Chapter Text
The studio was in a converted warehouse on the east side in a building that once made things and now was converted to a multi-use space. Morning light came through the clerestory windows in long slanted bars, and dust hung inside them, slow as snowfall in a paperweight.
Katara double-checked the address against the email Suki had forwarded her, took a breath, and pushed through the steel door.
She was doing this for tuition. That was the mantra. The scholarship she'd fought for covered half of med school, and the other half was hers to invent: modeling in the summers, when the campaigns paid best, and a clinic job already lined up for the school year. Classes started at the end of August, the first bill came due sooner, and MVI, the designer label with the razor-sharp silhouettes and the all-black lookbooks, paid campaign models enough to close the fall gap in a single booking. Suki had vouched for her with the booking agent after two years of dragging Katara to class at Kiyoshi Dance and telling her she moved like water.
Katara could survive one summer of standing under hot lights in expensive clothes. People survived worse things for less money.
"You're the nine o'clock," said a voice from somewhere near the floor.
Katara looked down. A small woman in a rumpled green flannel sat cross-legged on a road case, bare feet propped on a sandbag, a headset around her neck and a tablet balanced on one knee. Her eyes were pale and unfocused, aimed somewhere past Katara's shoulder.
"Katara, right?" She stuck out a hand. "Toph, manager. This studio is mine to run, everything except the camera, and honestly, some days I do that too."
Katara shook her hand, half amused and half terrified. "Nice to meet you, Toph. Yes, I'm Katara, the nine o'clock."
"Twinkletoes!" Toph hollered toward the back of the studio, where a wall of black flags and softboxes hid whatever was behind it. "The first model is here, and her heart rate says she thinks we bite!"
"We don't bite," came a warm voice from behind the lights. "Toph bites. I mostly just take pictures."
The photographer stepped around a C-stand with a camera slung across his chest, his sleeves pushed up over forearms marked with clean blue line tattoos. Suddenly, Katara's mantra about tuition evaporated entirely, because she knew that face. She had known it when it was rounder and shorter and perpetually sticky with sea salt taffy. She had known it before it belonged to a man who could wear a gray henley like it was a personality trait.
"Aang?"
He stopped moving. The easy professional smile fell off his face and something younger replaced it, something wide open and disbelieving, like a shutter left open too long.
"Katara?"
"Oh," Toph said flatly from her road case, in the tone of someone who had just found money on the ground. "Wonderful."
They got exactly four minutes to catch up before the stylist claimed her, and then they caught up in fragments for the rest of the day, in the gaps where Aang swapped memory cards and Katara stood very still while someone repositioned a collar by two millimeters.
He had moved away the summer they all turned fourteen. Aang had arrived at eight, trailing his grandfather Gyatso, a career diplomat posted to the consulate by the harbor, and that posting had outlasted every other one Gyatso ever held.
He'd arrived, though neither of them understood it then, into the quietest year of her life, the spring after their mother died, when the house still didn't know what to do with itself. Aang was the new kid from the consulate who, for the first thing in months, had made Sokka laugh out loud. The three of them became a matched set after that, she and Sokka born eleven minutes apart in March and Aang ahead of them by a season, their calendars so entangled they'd celebrated one collective birthday for years.
She remembered his leaving in the blurry way you remember things from that age: Gyatso, retired at last, packing a van full of plants and wind chimes, headed for the mountain monastery where he'd studied as a young man before the foreign service claimed him; and Sokka moping around the house for a month afterward.
What she learned now, in pieces, was what came after. The monks kept an archive and a storeroom nobody used, and Aang, fourteen and homesick for the first place that had ever felt permanent, turned the storeroom into a darkroom and photographed the mountains until he understood them. The portfolio won him a full scholarship to the best art school in the country.
The scholarship covered nothing else, so he worked all four years, assisting anyone who'd let him carry a light stand, and came out the other side with a dense portfolio, a career, and a life spent half in departure lounges, flown somewhere new every few weeks to shoot. He listed the cities lightly, postings and campaigns alike, like a man reading someone else's itinerary.
"That's a lot of traveling," she said.
"You get good at it," he said, and clicked the shutter before she could read his face. "Chin down a hair. There."
Sokka and Aang had never actually lost touch. They'd graduated from postcards to video games to the occasional phone call. Once an engineering firm claimed Sokka a full semester before he'd even graduated, he'd spent his first real paycheck flying out to wherever Aang was shooting that year.
Katara had heard her twin mention Aang the way you mention weather in another city, pleasant and distant. She simply hadn't been there for any of it. Those years, she'd been in a pool at five in the morning, chasing the swimming scholarship that eventually paid for all four years of undergrad, and at Gran-Gran's kitchen table at night, managing pill organizers and physical therapy schedules while their dad, who taught history at the public school, graded papers at the other end of the table. There had been dance classes with Suki when she could afford the time, and there had been Haru, who was gentle and went nowhere, and Jet, who was neither. Somewhere in all of it, "Aang" had become a name that belonged to her twin's life instead of hers.
