There was the feeling.
Always the feeling.
First, it was the heat. Falling, falling, falling through her fast like cascades. Pooling in her stomach and spreading like His fingers through her hair, down her skin, across every last part of her that bowed to the temple of sensation with wordless devotion. A sigh of prayer, a cry for mercy, and He was the pinnacle of her faith in this hedonistic religion which they had created, in which they thrived.
He was the deity which lifted her out of the waters of humanity and allowed her to graze the surface of heaven and its many wonders.
But this was all she knew, the feeling.
The animal of abandon was all she understood.
In the beginning, there was the world. She knew it well, felt the familiar shapes underneath her fingertips as she witnessed the shifts of night and day, the ebb and flow of the ocean, the lulling tug of the breeze. Colors all seemed beautiful enough in her eyes, a spectrum which she had known ever since the dawn of her time.
But that changed. He had changed it for her.
Part of her wondered if she should resent Him, the way He spoiled her. The way He unveiled an entire new haven for her as easily as taking her hand into His. The way the uncharted waters parted beneath her feet and the curtains of the new sky fell away, revealing shades of gray and pigments of color she never knew existed before He had showed them to her. And only at the sound of His voice. The spark in His eyes when she looked at Him and He looked at her and something simply fell into place. Easy. Effortless.
Part of her wondered if she should be frightened.
She still didn't understand.
"Katara,"
She had never been one for theatrics. The melodrama which women followed as if by script, by direction. Of course, there had always been the exceptions…the death of her mother, the absence of her father, the weight of the future pressing down on the shoulders of the ones she loved. And the more she thought of it in the aftermath of new peace, the more she realized she'd never lived without desperation, without the split mask of tragedy and comedy staring her in the face and tearing her in two.
But here it was. Falling apart at the sound of Him walking through the front door. His weary face like the sun, the epicenter of her growing universe.
There was something more than the feeling now. More than the animal of abandon.
She couldn't describe it. Never, at least not with words. It was one of those moments when words didn't seem good enough. When they fell short of grace and were trampled beneath her feet. Worthless. They were confusing, her thoughts winding around one another and suffocating on the right denotation. Peace. Contentment. Faith. Trust. Devotion. Not good enough.
It was mostly when He sat across from her at the table, his arrow-painted hands folded before him, and He said her name. The way it was spoken as if like a request and she dared not refuse Him.
He felt it too. That innocence in the face of something deeper than the superficial. The undeniable surrender to mutedness that she had never felt herself fall prey to before.
It wasn't the feeling at all.
She'd take His hand. Yes, this was something different.
In time, in what seemed an eternity, she had come to call it by name.
To understand something, her father had once told her, you must familiarize yourself with it. Study its habits and its properties, learn the entomology of its designated title. Before long, it will become second nature to you, recalling the facts of its existence. The shadows of misunderstanding will shrink away with the knowing light and suddenly it won't be so strange to you anymore, so nameless and frightening and new. You'll just know, Katara.
She would have liked to tell her father that not everything was simple. Not everything which bloomed in the world could be touched like the petals of a newborn flower or followed like the map of the stars. Some things, like what she felt for Him and felt in the ghost of his aura, were just there. Simply alive.
For once, she yielded to her defeat. It was a pleasant submission, giving in to her ignorance. It had taken too many wasted moments on thought and reason and the tangible on account of her stubbornness, her unwillingness to let life be. She came to realize she could waste no more…only a name. The last moment of logic that could be spared.
When the perplexing emotion surfaced in her, the name would emerge too.
Soon, it became something of an acquaintance. Not so alien to her. She began to recognize its face in the sea of emotions which accosted her on a daily basis.
I love you, Katara.
That night He held her. His narrow chest pressed against her back and she could feel the whisper of His breath resonating throughout the quiet room. Proof he was alive.
Bone and skin and rushing blood and all of him was hers just as resolutely as she was his.
Arms encompassing her as if she were the world and He the sky, locked together in an eternal embrace. That presence of mind had come over her again, moving through her being with the soft insistence of His hands. It was like Him in ways she could never understand, not even with all the time in the world to study them, and the gentle warmth which soothed her and knew her well.
He wandered off into sleep at last.
Home.
This is home.
Author's Notes: I'm not proud of this one. But I wanted to explore Aang and Katara's innocence in the face of love and the novelty of their relationship and its many layers. Hopefully it isn't as bad as I expect it is, but we'll see. I can always take it down.
Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me. All belongs to Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino.