1. One

**Commentary: **Another short story told in short snippets. I'll update this either every day or every other day. Each chapter will be between 500-1,500 words.

I hope you enjoy it! =)

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**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter One**

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"I've got you!" she screamed over the snap-crackle roar of the flames. "I've got you, I've got you!" And she did have him, Sokka thought as she surfed a wave of dirt over to him, taking out three insurgent Firebenders in the process. They buckled like flowers under a boot, their arms waving, their fingers clawing. She collided with him. She grappled at his armor, hoisted him upright. "Can you walk?" she demanded. "Hurry. They'll dig out."

Leaning on the small Earthbender, Sokka tried. He managed a wobbling canter with her and grated, his jaw clenched so hard he thought his teeth might shatter, "It's fine. Yeah, I can."

Toph huffed into his ear. "Good. Can't carry your heavy ass around forever. Which way's clearest?"

"That way." Sokka both pointed (instinct) and nudged her (learned behavior).

Immediately she tightened her arm around him and made off in the indicated direction. Under the smeared slant of her brow her eyes narrowed. "How bad did they get you?"

Sokka checked. The round of flesh beneath his shoulderplate was bruised, bleeding, and singed, but not the blackened ruin it might have been without Toph's timely arrival. "It's all right. Katara'll fix it." He blanched. "Don't tell her I walked into that trap, okay?"

"Are you kidding?" She aimed a fiendish grin at him. "You made me miss _lunch_, buddy. I'm going to tell her every last gory detail, right down to you twisting your ankle and crying like a baby—"

"I'm not _crying_," Sokka interrupted petulantly. "Spirits, Toph, I've got cinders all mashed up in the corners of both eyes here! They're _watering_!"

"Suuuure," she sneered. "It's funny how you're the only one with that problem, isn't it?" Toph's eyes were as clear as they could get, not to mention dry.

"I'm chalking that up to the fact that you're ridiculously short and, as a result, below most of the smoke," said Sokka.

"You say that like you're a giant."

"And you tease me like you're not a midget." He stumbled, yelped. Toph caught him in an embrace of pebbly soil and heaved him aloft again.

"Badassery comes in small packages," she insisted, and threatened next, "chop-_chop_, Snoozles, or I'll Earthbend us both out of here. I don't care how much grit you get between your buttchee—"

Whatever else she intended to say was lost to the abrupt _clonk _of metal against bone. She folded against him immediately and silently, like a doll, and he went down on top of her, a little to protect her but mostly because she'd been the only thing keeping him on his feet. He looked down and there was something shiny sticking out of her head like a third terrible ear. Her eyes were still, dull. A tributary of blood trickled into them from the river in her hair.

He opened his mouth to call her name and something smashed into his temple. Constellations exploded across his vision. The world fell away into star-specked darkness.


	2. Two

**Commentary: **Part two!

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**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Two**

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"…ka…"

He swam to the shimmery barrier of consciousness and broke it, blinking drunkenly awake. His sister was crouched before him, her outline wavering, her voice a distant chirp. She shook him—gently. Ripples of pain pulsed through his skull. At the edges of his vision gray tendrils convulsed, and Sokka thought for a moment that they were the limbs of monsters. Next he realized no, no, it was just his hair, the straggling mop of it all covered in soot.

"…Sokka!" His name was clearer this time. With a groan he sat up, clutching at his aching head. Katara's arms slid around him, steadied him, and her breath whooshed over his cheek as she worried, "Can you hear me? How many fingers?"

Three brown digits wafted into his vision. "Toph," he said, and clarified at Katara's incredulous look, "no, damnit, not the fingers. Where's Toph?"

Katara's brows drew together in the center of her forehead. Chewing her lip, she began, "Sokka, listen—"

Dread settled like a lead weight in his gut. Wrenching free of her grasp, Sokka climbed to his feet, heaved, wobbled, and fell forward again on his knees. The floor of wherever he was right now was made of dirt, and he decorated it with the meager contents of his stomach. With a series of soft shushing noises Katara knelt next to him and pulled back his hair. Her nails grated over his scalp and her hands were trembling, he noticed, or he was shivering. He couldn't discount either.

"Listen," Katara managed again. Her voice was high and queer, a clef away from its usual tenor. "Toph's in the next tent." She paused, hesitated—he looked over his shoulder at her and she flicked her eyes away. Quietly she went on, "But Sokka, you should know—"

For the second time Sokka scrambled upright. He lurched for the fore of the tent, got caught in the flaps—staggered out finally into the bright midday sun. Katara gave a squawk of protest somewhere behind him and his stomach wrenched again, but there was nothing left in it he could throw up. Ankle twinging, mouth sour, the tribesman tottered to the beige blotch that had to be the nearest tent. At its entrance he paused, sucking in great gulps of air. He tried to steel himself as images of carnage danced through his head: his best friend with a mangled skull, maybe. Comatose? But then there was a sound, a murmur from the tent's interior.

"Ease up, Twinkles," insisted a harassed and familiar voice.

With a cry Sokka tore into the tent. In his haste he nearly knocked free the hanging lamp from its hook—the thing creaked and swung angrily back and forth anyway. He saw Aang first, bathed in flickering orange light. "Sokka!" the bald teenager enthused, beaming. He was holding fast in his fingers another small hand. That hand belonged to Toph.

"Sokka?" she echoed. Propped up against Aang's knobby shoulder, the Earthbender grinned and blinked in the tribesman's direction. Half her face was a tangerine horizon of bruises and her upper lip was split too, canting her smile a little too much to the left, but she looked otherwise whole. The shiny thing he'd seen sticking out of her head before was gone. "Well," she greeted him, "if it isn't the guy whose ass I saved!"

"Spirits," he breathed. He took a hitching step toward her. His smile felt stupid, too big for his face. He didn't care. She was _alive_. "Sheesh, c'mon"—and he reached her bedside—"you don't have to rub it in—"

He stopped when her free hand flew out toward him. It hovered midair, resolute, expectant.

"Sokka," she said, "the name's Toph. Pleased to meet you."


	3. Three

**Commentary: **And here's a longer chapter! Also, "reduced to factory settings" - man, Crossy, I laughed forever. Thank you! =)

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**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Three**

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"What?" Sokka stared at his best friend and her proffered hand. Behind him Katara whisked into the tent—the flaps scuttered, and her fingers fell in a clench over his shoulder. "What did you say?" he persisted.

Toph frowned. Angling her face up toward him, she repeated, "Puh-_leazed _to _meetchu_." Next she drew back her hand and jerked its thumb in Sokka's general direction. Leaning closer to Aang, she stage-whispered, "Is this guy slow?"

"Sokka," Katara urged. "Sokka, we need to talk—"

Aang smiled—a sad, stretched kind of smile—and replied, "No, Toph. He's pretty smart."

"What?" Sokka tried saying it again. It came out a whisper this time, weak, thin. Toph's frown expanded like a crack in a plate; Aang winced, and Katara's fingers tightened enough that her nails bit into his shoulder through his shirt. "What—what's going on?"

"She doesn't remember us." Katara stepped around Sokka and took a seat on the tent's dirt floor on Toph's free side. She touched the Earthbender's knee. With a roll of her glazed eyes Toph permitted the attention, and Katara went on, "Toph, how old are you?"

"Are we really doing this again?" The bruised woman dug a finger into her ear resignedly.

"Yes. Answer, please."

"I'm nineteen. My birthday is soon." As Katara opened her mouth to put forth another query, Toph shook her head and continued, "My name is Toph Bei Fong. I'm from Gaoling. I'm blind but not really because my feet, hey, they're _awesome_. It's fall. I'm fighting some crazy Fire Nation rebels." She paused. Lips pursed, she finished, "…yeah."

Katara's hand moved in an encouraging pat and Sokka, silent, horrified, found himself taking a seat. "What's my name?" asked the tribeswoman.

Toph smirked. "You're Katara. Apparently I call you Sugar Queen. Fitting," she tacked on in a mumble. "He's Aang, or Twinkletoes"—she stabbed the air nearby the Avatar's collar—"and he's important. He saved the world, or so I've been told. And…"

She looked at Sokka, or what passed for looking. The corner of her mouth twitched and his heart leapt with it, but then she flicked a bit of ear wax at him. "…and that's Sokka," she sighed, "the guy whose ass I singlehandedly saved from getting burned to a crisp." She added, "You're _welcome_."

Rounding on Katara, Sokka begged, "_Fix her_."

"I tried!" His sister flung her hands high. "And I'll keep trying, don't think for a second I won't, but I'm not a miracle-worker here—"

"You brought Aang"—Sokka forced this through clenched teeth—"back from the _dead_."

"Whoa, really?" That was Toph. She prodded Aang's stomach none too gently and wondered, "So are you, what, a zombie now? Do you eat _brains_?"

"Uh, I'm a vegetarian."

"…wow. _Wow_. Man, I am so sorry," Toph said, with feeling.

"I don't have any of that special water from the Spirit Oasis anymore, remember?" Katara scowled. "I've done what I can—I mean, I put her skull back together—"

"Still hurts like hell, by the way," the Earthbender put in helpfully.

"—and I also woke her up, which for a while didn't look like it was going to happen at _all_, so just…" Near the end of the tirade Katara's voice wobbled and her chin followed suit. Jerking her face away from her onlookers, she swallowed and murmured hoarsely, "I'm _sorry_, okay? I'm so, so _sorry_, Toph—"

"Whoa, no, stop!" Toph swatted at the tribeswoman. "Don't cry, _don't_, I hate it when people cry—I remember _that_, see?" She forced a grin. "It's okay. It's really okay. I'm fine. …all right, I guess I'm _not _fine, but I _feel_, you know, functional, so…"

She trailed off. There was an uncomfortable quiet wherein the lantern swung and squeaked on its hook, Katara huffed half-sobs into the sleeve of her tunic, Aang bit his lip, Toph hung her head, and Sokka tried desperately not to cry. He hadn't been so tempted to shed tears for anyone or anything in almost a fistful of years, but the idea of his best friend not being _aware _that she was his best friend—it dug knives in him. Heat prickled at the corners of his eyes.

"What's the last thing you remember?" he found himself asking. "You know how old you are, but you've been with us—with _all _of us since you were, geez, since you were _twelve_, Toph. Is that all just a big… blank, uh, slate?"

Aang cracked a smile. Katara sniffled appreciatively, and Toph laughed, short and sharp, before she admitted, "No, I guess not. I remember…" Her eyes narrowed as she presumably sorted through what memory she had left. "I remember leaving my parents' house," she offered. "I remember having a good reason, and I remember being… being so _happy_. Because I mattered." She said this last bit with conviction and twisted her hand over her cot's edge. "I know I did something—something _big_. And I was busy, always busy, I was helping someone, and something _happened_, like, BAM, you know?" She mimed an explosion. "After that I could've left, I could've gone back to my parents, but I didn't because—"

She cut herself quiet abruptly and scratched at her cheek, pensive. Sokka scooted closer, Aang blinked hopefully, and Katara nudged, "Because?"

"Because there was someone," said Toph. She squinched her eyes shut. In the flickering shadows of the lamplight they looked like holes anyway, gouges of darkness. "Someone," she repeated.

The lamp squeaked again. "One of us should oil that," Aang suggested, but none of them moved.

"It's fuzzy," Toph provided at length. "I remember the war and I know I played a part—I know I'm _still _playing a part even though the war's technically over. Yeah," she clarified, mostly to herself, "I know it's over." She opened her eyes again, not that it mattered. "I know I've been happy. For a long time. And yesterday"—she was worrying the edge of the cot again—"I felt, uhm… I felt like that happiness was threatened, maybe, I don't know, so I tried to save you."

Her gaze slid to Sokka and then slightly away from him. Staring fixedly at the spot off to the right of his elbow, she finished, "I remember thinking you were heavy. After that, hey, I woke up and started chatting with you fine people and apparently I'm a few pages short of a book I couldn't read anyway, so yeah." She twiddled a finger. "Party _time_, baby."

She dropped her hand and folded it into the crease of her knee.

"So you sorta, kinda, not really remember fighting in the war. You just don't remember us." Sokka was half asking, half not.

"I… yeah. Yeah, that sounds about right." She granted him a thumbs up.

"Well, okay." Not by nature a pessimist, Sokka seized onto what small hope he could glean from the situation. "That's something. And where there's something, there tends to be, uhm—_more _of that something. If you dig for it." Looking around the tent, he spread his hands, his palms up, his fingers flattened out like sunrays. "So, yeah," he decided. "We dig."

"Dig?" Aang's brow furrowed. Katara looked similarly confused.

"I like digging. I remember that!" enthused Toph.

"It's metaphorical digging."

Toph's face fell. "…I hate metaphors."

"Do you remember that?"

"No. I'm making an educated guess, though, based on how I wanted to go to sleep the instant you said the word _metaphorically_."

Bristling, Sokka persevered, "Toph, you've got some memories left. It stands to reason there are more. We'll just have to dig for them."

"With what?" asked Aang. "Toph's already had enough metal stuck in her head to last her a lifetime and shovels are pretty, well, huge—"

"No, no—wait." A slow smile spreading over her features, Katara clutched at the Earthbender's knee. "I think I get what Sokka's saying. We don't need a shovel. We just need something more likely to yield results than this." She thumped her waterskin. "I mean, this already helped. Right? But there's only so much it could—or can—do."

"You said that earlier. So?" Toph cocked her head.

Comprehension dawned for Aang. "Oh! The Spirit Oasis!"

"Right." Sokka nodded fiercely. "So we head north. To get the biggest shovel there is."

"Metaphorically?" Toph hedged.

"Uhm, eheh, yeah. Sorry."

Immediately the Earthbender affected a snore. After a moment, though, she squared her shoulders and proclaimed, "No, that's great. I'm in!"

"I'll pack Appa! Here, Sokka, you help her sit up." Quickly trading places with Sokka, Aang dashed from the tent.

"I'll go tell Zuko and Iroh our plans," Katara agreed. "We'll have you back to normal in no time, Toph." Seconds later she was gone too.

Left alone with her elbow supported in Sokka's gut, Toph hummed a toneless bar of some disjointed melody. She spat into the dirt alongside the cot. At last she voiced, "So, Sokka. What's the Spirit Oasis?"


	4. Four

**Commentary: **=)

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**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Four**

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The sun sank and Toph's eyelids went with it. She was nearly asleep on his shoulder when the tentflaps rustled, admitting into the shelter two familiar—to Sokka, at least—men. One was short, round, and bearded, his face the sort wherein crinkles had creased the skin at the corners of his eyes—he smiled often and was smiling now too. The other man, tall and broad-shouldered and considerably younger-looking, wasn't smiling at all. Both had fair skin. As Toph sat up a little on the cot, the taller man gestured to himself and asked, "Do you know me?"

"Zuko," murmured the Earthbender. She yawned into Sokka's shoulder and persisted before the tall man could grow too much hope, "Right? Or was Zuko the fat one?"

Iroh chuckled and stepped around his nephew, balancing a cup carefully in his hands. "Indeed, young Toph, that is Zuko. I am the fat one. My name…" He paused, casting out the question as one might throw a line into a still lake.

"It's Iroh." Toph smiled. Without a trace of apology she supplied, "I don't remember either of you, but Sokka's been telling me stuff."

"Has he?" The former general's parchment-colored eyes drifted to Sokka, a mix of speculative and contrite.

"Yep." Toph withdrew her foot from its position on the floor and rested it against the cot's edge, wiggling her toes. Even that small motion came off fatigued. "He has a hard time shutting up. Or that's the impression I'm getting." She tapped a single finger against the tribesman's elbow. "Not that I don't appreciate being filled in."

"It is fortuitous that you have such a good teacher to reeducate you," agreed Iroh. Crouching next to the cot, he offered up the cup he'd brought into the tent. "Whether or not you remember, this is your favorite tea. It has calming properties." In the thicket of his beard Iroh's mouth gave a twitch. "Given the state of affairs today, I thought you might… enjoy it."

Nostrils flared appreciatively, Toph groped for and took the cup. It shook a little in her hands. "Help me steady it," she commanded. Sokka did so, and with a growl of mixed frustration and satisfaction the Earthbender sipped at the hot liquid. Her eyes widened. The growl died—the sip deepened into a gulp. "_Shit_," she exhaled upon drawing back, "I have good taste!"

"And you were one of my teashop's best customers back in Ba Sing Se." Iroh beamed. "Doubtless you will be again." Rising in a crackle of knees, the old man provided, "I'll send a package of this with your Waterbending friend so you will have a supply on your journey. Good luck, Toph."

"Thanks, geezer dude." Toph performed a wobbly salute with the cup, sloshing a bit of its contents over both her fingers and Sokka's. "You're pretty cool."

"Actually, since he's a Firebender, he'd be considered hot," Sokka interjected.

Brow quirked, Iroh thoughtfully rubbed his chin. "Are you saying you find me attractive, young man?"

Sokka gagged. Toph brayed laughter and sprayed him with tea, and even the silent Zuko managed a feeble smile. With a delicate flourish of a bow, Iroh chuckled and departed the group's company.

Left alone thus with the bruised Earthbender and the equally bruised tribesman, the Fire Lord blurted, "This was—is—my campaign. And this. _This_." He flung a hand first to Sokka and then toward Toph, at whom the point of his index finger lingered. He swallowed. His throat clinked like the links of a rain-drenched chain. "It's my fault."

"It isn't," protested Sokka. "C'mon man, no. You didn't order those guys to ambush us—"

"Much less flambé us," Toph concurred. She finished the tea in a slurp and dropped the cup next to the cot, where it made a harmless dent in the dirt below.

"They attacked you because they protest _my _rule." Zuko's face, already skewed by its scar, looked more pained and tormented than usual. The faint crescent of his maimed eye flickered shut and opened again, a sickle moon.

"Yeah, well, that's a stupid thing to protest." Shrugging, Sokka tightened his hold on Toph. She was getting heavier and slumping too; against his collar her head nodded, and her mouth touched his skin. Her lips were still hot from the tea. "This isn't your fault. Or even if you want to believe it _is _in some twisted way, fine, go for it. I'll bet Toph doesn't blame you for it. Right?"

He shifted his gaze down to Toph. Zuko peered at her as well, savaging his lower lip between his teeth.

"I don't blame anyone or anything except luck," sighed Toph. "Because I guess I don't freaking have any." Reaching up, she ran her fingers carefully over the spot on her skull where the bit of shrapnel had left its mark. The hair there was puffed higher than the surrounding mass, belying her hidden but swollen scalp. She blew out her breath in a hiss and muttered, "I wish people would stop apologizing. At least I'm alive."

Zuko shifted awkwardly. Shuffling from foot to foot like the teenager he no longer was, he allowed, "I'm glad you _are _alive," and turned to stomp from the tent.

After his footfalls had faded from perception, Toph scowled up at Sokka. "Hey." She prodded his cheek. Her fingers were grubby, insistent. One of her nails scratched through his stubble. "Sheesh. Am I really _that _screwed up?"

Sokka considered. In the dwindling lamplight she _looked_ the part of the victim, diminished and damaged, and parts of her felt the same. She was leaning on him. Toph never leaned on anyone.

But her knuckles moved against his hip, hard, shameless. She knocked the bone, _ratta-tap-tat_. The knuckles produced a threatening crack. Her next demand verged on menacing. "_Well_?"

"You're still you," he replied, and touched her hand. She blinked. "Yeah," he went on, voice thick, "you're still you, Toph, no question."

She groaned. "So what's the problem?"

Sokka took her fingers in his and looked at them, pale on dark, until they blurred. "You're still you without us," he answered. "And you don't seem to—to _miss _us." He added selfishly, "_Me_."

Toph gave him a short shove. Lowering herself on her elbows, she eased away from his grasp until she was prone on the cot. She let him keep her hand, though, and grouched back, "Why would I miss you?" Before Sokka's soul could break in half, she squeezed his thumb and said, "You're right here."


	5. Five

**Commentary: **Hi guys! Here's part five! I may or may not update over the weekend given that it's a holiday here, but we'll see!

I hope you're all enjoying the story so far!

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**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Five**

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"So let me get this straight," Toph said, curling her hands in the soft white fur. "You want me to climb up on this giant heaving creature which, according to you, I've done countless times before now."

"Right," Aang chirped.

"And then you want me to just sit there. _Willingly_. While it—"

"He," interrupted the Avatar. Toph scowled at him. Sheepish but firm at once, Aang insisted, "Appa's a guy." Stepping up alongside Toph, he took her hands and guided them down the skybison's massive flank to his face. When the Earthbender's palms were positioned on the glistening expanse of Appa's rounded nose, his master said, "A big guy."

"Really big," Toph agreed. She flexed her fingers gingerly against the spongy flesh. "Hey," she said, voice soft, "uhm. Don't—heh. Don't eat me, okay?"

