Chapter Text
Aang Gyatso had perfected the art of being liked by everyone.
At Four Nations High, this was its own kind of camouflage. He was the boy on a deck striped with yellow grip tape, faded orange cap pulled low in every season, carving the long hill down to the school doors. Half the building knew the wheels and the cap before they even knew the name.
The boy, meanwhile, knew everyone. He greeted the janitors and the cafeteria staff by name; talked Mr. Bumi into letting the robotics club salvage the broken vending machine for parts; pulled weekend shifts slinging bubble tea at Iroh's shop, the Jasmine Dragon; and could defuse a hallway fight with a joke and a hand on someone's shoulder. Teachers loved him. Underclassmen trailed him like ducklings. It was easy to be everyone's friend, and easier still to hide inside that.
For Aang had the spirit of a builder: on the robotics team, he sketched designs and built the flight systems, the drones and the gliders, machines whose entire purpose was to leave the ground, while the ultimate dream stayed pinned above them all. He'd been saving for flight lessons since sophomore year and could recite the private pilot requirements like scripture; the drones were his compromise with gravity in the meantime.
Then, the summer before senior year, in a ceremony of his grandfather's people, he received the arrow markings, clean lines of ink running down his forearms to the backs of his hands. Gyatso called them a promise about direction. Aang mostly thought about them when his hands were steering something through the sky, or resting on the soft orange cover of the sketchbook that went everywhere the deck went.
All of that motion had exactly one still point. The robotics lab sat directly down the hall from the natatorium doors, close enough that everything the club built smelled faintly of chlorine. The boy who never stopped moving had spent four years parked at a workbench that faced the one set of doors he couldn't figure out how to walk through with confidence.
Katara existed on the other side of those doors. She was co-captain of the girls' swim team, distance freestyle, the kind of swimmer whose turns were so quiet that coaches brought younger kids just to watch her swim.
Out of the water, she was warm and a little bossy, quick to laugh, and quicker to take someone's side. Her best friend Suki swam the 100 fly and had a black belt. On weekends, the two of them posted dance videos, thirty-second routines worked out on a pool deck or in Suki's driveway, all easy rhythm and helpless laughter at the end. Aang liked every single one, usually within the hour, one orange heart lost among a few hundred.
A few times a week, she came down the lab's hallway on her way to the pool in the team uniform. If the door stood open, she would lift a hand and say, "Hey," to anyone in the lab, easy as breathing. Aang, who once talked a crying freshman through a jammed locker and a substitute through a mutinous seating chart, would answer with a wave and something that was almost a word. By the time he'd assembled the rest of the sentence, the natatorium doors would already be swinging shut behind her.
Aang had been in love with Katara since freshman year, which was the year he came up to her chin.
That was the joke of it, really. He'd sat at her kitchen table a hundred times, because her twin brother Sokka was one of his best friends and the robotics team's self-appointed captain. The two of them had met freshman year over a burned-out motor in Bumi's classroom, along with Toph, who did all the team's fine soldering by feel and pinned people twice her size on the wrestling team; and Zuko, who wired circuit boards with a focus that scared the underclassmen, and who had been immovably devoted to Mai, a girl he'd known since before either of them could hold a soldering iron. The four of them together were a great team.
Aang had eaten Gran Gran's miso soup at that table more times than he could count, always with extra tofu just for him, the household's one vegetarian guest. He'd lost to Sokka at cards in their living room, helped Hakoda carry the couch when they moved it, and been permanently claimed by Momo, the family cat, who despised everyone else and slept on Aang's jacket whenever he visited. Katara would drift through those afternoons, ruffle her twin's hair, steal a bite of fruit pie off Aang's plate, and call the whole group of them "the boys" (Toph approved).
She followed him on socials. She liked his drone videos with the same blue heart she gave everyone. But in four years, she had never once asked for his number.
"You could just talk to her," Toph said one afternoon in his living, feet on the ottoman and Appa's shaggy white head heavy in her lap, reading his silence the way she read everything. "You've grown, like, a foot. You have shoulders now. I'm told this matters to well-sighted people."
"She thinks of me as Sokka's friend."
"You are Sokka's friend."