"Is Gyatso still up in the mountains?"
"Still there. He's got goats now. He'd tell you the monastery keeps the goats and the goats keep him." The shutter clicked twice. "He asks about you, you know. Every time I visit."
"He remembers me?"
Aang lowered the camera and looked at her over it, and there was something in his expression she couldn't place anywhere.
"You're unforgettable, Katara."
From video village, Toph made a loud, disgusted noise into her headset.
The he noticed the necklace when wardrobe asked her to take it off for the neckline of look three. Her hand went to her throat like the request was minor surgery.
Silently, he held out his palm to her as she unclasped the chain. From then on, it rode in the padded pocket of his camera bag during takes and came back to her at every wrap, warm from his keeping.
Kya's necklace. He remembered it was a keepsake from her mother.
At lunch, they found their oldest argument again, the one about the taffy shop on the boardwalk back home. Aang insisted it had closed the year he left, because the universe had that kind of sense of humor. Katara insisted it survived, though she couldn't swear to it, because she hadn't walked that boardwalk in years either. Neither of them looked it up to confirm that day. Some arguments you keep because they're a place to meet.
But the strangest part of the day came at wrap, when the label's creative director swept through in a black coat to review selects. Katara recognized her from the mood boards: Mai, the designer herself, all deadpan elegance. A man trailed behind her with two coffees and a scar over his left eye. He set both cups down in order to hug Aang with the grim thoroughness of someone executing a maneuver he had practiced.
"Katara, this is Zuko," Aang said, muffled. "Mai's fiancé. My best friend since we were fourteen. And I only found this out two years ago, he's also one of Sokka's fantasy football guys."
Zuko released Aang, straightened his jacket, and offered Katara a handshake that was ninety percent eye contact. "Your brother has terrible instincts and refuses to learn. It's an honor."
"You're ZuZu Zuko? He's been losing money to you for three seasons."
"He tells everyone it's the other way around," Zuko said, with the flat intensity of a man correcting the historical record.
"Small world," Mai observed, in a voice suggesting the world's size bored her.
"Unreasonably small," Katara agreed, and pulled out her phone to text her brother, who responded within a minute with seven exclamation points and the words AANG IS YOUR PHOTOGRAPHER??? DOES HE KNOW YOU'RE MY SISTER, followed immediately by a second text reading obviously he knows you're my sister, ignore me, I'm processing.
It took her the rest of that first week to map the geography of Aang's world. Mai was old money, the kind with buildings named after it, and her label's mark, an M beside a hard-angled V, resolved under a tilted head into a Z lying on its side. She had redrawn the logotype the season she got engaged, and when an interviewer asked about it she said she liked the geometry. Zuko was a military brat from a family of generals, shipped to his Uncle Iroh every summer his father shipped out. Iroh had retired to the valley below Gyatso's monastery, an old friend from the decades when the general and the diplomat had worked the same negotiations from opposite ends of the table, and their standing Pai Sho feud was older than either boy. That was how two displaced fourteen-year-olds had ended up teaching each other how to be from nowhere. Toph, she learned from a lighting tech, was a Beifong, heiress to a development fortune, who had fired her own family at nineteen and hired herself as Aang's studio manager not long after.
And in the middle of it all, sat the scholarship kid with a diplomat's passport and a civil servant's bank account, who had carried all their light stands before he ever outranked them, and whom every one of them, in their own dialect, plainly adored.
The campaign shot over three weeks, with a final wrap week for pickups, and the studio had a social ecosystem Katara had not been prepared for. The other models were professionals, most of them lovely, and two of them were not.
It took her a few days to understand why. Aang was, apparently, the industry's collective crush. He remembered coffee orders and played music between setups and asked people about their dogs. Models personally requested him. Two of them, a striking pair who had worked his last four campaigns, had clearly assumed this one would run the same way, and had not accounted for their photographer spending every break gravitating toward the new girl.
The cold shoulder started small. Katara's call times got relayed late. Her water bottle mysteriously migrated. Conversations dropped to a murmur when she entered the dressing room and bloomed again when she left.
She gave it four days, which she personally considered saintly. On the fifth, when her steamer went missing twenty minutes before a look, she walked into the dressing room, found it sitting beside the taller one's station, and picked it up.
"I'll keep this simple," she said, pleasantly, to the mirror they were both facing. "If either of you has something to say about me, you can say it while I'm in the room. I grew up with a brother. I promise you I don't rattle."
There was a thick silence. The taller model smirked at Katara's reflection.
"No idea what you mean, sweetheart."
"Great," Katara said. "Then we understand each other."
