Title: Like Razors On My Lips
Status: Oneshot, complete.
Pairing: Katara/Zuko.
Rating: T
Notes: Early S3 AU. See bottom for more notes.

Katara's eyes are starting to hurt from all the sharp angles in this country, as if the sloped rooftops and and carved depictions of the sun's endless rays could actually pull free of their moorings, sail through the air, and stab her right between the the brows.

It's not just the angles, no, but the colors that paint those angles, seal them in vivid reality. They are far too violent, too steeped in rust and blood droplets and the flush of a freshly picked fire lily. Everything is red in this Spirits forsaken country, from pale pink to the truest crimson. Red occasionally relieved by gaudy gold or somber black, red that does more damage to the throbbing space between her eyes than the pointed edges of pagoda roofs could ever hope to.

"Hey."

Sokka's elbow to Katara's side bumps her out of her embittered musings, jostles her forward on sandaled feet. The curve of her shoe frees a jagged pebble from its earthen moorings, and the tiny nuisance of a rock wedges between two of her toes. The Waterbender pulls her fingers through hair ravaged by the humidity, digs in her heels before she can wheel over onto her face, and tips her face around until her eyes hook onto her brother's. She sees a lot of exasperation and a little worry in his face, and the last bit makes her wonder how alarming her expression was before he nudged her out of her introspection.

"What?" The word is a flat stone tossed into a still pond, pulsing out agitated ripples. Her hostility has nothing to do with the disturbance and everything to do with the smears of red and jagged rooftops that linger at the very edges of her vision.

If she were a house to those toxic powers these people call Firebending, she'd raze the nearest building to the ground. And maybe the one after that, too.

"I know the architecture's pretty impressive," Sokka drawls, shifting packages full of what probably aren't food around in his gangly arms, "but that doesn't mean you have to stop in the middle of the street and stare at it for ten minutes straight."

"I haven't been standing still for ten minutes," Katara flares, the very ends of her hair bristling—truth be told, time hazed while she was trapped in her seething observations.

Sokka compresses his voice into a whisper, sidles close and closer and closest until he's managed to steer them both over to the side of the bustling street. "Katara, we're in enemy territory," he places special emphasis those two words, "and the less of a spectacle we make, the better."

Katara opens her mouth to remind him of the spectacle they (well, mostly Aang) made just the other night, but swings her jaw back shut when she thinks better of it. She is abruptly tired, so tired, and she can't look at the extravagance that permeates this nation and makes itself known in the decadent architecture without thinking of all the damage this country—this country capable of great fetes of beauty, clearly—has done.

So she nods like a mute, sucks down her irritated surge of rebellion, and falls in behind Sokka as they track through this town's market district and keep their eyes open for Aang and Toph. The younger children were supposed to be on a hunt for a vegetable stand, but Katara doesn't trust either of them not to get sidetracked.

Nor does she particularly trust them with their finite funds, but she can't bear herself to forbid Aang from touching the money pouches, not at the risk of putting a heartbroken look in his cloudy eyes (not again).

"Where did those pint-sized—" Sokka halts, digging in his heels, and Katara can't stop in time to avoid the crunching pain that blooms at the tip of her nose and spreads in hot waves around her eyes when her face bounces off her brother's back.

Now she unleashes a hiccup of her wrath, pressing her fingers to her face and checking for broken cartilage while her free hand bounds off of Sokka's shoulder in reprimand. "Sokka!" It comes out sounding like Dokka. "What's the big idea—?"

Sokka reaches around and grabs her by the wrist, giving her a gentle shake. Katara would toss him onto his back and jam her foot into his sternum for that alone if she hadn't already spotted the source of her brother's abrupt standstill.

People—hundreds of people are pouring out of a sprawling building in droves. It's situated in the center of the large town's square, and something about its architecture puts every other building in sight to shame. Katara notes that it relies less on heavy blacks than the others, more so on warm golds that fold across the backdrop of red in fat bands. Its angles are softer, its carvings are twenty times more elaborate, and the squared columns that hold up its roof make her think of soldiers turned to wood and stone by a spirit's hostile magic.