"You know what I mean."
"I can't see your sketchbook, Twinkletoes, but Sokka can, and he has a big mouth." She leaned further back in the chair. "Several years' worth of sketches of the same girl's pouts and smiles. That thing is a liability."
When Aang's phone buzzed late on a random Friday night, he almost ignored it. He was on his bed with the orange sketchbook open, pencil idle, his secondhand guitar leaning in the corner where it lived, listening to rain start against the window.
Unknown Number: Hey, is this Jet? It's Katara. 🙂 Suki gave me your number, I hope that's okay!
Unknown Number: Did you take notes in Lit today? I had a dentist appointment and Ms. Wu is definitely testing us on that whole metaphor vs. motif lecture. 😬
Aang sat up so fast the sketchbook hit the floor.
He stared at the screen. He typed this isn't jet and deleted it. He typed wrong number, sorry and deleted that too, and hated himself a little for the deleting. Then he thought about her sitting somewhere across town waiting on a boy who spelled "definitely" with an a, and his thumbs moved before his conscience finished its sentence.
Aang: yeah i got the notes
Unknown Number: You're a lifesaver!! 🙌
Unknown Number: Okay, hit me. What's the difference? Simple words please, I've been staring at a whiteboard of confusion...
He explained it the way he wished teachers would, that a metaphor was a single door and a motif was the same door appearing in every room until you finally asked why. Then he sent a meme of a dog in a hard hat captioned i have no idea what i'm doing, and she sent back three crying-laughing faces and a full, correctly punctuated sentence about how he was nothing like she'd expected.
She texted like someone writing thank-you notes, every comma accounted for. He texted like any punctuation cost extra. Somehow the two dialects fit, and it felt like a first test flight, that weightless instant after a glider leaves your hand and before the air decides what it thinks of you.
They texted past midnight.
She told him butter mochi was her comfort food, the homemade kind from her mom's recipe, and that she still made a batch on rainy weekends, rice flour up to her elbows. He admitted that on mornings when his head got loud, he still flew the patched box kite his grandpa built him at six, alone on the hill behind the water tower.
He had never told anyone that. Everybody knew the boy who wanted a pilot's license. Nobody knew the one who still needed the kite.
When she asked if he had pets, he typed Appa's name, remembered the shaggy white dog was all over his socials, and deleted it letter by letter. a dog, he sent instead, and hated the little message for how carefully it had been built.
Rain kept on against the glass. He fell asleep smiling, guilt curled up warm and traitorous beside the happiness.
By Saturday, they had graduated to photos, no faces, by some unspoken treaty.
Katara sent Momo asleep in an extra mixing bowl, her butter mochi lined up like full moons on cupcake trays, and the pool's lane lines looking like sheet music.
Aang audited everything he sent like a man sweeping a crime scene. Nothing with his hands was shared in frame because the inked arrows across them would name him faster than his face would. Instead he sent Katara photos of: his fruit pie from the corner bakery, a work in progress jigsaw puzzle (with Gyotsa, not pictured), and the sky over the school annotated with arrows ranking the clouds by flyability.
Those arrows he could share. His own stayed out of the shot.
Then, at one in the morning on Sunday, warm and careless, he sent a photo of Appa mid-yawn, all white shag and cathedral mouth. He understood ten minutes too late what he had done. The dog had his own highlight reel on Aang's profile.
Katara: HE'S PERFECT. What's his name?? 🥺
Aang: he refuses to answer to it so it's classified
Katara: Classified. Sure. 🙂
That particular 🙂 kept him awake another hour.
Songs came next. She built him playlists with titles like full sentences, For Walking Home When It's Almost Raining, and he lobbed back single tracks at strange hours, little skipped stones of taste. She had ideas about bridges and key changes. He had thoughts on which songs sounded like altitude, flying, falling, and floating. It became a second conversation running underneath the first, and it never once needed his voice.
On Sunday, the group hung out in Sokka's basement. Zuko's spot on the basement couch sat empty again. No one had seen him socially since October, between fencing practice and spending time with Mai (who had come down with the flu, which made Zuko the minister of soup).
Sokka texted him a photo of the snack table captioned traitor and received a single thumbs up in reply.
