Mood Lifting
Title: Mood Lifting
Summary: Sokka visits Toph after breaking up with Suki. She cheers him up.
Spoilers: Series, minor ones for The Promise.
Note: Set after both the series and The Promise. I think of Toph as sixteen or seventeen in this.
In a sense, it was inevitable. Sokka was going to become Chief of the Southern Water Tribe one day; it simply wasn't possible for him to relocate. And though not quite as set in stone, Suki's identity as the leader of the Kyoshi Warriors was just as important a responsibility and lifestyle for her. It wouldn't be right to ask her to give that up to go live on the South Pole with Sokka. They had been dating for a while now, and had reached the point where commitment had to be made: long-distance just wasn't going to cut it anymore, not if they planned to raise a family one day.
The breakup had been a long time coming. But somehow, no one had realized. They'd all tried to believe that everything would just work out, somehow - they always seemed to think that these days. The Gaang had managed to defeat the Fire Lord and restore balance to the world, ending a century-long war; how could anything stand before them now?
Very easily, it turned out. Zuko was the first (and least surprised) to be confronted with this, in the form of his first prevented assassination. Toph had faced her own lack of ability to conquer some enemies in a tragic talk with her parents not long after that - she had been forced to realize that although they loved her, they were never going to understand her, and never going to stop trying to 'protect' her. So far, Katara and Aang had been fairly blissful, neatly evading any such heartbreaks in typical airbender style, and Toph truly hoped they stayed that way, even if their pet-names for each other were annoyingly mushy.
But Sokka hadn't been able to do the same; he'd just faced his personal Ba Sing Se, his own unconquerable wall, and he'd broken himself against it as surely as Uncle had so many years ago. Worse still, this wasn't the first time for him. Toph knew that, as the only non-bender in their group, Sokka had been faced with his own helplessness more often than anyone else had (again, with the possible exception of Zuko, who always got special allowances for his psycho family). It just didn't seem fair that he had to be the one who suffered this time, too.
And he was suffering. He'd shown up on Toph's doorstep, making terrible jokes and laughing when no one else did, and had ruffled her hair and told her she was really growing up. And when she'd asked what the hell was wrong with him, he had said, "nothing" and his heartbeat raced far ahead of him in an attempt to escape the lie.
Toph said, "Liar," but didn't pursue the subject any further than that, because Sokka already knew she knew he was lying and he lied anyway. So the first week passed without any explanation, just an impromptu visit drawn out too long and aching in a bittersweet sort of way.
Toph might have just let things drag on that way, but Sokka was chafing under a lack of purpose and it was getting irritating. He spent all his time following her around, trying to convince her to go shopping with him and complaining about her lack of a library ("Yeah", she'd said, "I should read more but I get eyestrain, you know," and waited for him to catch on.) Friendship was important and Toph knew he was hurting deeply for some reason - but she was getting very close to burying him under a ton of rock until he just shut up.
So she took a deep, calming breath, pummeled some earth, and invited Sokka out for a drink. He made a lot of astonished comments regarding her ability to drink, and she was so little, didn't it go straight to her head? And she rose up and demanded to know if he really thought she wasn't man enough to drink him under the table, and he scoffed in his offended-male-pride way and told her she was on.
They went to the nearest pub that had learned its lesson about Toph being of age (not to mention fully able and willing to sink the entire building under the earth), and ordered some of the hardest liquor it had, and Toph drank Sokka literally under the table within the first hour.
She dragged him back into his chair.
"So what's got you all messed up, anyway?" she asked, slamming back another shot and savoring the burn.
Sokka giggled and fell off his chair again and said, "Suki and I broke up," and then started crying. Toph froze. Whatever she'd been expecting, it wasn't that, and the anger that overtook her was on par with any avenging god.
"I'll bury her," she snarled, slamming her glass down, but Sokka grabbed her leg pitifully.
"No!" he said earnestly. "No, don't. We both agreed to do it. It's not her fault. It's not anyone's fault," and then he explained why.
Toph slid down to sit under the table with him, and hugged her knees as she listened, all the fury draining out of her. She understood. She didn't want to, but she got it. Sokka couldn't leave, the same way Zuko couldn't get out of being Fire Lord - neither of them really wanted the job, but it was their duty and there was nothing they could do about that. Sokka might not harp on about it as much as Zuko did, but he valued his duty to his tribe just as much as their firebending friend. Katara may have been the waterbender of the two, but she was much less Water Tribe than Sokka in that respect - she was happy to continue traveling the world with Aang, righting wrongs, but Sokka knew he had to go back home to his people. And Suki's freedom was no less important - forcing her into a parka and making her into some fish-cooking igloowife would be just as horrible as anything Toph's parents ever tried to do to her. Of course she had refused that. And of course Sokka hadn't wanted that for her - he loved her for who she was, and would never want to take that away from her.
Toph listened and Toph understood and Toph didn't know what to do because there wasn't anyone to beat up and Sokka was trying to laugh like it didn't even matter to him.
"It'll be okay," she said awkwardly, patting his back. "You'll - you'll find someone. Maybe from the Northern Water Tribe or something."
