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The Space Between Tides
or, what fire does when it meets the sea
Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it.
— Margaret Atwood
I
The Ambassador's Disease
She had learned to perform herself.
That was the particular misery of diplomacy; the self became a costume, something you stepped into each morning before the mirror with the correct angle of chin and the voice calibrated to project authority without threat. Katara had been wearing the costume so long that she no longer remembered what her face did when she wasn't being watched. She was twenty three years old and she could not recall the last time she had wanted something purely for herself.
The Republic City offices of the Southern Water Tribe delegation occupied the top two floors of a sandstone building near the canal district, where the smell of brine mixed with coal smoke and the new electric street-lamps buzzed softly blue at dusk. Her desk faced east. She had arranged it that way deliberately and had told herself it was for the morning light, however, in the quiet of herself where honesty lived unattended, that it was because east was the direction of the Fire Nation.
Not that she thought about Zuko. She had simply placed her desk facing east.
The treaty negotiations had been going poorly for three weeks. The Southern reconstruction fund (siphoned if the financial auditors were correct, through a series of shell intermediaries connected to a faction of the old Northern court nobility) had become the central wound of the spring session. Aang handled the public calendar; the ceremonies and the speeches that made people weep. He was extraordinarily gifted at making people feel the world's beauty, to feel complicit in its healing. But the architecture of that healing; the contracts, the ledgers, the careful arrangement of interests, all fell to her.
She was good at it, that was perhaps the most exhausting thing, she was terribly good at it and it was eating her from the inside out.
Sokka had said, on his last visit, that she looked tired. She had told him she was fine. He had looked at her the way he sometimes did with their father's eyes, the deep still kind and said nothing further, which made it worse.
She hadn't truly bended in four months. There had been opportunities, of course, a clerk in the lower offices with a persistent knee injury and the making the ripples in the water when she bathed but she had looked at her hands and felt nothing come. The water listened to her. It moved when she commanded and obeyed form, but the deeper current, the one that had always felt like a conversation between herself and the ocean, had gone somewhere she couldn't follow.
Master Pakku had said once, in his gruff and infuriating way, that waterbending was the art of not-forcing. You become the opening through which water moves, he had said, you do not push but you invite.
At seventeen she had thought that she understood this. She now understood that she did not.
✶
The Fire Lord arrived on a Tuesday.
He came without ceremony, a studied casualness that meant he had organised everything very carefully to look unceremonious. She knew his habits. A single ship and a small delegation. Zuko had always been uncomfortable with the paraphernalia of power, which was ironic given that he inhabited it so completely; he had the kind of presence that made rooms rearrange themselves around him without his asking.
She had not seen him in nine months.
She learned of his arrival from the morning briefing scroll, noted it with what she imagined was professional composure and then stood at her east-facing window for slightly longer than necessary, watching the canal below catch the early light.
They met formally that afternoon in the grand chamber of the Republic City Assembly Hall; all carved mahogany and new electric chandeliers and the flags of five nations arranged in careful parity. He was wearing Fire Nation formal robes, deep crimson with gold trim. The scar was as she remembered it. She had spent years learning not to look at it and succeeding so completely that she now sometimes forgot it was there and then found it again with something that was akin to sorrow.
He met her eyes across the room before he did anything else. For a brief moment and just long enough that something in her sternum recognised it.
"Ambassador Katara," His voice controlled.
"Fire Lord Zuko," She matched his register precisely.
The negotiations resumed.
II
Doctrine of Opposing Forces
The old masters had a name for it, Yáng Yuè Dualism, the teaching that fire and water were not opposites in the sense of enemies but opposites in the sense of mirrors and each are defined by what the other was, each carrying a memory of the other in its structure.
Fire needed air and fuel to exist. Water needed containment or it dispersed into nothing. Fire was rapid and consuming; water was patient and winding. But both could destroy and both could sustain life. They moved toward entropy and away from it simultaneously and the masters who had achieved the highest levels of either art had reportedly been able to feel the other element as a kind of resonance; an awareness in the body and the quality that their own bending was not.
Katara had read this in one of the old scrolls she'd borrowed from the Fire Nation royal archives, two years prior, during a different set of negotiations. She had told herself she was reading for diplomatic preparation and then read the same passage four times.
She thought about it now, at the long table, watching Zuko's delegation argue about trade tariffs. Watching the way his hands moved when he was impatient; a barely perceptible tension in the knuckles, a very controlled motion. He ran warm; she remembered sparring with him once, years ago, how the heat had come off his skin like a second presence. Then she had found it unsettling but she wasn’t certain that was the case now.
