Chapter Text
The drive takes seven hours and Katara spends most of it in the back seat with her knees pulled up and her headphones in and her eyes on the window. It was either looking out at the windows or looking at Sokka, who has been asleep since the second rest stop and is drooling, or at the back of her dad's head.
She has a playlist going but she stopped actually hearing it somewhere around the state line. The same song has probably played three times and she couldn't tell you what it is. Outside the window the scenery has been the same for two hours, flat and dry and getting slowly greener the further they go. She tracks a road sign when it comes up. Forty miles.
She puts her forehead against the glass and closes her eyes.
The thing is that she knew this was coming. Her dad had sat her and Sokka down in the kitchen in January and explained it all. New job. Better position, better pay, better city. The house here is bigger than the apartment. Better school district. A yard. He'd looked at her when he said that last part, like a yard, was something she had been privately wanting, and she'd smiled back because she didn't know what else to do.
And it is all true. All of it is probably genuinely true and she knows it and she is seventeen years old and not a child and she gets that sometimes families move. She gets that. She had three months to get used to it and she did, more or less, and she said goodbye to Suki and Yue.
She's still tired.
"Twenty minutes," her dad says from the front.
Sokka wakes up. "Are we there?"
"Almost."
Sokka sits up and does that thing where he looks around blinking like he's surprised there's a car around him, and then he leans forward and starts asking their dad questions about the neighborhood that Katara already knows the answers to because she, unlike Sokka, reads the emails. She pulls her headphones out and rolls her shoulders and watches the town come in around them.
It looks fine. It looks like a normal suburban town. Streets and houses and a gas station and a grocery store and then more streets, quieter ones with trees and parked cars and kids on bikes. Her dad turns twice and then again and then pulls into a driveway and cuts the engine.
Silence.
"Okay, that's actually a nice house," Sokka idly comments and gets out of the car, and their dad gets out of the car, and Katara sits there a little longer.
The house is two stories, white with dark shutters, a porch with a bench on it, and a path from the driveway to the front door that someone has lined with small flat stones. It's tidy. The yard is bigger than she expected from the photos. There's a tree in the front corner that's old enough that it had to have been there before the house.
She stands on the driveway with her bag on her shoulder and looks at it.
Fine. It's fine. It's a good house.
"The moving truck is twenty minutes behind us," her dad says, checking his phone. "Let's get the key from the lockbox and start figuring out where things go."
Sokka is already on the porch. Katara follows.
The inside smells like fresh paint and cleaning products. It echoes a little when they walk. Her dad goes from room to room checking things off some list in his head and Sokka immediately claims the bigger of the two secondary bedrooms by walking into it and announcing "this one's mine" and Katara goes upstairs and finds hers.
It's at the front of the house. Bigger than she expected, bigger than her old room by a lot, with a window seat built into the bay window that looks out over the porch roof and down to the street. There's a closet that's basically a walk-in if you don't count the water heater taking up space in the back corner. She puts her bag down in the middle of the floor and stands there looking at it all.
It's a good room. She's going to put her desk under the window and her bed against the left wall and she'll hang the photos she took down from her old room and eventually it'll stop smelling like someone else's house.
She goes back downstairs and helps her dad find the lockbox key.
The moving truck gets here, which is the first thing Sokka decides to make a big deal about. Katara ignores him and starts pulling things out. They have movers, two guys, both quiet, both efficient, but there's still plenty to carry and she'd rather be doing something than standing around waiting for the rooms to fill up.
She's on her fourth trip down to the truck when she sees it.
She stops on the path with a box in both arms and stares.
Across the street, in the driveway of the house directly opposite, there is a car. It's orange. It's low to the ground, wide through the hood, something like the kind of car she sees in old movies and in magazines and not usually outside someone's actual house on a regular street. The hood is up.
And the person working on the engine is, well, shirtless. But, she wasn’t complaining, he was attractive to say the least.
