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Chapter Text

There was the noise of a key turning in a lock. The door opened and Toph startled awake.

“Jesus, Toph!” Katara exclaimed. “What are you doing here? I almost stepped on you!”

Toph heard the click of the light being switched on. She sat up, her back protesting – she had not been planning on drifting off on the hardwood floor.

“Were you meditating?” Aang asked from somewhere near the door.

“You wish,” Toph said.

Katara set her bags down on the floor, groceries rolling around inside.

“Are you feeling alright? Are you tired?” she said, opening the freezer and closing it and slamming cupboard doors left and right. “Did you get enough sleep?”

Toph started rummaging through the contents of the bags.

“House party next door. Lots of screaming. Thin walls, student housing, you know how it is. And I’ve got ears like a bat. Did you get the biscuits I asked for?”

“Well, don’t go to bed too late. You don’t want to miss the special guest appearance tomorrow.”

“Who’s the special guest?” Toph asked distractingly, occupied with the tower she was building out of canned food.

Aang snorted. “You are.”

“Fuck, that’s tomorrow?”

Aang and Katara were the two hosts of a podcast called “Balance to the World”, broadcasted on the University’s student-run radio, where they talked about current affairs and social issues and cultural things and whatnot. All very important stuff, Toph was sure, but as a matter of principle she was opposed to anything that required of her to get up that early.

“Why the hell is it on so early anyway?”

It was a rhetorical question but Aang still lamented, “Because we lost the 6am slot to the croquet – must you remind me of this traumatic event in my life?”

The issue was that the recording booth in the on-campus studio was constantly overbooked. They'd had to fight off the amateur DJs, the sports commentators and the wannabe journalists for that damn slot. Still, the croquet segment had prevailed over “Balance to the World” and relegated them to 5am, when the entire student population of the University of Omashu was still dead asleep, which didn’t help their audience ratings.

The long-awaited biscuits finally in her possession, Toph propped herself up on the counter while her two flatmates bustled about the kitchen. “Hey, you know what this means? The croquet has got more weekly listeners than we do.”

“Oh no, don’t get her started,” Aang said.

Katara opened a drawer with a bit too much force. “Honestly. What do they even talk about on that show?”

“Probably croquet,” Toph ventured.

“But what is there to talk about? How do you analyse croquet?” Her voice was getting shrill. “Which croquet are they analysing? Is there a croquet club at Omashu University? Croquet championships?”

“I assume so,” Toph said. “There is a miming club after all. I almost joined before I realised the whole thing would be rather confusing for me.”

“Croquet commentary. How is that more important than trying to make the world a better place?”

Katara brushed past her and Toph caught a whiff of her shampoo, something sweet and fruity. Katara always smelled good; Toph liked that about her. At the beginning, their friendship was the only reason she'd even agreed to become a radio presenter for a day. Now she was a regular guest on the show and quite a popular one at that – people seemed to enjoy her brutal honesty, snarky one-liners and inventive nicknames. Sokka too would make an appearance when he had the time, and although he had a tendency to ramble about the many things in the world that annoyed him, his theatrics greatly entertained the handful of early risers and insomniacs that made up their audience.

Toph munched on a biscuit. “If you’re that desperate to know what they could be saying on that show, why don’t you simply listen to it?”

“And add another listener to their ratings? I think not.”

Now that was a level of pettiness Toph aspired to achieve one day.

The Jasmine Dragon was quiet for a Friday. It was warm and smelled like tea leaves and Toph was comfortably nestled on a padded bench in their usual booth, feeling at home surrounded with the patrons’ murmuring and the clinking of china. She had missed this place over summer.

“Is it just me or are people looking preeetty rough this morning?” Aang said.

“Freshers’ flu making the rounds again?” Katara suggested.

“There was a massive party over at Jianzhu Building.” Sokka’s voice was muffled when he spoke, as if he was leaning on his hand.

Katara let out an indignant huff. “Why are we never invited to the rich kids’ parties?”

“I think the answer’s in the question,” Sokka said.

“Toph’s a rich kid! Zuko too!” Katara’s arm knocked into Toph, who could only assume she was gesturing at Zuko, busy waiting tables further away.

Almost all of the wealthiest students lived in Jianzhu Building, for it was the most expensive accommodation on campus. Zuko used to be on the same floor as his psychotic sister, but that was before he had a falling out with his father, dropped out of his business degree and moved in with Sokka and Suki who were desperately looking for a flatmate at the time – without much luck because no one wants to live in a three-bedroom with a couple. (You could not have paid Toph to do it. Granted, she was a rich kid, but the point still stood.)

Zuko had been working at his uncle’s teashop ever since while trying to figure out what he truly wanted to do with his life, so he hardly counted as golden youth anymore. And Toph, well, she had spent her summer at Aang’s so she wouldn’t have to see her own parents, and she didn’t want anything to do with that world anyway.

“I bet Zuko could get us invited. He still knows people from over there, right? His childhood friend, what's her name again...”

“Why do you even want to go? You’re not exactly a fan of those people.” In a perfect impersonation of Katara, Aang’s tone turned fervent: “They are the poison of an education system that favours the already privileged and contributes to perpetuate the cycle of inequality. My brothers and sisters, now is the time to take up arms… and all that.”

“I just want to see how the other half lives,” Katara said nonchalantly.

“Trust me, you don’t,” Toph told her.

Zuko must have heard them mention his name from the other side of the teashop, because suddenly his voice rung out, “Stop talking shit over there!”

“Man is the service good in this place,” Toph said.

Zuko marched over to their table. “I’ve told you before. If you two have come here for the sole purpose of taking the piss, I am not serving you.”

Sokka sniggered. “Oh come on, we only made fun of your apron once.”

Toph smiled into her teacup. Teasing Zuko was guaranteed to cheer Sokka up, and she suspected that Zuko secretly liked it when they made it a point to come and embarrass him. Despite his threats, he tipped his teapot and refilled each of their cups. The steam rising from the stream blew hotly in Toph’s face.

She slid her hand towards Zuko, looking to take advantage of his good mood.

“I actually have a favour to ask. I’m doing this survey thingy for my 'Introduction to Psychology' class and I need participants. Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”

“I can’t. I’m working,” he replied, dismissive.

“I don’t mean now – more like next week.”

“I’m working all of next week.”

“That’s alright, I can come here during your break or something.”

Zuko couldn’t find a counter-argument and said nothing, obviously furious at having lost that battle so easily.

“Why me?” he asked, frustrated.

“I just think your brain would be a fascinating specimen.”

“Not sure you want to look too closely at what’s going on in Zuko’s brain,” Sokka observed.

Zuko turned away at some other patron’s call just as Aang wondered, “Since when is psychology part of the physiotherapy curriculum?”

Pleased with herself, Toph took another sip of her tea, burning her tongue a little bit. “It is in second year. Managing the psychological issues that impact rehabilitation and all that. I’m already learning how to rearrange someone’s body, might as well learn how to rearrange their brain too.”

“Psychology’s not a real science,” Sokka said sullenly. “You can’t rearrange someone’s brain.”

Toph showed him her fist. “You sure about that? I’ll rearrange your brain so bad science won’t be able to tell it’s a brain.”

Aang laughed, but Sokka barely reacted. The sound of Katara's spoon stirring her latte stopped and she said, “OK, what’s up with you today? You’re even more of a grouch than usual, and that’s saying something.”

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s not about that grade, is it?”

“It’s completely unfair!” Sokka cried out. “It was worth a 75 at the very least!”

“Sokka, you got a 63, it’s not the end of the world.”

“63 is good,” Aang said encouragingly.

“Not if I want to do a PhD at Ba Sing Se. There’s only one that’s in mechatronic engineering and fully funded and I just know that that guy Teo is going for it too. I need to do exceedingly well this year.”

“Then maybe you need to drop one of your hundred extracurriculars and stop spreading yourself too thin,” Katara said.

Sokka was a busy man indeed: captain of the ice hockey team, on committee for the fencing club, member of art soc (although he was terrible at it), and he had initially joined the poetry society as a way to flirt with pretty girls but had found himself to have a weird knack for it, forcing Katara to hit him over the head whenever he started speaking only in haikus.

“That’s not the problem. The problem is Long Feng not giving me the grade I deserve.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you know better than Professor Long Feng, acclaimed academic and head of the Physics Department,” Aang said.

“Guys, this is not me being cocky, I am telling you it was a not just a good paper, it was a great one. His feedback sounds like he’s just trying to find excuses to mark me down. I showed it to my course friends and even to my tutor and they all agreed with me.”

Toph heard the zipper of Sokka’s bag being opened and Sokka slamming something on the table and the rustling of pages.

“You’re carrying it everywhere with you,” Katara stated in a dismayed kind of way.

“My theory is that Long Feng was offended I didn’t cite his work in my paper. In his lectures he’s always banging on about how prominent his research is in the field.”

Toph rested her chin on her hands. “If that was the case, wouldn’t you be able to contest the grade or appeal or something?”

“He’s supposed to be my supervisor for my master’s project this year, I can’t get on his bad side now.”

“Pick another supervisor then.”

“You can do that?”

“You can do whatever you want. If he wronged you, he shouldn’t get away with it, no matter how much of a big shot he is. Fight the system, ya know.”

“Yeah, that’s right… Fight the system. Yeah,” Sokka muttered with increasing conviction.

Yes, Toph did pride herself on being an agent of chaos.

“Stop moving!”

“You poked me in the eye!”

“Because you were moving!”

Suki brought a hand to the side of Toph’s face and drew a line on her eyelid. Her rings were cold against Toph’s cheek.

“This is sensual.”

Suki let out a laugh. “Stop distracting me.”

Toph pressed her hands to the soft carpeted floor. Katara was sitting crossed-legged next to her, only half dressed, scrolling through her phone in front of her full-length mirror. Makeup palettes were scattered around them, an array of colours Toph couldn’t imagine nor understand. One of Suki’s 80s playlists was on in the background.

“All done,” Suki said, leaning back to admire her work.

“Does it look okay? I’m not really a makeup kind of gal.”

“Are you doubting my abilities?” she said jokingly.

No, Toph was doubting herself. Katara understood that and said, “You look great. You really do.”

At the age of twenty Toph was still often told she looked younger than she was. There was nothing she could do about her small stature and round face, but she was hoping the makeup would make her look at bit more mature. She didn’t want to look like kid tonight.

There was a brief silence as the last song faded, and a slightly muted Careless Whisper started playing. Suki hummed the lyrics to the first verse. “Did I tell you guys that once a week, Dean Kuei locks himself into his office and blasts this song?”

“Does he dance around in his office?” Katara said, laughing.

“Guilty feet have got no rhythm, Katara,” Toph said.

“I like to imagine him lying on his back on the floor,” Suki said.

Toph leaned against the door and stretched out her legs in front of her. “It’s so cool that you have access to the teaching staff’s offices and such. It’s like we’ve got someone on the inside, we’ve infiltrated the system. You can tell us all the juicy stuff.”

Suki had just finished her Sports Science degree and was now starting out as a Teaching Assistant. Toph thought she would make a terrific sports coach, or personal trainer, or fitness instructor, or whatever it was she would end up doing. Suki liked to joke that they might work together one day, since Toph was studying to become a physiotherapist. Toph didn’t hate the idea but anytime Suki was nice to her came with a tremendous feeling of guilt.

“It’s actually so weird,” Suki said. “90 per cent of the time I feel like an imposter. Chatting with lecturers, eating lunch with them, and pretending like I have any kind of authority over my students as if I did not see them in the club last night and am not a bit hungover too.”

They laughed and Katara said, “Yeah, I’m sure they didn’t notice.”

“Funniest thing is that they think I have my life together. Meanwhile I had plain pasta for dinner, I’m late on my rent and I’m still living with my ex.”

She trailed off at the end, like she maybe regretted the joke, like it had come out heavier than intended. Suki and Sokka’s unfortunate living situation was the universe’s cruel punishment for having signed their renting contract thinking they'd still be together by the time it would come into effect, a constant and embarrassing reminder of their past naivety and their failure to make it work.

“How are you guys handling that?” Katara asked kindly. “Is it going to be okay for you, seeing him at the party?”

“Yeah, I mean, it’s been a little while now and we’re still friends. It’s super awkward, but he hasn’t brought a girl home yet so I consider myself lucky.”

Too unsure of what she was feeling to risk opening her mouth, Toph simply closed her eyes, alone with George Michael saying he was never gonna dance again and the dangerous thoughts swirling in her mind. Despite her attempts to squelch it, a tiny part of her had rejoiced at the news of Suki and Sokka’s breakup, but one thing she had not been expecting was that she would also feel deeply unsettled by it. Her friends were a constant in her life and the group’s dynamic had been disrupted, even threatened, for the very first time.

It had all started when Aang and Katara had met in an environmental lecture about the melting of the ice caps. Aang was doing a joint degree in Theology & Philosophy of Religion and International Relations; he wanted to become some kind of diplomat, like for the United Nations or something, and felt that understanding conflicts and cultures was the key to world peace (his words). Katara, who was now in her third year, had first gone into medicine, being somewhat pushed into it, but after a year had switched to Political Science: she wanted to fight for people’s rights, combat injustice, dismantle the establishment (which establishment? Toph was not sure she even knew), and politics were the best way for her to make a difference.

She'd brought her older brother into the mix and Aang had approached Toph at a freshers’ event – they were both in the same year – by claiming he'd seen her roaming around at some open day she had not even been to. He'd introduced her to the other two and it had just been the four of them for a while. Good times. Then Sokka had started seeing Suki on and off and that was how she started hanging out with them. Zuko was the latest addition to the group, first befriended by Aang – and really, he could only have ever been befriended by Aang – after Aang tried and failed to recruit him into meditation society at the freshers’ fair.

But now Sokka and Suki could not be in the same room anymore.

“Do you think we’ll still be able to hang out all of us together, like before?” Toph said softly.

Katara put her hand on Toph’s shoulder and squeezed.

“Hey, of course.”

“Don’t even worry about that,” Suki said. “Nothing’s gonna change, promise.”

Toph nodded at her friends’ reassurance. Northing was going to change. Here in the familiar scent of Katara’s bedroom, she could almost bring herself to believe it.

Sokka burst into his flat in full hockey gear. Zuko was sitting on the sofa with his jacket on, looking stiff and uncomfortable as if this wasn’t his flat too.

“We’re leaving in five,” Zuko said.

“Okay, I came back from practice as fast as I could, but a guy stopped me on the way to try and get me to sign up to participate in a study for the School of Medicine, something about paying you 30 yuan to ingest a bunch of pills and write down the side effects over the following days… Obviously I said yes! 30 yuan, can you believe it?”

“No, I can’t,” Zuko said dryly. “We’re meeting Mai in five.”

Sokka frantically kicked off his shoes. “Yeah, you said. Does Mai know she’s not just bringing you to the party but also five other people?”

“She doesn’t mind. She said there’s no way you guys could be more boring than the people she lives with.”

“Wow, it’s nice to feel appreciated.”

Sokka threw off his sweaty jersey and headed for the bathroom. Strangely, Zuko got up to follow him, stepping over the Xbox controllers.

“Listen, man, I know we don’t usually talk about this stuff, but… Are you gonna be fine with Suki there?”

Sokka discarded his hockey shorts in the corridor and turned towards Zuko.

“Why wouldn’t I be? It’s not awkward at all between us. And we live together, we see each other all the time.”

“In passing.”

“We’re busy people.”

“You eat later at night so you don’t have to be in the kitchen at the same time as her.”

“How did you notice that? You know what, this is probably a sign you’ve got too much time on your hands.”

“You’re not wrong, I don’t have a lot going on for me at the moment,” Zuko said pensively.

Sokka used the distraction to flee to the bathroom. The smell of Zuko’s expensive shower gel (that man lived way beyond his means) lingered in the warm humid air and Suki’s razor was in the sink. He wiped off the condensation on the mirror, ignoring Katara’s voice in his head telling him it made it dirty. As he turned the shower on, he heard Zuko hover over the door and decided to beat him to the punch:

“So at this party, is your sister gonna be there? ‘Cause that’s a dealbreaker.”

“I don’t think she will. She’s even more socially inept than I am.”

“I’m having a real hard time picturing that.”

At that, Zuko finally went away. He was back two minutes later, banging on the door and shouting, “The girls are here!”

Aang’s voice came from further away, “And what am I, an armadillo?”

The hot water felt delicious on Sokka’s sore muscles, but he got out of the shower, got dressed in record-breaking time, his t-shirt sticking to his damp skin, and came out in the living room.

“Hi,” he said. His gaze fell on Suki and he averted it a bit too quickly, his mouth in a thin line. He went up to the fridge to grab the six-pack of beer he had purchased for the occasion. Toph was the one to break the silence.

“So this is awkward.”

“Well now that you said that…” he complained.

“Okay, now that we got that out of the way, let’s go before Mai decides we’re not worth her time.”

“A very real possibility,” Zuko said.

It was getting dark. Walking alongside the halls of residence, you could see students in their lit-up kitchens, their laughs escaping from the half-open windows. Katara was holding a bottle of wine in one hand and guiding Toph with the other. Aang was practically skipping between Suki and Zuko. Sokka looked up at the weak orange glow of the lampposts, the dark blue sky slashed with electric wires. He was so glad to be back.

“Cool t-shirt, by the way,” Aang told him.

“Ah, at least someone notices!”

“What does it say?” Toph asked.

“It says ‘studying waves’ and there’s a surfer but he’s in a lab coat.”

When she didn’t laugh he added, “It’s a physics pun. Because we study waves –”

“No, I get it.”

When they finally reached Jianzhu Building, Mai was smoking outside the entrance, wearing so much black she looked like she had invented a new colour. She greeted them with a nod.

“Terrible timing. I am not wasting this cigarette. Now you have to wait for me to be done.”

“Do we really?” Sokka whined. He could hear music thudding upstairs.

“I waited for you so long that I gave up on my goal to give up smoking. You can wait for two minutes.”

“You give up on that goal of yours fairly often,” Zuko pointed out.

Mai shot him a scathing look and added, “Plus you need me to get in.”

Sokka tried peering inside. All he saw was his reflection. “Why, do you have security here?”

“You know they’ll take one look at you and turn you away,” Toph said with a cheeky smile.

“Alright, enough with the abuse.”

To pass the time, Aang and Sokka did a parkour face-off that would have ended very badly for Sokka (Aang, the fucker, was light on his feet) if Mai had not stubbed out her cigarette then.

They went through the doors, looking around with wide eyes.

“Everything looks so fancy!”

Aang grazed his fingers against the wall. “Look at the panelling… The floor tiles… The high ceiling!”

“They have individual letterboxes!” Sokka exclaimed.

Katara looked with distaste at the piles of takeaway packaging that had been abandoned on the coffee tables. “And individual housekeepers.”

A male voice echoed behind them. “Where do you guys think you’re going?”

They stopped in the middle of the entrance hall. A guy was sat at the reception desk; his name tag spelled “Lijun” and he looked young enough to be a student.

“Do you live here? You’re not allowed to come in if you don’t live here.”

“Lijun?” Toph said, like she knew the guy.

He seemed taken aback to see her. “Oh, Toph. Hey. You look… different. What are you doing here?”

“We’re invited to the party. I didn’t know you worked here.” She pulled at the hem of her shirt. That struck Sokka as odd; it was not often that he saw Toph uneasy.

Mai went to the front of the group and held up her keys. “They’re with me.”

Lijun looked from Toph to Mai to Zuko and then back to Toph and he nodded slowly, like he was realising something. He reluctantly gestured at them to keep going. As they were walking to the lift, Sokka leaned towards Toph and whispered, “Who is that guy?”

She hesitated for only a second. “My ex.”

“You have an ex? How do I not know about this?” Sokka turned his head to get another look at Lijun, who was cleaning up the rubbish left behind by the residents, craning his neck until he could only see a tiny corner of the reception desk.

Sokka had not given much thought to Toph’s dating life before. She never brought it up, at least not with him – judging by the look on Katara’s face, she on the other hand knew all about this. They were such a tight-knit group that it was weird to think Toph had her own life separate from them. He didn't mean that in a self-centred way, more in the sense that for the first time he wondered where they stood in Toph’s life. This Lijun guy seemed only peripheral, but maybe they seemed peripheral to him. Did she talk to him about them? And if so, what did she say? What did she say about Sokka? Did she call him one of her best friends, or one of her friends? Or worse – one of her mates?

Suki took a mirror selfie in the lift. Sokka did a peace sign, and Aang’s eyes were closed but there was no time to take another. When the doors opened on the fourth floor, the volume went up by a good twenty decibels and the temperature by a good twenty degrees. The place was packed; people were already tipsy.

“They have a pool table in the common room!” Aang marvelled.

“They have a common room,” Katara said, disbelieving.

They cut through the crowd towards a table covered in drinks. Aang picked up a bottle.

“This looks fancy.”

Sokka took it from him and poured some in a cup. He took a sip. “And it tastes fancy!”

Katara gave him a horrified look. “Sokka, don’t drink from a random bottle you just found when you don’t know what’s in it or who it belongs to! What is wrong with you!”

Zuko took the cup from Sokka and tried it too. “That’s just lemonade.”

Katara was too bewildered to be outraged when Sokka ruffled her hair.

“This is how I experience the world, Katara: by tasting it. Like a baby, or a Guinea pig. I just have to put stuff in my mouth.” A wicked smile came over Toph’s face and Sokka cut her off, “Don’t.”

He went looking for a bottle opener and on his way to the kitchen, a girl with a designer clutch and the ugliest shoes he had seen in his life grabbed his arm.

“Hey, aren’t you on the ice hockey team?”

“Am I on the ice hockey team? I’m only the team captain!” he replied with a self-important smirk.

“That’s so cool!”

“Do you like hockey?” he asked, delighted.

“I sure do!”

She started asking him questions about the sport and he was more than happy to respond. His friends never wanted to hear about it. It soon turned out many people in this house party were interested in ice hockey – civilized people, finally. He was just thinking he should spend more time in those circles when Aang came to get him.

“Sokka! Come see!”

He dragged Sokka away from the crowd and into a hallway and in front of an open door, where their friends were all standing. Aang gestured for him to look inside.

“Even the toilet looks fancy!”

The toilet did look fancy. They all crowded outside the bathroom.

“It must feel so soft underneath your bottom,” Aang said wistfully.

“It does,” Suki confirmed.

“If I had a toilet like this, I would probably do my course work on here.”

“It’s too nice. I kind of feel the urge to throw up in it or something”, Sokka said.

“Sokka, don’t you dare,” Katara said.

Zuko and Toph stood back, looking unimpressed, albeit for different reasons.

They went back to the party and Sokka lost track of time. Endless conversations, one hand in his pocket, the other one holding his beer in front of him. More girls touching his wrist and finding him "adorable" and "rustic", which was sounding less and less like a compliment. He was too hot and his head was spinning. He weaved his way towards the glass doors for a bit of air. Smokers were clumped together on one side of the balcony, dots of glowing red floating in the dark; he went to the other side.

Damn, that was quite a view that the rich kids had. Omashu’s skyline was twinkling in the night, towers reaching up with their thousands of windows, car headlights moving up and down the roads in lines, red lights flickering to green. In a moment of utter clarity, Sokka was suddenly very aware of where he was, of who he was, and of what his life was turning out to be, but that realisation came with a sense of unease, a fear that as soon as he would go back inside, he would forget. He clutched at the metal railing, cold underneath his fingers.

Suki appeared next to him.

“Not too shabby for a view.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Definitely not.”

Mai’s voice drawled at Toph’s shoulder, “What was the point of me getting you into this party if all you were gonna do was stand in a corner and talk amongst yourselves?”

“To see how the other half lives,” Katara said.

“Are you seeing it?”

“I’m seeing it all right.”

“We don’t need to make more friends,” Toph argued. “We’ve already got a friend group.”

“It was hard enough finding one the first time,” Zuko agreed.

“Speak for yourself,” Suki said, and Toph guessed she was pointing at Aang who was having a grand old time playing beer pong with a bunch of strangers.

Toph had stuck by Katara’s side since they'd arrived; crowds of drunk people were among the most difficult places for her to navigate. She wished the noise was loud enough to cover the sound of Sokka’s voice and the gaggle of girls who had not yet been driven away by his incredibly detailed explanation of hockey tactics.

“How old are you? Are you in fourth year?” one of them asked, cutting him off mid-sentence.

“Twenty-three. I did a gap year before going to uni.” He was bragging a bit, Toph could hear it in his voice.

“Shut up, I did a gap year too! What did you do?”

“Oh, worked a bit, travelled around...”

“No way, me too! I worked at my dad’s firm and went to Dubai and the Cayman Islands!”

“Ah well, I worked at Aldi and went backpacking to Chin Village and the Foggy Swamp. Basically the same!”

She giggled. “So cute!”

“Your shoes are ugly as hell”, Sokka said. A sign he'd probably had one too many.

The girls laughed like he had said something particularly funny. “They’re Balanciaga!”

“I don’t know what that is,” he yelled over the music. “Doesn’t make them any less ugly.”

“They’re $800 Balanciagas!”

“You paid $800 for that?” he screeched.

Toph didn’t hear the rest. She was soon pulled into a conversation with a girl who was also from Gaoling. They eventually found out that they used to have a German teacher in common, although he'd taught the girl in boarding school and Toph had been home-schooled all her life. Toph sometimes wondered how different her life would be if her parents had sent her to boarding school too, if she'd grown up surrounded with people her age and had made friends back then. She used to fantasise about running away from home and living as she pleased. In a way, university had allowed her to do just that; this was her first taste of independence. How ironic that the only reason she had all these opportunities now was because of the life she'd run away from: her family’s money had given her access to the best education she could get, private tutors and adapted teaching for the visually impaired; the most advanced and sophisticated tools had been made available to her. Yet, she couldn’t find it in her to be grateful for what had also caused her so much pain.

