Disclaimer: I don't own Avatar.

2. Relationship

It was cold, always so cold. But then, she was never a girl who took after the sun. She was just glad to be home even if he wasn't there with her. No one could rightly say she needed a man to keep her on her feet. Water Tribe blood, they called it. There was nothing stronger.

Women of the Water Tribes, northern and southern alike, raised children without husbands, held together families and waited out the storm. They supported their man when he came home, an aged and battered hero of war or mourned when he did not, forever plagued with wounded heartstrings. But neither a blackened cloud nor a flicker in the night could hold them down for long for they had undying strength to carry on.

Her strength came from someplace deeper or someplace not quite as. While theirs was to hold on, hers was to let go. He was a good catch, the older women, those-who-knew-best, would say. She couldn't deny it but she didn't know much about fishing except that it was a big pond and she wasn't afraid of the leopard sharks.

Still, maybe just one last session of penguin sledding would have been nice, for old times' sake.

"You realize that makes you alone now, right?" Sokka asked, his arm draped over Suki's shoulder and his fingers running over a bumpy whalebone calligraphy brush. "As in alone alone because you're not going to get him back." He never did learn when to keep his mouth shut.

"I know, Sokka," she said, carving away at her own whalebone brush. How she hated the unpredictable harshness of arctic blizzards. "If I thought I was going to want him back, I wouldn't have let him go."

"So you do want him back?"

The knife slipped, nicking the edge of her finger and the bone brush clattered to the icy floor, chiming like glass. I don't want him back, she wanted to scream or maybe something more dignified, I can't let myself hold him back anymore, or something selfish, something that tasted less like a lie, I can't let him hold me back anymore. But she didn't have to say anything he hadn't already caught on to. They had all caught on when she came home alone.

"Well, you sure did a good job at making things awkward," he said in an undertone, "You should see the letters that kid writes to me." It wasn't long before he and Suki were enthralled with the depths of each other's eyes once more in an exchange of hushed adulations and she only continued to whittle away at dry bones of something old and expired, wishing the blizzard winds would submit to the morning.

Katara was good at doing the things others didn't have time for. Like settling minor squabbles, raising walls for new snow huts and giving people her calm assurance that they had nothing to worry about under the young Fire Lord's leadership. That seemed to be of everyone's concern as of late and the smile of certainty she gave the villagers, as if they were children who needed to know the monsters in the dark were really never coming back; the smile sometimes faltered and sometimes it lied. The world just wasn't one of those things that a teenager should have to carry on his shoulders. She wasn't there to see to it that things ran smoothly and that made room for doubts. Or maybe it was just him she wanted to see; the letters always seemed so synthetic and formal. She took on the habit of mirroring the style until it felt almost normal.

But it was better than the arguments. She never liked the way he left things unfinished. His father was a lost cause, she could accept that, but his sister, left rotting in a cell, her element lost and her sanity on the brink; she was his sister. They could never quite agree on what fate the girl deserved.

And there were other things, always something until it became nothing, only stuffy letters with proper headings and impartial closings, forced brevity that never seemed to sate her sick hunger for something, anything at all. It only fueled her belief that somewhere along the too thin, straggled lines, she had acquired a cruel knack of killing friendships.

But at the end of those same familiar lines, something new began. A long, probably hard and possibly hopeless process of realizing that she actually doesn't have it all figured out just yet, despite her belief that she should; and "I love you," just as three simple words are just that exactly… three simple words; and just because something looks good on paper or sounds good to the ear, that doesn't mean you should be the one to say it. That it's okay to understand that two people are never going to understand each other. The last part came on a fleeting thought as the words, his words from his letters that she memorized without any intention to, echoed through her head, or her heart; she got the two confused a lot these days.

So when she received cynical stares and when the villagers asked, "How can you be so sure?" her response was without hesitation and with utmost certainty. "Because I trust him."

She would live in the moment for now, though, with the fleeting hope of finding herself inside it. Being alone didn't have to be a terrible ordeal. And she would box up her set of newly carved whalebone brushes and send them off, anonymously, to someone who'd use them more. With all his talk of treaties, papers and obligatory letters to lords and ladies that cluttered his letters to her, she figured the Fire Lord could use some extra ones. Or maybe her intentions were slightly more selfish.

At least the storm let up. It always did in the end and oh, how it shimmered; gray teal hues encompassing the ground, riding behind the tail of a passing wind. She stood somewhere it its midst, somewhere just far enough that they wouldn't see as crystal towers broke free of their icy depths, her mark carved in the snowscape. In her drenched mitten hands was the power to manipulate, to transform. They seemed to forget that so easily. There was nothing graceful or planned about the moment.

It was inevitable, in the end that she would lose him just like the Avatar, "a good catch," lost her. Anything too far would unravel them at the seams; anything too close would only break them both. But that didn't take the edge off of her thrill when his letter came.

Dear Katara, it read, Rebellions have been sprouting up all over. It's getting increasingly difficult to keep everything in check. Sending in troops to protect the citizens can only do so much and it can't change anyone's mind. I regret asking to bring you into all of this but…

And that was all she needed to the sun would be something she could get used to.