Dark joggers. Completely bald, she takes it in as a surprise, but she thinks of it as something that looks, objectively, very good on him, probably all in the bone structure. And tattoos. It goes down both his arms, running from his wrists all the way up over his shoulders and she can see from here that there's something on the back of his neck that runs up to his forehead. He's leaning into the engine with one arm braced on the hood and his head down and he hasn't looked up.
There's music coming from somewhere near the car. She can't make out the song from here.
"Katara." Her dad's voice from the porch. "The box?"
She carries the box inside.
She only looks back once.
It takes most of the afternoon to get everything in. By five o'clock the movers are gone and the house has boxes everywhere, furniture in approximately the right rooms but not the right positions, lamps with no bulbs and a kitchen with no food beyond what they'd packed in the cooler. Her dad orders pizza and they eat it sitting on the floor of the living room because the couch is backed against the wrong wall and everyone is just too tired to be bothered with it.
Sokka eats four slices and talks for the entire meal about what he wants to do with his room and which friends from back home he's going to FaceTime this week, and Katara eats two slices and listens, and her dad eats quietly and talks to Sokka.
After, Katara carries her own boxes upstairs and starts unpacking the things she needs immediately, her toiletries, charger, laptop, the photo of her mom from her nightstand. She props it against the wall on the floor because she doesn't have a nightstand yet and sits back on her heels and looks at it.
She gets up and goes to the window.
The street is quiet now, getting dark. The houses across the road have lights on in their windows. The orange car is still in the driveway opposite but the hood is closed and there's nobody in the driveway. A light is on in what must be the living room of that house, and one upstairs.
She sees him three more times before Monday.
The first is Sunday morning. She's in the kitchen making coffee when she hears the music start up again across the street. She tells herself she's just looking out the window to check the weather, which is what she'd been about to do anyway, and so technically that's true. He's already in the driveway with the hood up again, this time in a grey crewneck with the sleeves pushed to the elbows so she can see the tattoos, and she can see from here that he has something in his ear, a stud or a ring. She can't tell from this distance. She gets her coffee and sits at the kitchen table and drinks it.
She stands at the window for maybe two minutes about it and then she sits down, she’s no creep.
Sokka comes in at eight-thirty and makes himself toast.
"Have you done anything about getting your schedule for Monday?" Sokka asked.
"Yes, I got it by email last week." She replied.
"I haven’t looked at mine yet."
"It sounds like a Sokka problem."
"Whatever."
They sit at the table together and it feels like the most normal twenty minutes she's had in a couple of weeks.
The second time was that afternoon. She's on the porch doing the reading for her History class. They'd given her the summer list late and she's two books behind, when she hears the car engine turn over across the street. It actually starts on the second try, and she feels it more than actually hearing it, and then the orange car backs out of the driveway and rolls off down the street.
She watches it go. He's wearing sunglasses and has his arm up on the open window frame and the car turns right at the end of the block and disappears.
She shakes her head and reads another paragraph of her book.
The third time is Sunday evening, and this one she's not at the window for at all, she's actually on the porch again, she's decided she likes the porch, it's warm and the bench is comfortable and she can read out there until it gets dark, and he comes back while she's out there. She can sneak all the peeks she wants at him. The orange car pulls into the driveway across the road. He gets out with a bag over his shoulder and a drink from somewhere in his other hand and that's when she notices the eyebrow piercing, because the evening light catches the bar of it as he turns to push the car door shut. Just the one, left eyebrow, and there's the small ring in his ear she'd half-seen that morning. He goes inside without looking across the street and the front door closes.
Katara reads until it's too dark to read and then goes inside.
She texts Suki that night.
K: okay do you have any intel on the kid across the street from my new house
It takes Suki nine minutes to reply.
S: depends who you mean
K: bald. tattoos. orange car. across from 8 Asami Street
S: OH
S: okay yes I know exactly who you mean
S: that's Aang
K: Aang what
S: just Aang as far as I know. I think he was at my cousin's school before I moved. I've met him like twice
K: what's he like
S: idk?? hes friendly tho. he does art i think. or music. something like that
S: WAIT
S: is he the one you're going to the new school with
K: I don't know where he goes to school
S: but if he does
S: katara
K: goodnight Suki
S: I need UPDATES
She puts her phone face down on the mattress. Then she picks it back up and googles Ember High School, because she realizes she still hasn't looked at where the school actually is relative to the house, and it's a twelve minute walk.
