Chapter Text
The Beifongs had been in Kya's life for as long as she could remember.
Toph Beifong was a good friend of her parents, and they lived close enough that it made sense for her and her kids to be around a lot. Kya had never really paid attention to them, preferring to hide rather than deal with the crass metalbending kids, especially the eldest, Lin Beifong. She was loud and rude and opinionated and someone that the eldest child of the Avatar had never been interested in being around. Kya's father had constantly—and annoyingly—pushed her to befriend the girl. The two of them never found any common ground as children, and he had eventually given up, much to his eldest child's delight.
When Kya left to travel at eighteen, she didn’t speak to (or even think of) the Beifongs for four years. She visited countless cities and ruins, explored both water tribes, visited long abandoned air temples that her father had only ever taken Tenzin to see, walked along the slums of the Fire Nation, stayed in the most exquisite hotels of the Earth Kingdom—she saw it all. Sometimes she joined people she met on her journey, but she mostly traveled alone, preferring the solitude and privacy she never had as Avatar Aang's daughter. She let herself discover who she was outside of that connection, outside of being the daughter of the man who saved the world, outside of being Katara's daughter and Chief Sokka's niece. She found that she really liked healing, and she was good at it too.
She also found that she really liked women.
Back home, her mother and father had always questioned her about her love life, always asked when she would bring a nice man home. The questions annoyed her. So what if there were no men who interested her? She was young, she reasoned, she would find a nice guy.
Eventually.
But eventually never came, and she started to worry that there was something wrong with her. It wasn’t as if no one was interested in her—when she was in school, plenty of guys asked her out. She just… was never interested in them.
She didn’t understand why until she met a young woman in her first year of traveling. They were the same age, and she was insanely beautiful. The pair spent two weeks in the Earth Kingdom together, traveling side by side, sharing cramped rooms in overflowing hostels and camping when they couldn’t find a convenient rest stop on their route.
On the night they had planned to go their separate ways, the woman had kissed her. And Kya had kissed her back. And then they parted, and she never saw her again.
She didn’t know what it meant that she felt attracted to this woman—towards any woman, really. It was the first time she had felt a spark with someone, and it scared her. What did it mean for her to be different? What would that mean for her future, her friends, her family? Would it change how they saw her? She ignored these feelings, pushed them down, and continued on as if nothing had happened.
It wasn’t until she found herself in the Fire Nations months later, listening to an old woman talk about her passed lover while Kya helped heal her from a fall, that Kya realized she wasn’t alone.
She had found the woman complaining of a stiff neck at the market and offered her help, and she had accepted gratefully. While Kya worked, the woman told her of her life.
“My wife was a skilled healer too, you know,” she had boasted at one point.
“You loved another woman?” Kya asked her, stunned by the casual way she admitted to something so rarely spoken of. “You married another woman?”
The old woman chuckled, “Yes, I did. We weren’t married legally, of course, but marriage is more than a piece of paper stamped by a notary.”
“What is it then?” Kya asked. She was scared, but she was also curious. It was the first time she had ever heard of a same sex couple declare their love so openly and proudly—even if there was only one side left to the story.
The old woman chucked at her question, “Love, my dear. Love is the most important part of any and every union. Without love, that marriage certificate may as well be a prison sentence.”
“And this woman,” Kya asked tentatively, “she loved you too?”
The woman smiled, and it was the same smile that her mother carried when she spoke of her father. “She did. Does that surprise you?”
“I guess,” Kya admitted, “I’ve never heard of two women loving each other. Not openly, at least.”
The woman sighed, and the sound carried years of sadness and grief and anger in it.
“No, I would assume you haven’t. The Fire Nation did a very good job of erasing the part of history when they started their war.”
“There were people like that in the past?” Kya asked, surprised. “Women loved other women… openly?”
“Oh yes. Many. Even Avatar Kyoshi had a female lover.”
Kya's mind swam with questions. Did her father know this? Had these people been accepted in the past? Could there be a place for them in the future? In her future?
She finished healing the woman in relative silence, not quite knowing what else to say to her. That woman hadn’t known it, but she awakened something in the young healer that day: hope. Hope that Kya wasn’t defective, hope that she was always who she had been meant to be, hope that there was a place for her in this world.
As she traveled, she sought out more people like this woman, wanting to hear their stories. She became a kind of collector of history, letting those who would have died in silence share part of themselves with her. One man loved another man who served in the Earth Kingdoms army; another loved a man who wasn’t born as one; a young woman in the northern water tribe had been secretly seeing another young woman who was engaged to a man who didn’t love her, but her brother instead; she had met a woman who loved a man who had previously loved a man, but still loved her no less.
Lots of stories people shared with her were sad, and lots of them had lovers who had passed or were with someone who didn’t know of their past and their true inclinations, and with each tale tinted by sadness and grief, the hope inside her dimmed. Eventually, she locked away that hope before it could fully extinguish, and she never dared to look at it again. Her fate was destined to mirror those of the women who had lied and hid loved and lost before her. She accepted that, and because of that acceptance she knew holding onto that hope too tightly was dangerous. So she hid it and, eventually, she returned home to begin her own life of hiding.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
On her second week home, her father invited the Beifongs for dinner, and for the first time in four years, Kya and Lin were face to face. Kya had expected it to be like old times; tense and awkward.
But it wasn’t.
It was different.
