Fandom: Avatar: the Last Airbender
Pairing: Jet x Katara
Theme set: beta
Rating: T / PG-13
Warning[s]: Non-explicit sex and death, AU. And if you don't know why it should be AU, stay away from the cut or prepare to be spoiled.
# 01 - Walking
Life, Jet eventually realised, went on whether you liked it or not, even after everything you knew and loved went up in flames, even after your own people declared you a menace and you almost died at the hands of those meant to protect your country; the little jolts every time you realised your mother wasn’t there to comfort you, nor your father to praise you, that blue eyes weren’t smiling at you, were a sign that it was time to start filling the gaps with something less cankterous than hatred, more nourishing than memories, grief and regret.
# 02 - Waltz
Beautiful though it is to watch, Katara has rendered Jet unable to enjoy the graceful choreography of the waterbenders that now travel freely through the Earth Kingdom; memories of the tears she shed and the things she said ruin the comfort and satisfaction peace should have brought to those who fought to bring it about.
# 03 - Wishes
She did not come back for him, his affection, his wants, his forgiveness; she came back to demand that he either prove his claims from Ba Sing Se true, or give back the heart he had stolen from her in the woods.
# 04 - Wonder
The first time she dons her Painted Lady guise in front of him, he stares at her as if struck with waking dreams; he’s never quite the same afterward.
# 05 - Worry
Sometimes, when the wind turns cold or rain makes the roof of his forest home rustle, his thoughts drift to Katara, not unappreciative of the irony as he worries about the people who have not yet learned the lesson she taught him.
# 06 - Whimsy
Jet wasn’t one to mope, she knew (because a leader, he’d told her, was supposed to keep up the spirits of his troups instead of demotivate them), but from the weird looks Smellerbee gave her those first few weeks, Katara suspected he wasn’t usually quite this cheerful, either.
# 07 - Waste/Wasteland
After the end of everything they visit what was once his village, and after a long, lost look he crushes her to his chest to bury his tears in her hair and breathe in her scent like a new beginning: "I never expected to come out of this alive."
# 08 - Whiskey and rum
Katara is surprised to learn that Jet refuses to drink liquor, and doesn’t make up her mind for a long time about the reason he gives: "Forgetting is a coward’s way out."
# 09 - War
The tides of war call to them, always, singing in their blood with howls of rage and sorrowful lamentations, but the only drums to resound in their cavern of tarp and branches is the synchronized beating of their hearts.
# 10 - Weddings
"This is how they do it in the Southern Water Tribe, right?" he asked, and Katara does not tell him no (he has decorated the entirety of the fabric, polished wooden beads and simply looped twine against plain green cotton, with a motley tuft of feathers dangling from the front), but lets him put the necklace on her and starts a tradition of her own by wrapping blue around his throat; he is hers as much as she is his.
# 11 - Birthday
When she asks him, many hard years later, what his birthday is, he tells her one last lie and says it’s the day he realised she’d finally forgiven him.
# 12 - Blessing
Where once was Sokka’s ridicule and Pakku’s disdain is now Jet, encouraging and supportive all the way through, and the chill that runs up her spine as her water slices through trunks broader than The Duke is tall, and makes boulders burst from the inside out, fails to chase the butterflies from her stomach.
# 13 - Bias
She can’t trust Jet, with his suave charm, oozing self-confidence and intoxicating charisma, but he makes it hard for her to remember that without trust it’s not really love.
# 14 - Burning
It’s a good thing she’s breathless and almost delirious with pleasure; if she told him how the things he was doing to her made her feel like pulsing, dancing flames were wrapped around her, hollowing her out, he might stop.
# 15 - Breathing
He knows better than to degrade her skills by saying it out loud, but sometimes Jet thinks that making him drown in her eyes is Katara’s greatest feat as a waterbender.
# 16 - Breaking
Jet was, of course, right when he said they should have known better than to put their combined weight on a single branch while spying on them; Katara was just glad he told it to her, instead of Sokka and The Duke.
# 17 - Belief
Katara was always one to believe more strongly than the facts warranted; maybe that’s why she has yet to give up on Jet.
# 18 - Balloon
The day the Fire Nation stole the skies and broke the protective spell of their treetop home would be remembered as the first time Jet had to stop her.
# 19 - Balcony
Bringing Jet along had been a gamble (Sokka needed to shut up about the Freedom Fighter’s heart being too full of hatred for any love for the world to fit in, lest she start believing it), but when they look out over the Northern Water Tribe capitol together and all he can do is hold her hand, too overcome with emotion to even flirtingly compare her to the beautiful view, Katara knows taking the chance was worth it.
# 20 - Bane
"Hold still!" she orders with her best healer’s voice, and he complies, but it doesn’t stop him from muttering: "Those penguins are going to be the death of me."
# 21 - Quiet
He is naked and drowsy beside her when she finds the knife underneath his pillow, but when she asks how he got it, the rigidity in his face and limbs puts the walls of Ba Sing Se to shame.
# 22 - Quirks
His would-have-been-sacrifice in Ba Sing Se helped, but what really clinched the deal for Katara was that Jet did his own laundry.
# 23 - Question
"Of course it’s not what my parents called me, but it’s who I am; quick, forceful, intangible, unstoppable."
# 24 - Quarrel
He admits he misses the forest as readily as she admits she misses the ice, and neither suggests leaving the city.
# 25 - Quitting
She’s thought of leaving him before - never really stops thinking about it - but she never does, because it would feel like giving up on what could have been.