She puts her phone away and goes to sleep.
Ember High is bigger than her old school, which she knew from the website but which is different to actually experience. She gets there nine minutes before first period and spends minutes finding the right building for her homeroom. She makes it with two minutes to spare and sits in the third row because the back is already full.
The teacher goes through the register and mispronounces her name, which she corrects once and then lets go when he does it again. She's given a copy of the semester schedule and a student handbook she knows won't read and a locker number she writes on her hand.
Homeroom ends and she follows the general direction of everyone else and finds her locker by counting down from 221. It sticks a little when she opens it and has someone's old schedule taped to the inside from two years ago. She throws that out.
Her first two classes are English and then Chemistry and she doesn't know anyone in either of them. She sits where there are empty seats on both sides so no one is obligated to talk to her and she takes notes. She's been new before, enough to know that the first day is mostly just about getting around. Finding the rooms. Working out which teachers are going to be problems and which are going to be fine. Not getting lost more than twice.
She gets lost only once, which she's counting as a win.
Lunch she takes outside and sits on a low wall near the side of the building where it's quieter than the courtyard, which she gave one look at and immediately left because the noisy courtyard made her head spin. She eats her sandwich and reads her phone.
She's three bites into the second half of her sandwich when someone sits down on the wall about four feet to her left. Then the person says, "you're from the house across the street, right?" and she looks over.
The eyebrow piercing catches the light. Both of them, there are two, she sees now, two bars, one near the arch of his right brow and one near the tail of his left. He's also wearing a shirt today, which is notable.
"Yeah," she says. "I moved in Saturday."
"I thought so." He doesn't seem bothered about the pause that happened before she answered. "I'm Aang."
"Katara."
"How's your first day going?"
She thinks about it. "Fine. I got lost once. Mispronunciation in homeroom. Otherwise fine."
He nods. "Who's your homeroom?"
"Ozai."
Aang winces a little, just around the eyes. "Okay, so that's not great."
"He seems fine."
"He's fine now. Wait until October." He says it without elaborating, and takes a drink from the water bottle he's holding. "What else do you have?"
She reads off her afternoon classes from the schedule on her hand. He knows where all the rooms are and gives her the direct routes. He tells her that the English teacher, Pakku, is strict but nice but doesn't like it when people skip class, and that Chemistry is fine.
He tells her all of this easily. She appreciates it more than she would have expected.
"How long have you been here?" she asks.
"Two years. Since freshman year."
"Did you move here?"
"Kind of." He turns the water bottle in his hands. "I came to live with my guardian. Gyatso. He's been here forever."
She thinks about asking more and decides against it. They've been talking for maybe six minutes. "Is that his car? The orange one?"
Aang shakes his head. "Mine. Well, Gyatso got it years ago and he can't drive anymore so it became mine." He looks slightly more animated about this than he's looked about anything else. "It's a '71 Omashu Kestrel. They only made them for three years and then the company went under so there's not many left."
"I didn't know Omashu made cars."
"They didn't for long." He smiles.
"It looks good."
"Thank you. She runs good too, mostly." He pauses. "She'll be fully good when I get the carburetor situation sorted out. Which is what I keep working on."
"Is that what you're always doing in the driveway?"
He looks at her. She realizes she's confirmed that she's looked out her window enough to know this, and she holds his gaze and cocks an eyebrow. She lives across the street. Observing the street across is normal.
"Mostly," he says. "Sometimes I just sit with the hood up because it's nicer outside than in."
She didn't expect that answer.
He finishes his water and drops the bottle into his bag and stands up. "I'll see you around. I can show you the room for your next class if you want, I go past it."
"Sure," she says.
She wraps up the second half of her sandwich and follows.
