unanimous vote, Appa abstaining.
It didn't help. On opposite teams, she guessed his clue from across the room by pure reflex, out loud, scoring for the other side, and Toph stood up and said, "Ban them from the building," and Satoru pointed out, reasonably, that they lived there.
Zuko, when his turns came, mimed with the intensity of a man defusing his own childhood. Everything he acted out looked like fire, including, somehow, "library."
Suki won the night for her team on athleticism alone, and Kanto quietly narrated the whole catastrophe to Toph like a sports commentator, which was, Toph announced, the only entertainment holding up.
Katara brought the pies around at the end, by hand, one to each guest. From the kitchen doorway, Aang watched her do it with a tender expression that was noticeable to all their guests.
Later, drying that same plate after she washed it, Aang said quietly, so only she could hear, "Gyatso used to say a pie isn't finished until it's given away." The towel went still for a moment. "He would have liked you."
Katara looked up at him, and whatever she had planned to say about roommates stayed unsaid. She handed him the next plate, and their hands went on working like an assembly line that needed no instructions. That was the whole conversation, and it was somehow enormous.
At the door, Sokka lingered. "Great night. You two are aware that you host things now? Jointly. Like a..." Suki removed him by the scarf.
Toph paused at the threshold on Kanto's arm, Satoru behind them carrying the ruins of Boomerang, and grinned in Katara's approximate direction with unnerving accuracy. "Roommates, right. Sure. The boys and I are roommates too."
When the door closed, the loft held that particular after-party quiet, warm and slightly rearranged. Appa was wearing someone's scarf. Momo had claimed the last pie crust and would clearly die defending it. And the two of them washed and dried in the lamplight, bumping shoulders on purpose, and neither could remember, the last time a room had emptied out and left the best part behind.
The erhu player from one of his old segments sent two tickets to a show above a bookshop, with for you and someone special written on the envelope. They went because of the tickets; what a shame to have let it go to waste.
The venue held forty people and the music held all of them. Somewhere in the middle of the long sad piece, the one the player introduced only as "for the ones far from home," Katara's hand found his sleeve in the dark and stayed there, light as a settled bird, through the song. Aang did not move his arm through the entirety of the performance.
They walked home the long way, through the night market, sharing roasted chestnuts out of one paper cone, lantern light doing its generous work on everything it touched. Their knuckles brushed once in the crowd, and then again at the corner. On the third pass, neither hand retreated, and they walked the last few blocks with the backs of their hands resting lightly together, an arrangement with no name and no acknowledged existence, dissolved by mutual silent agreement in the stairwell under the mural.
The evening had every feature of a date except the word, yet neither of them reached for the word, the way you don't jostle a full cup on a moving train.
Katara's field notes lived beyond the apartment, taking inspiration from other relationships that existed closest to her.
Suki took a contract with Kiyoshi Warriors on a commuting basis, one week a month on the island, which meant short-term long distance, a compromise between two people who loved each other and were committed to making it work. Sokka bought a wall calendar and a cookbook called Dinners for One That Don't Taste Like It, and when Katara asked her, quietly, how they'd done it, Suki shrugged and said, "The ice holds if you build the whole village on it. It only breaks under people who sprint out alone to test it."
Katara wrote that down and then resented having written it down.
Then Suki looked at her a moment longer than the conversation required and asked, very mildly, how the apartment was going, and Katara said, "Don't you start," and Suki just smiled at her.
Haru was a perfectly lovely structural engineer Toph produced from somewhere with the words "he's nice, he's stable, just prove you're over it."
Katara found that he had gentle eyes and was a good listener.
But the date died at approximately eight forty-six p.m., when Katara caught herself explaining, for the third time, a funny thing her roommate had said.
Haru set down his fork, smiled without a drop of bitterness, and said, "Can I ask how long you've been in love with the roommate?" and Katara said "I'm not," at a pitch that made the sommelier turn around.
Her key turned at around ten, alone.
"Pie?" Aang said in the kitchen, with tremendous casualness, for a man covered in flour.
"Four of them?"
"Couldn't decide on a filling." This was true as far as it went and no further.
He then conducted a thorough interrogation disguised as small talk. How was the food? How was the engineer? Bridges, huh. Suspension, or the other kind? Katara answered between bites of the best pie she had ever eaten, kept Haru's question to herself, and they ended up laughing at the state of the kitchen.
