Disclaimer: My parents say I don't own anything until I turn 18. So... even if Avatar was in my possesion (which it is not) I wouldn't own it. So don't sue me m'kay?

Darn plotchihuahuas.

Of Playgrounds

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Chapter One:
Jumping off Swing Sets

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For Katara, nothing can quite beat the feel of the wind in her hair or the sound of the swings. Recess finds her racing towards the creaking contraptions, barreling past teachers and students toward the shiny blue plastic seats dangling from muted silver chain, a wide smile plastered on her face. It is her solace, her oasis in a world as unforgiving as the metal of the car that crashed through that windshield and left Katara with nothing but a necklace and her memories. Katara has seen loss, has known it and felt it and watched it bleed onto the concrete in the moments after the crash. But nothing can harm Katara on the swings. On the swings nothing can go wrong. It is her freedom, because on those swings Katara can fly.

Zuko is jealous of her, secretly. His life is filled with rules, filled with protocol, lines, and boundaries. Freedom is not allowed, nor is it tolerated, and he finds it easier to transition to home life if he does not allow himself to be free here. So he watches, green with envy, a girl who drowns her sorrow- for she is young and the wounds are still unhealed- in laughter and height, in the squeal of the chain as is swings back and forth and in freedom. Secretly, Zuko watches Katara fly.

One day Katara learns a lesson about gravity, a lesson involving a leap and an awkward landing on green grass from a height greater than anticipated, and the next finds Zuko standing above her, looking at the cast gracing her arm and asks, rudely, impatiently-

"What'd you do to your arm?"

And he is worried, truly. He admires the girl on the swing set and he wishes- secretly, covertly- that he could be that beautiful, that free… not that he'd ever tell anyone, he knows the rules and rules must be obeyed. He admires the girl on the swing set and he wonders if this cast- blue, hard, ugly- will prohibit him from viewing the joy, the freedom of this brown- haired girl on the swings and he is worried, for he does not feel joy unless she does.

"I broke it."

"Doin' what?"

Crystalline blue eyes stare into amber. Something happens- a spark, a flash of something more zings briefly through the air before it extinguishes as she laughs.

"Flying."

And he doesn't believe her, calls her a liar and claims that flying is impossible, though what he's seen her do is darn near close, and she drags him to the swings and she teaches…

And now they are jumping off swing sets and they pretend they can soar, high above the clouds and the city streets and the buildings and away from there, where a mother lies buried six feet under and another hasn't been seen in months, where emotional scars linger like flies over food and where cold, hard, disapproval is a mans reaction to his son, until they land in a laughing heap on unforgiving ground, mindless of grass and bruises and disapproving glowers and worried stares of older children. And briefly they forget, for now they are jumping off swing sets and pretending they can soar, because they are children and they can believe.