"And who are you texting, Aang?" Sokka demanded, pausing the movie with the authority of a man whose home it was. "You've been compulsively checking your phone all afternoon."
"No one," Aang said, far too quickly. "Someone. It's fine." Katara wasn't home; she was over at Suki's house, texting him from under another roof.
"Someone or no one?" Toph asked from the beanbag. "Because his heart rate just went up. I can hear it. It's disgusting."
Aang held the phone above his head while Sokka climbed him like playground equipment.
Later that night, alone, he typed i have to tell you something and deleted it again, because the something had grown heavier every day he'd carried it.
Monday morning, Katara found the real Jet by the vending machines. Aang, a dozen lockers away and pretending to study a flyer for peer tutoring, forgot how to breathe.
"Hey," she said, warm as sunshine. "I survived the quiz. You're a better teacher than Ms. Wu, you know that?"
Jet's eyebrows did some quick calculations. Then his smile arrived, easy and mischievous, and he leaned against the machine like he'd been waiting there his whole life. "What can I say? You were a quick study. Worth staying up past two for."
Aang's stomach dropped somewhere below the tile. They had been up past two. That was his two in the morning, and Jet was wearing it like a jacket he'd found on a chair.
"Past two," Katara repeated, still smiling. "Right. Hey, remind me what you said about motifs? I want it word for word, for the final."
"Babe, it's all symbolism." Jet gestured expansively with his toothpick. "A motif is basically a vibe. You either feel it or you don't."
An expression settled in Katara's face then, resolute and final, like water going still after the last swimmer climbs out. "A vibe," she said. "Got it. Thanks, Jet."
She walked away perfectly pleasant. Beside her, Suki sipped her drink and regarded Jet the way a lifeguard watches a kid who has just announced that he doesn't need swimming lessons.
Aang cornered Suki after her practice, after Katara had already left.
"You gave her my number."
"I gave her a number," Suki said, unbothered. "Chlorine damage. Digits get slippery."
"Suki."
"You've been in my contacts since our history class last year, filed under 'Aang, bibliography hero.' I keep records on good project partners."
"That's not an explanation."
"And how did our boy Jet handle his sudden reputation as a literature tutor?"
"He took credit," Aang said, and the words still tasted like the wrong end of a battery. "He stood right there and took credit for things I said to her at two in the morning."
"Of course he did." Suki looked genuinely pleased, which was somehow worse. "That's the most honest thing he's done all year, showing her exactly what he is. I couldn't have scripted it better."
She turned to face him fully. "Jet talked over her for twenty straight minutes at Yue's party and then said her lap times were, quote, pretty cute for a girl. Meanwhile, you like every dance video we post within the hour, you time your club's pack-up to the end of our practice so you can hold that door for her, and after four years she still files you under Sokka's friends. So I gave her a number of someone decent instead. Sue me."
Suki shouldered her bag. "I thought about telling her the truth, but after some thought... You should be the one to tell her the truth, Aang. I'm surprised you haven't yet." She gave him an empathetic look. "You honestly think she would pick him once she knows?"
"That's not the point. She thinks she's been talking to someone else. I let her think it."
"Then stop lying to her," Suki said, and left him standing under the exit sign.
Katara: Funny story. Someone took credit for your motif lecture today. Should I be worried you have an impostor? 🤨
Aang stared at the screen while understanding arrived in cold degrees. She knew, or she nearly knew, and every road out of this ran straight through the truth. He didn't answer, and the not-answering felt worse than any lie yet.
The next morning she looked smaller at her locker, arms folded around her books like a shield.
When he finally worked up the nerve to approach, Suki materialized between them with a bland smile. He understood that whatever her scheme was, it did not include him chickening out halfway, so he retreated with his ears burning.
That afternoon, during last period, his phone lit up with one careful little Hey. Everything okay?, and he broke instantly.
The conversation stretched across the next two hours, threaded through her evening practice in bursts: a flurry of messages, then twenty minutes of pool-shaped silence, then her again, thumbs presumably still wet. At one point the silence ran long, and when she resurfaced it was with Pakku just made me swim an extra 400 for smiling at my phone. Oops! 🙂, which did something to Aang's chest that he elected not to examine.