The difficulty was there was no safe way to want something you had no business wanting. Aang loved her with a simplicity and purity that should have been enough, that was enough, in every measurable respect. He loved her like water loved the sea, flowing toward her with the entirety of himself. She loved him. She was not certain she was in love with him, which was a distinction she had been refusing to examine for approximately two years, but she loved him and he was good and the world needed him to be whole.
None of this explained why she had placed her desk facing east.
After the session broke, Zuko caught her in the corridor outside the main chamber. He was alone; his attendant had been dismissed, deliberately she thought.
"You look tired," he said.
"Sokka said the same thing," she replied.
"Sokka's rarely wrong about you."
She looked at him for a moment with the feeling that the corridor had narrowed slightly.
"How is Mai?" she asked.
A brief pause as something moved in his expression.
"We separated," he replied, shifting his gaze just above her head. "Eight months ago. I assumed you knew."
"I had heard something," She had heard in full detail. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be." He said it without bitterness. "It was correct for the both of us," He paused again. "How is Aang?"
"He's well. Busy. He's been with the new air acolytes for the last month."
"But not here."
"Not here," she agreed.
The corridor held them for another moment, the electric light casting everything in its particular honest flatness. She was aware, with the precision that came from years of training herself to be aware of her body's responses as data rather than commands, that her pulse had shifted.
"I'll see you tomorrow," he said.
"Tomorrow," she confirmed.
She walked back to her rooms and stood at her east-facing window until the canal went dark.
III
Combustion Points
They had dinner together on the third evening, because the formal schedule required it and the lead delegates of each nation had a standing courtesy dinner at the mid-point of any negotiation lasting longer than a week. It was written in the protocol documents that she had helped draft three years prior. She had not, at the time of drafting them, been thinking about this specific contingency.
The restaurant was quiet, selected by his aide. A private room overlooking a narrow canal, paper lanterns casting their light in doubles across the water. At first, the food came in small courses and they talked about the negotiations; spoke frankly in the way they only could without their delegations present, acknowledging the pressure points and trade-offs with the bluntness that two people who had grown up in a war permitted themselves when nobody was performing for.
Then the conversation shifted when the formal agenda exhausted itself and what remained was simply two people in a room.
"You said you were tired," Zuko said, refilling her tea. "Not of the work."
"I didn't say that."
"You didn't have to."
She looked at her reflection in the window as the canal-light wobbled through it.
"I can't heal," she said, and was startled to hear it aloud. She hadn't said it to anyone. "I mean— I can. Technically, the forms are correct but something's gone quiet."
He was silent for long enough that she regretted saying it.
"I couldn't firebend for six months after the comet… after the war ended." He said it to the table, not her. "I could produce fire. But… but it was dead. I was going through the forms without being present in them."
"What changed it?"
"Nothing specific. I stopped trying to force it and I just let it be absent for a while," He looked up. "You've been trying very hard to be adequate to everything, Katara. I've watched you for three days doing so."
The words landed somewhere underneath her composure.
"That's—" she began.
"It's not criticism," he said. "I recognise it because I spent three years doing it."
She was quiet for a moment and the canal-light moved across the table between them.
"What did you want," she asked, "that you weren't letting yourself have?"
He looked at her. Just looked at her, for three full seconds, with the scar and the golden eyes and the absolute stillness that was his particular form of intensity. She felt the question land on her own sternum like a coal placed on paper.
"A lot of things," he said. "You should sleep. The morning session starts at eight."
She walked home through the canal streets with her hands curled in the pockets of her coat and when she got back to her flat she sat on the edge of the bath and called a small sphere of water from the tap, just a fist-sized globe, and held it in her palm. It turned slowly. It felt, for the first time in weeks, like it was listening.
IV
Tidal Bodies
The negotiation broke on the seventh day.
Not catastrophically, just suspended. The Northern court representative had received a communication from home requiring a three-day recess. This was diplomatically acceptable and personally inconvenient to everyone in the room, which meant it was probably genuine. Katara looked at three days of empty calendar and felt something in her chest that she diagnosed as a species of dread that was also relief.
She went to the canal district markets in the afternoon, bought persimmons and a paper-covered novel she would probably not read, and was standing at a canal bridge watching a market barge navigate through when she heard his voice behind her.
"I didn't know you liked persimmons."
"I don't, particularly." She turned. "I bought them impulsively."
He was in street clothes; a simple dark wool, no insignia, the topknot undone and his hair tied back simply. Without the robes he looked younger, and also, somehow, more himself. She had noticed this before that the formal version of Zuko was a very accurate rendering but slightly corrected.