"What's going on?" she asks no one in particular, because Sokka's hardly in the position to have a clue. He stopped because he didn't want them to be torn apart by the huge, thundering crowd, not because he recognizes this building or the chokingly large crowd as things of import or worry.

A squat woman has paused not two feet away from the siblings, no doubt waiting for the mob to thin. Her smile is half befuddlement, half condescension. "What sort of backwater town must you two be from, if you've never seen one of Agni's Temples?"

Katara bites back the inevitable question—Who's Agni?—that rises to her tongue. She's quite certain she's heard the word, the name, before, that it relates to those fire duels these warlike people fight. She and Sokka stand out enough as it is; one less stupid question means one less suspicious glance.

Sokka cranes his neck around, mouths, Fire god, and Katara nods stiltedly.

"We, ah, we grew up in a pretty small village," Sokka steps in as smoothly as he can manage (which, granted, isn't much). "No Agni Temples there, nope."

"Then you wouldn't be familiar with how choked the temples can get during midday worship." The stranger hitches her woven basket's handle higher up her arm and adopts a lecturing tone that isn't so much informative as it is officious. She flicks her manicured fingers at the knots of stalls that line the square, full to brimming with fruits and incense and beads beaten from semiprecious metals. Offerings. "It's quit the spectacle, you know," the woman goes on with evident pride. "Our temple is the fourth largest in the nation, and its beauty is rivaled only by the temple in Caldera."

Caldera—the capital. Yes, that makes sense, of course the most beautiful of Agni's temples would be situated in that huge volcano the Firebenders are foolish enough to inhabit. Katara may very well see that city one day—no, she most certainly will—but she doubts that she'll have the luxury of studying its architecture when the day comes.

"Yeah, right, right." Sokka has latched a firmer hold on Katara's arm, and he pulls her body even with his as the crowd at last starts to thin. If they talk to this lady for much longer, they may display too much ignorance in regards to how things work in this country.

Or worse—she could pick their faces off a wanted poster and call for a knot soldiers.

And there are always, always soldiers.

Sokka rests his eyes on a pocket-sized gap in the crowd and goes for it without another passing word to the woman, dragging Katara along behind him so gracelessly that the Waterbender comes close to breaking her toes, or at least spraining an ankle. Katara thinks she hears the stranger huff, but it's nothing more than a scrap of sound at the very edge of her awareness, and besides, she's too preoccupied with not straining a muscle to pay mind to a strange woman's sensibilities.

"Hey," she says, sliding her arm in her brother's grip till his fingers bracelet her wrist rather than her elbow. She pulls, he pulls harder. She's gotten stronger, but so has he, and his biceps are wider than hers, thready with big veins. He's growing up, but his burgeoning maturity doesn't put him in a place to boss her and haul her around. "Hauling me around like a bearded cat on a leash is something of a spectacle, don't you think?"

Sokka hesitates, and his fingers flex once before he peels them off her wrist. Katara massages the skin free of red smears and glares holes into her brother's cheekbone.

"You shouldn't have been walking so slowly," he mumbles, scraping his hand across the back of his neck, but the look her gives Katara—and her wrist—is apologetic. "You seem—off, today."

Katara picks the bundles of groceries, or whatever it is that Sokka bought, out of her brother's arms, and bustles down a side street, vindictively determined to put him out of breath in his quest to keep up with her. "I'm fine," she says, "this place just gives me a headache, is all." But she thinks of the temple's architecture, the softer colors that offended her eyes a little less than that of the other buildings here. Thinks of the knots of people swaying in and out of its gaping entryway, and twitches with a gentle inquisitiveness.

Sokka catches up to her on his longer legs and makes to wrestle for the groceries. "You sure that's it?"