They were both adults now. They had both aged and matured and grown out of old anger and past grievances were nothing but memories with hazy, misremembered edges. Kya found herself studying the young woman, watching her and all the ways she had changed. And, Raava, had Lin changed. Before, she was shorter than Kya by a good few inches, and now the roles had reversed with Lin being the one who had the height advantage. Before, she had an average build, maybe a bit more muscle than expected from someone her age, and now she had a toned, muscled build. Before, she had been hot headed and quick to anger, and now she was still and reserved, hiding her emotions, controlling her anger.
Before, Kya had never spared her a second glance.
Now she couldn’t seem to keep her eyes off her.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Kya made her way outside.
Everything inside the house felt hot and suffocating, and she needed a minute to just breathe without feeling like she was wasting air.
So she stood outside, back to the temple, facing the trees, breathing in the smell of nature, trying not to think about the ways she had changed and the ways her family hadn’t.
“Mind if I join you?”
Kya glanced behind her, and her heartbeat quickened at the sight of Lin Beifong approaching her.
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
Lin stood beside her, studying the tree line as Kya had been doing before she was interrupted. They stood in relative silence, both women sneaking glances at the other until, unavoidably, their eyes met.
“You’ve grown,” Kya said. Lin laughed.
“So have you, princess.”
Kya sighed. Some things never changed.
“Don’t call me that.”
“Why not?” she asked, but her grin told Kya she already knew the answer.
“Because it is mocking,” Kya said, returning her gaze to the forest, “and no one likes being mocked.”
“Who said I was mocking you?” Lin asked, taking a step closer to the young waterbender.
Kya turned, catching the other woman's gaze once again, and she saw something in it.
Hunger. Want. Need.
It scared her just as much as it delighted her.
“Then what is it?” Kya asked, letting herself be drawn into the metalbenders orbit, ignoring every nerve that told her no, this was a bad idea, step away, because Kya wanted this like she had never wanted anything. She wanted this in ways that she had never allowed herself to want, and for once, she wanted to know what it would feel like to give into her desires, wanted to know what it would feel like to do something that she really wanted without the voice in the back of her head that told her she was wrong or gross or impure for feeling something as simple as want.
“Complitary,” Lin supplied, breaking Kya's reverie. “Admiring, even.”
“Admiring?”
Lin hummed, stepping closer once again and yet she still wasn’t close enough. There was too much room between them, Kya longed to close in on the space that separated them. It is a bad idea, the voice prattled on, over and over again like a mantra. It is a bad idea. It will only end badly. Back away. It is wrong.
You are wrong.
“I admire you, yes,” Lin said, stepping so close that they were a measly two inches between them now. “There is much to appreciate.”
Kya did not back away.
She did not give into the voice.
Lin came in closer, and two inches became one, and Kya stood rooted to her place on the ground.
Their lips ghosted.
“Everyone is here,” Kya said weakly, moving back just a fraction. Lin caught her hips in her hands, walking Kya backwards towards the wall behind them.
“So?” Lin asked, raising a brow at her.
“So someone may come out and see us,” Kya hissed.
“They won’t.”
Kya's back hit the wall, and a gasp escaped her throat at the contact. She was, in that moment, reminded of her want.
Hands stayed on hips, fingers wound their way into fabric, breaths mingled, and Kya was molten with it.
“Tell me to leave,” Lin said suddenly.
“What?”
“Tell me to leave, and I’ll leave. Tell me you don't want this, and I’ll listen.”
Kya's breath hitched. “I…”
She almost said it. Leave. This is a bad idea. We shouldn’t. But Lin stared at her, waiting, and her eyes were dark and she was breathing heavily and she just looked so, so gorgeous, and Kya was hit with the fact that, yes, she wanted this. She wanted Lin in whatever way she was allowed to have her, in whatever way she asked of her. She wanted it so bad that her bones ached with it.
“Kiss me,” Kya said instead.
Lin didn’t hesitate. She dove in, and it was hot and hungry and messy and all Kya could think was More, more, please, more and the metalbender had her by the waist, hauling her in so that they were flush against each other and Kya moaned into the kiss and Lin gripped her waist harder when she heard it and someone was using tongue and Kya was so far gone she didn’t know where she ended and Lin started and, honestly, she liked it that way.
The waterbender wound her arms around the taller woman's neck, and Lin lifted her by the back of her thighs, pressing her into the wall as Kya wrapped her legs around Lin's waist to keep herself upright.
It was hot. It was really, really hot.
Lin moved away from Kya's lips, and Kya almost protested until Lin started trailing hungry, open mouthed kisses down her neck, biting and nipping as she went.
Kya almost hoped it would leave a mark.
The healer wound her fingers into the metalbenders hair, hauling her back up into another kiss. They were both panting and desire pooled in the waterbender's stomach. She wanted this. She wanted it so, so badly that her entire body shook with the force of it.
A door slammed and the two women pulled apart quickly. They were both panting, and the air on their skin turned to ice and their touch burned too hot in contrast and Kya was suddenly very aware of what had just transpired between the two of them.
Lin let her down, stepped away from her, and Kya wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve.
No one came out, no one caught them, and the world didn’t end.
They stood there, panting and flushed, staring at each other.
“I…”
“I have to go,” Lin said. “But you know where to find me.”
Lin left, and Kya didn’t follow her.
She left town again the next night, and didn’t return for another three years.