Sokka shook his head and mumbled something about Yue, a name Toph had never heard before. But it was clear that he didn't think too much of her attempt at comfort, which wasn't any real surprise. Toph didn't think too much of it either. She wished Katara were here; she could handle these sorts of things much better than Toph ever could.
But Katara wouldn't understand why Sokka couldn't just make it work, not the way Toph did. There was a reason Sokka had come to visit her, and she wanted desperately to live up to his faith in her but she didn't know how to fix this. It wasn't fixable. It plain wasn't, just as lots of people in the Fire Nation and out of it would always want Zuko dead, just as Toph's parents would always think she was helpless and weak and in need of being locked away for her own protection no matter what she did. This was Sokka's Great Wall, and all Toph could do was try to help him cope.
So she patted him on the back a few more times, and then stole enough money from his man-purse to pay for everything and carried him home on a rock sled and dropped him roughly into bed. Then she sat in the garden staring sightlessly up in the general direction of the moon and wondering what she should do until she fell asleep.
---
Most people waking up flat on their back in the dirt after a night of heavy drinking would not be happy. Toph wasn't most people; she woke with a grin at the feel of her element's embrace, and arched in a toe-curling stretch that softened and shifted the dirt around her into a comfortable chair. The warm sun on her face was particularly pleasant and Toph soaked it up like a gilacorn for several long minutes before she hopped to her feet in a cloud of dust and headed inside.
She had a bit of a headache, but nothing too terrible. She was still perfectly capable of handling loud noises and sudden movements, so Toph wasted no time in shooting a slab of the wall forward to throw Sokka violently out of bed, before slamming his door open and grinning widely at him.
"Wakey, wakey," she shouted.
He mumbled something evil sounding and tried to roll under the bed. Toph laughed, blocking him with a stone wall, and then stepping on him just because.
"Get up and make me some breakfast, lightweight," she snickered. "I want something with lots and lots of meat. Pig-deer bacon sounds good, don't it?"
Sokka groaned and clutched his stomach like a baby, but did eventually drag himself to his feet and stumble to the kitchen because he was Sokka. He was physically incapable of turning down bacon, no matter how hungover. Toph followed, and as an act of mercy refrained from harassing him any more (unless pointing and laughing counted, because she did that quite a lot.)
They ate lots of bacon, lots of cheese, a couple of pig-chicken eggs each, and then shared a long, melodious unison burp. There were reasons why Sokka was Toph's favorite.
Toph's metalbending students were annoying, so she had sent them packing several days into Sokka's visit with the demand that they master bending a metal rod into her name before they return. She didn't really expect any of them to be able to do so for at least another week, so she had time to pry Sokka out of his funk. It might be tough; if Toph had learned anything about boys during her travels, it was that they loved a chance to mope and were near-impossible to stop once they'd gotten started. Occasionally getting beaten up did the trick, but about half the time it only made them mope longer, and Toph was never good at telling when it would have which effect.
So, for lack of a better idea and with confidence instilled by her pleasant morning, Toph went her usual route: blunt and tactless.
"I'm going to cheer you up until you stop moping about Suki," she announced.
Sokka's head turned to face her. All was quiet.
"Stop giving me that look," she told him. "I hate it when you give me that look."
Sokka apologized, then realized a second later what he'd just done and said, "To-oph!" in a scoldy fond big-brother sort of way.
She both loved and hated that.
"Oh, c'mon," she said. "If you visit the badgermoles with me, I'll let you take me shopping."
---
The next three days passed swiftly, full of fun. A lot of meat was consumed, belching contests were had, Sokka had a love/hate relationship with riding on badgermoles, and Toph had a hate/hate relationship with going shopping. They sparred each other, they played Pai Sho with stone tiles, Toph made tea and imitated Uncle so well she made Sokka spit it out his nose laughing, Sokka read her books that she pretended bored her to sleep but actually fascinated her. There was nothing to get done, no schedule to follow except that Sokka would have to go home 'soon', and Toph's students would supposedly come back at some point. There were no rules and no vegetables and no boundaries, and Toph started slipping back into something she had told herself had long been over.
Sokka loved almost every minute of it, but he didn't really feel any better and Toph knew she wasn't helping all that much. She was distracting him, but only briefly, and at the close of the third day she was already getting sick of coming up with new things to get excited about every time Sokka started to get quiet and a little crumpled. It was wearing on him too, she could tell.
But Toph didn't know what to do, so she goaded him into challenging her to a drinking rematch and then joined him under the table to ask about Yue. It wasn't what she had planned to say, and she didn't know why she'd mentioned the name, especially as it was something he clearly wasn't drunk enough yet just to blurt out.
"Don't you remember her from The Boy in the Iceberg?"
Toph shook her head. "I wasn't really paying close attention to that play, Sokka."
"Oh. ...Let's leave," Sokka said very quietly, and paid without even protesting the outrageous prices before leading Toph almost all the way back to her house. He halted on a large, grassy hill, and tilted his head upwards in a way Toph knew meant he was watching the full moon. He was kind of obsessed with the moon, even more so than Katara, which had always been a little weird.