Appa groaned his affirmative and made to cement the deal, tongue lolling and slick with saliva. Jerking Toph away from the bison's exuberant display, Sokka muttered, "Trust me, you don't want him licking you. You'll smell like hay for a week." But he added, "He's a vegetarian too, like Aang. He won't eat you."

"Right. Yeah—right. I knew that," Toph said, and clearly didn't mean it. A wry smirk quirked the corner of her mouth upright. Her split lip was nearly healed, the scab having dissolved to a faint pink line thanks to Katara's efforts. "So," she resumed, "once I climb up, you want me to just sit there. Willingly. While _he_"—she added emphasis to the word, and Aang beamed—"takes off into the great yonder. With me," she stressed, "on his _back_."

"Yep!" Sokka gave Toph's shoulders a squeeze. Aang nodded vigorously.

"Uh-huh." Turning in the tribesman's grasp, Toph shook her head. "You know something? You guys are crazy. Absolutely _nuts_." Her hand nevertheless trailed back to Appa's fur. She wove her fingers in the thick mat and smirked again, softer this time. "Big _fluffy _guy," she murmured.

"Hey everyone?" Katara appeared around Appa's forepaw, hurrying into their midst. As Toph snatched back her hand and Sokka and Aang gave the tribeswoman their attention, she continued quickly, "Iroh says more insurgents are burning the southern border crops and attacking the villages there. He and Zuko left last night to try to salvage what they can of the situation—I just got his hawk." She held up a scroll and bit her lip. "They could use our help."

"Oh," Aang said. "Oh man—" He stopped and looked sidelong at Toph, whose face was impassive—next he glanced to Sokka.

"No," denied the warrior immediately. "_No_. We—we _can't _wait. What if this is a time-sensitive injury, huh?" His fingers stretched to Toph of their own volition and hooked in the hem of her tunic. At the fabric's tug Toph blinked—maybe in displeasure or surprise. It was hard to tell. Her thumb came to rest in the divots of his knuckles; despite frowning, she said nothing. "What if—what if waiting makes it permanent?" Sokka pursued. "Do you want that?"

"Sokka—" That was Katara.

"Of course I don't!" Aang rejoined, distressed. "But—"

"But nothing." Sokka clenched his hand into a fist in Toph's shirt. He urged her insistently toward Appa. "We have to go. We just…" Faltering, he eyed the scroll Katara held. He'd seen settlements burned before, huts reduced to nothing but circles of smoldering ash, buildings to blackened beetle-shine husks. He'd seen suddenly homeless people wandering soot-laden streets, eyes vacant, hands trembling. On the day of his mother's death too the sky had rained silt, specks of filth like black snow. "Just," he whispered. Bile rose in his throat.

"We just have to split up." It was Toph who said it. With a shrug the Earthbender continued, "I'm not gonna be responsible for people starving or losing their homes if I can help it. So—yeah. Aang, Katara?" She waved to them. "You two go. Help the geezer dude and—uh, Sad Face." She grimaced. "Sokka and I will go north. I'd offer to go alone," she allowed, "but see, I have _no _idea how to get there and I also can't drive this thing." She reached to pat Appa.

There was a moment's quiet. Katara squinted at Toph searchingly and seemed about to say something, but instead she shifted her eyes to Sokka at the last moment and asked, "Is it okay?"

"Two birds, one stone." Sokka was almost dizzy with relief. "Yeah, it's fine. Aang? We need Appa—taking a boat to the pole is, well, lengthy—"

"No, no, that's perfect," Aang agreed. He held up his hands. "Katara and I will borrow ostrich-horses from the soldiers here. Katara"—already the Avatar was climbing up the bison's flank—"will you go arrange that? I'll get our stuff."

"Yeah!" Katara spun on her heel. She jogged a few steps away—a moment later she was back, though, and she tore Toph away from Sokka's grip and into a crushing embrace. "It's not that we don't care," she hissed through the rattling fall of her braids. "Toph, really—we love you, we want to help; please don't think—"

"Mushy crap, agh," snarled Toph, shoving at the taller Bender's clench. "Stop! Stop, I get it—I'm special and important and _yeah_, go help your boyfriend!" Both women were red-faced upon parting, but Katara looked considerably less guilty as she hurried off again to procure transport.

Minutes later twin trails of dust rose up along the edge of the escarpment, and the ostrich-horses carrying the Avatar and the Waterbender were soon devoured by the green gloom of the treeline. Sokka waved until then, his lips bitten, his arm as high as it could go. Toph stood at his side with her legs planted in a V, her hands on her hips.

"Well," she managed finally. Pain erupted across Sokka's shoulder. He jerked sideways and found Toph grinning at him, fist poised. She'd punched him—whether by impulse or instinct he didn't know, but Sokka welcomed the bruise. "Just you and me, kid," she said. Her teeth flashed white in her face. "Let's get this party started."


	6. Six

**Commentary: **Taking a small break from my holiday to post this! I hope you enjoy it. If you live in my country, I also hope you get to enjoy some fireworks this evening or tomorrow!

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**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Six**

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"Toph?"

The wind prodded at them, warm, inquisitive. "Uh-huh?" Her response was distant and more than a bit queasy.

Sokka shifted, ignoring the press of her nails in his flesh. "You aren't talking much," he said. The reins slipped a little under his fingers. Tightening his grip, he looked over his shoulder at the woman settled flush to his spine. "Everything okay?"

Her reply was another moment coming. "Trying," she managed eventually around clenched teeth, "not to throw up all over you. Thought that might be, uhnngh"—her cheeks were green, he noticed, almost as much as her signature garb—"unpleasant for both of us."

He grinned. Around his hips Toph's legs flexed; her arms were looped about his ribs like rope, and her fingers dug into his upper arms on either side, their knuckles white. "You wanna take a break?" he asked.

She aimed a glare at him. "I'm not a wimp." Appa listed sideways, seeking out a thermal—he found one and they soared high, clouds frothing up over the bison's flanks. Sokka's stomach fluttered; his hair whipped too. Visibly biting back a scream, Toph burrowed the shelf of her chin into his shoulder and hissed again, "I'm _not _a wimp."

"Just a glutton for punishment, I guess," Sokka observed. He snapped the reins and Appa sank down the thermal's other side. "I have to pee," he murmured, "and it looks like a storm's coming anyway. Trust me, flying in one of those is a great way to get locked in an iceberg for a century or so, so we might as well make camp."

Toph's brows climbed her forehead. "Are you serious about the iceberg thing?"

"It's what happened to Aang," agreed the tribesman. He glanced over Appa's shaggy neck—the ground was rushing toward them in a slurry of browns and greens, and the glittering tattoo of a river wove through the scape off to the left. Guiding the bison in that direction and toward the nearest break in the trees, he continued, "He was flying over the ocean, though. We're about five days' journey from any body of water even remotely that big."

Toph lifted her head the tiniest bit. There was a pause as she swallowed; Sokka felt her throat move along the nape of his neck. "How can you tell?" she grudgingly pursued.

"How can I tell what?" The first few raindrops of the storm's heading pattered down across the tribesman's wrists. He shook them.

"The distance we are from water." Toph exhaled, drew another breath, and proceeded to sneeze into his hair. "Sorry," she said, and didn't sound it at all.

"Sure." Rolling his eyes, Sokka arched slightly as Appa landed and dropped the reins into his lap. "It comes from being part of the Water Tribe. I can _smell _moisture." He forked his elbow gently back into Toph's and gave it a jiggle. Her disbelieving snort was comfortably familiar. "I can't tell, not really," he provided truthfully, "but I've looked at a ton of maps over the years, you know, and I can remember where they've said water's supposed to be."

"Must be nice," grumbled Toph. "To have a working memory." She swatted at him. "Move your skinny ass. I want to touch sweet, sweet ground."

Sokka obediently swung his legs over and pushed off Appa's skull. He dropped to the grass below and was joined not a moment later by his best friend, who sank to her knees in the stuff and shuddered appreciatively. "Oh yeah," she husked, "that's more like it. Precious _earth_." She dragged her cheek across the ground.

"Want me to find you a rock so you can have some, uh, quality time with it?" Sokka smirked and leaned up to free Appa of the reins.

"You wouldn't know a good rock if it bit you on the nose," sniffed the Earthbender. She rolled aright and flexed her bare toes down into the springy grass. "River nearby," she murmured. "And a small village maybe two leagues that way." Her arm stretched out to point. "We're not visiting, are we?"

"Nah. We've got enough provisions." Overhead lightning flashed—thunder rumbled in its wake, and a few more raindrops spattered resolutely throughout the surrounding clearing, a small harbinger of the impending downpour. "You know what we could use, though?" ventured Sokka. He pulled their packs from Appa's back. "_Shelter_. Like, a big one—to keep us from getting drenched. Maybe wide enough for a fire. How's that sound?"

Toph nodded eagerly. "Pretty fantastic."

"Great!" Sokka spotted and brushed chunks of white fur from his breeches. "Mind whipping that up for us? One slab, two slab—don't worry about Appa, he's got other things on his mind." The bison was already lumbering off toward the clearing's higher grass.

"Ah." Toph stretched, wincing. The snap of her back was lost to the next snarl of thunder. "Yeeeah. About that." She hooked her hands behind her head and pointed her face in every direction but straight toward Sokka. It was apparently a habit that transcended memory, and it made the tribesman's brow twitch because it invariably meant Toph was about to tell him something sucktastic. "There might be a little problem," she admitted.

"What?" Sokka lifted one of the packs and shouldered it, frowning. Dismay grew like a vine in his belly. "What kind of problem? Is the soil too thin to Bend into shapes or something?" he asked hopefully.

"Oh hey, no. Nothing like that." Toph smiled, the expression just a little too blithe. She performed an exaggeratedly carefree shrug. "The soil's _fine_. Fine! I just, uhm. Don't remember." She hesitated, and finished, "How to Bend it, I mean."


	7. Seven

**Commentary: **SH-BOOM!

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Seven**

* * *

"You—"

The world went up in white. Underfoot the ground shivered; the air snapped and crackled between them and with a great _SH-BOOM_ the sky split in two. Instantly they were drenched and cold—or _Sokka _was drenched and cold. Squinting through the haze of the downpour at Toph, he thought she looked the part too.

"You," he said again, pointing. "You!"

"Me," she affirmed, and shrugged. The fabric of her tunic rose and fell with an audible squelch. "Damn," she observed, blinking sightlessly up into the rain, "this is intense, huh?" She lifted a hand next and wiggled her fingers as her palm filled with rainwater.

"You can't _BEND?_" He all but screamed it. He stomped across the sodden grass and seized her shoulders. Clutching at them, the fabric slipping under his grip, he squeezed the strong rounds and stammered, "But you—Toph, you never _said _anything—"

Her hands rose and folded over his. There were slick from the wet but firm too, the pads of her fingers hard and relentless. "Didn't I just say something?" she asked simply.

"But why not before?" He left off her shoulders and grabbed at her fingers instead. "Why not back when we were with the others? Wh—"

"It wasn't gonna do any good to mention it," interrupted Toph, "and Sugar Queen almost had it figured out anyway. In fact, I'll bet she knows." She squeezed his thumbs hard enough to make the bones grind. "And I never said I couldn't Bend," she corrected. "I said I couldn't remember how. There's a difference."

Sokka goggled at her. "There—there's not!"

"There _is_!" Wrenching free one hand, she slapped it against his chest. Even through the chill of the rain it stung, and her palm was warm besides. "There's a _huge _difference," she hissed. "There has to be. Don't you get that? There _has _to be."

Something in Toph's voice changed. Hardened. It put Sokka on the offensive immediately. "What do you mean?" he asked, exasperated. He waved an arm in the thick of the insistent ropy rain. "Toph, if you look at this rationally… I mean, not remembering something and not being able to do it, they're the _same thing_—"

"Don't." She hit him again. This time it wasn't a slap. It was a slam, and he staggered back a step under the force of it. She followed him, leering into his face. "_Don't_," she seethed. Raindrops pooled on her lips and flew from them in thin chains. "No. You're wrong."

"How am I—"

"Not remembering how to Bend means I can't do it right _now_. But don't say it like I can't Bend period, you asshole," Toph fumed. Her fingers found and clenched in his shirt. "Because if that's your logic, you know what else it means? It means I can't remember _you_. _Period_." She spat the word, and tacked on, "_The end_, Sokka." She gave him a shake for good measure. Locks of her hair broke free of her bun and fell down her cheeks, fluttering there like sodden dark pennants.

For a moment Sokka was quiet, stunned—and horrified. "I mean," he tried. Toph's features narrowed into a scowl. "I mean," he said again, "I just—"

She cocked her head, waiting. Her lower lip trembled.

"You can't Bend," he repeated, and finished as her eyes flooded with both anger and liquid that might have been rain, might have been something else, "_temporarily_."

She blinked. There was water on her face and on his too. The sources probably varied. "Yeah," she agreed, slow. "Yeah. Temporarily."

"Because you don't remember." Her fingers tightened a little. "You don't remember how," he went on. "But you will. You'll remember how to Bend and you'll remember Katara and Aang and Appa and—and _me_, even though you can't right now, you _will_ and it'll be okay, it'll be okay, _really_—"

"Sokka."

"—I promise you will, Toph, _Spirits _I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply anything else because you're badass, you've _always _been badass and you'll _continue_ to be badass and you'll _remember _you've just gotta _remember_—"

"_Sokka_." She shook him a second time, gently. "Hey. I got it."

"You'll—you'll fix it. No. We'll fix it," he insisted. His voice was small in the storm's swell, faint. He felt like he could cry.

"I know." She drew back a bit and scuffed her arm over her face, her eyes. "Apology accepted," she grunted. "Now." She released him and crouched next to the packs in the rain. Rifling through the first one she found, she drew free a coarse bit of fabric and snapped it. "Forget it," she said briskly, clearing her throat. "Seriously. Just—you know. Help me set up this tent and tarp."

"Sure." With a sniffle mostly disguised as a cough, Sokka moved to do just that. "Uhm," he ventured a moment later, "Toph?"

"Yeah?"

"This is a pair of pants."

"…well, shit."


	8. Eight

**Commentary: **=)

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Eight**

* * *

"Doesn't it bother you?"

He looked at her across the tent. She lifted her head and blinked, wiping at her cheek. Her fingers barely made dimples in the darkness. "Huh?" she asked.

"Not remembering how to Earthbend." He scooted closer. The tent, which had been cold just after they'd crawled into it, was hot and nigh steaming now, and a rill of sweat ran down his nose and dripped from its tip. His lips were salty when he licked them. "Doesn't it bother you?"

Her mouth twisted, or maybe it did. With a snort she muttered, "Oh, well, you know. Losing the memories of my best friends and my incredible, pretty much one-of-a-kind talent—these things _happen_, Sokka." Fabric rustled as she spread her hands peaceably. "I just have to take them in stride. Go with the flow."

He squinted at her. It was dark—he couldn't tell if she was joking or not. "That's… that's really, wow," he began.

"Of course it bothers me!" Despite the tent's cloth floor and the blurry vision it surely amounted to for the Earthbender, she still managed to gift his arm a solid smack. "It's _terrible_. It's like…"

She paused, considering. On the tarp above the tent the rain droned on, a continuous needle-dance of spatters and drips. Drawing her knees up to her chest, she looped her arms around them and shrugged.

"No," said Sokka. Curiosity he couldn't help—he still had sealcow teethmark scars on his fingers from childhood to prove it. "No," he nudged again, "really. What's it like?" With a final sliding motion he reached her. His hip bumped hers, and he felt her move as she turned her head toward him in the shelter's drooping gloom. "Sorry," he backpedaled, "I'm not asking because I get off on misery or anything. It's just—I mean, I'd want to tell someone if it were me, you know? So I thought I'd listen, or _offer _to listen, and I _do _want to know anyway because you're my friend and I'm that sort of guy. Kindhearted. Inquisitive," he concluded. "Yeah."

"Right." He got the sense she was smiling at him. "Inquisitive, huh?"

"You bet."

"Well, in _that _case…" But still she hesitated. Sokka waited. Toph mopped the back of her neck with a disgusted mutter, dried her hand on his breeches. Thunder colored the world in yawning groans and when there was a space between two of them, she said, "It's like a hole, maybe. Only it's different from a hole too, because most of those I can see into and this one I can't. I know something's there, down at the bottom of that hole—memories of how to Earthbend and everyone else and you, probably." She scratched her knee. "But reaching in, I can't touch anything. It's too far. Too deep."

A flash of lightning outside threw the tent's interior and Toph especially into sharp relief. Her chin was supported on her knees, her face turned slightly toward him. "That sucks," he supplied. Darkness was already rushing in to reclaim the spots briefly illuminated by the storm.

"Yeah," she acknowledged. She sighed. Her shoulder, wet, touched his arm. "And I can't just ignore it either, that hole. Because it's _huge_. All I can do is walk around and around it, and the ground's slippery, and I have this idea that if I'm not careful I'll fall in too."

The tarp rustled.

"And if you fall in?" Sokka pursued, unable to help it.

Toph gnawed the inside of her cheek. He heard the faint squelch of flesh and winced. "Game over," she suggested. "I forget everything."

A strong gust of wind tugged at the tent, but the pegs held. In the surrounding forest a tree swung into its neighbor; limbs fell, and Appa snuffled nearby and shook himself, jaws flapping. "Are you afraid?" the tribesman ventured.

"Stupid question," answered Toph immediately.

"Fine, okay." He nudged her. "What about not being able to Earthbend? Does _that _scare you?"

"Huh." She scratched at her knee a second time. In the next lightning flash Sokka saw there was a bite on it. "No," offered Toph. "I guess not."

"Really?" Sokka wondered. "Why's that?"

The tent floor whispered as Toph turned to face him entirely. "You're not a Bender, right?"

"Nope!" With a flex of a bicep, Sokka grinned. "Normal average everyday guy right here."

"Mmhm." Out of the darkness her hand came questing, and her fingertips brushed his elbow. "You're not a Bender and you're not afraid. So why should I be?" Sokka's chest swelled at Toph's apparent faith in him. His ego was feeling reasonably stroked until she finished, "You've somehow made it this long, right? I'm sure I can manage a few more days."


	9. Nine

**Commentary: **=)

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Nine**

* * *

The storm tapered an hour or so later. They emerged from the tent together and each stripped down to their underthings, and Sokka set about hanging their clothes on a few sturdy limbs to dry. Tipping her face skyward in the meantime, Toph inhaled. She wrinkled her nose. "You think it'll rain again?"

Sokka glanced up. "Nah. Sky's clearing. Here." He stuck out a hand. "Pass me that shirt."

She did so and folded her arms over her breastbands in the frail moonlight. There was a scar on her collar, winding down in a stippled puckery trail beneath the bunched fabric. Pink and new, it looked recent, and Sokka was halfway to asking Toph about it before he realized she probably wouldn't remember how she'd gotten it anyway. He groped for something to say, helpless, smoothing the sleeve of Toph's shirt along the branch. His eyes flicked to the moon, to the treeline, to Appa, and when he looked back at Toph again she was nude from the waist up.

"WHOA!" he yelped. He spun around on instinct and slammed his forehead into wet nettles. "What—_Toph_, geez! Why are you naked?" He added belatedly, "Ow!"

"I'm not gonna let modesty make me chafe. That's why." She sounded both amused and puzzled. "But I _do_ still have my underwear on." With a soft _ker-shwip _she snapped her sodden breastbands; droplets splattered across Sokka's cheek and branches nearby his head bobbed as she presumably draped the bands there.

"You—you do _not_. Not all of it! I can see your—" His statement ended in a strangled gurgle.

Toph was quiet. She was also near enough that he could hear her breathing, the sound slow and steady and somehow warmer than the night's autumn air. Wetness pattering down onto his bare feet suggested she was wringing out their clothing. "Yeah," she agreed. "Easy there, buddy. It's not like you haven't glimpsed boobs before."

Sokka whirled on her, eyes enormous. "How could you know that? Your memory—"

"Is absolutely unnecessary thanks to your big fat mouth," laughed Toph. She braced her hands on her hips, her shameless smirk almost too wide for her face—not that Sokka looked at her face long. "So who was it, huh? That Suki chick you mentioned? Or was it, hmm"—she lifted her hand and mimed caressing an invisible beard; her chest jiggled as a result and Sokka forced himself to aim his gaze elsewhere—"that Ty Lee person? Oooh!" She leaned close, her skin like porcelain in the moon's glow, her pewter eyes aglitter. "Was it _me_?"

"_What_?" Sokka cried. "I—no, _no it wasn't_ WHY would I look at _your _boobs?"

Toph blinked, then lifted her hands and cupped her assets in them. Sokka couldn't help noticing they spilled through her fingers a little, and Toph's hands weren't exactly small. "Because they're awesome?" she suggested. Pressing her palms flat beneath them, she lifted them in a gesture of seeming supplication and provided, "_Really _awesome. I mean, why would you _not _want to look at them? I would. If I, you know. Had the capability."

