Title- Pas de Deux
Author- Melon
Rating- K+
Summary- In the wake of a disastrous evening at the theatre, Aang and Katara struggle to realign their relationship... whatever that may be. The time for dancing around the subject is over.

A/N- Oh look, I took what could've been a happy, fluffy prompt and turned it into Kataangst. This is the first time I've tackled this topic (in fic, anyway- I've written more than enough meta on the subject), but it won't be the last. I'm saving my best words on the subject for Fireflight, but I felt a KW oneshot on the subject was appropriate as well.

Day 3: Dance

The moon was setting, casting dim illumination over Ember Island's rare white beaches and the troubled airbender who had flopped down in the sand.

Aang had long since given up trying to sleep. What might have been an enjoyable night at the Ember Island theatre had taken a violently unpleasant turn when the drama based on their group's adventures had been less than flattering and ended with mocking portrayals of their inevitable defeat and death. One way or another, he would have had nightmares even if he had managed to get to sleep, so it was probably better not to try.

The sight of his on-stage death and failure might be behind his insomnia and the vague sense of nausea that had been plaguing him ever since, but the heavy weight of his heart had another cause entirely. His relationship with Katara had taken a marked turn for the worse.

Ever since his impulsive kiss before the invasion, they'd been dancing around each other. On the surface, he supposed their friendship must look more or less the same as it always had, but they both knew that it wasn't, and they were both trying desperately to pretend that they didn't know. Well, Katara was. He had tried to talk to her more than once about what had happened, and every time it had been a spectacular failure. She was avoiding the subject, and he didn't understand why. Or at least he hadn't until tonight.

Aang had never thought of himself as especially brilliant, although he excelled at his studies, but now he had pretty much incontrovertible proof that he was a first-rate idiot. After all, only an idiot would decide it was a great idea to force a confrontation at such an emotional, unpleasant time. And it took a very special brand of idiot to walk all over a girl's boundaries the way he had with Katara tonight.

The whole humiliating conversation was bad enough, but the fact that he had somehow thought it would be a good idea to kiss her was really just the rotten cherry on top of the whole disaster. Aang wasn't exactly an expert in affairs of the heart, but even he didn't have to consult with Zuko to know that "I'm confused" was more or less girl-speak for take a hike, buddy. How on earth he had thought kissing her would help, he wasn't entirely sure.

They were going to have to invent a whole new class of idiot to explain him.

It took less than three hours after returning to the Fire Lord's villa for Katara's anger to simmer down to nothing and leave her feeling drained and upset. She tried to hold onto the anger, because that was easier to process than the weighty layers of emotions beneath it, but it was no good. She didn't have it in her to stay angry at Aang for long. She never had.

Now she was left just feeling vaguely betrayed. As irrational as it sounded when she actually thought about it, it felt like he had broken the rules. This dance they'd been doing only worked if they didn't talk about it. They were supposed to have the unspoken understanding that they weren't going to talk about this until later! But Aang just couldn't leave it alone, could he? And now look where they were!

The thought of Aang's face the last time she had seen him wouldn't leave her alone. As frustrated as she was, as much as she just wanted to be angry with him, she couldn't forget the look he'd worn as they bid each other a painfully awkward goodnight. He had looked so defeated and sad.

Katara didn't want to feel bad for him. This whole mess was his fault in the first place. She couldn't help it, though. She was incapable of closing herself off from him (just one of the many baffling effects he had on her), and it was impossible to rest comfortably knowing he was upset. With a sigh, Katara rolled out of bed and set out to find him.

She wasn't going to get any sleep until they could both get a little peace of mind.

When Katara found him at last, he was sitting barefoot and shirtless on the sand, staring out at the sea with a pensive expression on his face. Without preamble or greeting, she sat beside him.

He glanced at her, and immediately flushed bright red and looked away. "Hey," he mumbled.