Katara sucks in her bottom lip and darts to the side, hip jostling a cabbage cart. "Mhm," she says, and wonders what kind of god rules a nation of bullies. "Let's find Toph and Aang, okay?"

It's smaller on the inside, or so that is the impression she gets. Maybe it's the color scheme's doing, dark and dense shades of red that make the ceiling hang low and the walls practically graze. The resemblance to Roku's Temple is uncanny, but not unexpected. She was unsurprised to see a Fire Sage dusting litter off the front steps as she slipped in with the evening crowd. She has to wonder if the clergy in this temple are quite as corrupt as those she had the displeasure of meeting on the Solstice.

Her nostrils flare. Probably.

The crowd is a stringy arrangement compared to earlier that day, and people spread thin in murmuring knots. She doesn't know when the temple closes to the public, if at all, but they must keep late enough hours if the town's citizens loiter in its hallowed recesses still. The moon was fastened low in the sky when Katara toed her way out of their haphazard camp, but time has a way of stumbling forward at alarming speeds.

If her friends wake up to find her gone, her sleeping roll stuffed full of hastily arranged blankets rather than warm, sleeping flesh, they'll tear this town apart looking for her.

This was stupid, she chastises herself even as she breaks off from a tiny knot of sleepy devotees, scooting down a corridor that's narrower than the rest, and impulsive.

It's not exactly too late to turn back now; to pull her oversized cloak's hood low and bend herself into just another shadow. If anything, that would be the wise course, because the very last thing she wants is to be trapped here, should the temple's doors close and shut her in with Fire Sages to her left and right. But Katara has never been very wise, and the chance to watch these monsters pray to spirits—a spirit—like any other set of humans is just too much for her to resist. Sokka would approve in the long run, right? She's studying the enemy on intimate turf.

The thin hallway coughs her into a long, low room lined with short tables, thick with red clouds of incense. Katara slides her hood off even as she drags the cloak's sleeve across her wrist and presses it to her nostrils. It reeks, this place, and it's all she can do not to let the grimace on her face bloom into evident distaste. If she's one of them, she should be used to the rippling smell burning, scented sticks.

She watches the patrons hunch in front of the low-slung tables and, after a protracted moment of deliberation, sweeps her cloak and skirts to one side and settles down on her haunches, fists bunched on her knees, eyes trained on a golden statue that must be the very likeness of their fire god.

The architecture in this room reflects the building's outsides, sharp angles softened by dull gold. So much gold, gold on the wall panels, gold melted to form the statues of Agni, the spiraling limbs, the molded flames cupped in his tiny palms, the sharp tail of hair that makes her think of an angry boy with a comet scar. Gold for the sun, gold for flames, gold for the prosperity that this country gorges itself on while its conquests fall victim to starvation and slaughter and—

Katara's ears prick, because she hears the murmured prayers over the tinkling of bells, the patter of small, soft drums. She watches the Fire Nation citizens abase themselves before their shrines full of shimmering gold and fat candles, and she hears them murmur into their hands, into the marble floor. Some recite practiced mantras; others speak with a reverent casualness that is clearly unpracticed but no less sincere than the repetitive prayers.

Lord Agni, father of flame and vitality, may my children climb to the heights of potential…

Agni, lord of mine, king among spirits, would that my son survives this war…

…Agni, patron of fire, may he love me, please, may he love me…

…Bless us with glory, bless us with riches, bless us so that we may make our ancestors proud…

Some of the prayers pluck at Katara's compassion, that empathy she can never quash, for all the trouble it has caused her because that's something we have in common, because her empathy tricked her into feeling for a scarred fool with his god's amber in his eyes—

She breathes in careful streams of incense until her head spins and tips far, far away from sickly green highlighting gold and porcelain.

