Day 2 Warmth
fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender pairing: Zuko/Katara rating: GA word count: 1,057 summary: Katara and Zuko run a night mission as the Painted Lady and the Blue Spirit, and the mask comes off before either of them means to let it. ao3 link: Day 2. Warmth for @zutaraweek
“You’re supposed to be terrifying,” Katara said.
Smoke from the diversion fire still hung over the rooftops of Manoa Springs, a small canal spa town. It glowed gold against a sky cleared of clouds. Katara stood on the tiled eave, her mask pushed back in her hair, watching the last guards stagger off toward rice wine they wouldn’t remember drinking by morning.
The Blue Spirit squatted beside her, unmoving, silent as ever until he reached up and pulled the mask free.
Zuko’s hair was sweaty. The black paint around his eyes had smeared into his scar, catching the last bit of firelight and making him look, for a moment, like something out of an old volcano legend. When Katara shifted on the tile, he grabbed her elbow to steady her without thinking. Even through her sleeve, his hand felt too warm; warmer than the night air, warmer than her own skin. She hadn’t been surprised by that for months. “I was terrifying.”
“You tripped over a barrel.” Katara looked at him, holding back a laugh.
Zuko glanced over at her and quickly avoided her gaze, feigning offense. “The barrel moved.”
That had got her; Katara laughed, and for once didn’t stop herself. “Yeah. Barrel-bending.” The words came out broken by her own laughter.
“Like your hat-veil thing didn’t get caught on a branch.” Zuko grimaced, a laugh escaping despite himself.
She stopped laughing immediately. “Trees move, Zuko, that’s not; my ichimegasa got caught—”
“—and all your face paint melted. Like a wet fire ferret.”
Katara reached over the eave and bent a thin rope of water up from the canal below, flicking it into his face without warning. “Well. Now so is yours.”
“Hey!” Zuko sputtered, wiping paint and water from his jaw, blinking through the sting of it. “That’s cheating.”
“I think being the Blue Spirit is cheating. Fancy swords, no bending. This is justice.”
He huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh; quiet, and real in a way the performance rarely was, and reached over to smear the last of the red paint off her cheekbone with his thumb. His thumb was slow and steady against her skin, as if he’d been waiting for a reason to be close to her.
“There,” he said. “Now we match.”
Something passed between them in that moment, before either could move on. There was red on his knuckles, red she hadn’t meant to wear, an accidental mark that meant more than they expected. Whatever Katara wanted to say slipped away before she could find the words, and for a moment, neither of them moved. His thumb still rested under her jaw, and the wind from the canal picked up just enough for her to feel his warmth through it, reaching her through her damp sleeves as if it had been waiting for a chance.
Then she laughed, too quick, a beat too bright, because it was easier than sitting inside whatever that had almost been. “We should head back,” Katara said, mostly to hide how flustered she’d gone, “before the others wake up. Or before we catch Suki and Sokka.”
Zuko groaned and dropped down from the eave, landing in a crouch that had gone unconsciously graceful somewhere over the last year. “I never told you about that. I asked Sokka for advice; I walked in on him mid-production. Candles. A lei. It didn’t click until I realized I’d literally walked past Suki on my way in.”
“No—”
“Yeah. She was wearing a lei the next morning, too.”
Katara laughed, then let a slow, conspiratorial look cross her face. “So. You and Mai. Never?”
“Song. Jet. Jin, and Mai when I went back home.” He said it flatly, already walking, already braced for what came next. “You’re nosy, and you’re not getting anything else out of me.”
Katara stopped walking. “Jet?”
“Yeah?”
“Jet. Not you too.”
She shook her head, and he could hear the smile in it even with his back turned. “Oh. Well. You’re sharing now, too.” Zuko said.
“Nope. Watertight.”
Zuko rolled his eyes toward the sky, toward the smoke continuing to ghost up gold from the rooftops behind them. “Watertight.”
“That’s what I said.”
He didn’t answer that. He didn’t need to; the quiet between them had stopped being the kind that needed filling, somewhere over the last several rooftops. They walked the rest of the way back through Manoa Springs with the mask hanging loose from his hand, and the last of the paint drying unevenly on both their faces, and neither of them in any particular hurry to wash it off.
Their walk back grew quiet, the silence now easy and familiar. Zuko fell half a step behind her out of habit, watching the trees instead of her, and she let him. The night had cooled, the kind of chill that comes off the water after hours of darkness. Katara shivered once, just briefly, before noticing Zuko had moved a step closer without thinking about it. He didn’t mention it. He never did. He would just stay a little warmer for a while, close enough that the space between them wasn’t cold, the way he’d done since Ba Sing Se, quietly and without fuss. She never asked him to stop.
Once, her shoulder brushed his arm rounding a narrow dock path; neither moved away. She could feel the warmth emitting off him even through that brief contact, banked low and steady the way a coal held its heat long after the flame had gone, and she let herself lean into it, just slightly, just for the length of the path, before straightening again like she hadn’t.
When Ember Island’s shoreline finally broke pale through the palms, she glanced behind at him, checking he’d seen it too. “We should go again without the disguises.”
Katara nodded, “I agree; I want to try the onsen and the food.”
“Agni. I’ll take you after the war if someone doesn’t try to kill me.”
“Who would try to kill you?” Katara bumped her shoulder against his on purpose this time, and didn’t pull away when he let it linger.
Zuko looked at her, raising an eyebrow, but put his arm around her as they walked back, the last of the soft warmth between them the only thing either of them was willing to admit to wanting.
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