"Yue… was my first love," Sokka said, in a voice that caught and ripped on the word 'love' and hit Toph so hard she sat down on the spot. "She was the Princess of the Northern Water Tribe, and I only knew her for a couple of days, but…"
He trailed off. Toph already knew this story wasn't going to end well, and she had felt bad for Sokka when one love didn't work out but now he was zero for two and that just wasn't fair.
"You know what happened when Zhao attacked the Northern Water Tribe, right?" Sokka asked.
Toph shrugged. They'd never talked about it, but she'd still eavesdropped the gist of the story long before meeting her friends. "Sure. Aang turned into a big fish and kicked the Fire Nation Navy's ass."
Sokka snorted. "Well, yeah, but that's not the whole story. Basically, Tui and La, the moon and ocean spirits, are actually a couple of fish that spend all their time swimming around in circles in a sacred pool. Zhao killed the Tui fish, and the moon disappeared."
Toph knew this was a big deal by the way Sokka said it, but it didn't make much difference to her - she couldn't even feel moonlight like she could the sun. She nodded gravely anyway.
"Tui had saved Yue's life when she was a baby, and so she had a connection with it. Sh- Yue sacrificed herself to save us. She became the moon, and everyone was able to waterbend again."
So that was the importance of the moon - it was like the sun was for firebenders. And… and that was the cause of Sokka's obsession with the moon. Oh. Toph tilted her head up to the sky, aiming it in the same direction as Sokka, and tried to sense the moon. Nothing.
Sokka swallowed loudly. "Iroh was the one who told her to do it. I hated him so much for that… But he was right. She knew it, and - and she kissed me, and she said she'd always be with me, and then she died."
Toph didn't know what to say. There wasn't anything to say, not really. In a sense, this was even worse than breaking up with Suki. At least this time Sokka had some illusion of choice - then, he had been unable to do anything no matter how much he wanted to.
She reached up and grabbed Sokka's arm, pulling him down to sit next to her. Then Toph leaned against him, hoping that her body could say what she couldn't, at least to some extent.
Sokka took a deep, shuddering breath, but then leaned into her too, and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. He rested his cheek on her head, face still turned up toward the sky.
Something came over Toph then. It wasn't anything unexpected, not really, but it was unwanted. She'd gotten over Sokka a long time ago. Or at least she'd told herself she had, and seeing him so rarely had helped, but she still wore her meteor bracelet all the time and she had known, these past several days, that it was coming back - if indeed it had ever really left.
And it didn't make any sense whatsoever, it was just as pointless and twice as impossible as Suki - even if Sokka ever saw her as anything other than a friend and little-sister figure, there was no way Toph was going to become an igloowife. She'd only gone to the South Pole once, and had hated it - there was hardly any dirt, and what earth there was had frozen solid. She was completely blind almost all the time and couldn't even connect with her element without running the risk of frostbite. Toph was never going back there again. Nothing could make her do it.
So it was completely hopeless from the beginning and Toph knew it. This wasn't going to make anything better at all, and there wasn't really a point at all, but something overflowed inside of her when Sokka held her, and she didn't even care anymore.
Toph elbowed her way out of Sokka's embrace, then sat up and turned to face him. She could tell she was blushing, and if the moon was bright enough - if Yue was bright enough - then Sokka probably saw it. She'd always tried to avoid letting him see her blush before, but it was sort of too late to matter now.
She grabbed his head and held it still, then leaned forward and kissed him, very gently.
(Toph didn't usually like gentle, but this was different.)
Sokka made no move to kiss back, but she hadn't really expected him to, anyway. His lack of participation still caught in her throat and made it hard to swallow. Toph grit her teeth.
"Get over yourself," she mumbled, entirely too caught up in the speed of Sokka's heartbeat and what she knew it didn't mean. "You're a popular guy. Lots of people love you."
Sokka jerked a little in her grip, and Toph tightened it. She felt her face heat up even more but ignored it. She steadfastly chose not to consider what she'd just said any kind of declaration, just a statement of fact.
Then she kissed him again, despite herself. His mouth was warm, and slack from surprise, and he shivered when she touched him. Her hands were sweating. Sokka didn't move at all.
Toph pulled back. "You're going to find someone. And you're going to be really, really happy with her, okay?" Her throat hurt. Her eyes pricked, but Toph blinked hard once, and the feeling disappeared. "So quit your whining and cheer up already."
Toph let go of Sokka's face, and scrambled to her feet, turning away from him to start up the hill. She felt him slowly getting to his feet behind her, felt his every vibration traveling through the earth straight up into her, and her steps turned into stomps as she led the way back home.
He didn't say anything the whole way back, and then went to his room immediately. Toph bent a cone of earth completely around herself and curled up inside like an unhatched platypus bear, watching him toss and turn, pace and kick his bed and hop around in pain, then lay back down and stay very, very still for a long time, heart beating much too fast for sleep. He leapt up abruptly and stared out the window for several minutes. Then he slumped to the floor and buried his head in his hands, before finally getting back into bed and slowly falling asleep.