"I'm walking," he said. "Come, if you want."
She wanted.
They walked along the canal district for an hour, then longer, drifting through the older parts of the city where the electric lights hadn't yet reached and the paper lanterns still hung in orange clusters above the streets. He bought fried dough from a cart and she ate half of it without asking and he let her. They talked about nothing in particular; about a strange building they passed that had been built in architectural styles of three nations simultaneously, about a book she'd read on the history of the canal system, about his uncle's tea shop, which had recently expanded to a second location.
It was the most at ease she had felt in four months.
The problem with recognising that Zuko made you feel at ease was that it immediately introduced an enormous quantity of unease.
They ended up at a small park at the edge of the canal district, a narrow wedge of grass between buildings, where a single magnolia tree had planted itself and been allowed to stay. The moon was three-quarters full. She sat on the stone border of the tree's small bed and he sat beside her, their shoulders not quite touching.
"Tell me something true," she said, not planning to say it.
He was quiet for a moment as the canal murmured somewhere below.
"I think about you," he said. "More than is appropriate."
The city continued its business around them, indifferent. She could hear a distant tram, a restaurant's spillage of laughter. The magnolia tree dropped a petal onto the stone between her knee and his.
"For how long," she said.
"Longer than I've allowed myself to think about it clearly."
She looked at the petal on the stone. It was so white it seemed to gather the moonlight and hold it.
"This is complicated," she said.
"Yes."
"Aang—"
"I know." Not impatience in it, just acknowledgement. "I'm not asking you for anything I just didn't want to keep not-saying it."
She turned to look at him. He was looking at the canal below, his profile very still against the city's scattered light and she watched him without speaking for long enough that he turned to meet her gaze.
Neither of them moved.
The petal lay between them and the moon was very full in the reflection of the canal below and Katara thought, with a clarity she hadn't felt in a long time, I have been keeping something from myself.
"Me too," she said. "For longer than I've thought about clearly."
He exhaled. It was almost nothing, just a fraction of tension leaving the set of his shoulders but it was the most honest thing she had seen anyone do in months.
They walked back through the city separately. It was the right thing to do. She laid awake in her bed with the window open and the canal smell coming in and felt the water in her blood moving with the distant moon, moving the way it always had before she had forgotten how to let it.
V
What Fire Remembers
The second day of the recess, she found a note under her door.
The Fire Nation delegation has access to the bathhouse complex on Silk Canal Road for the duration of the stay. Private hours. If you want a proper hot spring after a week of that negotiating table, it's yours.
Zuko
She went around dusk.
The bathhouse was old, pre-Republic, built in the Fire Nation style with its emphasis on stone and heat. The main hall was cavernous and steam-filled, the water in the central pool mineral-dark, the light coming from oil lamps set into the walls in bronze brackets shaped like stylised flames. Everything smelled of sulphur and cedar and something underneath those, ancient and mineral, like the earth's own blood.
He was already there. Of course he was. He was standing at the far edge of the pool in the steam, arms at his sides. He looked like a figure from an old myth. She had read, in the scrolls, of the ancient Fire Nation deity called the Ember Keeper, who was said to stand at the boundary between the living world and the spirit world and hold the gate open with his hands. She thought of this now and felt absurd for thinking it, and thought it again.
She crossed the stone floor. She had brought nothing with her and had left the deliberate layers of herself back in her rooms, had walked through the city in a plain robe with her hair down, something she almost never did anymore. She felt unfamiliar to herself in a way that was not entirely unpleasant.
"You came," he said.
"You invited me."
"I wasn't certain."
"Neither was I," she said honestly, "until I was at the door."
She descended the stone steps into the pool. The water was extraordinary, not warm but genuinely hot and it received her with the thoroughness of something that knew its purpose. She felt the week leave her in layers, un-peeling slowly in the mineral dark.
He was in the water across from her and the steam moved between them and sometimes obscured him and sometimes didn't. She was aware of the water as something that connected them, a continuity between her body and his, atoms of mineral water that touched her shoulder having, moments before, touched his.
She thought about the Yáng Yuè dualism. Fire and water in the same vessel, held in the earth's body, the earth providing the container that neither could be without.
"The masters wrote that fire is longing made visible," she said.
He looked at her through the steam.
"Water is patience that forgets what it's waiting for," he said.
"That's not in any scroll I've read."
"No," he agreed. "I made it up just now."
She laughed, actually laughed, something real and unguarded cresting through her as she felt the water around her shift with it. It surprised her. She hadn't heard herself laugh without managing it for a very long time.
