Disclaimer: I do not own Avatar: the Last Airbender. I also cannot claim the initial seed idea, given anonymously on Tumblr.

keep the silence

you will get better at this with time

The problem, Katara decides as they stumble toward his bedroom, is fire bending practice.

It's how he moves sleek and powerful, like a predator, like a promise—while fire swirls along his skin in a way that excites her as much as it scares her. It's how his voice goes rough from calling out forms and encouragements and scoldings. It's how he catches her watching and his mouth pulls into a slow, sensual smile that says he wants her. It's…it's a lot of things, actually, but all of it leads back to fire bending practice.

Like this time: there had been fire bending practice, and then Aang had scampered off mid-kata to throw himself into the ocean alongside Sokka, and then Zuko had ignored his errant pupil in favor of prowling toward Katara where she sat on the porch watching them, and then he'd said Water? in a way that made heat coil low and tight in her belly.

So now here they are: his warm hands gripping the backs of her thighs as he hoists her up, her legs wrapping instinctively around his waist even as her hands slide up to anchor in his sweat-mussed hair, their lips colliding hungry and needy and wrecked while they try to make it to his bedroom with its stupidly comfortable bed.

Zuko apparently loses some of his patience because he pushes her up against the wall, hips thrusting upward to catch against her rapidly dampening core, and his teeth sink into her collarbone. Everything in her tenses and then releases in the sweetest way. "Zuko," she moans, drawing it out a syllable or three too long. And when his lips curl up into a smirk against her dark skin she does it again, just to tease.

"Katara?"

Both of them freeze.

"Is that…?" Zuko asks. He sounds somewhere between disbelieving and angry. Absentmindedly Katara smooths a hand through his hair in a patently soothing gesture.

The voice, distinctly feminine but with a brashness more familiar from Sokka, comes again. "Katara, are you in here?" By all accounts, Suki has some of the softest footfalls of any of them. Probably due to her warrior training if any of them wanted to justify it. But in the burst of oh-spirits-no they seem like the booming of thunder or something equally ominous.

"It is," Katara says. Her answer to Zuko's question seems a little anticlimactic. The smile he gives her—not full blown, just a small tilt at the left corner of his mouth—says he thinks it's cute.

It would be a delightfully romantic moment except that Suki is still coming. "Do you know where Zuko is? Sokka bought some food from a local vendor—we're going to have a cookout on the beach. We were hoping Zuko could light the fire—"

"I'm not a spark stone." Its just a touch too loud, and Suki's footsteps pause. Katara bites back a laugh and smacks Zuko's shoulder lightly. The right side of his mouth tilts up and now he's grinning, impish and not at all apologetic. In the dimmer lighting of the house, his normally gold eyes seem mellowed to amber, warm on her skin.

Spirits, he's handsome. Katara's pulse flutters just a bit. She leans down the inch or so between them and presses her lips to his. Soft and chaste and utterly at odds with the way they're wrapped around one another like they're heartbeats from fucking each other senseless. "Let's get out of here," she breathes in the space between their lips.

By the time Suki rounds the corner there's no sign that anyone had ever been in the hall. She brushes off the faint noises she'd heard as odd noises houses like this are bound to make and returns to the beach. It's only later, when both Zuko and Katara show up with slightly mussed hair and half smiles that she thinks maybe she'd been wrong. But then Zuko chances a soft kiss to Katara's cheek when he thinks no one is looking and Suki…Suki thinks she'll keep her silence. At least for now.