The solitude of her childhood was surely to blame for how friendship mattered more to her, it seemed, than it did to anyone else.

Toph was not one to dwell on the past, but today it kept seeping in, throwing her off balance. She kept thinking about running into Lijun earlier, how strange and standoffish he had seemed. Their relationship had not ended on the best of terms but it wasn’t like they'd dated for very long, or like there was any unfinished business there.

Right on cue, Suki’s voice rung out from the balcony. She sounded upset.

“You’re free to do whatever you want, but to do it right in front of me…”

Sokka said something that Toph couldn’t hear and that Suki didn’t seem to like.

“…I’ve made every effort to be accommodating and mature about this! And…”

Again, Sokka’s response was unintelligible. They were starting to draw attention to themselves. Katara had fallen silent, at a loss what to do.

“This was just insulting! How could you be so inconsiderate –”

“Suki, those girls were not flirting with me.”

“Please, you can’t be that oblivious!”

Sokka said something else and called out her name but Suki walked straight out the door. Katara ran after her. As soon as they were gone, people started whispering about what they'd just witnessed, bashful and entertained.

Feeling a bit ill, Toph sat down against the wall and put her drink between her legs. She was not the one who had just made a scene, and yet she wanted to disappear into the ground as if it had been her on that balcony. A strange kind of heartache was pulling at her chest. Suki and Katara were wrong. Nothing was the same. Nothing would be the same again. Or maybe the problem was that some things would never change. She felt so stupid in Suki’s makeup and Katara’s clothes, like a child in a costume, a laughable attempt at femininity.

Because Sokka had not looked at her at all.

Chapter Text

Something roused Toph from her sleep. Voices talking in hush tones. The front door closing. Steps in the living room. Then nothing.

She reached for her phone and her screen reader told her it was still the middle of the night. She rolled on her back. Her sheets were cool. The sound of a motorcycle rushing away in empty streets echoed in the thick silence of her room. Her first night in Omashu, she hadn’t been able to sleep because of the noise, a far cry from the quiet of the countryside and the Beifong estate.

When she woke again, a stripe of sun from where her curtains were not properly closed was warming her duvet and making the side of her face tingle. She pulled herself out of bed and went to the bathroom; Katara’s swimming suit was dripping in the bathtub. Then she walked into the kitchen, the floorboards smooth and creaking underneath her feet.

She opened the fridge and Appa squeaked madly in Aang’s room. Who knew a creature so small as a Guinea pig could produce such ear-piercing sounds, she thought as she poured herself some orange juice.

There was a rustling sound on the sofa. Toph, who thought she was alone in the room, was caught off guard and threw her bottle of juice in the general direction of the sound. Someone yelped.

“Sokka! You scared me to death!” Toph shouted.

“I scared you? I woke up to you throwing a bottle at my face!”

“It’s basically empty, you big baby. What are you doing on my couch?”

“I… I was a bit of a mess last night, so I asked Katara if I could crash here.”

Toph had a feeling it had something to do with the very public fight he and Suki had. She hopped on a barstool and leaned her elbows on the kitchen island, grumbling, “Well, no one asked for my opinion. See, I thought this flat was a democracy, but it seems like Katara has become the very thing she swore to destroy.”

The sofa’s springs squealed as Sokka got up and stretched. Every bone in his body seemed to crack in quick succession. “You and Aang should unionise, then.” He went up to the counter and turned the coffee maker on before rifling through the fridge. Appa did not miss his cue and the squeaks came back strong.

“I don’t approve of you eating our food either,” Toph said.

“I’m only eating Katara’s food. That’s allowed.” His voice was all gravelly from sleep. Toph would be lying if she said it didn’t do things to her.

The coffee maker was gurgling now and the scent of coffee wafted in the room. Sokka brushed past her and Toph was suddenly very aware that she was in her ratty pyjamas and her legs were bare and her hair was in a state that “messy” was too weak a word to describe.

They were both on opposite sides of the island, eating their breakfast in companiable silence when Katara came into the room.

“Sokka, explain to me how you’ve been here for less than a day and your clothes are already lying around in every corner of this flat.”

“It’s a gift.”

Toph heard Katara grab something in the bathroom and bring it over (she smelled faintly of chlorine, like she always did when she’d just come back from the pool), setting it down loudly next to Sokka’s cereal.

“This is a laundry basket. You use it for laundry. This is a one-time only warning: there’s no way you’re gonna sit here and not do your part.”

Toph was sniggering when Katara added, “You too, Toph. You’re no better when it comes to leaving dirty clothes everywhere.”

Toph lowered her head. Apart from one massive fight about the distribution of household chores, living with Katara had been smooth sailing for the most part. However, Toph knew that Katara got more temperamental when something else was stressing her out; she was putting her money on Katara’s upcoming dissertation proposal, and she knew not to push her luck.

So to the laundromat they went, Toph with her cane and Sokka carrying the overflowing laundry basket.

The morning air raised goosebumps on Toph’s legs – all her clothes were currently in the aforementioned basket, so she was wearing football shorts and a big hoodie without a t-shirt underneath. Students were hurrying out of their buildings to get to their early lectures, heavy doors slamming behind them, and a jogger was running alongside the pavement with music resonating from their earphones.

The laundromat was right around the corner. Sokka held the door for her with his foot, clumsily balancing the basket in his arms. Machines rumbling. The smell of laundry detergent.

“Okay, pick one,” Sokka said.

Toph pointed her cane at a row of washing machines.

He grimaced. “Not this one. It’s full.”

“That one, then.”

“That’s a tumble drier. This was a bad idea, I apologise.”

Sokka picked one out himself and stuffed their clothes into the drum. “Should we do one for the whites and one for the colours?”

“Are you gonna make me separate them too?”

“I apologised!”

“Nah, it’ll be fine,” Toph said, holding back a smirk.

“I usually just stuff everything together and hope for the best,” he agreed. “Is that… is that Aang’s underwear?”

Toph sat down on a bench, wedging her cane between her knees. “I don’t want to know.”

“’Buy sustainable’ – yep, definitely Aang’s.”

“Wait, is that written on the back?”

“No, on the label, but now I wish it was written on the back.”

The machine beeped and then started filling up with water, and Sokka joined her on the bench, which sagged a bit under his weight. The sun coming in through the glass wall was warm on Toph’s face and everything felt peaceful for a while.

“I’m sorry about you and Suki,” she said, and realised she meant it.

“Ah. It’s alright. I’ll be off your couch soon enough, don’t worry. Turns out living with your ex is more complicated than anticipated,” he said wryly.

Toph didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know how to deal with this light, playful tone that sounded almost like he was trying to save face, to make it seem like it was not a big deal. She wished he didn’t feel the need to do that with her.

Sokka let out a self-conscious little laugh. “We said we were different to other couples, that we would stay friends. I know we will, eventually, but I’m beginning to see that maybe we need a little time away from each other before we can reach that point.”

His shoulder grazed against Toph’s. The bench was vibrating slightly. There were friends laughing outside, their voices carefree and tinkling and flying off into the sky.

“I don’t mind you on my couch,” Toph said, trying too hard to sound nonchalant.

“What happened to resisting Katara’s reign of tyranny?” he said, and she could hear the smile in his voice.

“It’s in my best interest to get you on my side now so we have a better chance at overthrowing her.”

Sokka chuckled, but then his laugh faded away out of nowhere, and he was silent for a moment.

“What is it?” she asked.

“There was a man outside. He was staring at you,” he said in a distracted voice, craning his neck towards the street.

“Are you sure he wasn’t just remembering he urgently needs to do his washing because he’s got no underwear left?”

Sokka stood up and marched over to the glass wall, getting more heated. “No, I’m sure. I don’t like the way he was looking at you. It was weird.”

“Was it a boy or a man?”

“Definitely a man. He seems to be gone now…”

“Probably just some creep.”

That only seemed to make Sokka angrier. Toph tried not to be pleased. She knew it meant nothing. Sokka was like this with Katara, Sokka was like this with all his friends.

“It was weird,” he said again. “He was built like a tank.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

He didn’t reply.

“Sokka, come on,” she said to lure him away from the window.

Finally he listened to her, and she distracted him with an incredibly insensitive joke about the people who dumped your clothes on the floor when you didn’t retrieve them quick enough, and because they still had an hour and a half before that had any chance of happening, they went to get jianbing from a street food vendor and fucked about in the streets like only they knew how.

Toph was following Zuko around and interrogating him to his increasing irritation when the shop bell started ringing again and again and again – a lot of people were coming in the Jasmine Dragon at once, and they were a loud bunch. She hoped it wouldn’t mess up her recording.

She raised her phone to Zuko’s face.

“Are you kind to yourself when you’ve made a mistake or failed at something that matters to you?”

“Fucking hell,” Zuko hissed, having splashed tea on his hand.

“Is that off-record?”

“Listen, stay here, okay? And don’t go behind the counter.”

He left to take orders left and right and came back to find Toph behind the counter. Then he was running around, cutting pieces of cake, ripping open packs of biscuits, lining up cups and saucers and spoons on his tray. The kettles were grumbling and hissing in unison.

“Toph, you’re in my way.”

“Question number eight. How often in your daily life do you feel anxious or overwhelmed? Your options are: almost never, sometimes –”

Someone called for a napkin. “I’ll be right over!” Zuko said.

“…often, almost always.”

“Look, Toph, I know I agreed to this, but in case you haven’t noticed, the drama students are having some kind of tea-tasting social –”

“How do you know they’re drama students? Is it because you feel a kinship with them?”

“They’re dressed like 17^th century French royalty,” Zuko responded. Toph was not expecting that, although it did explain why everyone was talking like they had taken a bite out of something too hot. “Apparently this is an exercise – or a game, I’m not sure. They’re supposed to stay in character all day long.”

 “Are you telling me the people you’re serving are wearing enormous wigs and frilly shirts?

Zuko’s silence told her it was indeed the case, and that he hated every second of it. Toph giggled.

“Anyway,” Zuko said, “it’s busy out there today and Iroh probably doesn’t want me chatting with my friends during my shift –”

“Nonsense!” Iroh said from the till. “You two carry on! Miss Beifong is doing very important work here. It’ll do you some good reflecting on those things.”

“Thanks, Iroh!” Toph said, giving him a thumbs up. “Now that your uncle has given us his blessing… How would you describe your current state of mind?”

“Annoyed.”

“Moving on. How often do you think down on yourself or blame yourself? Your options are: almost never, some—"

“Yeah, I got that the first time.” Zuko took off with his tray and was only back a while later. As she waited for him to return, Toph made her phone read out the remaining questions to her. She had to turn the volume up so she could hear it over the chatter and – yes – the singing.

“Question eleven. Or was it ten? Doesn’t matter. Does your daily life ever make you feel anguish or even distress?”

“I can think of something that’s distressing me right now.”

Toph was not deterred. “When you look in the mirror, do you like what you see?”

“Are you doing this on purpose?” he snapped.

“What do you mean?” Zuko’s stare must have been quite deadly because she could feel it burning her own face. Burning her own face… “Oh! Oh, I’m so sorry, I genuinely forgot about that.”

“You forgot,” Zuko said, sounding baffled – almost wonderstruck.

Now her face was burning in shame. “I’m awful, I’m so sorry.”

“You’re not awful,” he told her, his voice considerably softer. “It’s kind of nice, in a way. You’re the only person that forgets.”

Her heart clenched at those words. She wished she could give Zuko what she had and what he didn’t, the luxury of forgetting. No matter how much distance he would put between himself and his father, there was no escaping it; everywhere he went, it went with him, a constant reminder, a mark so destructive it had changed his face into a new one, changed the fabric of his being permanently, made it the first thing about him anyone would ever see. It suddenly struck Toph that they were so far, so far from home, different and yet unchanged, out of place in the world they had chosen for themselves; it struck her how incongruous it was, Zuko in his apron, clearing out the tables of people dressed like bishops and courtesans, Toph in her washed-out band t-shirt and dirty trainers, doing a survey on mental health, of all things. It might have seemed small to someone else, it might have seemed like the opposite of an achievement, but they were doing it on their own. They were doing fine. Except that Toph could not forget either. When she’d left, she’d thought she was free, free from them, free to start anew, but she wasn’t. She was still attached. Her scar had gone with her too.

“Do you ever miss your dad?” she asked.

Zuko was quiet for a moment. She couldn’t tell if he was mad or just taken aback.

“Is this for your survey?” he said at last.

“No. It’s for me.”

He turned the tap on and began wiping the counter, and said genuinely, “Never.”

Toph felt inexplicably crushed by his answer. Zuko was the person closest to what she’d been through, the one most likely to understand, and yet it still wasn’t enough: she was alone in what she felt, just like she’d always been.

Sokka typed his name at the end of an email to his new supervisor, and, too spent by the immense effort it had required of him to write it, pressed send without proofreading it. His laptop started overheating like it was preparing for launch; he could feel the burn of it on his stomach, but didn’t move. He hadn’t changed position since he’d sat down hours ago and his work had been so stupefyingly dull that he’d been sliding down the sofa, a slow and ineluctable descent, so that he was now slumped beyond the point of no return, upper half on the sofa, lower half on the floor.

He looked at his newly sent email and saw to his dismay that he had signed it “Sokak” – although that would probably increase the chances of his supervisor actually spelling his name right – and also that his overzealous use of exclamation marks made him come off as a bit of maniac.

Eh, too late now. It was a done deal anyways. In that moment, Sokka realised he had nothing left to do, a rare occurrence in and of itself. There must’ve been something he was forgetting. He looked around the room.

Katara had been sitting next to him on the sofa for the better part of an hour, typing away on her phone, and not a word had been uttered between them at any point. Her tote bag was lying on the floor, books spilling out of it. On the coffee table were a water bill, a letter for a student who lived here last year and didn’t change their address, another one trying to get them to join a cult (Sokka would have to put it out of Katara’s sight), and a pair of earphones. Toph’s oversized military jacket had been thrown on the back of a chair. A square of sunlight was framing part of the kitchen island and crumbling down the barstools, which meant it was late in the afternoon. Aang’s vegetarian cookbook was open on the counter, coated paper glistening.

Sokka looked at his sister. “Who are you texting like that? Your secret boyfriend?”

She gave him the stink eye. The typing resumed.

Sokka leaned towards her and stole a glance at her screen. Tomatoes, baking powder, washing-up liquid. Katara pushed him off. “I hate it when you do that!”

His laptop started sliding off his lap, and Sokka gasped and flailed and caught it right before it fell.

“Look what you almost did!”

“It’s fine. I swear you care more about that thing than you do any human being.”

“Well, as opposed to human beings, it’s never let me down before.”

“It can’t say the same for you,” Katara replied with a smirk.

He made a face at her. She made a face back and got up from the sofa, saying, “I’m going to the shops. Since you’re staying here and eating all my food, the least you could do is give me a hand.”

Sokka couldn’t think of a less appealing prospect, but there was one thing that would make it more fun. “Can I bring a friend?”

“Sure,” Katara said, tapping her pockets for her keys.

He sat up and raised his voice, “Toph! Wanna tag along?”

Toph’s voice came from her room, “Where to, the Underworld?”

Sokka gave Katara an all-knowing look and said conversationally, “She’s got ears like a bat.”

In her room Toph spoke again, “You know what, I don’t care. I’m bored, count me in. I’ll kick Cerberus in the groin – three times if that’s what it takes.”

They waited for her to put her shoes on as she sat open-legged on the hall floor, and then they were off.

It was warm outside, one of those late summer days when time seems to stretch indefinitely, a quietness in the air, people lingering in the streets, the evening coming around you like an embrace. The asphalt seemed different under Sokka’s feet, vast and vivid, and he felt like running; but Toph was holding on to his elbow, so he didn’t. The shop’s sign stood tall as always, faded red against a sky so pale it looked almost white. Dim light in the parking lot, children fighting for the front seat, someone slamming the boot of their car.

They went to get a shopping cart and Toph climbed into it.

“Is that allowed?” Katara said.

“No, but that’s the one perk of looking like a kid. Onwards!”

With a laugh, Sokka obediently pushed the cart inside the shop, wheels quivering on the floor tiles, the metal grid clinking madly. Fruit and vegetables first – stacking them around Toph like a game of Tetris. Toph and Sokka kept sneaking stuff into the cart when Katara wasn’t looking, and when she eventually did she would get mad and tell them to put it back, and Sokka would call her a killjoy. We don’t need a coat rack shaped like a dancing frog, Katara would respond. See, that’s where you’re absolutely wrong, Katara.

She was currently in the dairy aisle, hands on her hips, intently studying yogurt prices. Sokka propped himself up on the cart and gave it a good push with his foot, and they glided along the aisle, both he and Toph singing, “Rolling with the homies… Rolling with the homies…”

Katara laughed. “I can’t take you guys anywhere.”

“Don’t you disrespect Brittany Murphy like that – God rest her soul,” Sokka said.

Food was piling up in the cart and a sharp turn caused some of it to collapse on Toph, which he found very amusing. She struggled against the bottles of milk and a net of clementines while he did nothing to help her out.

“You’re going to hell for this”, she said.

 “That’s already been established and you did say you’d tag along. I’m afraid you’re stuck with me.”

“You’re the one who’s pushing me around everywhere, who do you think is the bigger loser here?” She laid back in her bed of food, putting her hands behind her head and crossing her ankles on the handle. She was wearing mismatched socks; Sokka saw that one of them was his and he smiled to himself.

“Hand soap. Hand soap, where’s the hand soap,” Katara muttered. Her hand was fisted on the metal grid, pulling the cart from the side.

Sokka added Honey Pops to the cart. She immediately fished it out and put it back on the shelf.

“We’ve got enough cereal already. What was I thinking, bringing the two of you? You’re more of an inconvenience than anything. All you do is slow me down!”

With that she wandered off to find the missing items on her list. Completely unaffected by her scolding, Toph yawned, and Sokka crossed his arms on the cart handle and rested his chin onto them.

“Where are we?” Toph wondered.

“Do you have a sudden onset of amnesia or is that an existential question?”

She seemed surprised to hear his voice so close to her. “What aisle, dumbass.”

“Meat,” Sokka responded, noticing a familiar figure at the other end of the aisle in question.

She rubbed the goosebumps on her arms. “Well, hurry up. I’m cold.”

He was certain of it now: it was Toph’s ex over there, checking out the expiry date on a slice of beef. He looked different from the other day, no stuffy uniform but a leather jacket, and now that he wasn’t sitting behind a desk Sokka could see that he was quite tall.

Toph repeatedly tapped Sokka’s head with kitchen roll. “Hellooo, did you hear what I said?”

“Your ex is here.”

She lowered the kitchen roll. “Who, Lijun?”

“Is there another one I don’t know about?” Sokka said, alarmed.

“Get out of here.”

“Wow, I didn’t think it was such an outlandish question –”

“No, I mean move!” she whisper-shouted. “Quick! Before he sees us!”

Not quite understanding the urgency but getting contaminated with it nonetheless, Sokka hurried to push the cart around the corner.

“Damn, at this pace, we’ll be lucky if he only sees the back of our heads,” Toph said.

“Hey, no offence, but it’s heavy as fuck. It’s really hard to manoeuvre.”

He had to pull on the handle with all his weight to stop the cart from drifting into the frozen food. He cast a quick glance at the beef section; they were out of sight now.

“Why are you hiding from him?”

“I just don’t feel like dealing with the awkwardness today.”

Sokka fiddled with the cart’s lock and said casually, “What happened between you two?”

Toph’s head was bowed, her eyes hidden behind her bangs. “I broke up with him and he didn’t understand what went wrong.”

“What went wrong?” Sokka knew he was crossing a line by asking this, but his curiosity in that moment was stronger than the unspoken boundaries of their friendship.

He was just about to add that she didn’t have to tell him when she said, “I did.”

He wasn’t sure what she meant, but he didn’t press the issue, although he really wanted to. He couldn’t explain the weird fascination he had with the guy, with something that had nothing to do with him at all.

He climbed onto the cart’s wheels and examined his surroundings, feeling like a sailor on the lookout for a pirate ship. Lijun emerged in the main aisle.

“Ex to the port side!” Sokka said as he hurled the cart in the opposite direction.

They reached a good speed that had Toph laughing delightedly, but then Sokka took the turn too wide and lost control of the cart a little bit, and it collided against the shelves. An avalanche of cereal boxes fell on them, filling up the cart.

“What the fuck just happened,” Toph said.

“I think he saw us,” Sokka said.

He peeked over his shoulder. Lijun was looking straight at them.

“Okay, he definitely saw us.”

Toph started laughing and Sokka looked at her face sticking out of cereal boxes and started laughing too. Soon he was bent over, hands on his ribs, tears streaming out of his eyes, and Toph was laughing so hard no sound even came out of her. This is the spectacle that Katara came back to a few minutes later. She almost dropped her armful of groceries.

“Are you guys serious? What did I say about cereal!”

“There has to be a mistake.”

Sokka turned his test upside down, checked that it had his name written on it, that it wasn’t missing a page, that every point was accounted for, but no; the 52 was still there, big and bold and unmistakably a 5 and a 2. He leaned over the table in an attempt to catch his lab partner’s attention.

“Sendhil! Sendhil! What did you get?”

Sendhil held up his test, a 70 circled at the top of the page.

“What? But we compared results! How is that possible?”

Sendhil shrugged. In his agitation, Sokka had forgotten to keep his voice down; it carried, and over on the dais, Professor Long Feng turned away from his slideshow and towards the class. His piercing eyes fixed upon Sokka.

“It seems as if you have a lot to say, Sokka. Are you happy with the grade I gave you?”

Sokka shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Long Feng continued, “And what about the second marker’s grade? Or do you want to contest it this time too, since you think yourself smarter than the both of us?”

Sokka turned red. All eyes were on him. There was nothing he could say that wouldn’t make him look bad.

Long Feng’s thin moustache twitched. “Maybe you should’ve spent less time riding waves and more time actually studying them.”

There were a few chuckles. Sokka closed his lab coat to hide what he was wearing underneath, and, seeing the smile on Sendhil’s face, whispered to him, “Traitor! You complimented me on that shirt!”

Long Feng was smirking, not even bothering to hide his glee. He seemed to revel in putting Sokka in his place. This was payback, Sokka realised. For the supervisor thing.

Long Feng turned back to his slideshow and addressed the whole class, “Well, let this serve as a lesson in humility. Not everyone is destined for greatness… Especially not with that haircut.”

The students laughed, some of them sheepishly. Sokka looked down, his face burning, thoroughly humiliated.

He barely looked up for the rest of the hour. Didn’t take notes, didn’t participate, and because he was one of the only people who usually did, the class was indolent and unresponsive and it seemed to drag on forever. When it was over he carelessly stuffed everything into his bag, hoping to get out of there as quickly as possible.

“Hey, Sokka. Wait.”

It was Teo, who came up to him despite Sokka’s less-than-inviting demeanour.

“I’m really sorry Long Feng said all that to you. And in front of everyone… It’s just not right.”

Sokka nodded. “I appreciate that.”

“He’s a dick,” Teo added. “One time he accused me of scratching his shiny Lexus with my chair when I was struggling to get out of my dad’s car… He’d parked it halfway on the handicapped spot.”

Sokka replied that wow, that was indeed a dick move, and thanked Teo again, and when Teo finally went away and was out of earshot, turned to Sendhil conspiratorially.

“That guy wants me dead.”

And then Sokka dragged his feet back to his sister’s flat, and on the way there he told himself he would keep what had just happened to himself, brood in dignity, not add to his embarrassment by increasing the number of witnesses, but as soon as he crossed the threshold and Toph asked “what’s up your ass” he was ranting like he’d never ranted before.

She didn’t interrupt him once; she just stood between the barstools and the back of the armchair, calmly eating yogurt, as Sokka restlessly stomped around her.

“Maybe he’s right,” he said at last when he’d calmed down. “Maybe I’m in waaay over my head.”

She looked pensive.

He carried on, deflated, “I just… I thought I had it, you know. I was never a prodigy like Katara, but I was the first in the family, in the whole village, to go to university. Physics… science… It’s my thing. Something I’m passionate about, something I’m good at. I… I thought I was good enough to do a PhD.”

Toph raised a spoonful of yogurt to her mouth. Feeling exposed, Sokka faced the window and put his hands on his hips. Birds were huddling on an electric cable, feathers ruffled in the wind.

“But maybe I’m not. Maybe I was good, but not that good, not Master’s good, and this is as far as I can get.”

He hadn’t been able to keep the insecurity – the fear – from seeping into his voice. Because that possibility, if it were true, was much worse than Long Feng having taken a dislike to him; it would be the confirmation that Sokka, unlike his sister, could never excel at anything – that he was nothing special.

“Bullshit,” Toph said.

The birds flew away.

“How do you know?”

“Sokka, let me tell you something: if you were acting entitled or being arrogant, believe me, I would tell you.”

When he didn’t respond she insisted, “Do you believe me?”

He looked at her. “Yeah.” Yeah, that was one of the good things about Toph, that you could always trust her to tell you the truth, even when the truth was uncomfortable.

“From everything you’ve told me, Long Feng seems to be an egotistical, tyrannical professor who’s had a grudge against you since you didn’t cite his work in your first paper of the semester. He’s on a power trip, and I would even wager that he feels somewhat threatened by your intellect, and that’s why he’s sabotaging you at every turn.”

She tossed the empty yogurt in the bin, put her spoon in the sink.

“By the way, I’m sorry that I suggested you change supervisors,” she said sincerely. “I didn’t realise I would actually get you in trouble.”

“No, don’t say that, it’s not your fault. Besides, it was the right call, and I’m glad I did it. Otherwise I would have been stuck with Long Feng all year long and God knows what he would’ve put me through.”

He was getting angry again, but this time it wasn’t a feeling of powerlessness: it was a need for vindication. It felt good to have someone put what he’d been feeling into words, however trifling it looked to everyone else – to have someone tell him he wasn’t paranoid or overreacting.