He drops her at the right room with two minutes to spare, points out the shortcut through the side door that takes three minutes off the usual route, and then heads in the opposite direction without any kind of drawn-out goodbye, just a small lift of his hand. She watches him go for maybe one second before she goes into the room.
She texts Suki at the end of the day while she's waiting for the bus.
K: he goes to my school
The three dots appear immediately.
S: KATARA
K: I know
S: what happened
K: nothing, we just talked at lunch
S: that's not nothing!!! what's he like in person
Katara watches the bus come around the corner at the end of the street.
K: I'll tell you later
The second week is easier. She learns where everything is. She learns which staircase is faster for getting from the science wing to the English room and she uses it every time.
She doesn't have any classes with Aang, which she figured out by the end of the first week, but they have the same lunch period. She doesn't specifically plan to sit near him, it just turns out that she prefers the wall outside to the courtyard and so does he, and it's a long wall, and it's not a big deal. On Tuesday he's already there when she gets out and he lifts his chin when she sits down a few feet away. On Wednesday he asks if she figured out the shortcut and she says yes and he says that's good. On Thursday it rains and she ends up eating in the building.
On Friday it's dry again and she gets there first and sits down and he shows up about four minutes later and sits closer than he has the other days, not a lot, but she notices. Maybe two feet instead of four. He's got the sleeves of his shirt pushed up the way he does and she's able to pick out the lines of his tattoos on his biceps, he has nice biceps, she thought.
Instead she asks about the car, because she'd heard it not start that morning from her window, two tries and then a pause and then it had turned over on the third, rougher than usual.
"The carburetor's getting worse," he shrugs, like it's a minor annoyance, but there's a wrinkle between his brows that wasn't there on Monday. "I ordered a part but it takes forever to find anything for this model."
"Can you drive it in the meantime?"
"Yeah, it's not undrivable. It just takes a minute to warm up." He takes a bite of his lunch. "I walked today anyway. Figured I'd give her a day off."
"How long have you been working on it?" she asks instead.
"Since I got it. About a year and a half." He shrugs with one shoulder. "I didn't know anything about cars before. Gyatso found someone to show me the basics and then I just figured out the rest."
"By yourself?"
"Mostly. There's a lot of forums." He does a small, brief thing with his mouth that's not quite a smile but is in that direction. "And Gyatso makes tea and sits nearby and tells me I'm doing a good job, which doesn't help really but is still good."
She laughs before she means to. He looks up and gives her a smile.
"What about you," he says. "Did you drive here? I haven't seen you with a car."
"I don't have one here. I've been bussing or walking."
"Where'd you move from?"
"South Pole." She says. "My dad got a job transfer."
"That's a big move."
"Yeah."
"How are you finding it?"
She thinks about it, which she's noticing she does more with him because he asks things in a way that suggests he actually wants the answer and not just something to say back. "It's fine so far. The school's bigger. The town seems okay. I haven't really seen it yet." She pauses. "I miss my friends. It’s definitely warmer here."
He nods. "That makes sense."
The bell goes. They both stand and collect their things and she's about to go in the side door when he says, "I can show you around the town a bit if you want. Whenever. It's not that interesting but I know where things are."
She looks at him. He's not looking at her, he's holding the strap of his bag and looking at a point somewhere near the door.
"Maybe this weekend," she says.
He nods. "Yeah. Okay." He pulls the door open and holds it. "Have a good weekend."
"You too," she says, and goes in.
Saturday morning she's in the window seat in her room with her laptop and her second coffee when she sees the front door of the house across the street open and a man come out. Her first impression is that he is genuinely old, seventies at least, with white hair and a white beard that's pretty long, wearing what looks like a loose shirt in some light color and walking slowly with one hand on the porch railing. He comes down the steps and out to the driveway and stands there looking at the orange car for a while, just looking at it, and then he does something that surprises her: he puts his hand on the hood of it, just rests it there for a second, and then he turns around and goes back inside.
Aang comes out about ten minutes later, he looks at the car for a second before going around to the driver's side and getting in. She hears it try and fail and try again and then catch the same rough start as the day before. He backs out and she watches the orange car pull away down the street.