"Hey." She didn't know what to say. She knew she needed to say something, but he made her so tongue-tied sometimes, and she couldn't find the words to express all the fear and affection and bafflement that were churning around inside her. She felt a brief spike of thoroughly irrational anger that he couldn't just look at her and understand her; he'd never seemed to have much difficulty understanding her until lately, but now it seemed that their intuitive ability to read each other had gotten lost somewhere in the steps of this precarious dance the were doing.

Fortunately, at least one of them seemed to have retained some ability to string together a coherent sentence.

"I'm sorry," Aang blurted out. "About tonight, I mean. I was... stupid."

"Yeah." She couldn't argue that. She hadn't helped matters at all, but Aang was the one who had gotten so worked up in the first place.

He lifted one shoulder in a half-hearted, lopsided little shrug. "I shouldn't have pressured you like that," he said. "Everything has been kind of building up in my head for awhile and I guess I just kind of freaked out."

"It's okay," she rushed to assure him. And really, it was. Or at least, it would be eventually.

He shook his head vehemently. "No, it's not. I never meant to hurt you or make you uncomfortable. That's the last thing I'd ever want to do. I don't want to ruin our friendship just because I'm in love with you."

The way he said it, so matter-of-factly as if she should have known this all along, made her breath catch. She stared at him. It felt oddly as if she should have worked that out before now. But she hadn't known, had she? Oh, she'd known he at least liked her a little, but she'd never suspected he cared that deeply for her. "You love me?" she asked, flabbergasted.

He blushed scarlet again, the color in his cheeks visible even in the dimming moonlight, and nodded. He studied his toes intently- he couldn't seem to look her in the eyes.

Katara was still stuck on the part where her best friend was in love with her. It just didn't seem possible, it was too good to be true. "Are you sure?" she inquired, earnest curiosity in her voice.

His head shot up and he scoffed disbelievingly. "Katara, it's just about the only thing I am sure about!" he exclaimed. "Everything is so crazy and so messed up and most of the time I don't even know which way is up anymore, but I do know that I love you."

"Oh."

It was her turn to blush and look away, embarrassed and delighted and terrified and overwhelmed. It was more than she had ever expected to hear from him, more than she had dreamed of actually getting. She had wondered for so long what was in his heart and now she knew. It was exactly what she'd hoped for when she wasn't even entirely sure why she was hoping for it, and now here it was, just blurted out as if it should have been obvious all along.

"I'm doing it again, aren't I?" he asked miserably when she said nothing else. "Just making a bigger mess of things, like always."

"Aang, no..."

But she didn't know how to finish the thought, and it trailed away uselessly.

"I'm sorry. I don't mean to be difficult. I just can't take this limbo thing any more!"

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"It's... I mean... if you don't feel the same way- and I'm guessing you don't- that would be okay. It'll hurt, but... at least I'd know. But all this dancing around the subject, I can't take it. I feel like I'm constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop and it sucks." He let out a grunt of frustration and flopped back onto the sand. "I'm sorry. I really don't want to pressure you. You're confused, I get that. I just... Argh!"

He rubbed a hand over his face, visibly frustrated with himself and with their whole situation, and she couldn't help but think that he looked incredibly tired. It went beyond the physical, as if his very soul was tired, and she knew it wasn't just them that was weighing on him. It was everything. He had so much on his shoulders already. Katara understood, suddenly, that they couldn't keep avoiding the subject. Aang didn't need any more to worry about on top of the enormous pressure he was already under.

It was becoming clearer by the second that Aang was caught in something of a double bind, stuck between wanting to respect her boundaries and give her space and his expressed need for some clarity about where they stood, and the result was this entire painful situation. Katara could appreciate that probably better than he knew. She was all tangled up in an internal mess of her own.

"I'm sorry, too," she said quietly, breaking the silence that had stretched taut between them.

"For what?" Aang asked, propping himself up on his forearm with his eyebrows drawing together in confusion.

She fiddled with the ends of her hair, avoiding his gaze as she admitted: "I've been avoiding this. I know how much pressure you're under and I know we should have dealt with this sooner, but I just... I couldn't."