Toph nodded. She put her hands in her pockets and made to leave, but before turning away she said, “Also, Sokka… in my humble opinion… You are Master’s good. And PhD good. And, actually, ‘can do anything’ good.”

She seemed to ponder for second.

“Except maybe art.”

He laughed, but he was touched also; Toph did not hand out compliments freely, and so when she did, you knew she really meant it.

“Sorry, I’ve got to get to my microbiology tutorial,” she said.

Sokka waved his hand self-consciously. “Yeah, yeah, don’t let me keep you. Go study the hell out of those microbes.”

He watched her out of the corner of his eye, a little bit in awe of her, as she put a jumper on, shouldered her bag, grabbed her cane, as she smiled and waved in his direction before going out the door, and he thought about how he’d been wrong that other time, you could rearrange someone’s brain: she’d just done it with him.

The wheels of Aang’s skateboard screeched on the tarmac. He kept circling Toph as she walked along the pavement, doing tricks while he waited for her to catch up. He would also say hi to everyone who crossed their path and constantly stop to pet the campus cat (it had been following them since they’d passed the library).

“I hate going anywhere on campus with you,” Toph said.

Aang was astonished. “What? Why?”

“Hey Mr President! Y’alright?” someone yelled.

“The Duke!” Aang cheerfully replied. “How’s it going? Having a good time doing Duke things?”

“Unbelievable,” Toph said under her breath.

They were thousands of people in this university and Aang seemed to know every single one of them. It sort of made sense: as the President of the Students’ Union, he met a lot of people and was very involved in student life, but what mystified Toph was that he was friends with everyone, or at least friendly with everyone, including that guy who (as Aang had explained to her) had been nicknamed ‘The Duke’ during one legendary night of drunken shenanigans, although no one could remember the exact reason why, not even the Duke.

“And what have you got here?” Aang said.

“Flyers! I’ve been trying to hand them out all day long and let me tell you, I’ve been brushed off so many times I’m starting to second-guess the fact that I exist. Pipsqueak’s been much more efficient than me – but I guess when a 6ft5 guy as wide as a truck hands you a flyer, you take it.”

Pipsqueak? How drunk did they have to be for that one?

 “What’s the flyer for?” Aang asked.

“A meeting to discuss the university’s plan to raise tuition fees. Here, take one. You should come!”

“Oh, uh… I don’t know... Is it sanctioned by the uni?”

“Not exactly, but you’re supposed to represent students’ interests, after all…”

Sensing Aang’s unease, Toph stepped in. “Aang, the game is gonna start, I don’t wanna miss it.”

The Duke told Aang it was nice seeing him, and Aang told him the same, and they took their leave. Aang walked with Toph in grateful silence, carrying his skate under his arm. More and more people joined them in the street, all going in the same direction, talking loudly, spilling their beers. One guy anxiously asked them if they’d seen his head anywhere – presumably Bosco, the team mascot for the Omashu Bears.

Toph zipped up her jacket when they entered the rink. The stands were still filling up; they found two seats in the front row.

“Okay, remember why you’re here,” Toph said. “Don’t leave anything out.”

“I can see Sokka,” Aang told her. “He’s talking with his teammates. Oh, he’s waving at us now.”

Toph heard the sound of skates slicing the ice towards them, and then the grin in Sokka’s voice as he said, “You guys made it!”

“Barely,” Toph said, side-eying Aang.

“Oh, yeah, I hate going anywhere on campus with him,” Sokka said.

Aang let out an indignant “hey”, but was interrupted by someone else.

“Excuse me. You’re blocking the way.”

“Hey, Bosco,” Sokka said. “I see you’ve got a good head on your shoulders now.”

“Very funny,” Bosco said shortly.

Sokka waited for him to leave and told them, full of mirth, “He’s got important business to attend to.”

“Don’t poke the bear, Sokka,” Toph said, equally amused.

Sokka had to get back to his team after that. As soon as the game began, Toph realised that having Aang, someone who knew nothing about hockey, serve as her sports commentator was probably not her brightest idea.

“Number 45 hits the thingy with his stick… It goes to number 29 – no! Number 28, sorry… oh numb–oh it’s already–the other team has it! It goes to – wow, they’re going really fast… Counterattack – COME ON SOKKA! Number 9 – 87 – he shoots aaah! It didn’t go in… back to the Owls… What? He just used his stick to – can you do that? Is that allowed? Number 53 sends it to – shoot, Bosco’s doing a weird dance in front of me… YES! YES!”

Toph let herself drown in the atmosphere of the game, the plexiglass rattling when players slammed into it, the small crowd’s contagious excitation. There was something exhilarating, liberating about getting up and screaming your heart out when your team scored. The BSSU Owls were leading by the end of the second period, but only by a few points.

“Ouch! Number 14 from Ba Sing Se just fell… our goalie tells him to get up – back to us! Sokka passes it to number 45 and… What is he doing?”

“Who, Sokka?”

“He – he’s not moving. He just stopped in the middle of the rink. He’s staring at something, but I can’t see what it is.”

There was a lull in the cheering, other people having noticed Sokka’s strange behaviour, and Toph distinctly heard Sokka say, “What the fuck?”

“He took off his helmet,” Aang said. “He’s getting out of the rink.”

Suddenly Sokka’s voice was much closer, and full of urgency. “Toph! I just saw him! The man—the creep from the other day, he’s here!”

He swore, and Toph understood that he was struggling to take his skates off. He wanted to go after him. She wasn’t sure if she should let him.

“Shit, he saw me,” Sokka said. Finally his skates fell on the ground, and he took off.

Aang grabbed Toph’s wrist. She barely had the time to grab her cane before they were running after Sokka.

It got warmer around Toph and the spectators’ noise became more and more distant. They took a right and then another, went through a long corridor, their steps resonating between naked walls. They were too slow – couldn’t hear Sokka anymore. They almost came to a stop, but then voices came from further down the hall.

Toph and Aang let the voices guide them and came into a room with a familiar smell – a locker room.

“What’s going on?” Toph said.

Heavy breathing in a heavy silence. Sokka came to Toph’s side, a reassuring presence.

“Tell her what you told me.”

The man’s voice was deep and earnest. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m just a bodyguard doing his job.”

“A bodyguard?” Toph said, confused. “Who are you guarding… me?”

An uncomfortable feeling settled in her stomach, a feeling that she knew the answer, that she knew what he was going to say. That she wasn’t going to like it.

The man sighed. “You weren’t supposed to find out, but now that the cat’s out of the bag… I was hired by your parents.”

Chapter Text

Toph’s mind was reeling. Of all the things this could have been about, some more problematic, some more frightening, this felt somehow worse. For eighteen years her parents had watched her every move, and it was hell, but at least it was straightforward: she knew the rules and she knew what to expect if she broke them. Now and then she would find a way to escape, and she hoped that one day she would find a way to escape for good. And she thought she had, she thought that for the first time in her life she was making her own way into the world, that she was independent and free to do whatever she wanted, when in reality they were still watching over her, not trusting that she could take care of herself, not trusting that she could do this one thing alone. It was like when you let a little girl win at a game, make her think she did it on her own to make her happy; meanwhile, you’re sharing amused smiles with the other adults, convinced of the legitimacy of this game of pretend. Oh, how degrading it was… Not only because they didn’t believe she was capable, not only because they hadn’t respected her wishes, but because she had been lied to.

How long had they had her followed? Was the bodyguard there every time she was leaving for class, every time she was coming out of a bar? All those times when she thought she was alone, their eyes might have been on her, and she felt violated, blindsided (ah!). How easy it must have been for them, seeing as the bodyguard was literally invisible to her! If Sokka hadn’t fought with Suki and temporarily moved in with them, he wouldn’t have spent as much time with Toph recently, wouldn’t have gone places with just her, and wouldn’t have noticed someone was following her. If Sokka hadn’t fought with Suki, she might have never known.

“I need to talk to them.” Toph was standing very still, and didn’t recognise her own voice.

“On the phone?” Sokka said tentatively.

They were just outside the rink’s back entrance. They could hear the Omashu Bears taking a beating inside. Aang had left some time ago for a tutor meeting and the bodyguard was smoking a few feet away from them (“Do you mind if I take my break? It’s usually at 5:50”, “Please, don’t stop on my account”).

“No, this is not the type of conversation you can have over the phone,” Toph said.

“We could go this weekend,” Sokka suggested.

“I need to talk to them now.”

She couldn’t carry on as if nothing had happened: there was a breach in her new life, the old one had come in and poisoned it. The wrongness of it surrounded her, overwhelmed her. She had to do something.

“Now? Should I point out that they’re in Gaoling and we’re not and it’s almost 6pm?”

The cigarette smoke was acrid in Toph’s mouth. “There’s no ‘we’. You can go home if you want.”

She regretted the words as soon as they came out. Sokka had run out of his first hockey game of the season because of her. Anytime her parents were involved, she unwillingly reverted back to the child she used to be, bad habits and all.

If he was hurt, he didn’t show it.

“You shouldn’t go alone.”

She let out a derisive, bitter sound. “Don’t worry, I won’t be alone. I won’t ever be alone. My parents made sure of that!”

“You know what I mean. Even if you can find a train ticket on such short notice… You shouldn’t go alone,” he said stubbornly.

Toph reminded herself that she wasn’t Toph Beifong, twelve years old, but Toph Beifong, twenty years old.

“I know,” she relented.

“I can borrow Suki’s car and drive you there,” Sokka offered suddenly.

Her expression dubious, she asked begrudgingly, “Aren’t you guys in a fight?”

“For this, she won’t mind.”

(As if Toph needed a reminder of how great a person Suki was.)

“What about your game?” she said. She distantly realised that apart from his skates and helmet he must still be dressed for it.

“I think it’s too late for that,” he replied light-heartedly. “It’s fine, it was just a friendly anyway.”

Toph, who knew how much hockey mattered to Sokka, saw right through his attempt to minimise it. She felt like hugging him, but did no such thing, afraid that the touch would somehow enable him to see through her too.

They walked back to their street with the bodyguard following them from a distance, having declined Sokka’s invitation to join them. There was a chill in the air – the sun was going down and autumn was just around the corner. Toph waited for Sokka at the entrance of his building while he went up to fetch Suki’s car keys.

Her car was parked on one of the allocated spaces for students. When Sokka turned on the ignition, the air vents started blowing out a wind that was simultaneously hot and cold, and filled up the car with a weird dusty smell. Then they were on the road, accompanied only by the rumble of the engine and the muted robotic voice that would come out of Sokka’s phone from time to time, telling him which exit to take. In her mind Toph was picturing all the ways she would blow up at her parents when they’d arrive in Gaoling, rehearsing over and over the things she would say to them and how she would say them.

Sometime into their ride, Sokka said, “For your information, your bodyguard is in the car behind us.”

Toph hung her head and brought it back hard against her headrest. “Are you fucking kidding me… I can’t believe them. I honestly can’t believe them.”

“Okay, I know it’s not really my place to say,” Sokka said hesitantly, “and I agree they went the wrong way about it, but I don’t think there’s any malicious intent there. It seems like they’re just worried for your safety.”

There were so many things Toph had to say to that, they all gathered in her mouth and she couldn’t pick one. Of course there was no malicious intent, there was never any malicious intent, that’s what made it all so much worse.

“You don’t know the half of what they’ve done in the name of being worried for my safety,” she retorted.

“Sure,” Sokka mumbled, tapping the wheel with his fingers.

Immediately she went on, unable to keep the bite out of her voice, “The truth is they’re having me trailed because they can’t stand not knowing what I’m up to. They’re trying to weave their way in and take control somehow.”

She couldn’t go back. She couldn’t go back to the way it was before.

When Sokka spoke again his voice was very controlled, but forceful at the same time.

“Maybe they just want to be a part of your life, but you won’t let them, so this is the only way in they could find.”

At first she was baffled by the implied reproach in his words, but then she understood: of course Sokka would think like this. Of course Sokka, who had lost his mother at such a young age, wouldn’t understand how you could choose not to have your parents in your life when you were still lucky enough to have them, how you could simply not try to repair your relationship with them if you had the chance. He thought she was being stubborn and immature, he thought she was holding a grudge. The reality was that Toph had forgiven her parents more times than it was possible to forgive someone.

And yet, here she was.

Her lack of response must have made him feel ill-at-ease. “I just think it comes from a place of love,” he added, before saying to a passing car, “Put your blinker on, idiot.”

There was a painful lump in Toph’s throat.

“Well, they don’t know how to love me in a way that doesn’t make me terribly unhappy.”

The car stopped, probably at a red light, and the silence hung between them, thick with all the other things Toph couldn’t say – that her parents didn’t know how to love her in a way that didn’t make her want to run away, that for a long time this overbearing, controlling, oppressive love was all she knew of love. They loved a version of Toph that didn’t exist anymore, that never existed at all – it had been invented for their benefit, because it was the only way for her to get the affection she craved for. She had pretended to be someone else until she didn’t recognise herself anymore, and then she had sworn she would never do it again. But when she was with Lijun, she had seen how easy it was for her to slip back into this – sacrificing parts of yourself for someone else’s happiness – and it had scared her. That’s why she had to be unyielding.

“The sat nav says we’re here,” Sokka said. “It’s getting dark so I can’t read the numbers.”

He was driving very slowly while he looked out the window on his left.

“There’s a boar with wings above the gate,” Toph said.

“Ah, found it. It’s hard to miss, really. Is there a doorbell, or do we knock, or…?”

Toph leaned over and pressed her hand at the centre of the steering wheel so that the car emitted a loud and ongoing honk. She only pulled away when she heard the buzz of the automatic gate slowly sliding open.

“That will work too,” Sokka observed.

They moved into the driveway, gravel crunching beneath the tires. Sokka was quiet at the sight of the fountains and the copses and the ponds with their littles bridges and the lush gardens, but couldn’t hold it in when they reached the main house.

“Jesus fuck! This is where you grew up?”

Toph unfasted her seatbelt and took a few calming breaths.

“Do you want me to stay in the car?” he asked.

“I don’t care what you do,” she said, and she got out of the car.

She came up to the front porch, her cane almost useless – she knew this place like the back of her hand. Her legs remembered the exact height of each step, and in them she felt the desperation and powerlessness of being a child again. The door had been unlocked for her. She came in and closed it behind her despite everything in her that screamed she wouldn’t be able to open it again.

“Toph,” Lao said. “How nice of you to come by.”

She didn’t miss the reproach he had carefully integrated in his irony, and she suppressed a feeling of guilt.

“Is Mum here?” she asked.

“She’s visiting her aunt.”

Toph was both disappointed and happy to hear that. It would make things easier.

“So,” Lao said in his businessman voice. “To what do I owe the pleasure? Is there a special occasion?”

This was the moment Toph had prepared for in the car, the moment she was supposed to rage, but now that she was actually in front of him, the mere idea of doing that felt preposterous, so completely at odds with the reality of their relationship. Because her rebellion had always been a covert one; in fact, she’d never been the kind to stand up to her family much. She’d had to, eventually, and it had taken years for her to gear up to it, but she was no more equipped for it now than she had been back then.

“You know why I’m here,” she said.

“I take it you’ve met Hong.”

“Yeah,” she replied, sardonic. “Thanks for the introduction.”

She heard him get up, take a few angry steps on the marble floor.

“Don’t take that tone with me. You know very well why I had to do this. You refuse any kind of assistance – you have barely any contact with us. What choice does that leave us? What was I supposed to do?”

“You were supposed to let me live!” Her voice echoed against the hall’s high ceiling, sounding high-pitched and childish even to her own ears.

“Let you live, on your own, in a big, dangerous city? Toph, you are disabled. You are a girl. And the world is full of people who will want to take advantage of that – to take advantage of you.”

Toph wasn’t naive, she’d learned how to defend herself. She was trained in several martial arts and was bloody good at it; she’d put people in their place before.

She laughed incredulously. “You think you need to tell me I’m disabled? I live with it; you don’t. The problem is you being more bothered by my own disability than I am.”

“You’re right, that’s exactly what the problem is. You’re too reckless. You can’t keep ignoring the reality of biology, which is that you are vulnerable.”

She threw her hands in the air. “I live with my friends in student halls. I’m practically always on campus. I know there are always risks, but I think I have a pretty good idea how much danger I’m actually in.”

He turned away from her. “You don’t know everything.”

“What is it that I don’t know, then? Tell me.”

“A few weeks ago, someone tried breaking in the estate.”

 “What? Why didn’t you lead off with that?” she exclaimed.

It was infuriating how he always felt the need to hide things from her, to protect her from the truth. How he did it still, even though she wasn’t twelve anymore.

Lao wouldn’t stop pacing. “The police have no leads. It could be an isolated incident, a simple robbery… or one of my competitors. And they might go after you to get to me.”

Toph was starting to piece things together. This was one of the reasons why, for many years, the Beifongs had hidden their daughter’s existence to the world: Lao feared that people might try to hurt him by hurting her. That Beifong money made a lot of people envious.

“Of course, I increased security around you and your mother right away. Hong went from only watching you when you were out alone to watching you all the time… and it will remain that way.”

This was the worst scenario Toph could have come up with, because there was reason to it.

“You – you can’t do that to me,” she stammered.

“I’m doing it for you.”

“Well, it works out just fine for you, doesn’t it?”

“For God’s sake, Toph, do you always have to –”

“I’m legally an adult,” she argued, hating how petulant she sounded.

“Legally, yes. Financially… Must I remind you who pays for that university of yours?”

She should have expected this, really, but still she was hurt that they would go as far as threatening to pull the rug from under her feet. Maybe this was a sign she should sever the last tie that still chained her to them, so that she didn’t owe them anything, so that they couldn’t use it to manipulate her anymore. A part-time job would cover her food expenses, and she could get a loan for tuition fees, but would she be eligible for an accommodation loan? Probably not.

Toph was grasping at straws, feeling more and more helpless and disillusioned. When she’d imagine confronting her parents, it always ended with them finally understanding her, finally seeing her. But that would never happen. Stupidly she’d let herself hope, but she knew it now.

Sokka was leaning against Suki’s car, arms crossed, head tilted up at the overcast sky. Night had come down on the Beifong estate and the clouds were heavy with unshed rain.

The glint of a security camera caught his eye. It was moving at the edge of the roof, unnervingly quiet, watching him. He did his best to ignore it, but ended up giving in the weird urge to throw a peace sign at it.

A security guard came around the outer wall, casting a long shadow over the dark-blue grass. Sokka nodded at him awkwardly. He felt more than a little inadequate here – his Gran Gran’s house could fit a hundred times over in this part of the property alone. Toph and he had come from such different worlds, it was a wonder they got on so well – although it was more of a testament to Toph’s character that she hadn’t grown up to be snotty.

Suddenly the front door slammed. Toph made a beeline for the car and climbed in without saying a word.

Sokka raised his eyebrows. “Alrighty then,” he singsonged, and he opened the driver’s door.

It took him a few tries to make a u-turn, and he almost crashed into a pillar, but he managed and there they went, back down the loud gravel driveway, out onto the winding path lined with trees, then along the main road through Gaoling, and finally the deserted motorway. The yellow of their headlights on the road was all he could see of the world.

Toph was completely mute. She was resting her head against the window, her cheek smushed against her arm. The patter of raindrops on the windshield started hesitantly, sped up, and soon filled the whole car.

He risked another glance at her. There was something shiny on her turned-away face.

Sokka was shocked. He’d never seen Toph cry before.

“Are you alright?” he said.

The wipers were rhythmically squealing against the windscreen. He saw Toph wipe her tears away.

Weirdly shaken, Sokka forced himself to focus on the road. He ended up fiddling with the radio just to do something, anything. Interference, a studio audience laughing, Wuthering Heights. Sometime during the second chorus he started singing along to Kate Bush’s falsetto, his voice ridiculously high-pitched. He smiled when he heard a wet laugh to his right, and then Toph singing along too.

They drove into Omashu, a giant of light in the darkness – trams rushing on overarching bridges, lit up offices in the business district, giant billboards disintegrating into new colours.

Sokka’s stomach growled and he suggested they grab something to eat. He parked in a narrow street not very far from theirs. It had stopped raining and everything was dripping and gleaming, fluorescent lights reflecting off the pavement. They picked up food at some takeaway shop and ate it in the car.

At last Toph broke the silence.

“I’m sorry I’ve been acting like an ass. You didn’t deserve any of it.”

“It’s okay,” he said with his mouth full of burger.

“It’s not okay. I hate that I get like this.”

She’d stopped eating; her hands hung limply on her lap.

In a small voice she spoke again, “I can see how… how my reaction might have seemed blown out of proportion when compared to the actual significance of the bodyguard thing. I know it’s not the end of the world… But the reason I reacted like this is, it’s not just this thing. It’s years of things like this, piling up. It’s… it’s the way I was treated when I was younger.”

“How?” Sokka asked, feeling uneasy and apprehensive. He clarified, “How were you treated when you were younger?”

“I had no agency of my own. Everything I did, everything I… everything I was, was controlled by them. They isolated me completely… made me feel like I could never fit in or accomplish anything – like I was less-than.”

In the way Toph struggled to get the words out, Sokka could see that confiding in him was taking a lot. Maybe because when he’d met her, he knew nothing of her past and saw her simply as the person she was now, assertive, strong willed, confrontational, and she was afraid that this would change the way he perceived her, that he would start pitying her like her parents had, seeing her as weak and less-than.

“Hey,” he said softly, “I knew you had problems with your parents, but I didn’t really understand…”

“You don’t think I’m being selfish? Ungrateful?” she blurted out.

“I don’t think you’re being selfish or ungrateful at all,” he said patiently.

She often acted as if she couldn’t care less what people thought of her, but it was evident now that she did care what he thought of her. And it felt like too big a responsibility to take on: she’d opened herself up to him and he had to be careful not to scare her back into her old ways.

Sokka adopted the matter-of-fact tone he used when he was doing an experiment in the lab, or when he discussed hockey strategies with his team. “I guess the real question is, regardless of the history between you and your parents, do you think that the surveillance thing is warranted at all? Do you think it would be unreasonable to dismiss it entirely?”

“It would,” she admitted grudgingly. “There was a break-in. My dad is afraid someone might try, like, kidnapping me or something.”

There was a pregnant pause.

“But like, isn’t the whole point of asking for a ransom that they need to bring me back alive? So am I really at risk here?”

He couldn’t contain a strained laugh at her mischievous expression.

“Toph,” he said reluctantly. “This is serious. You gotta be more careful.”

She was always talking to people as if she was invincible. But she wasn’t all bark and no bite, she was more like… all bark and all bite. Yeah, that was Toph for you.

Sokka looked at her. Her jet back hair was pulled up, tendrils falling around her face. Neon lights from the shop’s front washed her skin blue, clair-de-lune like Chinese porcelain, studded with the unmoving, glistening raindrops on the car windows. Her dark eyelashes cast shadows on her cheekbones, framing her glazed, pale eyes. She looked ethereal, a contrasting study in sharp edges and blurry lines, and there was an ache deep in Sokka’s chest, one that wouldn’t go away even when he stopped looking.

The RADIO STATION sign was duplicating in Sokka’s peripheral vision; Aang and Katara’s voices were buzzing as if from the other side of a wall.

“Sokka! Wake up!”

Someone kicked the leg of his chair. Sokka gave a start.

“I wasn’t sleeping!” he exclaimed, adjusting his lopsided headset.

“You were snoring into your mic,” Aang whispered, covering his.

In Sokka’s defence, the studio was a small, warm room that contained an even smaller and warmer room, the recording booth, inside of which all you could see through the window panes was shelves upon shelves of records and tapes and CDs, making you feel like you were in a cocoon, kind of. And it was five in the morning, 5:17 to be exact, and their guest, a guy named Jet, liked the sound of his own voice a little too much for Sokka’s taste.

Katara sent them an imperious look before turning back to Jet with a coy smile. “So you were going to tell us about this group you founded?”

Jet was gnawing on a toothpick, a habit that was clearly meant to look cool, which was frankly disgusting on both accounts.

He leaned towards the microphone. “Yeah, the Freedom Fighters. I came up with the name.”

“The Freedom Fighters?” Sokka said with a laugh. “Come on, that’s not very inspired. Fighting for what? The freedom to be a jerk?”

Jet didn’t seem to hear him, and never took his eyes off Katara, who was hanging on his every word.

“The Freedom Fighters came to be because of widespread student dissatisfaction. There are many issues that need to be addressed: the increase in tuition fees, of course, but also the way the uni uses our money, the mitigation and deferral policies, the complete disregard for students’ struggles, the lack of mental health support…”

Okay, maybe he was making some valid points.

“All in all, we intend to make students’ voices heard,” he concluded.

“Isn’t that what the Students’ Union is for, though?” Sokka said, looking between Jet and Aang.

“The Students’ Union is not doing enough,” Jet argued. “Things have been stagnating for too long. We need to take concrete action, to be less accommodating and more inflexible if we want things to actually change.”

Katara was nodding along in agreement. Sokka suspected she’d been harbouring similar feelings for a while.

Jet turned to Aang. “This is why I need you to back me up on this. In fact, I urge you to take a stance against the administration.”

Sokka didn’t like that Jet was putting Aang on the spot like that, on live radio. On second thought, it had probably been his plan all along…

“It’s not just me in the Union, you know,” Aang said, his discomfort obvious, “but many people, trying to work together.”

“You’re the President,” Jet responded. “Surely that counts for something… unless you’re just another puppet.”

“It’s not that simple.”

The edge of distress in Aang’s voice led Sokka to interrupt, “Oh, look, it’s time for our 5:30 ‘questions from the audience’ segment!”

“It’s only 5:25,” Jet said.

“Your watch must be fast.”

“Do you even have people calling in at this time?”

“…Sometimes,” Sokka lied indignantly.

