Entry for Zutara Week 2014: 'slow dancing'. Not really much dancing, but hopefully you'll see what I'm getting at (because I totally didn't just need an excuse to write this down). As always, I own nothing of this franchise, but I can always dream.

The people around their campsite now numbered ten. There were so many of them that they had had to alter the structure of their fire – Hakoda, Toph, Sokka and Chit Sang had ventured into the jungle and brought back whole trees for them to burn. As she cooked, the merry blaze reminded Katara of a long-ago time before the Fire Nation raid on her village, before the warriors left, when the whole village would gather in the long house on winter nights to tell stories. The sight of her father pondering the flames with his chin cupped in his fist, Sokka and Suki draped over each other like newly cured tigerseal pelts, Toph teaching Haru to play an earthbending game ("Honestly, Pebbles, how have you never played Earth-king Me before?"), filled her with a deep sort of comfort she hadn't realised she'd been missing in all the fracas surrounding the invasion.

Wait. Ten. Someone was missing.

She spotted his form half-hidden by a pillar, facing away from the fire and out over the quiet night. In the first days after he had joined their group she might have been suspicious of such behaviour – was he looking for Fire Nation allies? Plotting a way to capture Aang and betray them all?

Now though, after everything he had done, she found it harder to dance around the notion that he wasn't quite the monster her heart wanted to vilify, that his actions now were every bit as sincere as that crystal moment in the Catacombs of Ba Sing Se, when he had quietly insisted that the Fire Nation had taken his mother, too. When he could easily have kidnapped Aang on the way to the Sun Warrior city, he had been found worthy by dragons and taught the avatar firebending. And how could she ever repay what he had done to help Sokka rescue her father? She hadn't needed her brother's little pep talk to 'lay off the guy and give him a chance' to know that she owed the young firebender a lot more than she would have been comfortable with a few months ago.

"Zuko?" she asked, stepping away from the heat and the light. She ought to swallow her pride. "It's kinda cold over here, don't you want to come sit by the fire?"

It took a moment for him to answer, perhaps because, like her, he was trying to process the unaccustomed gentleness in her voice, but because his back was turned she couldn't be sure.

"I'm watching for airships," he told her finally.

A spike of worry reared up in her belly before she could squash it down. "Why?"

He turned to face her, muscled arms folded over his broad chest, his good eyebrow pulled down in a frown. The firelight cast sharp shadows on the sharp plane of his cheeks and made the gold of his eyes dance… but Katara pretended not to notice that.

His shoulders relaxed. "It's Azula." His voice came in a tired rasp. "When we escaped the Boiling Rock we didn't just evade her, we humiliated her. She won't stop until she finds us."

"It must be a family trait, then," she joked, but her smile faltered at the sudden guilt marring his features. She tried again. "Look, standing around worrying won't help. When – when you were chasing us, we didn't waste time worrying when you would show up, not because we weren't worried, but because we knew to have any chance of beating you we'd have to be fed and rested. We have Appa to warn us about approaching airships, and nobody's going to sneak past Toph if they come overland."

"But –"

"Dinner's ready," she continued firmly. "I made enough for everyone."

A little smile, like the first ray of Spring in the South, lit his features as he thanked her, and Katara's stomach lurched slightly to see it. To avoid the implications of such a feeling, she turned and marched back to the group to begin ladling out rice. Aang had just scootered in to place next to Teo and the Duke, and was sat listening to Sokka's fifth retelling of his heroic escape from the Boiling Rock.

"And there she was, all sad and prisoner-y, but I could spot her a mile away, and I knew that nothing would ever stop me from getting her out," he was saying, a soppy, heavy-lidded look on his face.

"That actually sounds kind of romantic, Snoozles," Toph interrupted from her position resting against her bedroll. Beating Haru at Earth-king Me had clearly been too easy for her.

He pouted. "Don't act so surprised. I'm all about romance. You weren't there when we had to take that secret love tunnel under the mountains."

Katara snorted. "I was. We only went that way because the Fire Nation was after us – you hated the idea that we would have to 'trust in love' to find the way out."

"No, I hated the fact that those crazy nomads had no idea what they were doing!"

"What secret love tunnel?" Suki asked as she took a bowl of rice and steaming curry from Katara.

Aang answered. "The one that leads to Omashu. See, there was a man and a woman, who -"

Sokka cleared his throat loudly. "Don't you think the guy who brought it up should tell the story?"

"Oh, right, sorry Sokka," Aang apologised. "I just got carried away – it was a very special place, and…" As he trailed off, a blush deepened on his cheeks and he glanced at Katara. She studiously ignored him and handed a bowl to her father, who took it with a nod of thanks. For the past few weeks their interactions had become like this, a sort of dance where he hinted at liking her and then lost courage and she, preoccupied with winning the war and keeping the avatar on track, found the path of least resistance, like water, and pretended she did not understand. She hoped nobody caught the slight stiffening of her shoulders at Aang's allusion to their almost-kiss, but when she handed Zuko his bowl he was looking at her with a strange expression on his face, as if trying to work out the solution a riddle that did not really have an answer.