He was watching her with an expression she couldn't quite name, warm and complicated but very still.
"There," he said softly.
They stayed in the water a long time. As the oil lamps burned lower she moved to the shallow end and sat on the submerged stone shelf there, the water at her collar, he moved to the same shelf at a different angle and they talked at length about things she hadn't talked about to anyone. About the cost of the rebuilding work, not politically but personally. About what it felt like to watch the world reconstitute itself from catastrophe and to wonder, sometimes, if you were being reconstituted correctly or only approximately. About the particular loneliness of being very necessary.
"Iroh used to say," Zuko said, "that the saddest people in the world were the ones who knew who they were supposed to be and forgot who they actually were."
"When did you remember?" she asked. "Who you actually are?"
He was quiet for a moment, looking at the water between them where a lamp's reflection wobbled.
"I'm still working on it," he said. "But I know what helps."
The water moved between them. She was very aware of the distance, perhaps two feet of hot dark water. She was aware of his hands resting on the stone shelf beneath the water, the way heat moved off him even in the heat, the specific signature of his warmth.
She moved without deciding to. Not toward him, just shifting enough that the water between them decreased by half. He didn't move, he only watched her.
"Katara," he said.
"I know," she replied.
"Aang—"
"I know." She did know. She was holding it, feeling its full weight, not putting it aside. "It isn't— I don't want to pretend that's nothing, it isn't nothing."
"No," he agreed.
"But I've been disappearing," she said. "I've been disappearing for a year and I didn't notice until I couldn't heal anymore, and right now, sitting here—" She stopped and looked at him. "I don't feel like I'm disappearing."
The lamp on the nearest wall had burned down to its last quarter-inch. Its light was very warm and very small and it made everything around it the most precise kind of shadow.
He reached across the water and touched her wrist. Just his fingertips to the inside of her wrist, where the pulse was. She felt the heat of him as a distinct phenomenon, not the water's heat, something more specific. She felt her pulse lift under his touch like a creature surfacing.
"Tell me to stop," he said.
"I will," she said. "If I want to."
He looked at her for one more moment and then he closed the last distance between them.
VI
Confluence
The first kiss was careful.
That was the thing that undid her, more than anything, the care of it. His mouth on hers was warm and unhurried. She had forgotten and had it trained out of her through years of being useful, of moving always toward the next thing and what it felt like to be kissed by someone who was entirely present in the act.
She kissed him back. She put her hands on his face, the scar under her palm and felt him exhale against her mouth with the same involuntary honesty she had watched in him at the magnolia tree. The heat of him moved through the contact into her palms, into her wrists and into the slow column of her body in the dark water.
She was conscious of the water around them as she had always been and she felt, with a precision that was almost shocking, the current of her own bending stir. The way Pakku had described it, a thousand years ago in the snow, and she had thought she understood.
She understood now.
He pulled back a fraction, enough to look at her, to ask with his eyes the same question his mouth had asked.
"Still here," she said softly.
"Still here," he echoed, his voice was rougher than it had been.
She kissed him again, less carefully this time, she felt his hands in the water finding the curve of her waist and settling there. She moved against him and the water moved with her, the small lamp on the wall breathed its last light and went out, leaving only the blue-dark of the stone and the faint glow from the entrance and the particular luminescence of hot mineral water in near-darkness.
They said each other's names once more, like reminders, then the talking was done.
✶
Later she would think about what the masters had written; that when fire and water were brought into true contact, neither was destroyed. That was the misunderstanding most people carried, that the meeting of opposites produced annihilation, but fire needed water as an adversary, as the force that gave it its shape and its urgency; and water needed fire to know itself as cold, as the thing that could receive without being consumed. Each element was, in some sense, the grammar by which the other became legible.
But that was later. At that moment, she was not thinking about the masters.
At that moment she was thinking about nothing at all.
VII
What the Water Carries
They left the bathhouse separately; her first, him a few moments behind, an arrangement both practical and unnecessary, since anyone who saw them together in the canal district at night would have assumed ambassadorial companionship and thought nothing of it.
But she was glad of the time alone.
She walked through the canal district with the night air on her wet hair and the lamp-doubled reflections moving in the water below the bridges and felt, for the first time in months, the specific weight of herself. Not the weight of what she owed which was heavy, but the weight of her own body as a place that had needs and that was not only a vehicle for usefulness.
She sat on a bridge for a while, watching the moon find the water below. She reached into her pocket and took out a small amount of water, the flask she always carried, and let it pool in her palm. It was listening again.
