dusk sweeps its purple hand across the sky; heathers the hues of orange in anticipation of the evening’s cornflower blue, and all katara’s eyes could see are these endless hills of sand — glowing beneath their feet like blood embers; no matter how many mounds they covered, how many sinking steps they took, the landscape remained the same, waves upon waves of sand - glutted slopes that slipped and rolled beneath their weight. she should be accustomed to it, she thinks, the unsteady ground — soft like the snow - jewelled terrain of her home, yet katara discovers that sand was coarser, that her steps sounded more like rows of grit teeth than the muffled exhale of frozen cotton; she discovers that where snow melts, sand sticks like ambers in mock fossilization, and most of all, she discovers the bite of frost was a caress compared to the heat - riven air, to the gusts of yellowed wind that whip her across the face, leave her pink - cheeked and breathless.
in the distance, aang’s silhouette is a black brushstroke against the sunset; he glides and dips; like a silver - tipped quill, the wings of his staff draw circles, questions, spell appa’s name with each maneuver. katara’s eyes follow him, always so high above, always among the stars, until light’s voice draws her back to the ground, and the heat, and their current state — exhaustion made tangible in the sheen on their skin, the heatwave searing its initials in the flush of his face, in the fissures on her lips. when she looks back up, aang’s gone, and light’s voice fills the emptiness the avatar’s left. it was oddly comforting, listening to light speak in wills and shalls, conjuring a plan in the heat haze. she can see ba sing se the way he describes it: the winding passages that snare the beating heart of the city, and appa, a white fuzzy clot blocking the secrets from flowing. light speaks, and katara listens, and maybe it was dehydration, maybe it was the headache ( like someone had set cotton on fire inside her skull ), but she found solace in his voice — one continuous stable note that went on and on and on. light yagami was stability personified. a pillar she could lean on if only she would allow herself to relax, to trust.
the last thing we need is a fire.
a stutter in her resolve; lips press thinly — she cannot, should not, let him lure her with a false sense of security, with the idea of warmth behind a branding iron. sure, he has answers, and it feels nice, so nice, for the world to make sense under his breath, for the snake beneath his words to whisper : trust, trust, trust. TRUST MEANS SURRENDER. katara's fingers ball into a fist. she marches after him steel - faced, refusal etched into the crease between her brows. the camp comes into view: there, toph shifts once, twice, as if movement alone can carve a bed out of sand; and sokka dances with dream - silhouetted visions which turn into ash in his arms. ' a fire, ' comes her answer to his query . . . but sand can't burn. ' no, we stay close, huddle together, our bodies should provide sufficient heat to keep us all warm — ' like they used to do back home . . . something shatters against katara's sternum, and she doesn't want to admit it's her heart.
she refuses to look at yagami, instead opts to kneel down in front of a desert marigold that had snagged her periphery. she cups it between her palms like a prayer, her head dips as she brings it up to her nose and breathes in, locks its scent in her lungs, as if there was enough space for both the flower and her apology. it only takes a moment for the flower to shrivel between her palms, and another moment for the water she had extracted to fill her pouch. ' come on, let's go before sokka hurts himself. '
continued . . . @namenoted