He prayed for a miracle, but no one did call in this time either. At least the diversion allowed them to change the subject, giving Aang some respite. As soon as the taping was done, though, he declared he had to call an emergency meeting with all the Students’ Union officers. When Katara pointed out that it wouldn’t be several hours before they’d be awake, he decided to go to the library in the meantime, and Sokka and Katara came home just as the sun rose in the sky.

Sokka wanted nothing more than to go back to bed, but he had been instructed to feed Appa in Aang’s absence. Appa’s menu was displayed above his cage.

“Jesus. Guinea pig food, treat stick, hay, and six different types of vegetables per day? This guy’s got a more elaborate diet than me.”

Katara’s voice came from the living room, “You say that like that’s a difficult thing to achieve. That’s more vegetables than you eat in a year.”

Ignoring his sister’s vile comments, Sokka dropped some lettuce into Appa’s bowl. “It’s a wonder these creatures ever survived in the wild,” he mused.

His phone pinged; he took it out of his jeans, balancing the bag of hay in one hand. It was an email entitled ‘Your Application to BSSU’.

Sokka’s heart started hammering in his ribcage. He opened the email with shaking fingers. His eyes skimmed over the words, unable to settle anywhere, and at first he read wrong, disappointment stabbing him like a knife.

He looked up at Aang’s massive rainforest poster. Then he called, “Katara!”

“What?”

He ran out of Aang’s room with the bag of hay still in his hand. “Katara! Katara!”

“What’s going on?” she said as she got up from the sofa, alarmed at his expression.

“I got it! The PhD! Ba Sing Se! The scholarship! I got it, Katara! I’m in!”

Chapter Text

There was a loud knock; Aang leapt up to get the door and made a show of looking through the spyhole before unlocking it, though they all knew who it was.

Sokka raised his glass as Zuko and Suki entered.

“Welcome, my tardy friends!”

He’d been on a high since morning and wasn’t planning on coming down any time soon. Now and then he’d have a look at his emails again, just to check if it was still there; and every time, it was, a future so tangible he could almost catch it in his hands.

“The party doesn’t start until I walk in,” Suki said, waggling her eyebrows.

“That’s because you bring the speaker,” Toph pointed out.

Suki took the speaker out of her bag and perched it atop the microwave, letting Aang and Toph fight for control. The gold hoops at her ears caught the light, and her orange eyeshadow made Sokka think with a pang of those times when he would let her practice her new palettes on him, and for hours after that he would be lying around on the sofa, on his phone, with a full face of makeup.

 Zuko set an expensive-looking bottle down on the table. Katara looked at the label with concern and said in a slightly chastising tone, “Zuko, you can’t afford that kind of stuff anymore.”

“Sokka’s going to Ba Sing Se, the best university in the country,” Zuko countered. “That’s not cheap plonk worthy, that’s a big deal. The alcohol had to match the occasion.”

Sokka gave Zuko a pat on the back. “Thanks, my man.”

Music started pouring from the speaker; Toph had managed to connect her phone before Aang could connect his, and was being smug about it.

Suki in turn approached Sokka.

“Congratulations,” she said with quiet sincerity. “I’m so happy for you.”

She more than anyone had heard him prattle about the PhD at the time when he was filling out his application. He held her gaze so she knew what it meant to him that they were friends again, even though the feeling was bittersweet.

She hovered for a second, but he leaned in for a quick hug and she gladly came into his embrace.

Aang started jumping up and down around them. “Sokka’s gonna be a fricking engineer!”

They all cheered and Toph drummed against the table and Zuko whistled, and Sokka held up his hands, beaming, “Okay, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, it’s only a conditional offer…”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s as good as done,” Katara said, hugging him again.

She’d been hugging him all day long, but Sokka hadn’t complained for once, because he knew what it meant for her that he got the scholarship. Only the two of them knew – the years of hardship, of barely making it by, of being left alone, of not being able to mourn because they were trying to survive, the gamble and heartbreak of leaving everything behind, the way she’d taken care of him through it all, yes, he owed it all to her.

Earlier he had called Gran Gran to tell her the good news, and proceeded to spend an hour with her on the phone as she asked him about everything that was going on in his life. He’d also tried calling his dad, but it had gone to voicemail – probably busy with work. Sokka had sent him a text telling him to call him back and was still waiting for a response.

He made himself put his phone face down on the table and went to grab the bottle of vodka that stood on top of the fridge.

“Okay everyone, we’ve got a couple hours before we go out, so give me your glasses, grab your mixer of choice, gather around, because we’re gonna celebrate…”

“…you evolving into your final form of being a nerd?” Toph suggested.

Sokka let the silence stretch for a few seconds, his face solemn. They were all waiting for him to go on.

All at once, he looked around at his friends with wild eyes, punched the air in a dramatic fashion, and yelled,

“In your face, Long Feng! I’m gonna be a fucking engineer!”

The Cave of Two Lovers, more commonly known among student population as The Cave, was an underground nightclub that could only be accessed by way of a tunnel which ran directly through the mountain. All you had to do was follow the trail of crystals embedded in the ceiling, or just follow Toph, who always said she felt strangely connected to the place.

The stairs were slippery with spilt alcohol and Sokka, as usual, almost fell to his death. The echo of their laughs came back to them twice over; the third time it did, music came with it. The neon sign appeared in the distance, blue and yellow letters in cursive; people were queuing alongside the wall while the bouncer let them in one by one through the swinging doors.

They went to the back of the line and for the first time since he’d gotten the email, Sokka was left alone with his thoughts: Katara was chatting with a bunch of girls from her swim team; Suki was showing Aang the selfie she’d just taken of the both of them; Zuko and Toph were leaning on the metal fence, laughing privately. Something about it annoyed Sokka, maybe because – he also noticed for the first time this evening – Toph and he hadn’t really talked all day, and he had a feeling she was avoiding him, although he couldn’t figure out why. Their little trip to Gaoling hadn’t come up again, but Sokka felt as if it had brought them closer, if anything. The nature of their friendship had been changed by it. But perhaps it was too close for Toph’s comfort, perhaps she didn’t want it to change.

As they neared the entrance they took out their IDs, made fun of each other’s pictures, tried to look innocent when the bouncer studied them (for no reason, but to no avail), and then they were in: music so loud it seemed to be entering every cell of your body, lights reflecting off the crystal-spangled ceiling, moving flashes of a bare shoulder, a glittery neck, closed eyes.

The dancefloor was packed, and so the tacit understanding was that Toph was to be at the centre of their circle at all times to limit the amount of people bumping into her. The DJ was playing an ABBA medley that had them jumping around and screaming the lyrics until it all became a blur of euphoria. The girls had this habit of singing to each other and making each other spin; Aang and Sokka, that of dancing like idiots and making fools of themselves; even Zuko, periodically sipping his Rhum and coke, was loosening up, and Sokka thought about how when he’d just started hanging out with them he couldn’t be coaxed to join them on the dancefloor and would just watch miserably from the corner.

They went back to the bar to get another drink. Sokka checked his phone and saw he had a missed call from his dad. He told the others he’d be back and headed for the smoking area, pushed the door, climbed up the narrow staircase, emerged in an open courtyard closed in between the mountain’s walls.

There were a lot of people here, few of them actually smoking; he isolated himself in a corner. He pressed ‘call’, raised his phone to his ear, and looked up at a chunk of starry sky that was so far above it seemed fake, like a piece of wallpaper laid upon the mountain tops.

It rang a few times, and then, “Hello?”

Sokka covered his other ear to block out the sound of chatter around him. “Hey, Dad? Can you hear me?”

“Sokka! I just got your message!” His voice sounded tinny and small, like it was very far away. It felt surreal that Sokka could hear it in his ear, so close and so immediate, that it could reach him all the way to this tiny courtyard in the Kolau Mountains.

“Yeah?” he said excitedly.

“I can’t believe it! It’s incredible, I’m so proud of you!”

“Thanks.” He felt warm all over.

“You know what… I feel like you and your sister should come home for a few days, so we can celebrate as a family.”

Sokka was surprised: Omashu was so far from home that they usually only came back for the holidays; but he was also flattered that his dad thought this was important enough to justify a reunion.

“Yeah, actually, that would really be nice.”

“Great, it’s settled then. What’s all this noise?”

 “I’m on a night out right now,” Sokka said, smiling.

His dad laughed. “Ah, that’s my boy. Have fun tonight, you deserve it! And listen, I’m sorry, I’ve gotta go, but I want to say how proud of you I am again, and I’ll see you soon, yeah?”

“Yeah, no worries! Good luck at work!”

“Say hi to your sister for me!”

Sokka put his phone back in his pocket, his face hurting from smiling so much. He went down the stairs a tad too quickly and came back inside, to the deafening music and the sweaty heat, looking for Katara. He found her at the bar, pressed against Suki’s back in a crowd of people who were scrambling to get the bartenders’ attention, as Suki was elbowing her way through like Moses parting the red sea.

“Dad says hi,” he yelled over the music. “He wants us to come see him for a couple of days.”

He thought Katara would be happy at the prospect, but she frowned.

“During term? That’s a lot of travelling for only a couple of days!”

Sokka shrugged. “Yeah, but we never get to see him.”

“I know.” She took a couple of bobby pins out of her dishevelled hair, stuck one between her lips, and tried to pin her braid back into place with the other.

“Don’t you want to see him?” he asked, confused, and maybe a little annoyed.

“Let’s talk about this some other time,” she said out of the corner of her mouth.

She was right about the setting not being ideal: Sokka let it go. He took out his wallet and leaned on the bar, only to pull back when he felt how sticky it was. He was just about to order when he spotted Zuko, who was making out with a brown-haired girl. Good for you, buddy.

He then caught sight of Toph behind Zuko: she was talking with a tall, broad guy. There were other people with them but his body was angled towards her with a familiarity that could only mean one thing.

“Is that Toph’s ex?” Suki said, echoing his thoughts. “He’s pretty cute.”

“Average at best,” Sokka grumbled.

Toph looked nice with her hair down, too nice for Lijun, for sure. She didn’t seem too happy to be there. She said something and the group looked taken aback, maybe even offended. Sokka remembered what she’d said about wanting to avoid her ex, that day at the shops; without warning he pushed himself off the bar and walked over to her.

“Hey Toph, come here, we’re doing shots!”

She latched onto his arm – Sokka was relieved to have read the situation correctly.

As they walked away from Lijun and the others he tilted his head toward her. “It was just an excuse, but shots actually sound like a good idea.”

“They always do,” she said with a playful smile, “but they never are.”

Despite that bit of drunken wisdom, she ordered four shots of Sambuca just for the two of them. Sokka watched her throw her head back and gulp them down one after the other, her throat bobbing.

“Fucking Lijun,” she said, slamming the shot glass on the bar. “Of course he had to show up and ruin the night.”

Sokka wiped the drops of Sambuca that trickled down his chin, grimacing at the taste. “He’s not gonna ruin your night, I won’t allow it.”

She laughed at him. “You won’t allow it? What’re you gonna do?”

“Make him jealous, obviously.”

She arched an eyebrow, amused. “And how are you gonna do that, Casanova?”

Maybe Sokka was emboldened by the Sambuca, or maybe he felt challenged by the dismissiveness of her tone; either way, he held up his hand. "I'm holding up my hand," he informed her one beat later. Toph looked torn for a few seconds, but to his surprise, ended up taking it. He led her to the dancefloor, sparser now that a slower song was playing, and started spinning her around in a very personal interpretation of a Waltz.

“You think you’re gonna make anyone jealous with this?” she laughed.

“Jealous of my out-of-this-world dancing skills? Definitely.”

“Maybe ‘out of this world’ in the sense of ‘never has anyone on Earth danced like this’, sure.”

Sokka took on a pompously offended tone. “Okay then, if you’re so smart, show me the proper way.”

He cast a glance at the bar: Lijun, a head taller than everyone else, had a baleful look on his face. Sokka’s inattention caused them to bump into another couple, and he apologised.

“I don’t know the proper way, but I’m pretty sure this is not it,” Toph said.

“Your parents didn’t teach you how to Waltz? This surprises me.”

A smile was tugging at the corners of her lips.

“You’ve gotta draw the line somewhere.”

“That’s right. Draw the line.”

He made her spin and tugged her back to him, vaguely aware that he was distinctly stepping over the line, but unable to stop himself from doing so. Maybe he didn’t give a fuck about the line, not when Toph’s face was alight with the crystals’ flickering reflections, not when he was pinned in place by the pale blue of her frozen eyes. Strands of dark hair were sticking to her temples and his hands were itching to brush them away.

As he rocked them back and forth with a bit too much force, bringing that little hiccup-like laugh out of her, her chin came to rest against his shoulder. He stopped breathing altogether. This was definitely uncharted territory, this was never-even-knew-existed territory. He became hyper-conscious of his hand on the small of her back, pressed against the damp fabric of her top. He was worried that his other hand, which was holding hers, was clammy. Her head was so close to his that he didn’t dare look at her anymore.

What the hell was he doing?

“Why are we stopping?” Toph asked.

Sokka pulled away abruptly. The world spun. Wow, he was pretty drunk.

“Your ex’s not looking anymore. Let’s go find the others.”

Toph was happy for Sokka. She wanted him to succeed, she wanted him to get everything he wanted. So why did she have this feeling of grief in her gut?

Yeah, why? When there was nothing to grieve, when there was no reason to feel crushed that Ba Sing Se was on the other side of the country, no reason other than Sokka was her friend, and would still be her friend even in Ba Sing Se, because now that he was moving very far away it was certain that… Actually, this was a good thing, she told herself. Now that their fate was sealed she could stop wasting her time waiting for something that would never come, put this nonsense out of her mind for good. From the way Suki and Sokka had interacted earlier, she knew this meant he wouldn’t be staying on their sofa much longer, and that was a good thing too, it would be easier this way.

Toph hadn’t felt like herself recently, not since the thing with her parents, but tonight she was going to have fun, she was going to move on, and no one would stand in her way.

That was until she ran into Lijun. Or rather, it was one of Lijun’s friends who spotted her – an older girl named Kazue.

“Toph, hey! Oh my God, you look so good!”

Judging from the way she slurred her words she must have been quite inebriated, and Toph didn’t give the compliment too much credit. She did feel comfortable in her body tonight: she was wearing her favourite baggy trousers and a top Katara had helped her pick, because Katara liked being asked for advice.

“Thanks! I’m afraid I can’t return the compliment,” she said.

Kazue’s laughter came with a delay: for a second she’d thought Toph was serious. Toph sometimes forgot that not everyone was used to her dry humour, or how blunt she could be, or the way she talked about being blind.

She heard Lijun’s voice to her left. “Are you here alone?”

The question seemed innocent enough, but something in his voice rubbed her the wrong way.

“I’m here with my friends,” she said, her tone defiant in spite of herself. “And I don’t know for sure but my bodyguard must be around here somewhere.”

Another girl – Toph had met her once, but couldn’t remember her name – sniggered in disbelief.

“You go clubbing with a bodyguard?”

Toph kept her face blank. She’d always had the feeling Lijun’s friends didn’t like her very much.

“You don’t?” she said sardonically. “I recommend it for warding off the creeps.”

“Good use of daddy’s money,” Lijun said under his breath.

Toph didn’t miss a beat.

“It sure seems like he uses his money better than you do yours.”

It was petty and it was mean, and she despised her parents’ lifestyle and attitude to money more than anyone here knew, but Lijun was getting on her nerves. He hated her for dumping him, he hated her for breaking his heart, she got it, she was the bad guy.

It was at that point that she heard Sokka’s voice to her right and felt his hand gently touch her elbow. She was grateful for the way out, and as they left, she heard Kazue say to Lijun, “She’s another one of those uni students who think they’re better than the locals because they’re going somewhere. You’re better off without her, honestly.”

Toph was still seething when she did shots with Sokka, and when he joked around with her, and then they were on the dancefloor and she wasn’t anymore. Why did he have to dance with her now? It was all a joke to him, and he was making it so difficult not to care. It was like the universe was playing with her, testing her newfound resolve.

But what was she to do? They were so close, closer than she’d ever dreamed. It was almost too much: the feel of his hand enveloping hers, the feel of his chest against her, the smell of his laundry detergent. She let herself be carried, and the future disappeared and there was only the present, her heart swelling, her skin warm, music thrumming through her body, here in Sokka’s arms, like she was cradled in the bed of the sea, like something had gone very still inside of her.

She felt his arm shift around her back. His chin grazed the side of her forehead. Her face grew hot; she was grateful for the darkness.

“Why are we stopping?”

He let her hand fall.

“Your ex’s not looking anymore. Let’s go find the others.”

She hated herself for the rush of disappointment that came over her. When would she learn? She quickly schooled her face into a neutral expression, but Sokka had already turned away from her.

He texted Katara asking her where she was and she told him they were on the terrasse. Similar to the smoking area, it was an open-air floor encased in the mountains, and you had to climb up a staircase from the club’s underground floor to reach it, but it was much bigger, with bars against the walls serving all kinds of things, and food stands and round tables and fairy lights (or so she was told) and swarms of people who were talking very loudly.

The cold air was a shock to Toph's system. Sokka seemed like he was trying to outrun her, meanwhile she wished she could let go of his elbow – they were both each other’s prisoner.

They finally came to a stop. Her heart sped up: there was an intruder amongst her friends. Aang was asking him how it was, working at Jianzhu Building.

“They treat me like crap, the students there,” Lijun said. “Never say hi or thank you, never clean up after themselves, expect me to drop everything to help them. I’m not even a person to them.”

“They can’t all be like that,” Katara argued.

“Yeah, there were some nice people at the party,” Aang said.

“That’s because they consider you their equal. Work for them and then you’ll see.”

Zuko whispered something in Suki’s ear. Lijun zeroed in on him.

“Your sister treats me like a servant.”

“To be fair, Azula treats everyone like a servant,” Zuko said casually. “This is completely normal behaviour for her.”

“You were not much better back then. Always rude, dismissive –”

Zuko cut him off, “That was different, that was because you broke up with Toph.”

“She broke up with me!”

“Well, I didn’t know that at the time,” Zuko said, embarrassed.

There was muffled laughter coming from Aang. Sokka was being unusually quiet. Toph only wished for Lijun to go away: there was a reason she hadn’t mixed those two parts of her life before, despite everyone’s insistence that she should.

Lijun snorted and said derisively, “Yeah, I bet she didn’t tell you the whole story.”

“Do you really want to do this right now?” Toph said. Her throat was sore from all the singing and the yelling she’d done inside.

“I’m sure you’d rather I wouldn’t, not in front of your friends, no, you wouldn’t want them to know that you just got with me to piss off your parents…”

It wasn’t a lie – at first it had certainly made him more appealing to her, that her parents would disapprove of him, that he was the opposite of everything they stood for – a bad egg, working class, penniless. But they both knew it had grown into something more, that is until she’d started wanting less.

“Please, you were just as happy being used. You got the Beifong girl, right?”

Lijun scoffed. “Yeah, because you’re so sought-after. I’m sure they’re lining up at your door right now. Do tell, who’s the guy who can bear being with you for more than five minutes? Dean Kuei? Or maybe Sokka here?”

For once, she was speechless.

“Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

And he walked away. To Toph’s even greater surprise, everyone started laughing, like they didn’t believe a word Lijun had said.

Suki was giggling into her cup. “Hammered.”

“And you’re the picture of sobriety,” Katara said, which made Suki’s giggles intensify.

“What a dickhead,” Zuko said.

“What was he going on about?”

Aang put his arm around Toph’s shoulders. “You and Sokka should play a prank on him. Kiss in front of him, or something – that would teach him.”

Everyone laughed again, because apparently the idea of Toph and Sokka kissing was hilarious.

“Yes! Do it!”

“You’ve gotta do it!”

Toph’s face was burning.

Then Sokka said, in an oddly serious voice and a bit shortly, “No… No, I’m not doing that.”

Oh, the humiliation of being rejected as a joke, of not even being considered a real option. She laughed it off but the effort she had to put into pretending was almost painful. This was her fault for entertaining those delusional, self-indulgent fantasies – how ridiculous, how juvenile they seemed now, when confronted with reality! Maybe tonight was what she needed: a wake-up call. She had to stop breaking her own heart. She was Toph Beifong, for God’s sake; she had better things to do with her time.

She spent the rest of the night having fun with her friends, didn’t attempt to stay close to him, didn’t once let her hand linger on his arm. When she dragged herself out of bed in the morning and Sokka’s stuff was gone from the living room, all she felt was relief.

Chapter Text

Sokka folded his hands on the table.

“So. Do you guys know why I gathered you here today?”

Aang laid down another sugar packet on top of his precariously balanced castle, and glanced up at him.

“Not for the pleasure of good tea and good company?”

“I personally find no pleasure in your company,” Toph told Aang. Then she added, “I assumed it was to annoy Zuko, but I’m not sensing his aura of constipated brooding anywhere near, so he must have the day off.”

She blew her bangs out of her eyes and Aang shielded his creation from what he interpreted as yet another attempt of hers to destroy it. They were both sitting on the other side from Sokka, who for the first time felt for his teachers of old in that they had to deal with his wandering attention all these years.

“The reason I chose this place,” he said, “is because Katara can’t know about this.”

“No problem,” Toph said. She was tracing the jasmine flowers embroidered on the tablecloth.

“You don’t even know what you’re agreeing to,” Aang objected.

“I already know Katara can’t know about it. And that’s all I need to know, really.”

Sokka held up a placating hand.

“It’s not you I’m worried about. Aang, I’m looking at you.”

Aang had the gall to look astonished.

“What? I don’t tell her everything!”

“Yesterday you told her what kind of sandwich you had for lunch,” Toph said.

“It was a really good sandwich!”

Sokka sniggered. “Said no vegan person ever.”

“Well, I’m a vegetarian.”

“And a mouthy one at that,” Toph said.

Aang got up in her face. “Fine, I won’t say anything!”

Toph seized the opportunity to steal Aang’s cap and put it on – it had the WWF logo on it, with the panda, and she was wearing overalls with a big t-shirt underneath, and Sokka was definitely not thinking about how cute she looked – no! Not going there.

He took out his planner and opened it. It was battered at the corners and thick with multicoloured post-it notes.

“I devised a plan.”

“Of course you did,” Toph teased.

He was somewhat flustered, but covered it up by clearing his throat.

Toph was different with him. Not in a way that would be noticeable to anyone else – she still taunted him and she still laughed with him, sure, but it was devoid of the unspoken complicity that had come to exist between them, as though it had never existed at all. She had pulled back a little; she wasn’t distant per say, but it was, rather, something akin to indifference, which was much worse. He’d been left alone in what used to be theirs alone, and he felt lonely in way he’d never known before. He wanted her back. It was his fault that he’d lost her, because of the way he’d acted, because he was the one who was different with her – because he was not indifferent to her. He didn’t know what had come over him that night, but he wasn’t done kicking himself for it; he’d spooked her, he’d weirded her out, understandably, and he hated that it felt irreversible. Why couldn’t he just go back to acting normal around her?

Aang kept trying to get his cap back but Toph had her arms wrapped around her head, trapping it there. Sokka snapped his fingers at them.

“I’ve found a way to get back at Long Feng, and I need your help.”

Toph clapped her hands. “To kill him?”

“Murder’s not on today’s schedule, I’m afraid. Just a harmless little prank.”

“That’ll do, I guess.”

“I’m gonna book a meeting with Long Feng for some bullshit excuse. Then I’m gonna need you guys to come up with a diversion.”

—

Long Feng’s office was bright and spacious; the window panes were red with autumn leaves, and between the branches you could see fragments of the library’s brick facade, as sturdy and still as the enduring presence of ancient wisdom. Framed on the walls was an impressive collection of diplomas, prizes, accolades of all kinds, the same ones Sokka had dreamt of getting all his life.

“You said you had a question about the equations?” said Long Feng. He was gloating, because Sokka coming to him for help was an admission of surrender: by doing this, Sokka was figuratively submitting to Long Feng’s authority, recognising Long Feng as his superior in intelligence and standing alike, which he was, but it also meant recognising that Long Feng had been right all along, and to hell with that.

Sokka swallowed his pride and slid his notebook towards his professor.

“Yeah, I’ve been struggling with the second to last one.”

Long Feng studied the calculations on the page, caressing his moustache with two fingers. Sokka’s hands flexed on his armrests. The clock above the shelves was ticking briskly in the quiet of the room.

Aang’s voice rang out from the corridor.

“How dare you show your face around me? You think I didn’t see you with Beatrice in band practice?”

Long Feng’s gaze flicked to Sokka, who focused on looking as neutrally startled by the interruption as his professor was.

“I was just helping her polish her horn!” Toph retorted, right outside the office’s door.

“She seemed to enjoy you polishing her horn a whole lot!”

It took all of Sokka’s willpower not to burst out laughing right then and there. Unfortunately, Long Feng didn’t deem the disturbance worthy of him abandoning his post; he shook his head irritably and carried on reading.

—

Toph popped a tea biscuit into her mouth. “I think you should call me a bitch then. For dramatic effect.”

“I’m not calling you that,” Aang said.

“Come on, don’t be a pussy. I think it would add to the character.”

—

Long Feng picked up a fountain pen and flipped the notebook so Sokka could see it, but before he was able to explain anything Aang raised his voice again.

“I can’t believe you did this to me, you b… you b…”

Sokka heard Toph whisper to him, “Come on!”

“You bitch,” Aang finally said, in a very small voice.

“DID YOU JUST CALL ME A BITCH?”

Long Feng slammed his pen on the desk. He went out the door swiftly and, as they’d hoped he would, began telling them off (where did they think they were?). Sokka sprang into action: he threw himself at Long Feng’s briefcase and rifled through it, the fine leather cracking in his hands. There was a thin laptop in there, a couple of folders, a stack of papers entitled ‘Dai Li: Round Table 3’ – not what he was looking for.

“I’ll beat you up,” Aang said outside, a sentence so unlike Aang he must have been running out of creativity. Judging from the sounds Sokka was hearing, it had gotten physical: Long Feng was trying to pull Toph and Aang apart.