There was flour on her cheek from the hug hello, and he said "hold still" and reached up and brushed it away with his thumb. Aang's hand just stayed there, cradling her jaw, flour-dusted and warm, and the kitchen went very silent. Her heart was hammering out a message she refused to sign for. His eyes did the drop-and-return again, mouth to eyes, a question with no words in it, and she felt herself sway in like a tide answering a moon, close enough to feel his breath, close enough to abandon every thesis she'd ever published-
and the theory grabbed her by the collar. The thaw is the ice's nature. Three weeks. She had documented it herself.
She stepped back. His hand fell away with perfect grace, no grab in it at all, which somehow made it worse.
"Long day," she said.
"Sure," he said, in a voice swept completely clean. "Goodnight, roomie."
She lay awake listening to him do the dishes very quietly, and hated the Painted Lady a little, and could not tell anyone why.
The solstice found the loft with snow on the fire escape and Iroh's lanterns burning in the tea shop windows below. The gift exchange convened on the couch with all four residents present.
The animals did well out of it. A sheepskin cushion for the couch Appa legally owned, a heated window perch that Momo occupied before the wrapping was fully off, ribbon distributed across every surface, gratitude nowhere. Then the ribbon settled and there were two parcels left - both humans got strangely formal at the same moment.
She gave hers first. It was a spiral-bound book, decades old, foxed at the corners, hunted patiently through secondhand dealers and temple newsletters since the first night she watched him recite a recipe with his eyes closed. Recipes of the Western Temple Community Kitchen. Page forty-one held the fruit pies, attributed in faded print.
Aang went still in the way she had learned meant the deepest water. He touched the printed initial with two fingers, very lightly, the way you touch something that might still be warm. "I recite it," he said finally. "I've never seen it written down since I was a kid. I thought the written version was gone."
"Proof of life," she said. "And you can add to whatever already exists here."
His gift came in a box small enough to disappear in her palm. Inside was a carved bead, pale bone, worked in the wind-spiral pattern of his temple, and sized, she realized as she turned it, exactly to the beads already in her braid.
"So the memory has anchor and hold," he said, which meant he had been listening with his whole life, which she already knew, and which undid her anyway.
She braided it in right there at the hallway mirror, his hands helping, hers unsteady, one pale spiral riding among the whale-bone and shell like a guest who intended to stay. They had somehow given each other the same gift, and both of them saw it at the same time: a body for the thing each of them carried alone, a place to keep it.
"I love it," she said, to the bead, in the mirror.
"I love it," he said, hand flat on the cookbook.
The word crossed the loft twice inside a minute, hung in the air like an unspoken promise.
Sokka and Suki were married in a hall on the harbor, under strings of paper lanterns that Ty Lee, who moonlighted as the entire concept of enthusiasm, had hung in defiance of at least two fire codes.
The band went slow late in the evening, when the lanterns had burned down to a low gold and the dance floor had thinned to couples and the brave. Katara was at the drinks table constructing an excuse to leave when Aang appeared beside her in his formal greys, held out a hand.
He asked, "One dance. Ancient Air Nomad custom. The single people have to dance at weddings or the marriage is void, you'd be doing Sokka a favor."
"You are a fraud and a menace."
"And light on my feet," he said, and he was.
He danced the way he did everything, easy and unhurried, one hand warm at her waist. Somewhere in the second verse, the joking ran out of both of them at the same time. She was close enough to smell cedar and undershave on his collar. His thumb moved once against the small of her back, a half inch, a question.
She looked up. The lantern light was doing its generous work again, and he was watching her with his whole undefended face, no charm deployed, nothing packed, and she thought, with the clarity that arrives only when it's too late to be useful: oh. I'm not on thin ice. I'm already in the water. I've been in the water for months.
"Katara," he said, very quietly. "I'm going to say a true thing, and you can do whatever you want with it. I think I'm-"
She kissed him.
She felt the surprise go through him, a single caught breath, and then he answered her like a held note finally released. Aang's hand came up to cradle the back of her head with an aching gentleness, careful of the pins in her hair, careless of everything else. His mouth was soft and certain and tasted faintly of the toasting wine.
It was a slow kiss, steady as his dancing, deep and warm and getting warmer, her fingers curling into his lapel, his arm gathering her in until there was no light between them. Somewhere far away, the song ended and neither of them noticed, because he had made a low sound against her mouth, half-wonder and half-relief.