"…are you trying to tell me you like breasts, Toph?"

"Well, here's the thing. I don't have any recollection of liking breasts, but I'm pretty sure I'm reasonably apathetic. _Still_." She dropped one of the matters of discussion and held up a finger instead. "I'm classy. I know how to appreciate works of art. And these puppies? They're downright _masterful_, Sokka. Here." She reached for his hand. "Let me show you."

"AGH!"


	10. Ten

**Commentary: **Sorry this is a bit late! I hope you all enjoy it anyway. =)

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Ten**

* * *

"Oh c'mon," Toph sighed, drumming her fingers against his sternum. "You're not still mad about the boob thing, are you?"

"I'm not _mad_," Sokka disagreed, twitching the reins. Appa coasted higher. Dawn and chilly, the gray sky around them streaked toward red at its edge. Soon the sun would crest the horizon, bringing with it the unbearable dog day heat still persisting from summer's end—Sokka had thought it better to get their travels started early and planned for a break near noon. "Seriously," he continued. "I'm not. I'm _traumatized_."

Toph giggled into his shoulder. He scowled. When some girls giggled it was cute—Toph just sounded sinister. "Aww," cooed the Earthbender, "poor _baby_, getting to cop a feel!"

"On my best friend! My best friend," he clarified, "who's like, oh I don't know, the _strongest _woman I know, who _crushes _dudes like me and wipes the floor with their blood and _fluids_—"

"You're welcome."

Fuming, the tribesman wrangled around so he could look at her. "I'm sorry. Did it sound like I was thanking you? Because I wasn't. I promise."

"Are you trying to tell me you didn't enjoy it?" Toph stuck a finger into the soft flesh of his cheek. "I mean, you're acting like an ass about it if you _did _enjoy it, which you must've—you're a dude. I might be missing a giant chunk of my memory, but I know about dudes, Sokka." She prodded him. "And dudes? Dudes like boobs. You could at least pretend you're marginally grateful that I let you—"

"_Forced me_," he interjected.

"—_strongly encouraged _you to appreciate my extraordinarily voluptuous and downright magnificent talents."

"There's such a thing as consent, Toph." He shifted his gaze back to the fore, where muddy steel clouds tempered the morning sky and there was nothing to look at but a line of geese flying south with them, their shadows like footprints on the ground so far below. Toph's finger bumped along his jaw and into his hair.

"You gave it," she insisted, drawing back. "I didn't hear a _no_. I also didn't feel any resistance when I pulled you over, but you know what I _did _feel?" He didn't have to look at her to know she was leering. "I felt your hand goosh right up against my—"

"You _surprised _me!"

"People _like _surprises!" she crowed. She looped her arms around him and squeezed him such that his breath left his lungs in a hoarse yelp. "And as much as you've sulked about it, don't even try to lie. You _really _liked my surprise."

Sokka blinked, temporarily derailed from the argument. "Wait. You remember you're able to tell when people lie?"

"Sure," Toph agreed lazily. Muffling a yawn into his shoulder, she stretched.

"But we're—we're not even on the ground!" protested the warrior.

"I don't have to have working eyes, much less any Earthbending skill, to see right through your transparent ass. You liked it." Smug, she thumped his ribcage from behind.

"Traumatized," he disputed. "Forever."

"Sweet supple _flesh_," she crooned in his ear.

"I will _land _this bison, I swear to—"

"Okay, okay! Keep your shirt on, geez! Crybaby." Heaving an explosive sigh, Toph shifted around a little and proceeded to fall into a sullen quiet. Minutes passed—half an hour. The burning coin of the sun, copper-hued, climbed steadily up into the clouds and kissed them colorful. The air thickened, crisped. Sokka began to sweat. He was also cultivating a strong desire for breakfast when Toph spoke again.

"So that was really the first time you'd seen them." She said it carefully, contemplatively.

He frowned. "Huh?" Craning his neck to peer over his shoulder, he asked, "The first time I'd seen what?"

"My boobs, genius."

He cringed. "Aw man, Toph! Why are we still talking about this?"

A chance updraft rocked Appa and Toph's nails dug into his hip. "It's just a question," she informed him. "Answer it, how about?"

Exasperated, Sokka dropped the reins over his knee and spun again to look at Toph. "No, how about this. Why do you even want to know?"

She grinned into the press of the wind. "Don't you think I have a right to know if you've ever seen my boobs?"

For a moment Sokka sought a way to argue the point, then grudgingly admitted, "I guess." He followed up with, "Yeah, err—no, uhm. That was the first time. Are you happy now? Can we just drop it?"

Scooting forward into his previous position, he took up the reins once more. Idly he scratched Appa's ear. The bison groaned appreciatively. For her part, Toph was quiet.

But, "Really?" she pursued at last.

Sokka's stomach growled. He winced. "Uh-huh."

"No kidding." Toph's fingers tapped softly over his hip, catching now and again in the fabric there. "So we're not together?"

"What, like… _together_-together?"

"Yeah."

"No." Sokka shook his head. "No, we aren't."

"Why not?"

He squinted into the horizon's pink blaze. Had she really just _asked _that? "What?"

"Why _not_?" Toph persisted.

Sweat pooled in the dip of Sokka's collar, dribbled down his neck. His clothes were sticking to him. "Uhm," he managed. "Uh. I don't… I don't know, I guess. I never thought you—you would _ask_ anything like that, sorry—"

"No, it's cool. I get that my awesomeness might be overwhelming. But seriously," she went on, "why not? You're single, right?"

"…thank you for bringing that up. Yes. Yes I am. _Currently_. But—"

"And I've _always _been single. Correct?"

That made Sokka feel a little better. "As far as I know."

"Okay. Gotcha. So, let me get this straight." Leaning around him, Toph thrust her face into the meager breeze, her eyes pointed more or less in his direction. "Based on what you've told me, we've been traveling together for years. _Years_. A long damn time, anyway. And we always hang out with each other. We like the same stuff. You're a guy. I'm a gi—err, I'm _not _a guy. And I have these." She motioned to the curvier parts of her torso. "All of that's true. Yeah?"

With the desperate but inescapable sensation of walking into a trap, Sokka affirmed, "Well, yeah."

"Right." Frowning now, Toph provided, "Enlighten me. Why aren't we together?"

Helpless, Sokka gestured to nothing. "I don't know! You—you think I'm stupid! And you've never acted interested—"

"I could be wrong, given my brains are the equivalent of scrambled eggs right now, but I'd wager those two statements aren't exactly true," Toph cut in.

Sokka stopped. He glanced down at the top of his best friend's head, his mouth pursed. He was abruptly and damnably curious. "So you're saying you _don't _think I'm stupid?"

"I don't think you're stupid right now." She shrugged. "I can't promise how I'd feel with all my reasoning intact, though."

"And you might be… interested in me." He couldn't quite make that a question.

She wiggled the same finger she'd used to prod his cheek earlier at him. "Might _have been_. Past tense. At this moment you're just sweaty and fun to harass."

He blanched. "Thanks. Thanks just _so _much." Tugging the reins enough to bear them collectively off to the right, he considered and pursued at last, "Hey, by the way… what makes you think you might have ever been interested in me at all?"

Toph smirked. "Well, I didn't have the inclination to flash my boobs at you or anything, right?" Tapping her chin, she snapped her fingers and corrected, "Oh _wait_…"

Sokka spent the remainder of the morning locked in a suffering—if not thoughtful—silence.


	11. Eleven

**Commentary: **And they talk still more. Sorry if there are errors—I will look and fix them later, but I thought you all might want to read this before I lose computer access for the day!

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE **

**Chapter Eleven**

* * *

The day sizzled by uneventfully and the night went with it. On the following morning they set out early again, though this time at a brisk walk: it was raining so hard visibility was nil, and neither Sokka nor Appa felt a keen desire to fly headlong into a tree, cliff, or mountainside. As the bison alternately ghosted low over the forest or trundled along the mucky road nearby the two friends, the sound of a few persistent crickets rose in crescendo. The badgerfrogs soon contributed a deafening baseline, and Toph broke the natural medley eventually with the growled query of, "So, do you always suck this much at the whole conversation thing or am I just lucky?"

Jerked from his thoughts by the sound of her voice, Sokka blinked over at her through the rain's sheeting haze. "Huh?"

She pinwheeled her arms, fists pumping, face closed in a glower. "Don't _huh _me, Snoozles. I used to call you Snoozles, right?" Before he could reply, she plunged on, "You've said approximately ten words to me since yesterday morning. I could sum up the rest of your communication with a series of various grunts. I guess I was just wondering if, I dunno, you're like this all the time or if talking to me is really so much of a freaking _endeavor _that you've found solace in silence."

"Nice vocab use there."

"Hey, I try." A smile flitted over her features. It was gone in a blink. "Seriously, though. What's your malfunction?"

Sokka shook his head. Rain flew off the wide-brimmed straw hat he was wearing in thin bright chains. "Nothing. I'm sorry," he put in, and Toph's taut jaw relaxed its clench a little. "Really. It's not you. I was just thinking."

She clutched at her chest, choked out a gasp. "Thinking?" she wheezed. "_Thinking_?"

"Oh ha-_hah_." But he confirmed, "Yeah. About what you said before. About maybe"—he was glad she couldn't see him and grateful for the rumble of the rain too; both made his red face and lolloping heart a little less conspicuous—"liking me. At some point. In the, uh, past."

She stepped closer to him, tipping up the saucer helmet she'd been granted by the Earth Kingdom military years ago. Her thumb settled in a dimple at its edge, and a thread of water ran down her sleeve. With a disgruntled hiss she shook the dampened limb. "It's bugging you that much?"

"I wouldn't say it's bugging me," he denied. "I'm just trying to remember times when there may have been some, eheh, sparks?" He glanced at her. She looked remarkably unimpressed at his word choice, and he tried again, "_Indicators_. Special moments"—she pretended to gag and he sighed—"_c'mon_, you know what I mean!"

"Yeah," she acknowledged, "I get it. You're trying to remember occasions when it might have been obvious I liked you if you'd been paying attention. But"—and she bumped his arm with her knuckles—"you clearly _weren't _paying attention because, let's face it, you've been racking your brain for a whole day and you haven't come up with anything. If you didn't notice it then, you're not gonna magically remember it now."

He gave her a light shove. They both slid in the mud a bit. "My memory's not full of holes like yours."

"Yeah?" She shoved him back. "It's just that slow naturally, huh?"

"He-EEEEY—" The road sloped. Sokka's foot caught a spot more slippery than most and went skidding out from beneath him. He flailed and felt Toph's fingers close over his wrist, and heard her bark laughter next as her footing gave way and they went plummeting down the shallow embankment together. They landed at the bottom of it in a filthy, sodden, squelching heap. After vigorously clearing mud from a nostril, Sokka provided, "That? That was not my fault."

"Sure it wasn't." Toph upended her helmet and let globs of the stuff in it fall earthward again. "You know," she said conversationally, giving said helmet a shake, "remembering whether or not I liked you might be great and all, but there's something you should consider before you bother investing too much more thought in my feelings."

"Yeah?" Sokka shifted in the slimy muck. A foothold seemed like too much to hope for, and the wet ooze was having its way with his pants. "What's that?"

Maybe because she was an Earthbender or maybe because she just had better luck than the tribesman, Toph made it upright before Sokka. She seized twin handfuls of his tunic to drag him to where the ground was vaguely solid, and she said as he gathered his footing, "You should think about whether or not _you _like _me_, buddy. If you don't," and she gave his hip a healthy smack, leaving behind a dark handprint, "there's no sense in getting all worked up over how I feel. Felt," she corrected belatedly. A muscle in her cheek jumped.

He rubbed at the handprint she'd gifted him. It smeared. "That's a little harsh," he opined. "And not very fair. To you, I mean."

She shrugged, her smile wry and wet for the rain. "It's fair enough." She blew beads of sweat from her upper lip and murmured, "Because it how it's always been, I think. I mean… if I _did _like you, you never noticed, right?" He could do nothing but nod. "And it didn't matter how I felt then, did it? Because you didn't like me." As Appa came padding down the embankment to sniff at them, she finished, "If you still don't, it's best to just not worry about my take on the situation. I'm gonna stick with you no matter what." She help up her hands in the downpour. "Isn't that obvious? I can't remember you and yet, hello, here I am!"

After studying his best friend a moment, Sokka felt compelled to insist, "It's not that I never liked you. Not that I've been harboring a secret crush on you or anything," he rushed to clarify, "but it's just—I guess, it never even occurred to me to look at you that way and…" The corner of her mouth dipped. Her brow wrinkled too, just a bit, and the signs weren't much but Sokka, who had been Toph's friends for years, knew hurt when he saw it. "Wow," he managed, "uhm. That—yeah, that didn't _quite_ come out the way I wanted—"

"Save it," she muttered. "I get that I'm not exactly a walking column of femininity here. And"—this was grudging—"I guess Suki probably had, well. _Giant _boobs."

"Actually, they were pretty avera—uhm." Sokka gnawed his lower lip. "Maybe we should… not talk about this anymore."

"Brilliant plan. You have my undying support."

They started walking again. After a few squishing steps, though, Toph reached for his arm and squeezed it. "Sokka," she said, her voice soft, "I have a confession."

Sokka's pulse was an abrupt drum in his neck. "Yeah?"

With a wince and the unmistakable sound of suction, Toph pulled free a scrap of something that had been cemented to her backside. Offering it up to him, she admitted, "I think I sat on your hat."


	12. Twelve

**Commentary: **=) Hope everyone had a good weekend! Let's get this party started again, shall we?

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Twelve**

* * *

She unfailingly fell asleep before he did every night, but she always woke up first too. The fifth morning of their travels he blinked awake and her face was inches from his own, her eyes staring through him, her cheek in her hand. The shock almost made him wet his pants. The following day the process recurred: cracking his eyes open and finding her almost on his bedroll with him, he jolted upright and barked his head sharply against the rock overhang they'd chosen as their nightly shelter. A cave-hopper skittered into his ear. He clawed at it, mistakenly scraped the overhang's ceiling, and upended a whole colony of the insects from a crevice in the rock. They landed all over him, their legs tickling across the bare flesh of his chest, throat, face. With a shriek fit to rival the best efforts of a four-year-old girl, the tribesman shot out of his bedclothes and into the surrounding forest. Toph's choking laughter chased him as far as he ran.

When he had mustered the courage to return to the campsite, he grouchily demanded of the breathless Earthbender, "Why do you _do _that? Geez!" He hitched up his sleeping pants. A lone cave-hopper fell through the seam of his fly.

"Why do I do what?" asked Toph, sniggling into her blanket. She hadn't even bothered to get up yet.

"You, agh"—Sokka flicked off the invasive pest—"you get all close and you _look _at me—"

She propped herself up on her elbow. "Uhm, about that."

"Fine. It _looks _like you're looking at me. And you're, what, _millimeters _away, right?" He took her lack of reply as agreement and muttered, kicking dirt over the circle of their dead fire, "It's kinda unnerving. Scary, almost."

"I'm that ugly, huh?" Toph sat up and grinned, ruffling a hand through her hair. Unkempt and ridiculous, it was almost long enough even tangled to brush the ground. The ends of it frothed, black and shining, halfway down the curves of her hips.

"_No_. No, you're not ugly at all—but being that close to you is, I dunno, like being close to a huge sharp-taloned _beast_ or something," Sokka answered. Kneeling to roll up his bedclothes, he smacked a closed hand into his palm. "One minute the beast's all docile and sweet and the next, _wham_! It gnaws your face off."

"…I am pleased by this comparison," Toph admitted. She stretched. All the bones in her spine cracked simultaneously and the sound was nearby that of a thunderclap. "Oooh," approved the Earthbender, "_yeah_ baby."

"Nice. But could you maybe"—and he nudged her with his elbow—"_not _get so close to me in the mornings like that? We can't both afford to be concussed." Glancing up, he wondered, "Why'd you start doing it anyway? You never tried it before."

"Never tried what?" Probably for his benefit, her eyes rolled toward him.

"To get, you know, snuggly. Are you cold at night or something without your earth tent?"

By now Toph had wound most of her hair up into its signature spherical twist. "No. I wouldn't sleep that close to you even if my toes were icicles," she offered.

This statement was something of an indignity to Sokka. "Why not?" Beneath his thin tunic his chest puffed in resentment. "I'm perfectly cuddlesome!"

Toph smirked. "You want reasons? Okay, here's a few." She held up three fingers. "First reason: you kick. Like a wild horse. You've already woken me up about twenty times thrashing around." Her smirk widened. "If you did ever manage to land a hit on me in the night, I'd probably kill you before I fully regained consciousness and I _do _need a seeing-eye person to get to that fancy Spirit Oasis place, so—yeah." The fingers wiggled. "Second reason: you drool by the bucketload. Haven't you ever wondered why your pillow smells so bad?"

"It does _not _smell bad!" Correction: it smelled terrible.

"Uh-huh. Third reason: you _snore_. We're talking earthshattering, earsplitting _cacophony _kind of snore here, Snoozles." Her hair more or less in order, Toph slid from beneath the overhang, dragged herself into her clothes, and began to vigorously pick her nose. "You scare away the nightbeasts effortlessly with the racket you make."

"You've never complained," he noticed peevishly.

"Because I get to drop spiders in your mouth," came the cheery rejoinder.

Sokka squinted at his best friend. "You're… heh. You're kidding." She blinked at him and he pursued, stomach stirring queasily, "Right? You _are _kidding? _Toph_?"

"Aw c'mon." She beamed. "You've never _swallowed _one. At least, I don't think so. But then again, how could I possibly know for sure?" She maneuvered a hand before her eyes demonstratively.

"…you're kind of cruel, you know that?"

"You like it."

Cinching the knot of his bedroll, Sokka fumbled in his things for his toothbrush and determined to steer the conversation back to its stem. "So okay, you _obviously _don't want to sleep near me. Why do you get so close in the mornings, then?"

He glanced sidelong at Toph. Seated on the heap of her things, she gazed off into the gray woods. Here and there light lanced down from above and tinted bits of the brush golden, but the occasional feathery beauty of the dawn was lost on the Earthbender for obvious reasons. Shifting instinctively into a patch of that sunflower warmth, though, she laced her hands and murmured, "I'm just listening, that's all."

"Listening to…?"

"You." She pointed at him, then waved to their surroundings. "That. Everything. Mostly you, though."

She said it as easily as she might have said, "I like cheese," or, "That tree is dead," but Sokka blushed to his roots regardless. "What do you mean?"

"Dawn's a concert." She turned her face up toward the forest's canopy. Her split lip was fully healed now, and most of the bruising had faded too. Only a single dark smudge lingered on the swell of her cheek. "It's always different, always changing—the bugs, the trees, the wind, damn—even the bark on the trees stretching as it warms up or cools down. But you, see, you're pretty much a constant." Drawing her fingers in toward her chest in a furl, she tapped the spot above her left breast. "You're a drum. And percussion's my favorite part of any ensemble."

Sokka was abruptly aware that he'd never felt more flattered in his life. "Oh."

Toph shrugged. "But if it makes you uncomfortable—"

"No, no! It's cool. I don't care if you—if you listen." He swallowed. "But you can tell when I'm about to wake up, right?"

Making a circle with her thumb and forefinger, she confirmed, "You betcha."

"Great. So could you maybe, uhm, scoot away? When you notice that? Just so you don't scare me," he rushed on. "Yeah."

Popping upright, Toph made a little bow in his direction and then, after looping her bag over her shoulder, set off for Appa. "No problem, Snoozles. I guess I can find something else to amuse me for those few minutes."

"Thanks, Toph."

"What can I say?" Upon reaching the bison, Toph gave his nose a good-morning scratch and smiled over her shoulder at Sokka. "I'm a giver."

True to her word, Toph found another pastime and was nowhere near Sokka the next morning. He woke to thick clouds of billowing black smoke and the stench of what might have been burning hair. His heart flip-flopped in his chest and he lunged from his bedroll, stubbing his big toe mightily on the way out and jabbing his eye into a tree branch for good measure. He expected to stumble straight into a battle with enemy Firebenders.

He was instead greeted by the (somewhat watery, thanks to the branch) sight of Toph crouched next to a skillet over their resurrected cookfire. Poking the unholy contents of said skillet with a stick, she grinned and said proudly, "Look, Sokka! I made breakfast!"


	13. Thirteen

**Commentary: **=)

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Thirteen **

* * *

They were nearing the tip of the Earth Kingdom, Sokka knew, because the air tasted less like pine and more like salt with every passing hour. Toph knew it too because of the way the earth gradually warped and crumbled from stone into loam into sand underfoot, and she told him after they'd been traveling a week and a day, "Land's a huge series of doors and the ocean knocks on them always. Rivers and bays and lakes and stuff are the places water's been let in already."

