What can I say, I got sucked in this year ^^;
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“Zuko? What are you doing?”
Katara’s steps rang loudly across the marble floor of the Fire Nation palace. Startled, Zuko quickly stuffed the small paperback book into the cushions of his chair before leaning over the breakfast table, spooning some fruit onto his plate. “Morning, Katara.”
“Don’t ‘Morning, Katara’ me,” she retorted. There was a sparkle of laughter in her eyes. “Tell me what you’re hiding!”
Zuko feigned confusion, his eyes wide. “I’m not hiding anything.”
Katara crossed her arms. “Please. I know that look innocent look of yours. Now, let me see!”
A few minutes and about five bruises later, Katara pulled the small, worn paperback book from between the cushions. A rather bedraggled Zuko tiredly tried to snatch it back from her, but she ignored him, flipping the book over to read the back. “Inuyasha? I’ve never heard of this before.” She eyed him, smirking. “It seems a little bit young for a twenty-two year old man.”
Zuko, looking embarrassed, flopped down into one of the chairs around the table. “C’mon, Katara, give me a break! I never really got a chance to read this when I was a kid, thanks to my dad banishing me. So why shouldn’t I read it now?”
Katara smiled. “I suppose.” She perched on the arm of his chair, stroking his hair absentmindedly, letting him pry the manga from her fingers. “What’s this about, anyway? I’ve never heard of it before, but we never had many books or manga in the South Pole.”
“Well…it’s about this girl named Kagome who shows up in Feudal Japan, because she fell into a well in her own time. And she finds this dog guy…Inuyasha…who’s been asleep for 50 years on a tree, and she wakes him up, and they travel around together with some friends trying to save the world from this evil dude named Naraku.”
Katara raised her eyebrows, looking down at the small Japanese book Zuko held in his hands. “Sounds familiar.”
Zuko nodded. “That’s what I thought, too. But you know what seems more familiar to me?”
“What?”
Zuko looked up at Katara, his ember eyes burning into her sapphire ones. “Kagome. And Inuyasha. They started off hating each other. And they didn’t get along. But in the end…Inuyasha loved Kagome. She meant everything to him. She…still does.” Zuko grinned sheepishly.
Katara blushed, but never broke eye contact. “Well…maybe…Kagome loves Inuyasha, too. And maybe she always will. ”
And, for the first time, Zuko blushed.
