Night
A/N: Bryke owns these. I just grew them up a little. I could write their first time ten thousand ways, but this is my current head canon.
Summary: A particularly significant evening is special in more ways than one. Meringue pie. (Fluff/Lemon)
Katara had never seen so many fireworks.
The night sky above the upper ring of Ba Sing Se, usually so dark at this time of night, was nearly as bright as it would have been at high noon as showers upon showers of sparks cascaded from the heavens, glittering in gorgeous greens and reds that put themselves out like falling stars. Each crisp thud momentarily deafened her to the roar of the crowd around them, but it was a pleasant sort of deafness, a giddy, celebratory overwhelming of the senses, and it slowly began to dawn on her that she was grinning.
Toph was having a substantially rougher go of it, but Sokka seemed to have the situation under control for the moment. He stood just behind the blind earthbender, his head bent low so that he could describe what was happening, his right hand planted firmly on her hip with the thumb hooked though the belt at her waist. Had her brother not been careening towards engagement to someone else, Katara might have assumed that the intimacy of their position carried some meaning to that effect, but for the most part, it just made her miss—
"Sorry it took me so long to get out, sweetie."
Speaking of intimacy.
Aang's arms curled tightly around her waist as he spoke the words against the shell of her ear, his warmth a welcome contrast to the brisk autumn night. She grinned all the wider, leaning her weight back against his broad chest and nuzzling affectionately into his neck. "You made it! Where have you been? You're missing your own party. You only come of age once, you know."
She felt, rather than saw, her boyfriend roll his eyes. "No one on the council cares that I'm turning sixteen when there's so much political nonsense to worry about. But I think we have it sorted out. At least, you know, until tomorrow." He pressed a kiss to her temple before resting his chin comfortably on the crown of her head, raising his eyes to his birthday celebration in the sky. Content, she followed the twist of his arms with her own, lacing both sets of their fingers together as the last of the explosions faded from view.
"Well," the Avatar spoke into her hair. "At least I got to catch some of it."
"HEY. LOVEBIRDS. OOGIES."
Katara sighed softly as Aang's attention shifted, his grip on her loosening. "Aww, c'mon, Sokka. It's my birthday."
"Doesn't mean I want you feeling up my sister in public," the warrior smirked past a section of the crowd as the nobles around them began to move, disbanding for the relative warmth of their houses. With the absence of the disorienting explosions in the sky, Toph disengaged herself from Sokka, who seemed a bit reluctant to let go until she assured him that, first of all, she hadn't needed his help to begin with and that, almost as important, she didn't need anyone to see her actually acting like a blind person. It was bad for the reputation. This sparked an argument that lasted all the way to the living room of the large house the group permanently shared in the upper ring. Aang and Katara, for their part, followed their bickering friends in a bemused sort of silence, fingers intertwined as they walked in perfect step down the neatly bricked lane.
"Well, that was fun," Sokka declared as Toph stomped off to bed in a huff. "I don't know about you two, but I'm beat, and I've got to head out to Kyoshi Island early in the morning tomorrow. If I don't see her, can you tell Princess Rock that I'm sorry I made her feel blind, and that I was just trying to keep her grounded?"
Katara chuckled. "Of course. She already knows that, but we'll tell her. Will you be around for breakfast?"
Sokka appeared to give this some thought. "Will there be meat?"
Aang smirked knowingly from the stack of cushions he'd collapsed into. "Not likely, Sokka. I did the shopping this week."
The warrior yanked a frustrated hand through his wolf tail with a deep sigh. "Fine. I'll grab something from one of the middle ring food carts on the way out. Because my life. Is so. Difficult." He raised his eyes to the heavens dramatically, as though waiting for pity, but received none. "Well, goodnight, oogies. Try not to touch each other too much. Toph tells me everything."
"Toph's mad at you right now!" his sister called after him as the door to his bedroom swung shut. The Avatar snickered behind her, generating an air current to propel him off the floor and onto his feet. He seemed to regret it immediately.
"Ughhh, my feet hurt," he whined, stretching his long arms toward the ceiling. Katara's eyes, as always, were instantly drawn to the clean brightness of the arrows that marked his pale skin as the downward slip of his robes slowly revealed the way they curled around his triceps, the muscle lean and defined and practically begging for her fingers—
"Katara?" he repeated, probably not for the first time, and she blinked wanly in return.
"Sorry?"
"Would you mind helping me out? I have Avatar aches and pains that could use some good water," he wheedled, and she smirked back at him. Their healing sessions of late had become ever more frequent excuses for her to retire to his room in the early evening instead of going straight to her own, because they were currently riding a rare lull in world affairs that didn't require either of them to be gone for weeks at a time. It was the first time in over a year that they'd truly had privacy as a couple, and they had been taking increasing advantage.
