Chapter Text
The water had been running for a long time.
Aang stood in the hallway outside their bathroom, one hand resting against the doorframe, listening to it hit the tile. Underneath that sound, unmistakably, was Katara.
He had heard her cry before, though rarely, and he had never quite grown used to it. There was an old, unspoken order to how the two of them came apart. Katara held things together long after everyone else had given up: she braced, she stitched, she kept her voice level while doing both. Hearing her come undone still felt, after all this time, like watching a mountain crack.
He knew why tonight, or thought he did. Katara had spent weeks arranging for a delegation of healers from the Northern Water Tribe to watch Kya work, the kind of early recognition that usually took years to earn, and Aang had promised to be there.
He'd meant it when he said it. But Tenzin had been in the training arena since dawn, red-faced and furious with himself because he couldn't hold the shape of an air scooter for more than a few seconds at a time, and something old and afraid in Aang wouldn't let him leave a struggling airbender to struggle alone - not when there was no one else left in the world who could teach him.
So he'd stayed until the lesson ended on its own terms instead of the clock's. By the time he remembered the ceremony and sprinted across the island, it was already over.
Katara had been waiting for him on the porch, arms crossed, Kya nowhere in sight.
"She told everyone it was fine." Katara's voice had been low and controlled in the way that always meant the opposite. "She smiled at the whole delegation and said you must have gotten held up, and they believed her. That's the story we've all agreed to keep telling, isn't it?"
"Katara, I can explain."
"I don't want an explanation. I could probably give it myself by now, better than you. I've had so much practice standing next to our children while you're somewhere else, being needed by something else greater than us."
It had gone on longer than that, but Aang couldn't retrieve the rest of it cleanly now, only pieces: his voice rising in his defense, something about legacy, about no one else being able to do what he does... Then Katara's face closed like a shutter as she turned and walked into the house without waiting for him to finish.
That had been almost an hour ago. He'd wanted to follow her right away, but some old instinct told him to let the worst of it pass first. So he'd waited in the hallway, useless, until he couldn't stand doing nothing for one more second. He made himself go sit on the edge of their bed instead, so that whenever she came out, he wouldn't be standing outside a door like a stranger in his own house.
When Katara finally appeared, her hair was damp and combed back, dripping small dark spots onto the shoulders of her sleep robe. Her eyes were dry now but rimmed red, and she crossed the room with the same careful precision she used when she didn't trust herself to move any other way.
Aang had spent the last hour rehearsing an apology and discarding every version for being too small. He reached for her hand as she sat down on the bed beside him, and to his relief, she let him take it, though she didn't look at him.
"Katara. I'm sorry. I know sorry doesn't fix it. I know Kya waited for me, and I hate that, I do, I just- Tenzin was having such a hard morning, and I thought if I could get him through it-"
"I know why you stayed." Her voice was quiet, and worse than anger, it was tired. "You always have a reason, Aang. That's never been the problem."
"Then what is the problem? Tell me and I'll fix it. I'll go find Kya first thing tomorrow, I'll make it up to her-"
"You can't fix this by talking to Kya." Katara drew her hand back, not sharply, just enough to settle it into her lap with the other one. Aang felt the loss of it more than he wanted her to see. "This isn't about the ceremony, not really. Kya will be alright. She always is, that's almost the trouble with her." A short breath escaped her, not quite a laugh. "I keep waiting for it to be about one thing I can point to. A single day I can circle and say, there, that's what broke it. But it isn't one day. It's been every day for years, and I don't know how to explain that to you in a way that finally lands."
A chill worked its way down through Aang's body. "Are you saying you don't think we can fix this?"
Katara didn't answer right away. Her eyes were fixed on some point on the far wall, or maybe on nothing at all.
"I don't know if we can," she said. "I want to. I love you, Aang. I've loved you since we were children finishing a war we didn't start, and I don't think that's ever changed. The children adore you too, when you're here - really here, not halfway to the training arena in your head. But I've been lying awake for months asking myself whether loving you is enough to keep doing this. I don't have an answer. That's the truth of it. I don't have an answer anymore."
She was quiet for a long moment, and Aang almost let himself hope that might be the end of it. Then she kept going.
"You once told me the monks never did this." Katara's voice had gone quieter, almost turned inward, like she was working through something she'd already circled a hundred times alone.
She continued, "Marriage, binding themselves to one person for the rest of their life. You said they raised their children together, all of them, no one saying this child is mine and only mine, no one waking up every morning promised to just one other soul. You told me that back when we were young, before any of this, like it was the loveliest thing about them. That was never something your culture asked of you, Aang. I asked it of you. I wanted it, and you gave it to me; some nights I lie here wondering if you ever actually wanted it too, or if you just learned what I needed and built yourself around it."
