i kept going back and forth on weather or not i wanted to make this a separate one-shot type thing, but i decided that i might as well continue with my drabble series.

so, setting this one up... eh, i don't know... i guess it's just a mildly angsty romance type thing.

oh, one more thing and this is important: SLIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD!!! DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU HAVE CHEATED AND WATCHED ALL THE EPISODES THROUGH THE DAY OF BLACK SUN. it's not really anything major, but i figured that i'd just warn you so you don't freak out at me.

i don't own avatar. if i did Katara and Zuko would kick every one of their former love interests in the face and then make out all over the four nations.

so meh.

He had always feared Water.

Not because he didn't think that it was beautiful, or because he thought that it was weak; oh no. Quite the opposite.

He feared water because he thought that it was too powerful.

His worst fear was drowning.

As a young child he had fallen into the pond in his mother's garden. The water had been everywhere. In his eyes and in his ears and in his mouth. All he could hear was a rushing and all he could see was darkness and bubbles. Dark, suffocating, and cold. He had screamed and couldn't even hear himself over the rushing, pressing silence that pervaded this murky world.

It had seemed to last an eternity before strong hands pulled him roughly from the water's cold embrace.

For weeks he would not go anywhere near water.

He refused to bathe, screamed when water was given to him at dinner, and would wake up howling in the middle of the night from dreams of cold, wet, darkness.

After a long time he began to go back to his normal life.

He bathed.

He drank.

He dreamed of normal things.

When he was banished and spent years on a ship, he got even more used to water.

He learned to swim and even enjoyed it sometimes.

But he never forgot his fear.

)rh(

She had always feared fire.

Everyone knew that fire was the enemy.

Fire was dangerous.

It hurt you.

Fire had killed her mother.

She could not and would not forget her mother's final screams.

The solders had arrived as they always did, amid a cloud of black snow. Oh how her mother had hated those faceless monsters that killed and stole without reservation. Her mother had seen them destroy her home. Her mother had seen them win too many times. So when the solders had pushed her aside to take her house, Her mother had fought for her and her family.

Three Fire Benders against one lone woman of the Water Tribes armed only with a club she barely knew how to use… it wasn't much of a fight.

Memories of her mother's horribly burned corpse would haunt her forever.

Every night for weeks she nearly froze, for she refused to go anywhere near fire. She didn't want to feel its warmth, to hear its roar, to see its glow; she lived as one with the ice and snow and moon.

Eventually she had to go near the fires, to face the sun, to begin to live again… but she never forgot the raw power of the flames; she never completely trusted them again.

Until…

The attraction that they had both been fighting had been harder and harder to ignore as the days to the final assault on the Fire Nation drew closer. But now, as they stood watching the moon rise at the Western Air Temple on the eve of the invasion that they had been planning for so long, it suddenly became impossible.

"You know," he said, as the huge silver orb rose above the horizon, bathing the world in it's beautiful glittering light, "this could easily be the last night we get to do this..."

He could tell by the way she stiffened and tensed that she knew exactly what he meant.

"You shouldn't talk like that," she replied in a voice slightly higher than her normal one "of course we'll do this again. We'll win. We have to."

"But-"

"NO!" She screamed and whorled to face him as he turned to her

Their eyes locked.

Her eyes, so blue, so deep, so powerful… just like water…

His eyes, so blazing, so raw, so dangerous… just like fire…

They fought it, but gravity is one force in the universe that will always prevail, and they found themselves drawn irresistibly toward each other.

Their lips met.

He drowned.

She burned.

And neither ever wanted it to stop.

oh the marvelous wonders of the smexy Zutara make-out scenes.

gotta love it.

pleeeeeeease review!!!