Sokka stared at her. "That's really… awesomely poetic, Toph. Like, wow. Talk about evocative."

She rolled her shoulders, her cheeks pink in the wind's chill, and pointed off left. "There."

He looked, squinting. First he just saw clouds, thick and soft and fleecy, and below them the scrub forest and brush so common to this part of the Kingdom's continent. He cocked his head and there was a glitter, fleeting, sharp. He sucked in a breath. Toph's hands tightened in their clasp of his arm. He waited patiently and the glitter came again, persistent in the same way a blade will cut if given the chance.

"Dang," he marveled. "The sea. We're here." He pivoted a little and grinned down at Toph. "How'd you know?"

She cupped a hand about her ear. "I hear it. And smell it." To this latter observation she attached a musing look. "It's kind of like your breath on a good day." She sniffed again, theatrically. "Pungent. Briny. _Fish-o-rama_—"

"Yeah, okay, I get it, great," he supplied. Excitement fluttered in his chest, high and heady. If he cocked his head into the wind he could hear maybe a fraction of what Toph did, the unending _boom-ssssh _of the waves. The sound was like a homecoming, interspersed too with the distant but yelping cries of gulls. "It means we're close," he told Toph. "Another day of flying and we'll be there. Two at most. Right, buddy?" He gave Appa a healthy scratch and the bison flicked his ear, groaning his agreement. "Tonight we'll camp on the beach, though," Sokka finished.

A few minutes later they landed on that very thing, a stretch of deserted pale sand at the brink of a bay sporting water so blue it almost hurt Sokka's eyes to look at it. Despite the evening's nip he stripped down to his loincloth and trotted into the surf, letting the waves froth over his feet and against his calves. Toph watched from shore. Sort of.

"Feels pretty good!" he enthused, suppressing a shiver. He sent a splash her way. A few droplets managed to patter across her front, and she scowled at him and braced her hands on her hips.

"It's cold," she disagreed. One foot crept out, skimmed the surface of the shallows, and darted back to dry sand again.

"If you think this is cold, wait 'til we get to the Northern Water Tribe's city. Man, it's frigid there. This?" Sokka splashed at Toph again, grinning. "This is _mild_."

Scowl melting to a vaguely inquisitive frown, Toph skimmed off her breeches and tossed them back toward Appa. They landed on his horn. Browsing through the seagrass, the bison took no notice.

The Earthbender chanced a small step into the sea, then another. Her arms rose and her hands stretched out, not quite toward him but not away from him either. Grasping at air, she growled, "Mild? _Mild_? You're a liar, Snoozles."

Sokka laughed and gave a leg an idle kick, the resulting splash of which drenched Toph from the knees down. "Really? Oh, my bad!"

In the air her hand made a fist. She waved it threateningly. "Just because I can't Earthbend right now doesn't mean I can't kick your ass. And I will. Kick your ass, I mean. Don't test meEEEY!"

She stumbled. It was such a rare sight, Toph off-balance, that for the briefest instant Sokka just goggled. Instinct snapped him into action before she toppled into the waves, though: shooting out his arms, he caught her broadside against a swell and jerked her upright again. Her head collided with his chin and he bit the inside of his cheek without meaning to; her fingernails climbed up the bare flesh of his spine and her cheek moved over his collar, soft, hot. Her knee wedged itself uncomfortably close to his more vulnerable bits. She squeezed him tightly, shamelessly, and tried for a moment to climb him until the next small wave slapped at their hips and drove them together. Her thighs slicked about the one of his.

"Uhm," said Sokka. Suddenly he wondered how he'd ever thought the water cold.

"Heh," Toph replied. She pursed her lips and stared determinedly out across the ocean she would never see, her hands fisted in his hair, his chin pulled forcibly down into the crux of her shoulder. "Well. Uh." With every breath the swell of her breast brushed his cheek. "This is. Yeah."

"Awkward?" Sokka tried.

She shifted, swallowed. "Sure," she affirmed. "Right. Hey. Yeah. Awkward." She squirmed. Sokka looked down and realized, with something that should have been horror but felt more like victory, that he was essentially palming her right buttock.

"Almost eight years," he heard himself say. He stopped, turning a little to brace against the next wave. Toph arched into him in her efforts to escape it, probably. "Almost eight years," he resumed through gritted teeth, "I've known you and nothing like this _ever _happened until, wow, this past week, and what do I go and do? I grope you. _Twice_."

Toph gasped into his neck, "Oh, well, you're a late bloomer, that's all. Nothing to be ashamed of. And Sokka?"

"Yeah?"

Her next statement came out hoarse, strained. "You're _still _groping me."

"Oh! Oh, geez, I'm sorry—"

"No," Toph interjected. "No, really. It's fine. _Fine_. And by fine I mean, you know, just a _little _harder."

"_WHAT?_"


	14. Fourteen

**Commentary: **The plot thickens! Pass me the butter! Also, there are probably errors in this, and I apologize for them—I will fix them as soon as I get a spare second.

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Fourteen**

* * *

"Toph, look, I—"

"Don't," she sneered at him. Turning on her small hillock of sand, she pivoted away from him. He looked at her back in the flickering glow of their fire, watched shadows pool in the dip between her shoulders. "Don't _even_," she revisited.

"Look," he said a second time, petulant, "it was an _accident_, okay? I didn't mean—"

"You," spat the Earthbender, tone venomous now, "_dropped me_. DROPPED ME, Sokka. Into the _ocean_." Her head rose, swiveled. A mint-colored eye rolled toward him, its edge tempered orange for the fire's reflection in it. Her mouth plunged down at either corner like a horseshoe. "So just don't even," she finished, and looked away from him again.

Sullenly silent, Sokka picked up a stick and stirred the embers with it. A circlet of sparks rose under his ministrations and wafted, their movements delirious, into the evening sky, gone in the next blink like fireflies. He waited one moment. Two. And then, "It really was an accident."

There was a sudden sound of movement. He glanced up and saw that Toph was on her feet. Dusting her pants free of sand, she padded wordlessly out into the night and an envelope of darkness folded over her. He strained his ears and heard the padding _pssht-tah, pssht-tah _of her heels on the beach, first strong, next fading, and then gone altogether. Tightening his fingers around his stick, he gave the fire a healthy jab and muttered, "Smooth, Sokka. _Smooth_."

After a moment, he threw the stick into the flames and watched them lick at it. He thrust his face into his hands too, tapping his fingertips against his chin, gnawing his thumbnail. It had always been hard to piss Toph off and now, even with her memory in fragments, it was _still _hard to piss Toph off. She wasn't moody or hormonally trigger-happy like his sister. She wasn't given to hiding her ticking time bomb emotions from him behind a mask of paint and rogue either. When Toph was upset, she threw shit—when she was happy she laughed, and insults and jibes typically ran off her as easily as (he considered this wryly) water runs off rock. She was thick-skinned. She was tough.

There were some things, though, that unfailingly caused Toph's temper to flare, and being dumped unceremoniously in the cold ocean whilst half-naked was one of them.

The water hadn't been deep, no, and Sokka hadn't meant to drop her at all, Spirits save his feckless soul, but the situation stood thus: Toph was royally pissed and he didn't have a clue how to fix it.

_K-chak! _The stick cracked and rolled in the fire. Gradually an hour passed and the moon rose, bathing the beach in silver light and cutting out the necessity of the flames for anything but food or warmth. Sokka wasn't hungry, much less cold. What he was, he realized with a jolt, was lonely. Not soul-shatteringly desolate or heartbreakingly forlorn, nah—he was too manly for that. But the solitude chafed a little, gentle as it was with the breeze a mere sigh and the crickets murmuring in the dunes. "You don't count, buddy," he said to Appa. He tacked on, "Sorry."

Restless tonight, the bison tossed his head and appeared to be ignoring Sokka.

"We should've brought Momo," the tribesman groused to no one in particular. Without really knowing what he was doing, he rose, kicked sand over the fire until it was a nest of smoldering embers, and set off down the beach, following the small stippled footprints that still lingered there.

She wasn't far. He'd been walking about five minutes when she came into view, a dark spot on an expanse of sand bleached white by the moon. Crosslegged, her face pointed toward the sea, she was tossing idly an object from hand to hand, and with every pass it made between her palms it caught the light and flashed. Seven times she did this before he came to her, and when he took a seat at her side she paused, eyes narrowed, but only for a breath. Soon the thing was moving again, making a constant arc over her lap and throwing spangles out toward the waves.

Sokka, who wanted to say sorry and sensed Toph silently daring him to do just that so she would have an excuse to brutalize him, ventured at last, "What's that?"

Another pause. Grasping hard at the thing in question, Toph hesitated, savaged her lower lip under the press of her teeth, and replied grudgingly, "What's what?"

"Your little trinket there." Sokka leaned in to get a better look. It was a bit of metal, that he knew, but Toph hadn't ever made a habit of carrying knives and he was pretty sure it wasn't a habit she'd picked up recently. "I haven't seen it before."

"That's because I haven't had it long." She held it high for his benefit, pinching it between her thumb and forefinger. It was a metal crescent about four inches long, sickle-shaped, thick on one end and thinning down its opposite tip. One side of it glinted sharp. "Katara gave it to me," said Toph. There was still anger in her voice, but it was bubbling away, fading. "She yanked it out of my head. Souvenir shrapnel, I guess."

"Oh!" Sokka winced, still looking at the thing. In the moonlight it was practically glowing, a metal grin flush against his best friend's flesh. He frowned in response. "Oh," he said again, slower this time. "Hey, uhm. Can I see it?"

She shrugged and passed it over. It was still warm from her touch. Cradling it carefully, Sokka studied it. Something about the small sliver of metal bothered him. "You haven't been able to Bend at all, right?" he asked Toph quietly.

"Are you just _trying _to die?" She fisted her hands and pounded her knuckles down against the beach. "Because that's great, Sokka, _yeah_, just reinforce how pathetic I am—"

"_Right_?" he interrupted. His fingers clenched over the shard and it bit into his palm, almost enough to draw blood. "It's important. Have you been able to Bend at all? Anything? This?" He gestured with her gruesome battlefield memento.

She angled her head toward him, curiosity and anger at war on her face. "No," she admitted. "That's the way it was when Katara gave it to me. Why?"

Sokka looked down at the crescent in his hand, innocuous now that it wasn't buried in his best friend's skull. "This isn't shrapnel," he said at last.

"Uhm. You're crazy," she suggested. "Hole in memory here. Scar on head. Moron adjacent—"

"Someone threw this," he insisted. "It's not warped or scorched or anything like that, and shrapnel usually is, so…" He trailed off.

"So I wasn't unlucky," Toph supplied. "I didn't get pinged by some random piece of armor because of an explosion or anything. I was a target." She groped for the bit of metal, found it, and took it back. "So what? We were fighting rebels, right? Stands to reason they'd try to hurt me any way they could." With a final flash the thing disappeared into her pocket. "Burned to a crisp, knifed in the head—what's the difference?"

"The result," said Sokka tightly. "The insurgents would try to hurt you, sure, but only to _capture _you, Toph. You'd be more valuable as a prisoner because their end goal is to get Zuko to do what they want, and he'd try to help you if you were a hostage or something." Reaching out, he gingerly—for the first time—brushed the spot on her skull where metal had once sprouted up like a sinister weed. Her brow twitched, but she didn't flinch away. "Someone who throws a knife at your head," he finished, "means to kill you. Screw manipulating Zuko and the rebel agenda."

The waves hissed, burbled. The Earthbender frowned as she digested the idea. "Well," she observed at last, "that's _peachy_. And let me just guess at something here, okay? Because I can smell the freaking drama." Licking her lips, Toph muttered, "There's a person wandering around out there with a grudge against me and _great _aim. Right?"

Suddenly the beach felt too open and the night too stark, too quiet. Clutching at Toph's hand, Sokka confirmed as he jerked to his feet, "We're getting the hell out of here right now."


	15. Fifteen

**Commentary: **Making Toph mad is just really dumb.

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Fifteen**

* * *

"Hey, don't you think you're being a little hasty?" asked Toph. "If someone's out there—"

Sokka wordlessly wrenched the Earthbender upright and commenced dragging her down the beach. She stumbled after him the first few steps and matched his pace next, making sure to slam her heel down on the top of one of his bare unprotected feet. Staggering, he hissed out a startled, "_OW!_" and found then that Toph had looped around in front of him, barring his path. She reached out, seized the soft skin of his cheek. She twisted it. "Ow!" he managed again, her thumbnail sinking into the flesh of his lip. "Ow, ow, ow-ow-ow, okay, _stop_—"

"Yeah," she affirmed, leaning close to him, "_stop_." She released him and scowled up into his face, expression unsympathetic as he rubbed at his jaw. "Stop being an idiot," she reinforced. "If someone's out there, they're blinder than I am because wow, Sokka, haven't we been sitting out in the open this whole time? Aren't we still?" She waved a hand toward the dunes. "It's a golden opportunity for someone to turn us into pincushions and since they haven't yet, I'm gonna go with the idea that _maybe _we're alone right now. So _stop_"—she was getting fond of that word—"trying to haul me around like a little kid. Calm down. And"—this last bit was particularly forceful—"let me _go_."

There was a tug between them. Sokka looked down and realized he still had his fingers wrapped firmly about her wrist. "Oh, uh. Sorry," he allowed. He drew back his hand and Toph, with a deepening scowl, turned away from him to stalk down the sand back toward camp. He jogged after her.

"I just don't get it," she snapped at him as he drew abreast of her shoulder. She threw her hands up. "I really don't. I mean, damn." She stomped a foot and paused, looking almost as though she was waiting for something to happen. When nothing did, she huffed out a snarl and started walking again. "When I'm in mortal peril and angry and apt to tear your face off," came the mutter, "you wanna touch me, _sure_, but when I'm in your arms and geez, I dunno, _writhing_—"

"Please don't use that word," suggested Sokka.

"Convulsing?"

"Reminiscent of being electrocuted."

"Fine. _Asking with movements of my body_. Is that okay with you, Princess?" Before Sokka could formulate a response, Toph barreled furiously on, "When I'm in your arms and I'm doing _that_, when I am seriously freaking desirous of touch, what do you wanna do? You wanna drop me. You just wanna _drop me_, a blind Earthbender, into the ocean, and"—she aimed her face at him—"I have no-ho-_oh_ idea what your problem is, buddy, but there is something seriously wrong with you if you can't tell I—"

She shuddered, stumbled. She sucked in her breath in a rush and Sokka thought at first it was because she was preparing to verbally flay him, but then she turned a little and he saw a fresh sharp shining thing sticking out of her upper arm. Blood coursed to her elbow and dripped from it slowly, black as ink in the moonlight.

Another bladed crescent sparked from the dunes and buried itself in the sand inches from her toes.

Acting on instinct alone, Sokka leapt for Toph. He meant to shield her, maybe, or try to drag her away again, but she sidestepped his lunge and he went sprawling across the sand instead. Clutched in such an intimate embrace with the ground, he was the first to notice when the entire beach quivered and lurched under him.

He looked over his shoulder. Teeth bared, hands clenched into fists, Toph snarled, "I'm trying to bare my soul here and some asshole wants to _interrupt _me_?_" She lifted a foot and slammed it down again. The beach broke—no, Sokka realized, it _Bent_—into pieces beneath her heel.

Sokka gaped.

With an expression that suggested she had no clue what she was doing but fully realized how badass it was regardless, the newly realized Earthbender squared her shoulders and muttered as she strode toward the invisible danger in the dunes, "Bad idea, pal."


	16. Sixteen

**Commentary: **=)

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Sixteen**

* * *

Toph made it three steps before Sokka slammed into her from behind. It was a stroke of luck that he managed to touch her at all, and she folded under his weight with a furious grunt and an immediate snarling suggestion regarding what he could go do to himself. The beach seethed, roiled. A wall of clumped sand blocked another bladed crescent from stabbing him in the leg—that was probably his second stroke of luck for the evening; Toph looked livid and not entirely keen on the idea of doing him any favors. He shouted, hooking his hands forcibly under her arms, "C'MON! WE GOTTA _GO_!"

"No!" she denied. She dug her heels into the sand, the movement both fervent and panic-inducing on Sokka's part. A cloud passed over the moon and plunged the beach into stippled darkness, and with a faint _thwip! _another weapon passed nearby his ear. Toph's desire to maim was going to get them killed. "NO!" she repeated. She sank an elbow in his gut. "Let go, asshole!"

"_Uff_." He scrabbled at his squirming armful of Earthbender, desperate. "Toph, Spirits—"

"I can _handle _this!" The elbow formerly acquainted with his abdomen made a merry journey upward and jounced into his chin. Sokka saw stars. He tasted copper too, the tang bitter on his tongue.

"You _can't_," he disagreed. He wallowed backward and Toph came with him, unwilling and bloody and thrashing. Gritting his teeth, he shook her as hard as he dared—once. "You _can't_," he hissed in her ear, crushing his face close to her sand-caked skull. "You don't know what you're doing and can you even _see _who's attacking us? Can you? Huh?"

"I'll find them, damnit, just—"

Again he shook her, rolling with her across the trembling beach. Her chin smashed into his shoulder. The clack of her jaw went off like a firecracker in the night and she stared at him, or what passed for staring. Furious, scared, Sokka yelled down into her startled face, "You can't and you won't _because I said so now GET UP let's GO_!"

She blinked. Her throat worked. He slid his hand up her arm to the blade still stuck in it, and as he closed his fingers around it to wrench it free, the Earthbender fluttered her eyelashes and said, "_Well_, look who grew a pair!" Her hand rose, folded over his. Together they yanked at the weapon. It came loose in a spurt of warm liquid and Toph provided, "It's kinda hot, Snoozles. You know. When you actually act dominant and stuff."

Sokka coughed out crippled laughter, trying hard not to focus on the bubble of blood—her blood, Spirits, _her _blood—beneath his hand. "Toph? Just so you know, you're a total freak."

"Oooh, talk dirty to me."

With a strangled sound Sokka begged, "Can we _please _just get out of here?"

Toph shrugged under him. "Since you asked _so _nicely I guess I can—"

"Toph _Spirits _we are going to get _skewered_—"

"Geez, okay, _okay!_" Reaching up, the wounded woman looped her arms about Sokka's neck and dragged him down over her. Their cheeks collided; her lips moved in a smirk against his jaw and she insisted, "You might wanna hang on. I mean, you were right—I have _no _idea what I'm doing."

"NO! No no no no _NO_ don't _Earthbend _us out of here—"

The beach yawned open to swallow them whole.


	17. Seventeen

**Commentary: **=)

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Seventeen**

* * *

Sokka had a secret.

Or maybe it was a flaw. A lapse in character. A personal failing. A dispositional blemish. Whatever its true design, it was a crippling thing like a wound that bleeds endlessly, and from his friends—from even his family!—he'd kept it hidden for years. He was ashamed of it. He refused to mention it aloud even in healing halls on the off chance that his enemies would hear of it and use it to exploit him, and _really_, who needed to know he was claustrophobic anyway?

Well, he reflected as approximately ten tons of beach closed over the top of his head, telling Toph _might _have been a good idea.

He opened his mouth to scream and sand rushed into it. It tore at his eyes, his face; he gagged. He flailed for a moment, desperate, and when his next breath was of earth and not air, he panicked and—in an adrenaline-fueled feat of strength—thrashed free of Toph's arms. Instantly an incredible weight fell over him. He had the briefest moment to realize he was being crushed, he was being _eaten _by the beach, before his awareness shattered and he presumably died. In fact, that was his last thought: _oh hi, I'm dead_.

He discovered he was _not _dead when he woke an indeterminate amount of time later sprawled flat on his back in the middle of a clearing, the mother of all headaches jackhammering cheerfully between his temples and the sun shining with equal abandon onto his upturned face. "Hnngh," he managed. Turning his head, he noted Toph's feet resting nearby his cheek. For a terrible instant he thought the worst, but then her toes gave a twitch and shifted out of his line of sight, replaced quickly by her face hovering close to his own.

"'Sup?" she greeted him.

"Hurg," replied Sokka. Working himself up on an elbow, he looked around. The circle of trees was standard, nondescript, and completely unfamiliar. Their belongings were strewn everywhere and Appa, resting in the midst of said belongings, huffed at the tribesman pleasantly. Birdsong sifted down from the canopy and the sky overhead winked brilliant blue, its swell studded with the puffed white of clouds. The position of the sun suggested a time a little before midday and Sokka, bewildered, ventured next, "Uhng?"

"Here." Toph unclipped a pouch from her belt and offered it to him. "It's water. Take a sip, swish it around, and spit it out. Don't swallow," she advised as he fumbled greedily for the pouch's cap. "You've got more dirt in you than sense."

Sokka slopped the pouch's contents into his mouth. Grit scraped his teeth, his tongue; his throat clenched and his eyes began to stream freely. With Toph staring through him, the tribesman obediently spat out his mouthful and repeated the process thrice more, and only when he was able to grate out a hoarse gasp of thanks did the Earthbender allow, "Try drinking now."