—And the other prayers, such as they are, have her bottom lip curling and her ears tunneling with a rush of blood. How could they possibly dare to ask for more from their patron spirit, from their sulfurous god, when he's given them so much as it is? He has given them the world, at the expense of so many innocents, and Katara wants to spit a long stream of saliva that will land on the biggest statue's smooth cheek. She looks at its tail of hair and its chest plate and the eerily vital, bulging eyes, and she sees the face of the enemy.

Curled shoes shuffles along her line of vision, shoes that peep out from under billowing robes dyed with what could be fresh blood, and Katara rips her eyes off the statue, fastens them to her knees, and leans forward until her elbows are planted on the floor that is too warm for something wrought from marble.

The ends of her hair drag and snatch up pockets of dust.

"Lord Agni," she says, the statue's likeness burned onto the backs of her eyelids, a wavering outline of bronze and gold, "I owe you no titles, I owe you no deference." Quiet, so quietly, a murmur into what little air cushions the space between her face and the marble, a kiss that grazes the expensive floor. "But if you're as kind and merciful as these people seem to think you are, you'll listen to me regardless of how I feel about you."

Her heart sticks to her ribs. She peeks out from between her thick strips of hair, breathes through her nose when she sees the outline of a crowd shuffle from the sanctuary. She dares to lift her voice because the only jitter of blood, the sole exhalation of air in this room, belongs to her.

Katara slides onto her stomach, folds one hand on top of the other, and puts all her hatred for this nation of bullies and their conceited pride in a shrine built by bloodied coin into one searing look.

She hopes Agni has possessed that statue, so he may see how much she detests his world.

"I don't want anything for myself, fire god. All I want is for your nation to end this bloody war and for your nation full of cowards to repent for all the damage they've done. That's all I want—so fix it."

"Agni is a god of power and vitality." Brands—no, fingers, those are fingers—fasten around her the curves of her shoulders, haul her up with all the casual carelessness a tired fishermen would a net of his latest catch. "I don't know about the spirits you pray to, but Lord Agni isn't one for mercy."

Katara curls her tongue between her teeth, ready to demand what he is doing here, but the question, the frantic, horrified question, freezes into tangible blocks inside of her mouth. Of course he is here, of course, because he's always, always had a bad habit of turning up exactly where she and the others are, even if he never catches them. Ba Sing Se, that Earth Kingdom nunnery, Roku's Temple—another holy place, but will she turn out as fortunate now as she did then?

"Shouldn't you be in your palace," she croaks, mind shutting off, tongue winding back into usefulness, "lording it up?" His front pinches her back, and the hands on her arms have pulled away only to be exchanged for a chokehold on her throat.

"This is my country, Waterbender." He does not sound overtly hostile, and that disturbs her, because his hostility has always been preferable to his calm. Look what happened the last time they exchanged quiet words—no, no, do not. "It's not uncommon for a Crown Prince to survey his future holdings." His arms flex on her tremulous throat when he says that, and Katara's fingers star to keep a path towards her waterskin, painfully slow as to go unnoticed.

They are the only ones in this room—and even if they weren't, why would a citizen snatch an inconsequential peasant from their prince's arms?

"So you're heir apparent again, huh?" Her fingertips stutter against her navel when Zuko exhales into her ear, but take up their tentative creep after a stifling beat of nothingness. "Your precious daddy restored your honor?"

The arms shift, turn to nails furrowing sticky paths across her throat. "You will speak of the Fire Lord with respect."

Almost there, almost there… "I don't owe a foreign king respect—I definitely don't owe respect to a bully." She means them both, father and son, and Zuko must comprehend that because he hunches closer to her, bends her back under the force of his front.

"You ought to be careful—my father isn't one tolerate fits of rebellion." His voice is caustic, far bitterer than the incense that coats their noses and tongues. She would ask what he means, what his father did to him to make him speak that way, but she stopped caring about Zuko's ostensibly tragic past when he chose his psychotic sister over the good guys.

