characters: aang, katara, zuko.
etc: gotta switch points of view every two chapters.

…

iii. let me throw my head back and laugh
of learning to share perspective
…

Zuko can never enjoy the air that pulls through his clothes as he slips between levels of the air temple. Sometimes, it can be so strong and so suffocating that he anticipates a fistful of air to grip the back of his tunic and toss him into the crevasse below (and even though he suspects it is where he belongs, something about the wind being stolen from his lungs until the shattering of his spine against the earth doesn't seem fitting to him, lying there as all the air rushes back for a final, hauntingly desperate inhale).

He always seems to aimlessly wander towards the spot for their mediation, as if it pulls at him, the earth peeling back and pressing together, a tiny ridged mountain that he and Katara always straddle. Zuko pictures curls of fire on one side, running along the small slope, never to intertwine with the foamy waves that crest on the opposite side. He tries to count the hours that have passed since he last spoke, mere slivers of an entire day slipping away as he thinks.

It was foolish to expect her to be stretched under the pressure of the gravity in his words, because she could have never understood those feelings. He'd wrestled so long with his right to make choices, wrestled with the fire that burned in his veins and begged to destroy.

No, Katara would have never understood what it was like to push poison through his own body for years, to fuel it with hatred and bitterness, to constantly have to struggle between hurting others or hurting himself, because fire only ever hurt, only ever reduced beauty to ash. (He'd long since taught himself not to remember how fire melts the flesh from bone immediately, taught himself to desensitize it all.) The decision to withhold didn't exist with fire, not the way it did when he handled steel.

"How long have you been sitting here?"

She is a formidable woman, because he knows the warrior's heart that tears at her insides, even though the sight of her with her hair wound in a dripping, spiral bun and her lips poked into a pout leaves him to wonder how she retains her softness. She is formidable, and she is a woman, and Zuko knows better than to let either of those facts disarm him from the validity of the other. (To say, that her softness does not discredit her ferocity, and that her ferocity does not overshadow her softness.)

"A few minutes," Zuko replies, but she sits so suddenly that it hardly matters, and something floral and earth scented drifts across the small space. When she scoots forward, their knees touch in a splash of chill, freshness that drags his thoughts into the fact that she was bathing.

"Last time, I, uh," she fumbles, and he huffs quietly.

"I didn't mean to just walk away like that," he frowns, and she raises an eyebrow in frustration.

"Yeah, well, don't do it again, okay?" Katara folds her arms across her chest, and he swallows; a perfect mixture of her wrath and her femininity, all in one gesture. "I didn't know how to explain to Aang that I didn't speak."

Her cheeks scatter with blush but he doesn't say anything about it. "I'll follow the rules, promise."

Katara seems wholly unimpressed, but she purses her lips in thought and that is enough to sate him for now. For a few minutes, the only thing to listen to is the sound of their breaths mingled together, like living currents of wind back and forth. He coughs into the crook of his elbow for what feels like an eternity; Katara shifts and pulls her hair out of the knot to let it dry.

"Listen, I don't like this idea any more than you do," she tips her head back in a way that Zuko can only think belongs to a royal, someone entitled and confident, and yet Katara retains none of the sharpness he recognizes from his experiences, "but I suppose, until Aang comes along, we have to, uh—"

"Bullshit?" Zuko blurts out, and something like a smirk (or is it a real, genuine smile?) tears across her soft lips, and he thinks he even sees her shoulders twitch to repress a laugh.

…

"I just freeze a walkway," she says, a devious look pinned onto her features, looking at him with a slightly sadistic amusement.

"But how?" Zuko's hands crumple in front of him in confusion as he stares at her, "It's all ice, what's to say you won't just slide off of it and fall off the side of the temple?"

Katara traps her bottom lip between her teeth, thinks about it for a moment before she lowers her gaze (and maybe something sultry bites back at him within those blue eyes, but it's all imagination, at this point, and Zuko is more pleased that they can converse, even trivially). "You'd like that," she says tauntingly, and she reaches her fingers out to walk across his knee, freezing a pathway, "wouldn't you?"

He splutters, swatting her away, and he waits until she snatches her dark hands away before he melts the ice. "I just don't understand how airbenders—how does Aang solve anything like this?"

"I really appreciate Aang, you know," and Zuko wonders what word tripped up her tongue, how deep her appreciation is, "but this has to be the most terrible idea he's come up with, and there have been plenty of terrible ones."

…

It passes so quickly that—

"Are you talking about me?"

He floats over the cliffside so rapidly that both Zuko and Katara scramble away, stirring up dirt underneath their hands as he whirls into place, and Katara's shoulders shrink up with nervousness, her laugh is a flighty, unbelievable thing. It's so obvious to him that they have such a drastic effect on the other, because Katara becomes wobbly around her knees and Aang becomes soft in his skull, and Zuko just stares at them.

It's so easy to forget that they're all children.

And yet, when she says, "Of course not, Aang," there is a gentleness to her voice that melts Aang into nothing but a childish smile and globe of air between his palms, and it's almost like they haven't spent the last five minutes talking about the Avatar at all. But Katara retreats behind Aang, curls starting to fray and frizz with the heat, and she looks over her shoulder to toss him a look.

He doesn't miss it; he smiles at her, and it disarms her.

…

notes: for rachel and beantara, because her sass inspires me. this was supposed to be so much shorter, but i couldn't cut any of this out, sorry. if you have a moment, you should leave me a review :)