Aang and Katara walked hand-in-hand down the halls of the Fire Nation palace, following the attendant sent to usher them to a waiting area. After three days of sitting in stuffy conference rooms with hot-headed politicians, they were looking forward to heading home on Appa's back with the cold wind of the open air in their faces. They only had one more order of business to discuss with Zuko before they left, but annoyingly, he was held up with local matters for an indefinite amount of time. Hopefully just a few minutes, they were told, but maybe a few hours.
At least it would be a pleasant wait. The attendant led them outside to a private patio adjacent to the lush palace gardens. The little alcove was shaded, and the warm breeze drifted the fragrance of the garden's flowering shrubs through the air. There were fruits and snacks waiting for them too, since their wait had the potential to be a long one.
Katara amused them both for a while by playing with Momo, tickling him so that he would scurry around and come back for more as they laughed. But eventually Momo had enough, and he flew off to chase some bugs.
They sat across from each other in a comfortable silence, heads tilted back to rest on the chair cushions and watch the clouds drift by. Katara couldn't help but see shapes in the clouds. One looked like a crescent moon, one resembled Appa. The breeze morphed the clouds gradually into different shapes, until they were reminding Katara of some very recent memories that made her blush.
She was grateful that Aang was across from her instead of beside her. It gave her some space to breathe as she grappled with the images in her mind. Last night she had decided to sneak into his room a bit sooner than she normally did, and she ended up catching a view of his full and hardened package in his hand. It was a new sight for her, and the accidental transgression over their established boundaries embarrassed them both.
But she couldn't stop thinking about it. It was the most exciting thing she'd ever seen, like seeing his tattoos for the first time again, but even more special in some secret way. When she eventually returned to his room later that night, he confessed that she had caught him in a nightly habit, a precaution he took to try to avoid surprising her with a bulge against her back as they slept. And as she was aware, it didn't always work.
She felt nearly drunk with power since then. Her mere existence, the way she moved, her body simply taking up space had such a strong hold over the almighty avatar that he physically couldn't control himself when they touched. And even though it went beyond their agreed upon limits, she couldn't shake her desire to see him again, or to know what he felt like without clothes in the way.
Not wanting to explain her quickening heartbeat to her boyfriend, she tore her gaze away from the unreasonably phallic clouds and tried to clear her thoughts. She crossed her legs and sat up to pick at the food on the table in front of them, relieved to see that Aang was distracting himself by juggling a flower petal in the air over his face.
And of course the fruits on the table would send her mind back into the gutter. She wondered how anyone in their right mind could place such a display in front of a dating pair of teens. The fruit bowl had a wide selection, but her attention was fixed on an unusually straight banana, the tip of which was nestled snug against the fuzzy crease of a moon peach. She felt her heart race all over again as another wave of heat rushed from her ears down to her crotch. She squirmed in her seat and glanced at Aang again, who was thankfully still engrossed in his air bending tricks.
She picked up the banana and compared it to her mental image of him. The fruit was remarkably straight, just bending slightly before the stem. She decided that the taper of the opposite end most closely resembled the tip of his length. She had seen how his skin moved up and down, folding up and around the end at the peak of each stroke—which he hadn't stopped doing at her interruption. That detail was an entire fantasy on its own.
She turned the banana over in her hands, wondering if the ripe texture of the peel was anything close to his real skin. It was certainly not as pliant, but it felt smooth like the skin on her wrist. She suspected that he would feel heavier than the fruit in her hand, too. Curiosity overcame her and she closed her eyes, pressing it gently to her cheek, dragging the length of it slowly across her skin toward her chin.
The mind is a powerful thing. By the time she moved the fruit back up her cheek, she was lost in her imagination and entirely convinced that she might actually be holding part of Aang. For a moment she forgot to be concerned with subtlety and stealth, and she didn't care what the Aang sitting across from her might think if he noticed what she was doing. She let out a sigh and nuzzled her face against it, turning it to her lips, using the approximation of him as an outlet for her lust and affection.
