HI GUYS...sorry i had another little Zutara moment pop into my head while i was at work today...it was parctially inspired by a passage in the last book of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants quartet...it just made me think of Zuko and Katara...

and the first two chapters of Firefly are done and the first will probably be up tomorrow or monday night...

disclaimer: yeah, i own nothing...excpet the idea...read and enjoy

"It couldn't keep getting better, Tibby decided. It just couldn't. There was a law of physics that prohibited it. Seriously, there was some kind of law. Conservation of joy. No joy could be added to the sum in the universe without some being taken away." Ann Bradshares, Forever in Blue

Zuko was a firm believer that all the good things in life had to be balanced out by the bad. The universe was a logical place and all the happiness in the world had to be paid for by unhappiness in one form or another. The balance had to be maintained. It wasn't a form of fate exactly, or destiny for that matter. It was a system of checks and balances to be sure that no one person got all the happiness in the world and someone else got none. And just like everything else in his life, happiness just happened to have a very expensive price tag.

Case in point; he'd had a rather happy childhood. Having his mother vanish into the night and disappear as if she'd never been in the first place was the price he paid. It was a great deal of happy he'd gone into debt for. He was still paying for it, he thought to himself sometimes.

Some years later, when he'd finally gotten the chance to sit in on his father's war council, he'd spoken out of turn. Still his punishment was burned into his memory as well as his face. For every scrap of happiness he'd earned or found or stolen, he'd paid. It was only fair. Everyone paid.

"Hello...!" Katara's voice rang in his ears as he came back to himself. For the past ten minutes or so he'd been staring into the small campfire. The others had already moved away from the campfire and were laughing and joking like the children that they were. Really, they were all children trying to change the whole world order...sometimes it was mindboggling.

"What?" he asked, jumping away from her a little.

Katara rolled her eyes and put one hand on her hip, she was annoyed and in the last few weeks, Zuko had become an expert on reading her. It was best to let the bad mood blow over, if goaded any farther in this mood, she'd snap at the nearest target. Somehow that nearest target was always Zuko. She handed him a huge stack of dishes; bowls, plates, chopsticks. "I'll wash, you dry," She ordered and flounced away toward the little stream they'd found a few days ago.

He thought about rolling his eyes at her. He thought better of it, however, Katara had a strange tendency to know when someone was rolling their eyes at her.

They settled down on the bank of the stream, Katara pulling water from the stream and cleaning and handing the dripping dish to him without a word or glance. Zuko would dry it and set it back down with the other clean dishes. It was a pattern, a somewhat odd but comforting pattern. They hardly ever spoke.

But there were moments, honest to Angi moments, that Zuko was sure that she didn't hate him as much as she seemed to show she did. There was nothing momentous about these moments. They were not particularly remarkable or extraordinary and he was sure that no one else picked up on, or were even aware of their presence or existence.

In the mornings, Zuko and the Avatar would rise with the sun and fire bend. To Zuko's great surprise, the skinny bald kid had taken to this element exceptionally well. He would master it in to time. But those were not the moments he was thinking of as he and Katara sat there washing and drying plates in near silence.

Most mornings, Katara would perch herself on a crumbling rock wall to watch. She had just gotten up and her hair was loose in waves around her face. She made no effort to tie it back or restrain it in anyway. Half of the time, here blue eyes were still cloudy with sleep and she would blankly stare at them as if in a trance for twenty minutes or so. But after that first twenty minutes, Katara's cerulean orbs wouldn't miss a thing. At first, Zuko was sure she was there to make sure he didn't kill the Avatar, but now he wasn't so sure. Katara's eyes would drift form Aang to him and stay there. There was nothing malicious or threatening in her azure gaze, only curious. But that was the only time of day that her gaze remained so. The rest of the day, she was hostile and belittling, she would glare and snipe and argue.

"Do you hate me?" He asked quietly as he took another clean but wet plate from her. A crescent moon hung in the night sky above them and he had been totally unaware of the time passing as quickly as it did. She looked over at him, her brows furrowed in real confusion. "Really? Do you hate me?" He asked again.

"Why would you care?" She snapped back.

"It was just a question."

"And I answered your question with another," she shrugged. She was more relaxed now, due to either the moon's presence or the fact that she didn't have to think so much as she cleaned. "Why do you ask?"

"I don't think you hate me..." Zuko state, bracing himself for the full onslaught of her fury, which he'd learned could be quite extensive and harmful to both body and mind.

That utter curious gaze was back in her eyes. Katara reached up and brushed a stray hair off of her face as she handed him another bowl. He took it without breaking her stare, but as he took it from her, his fingers brushed against hers and her cheeks turned a deep scarlet under her russet skin. She broke the staring contest first and looked down at their hands which still held on to the plate.

Suddenly, Katara leaned forward until there was only about a foot between them. She extracted her hand from his and set the plate down and let out a deep breath before looking back up at him. Zuko swallowed hard; he would give every bit of happiness if she didn't hate him... Katara smiled smugly, crinkling up her nose and eyes a little. "No," she murmured softly. "I don't hate you." All thought fled his mind as Katara pressed her lips to his.

Zuko smiled as one of his hands explored the curve of her waist and the other tangled itself in her hair. Katara wound her arms around his neck in response. Somehow he knew that while this was making him happier than he'd been in...now that he thought about it, years; there was going to be hell to pay and he'd be more than willing to pay it.