When they finally broke apart, they stayed forehead to forehead, breathing each other's air.
Aang laughed, shaky and amazed, and said, "Took the words right out of my mouth."
Katara joined his laughter, and for one entire evening, everything was simple.
They took a cab home with her head on his shoulder and didn't say a word the whole way, because the words were done for the night and both of them knew it.
On the stairwell landing, under the painted eyes of the building's guardian, he kissed her again, slower this time, her back against the cool plaster and his thumb tracing her jaw. She pulled him up the last flight by the lapel she had already claimed once that evening.
Inside, the loft was dark except for the streetlamp.
"Help me?" she said, turning and lifting her hair from her neck.
The clasp of her mother's necklace opened on the first try, steady and sure, and he pressed his mouth to the place where it had lain and felt her breathing change. He took the pins from her hair one at a time and set them on the windowsill in a tidy little row, a monk's neatness applied to sacrilege, and she laughed at the ceremony of him.
Aang murmured, "I have thought about this row of pins for an embarrassing amount of time," and she stopped laughing to pull him for another kiss.
What followed was slow and thorough and entirely unperformed with all their grammar in it: things passed before they were asked for, the shorthand, the checking, the ease. She could feel his heart going the way it had gone in the copy room, conspicuous and undisguised, and this time neither of them pretended it had anything to do with hiding. There was laughter in it too, at the stubborn zipper, at Appa's tactful relocation to the couch, at the discovery that a man who could hold a slow form for a full hour had no patience left anywhere else in his body.
There was cedar and rain, and her name in his voice like a poem being recited rather than said, and the window had gone pale before they finally slept.
It didn't look like anything at first. He was warm at breakfast and vague by dinner. He started sleeping badly, and she'd wake to find his side of the bed empty and the fire escape occupied at three a.m.
When the network offered a month-long remote in the Si Wong desert, a prestige piece on the sandbender water crisis that any producer would fight for, he took it in one meeting without telling her first.
Aang stood in the kitchen with the itinerary in his hand and his eyes somewhere over her shoulder, saying, "It's just a month. It's just work."
"Look at me and say that."
He looked at her. He couldn't say it. Then her temper arrived, the real one, the one the office had never seen. She told him exactly what she thought of a man who would rather cross a desert than a hallway, and of a philosophy that invented ancient customs for everything except staying.
"I have been holding on to people with both hands since I was eight years old," she said, "and I will not apologize for it to a man who lets go for a living."
He absorbed every word, agreed with all of it, and packed anyway, lightly, the way he'd always known how. There is no arguing with someone who has already conceded the case and is leaving to serve his own sentence.
Katara did the thing she did with pain. The column she filed that week was the harshest she'd ever written, ice metaphors sharpened to a killing edge, and it was a hit, and it was a lie, and Toph published it with the note last one like this, Sugar Queen, you're writing obituaries for someone who isn't dead.
Azula read it, smiled her smile, walked into the Monday meeting, and announced that the hunt was over: the Painted Lady, she said, works in this building. She'd narrowed it by printer metadata and pettiness. She scheduled a live special for the following Friday, Unmasking the Painted Lady, and let it be understood that the mask would come off whether or not its owner cooperated, because she had a shortlist of three names, and a bluff, she said, watching the room with reptile patience, only works until someone flinches.
Jet chose that week to circle back, because men like Jet have a sense for structural weakness. He found her at a staff-organized karaoke, alone by the windows, and did his best work: the rueful smile, the I was a coward, I've grown, seeing you tonight I remember everything. And it was strange, standing there hearing the trailer music again, because it had no effect at all. She could see the whole machine of him now, every gear.
"Thank you," she said, and meant it, "for being such a clean example," and left him holding his own charm like a returned gift.
She went home to an empty loft above a closed tea shop, and Appa lay by the door with his chin on Aang's left-behind sandal. Katara sat down on the floor next to the dog and admitted, to the guardian mural on the landing and no one else, that the Painted Lady had been wrong about everything except how much the water was going to hurt.
Friday came in cold and clear. Studio 41 at eight p.m., live across four time zones, WILDFIRE SPECIAL in letters that could be seen from the harbor.