The pettiness stopped. The murmuring didn't, quite, but it moved further away, and Katara counted it as a win and told no one. At lunch, Toph dropped onto the bench across from her with unsettling accuracy for someone who couldn't see the bench and said, "Heard you handled the vipers."
"Nothing to handle. They're threatened over nothing. Nothing's happening."
Toph chewed her sandwich thoughtfully. "You know I can hear people's heartbeats change when they lie? Old party trick."
"That's not a real thing."
"Agree to disagree," Toph said, and stole one of her chips.
Suki, meanwhile, texted the way she danced, no wasted motion. Katara had made the mistake of mentioning the monastery and the industry's collective crush on him in the same phone call, and Suki had answered with two words that could never afterward be unrung.
how's the campaign? and monk rizz?
He has a name, Suki. And he's my coworker for goodness' sake!
but are you into him?
He is my COWORKER!
that's not a no, Suki wrote back, and did not push, because pushing wasn't her way. She just left the question standing where Katara would trip over it daily.
And then the accident happened.
Mai's concept for the hero shot involved a shallow reflecting pool built on a riser, a sheet of black glass under black silk, gorgeous and actionable in equal measure. Katara had done four hours of takes in it, and the water had felt like the first honest thing in the building, cool and familiar around her ankles, ten years of five a.m. practices humming somewhere in her body.
Stepping down off the riser, her foot found the one wet strip of tape on the stairs, and the world tipped sideways.
She heard the wet crack of her ankle rolling before she felt it, and then she was sitting on the studio floor in fourteen thousand dollars of silk with pain flashing white up her leg. Her first coherent thoughts were: shooting days left, tuition due dates, the replacement model they would call by dinner.
Her eyes flooded, fast and hot, and she bit it back, jaw tight, just as she had bitten everything back in front of strangers since she was eight, and ran her own assessment instead: lateral roll, no give of bone, weight-bearing doubtful. A sprain, and not a polite one.
"Don't move." Aang was there before the crew finished gasping, kneeling, his camera abandoned on the floor behind him with a carelessness that would have horrified him any other minute of his life. "Hey. Look at me. Breathe."
"I'm fine, I can stand, we still have the-"
"Katara." He said her name quietly, and it worked on her the way nothing had in two weeks; the tears stood down without being dismissed. "We're going to get ice on this. That's all that's happening right now."
Then he slid one arm under her knees and one behind her back and lifted her off the floor like she weighed nothing, princess style, silk train and all. He carried her the length of the studio while thirty industry professionals watched in a silence.
Somewhere behind them, Toph said, to no one and everyone, "Yeah, get it all out of your systems now, people."
In the greenroom, she took over her own case before anyone could offer. "Cushions, two please. It needs to be elevated." She gingerly arranged her leg on the stack while Aang hovered, positioning the cold pack herself. "Is there ibuprofen in that kit? Or anywhere in this building. And something to eat first, if you can find it."
"You're triaging yourself," he said, somewhere between alarmed and admiring, already moving.
"A decade of poolside ankles and a head start on the degree." Her voice came out steadier than she felt, which was the whole trick of her, and it held right up until he knelt to reseat the cold pack, gentler than the moment required. The adrenaline chose that minute to leave.
Two tears got away before she could vote on it. She swiped them with the heel of her hand, furious.
Aang didn't flinch, didn't look away, and didn't tell her it was fine. He kept his palm steady over the ice and said, "You don't have to be composed in here. It's just me."
And that was how the fear got out. "I need this campaign. If they replace me, I can't close the gap on fall tuition, and I know that's not your problem-"
"Nobody's replacing you." He was crouched in front of her, steady and certain. "The remaining looks work seated and in close-up. I'll re-block the schedule tonight. We'll figure it out. I promise."
"Why?" she asked, before she could stop herself. "Why go to all that trouble?"
For a second he looked like he might actually answer. Then Toph banged the door open with more ice and a compression bandage and announced that the campaign's new hero prop was a very chic chair.
He drove her to urgent care that night and sat through the X-ray in the waiting room. The film came back clean: no fracture, a proper lateral sprain, compression and patience and staying off it, no heroics. Katara had called it on the studio floor before anyone official said it out loud, and being right steadied her more than the injury had shaken her.
Then Aang drove her home, and somehow he was driving her every day after. He even started showing up at her apartment on her off days with groceries because "you shouldn't be standing on it."
(Momo, a lean gray cat with enormous ears, spent the first grocery visit glaring down from the top of the refrigerator. By the second visit, Momo fell asleep in Aang's lap before the kettle boiled.)
The drives were where they refilled ten years.
Somewhere between the studio and her street, eyes on the road, he asked, "So whatever happened with Haru? Sokka's reports said he moved home to run his dad's quarry."
Katara turned in her seat. "You know about Haru?"
