Disclaimer: It's all Byke's, except what's not.
A/N: For socksssss on Tumblr, because she's darling. Heavily inspired by Great Big Sea's "Barque in the Harbour".
It is a Tuesday night and he comes in bringing the smell of salt and the sea through the open door, rolling in on the summer breeze, but he smells like smoke when he walks by her, like the fires that burn all night long down by the docks, where the workers warm themselves against waves and winds that are chill even in the summer, when the sun goes down.
His companions talk and jibe around him, and he seems uncomfortable in their boisterous atmosphere. He drains his drink slowly, speaking only when spoken to, and his knuckles are bone-white where they grip the bottle.
She weaves her way through the crowd, asks him to join her, and ignores the hoots that come from his companions as he follows her over to the booth where she has been sitting alone, drinking something that is probably far too strong for a weeknight and culling her thoughts from a long-black sky.
They sit together in near-silence until a few more sips have made the space across the table, between them, less fathomless, until his fingers have loosened their death-grip on the bottle, until she musters a smile and asks, "So what's your name?"
"Zuko," he says, and the syllables are sharp and almost foreign when they come spoken in his gravelly voice.
She bites back a shiver and tightens her own fingers on her glass. "I'm Katara." A glance over her shoulder shows that his companions are much farther along in their cups than the two of them, and unexpected contentment surges in her stomach, because the distance between them has closed now, across this table, and they are in their own insulated setting as the noise and chaos of the pub bellows around them.
"Why are you here with them if you don't like them?" She tosses her head toward the main group and he looks up, surprised.
"What else am I supposed to do on my night off?" His tone carries a challenge, and she wonders where he's from, this man with the scarred face and hair blacker than the surrounding night, wonders if anything other than seasonal work brought him to her island town.
She taps her fingers on the rim of her glass, meets his gaze, and lets a genuine laugh slide out of her throat, because she is as proud as anyone could be of her village, and she knows many answers to that question.
By the end of the evening, her head is beginning to be thick with drink, but she is glad she invited him to join her, because despite his taciturn nature, he is better company than an evening alone.
They meet again in the pub the next Tuesday night, even though she won't admit to herself that hopes of seeing him again were what drove her to risk another evening of drinking alone. Their talk is smoother now, more comfortable with the semblance of familiarity they share, and she leaves with his phone number and cheeks that are sore from smiling more than she has in a long time.
He has Tuesday and Friday evenings off, and accepts gratefully when she offers to show him alternatives to drinking with his coworkers or spending the night alone reading in his bunk on his nights off.
She takes him to the rocks where the tide pools hide scuttling life; she takes him into the woods where scraggy pines grow in sandy soil and the seagulls' distant screams are muffled by the curtain of needles; she takes him to the cliffs beyond the lighthouse where they can make out eerie remnants of shipwrecks glowing in the moonlight; she takes him to the outcroppings of rock where high tide cuts them off from the island and they are alone, surrounded by the endless sea and the blue dolphins.
On these trips, bright smears of heat-streaked sunset blur into black nights. She learns that he lives with his uncle on the mainland when he's not working on one of the islands and that he has a sister; he's working, in part, to help pay her way through college. He mentions once that his father was a politician, but she doesn't ask for details or about his use of the past tense. She hopes he'll tell her when he's ready, because he is rapidly becoming a puzzle she wants to solve, a wound she wants to heal, a blanket she wants to wrap around her soul to keep out the hurts of the world.
In turn, she tells him that her brother lives with his wife and daughter on the other side of the island, that her father still works on the boats and will be at sea for several more weeks, and that her mother has been gone since she was little, killed in a car crash. He looks at her with golden eyes that seem to know the weight of endless sorrows and tells her that that's something they have in common. She doesn't pull her hand away when he reaches out to cover it with his where it rests on the cool rock.
Against the sound of crashing waves and screeching gulls, against the pinpricks of distant light from the mainland, against the vast expanse of the stars above them, she learns that his lips taste faintly bitter and that his skin smells of wood smoke, that his hair is soft when it brushes her cheek and that his fingers are gentle, almost tentative, when they touch her arms or tangle in her hair.
It is the first time in a long time that she has felt comfortable with someone, so she tells herself that anything is permissible for a summer and, a month after they first meet, she invites him back to her father's empty house, upstairs into her bedroom, and shows him another way he can spend his evenings off.
Before long, she begins to invite him over even on the nights when he works, when he comes bone-tired, with barely enough energy to sling his arm over her when he climbs into bed beside her. They share coffee in the mornings, read the newspaper together, and her heart aches with the now-easy companionship they share, because she cannot allow herself to get used to his company. Summer will end and he will leave with the season, heading back to the mainland with the coloring of the leaves.
She resolves to enjoy herself, to soak up his affection, while she can.
Their first real fight comes when she decides she feels comfortable enough with him to ask about his scar, and she learns that she was foolish to think she had broken through all of his defenses even with their long conversations and longer kisses. They begin to hurl hurtful words and after she has said things just as hurtful, her anger scalds her heart when he asks her if she makes a habit of this, of falling into the arms of every itinerant worker who comes to her island for a summer.
Before she orders him out of her room and out of her house, she tells him that no, she does not, that he is only the second, and that she married the first before he died, over a year ago, in a boating accident. When he storms out, she hopes he notices the pictures that still remain, mixed in with pictures of her and her brother, with pictures of her family when it was whole, of her with the man whose most memorable feature, according to her brother, was the usually-unlit cigarette he constantly chewed.