He did. The first swig went down like knives, and the second too. The third was a little more bearable. Gradually the sensation waned enough that Sokka could drink without wincing, and when the pouch was a good deal lighter he asked, "What happened?"

"You slugged me in the face," said Toph. She scowled at him. "You jerked away from me. And then you got yourself smushed under an entire chunk of shoreline." Clapping her hands over her knees, she rocked forward and finished, "Congratulations, Sokka. You are the world's biggest dumbass. Care to explain what prompted your little freakout back there?"

"No," he provided, and went on, "and if _you _hadn't gone all homicidal on me, none of this would've even _happened_—"

"Are you trying to say this is _my_ fault?" she interrupted incredulously.

"Uhm, _yes_?" Sokka wobbled the remainder of the way upright. "This is _entirely _your fault. _You_ dragged us beneath the beach—"

"_You_ wanted to get away! I do somewhat recall your very girly plea for _rescue_—"

"Not like that!" barked the tribesman. He was horrified to hear a quaver in his own voice, but he forced out next anyway, "_Not _underground!"

Toph's scowl waned to a frown. She blinked; her eyes winked for the midmorning sunlight, coins in her dirt-smudged face. "It scared you," she observed. The statement was half a question too and her knuckles chuffed his knee, leaving behind a smear of sand grains and soil.

Sokka wavered. He looked at her searchingly, breathing slow and hesitant because his throat still felt raw down the middle. Reaching up to rub a hand down the back of his head, he twitched at the scrape of grit in his hair and muttered, "Yeah." If he was going to tell anyone about his shortcomings, he figured it might as well be the person who had experienced them firsthand anyway.

"Because I didn't know what I was doing?" Toph asked. "Because you were worried I'd, hmmm, squish your head between a couple of boulders or something?"

"Well, when you put it that way, yeah I was a little worried about that, but mostly"—he fiddled with the water pouch—"it's just, you know. They freak me out. Enclosed spaces, I mean. Dark ones. And it's bad, uhm. Not being able to see."

"Ain't that a bitch," Toph commiserated. She blinked at him several times. Slowly.

Sokka grimaced at her. "You know what I mean. Not being able to _do _anything because I can't see. It bothers me. I mean, I'm already limited—I'm not a Bender, and when I can't even aim a weapon or anything, I'm…" He gestured helplessly. The liquid in the pouch provided a weak _slish _and he concluded, angry at himself for confessing the sin in the first place, "I'm useless like that. In dark, tight places."

"And that scares you because _why_?" Toph demanded. Thumbing to herself, she insisted, "You've got _me _looking after you, so to speak. I'm pretty much _awesome _in case you hadn't noticed, and I'm not gonna let anything happen to you."

"But something might happen to _you_," Sokka argued. "Something _did _happen to you before when you were trying to protect me. Remember?"

"No," Toph reminded him. "No, actually, I don't, genius."

"…sorry. But—"

"But nothing." Toph held up a hand. "Shut up. Right now. And do two things. One." She flipped her index finger at him. "_Trust me_, okay? If you're ever in a dark, tight place again, I'll pry you out of it. They're kinda my specialty. Two." This time the index finger jabbed him in the chest. "_Tell me _the next time you've got a problem. I am your best friend. It's my job to listen and to take care of that shit. All right?"

"It's just—"

"I," she repeated delicately, "am your best friend. Right?" She twisted her fingers in his shirt. "Or have you been lying to me all this time in saying that? I mean, if you were lying you were doing a damn good job of it because I couldn't tell, but hey, I'm not _always _perfect. Just usually. So—"

"I wasn't lying." Sokka shook his head. "You _are _my best friend. But—"

"If I hear that word one more time, I will kick yours. Do you understand?" Toph didn't give him time to respond. She continued in the next breath instead, "I am your best friend. You've said so and I'm saying so now. I'll take care of you. I promise." She groped for his hand. Once she found it, she squeezed it until it cracked, dropped it, and leaned away again. "Okay?"

Despite himself, Sokka felt a smile creeping over his face. Seeing Toph all protective and huffy on his behalf was odd—but also nice. Flattering, even. "Okay."

"Good." She sighed. "So no more trying to swallow whole beaches, mmhm?"

"You got it."

"Perfect. Now." She made a spinny motion with her fingertips. "You. Dude with working eyes. Please figure out where the hell we are, because I don't have the first freaking clue."


	18. Eighteen

**Commentary: **=)

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Eighteen**

* * *

Sokka looked around the clearing again, blinking. "Uhm. Well," he offered, and stopped. He listened. Aside from the distant twitter of the birds and the faint rumble of Appa's breathing, there were no real notable sounds to this place. "Wait. Toph," he asked, "how did we get here? You didn't Earthbend us the whole way, did you? With all this stuff? And Appa?"

"That would be a _negative_, Meathead," replied the Earthbender. "I was gonna just get us back to the campsite so you could fly us off into the great yonder, but then you, uh—" She hesitated. Even Toph apparently had some small shred of tact, and she looked reluctant to make Sokka feel worse than he did already.

Shrugging at her effort, the tribesman provided anyway, "But then I flipped out?"

Her brow twitched, but not her lips. She wasn't smiling as she acknowledged, "Fine. But then you flipped out and you couldn't fly us anywhere and I was, well, admittedly sort of freaking out myself because you were acting, you know, dead, so I just threw as much as I could onto the saddle and dragged your ass up there too. And Appa took off," she thrust an arm skyward to demonstrate, "and when I couldn't smell or hear the ocean anymore, I asked him to land. A few of our things might've blown off along the way," came the admission, "because I couldn't tie much down."

Sokka's eyes fell to her wounded arm. The gash below her shoulder gaped like a leering mouth ringed in red, the edges crusted with dirt, the skin puffy and bruised. Edging closer to the Earthbender, Sokka took the abused limb in hand and set about examining it. "Does it hurt?" he asked. "Here, give me that other water pouch."

Passing over the requested item, Toph affirmed, "Yeah, it's not exactly pleasant. Ssst!" As Sokka poured the pouch's contents over the gash, she stiffened and growled, "And that's just _daisies_, Snoozles, really it is."

"Yeah, well, it needs to be cleaned." He noticed one of their supply bags lying on its side nearby. Scrabbling for it, he fished free a mostly-clean cloth and went on, carefully working the fabric over the wound, "It looks like complete crap."

"Pardon me for not knowing that," Toph shot back. And then, eagerly, "Will it scar?"

"Oho yeah, definitely. And it really needs to be stitched." He twisted the arm gingerly and frowned. "But Katara's the person for that; I'm not very good at it—"

In an instant she'd snatched away her arm and was clutching it protectively to her chest. "Uhm, wow," she observed, "swallowing all that sand has seriously messed with your head if you even _remotely _think I would ever let you treat my flesh like a torn shirt. My _flesh_, Sokka," she stressed. "Skin. Actual living human skin."

"Don't like needles?" he teased.

She stuck her tongue out at him. "Show me someone who does and I'll be impressed. But"—and she snapped back to the subject at hand—"you're not sticking one in me. So don't even _think _about it."

"It stands a pretty good chance of getting infected if it's left open like that," protested the tribesman.

"So tie it up tight enough that my flesh realigns and call it a day," Toph suggested. "I mean, do you really _want _to weave a needle through my arm? Because if you do, we might need to reevaluate our friendship."

"Trust me," Sokka deadpanned, "I can think of a few things I'd rather do to occupy my time. But here, hold still." Using the contents of the fresh water pouch and the scavenged cloth, Sokka blotted grime away from the wound until it began to bleed again and Toph's face was looking pinched and drawn. "Don't touch it," he warned her. "Let me find the medi-kit. I know Katara packed one—she always does. And there'll be bandages in it."

"Just hurry up," she managed through gritted teeth. "This itches all to hell."

A few minutes later, after Toph's arm was swathed in bandages down to the elbow and Sokka had taken stock of their remaining supplies—their clothes were gone and their cooking skillet too—the tribesman scaled one of the taller trees at the clearing's edge. Despite his headache and the scratch of sand in all the wrong places under his clothes, he made good time, and soon he thrust his head past the topmost branch and into the full scatter of the midday sun. His vista was blinding but beautiful too, a sea of softly undulating greens and yellows that went on forever in all directions. Leaves rippled and rustled in the breeze; their waxy surfaces caught the sunlight, flashed. For several moments Sokka stared, mesmerized, out and around at the unending canopy. Eventually Toph yelled up to him in concern, though, and he picked his way down to the clearing again.

"Well?" she demanded as he dropped down at her side. Her eyes rolled up toward him. "Did you get your bearings?"

"Yep. We," he answered, "are in the middle of nowhere."

"Awesome!" enthused Toph. Holding up their food pack, she offered him a piece of jerky. "At least there are snacks."

"Positive attitude. Hey, I like that." He smiled. "We're pretty far off course, though—several leagues, I'd guess. I can't see the ocean and there's no smoke from any settlements either." Sokka took the proffered piece of jerky. He gave it a halfhearted gnaw. "Can you sense a stream nearby?"

"Mmmm…" Toph pressed her foot flat to the grass and considered. "Yeah. About half a league that way." She gestured.

"We'll follow that back to the ocean." Ripping off another bite of the jerky, Sokka mumbled, "But it could take a few days. If we fly we might be seen by whoever's hunting you and—well, I'm sorry. It's… it's kinda my fault. All of this." He chewed his lip. "And your head—"

"Is doing fine," Toph finished for him. Waving her rapidly disappearing bit of breakfast, she suggested, "Don't worry about it. I'll let you know if I start to forget my name and stuff like that, okay?"

"But you keep getting hurt too!" argued the tribesman anxiously. "First your head—now your arm! What if—"

With aim remarkably precise for a blind person, Toph shoved the remainder of her snack into his mouth. "Look," she sighed, "_that _wasn't your fault. Me getting hurt, I mean. Either time, come to think of it. I went into both situations willingly and you just happened to be close by, so stop blaming yourself."

"Should've been me," grumbled Sokka around his mouthful.

Arching a brow, Toph surveyed him—or went through the motions. "You big sulky crybaby!" she accused him, smirking now. "You're upset because _you _didn't get hurt?"

"It _should _have been _me_," Sokka reiterated.

Not two seconds later Toph's fist slammed into his shoulder. As crippling pain spiked down Sokka's side and he doubled over with a wheeze, Toph put in, "There ya go, O Noble Warrior! Feeling better now?"


	19. Nineteen

**Commentary: **=)

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Nineteen **

* * *

They found and followed the stream for the remainder of the day, and when night bruised the sky black they continued on a while too, heralded by the sounds of crickets and Appa plodding pleasantly along behind them. Sometimes they were quiet. More often, though, they spoke, Toph asking questions and Sokka lobbying back answers. Stories wove themselves into the fabric of conversation, details of shared past exploits Sokka struggled to explain with enough merit that his best friend might remember them. "And then the drill just, _sh-boom_!" he described, slapping his hands together. His palms collided with a sharp _spak! _and Toph grinned appreciatively. "It stopped straight where it was and there was slurry _everywhere_ and Princess Sparksalot was _so _pissed," he finished, "and then, _finally_, we got into Ba Sing Se. Which you hated."

"Too crowded," she agreed without missing a beat. Sokka shuddered, though, and he turned to look at Toph in what moonlight had made it through the forest's thick canopy.

"You remember that?" he chanced. He hardly dared to hope.

The Earthbender's pace slowed, stilled. She frowned. "Well," she hedged, "yes and no." With one foot she idly kicked a wet clump of leaves into the stream. "You say things sometimes," she began. "You say them and they make me think of stuff. Stuff from before this." She reached up to run her fingers over her head in the dark, hand hovering nearby the spot where a blade had once been buried. "_Important _stuff. Like when you said Ba Sing Se just a second ago, I imagined footsteps. Hundreds," she clarified. "No. _Thousands_. On and on, always, in stacks—in levels. It's a huge city. I _know _it's huge because I've been there and I've sensed it, and while I don't exactly remember being there or what it meant to me, I remember what it felt like, all those footsteps and mine lost in the middle of them." She licked her lips. "So"—and she made a cutting motion with one hand; her bandages bulged for the flex of muscle in her arm—"it's crowded. It's too crowded."

She started walking again. Sokka trailed behind a pace or two, thoughtful. The brush crunched as Appa found what must have been a particularly delicious-looking cluster of sawgrass and set about making it his dinner. "Wait," suggested the tribesman. As Toph obediently paused a second time, Sokka wondered, half to himself and half to Toph, "If things I say make you think of important stuff, won't things I _do_ have the same result?"

Her mouth quirked in a smile. It was a feral smile but it was pretty too, sharp and shining in the moonlight. Sokka found himself squinting to get a better look at it. "I dunno," she supplied. "Nothing has yet, really." But then she cocked her head at him and asked keenly, that smile spreading wide, "Why? Is there something you want to try?"

Sokka felt a sudden terrible itch in his chest. It rose up into his throat next, hot and prickling like needles, steadfast in the discomfort it was causing him. It was anxiety. It was hope. It was something else too, something his awareness simultaneously grasped at and refused to acknowledge, something that had everything to do with the way she was smiling at him in the quivery half-dark of the forest—

"Uhm," he interrupted his thoughts, "well, let's see…"

"Let's not," she disagreed, and stepped closer. Her smile had become a full-fledged grin now. "C'mon." She lifted her hands and wiggled the tips of her fingers, eager. "Whatcha got? Lay it on me."

The crickets hummed. Appa was still munching the sawgrass. The night air hung heavy between them, almost clinging, and Sokka was reminded of another instance not terribly much like this one save for the heat of it, long ago and nearly lost to memory. Toph had been shorter then—and shivering. Downright miserable, even, but not apologetic or shamed. Her feet… Zuko had burned her feet and…

Sokka edged near to her, and next nearer still. He braced a hand between her shoulders. She inhaled—under his palm he felt her spine swell—and he said, "Here." Just the one word. On instinct she leaned back into his touch. It was exactly what he wanted and he stooped a bit, looping his other arm behind her knees. He lifted her, folded her in a cradle against his chest. Her eyes widened in surprise and her knuckles knocked at his sternum once, but then she was quiet, motionless, and Sokka realized that for all her strength and severity and the passage of years since the time he'd last held her thus, Toph was still _small_.

He shifted her a little. Her legs swung over his elbow, swaying midair; her fingers splayed across his chest in a dubious star. "What—" she tried, and bit off the rest of the statement as Sokka broke into a run.

He almost slipped in the soft grass at the edge of the stream, but gathered his footing and barreled forward into the forest's night closet, sweeping past cattails and dodging the odd low-hanging branch. He sucked in a whooping breath and forced it out again fast between his teeth, trying to make it sound ragged, harried, like it had all those years ago. They'd been running from a man able to blow up things with his _mind_, Spirits save them, and Toph had only managed a few hobbling steps herself before collapsing sideways into Sokka. In the shadow of the crumbling temple Sokka had glimpsed the raw soles of her feet, weeping blood, the skin coming off in little shredded white circles, and he'd—

"Carried me." Her hand fisted in his tunic. She jackknifed aright; her temple scraped his chin and she laughed, incredulous, "I burned—no. Someone else burned my feet! That _asshole_"—she cried this, but it came out more euphoric than angry—"and you, you _carried _me and we were, uhm, we were running from something—"

"Someone," he offered, slowing to a stop. His heart thundered under his collar, drumming fit to burst.

"Someone," she agreed, and hurried on, "and then you… we…"

Sokka bit his lip. A badgerfrog croaked on the stream's opposite bank; Appa lumbered up sidelong and Toph's face fell, despondent. "That's it?" he asked.

"That's it." She ground her face into her palm. "Ungh! I hate this. I _hate _this—I know it's there but I can't—" Her chest heaved; her shoulder dug into his upper arm and she snarled again, furious, "I _can't_ get to it!"

She clawed at her head unhappily, the hanks of hair dark and jagged as they sprouted up around her knuckles. Unable to think of a comforting thing to say, Sokka tightened his hold the tiniest bit and resumed his sedate walk into the trees, letting her legs swing with every stride. Leaves crunched and rustled underfoot. Gradually the tension bled from the both of them. Toph relaxed; Sokka hummed. As the moon crested high and canted off northward, the tribesman decided, "We'll try something else."

"Yeah?" Toph sounded sleepy. "Like what?"

"I dunno. Let me think about it." Glancing down into her face—her eyes were closed, her mouth parted slightly—he ventured, "Do you wanna get down now?"

"Nah." She turned her brow into the well of his neck. "You make a good steed. And you don't shed giant white clumps of fur all over me either."

"Thanks," Sokka sighed. "Thanks a lot."

His only reply was a soft grin and a feigned snore.


	20. Twenty

**Commentary: **Happy Friday! =) I may or may not update over the weekend. Take care, all.

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Twenty**

* * *

The next morning, Sokka awoke not because the sun was in his eyes, but because the ground beneath his bedroll was trembling faintly. He sat up with a groan of puzzlement and, rubbing his eyes, squinted around at their meager campsite. The sight of Toph's vacant blanket sent a bubble of panic straight to his brain, but as he struggled to free himself from the tangle of his own bedclothes she wandered into view at the edge of the stream. A huge moss-speckled boulder followed her from a thicket like a puppy, and with a marked flex of her arms and a stomp of her foot, Toph sent it sailing skyward. Sokka, slack-jawed, watched it vanish into the creamy dawn.

Pivoting again to face him, the young woman raked her hair back from her brow and grinned. "Oh hey, you're awake," she observed. "Great! How about making us some breakfast?"

"What—uhm. What did you just do?" ventured Sokka. From a great distance away there came the unmistakable sound of the boulder crashing into a variety of unsuspecting trees.

"That?" Toph thumbed over her shoulder. "Just some diversionary tactics, is all. Now. About breakfast—"

"You just let the whole _Kingdom _know where we are, Toph!" Scrambling to his feet, the tribesman hiked up his sleeping breeches and demanded, "How is that _diversionary_?"

"For starters, I let the whole Kingdom know where we _aren't_," Toph corrected. "If someone goes to check out those noises, all the better—they'll be moving away from us."

"But—but _why_?" Sokka motioned helplessly to their campsite. "We're hidden! Why was that even _necessary_?"

Toph frowned at him. Heaving a sigh, she dropped into a squat next to him and muttered, though not so quietly he couldn't hear it, "Freaking Water Tribe morons." She went on next a little more loudly, "That stream over there we've been following. It empties into the ocean, right? You said so yourself."

"Yeah," acknowledged Sokka. "So?"

"_So-oooo_," Toph drawled, leaning in close to him; beads of sweat stood out on her forehead like coins, "I'm gonna guess most streams empty into oceans. Yeah?"

The tribesman fidgeted. "Right. But—"

"And I'll bet most people know that. Don't they?"

Sokka considered. "I guess. I mean, especially if they have combat experience."

Toph clapped him on the shoulder. "Exactly. See, Snoozles, put the pieces together, okay? Whoever managed to hit me with those knives probably didn't just hone that throwing skill for fun as a kid, you know? Something like that—it's taught. It's a technique. It's a _military _technique."

"Okay…" Blinking at his best friend, Sokka began to instinctively pack up his bedclothes. "I could buy into that. But what's it got to do with you hurling rocks out into the forest?"

"Oh Spirits." Rocking back onto her butt, Toph threw her hands up and prayed, "Save me from this idiot, I beg you."

"Hey! I'm not an idiot!"

"I didn't think so either until now," the Earthbender confessed, "but Sokka, for such a smart guy you are _really _clueless sometimes, you know that?" Before he could vocalize his denial, Toph reached out, grabbed his cheek, and wrenched it sideways. She pointed in the direction of the stream and angled his head such that it was facing that way too. "If the guy chasing us was ever in the _military_," she explained, enunciating her words slowly as though speaking to a small child, "which we've both agreed he was, then he's had combat experience, which _you _said probably means he knows streams tend to empty into oceans. And Sokka?" Pinching his cheek so hard it was certain to leave a bruise, Toph finished, "That stream? That one right over there? It's the _only one _around for _leagues_."

There was a long, pregnant pause.

But then, "…oh shit," realized the tribesman. "Oh. Oh man. Just. Just _shit_."

"_There _ya go!" crowed Toph proudly. "Now you're getting it!"

When Sokka spoke, it came out hollow. "We're probably being tracked right now," he said. Toph's fingers left his cheek.

"Yeah," she agreed. She both sounded and looked fearless. "Most likely. And when I realized it this morning, I thought I'd try the boulder trick since I couldn't sleep anyway. It took me a few hours to figure out how to get them to move at all, but now"—she began to pick at her ear, beaming—"I've got it _down_. No sweat."

Despite that he felt more than a bit stupid for not thinking of it himself, Sokka praised the Earthbender, "It's a really good idea, Toph. It might save us from getting boarcupined to death too."