"I got the newsletter. Annual Sokka dispatches, heavily editorialized. Haru was 'boring nice guy' and Jet was 'walking red flag.'"
"Jet was not a red-" She stopped, in the interest of honesty. "Jet had his flaws, okay. Fine. And you? The newsletter apparently ran one direction, because I got nothing on you."
"Well, since you're asking... There was Meng, second year of art school; she liked me more than I liked her, and I handled it badly by being nice about it for six months, instead of being honest. Then OnJi, when we were both assistants. We loved the same bands and hated the same clients; when it ended nobody cried, which tells you what it was." He said it lightly, hands easy on the wheel. "Neither of them ever quoted a rulebook at a meet official from the podium, though. Page and paragraph, the way Sokka tells it."
"That story has improved with age. I cited only the page." She was smiling, and then slowly not, as a memory from earlier in the week assembled itself. "Sokka has never in his life described choreography. So think very carefully about how you were planning to finish the sentence you started on Tuesday about the footwork in my winter showcase."
Aang stared at the road with the expression of a man calculating the fine for a crime he had definitely committed. "Kiyoshi Dance," he said at last, "posts videos. To a public account. Publicly."
"How many times?"
"There's no way of knowing that."
"Aang."
"The winter showcase has a view count and I might be a meaningful percentage of it," he said, ears going red. Katara laughed until her ankle complained, and filed the whole confession away in the drawer with the unpacked boxes.
He turned the radio up to survive it. The universe, feeling cooperative, served up the sugar-rush pop single from the summer they were ten, the one every station on the coast had played into the ground while the three of them ran the boardwalk.
Katara gasped like she'd been handed evidence and cranked the volume. She came in at full voice and zero shame. Aang joined on the second chorus with entirely the wrong words, committed to every one of them. By the bridge, they were performing to the windshield of the neighboring sedan, whose driver chose not to see them.
Then that song ended, and a piano came in low and nostalgic. The song was about how the first person you love stays folded into you no matter who comes after. Katara reached to change it, an old reflex of mercy, and stopped, because at the red light Aang had gone quiet.
His hand hung loose on the wheel and he was mouthing along, every word, like a song you know because you've lived inside. She dropped her hand didn't change the station.
The light turned green.
On set, the ritual evolved. The first day of the re-blocked schedule, he was everywhere, handheld over the pool, up the ladder rig, and down on the floor for the low angles.
When she unclasped the necklace at call time, he looked across the studio at his camera bag, parked behind three flags, and then at her.
"Can I wear it today?" he asked, light as anything. "Safer than the bag. I'll keep it under the collar, out of your shot."
She fastened it around his neck herself, which was not strictly necessary, and stepped back, and he struck a pose against the C-stand. "How do I look?"
"You mean all of you, or just your neck?" she said, before her brain could file an objection, and the tips of his ears went red. Studio staff pretended not to be first-hand witnesses of the flirtatious exchange.
He wore it every shoot day after that, out of sight under his shirt, her mother's pendant lying all day against the loudest heartbeat in the building.
On the first Sunday of her wrapped ankle, he brought something else: a battered leather case, soft at the corners, holding a film camera older than both of them. Gyatso's. The light meter was held together with a strip of gaffer tape gone amber with age.
"You're going to be shooting from a chair for the rest of this campaign," he said. "Might as well learn something else you can do sitting down. Lesson one."
The loft door opened onto a hundred pounds of dog, gray and shaggy as a storm cloud, who inspected her wrapped ankle with tremendous gravity and then leaned his entire weight against her good leg in welcome.
"Appa," Aang said. "The monastery dogs had a litter my last year of art school, and Gyatso said I looked lonely. He's been with me ever since."
His loft had roof access, and he installed her in a folding chair up there in the slow end of a summer afternoon with the camera in her lap. The city spread below them going soft at the edges. He taught her the way he seemed to do everything, patiently and with his whole attention: aperture, shutter, the alchemy between them - to roll the focus slow and feel the world sharpen.
The light in the sky changed. It came in low over the rooftops, turning the brick to crust and the water towers to brass. Everything ordinary in the city looked, briefly, transcendent.
"There it is," Aang said. "Golden hour. You get maybe twenty minutes, if the sky's kind." He was watching the light instead of her, and his voice had gone somewhere older. "You know how I grew up. New posting every couple of years, new school, new word for goodbye. Your town was the longest we ever stayed anywhere. Then the monastery, and the monks had whole teachings about impermanence, loving things without holding on to them. I was fourteen and homesick, so I mostly learned it as light. And now the work flies me somewhere new every few weeks. I got very good at twenty minutes."
Katara looked at him, at the gold pooling along the line of his jaw, and raised the camera without letting herself think about it. He turned at the sound of the film advancing and grinned, caught, one hand coming up too late, and she pressed the shutter on that.