Sokka let go of the briefcase, looked around in desperation, saw the coat on the back of the chair. Only a used tissue in the outside pockets. Better luck on the inside: Long Feng’s phone, his wallet, and – here it was!

Sokka thrust the car keys into his own pocket and dove onto his chair. Just in time: Long Feng came back into his office, looking red in the face.

“Where were we?”

—

“When that’s done, we regroup in the staff’s parking lot. Aang will bring the spray paint. Toph will stand guard –”

“I’ll give you a few seconds to think about why that would be a bad idea,” Toph said.

 “Good point. Aang will stand guard. In the meantime, I’ll put some of my art skills to use.”

“So you’ll draw a stick figure on his car? That’s the prank?”

—

While on paper you would have expected ‘walking through the parking lot’ to be the easier part of the plan, Aang and Sokka struggled with looking inconspicuous.

“Is it me or is that guy looking at us?” Aang whispered. “He can probably tell we’re not staff.”

Sokka hit Aang’s bicep with the back of his hand. “Stop throwing glances over your shoulder like that, or he’ll start looking at us for real.” He straightened his collar. “And I can pass for a postdoc.”

“You’re wearing a Hello Kitty bracelet.”

He narrowed his eyes at Aang. “Watch me still wear it when I’m a postdoc.”

Sokka scanned the row of parked cars in search of a Lexus. He found one, pressed the key’s ‘unlock’ button, but it wasn’t the one.

“We’re walking weird,” Aang said anxiously.

“We’re not. Are we?”

“We’re walking too slow, like we’re gonna steal a car but we can’t pick one.”

“Say that any louder, will you? It’s fine. People forget where they parked their car all the time.”

Another Lexus came into view – black, sleek, gleaming. The tail lights flashed red this time around. Sokka checked again that they were alone and got to work. On the right side of the car he sprayed, in big white letters: ‘looking for love and having a hard time finding it’, and on the left: ‘if you are a mature woman and available, call me for a good time’. He wanted to write a dirty joke using Long Feng’s name on the back of the car, but Aang talked him out of it.

“Sokka!” Aang called just as he was finishing off. “The guy from earlier is coming this way!”

“What? You were supposed to stand guard!”

“That’s what I’m doing! I’m standing and I’m guarding! What else do you expect me to do, knock him unconscious?”

They dove behind the car, so fast in fact that Sokka felt his bad knee crack in a concerning way, but it was too late nonetheless.

“What are you doing?” said the man.

They both froze. Sokka didn’t even think of hiding the spray-paint can under his jacket, which made it very obvious what they were doing.

The man, who was stocky and podgy and didn’t look much older than they were, glanced at the car and then back at them.

“Is this Long Feng’s car?”

Sokka nodded.

The man had an inscrutable expression on his face. His mouth twitched.

“Never mind,” he said, and he walked away, his keyrings jingling where they hung from his messenger bag.

“See,” Sokka told Aang, “this the kind of postdoc I’m gonna be.”

—

Toph was leaning back on the bench, arms crossed, and had lowered Aang’s cap on her head so that the visor shielded half her face.

“Oi,” she said. “I’ma stop you right there. You forgot the most important part. Where am I while this is happening?”

“You’re conducting what is arguably the most dangerous part of the mission,” Sokka said gravely. “Are you up for the challenge?”

A wicked smile appeared under the brim of the cap. “Aye aye, captain!” she said as she sat up and did a military salute.

Yes, nicknames. He could do nicknames.

“You’ll be in enemy territory. This is when Suki comes in, because that part of the building is restricted to students, but not to Teaching Assistants.”

—

The door beeped as Suki swiped her TA badge in whatever machine it was that opened doors. She led Toph inside; the old parquet creaked beneath their feet.

“The coast is clear,” she said.

Toph wasn’t too worried. According to Suki, it was unlikely that anyone would question their presence here, and if someone did, Toph would simply do what she always did when she was found someplace she wasn’t supposed to be, namely hit their knees with her cane and tell them she was lost, a pretty irrefutable strategy if you asked her, or at least one that nobody had dared refute before.

She adjusted the sunglasses she’d borrowed from Zuko. Don’t you think it’s a little too on the nose? Aang had asked earlier, to which she’d replied that she may be blind, she still knew that was precisely where glasses went, thank you very much you insensitive fuck. Sokka had laughed a lot.

“Is this it?” Toph asked when Suki slowed down.

“No, we’re just passing Kuei’s office.”

Toph’s left ear caught a faint whisper of music, as though from the other side of a closed door. We could have been so good together, We could have lived this dance forever, But now…

Suki’s hand came up to Toph’s, which was resting on the crook of Suki’s elbow, and they snorted uncontrollably, their heads close together.

Someone crossed their path, but didn’t stop or say hi. Suki steered Toph into a room that smelled of old books.

“Here’s the mic,” she murmured. “I’m not sure how it works.”

Toph sat down on the desk chair and gave it a spin. “Don’t worry. I was born to do this.”

It had been agreed that Toph would be doing the dirty work so as not to implicate Suki. Not a huge sacrifice on Toph’s part: she was just realising that on some subconscious level she’d always dreamt of doing this.

She pressed the ‘on’ button and cleared her throat. She heard her amplified voice reverberate in the corridor.

“Oh man, this is too much power,” she said, her voice wobbly.

“Don’t do anything too stupid, okay?” Suki told her. “Stick to the medium-stupid plan.”

With great effort Toph resisted the urge to address students as ‘the people of this great university’. She pressed the button again, leaning towards the microphone.

“Attention. Professor Long Feng is requested to come pick up his car outside the great hall. I repeat: Professor Long Feng is requested to come pick up his car outside the great hall.”

—

The car windows were open all the way down. Music blasted from the car radio. Sokka put his foot down and drove up to the great hall. It was midday and so the centre of campus was swarming with students – sitting on sunny steps with coffee or a sandwich, distributing flyers about whichever society they wanted you to join, waving and jogging towards their friends…

Some of them pointed at him, laughed, took out their phones –

—

“Hold on,” Aang said. “What if someone recognises you? You could get caught.”

“You’re assuming anyone knows who he is,” Toph said.

Sokka reached over the table and tilted the cap down on her forehead – a gesture meant to show annoyance, but that came off as affectionate.

“Shut it, kid.”

Kid? Kid? Sokka really was losing it. He thanked the heavens Aang was enthralled enough by his architectural endeavour that he didn’t see the flush spreading on his face.

“I forgot to mention that I will obviously be wearing a disguise.”

They kept the mascot costume in the locker rooms. All he’d have to do was linger after practice and steal the thing. Not too difficult, right?

—

Sokka adjusted the gigantic bear head so that his eyes lined up with the holes. Every inch of skin was slick with sweat: he could feel it trickling down his back, it was gathering on his eyelids, his thighs were soaked against the leather seat. He was dangerously close to asking himself whether it was all worth it, but he had to keep all his focus on the road in front of him. He took a left and his spray-paint can that he’d throw on the passenger seat rolled, hit the door and fell into the gap.

Here was the great hall. Sokka blew the horn to announce his arrival, much to everyone’s delight. He slowed the car down and leaned out the window to give people high fives with his big paw-covered hand. When he put on the brakes, he didn’t bother getting away from a lone bench and let it scrape the side of the car.

Then he got out of the car, and fled the scene.

Katara had a swim meet later on that same afternoon. She didn’t always invite them to these things, but today the team was staying for a bit afterwards, and she even told them to bring their swimming trunks. The pool was off-campus, so the three of them, Aang and Toph and Sokka, still buzzing from the adrenaline, caught a tram through the city. It was rush hour and it was boiling in the tram car, Aang ended up compressed between a business man, a crying stroller and the scratched window, and Toph tightened her grip on Sokka’s arm, but he knew better than to make anything of it.

Then it was the swimming pool’s sticky heat, the prickly smell of chemicals, echoing shouts. Katara came fourth and Sokka cheered the loudest. When it was over and they put away the red and white lane ropes, he jumped into the water to splash her. Aang was quick to follow, but Toph lingered at the edge of the pool, sitting next to the ladder with her feet in the water. Her swimming costume was a one piece, the sporty kind–

Someone pushed on Sokka’s head and suddenly water was all around him, up his nose, into his eyes. He struggled against the treacherous hand and came up sputtering. He launched himself at Aang for retaliation.

After he got his revenge, he swam to Toph with stinging eyes and crossed his arms next to her on the ledge.

“You good?”

She kicked the water with her feet. “Peachy.”

“Why don’t you come join us? I don’t like seeing you here all by yourself.”

“Don’t look at me then.”

That was actually proving to be quite difficult at the moment.

He lowered himself into the water, still holding on to the edge with one hand. “What, you’re not even going to take a dip?” he said, chuckling incredulously. (God, he was annoyed at the sound of his own voice.)

She kicked water at him. “Why do you care?”

“Quite frankly, I’m getting a little bored. It’s not very nice of you to leave me alone with those two over there.”

“So that’s all I am to you?” she joked.

Why was Sokka’s heart beating so stupidly fast? All that you are to me can’t be seized, can’t be contained by words. I don’t know what you are to me anymore. I don’t know if you want to be more.

All he could utter was, “Yes, like a court buffoon.”

 “See, this whole time I thought you were the court buffoon.”

“So you’re telling me we were unknowingly each other’s court buffoons...”

She was smiling. “Happy to entertain.”

“Unless you have to get wet,” he pointed out, and immediately regretted his choice of words.

She didn’t bat an eye. “Getting wet is not a problem.”

How did they get here again?

Katara took a perfect dive not very far from them, and the water lapped at Toph’s legs. Sokka let go of the ledge so he could make himself stop staring.

“What is it then? Are you on your period?” he asked seriously.

She didn’t reply straight away; she had a blank look on her face, and it took him a while to realise it was bafflement.

“What?” he said defensively.

He did grow up with a sister, though it was mostly Gran Gran who had no qualms about calling a spade a spade around him. He would have assumed Toph would have no qualms about it either, she usually didn’t about that sort of thing.

She stammered, “Wh— Sokka, you can’t say that to people!”

People, no, but friends? Okay, no, but Toph, yes, but only before, before whatever it was that had happened to their friendship to make it into this not-quite something else where they could joke about getting wet, but he couldn’t ask her if she was on her period because it was too weird and too intimate a thing to ask. Jesus, he had no idea how to navigate this, he couldn’t stop messing everything up.

“You’re the one who’s always saying there are no taboos!”

“I didn’t think you would take it so literally!” she replied, her eyes wide.

“I’m a literal guy!” His voice was all whiny and indignant and he hated it. He put his head underwater and stayed there for a few seconds, in the muffled blue silence, looking at the pool tiles in front of him, trying to calm himself down. He came back up and wiped his dripping face with both hands. “Sorry for prodding,” he said earnestly.

Toph did a one-shoulder shrug. She was uncomfortable in a way that was new to him, maybe new to her as well.

“Swimming is not my strong suit,” she admitted.

Sokka swam back to her, put his hands on the ledge and pulled himself out of the pool, his swimming trunks heavy and sticking to him and dripping everywhere. He sat down next to her but didn’t speak right away: he had to choose his words carefully.

“Your parents never paid for a swimming instructor?”

“Funnily enough, they did. No, the problem was me.”

Behind them the lifeguard yelled at some overexcited kids – one of whom may or may not have been Aang – not to run around the pool.

“It’s fine when I’m in the shallow end,” Toph explained. “It’s fine as long as I know there’s something solid under my feet. But when I’m in the deep end…”

She trailed off, struggling to get the words out.

“It’s like… it’s like I’m lost in a sea of nothing. I don’t know where to reach to, I don’t know where the edge is. Everything gives way under my touch. And I don’t know how long I can hold myself up like this…”

“That sounds horrible,” Sokka said quietly.

“My swimming instructor kept telling me he would catch me, he wouldn’t let me drown, but I couldn’t let go of the edge. I still can’t. It probably sounds stupid, right, it’s just a pool, I’m bound to reach the end of it sometime…”

“No… No, it’s not stupid.”

Knowing everything he knew about Toph as a kid, he could see what a considerable act of faith, of trust, of surrender it would have been for her, to give up control, to make herself this vulnerable, let alone to put herself in the hands of a stranger.

“What if it was me?” he said after a while.

“What do you mean?”

“Guys!” Aang called. He was swimming so fast towards them it looked like he was running on water. Sokka felt like strangling him for a hot second. “We’re compromised! She knows about the prank!”

He pointed over his shoulder at Katara, who was facing away from them, chatting with a girl from her team. He couldn’t drive away because there were people everywhere. And for some reason he couldn’t turn the music off, it was hysterical…

Sokka went from sitting to squatting to get a better look at his sister’s face.

“She’s laughing,” he said. “It’s fine.”

Katara put her hands on her hips, smiling wide. “Who was it, did you know him?”

“The head of the Physics Department, I can’t remember his name,” the girl replied.

Katara turned her head to the side, and as Sokka watched her profile he could almost see the cogs turning inside her head. When she turned towards them fully she wasn’t smiling anymore. They watched her come nearer in petrified horror – except for Toph who was wearing her usual unconcerned expression.

“Tell me it wasn’t you,” Katara said.

No one piped up. Sokka thought she would go after him first, but to his surprise she chose a different target.

“You’re President of the Students’ Union, Aang,” she said, her voice hard. “You can’t take on a responsibility like that and then do something like this.”

Aang squirmed. Sokka threw a sideways glance at Toph and saw her roll her eyes.

“Especially not now!” Katara continued. “Have you not paid attention to anything that’s been going on between the student body and the administration? If you’re found out, you’ll lose all credibility and you won’t be able to negotiate with them anymore!”

“He’s not gonna be found out, Kata—”

“You could lose the job we worked so hard for you to get! All the campaigning and the all-nighters helping you prepare – all of the effort we put in, it would go to waste, all that we’re lobbying for, to make a positive change in this university, we would lose the chance to make it happen.”

Toph hummed the melody to Get On Your Feet and Sokka had to suppress a very poorly-timed nervous laugh. Katara didn’t hear, or pretended not to; she was now talking loud enough that people were looking.

“Did you stop for one second to think about any of that? Or did you just think about having fun? I swear you can be so selfish sometimes.”

Aang hung his head. Against his better judgement Sokka intervened, “Hey, I understand why you’re mad, but I was the one who asked him –”

“Do you?" she roared. "Do you understand why I’m mad? Because it doesn’t seem like you do. Because it doesn’t seem like you understand all that we sacrificed to get here, as first-generation university students who had to leave their native village behind, seeing how you seem to have no problem jeopardising that…”

“Katara, they’re not gonna kick us out,” Sokka said nervously.

“How do you know?” Her eyes were wide and fixed on him, intimidating in their intensity. “Long Feng is a very big deal around here. You already know he’s capable of backhanded stuff and that he can’t stand you. And you thought making him hate you even more would be a good idea, why? So you could have your five minutes of petty revenge?”

Sokka frowned. “It wasn’t just petty. He deserved it. What he did to me was unfair, and it’s not the first time he’s done it to a student, but he never faces any consequences.”

Now he was raising his voice too. He did understand what was at the root of Katara’s anger: she was terrified for him. Still, he wasn’t feeling particularly understanding about the way she always got all patronising despite being the younger one, blaming him for what she assumed he felt, acting like he couldn’t possibly know what it was like to be, well, in her shoes, as if they hadn’t been walking the same path for twenty-some years.

“That’s not the point,” Katara retorted. “You can’t make your own justice.”

He laughed. “That’s a bit rich coming from you, self-proclaimed breaker of chains and leader of the free world. Rebellion is all well and good as long as it’s on your terms, eh?”

From the look on her face she had not been expecting that line of defence, and was outraged by it.

“That’s not – that’s totally – was it really on your terms, though, or was it just another one of Toph’s brilliant ideas?”

Toph didn’t try to defend herself; instead she said, “My ideas are brilliant, thank you, but I can’t take credit for this one.”

“It was my idea,” Sokka asserted. “Leave her out of it.”

But when Katara had a bone to pick, there was no taking it away from her.

“I don’t know, it’s got Toph Beifong written all over it.” She crossed her arms and told Toph, “I’m sure you were as happy to encourage him as you were to lie to me. But I guess I should have expected this from you.”

“And I guess I was right to expect this from you – I knew you were no fun,” Toph said, in an offhanded way that suggested she was hurt.

Katara didn’t find anything to say to that. She tried storming off, a task made difficult by all the water around her. Aang gave them a strained smile and followed her. If anyone could get her to mellow out, it was him.

“Are you okay?” Toph asked when they were gone.

Sokka hadn’t realised he’d been acting unlike himself – taciturn, subdued. He slid into the pool again.

“Yeah… Yeah. Listen. I could help you go in the deep end, if you wanted.”

“That’s your reaction to Katara going off the deep end?” she joked.

He smiled in spite of himself. “Is that a yes?”

She reached out her hand. Sokka stared at it, his chest tight. It was a simple gesture but it felt momentous.

He took her hand and helped her off the ledge. The water was up to his shoulders where they were, and up to her neck if she stood on her toes; she started kicking her legs to stay afloat. He brought his hands to her sides, just the ghost of a touch.

“Is this okay?” he asked.

He heard a very faint “yeah” and left them there.

Sokka stepped backwards and they slowly drifted towards the centre of the pool. Toph was at arm’s length, her face right in front of his, overwhelmingly so – it was all he could see, the determination and the focus, the plain fear, the openness of it. He ought to be looking away, he was looking at something he shouldn’t, it felt wrong that she didn’t know he was looking. Despite the distant noises all around them, the air between them was thick with silence, with the only sound of water rippling around their bodies.

It was just Sokka’s head above the surface now. “Do you want me to let go?” he asked as he loosened his hold on her.

She tensed and her hands flew to his forearms. "I'll kill you and everything you love."

He laughed a little, not even trying to disentangle himself from her vice-like grip. “Do you really think I would let you drown, you dumbass?" His hands flexed against her sides. "You won’t feel my hands, but I'll be right here, ready to catch you."

There was a sheen of sweat on her forehead. She nodded a bit frantically. That wasn't good enough – he needed her to understand, he needed her to know, without a single doubt in her mind, that his hands would be there to pull her out.

"There is no way I would ever let you drown, you know. You're like, my best friend. Not that I would let anyone drown," he added loudly, "but yeah."

The corners of her mouth were trembling. He'd pulled her out of her own head.

“Do you believe me?” he asked, his voice earnest, insistent.

A small smile broke out on Toph's face.

“Yeah. I do.”

Then she told him to let go, and he did. For a few seconds it was fine, he even took a tiny step back, but then a look of panic came over her face, like she’d forgotten how to swim, there was a “Sokka” full of dread and he grabbed her before he could sink. She latched onto his shoulders and he held her close, laughing, “Hey, you’re okay! It’s okay, I’ve got you…”

They did it again and again and again, until people trickled out of the building and Sokka’s skin was creased as a dried fig. By the end, when she swam in circles around him and he cheered her on, he felt her absence in his hands more acutely than he’d ever felt her presence.

They made their way back to the station. The tram car they climbed into was empty except for them. The sun spilled over the orange seats. Sokka twisted his upper body so he could look at the city rushing out the window: skyscrapers breaking through the rings of little white clouds that stuck to their glass facades, roads that looked vertical against the baby blue sky and trams sliding down the ramps on their electric cables, scaffolding everywhere and construction workers suspended in the air, oh, what a strange and beautiful sight Omashu was, what a shame it wasn’t what he wanted to be looking at, at all.

Walking out into the cold air Toph felt refreshed and raw, and like maybe she could do anything. The hair at the nape of her neck was wet. Sokka must have been deep in thought because there was none of his usual chit-chat on their way to the tram stop.

It wasn’t long before the tram came. They were spoilt for choice of seat, so she chose two, and they had a lot more room than they needed, so she propped her legs up on a third one. The tram set off and she let the vibration of it settle into her body, lull her to a state of peaceful drowsiness.

“D’you think Katara will have cooled off by the time we get home?” she wondered quietly.

“By the time you get home, you mean. No passive-aggressive comments for me.”

She frowned at him for a second, confused at his boastful tone, before she remembered he wasn’t staying over at theirs anymore. “Shit, I forgot. That means I’ll take the brunt of it – she can’t stay mad at Aang for long.”

“Glad to see I’ve become such a permanent fixture in your life,” Sokka said smugly.

Time to take him down a notch. “Yeah, like a parasite.”

“I’ll take what I can get.”

It sounded like something he would say to a girl, and Toph felt the urge to change the tone.

“So you and Suki made up?”

“Mmh mmh. Turns out I’m pretty lucky in the ex department.”

“As opposed to me, you mean?”

There was silence. The tram jolted. Toph linked her fingers on her stomach, looking more relaxed than she felt.

At last Sokka said, with some reluctance, "He doesn’t seem like a very nice guy, is all."

She couldn’t help but feel insulted, like she had to defend Lijun, or herself.

“I wasn’t very nice to him.”

Again, Sokka didn’t say anything, which prompted her to say too much.

“He used to be nicer. I think he’s unhappy with the life he’s got, but he’s unable to get out of it.”

She knew the feeling well.

“That’s no reason to take it out on you,” Sokka argued, a bit stubbornly.

It was her turn to be quiet. The things Lijun had said had been nagging her since that night, never quite leaving the back of her mind. They were not empty words, because Lijun knew her, more intimately than anyone else did; he’d had no trouble tapping right into her deepest insecurities.

“He wasn’t wrong, though.”

Sokka huffed. “Well, sure, posh students are pretty unsufferable, and by some people’s definition you do classify as one, but –”

“No, I meant about me being undateable.”

She realised as she said it how much it’d been weighing on her. Yet it wasn't a new thought, she'd known for a long time she wasn’t the type of girl that boys liked… that Sokka liked. To him she wasn’t even a girl, he’d seen her act unwomanly too many times to ever be able to see her as one – that much had been made obvious when he’d asked her if she was on her period (ironically enough). Way to take the romance out of everything, dumbass. And to think that once upon a time, she'd been proud to be one of the guys!

The problem with Toph was that she’d been forced to be prim and proper when it wasn’t who she was, forced into pretty dresses when all she wanted was to play in the mud, and in her child’s mind, femininity had become inextricably bound up with the gilded cage she'd grown up in. She hadn't just been trapped inside her house, she'd been trapped inside of herself, inside the porcelain body of an ancient doll, delicate and cold to the touch. Then, after a lifetime of being told to be a certain way, she’d rejected it altogether. The only way she could be who she was had been by waging a war against who she was expected to be. But sometimes it felt like she was still trapped, still lost to herself in some small unfathomable way, only this time the doll was inside of her. To this day, Toph still had trouble differentiating the parts that were her and the parts that were a rejection of them. But most of all, she was afraid that the doll would break, or be broken, or that it was already broken and it would be seen as useless and be put away on a dusty shelf, condemned to be alone, she was afraid it would be derided and diminished, objectified and derogated, and maybe that was why she had purposefully hidden it, even to herself. Only recently had she grown out of doing that, thanks in no small part to Katara who’d taught her a thing or two about the ways in which Toph felt the need to prove her worth, and about the things she didn’t allow herself to want, such as dressing up, or feeling desired, or… or falling in love.

Sokka started stuttering his way through a protest, but she cut him off, saying, “It’s okay, you don’t have to say anything, it’s the truth. I’m not fishing for compliments or anything.”

There was another silence. She could feel him looking at her.

“It’s not true, not at all,” he murmured. “Why are you saying that?” He sounded upset, almost angry, as if she'd said he was undateable.

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not lying,” he replied with more force. “What the hell, Toph? Why would you say that?”

She shrugged. “You said it yourself, I don’t have the greatest track record when it comes to relationships. One bad ex and a whole lot of nothing.”

Sounding baffled, Sokka countered, “Do you really think believing what your bad ex thinks of you is the way to go?”

“Are you saying I should believe you over him?”

“Yes! Yes, I am!" His voice was getting more and more high-pitched. "Why don’t you believe me?”

She recalled his clipped tone as he had said the words, No... No, I'm not doing that. It all bubbled up to the surface, resentment she wasn’t fully aware was even there, that she had dismissed and ignored because it wasn’t fair to him – but why should she be fair to him when he couldn’t be straight with her?

The words erupted out of her, “Because you made it pretty clear the other day that the mere idea of kissing me is utterly repulsive to you!”

He was left speechless. Toph’s hurt was out in the open and it was embarrassing and wrong and she was proud to say she didn’t even want it back.

“But that wasn’t – no, that’s not –”

“Then why?” She opened her arms in exasperation. “What was it? It wouldn’t have meant anything, they were just being funny –”

“Because I didn’t want it to be funny!”

He sounded breathless; so did she. They were on the edge of something, all that was missing was a little push, but neither of them was willing to do it. The tram came to a stop, the doors opened, people came in and sat down all around them. She wanted to ask what he meant, but didn’t. They didn’t speak for the rest of the ride home.

Chapter Text

Toph was in her Orthopaedics and Traumatology lecture, and she was trying very hard to think about orthopaedics and traumatology, rather than other things.

But Sokka hadn’t wanted it to be funny… Most things to him were an opportunity to be funny, but not this. Not kissing her. And that was the reason he’d said no, not because kissing her was the last thing he wanted to do, but because the last thing he wanted to do was to turn it into a joke. He didn’t want it to be a meaningless prank, another anecdote in the never-ending comedy of their friendship. And that made no sense, unless…

Unless, for him, this wasn’t just a comedy, nor was it just a friendship. Unless he, too, felt the possibility of it; not only that, but it mattered to him that he didn’t spoil it, that the what-if didn’t evaporate. If something were to happen, he cared how it happened, it had to happen the right way, or else it would always be wrong – or else it would be ruined. Maybe a small part of him, deep down, no matter how irrelevant he thought it was, was holding on to the hope that she might not want it to be funny, either.