"Well, we can't have the last airbender going to bed with aches on his birthday," she reasoned, giggling at her boyfriend's broad grin as he took her hand to pull her down the hall to his bedroom. He threw open the door with enormous gusto, clicked his fingers together to light the two oil lamps on the far end of the room, and stopped short, a quizzical look on his face.
Katara chuckled darkly, suggestively. "Do you like them? They're my birthday gift to you."
Aang quirked an eyebrow at her over one shoulder. "Why did you buy me a ridiculous number of plush rugs for my birthday?"
She winked back. "Let me show you. Take your shoes off and close your eyes."
The Avatar shrugged and launched himself onto a futon, stripping his boots off and placing his toes against the exposed stone floor, eyes firmly closed. After waving a hand in his face to ensure that he wasn't peeking, Katara turned and strode confidently across the carpet, her feet making no sound at all, and only the tiniest of vibrations.
"Okay. Now open," she commanded, and when he did, noticing immediately that there was a great deal of movement he'd been unable to feel, he raised his eyebrows.
"This is the best birthday gift *anyone's* ever given me," he informed her. "Bar none."
She crossed the room again, pulling him up from his seat and toward the bed. "Excellent," she replied, planting a firm kiss on his lips and pulling back just as firmly. "Now strip. We have to work on your aches, sweetie."
Aang began tossing clothes obediently, pulling off first the red robe that clasped at his neck, then the yellow and orange wrap that draped over his shoulders. The casual ripple of the muscles in his back was enough to make Katara's cheeks warm as he slid fluidly out of the rough brown pants and flung himself face first onto the large bed, now wearing nothing but his underwear. He turned his face to her, silver eyes bright with mischief as he rested his cheek on his crossed arms, and intoned, "Your turn."
She obliged, unwinding her hair from the day's braid and letting it loose before unwrapping her dress and stepping neatly out of her shoes. The leggings underneath went last, leaving what remained of her dark skin wrapped in white as she pulled herself up onto the coverlet with him.
"You're so beautiful," he told her, like he did almost every night. Had it been anyone else, or had he said it with any less sincerity, she might not have believed it, but the soft awe in his expression was still enough to make her breath catch, even though she'd seen it hundreds of times. The urge to reach out and touch him finally won her over; her cool hands met the warmth of the skin on his shoulders, and she dug her fingers in for a moment or two, caressing up and down his neck to a most satisfying moan.
"You are sort of tight this evening," she confirmed, swinging a leg over top of him to straddle the small of his back and raising a hand in the general direction of the water spout near the door. It responded immediately to the tiniest flick of her wrist, her element twirling smoothly through the air to wrap itself around her fingers. The water glowed softly in the half-dark as she pressed it gently into Aang's skin, carefully untwisting the offending energies in his shoulders and working her way down his spine. On the way, she checked, as she always did, that everything was running as smoothly as possible beneath the scarred flesh in the center of his back; to this day, it still bothered him when certain stress triggers popped up. Satisfied that everything was in order there, she moved back up to his shoulders and started down his arms-first the left, then the right—all the way down to the fingertips, feeling the deep hum in his chest as he relaxed beneath her hands.
Katara shifted down farther to kneel between his knees, her hands flowing easily over his hamstrings to his calves to his feet, where she focused particular attention, since he'd complained earlier. From where she sat, she could see his eyes flutter closed, long eyelashes coming to rest softly on pale cheeks. She was struck again by how very handsome he'd become lately. Not a trace of the rounded child's face remained, and she was reminded again that as of tonight, as far as the world was concerned, the boy before her was now legally a man.
She finished the feet, and rocked back. "Roll over," she commanded, another regular occurrence, and Aang obliged, twisting his body into a formerly nonexistent wind and flipping easily midair. This was his favorite part of their routine, for obvious reasons—as soon as he was face-up, Katara transferred her water to one hand and maneuvered herself up and over his crooked knees to straddle his waist. But where most nights he let her move her thumbs to his forehead or the line where his jaw met his throat to soothe one thing or another, this night he took her gently by the wrists and sat up beneath her, startling her so much that she dropped the water in their laps as his lips met hers, warm and insistent and searching. She whimpered softly against his mouth as his hands left her own to wind through her dark curls. His tongue slid into her mouth briefly, enough of a taste that a familiar warmth began to pool in her belly, and darted just as quickly back out so that he could pull at her lower lip with his teeth. It was a delicious friction that made her gasp—exactly the reaction he needed to glue their parted lips together again, exploring her, tasting her, retracing the many details he'd learned by heart.