Toph bent herself out of her cocoon. Her nose was stuffy and her head hurt. She hoped she hadn't messed everything up. She went to bed and slept with her feet wrapped in the blankets, trying to blot out the world.
---
The next morning, Toph woke to the smell of porridge, and when she slumped into the kitchen, it was to the familiar vibrations of her metalbending students gathered round the table.
She sort of wanted to thank them for their convenient timing; even if they all hadn't presented her with her name in metal (Toph, Beifong, Metalbending, Academy, and kickass were the extent of her literacy) as soon as she entered the room, she might not have beaten them up, simply out of gratitude.
Well, no, she probably would have - if only to keep face.
Sokka was nowhere to be seen, but no one else had been either for as long as Toph had lived; she knew he was in his room. She could feel him packing his things.
Her kind of sight was way more useful than most peoples'. She was able to prepare herself for his leaving long before he came out into the kitchen and announced his intention to return to the South Pole.
Toph just grinned, and slurped up enough porridge to burn her tongue. "About time," she lisped around the mouthful. "I'll give you a ride to the harbor."
She half-expected Sokka to argue, but he didn't. She wasn't sure if that meant anything significant or if it was just his laziness acting up again. It didn't really matter. She'd screwed things up last night, and Toph knew it. If Sokka wanted to run away, she wasn't going to stop him. Some other time she might have - but he'd come to her for help, and instead she'd just put even more on his plate. She deserved a little penance right now.
That didn't mean she had any desire to be alone with him, though, so Toph commanded her students to come along. The Dark One - a prime example of ridiculous boy moping - grumbled, which gave her an excellent excuse to punch a small boulder at him. It hadn't felt right holding back for so long.
"Shut up, you need the practice," she told them, and that was that. Toph rather liked her word being law. She totally didn't understand why Zuko whined about it all the time in his letters (which she made Ho Tun read aloud to her because he was always so hilariously terrified by having to read Sparky's snotty comments about her).
They got moving fairly quickly. Sokka had always been efficient about that sort of stuff, and under Toph's supervision, their rock chariot far outstripped any ostrich-horses on the road. It made a lot of noise, too, enough to prevent any conversation.
Despite all their speed, it was somehow much too long a journey to the nearest coast. Sokka leapt to the ground as soon as they arrived, and Toph only followed because he'd grabbed her arm and yanked her down after him.
"I'm going to borrow your teacher for a minute!" Sokka shouted, and then dragged her forcefully across the street. Toph could have dug her feet into the ground (literally) and refused to go with him, but she wasn't that much of a coward even about this. She contented herself with ripping her arm free of his hold and walking by herself.
Sokka led through the marketplace for a while before coming to a halt at a stand, where he then proceeded to haggle viciously with the salesman for over fifteen minutes. In the end the man threw whatever it was at Sokka, spit angrily on the ground, and accepted only five coins. Toph stood to the side, tapping a foot impatiently all the while.
He didn't even bother to pretend that it wasn't a gift for her: he just handed Toph a small jade hairpin. He didn't ask her to put it on, or explain the gift, just began leading the way back to the docks. Toph followed grumpily, hairpin squeezed tight in her fist. Neither spoke until they reached their destination.
Then Sokka turned and caught Toph up in a fierce Water Tribe bearhug, lifting her right off the ground. For several long seconds, she was blind; her senses limited only to what she could feel, which was all Sokka. His warmth, his strength, his stupid furry collar tickling her nose.
He set her down.
"I'll come visit again," he said, and turned to go. Toph almost let him. She understood what he'd been saying with his hug - they'd still be friends. She hadn't ruined everything, at least. Sokka was never going to mention this again and she didn't have to either, and they wouldn't stop being friends. That was what the gift meant, too. He wasn't going to let her stupid mistake ruin them, and that was great, but it wasn't enough.
She called out after him. "Are you going to stop moping now?"
Sokka stopped walking. Toph's eyes began to sting again, and she clenched the hairpin in her hand so tight that it began to really hurt. She felt like a child. But she didn't care. She asked again, a stupid tremble in her stupid voice: "Did I cheer you up?"
She felt Sokka turn and walk back towards her. Toph held her breath, but then she got mad at herself and blew her bangs out of her face instead. Sokka stopped in front of her. He reached out and gently peeled her fingers away from the hairpin. He used it to clip her bangs back off her face.
"Yeah," Sokka said softly. "Yeah, you did. Thanks, Toph."
Then he bent down and pressed a kiss to her forehead. His lips were warm, and gentle, and Toph didn't move at all. She just watched him step back and start walking away again. She concentrated solely on him, and followed his unhurried progress through the crowd, all the way to when he hit the dock and she could no longer feel his presence at all. Only then did she move.
Toph reached up and touched the hairpin. Then she slid it carefully out of her hair and put it in her pocket, letting her bangs fall back into her face. She closed her eyes and then opened them, even though it made no difference whatsoever. She touched her forehead with a single dirty finger, leaving a dark smudge behind.
Then Toph smiled - slow and wide and the greatest earthbender in the world, the inventor of metalbending, just a girl made of pure awesome.