"Your father isn't here." She pinches her thumb and forefinger around the waterskin's fat plug, tries to think of a way to wedge it free without a betraying pop. Maybe, if she is fast enough, the noise won't matter—but if she is fast, Zuko is faster. She's seen him move. "But you are. I thought Caldera was miles from here." She hasn't half the grasp on geography that her brother does, with his maps and coordinates, but she knows enough to calculate that travel from here to the shining city would have taken days. The Fire Nation isn't all that big, but it's big enough.

"And the Earth Kingdom is thousands of miles away from Caldera," he snaps, holding his palms to her throat but not quite choking her, "and yet, here you are." The unspoken, And if you're here, your friends are, too, settles into Katara's eardrums, mute potential, a silent threat.

But he believes Aang to be dead—he must. He wasn't there to see the tears Katara shed, tears that sluiced down to mingle with her healing water.

Water that she nearly wasted on this bully. Hah!

"So I am." Just a little twist, just one wiggle to the left… "Maybe I'll even tell you why, if you spit out your reasons first." She lies with ease.

His voice, when he speaks, is softer—he took the bait, maybe, which is odd, because shouldn't a liar know the scent of another liar? "It is a Crown Prince's duty to survey his father's men. I'm stationed here to put troops through inspection, as a favor to my father. I came to the temple to—to clear my head."

"Maybe your father just wanted you out of the palace and out of his sight," Katara says, and her voice is mean, so mean. She knows little of Zuko's relationship with the Fire Lord, but she must have struck very close to home, because his fingers flex and pulp her skin into a red necklace.

"Maybe." His hand lands on the inside of her elbow, grips, and twists her arm out and behind them. "I'd put away your magic water, if I were you."

Magic water. There it is, that inherent, condescending disdain that she used to hear from Sokka. Her arm stings from the angle he's put it in, a twist arc of strained flesh and bone, but she worked the cork in her pouch loose, and her other arm is free, and all it takes is agitated curls of her fingertips to swirl water up and around into her adversary's face.

He lets her go so abruptly that she stumbles over the overlong hem of her cloak, careens into one of the tables, sending candles and dried garlands and statuettes toppling. Cursing foully enough to have Aang gaping, if he were here (thank La he is not, that he did not follow her), Katara rights herself, kicking a toppled candle out of frustrated spite. Her biggest toe erupts into a hot smear of pain to match the rest of her.

Zuko drags his fingers under his eyes, shakes himself like a wet cat, and forms tired curses at her. His hair is loose, longer than before, and softens a face Katara once thought irreparably ugly (except for the half of a moment in which she thought she could fix his insides as well as his outsides). She expected elaborate robes on his shoulders and gold in his hair, but he's dressed like a commoner—a finely tailored commoner, but a commoner all the same.

"You stupid girl," he starts to say, but then his eyes land on her swollen throat, and his mouth works mutely. "I—did I—"

"Yes," she says, rather huffily, flicking water from her arms. She'll heal herself later, when his prying eyes, the same color as the large statue of Agni, are no longer crawling across her like he's trying to read her the way he would a scroll. "You did. What does it matter? I would have done the same in your shoes." An enemy is an enemy, and Katara has always been far more ruthless than people give her credit for.

"But I—" He lifts his hands, and she tenses. He drops them. "Never mind. Are you aware that Temples of Agni are favored by soldiers? They come to pray for victory—"

"I know. I heard." She rolls her fingers, and the tiny puddle that Zuko shook off twitches. The prince takes one big step back, then another, eyes fastened to the water. Katara smirks, counting it a victory.

"—As I was saying, you might as well have walked into a nest of rat vipers, you stupid child—"

"I'm fourteen," she says hotly, "not all that younger than you, I'd bet. What do you care, anyway, daddy's boy? If a soldier found me, how could that possibly be any worse than you jumping on me?"

Red burns bright on Zuko's good cheek. He must have taken the "daddy's boy" bit to heart. "I don't—care, that is. You ought to keep in mind that a common soldier would behave far less honorably around a lost little girl than a royal would."