Aang was using every trick he knew to keep himself distracted from his girlfriend. All he could think about was the look on her face when she saw him touching himself the night before. It hadn't left his mind for even a second. She'd been surprised at first, yet her eyelids immediately slid back down and she unconsciously licked her lips as she backed out of the doorway. Her reception made him shameless enough to keep going, hoping she might decide to stay, even though she was already closing the door in a flustered hurry. But the sight of her wet tongue darting out in nervous anticipation was more than enough to crowd out any embarrassment he might have otherwise felt from the whole ordeal.
The memory of that brief moment—and the implications of their reactions to it—pestered him relentlessly. And it seemed to be sticking with Katara, too. He noticed when she apparently saw the same shapes in the clouds that he did; he felt her heart fluttering against her ribs, the vibrations reaching his feet and rattling his own pulse to her beat. He noticed the edge to her breathing when she crossed her legs, and how the air caught in her throat when she sat up and stopped looking at the sky.
He couldn't tell what she sat up for, though. It didn't feel like she was looking at him, so maybe she was trying to distract herself. In his peripheral vision he could see that she reached for something on the table. It almost looked like she was eating, but she seemed worked up about it. When he heard her let out a long and quiet sigh, he thought perhaps the food was just that delicious, and he raised his head to lean forward and join her.
He was taken aback at what he saw. Katara was cradling a banana against her cheek and the corner of her mouth. It almost looked comical, but as he continued to watch her, it sank in that she was entirely in her own head. It appeared that she was lost in her memory of last night, trying to relive it with an alternate ending. He watched as she parted her lips ever so slightly and ran them up along the side of the fruit, sending blood from his head rushing down to his groin. He gasped and reeled, leaning heavily into the seat back.
He saw Katara freeze at the sound and open her eyes to look at him through her lashes. He held her gaze, both of them reading each other in silence, uncertain how they should react. They'd made eyes at each other plenty of times before, but this was different. The weight of their unspoken thoughts loomed heavily over them. It built up pressure, their hearts pounding as if to fight back against the tension. Aang felt exposed to her all over again. He felt like her prey, and he thought once again with a pleasant lurch in his gut that he wanted her to devour him.
Katara thought she saw him move first. Her eyes wandered from his own down to his lips, his chest, his crotch. She saw another slight motion under his robes and her lips quirked to a smirk at the realization that their standoff was broken by his body betraying him. The feeling of power over him ran through her in a shiver. It seemed as though she was handling her prop correctly, and she wanted to know how else he might like to be touched. She looked him in the eye again and turned her face slightly to press slow, wet kisses along the length of the fruit.
Aang let out the breath he was holding in a wordless splutter. He grasped the cushions at his sides and leaned harder into the back of his seat, his hips sliding forward and torso stretching out, intimidated yet gladly submitting to the wicked spirit before him. He didn't know what to do with himself. He wanted to sit still and watch his girlfriend pretend to explore him, but he also wanted to jump on her and… well, he wasn't sure what he would do after that. Something they weren't ready for, whatever it was. And they didn't have that much privacy where they were waiting. So he sat there, tensed and panting, his fight or flight response tripping over itself and freezing him there on the spot.
His reaction emboldened Katara. She hadn't expected to learn from him when she picked up the fruit, but now seeing his enthusiasm made her want to take full advantage of the opportunity. She lowered the fruit from her face and held the stem end in her left hand, then gripped the rest of it loosely with the palm of her right hand. She watched all of him, looking for signs in his face and body that she was onto something, and stroked it toward the tip. She saw his lips tighten, so she did it again. Then she remembered how he was holding himself and moved her hand in imitation, her thumb and pointer finger stretching out to rub at the tip while the rest of her hand kept moving in broad strokes.
Her attention to detail was rewarded with another twitch in his pants, and this time the tent in the fabric of his clothes persisted. He turned completely red in embarrassment, but didn't dare hide himself from her approving gaze.
Thoroughly enjoying herself, Katara uncrossed her legs and leaned forward to rest her elbows on her knees. She kept stroking the fruit as she brought it up in front of her face to examine it. The 'lower' side of it had a ridge running along the length, and her wonderfully vivid memory recognized it as being similar to Aang. She opened her right hand enough to rub the 'upper' side of the fruit along her lips again, letting her mindless excitement drive her. Then she moved it lower, past her chin to her sternum, dragging it to rest at her cleavage.