Between sets, she told him why she swam distance instead of sprints, that the eight hundred was the only place quiet enough to hear herself think. He told her about the time he crash-landed a glider into Bumi's windshield and confessed within the hour, because carrying it around had felt worse than the trouble.
Katara: I like that. People who tell the truth before they're caught.
He read that message six times, heard everything underneath it, and chose Thursday the way he planned a flight path. The robotics lab sat empty that day, no club meeting, nobody soldering in a corner, and the pool across the hall went quiet too, because Thursdays were the swim team's rest day. It was the one afternoon a week when both sides of that hallway had no audience. Finally, hands unsteady, he typed:
Aang: i need to tell you something important, in person. can you meet me in the natatorium doors thursday after school?
Katara: Okay 🙂
Katara: You're not about to confess to a crime, right? 😅
Aang: no i just want to be honest with you. you deserve that face to face
Later, a voice note arrived, thirty seconds recorded on her walk home from the pool, wind popping the mic, her laugh landing before the joke did. Aang played it seven times. Somewhere around the fourth listen, the background caught up with him: night air, an empty street, the particular echo of no one else around.
Aang: wait are you walking home alone rn? it's late
Katara: I am. Every Tuesday since freshman year. Fourteen minutes, well-lit the whole way, and I swim distance, so I can outlast anything I can't outrun. 🙂
Katara: But thank you for asking. Noted and appreciated! 💙
Ten minutes later a last message arrived, Home safe! 🙂, and Aang exhaled a breath he had no official right to be holding.
He never sent a voice note back. His voice had spent four years at her kitchen table, and she would know it inside half a syllable. When she teased him about the silence, he claimed he had a throat thing and could barely talk that week, which was, in the strictest technical sense, the truest lie he had told her yet. His voice was exactly the problem.
She replied with a single thoughtful 🤒 and informed him she had follow-up questions for that voice whenever it recovered.
Wednesday at lunch, Katara steered Suki by the wrist across the cafeteria to sit at her brother's table.
"We're eating with you today," she declared to her twin.
"Are we," said Suki beside her, who had engineered a wrong number and everything downstream of it, and wisely said nothing else.
"Why?" Sokka asked, instantly suspicious, as his sister slid onto the bench directly across from Aang.
"Sisterly love."
"That's interesting," Toph said pleasantly, and went back to her sandwich.
"Hey, Aang," Katara said, and his name in her mouth was so easy that it took him a second to answer.
"H-hey, Katara."
His brain browned out like an overdrawn battery, partly because she had chosen the seat straight across from him, and partly because she was looking at him the way she looked at pace clocks.
Sokka was mid-rant. "All I'm saying is that the spring play needed vision, and when I improvised the death scene, that was artistic courage."
"You fell off the stage," Zuko said.
"And I became a legend."
Katara laughed at her brother's antics with her head tipped back, and Aang caught himself memorizing the angle.
She nudged her fries into the middle of the table without ceremony. "Want some? I grabbed too many."
Then she slid a folder across to Zuko, past the seat beside him that was Mai's by unbroken custom and had sat empty all week. "Gov notes. Tell Mai that falling behind is not a flu symptom."
"She'll appreciate the sentiment," Zuko said, tucking the folder away.
"Also, whoever watched me hand you her homework yesterday and decided we're secretly dating needs a hobby."
Zuko looked unwell. "Who is saying that?"
"Half of third period. Mai heard it before I did. She texted me to say she rated the rumor 'boring' from her sickbed."
"That's the most romantic thing she's ever said about me," Zuko muttered, and meant it. Then, he excused himself from the table to phone Mai.
Katara glanced between Suki and Sokka next, eyes bright. "You don't seem so annoyed now for sitting at your lunch table, Sokka."
Sokka choked on his drink. Suki smirked and bumped Katara's shoulder. "Double date? But please bring someone hot."
"Working on it," Katara said lightly, to her fries. Under the table, something bumped the side of Aang's sneaker. He almost forgot how to chew.
"Steadier pulse than the last one, anyway," Toph remarked, to her sandwich.