And she began to swagger back home.
Summary: Sokka visits Toph after breaking up with Suki. She cheers him up.
Spoilers: Series, minor ones for The Promise.
Note: Set after both the series and The Promise. I think of Toph as sixteen or seventeen in this.
In a sense, it was inevitable. Sokka was going to become Chief of the Southern Water Tribe one day; it simply wasn't possible for him to relocate. And though not quite as set in stone, Suki's identity as the leader of the Kyoshi Warriors was just as important a responsibility and lifestyle for her. It wouldn't be right to ask her to give that up to go live on the South Pole with Sokka. They had been dating for a while now, and had reached the point where commitment had to be made: long-distance just wasn't going to cut it anymore, not if they planned to raise a family one day.
The breakup had been a long time coming. But somehow, no one had realized. They'd all tried to believe that everything would just work out, somehow - they always seemed to think that these days. The Gaang had managed to defeat the Fire Lord and restore balance to the world, ending a century-long war; how could anything stand before them now?
Very easily, it turned out. Zuko was the first (and least surprised) to be confronted with this, in the form of his first prevented assassination. Toph had faced her own lack of ability to conquer some enemies in a tragic talk with her parents not long after that - she had been forced to realize that although they loved her, they were never going to understand her, and never going to stop trying to 'protect' her. So far, Katara and Aang had been fairly blissful, neatly evading any such heartbreaks in typical airbender style, and Toph truly hoped they stayed that way, even if their pet-names for each other were annoyingly mushy.
But Sokka hadn't been able to do the same; he'd just faced his personal Ba Sing Se, his own unconquerable wall, and he'd broken himself against it as surely as Uncle had so many years ago. Worse still, this wasn't the first time for him. Toph knew that, as the only non-bender in their group, Sokka had been faced with his own helplessness more often than anyone else had (again, with the possible exception of Zuko, who always got special allowances for his psycho family). It just didn't seem fair that he had to be the one who suffered this time, too.
And he was suffering. He'd shown up on Toph's doorstep, making terrible jokes and laughing when no one else did, and had ruffled her hair and told her she was really growing up. And when she'd asked what the hell was wrong with him, he had said, "nothing" and his heartbeat raced far ahead of him in an attempt to escape the lie.
Toph said, "Liar," but didn't pursue the subject any further than that, because Sokka already knew she knew he was lying and he lied anyway. So the first week passed without any explanation, just an impromptu visit drawn out too long and aching in a bittersweet sort of way.
Toph might have just let things drag on that way, but Sokka was chafing under a lack of purpose and it was getting irritating. He spent all his time following her around, trying to convince her to go shopping with him and complaining about her lack of a library ("Yeah", she'd said, "I should read more but I get eyestrain, you know," and waited for him to catch on.) Friendship was important and Toph knew he was hurting deeply for some reason - but she was getting very close to burying him under a ton of rock until he just shut up.
So she took a deep, calming breath, pummeled some earth, and invited Sokka out for a drink. He made a lot of astonished comments regarding her ability to drink, and she was so little, didn't it go straight to her head? And she rose up and demanded to know if he really thought she wasn't man enough to drink him under the table, and he scoffed in his offended-male-pride way and told her she was on.
They went to the nearest pub that had learned its lesson about Toph being of age (not to mention fully able and willing to sink the entire building under the earth), and ordered some of the hardest liquor it had, and Toph drank Sokka literally under the table within the first hour.
She dragged him back into his chair.
"So what's got you all messed up, anyway?" she asked, slamming back another shot and savoring the burn.
Sokka giggled and fell off his chair again and said, "Suki and I broke up," and then started crying. Toph froze. Whatever she'd been expecting, it wasn't that, and the anger that overtook her was on par with any avenging god.
"I'll bury her," she snarled, slamming her glass down, but Sokka grabbed her leg pitifully.
"No!" he said earnestly. "No, don't. We both agreed to do it. It's not her fault. It's not anyone's fault," and then he explained why.
Toph slid down to sit under the table with him, and hugged her knees as she listened, all the fury draining out of her. She understood. She didn't want to, but she got it. Sokka couldn't leave, the same way Zuko couldn't get out of being Fire Lord - neither of them really wanted the job, but it was their duty and there was nothing they could do about that. Sokka might not harp on about it as much as Zuko did, but he valued his duty to his tribe just as much as their firebending friend. Katara may have been the waterbender of the two, but she was much less Water Tribe than Sokka in that respect - she was happy to continue traveling the world with Aang, righting wrongs, but Sokka knew he had to go back home to his people. And Suki's freedom was no less important - forcing her into a parka and making her into some fish-cooking igloowife would be just as horrible as anything Toph's parents ever tried to do to her. Of course she had refused that. And of course Sokka hadn't wanted that for her - he loved her for who she was, and would never want to take that away from her.
Toph listened and Toph understood and Toph didn't know what to do because there wasn't anyone to beat up and Sokka was trying to laugh like it didn't even matter to him.
"It'll be okay," she said awkwardly, patting his back. "You'll - you'll find someone. Maybe from the Northern Water Tribe or something."