She didn't know what came next but she knew with perfect clarity what she was going to have to think about and be honest about; with Aang, with Zuko and most importantly with herself. None of it was simple and none of it was without consequence.
But she was present in her own body again, the water was speaking again and the moon was doing what moons did regardless of human complication. She watched the light on the water below for a long time and something in the deep structural self of her; the self that existed prior to the ambassador, to the good daughter, to all the roles she had inhabited and settled into a kind of quiet that was not absence but rest.
✶
He was waiting for her at the entrance to her building.
She had not expected this, as he was leaning against the stone arch of the doorway in his plain wool coat when she rounded the corner he straightened. He had always had excellent hearing; she remembered this from the war.
"You said you were moments behind," she said.
"I walked faster."
"Zuko."
"I know," he said, premptively. "I know everything that I know. I just wanted to see you once more before tomorrow."
She looked at him in the lamplight of the street, a simple earnestness that he had never fully learned to hide despite years of trying, the quality in him that she had first noticed in a cave in Ba Sing Se when they had told each other true things about their mothers and something between them had changed its shape permanently.
"Come up," she said.
Her room was small and functional, but deeply impersonal as the way of a temporary diplomat's housing. The same regulation furniture with the single exception being a water sculpture she had made herself in an idle evening and left on the windowsill, a frozen wave in a shallow dish. She saw him notice it when he came in.
She made tea and they sat at the small table by the east-facing window, the city's night breathing below and drank tea without saying much. It was one of the most companionable silences she had experienced in recent memory as she watched his hands around the cup and felt the awareness of him.
"I need to talk to Aang," she said.
"Yes."
"Not… I'm not saying that as a way of saying something else. I mean I need to talk to him because it's true and necessary and I've been avoiding understanding it for longer than tonight."
"I know that," Zuko said. "I know that's what it is." He looked at her across the table. "I'm not asking you to resolve anything and I'm not asking for a promise."
"What are you asking for?"
He was quiet for a moment, turning his cup in his hands.
"To not pretend the last two years didn't exist," he said. "To not have to perform without feeling it."
She reached across the table and put her hand over his. His warmth came up through her palm immediately and she felt the water sculpture on the windowsill shift slightly in its dish, a small rotation.
"I'm not asking you to perform anything," she said.
He turned his hand under hers so their palms were together.
Outside, the city continued to exist with its canals and its lamps and its five-nation architecture, its ongoing improbable attempt at peace. The moon moved through the sky the way it had been moving for ten thousand years, indifferent to everything below except the tides, which it pulled with a constant that was one of the few genuinely reliable things.
She had always loved the tides for exactly this reason. They came and went not from indecision but from fidelity to something larger than themselves, the gravitational conversation between bodies and the language planets and moons spoke to each other across the silence of space.
VIII
Night Cartography
She led him to the bedroom.
The room was narrow, the window looking south rather than east and the bed a plain linen with the light coming in from the street below in a pale amber stripe across the floor. She stood at the foot of the bed and looked at him in the doorway and felt something in her chest open.
He crossed the room and kissed her without preamble and she welcomed it.
This, she thought, is what I have been refusing to know about myself.
They shed layers. His coat, her outer robe, the careful articles of separation. She ran her hands across the plane of his shoulder, over the collarbone. She put her hands in his hair, the topknot already loosened from the earlier hours and his hands were at her waist, the warmth of him was specific to him; not diffuse like the bathhouse heat but localised, coming from the particular source of him from the fundamental temperature of a firebender's body. She felt it in every place they touched, travelling through her. She had read once that masters could heat their own blood, could sustain themselves in colds that would kill ordinary people, that the body of a firebender was a kind of permanent ember. She felt this now as a fact she had always known abstractly and now knew in her hands, her wrists, the concave place below her clavicle where he pressed his mouth.
She gasped at that. The sound surprised her. He stilled, questioning.
"Don't stop," she said.
He didn't stop.
His mouth was fire and purpose. It moved from the hollow of her throat, down the slope of her breast, his teeth scraping lightly over the thin fabric of her tunic. Katara’s hands fisted in his hair, not to guide but to anchor herself. The heat was a live wire beneath his skin and where his fingers worked the ties at her side, she felt it bloom against her ribs, a brand of pure want.
The tunic loosened. He pushed it from her shoulders, the movement slow. The cool air of the room hit her skin, a shock that made her shiver, but it was chased away an instant later by the sweep of his hands. Calloused palms, she thought, warrior’s hands, tracing the curve of her waist, the dip of her spine. They burned a path of sensation that went straight to her core. She was already aching, a pulse between her legs that matched the rhythm of her heart.