"You were right about Haru," Katara said. "I think I trust your judgment on matters of the heart."
"Call me the expert. I charge by the hour."
Aang knew that shorthand secondhand, because Sokka told him and Zuko. Junior year, Toph had listened to Katara talk about Haru, her boyfriend at the time, for ten minutes and delivered her verdict: Katara liked him fine but her heart needed more. Katara, instead of getting angry, had taken three weeks to decide Toph was right. The breakup had been very amicable. The two of them had operated on a standing truth agreement ever since, which was, Aang realized with faint alarm, a dangerous table to be lying at.
A cluster of sophomores drifted past the table then, and one of them, Onji from the art wing, went pink to the ears.
"Hi, Aang," Onji managed, and her friends dissolved into giggles and carried her off like a tide.
"Hey, Onji!" Aang called after her, sunny and entirely oblivious. "Good luck at the showcase Friday!"
Katara's smile stayed exactly where it was, but her straw went into her juice like a harpoon.
Toph tilted her head toward her the way she tilted it toward faulty wiring and said, "Huh," to no one in particular.
"Suki tells you're really smart, Aang," Katara said, reclaiming the conversation and leaning in a little. "That you've rescued Sokka's history grade at least twice."
"History is gossip with dates," Sokka said, with the serenity of a man who had never once missed a physics question. "I don't have a lot of respect for it, but Aang does. The system works."
Aang glanced at Suki, who was looking at him expectantly. "Did she really say that? I would've guessed she would’ve called me a disaster."
"You are all disasters," Toph said immediately. "But sometimes, Twinkletoes, you surprise even me."
"High praise."
Katara studied him with open curiosity, chin propped on her hand. "You don't like taking credit for things. Sokka told me the flight controller that won regionals was yours, and you made the whole team take the trophy photo without you."
He shrugged, sheepish under the attention. "Guess not."
"Well, I noticed," she said simply, "I see you, Aang."
For one reckless second, Aang forgot to be careful. "I'm going to need that in writing," he said. "A full sentence. Punctuation, an emoji, and everything."
There was an instant spark behind her eyes, swift and delighted. Under the table, her shoe found his again and stayed there.
Sokka made a sound like a garbage disposal starting up. Suki elbowed him without looking.
The cafeteria noise dropped away like water closing overhead. Aang stared very hard at the fries and understood that she had been at the edges of his life for four years, that everyone at this table already had a private lane to her, and that he was the only one who had built his out of a borrowed name.
After lunch, Sokka caught his arm in the hallway and guided him toward the trophy case with a grip that meant business.
"So," Sokka said. "Friday, Suki gives my sister a number. Sunday, you start checking your phone like it's a heart monitor. And last night at dinner, Katara smiled at her screen through Gran Gran's entire story about the fish market, which has never happened in recorded history. Then, today at lunch, you two are flirting with each other in front of all of us. Oogie level 1000."
Sokka pinched the bridge of his nose. "Here's my official position, as her twin and your best friend. One, if you hurt her, I will disassemble you and sell you for parts. Two, she could do a lot worse, and recently almost did, and his name rhymes with regret. Three, are you currently lying to her, which is the only part I actually care about. So whatever you've got planned, do it soon. Because if you don't tell her, I will."
He clapped Aang on the shoulder, softer than his speech. "For the record, I've been rooting for you since sophomore year. I think you two would actually make each other happy."
That night, past eleven, his phone lit up.
Katara: Okay, new theory: you're funnier at night. Video call? I want to test this under controlled conditions. 🧪
Aang's heart did something arrhythmic. He looked at his own dim reflection in the phone screen, the face she'd known since it sat a foot lower.
Aang: can't. my wifi runs on hope after 10pm
Aang: the video would just be a haunted slideshow
Katara: A haunted slideshow of what, though? 🤔
Three dots appeared and vanished. He put the phone face-down and stared at the ceiling, listening to the lie settle over everything like dust.
He lasted about an hour like that. Then he got up, took the guitar from its corner, and did the only honest thing available to a boy who couldn't use his own voice.