Her hands moved from his chest down and around to his back, fingernails tugging on the soft skin there as she endeavored to pull him closer, their lips fused, their tongues locked together. He gave her hair a soft tug, a sweet tension in her scalp, and as the warmth swelled she rocked her hips hard into his, drawing an involuntary "ah!" from the airbender beneath her. He loosed a hand from her hair and moved it to cup her rear in one smooth motion, peppering kisses down her face to her collarbone and sucking gently at the soft skin along its line.
"Ah—mmmm—Aang," she managed to shiver out as she rocked her hips again, this time met just as forcefully by his in return, the bulge in his pants rubbing meaningfully against her center. His hands were skimming her sides, one wrapping toward her back, the other purposefully moving in the direction of her hip, where he would notch the bone there between his thumb and forefinger to pull her into him. "We're going…to wake someone—"
"No, we're not," he insisted, his teeth grazing her shoulder and nibbling down her upper arm. "We have carpet."
A giggle bubbled up in Katara's throat at the absurdity of the statement, and he pulled back to quirk an eyebrow at her, an expression that would have been funny had his eyes not been so dark, so full of yearning—
"Spirits, I love you so much," he blurted in a rush, taking her face between his hands, caressing his rough thumbs across her cheeks. Her heart leapt into her throat, a sudden reckless nervousness climbing in her chest at almost the same rate that heat had been pooling between her legs, and there was something fevered about the way he looked at her now, something hot and bright and urgent. And she had seen it before, had felt it before, but never like this.
"Oh, I love you," she replied breathlessly, letting their foreheads fall together before descending hungrily upon his lips again. He took this as an invitation, running his hands up her back to tease open the bindings that held her breasts, the gentle way he touched her drawing a shudder from the waterbender as he tugged the cloth away.
Aang leaned back, taking her with him into the sheets. He rolled them gently to one side, using one hand to cradle her head and continue kissing her and the other to skim up from her knee to her hip to her rib cage before moving on to cup her breast, applying pressure in all the right places with a practiced hand. She squirmed beneath him, gasping into his mouth and hooking her free leg up around his hips to pull their bodies flush as he focused on the feel of her beneath his fingers and the way she moved against him—none of which was helping his concentration. Certainly, they'd each been naked in front of the other before, but never at the same time; so far, they'd been careful to keep it to one or the other, lest their experimenting lapse into something new, something more.
Tonight, he realized with a jolt as his hand found the apex of her legs and felt the wetness there, might be different. The very notion dragged an involuntary groan from his throat as he dipped his head to seal his mouth around her nipple and simultaneously pushed beneath her undergarments, slicking his fingers with her arousal and running them over her bundle of nerves with agonizing slowness, drawing a cry from his beloved as she thrust against his hand. Her toes hooked into the waistband of his underwear and pressed downward with an urgent fervor as he swirled his fingers once, twice, and then slid two inside of her, earning him the loudest shout so far as she clamped down on him, her fingernails dragging along his scalp.
He thrust his fingers into her a few more times, crooking his fingertips toward him as he did, and she mewled into the pillows, writhing beneath his touch. Aang was fairly certain, as he pulled free, discarded the last of her underwear, and rolled back to look at her, naked and undone, that he had never seen something so erotic in any of his many lives.
She had managed to drag his undergarments down to his knees in her fervor, and he was unsure of where to go from here—to pull them back on, something he was loathe to do, now that his straining erection was free of its bounds, or to take them off, which might bring her crashing back to reality. Katara, for her part, seemed suddenly shy, nuzzling into his neck to place open-mouthed kisses against his throat and skim her hands hesitantly over his upper body, as though debating a very similar set of internal questions.
Aang pressed a kiss to her forehead, not yet quiet brave enough to try to pull her closer, as much as he craved the warmth of her body against his own. Her blue eyes met his, and the blazing certainty there sent him reeling, made him brave.
"We should get married," he found himself saying, and a short laugh burst from her lips, her face alight with surprise.
"That's what you want to talk about at a time like this?" she replied, clearly a little taken aback. "But we're so y—"
"We are *not *'so young,'" he reminded her, running a hand up her leg to palm her behind and eliciting a smirk at the not-so-subtle gesture. "Not anymore. I know we've been sort of dancing around it for the last year or so, but we really should start to think about getting married if I'm going to make love to you tonight." Her stomach flipped nervously, but her eyes burned into him, giving him the courage to continue. "Because I… I really want to. Tonight and for the rest of my life. For me, it's always been you."