"Hey. I'm supposed to be teaching you focus."
"I focused," she said. "Lesson one, done."
Below, on the way out, she noticed the thing she made herself not ask about. Nearly half his loft was still in boxes, stacked along the brick wall like a cardboard skyline, the packing tape unbroken and furred with dust. Three years he'd been in this loft; he'd mentioned it once in the car, in passing, the way he mentioned all his addresses. The only things he had bothered to put on the walls were photographs.
And the ledger refused to balance, because the man who kept his kettle shut also kept a dog the size of a loveseat, brushed and adored, with a feeding schedule taped inside a cabinet door. The keeping was in him, intact and working. He'd just stopped spending any of it on himself. She filed it away, the way you file a sound in a house you're still learning.
Suki showed up that week with dumplings and zero warning, took one look at the propped ankle and the film camera on the coffee table, and made herself at home.
Halfway through dinner she said, lightly, "So. Sokka and I have been hanging out."
Katara set down her chopsticks. "Hanging out."
"Talking, hanging out." Suki shrugged, easy as anything. "You know how he's always been really funny. And he's kind, like you. But taller. And nerdier. Guess I'm into that?"
"You're dating my brother."
"I'm dating your brother," Suki agreed, and stole a dumpling, and that was the whole procedure: named, organized, and done, no runway required.
Katara looked at her best friend with love and with something that stung a little. It had taken Suki one dinner to say a true thing out loud, while Katara was currently sitting inches away from a film camera she had no right to be borrowing.
"Your turn," Suki said. "Monk Rizz."
"You mean my coworker."
"Katara, please."
"Well, in a sense…" Katara said, with dignity, and Suki let it go the way you let out a fishing line.
Toph, meanwhile, had abandoned all subtlety, and she had staff for it. Kanto, her assistant, was a quiet man with wire-rimmed glasses who executed her schemes without comment and looked at her, whenever she wasn't facing him, like she'd invented weather; since Toph heard everything, Katara suspected she knew, and was taking her time about it.
Under Kanto's neutral administration, Katara's call sheet mysteriously synced with Aang's schedule down to the minute. A "catering error" left exactly one dinner in the greenroom fridge, portioned for two. Finally, on the last Friday before wrap week, Toph confiscated Aang's keys at the end of the day, physically stationed herself in front of the studio door, and said, "The building is closed. It's seven o'clock. There's a night market four blocks away. I cannot believe I have to art-direct this too."
At the night market, lanterns hung between the stalls like rows of paper moons. Aang won her a ridiculous stuffed turtle at a ring toss and insisted the turtle was hers to name, and she called it Sokka Junior specifically to watch him wheeze.
They ate skewers standing up, hers off the grill and his the vegetable ones. He asked why medicine, and she told him the true version, the one she sanded down for admissions interviews: that when her mother was sick, there had been one doctor who crouched to a seven-year-old's eye level and told her the truth in words a child could hold, and the room had stopped spinning for exactly as long as that woman was in it; that she'd then spent a decade of Gran-Gran's appointments translating physician into grandmother and back; that she wanted to be the still point in the worst room of somebody's life.
"You already are, you know," Aang said, and she had to look very hard at a lantern stall for a while.
His loft was on the walk to her bus stop, which was the excuse, and he wanted to show her the campaign selects, which was the other excuse, and both were so transparent that neither of them insulted the other by pretending.
They stumbled in the door still laughing about something Sokka Junior related. Appa raised his head from the couch, assessed the situation as requiring nothing from him, and laid back down. Then their laughter trailed off, the loft dark and cozy, and he was looking at her like every light he'd ever metered had been practice just for her.
She kissed him first.
It was soft and then it very much wasn't, her hands finding the front of his shirt, his palm warm against her jaw, the stuffed turtle falling somewhere unmourned. They fetched up against the kitchen island and Aang pulled back an inch, breathing unevenly, and said, with total sincerity:
"Pinch me."
Katara blinked at him. "What?"
"Pinch me. Please. Because there's a real possibility I'm dreaming, and I'd rather find out now." His thumb traced her cheekbone like he was committing it to film. "I've dreamt about this, about kissing you, since I was twelve years old, Katara. Before I even knew what to call it."
The confession knocked the air out of her. Twelve - two whole years before he ever left. The boardwalk, the taffy, every ordinary afternoon of it, and this underneath all of it the entire time.
He seemed to hear himself a beat too late, and winced. "Is that weird? That's weird. You can say it's-"
She shushed him with another kiss, more tender, with both hands at his collar. She felt him smile against her mouth, and neither of them spoke anything articulate for a good while after that.
The problem with a perfect night is that daylight audits it.
Wrap week arrived, and with it, reality. On set, they were professionals, which meant Aang was warm and attentive to her in exactly the same key he was warm with the lighting assistant, the caterer, and both of the models who disliked her. Katara knew the discretion was for her benefit.