Sokka shook his head and mumbled something about Yue, a name Toph had never heard before. But it was clear that he didn't think too much of her attempt at comfort, which wasn't any real surprise. Toph didn't think too much of it either. She wished Katara were here; she could handle these sorts of things much better than Toph ever could.
But Katara wouldn't understand why Sokka couldn't just make it work, not the way Toph did. There was a reason Sokka had come to visit her, and she wanted desperately to live up to his faith in her but she didn't know how to fix this. It wasn't fixable. It plain wasn't, just as lots of people in the Fire Nation and out of it would always want Zuko dead, just as Toph's parents would always think she was helpless and weak and in need of being locked away for her own protection no matter what she did. This was Sokka's Great Wall, and all Toph could do was try to help him cope.
So she patted him on the back a few more times, and then stole enough money from his man-purse to pay for everything and carried him home on a rock sled and dropped him roughly into bed. Then she sat in the garden staring sightlessly up in the general direction of the moon and wondering what she should do until she fell asleep.
---
Most people waking up flat on their back in the dirt after a night of heavy drinking would not be happy. Toph wasn't most people; she woke with a grin at the feel of her element's embrace, and arched in a toe-curling stretch that softened and shifted the dirt around her into a comfortable chair. The warm sun on her face was particularly pleasant and Toph soaked it up like a gilacorn for several long minutes before she hopped to her feet in a cloud of dust and headed inside.
She had a bit of a headache, but nothing too terrible. She was still perfectly capable of handling loud noises and sudden movements, so Toph wasted no time in shooting a slab of the wall forward to throw Sokka violently out of bed, before slamming his door open and grinning widely at him.
"Wakey, wakey," she shouted.
He mumbled something evil sounding and tried to roll under the bed. Toph laughed, blocking him with a stone wall, and then stepping on him just because.
"Get up and make me some breakfast, lightweight," she snickered. "I want something with lots and lots of meat. Pig-deer bacon sounds good, don't it?"
Sokka groaned and clutched his stomach like a baby, but did eventually drag himself to his feet and stumble to the kitchen because he was Sokka. He was physically incapable of turning down bacon, no matter how hungover. Toph followed, and as an act of mercy refrained from harassing him any more (unless pointing and laughing counted, because she did that quite a lot.)
They ate lots of bacon, lots of cheese, a couple of pig-chicken eggs each, and then shared a long, melodious unison burp. There were reasons why Sokka was Toph's favorite.
Toph's metalbending students were annoying, so she had sent them packing several days into Sokka's visit with the demand that they master bending a metal rod into her name before they return. She didn't really expect any of them to be able to do so for at least another week, so she had time to pry Sokka out of his funk. It might be tough; if Toph had learned anything about boys during her travels, it was that they loved a chance to mope and were near-impossible to stop once they'd gotten started. Occasionally getting beaten up did the trick, but about half the time it only made them mope longer, and Toph was never good at telling when it would have which effect.
So, for lack of a better idea and with confidence instilled by her pleasant morning, Toph went her usual route: blunt and tactless.
"I'm going to cheer you up until you stop moping about Suki," she announced.
Sokka's head turned to face her. All was quiet.
"Stop giving me that look," she told him. "I hate it when you give me that look."
Sokka apologized, then realized a second later what he'd just done and said, "To-oph!" in a scoldy fond big-brother sort of way.
She both loved and hated that.
"Oh, c'mon," she said. "If you visit the badgermoles with me, I'll let you take me shopping."
---
The next three days passed swiftly, full of fun. A lot of meat was consumed, belching contests were had, Sokka had a love/hate relationship with riding on badgermoles, and Toph had a hate/hate relationship with going shopping. They sparred each other, they played Pai Sho with stone tiles, Toph made tea and imitated Uncle so well she made Sokka spit it out his nose laughing, Sokka read her books that she pretended bored her to sleep but actually fascinated her. There was nothing to get done, no schedule to follow except that Sokka would have to go home 'soon', and Toph's students would supposedly come back at some point. There were no rules and no vegetables and no boundaries, and Toph started slipping back into something she had told herself had long been over.
Sokka loved almost every minute of it, but he didn't really feel any better and Toph knew she wasn't helping all that much. She was distracting him, but only briefly, and at the close of the third day she was already getting sick of coming up with new things to get excited about every time Sokka started to get quiet and a little crumpled. It was wearing on him too, she could tell.
But Toph didn't know what to do, so she goaded him into challenging her to a drinking rematch and then joined him under the table to ask about Yue. It wasn't what she had planned to say, and she didn't know why she'd mentioned the name, especially as it was something he clearly wasn't drunk enough yet just to blurt out.
"Don't you remember her from The Boy in the Iceberg?"
Toph shook her head. "I wasn't really paying close attention to that play, Sokka."
"Oh. ...Let's leave," Sokka said very quietly, and paid without even protesting the outrageous prices before leading Toph almost all the way back to her house. He halted on a large, grassy hill, and tilted his head upwards in a way Toph knew meant he was watching the full moon. He was kind of obsessed with the moon, even more so than Katara, which had always been a little weird.