She doesn't like his implication—partly because the threat is very real, and partly because it implies that she cannot fend for herself, when he of all people should know better. Katara flings her hands open, not to bend, just to gesture to this stupid room's decadence, to the stupid boy who would imprison her but blanches at the thought of bruising her. "You really need to stop telling me what I ought to do, Prince. I came here to take my peace in a shrine," and study those who dare to call themselves the Sun's children, "not to hear you rail away at me—"

Zuko has her by the wrists and her mind is stuttering back, far back, all the way back to "I'll save you from the pirates", and he's wrenched her out of the sanctuary and into the cramped hall before she can get a decent kick in.

"The Sages," is all he says, curtly, ducking around corners that Katara doesn't remember being there. "They must have heard you knock that table over."

"What—my waterskin—" Gold smears into red that blurs into black, and the colors make her think of primordial, not-quite-there memories of the womb.

"Buy a new one," he says, clearly blind to the fact that not everyone can just march around flinging money about. "And be quiet." What is this—why is this—what does it matter if he can hear footsteps clomping down the twisting halls; he is a prince, he is in no danger here. It's all her, he has no reason at all to drag her left and right and—

Her lungs stretch around pockets of fresh air. Zuko releases her wrists only to back her into a curved, dingy wall.

They are in an alley—he pulled her out of a side door that spills into the space between the temple and a smaller, squatter building that could sell food or clothing or anything during the day.

"Get off of me," she says, shoving her arms around his, scrabbling at his back.

"Shut up," he says, hisses, "just shut up." His hips stutter forward when her torn nails land on the small of his back, and although she can't be sure why, she gulps.

There are people—there are gritty voices, too uncultured to belong to the sages, and armor clinks and grinds. Katara pushes herself back like she has some hope of melting into the stones that are still warm from today's sunlight.

Neither of them has to say it. Soldiers.

"…A disturbance in the sanctuary?"

"Yes, yes…was…heard shouting…candles knocked all over the place…lucky…didn't catch on fire again…"

Katara snorts. Accidental arson must be a hazard of living in this country.

Her heart has lodged between two of her ribs, and her fingers have gone from shoving at the prince to holding him closer. If he wants to risk himself for an enemy, fine, no skin off her nose. This could be another trap, or he could be genuinely aiming to help her out, for whatever obscure reason, but no matter his motivation, she will not be caught, she will not let them take her from Aang and her brother and—

This is what she gets, for wandering into a foreign temple out of curiosity, of all things.

The door they pushed out of stutters, and Zuko swears softly before dragging them painstakingly to the left.

"In there," he says, in her ear, steam catching in her hair, "you sounded—you sounded so genuine when you talked to Agni, I couldn't—I can't—"

Talking—if those soldiers and Sages catch two teenagers skulking and talking not twenty feet away from their disturbed shrine, they will go on alert, she is sure. Didn't he just tell her to shut up? What do people do when they're like this, when they need to hide in plain sight? Footsteps kick and crunch, and she knows that if they run, they will be seen, and this will be one less town for her and her fugitive friends to take refuge in.

Zuko's chin bumps her upper lip, and Katara's mind turns over with—what's the word—an epiphany.

"I'm about to do something vile," she warns him, grips the stiff collar that peeks up above Zuko's cloak, and drags him down.

"Mmph," he says, because his mouth is currently full of Waterbender.

Katara tastes spices and dried meat when she licks into his mouth, fingers fastened on his sharp teeth. She kisses him and kisses him in a way Jet taught her, before—before. She drags her teeth across his bottom lip, and his hips stutter again before he yanks them away. He pushes his fingers into her hair like he's trying to pry her off.

"Act," she hisses, tilting her mouth away for the scantest of seconds, "convincing," and swoops back in.

Zuko's fingers twitch in her hair.

He stops trying to pry her off.