She had to touch him back. Her own hands were clumsy with need, pulling at the ties of his own tunic. He helped her, shrugging it off and then his chest was bare. The blooming scar stretched across his septum, she’d seen before but never like this. Never with her fingertips. She traced the brutal mark across his rib cage and over his heart. His breath hitched. She looked up and saw his eyes, molten gold in the amber light, watching her. An open vulnerability that stole the air from her lungs.
"Katara," he breathed, a plea.
It broke the last dam inside her.
She surged up, capturing his mouth again. This kiss was different, all tongue and teeth and shared breath. His hands slid down, cupping her backside, lifting her against him. The hard ridge of his erection pressed against her thigh through his trousers as a moan tore from her throat. He was above her, the pale stripe of light from the window cutting across his shoulder, gilding the sweat already beginning to form on his skin. He braced himself on one arm, the other hand moving down her body, over her stomach.
"Tell me," he murmured against her lips, his voice thick. "Tell me what you want."
"I want you," she gasped. "All of you. Now."
He made a sound, low and deep in his chest, a rumble of pure fire. His fingers hooked in her sarashi, drawing them down her hips. The cool air kissed her most intimate skin, followed a heartbeat later by the searing heat of his gaze.
Then he touched her.
Not with his hand, but with his mouth.
He shifted down the bed, his hands spreading her thighs, and he pressed a soft kiss to the very centre of her.
Her back arched off the bed and a cry ripped from her, "Zuko!"
His answer was the flat of his tongue, a long deliberate stroke that had her seeing stars. He studied her like a map. He licked and sucked, his fingers digging into the flesh of her hips, holding her steady as she bucked against him. The heat was inside her now, a spiralling tension that built with every flick of his tongue, every soft groan of encouragement he gave against her skin. It was too much and yet, it was not enough.
Her hands scrambled for purchase in the sheets as pleasure, crackled through her veins. She was babbling, half-formed words.
He added a finger, then two, curling them inside her and the world dissolved into white-hot sensation. The orgasm crashed over her without warning, a wave that tore a scream from her throat. It went on and on, her body clenching around his fingers, trembling uncontrollably as he gentled his mouth, coaxing her through the last shuddering pulses.
Before she could even float back down, he was moving. She heard the rustle of fabric, the sound of his own clothes being shed. Then he was there again, his body covering hers, skin to skin. The heat of him was a furnace. He was trembling too, the fine control he always exhibited gone, replaced by a ragged need that mirrored her own.
He kissed her and she could taste herself on his lips, an intimate flavour that sent a fresh jolt of desire straight to her spent core.
He positioned himself at her entrance, the broad head of his cock pressing against her sensitive flesh. He was breathing hard, his forehead pressed to hers. His eyes were squeezed shut.
"Look at me," she whispered.
His eyes opened. The vulnerability was back, mixed with a desperate hope.
She wrapped her legs around his hips, pulling him closer. "please."
He thrust forward.
It was a single stroke that filled her completely. They both cried out. For a long moment, he didn't move, buried inside her and his body shaking with the effort of holding still. She could feel every inch of him and the way her body stretched to accommodate him. It was an ache and a rightness that made her eyes sting.
Then he began to move.
Slow at first, a rolling rhythm that made her gasp with each withdrawal. His mouth found hers, his kisses messy and open. Her hands roamed his back, feeling the powerful muscles work. The pace quickened. The sound of skin against skin, of her soft cries and his guttural groans filled the small room.
When she moved against him and the water in her blood moved with her, a sympathetic resonance of a body remembering what it was made of. She felt the tide in herself that the moon pulled, felt it in her sternum and her palms and the long line of her legs against his. The water in the dish on the windowsill of the other room, she knew distantly, was spinning.
"Katara... I... "
"Don't hold back," she pleaded, her own climax coiling again, fiercer than before. "Let go. Please."
With a ragged shout that was half her name, half a sob, he drove into her one last, deep time and shattered. She felt the hot pulse of his release inside her. Her own climax seized her, a slower unravelling that melded with his.
He collapsed atop her, his weight a welcome anchor. His face was buried in the crook of her neck, his breath hot and uneven on her skin. She held him, her arms wrapped tightly around his heaving back, her legs still locked around him. The amber light had shifted. She could feel his heart hammering against her own, their rhythms beginning to sync.
Moments passed and the world slowly filtered back in. His weight was beginning to grow heavy, but she didn't want him to move. Not yet.
