Warning: For mild incest. I've portrayed it as a couple of curious kids experimenting, but it's still there.

Point in timeline: Pre-canon flashback; takes place early on in the episode "Jet".

Level of explicitness: Closed-mouth kissing.


"Who? Gran-Gran?" Katara crossed her arms over her chest with an insufferably smug expression. "I've met Gran-Gran."

Katara was simply infuriating when she got like this—even more so because they had both heard what she wasn't saying, and which neither one of them was going to bring up in front of Aang. She knew exactly how much experience he had with kissing.

There had been no one else in their tiny village even close to their own age—middle-aged women and a handful of toddlers had been the norm, Sokka and Katara the exception, two teenagers amidst the children and the elderly. As the two fittest members of the Tribe who'd remained at home, they'd also been the ones to do most of the hunting and fishing. They'd spent a lot of time alone together out on the ice.

They'd been just old enough to be curious, just young enough not to know better. It had only happened a few times and it had never gone far, lips brushing up against each other in the barest of shy touches before they'd pulled away and gone back to minding the nets as if nothing had happened. They never spoke of it out loud, either—what was there to say? Though they'd always known that what they were doing was fundamentally forbidden, it hadn't seemed particularly wrong at the time—it wasn't like they'd be having babies together, and it wasn't as if either of them would ever get the chance to kiss anyone else. On some level, he thought that they'd just wanted to know what it felt like before they grew too old for it to matter.

Now, of course, things were different. He'd seen the way the Avatar looked at his sister—Aang might have thought he was being subtle, but his affections were obvious to anyone with eyes. As for Sokka's part… well, he remembered a girl with exotic makeup, so like and yet so unlike the Water Tribe's war paint, and a pair of soft lips brushing up against his cheek. For the first time in their lives, they both had options.

What had happened before would always remain a secret between them—"I got my first kiss from my sister" wasn't exactly something you bragged about. Besides, the situation had changed—Katara, he knew, now had the chance to fall in love and get married like any other girl, and now that they were out in the world even Sokka had begun to consider possibilities he'd never allowed himself to think about before. They might have left Suki behind, but they'd met a lot of people on their journey, and he knew that there would be other girls. He and Katara might have been each other's firsts, but for the first time in their lives, there was the possibility that they wouldn't be the last.


A/N: Um... yeah. This was the one chapter I originally wasn't going to write as a romance, because incest is a major squick zone for me, but then this plotbunny popped into my head and Just. Would. Not. Leave. Me. Alone. So there you are. In the end, I think, it ended up being less about the pairing and more about the tragedy of Sokka and Katara growing up in such an isolated environment without any peers for companionship.

As a side note, I also know at least one pair of siblings IRL who've tried kissing each other out of curiosity. These things do happen.