Aang watched helplessly as she rubbed it slowly up and down, the fingers of her right hand pressing it against her chest as her left hand moved it. Her breasts hung plump and soft with gravity as she leaned, and the fabric of her summer tunic draped loosely between her curves, emphasizing the snug envelopment of her body around the decoy of him.
His imagination replaced her prop with his own appendage and tried to fill in the blanks of where the rest of him might land. He took in the orientation of how she held it, her still hand delicately caressing the lower ridge that faced out toward him, the tip pointing up toward her face. She leaned farther forward onto it, and he choked when his mind completed the picture: he would be lying on his back, pinned beneath her, staring at her delicious backside while she pressed herself against him. Hypnotized and immobilized. Just like she had him right now. As if she could read his mind, she held the fruit still in her hand and switched to moving her body against it.
He'd never expressed his lust to her so openly before. In close quarters it takes far less to say I want your touch; a kiss on the jaw instead of the cheek, a hand wandering just a blush further than before, or even a casual touch with less or more pressure than expected. But without touch, she noticed his visual cues much more. His pupils were blown wide with desire, his skin shimmering with the beginnings of sweat over a flush of pink. And then there were the more blatant signs. He looked bigger than she'd been able to feel any of the times he grew hard against her in the past, never daring to use her hands and only feeling him on her body. Staring at him now, she felt the warm tingle of excitement pulse between her legs, her underwear becoming more damp by the second.
A breeze drifted from her back toward Aang—whether by chance or by his unconscious bidding, he didn't know—and her scent hit him like an entire ocean eroding his sanity. It was like the musky fog that shrouded them whenever he found himself rutting slow and aimlessly against her, carried away with an overheated kiss. But this was purely her, brought on by nothing more than their shared thoughts. She smelled new, heavy, excited and exciting. He gripped the edges of the seat cushions under his thighs as if they could save him from floating away with the wind.
Katara blushed when she saw him inhale deeply and twist his brow in satisfaction. She crossed her legs again, partly out of bashfulness, but mostly to feel some friction between them. Just as she was ready to lose herself, she was startled by Aang yanking a pillow from beside him and holding it down on his lap. He sent her a panicked look before turning his face out toward the garden, away from the doorway. Katara realized that someone must be approaching from inside, so she leaned back and rested her hands casually in her lap.
Their attendant emerged from the doorway with a pitcher of iced water. She topped off their glasses and went back inside. The pair of them stared at the condensation dripping down the glasses, still panting from their heated tryst.
Katara glanced back at Aang and saw sweat beading heavier now on his forehead, too. He was still clutching the pillow on his lap as though it could save him from her torment. His chest heaved with his breathing as he attempted to calm down. But she still had more ideas, more ways to toy with him, and she wanted to find out if he'd like them.
Aang's attention shot from his glass to his girlfriend when she lifted her hands from her lap. He watched her pinch the brown end of the banana and pry it open, splitting the skin apart at just the top inch or two. She stopped pulling the peel to break off the unappetizing bit and flick it away. He was both disappointed and relieved that she seemed to be through with her games and was moving on to eating.
But how wrong he was. Instead of continuing to remove the skin and eat the fruit, she brought it up to her mouth and gave him a look as timid as it was inquisitive. The split skin wrapped loosely around the end, not yet separated enough to hang down or expose the flesh for a bite. She brushed the tip across her lips and the peel dragged ever so slightly against the friction. And then she opened her mouth, sliding her dainty tongue under the layer of skin to swirl around the head of the flesh beneath it.
His body reacted without his permission. His hands pressed the pillow down along his lap and his hips lurched up into it. A quiet whine escaped him and he bit his lip to stifle it. But before he could feel self-conscious about his response, he saw all coyness leave her expression as the familiar glare from last night returned on her face. Back then, he only suspected that she wanted to watch him please himself, but there was no mistaking it now. She stared at him like she planned to force out all of his secrets one by one, starting right now with how pleasure looked on him.