He knew the chords the way you know a road you've walked at night. Freshman year, Katara had played "Pualena" so relentlessly that it leaked under her bedroom door and filled the whole house. Sokka would pound on the wall and threaten to move to the garage, and fourteen-year-old Aang, losing at cards at the kitchen table, had privately decided it was the best song ever written, because it playing meant she was home.
He'd taught it to himself that same winter and never told a living soul why.
He recorded it in one take, just the chords, no singing, because the singing would have said his name for him. He pressed send before his nerve could file an objection.
The three dots appeared. They stayed there a long time.
Katara: I know this song.
Katara: I used to play it so much freshman year that Sokka threatened to sleep in the garage. I didn’t care because it’s such a sweet song. 🌺
Katara: Play it for me all the way through sometime. Words included.
Aang lay in the dark with his heart going like a tuning fork and understood what he had just done. He'd handed her everything. Doing had never been the hard part; he could record a love song at midnight and hit send without blinking, could hold a door for four years, could give a jacket away in the rain. It was saying that undid him.
All that was left was standing still while she looked at him, and saying it aloud.
Thursday morning, with nowhere left to hide, he panicked.
The message sat drafted in his phone from breakfast onward, i'm so sorry, something came up. rain check?, and he carried it through the day like a live grenade, thumb hovering over send in first period, at lunch, in the hallway outside the very lab he was supposed to be brave in. He told himself he wouldn't send it. He told himself that for six straight hours.
He sent it as the last bell of the day rang.
Three dots. Gone. Back again.
Katara: Oh.
Katara: Okay. Sure.
No exclamation points. No emoji. Aang read the two little messages four times, searching for the warmth that had been removed from them like furniture from a room, and felt every ounce of it land on him.
Sending it at the bell had been its own small cowardice, and he knew it: too late for her to make other plans, too late to catch a ride, too late for anything but her locker and an emptying school.
Rounding the corner to that locker minutes later, apology rehearsed and already crumbling, Aang stopped short.
Jet had gotten there first, one arm braced against the lockers with practiced ease. "So I've been thinking. After all those late nights, we should make it official. Dinner Friday. I know a place."
Katara closed her locker with great care, the way she did everything right before a race. "One question first. That song you sent me last night. What was it called?"
The toothpick went still. "The song."
"You played it just for me," she said. "It was very memorable."
"Right, right." His grin found its footing again. "'Burnout.' The Freedom Fighters. It's everywhere right now, babe. I've got range."
"Mm." She let the word land, calm and level, and placed the next ones like stones across a river. "The person who played for me didn't sing a single word, and he still told me more about himself than you ever have. So no, Jet. Not Friday. Not ever."
Jet slouched off down the hall with the wounded dignity of a cat that had missed a jump, and Aang stayed rooted at the corner, heart going like a starter's pistol, because she knew. She had known for days, probably. Then he registered the rest of it, that she was still standing at her locker with her cardigan wrapped tight around herself, blinking too fast at the rain-smeared windows.
Turning Jet down had cost her nothing. The canceled meeting was clearly another matter.
Outside, rain came down in gray sheets, and Sokka's car was already gone from the lot, Suki riding shotgun, the two of them having cleared out together on the shared assumption that Katara had plans after school. Neither conspirator knew about the cancellation that had landed with the final bell, timed by the coward who'd sent it so that nothing about it could be fixed.
Aang's skateboard was useless in this weather, which was not the reason he had Gyatso's car. He'd borrowed it that morning for the version of today where he told her the truth in the robotics lab and, if the truth went well, drove her home. He had canceled the brave half of that plan by the end of the schoolday.
The car sat in the lot anyway, patient as his grandfather, holding the other half open.
Aang took a breath and closed the distance.
"Hey. Do you, um, want a ride?"
She looked up at him, startled, and then kept looking up, as if recalculating something. "When did you get taller than me?"
"Sophomore year, technically. It was very sudden. Sokka called it a betrayal." Thunder rolled somewhere over the parking lot, backing him up. "It's really coming down, and I thought maybe..."
"Yeah," she said softly. "Okay."
She was quiet for the first block. When he glanced over at a red light, she was looking at his hands on the wheel, arrows running down to the knuckles, kitchen-table hands doing the ordinary work of taking her home.