The chain of her mother's necklace ghosted at his collar all week and said one thing while the evenhanded warmth said another; at night, her brain ruled the testimony inconclusive. It agreed with her in the daytime and defected after dark, at which point it played her a supercut of everything they hadn't said. He texted her good morning and kissed her goodnight at her door like something out of a film, and neither of them had used a word like dating or girlfriend. He was a beloved man in an industry built on temporary intensity, and she had watched him love a hundred things twenty minutes at a time.
Then the dressing room handed her something worse than doubt. On the second to last shooting day, she was in a fitting stall, hidden by a rack of coats, when the two models came in mid-conversation.
"...twenty-four and this is her first booking," one was saying. "Started late and walked straight into a house campaign. Make it make sense."
"You know exactly how it makes sense. He's sweet on every set, that's just Aang, but he begged Mai to keep her after the ankle. Put his own rate up against the insurance overage. He does love a project."
"They always think they're the exception," said the first, and they laughed.
Katara stepped out from behind the coats, still holding a hanger, and had the small satisfaction of watching both of them recalibrate in real time.
"We talked about this," she said. "In the room."
The taller one recovered first, and her smile this time had actual teeth in it. "You should be thanking us, sweetheart. Better you hear it from someone. Ask him what the extension cost."
Katara held her gaze until the two of them gathered their garment bags and left. She won the staring contest but felt like lost everything else. The started-late line was nothing; she knew the odds herself before she ever took the booking. It was the other barb that stayed in, because it was true-shaped. She'd spent two weeks telling herself the seated shots had saved her spot on this campaign.
Nobody had mentioned money.
She found Aang between setups, coiling a sync cable, and didn't bother with a runway.
"Did you pay to keep me on this campaign?"
His hands stopped on the cable. "Where did-"
"Answer the question, Aang."
"Technically nobody pays Mai anything, her margins are a national security matter-"
"Stop deflecting."
He set the cable down. Around them, the crew developed a sudden intense interest in sandbags. "The insurance flagged the schedule extension after your fall," he said quietly. "There was an overage. I told Mai to take it out of my rate. It wasn't a big-"
"Don't you dare tell me it wasn't a big deal." Her voice stayed low and it burned anyway; she could hear it burning. "I have paid for every single thing I have ever had. I swam before dawn for ten years and the swimming bought every credit of my undergrad. I fought for a scholarship that covers half of med school and I am earning the other half in silk that costs more than my rent. The one thing that made it bearable was believing I'd earned the frame. So I need you to tell me the truth. Did I earn this campaign, or did you buy it for me?"
"That's not-" He stopped. He looked, for the first time since she'd walked back into his life, genuinely lost for an exposure. "Katara, I didn't do it because you were fragile."
"Then why?"
And there it was again, the swerve she was learning to recognize, his eyes going to the middle distance, his voice reaching for lightness like a railing. "Because it was the right call for the campaign. Ask Mai."
"I'm asking you."
He didn't answer. She nodded once, the way she nodded at scales and bank balances and other unmoving objects, and walked back to set. She was flawless for the rest of the day, which was its own kind of message.
She lasted until one in the morning. Anger, she had learned young, was a tide in her; it went out and left the actuality of things sitting on the sand. He had dodged her question, and he had also quietly cut his own pay so she could make tuition. Only one of those facts got to be the whole story if she never went back for the other.
The studio's side door was unlocked. She followed the only light in the building to the workstation behind the flags and found him there, editing, in the same clothes from set. Two cold coffees stood sentry beside the keyboard. The schedule he'd re-blocked after her fall was pinned above the monitor: he had folded the retoucher's job into his own nights so the extension cost the production almost nothing beyond what he'd already given up. His shoulders had the specific wrongness of a person running on fumes and calling it discipline.
"When did you last eat?" she said.
He startled, turned, and had the decency not to lie. "There was a granola bar. Earlier."
"Sit back." She set her bag on the desk and started unpacking it. Congee from the all-night place near her apartment, still hot, and a white paper bag gone translucent at the corners. "You can be a martyr after you've had soup."
"Katara, about today-"
"Eat first."
He ate. She sat on the desk beside the monitor, wrapped ankle propped on a road case, and watched color climb back into him. When he was most of the way through the container, she put the paper bag in his hands. He opened it and went completely still.
Sea salt taffy. The wax paper twists, the pale blue stripe, unmistakable.
"The shop's still there," she said. "I called the boardwalk association, I called the shop, I paid criminal shipping. So... I was right. Of course."
He chuckled and he looked down at the bag for a long moment, as if selecting his next words carefully.
