Gladly Without Fanfare
Sometimes people didn't require a lot of fanfare to fall in love and most often this love was never intended. One day someone would wake up and realized that they loved another person. It wouldn't be complicated, but fact. The same could be said for how Katara felt about Aang.
While she clicked with him right away and he became her best friend, she never planned to fall in love with him. He was just a goofy kid she found in an iceberg and also the lost Avatar she always believed in as a child, but at the end of the day, he was just still Aang. They got to know each other and build a strong friendship built with trust and support. He would help her loosen up and enjoy being a child and Katara would help him focus on the task at hand. While almost seeming like opposites, they complimented each other through differences by sharing the same values of love, justice, and friendship. But of course, they were still different.
To him, Aang's feelings were loud and intense- almost distracting. Though they were friends first and foremost, he could not deny how attracted to her he was or that he quickly fell in love with her. From the moment he saw her, fate all but screamed at him that she's the one even if he didn't completely understand it.
Katara, on the other hand, woke up one morning not knowing she loved Aang romantically only to fall asleep realizing she did. Sometimes she liked to credit the moment to when he died in her arms briefly and she had to consider a life without him, but still she couldn't always be sure if that was the exact moment she truly fell in love with him. The more hopeful part of her liked to think that the moment was not his death, but instead his resurrection when he looked back at her and breath filled his lungs and blood pulsed through his heart.
Yet if she wanted to be completely honest with herself, Katara didn't know when she fell in love with Aang. His place in her heart had shifted and before she knew it, she loved him not only platonically, but also romantically. Though Katara was always and would continue to be a complicated girl, however, her falling in love was surprising simple. Unlike legends and epic tales with characters consumed truly by the prospect of love, Katara fell in love without fanfare and to her, that was the most beautiful story of all.
A/N: Hi! Thanks for reading! Feel free to send me prompts or leave any constructive criticism. Also, skip chapters if you don't like them! There will be AU ones and some in universe. Some chapters written like this, others written more traditionally. I like to mix it up.