She didn't say anything about it. Neither did he.
They ended up at the Jasmine Dragon with the windows steamed white. Katara ordered butter mochi without opening the menu and Iroh asked after her father by name while preparing Aang's bubble tea with a knowing warmth that made the boy want to hide under the counter table.
"So," she said, once their order was ready and they went to sit at an open table. "I've liked your drone videos for years, you know."
"I know," Aang said. "Blue heart."
"And lately," she went on, unhurried, "somebody's been sending me skies with little arrows drawn all over them, ranking the clouds." She bit into a mochi and slid the plate toward him. "They're better shared. Do you play anything by the way? You have the hands for it."
He looked down. The arrows lay on the table between them, pointing at her, which felt suddenly very on the nose. "A little guitar," he said, with the dignity of a man walking into traffic.
"A little guitar," she repeated, gravely, the way you'd repeat a suspect's alibi.
"They're from my grandfather's people," he said, tapping one line of ink, mostly to change the subject. "You receive them when you're ready to be responsible for your own direction. They all point forward. That's the whole idea."
"Forward." She propped her chin on her hand, a mirror of the cafeteria. "So which way are they pointing right now?"
His entire nervous system lit up like a runway. He opened his mouth, and Iroh materialized with the sweet treats on the house, the sublime timing of a man who had helped raise Zuko, and the moment slipped past like a dropped signal.
The rain kept coming, streaking the steamed glass. Aang watched it for a moment and heard himself say, "It's the same door again."
"Hm?"
"The rain." He nodded at the window. "It was there Friday night. It's here now. Same door, showing up in every room of the week. At some point, you have to ask why."
She smiled, a slow but genuine one, and then tilted her head at him, eyes bright over her boba. "You're the second person who's ever explained a motif to me like that."
He gulped his tea. There would be no third chance, he decided. Friends tell the truth.
Aang drove her home through the wet streets. Outside her house, the rain had softened to mist, silvering the porch light.
She paused on the bottom step. Aang pulled off the faded orange cap, which he never did, because it seemed to him that you didn't say a thing like this from under a brim, and made himself speak before his nerve stalled out on him.
"It's me, Katara,” he said. "The number Suki gave you. It was never Jet. It's been me since that first Friday, and I should have said so in the first ten seconds, and I'm sorry I didn't."
Katara looked at him for a long moment through the mist. "I know."
He blinked. "You... know."
"I knew by Sunday. Jet has DMed me exactly once in his life, and he’s not a great speller. Then someone sent me a one-in-the-morning photo of a dog who has his own highlight reel on your profile." A small smile surfaced, slow and certain. "After that, everything was confirmation. No voice notes, no video call, because I've known your voice and your face since freshman year."
Her voice went softer. "And then last night you played 'Pualena.' Nobody outside my house knew what that song meant to me. Sokka hated it. You sat at our kitchen table through all of it, and you remembered... You played it without singing one word, because the words would have given you away."
The smile tilted. "You weren't hiding anymore, Aang. You were asking me to find you. And I'll tell you something... Monday night I typed it out, it's you, isn't it, and then I deleted it letter by letter, because you'd built this whole careful thing, and I wanted you to get to finish it. That's why the canceling hurt. You did the bravest part in the dark and then ran from the easy part in the daylight. Please don't do that again."
"Never," he said, meaning it with his whole ribcage.
"Good." She came back down one step, lifted herself up by her toes, and kissed him, soft and chaste and perfect. Then, she disappeared inside before he could remember how breathing worked.
Aang stood in the mist for a full three seconds, then performed a silent, ecstatic spin on her wet lawn, arms out, the rain as a witness.
A moment later, his phone buzzed.
Katara: Drive safe! 🚗
Katara: And call me when you're home. You owe me a hundred voice notes and one song with the words left in. I intend to collect. 💙
He most certainly did.
On Friday morning, Aang came off his board at the school doors, cap low, deck under his arm, and stopped. Katara was waiting on the steps of the school entrance.
He looked at her, then down at the arrows on his hands, all of them pointing exactly where they had always pointed.
"Forward," he said, and walked through the doors with her.