Bindings

Summary: Kataang, OneShot. "He felt awkward and drowsy, standing outside with her chest bindings whipping in the night wind around him, flapping clean, reflecting the moon. He thought he could see her there, smirking at him, embarrassed." We learn the most about people through their clothes.

Author's Note: I apologize in advanced for those who were looking forward to yet another "Letters from the Falling Sky" update. It shall come soon. I feel terrible. Everything is moving so fast and here I am, popping out another innuendo induced OneShot.

Bad, scorpiaux! No lemon pies for you!

(This fiction occurs near the end of Book One, before the GAang meets Toph or defeats Zhao's invasion at the North Pole, way before Katara and Aang practice "Octopus form" in "Cave of Two Lovers.")

Enjoy this dripping brain child on sex and clothing and being bound to one another, my beloved readers.

Aang had grown accustomed to waking up from his nightmares and having Katara there awake with him to talk about it. One could almost assume that he had grown spoiled in the short period he had been with Katara and her brother. He enjoyed them. He enjoyed reciting his dreams to the amateur waterbender who also did his laundry.

Yet a night passed where Aang's thoughts and dreams were not met by Katara's soft, brisk nods of understanding.

Katara—exhausted from doing laundry at a nearby river and rather sick of staying up late and draining her energy sources—had fallen fast asleep at dusk and was not awake when Aang awoke in the middle of the night, sweating and breathing hard. He looked at her resting form in her sleeping bag and almost felt disappointed—almostfelt disappointed, but not completely. Watching Katara rest was almost as nice as having her awake to talk to him.

Restless and anxious, Aang stood up and walked the perimeter of their campsite, taking note of Sokka's undulating snores and the twitches that took place on his face. One day this warrior boy would grow to be massive. Aang could tell.

Katara's face was even-tempered. Her lips were turned downward at an angle, thought, and her brows seemed knotted. She looked upset. But also relaxed, as if receiving a body massage from someone she hated.

Aang smiled perversely at his own thoughts and shook his head.

In the distance, the Avatar could see that Katara had forgotten to remove their laundry, and so his favored pair of pants that he had stained the week before by mud wrestling with Sokka flowed calmly in the breeze, clean as it had been before. There were his two extra shirts, also crisp and yellow, calm dots in the dark horizon of the forest.

Aang walked towards the laundry lines, deciding to help Katara with this task, should she awake to find that their clothes had been ransacked by peddlers or thieves in the night.

Aang almost immediately noticed that the clothes were mostly his and Sokka's. Katara didn't dirty her clothes as fast as they did, and even when she did have a few unclean garments, she took the liberty of cleaning them without Aang or Sokka knowing. She worked quickly and efficiently. And, until now, Aang had almost forgotten that Katara ever washed her own clothes.

But now he saw them, blowing at him with the rest.

There was her plain blue kimono, strewn over the far end of the two lines, as if an invisible person rested in it. Right next to the kimono there were Katara's tight black pants with the white fur lining around the ankles. And then Katara's pastel sash, tied a few times over the line to guard against wind.

Aang's expression was unreadable in the pitch darkness when he walked up to Katara's clothes and felt them with his open palm. How soft they were! His shirts were hardly crafted of the same material. Yet as his fingers caressed the expanse of the fur on Katara's pants, he remembered where the fur had most likely come from—some dead snow rabbit or zebra seal—and then his hand came back to him quickly, horrified but also interested. There was a collection of sashes behind the kimono that he had yet to notice.

He walked towards them, squinting at the darkness before him and keeping an arm on the line to keep track of his progress. But these weren't sashes—they were too long to be sashes. And they weren't Sokka's arm coverings, either—those were darker, hanging only a few meters away.

Suddenly it occurred to him that these could be Katara's undergarments, and his face twisted into one of pleasant shock, eyebrows up, mouth slightly agape. He walked closer and looked behind him.

It would be a lie to say that he didn't feel privileged, because he did. But he also felt awkward and drowsy, standing outside with her chest bindings whipping in the night wind around him, flapping clean, reflecting the moon.

In fact, Aang had the nerve to reach out and touch one and—again, for the second time—he was amazed at how soft Katara's clothing was.