She has his number by this point, they'd exchanged them on Wednesday, he'd said he'd send her a link to the forum he used for the car because she'd been curious, and she'd given her number and he'd sent it, and she'd actually read it which she hadn't expected to but it was more interesting than it sounded. She hasn't texted him first since then. She picks up her phone and puts it down and picks it up again.
K: still up for showing me around today?
She puts the phone face-down on the window seat cushion and looks at her laptop. She's supposed to be finishing an English essay.
The phone buzzes.
A: yeah for sure. What time works?
K: whenever is good for you
A: I've got something until like 12. After that?
K: works for me
A: I'll knock when I'm back
She puts the phone down and opens her essay document. She writes two sentences. Then she gets up and goes to her closet and stands there for a while.
She ends up throwing on jeans and a casual top. She goes downstairs and tells her dad she's going out with a friend from school and he looks up from the dining table where he's working and says okay and when will she be back and she says she doesn't know and he says text him, and she says she will.
Sokka is in the kitchen and says "Who are you going out with?"
"A friend. Bye." She replied.
Aang knocks a little past 12..
She hears it from upstairs and takes a moment. She comes downstairs at a normal pace and opens the door.
He's changed out of whatever he was wearing earlier and has on dark jeans and a long-sleeve black shirt with the sleeves pushed up to the elbow, sleeves already up before he's even started moving, she thinks, which is probably a habit of his. His bag is on one shoulder. Both piercings catch the midday light, a bar at his eyebrow and the ring in his left ear, and there's one she hasn't noticed before, a small hoop at the left side of his nose that she must have missed from the window or from across the lunch wall.
Three, she thinks.
"Hey," she says.
"Hey. Ready?"
"Yeah."
She pulls the door shut behind her and falls into step with him down the path to the street.
"Do you want to take the car or walk?" he asks.
"Walking's fine."
He nods and they head down the street, turning left at the end of the block. The day is warm and clear and she has to squint a little heading into the sun. The first minute is quiet but it doesn't feel like a problem.
"So," he says casually, "what do you want to know about?"
"Just what's here. What you actually use."
He thinks about it "Okay. There's a good coffee place about six blocks this way. My friend owns Bumi's, which is a weird name for a coffee place but well, it’s his name, and the coffee's good and they have tables outside. The bookshop on the same street is decent. There's a park about ten minutes from your house that's better than the one near school, there’s less people there." He continues. "The shopping area on the main road is the same as anywhere so I won't make you walk up there. There's a farmers market on Sunday mornings here that has good stuff there if you get there early."
"What counts as early?"
"Like 8:30."
"That's fine." She walks with her hands in her pockets. "Anything else?"
He thinks again. "Gyatso goes to a community center on the other side of town for things, so I drive past most of it on Saturdays. I'll point things out as we go."
She'd forgotten about Gyatso until he said his name. She looks over curiously. "How old is he?"
"Seventy-four."
"Does he need a lot of help?"
Aang is quiet for a second, looking at the street ahead. "More than he did a year ago. He doesn't always say it." He says. "I keep an eye on things."
She doesn't push it further. They walk for a bit without talking. They go past a row of houses and then a small intersection and then the street opens up a little and she can see the start of something more like a commercial strip ahead.
"The tattoos," she says.
He looks over. "What about them?"
"What are they?"
He pulls the sleeve on his right arm up a little further, as if she needs a better look, which she wasn't going to ask for, but she’s not complaining. Dark blue lines, very clean.
"Air Nomad symbols," he shrugged. "Traditional ones. Gyatso has them too, he had them done when he was young as well." He lowers his arm. "The whole sleeve. And the arrow." He touches his forehead briefly.
"Is it a religious thing?"
"Cultural, mostly. Some of it crosses over." He doesn't seem uncomfortable talking about it. "Gyatso taught me what they mean. I wanted them because of that, because of him, mainly."
She looks at his arms as they walk and then makes herself stop looking. "How old were you when you got them?"
