A/N: So it's completely accidental that I wrote this during Smellershot Week. I just had insomnia at three a.m. and an urge to write an obscure pairing because my Maiko oneshot plot bunnies are on strike, and then six hours later I get on tumblr and lo and behold: September 24-30 is Smellershot Ship Week. What are the chances?
In any case, A:TLA and its characters belong to Bryke, not me.
Review please: and imaginary Iroh will make you an imaginary house call with his own special blend of tasty imaginary tea.
It came upon her softly, as silent and immutable as his nonexistent words. A tortoise-panther would have been faster and louder, and more easily faced. But this—this was a ghost, an ethereal spirit that haunted others with its untameable, inexplicable presence. Love, that kind of love, the kind that only existed between two people at a time and was both very grown-up and impossibly immature, was not on the spectrum of strange creatures by which Smellerbee ever really expected to be ambushed.
But she was taken in, utterly and unreservedly. She fell in love without warning, the way one falls into sleep after a hard day's ride, collapsing into it in a sudden rush and with a heavy permanence that you could feel in the stuff that filled your bones. It was a pleasant ambush, an attack from a spirit she would someday come to thank in the moments of silence when all was well, better than she had ever imagined it could be.
In later years she would tease that Longshot himself could not have been so accurate if the quiver of magic arrows had been his to plunge through hearts—though she sometimes thought, when his gaze thundered through her and she could only stand riveted, that he would not have had to be.
If you had asked her, she could not have pinpointed when it began.
The war ended when she was twelve years old and Longshot was fifteen. Jet's gang had fractured even before the open world was made of raw freedom, but for her and her best friend, there was never any question of parting ways. They became the grand two adventurers who never left a name, but helped all who dwelled under a fist of injustice. Even at their young age, they sensed that they needed more than adventure, more than freedom; they sought redemption, side by side.
They grew older, halfhearted birthdays forming invisible tally marks that edged them ever closer to the adulthood that seemed neither daunting nor strange, so long had they been vagabonds. But as winter followed summer followed winter followed summer, Smellerbee began to take notice of two things which bothered her for reasons she could not identify.
She wasn't pretty; at least, not in the same way that Longshot was handsome. The tall, tacit archer attracted the mooning gazes of so many girls in villages they passed through that on her bad days, Smellerbee had to split off and sulk, working off the knot in her stomach with a knife-juggling display or a good rolling argument with some cabbage merchant. But no boys ever looked at her like girls looked at Longshot. Not that she wanted them to; most of the pasty, stick-armed city boys wouldn't last two days on the trails with them.
But it still irked her, on her bad days, until one month when she went to chop off her hair around her ears and Longshot halted her with an outstretched hand. He took the knife and carefully applied his own deft strokes to her unruly mop, and the next time she caught sight of her reflection in a pool she found that instead of resembling perpetual five-year-old's bedhead, it actually looked sort of nice. She could see her eyes, and she noticed too that her hair wasn't so much of a murky, unidentifiable brownish shade anymore; sometime when she wasn't looking it had acquired a faint auburn hue.
She still wasn't sure why she'd let Longshot cut it, or why it pleased her that he had. But after that day she found that a similar look from Longshot stilled the tenseness in her gut when strange girls flocked about him like ripples lost in the wake of a boat.
There were signs of it that she might have caught if she'd had any idea what to look for. But she thought she'd already attained all the hallmarks of adulthood when she established herself as independent and self-sustaining. Longshot was her best friend, a companion valued above all others, but she didn't depend on him to live.
It never occurred to her, when other people fell in love or were in love or just knew what love was, that it was an experience that would fall into her lap, saunter into her realm of experience without so much as a by-your-leave.
They touched each other often, friendly punches or pokes or brushing against one another when they passed bowls of stew across the fire or swapped weapons for sharpening and fletching just because it was more interesting that way, or a hug now and again, because they were vagabond children and even they had nightmares sometimes. But they were always touches of normalcy, of rhythm and routine. They were best friends, and they behaved accordingly.
It was a sweltering summer morning when she began to rethink the strictures of her and Longshot's relationship, when she began to wonder if there was more going on behind his sun-dappled skin and silent facade than she had any idea.
She'd broken one wrist in a fight the evening before and the newly affixed splint startled her as she tried to raise her haversack with the injured limb. She bit back a hiss of pain, then stared at her immobilized wrist in dismay.
"Aah," she grumbled, scowling at the horizon.
Longshot cast her an inquiring glance, one eyebrow quirked. His eyes took in her difficulty at once, of course, but she explained it aloud anyway, to calm herself.
"I can't get my face paint on properly like this. Not like it matters much, really—but it somehow wouldn't be right, going without it. Somebody might try to kiss me if it isn't there to scare them off."
She expected to coax from him a flickering smile with her joke, with her suggestion's obvious absurdity, but instead he came and crouched in front of her, pulling the compact from its place in her bag and pushing aside the top to dip a finger in the clay.