"If you mean it was a freaky, disturbing place we should never have to see again," Sokka was saying, "Then I agree."

Suki swallowed a mouthful of rice. "Come on, guy, don't leave me hanging. What's the story?"

"It's not much of a story," Toph scoffed. "Two lovers, blah blah, One of them gets killed, city named Omashu, blah blah. The only good bit is when that chick crushes the entire army with her earthbending – now that's a role model."

"What did I just say?" Sokka demanded, jabbing a thumb into his chest. "I brought it up, I get to tell it!"

"My apologies, your bardliness. Please, enchant us all with your fabulous storytelling ability."

"You know, I'm kinda getting the feeling you're not taking this seriously," the Water Tribe boy sniffed.

"What gave you that idea?"

"Well, I for one would like to hear," said Hakoda, deciding to intervene now before he would have to physically separate the pair. Sokka beamed at him. After stuffing a large spoonful of curry into his mouth, and with a pensive expression wrinkling his brow, he began.

"Once upon a time -"

"That's a promising start."

"Toph!"

"Well, it's not."

"Ahem. Once upon a time there were two villages at war. The only reason they didn't destroy each other was because they were divided by a mountain. It's difficult to get an army over a mountain. One day, a young woman was picking flowers when she had the urge to see what was on the other side, to see if her village's enemies were really the monsters they had been painted. At the top, she stumbled across a guy from the enemy village, a hunter who had been chasing a hog-monkey when he lost his way. The two were immediately attracted to each other and, after spending some time talking, agreed to meet again.

"Every day they came to the same place and fell in love, and went walking in the mountains where they could forget the war. This is where they found the badgermoles. The badgermoles took to the young lovers and taught them earthbending, and they build a labyrinth of tunnels so they could meet in secret without worrying about being discovered."

The hush around the campfire seemed to writhe like a living thing. Sokka seemed almost surprised that he had become the focus of such rapt attention, and chased away the uncertainty with a nervous swig of lychee juice.

"Come on, Sokka, what happened then?" Suki asked as she leaned into him. Echoes followed, egging him to continue.

"I'm pausing for dramatic effect," Sokka informed them.

Katara only half-listened. She was buried in memories of the tomb, of the mural that said love was strongest in the dark. The story stirred something in her, though when she tried to grasp at precisely what that feeling was, it slipped like sand through her fingers. At the time, lost and afraid with Aang by her side, she had thought it was merely the weight of the rock above pressing down on her fears. He was looking at her now, under cover of his eyelashes, trying to catch her eye. She plucked a stick from the pile of kindling and poked the fire, frowning.

Could it be… memory…?

"Just get to the good bit, Snoozles, we haven't got all night!"

The Water Tribe boy rolled his eyes. "Fine. Where was I?"

"They were happy and kissing and stuff. Go."

"Oh yeah. So, they spent many happy months that way, sneaking off into their secret love cave to make out. But one day a conscript came through the man's village and took him to fight on the front line. By the time the woman heard about it, he had already been killed. In her grief, she flattened the mountain between their villages, and ordered the war to stop. Well, they didn't really feel like arguing with her. She united them, and they built a city where she kept the peace until her death. Because the woman's name was Oma and the man's name was Shu, the city was named Omashu to commemorate the enduring power of love." His eyes went soppy again and he smiled goofily at Suki.

"Wow, Sokka, you remembered more of that story than I thought," said Aang. The avatar scratched the back of his bald head and blushed. "I thought you were too busy getting annoyed with those nomads to pay any attention to it."

"Hey, I can multitask."

Toph stretched and sat up. "What were the rest of you guys doing, if you weren't getting annoyed by nomads?"

"We got split up in a rockslide," Katara explained.

"Shame I wasn't there - I'd have got us out no problem."

"No, it was a good thing," Aang insisted. "Because we got separated, Katara and I found where the two lovers were buried."

"Sounds creepy."

"Their whole story was written at the base of this huge platform, and there was a giant mural that said 'love is strongest in the dark.' And Katara and I…" he trailed off and peeked at her again, but she spoke over him.

"It gave us a clue to finding the way out. We had to douse our torch and the ceiling lit up with glowing crystals." No way was she going to have Aang blurting out that they had almost kissed, especially when, on her part at least, it had been an act of desperation - not with her father, Sokka, and Zuko (Zuko?) listening in.

"Wow, Sugar Queen, it must have been one exciting love tunnel. Your heart rate just picked up big time." Toph was grinning.

"No, not really. It was kinda boring once you got over the whole 'we might never see the sun again' part."

"Do I have to remind you every time that I can tell when you're lying?"

Katara's cheeks flamed but she declined to answer. She wasn't lying. At the time, kissing Aang had been… well it had been nice, but also kind of weird, brought on by circumstances, and now her only worry was that he had taken more away from it than that. The feeling prodded her again as she stirred the flames, and by chance she looked up and saw Zuko.

The expression on his face mirrored hers.