For better or for worse – probably for worse – it had reignited the hope in Toph’s chest, and here she was, in her Orthopaedics and Traumatology lecture, not thinking about orthopaedics or traumatology.

She was startled by the sound of chairs scraping around her, everyone leaving, class was over. She gathered her things and walked out the building, sliding her cane along the ground. The air was crisp and the sun was out. She set off for Ukano Street, where Zuko would be meeting her during his lunch break.

As she passed the theatre she heard shuffling behind her, way closer than she’d have expected anyone to be from the awareness she had of the street. She stopped right in the middle of the pavement.

“Do you have any piercings, Hong? Pierced nipples, perhaps?”

If her intuition was wrong, she was gonna look real stupid.

“I-I don’t, Miss Beifong,” Hong replied.

“I’ve been thinking about getting some. Not nipple ones, mind you.”

“Sure,” Hong said, sounding like he was not quite sure why she was telling him this.

She resumed walking. “See, I went to a tattoo parlour with Aang the other day and – oh wait,” she gestured at him half-heartedly, “you know that, don’t you, you were there.”

He jogged to catch up with her. “Was that the time you tried to convince your friend to get Paul Rudd’s face tattooed on his back?”

“I can’t believe you have to hear every dumb conversation I have with my friends. Must be exhausting being you.”

“It’s not always me,” he remarked. “There are two other guys, we have a rota.”

“A rota.” Her eyebrows twitched. “Glad to know your schedule that’s organised around my schedule is so… organised. Who gets me when I’m taking the bins out?”

“You never take the bins out.”

She pointed at him. “Precisely. No one but my flatmates should concern themselves with my bin-taking-out habits – or lack thereof.”

“I’m being paid to concern myself with your bin-taking-out habits.”

Hong’s tone was tranquil, detached. She wanted the facade to crack, she wanted him to be a real person.

“Then I hope you’re being paid well,” she said pointedly.

“I can’t complain.”

Was there anything he could complain about? If she could find a way to turn him against Lao, maybe he’d be more willing to bend the rules for her.

“Do you get benefits? Good working conditions? Enough time off for a healthy work-life balance, et cetera?”

“Yes, actually.”

Dammit. Whatever happened to treating your employees poorly?

Hong then added, “I can even change shifts for the nights when my band is playing.”

“You’re in a band?” Toph exclaimed, struggling to hide her enthusiasm – never mind Hong had suddenly become worthy of interest, he was still the enemy.

“Earth Rumble, ‘you heard of it? We’re playing at The Cave in a couple of weeks.”

This new piece of information completely took apart the vague idea of him she’d constructed in her head. She asked him what type of music they played (mostly rock, sometimes other genres) and he asked her if she played any instruments (the drums and the guitar, but she was little rusty), and they talked music all the way to Ukano Street.

Toph sent Zuko a text asking ‘where are thou’, to which he replied ‘just finished cleaning’. She sent him a recording of her telling him to hurry up, not in those words but in other words which made a passer-by gasp, and she tried convincing Hong to say something threatening into her phone, to no avail.

“Listen,” she began as she folded her cane, “my friend’s gonna be here any minute now, so there’s no need for you to stick around. He would put his body on the line for me.”

“I would not,” Zuko said from a few feet behind her.

She turned towards him as he approached, mocking, “Yeah, because you wouldn’t get there in time.”

He stopped in front of her. “I’m only five minutes late.” Underneath all his sternness was something almost amused, or dare she say, fond.

“More than enough time for me to get kidnapped.”

He leaned closer, his tone conspiratorial. “That’s what I was counting on.”

Toph fake-gasped and looped her arm through his. “Come on now, what would you do without me to keep you grounded?”

“The same things I usually do, but I’d feel lighter,” Zuko quipped.

She laughed. “Your head would get so big you’d fly away.”

They positioned themselves in the line outside the fast-food joint.

“Don’t you mean I’d sink to the ground?”

She gave him a wink. “Nah, you forget it’s empty.”

“Can’t argue with that logic.” They were getting closer to the counter and so Toph made him read the menu out to her. She asked Hong (who had retreated back to his usual distance) if he wanted anything, but he never ate on the job. Once they got their food, they went to sit at one of the tables outside in the street, people walking up and down around them; the chairs were so high Toph’s feet didn’t reach the bars.

Her ears were prickling from the cold. A street vendor’s frying pan was sizzling and there were fumes from something being caramelised. She took a bite out of her wrap, warm food melting in her mouth. Opposite her, Zuko was eating in the same reverent silence.

He hummed in appreciation. “There’s nothing like this after working since dawn.”

“This eight-yuan wrap is better than all the chef-cooked meals you’ve had in your life?”

“Isn’t it?”

They contemplated the question, chewing slowly, and they both broke at the same time.

“No, it’s not,” she snorted.

“It really isn’t.” He sighed. “This is when Iroh would tell me something about learning to enjoy the simple things in life.”

“Hey,” she said through a mouthful, “you went from having people wait upon you to waiting on people in the span of, like, two months. That’s quite the adjustment.”

There was a small huff. “Sometimes it feels like I’ll never adjust. And I don’t mean about the food.”

“You seem a pretty well-adjusted person to me.”

“I don’t know, it’s like... I’m on stand-by. Every day’s the same. Everyone’s going somewhere, everyone’s working towards something, but I’m… I’m just trying to get through the day.”

“Not everyone has had to burn the bridges they were standing on,” she objected, her tone serious. “Zuko, come on. That’s a great deal of ground to make up. You did it without anyone to rely on, and you’re making every day your bitch one jasmine tea at a time. Not many people can say that.”

By standing up to his father Zuko had lost everything he’d ever known, including the life he’d envisioned for himself. Too busy chasing his father’s approval and trying to become who he thought he was supposed to be, he’d never really had the chance to find out what he liked, what he was good at. Cut to the present, his self-discovery journey long overdue, but he had to do it while working forty hours a week and getting increasingly pressing emails from his landlord.

He didn’t contradict her, which was as good as she was going to get in terms of him accepting any praise, though he did correct her, “I did have someone to rely on. I had a lot of help.”

“My point is, it takes a lot… a lot of bravery, to take that leap, when you’ve got nothing to fall back on.”

Zuko must have picked up on something from her voice, or her face, because he said, cautiously, “Sometimes it is the only thing that can be done.”

Toph picked at her napkin. “What if it’s not, though?”

“Toph,” he said, with more understanding, more compassion, more gentleness than she’d ever heard from him. She guessed he’d recognised himself in her desperate attempts to hold on to something she’d never have. “The fact that you’re even considering it…”

She turned her face into the biting wind.

“Are you safe?” he asked.

At first she was confused, thinking the question was about the bodyguard her parents had appointed her, but then she understood what he meant: safe from them. She suddenly felt very sad. She managed a nod.

“Good. Good,” Zuko said quietly.

There was a lump in her throat. “I don’t even know where to start.”

“Lucky for you, you’ve got an emancipation expert right in front of your eyes.”

She sneered. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

And together they laughed, their heads bent close over their eight-yuan, half-finished lunch.

It was four in the morning when the fire alarm went off.

Sokka nearly jumped out of his skin, his senses reeling at the aggression. He wiped the drool that was drying at the corner of his mouth, blinked dazedly at his too-bright screen, and it all came back to him: his lab report was due at noon and he was pulling an all-nighter to finish it. Although it seemed to have turned into more of a partial-nighter: he’d been nodding off over his desk despite the litres of coffee he’d injected into his system.

The alarm was still blaring, and now there was banging on his bedroom door, Zuko shouting, “Sokka, you awake in there?”

“Unfortunately, yes!” he shouted back. He grabbed his laptop, his thermos, and went out the door just as Suki went out hers, looking disgruntled and with her duvet wrapped around herself.

“Is this the fire drill?” she mumbled. “I thought we already had one earlier this month?”

“Maybe that was the practice drill, and this is the real drill.” A smile came over his face. “The real drill. Get it?”

She ignored him. “At this rate, they’ll have burst our eardrums enough that we won’t be able to hear when there’s an actual fire.”

“It’ll all go down in flames, Library of Alexandria style.”

“Like our relationship,” Suki said. They high-fived under Zuko’s perplexed stare.

The three of them hastily put their shoes on in the hall, which was shrouded in darkness, and only when they were out the flat did Sokka realise he was wearing Zuko’s Vans instead of his own. The voices of other residents were echoing in the concrete staircase. It was freezing outside, there were dark silhouettes jumping up and down on the road before every front porch in their street; the alarm hadn’t just been in their building, but in the whole block.

“I think I can see the girls,” Suki said. She jogged in their direction, duvet billowing around her like a cape. Sokka and Zuko followed suit but Sokka had to slow down because his sloppily-tied laces were coming undone, which is when he saw that Zuko himself was wearing Suki’s fluffy slippers.

When Sokka finally caught up, Katara greeted him with, “I guess this confirms my theory that this is the first thing you’d save in case of a fire.”

He smiled and gave his laptop a gentle pat. “My lab report’s on there. Nothing in the world could make me miss that deadline, I’m telling ya. I’d run back into a burning building if I had to.”

“How far along are you? You should be finished with the editing by now.” Her tone was accusatory, but it was only to keep up the pretence that she didn’t care about the answer. Even when she was mad at him, she still worried.

“Getting there. I took a power nap.” Given how out of sorts he felt and the exhaustion that was pulling at his face, the power nap had had the opposite of the intended effect. Katara’s expression suggested she was thinking something along the same lines, and he defended himself, all high-and-mighty, “It was a strategic decision meant to benefit me in the long run. Think ahead, Katara, s’what I always say.”

She tightened the lapels of her dressing gown, visibly suppressing a smile. “Yeah, think so far ahead that you finish your assignment the night before the deadline.”

“Hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

He threw a glance over Katara’s shoulder, where he had pointedly not been looking, where Zuko, Suki and Toph were huddling for warmth.

“Did you leave Aang up there to die?” he wondered.

She tilted her head at their next-door neighbours. “He’s gathering intelligence on what might be happening.”

Just as she said the words, Aang returned, seemingly immune from the cold in his old-fashioned striped pyjamas, with Appa peeking out from the cradle of his arms.

“Apparently someone tried to force their way into one of the buildings,” he told them. “But they’re not sure whether the alarm was pulled or whether it malfunctioned.”

“All this because some drunk student forgot their keys?” Zuko complained, bundled up in his coat like a cranky old lady. “I have to open up in three hours.”

Aang slapped him on the back. “Cheer up, mate! This is fun! Unexpected! Where’s your sense of adventure?”

For a split second Zuko looked like he was going to slap Aang in the face, but he simply burrowed deeper into his coat.

Suki, too, was unimpressed. “You seem way too perky for someone who’s been woken up at four in the morning.”

Everyone nodded in approval. Unbothered, Aang placed Appa inside the collar of his pyjama top.

“Oh, I was already awake. I was just about to start my morning meditation sesh.”

“You’re insane,” Sokka said.

Only then did he notice that Katara was eyeing him suspiciously. Not just him, actually: Toph and him. Had she noticed something was off? That Toph wasn’t talking to him? That he could barely stand to look at her, knowing she knew how he felt, knowing she didn’t feel the same?

“This better not be another one of your stupid pranks,” Katara said.

Sokka’s heart stuttered from the relief.

“Yeah,” Zuko agreed in the back, in a long-suffering tone, “you just don’t mess with other people’s sleeping schedules. Some of us have to work, for God’s sake.”

“Alright, we get it, champion of the working man,” Toph said wryly. She yawned without covering her mouth. “And I can’t see who you’re death-staring at, Leslie Knope, so please, do let me know if this is directed at me.”

“It’s directed at both of you,” Katara replied curtly.

Under her scrutiny, Toph and Sokka did acknowledge each other then. His embarrassment died down at the sight of her, which he was wholly unprepared for. Rough morning by the looks of it: her hair was tousled and her eyes puffy, and she didn’t have a jacket or shoes on, only socks. No, it wasn’t embarrassment he felt now, it was something worse. And the words just wouldn’t come out of his mouth.

Toph rubbed her eye with a dangerous kind of innocence.

“Oh, really?” she told Katara. “But you’re usually so eager to pin it on me. Come to think of it, it’s almost flattering, that you think me such a bad influence on your brother.”

Katara didn’t bother replying, rolling her eyes and turning to Suki instead.

Sokka finally found his voice. “Not that I need anyone’s help with that – I negatively influence my own life.”

The smile that appeared on Toph’s face was amused, private.

“But the question is, have I corrupted you?”

Yes. Yes, you have.

“Nope,” he replied, popping the p.

“Good. I don’t mind taking all the credit, but I’d rather share the blame.”

“I’d rather be sharing it too,” he said, thinking the blame is not the only thing I want to share with you, trying his damned hardest to figure out what she was thinking.

But her blank eyes gave nothing away. Nothing was ever easy with Toph, she never gave anything away. It was Sokka who was the giving kind.

She was shivering. Before he could stop himself he asked in low voice, “Do you want my jumper?”

He almost laughed at himself for that one. To his surprise, she didn’t make fun of him or call him a fucking cliché, the way friend-Toph would have done; she simply shook her head. Remorse and hope fought their way through Sokka’s heart: he was torn between wanting her to treat him like a friend again, and not wanting her to treat him like a friend ever again.

He suddenly registered that the others had resumed the conversation. Katara was saying there was no point in going back to sleep, as they had to go in the studio to record “Balance to the World” in less than an hour. Sokka offered his thermos in sympathy, and they passed it around, sipping Sokka’s all-nighter coffee and warming their hands on it in turn, except Suki who said “no thanks, I’d like to go back to sleep.”

Toph was rubbing her hands together, her fingers numb and red. Sokka closed his fists against the urge to wrap them in his, against the even stronger urge to wrap her into his arms, and said, “Are you crazy, coming out like this?” He took off his jumper, his beaded neckless catching in the collar, goosebumps covering his stomach where his shirt rode up. He offered it to her so that it brushed her arm. “Just take it.”

She pulled it over her head. Sokka looked up at the night sky that would soon turn blue, elation stretching his heart in every which way.

“Oh, yeah, the new Postie article. Have you read it?”

Pages rustled as the Duke flipped through the student newspaper, which was officially called The Omashu Post but affectionately referred to as the Postie.

Toph raised her voice over the bar’s noise, “Literally, no. Figuratively, also a no.”

“My flatmate was just telling me about it,” said Haru, a friend of Katara’s. “The one about the legacy admissions, right? Lemme have a look.”

The newspaper went from the Duke’s hands to Haru’s. Nearby shouts let Toph know that Aang was kicking Sokka’s butt at pool.

She took a sip of her beer. “What’s this about legacies, then? Nepotism on the rise?”

“That’s literally it,” Haru said, laughing. He cleared his throat and read out loud, “Our investigation reveals that the percentage of legacy admissions of each entering class has been steadily increasing since Dean Kuei was appointed in 2016. Uhm… Being a legacy changes— sorry, raises a student’s chance of being accepted by… okay, blah blah blah, let’s move on… Omashu is effectively following Ba Sing Se’s lead. Donations by alumni make the practice hugely profitable and are its raison d’être, yadda yadda yadda…”

“Have you ever thought about going into the audiobook business?” Toph said.

“I’m friends with the girl who wrote the article,” the Duke told them, “and let me tell you, the university did not want these figures to come out and be discussed. The Postie really is rocking the boat by publishing this.”

“Pretty ballsy of them to include pictures,” Haru mused. “Wait, is that Yue?”

Yue was a soft-spoken, doll-like, bleached-white-haired heiress of some kind, and also Sokka’s ex from before Suki, although their relationship had been short-lived. They’d met in his astrophysics class – Toph knew because Sokka had told this story as many times as the moon had rotated around the earth since the beginning of time, that is… many a time. Yue could do the maths. No, she literally could, and Toph certainly wasn’t going to.

The Duke hummed pensively. “They’ve had to have asked for permission, which means she agreed to be included in this. So she’s on our side.”

There was a moment of quiet as both Haru and the Duke, bent over the newspaper, appreciated the picture of Yue.

“Sokka’s a lucky guy,” Haru remarked.

Toph didn’t like the way he said it. She recalled the break-up’s aftermath, Sokka listening only to Pink Floyd for weeks on end, and the before, Sokka feeling like he didn’t deserve to be with someone like her.

“Actually, she was the lucky one,” she said icily.

She downed her beer and got down from her barstool. She realised she was tipsier than she thought as she walked, slightly wobbly, toward her friends, only to be welcomed with loud cheers and a group embrace which told her they were as tipsy as she was.

Zuko, Suki and Katara started a game of pool that any sane person would stay clear of, knowing how competitive each of them could get, and roped Mai into standing in as their way-less-invested fourth player. Mai had brought her friend Ty Lee, who was at the bar getting drinks for free and who’d complimented Toph on her braid (Katara’s handiwork) three times so far.

“Teo, over here!” Aang yelled.

“You invited him?” Sokka whispered furiously.

“What? We’re mates!”

“Aang, I got the PhD we were both competing for!” Sokka’s arm bumped into Toph’s as it flailed. “It’s gonna be super awkward, he hates me!”

Aang forcefully shushed him – Teo must have been getting close.

“Hey every– ah!” Teo cried out. “That will teach me, falling for their second-drink-at-half-price ploy… Anyway. Wouldn’t be the first time I wet myself in a bar!”

They all laughed at what Toph could only assume was Teo spilling beer on his lap.

“Wouldn’t have pegged you for a soak, Teo,” Aang said.

“What can I say, we’re finally done with this godforsaken lab report… It’s time to indulge!” There was the sound of glasses clinking, probably Teo’s against Sokka’s. “Congrats on finishing, by the way!”

“He never has a problem with that,” Toph said, earning a few laughs and Katara nearby asking her why she always had to be crass.

“To you too,” Sokka replied with more emphasis than you’d expect. “I’m sure you did great.”

“Probably not as good as you,” Teo said, “historically.”

“I’m not sure about that, I mean… Let’s say it wasn’t my best work.”

“Oh, come on,” Teo said in his ‘I don’t believe you’ voice. “You’re, like, a genius.”

Clearly, they were both overcompensating: Sokka by trying very hard to be humble about getting the PhD, and Teo by trying to show he wasn’t bitter about not getting the PhD. It was awkward.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Sokka deflected.

“No, really, I’m thinking… I should introduce you to my dad sometime.”

Toph leaned against a pillar, crossing her arms. “Wow, this relationship is moving fast.”

“Your dad?” Sokka said feebly. “Your famous-scientist, BSSU-alumnus dad? That one?”

Toph stifled a laugh, sensing how difficult it was for him to contain himself and not go into full fan-boy mode. Aang, who'd picked up on it too, feigned innocence when he spoke up, “Teo and I were talking about getting him on the podcast.”

“Yeah, yeah, I guess that could be cool,” Sokka said with a slight tremble in his voice.

It was around that time that one of the bartenders announced they were closing. Everyone loudly expressed their dissatisfaction until Suki suggested they go back to theirs and keep it going.

“Gotta be careful,” Teo said as they went out the bar, “one more drink and I’ll be arrested for drunk driving.” Haru burst out laughing.

It had been raining; tires were squealing on the road, puddles splashing around the bend. Humidity clung to Toph’s jacket, to her skin, to her hair, but still she felt warm all over. The night air sizzled with something sharp, something electric, it was blowing her up like a balloon, she was just about ready to burst. It felt like anything could happen.

Sokka fell into step with her. “Have you read the new Postie article?”

Did he feel too?

“You could say that.”

“Good. Then, I can do this.” There was the sound of paper crumpling, and she felt something light being deposited onto her head. “I made you a hat. Cause you don’t have a hood.”

She shook her head. “Have you got no respect for our brave student journalists?”

He chuckled – less at what she said, it felt, and more at how she looked saying it. “They should be thanking me for making their hard work finally be of some use.”

“Sokka,” Katara admonished from a few steps behind.

“Yeah, don’t say that, that’s unfair,” Toph said. “They’ve been a massive help during the toilet paper shortage.”

“Toph!” Katara shouted. “The Postie is a quality publication. You guys will make fun of anything just for the kick of it.”

She was right about that.

“They got their facts about Yue wrong,” Sokka argued, touching the top of Toph’s hat and bringing her head closer to get another look. Toph was happy to oblige. “She’s twenty-four, not twenty-three. Lazy journalism.”

His bad faith was as deliberate as it was obvious, but Katara still fell for it.

“They’re the ones trying to shake things up, while all you do is criticise like a bitter old man.”

“Oh, don’t give me that! Subversive, my ass… They’re just trying to sound smart.” Sokka’s drunken voice was booming throughout the street. “They’re so pretentious and full of themselves, those guys, you can just tell, they think they’re doing the world some huge favour. Well, they are now! By shielding Toph Beifong from the rain.”

Warmth spread to Toph’s cheeks. Was this Sokka’s strange way of flirting with her? Offering his jumper, making her a hat – like he was a little boy on the playground and the only way he knew how to express his affections was by giving her everything he had, and everything he didn’t, just to protect her from the cold and the rain.

Sokka turned to look behind him, muttering, “Which should be her bodyguard’s job, by the way. Where is that bugger?”

“I don’t know, it’s too dark for me to tell.”

He nudged her. “Alright, I’ve had it with you tonight.” He was grinning, and so was she. “Oh, here he is! How did I miss him before? Built like a tank, he is.”

“Can’t escape,” Toph said.

Sokka’s hand slid down her forearm, which made her stomach flutter. He bent his head toward hers and asked in a low voice, “Are you ready?”

“Aye aye, captain.” She had a pretty good idea what he intended to do, but at this point, she would have said yes to anything.

He grabbed her hand and took off. Hong’s reaction was immediate, but they had quite the head start. They passed Zuko and Ty Lee who were having a deep, intimate conversation about never feeling good enough in comparison to their siblings, and then Aang and Suki who were comparing the length of their pinkies.

They took a sharp right, their shoes slapping the wet pavement. Raindrops prickled Toph’s face and there was wind in her hair; she put a hand on her head so the paper hat wouldn’t fly off. Sokka’s hand was large and solid in her own, the cold of a ring pressing against her palm as she held on tightly. Poor Hong yelled at them to stop, but it only made them laugh harder, which wasn’t good for saving your breath. Soon Sokka wasn’t dragging her as much as she was dragging him, and they came to a halt, both of them wheezing, with Hong hot on their heels.

“Don’t do that again,” he croaked. It sounded like he was bent over, hands on his knees.

“Just keeping you on your toes,” Toph said innocently. “You never know when I might get kidnapped.”

She felt a pull on her hand – it was Sokka collapsing to the ground.

“Terrible stamina, the both of you,” she teased, tugging on his hand to try and get him up. “Suki would be ashamed.”

Sokka didn’t move; the dead weight was too great for Toph and their arms went slack.

“It’s because of my bad leg,” he whined. “Hockey injuries are no joke.”

Toph’s physiotherapist brain took over. “It’s still giving you trouble? Have you not been doing your exercises? You should get it checked out.”

“You do it.”

“By someone who’s got a degree,” she said pointedly. Sokka started pushing himself to his feet and she helped him up with a groan. “Heeeere you go.” She let go of him and took a step back – it would have been weird and inappropriate not to, but also, she wasn’t sure what she would have done if she hadn’t.

“My butt is wet,” Sokka observed sadly.

“Are you gonna be a little bitch about it?”

He laughed in surprise. “Why are you always so mean to me?”

In truth, it had been a knee-jerk reaction at being overwhelmed with her feelings for him and trying to conceal them beneath their usual friendly bullying, but the panic had made her go overboard and she’d crossed over into rude territory. She’d never felt quite this untethered, and her mind was full of him, Sokka’s goofiness, Sokka’s gruffness, Sokka’s bear hugs, Sokka’s wild cackle, the way he could be immature and annoying but also the way he just took charge sometimes, even his stupid waves t-shirt…

Sokka. Sokka was friendship: a warm feeling in your chest, someone’s attention and care enveloping you wherever you are. It was being completely relaxed and comfortable around someone, not having to be anybody but yourself. It was being excited to do the most mundane things, like doing your washing or going to the shops. It was being excited to just be in their presence.

Next year, Sokka would be gone.

“You’re my best friend in the world,” she said, her treacherous heart beating wildly in her chest, screaming that’s a lie, I love you, I love you, don’t you see? I love you!

It sounded like a confession. It was one. She’d felt as though she was running out of time, and the alcohol had certainly helped. She heard voices down the street: the others had caught up with them, too soon, finally.

Sokka made a joke she didn’t quite hear over the roaring in her ears. He ruffled her hair like he often did Katara’s. The relief that she hadn’t betrayed herself was immense, but so was her disappointment.

As soon as Zuko unlocked the door to their flat, Sokka went straight to his room to take off his damp clothes and scream into a pillow. Once he’d done that, he grabbed a rugby shirt off the floor, put it on, took a few deep breaths to try and centre himself, and went back to the others.

Katara was uncorking a bottle of wine. Suki had reached the giggly stage, while Mai had reached the slightly-less-dead-inside stage. Aang and Toph were bickering over who was in charge of the speaker.

“Stop putting shit music on,” Toph said.

“Why do you guys always bully me?” Aang whined.

“Because you play shit music.”

Sokka sat down on the sofa heavily. It wasn’t long until Ty Lee took a seat beside him, and she only moved closer from then on, attempting again and again to strike up a conversation with him despite his laconic replies, his occasional spacing out, and his staring longingly at Toph from across the room. He knew he was being a terrible host, it wasn’t Ty Lee’s fault that he was out of it; he was simply trying not to get lost in this haze of conflicting feelings and you’re my best friend in the world and Toph’s presence radiating all the way to him, all the way through him.

At some point, when he couldn’t bear it anymore, he got up and fled to the kitchen, where Katara was collecting empty cans. He hovered in front of the fridge, actually paying attention to the photos stuck to the door for once: Aang pulling faces on top of a half-pipe; Suki and Katara hugging in the stands at a hockey game; a blurry group selfie from a night out; Zuko looking surly in his work attire with his uncle grinning in the background; Sokka at the wheel of Suki’s car, in his swimming trunks only; a close-up of Appa with a sweater vest on; Toph lying on the floor in the studio with Aang sending the camera a thumbs up; Katara showing off on her surfboard with an out of focus Sokka falling off his.

