What Happens in the Swamp

-14-

I used to wonder what love was in terms of a medium: water, plasma, solid, air. Time slows in a medium or speeds up; things get consumed and are never found again. You put your fingers in this medium and you bring them back to you and your thumb is missing.

These are the things you think when it is late evening and you're so drunk off your ass you can't tell what color the sky is or if you're even outside looking at the sky or in your room on your bed staring at the ceiling or on top of some palace hooker cursing her father while you're undoing your pants.

Since we landed in the swamp I defined Katara and Aang's medium: sugar-coated interpretive dance, fruit tart honey lilied, sweet-smelling love, knows-no-lies love, no-other-in-the-universe love. The love they save for theaters. People pay to get into theaters to see that kind of love because it doesn't exist outside the theater—it's too good, too human and too heartfelt, and people pay for things like that because on some level we all want to watch the 'good' sex, not the bad.

I always told the people who asked—well, Uncle—that I loved Mai but that I couldn't love her after what she did. But the truth is, you can't really ever use the word 'loved'…as much as you hate to admit it, if you love someone once—for real, like in theaters—you never actually stop loving them. There is no past tense. If you can ever think of them without love, you never loved to begin with. This was deduced from Uncle after pots and pots of jasmine tea.

You misplace the love in a medium but you can always swim back down to the bottom and retrieve it when the time comes. It's why I couldn't kill Azula. It's why I came back after I betrayed Uncle. It's why I still haven't given up searching for my mother, though it has been years. It's why I have my father locked up in a cell instead of twenty feet inside the earth and dead. Mai took up space but when I think of her now all I can ever feel is cool indifference and a pang of sadness for lost time.

Theater love. Public love. I love Katara—not as a woman, but what she is made out of. I love Katara's molecules and her chemistry. I love the anatomy that holds her brains together. She has something I don't have and I fooled myself into thinking I could take it if we slept together. But I still haven't broken her and she hasn't broken me, and we're standing as tall and as naked as the trees that have imprisoned us since day one. I love her. It's why I made the decision never to tell Aang what happened. Not for his sake and his bright colored, falsified medium—but for her. For all the bad things she thinks that she keeps hidden in the dark. For all the lies she has covered under layers, for all the lies that seep between her fingers like rotting memories, soft decomposing earth, grainy, with so many oblong pieces sticking out. Even Katara herself can't make sense of it all.

She can tell him if she wants, but I won't breathe a word.

She felt her heart rattle between her throat and her stomach when Aang stumbled out from between the vines. He wore an unreadable expression. His pace was even and he seemed shorter than before. Or maybe taller; she wasn't sure.

She and Zuko stood fully dressed, looking at him with lopsided smiles that Katara wished weren't so shallow. Aang ran to her and swung his arms around her waist, nuzzled his head between the flex of her neck and shoulder. She wondered suddenly if she smelled like Zuko—or if Zuko had a smell, and if so, if Aang could recognize it—so many days in the Swamp had left her clueless, and she stood there, as dumb as ever, returning the hug and feeling her ribcage loosen and shake like the frame of an ancient building, on the verge of collapse.

Aang let go and nodded in Zuko's direction, then embraced him briefly before grabbing Katara again. She was so, so relieved to see Aang smiling—she wondered why that would be a relief instead of the expected. Guilt felt sticky like egg yolks and gum paste and she didn't like it at all. Aang broke the silence with his good-natured laughter. "Looks like Appa found you guys before I did!" he boomed.

"That he did," said Zuko, and it bothered Katara that he was forcing his tone to be light. "He's clever. He could probably smell us from a mile away. Or something." He hesitated. "What happened to your saddle, though? Everything is missing."

"I didn't bring it." Aang turned to Katara and hugged her again, tightly. She felt her breasts press against him and her stomach dropped to her knees. Aang looked at Zuko with his arm around his fiancées hips. "I was worried I would only find one of you. I'm so glad you protected her."

"I don't need protecting." Katara laughed, sporting a queasy smile. "But Zuko was helpful to me."

"I bet," Aang said, but she wasn't sure if this was spiteful or just said for the sake of saying something.

"Why didn't you bring his saddle?" Zuko asked, before the previous matter could develop and divide into details. "It's going to be kind of difficult to get out without one."

"I knew better. I mean, last time I was here, we were sucked down into this enormous tornado and all of our stuff went missing anyway. Besides," he finished, grinning, "it's not so bad to ride bareback. Just takes some getting used to. But it's not impossible." He looked at Katara again, his eyes big and full of all the trust and love in the world. She closed her own eyes and swallowed. "So glad I found you both," he said, not turning to Zuko. "Let's get out of here."

On the ride up, the trio was silent. It was late morning and the sky was dark and rainy. All the clouds looked gray and the white clouds seemed to be swirled into the gray ones. This made Katara frown and she distracted herself by thinking of lies.

Aang removed his tunic and gave it to Katara, who wore it against her will despite the fact that she wasn't all that cold. She guessed this was because her kimono was revealing and that Aang didn't like it. He had his own ways of displaying his disapproval, of this she was sure. Still, the fact that he had given her his tunic suddenly suggested that he was controlling what she showed of her body—not her temperature—and the thought brought a burst of anger to Katara that was unfamiliar and enlightening, like a jolt of electricity. She eyed him with detached determination for the remainder of the flight. Zuko asked how long it had been and Aang told them that it had been a month since their disappearance. Katara felt like vomiting.

They landed in a small Earth Kingdom village, Gong Kei, where Aang was staying with Sokka, Toph, and the mayor of the city, a nervous man by the name of Ping. There was a large meeting to be scheduled in Gong Kei for the upcoming month, and Ping had offered the Avatar and his makeshift family an all-expense paid stay until the big day. Ironically, the meeting Katara and Zuko were sent to had been cancelled because several of the generals couldn't make it. When Katara heard this she put her head in her hands and laughed soundlessly. Zuko crossed his arms and looked at the sky.

The entire first day back, Katara couldn't believe it was real. She felt as though she were witnessing these events happening in a dream or a on a stage—but she was out of her skin, still trapped somewhere deep in the Swamp. She knew Zuko felt this way too because she could feel the hiccups in his thinking—once or twice, someone was talking or they were all talking at once, and Katara looked to find Zuko staring at her, and she had been staring at him, and in this way she felt as though she was connected to him in some unbreakable way, and it only made the sticky guilty feeling worse.

She slept deep and didn't dream.