Daydreams ran into him, crowded his forethought. He thought he could see her there, smirking at him, embarrassed. She would walk towards him and rub her eyes and ask him sleepily, "Aang, are you looking at my chest bindings? Why on earth would you want to do that?" And he would move closer, and—

He could smell the essence of sea salt in her hair as she appeared, strip by strip, in front of him, underneath these white pieces. Maybe she would be naked, asking him to please hand her the clothes—she had fallen asleep naked and this is why she couldn't talk about dreams tonight. "I'm embarrassed from you, Aang," she would say, but then reach forward and kiss him, taking the clothing away and turning around, revealing her bare back and—

Another vision found him pulling her chest bindings off the line, removing them from the flimsy position that Katara had placed them. He could feel them—the very same cloths that held Katara's temperate breasts up, under the kimono hanging only a few feet away. And goodness knew where else they had been. He would hold them to his nose and look for her sea salt smell—look for traces of paint, to assure himself that Katara's perfect skin tone was painted on, not natural, as her skin tone often captivated and eluded him. And then he would—

"What am I doing?" Aang asked loudly, touching his forehead.

Then he looked around wildly and blinked. He shouldn't be standing here, he thought. This wasn't something that Katara would like, if she were to find him among her clothes. After all, there had to have been a reason that she did her washing at night. Perhaps it was simply to spare herself the embarrassment of putting clothes in front of the boys.

Feeling like a thief, Aang turned around to go back to his sleeping quarters when he was met nose-to-nose with none other than the ever-evasive Katara herself.

At the shock of finding her face this close, Aang yelped loudly and then slapped his hands over his mouth, blinking, fancying that this was maybe another one of his daydreams. His yelp had unsettled the night. But Katara wasn't going away. In fact, her vision before him now was only getting clearer.

He was even more surprised to find her laughing, a syrupy giggling that she covered with a poised hand.

"Katara!" he whispered loudly when he could think straight. "Oh! Ha!" He touched the back of his neck and avoided eye contact. "You scared me."

"Did I?" she laughed back.

He nodded eagerly.

She took a step closer to him, bringing their proximity even nearer than it had been seconds before. "Aang," she returned deviously, biting her lower lip. "What are you doing with the laundry this late?"

He wanted to answer that he didn't know—that he was just sleep walking, maybe—or that he was possessed with restlessness, looking for something to do since she wasn't awake. But for a short while he couldn't say anything.

It was her closeness to him. Did she realize how near they were? He could feel her breath on his face when she spoke. And her breath, like her clothes, was soft and free-moving, like a watery poem slapping his skin, tickling him.

He could also tell her that he was having very boyish thoughts about her—thoughts that would have upset the monks to unbelievable levels.

Aang shrugged and said instead, "There was nothing to do, since you weren't awake." And then he smiled awkwardly and crossed his arms over his chest, proud to find that he and Katara were nearly the same height now. Maybe one day he would grow to be as massive as Sokka, or much taller.

"Did you have a bad dream?" she asked, suddenly troubled about his state. "Which one was it? The one with the Fire Lord? Or Gyatso?"

"Uh."

"You know, I should give you one of Gran Gran's sleep remedies. They work wonders." She paused. "I can't believe I haven't thought of that before!" She pushed her tongue through the skin in her cheek, Katara's trade-mark "I'm thinking" gesture.

"It's okay," Aang returned, glad to find that Katara's original quest to find out about his late-night wanderings had been sequestered. But he couldn't help himself. "Do you always leave the laundry hanging up at night?"

Katara looked up and then turned her face. Aang imagined her to be blushing underneath the dark tones of the night, and then he wished that this could have occurred a little earlier in the day, so that he could have seen it.

"I'm exhausted," she admitted, yawning for emphasis. At her position this close to him, Aang could feel the warmth in her breath—the softness of the sea salt smell that devised every aspect of her. Then she looked up and him and smiled sweetly, touching his shoulder. "Why don't we go back to the campsite, Aang? You can tell me about your dream."

When he spoke to her of his nightmare moments later, he wanted to describe long thin ghosts that whipped about in the wind, choking him with a sensation not unlike that of desire, until the mother of all ghosts came to redeem her children, and they stuck to her like wet scrolls—wrapped and warped about her form, transparent like spring buds—and how sweetly they smelled! And how the mother phantom grinned and toyed with the other ghosts—ghosts of orange and yellow, she spun them around her finger and twirled them about her, laughing—yet he had felt bound to this phantom, close to her. And the only thing that had honestly bothered him about the mention of these apparitions was that the whole ordeal had ended too soon.

He wanted to tell her of their bindings—the things that bound he and Katara this late. Their talk of dreams. How he helped her with her chores. Their bending. It would be an enormous conversation in a future midnight such as this one, running synchronous with Sokka's undulating snores.