Yue pushed the slim canoe from the frozen shore with a practiced movement of her oar, and Katara sighed in contentment. This. Now this was the stuff dreams were made of: tunnels of glacial ice filtering the daylight from far above into blues and greens, reflecting off the water and back onto kaleidoscope walls, all for them to glide through with the most gorgeous human being Katara had ever seen at the helm of their boat.
"You can feel it, can't you?" Yue's musical voice broke the enchanted silence after a few minutes of silent paddling. "The push and pull of the water."
Katara smiled, heart leaping at the thought of a kindred spirit.
"Yeah of course, it's called the tide."
Katara's dopey grin instantly melted as she turned to swat at the smartass seated next to her. "Sokka!"
She'd been trying to have a moment. But of course her greatest headache in life was doing everything he could to make sure that never happened.
"What? Stop acting like it's some magic spiritual thing, it's literally just gravity. Big, massive moon and bigger, more massive Earth. Note that I didn't say heavy, because weight only has meaning when mass is multiplied by the gravitational constant -"
Katara accidentally splashed Sokka with some freezing cold, magic spirit water.
"Hey!"
Looking over at Yue, Katara saw the princess hide a grin behind a gloved hand. Hmmm. She should throw water at Sokka more often.
"Oops," she said to him. "Gravity, what can you do."
Sokka eyed the water as if he was calculating exactly how quickly it would freeze his hands before he could splash Katara - which he probably was doing - then apparently concluded that it wasn't worth it, because he decided to talk instead. "Well, there's always something, especially when gravity is a b-"
"Oh, look at that, here's your stop!" announced Yue, turning the boat into an eddy with the flick of an oar.
"- and her name is Katara," Sokka finished, then knew he was safer out of the boat than in it.
"Bye now," Katara said sweetly, joining Yue in a sarcastic wave, and mentally scheduling a reminder to destroy her brother later.
"It must be difficult, sometimes. Having a sibling," Yue remarked, once they were again underway.
"Let's just say there are many times I wish I was an only child," said Katara.
Yue laughed, and it echoed in the icy tunnel like a tinkling bell. "Really? Katara, forgive me for saying so, but you - I think you shine your brightest when standing next to other people."
Katara's heart skipped a beat, and she bit her tongue on not when it's you. "If you're saying I'm surrounded by sub-par people, you might be correct," she joked instead, thinking of her brother and her traveling companions.
"That's not what I mean," Yue insisted, then patted the bench at her side. "Come. I'll show you."
Katara eyed the bench, which was barely wide enough for Yue's slender frame, and couldn't get there fast enough.
"Here." Yue took Katara's hand and placed it on one of the oars. "Have you rowed before?"
My people were Islanders, Katara didn't say, in favor of playing dumb to keep Yue's hand there a while longer. "What's an oar?"
Not that dumb!
"I mean," Katara hastily corrected. "We, uh. Sail. On the sea ice, sometimes."
The look Yue gave her was a knowing one, but the princess had the grace not to say anything. "Push and pull, Katara. Push and pull."
Katara nodded, moving her arms in rhythm with Yue's, feeling the space where their shoulders brushed and wishing they had fewer layers in between them. "Like the current. The tide. Usalai and kulis."
Yue turned towards her and cocked a perfect eyebrow, which Katara lost herself in appreciating from up close. "What are those?"
"Names for the tides," Katara breathed, forgetting what she was even thinking about and just rambling now, lost in Yue's eyes. They were violet, she decided one moment; blue, the next. "In our Strait, they either flow west to east or east to west. Usalai and kulis. You never catch turtle with kulis."
"Do you even catch turtle these days, with the Islands ice-bound in the Torres Strait?"
"Well… turtle might not be the appropriate term anymore," Katara allowed, thinking of the mutations that species had undergone since her ancestors' days. "But the tides are still there, under the ice, and they still flow the same as they always have."
"Mmmm," Yue hummed. Soft resonances from the tunnel added layers to the sound. "It's nice to know that not everything has changed, in this broken world of ours. Usalai. Kulis."
The words sounded foreign on Yue's tongue, and Katara loved it.
"The feeling of water, the formation of ice," she added.
"The warmth of a smile," Yue said, tentatively raising a thumb to brush at the side of Katara's own smile.
Katara found it wouldn't disappear, even as her heart pounded louder and louder and nervous butterflies buzzed in her stomach. "Gravity," she whispered, gladly letting Yue's own pull her in to her orbit.
A/N: If you're not familiar with Dancer, all you really need to know is that it's a post-apocalyptic future Earth, Katara and Sokka are from the Torres Strait Islands, Yue is Kazakh living under a glacier in Baikonur aka where most of Europe's rocket launches happen, Sokka is an actual genius but still kind of a jerk, and the names of the tides given here are taken from Myths and Legends of the Torres Strait Islands: Wat and Zigin, a tale told by Ben Nona on Badu Island. This marvelous book is available as a free pdf download, and I highly recommend checking it out!
Happy Yuetara week, everyone!