"Yue… was my first love," Sokka said, in a voice that caught and ripped on the word 'love' and hit Toph so hard she sat down on the spot. "She was the Princess of the Northern Water Tribe, and I only knew her for a couple of days, but…"
He trailed off. Toph already knew this story wasn't going to end well, and she had felt bad for Sokka when one love didn't work out but now he was zero for two and that just wasn't fair.
"You know what happened when Zhao attacked the Northern Water Tribe, right?" Sokka asked.
Toph shrugged. They'd never talked about it, but she'd still eavesdropped the gist of the story long before meeting her friends. "Sure. Aang turned into a big fish and kicked the Fire Nation Navy's ass."
Sokka snorted. "Well, yeah, but that's not the whole story. Basically, Tui and La, the moon and ocean spirits, are actually a couple of fish that spend all their time swimming around in circles in a sacred pool. Zhao killed the Tui fish, and the moon disappeared."
Toph knew this was a big deal by the way Sokka said it, but it didn't make much difference to her - she couldn't even feel moonlight like she could the sun. She nodded gravely anyway.
"Tui had saved Yue's life when she was a baby, and so she had a connection with it. Sh- Yue sacrificed herself to save us. She became the moon, and everyone was able to waterbend again."
So that was the importance of the moon - it was like the sun was for firebenders. And… and that was the cause of Sokka's obsession with the moon. Oh. Toph tilted her head up to the sky, aiming it in the same direction as Sokka, and tried to sense the moon. Nothing.
Sokka swallowed loudly. "Iroh was the one who told her to do it. I hated him so much for that… But he was right. She knew it, and - and she kissed me, and she said she'd always be with me, and then she died."
Toph didn't know what to say. There wasn't anything to say, not really. In a sense, this was even worse than breaking up with Suki. At least this time Sokka had some illusion of choice - then, he had been unable to do anything no matter how much he wanted to.
She reached up and grabbed Sokka's arm, pulling him down to sit next to her. Then Toph leaned against him, hoping that her body could say what she couldn't, at least to some extent.
Sokka took a deep, shuddering breath, but then leaned into her too, and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. He rested his cheek on her head, face still turned up toward the sky.
Something came over Toph then. It wasn't anything unexpected, not really, but it was unwanted. She'd gotten over Sokka a long time ago. Or at least she'd told herself she had, and seeing him so rarely had helped, but she still wore her meteor bracelet all the time and she had known, these past several days, that it was coming back - if indeed it had ever really left.
And it didn't make any sense whatsoever, it was just as pointless and twice as impossible as Suki - even if Sokka ever saw her as anything other than a friend and little-sister figure, there was no way Toph was going to become an igloowife. She'd only gone to the South Pole once, and had hated it - there was hardly any dirt, and what earth there was had frozen solid. She was completely blind almost all the time and couldn't even connect with her element without running the risk of frostbite. Toph was never going back there again. Nothing could make her do it.
So it was completely hopeless from the beginning and Toph knew it. This wasn't going to make anything better at all, and there wasn't really a point at all, but something overflowed inside of her when Sokka held her, and she didn't even care anymore.
Toph elbowed her way out of Sokka's embrace, then sat up and turned to face him. She could tell she was blushing, and if the moon was bright enough - if Yue was bright enough - then Sokka probably saw it. She'd always tried to avoid letting him see her blush before, but it was sort of too late to matter now.
She grabbed his head and held it still, then leaned forward and kissed him, very gently.
(Toph didn't usually like gentle, but this was different.)
Sokka made no move to kiss back, but she hadn't really expected him to, anyway. His lack of participation still caught in her throat and made it hard to swallow. Toph grit her teeth.
"Get over yourself," she mumbled, entirely too caught up in the speed of Sokka's heartbeat and what she knew it didn't mean. "You're a popular guy. Lots of people love you."
Sokka jerked a little in her grip, and Toph tightened it. She felt her face heat up even more but ignored it. She steadfastly chose not to consider what she'd just said any kind of declaration, just a statement of fact.
Then she kissed him again, despite herself. His mouth was warm, and slack from surprise, and he shivered when she touched him. Her hands were sweating. Sokka didn't move at all.
Toph pulled back. "You're going to find someone. And you're going to be really, really happy with her, okay?" Her throat hurt. Her eyes pricked, but Toph blinked hard once, and the feeling disappeared. "So quit your whining and cheer up already."
Toph let go of Sokka's face, and scrambled to her feet, turning away from him to start up the hill. She felt him slowly getting to his feet behind her, felt his every vibration traveling through the earth straight up into her, and her steps turned into stomps as she led the way back home.
He didn't say anything the whole way back, and then went to his room immediately. Toph bent a cone of earth completely around herself and curled up inside like an unhatched platypus bear, watching him toss and turn, pace and kick his bed and hop around in pain, then lay back down and stay very, very still for a long time, heart beating much too fast for sleep. He leapt up abruptly and stared out the window for several minutes. Then he slumped to the floor and buried his head in his hands, before finally getting back into bed and slowly falling asleep.