The electric spark in her eyes sizzled through him and knocked his gut into free-fall. Her single-minded determination was palpable, so strong that there was no version of reality where he didn't submit to her will at that moment. He thrust his hips up into the pillow again and she rewarded him with another lap of her tongue around that damned fruit. Her warm, tender tongue and her soft lips, luscious with the gloss of her appetite to be eating him instead.
Katara hummed in satisfaction as she watched him give in. The gratified scowl on his face, the roll of his body, the rasp of his breath were all an intoxicating wine, aged for years in the cellar of uncharted territory. A bottle that they'd opened and sniffed fairly often as of late, but always corked again without imbibing. Now, purely by chance and loopholes, she felt brave enough to savor a taste.
It seeped into her blood and clouded her mind. There was nothing else but their game and the things it taught her about his body. The way he responded differently to a consistent rhythm compared to a new experiment, lost in a trance or overwhelmed with desire. The way his breath hitched or raced with her changes. The way he looked at her. It was addicting, and even more so when it was all laced with understanding and compliance to what she wanted from him.
His little whines were barely audible, intentionally loud enough for only her to hear. Like a forbidden love note sent in the night, a subtle call inviting a hint of a response. She answered him with a shuddering sigh as she shifted restlessly to cross her legs the other way, rocking her hips when the seam in the crotch of her leggings pulled taut against just the right spot. The corner of his mouth turned up briefly, then pulled back in a snarl when she pursed her lips around the end of the peel and gently tugged as if to stretch it.
She watched his eyes slam shut as he sucked in a gasp and tilted his head back. But his motion kept the same slow tempo, even after he pried his eyes open to continue watching her, his brow peaked in a desperate expression that begged her for more. She recalled his hand moving much faster when she walked in on him, though. Hoping to spur him into the same quicker pace, she took her prop out of her mouth and pulled the peel down to where she grasped it at the base, then brought it to her lips again.
Aang could guess what was coming this time, but that didn't keep him from losing all sense of his own element when Katara slid the fruit into her mouth until it reached her throat. She stared at him, the cool blue of her eyes that normally felt so refreshing now burning into him, a torrent of steam that propelled the indulgent wiggle of her hips against her seat and the steady in-and-out of 'him' in her mouth. He found himself unable to think or move for himself. He was only reacting now, lost in her spell and obeying her cadence like his life depended on it.
He moaned quietly when she closed her eyes and sped up. He kept time, relying less on his hips and more on his arms to press the pillow onto himself at a faster clip. Another breeze cooled the sweat on his skin, and he remembered her sweet aroma that it carried the last time. He pictured her over him again, this time with her mouth on his throbbing need, his face smothered by her heady grind that was currently wasted on the ungrateful furniture. It was all too much. Try as he might to savor it, this would be over soon.
But then he felt the worst thing he could imagine at that moment: Zuko's stride approaching. He scoffed and slammed the pillow back where he found it before springing up and flying away on his glider. He left so quickly that Katara barely had a chance to acknowledge him, and he gave her an apologetic glance before foliage and trees separated them.
He fled until he found a secluded spot and built back up the image in his mind, recalling her bold explorations, the taste of her lips, the soft curves of her body, her fragrance. The dextrous and targeted pressure of his hand finished the job much faster than he expected. At least this way, the mess could land in the dirt instead of an uncomfortable wad in his pants.
He found Momo before walking back to the patio, more as an alibi than any real need to keep tabs on him. Momo announced their arrival by landing on Zuko's head, met with reluctant grumbles and scratches.
Aang felt a lazy smile spread on his face when he saw Katara again, so beautiful and vibrant in front of the garden flowers that seemed to echo her feminine allure. Perfumed, lush, succulent. Perfect.
Katara swallowed the food in her mouth and lowered the half-eaten banana from her face. "Hey, Sweetie, there you are." She took in his satisfied daze and smirked. "I knew you'd come."
I wanted this to have no dialog but then Sifu Grapefruit suggested "thanks for coming" so I made an exception, with some tweaking. (still working on lion turtle SORRY)