With just him and his sister there, it felt an awful lot like home. Most people found it surprising that they had the same friend group: university was for branching out and it was unusual for siblings to stick together during that time.

Sokka propped his hip against the counter, fiddling with one of his rings. “Dad told me you’re not talking to him much these days. Being secretive and shit.”

“Have you told him about your recent exploit?” Katara shot back.

He shrugged. “He’d think it was funny.”

She arched an eyebrow in that infuriating way of hers. “Why haven’t you told him, then?”

“Don’t think I don’t see what you’re doing, turning this on me so you don’t have to answer the question.”

She started lining up empty bottles on the windowsill, as if to show she didn’t really care about this conversation. “He’d be real proud to know all the enriching experiences you’re having at uni, I’m sure.”

“Oh, suddenly you care what he thinks? Last I heard, you didn’t even want to see the guy.”

The bitterness in his voice made her stop and turn to him.

“Maybe I don’t,” she conceded. “Maybe I don’t want to jump on a plane to see him at his convenience when I have my own stuff going on and my obligations to think about, and when… when he’s never done the same for us.”

He gaped at her. “What are even you talking about?”

“Did you just forget the years he was never home? Working all the time? Gran Gran practically raising us?”

Did he forget? Did he forget missing his father almost as fiercely as he’d missed his dead mother?

“He was working all the time to provide for us!” he exclaimed, arms wide open. “He became a single dad of two kids, he had no choice! That’s why he was gone, for us! How can you hold that against him?”

“You idealise him so much, you can’t see what’s right in front of your eyes,” Katara pleaded. “He was running away!”

“From what?” he barked.

“From us.”

She pressed her palms against her eyes. Sokka deflated instantly. The silence made the muffled voices and the music coming from the other room seem louder.

In a small voice Katara said, “I think he didn’t know how to deal with our grief, as well as his. It was too much. Emotionally, he… he abandoned us.”

Sokka ground his teeth. He wouldn’t hear it. He wouldn’t let her take this away from him.

“That’s the way you see it. Doesn’t mean it’s true.”

She gave him a look, but he ignored it and returned to the living room. There was some sort of pillow fight going on that seemed to have originated from an attempt to build a makeshift bed on the floor, presumably to accommodate their extra guests. Even Zuko had joined in as Toph’s human shield; they were laughing so hard their neighbours would probably hate their guts after this, but that was fine, they hated them too.

Someone told Sokka they’d given Teo his bed, and he ought to have been outraged they didn’t ask him for permission first, but he was too tired to complain. He laid back on the sofa and everything started spinning. Closing his eyes only made it worse.

—

When Sokka woke up, it was dark around him and the inside of his mouth felt like sandpaper. The only sounds in the room were steady breathing, hushed voices, and the TV with the volume turned low. He rolled over on his side and was grateful to find that his stomach was hanging in there, as opposed to falling out there.

The blue light of dawn was slipping in below the curtains, making marble mountains off the bunched-up sheets. Suki was showing Mai a video on her phone, both their faces white from the screen’s light. Sokka’s eyes found Toph’s sleeping form: flat on her back, one arm outstretched, the blanket down to her waist.

He sat up and pulled at his rugby shirt, which was all twisted around his torso. He could hear the shower down the hall – Zuko was getting ready for work. Careful not to disturb anyone, he stepped between his friends’ arms and legs and heads, the mattress dipping, and went to knock on the bathroom door. No response, but it was unlocked.

“Sokka, get the fuck out,” Zuko said from behind the shower curtain.

“I really need to take a piss.”

Zuko made a noise of disgust which didn’t deter Sokka in the slightest. While he was there he also fixed his hair, washed his face and brushed his teeth.

“I shall use this lovely moment to remind you that this is not your family mansion,” he gurgled, mouth half-closed around his toothbrush, “and that your extra-long showers are putting a strain on this household’s finances.”

“I’m waiting for you to leave!” Zuko cried out indignantly.

Sokka spit in the sink. “Why, did I interrupt something? Jesus, Zuko, gross.”

The first thing he noticed when he was back in the room was that Toph was gone. Her blanket was in a heap on the mattress and her shoes weren’t in the hall. That was odd: she was never in any rush to get out of bed, and she wouldn’t leave without helping herself to their food first. Did she even have her cane with her last night?

A wave of panic crashed over Sokka, a terrible feeling that he’d missed something, that it was too late. He slipped his Vans on, tucking the laces in rather than tying them, and he dashed to the lift. By the time it arrived he’d already decided to take the stairs instead, and he was out of breath when he sprung out of the building. It was all foggy and humid outside, the navy-blue sky looking down on him coldly, street lights barely piercing through the hazy white. He only had to take a few steps in the direction of Toph’s flat before her silhouette appeared ahead of him.

He called out her name and ran to her, but she didn’t slow down.

“Why are you leaving? Is something wrong?”

“I’m just going home,” she said. “Is that allowed? Or do I need to email you a copy of my schedule too?”

He tried getting a look at her face.

“You’re upset.”

She sniffled. “Leave me alone.”

“Come on, tell me what’s wrong.”

She stopped, turning to face him. He almost recoiled at her expression: he wasn’t expecting her to be angry at him.

“No, you tell me, Sokka. You tell me, because I don’t understand any of it.”

He swallowed hard.

“What is it you don’t understand?” he asked, even though he knew.

And he knew that look on her face, too: she was steeling herself. It was on the tip of her tongue. He waited for the words to come out and make it real, waited for them to make the intangible materialise, to make the invisible appear out of thin air, to fill out the space between them once and for all.

She took a breath. “One day you say something that seems like maybe you…” She faltered. “And then… and then you spend the whole night glued to Ty Lee’s side.”

Sokka let out a surprised laugh. “Ty Lee? You think I care about Ty Lee?”

He’d given her the cold shoulder the whole night. Surely Toph knew he would never…

“How am I supposed to know?” she retorted. “You’re acting different with me but then at the same time you keep treating me like a child! Which is weird, by the way–”

“I know it’s weird,” he said, frustrated.

It had been the only way to keep her at a distance every time his feelings for her had frightened him, every time he’d forgotten how to behave like a person, like a friend, like someone who didn’t…

She pointed her finger at him. “Oh, so you do think it’s weird, like all the others!”

“That’s not what I meant,” he said forcefully. “I don’t care if they think it’s weird or funny… I only care what you think.”

“I don’t know what I think! I’m not even sure it’s not all in my head.”

It’s not, it’s not, it’s not, chanted the voice inside Sokka’s head, but outside of it there was only silence, and Toph’s face getting more and more pained as it stretched, he had to do something, he had to break it, why couldn’t he break it?

Eventually he said, his voice quiet and raw in the silence, “I’m leaving at the end of the year… I don’t want to ruin everything.”

The words hung in the air. They sounded like a confession. A myriad of emotions flashed on Toph’s face, too quick for him to decipher.

“Then why do you keep…” she began, defeated. “…making me think that… I waited for you to do something the whole night.”

Sokka stared at her helplessly. All his wit, all his haikus written for poetry society, all the things he knew how to say had been wrung from him, but hope was flapping its wings in his ribcage, screaming at him to be let out.

“It’s not like you to wait for anyone to make the first step.”

He realised as he said it that it was exactly like her. Toph was confident about most things, but not this. She was approaching this strange dance of theirs as she would a duel: she needed him to make his move before she would make hers.

She wiped her nose on her sleeve and said stubbornly, “Don’t tell me what’s like me or not. You don’t know me that way. And I apparently don’t know you that way either, because I thought– you could have tried something a hundred times last night, but you didn’t.”

“That’s because I wanted to be sober when I…”

His breath caught in his throat as he took her in, her braid in disarray, her flushed cheeks, the dew on her lashes. She was so small, but she felt bigger than life. Sokka didn’t think he’d ever wanted to kiss someone so badly.

He went up to her in a couple of steps. The morning mist was so thick it was encompassing them, and she was all he could see.

Toph didn’t pull away when he leaned down, when he let his forehead fall against hers, when their noses brushed.

He kissed her. Unbelievably, she kissed him back. His arm came up around her back, bringing her close, his other arm around her neck, tucking her in the crook of his elbow. She hummed against his mouth, fisted her hands in his shirt. His heart was going to explode. The tip of her nose was cold against his cheek and her bangs kept tickling his face. His numb lips couldn’t get enough of hers.

They took a ragged breath against each other’s mouths, eyes closed, foreheads pressed together, and he kissed her again, and again, and –

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

They broke apart. Teo had just come out of the building, beanie pulled down low over his eyebrows.

“No worries, mate,” Sokka breathed, trying to get a hold of himself. He glanced back at Toph, whose face was a light shade of pink.

“Since I have you here,” Teo said, “I wanted to say thank you for letting me have your bed last night. I didn’t want to impose, but the others insisted…”

Sokka waved off his concern. “I’m more of a sofa kinda guy anyway.”

“Still, it was especially kind of you, considering… you know.”

Sokka narrowed his eyes. “Actually, I don’t really follow.”

“Well, I didn’t want to bring it up unless you did, but I… I feel like you deserved to get it as much as I did, if not more.”

“It’s not really that big of a deal,” Sokka said confusedly.

Teo rubbed his neck. “I mean, it kind of is. And I want you to know that it was an honour to be in this race with you. You were a worthy opponent.”

“It’s not even that good a bed,” Sokka argued, utterly lost.

“N-no… the PhD.”

“What?”

“I’m saying you should have gotten it. The PhD.”

Sokka looked at Teo blankly.

“What?”

Chapter Text

And sure enough, there it was on his phone, which he’d left upstairs in his haste: an email dated from a few days ago, saying BSSU was withdrawing the offer.

Sokka put his face in hands as Katara paced around him, bombarding him with questions she knew the answers to – can they do that? Yes, obviously they can, that’s why it’s called a conditional offer – but on what grounds? I just said, insufficient results in modules PL29400 and PL26700 – but that’s so vague, that sounds like a bullshit excuse!

It did sound like a bullshit excuse, was the thing. And Sokka didn’t know if that was just wishful thinking on his part, because he knew how it sounded, I failed so there must be something fishy there, but he also had this gut feeling that, well, there must be something fishy there, because it didn’t make sense. Sokka liked things to make sense, needed things to make sense, in fact, he couldn’t leave things alone until they did, he would just throw his brain at the wall until he found a way to make sense of it. That was why he chose to do this degree in the first place: to unravel the mysteries of the universe, to understand the way it all worked.

It was only the next day that it did make sense, when he ran into Long Feng in the Physics Building. They passed each other in the corridor, and as their eyes met he realised that the last time their eyes had met Sokka was clad head to toe in a bear costume and Long Feng’s precious Lexus lay behind him, lacerated with a bench. Long Feng knew it was Sokka who’d wrecked his car, but he had no way of proving it. A student had provoked him, taunted him, disrespected him, and there was nothing he could do. Oh, he must have been fuming. That was what Sokka wanted, wasn’t it?

Sokka hadn’t failed. For once it wasn’t a nice feeling being right, it wasn’t wishful thinking anymore, because now he had to live with the knowledge that he’d brought this on himself. He knew it was Long Feng who’d messed with his admission – he just couldn’t prove it.

Or could he?

It was that time of the year when it got dark a little earlier every day, and every day when it got dark everyone had to talk about how dark it was for a minute. Toph didn’t have a strong opinion on the matter. They’d just had the conversation; now the flat was silent. Earphones in, she was attempting to catch up on late chapters from her osteopathy audiobook by playing it at 2x speed. Aang was on the other side of the couch with his laptop, and Katara was doing stretches, her yoga mat laid out on the wooden floor.

“Não são permitidos animais,” Aang said out of nowhere.

Toph paused her audiobook. “What?”

“Não são permitidos animais… What does that mean?”

So she hadn’t heard wrong. “How should I know?” She rewound and pressed play again.

Aang shrieked, “No pets allowed?!”

Toph ripped out her earphones. “What’s your problem, man?”

“My problem is I’m looking for accommodation for my semester abroad and none of them allow pets!”

“This shouldn’t come as a surprise,” Katara said, sounding like her head was upside down. “Most landlords are not exactly animal friendly.”

“What am I going to do?” Aang lamented.

“You could try dressing up as a human man,” Toph suggested.

He was so agitated he didn’t even hear what she said. “I’m not leaving Appa behind!”

Katara’s hip clicked as she moved from one yoga pose to another. “Worst comes to worst, it’d only be for a few months. It’s not like he takes up a lot of space, we could take care of him for you, we wouldn’t mind.”

“We? Speak for yourself,” Toph said. “You’re not the one who gets woken up every time he goes apeshit in his cage at three in the morning.”

Genuinely offended, Aang jumped to Appa’s defence. “He just gets the zoomies sometimes. Don’t we all?” He gave a haughty sniff. “But you won’t have to endure his presence much longer, because he’s coming with me.”

“Great.” Toph put her earphones back in. She sighed when Katara did not get the hint.

“Speaking of which, Toph, we need to figure out what we’re doing next year. With Aang away, and Sokka—well, if not Ba Sing Se, then somewhere else… It’s already late in the year, we’ve got to sort it out before all the cheap flats are gone.”

Toph fought off the urge to groan. She didn’t want to think about next year. House viewings, estate agents, renting contracts, she found it all agonizingly boring. She always relied on Katara to take care of things, which she felt only slightly guilty about.

“I’ve had a look and I’ve already made a list of possible places,” Katara informed her.

Toph gave her a thumbs up. After that Aang went on for a while about how excited he was at the prospect of meeting new people, making friends from a different country, immersing himself in another culture and so forth, and she was glad for him, really, but she was getting tired of listening to the same paragraph on muscle tissue over and over again. She stood up, maybe a bit abruptly, walked to her room, and sat down at the edge of her bed. She tossed her phone on the pillows, eyes burning.

Why did they all want to leave so much? Was it really so bad here?

There was a tentative knock on her door.

“Can I come in?” Katara said.

Toph sighed. “If you must.”

Katara took a few steps into the room and Toph could almost hear her hold back a comment about the state of it. The bed dipped next to her.

“Hey…” Katara started gently. “Listen, I know it won’t be as fun, next year, living here without Aang and Sokka –”

“No, it’ll be fun.”

Katara clearly wasn’t expecting the interruption, and she didn’t finish her thought. Toph was pretty sure she was smiling to herself.

“You don’t have to say that, you know.”

Toph bumped their shoulders together. “What are you talking about? Between a party girl like you and a funny chap like Zuko?” Katara laughed, and so Toph carried on in an intense voice, “It’s gon’ be wild. We’ll be out clubbing every night. Getting blackout drunk. Doing drugs. We’ll all get tattoos.”

“’S funny, I’ve been wanting to get a tattoo for a while.”

That actually took Toph by surprise.

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, something for my mum. So she’s always with me.”

Leave it to Katara to find the corniest way to justify a tattoo – was Toph’s unbidden first thought, immediately followed by a feeling of shame and a vow to take it to the grave.

“Nothing flashy or anything, just a small one on the inside of my arm… I keep putting it off though, there’s always something, you know,” Katara said distractedly.

“You mean, besides the permanence of it?”

“More like, my swimming schedule getting in the way of the healing process. I’m not actually scared of the forever part. Carrying my mum everywhere with me, that’s something that will never change, it’s already the most permanent thing in my life.”

Toph pondered this for a moment, the ways in which Katara was braver, bolder than she was, and so sure of what was in her heart. A year ago, should you have asked, Toph would have confidently told you she knew who she was, but now it felt as if everything in her life was on shaky ground, including the foundations upon which she’d built her sense of self. She was in the deep end of the pool, losing her grasp on any and all certainties. There were no hands to pull her out. She was uprooted, but also unrestrained, and she couldn’t trust herself not to change, or in other words, not to lose herself. What was the point of engraving anything onto her skin when it could all come crumbling down the following day?

She leaned back on her elbows, wishing she could stop thinking about Sokka’s absence, about Sokka’s presence. I’m leaving at the end of the year… I don’t want to ruin everything. But he had, he had ruined everything, everything was perfectly ruined. Her face warmed at the memory of the ruining in question, at Katara sitting beside her having no idea what was playing inside her head, not knowing her brother had kissed Toph, had kissed her good.

“You should go to the parlour on Ukano Street,” Toph declared suddenly, flustered and stumbling over her words. “You can walk in at any time and they’re super nice, I talked piercings with them for like an hour.”

Katara got up from the bed in one swift movement. “We should go right now.”

“Now?” It was still afternoon, but it felt later than it was. Not exactly what Toph had in mind when she talked about living young, wild and free, but if Katara’s exhilarated tone was anything to go by she was getting that tattoo done today one way or another. “I guess so, yeah. No time like the present, eh? Take the plunge, Michael Phelps. I won’t be the one to stop you.”

“No, I meant we. I should get my tattoo, you should get your piercing!”

Katara had this nasty habit of including Toph in her we, when Toph would have rather just stayed an I. She backtracked, “Uhm, I don’t know, I wasn’t planning on taking the plunge myself just yet…”

“What’s this you just said,” Katara teased, “no time like the present, Michael Phelps?”

“I don’t think Michael Phelps said that.”

Katara was now unbearably smug. “Just thought you were the type to put your money where your mouth is.”

So that was her strategy, going after Toph’s pride. Not to say it wasn’t working.

“I’ll put my fist where your mouth is…” Toph replied instinctively, before she remembered she was talking to Katara and not her brother, “Sorry, that was a lot.”

“I’m only doing it if you’re doing it,” Katara challenged.

“You’re really good at this peer-pressure thing, you know. You should consider a career in politics.”

Despite the jokes, Toph thought about it. Her parents would hate it, but really, what was a little nose ring compared to moving out of the estate for good? She was getting disowned anyway. Might as well be broke and look cool. And the upside was that her parents would hate it.

Katara caught Toph’s wrists and pulled on them. “Tooooph, come on, don’t be boring…” Though Toph had already been swayed, she let the whining go on for longer than it needed to, struggling not to crack a smile. “Come oooon… You’re no fun!”

“What did you just say about me?”

‘Outside,’ read Sokka’s text.

Toph got up so fast she felt lightheaded. She forced herself to walk at a normal pace so that she wouldn’t reach the door too soon. Aang had people over, they were getting rowdy in the living room, they paid her no mind as she passed with her hand brushing against the wall. Once she turned into the hallway no one could see her come to a stop on the doormat and stand there, heart beating in her throat. She smoothed out her clothes, feeling silly.

She swung the door open. They both said hi at the same time and dissolved into awkward laughter, followed by even more awkward silence. But then Sokka gasped.

“What is that? Is that… Is that a piercing?”

It was all it took to break the ice.

“I was under that impression when the guy put it through my left nostril,” she deadpanned. “Did it start festering?”

“Oh my God!” he squealed in overdramatic Sokka fashion. “It looks so fucking cool! I can’t believe you went through with it!”

Toph turned back toward the living room so he wouldn’t see the smile that threatened to split her face in two.

“It’s no big deal, it was over in like, two seconds.”

“It is a big deal,” he objected, following her through the kitchen. “There’s a whole new hole in your nose.” He giggled. “A whole new hole.” He started singing it to the tune of A Whole New World and she threatened to deck him.

“I hate that song.” She led him to her room, closed the door between them and the loud voices coming from the other side of the flat, and threw herself onto her bed, springs squeaking beneath her. Sokka hovered at the door in an uncharacteristic display of shyness.

“Whatcha doing, standing over there like a statue?” Toph prompted. “I don’t bite.” Though I might kiss you.

“Uhhh… I can’t see anything. Like, it’s pitch-black in here. And you definitely do bite.”

“Oh, sorry!” She didn’t often have people over when it wasn’t daylight, and all her lamps were unplugged to leave room for other electronics. She had once tried arguing that this should reduce her share of the electricity bill, but her flatmates had disagreed.

Once the lights were on Sokka dropped something on the bed. The bounce of it told her it was too heavy to be his laptop, so it was probably his planner. Right. Because that’s what they were here for.

“So what’s the plan?” she asked.

He kneeled down beside the bed, leafing through the planner. “You tell me.”

“No, you tell me. Did you forget how this works? You’re the brains, I’m the muscle.”

There was a smile in Sokka’s voice, “Right. We make a good team.”

We sure do, she thought, picturing his mouth against hers. She closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead. “Are we breaking into Long Feng’s office again? Stealing his laptop?”

“To do what?”

“I don’t know, hack it.”

“And how, pray tell, do you suggest we do that?”

She sat up, patted down the pillows behind her back, settled again. “Don’t you know how to hack into someone’s laptop?”

“No,” Sokka said emphatically.

“Then what do they teach you in those coding classes of yours?” she exclaimed, opening her arms.

“Forget Long Feng’s laptop. What about the administration? All the information we need is down there, probably.”

“Yeah, on the computers. So unless you’ve learned how to hack in the last five seconds or you want me to use brute force with one of the secretaries…”

Sokka faceplanted into the duvet. “Damn,” he said, his voice muffled. “This whole thing is waaay above of our competence level.”

Toph’s chin rested against her sternum as she nibbled on her fleece’s zipper. “What if we asked someone who does have the skillset? The Duke mentioned he knows one of the Postie writers.”

“The one who wrote the article about Yue?” he asked through a yawn.

“Yeah. That’s investigative journalism, right? They might be interested in the case of a faculty member abusing his power.”

Sokka shifted abruptly. “Wait. Teo’s dad went to Ba Sing Se. Wouldn’t that mean…”

“You may have better grades, but Teo’s a legacy,” she finished. “Long Feng probably didn’t have much trouble convincing BSSU to favour his application over yours.”

Sokka let out a few of his favourite swear words. They kept going like this for a while, considering any eventuality and mapping out their way out of it, going through every position imaginable on the bed (well, almost) to the sound of Sokka’s scribbling, until it went quiet in the living room, and Toph found that Sokka had fallen asleep. She closed the planner gently and moved it from his lap to the floor. Blood rushed to her head as she let it hang off the edge of the bed, not very far from Sokka’s own, which was bent at an odd angle. She focused on the steady rhythm of his breathing, trying to match it with hers.

Sokka losing the scholarship had put everything on hold. He had a lot on his plate, she didn’t want to bother him with such trivial matters as what did it mean that they kissed, and would he like to do it again. Who was she kidding? Their proximity was suffocating; after a while she left him there and went to the living room. Aang’s friends were long gone. As soon as she laid down, she felt the tension leave her body. The hardwood floor pressed harshly against her back, solid and unmovable, holding her up, anchoring her to the present. Everything inside her that was off-kilter, askew, unbalanced, fell back into place, aligning all at once. Her breathing evened out. She listened to the night around her. A door slamming, steps echoing up the staircase, the jingle of keyrings. A shout in the distance. Sirens, far away, the hum of traffic. A conversation along the pavement, voices getting closer and then fading away. She could feel every vibration, like the city was pulsating through her, ever awake, ever alive.

Her bedroom door opened. She heard Sokka getting closer. He lied down next to her without a word.

“Thank you,” he whispered. “For, like… doing this with me. Being on my side. Taking me seriously, and shit.”

Toph was acutely aware that now was not the time to make a joke, but she couldn’t come up with anything else that wouldn’t make her sound like she was gone for him in an embarrassingly irrevocable way. She reached out for his hand. For a long time they stayed like this, fingers intertwined.

“Sokka,” she said carefully. “Maybe you should think about applying for PhDs in other places…”

He said nothing for a beat, then, “Less prestigious universities, you mean?”

“You know that’s not what I’m saying.”

“Is it not?”

“Everything doesn’t always go according to plan, yeah, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still achieve what you want to achieve, just… maybe not the way you pictured it.”

She heard him swallow. He tugged on her hand a little bit.

“This was like… my one chance at being great.”

“Hey. Don’t start with that shit again.”

He propped himself up on his elbow, leaning over her. His hand grazed her face; her pulse jumped. He pushed her bangs away gently, and kissed her.

It was different than the first time they’d kissed, less frantic, more tender. Deeper. Toph got caught in the slow rapture of it. Her hand came up to the back of his neck, holding him close, while he slipped his arm behind her head and held her face. She wanted to stay here forever, wrapped up in him. At some point his nose bumped into hers and she hissed – that fucking piercing, she explained when he pulled back, in a whisper that still sounded too loud, that had him smiling against her lips.

There was the noise of a key turning in a lock.

They scrambled up, and in less than a couple of seconds they’d managed to put the length of the room between them both.

“Jesus, Toph!” Katara cried out. “What are you doing here in the dark? I almost tripped on you!”

They were fifteen minutes into their training session when Toph blurted it out.

“Sokka and I kissed.”

And because Suki wasn’t saying anything, wasn’t moving next to her on the bench, she went on, “Twice, actually.”

She couldn’t read Suki’s emotions and it was making her uncomfortable. Maybe she shouldn’t have sprung this on her like this, in the middle of the gym of all places, but when it came to delicate matters Toph was always in favour of ripping off the band-aid.

“Are you guys dating, then?” Suki asked eventually.

Toph dabbed at the sweat on her face, took a swig from her flask.

“I’m not sure.”

She felt weirdly embarrassed to admit this. She didn’t even know whether Sokka was looking for anything serious. What if he was just curious, as he was with everything? What if she was just another thing he wanted to try?

“Look…” Toph began. “I’m kinda new to this whole ‘being friends with girls’ thing, but I’m pretty sure dating your friend’s ex-boyfriend is a big no-no. So… I wouldn’t want to ruin that over some guy.”

Suki laughed softly. “Come on… We both know Sokka isn’t just some guy.”