Finally, he shifted just enough to lift his head. He looked down at her, his expression dazed. He opened his mouth and then closed it as no words came out.
A content smile spread across Katara's face. She lifted a hand, traced the line of his jaw, the curve of his nose.
She had thought, when she had allowed herself to think about it, which she had done more than she should admit, that being with him would feel like friction. A contact between unlike things that produces heat through incompatibility. She had thought it would be intense in the way of opposition, of resistance.
She had not thought it would feel like recognition.
His hands mapped her with the focused attention he brought to everything that mattered to him, the slowness not of someone who lacked urgency but of someone who had decided that this particular moment merited his full presence. She felt herself open under that attention in ways that had nothing to do with the body and everything to do with it simultaneously. A feeling long-folded beginning to extend itself.
"You're here," he said quietly.
"Entirely here," she said.
They lay in the dark afterwards with the amber streetlight on the floor and her head on his chest and his arm around her, his hand moving slowly in her hair, it was a comfort so undemanding it was almost unbearable. She could feel his heartbeat under her cheek, steady and slightly elevated. The city murmured below with the small human orchestra of a living place at night.
"The masters wrote that water has memory," she said.
"What kind of memory?"
"Structural," she said. "That it carries information about everything it's touched. Every mineral, every channel, every temperature it's been held at. That if you're sensitive enough you can read water the way you can read a text and find the history of it in what it's become."
He was quiet for a moment, his hand still moving in her hair.
"Fire doesn't remember like that," he said. "It doesn't carry things forward, It transforms."
"Maybe that's why water and fire are described as seeking each other," she said. "One holds the past and one dissolves it."
"One dissolves the past and one carries it forward," he said. "Together they cover the whole span."
She thought about this. Outside, a light rain had begun to fall and she could hear it on the window, the particular percussion of rain on glass as she felt it in herself as she always did. The water in the air was also water in her blood.
"It's raining," he said.
"I know."
"Do you feel it?"
"Always," she said. "Like a word in a language I've spoken my whole life."
He pulled her slightly closer.
IX
The Permeable Boundary
He woke before dawn to the sound of the rain still falling and the grey sky through the window and him asleep beside her.
She laid still and watched the light come up, increment by increment, the city emerging from the dark into the particular blue-grey of a rainy Republic City morning. He slept on his back with one arm still around her and in sleep his face had a gentle ease.
She thought about her mother.
She did not often let herself think about her mother in full. Usually she held the grief at a specific distance, but lying in the grey morning in the aftermath of the previous night she found it arrived without management. A brief memory of water in a bowl in a lamp-lit tent and her mother's hands guiding hers. The feeling of love as something that simply was not yet mixed with loss.
Her mother had told her that healing required love. Not performed care but love. The real thing, the kind that cost something and that could not be faked by sincerity of technique. That was what the water responded to. The willingness to truly feel what the person you were healing felt, to let their pain pass through you on its way out.
She had spent a year willing herself into efficient caring. She had been caring efficiently, without the cost of real contact. She had been afraid, she understood now, of what happened if she was genuinely moved.
She thought about Aang. About the conversation she needed to have, which she had been approaching obliquely for a year and which she would now have directly. She thought about what she owed him, which was honesty and not the kind that was managed for his comfort but the real kind. She thought about how much she loved him and how much of what she felt with him was love and how much was the specific love of someone who had saved the world together with you, which was a profound and real thing and was not the same thing as the love you chose every day with your whole self.
She thought about what she had felt the night before and what she had felt for months. She did not look away from it and she found she was not afraid of it.
✶
He woke when the grey light had deepened to something that was almost morning.
He was immediately awake as he turned his head and looked at her with clear eyes and said, simply "You've been thinking."
"For about two hours."
"Good thinking or bad thinking?"
"Honest thinking," she said. "Which is a different category."
He looked at her for a moment.
"What do you need from me?" he said.
"Nothing," she said, "that you're not already giving." She paused. "The willingness to let this be what it actually is rather than what's convenient for it to be."
"I can do that."
"I know you can," She turned to her side to look at him directly. "I don't know what will happen after next week. I need you to know that."
"Katara," he said. "I've known you for eight years. I know you're not reckless. I know this isn't… I know what this is."
"Tell me what you think it is."
He looked at the ceiling for a moment, then back at her.
"It's true," he said. "Whatever it is. It's the truest thing I've felt in a long time." He paused. "I don't need it to be simple, all I need is it to be real."
