slow dancing (v) - to dance slowly

Bending is like dancing, an art made by the body and its movements.

Katara has heard this comparison before in her travels, and she can see how it is true. There are many different styles of bending—slow and graceful and evasive and fast and sharp and direct—and in her travels, she has also seen that there are as many styles of dancing, perhaps more, as there are styles of bending.

Among her own people, in the Water Tribes, the dances are commemorative. The women are the keepers of memories, of ancient stories (even the North has allowed them that honor beyond their confinement to cook-fires and healing huts), and on cold winter nights and during festivals, they dance together in the lodges and around fires, bringing a people together against the water and the cold. Their fluid movements tell stories of the weather, of the ice, of the gods, and of the whales and the tiger-seals and the hunt.

In the Fire Nation, where dancing was publicly forbidden for long years, many of the dances have been forgotten, but in the Fire Sages' archives and in rural towns where the laws were less strictly enforced, there are dances that are sharp like the nation's bending and are as much performing as they are storytelling. Zuko tells her that the dances mostly tell stories of the gods, of Agni and his warriors and of fire filling the land.

The Earth Kingdom's dances are as varied as its people. Katara has seen them sometimes, when she happens to be visiting Toph during a festival or during planting-time, when earthbenders and dancers each make offerings of their movements to the land to ensure a good yield. The Earth Kingdom's dances tell stories, too, like those of the Water Tribe, but their stories are of crops and mountains and ancient warriors revered in battle.

No one quite remembers the dances of the Air Nomads. Aang isn't sure they danced at all, even though his love of airbending and its airborne motions make him well suited to the pastime, and the nuns that Katara has met—the abbey at Mo Ce Sea continued to run its nunnery during the war, and its neutral stance made it a repository of knowledge—live in such austerity that Katara thinks Aang's memories might be correct.

But one day, a wrinkled, solemn-faced nun takes Katara down to old cellars, full of perfumes and wine and dusty trunks, and pulls out old scrolls. Katara sees, then, in script she can't decipher but in pictures she can understand, that the airbenders did have their own dances, dedicated to the wind and the promise of freedom from earthly confinements.

She tells Zuko about the scrolls that evening as they're curled up together in their room in a far corner of the abbey (the young Fire Lord has several gallons of shirshiu-destroyed perfume to pay for as well as helping the Avatar recover remnants of his people's past), and Zuko smiles a little ruefully and says he remembers Iroh saying something, over tea during his banishment, about all of life being like dancing—a series of interconnected movements that, taken alone, seem isolated, but that, seen as a whole, tell a life's story.

Zuko had been angry and focused and unwilling to listen at the time, dismissing the comment as more of his uncle's foolish babbles, but here, in the quiet that falls over the abbey at nighttime, she can see in the soft fondness of his yellow eyes as he speaks that he thinks more highly of his uncle's words now than he did a few years ago.

She is thankful every day for Iroh's influence in Zuko's life.

Zuko won't dance with her publicly—she's asked, several times—but as Katara lies awake that night, wrapped in her new husband's arms, she thinks that Iroh is right. They were separate before and now are joined in a slow dance of days that ebbs and flows like the tides and changes like a fire in the wind, but each choice is one that entangles their lives more fully.

He won't dance with her publicly, but Katara likes this sort of dancing, the forging of their lives together every day, even better.

So she kisses his shoulder and smiles when he stirs in his sleep and pulls her tighter. She settles against him and falls asleep herself, a half-coherent prayer of thanks to the spirits drifting in her mind.