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Prompt: breath

Aang wakes up.

With one eye open at first, all he sees is the dark. For now he doesn't know what to think of the dark, with him waking up in the middle of the night from a dream of winged lemurs and flying bisons following him through some sort of paradise. He somehow misses the last slivers of that dreamy, dreamy state as he catches up on reality and figures out: I'm not looking at the dark—I'm breathing in Katara's hair.

It comes out to be an unusual thought since he doesn't just think, "I'm breathing in my girlfriend's hair." But he likes it. He learns to love it as he inhales the lovely smell of Katara—he's always dreamed of holding her close like this, and he has been able to do just that for the past two and a half years. It gives him that beautiful, elated feeling only Katara can. He doesn't need to hope she knows because she already does.

A few seconds later she shifts—he still does freeze a tiny bit before his arms encompass her waist; Aang is always careful—and he pulls her closer as he can feel her stretch her arms and yawn against his chest. Four breaths pass before she moves again, and finally she rolls to meet him face to face.

"Mmm." Katara squeezes in closer, giving full permission and reassurance for Aang to lock her right there—against him and his. They're each other's; they've established that. And after fights between the avatar and the master waterbender they've concluded that it feels great to be wanted, to be loved. It really does.

But it feels more exhilarating and safer in each other's arms.

He can feel her breath come and go on his cheek. A blush rises across his face, then he caresses the naked small of her back and eventually—yes, languidly—both their mouths meet in hot breath. It is an explicit display for no one else to see, of limbs upon limbs and of arousing sounds of hunger and beautiful thumps of two hearts coalescing into one.

At one point Aang inadvertently brushes the back of Katara's left knee as he kisses her clavicle and makes her giggle. She could feel his breath ghosting over her wet skin, then his lips kissing the place where her neck and shoulder meet and planting a close-mouthed smile right there. Then a laugh of his own tumbles up and around. Heavenly.

Light is coming in through the curtains. He can feel his twelve-year-old self cheer at a present revelation that was always there, hiding somehow: She would always be his breath and he hers.