"That's not-" He stopped, because his first instinct, wounded and quick, wasn't the truest thing he had either.
He made himself slow down. He remembered telling her that, once, some quiet night before either of them had known what they'd become to each other, though he couldn't now recall exactly why it had come up.
"You're right that no one made me do this. Nobody raised me to want one person for the rest of my life. If anything, everything I was taught said the opposite, that wanting anyone that much was the exact thing standing between me and who I was supposed to become."
He thought of a temple in the mountains, of a teacher who almost got him all the way there, of the searing, unbearable moment he'd chosen to run instead of finish.
"There was a man once who tried to teach me the last lesson my own people would have wanted for me. How to let everything go. I was close, Katara, closer than you know. And then I heard you needed me, and I left without finishing it. I have never once regretted that, not for a single day since." He swallowed. "That doesn't sound like something I built to match what you needed. That sounds like the one time in my life I chose myself, and it happened to be you."
Katara looked at him for a long moment, something in her face softening at the edges, though not all the way. For one strange second, something that might have been the ghost of a smile pulled at the corner of her mouth.
"Sokka used to complain we gave him the oogies, you know. Every time we so much as held hands in front of him."
A chuckle caught in Aang's throat, gone again almost as soon as it arrived. "He still does. Just to Suki now, like it's a fresh injury every time he catches us." It was an old joke between them, worn smooth from years of retelling at dinners and anniversaries; for one second, it worked exactly the way it always had, something in her shoulders actually loosening.
Then, almost as if she resented herself for it, Katara straightened again. She didn't say anything else for a moment, and he could see her deciding whether to let the last few minutes be enough.
It wasn't.
"You know what you say, though." Her voice had gone very careful, the way it did when she was handling something she'd already cut herself on once. "When you're tired, or after the Council's been especially hard on you. You say no one really understands what it's like, trying to save something that's almost gone. That I can't understand it, not really, because whatever I lost in the war, my people still have a whole culture standing behind them, and yours doesn't. You've said it enough times now that I've started to believe you mean it. And if you do - if there really isn't anyone who understands that except maybe a disciple of the Air Nation's teachings - then maybe I'm not actually the right person for what you need. Maybe there's someone out there who'd understand you the way you keep telling me I can't. For your sake, perhaps that's who you should be with instead."
Aang went very still. He heard the words and felt, for the first time all night, genuinely afraid, not of losing the argument but of what he might have done, carelessly, across a hundred tired evenings, saying true things in the worst possible way to the one person who had never once stopped choosing him.
He got up before he'd decided to, crossed to the chest at the foot of their bed, and came back with the blanket she kept there for exactly this: cold nights, damp hair, the particular emptiness that came after crying. He settled it around her shoulders, an old habit from countless nights that had nothing to do with tonight at all. She let him, still watching him with that exhausted and sad expression, neither of them acknowledging that he'd just done it in the middle of the worst conversation they'd ever had.
"Katara, I didn't mean-"
But he had meant it, each time, in the moment he'd said it. That was the terrible part. He had meant every one of those small, exhausted complaints exactly as much as he meant everything else he'd said tonight. Only now, hearing her hand it back to him with her careful voice, did he understand what it must have sounded like from her side of the bed, over and over, for years.
"Wouldn't it be easier for you?" she went on, before he could find the rest of the sentence. "If you were untethered. You could throw everything you have into training Tenzin and leading the Acolytes, go wherever the Council needed you and stay as long as they needed you, without feeling like you were failing someone back home every time you left. You could be with other women, if you wanted. Have more children. More airbenders, if that's really what any of this comes down to. You'd never have to choose again."
"That's not what I want!" It came out louder than he meant it to, sharp enough that he heard it land in the quiet room, and he saw her flinch slightly at the force of it. He brought his voice back down, though not the feeling behind it. "Katara, I don't want other women. I don't want any more children if they aren't ours. I don't want to be separated from you, I want-"
He stopped, because he realized, with a kind of shame, that he didn't actually know how to finish the sentence in a way that would mean anything to her tonight. Every ending he reached for felt like something he'd already promised her once and already failed to keep.
Katara watched him flounder with a patience that was worse than any anger could have been.
"What do you want then, Aang?"
He sat with the question, turning over a dozen true things and finding that none of them arranged themselves into a whole answer.
Into his silence, Katara spoke instead, quietly, like she'd already worked it out somewhere private and was only now saying it out loud for the first time.
"I've thought about it, you know. What it would actually look like."
