4
His knee had not stopped bouncing for the past several minutes. The up and down motion was in time with his beating heart, but he hoped that his uneasiness was not apparent on his face. Aang glanced up from the menu again, trying to find courage to change this awkward moment, but he didn't know how. With a hesitant hand, he reached for his water, the cup beaded with condensation as he refused to look too long at the person sitting across from him. Gulping the icy tap water, the taste of iron sitting on his tongue, he considered that his restlessness could have been due to many factors, like the fact that he was dressed in a jeans and flannel button down instead of traditional red and orange robes.
Or, Aang contemplated, maybe it was the atmosphere of the "hipster" vegetarian restaurant that Bumi coerced him into choosing for lunch with a menu filled to the brim with cheese, tofu, and mushrooms. Couldn't a guy get a simple dish of vegetables and rice? However, despite the plethora of excuses that he could make, Aang knew that the real reason his nerves were in overdrive was the person sitting on the other side of the table.
"Aang?"
He hummed, unwilling to give a verbal reply. Drinking water was serious business.
"What are you trying to drink?" Katara asked. "There's nothing left in your glass."
He slammed the glass down harshly, startled by her innocent question, but then winced, a sheepish blush gracing his cheeks as he raised a hand to rub the back of his head. His voice was high, like a teenage boy's: "It's just a scorcher out there today, you know."
Katara offered a small smile, white teeth peeking through her dark lips. Silence was lulling between the two of them again, like the day she met him at the monastery, as if a reminder of everything broken and foreign between them.
"...I like your hair," she finally said, her fingers twitching next to the cutlery. "Don't think I've ever seen you with hair before."
He wanted wanted to make a joke that he planned on being a monk, but even to himself the joke didn't seem funny. Running a hand through his dark locks, he was glad that the previous itchiness seemed to be dying the longer it grew.
After a pregnant pause, he gave a weak smile back, "Thought I would try something new."
"Well, it's nice."
"This is nice too, you know," he blurted. He needed her to know that despite how upside-down everything had been recently, seeing her was still important.
A small noise escaped from her throat, her lips pressed together tightly as if she wanted to disagree with him. But before she could say anything, the waitress brought their meals. Noodles for him, stew for her.
Around them, the other restaurant patrons chatted happily to their friends and partners, laughing boisterously at what must have been a hilarious joke. Aang and Katara, however, only engaged in idle chit chat about the weather and her internship. The clinking of their silverware was a more meaningful conversation than the actual words spoken between the two.
Braving forward, he couldn't help but ask, "Is everything okay?" .
For a moment, he hoped that she was going to say that nothing was wrong and that all the excitement that he had until he sat down for lunch was going to come rushing back because he was finally spending time with Katara. In the pit of his stomach, where the food didn't sit well, he knew that was not true. After all, they both knew he wasn't talking about the stew.
Sighing, she put her spoon down calmly on the napkin. Her big blue eyes went straight through him, looking exhausted and unwell. Placing her hands on her lap and chewing her lip, she replied, "Why didn't you call me first?"
The rock that had begun forming in his stomach solidified and Aang didn't know how to answer. For the first time that day, he regretted meeting her somewhere public because there were just so many things that needed to be said between the two of them. They lost a year and half together because of obligations he didn't want, and now he feared that things were far too irreparable between them.
Taking his silence as a cue, she continued, irritation rising with each syllable. "I mean, I know we haven't been on speaking terms, but why did I have to hear from Kuzon?" She then took a deep breath, almost as if finally remembering that she was in a public restaurant. To defuse her anger, she began swirling her stew in the bowl, a distraction from the animosity that had rested so long in her chest.
Now, Aang was never one for confrontation, but as of late it seemed to be all that he had been doing. First with himself and his beliefs, then with the Abbott and the Order, and now with Katara. But regardless of how much he had thought about what he was going to say to her, despite the amount of preparedness that he had scrutinized over, he just couldn't understand the next sentence that came out of his mouth.
"Well, he wasn't even supposed to be there. I called Bumi," he said offhandedly as he took a bite of his noodles.
The scraping of metal on ceramic halted and her head snapped up to look at him, her face devoid of all emotion.
"You called Bumi?" she asked casually, as if she was just asking for the time. "You called Bumi first to go get you?"
He swallowed and wiped his mouth with a napkin, trying to find any way to stall. "Well, Bumi is my best friend; he always has been my best friend."
In the back of his mind, he knew that he should be wincing at those words. Bumi has always been my best friend, it echoed, yet that looping phrase did not stop the anger that he felt at Katara's silence.
"Do you have a problem with Bumi or something?" he demanded, bunching the napkin in his hand.
Her face remained blank for a few more seconds, colored in surprise by his question before she broke out into loud laughter. Loud and ringing, she disrupted the entire establishment with her booming voice, an avalanche of a laugh he had never heard once in all the years that he had known her.
Slowly though, her laughs ceased and she was breathing normally, her eyes burning with determination as she met his line of sight.
"Do I have a problem with Bumi?" she parroted. "No, Aang, I don't have a problem with Bumi."
Slipping the strap of her bag over her shoulder, she spoke to him like a child. "No, Aang. I have no problem with Bumi," she repeated. "The only problem I have is that I was stupid enough to think that you actually cared about our friendship, or hell—I was stupid to even think that you cared about me."
He sat there stunned, looking at the woman who sat across from him. His mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water, trying to grasp a reply from his now limited vocabulary. She thought that he didn't care about their friendship? That he didn't care about her?
But his stupor was shattered by the screeching of her chair being pushed in. His eyes zoomed in on her, noticing a clean and manicured hand digging into her purse to fetch her wallet. Hastily, she tossed some bills on the table and beelined towards the door, not even saying a goodbye as she left.
Though he had been slow the entire day, reality finally caught up with the ex-monk as he processed the scene in front of him. Throwing enough cash to make sure his part of the bill was covered, he chased after her—something he should have done a long time ago.
A/N: Well, sorry for the long wait! But here is the latest chapter! I have now finished grad school and I have moved back to the United States. I'm hoping for a more regular updating schedule too! :) Anyway, thanks for reading! Feel free to leave a review :)