"I know." She flapped a hand at him. "Feel free to continue to applaud my efforts. But you know what would be even better? _Food_. And then maybe," she suggested, "we should move along. The boulders won't fool him for long."

Sokka murmured his agreement and set about making a slapdash meal over a small fire. He didn't dare try to cook much, worried the smoke would attract unwanted attention. As he passed a warm biscuit smeared with honeyjam over to his eager friend, though, a stray thought occurred to him and he asked, "Hey, Toph?"

"Mmmghfrgh?" she managed around her immediate mouthful.

"Why couldn't you sleep?"

Toph scowled. A reluctant flush crept up her neck. Swallowing her bit of biscuit, she directed her face pointedly away from him, shrugged, and replied, "I guess I was more comfortable before you put me down."


	21. Twentyone

**Commentary: **Those of you who have never experienced what Toph does in this chapter… consider yourself fortunate.

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Twenty-one**

* * *

Whether because of Toph's efforts with the boulders or the presence of sheer dumb luck, the pair avoided random knife-throwing action during the remainder of their journey back to the coast. It took two days for the stream they were following to widen into a river, and another half-day of trudging down its banks for that river to gush into a fanning inlet. The ground underfoot grew spongy, treacherous; the sulfur-smelling air thickened into a humid cape made all the more hospitable by the persistent whine of mosquitoes. Appa took to hovering, too heavy for the marshland. By the afternoon of their third day dogging the waterway, the ocean was a distant but discernible glimmer through the gnarled trees and Toph, not for the first time, sank an unwitting foot into an ankle-deep, muck-filled bog hole. She stumbled, lurched—fell face-first, finally. An explosion of slimy mud marked the moment and spattered Sokka's shoes too.

"Epitome of grace right there," the tribesman complimented gravely. He did have the decency to tack on, "You okay?"

"Fine," grunted Toph, struggling upright again. She pawed gingerly at the grime now adorning her front. "Just peachy. _Grand_. Water freaking _everywhere_—ground's soaked, hard to see—"

The complaint dissolved into unintelligible muttering. As the Earthbender heaved to her feet, Sokka spotted an anomaly in the shadow of her jaw. "You've got a little, uhm…" Reaching out, he prodded what was definitely a leech on Toph's neck. "Er. Yeah."

She ran cautious fingers over the thing, grimacing. "Is this _attached_?"

"Looks like it." Actually it looked like a thin purple slug, but Sokka didn't think it wise to say as much.

"Okay. Okay, that's _sick_. It's my blood, you little bastard," she muttered to the leech. "You can't have it!" With fumbling fingers she tried to grip the parasite enough to pull it free. She succeeded. In a faint rush of red the leech relinquished its hold and Toph threw it disgustedly off into the marsh. "Sick," she repeated. "Just—"

She paused to rub at her neck, smearing the small trickle of blood there. Next she swayed. Sokka jerked close to steady her and observed, both incredulous and delighted, "You are _not _about to faint because of a little tiny bloodsucker! _Seriously_, Toph?"

She planted a hand in the center of his chest. For a stretch of time she stood thus, her head bowed, her lips bitten from the inside. In the simmering gloom of the swamp her skin glistened, paler than porcelain; sweat beaded on her brow and slid down her cheeks like tears. Once she heaved—twice. Cords of muscle stood out along her throat's pulsepoint.

The fit passed as soon as it had come. Drawing in a slow, shivery breath, the Earthbender straightened. She stomped a foot. All the sludge on her clothes fell away in curtains.

"Let's go," she insisted, and set off briskly. She added, "You're on leech watch. If you let another of those things get even _vaguely _close to me, I'll castrate you."

"Don't you think that's a little—"

"_Castrate you_, Sokka. With a jagged _rock_."

She quickened her pace. Sokka had to jog to catch her. When he did, he marched along at her side in silence a while. To his credit, he did keep an eye out for the more leeches, not that they were particularly easy to spot in the first place.

"You're not gonna tease me?" she wondered at length, breaking the bubble of quiet that had closed over them.

Sokka watched his friend a moment from the corner of his eye. Her face was still pinched; occasionally her hand wandered to her collar, probing anxiously the skin there. What fun was there in tormenting someone already miserable?

He answered indirectly, "I didn't know you were afraid of anything."

Her brows rose, formed a dark line over her milky gaze. "Huh," she agreed. "Makes two of us."


	22. Twentytwo

**Commentary: **=)

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Twenty-two**

* * *

Side by side in the thin blue starlight, Sokka and Toph crept onto the beach. "There's no one here," reported the latter, her heel pressed sharp to the sand. "Not that I can see, anyway."

Sokka cast a careful eye down the nibbling line of waves. He couldn't see anything either; the rustle of the dunegrass dominated all other sounds too, and for all he knew there was a whole legion of blade-throwing assholes no more than ten feet away. Taking a steadying breath, he determined, "Yeah. Maybe not."

Despite the statement he kept still, staring off determinedly into the night. A nesting gullpiper muttered. The surf churned. At his hip Toph shifted and then slipped her fingers against his wrist, tightening them next over his knuckles. She grasped hard at his hand below—found it, clutched it.

He blinked down at her in the dark. "Toph?"

"Hm?" He saw the dim silhouette of her head cock toward him attentively.

He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. "What," he managed finally.

He wasn't sure, but he thought maybe her face twisted. Her mouth did, at least, and her teeth flashed white as she chewed her lip and answered, "Sokka." Flexing slowly, her hand tensed in its clasp of his. "The whole leech thing got me thinking."

Frowning curiously, Sokka acknowledged, "Okay?"

"It got me thinking," she repeated. "That and—and what you said. Earlier. About me being afraid of them." The gullpiper muttered again. Scowling off in its direction, Toph went on, "I started trying to remember if I'm afraid of anything else because it would be nice to, you know, have some warning next time. And—" Her throat clinked. She shivered and said suddenly, "Sorry. Feelings. They're hard."

"Yeah," he agreed. Because her palm was sweaty and threatening to slip, he threaded his fingers through hers and squeezed them.

After a moment of strained quiet, Toph resumed, "I've decided that I'm afraid of, uh… of getting to this Spirit Oasis place and it doing more harm than good, I guess. Like, what if someone tries to fix me and that special water you've been telling me about just erases everything I do still remember?"

"That won't—"

"Shut up, Snoozles, I'm trying to be open and vulnerable here."

"My bad."

The waves whispered. The breeze gossiped. "So I'm afraid of that," said the Earthbender. Her thumb moved over the tip of his, rasping across the skin there. "Big time. And I'm afraid of leeches. Not as badly as I am of forgetting everything, but yeah—leeches. They suck. No pun intended." She paused. Reaching up with his free hand to rub the coarse fur at the base of Appa's horn, Sokka nodded. "And," Toph admitted, "I'm a little afraid of you. Sorta."

"_Me_?" Eyes owlish, Sokka stared at the dark blotch that made up his best friend. "And what do you mean by _sorta_?"

The crescent of Toph's thumbnail worried along the creases of his fingers. She attempted, picking through her words slowly, carefully, "Fear. It's a funny thing because it comes in a bunch of different sizes. My fear about what's gonna happen at the Spirit Oasis—that's huge. My leech fear is, eh, maybe this big." She made a watermelon-shaped circle with her arms. "And then there's this last thing, this last fear—maybe not a fear _of _you exactly, but one that's tied to you because I only start to feel it when I—when I think about you."

There was a hesitation, like she was waiting for him to say something. "Uhm," he answered stupidly. He wanted to offer more—he wanted to look at her, to see her face. He sidled gingerly closer, squinting. The darkness gave up nothing, but then she tipped her head, took a step, and her face—the snub of her nose, the swell of her cheek—touched his shoulder.

"It's small," she murmured into his tunic's sleeve. She left off her clasp of his hand and enfolded both her arms about the one of his instead, tugging it near. The low drum of her heartbeat pulsed into his elbow. "The fear about you, I mean. It's really, really small right now, like a twinge or an ache or something, but I think the only reason it's small is because I don't remember how hugely, ridiculously big it was before."

"Before?"

"Before a knife swizzled my brains around."

"Oh."

They considered this together. Toph said next, "I think I liked you. I think I liked you a lot, Sokka. I think I l… lo… uhm. Loved you."

"Oh," replied Sokka again. Against his elbow Toph's heartbeat stuttered.

"But I was afraid to say so," she insisted. "I was afraid to say so more than I was afraid of anything else, so much that when I think about you now a part of me still remembers to tense up. My stomach flips over. My hands get all sweaty and I just, uhm—well, sometimes I want to just tear your clothes off but you're my friend, you're my best friend—"

As she said this her grip on him tightened, and she at last broke off and buried her face in his shoulder. "Back when this first happened," she growled, muffled, "in the tent. With Aang and Katara. You asked me how much I remembered about, you know, before. Right?"

"Right." Sokka nodded, maybe too many times. Without really thinking about it he hooked his spare arm around the Earthbender. Had he ever hugged her like this—just the two of them, alone? No, he thought. Probably not. Never. He found himself wishing he'd tried harder to make it happen. She felt nice there in his chest's small hollow, soft where he wasn't, firm in places he could never hope to match her muscle.

"And I said I stayed with you guys after what must have been the war's end because of—uhm. Someone. Because of someone," she struggled, and finished, "remember?"

For the second time he nodded. "Yeah," he agreed, his voice drawn down to nearly a whisper. "Yeah, I do."

"I think…" Thrusting her cheek harder into him, she corrected, "No. I _know _that someone was you. I know I stayed with the group because of you. And that means I've loved you a long time, buddy—since before I probably even knew what love _was_—"

"You know what it is now?" interrupted the pragmatist in Sokka. "You've been single your whole life, Toph."

He felt bad saying it—felt _terrible _saying it. He also felt like he'd earned himself a punch straight to the groin and wouldn't have really blamed Toph if she'd taken it, but she only pressed both hands to his chest and shifted sidelong, such that her brow came to rest in the divot of his collar.

"I barely remember who you are and what you mean to me," she allowed, "and still the only thing I can think of or want to do is be where you are. So yeah. Yeah, Sokka, I think I know what love is."

A lump manifested in Sokka's throat, too hot to reckon with, too thick to swallow. "Wait," he grated. "Wait—just wait. You… you said a few days ago that you thought maybe you liked me before all this happened, sure, but you said it was _past tense_. You said I'm just fun to harass—" He was babbling. He bit off the sentence and tried again, "The way you're talking, it sounds like—"

Her hands slid up his chest, scudding across the cloth of his tunic. They fanned over his throat, found his chin, crept higher still. When her fingertips were touching his cheeks, both of them, Toph cupped his face and agreed, "Yeah. I think I love you now. Right now. Or still. Or I always have and maybe I can kind of remember how much, I don't know—I don't! Take your pick! But"—and despite that he couldn't see much of anything, Sokka realized instinctively that the distance between them was closing rapidly—"I want to do this while we're on the ground so I can see you, and while my fear's still small. I want to do this while I still can. Because soon I might not remember how _much _I want to do this, or I might be too afraid to try again, so—"

Her breath fluttered over his jaw. He waited. She did too. Disgusted by the suspense, Appa huffed and lumbered away.

Finally Sokka whispered, "What are you doing?"

She licked her lips—and his, just a bit. She was that close. "Giving you a chance," she answered hoarsely, "to meet me halfway. If you want. If you don't, and that's okay, really, just—just step back."

Another moment passed. Neither of them moved during it, and when it was over Sokka flared his hand in the small of Toph's back and pressed her the last bit into him. "You were closer than halfway," he murmured against her cheek.

"You're still not close enough," she insisted. Her teeth sang over his lower lip and when he hissed, she twisted her hands in his hair and dragged him down to seam their mouths together.

For a while afterward, as palms roved and clothing fell, Sokka worried about exposure—about their pursuer, and about whether they were safe. Her fingers tore free his belt eventually, though, and as she coaxed, "_Little _closer, Sokka, c'mon," he adopted a state of mind similar to hers and forgot everything but Toph.


	23. Twentythree

**Commentary: **Hello insomnia. How are you?

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Twenty-three**

* * *

The first thing Sokka realized the next morning was that he was not alone in his bedroll.

As far as first realizations went, it wasn't at all a bad one. Despite hogging his blanket and digging her toes into his thigh, his sleeping companion was soft and warm and her hair, a long dark mass of it, puddled like silk over his chest. Her arms were thrown over him haphazardly, jealously, one woven through his elbow and the other hooked about his hips. He felt the curl of her fingers in the dip below his navel. And he was clutching her too, tucking her to him sideways, his palm pressed flat just where her spine began its curve. One of her legs and both of his were tangled together.

All this he knew without opening his eyes. Blinking open said eyes, though, and craning his neck down to get a look at his limpet, Sokka experienced the morning's second realization.

He was naked.

Third realization: so was Toph.

Fourth: wow. _Toph_.

He licked his lips, but his mouth was dry and his throat drier still. His chest clenched, ached and his heart performed a series of acrobatics normally reserved for life-threatening situations, and—

"You didn't take advantage of me," said Toph drowsily. He jerked and she slanted open a single eye, not that it mattered, and rolled its silver solemnity up to his face. "You didn't," she repeated.

"How did you know I—"

She lifted a hand—reluctantly—to tap a finger against his breastbone. "Your crazy percussion here."

"Oh." For the second time Sokka tried licking his lips. "Uhm," he ventured. "You're sure?"

"I think I was sure"—Toph thought about it; her eye slid closed again and she nuzzled her cheek into his bicep—"what was it? Three times?"

"I'm pretty sure I remember four," he admitted.

She frowned, lifting her head. "Really?"

"You _don't _remember?"

"A fourth time?" She scratched at her chin. "It's all kind of a blur. So no." Shifting a knee between the two of his, she rolled atop him and opined, "But hey, no big deal. You could just, you know. Remind me. Give me a refresher course, so to speak." Her hands feathered like stars across his belly, the fingers kneading, caressing.

"Right now?" Oh Spirits, he prayed, _please_ let it be right now.

Her thighs ghosted over his hips; her breasts over his ribs. "Oh, well," she demurred, a smirk hovering about her lips, "let me check my schedule—"

"Right now," he insisted, and pulled her down to him.

Not quite half an hour later, as they shrugged slowly into their clothes and sunrise sent a thin pink thread along the horizon, Toph wondered, "You okay with this, Snoozles?"

Sokka glanced up from lacing his boot. "Loaded question."

Pulling her shirt down over her abdomen and the conspicuous bitemarks there, Toph shrugged. "So give me a loaded answer."

The tribesman considered. He switched to the next boot, movements methodical, practiced. "It was awesome," he began, and amended next, "it's _still _awesome. Not just the physical part—"

"Which, I have to agree," she interrupted, "was just, seriously. Damn. Why haven't we done that before?"

"I was oblivious"—he held up a finger—"and you were closemouthed."

Toph hopped into her pants. The cuff of one leg caught. She stumbled and as he steadied her, she grouched, "Might as well call it like it really was. We were _idiots_."

After a short, contemplative pause, Sokka consented, "Yep." But he resumed, "Anyway, I mean—the physical part was fun and I… really… liked it?" He cleared his throat. The warm glow of the sun climbing up the tideline couldn't hold a candle to the heat in his cheeks. "But this—us. This," he tried, "like… you and me, together but, you know, _closer _than together, and you right here, happy about… me being right here too…"

Her head tipped slowly in his direction. The smirk he'd seen earlier had been replaced now by a smile: the slow, spreading sort. "You suck at this," she provided.

"Yeah. Yeah, I do. But it's nice—being together. We are together," he hedged, "aren't we?" Before she could answer, he barreled on, "It sounds a little cheap to say only that because it feels like it's more than just, oh hi, we slept together, and it's more than just hey, we hang out a lot, and—"

Toph revisited, awed, "You really, really suck at this."

"You said you loved me!" Sokka exploded weakly. Her shoulder rolled in his hand—she was adjusting her belt. "You—you said you loved me and do you have any idea what that's like? To hear that from someone? Someone who's been your best friend for years?"

"No," she admitted, and Sokka sucked in a breath.

"I," he began.

"Don't," she corrected delicately. He bit his lip and she stared off past his elbow across the beach. "It's okay," came next, followed by, "it doesn't matter if you say it back, Sokka."

The tribesman recoiled. "It doesn't?" And then: "Don't you care? Don't you want me to say it back?"

For a moment she fiddled with the buckle on her belt. _Tink-tink, tink-tink_—the metal sang in the growing dawn. "Look," she murmured, "words are words. Some are nice, some aren't, and yeah, maybe there are a few I'd like to hear from you, but mostly I don't care about them. Words, I mean." Her hand rose, hovered midair—found his arm next. There it folded and she finished, "They don't really do a very good job of conveying all the complexities of an emotion like love."

After digesting that, Sokka managed, "Okay."

"Okay?" She blinked, smiling again.

"Yeah. I can stand by that, sure. But," he insisted, "can I say this? I _do_, you know. Have strong. Very. Passionate. Uhm. Deep, yeah," he choked, "feelings. For you."

She gave his arm a gentle pat. "I know."

"You do?"

"Takes two to stick together, doesn't it?" asked Toph. "All these years we've been friends and it's not just because I did all the caring for both of us. Right?"

"Right."

"And now"—she tugged his sleeve, then crooked a finger; he lowered his head and she planted a somewhat off-center kiss to the corner of his mouth—"we're still friends. Maybe more. But who needs words to clarify complexity when we have all that, you know…" She pumped her eyebrows. "Action. To speak for us."

"It's pretty revealing, that action," Sokka affirmed. Tucking his chin down into her hair, he fell quiet. He watched the sunrise over her ear and she stood in the slope of his side like she'd been renting the real estate forever, and finally he said, "Yeah. Yeah, Toph, I'm okay with this."

She supplied easily, "Me too."


	24. Twentyfour

**Commentary**: And they finally arrive.

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Twenty-four**

* * *

"Two days of straight flying," said Toph. She paused, burrowing her face into his shoulder; around his waist her arms tightened, and she began again, "Two days of straight _freaking _flying—"

"We landed on that ice flow a while back," Sokka reminded her gingerly.

"Oh, right. I'm sorry. Was that before or after we started to freeze to death?" snapped the Earthbender. There was frost in her hair—it tickled the back of Sokka's neck and he shivered, squinting into the dim horizon for any sign of the Northern Water Tribe's splendid city. As ever, there was only purple darkness and the faint flicker of thin moonlight on the water.

"We'll be there soon," he muttered anyway, twitching the reins. Appa sighed.

"You've said that about ten times now, Snoozles."

"I'm trying to be reassuring!"

"You're trying"—Toph's thumb dug into his kidney; it took all Sokka's strength not to yelp—"to make me throw you off this bison."

Gritting his teeth, the tribesman supplied, "Fine. We just won't talk anymore, then. How about that?"

"Good. No—_excellent _plan," fumed Toph. She wasn't really angry and neither was Sokka, but arguing was the only thing to do atop Appa's frigid neck that simultaneously stimulated the mind and made the blood boil. They both needed to be warm and, for his part, Sokka needed to be sharp. A sign of his sister tribe's civilization in all this icy, frigid darkness could pass in an instant. Here, where currents and temperature moved and changed the terrain continuously, the tribesman's innate sense of direction was useless and his eyes almost the same. Every chunk of ice resembled a canoe; every star looked like a torch, burning orange and bright and stalwart against the pole's haze—

Wait.

He stiffened and leaned forward, straining his senses toward that bobbing light. "Hah," he whispered, and then, "_ha_! There! Toph! _TOPH_! There it is! We're here!" He snapped the reins and Appa snuffled, gliding down toward that single smudge of heat. Shapes formed the lower they coasted: buildings, bridges, monuments, statues. They skirted an ice watchtower that loomed from the night at the city's corner. Sokka yelled to its guardsman, who gawped stupidly at the bison's driver before breaking into a stunned grin and waving back furiously.

Within seconds the city was ablaze with torchlight and activity, and Toph observed, "I can hear it. Them. Lots of people, right?" Her hands twisted in the hem of his tunic, making knots of the lining.

"Lots of people," he agreed, lacing his fingers over a few of hers. As Appa touched down before a growing assembly of the tribe's natives at the pole's arching gate, Sokka squeezed the limb in his possession and asked, "You ready?"

In reply she felt her way to Appa's side and slid down it, leaving him to follow her into the snow and the tribe's eager throng. "Sokka?" the foremost member wondered, and provided next, "SOKKA! It is you!"

After hours with his face thrust to the pole's relentless wind, Sokka was unprepared for the sudden heat he experienced as a man much larger than himself embraced him heartily. "Gurk," he managed. He convulsed, gasping. "Chief, uhm. Chief Arnook?"