He sat up fully. "What do you mean, you couldn't?" he asked, clearly trying for a comforting, reassuring tone but mostly just sounding anxious.

Katara dug her toes into the sand for a few seconds, trying to figure out how to put it. Spirits, why was it all so difficult? If this was the great romance Aunt Wu had predicted for her, she was certainly making a mess of it. It would serve her right if she managed to screw this up too badly to be repaired. "It's hard to explain," she finally said, rolling her shoulders in an uncomfortable shrug.

Voice tight with some emotion she couldn't interpret, Aang asked, "Could you try?"

He sounded so nervous and so earnest that Katara had to bite down on her trembling lower lip to keep herself from crying. She didn't want this, she didn't want this churning anxiety inside her or the responsibility of being offered a heart she was pretty sure she didn't deserve.

"I'm scared," she blurted out. "It was supposed to be over on the Day of Black Sun! It wasn't supposed to be like this. You aren't supposed to have to fight the Fire Lord when he's at the height of his power! We aren't supposed to still be running and hiding from Azula and pretending to be people we're not and hiding your arrow and- and- I don't know how much longer I can keep fighting this stupid, rotten, horrible war!"

Abruptly, she felt his arms go around her in a fierce hug. She buried herself down in the reassuring closeness of him, allowing herself a rare moment of weakness as she drew comfort from his embrace. This was how they were. No matter how messed up things were between them right now, he couldn't see her upset and do nothing any more than she could. He held her tight, offering her what strength he could, and his right hand stroked her hair soothingly.

"It's all I can think about," she mumbled into his shoulder. "I can hardly sleep and I just keep waiting for it all to go wrong and... I just want it to be over."

She felt him nod. "I know. I wish I could go back and stop all of this before it even started," he told her. "I wish I could give back everything you've lost because of this war."

Katara pulled out of his arms, staring at him. The deep sincerity she read in his eyes overwhelmed her, and once again she was rocked by a powerful urge to just break down in tears right then and there. "I don't," she confessed in a shaky voice. "If you had stayed and somehow ended it all back then, I would never have met you."

Aang's mouth fell open, but he said nothing. He seemed to be trying to process what, precisely, she had just told him and wasn't entirely sure that it added up to what he thought it did.

She knew how it sounded, but she had nothing else to offer him. "I know how selfish it sounds," she affirmed, "But I can't help it. With all this mess in my head, that's the one thing I'm sure of. Everything this war has put me through was worth it because it means I got to meet you."

"Oh." His expression was priceless. "Oh."

"I don't know what else to tell you," she admitted. She wanted so badly for him to understand, so he wouldn't feel trapped in limbo, but how could she explain it when she had no idea what was going on in her head, herself? "You're just too much, or maybe I'm just too much of a mess to figure you out, or... I don't know. I'm bad at this. I don't know what I want or how I'm supposed to feel and it's like I'm being pulled in about six different directions and I miss being friends like we used to be before everything got complicated but that's not all I want but I don't know what exactly it is that I want to be different and I just- I just..."

"It's okay," Aang interrupted her rambling attempt at an explanation. "You're confused. I understand." This time, though, he was smiling as he said it. It wasn't much of a smile, nothing compared to his usual blinding grin, but the little upward curl of his lips was more than she had seen since they had walked into that stupid theatre and she would take whatever she could get. She loved his smile...

"So can we just table all of this and figure it all out later when I'm-"

"Un-confused?"

"Yeah."

He nodded, still with that tiny half-smile on his face. "I think we can do that. You made a lot more sense than you think you did."

"Thank you," she said. She felt enormously relieved and she had no idea why. Nothing had really changed. The were still not-quite-friends and not-quite-more and there was still a lot they had to work out. Yet the tension was cleared from the air and she got the strange sense that she had somehow told Aang a lot more than she had intended, somehow.

Aang's fingers twined through hers quite suddenly. She looked up at him, startled.

"Is this okay?" he asked.

She smiled, and nodded. There were those boundaries she needed, at least for now. "Yeah," she said. "This is okay."