"You want to know why," he said finally. "Okay. The truth is the seated shots are the best work I have ever done, and that's you. Taking you off this campaign would have been a professional lie, and I don't tell those. So no, you didn't get kept out of pity. You were kept on because Mai is going to build the whole launch around your face, and she knows it. Every person in that dressing room knows it too."
He turned the taffy bag over in his hands. "And I need you to hear the other part. I was the scholarship kid in rooms full of Beifongs for years. I know to the cent what it costs to wonder whether you were let in. I would never have hung that around your neck. The rate was nothing; I'd have paid more for the picture. That's the whole truth about the campaign."
"And the rest of it?" she asked, gently, because she could see the swerve gathering. "The part that isn't about the campaign?"
He opened his mouth. She watched him stand at the edge of it, whatever it was, and step back.
"The light's better when you're here," he said. "That's a photographer thing. Ignore me."
It wasn't nothing, and it wasn't the answer.
Katara, who had confronted swim coaches and boyfriends and once made a hospital billing department cry, discovered there was exactly one question in the world she was afraid of. She let him keep the swerve, this once, and stole a piece of taffy while she made herself a deal. The day the campaign wrapped, when he was no longer her photographer and there was nothing professional left to shield either of them, she would ask him what this was, out loud and plainly, and stand in whatever answer came back. Being scared of a question, Gran-Gran liked to say, was not a reason to leave it unasked.
She just had to survive until the wrap party.
Mai threw the wrap party at the studio itself, the reflecting pool relit in gold so the whole room seemed to hang above its own reflection.
Everyone Katara had somehow accumulated in one strange month was in the same building. Katara wore black silk and a discreet ankle wrap, which Mai had considered once, head tilted, and pronounced "editorial." Suki came as her plus one and immediately hit it off with Toph in a way that boded poorly for the city at large. Sokka arrived uninvited but well informed, given that his girlfriend was already inside as somebody else's plus one, was welcomed anyway. He spent ten full minutes standing between Aang and Katara looking back and forth like a man watching tennis.
"So this is happening," he said finally. "You two. My childhood best friend and my twin sister."
"Sokka," Katara started.
"No, no, I support it. Fully, and from a distance. No oogies. That's the whole policy. I just need everyone to acknowledge that I am the load-bearing character in this story. None of you would know each other without me."
"Check the call sheets, Snoozles," said Toph, materializing with a drink. "This was produced. You were location scouting at best."
Kanto appeared beside her without being called and traded her empty glass for a full one; Toph took it without turning her head, and Suki mouthed are they? at Katara over the rim of her own, and Katara mouthed back not yet.
Mai passed through the crowd once, like weather. She stopped in front of Katara, looked at her the way she looked at fabric, and said, "The seated look is the hero image. It goes up on Fifth Street for the fall launch." A pause, precisely measured. "Before you ask, I don't repeat favors. I keep good pictures." And she was gone, leaving Katara holding the one piece of proof no one in that dressing room could ever take back.
It was Zuko who found her by the drinks table towards the final hour. He planted himself at her elbow with the stiffness of a man who had rehearsed in the car and said, "I'm going to say something, and Mai says when I do this I should lead with the point, so. The point is about Aang."
"Okay," Katara said carefully.
"I've helped him move six times since we were eighteen. The last time was into that loft, three years ago, and he's never opened the boxes. He keeps everything more or less packed." Zuko frowned at his own hands. "Except the first day of this project, before we found so much as a mug, he put one picture on the wall."
He stopped, visibly heard himself, and looked briefly like a man watching a cart roll downhill.
"The point is he doesn't stay for things, and he stays for you, and someone should tell you that plainly, because he never will. He'll orbit it forever. He's been my best friend for ten years and he still says goodbye at airports like it's practice. Do what you will with this information."
He nodded once, mission complete, and walked away with his shoulders squared.
Before they left, Aang pulled her aside. "Can I show you something?"
He led her back behind the flags to his workstation, where the campaign selects glowed on the monitor. But it wasn't the selects he pulled up. It was a scan of an old photograph, black and white, grainy, the corners soft with age.
A community pool with a crowd of kids on a summer morning. In the center of the frame, caught at the edge of the starting block, a twelve-year-old girl with a braid down her back, laughing at something outside the frame, entirely unaware of the camera.
Katara's hand came up to her mouth.
"Sokka dragged me to your swim meet, the summer I was twelve. Two summers before we moved," Aang said quietly. "Gyatso had just given me the camera. I didn't know anything. I couldn't even focus it properly. This is the first photograph I ever took, and out of the whole roll, it's the only one that came out."
He was talking to the screen instead of her, which she understood, because some things are easier to say to a photograph. "I've carried it to every apartment I've ever had. When your name came up on the casting sheet, Toph had to physically stop me from calling the agency to confirm it was really you."
He took a breath. She watched him stand at the edge again, the same edge as the studio at one in the morning, the same edge, she suspected, as ten years of edges.