Shifting Sokka out to arm's length as quickly as he'd jerked him close, the headman beamed down at the visiting warrior. "The one and only. Good to see you again, Sokka! We were expecting the Avatar, what with the bison"—he motioned to Appa—"but you're just as welcome. What brings you here? And who—"

He looked sidelong at Toph, who was shifting uncomfortably from foot to bare foot in the powdery snow nearby the city's gate. "Toph," she offered. Her hand quested out a good deal to Chief Arnook's right. No small wonder, thought Sokka—it was probably close to impossible for her to see anything here. The Earthbender added, "Toph Bei Fong," and finished with, "hey, nice to meet you. Could I get a blanket? Or someone could just set me on fire. That would be fine too."

Titters and startled whispers broke out among the eavesdropping crowd. Chief Arnook, eyes wide, took Toph's searching hand and clasped it. "We are honored by your visit, Lady Bei Fong. The Avatar's teacher and friend is an esteemed guest—"

"Oooh," Toph replied immediately, shuffling forward through the snow. Clumps of it spattered under her hurried shuffle. "You seem hot. Literally. C'mere, big boy."

Shamelessly she tucked herself into the headman's furs. As her wiry arms encircled his waist and she rooted into the hollow of his ribs, he cleared his throat and turned his attention back to Sokka. His creased smile was good-humored if not puzzled. "…yes. Erm. So—Sokka. What can we do for you and your, ah, chilled young companion here?"

"I'm still waiting on that blanket," Toph put in helpfully.

"Chief Arnook," answered Sokka, "we need a favor."


	25. Twentyfive

**Commentary: **=)

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Twenty-five**

* * *

The short, squat matron took Toph's chin in hand and turned the Earthbender's dark head carefully from one side to another, lips pursed. "Another Waterbender has healed her," she observed. Glancing over her shoulder, she beamed at the waiting assembly: Sokka, anxiously clutching his knees; Chief Arnook too, silent and sturdy in his concern. "Was it young Katara? She is well?"

"She's fine," Sokka agreed. "Yeah—err, yes ma'am. She found us after the battle. She said she, uhm. Put Toph's skull back together." He added belatedly, "She's fine. Fine! She and Aang would be here too, but—insurgents, burning crops…" He trailed off, watching as the head of the healing huts uncapped her waterskin—so like his sister's—and drew a thin thread of its contents aloft. The rope of liquid flattened into a wobbly disc-like shape and, glowing, sank into the inky mass of Toph's hair.

The Earthbender winced, squinching one eye closed. "It's cold."

"I'm sorry, dear," Yugoda provided. "I would warm it if I could. Hold still, now." With a rustle of furs she leaned closer to Toph's crosslegged form, wrinkled hands hovering inches from the smaller woman's face and temple. Her breath steamed; her mouth quirked and she opined idly, "Hmmm."

A moment passed. Shifting to stir the embers of the dying fire at the hut's center, Chief Arnook pressed, "Well, Yugoda?"

"Katara has done well," the healer replied, voice distant. Her hands moved again, tracing patterns in the air above Toph's brow. "The wound has seamed nicely. The swelling is minimal—but still a bit tender, I'd wager."

"You'd win that one," agreed Toph.

The remark provoked a dry chuckle. "Mm, I thought as much. All in all," she granted, "a fine job. But"—and next Yugoda frowned; the expression wasn't at home on her kindly face—"there is a bruise in the tissues of your brain, Master Toph. It is small if not deeply set."

"Brains can bruise?" Sokka hedged. The idea made him queasy.

Toph, who clearly didn't share the same nausea, admitted, "That's actually pretty cool."

Yugoda's frown ebbed. "It can," she affirmed, and continued, "it's just as susceptible to injury as a body's other limbs. Because that's all the brain is, in truth—a talented, dexterous, highly evolved limb." Sliding one hand down through Toph's jagged bangs, the healer asked, "You've heard of concussions before, haven't you?"

"Sure." Sokka nodded.

"This," Yugoda finished, "is a concussion." Gently tapping Toph directly between her milky eyes, the healer withdrew and, after recapping her waterskin, smiled.

The coals in the firepit hissed. "But," said Sokka, stupefied, "but—she can't _remember _things! Lots of things! For a while she couldn't even figure out how to Earthbend—"

"But you have since regained that ability, have you not, Master Toph?" Yugoda blinked down at her patient.

Toph rifled her fingers through her chilled hair and shrugged. "I'm getting there. I still have the feeling I'm not nearly as awesome at it now as I was before, but yeah—it's kinda coming back."

"It will continue to do so, I am certain." Spreading her hands, the healer permitted, "Concussions of this particularly severity often result in temporary but total amnesia. I believe Master Katara's quick action enabled you to retain _some _of your core memories, dear. You have what appears to be a decent idea of your own identity; you may not recall Sokka entirely, but you are implicitly aware that you trust him. Yes?"

"Smart lady," Toph approved.

Yugoda took a moment to feign primping. "Given time," she resumed, "your faculties would have returned to normal, I imagine. But if you'd rather not wait for that, I can hurry the process along now."

There was a moment of stunned quiet. "That's it?" Sokka managed at last, voice thick and heavy with relief. "That's all? No—no magical Spirit Oasis water? No dramatic near-death diagnosis?"

Chief Arnook and his head healer exchanged a grin. "Sorry to disappoint you, young man," said the latter, "but I'm afraid your friend is going to be just fine."

"Wow." Toph sagged. "That's, uh, pretty anticlimactic, huh?" Before anyone could reply, she rushed on, "Why couldn't Sugar Queen fix me? And there's no chance that, you know, I'm gonna up and forget everything if you try to heal me, is there?"

Yugoda laughed. It was a pleasant, easy sound, one that reverberated off the hut's sealskin-lined walls and made the air seem warmer too. "No, Master Toph," she assured her patient, "you won't forget anything else. And I'd stake Master Katara's inability to completely repair your injury on two factors." She held up a finger. "The first is simply this: while she is without a doubt one of the most capable Waterbenders among our people, she is not yet a fully realized healer. She will need far more training before she is able to identify and mend all manner of wounds, and messing with the brain is tricky business anyway." Another finger rose to join its mate. "Secondly, it is extremely apparent she reached you soon after you sustained your injury. You wouldn't be here otherwise—she _did _save your life. But the amount of swelling present in your brain at the time of the injury could very well have prevented her from seeing the bruise I can easily detect now."

Another moment of quiet descended on the hut. Sokka exhaled, glad he was sitting down—he felt wobbly, weak. He glanced sideways and noted that Toph's expression was one of cautious optimism. Behind them somewhere Chief Arnook's braids gave the faintest rattle, and Yugoda calmly turned away to tend to the fire. The poker scraped. Three bloody sparks erupted from the coals and drifted high before dissolving into nothing, and Toph said, "Fix me. Please." She swallowed. The skin of her cheeks stretched taut and her hand stretched too: out, away from her hip and toward him. Sokka took the very tips of her fingers and she continued, "Everyone's waited on me long enough. I—_we_"—and she angled her face toward Sokka—"need to get back to the front. We should recommence kicking rebel ass as soon as possible."

Chief Arnook husked out low, appreciative laughter. His head healer set the poker aside and clapped her hands together, smiling her sweet furrowed smile. "We'll start now, then," she affirmed. "Master Toph, this will be painless but most likely exhausting for you. It takes a good deal of personal energy to restore hindered brain function. You should be prepared to sleep for several hours."

"Long nap, sure. That okay?" Toph arched a brow at Sokka.

"Yeah—you bet! Fine. Get your beauty rest, you know—take as long as you need. Uhm—"

He floundered helplessly another few seconds before a hand fell on his shoulder. He looked up into the thoughtful gaze of the headman, who suggested in his deep bell's toll of a voice, "Walk with me, Sokka? Your friend is in good hands."

Hands. Sokka blinked down at those very things: his and Toph's twined together over his knee, her fingers like moonlight slanting through the darker branches of his own touch. His throat tightened. Leave her? Really? Now?

Maybe sensing his indecision, Toph gave his knuckles a soft thump and leaned away from him. "Yeah," she agreed. A muscle in her cheek jumped, thus far the only sign of anxiety on her part. "Yeah, I'm fine. It's okay. You—you can go." Sokka opened his mouth to say something and she interrupted him hastily, "Don't worry, Snoozles. I'll see you when I wake up. You know. Sorta."

She swiveled her face in the direction opposite him, shoulders hunched. Chief Arnook tugged Sokka's tunic at the same moment and, wordless, the tribesman rose. He followed the headman from the hut and out into a wavery snowfall. Five crunching steps later he pivoted on his heel and dashed for the skins on the hut's door. He collided on the threshold with Toph, who had apparently had the same idea.

For a breath they struggled with the flaps, but then Toph took a final step forward and they were both outside. Her skin broke into gooseflesh and she snarled; her arms belted around him like iron, desperate, her fingers digging hard into the dip of his spine. He clenched her close too, thrusting his face down into her hair. Her cheek was wet and hot when she tucked it to his neck.

"Whatever I remember in there," she choked, "goddamnit, Sokka, don't let me forget this."

Giving him no time to form a reply or promise, she tore herself from him and disappeared back into the hut.


	26. Twentysix

**Commentary: **I didn't think I'd be able to post this today, but hey, look! I was wrong!

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Twenty-six**

* * *

For a while—how long exactly he didn't know—Sokka stood and stared at the softly swaying skins of the healing hut's door. His vision trebled, swam. His breath coalesced in thick white clouds; his hands made fists, rose, fell and loosened again.

Snow crunched. Chief Arnook took Sokka's elbow gently if not firmly and insisted, "Walk with me, young man."

Sokka obeyed, allowing himself to be led away down the city's dark streets. Here and there a window cut the night, an orange square in the gloom, but for the most part the buildings slumbered and the inhabitants in them presumably did the same. Silent save for the _sssh-kch _of his footsteps and the smooth creak of his furs, Chief Arnook ambled slowly on until Sokka, hoarse, ventured the question, "Sir? Where are we going?"

The headman's silhouette paused in a thin pool of light nearby a staircase. Sokka saw the outline of his head dip a bit. "This place holds bad memories for you, Sokka," he said. "Because of that, you fear the loss of your friend. I am sorry. I wish it weren't so."

The visiting tribesman bit his lip. After the briefest hesitation and an embarrassed foot shuffle, he admitted, "Coming from you, sir, uhm—that, well. You of all people—you. You," he forced out finally, "shouldn't feel the need to apologize to me."

"Why not?" Chief Arnook smiled. It was a sad, half-strained smile, true, but a smile nonetheless. His mitted hand tightened in its clasp of Sokka's arm. "I shouldn't apologize for what happened to you here because you believe my own loss was and continues to be greater?"

Heat crept up Sokka's face. "Well." The word came out strangled. "Kinda—exactly that, yeah. I mean, yes sir."

Leather squeaked: it was the chieftain releasing his hold of Sokka's arm. He began to ascend the staircase and Sokka followed of his own volition this time. "Loss is a terrible thing no matter its measure," sighed Arnook once they'd reached the top. Through an archway and down a narrow, winding path they crept—it was at once familiar and completely foreign to Sokka, who might have asked about it had his guide not continued to speak. "I lost a daughter, yes. You lost a friend and a—what would you say it was, Sokka? A particular kind of future?"

Sokka thought of Yue: her laughter, soft and quick. Her lips against his, soft and quick too. "Yes sir," he mumbled.

"Who is fit to say which of those left the greatest wound?" Chief Arnook stopped. It was darker here than most places—they stood in the shadow of a great ice wall, and Sokka could only just make out a small wooden door at its center. Resting his hand over that door's handle, the headman resumed, "Regardless, there is an important lesson to be learned from loss, and it is that one never loses something—or someone—without gaining something else. Or, as it happens once in a while, someone else."

Twisting the handle, he pulled open the door. The revealed threshold was scarcely a meter's height—a grown man would have to crawl to get through it. "Sir?" Sokka chanced, asking half about the door and half about the chieftain's statement.

With a quiet, rasping chuckle, Chief Arnook confessed, "I find it hard to think another dear to your heart will be taken from you here. But who am I to predict the ways of the spirits?" Motioning to the circular break in the ice beyond the door, he urged, "Best ask the spirits themselves, Sokka."

Sokka looked doubtfully at the opening.

"I find it helps," admitted the chieftain after a moment, "to bend at the knees."

The wind tore over the ice wall, howling, cold. Sokka shivered. In the next moment he dropped and squirmed through the hole, and he turned to help his elder through when the door clicked back into place. His fingers brushed the rough surface. For better or worse, he was alone now.

"Uhm," he muttered. "Yeah, okay, great. Thanks for the mystical midnight sojourn, but—"

He came to the abrupt realization that it wasn't cold anymore. He exhaled: he couldn't see his breath. But he _could _see, a little—the air was beset by a thin, thready glow, almost like starlight. Rising, he turned, squinting, and then—

"Oh," he whispered. "Oh. This place."

He was in a chasm. Two bridges, their outlines dim but discernible in the dark, forked out from his current footpath over the water at the quarry's bottom. They met on either side of an island at the chasm's center. On that island was a shallow, glittering pool…

Twenty paces. It took him that to reach the pool. Once there, he shrugged out of his parka and crouched on the bank, chewing his cheek's inside, curling his fingers in the cool, springy grass that had no business growing so near the world's pole. He looked through the clear water down to the two fish swimming therein, one dark with a white spot adorning its brow, the other its equal save for its reversed colors.

"Hi, La," managed Sokka, nodding to the dark fish. Shifting his gaze to its partner, he husked next, "Hi, Yue."

Unending and unresponsive, the two fish circled one another. Sokka pillowed his cheek on his arm and watched them a while—until they blurred into nothing but a disc of inseparable pale and dark. He thought to ask them what Chief Arnook had suggested—whether he would lose Toph—and came close several times, but in the end he determined, scrubbing his hand down his cheek, "It's good to see you again, Yue. There's, uhm. There's someone I'd like you to meet later, if it's okay for me to bring her here." He paused. There was no dramatic denial—not even the scarcest ripple across the pool's surface. "If you thought I was funny before," he went on, "you'll really love her."

It might have been his imagination, but it looked as though the paler fish flicked a fin at him. Grinning into his elbow, Sokka closed his eyes. "She'd be able to see here," he added. "She'd like it…"

Moments passed. He opened his mouth to say more and produced a faint snore instead, his head lolling down his arm and into the grass. He twitched once, fitfully, before dropping totally into a fatigued sleep. As such, he missed the white hand that slipped soundlessly from the pool and smoothed once across his brow—but he did dream of the moonlight. It was warm.

He was roused later by a voice nearby his ear and a rough clutch in the tunic at his shoulder. "Sokka! Sokka!" insisted that voice.

The tribesman jolted upright. Chief Arnook was crouched at his side. "What?" Sokka asked, blinking away sleep. "What's wrong? What is it?"

The chieftain replied, "Master Toph is awake."


	27. Twentyseven

**Commentary: **I may or may not continue this during Tokka Week. We'll see! It's almost over regardless. =)

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Twenty-seven**

* * *

The Northern Water Tribe's city was more resplendent in the sunlight than Sokka remembered, but he paid its wonders little mind as he bolted through the glittering streets. The position of the sun suggested mid-afternoon; because he'd left his parka back on the grass nearby Yue's pool, his arms prickled in the press of the arctic wind. He half-fell down the staircase Chief Arnook had guided him up just hours prior. Breathing hard, he ignored the throb of the knee he smashed at the bottom of said staircase and limped determinedly the last several hundred yards to the door of the healing hut. Yugoda was waiting for him there.

"She is passing in and out of consciousness," the matron supplied. "But she has asked for you already several times."

Sokka sucked in a breath and stomped into the hut. Sprawled on her side with her back to him was Toph, meager and white in the sea of furs that made up her pallet. Her hair clouded about her head like an ink stain; one arm stretched haphazardly out toward nothing, and in the momentary square of light the hut's door admitted her fingers shaped a star. But then the skins shushed back into place, the fire spat, and her shoulder rolled as she asked weakly, "Sokka?"

"Hey, yeah," he said immediately. His knees went to water. It was all right, though—he could still crawl and he did, scuttering over to her across the hut's floor. "Yeah, Toph, it's definitely me."

He reached for her the same time she turned on the pallet. His hand jolted over her cheek and she winced, one eye closed still, the other narrowed to a watering slit. "Definitely you," she echoed, and rasped next, "geez, like—your hand. Your damn hand is _freezing_."

He snatched it back. "Oh! Oh, uhm. I'm sorry—"

"Give it." The furs jounced and her arm rose, wobbling. "Give _it_," she repeated, the demand nearly a snarl. She found his wrist and seized it, jerking it to her chest. Sokka rocked forward after it. They knocked foreheads; Toph's lashes, smeared with sleep, flicked across his cheeks and then she was kissing him, kissing him hard.

They broke apart a moment later and she confessed, "Unngh! Your breath. It—it tastes like _death _and it smells even worse, Spirits—"

"Well what about yours?" Sokka shot back, bristling. "You're lucky it didn't trigger my gag reflex! And," he added, "you _bit _me!"

"You _liked _it!"

"I did not!"

"You moaned!" Toph held up a single finger and jabbed at her lips. "Into my _mouth_! I tasted your freaking _desire_—"

"Desire?" he exploded. There was a giggle outside the hut and he squeaked next, lowering his voice, "_Desire_? That wasn't _desire_!"

"It was totally desire," Toph decided. Before he could rebuke the statement, the Earthbender's elbow seesawed and she folded down over his startled lap. "Unf," she huffed, and mumbled into his hip, "speaking of desire, you know what I want right now?" Her fingers sought, found, and twisted in the fabric of his breeches. "I want breakfast. I want, uhm, eggs and… and those fluffy, square-holed things Sugar Queen makes sometimes—"

"Wafflecakes?" offered Sokka.

"Yeah," agreed Toph. Her eyes slid closed. "Those." She snapped her fingers. "Get on it, Snoozles."

"You really want me to move?"

"If you do, I will absolutely kill you."

"Okay." Sokka cautiously rested a hand along the tangled curve of Toph's head. "So," he ventured, trying to sound casual, "you—you remember the wafflecakes? And Katara—"

"I remember everything."

"Oh." He chewed his lip. "And this," he blurted, jiggling his knees a little. "This is still okay? Do you still want—uhm. Us… being together. We—"

"Sokka?" Toph interrupted.

He stiffened. "Yeah?"

"Don't bother."

"Oh," he observed a second time. "Oh. Okay."

There was a moment of terrible, uncomfortable quiet. Toph broke it by muttering, "Spirits, you're an idiot. I voraciously kissed you not even two minutes ago and now I'm lying here with my face pretty much pressed into your crotch. What do you _think _I want, Meathead? Come _on_."


	28. Twentyeight

**Commentary: **I am pleased to return to your regularly scheduled updates!

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Twenty-eight**

* * *

Across the beach the waves unscrolled and scissored, gold ribbons in their swells, their foam nibbling slowly up the tideline. Sokka took turns looking between them and the pale hands clutched in a knot just above his navel. Occasionally he traced his thumb over the knuckles of the latter. Their owner's chest rose and fell in the space beneath his shoulders and her cheek, a round of warmth, rested against his spine's slow slope. "We're back," he said. He pitched the words quiet. Maybe she was sleeping.

"I hear the surf," she mumbled. "And the birds." Lifting her head a little, she dug her chin into the nape of his neck and huffed, "We gonna land soon?"

"Not so near the coast," he declined, and tacked on, "sorry, but whoever hurt you might be staked out and waiting for us somewhere down there."

He looked over his shoulder. From the corner of his eye he could see Toph frowning, her chapped lips turned down in a disgruntled curl. But, "Yeah," she agreed, "I guess that's true. That asshole—or assholes, plural." Her brows rose. "Maybe it's more than one person?" she ventured.

The notion gave Sokka's stomach an unpleasant case of the prickles. "Could be," he acknowledged reluctantly, pressing his thumb down hard in the divots between Toph's smaller fingers. They flexed under his touch, bending like branches. Toph grinned.

"Don't like that idea, huh?"

"Well geez, let me think. Some crazy person coming after my girlfr—uhm. My g… my guh…"

Again he glanced back at Toph. Her expression was a mix of sly and fond, mouth twisted into a sinister smile now, eyes crinkled at the corners. The wink of the falling sun on her cataracts was akin to a blade's snicker coming out of its sheath, and the words in his mouth faltered and dried up and died. Toph took pity on him. She supplied in his stead, easy, "Some crazy person coming after me."

"…you," Sokka affirmed. It felt like he was weaseling his way out of something, but Toph didn't seem to care and his tongue, Spirits, it wasn't cooperating much either. "You, yeah—some crazy person coming after you, with these bladed boomerang wannabes and stuff—I mean, why would I like that?" Appa's reins squeaked in his hand. Loosening his grip, he wiggled his shoulder under Toph's collar and demanded, "Really, why?"