"Sixteen. Gyatso came with me." He huffed. "He cried, which he would hate me saying."
"Here," he says, stopping. "This is Bumi's."
The name above the door is painted in yellow and it does look like an odd name for a coffee place. She follows him inside.
There's a woman behind the counter who is clearly in her sixties and wearing an apron with a sun on it and she looks up when Aang comes in.
"There he is." She says, like he's slightly late for something, and he says "hi Ming" and the woman, Ming apparently, looks at Katara.
"Who's this?"
"Katara. She just moved to the street."
"Into the Tobin place?"
"Yeah."
Ming looks at Katara with the particular evaluating look of someone who knew whoever had lived there before and wants to take a read on the replacement. "How are you finding it?"
"Good so far," Katara says.
Ming nods. "What do you want?"
Katara orders an oat milk latte because it's on the board, and Aang orders a chai tea, something he clearly orders regularly, and Ming starts on them both without writing anything down. Aang pays for both before Katara has fully registered what's happening and she looks at him and he looks away at the board on the wall like he didn't just do that.
"You didn't have to do that," she says.
"It's fine, I invited you basically."
She decides to let it go, vowing to pay next time. Ming slides both cups across and they take them outside and sit at one of the small tables on the pavement.
"Okay," she says. "You’re right, it's pretty good."
"Usually am."
She looks over. He's looking out at the street but there's a smile that says he knows that was funny. She looks back at her cup, shaking her head.
They sit there for close to an hour. He tells her about the market on Sundays, that the good produce goes fast but the bread lasts longer, that the woman who does the honey is there every week and gives out free samples happily. She tells him that her old neighborhood had a farmer's market on Saturdays and that Sokka used to pocket the free samples and pocket more on the way back, and Aang laughs at that and it catches her off-guard enough that she gives him a laugh too.
She asks about school, about what he actually thinks of the teachers past the practical information he'd given her in the first week, and he gives her his actual opinions, which are more considered than she expects but not pretentious about it. He says what he means and lets her say what she means.
She asks about Gyatso and this time he goes further than he had on the walk over. Not a lot further, but some. Gyatso was a teacher before he retired, philosophy and some art history, and he still has his books everywhere and reads constantly and likes to have long conversations about ideas when Aang has time for them. He cooks the same 5 meals because it's the only dishes he knows how to make. He falls asleep in his chair in the living room more than in his bed and doesn't consider this a problem.
"He sounds nice," Katara says.
"He's great," Aang says. "He's like a father to me."
She looks at him when he says it, just for a second. The way he said it, so certain..
"I should probably get back," she says regretfully. "I told my dad I'd help with some stuff this afternoon."
"Yeah, me too." He stands when she does. "I'll walk you back."
"You don't have to—"
"Well, I live on the same street." He shrugged. "I'm going back anyway."
She doesn't argue. The walk back is the same as the walk there. He points out the bookshop on the way and it is, as advertised, actually a decent bookshop; she can see through the window that it's organized and has a dim atmosphere. He says they can go in some other time and she agrees.
They turn into their street and walk up to where the houses face each other. Her path and his driveway are almost directly across from one another and they stop roughly in the middle of the road.
"Thanks for showing me around," she says.
"Yeah. There's more to show you when you have time." He smiles. "The park's worth seeing if you haven't been."
"I'll find it this week."
"Text me if you don't."
She looks at him. "Because you'll come find me?"
He considers this. "Because I'll send you better directions than the map app gives. The route it uses is bad."
She smiles. He's already turning toward his own side of the street but he looks back when she does it and she watches something move across his face for a second before he turns away again.
"See you Monday," he says.
"See you Monday," she says.
She goes up her path and inside. Sokka is on the couch and starts to say something and she says "not yet" and goes upstairs and sits on the edge of her bed and looks at her phone.
She thinks about texting Suki.
She puts her phone down and lies back on the bed and looks at the ceiling instead, and stays there for a while.
She stays on the bed and lets herself smile at the ceiling.
Then she gets up and goes to help her dad with the stuff she promised she'd help with.