They don't speak for over a week, and when she finally answers his call, she tells herself it's only because her bike is broken and she doesn't feel like fixing it herself, but if he's sorry enough, he probably will.
She admits that lie to herself a few hours later, when they're once again out with the damp sand cool underneath their bare toes. She's missed him, and she shouldn't have, not if he's just a summer fling. But she grips her sweater tighter around herself and talks to him. About her mother. About her husband. About everything that's gone wrong on this island since she was a little girl.
He looks at her, his own arms bared by his t-shirt to the chill breeze, and talks to her, too. About his mother and how he hasn't seen her since she divorced his father years ago. About his father and how he got his scar and why he and his sister live with his uncle.
They sit together on a jetty and he holds her in his arms while she cries, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," and she doesn't know if she's apologizing for their fight or his childhood or her childhood or all of the world's evils all at once.
He apologizes, too, and they sit in near silence for a long time, until the stars have faded into the pinking grey of early sunrise. He walks her home and she invites him in. They drink coffee, eat cold cereal, and start over again.
That night, he comes by after work and the next morning, he gets up early to fix her bike.
Days pass, and after he's fixed not only the bike but the upstairs sink and the weed-whacker, she interrupts him when he picks up a light bulb to replace the one that just blew out over the kitchen table.
"Stop," she says, framing his face in her hands and pulling him in for a slow kiss. "Stop trying to fix things. That's not why I hang out with you."
"Yeah?" His mouth is so close to her own that she feels her lips buzz with the vibration of his words. "Why do you hang out with me, then?"
"Because I lo— like you a lot. You're handsome and I'm shallow."
He chuckles and wraps his arms around her waist, mutters, "You're not shallow," and kisses her again, but she felt his chest move with a small, sudden intake of breath when her words almost slipped, and she knows he caught her mistake. But summer is almost over, and she tries to close her heart against the future sting of autumn.
August passes in a blur of sun-soaked days and humid nights that are laced with the impending change of the seasons. She takes him to the annual street fair, he buys her cotton candy. They walk all over the island and they spend long hours on beaches and cliffs, listening to the crash of waves on the shore. She closes her eyes, leans her head against his strong shoulder, and listens. She thinks that this is almost perfection, the smell of salt and sand and him, the sound of the sea and his heartbeat, the feel of his hand around her own.
She has fallen in love despite its futility, and she cries when he sails away on the ferry for the mainland even though she told herself time and again that she wouldn't.
In his absence, she throws herself more fully into her work and her friends, into caring for her father when he's home, playing chess and talking over beers or coffee, depending on the time of day. The weeks pass more quickly than she expected they would and she is even able to smile when her elderly neighbor asks her where her "dashing gentleman caller" went and she has to inform her that he was never meant to stay. The woman bakes her cookies and she eats them in the sunny yellow next-door kitchen she and her brother used to visit sometimes when they were children. It's oddly comforting.
The leaves change and the rains come and she thinks she's almost gotten over her own foolish feelings when a letter comes in the mail with his handwriting on the envelope. She is used to seeing that writing on scribbled notes stuck to her refrigerator, not on a crisp white envelope with a return address in a different state that reminds her, once again, how far removed his life is from her own.
She walks inside slowly, quietly savoring the anticipation of the unknown contents of his letter. Maybe… She shakes her head, tosses her raincoat over the back of a kitchen chair even though she knows her dad will scold her when he sees it, and sits down at the table. The rain pounds rivers against the window-glass and she opens the letter.
Inside, she finds her mother's sorority necklace, the one she wears all the time and that she'd thought she lost when it disappeared at the end of summer. The note reads, Sorry it took me so long to get this back to you. I know it's important to you, but I only just found it—it was folded inside one of my shirts. She blinks back tears because she misses him, misses the familiar rasp of his voice that she can hear now, in his note, misses waking up to his bedhead and sleepy smiles. She has been alone for much of her life, except for short interludes, but knowledge of him has disrupted the solitude she'd lulled herself into after her husband's death.
The note continues with several crossed-out phrases, and she laughs through her teary eyes, because that is him, there, all awkward uncertainty mixed with spurts of boldness. After several scratched portions, she reads, Would you want to come visit me sometime? I told Uncle about you and he wants to meet you. He was scandalized when I came back from summer with a coffee habit; he says he wants to show you that our family can brew good tea. So do you want to come visit for a weekend?—drink some tea? I could meet you at the other side of the ferry and drive you here.
It takes very little consideration before she runs around the kitchen, opening various drawers until she finds the one with the notepaper inside, grabs a pen, and answers in the affirmative.
It is a Saturday morning when she walks through his front door on the first sunny day they've had in what seems like weeks, bringing a brisk autumn wind and a few trodden leaves in with her, holding his hand and laughing when the first words his uncle speaks to her are, "Welcome, Miss Katara. Would you like some tea?"
The tea is delicious, the weekend is pleasant, and a good portion of the two-hour-long car trip when he drives her back to the island ferry is spent making plans to see each other again. She snuggles under his coat in the car, looks through his CDs and teases him about his taste in music, and doesn't cry this time when the ferry leaves.
As soon as she gets home to a house that is empty again with her dad out at sea, she tosses her bag on her bed, settles into a chair, and picks up her phone to call him. And when she hears his voice on the other end of the line, she smiles.