ZW 2012 Day 7: Seasons

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Summer

Loving him was like Appa in a nosedive.

Loving him was like Appa in a nosedive, world flying by while time crawled away. It was like trying to play Pai Sho without half the tiles, like changing her mind after the Omashu mail cart had started flying down the slope. Everything was perfectly clear and bright (until it wasn't), terrifying and exhilarating (until they crashed). Like a Fire Nation summer sped through fall and stopped dead and frozen in a South Pole winter.

Katara misses him. She's been flung from hot to cold in a heartbeat and now the world is dark and gray. It's not so much that she regrets everything, because Gran Gran always told her not to cry when it's over if she can still smile because it happened, but in some ways she wishes she'd never gone anywhere near him. If it had never happened, there wouldn't be a gnawing hole in her chest or pain from the crash (but then if it had never happened, there wouldn't be the euphoria right before it, either).

It had started at the beginning of summer, as these things do. Team Avatar's annual reunion had fallen to Zuko to host that year, and he welcomed them all to Ember Island with that air of being put-upon that they'd come to expect to ignore over the years. Uncle took nearly all of his teashop with him for the week, coming across the sea on one of the retired war balloons laden with his very best travel tea sets and six different canisters of tea for each of his favorite nephew's old friends.

At twenty-three and newly unattached, Zuko had been beset by the locals upon arrival, as if when he took off his shirt, doves appeared (which seemed to result in him patently refusing to leave his family's property for the duration of their vacation). "At least they aren't trying to kill you," Aang points out, helpfully. Zuko grumbles incoherently, and Uncle chortles, tasking Katara with getting the Fire Lord out to the beach.

It takes less convincing than she expects, once the others have gone into town.

They find themselves in the sun and the sand and the water early in the afternoon, and they've stripped down to their underwear in a way that's never been remarkable, and wouldn't be except that she notices Zuko's eyes linger on her white wrappings just a moment too long when she emerges from the ocean. And because Katara is twenty-one, perhaps because the only boy she's ever kissed is Aang or perhaps just because Sokka isn't here, she stretches her arms above her head, gathering her hair in her hands, off her neck, and glances at Zuko through her eyelashes.

He closes the distance between them and brushes his fingers along her hips, at the place where the bottom wrappings meet skin. She turns into him, close enough that her breasts touch his chest when she moves, and his hands stop fluttering, coming to rest, warm on her skin. Katara drops her hair and loops her arms around his neck, and he presses closer, his hands gripping her waist tighter. Zuko's eyes flutter closed and suddenly his mouth covers hers and his arms are around her, one hand tangled in her hair and the other fiddling with her wrappings. Heat courses through her and pools deep inside.

She kisses him hungrily and tightens her arms around him, suddenly wanting to be as close to him as possible. Zuko tears his mouth from hers and tilts her chin, trailing kisses under her jaw and down the side of her neck. Pulling away a little, he opens his eyes and looks at her, gold eyes warm and lidded. "Maybe we should go inside."

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Katara follows him back to the palace at the end of the week-the Fire Nation has been enduring a work shortage, which has led to slums at the edges of the city and corresponding rampant illness, something that hasn't happened for a hundred years. Zuko looks at her one night as she sits in his lap, facing him, running her hands over his chiseled chest, and grumbles that maybe they shouldn't have ended the war after all. She kisses him and retorts that in the Lower Ring of Ba Sing Se people had always preferred being poor to being dead.

"I didn't," he pouts, and nips at her ear.

"You're a spoiled prince," she says, and wiggles a little in his lap.

"Katara."

She smiles and lays back, pulling him over her.

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It comes to an end, as all summers do. As the autumn rains start, Katara finds a cure for the disease ravaging the capital-it was easy, she says, once she realized it was transmitted through the drinking water. Zuko thinks he should ask her to marry him, maybe because it's the honorable thing to do at this point, maybe because sometime during the summer he fell in love and can't imagine his life without her. Maybe both.

So he gets down on one knee before her as the rain pounds the roof and the thunder crashes outside, and she gasps as he looks up at her and stutters that he loves her and wants to be with her for the rest of his life and will she marry him and of course she will and then there are tears on her cheeks and the biggest smile on his face that anyone has ever seen. The wind howls that night as lightning sparks in the sky, and Zuko draws the curtains around the bed and pulls her close, her back against his chest, and his chin rests on the top of her head. They talk about everything and nothing, how to tell the others, when to tell the government, what they'll do the rest of their lives.

Katara spends the season learning the functions and duties of a Fire Lord's wife, broken up by bending in the rain. Winter comes, and the rain grows cooler. She misses the snow and ice, and her grandmother and Sokka and Dad, and Zuko notices she's putting off telling them (which she should really do if they want to marry in the spring). Aang comes for the Winter Solstice, and congratulates them as enthusiastically as only Aang can, with no trace of bitterness. The three of them go to the festival, full of youthful energy. Katara kisses Zuko as the fireworks explode over their heads, and the people cheer for the healer who saved them and the Fire Lord who has enough sense to keep her around.

When Aang leaves, things return to normal, but as the rains begin to clear and spring approaches, Katara feels the weight of a nation on her shoulders. The Sages and the Council scrutinize her mercilessly. Zuko grows busier dealing with what he calls "tax season" and "land demand season", wrapped up in meetings with petitioners and dates with paperwork. Katara has never been afraid of hard work; she's certainly never run from it-if anything, she runs toward it-but it's not the work that scares her. Summer had bled into fall, fall had bled into winter, but the heat of one kind is beginning to die down, replaced with fire of a different kind. They argue, they fight, they bicker, over everything from whether Zuko should grant a petitioner another tract of land to the incontrovertible fact that Katara seems set on surprising Sokka with her wedding. Zuko feels the grip of death upon him every time he remembers. Katara wants him to understand that it's better to ask forgiveness than permission. Zuko has found that it's harder to get forgiveness than permission, almost universally.

They are fire and water, one dousing the flame and the other evaporating away the water.

Then when the first blooms of spring start and the sun shines through the rainclouds, she's gone. Her note begins with "Zuko, I'm sorry you have to find out this way," and Zuko can't help but laugh caustically at himself.

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A/N: Partially inspired by Taylor Swift's Red album. I've been on a binge.

I had trouble finishing this one, mostly because I hate to break them up for no particular reason. Oh well. These things must be done. Hope you enjoyed it!