As he gently drew the quartet of pointed strokes across her cheeks, Smellerbee sat speechless. She could not identify whether she was more unnerved by the fact that this simple yet intimate touch was raising her heart rate or that this was the first time in her memory she hadn't been able to read the look in Longshot's eyes.
Articulation was a skill best learned through practice, and she had none.
The night sky was a clear sheet of obsidian, spread above them in variegated shades of black and indigo and cobalt and azure, barely distinguishable from one another. They were fixed tonight on the stars, burning like silver holes in the sky, as if to let another world peek through at its twin below.
Smellerbee was stretched out on the hillside, hands bundled under her head, admiring the constellations. Longshot was sprawled beside her. They were almost the same height—her bare toes lay even with the tops of his booted feet. This was a relatively recent development: over the years, Longshot had grown like a tree, slow but steady; she had grown like a mushroom, shooting up in rapid, joint-wracking bursts, curves popping out in strange places. They were both finished growing now, she thought. She'd pulled even just in time (though she couldn't figure out why she seemed to think it mattered).
A long sigh broke the companionable quiet between them as Smellerbee frowned up at the sky. It was like another world up there. She wondered if life made more sense to the stars, if they were omniscient and didn't have strange gaps in their working knowledge of the world. Humans, it seemed, couldn't even successfully manage one little pocket of time and space and keep track of everything in it.
"Do you think they ever look down on us and wonder what we're doing? Whether we're all just crazy, driven to commit a vast array of deeds, good and evil, to fill up our short little lives with things that don't even make sense to us half the time? It's so—it must be so very simple for them, just…just sitting up there, shining…forever gazing down at us, just waiting for somebody to look back at them…"
She stopped talking then, because her throat had gotten too tight for her to keep babbling, and because beside her Longshot had sat up and was staring not at the sky but at her face, which she realized suddenly was wet with rolling tears. His battered conical hat had been sitting on his chest; it now rolled away in the grass, but he didn't so much as twitch to retrieve it.
Suddenly, he drew all her attention. Never mind what the stars thought; the deep tangle of emotion she saw reflected in her best friend's face was infinitely stranger and more fascinating...
His gentle fingers lighted, birdlike, on her cheek; his eyes, attuned to her every movement, fixed unwaveringly on her tears—his slender mouth tipped carefully to cover her own—
And the love that came without words was enough.
They'd had twenty years.
She was not an old woman. Her curves, even without the support of her nigh-ubiquitous armor, were smooth and self-sustaining, if slim; and the veins had not yet begun to stand out on the backs of her hands.
He was not an old man; his hair was still earthy and thick, and if he had been the laughing type only the earliest of crows' feet would have started forming about his wide eyes.
Yet, she was losing him. Smellerbee knew a thing or two about first aid, as adventurers had to, but her most valiant—even desperate—efforts had done little more than staunch the flow of blood just barely too late.
In a fit of terrified rage, she'd snapped the sword that had gutted him, and the fatal tip of it lay buried somewhere in his abdomen, under the hand fisted in a red-soaked tunic.
She'd already panicked, shouted helpless curses at the too-clear sky, hyperventilated, ripped apart the body of the slave trader who'd buried his scimitar in the belly of the man that she needed to live. She needed him to live.
Through her fit of hysteria, as she flitted from one wrenching emotion to another, he had very calmly held her hand, and eventually she was reduced to sitting by him in a last farewell. He hadn't said a word—dimly she wondered if his characteristic tacitness was granting him a few more minutes' life. She herself had already exhausted all the words she could think of saying, every word she wanted to say, most of them angry and sorrowing and helpless.
Their twenty years had been glorious and simple and perfect.
But now, at the end of it all, she found it was unbearable to think of letting him go on without one last thing.
They had never needed to succor their love with words: words were mere syllables of sound trailing in tasteless open air. They had vowed and defended and loved with knives and swords and arrows and attempts at cooking and ostrich-horse races and the houses they'd built with their own hands, always with a synchronous rhythm that reassured them of one another's sure constancy.
The fumbled nights between borrowed sheets, of clammy hands and harmonized breathing and earnest lips seeking out places daylight never saw, were to reassure them that it was not simple routine that ensured their unfaltering fidelity.
They had never needed to speak of their love—only live in it.
Now, rendered breathless by the thought of never saying it—of never daring to offer even as the rarest delicacy that ambrosia which all other couples regularly partook of, relied on to continue existing—Smellerbee prepared herself to say "I" and "love" and "you" (in that order; surely it could not be so difficult) to the one man who would understand what it cost her.
His mouth parted, and she could hear the massive sentiment ringing unsaid between them. He had thought to say it too—did not want to deprive her of the last memory he was still alive enough to give. She deserved parting words, didn't she? And he could no longer lift a blade or bend a bow to defend her life, or her honor.
He too heard the words, dangling unspoken, and he paused.
She deserved parting words. So let her say them.
Damp cheeks bending under the weight of her grief-shattered smile, she bent forward and laid her forehead on his. She very carefully, reverently, desperately whispered three words in his ear.
The last thing Longshot did was smile, irritant growth of stubble scrunching unevenly—
But it, as always, was enough.