She wasn't looking at him anymore, her gaze fixed somewhere past his shoulder. "You'd keep training Tenzin, obviously, that wouldn't change. Bumi's nearly grown, he won't need either of us managing him much longer. Kya-" her voice caught, just slightly, on her daughter's name, "Kya's the one I worry about, but she's strong, she manages everything, she'd manage this too. I'd move back to the South Pole, I think, and continue my work as a healer there, just to be closer to Sokka, Gran-Gran, and my father. You'd have Air Temple Island and a place in Republic City for when the Council needs you close. And we'd be perfectly civil about all of it, because that's what we're both good at, being fine in front of people. We've had plenty of practice."
A short, humorless breath. "And someday, a few years from now, I'd hear you were seeing someone. Some Acolyte, maybe, someone young enough to still believe in all of it the way I used to. And I'd tell myself I was happy for you. I might even mean it."
Aang tried, without meaning to, to do the same thing in reverse: to picture Katara happy somewhere without him, and be glad of it the way she'd just claimed she might manage to be glad for him. He got as far as an easy, unbridled laugh, hers, at something some faceless man had said, in a way he couldn't remember managing to make her laugh himself in longer than he cared to admit.
Something in his chest closed, fast and hard, less like an emotion than an injury: a blade going in exactly where he hadn't braced for one. He didn't give the man a face - he didn't need to. It was enough just to see her happy in a life that didn't have him anywhere in it.
"Stop." It came out rougher than he meant it to, almost a plea. Aang hadn't realized he'd taken her hand again until he felt how tightly he was holding it. "Please. Just stop. I can't listen to you plan it. I can't hear you talk about some stranger's future, some version of my life that doesn't have you in it, like you've already-" His throat closed around the rest of it. "I can't picture it, Katara. I just tried, listening to you, and I can't. There's no version of it I can stand to look at."
Katara went quiet, watching him with an expression he couldn't quite name, something caught between surprise and an old, tired hope she seemed almost afraid to let show.
"Then tell me," she said, softer now. "Really tell me. What do you want, Aang? Be honest, it’s okay.”
"I want you," he said finally. It sounded pathetically small the moment it left him, but it was the truest thing he had. "I want to be someone Bumi doesn't steel himself around, and someone Kya doesn't have to make excuses for. And I want to give Tenzin everything he needs so he doesn't grow up feeling like the last of something, the way I did. I don't know how to want all of that at the same time without dropping half of it. I keep trying, and I keep dropping it anyway, and I don't-"
His voice caught, and he pressed the heel of his hand briefly against one eye, embarrassed at how close he was to crying, in this room on this night, for all the same reasons she already had.
"I don't know how to be the last airbending master and just be your husband. Nobody ever taught me how to do both. Nobody's ever had to... But loving you was never the hard part, Katara. That's the one thing in this whole mess I've never once had to figure out."
He was quiet for a moment, the first real pause he'd allowed himself all night. When he spoke again, his voice had changed, less like a confession and more like someone trying, clumsily, to build something.
"I could start tomorrow. Set an actual end time for his morning sessions, the same time every day, and hold to it even on the hard days, instead of staying until whatever's wrong feels finished. It's small. I know it's small, next to everything else I've gotten wrong. But it's a real thing I could actually do, starting tomorrow, instead of another promise I don't know how to keep."
Katara was quiet for a long moment. When she finally moved, it wasn't away from him. She reached over and took his other hand, lacing her fingers through his the way she had a thousand times before, though tonight it felt less like comfort and more like two people holding the same rope from opposite ends.
"That's something." Her voice was quiet, but some of the flatness had gone out of it. "It's not everything. But it's real, and I'll take real over another speech, even a good one." She let out a breath. "I still don't have an answer for the rest of it. I wish I could hand you a whole list and watch us both stop hurting. But I don't think all of this gets fixed at once, not even with the best list in the world. I think most of it is something we have to keep choosing, over and over, maybe for the rest of our lives. And some nights we're going to choose it badly."
She exhaled, and some of the rigidity went out of her shoulders.
"Tonight was a bad night."
"I don't want to lose you." The words felt too small for what he meant by them, but he said them anyway, because for once he didn't have anything else left to offer. "I've lost enough people. I don't think I could survive losing you too."
Katara didn't answer that directly. She reached up instead and brushed her thumb along his jaw, catching a tear there he hadn't realized had fallen. Then she kissed him, brief and salt-tracked, neither of them trying to make it into more than what it was: two people who had just told each other the truth, maybe for the first time in years, reaching for the one language that had never once failed them.
"Katara, I love you," Aang said, because he hadn't managed to say it plainly yet tonight. "I don't think anyone ever taught me how to say that either. Not really, not the way you mean it."
"I know you do," Katara said. Her thumb moved once more, gently, along his jaw. She let her head rest against his shoulder, her damp hair cool against his collarbone.
Aang and Katara stayed like that for a long time without speaking, both of them wide awake in the dark, no closer to knowing what tomorrow would ask of them, but not letting go, either.