She reached up and touched his jaw, the undamaged side, then the other. His eyes closed for a moment at the touch on the scar. She had healed people for fifteen years and she knew what the body's guarding looked like, the reflexive tensing at a touch that had once been pain. He had been guarding that side of himself for so long it had become unconscious.
She kept her hand there until she felt the guard ease.
"Real," she confirmed. "Undeniably enormously real."
He turned his face into her palm.
X
Tide Returns
She healed someone that morning.
It was accidental. She was walking to the negotiating hall, passing through the canal market and an elderly vendor had cut his hand badly on a crate edge, a deep gash that was bleeding freely onto his goods. She stopped without thinking, asked permission with a look, and put her hands over the wound.
The water came.
From the flask at her hip and from the air and from the faint damp of the canal wind, it came and it knew what it was doing and she was finally present inside it, feeling the man's pain passing through her rather than at her and the wound closed cleanly.
The man looked at his hand and then at her and she felt tears prick her eyes, which she hadn't expected. She turned and kept walking before they could fall.
She walked into the negotiating hall and took her seat, waiting for the session to begin and felt. Running under everything the particular current that she had been missing, her actual self, moving in the familiar direction.
✶
Zuko arrived moments later than the rest of his delegation, which was notable; he was normally the first. He settled into his chair with composure and caught her eye once across the table.
She felt it in her sternum like a coal placed on paper.
The negotiations resumed. The Northern representative had returned from his communication. There were documents to review and positions to restate. She did all of it with the thoroughness it required, she was good at this.
But under the good work, the capable performance of her real and legitimate skills, she was also running the other current with the self that existed before and beneath the ambassador, the girl who had drawn water from nothing in the snow, who could read the history of what water had touched and know it had touched something remarkable. That self had not disappeared.
She had it back now and she intended to keep it.
After the session, she wrote a letter. Not to Zuko, that conversation would happen in person. To Aang, she wrote it carefully and honestly. She sat with it for an hour after it was written, reading it. Then she folded it and addressed it and put it in the outgoing post and sat in her east-facing window with the letter's absence in the room like a new kind of space.
The canal below caught the evening light and turned it gold.
She was sad, and she was more present than she had been in a year, and she thought that these were not contradictions but coordinates; two points by which you could triangulate where you actually were.
✶
He came by that evening with no note this time, he just knocked at her door. He was there in street clothes again, something simple in his hands; a paper bag with two persimmons in it which meant he had gone to the canal market specifically.
"You bought persimmons," she said.
"You bought them impulsively," he said. "I thought maybe there was something to it."
She laughed again, the real laugh, and let him in.
They ate the persimmons at the small table by the east-facing window, they were sweet and slightly astringent. The city's evening arranged itself below; the canal lights coming on one by one, the reflections doubling and then multiplying as the wind moved the water.
"I sent the letter," she said.
He looked at her, "Are you all right?"
"Yes," she said. "It hurt but it was true and I feel…" She paused, finding the word. "Clear."
He reached across the small table and turned his hand palm-up, an offer and she placed hers in it. His warmth came up through her palm and she felt the water in the air around them, the current of herself moving in its right direction.
"The masters said," she began.
"The masters," he said, "said a lot of things."
"This one matters," She looked at him across the table. "They said that fire and water, in contact, do not destroy each other. That the meeting of opposites is not annihilation as each one teaches the other what it is."
He was quiet for a moment, looking at their joined hands.
"What have you learned?" he said.
She thought about it. About the water and the self she had misplaced and was finding restored in pieces. Mostly she thought of the particular quality of this man's presence in her life, warm and constant.
"That I was cold," she said. "Not cold like the South Pole but cold like absence." She squeezed his hand once. "And what have you learned?"
He looked at her for a long moment. Outside, the rain had started again.
"That fire is afraid of itself," he said. "That it burns things because it doesn't know what else to do with its nature," He stopped. "That the things it's been taught to believe about itself are not the whole truth."
She heard the cost of that sentence.
"What is the whole truth?" she said gently.
He looked at her with those gold eyes in the canal-light, the city making a frame around him.
"That it can warm things too," he said. "Not only consume them."
The water in the dish on the windowsill was moving. Outside, the rain fell on the canals and the city's five flags moved in the wet wind, and somewhere beyond the clouds the moon was doing what moons did, pulling the tides of every sea on the planet with perfect impartiality.
She did not know what was coming. She knew it would require the willingness to be reshaped by the truths she was choosing to face. She knew it would not be simple but she knew it was real.
The water turned in the dish and the ember in him burned its steady warmth as she sat in her east-facing window with her hand in his, returned to herself at last. Moving always toward the sea.