"So. Anyway." The swerve, arriving right on schedule, his voice lifting into brightness like a hand reaching for the railing. "I scanned it for you. For your apartment, or your locker, or- You don't have to keep it. It's just-"
"Aang."
"Hm?"
"I came to this party carrying a question." Her heart was going like a starting gun had fired somewhere, and she asked anyway, plainly, the way she did everything that mattered. "What is this to you?"
The brightness went out of his face and left something truer and more frightened behind it. The party glowed gold on the far side of the flags. He was quiet long enough that she could hear the reflecting pool lapping faintly at its riser.
"Every posting, every school, every set I've ever worked," he said, "every city they fly me to, I'm everybody's favorite twenty minutes. The fun one, the one people love while the light's good. And I learned that if you don't name a thing, you don't have to watch it end, so I don't name things. I didn't name this. Because the second I call it what it is, the clock starts, and Katara, I have wanted this since before I knew what wanting was - I could not survive watching it be a transient golden hour."
There it was. The whole roll, finally developed.
"Zuko told me about the boxes," she said.
Aang winced. "Of course he did."
"Three years, Aang. You never even unpacked the kettle?" She stepped in close and took his face in both hands, the way she'd wanted to since a taller, sadder version of a boy she loved had walked around a C-stand into her life.
"So listen to me, because I've been rehearsing this since a fitting stall two days ago. I'm a swimmer. Ten years, before dawn, in the water. And the thing about water is that it always comes back. Tide's the most reliable thing on earth. You've spent your whole life bracing for the light to leave, and meanwhile I have been standing here trying to work up the courage to ask you to keep me." Her thumb traced the line of his jaw, gold-edged in the party light. "So I'm asking. I would like the name, the label... and the goats. To be the person who drives you home when you forget you're a human being and not a schedule. I want everything, out loud. What about you? What do you want?"
He exhaled ten years.
"Pinch me," he said, unsteadily.
"No." She smiled, and felt it tremble, and didn't care. "Not this time. This one's real, Aang, and you get to keep it."
He kissed her like a man unpacking, unhurried and thorough, one stored thing at a time brought out into the light. Both arms went around her and her feet briefly left the floor; when they found it again, his hand traveled up to rest at the nape of her neck, over the clasp of her mother's necklace, the small weight he knew by heart, keeping it and her in the same palm. For the first time in his life, twenty minutes had no countdown in them.
Against her mouth, he was smiling, or trembling, or both; she couldn't tell yet, and she had time to learn.
Aang had an editorial in Seoul, booked months before the summer rearranged itself: eight days, a crew he liked with a client he didn't.
He told her over dinner with his thumb moving across her knuckles, watching her face the way he watched a light meter, and she said, "Aang. I start school in a month and you take pictures for a living. Go take them. Appa can stay with me and Momo." Momo had already approved the arrangement, with conditions. She meant all of it, and believed she meant all of it, right up until the morning he flew.
She was elbow-deep in financial aid forms when Zuko's voice surfaced in her, uninvited. He still says goodbye at airports like it's practice. Ten years of departure lounges, a childhood of being no one's reason to drive to an airport. They had said goodbye at her door at dawn, and it had been sweet and ordinary, but the wrong size for the occasion.
She left the forms where they lay.
The terminal at midmorning was all rolling suitcases and announcements. She ran it in sandals, the ankle only lately returned to full service, dodging a tour group and a man carrying a cello, and caught him at the mouth of the security line, backpack and camera bag on, about to surrender himself to the stanchions.
"Aang!"
He turned, and she would keep the look on his face for the rest of her life: one blank second of a man hearing his name in a place where his name was never called, and then the whole sunrise of understanding it.
She arrived out of breath. "Hi. This morning didn't count."
"It didn't?"
"It was practice." She watched the word land and knew Zuko would be hearing about it. "This is the real one. Nobody's ever chased you through an airport, have they."
"No," he said, wonder plain on him. "Nobody ever has." He checked the time. "I have about twenty minutes before I have to be through there."
"Twenty minutes." She stepped in and straightened his collar, mostly to have her hands somewhere on him. "Your specialty."
"Katara."
"Go take beautiful pictures, eat actual meals, and call me when you land." She took his face in both hands. "Come home to me."
"Eight days," he said. "I'll be home soon. And I mean that word now. It stopped being the loft somewhere in the middle of July." He leaned his forehead against hers. "It's wherever you're standing. You're it. You're my home, Katara."
She kissed him there, in front of the tour group and the cello and the whole indifferent morning, long enough that somebody whistled at them.
He looked back twice from the security line. She stayed until she couldn't see him anymore, then walked out of the terminal into the flat bright light of midmorning, the kind no photographer chases and nobody ever loses.
She drove home to his dog and her cat and eight days of waiting. After ten years, it barely counted as a wait at all.