Toph bent herself out of her cocoon. Her nose was stuffy and her head hurt. She hoped she hadn't messed everything up. She went to bed and slept with her feet wrapped in the blankets, trying to blot out the world.
---
The next morning, Toph woke to the smell of porridge, and when she slumped into the kitchen, it was to the familiar vibrations of her metalbending students gathered round the table.
She sort of wanted to thank them for their convenient timing; even if they all hadn't presented her with her name in metal (Toph, Beifong, Metalbending, Academy, and kickass were the extent of her literacy) as soon as she entered the room, she might not have beaten them up, simply out of gratitude.
Well, no, she probably would have - if only to keep face.
Sokka was nowhere to be seen, but no one else had been either for as long as Toph had lived; she knew he was in his room. She could feel him packing his things.
Her kind of sight was way more useful than most peoples'. She was able to prepare herself for his leaving long before he came out into the kitchen and announced his intention to return to the South Pole.
Toph just grinned, and slurped up enough porridge to burn her tongue. "About time," she lisped around the mouthful. "I'll give you a ride to the harbor."
She half-expected Sokka to argue, but he didn't. She wasn't sure if that meant anything significant or if it was just his laziness acting up again. It didn't really matter. She'd screwed things up last night, and Toph knew it. If Sokka wanted to run away, she wasn't going to stop him. Some other time she might have - but he'd come to her for help, and instead she'd just put even more on his plate. She deserved a little penance right now.
That didn't mean she had any desire to be alone with him, though, so Toph commanded her students to come along. The Dark One - a prime example of ridiculous boy moping - grumbled, which gave her an excellent excuse to punch a small boulder at him. It hadn't felt right holding back for so long.
"Shut up, you need the practice," she told them, and that was that. Toph rather liked her word being law. She totally didn't understand why Zuko whined about it all the time in his letters (which she made Ho Tun read aloud to her because he was always so hilariously terrified by having to read Sparky's snotty comments about her).
They got moving fairly quickly. Sokka had always been efficient about that sort of stuff, and under Toph's supervision, their rock chariot far outstripped any ostrich-horses on the road. It made a lot of noise, too, enough to prevent any conversation.
Despite all their speed, it was somehow much too long a journey to the nearest coast. Sokka leapt to the ground as soon as they arrived, and Toph only followed because he'd grabbed her arm and yanked her down after him.
"I'm going to borrow your teacher for a minute!" Sokka shouted, and then dragged her forcefully across the street. Toph could have dug her feet into the ground (literally) and refused to go with him, but she wasn't that much of a coward even about this. She contented herself with ripping her arm free of his hold and walking by herself.
Sokka led through the marketplace for a while before coming to a halt at a stand, where he then proceeded to haggle viciously with the salesman for over fifteen minutes. In the end the man threw whatever it was at Sokka, spit angrily on the ground, and accepted only five coins. Toph stood to the side, tapping a foot impatiently all the while.
He didn't even bother to pretend that it wasn't a gift for her: he just handed Toph a small jade hairpin. He didn't ask her to put it on, or explain the gift, just began leading the way back to the docks. Toph followed grumpily, hairpin squeezed tight in her fist. Neither spoke until they reached their destination.
Then Sokka turned and caught Toph up in a fierce Water Tribe bearhug, lifting her right off the ground. For several long seconds, she was blind; her senses limited only to what she could feel, which was all Sokka. His warmth, his strength, his stupid furry collar tickling her nose.
He set her down.
"I'll come visit again," he said, and turned to go. Toph almost let him. She understood what he'd been saying with his hug - they'd still be friends. She hadn't ruined everything, at least. Sokka was never going to mention this again and she didn't have to either, and they wouldn't stop being friends. That was what the gift meant, too. He wasn't going to let her stupid mistake ruin them, and that was great, but it wasn't enough.
She called out after him. "Are you going to stop moping now?"
Sokka stopped walking. Toph's eyes began to sting again, and she clenched the hairpin in her hand so tight that it began to really hurt. She felt like a child. But she didn't care. She asked again, a stupid tremble in her stupid voice: "Did I cheer you up?"
She felt Sokka turn and walk back towards her. Toph held her breath, but then she got mad at herself and blew her bangs out of her face instead. Sokka stopped in front of her. He reached out and gently peeled her fingers away from the hairpin. He used it to clip her bangs back off her face.
"Yeah," Sokka said softly. "Yeah, you did. Thanks, Toph."
Then he bent down and pressed a kiss to her forehead. His lips were warm, and gentle, and Toph didn't move at all. She just watched him step back and start walking away again. She concentrated solely on him, and followed his unhurried progress through the crowd, all the way to when he hit the dock and she could no longer feel his presence at all. Only then did she move.
Toph reached up and touched the hairpin. Then she slid it carefully out of her hair and put it in her pocket, letting her bangs fall back into her face. She closed her eyes and then opened them, even though it made no difference whatsoever. She touched her forehead with a single dirty finger, leaving a dark smudge behind.
Then Toph smiled - slow and wide and the greatest earthbender in the world, the inventor of metalbending, just a girl made of pure awesome.
And she began to swagger back home.