It was meant as reassurance, that she understood, that she knew Toph’s character, that she knew Toph would never do this if it was anything less than that, but all it did was bring the problem into sharper focus. Lijun was some guy, but Sokka, there was no going back, there was no cutting him out of their lives. Because of who he was to all of them, the shift in who Toph was to him was putting the balance of their world at risk. Toph got reminded of that time in Katara’s room when Suki had assured her that her breaking up with Sokka wasn’t going to change anything between them.

As though Suki had been thinking about the same thing, she asked, “What does Katara think about all this?”

Her guarded tone was putting Toph on edge. Do you hate me? she wanted to ask.

“She doesn’t know. You’re the first person I’ve told.”

It must have been the right thing to say, because when Suki spoke again there was nothing standoffish about her anymore.

“I suspected he had feelings for you.”

She sounded neither sad nor bitter, nor even resigned, and it took Toph off-guard how immensely relieved she felt.

“Wait, really?”

“I don’t know… I don’t think he was even fully aware of it at first.”

Toph’s curiosity got the best of her. “Is this why you broke up with him?”

“He broke up with me, actually.”

Toph bit back an incongruous, obnoxious ‘Well, this is Brand New Information!’ She didn’t know why they’d all assumed it was Suki who had dumped him, maybe because in the past Sokka had always been the one getting dumped, the one who loved the other more. It did explain a lot about how the whole thing had gone down, how Suki had been angry and Sokka apologetic, going so far as to leave the flat to give her some space. Toph wasn’t sure whether to be happy about it or not: on one hand, it meant that Sokka definitely wasn’t hung up on his ex, and that Toph wasn’t a rebound for him, nor a consolation prize; on the other hand, it did make whatever Toph and Sokka were doing… worse.

“Dude, what a jerk.”

Suki laughed. “That’s how I felt for a while.”

“How did you get over that?”

“Well, obviously, being rejected in this way, it hurts like hell. But after a long while of feeling like crap, and hating him for breaking my heart and all that, I just… couldn’t keep doing that anymore. Hating him. Because he didn’t do anything wrong.”

Her tone was wistful. Toph felt weirdly intimidated, like any word that’d come out of her mouth would be wrong, and so she waited for Suki to go on.

“In fact he did the right thing. He was honest with me. That, he could control, as opposed to how he felt… or how he didn’t feel… about me. I couldn’t blame him for what he had no control over, see, I had to respect him and his feelings enough–”

She trailed off, cleared her throat. This would be when Katara would put her hand on Suki’s, or on Suki’s shoulder, but Toph’s hand stayed right where it was, gripping the bench.

“Once I accepted that… Well, I was still hurt and angry that he didn’t want me, I couldn’t help it, but I stopped directing it at him.”

“’S real mature of you,” Toph murmured.

She had a moment of marvelling at Suki’s emotional intelligence. She’d never heard someone put it like this, and it made her reflect on the way Lijun had acted after their breakup, how she’d thought she deserved it, whatever he threw her way.

“I don’t know, it just made a lot more sense in my head that way,” Suki said in a casual, chipper tone, as if she was trying to dissipate the heaviness of the conversation.

Toph wondered idly whether her and Suki would have been friends if not for Sokka introducing them. Whether her and Suki would have been better friends, if not for Sokka introducing them. Anyway, it didn’t matter; what mattered was that they were.

“I know you were kind of joking when you said it,” Toph said all of a sudden, “but we really should do it, the working together thing.”

Suki perked up. “Are you for real?”

“Yeah, we should open a practice together, or something.”

“We should totally do that,” Suki replied, stunned. “Our own physiotherapy and sports injury clinic!”

Her enthusiasm made Toph go on more exitedly, “I would do the treatment stuff, you would handle the coaching side of it.”

“We could have a little sign by the door that says both our names!”

The more Toph thought about it, the less insane it sounded. By the time she would get her license Suki would be finished with her vacancy as a Teaching Assistant and would be looking to put her Sports Science degree to use. They were both active people and trained together, they were sitting in a gym, for God’s sake. Even Suki’s educational approach and Toph’s ‘I’m hurting you for your own good’ method would balance each other out nicely.

“Oh my god… Oh my god Toph, I want to do this so bad…”

“Let’s do it then. What’s stopping us?” About a thousand practical reasons she was choosing not to think about right now.

“Let’s make a pact,” Suki said fervently.

Toph spit in her hand. To Suki’s credit, she only hesitated for a second before she did the same. They shook hands, and for the first time in a while Toph felt like she had some direction; whether or not it was a good one remained to be seen, but as she often liked to remind people, wasn’t that the case for most things in her life, that they remained to be seen?

Chapter Text

“We’re going to miss the first song,” Toph said accusingly.

She walked as fast as her tiny legs could probably stand it, dragging Suki – who was meant to be guiding her – along with her, and Sokka, despite having the height advantage, struggled to keep up.

“Take it up with Zuko here,” he said as he attempted to tie his hair up without losing pace. “If he didn’t use the communal bathroom as his own personal en-suite, everyone would’ve had ample time to get ready.”

“Using all the hot water too,” Suki grumbled in agreement. She pulled the furred hood of Katara’s parka over her head. “And for what? To look like this?”

“What’s wrong with my outfit?” Zuko protested.

“You’re wearing a button-up to a concert. And why is your hair all slick and parted in the middle like this?”

Zuko ran a hand through his hair to muss it up, looking miffed. “No reason.”

“You look like you have a hot date,” Sokka said idly. “Wait, are you hoping to run into someone?”

“No,” Zuko snapped. “Shut up.”

“Oh my God, you are.”

Toph waved her arm at them. “Guys! I don’t care about the poor lass who’s going to be subjected to Zuko’s conversational skills tonight, Hong said he would introduce me to his band before the gig starts, and the gig is going to start any minute now and we’re only… I don’t know where we are exactly, or even at all, but it sure doesn’t feel like we’re there yet.”

The four of them were in fact reaching the entrance of the tunnel that led to The Cave, which meant they were almost there. Sokka caught sight of Toph’s scrunched-up face before the mountains’ darkness swallowed it whole. Funny this – normally she was pretty laid-back, and Sokka was the uptight one, getting on everyone’s nerves when things didn’t go his way.

“You could always go to Hong after the show,” he offered.

“That’s when everyone will be trying to do the same. I’m not some groupie, I know the guy.”

“’S not like it’s hard for you to meet up with him though, seeing as it is his actual job to follow you around.” He cracked his neck loudly, the sound echoing in the tunnel – taking advantage of the fact that Katara wasn’t here to scream at him because she ‘hated it when he did that’. “Speaking of which, how the hell is he going to keep an eye on you while playing an instrument at the same time?”

There was a pause. “You know Sokka, I often think about the fact that we’re both missing a sense. For me it’s the sense of sight, and for you it’s the sixth one, common sense.”

Their friends taught that was very funny. Sokka communicated how unhappy he was with their mockery of him until he didn’t want to kiss her so desperately anymore, and until the distant yellow-and-blue glow of the club’s sign made their shadows grow longer.

It turned out Toph needn’t have worried: the band was late to come on stage. Most of the crowd was still at the bar getting drinks, or chatting under the giant Earth Rumble banner that hanged from the high ceiling. The Cave looked like a whole different place with the lights on, nothing like the flashing, shapeless dancefloor where he’d held Toph in his arms for the first time and then freaked out like a ten-year-old finding out he liked girls. He wondered if she was thinking about it too, but she grabbed Zuko’s arm and announced she was going to say hi to Hong. As soon as they were gone, Suki turned to Sokka.

“What are you doing?”

“What?”

She levelled him with a look. “I know about you and Toph. You don’t have to dance around each other like this, pretend like nothing’s going on.”

Still trying to come to terms with the fact that she knew, Sokka sputtered, “I’m not… We’re not pretending.”

“What are you doing, then?”

“I don’t know, being considerate? My ex is literally right here. Maybe you know her, her name rhymes with potpourri and she’s a real pain in the ass.”

She laughed. “Thanks for the concern, but I’m telling you I don’t mind, so don’t hold back on my account.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Are you a masochist? Why are you so desperate to see me and Toph getting it on?”

“Uhm, I wouldn’t go as far as wanting to see that,” she quipped. “I just want to make sure everything’s good.”

“Good means different things to different people. Not everyone’s into PDA, okay?” He could hear how defensive he sounded, yet he was helpless to tone it down.

She jabbed her finger at his crossed arms. “But you are. This is not like you.”

“Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do,” he shot back pettily. What right did she have to decide what was like him and what wasn’t? His personality wasn’t confined to a past relationship, to the memory she had of him. He glanced at her face and saw only patience, and he added more gently, “Toph and I, it’s not the same thing it was with you and me.”

“I’m not saying it is, or that it has to be. But I know how you are when you like a girl – I’ve been on the receiving end of it. And I’m wondering why Toph isn’t.”

He shook his head. “Toph’s not like that.”

Sokka was a master at wooing girls, if he dared say so himself; a master wooer. The problem was, he couldn’t use his usual moves on Toph, and this for two reasons: she knew them all, and she was Toph. She was one of the boys, she had been his mate for so long he didn’t know how to be anything else with her. He couldn't get her flowers – she would laugh in his face. So he was trying his hardest to reign in his romantic side, but he was also dismayed to find that he didn’t have any other side he could fall back on. He needed someone to tell him what to do. That was yet another problem: he would usually go to Toph for advice, she was so good at it, level-headed, patient but no-nonsense. Aang would tell him to "open his chakras" or something equally obscure. Katara might have some good insights but there was a risk of her slipping into her bossy, ‘I know what’s best for you’ mode, and besides he wasn’t sure he wanted her to know just yet. Meanwhile, the idea of asking Zuko for romantic advice was hilarious in and of itself. That left him with Suki, the girl he’d broken up with, who was being exceptionally lenient with him; yeah, something told him not to push it.

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” she said.

Sokka followed her gaze and saw Toph near the stage; a guy from the band was showing her his bass, and Hong was laughing at something she’d said. She’d taken her jacket off – it was resting on Zuko’s arm, Zuko who stood stiffly behind her, looking remarkably like her butler –, revealing a white tank top that made her dark hair stand out even more, her piercings glinting in the strobe lights. She was so pretty, it wasn’t fair. She looked in her element, feeling the instrument expertly, her excitement radiating off of her. His heart swelled. That’s why she was so intent on getting here on time, he thought, this was her scene, she wanted it to be her scene. She needed an outlet that had nothing to do with her parents or their money. He wanted her to have this, to smile like this all the time.

He remembered Suki and looked back at her like he’d been caught, only to find her looking at him amusedly, but with a touch of something sad, something sour underneath. She’d probably come to the same realisation as him.

Oh, he liked her liked her.

Hong invited Toph and her friends to stick around for drinks with the band and crew after the show was done. Now that he’d experienced one, Sokka could say that Earth Rumble was aptly named: he wouldn’t be surprised if his dad had felt the vibrations in the ground from the other side of the world. Most people had now left, including Suki half an hour ago because she had to get up early tomorrow, something about her car making a new kind of weird sound that she couldn’t ignore like the others. Zuko had unloaded Toph’s jacket onto Sokka before going off with some girl. Sokka still had it – last he’d seen of Toph, she was in the middle of a passionate conversation with the band’s drummer and a sound technician while the rest of the crew was packing up around them, but then Sokka had run into two guys from his hockey team and they’d been at the bar since, exchanging anecdotes from their first year of university.

Sokka looked around for Toph again. He found her next to a tall figure that wasn’t wide enough to be Hong. He did a double take, lowering his glass onto the bar. In a city of more than half a million people, what were the odds of Toph’s ex showing up everywhere they went?

Lijun seemed agitated, and Toph unsteady on her feet. When she backed up and he grabbed her arm, Sokka patted his hockey friends on the back and strove over to them.

“Hey, everything all right?”

He’d barely finished speaking that Toph’s face lit up. “Sokka!”

She stumbled toward him, arms wide open. He met her in the middle, closing his arms around her, and she hugged him with so much force it cut his breath; he put his chin on the top of her head, unable to contain his smile.

“Where have you been?” she whined. That confirmed it: she wasn’t playing it up for Lijun’s benefit, she was just drunk.

“Around,” he said, eying Lijun warily over Toph’s head. “You good, man?”

Lijun nodded. The look on his face was indecipherable.

Sokka rubbed Toph’s back with the hand that didn’t have her jacket draped over it. “Let’s get you home, eh?”

“Don’t say it like that. I’m perfectly sober,” she slurred.

“I can see that.” He tried to manoeuvre her away from Lijun, but she hung limply from his neck, refusing to let go. “Come on, love. Let’s put your jacket on.”

“I’m not cold.”

“You will be.”

“You know the future?”

He chuckled. “What do you think they teach us in Physics?”

“Waves,” she asserted, poking his chest. “But no hacking. What’s even the point?”

Overcome with fondness, he leaned down and pressed a kiss to her forehead. Where too much alcohol made a lot of naturally gentle people aggressive, it had the opposite effect on Toph, whose aggressive nature would water down one drink at a time until she was something almost like gentle herself.

“Toph,” said Lijun, who was hovering nearby. She turned to him, hands still clinging onto Sokka’s jacket. “You know, I was just joking that other time… Didn’t realise I would give you ideas.”

“About what?”

“Dating him. I mean, I can definitely see why you would – he fits the bill, doesn’t he?”

Sokka frowned, looked between Lijun and Toph.

Lijun’s gaze didn’t waver. “Another working-class boyfriend to make you feel cool, rebellious…”

Toph didn’t try to defend herself. She was blinking slowly, white as a sheet, like she was fighting off dizziness.

Sokka’s eyebrows shot up. “Okayyy, not that I don’t want to discuss the Marxian class theory with you guys, but it’s getting late and—”

“You should be careful,” Lijun told him. “She’ll get bored of you real quick once her parents stop paying attention.”

He’d said it in an earnest tone, as though he was trying to talk to him man to man, warn him out of the kindness of his heart, but there was a hint of a smirk there that made Sokka take a step forward.

“Not offence,” he started lightly, “but when I get involved with a girl, I usually don’t go looking for relationship advice from the one person who failed to stay in one with her.”

Lijun squared his shoulders, making Sokka very aware of how much bigger he was than him.

“Sure, you don’t need my advice,” Lijun countered, “you keep telling yourself she’d be into you for any other reason. You must be used to it, didn’t you date that girl Yue?” He sneered at Sokka, who was staring at him in shock – how did Lijun even know about that? “Bit of a rich girl magnet, aren’t you? Or maybe it’s the opposite. You do seem to get involved with a lot of the same crowd. You’re never gonna be one of theirs, you know.”

That seemed to shake Toph out of whatever trance she was in; she stepped in front of Sokka and pushed Lijun’s chest.

“Yo, fuck off.”

Lijun straight up laughed at her. Wrong move. Sokka wondered if he should hold her back when she got up in Lijun’s face.

“You know what, Lijun, you say I’m the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, but I think I’m the only thing that’s ever happened to you. Because why else would you spend that much energy projecting every single thing that’s wrong with you onto a relationship that didn’t even last a full term?”

Sokka pulled Toph away from Lijun’s twisted face, not wanting the night to finish with a brawl. “Okay, I think that’s enough. We’re going.”

Lijun nodded, jaw clenched, before turning away from them.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Toph shouted after him as Sokka dragged her away. “Go back to scrubbing the toilets at Jianzhu Building!”

A particularly callous remark, even for an inebriated Toph. She was worked up enough that Sokka managed to pull the jacket over her arms without her noticing. “You do know the future,” she said when they came out in the street, because it was cold and raining a little.

The walk home was mostly silent, with him steering her in the right direction toward her flat and her making jokes about not being able to walk straight and having lost her keys.

“Oh no, that’s not a joke. I’ve lost my keys. They were in my pocket earlier and they’re not anymore.”

“You’ve lost your keys?”

“I just said that, like, a million times. Are you drunk?”

Sokka came to a stop in the middle of the quiet street, threw his head back. “Fuck me.” They must have fallen out when he was attempting to put the jacket on a wriggling Toph, if not earlier.

“What are you swearing about? You’re not the one who’s gonna have to pay the fee for a new key.”

“I’m swearing because this means you have to sleep in my bed,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.

She swatted his shoulder as he laughed. “Oh, poor you,” she mocked in a whiny voice. He tried to escape her blows but she held on to him and jumped on his back. “Onwards!” Sokka let out a “oof,” staggering under the sudden weight of her.

All the way to his building he grumbled about how she only thought of him as her own personal chauffeur, but the feel of her face in the crook of his neck was reason enough not to let go. He tapped her arm to let her know they’d reached the main door and she had to get down. They ushered in, the rain just getting heavier; Sokka felt a tug at his collar and saw that Toph was holding on to the hem of his jumper, letting herself be led by him.

The flat was eerily silent, no light seeping out from underneath Suki’s or Zuko’s door. He made Toph drink a tall glass of water despite her assurances that she felt fine. Walking into his room he had the lovely surprise of finding the clothes he’d been too lazy to fold in the middle of his bed, a ‘problem for future Sokka’ that present Sokka wanted to kick past Sokka for. He dumped the pile onto the floor, then fumbled for sweatpants and a T-shirt to give her. He changed while she was in the bathroom, not like she could see him anyway, but it felt too intimate a thing to do in front of her.

Once they were lying side by side in Sokka’s bed, lights off, he let the evening’s events wash over him, every little moment, the good and the bad. There was something stuck in his throat that wouldn’t allow him to relax. Toph, even in her state, could tell that this was the wrong kind of silence.

“I’m sorry you had to take care of me tonight,” she said.

“No – no, don’t be. It’s not very often that you let me take care of you, I like it.”

She hummed, went quiet. Sokka listened to the crackle of the rain against the windows.

She spoke again, “It’s what he said, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s what you said to him,” he replied, figuring it out himself as he did. “When we were leaving, his job at Jianzhu Building…”

Toph turned to her side so she could face him. The window’s pale glimmer caressed her face, stained the sheets blue in the darkness of the room.

“You know, it’s what my Gran Gran does,” Sokka murmured. “Cleaning people’s homes. It bothered me, I guess, to hear you say it as an insult. It… It made it sound like he was right about you, Lijun, and while I know you don’t look down on people like my grandma—”

“I don’t, I really don’t,” Toph said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said it, I was defending you and I went a little crazy…”

“You were?”

She propped herself up on her elbows. “What did you think I was doing? He was basically calling you a gold digger and a class traitor, what the hell?”

Sokka had read her outburst wrong: she’d been focused on disproving Lijun’s judgement of him, rather than Lijun’s judgement of her. He now understood what this weight in his chest was. More so than making him uncomfortable from a moral standpoint, Toph’s comment about the toilets at Jianzhu Building had made her sound precisely like the posh students she was trying not to be associated with; it had reminded him that that’s what she was at her core, and that her down-to-earth demeanour was a choice, a choice not to be like them, a choice to be like him. But she wasn’t like him. She’d grown up rich, insanely rich. You know the Beifongs, they’re rich rich, he’d heard people say on campus. The more he thought about it, the more unbelievable it seemed that she could be into him, given that she was also the coolest person on the planet.

“You’re not doing this with me just because I fit the bill, are you?” he whispered.

A beat, then, “What? Sokka, no.”

Her hand landed on the side of his stomach. She was probably aiming for his arm, but he trapped it underneath his own before she could remove it.

“First of all, you don’t even fit the bill,” she joked. “You’re a massive nerd…”

“Gee, thanks, that makes me feel better.”

“And besides, I’ve liked you for ages.”

Sokka’s heart gave a lurch. He wasn’t sure whether her light tone meant that it’d slipped out unintentionally, or that she’d been waiting to tell him.

He got up on his elbow. “You have? How long have you liked me?”

“Oh, I don’t know… A little while…”

Her evasiveness told him she knew exactly how long. “Since before I broke up with Suki?”

Even in the dark he could see that she was bright red.

“Since before I got with Suki?” he asked, stunned. She tried pulling her hand free, but he pulled her into him. “You’ve liked me the whole time! That’s so cute!” he exclaimed delightedly, flipping her over. She complained and hit his chest lightly as he teased her, kissing her face all over, tickling her until she was squirming beneath him.

Eventually they went still, her little arms slack around his neck, and she said in a soft voice, in the small space between them, “Well, you didn’t see me that way.”

“I do now.”

He kissed her deeply, pressing her into the mattress. Her arms tightened around his neck. She was shivering against him, warm and pliant, every touch divine even through both of their t-shirts, and Sokka let out a low sound in the back of his throat that surprised him.

He pulled away and rolled on his back. Took a deep breath, staring at the shapes on the ceiling.

“You’re driving me insane, you know that?”

She had the nerve to giggle.

If he was honest with himself, there was one time, a long time ago, when he’d noticed her in that way. She was eighteen then, a first year, while he was in his third. He’d felt like such a creep. He’d vowed to take it to the grave, never to dig it up again – why did it matter anyway, it wasn’t like something was ever going to happen, right? And now with every smile she sent his way, she was digging him an early grave, and he was going willingly, yes, he was going to lie there and die a happy man.

When Toph woke up the first time, it took her a minute to remember where she was and why there was someone in her bed. Then a hand landed softly on her back, Sokka’s voice whispering, “It’s still early, you can go back to sleep.”

She edged closer and he brought her against him. She snuggled happily into his chest, still in awe that she could just do that now. When she went to put her arm around his middle, something sharp collided with her hand.

“Is that a book?” she mumbled. “Why are you awake?”

“Suki wasn’t kidding about her car.” She could feel his jaw moving, the huff of his voice against her forehead. “Took her about twenty tries to get it to start and by the time the ruckus stopped I couldn’t fall back asleep.”

Toph accepted the explanation and was content to just doze off under Sokka’s arm, feeling toasty and cosy under the sheets, lulled by the steady sound of rain. A perfect morning if she’d ever seen one, which in a literal sense, she hadn’t.

When she woke up the second time around, Sokka was snoozing too, his book lodged between their bodies. She’d rolled back to her side of the bed but his hand was on her stomach, resting underneath her t-shirt, and so she didn’t move for a long time, relishing the feeling. The window was ajar, humidity slipping in. Thunder rumbled in the distance. In the kitchen, the microwave dinged.

Toph pushed the book off the bed and it landed on the carpet with a soft thud. She squirmed until she was level with Sokka, poked his cheek until he batted her hand away. She replaced the pokes with kisses; he didn’t push her away this time.

Sokka had just wrapped his arm around her waist to bring her closer when his phone started vibrating on the nightstand. He reached out for it, twisting his body so he wouldn’t have to let go of her, and there was a moment when she thought he was maybe frowning at the caller ID; then, to her surprise, he picked up.

“You couldn’t just text?” he croaked into the phone.

Toph had no trouble hearing a tinny voice reply, “Good morning to you too.”

“No, bad morning, it’s a bad morning when someone gives you a call at the ass crack of dawn without any warning whatsoever, like a psychopath.”

“It’s nine in the morning, I would hardly call that the ass crack of dawn—”

“Let’s just agree to disagree, Smellerbee, you and I are…” Sokka trailed off when Toph mouthed the word like a question. “Yeah, what kind of name is that, by the way?”

“It’s my penname. It’s safer that I remain anonymous.”

There was a pregnant pause as Sokka tried not to snort. Toph wiggled her eyebrows at him to make him crack, and he covered her face with his hand, his voice quavering slightly, “Yeah, God forbid the campus police goes after you.”

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit. Are you alone?”

Another pause. “Yes,” Sokka said, almost nose to nose with Toph. She smiled, and felt his nose nudge hers in response.

“Okay,” said Smellerbee. “I did some digging, and – well, it was a long shot...”

Sokka swore under his breath, let out a sigh. Toph patted his chest comfortingly, but that didn’t seem to help: when he spoke, he sounded utterly disappointed. “You’re right, it was a long shot.” His fingers were absentmindedly playing with the shell of her ear. “Ah, thanks for trying anyway, I appreciate—”

“No, not a long shot. Longshot.”

“What?”

“My partner, Longshot, it was him who did the digging. Jesus, keep up.”

“What kind of name is that?” Sokka cried out, while Toph sniggered into her hands. “So it’s not over then?”

“No, not by a long shot.”

Sokka was speechless until Smellerbee said, “I’m messing with you now.”

“You journalists should all burn in hell,” he grumbled.

She paid him no mind. “So, we met up with a student who dropped out because of Long Feng, and he was more than happy to point us in the right direction. We found some evidence of favouritism and unfair treatment over the years… a great deal of it, actually.”

Toph squeezed Sokka’s wrist. His pulse was as frantic as the rain outside.

“We also found out that he’s the one pushing for more legacy admissions. As co-president of the Dai Li—”

“Sorry, what’s that?” Sokka asked.

“The Parent-Teacher Association. And the kind of parents who are PTA members, well… they’re the ones who benefited from legacy admissions in the first place, and whose children did too, so obviously, Long Feng has their support every time he suggests something to the board.”

Once again, Katara’s long-winded, conspiracist-sounding speeches about corruption were turning out to be true.

Smellerbee added, “He’s also good friends with the dean of admissions at BSSU, if you can believe it.”

Sokka let out a bitter laugh. “No shit.”

Toph was getting bored. She dove under the covers, and when that didn’t get Sokka’s attention, dove under his actual t-shirt, wishing she could burrow herself under his skin. “What are you doing,” he laughed when he felt her head crawl up his torso like an oversized beetle, trying to hold the phone to his ear while feeling the enormous bulge of her with his other hand. She emerged at the collar, not caring that she was stretching it, and accidentally touched a sensitive spot that had Sokka suppress a yelp. Meanwhile Smellerbee was saying something about the difficulty of proving anything, but having enough to work with for a solid article, yes, one that was guaranteed to make waves in the current context.

Sokka thanked her profusely, and Smellerbee told him to have a nice day, and your lady friend too – or your boyfriend… I don’t know you, and Sokka hung up the phone without correcting her. He wound his arm around Toph and flipped them both over, bringing a hiccup-y, pleased, evil little laugh out of her.

“You… you absolute menace.”