What Azula did not know: Mai had spent Thursday night quietly shredding the evidence chain, because Mai had pulled the printer logs first, weeks ago, and had been sitting on the truth with her usual expression, which was no expression. What changed her mind was never fully explained, though Ty Lee would later claim it was the sight of Azula rehearsing the humiliation of a shortlist of innocent women, and Mai would only say, "It was a boring plan."
Ninety seconds before air, Mai killed the reveal package from the booth. Ty Lee, on audience, developed sudden technical difficulties with her ability to hear her headset. Azula, live, with a hole where her ambush had been, did what she always did, and hunted on instinct, cold and glittering, promising the audience a truth by the end of the hour.
She never got to improvise one. Katara walked out of the wings.
She hadn't planned the speech, so it came out true. She took the guest chair she'd booked a hundred people into, looked into the camera, and said, "I'm the Painted Lady, and I'm here to retract."
The floor went silent in the way studios almost never do.
"I wrote that men in love are spring ice," she said. "Beautiful until you trust your weight to them. I wrote it because a man dropped me through, and it was easier to publish a law of nature than to admit I'd been hurt by one specific coward on one specific morning. Here's what I've learned since, living in the evidence. I watched my brother say I love you, let's make this work out loud and stay. I watched a marriage get built like a village on the ice, weight spread wide, everyone holding. And I fell in love with a man who runs, and I finally understand that he and I have the same wound in mirror image. My mother died when I was eight, and I learned to grip everything until it bruised. He lost his whole family young, and he learned to let go of everything before it could be taken. Neither one of us was describing men, or women, or ice. We were describing grief, and calling it something else."
A breath. "Someone I live with once told me, to my face, that the Painted Lady wanted to be right more than she wanted to be fair, and that it showed in every line. He had no idea who he was saying it to. He was right anyway, and he was fair about it, and the fairness was the part I couldn't forgive at the time." She looked straight down the lens, because there was a chance, somewhere past four time zones of desert, of the right person watching. "The thaw isn't the ice's nature. The thaw is what happens to ice that has to do it all alone. So this is the Painted Lady's last finding, and then she retires. Come home. The water's fine."
He caught up to her in the snow on Harmony Street.
Katara heard him running before she saw him, and turned. There Aang was under the streetlamp outside the darkened Jasmine Dragon, breathing hard, dusted white across the shoulders, looking at her like the answer to a question he'd been asking his whole packed-up life.
"You're supposed to be in a desert," she said.
"Zuko's text caught me in Gaoling, and I flew seventeen hours, I haven't slept, I-." He came closer, slow now, giving her every chance to stop him. "Katara. I unpacked. On the flight, in my head, all of it, every box. I want the lease with your name next to mine with the bathroom schedule and the movie nights and the weekly groceries. I want week four, I want week four hundred. I'm terrified and I'm staying, and those are going to have to be roommates too. I'm so sorry that I ran... Will you forgive me?”
"That's the whole speech?"
"And I love you, Katara."
She took it all in. Then, before he could utter another word, Katara stepped into his arms and said, "I love you too, Aang."
This kiss was nothing like the wedding; that one had been a discovery. This kiss was a homecoming, and it started with her cold hands framing his face, his gasp at the chill turning into a laugh against her mouth, snow melting where they touched. Then it gentled into something slow and thorough, all the held-back weeks of it, his fingers sliding into her hair, her arms wrapped inside his open jacket around the warmth of him.
He kissed her like he wasn't going anywhere, and she could feel that certainty in it, steady as held weight on solid ice.
When the cold finally drove them toward the door, Appa was already filling the entire entryway upstairs, and shoved between them with the full authority of the true leaseholder. They went down in a heap of fur and snow and laughter on the landing, under the painted eyes of the building's guardian spirit, who, Iroh swore ever after, looked distinctly pleased.
Much later that night, over cooling dumplings and the vegetarian half of a standing order from Kwan Street, Katara dug the founding takeout menu out of the kitchen drawer and added a fifth rule in her tidy booker's handwriting. Rule five: as long as there's love, we stay.
Aang read it twice, signed it.
The Metropolitan ran the Painted Lady's final column when the ice was going out of the bay. It was four sentences long.
A correction, from the field. Spring ice is not a trap, and the thaw is not a verdict. Ice thaws so the water can move again, and water, it turns out, remembers how to hold you up if you learn how to swim together. This lady is hanging up her hat on a hook, by a door, at an address where she plans to stay.
- The Painted Lady, retired, month to month no longer