Title: Thaw
Prompts: (from destructivesorceress) "You must have seen her dancing in the sand," - from Tiny Dancer, by Elton John
Words: 475
Notes: I love the way comparisons and similes and metaphors flow, and with Avatar fics, they tend to abound. :)
Sometimes Aang watches Katara when she's not looking.
He's been watching her ever since the two of them met a thousand thousand years ago it feels like, or was it only a summer ago? She's always moved beautifully, with a grace he used to find unnatural to her people, who lumbered around all day in multiple heavy layers like hibernating bears.
Katara moves as though she's never even touched a fur coat, never been weighed down by it. She walks on water and dances on air.
(Like they once danced together, outfitted in the colors of another nation but using the elements of their own to go through the motions, weaving through air damp from body heat like the spray from a fountain)
It makes Aang's heart tap out an off-kilter tattoo somewhere in his rib cage; the feeling snakes up his spine like (her) fingertips dancing along the scar on his back to heal him.
It thrills him and unnerves him, because he is not thinking only about the effortless fluidity of her arms wheeling about in the air and how her hips shift from side to side, rolling like the water she fuses in midair, beneath the blue robe that suits her eyes.
He is also thinking about Zuko, and how he firebends in a way that looks so like Katara, and how if you stood one in front of the other, their bending would overlap and complement each other in a stunning portrait of elemental symmetry. The coldness of water running down in tangles of vinelike streams darkening the surface and coiling like soldered wire. Beneath it, the intense heat of a torrid blaze, one that sparks against stone and fills the air with its luminosity before furling into a corona of red, of gold, of eerie white-blue.
The coldness of chips of ice reflected in the Waterbender's eyes the day Zuko made himself a part of their team. The fierce warmth of fire that came much later, warmth that was hardly subtle in the eyes of the Fire Prince as he, too, watches Katara bending, walking, doing ordinary things and making them look beautiful. Watching through golden eyes with something that is part admiration, part awe and fear and more of something else. Aang sees that Katara does something to him, taming what remains of Zuko's anger, cooling his intimidating nature like drops of rain sieving through leafy trees to calm a wild conflagration.
(And Aang is trying to ignore the steam that rises)
Like the moon eclipsing the sun on a hot summer's day.
He has to swallow hard when he remembers how, in the union of the sun and moon on one such summer's day eclipse, the cool breeze went stale and humid before drowning in the heat.