She wriggled closer, twining their legs together, pressing skin to skin. "When?" she asked as he buried his face in her hair. Whatever she was washing it with in the city lately smelled vaguely of incense, and he hadn't mentioned it to her, but to him it was the scent of childhood, of home.
"When what?"
"When do you want to get married?"
"Next week?" he suggested. He pulled her into him, running his hands up her back, relishing her contented sigh. "Hmmm…maybe tomorrow. Tonight, if we can arrange it quickly enough."
Katara chuckled against his shoulder, her lips tracing softly along his skin. "Based on the amount of planning that went into your birthday party, you should probably extend your timeline a little."
He chuckled with her, tipping her chin up to meet her eyes again. "Probably. Katara, will you—"
"Aang," she interrupted. "I love you. I've loved you since we were kids. Of course I'll marry you." And she leaned up to catch his lips in another kiss, this one fraught with meaning—a seal for her promise that warmed them both from the inside out as they moved together, making quick work of the last of his clothing as he pulled her hard against him. The evidence of his desire ground stiffly into her thigh as they kissed, hands everywhere, their pace returning to its previous frenetic state. Her body rocked into his, and his warmth intoxicated her, pulling her in, then pulling her under, and then suddenly he was above her as she arched into the sheets, gripping his hips with her thighs. He lowered his forehead to rest it on hers, looking deeply into her eyes in a way that made her burn from the inside out. She could feel that smooth hardness between her legs, moving, searching, and when he found her entrance her stomach flipped again as his eyelashes fluttered. His breathing was ragged and harsh against her mouth and he rolled his hips, almost involuntarily, parting the folds, pressing tentatively into her warmth, and she leaned up into him, fusing their mouths together and meeting his body with her own, pulling him into her with a gasp as he cried out around her tongue.
The weight of his hips settled onto hers as they froze there together, just for a moment, almost as though they had forgotten how to move. They breathed together, reveling in the sensation—the stretching, the wetness, the warmth. Somehow he managed to open his eyes to meet hers, and was surprised to find no pain there—only a love that seemed to pull him deeper under her spell.
"Doesn't it—?"
"No," she answered simply, having anticipated the question, and hooked one of her ankles around the back of his knee. Spurred suddenly back into motion, Aang pulled out of her almost all the way and then slid back in, a smooth, fluid undulation. She met him halfway, gasping a little as she did, and the way her tight heat surrounded him was enough to make him crazy, and after two or three carefully-paced thrusts his name tumbled huskily from her lips and his teeth met in her shoulder and any shot he may have had at self-control flew promptly out the window.
A tiny thrill raced up her spine and down again as he picked up the pace, each time seeming to push further into her as she opened her hips to him. It was madness; it was ecstasy. She couldn't remember ever thinking him so beautiful as she did now, taking him deeper as though trying to pull him physically into her heart, to wrap their souls into one.
"Oh, Aang…"
"Katara, it's…you're—" his breath caught briefly in his throat as her inner muscles tightened around him, her lips and tongue at his ear, her fingernails tracing the line of the tattoo up his back "—so amazing."
The movement of his hips was becoming erratic, and their rhythm began to dissolve into quick, jerky motions. Neither of them was paying any attention to the volume of their cries anymore, each gripped as they were in the gorgeous pleasure that was the other, hurtling ever faster toward unity.
The cry of completion that tore itself, at long last, from his lungs was completely and utterly covered over by the sound of the water spigot exploding off the wall on the other side of the room. Aang collapsed against her, their skin glimmering with exertion, and Katara's eyes sparkled up at him.
"I love you so," she murmured against the line of his jaw, peppering his neck with kisses as he struggled to calm his breathing, unable to pull the unbelievably wide grin off his face as he repeated her words breathlessly back to her. He rolled off of her, moving to pull her into his arms, but before she fell into his embrace she raised a hand, once again, to the water pipe, pushing the sloshing liquid back into the wall and freezing over the place where the faucet had been with a brief gesture.
Aang chuckled as she settled her forehead against his chest, drawing her closer to him now that the mess was cleaned up. "Was that you or me?"
Quite in spite of herself, Katara found herself responding to his infectious, improbable laughter, giggling with him at the absurdity of the situation. "Honestly," she replied, "I have no idea."
"Sokka's going to eat me for breakfast tomorrow," the airbender announced as he wound his hands deeply into her hair, sounding oddly satisfied with the prospect, but Katara scoffed, pinching lightly at his rear to reinforce her point.
"How can he? We're getting married," she reminded him, drawing yet another contented sound from her lover.
"Married," Aang hummed as he pressed a kiss to mouth and, with a twist of his fingers, put out the last of the lights.