As it turns out, Zuko is a horrible kisser, but he is an excellent actor. Both fit in well with what she knows about him—she never saw him with a girl, but she knows firsthand that he twists his vulnerabilities around for his own convenience.

His is a horrible kisser because he uses too much teeth and too little tongue, chewing away at her mouth like she's a piece of food.

He's an excellent actor because his hands have moved from her hair to her hips, and he's squeezing at her flesh—gently, as if to make up for the bruises he gave her earlier.

What kind of man regrets bruising an enemy?

What kind of man speaks of resentful prayers murmured by a foreign peasant with something like awe?

Katara pulls herself onto her toes, slants her mouth under his, back and forth, soothing him into using his tongue rather than his sharp teeth. She taps her fingers against his scar, moves them into his luxuriously thick hair, and forms her hand into a careful fist. Her other palm opens on his side, beneath his cloak. Her nostrils flare where her nose is smashed into his cheek, and she smells musk and thin layers of sweat.

It's through a silent, mutual agreement that they pull Katara off her feet and onto Zuko's bony hips (convincing, convincing, they must appear convincing). Katara's thighs fall open around his waist, calves and feet dangling in midair, and there's no chance of falling when his palms open firmly on her backside, support her weight with only the softest of strained grunts.

(He touched her butt; La, she will make him pay, no matter that this was her idea).

Voices magnify, bloom on the sticky air, and Katara turns desperate.

She will not be lost to her friends.

Katara tugs her hips off of Zuko's, presses them back down, slowly, and he groans curses onto her tongue. One of his hands peels off her bottom to map patterns onto her bare ribcage, furrow greedily across the rippling flesh.

When he pulls his mouth off of hers with a damp pop, only to bury those chapped lips in the nape of her neck, Katara groans.

Good…good actor.

Exhalations of adult disgust tunnel into her awareness, but that tentative wakeup call cannot hope to drag her out of her daze, because her stomach is hot and her mouth is swollen and she hears her own prayers to a god she doesn't worship as the Crown Prince of the Fire Nation kisses flame across her collarbone and squeezes her skin with more tenderness than she ever thought him capable of.

So when he drops her like a stone and leaps back, hands diving down to shield his crotch, she yelps her surprise.

Oh.

She never asked him what he meant, what he felt when he saw her speak to his fire god. Her legs give out just as she reaches her sleeping roll, shoving the blankets meant to mimic her unconscious body unceremoniously to one side. And she does not care.

Her mouth is still hot.

He let her go without a solitary protest.

Today, yes, tonight. Wait until another day, when he knows for sure that Aang lives.

—Repent for all the damage they've done—

Was Zuko's clumsy mercy a small form of repentance?

Katara tosses over onto her side and squeezes her forearm against her ear. Her feet wheel restlessly, rustle furs.

In her tent carved from the earth, Toph snores with hearty bravado.

She lost her waterskin, damn it, all because of—

Katara growls and proceeds to scrub the back of her hand over across her mouth, repeatedly, until the sensitive skin numbs and aches.

Worst of all, she's pretty sure that she'll no longer look at this country's architecture or think of their amber god and feel clean spurts of hate. Nor will she look at her own mouth in the mirror and not feel his fastened between her lips.

"I'm going to drown him!" Katara shrieks, and earns a chorus of groggy shouts for her troubles.

1. the first third of this took me weeks to write; the last two thirds took me a day. neither process was particularly fun.

2. this is for bean, elle, and socks, my (un)holy trinity of lady loves.

3. this is unbeta'd.

4. it totally wasn't birthed by "god help the outcasts" or anything (only, it totally was).

5. yes, I'm aware that zuko is actually a very bad liar and actor, but as of right now, katara isn't. can you blame her.

6. fakeout makeouts are fun.

7. i pushed the t rating as far as I could tbh. but nobody who's read my other stuff should be all that surprised.

8. i really hate this because it is dumb but I hope you guys enjoyed it even a little bit. thanks for reading!