"Some people get off on being all protective and fierce," Toph opined. "Didn't know if maybe this sort of situation rings your chimes, Snoozles." The nickname went through Sokka like an arrow, a jolt of sharp, familiar heat. He shivered and Toph continued, "Gets you hot and bothered. Stimulated. Arous—"

"Okay, okay—uh, how about _no_, all right?" He swallowed. Toph's elbows pinched at his hips, rolling softly as Appa went with the wind up westward, and Sokka said, "That blade sticking out of your head—and then your arm later, the second time… that was just…" Terrible. Terrible, awful, his worst nightmare made real, and he remembered, just for a moment, the way her eyes had looked on the battlefield a few weeks prior. Dead. Dull. A mirror's surface, blank and unmoving forever. Without thinking about it he tucked his arm down over hers, folding his palm across the smaller lump her fingers made at his middle.

"Hey, c'mon, don't get all sappy and feelingful on me," Toph sighed. She wriggled closer up against him, her knees two pegs digging into the backs of his thighs. He felt her exasperated smile bloom into the skin of his neck. "You saw me almost die. It sucked for you. I get it. But it's cool now." She could've gone on, Sokka knew—could've said something about how her getting hurt had brought them together, had loosened her lips and given him a clue. Poignancy wasn't Toph's style, though, and she settled for drumming her forehead methodically into the spot where his spine met his neck instead, over and over, like a hammer to a nail. Her brow was slick with sweat despite the breeze. "Whether it's one person or not," she insisted, "why are they after me anyway? And hey, here's another question, surprise! Are they after you too?"

Uncomfortable in the open sky so near the beach, Sokka urged Appa faster into the burgeoning headwind and answered, ginger, "I don't think so."

"No?" The crease of Toph's palm slid over his belt, found the buckle, settled there. "Why not you too? Do tell."

"Well," he managed, turning his face into the breeze to cool it, "I mean, that first time, someone was clearly trying to kill you. And"—her fingertips migrated north, tickling up under his tunic—"they only knocked me out. Could've done the same to me they did to you, but they didn't, they just bruised me and, eheh… Toph?" Her nails made a crescent in the dip of his hip. "What are you doing?"

"Molesting you, probably. Please, continue."

"You're _distracting _me."

"I'd be worried if I wasn't." But Toph's ministrations slowed, stopped. "They just knocked you out," she repeated, thoughtful. "With what?"

"Huh?"

"What did they use to brain you?" Sokka looked sidelong toward the Kingdom's looming foothills. Already the shrill cacophony of the seabirds was dwindling, the lull of the waves more a memory than a presence. Toph continued, "I don't remember Katara commenting on any weapons around you, or shrapnel. And you didn't see anything either, right?"

"Right. We can ask Katara when we meet up with the group again—we'll be there in a few days. But," he admitted, "she probably would've mentioned anything suspicious. Don't you think?"

"Uh-huh." Leaning back such that her linked hands rose and compressed against his sternum, Toph murmured, "She's pretty observant. Katara, I mean. Gotta give her credit. And if she didn't say anything about conspicuous objects lying near your unconscious body, I'm gonna guess it's because there _weren't _any." She fell quiet suddenly, gnawing her lower lip. "You realize this person might be an Earthbender," she allowed. "They could've hit you with a bit of flying rock or something. Rocks aren't obvious weapons—Katara would've looked right over one of those."

"If we're going with a flying rock theory, they could've just as easily used a slingshot," Sokka put in. "We already know they're decent with long-range weaponry."

They fell quiet together, each pondering, Sokka with his eyes pointed toward the evening's gathering gloom and Toph's temple wedged tight to his upper arm. Trees whisked by beneath them in a low green blur. "Hey," wondered the Earthbender at last. "Have we ever hurt anybody? Like, seriously hurt—I know we helped put Ozai away, and committed Azula too. But besides them. Can you think of anyone?"

The tribesman frowned. "You think we've pissed someone off so badly that they're determined to kill us now?"

"Determined to kill me," she corrected. "I don't know what they want with you. _If _they want you," came the mutter. She tightened her arms. "That might be it too. Someone could be coming after you and they thought, hey, better take out Sokka's bodyguard first—"

"_Bodyguard_? I don't need a bodyguard!"

"You've got one anyway, though. And I'm the best kind too, don't deny it. I come with _benefits_." She gooshed two of those benefits into his shoulders, touching her grin soft to his hairline. "Nice, huh?"

"Oh don't get me wrong, hey, yeah—I am _so _appreciative of those benefits." _And of you_, he almost said, but the words wouldn't come, stoppered up somewhere beneath his collarbone. Toph rubbed her face into his arm. Her hair tickled down to his elbow. He edged back a bit, wanting to be closer to her; her hands folded in his tunic, pulling him, helping to close the distance.

The reins creaked.

"Have we ever hurt anybody, Sokka?" Toph revisited.

"I don't know," he answered, and meant it.


	29. Twentynine

**Commentary: **…well, sort of regular updates. =P Sorry all. Things are busy here. I'm trying, though!

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Twenty-nine**

* * *

"That guy at the bar in Makapu," Toph attempted. "You know. Nose guy. _Unfortunate _nose guy. Looked-like-he-had-three-nostrils guy—"

"How do you know what he looked like?" interrupted Sokka sleepily.

"You wouldn't shut up about it, that's how." She shifted, her head heavy on his shoulder. "But he's a good candidate for wanting to kill us, right? We kinda humiliated him—what with the pants incident and everything."

Sokka considered, eyes fixed on the horizon. The stars creeping up the sky's seam blurred, drifted. He blinked away slumber. "No, no way," he determined. "He didn't have any kind of coordination—couldn't be him, he was a loser—"

"He was also standing up falling down _drunk_, Sokka, in case you don't recall the details of the night since you were similarly shitfaced. Who knows if he was coordinated or not? He _did _almost hit you with that mug." Yawning into Sokka's neck, the Earthbender muttered, "Given that he couldn't remember his own name or gender, hey, I'd call his ability to throw things downright impressive."

The tribesman heaved a sigh. "…do you _really _think a dude with a tattoo of a turtleduck stretched across his nipples is out for our blood?"

Toph shrugged. "You know something? I don't get tattoos. Seriously."

"You wouldn't, being blind and all."

"True story," she acknowledged. Grinding the heel of her hand sluggishly across her dead eyes, she ventured next, "Can we land soon? Please? We've gotta be at least, what, twenty leagues from the coast by now?"

"Probably more like thirty," Sokka admitted.

Wrapping her hands about his hips, Toph gave them a squeeze and nodded. "Right, so—if our mysterious attacker staked us out and waited for us, and happened to see us fly over the Kingdom's borders, and then started to follow us back inland"—she paused to yawn again; her jaw cracked, and Sokka smiled—"haven't we gotten far enough ahead to not worry about them for a few hours?"

For the second time Sokka pondered, trying hard to ignore the weight of his eyelids and the pulse of weariness in the pit of his stomach. Almost three days ago they'd left Chief Arnook's glittering ice city at the North Pole. Aside from stopping to rest briefly on ice flows in the sea that separated the Water Tribe's civilization from the Earth Kingdom, they had taken no breaks. Appa was exhausted, listing low against the headwind; Sokka was done in himself, and Toph clearly wanted to rest too. "We can stop for a while, I think," he allowed. The words were scarcely out of his mouth when Appa dipped below the treeline and made for the nearest clearing. The bison was asleep and snoring before all six of his paws hit the ground.

As she vaulted down his flank and fumbled for the buckles on his saddle, Toph gave their companion a gentle pat and said, "I guess it probably isn't him, come to think. Nose guy, I mean." Overhead the trees shush-shushed together, and the Earthbender tipped her face up to them, squinting. The shadows of her bangs zigzagged over her cheeks, her mouth. She sighed, "Got any other ideas?"

Sokka shook his head, realized the gesture meant nothing to Toph, and provided aloud, "Nuh-uh. And anyway, I'm so tired right now that I can't really think straight. For all I know we're being hunted by a giant mutant cabbage—"

"Ugh, _vegetables_."

"I know, right?" Shrugging off his pack and flopping back against Appa's softly heaving side, Sokka threw his arms high and managed, "But seriously. Let's look at this with fresh eyes—" Toph cleared her throat. Sokka winced and corrected, "Let's reconsider and regroup in the morning, okay?"

"Prime plan, Snoozles." The Earthbender fired off a salute. Next she dropped her hands and, curling her fingers, turned to seemingly contemplate the ridge of trees nearby. After a moment a strange sound began to drift across the clearing, muted, toneless. Sokka, listening, was astonished to recognize it as a hum.

Since when did Toph _hum_?

"Uh," he queried, sitting up a little, "Toph? Something wrong?"

She waved back at him, her shoulders a solid green square in the dark. "Nah. Not really." She fell quiet a moment, two—and then it came again, that stilted, awkward hum. Rocking from one foot to another, she put in, "Except, this is—kinda. Heh. This is kinda the first time we've been alone, like, _really _alone since before we got to the city at the Pole, the on the _ground _kind of alone, and—"

She broke off to turn back toward Sokka slightly, gnawing her lip and rubbing her knuckles against her chin. Her heel thumped down into the clearing's grass. As though in answer Sokka's chest throbbed and clenched, and he observed gingerly, "Oh. _Oh_, right, yeah—uh. It is, isn't it?"

"Yeah." Scuffling a foot, Toph shrugged and asked simply, "So. What... what exactly do we _do_?"

A blanket of uncomfortable quiet fell over them, punctuated only by Appa's shivering snores and the occasional contribution of a cricket. Sokka's pulse roared in his ears. Toph's toes dug furrows in the grass, and at last the tribesman gave the spot nearby his hip a smack and said, "Okay. C'mere."

Toph took the two steps to his side and dropped down next to him. Her ribs tucked easily into the space under his arm; her head lolled back onto his shoulder, her hair at once prickling and soft where it puffed against his chin. With a wiggle and a grunt of arrangement she made herself comfortable, and when she was finished Sokka hooked a careful, questing arm around her.

"This all right?" he wondered.

Toph nuzzled her cheek into him. "Mm. 'S'fine." Working one hand between them, she fisted it in the cloth of his breeches, tugged them once, and fell still. "It's really good," she said at length, "but you should know that in the future when, see, we're alone like this and in top form? I expect your pants to be gone. And I also expect your legs to pretty much be squeezing off my circulation from the waist down because—"

"_Noted_, noted! Not protesting! Good_night_, Toph."

"Killjoy," the Earthbender accused him. But she yawned next, "G'night, Sokka," and closed her eyes. Within moments her breathing was deep and steady, and as the moon rose high over the trees she loosed a faint snore for good measure.

When he thought she wouldn't know, Sokka tightened his hold on Toph and finally succumbed to sleep himself.


	30. Thirty

**Commentary: **Here's a clue. Sokka almost gets it, Toph misses it completely, and… readers? Do _you _know where this is going?

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Thirty**

* * *

All around them: flames, roaring. Metal on metal, screeching harsh into the wind. Billowing plumes of smoke too, clustering thick about them as they ran, dodged, darted across the airship's hull. Sokka swallowed and pulled at Toph's hand in his, but it was hard as a rock and slippery as a pebble in a stream. Horrified, his heart a stone in his throat, he spun and found that she was wheeling over the airship's side, too heavy to hold, too brief to grasp. He tugged at her again, trying to keep her, screaming her name. Her fingers slicked free of his and then she was falling, falling away from him and leaving him standing on a lattice of clouds and flame and failure, and as she disappeared into the smeared blue gulp of the sky and sea together her lips formed a single word:

"_Why?"_

Flailing, Sokka broke from sleep's clutches and gasped a hoarse, "No!" into the night. He jerked aright. Against his chest Toph sunfished and snarled, digging her nails into his neck.

"What?" she demanded, nostrils flared, both feet flat on the ground now. Her knees made merciless friends with his kidneys. "What is it? What's wrong? Sokka?" One of her hands rose to patter over his face, the heel of her palm sliding in the sweat there.

"Bad dream," answered the tribesman. Toph was heavy—he pushed and clutched at her simultaneously, the cobwebs of the dream clinging to him still. His mouth tasted of ash and cinders. Turning his head, he spat and repeated, "Just a bad dream." But his chest was a lockbox of anxiety, his pulse all thunder and grind. When he chuffed his fingers over her hip, they were trembling.

Toph's thumb drove itself deeply into the meat of his cheek. She leaned in close to him, almost near enough to kiss, and said, "Just?" He couldn't make out much of her face for the darkness, but he was almost certain her eyebrows were high on her forehead. "You don't usually have nightmares," she observed, as though he didn't know his own tendencies. She fell expectantly quiet. Squinting, he could make out that her head was cocked, and he felt her free hand on his chest, her fingers curled, the index of those tapping.

The trees ringing their clearing stirred, and the breeze doing the stirring wove next through Sokka's hair. He shivered—he was sweating, and it was cold. "Not usually," he agreed. Toph squirmed into the slope of him, her elbow jabbing his ribs but nevertheless welcome. "It was about you," he blurted suddenly. "It was about—"

"My untimely and, lemme guess, _gruesome _death?"

"Well." Sokka swallowed. "It wasn't exactly gruesome, but you—yeah. You died. Or you were going to die and I couldn't stop it—"

"We've been _together_-together for approximately a week and you're already dreaming about my death?" Toph interrupted. She laughed in the next breath, a soft huffing sound warmer than any fire. "Spirits, can't wait to see how long this relationship lasts." But her palm scudded down his chest once, twice, and she said seriously, "No—really, Snoozles. It's cool. Everything's fine."

Sokka offered no response. Again the trees whisper-sighed; at his back Appa shifted and grumbled, and some great distance away a pumawolf yowled up into the sky's gloom. What time was it? He strained his eyes heavenward and saw only the faintest specks of the stars, silver and faint like the freckles lining Toph's knee on the inside. _Everything's fine_, she'd said, but it wasn't—it wasn't fine, and—

She muttered something unintelligible. Her fingers feathered over his waist, low—almost where he liked it. His heart thumped and she asked, "What happened? In the dream?" She added quickly, "Don't think I'm going to indulge you like this every night, okay? I need my beauty sleep." To drive the point home she forked her thumb into his navel, pushing. His knees quivered, jostled her hips. She was straddling him, pressing down hard into him, and after a moment of strained silence she smirked—he couldn't see it, but he knew—and leaned in to hiss, "Unless you'd rather let me distract you…"

For the second time he didn't answer her, mostly because her mouth was on his in the next instant and a little because he _did _want her to distract him. He wanted to forget the separating sensation of her hand leaving his—wanted to ignore the creeping sensation of recognition and blame in his belly. "The airships," he whispered against the curl of her tongue. "The—"

She nipped him. "Over," she said. "It's _over_. Empty dream. Long time ago." She hooked her fingers in the hem of his breeches and yanked, insisting, "Kiss me back, idiot—I'm still not very good at it and I'll drool on you if you don't help me—"

"You will not!"

"Oh yeah? Such blind faith—haha, get it? Eeengh—"

"Eeeuyugh! Stop: okay, okay, I'm helping, I'm _helping_! See?"

"Never," Toph supplied, and opened her mouth to say something else.

Sokka kissed her quiet.


	31. Thirtyone

**Commentary: **While I'm flattered many people have read this story and liked it enough to comment, I'm amused that just as many have sent me PMs protesting some of the more adult-themed content in various chapters. I won't apologize for it—hey, the story's rated T for a reason, and Toph and Sokka _are _adults in this particular work. If you think I should change the rating, I am more than willing to consider doing so. I don't want to offend anyone. In all honesty, though, I think things have been pretty tame so far.

...you **might** wanna shield your eyes for this chapter. Humorous innuendo galore ahoy!

As always, thanks for reading!

* * *

**POT CALLING KETTLE**

**Chapter Thirty-one**

* * *

"That? That smells terrible."

"It does not."

"Like shit, actually. Smoky, meaty shit."

"You are an uncultured heathen," Sokka argued. Forking over two blackened breakfast portions onto Toph's plate, he declared, "Blubber sausage is the food of the gods. It'll make you a man. Put hair on your chest—"

"So you must've skipped out on it as a kid, right? Mister Sleek-and-Supple Chesty McManbits." Dubiously Toph prodded at one of the sausages. It left a smear of grease and char behind along her thumb's edge. Grimacing, she went on, "And you want to make me a man? Really? Because I was under the distinct impression that you were enjoying me as a woman up until, hmm, about ten minutes ago."

"Oh believe me, yes—yes I was." Sokka nodded. "But blubber sausage, hey. I'm just trying to say that there are very, very few things in this world that are flawless, and it's one of them. Put it in your mouth—"

"_Again_? Already?" Toph whistled. "I am _impressed _at your recovery time, Snoozles."

Sokka flushed. "Just try it," he insisted, and sat down next to his best friend. From the corner of his eye he saw her take an obedient bite out of the breakfast; juice squirted down her chin, and she grinned and set into the meal earnestly. "Thought so," he huffed, and asked next, "hey. What did you mean by sleek and supple, anyway?"

Around her mouthful Toph muttered, "You know. You're"—she waved in the general direction of his torso—"not furry like some people. You're all smooth and stuff. Kinda squeaky, even."

"Squeaky?" Sokka started on his own food, supplied graciously by Chief Arnook's tribe. The spices in the sausage were unique, the textures different from those he'd savored growing up, but the taste was familiar enough anyway that he was forced to muffle an appreciative groan. "Is that a good thing?"

Toph blinked. "Are you asking me to compliment your chest?"

"I am asking you to give me your _opinion _of my chest," Sokka disagreed. After a pause, he provided, "If you want to compliment it, though, I'm listening."

There was a thoughtful, mostly quiet pause, punctuated by the morning's low drizzle of birdsong and the _ker-chump, ker-chump _of Toph's molars over the sausage. At last she offered, "I like it." A speck of spice lingered on her lip. She licked it away and summated, "Your chest. I like it."

"That's it?"

Toph gave him her version of a dry look. "Yep. Treasure it, Snoozles. I don't hand out praise on silver platters, you know." She began on her second sausage.

"Yeah. Yeah—that's true. Thanks," he added. A few bites later he realized, "Another thought, by the way. How do you know about, uh… chest hair? And its frequent occurrence on the pectorals of other dudes?"

"Well now." Toph smirked and twitched her head toward him. "Do I hear _jealousy_?"

"Try curiosity," Sokka denied despite that his throat had already tightened a bit. The thought of Toph with someone else rose unbidden in his mind: her hands clutching, reaching for a man that wasn't him; eyes that weren't his seeing the scars on her hip, the pennant-shaped birthmark low in the stretch of her spine. Instinctively, possessively he edged closer to her, considered maybe putting an arm around her too, and decided against it. Toph wasn't cuddlesome. Toph was—well. She was Toph.

Her smirk softened and she shrugged. "Fine, uh-huh. Whatever." Tapping her toes nearby his boot, she admitted, "I've never actually _experienced _anyone else's chest hair or lack of it. I just know what Katara's told me."

The tribesman's belly lurched. "Wait, what?"

"Yeah." Toph nodded. "Katara—she tells me about guys. Girl talk, right? Contrary to popular belief, I _am _a girl."

"Right. Right, sure, yeah. But… girl talk? Like… what kind of talk exactly?"

"Like how Zuko's apparently a walking column of muscle and has hair _everywhere_—"

"_Spirits_, how does she know _that_—"

"Stumbled across him at a hot spring or something last year, I think. After the eastern border campaign." Toph's sausages were gone. Shamelessly she reached over, pattered her hand across his plate, and ferreted away the remainder of Sokka's breakfast. Sokka didn't bother protesting. He suddenly felt too ill to contemplate food. "Plus," Toph put in, "he trains with his shirt off all the time. Even I know that."

"…okay. Okay, gross. And," Sokka muttered, "I can't believe she looked at him enough to notice."

Shrugging, the Earthbender continued, "She says it's incredibly hard not to look at him."

"She—she—" Sokka blanched. "Toph, are you trying to imply that my sister likes the Fire Lord?"

"Your sister"—this came out distorted; Toph was chewing again—"likes the Fire Lord's ass, Snoozles. And his abs. But she is in _love _with Aang. Who, get this," and Toph swallowed, "_shaves _his chest. And his—"

"_STOP_, stop! I don't wanna know! I really, really don't!"

"You sure?" Arching a brow, his best friend dissolved her plate back into the earth from whence it had come and brushed her palms down along her knees. "C'mon. Don't you at least want to know _why_?"

Sokka opened his mouth to say no, remembered Toph could tell when he was lying, and grudgingly admitted, "…sorta."

Toph rose. Forming her hands into a triangle, she performed a flourish and claimed, "He says it makes him more aerodynamic."

The tribesman contemplated this. Somewhere off in the surrounding forest a cricketmouse succumbed to the dawn's last hunting catowl, and in the following silence Sokka managed weakly, "Why does he need… _that_… to be more aerodynamic?"

"Katara says—"

"You know what? Forget I asked."


End file.
