Chapter Text
The weather forecast could not have predicted the predicament Katara would find herself in. The sky was a singular color—dark gray—pummeling rain into the concrete with a vengeance. Across her, the streets that stretched into the edges of the town, the whole nine yards of it, were nothing but an impassable sea.
She lowered her umbrella in defeat, jamming it back into its small form. Funnily enough, her affinity for water never lent her the tolerance for rain in all its forms.
Guess I’ll wait, Katara thought, and made the journey back to the students’ common area. In recent weeks, she had spent much of her afternoons holed up in a corner of the commons, busying herself with the dull task of going through college applications. It was her one ticket out of this small, perpetually flooded town, so she might as well put her heart into it.
She was surprised to find a man standing where her papers were scattered, and if not for the mottled purple scar on his face her first instinct would have been to jolt in surprise.
“Zuko?” Katara called out hesitantly, the name floating almost nervously on her tongue. He cast a glance her way.
“Oh. Hi Katara. I didn’t realize you were still here.”
“I could say the same,” she said as she strode to her seat, tentatively gathering her papers into a pile just so she could have something to do with her hands.
Her friendship with Zuko was nothing short of unexpected. She could count all the conversations they’ve had on one hand prior to becoming close with him in the last stretch of their senior year. She could not fault him, high schoolers are notorious for coming up with the vilest of things. Zuko especially was not immune to the dangers of teenage gossip, and was subject to some of the worst of it.
It was not surprising then that he’d float around having little to no one to call friends in their year. Until he somehow ended up in her corner, like a piece of firewood drifting onto a riverbank.
Katara was more than happy to have him anyway, firewood and all.
“The rain is,” he gestured lamely to the downpour outside the window, “intense.”
“It really is.” Katara said, sizing him up discreetly. “I guess that explains why you haven’t left then.”
A look Katara can’t quite decipher moved across his face before he answered, “Yeah.”
She patted the empty chair beside her, and gestured for him to come sit. He looked at her dumbly before doing so, setting his bag on the ground.
The silence that swelled between them was the comforting kind. One that doesn’t expect half-hearted answers to fill in the gaps of the quiet in between. This is one of the little things Katara would miss about their little friendship: the act of simply existing, of just being in each other’s orbits.
(Katara was not stupid. More than the memories, more than the moments, she knew she would miss him even more. But something tells her she would need a lifetime of having him first before she could ever begin to let him know.)
Katara noticed the furtive look Zuko was giving the pile of papers in front of her, as if any moment the pages could up and walk away and his stare was the only thing holding them in place. He was amusing, in little moments like these, Katara would always think that.
Like the time they would bump into each other at the corner store, reaching for the same flavor of yoghurt milk. Or the time they found each other in the theatres waiting in line for the same film.
(Her curiously, “Love Amongst The Dragons? I never pegged you as a romance guy!” Him sheepishly, “No one has ever bothered to ask.”)
“You’re going to Ba Sing Se U?” He prodded first, pulling her out of her reverie. He’d read a bit of what was on her applications.
“It’s nice to have options. There’s still Omashu U, or the private university in Caldera. But if I could choose, I’d like to end up in Ba Sing Se.”
Zuko nodded, sinking back into his chair. His face seemed a little forlorn. “If the rain here in Jang Hui is relentless, you are not going to like the heat waves in Caldera. It’s so hot it melts your skin off. The stuff of horror movies…”
She could not help it; her eyes landed on the purple of his scar. Time had faded it immensely, but fleeting mentions of his hometown would never fail to remind her of how much that place and that time in his life had burned him, singed his childhood innocence out of him in every way humanly possible.
“But that’s great, Katara,” Zuko quickly added, as if he could see into her mind and decided to wave away the thought for her. “You’re smart. I hope you get into all of them.”
She laughed. “All of them?”
“It’s nice to have options,” he echoed back to her, a friendly smile playing on his face. Katara realized she came to like this side of him, all smiling and awkward and familiar. This prompted an ask of her own:
“And you?”
“Me?”
“Yeah—after high school. Where are you going? Any plans?”
Zuko hummed, as if in thought. “I was thinking of Ba Sing Se too.”
This surprised her, in fact it almost felt like excitement. “What! Really?”
If Zuko noticed the almost childlike flicker of joy and something else in her eyes, he does not make a move to address it.
“Yes, really. My uncle, he’s planning to open up a second shop there and thought it would be nice if I went to school nearby.”
The mention of Iroh brought a smile to Katara’s face. She cooed, “That seems really nice. I hope you get in, Zu.”
She stilled, suddenly feeling so stupid at sudden slip of her tongue with the nickname she had given him unnanounced. He seemed to notice this as well, his eyes widening almost imperceptibly.
“…ko.” She finished lamely, albeit her voice had already trailed off rendering her attempt to save face useless. What am I, thirteen? Own it or something!
Instead of making a sour face which her mind had decided was indeed the worst case scenario, Zuko simply smiled, this time much wider. Much more real.
“I hope I get to see you there, Kat.”
Katara exhaled into a shaky, laughing, relieved albeit flushed mess. Around them, the world pushes on. Unbeknownst to Katara the rain around them had already quieted down, a ribbon of sunlight parting the sea of gray clouds around it. Zuko noticed, and would choose not to tell her just for a moment longer.
(What he also does not tell her: She is the sun. She is the impassable sea of rain. She is the riverbank where firewood always finds its way back to. She is the better part of his eighteen years. She is what makes the rest of it looking forward to.)