# 26 - Jump
After she’s travelled the four nations, seen every wide expanse and hidden cranny of the world, fought and loved, won and grieved, a home of timber in the treetops is the anchor that keeps her from losing herself to memory on every breeze.
# 27 - Jester
Despite everything, Katara cannot help but be amused when big bad Jet turns out to be sea-sick.
# 28 - Jousting
Once bitten, twice shy; Katara never lets Jet get away with showing off anymore without taking it as a challenge.
# 29 - Jewel
It takes a visit from Suki and half a day’s worth of gossip for Katara to start thinking that, for all his smooth talking and glue-like qualities, Jet was a rather stingy boyfriend in the flowers, candy and jewelry department - but a heartbeat is enough to both remember and reevaluate the handkerchiefs full of roasted nuts that have a tendency to mysteriously appear on her bed, and the way Longshot’s pineapple cone creations were wont to end up in her general vicinity once he got bored with them, and the wildly glittering pebble Jet had once flicked at her head while bathing; his uncharacteristic embarassment when she thanks him that night is the most endearing thing in the world.
# 30 - Just
Katara asks him how he could expect her to trust his judgement when she can still see the dam burst behind his eyes sometimes, and she will keep demanding an answer until understanding clears his vision.
# 31 - Smirk
She hates his lips, hates every word to flow from them, every smile they quirk into, every inch of bare skin tingling beneath them; nothing should have such power over her and yet make her feel so good.
# 32 - Sorrow
Tears froze to her cheeks as she watched the burning kanoe drift out onto the icy seas of the north, smoke and memories blurring her vision: "Are you kidding? I’m Earth Kingdom, I’m not going to die in a place where I can’t even get a proper burial."
# 33 - Stupidity
It didn’t stop her from saving him, but Katara thought that anyone who managed to forget they couldn’t swim in their eagerness to show off actually kind of deserved to drown.
# 34 - Serenade
Katara was new to the mere concept of whistling, but it doesn’t take long for her to twitter the birds from the trees and make Jet’s jaw drop at her... provocative improvisations.
# 35 - Sarcasm
"Maybe Katara could kiss him; that should bring something back."
# 36 - Sordid
Even cursed luck is luck; if there was anyone Katara would have wanted to walk in on them in such a position, it was Longshot.
# 37 - Soliloquy
It is at night, when sleep breaks his voice and drags him back to being eight years old and watching the world burn, that Katara remembers why she stays with him.
# 38 - Sojourn
As hard as he tried to convince himself that the Freedom Fighters had more than enough members to keep his thoughts occupied, that Ba Sing Se held enough people to fill his heart trice over, his treacherous senses told him that grey eyes were blue, hair loopies were attached to every ordinary braid, the weathered hands of bar maids were soft and gentle: he missed her, plain and simple.
# 39 - Share
Katara had the peculiar ability to love everyone who needed to be loved, regardless of who they were or what mistakes they had made in the past; Jet often wondered what he had done to make her love him most.
# 40 - Solitary
At night, with only Yue’s immortal eyes still open to the shadows of broken hearts and lost innocence, Katara tries to retrace the path Jet’s fingers trailed along her skin in those stolen hours in the trees.
# 41 - Nowhere
"Just so you know," he whispers at the last moment, the terrifying odds resonating in his voice, "if I go first, I’ll wait for you on the other side; I’ve always wished I could take you home to meet my mother..."
# 42 - Neutral
His complexion is alltogether too light (he’d go horribly pale in the polar winter) and in the presence of her tribe the lack of blue eyes to stand out against brown skin and hair reminds Katara of his native badgermoles, but when she watches Jet show off to Sokka’s kids, manouvreing the ice with the easy grace of a practiced climber and dressed in blue sealion furs, she wants to hear him call this home.
# 43 - Nuance
Not like before, there is now a natural transition between the clash of icicles on steel, the scrape of bark beneath their feet, the snap of branches - and the thud of suddenly being hugged between a bed of leaves and a firm body, lips melding and empty hands groping for skin.
# 44 - Near
"Because I love you too much!" he screams when she demands to know why he did it and what reason she has not to drive a blade of ice through his chest right then and there. "I love you and I want to stop fighting you and stop fighting the Fire Nation -" here his voice cracks, and he finally sounds his nature; a boy, not even a man, broken too deeply; " - and I’m scared, Katara..."
# 45 - Natural
Sometimes the urge to hurl him bodily from the tree became so strong it overrode even her most deeply ingrained bending instincts... and she could have sworn he only became more annoying after she realised how much he enjoyed it.
# 46 - Horizon
From the top of the highest tree in Jet’s forest, the view is endless; Katara imagines she can see all the way to the ocean.
# 47 - Valiant
Behind every great man is a woman ready to freeze his ass to a tree when he tries to do something stupid.
# 48 - Virtuous
Ever since the Avatar ‘freed’ him from the false peace planted in his mind by the Dai Li, Jet has feared (hoped) that he could (let himself) slip back into being the person they tried to make of him, wizened but not haunted, willing to fight without hungering for it; he does, eventually, because he believes Katara can make truth bloom from the illusions.
# 49 - Victory
Not until he starts doing the right things for the right reasons does he realize she deserves so much better.
# 50 - Defeat
Knowing she would have done anything to keep him alive, Jet could have died a happy man... if it hadn’t made so much more sense to just give her what she wanted, that is.