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For the first time in who knows how long, Toph and Sokka were off at the same time. A long weekend was among them, having forced Toph to close down her academy and Sokka to take the three days off to unwind from his ambassador woes.
The two of them were so dedicated to their jobs, seldom taking time to decompress from the stressful aspects of their respective jobs, so the forced time off was greatly appreciated, though Toph was restless. He couldn’t blame her—she did enjoy her job more than anyone he’d ever known. It was something she built up and did on her own, establishing her own credibility in an implausible world. Sokka was so proud of her.
He, on the other hand, was more than happy to have the time off. While he enjoyed his job, it got tiresome at times, and any moment he got of reprieve, he appreciated.
Not only that, but he got to spend time with Toph.
They had started dating a little under a year prior, all starting with longing stares and drunken confessions. She had told him that she loved him after a night of insane drinking and fooling around like the idiots they were.
“I love you,” she’d said. It was simple. Three words. Ones that they had never before uttered to one another in so many words. They always showed each other how much affection they held for each other through actions—an act of kindness, a crude nickname, a punch anywhere she could reach. So he knew that she loved him and he knew that he loved her back.
But something about this felt different.
It was a slip, he knew it. She hadn’t intended to tell him and she could see the fear momentarily flash on her face before she relaxed against him. Within seconds, he could hear her soft snores filling the room.
The following day, he had woken up with her sprawled on his lap, her hair a mess, dried-out drool trailing down her chin, but Sokka found himself mesmerized by her.
For a while, he wondered if he had imagined her saying that she loved him, but he was certain that he hadn’t because he found himself feeling the exact same way, even if she hadn’t meant what she said.
It took her longer than he would have liked to wake up, but when she did, she grumbled and wiped her face, stopping to scrub the dried saliva off her face with his sleeve.
He couldn’t help but smile.
“Watching me while I sleep?” she had asked him groggily, slumping back onto the bed. “Kinda creepy, Snoozles.”
“What choice did I have? You were unmovable and I had nothing else to do but look at you.”
Toph shrugged. “I say that’s a win.”
“Sure is, especially when you’ve got bar peanuts in your hair.”
“Damn it,” she muttered, picking at her hair as he laughed at her. Then, she groaned, flattening her hand on her head. “How much did we drink?”
Sokka had shifted on the bed; his legs had begun to fall asleep from the position he was in. This was his chance to ask her about what she had said. “I’d say enough to say ya loved me last night.”
“Oh, uh, okay?”
“Mhm, but the way you said it was different.”
Toph rolled her eyes at him. “Different, how?”
“You looked, I don’t know, freaked out when you said it.”
“People do a lot of things when they’re drunk,” she replied nonchalantly, then snorted. “Like that time you were on cactus juice during Aang and Azula’s engagement party and you forgot they were a thing and proceeded to make a mess out of the whole place.”
Sokka had groaned. “I’m still not fully convinced that happened.”
“Well, it happened, and it was probably the best day of my life.”
“Anyway,” Sokka said emphatically, trying to get back to the subject at hand. “You know what they say—drunk thoughts, sober truths, or something like that.”
“Would you just—please drop it. It’s way too early for this. I literally just woke up, with a hangover no less, and you’re—you’re interrogating me, dipshit.”
She stood up and was getting ready to drag her feet toward the restroom, but he had scrambled to her side of the bed and stopped her by grabbing her arm to pull her toward him. “What if I told you I love you too?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I didn’t—I didn’t mean it…that way.”
“I know I’ve told you this before,” Sokka told her, “but you’re a shit liar, Toph Beifong.”
Whatever insult she had been planning on spewing at him was cut off by his lips on hers. She was tense for a moment, unmoving even as he kissed her. Dejected, Sokka had pulled away and was about to stutter out an apology and tell her that they never had to speak of this again, but she gripped his shirt in her fist and kissed him again.
They’d spent the entire day together, catching up on the time they had spent not being with each other and it was up there with the best days of his entire life.
At present, Sokka and Toph sat together in comfortable silence on the couch in their living room. One of her legs was on his lap as she laid back against the couch’s armrest, chewing on a few of the snacks they had thrown into a huge bowl for them to munch on, and Sokka was reading a book.
Or pretending to read a book, rather.
All of his focus—instead of being on the book— was on her. He was just watching her. She was doing nothing special or new; she was just picking at her nails and nibbling at her cheek and eating out of their massive snack bowl, but he couldn’t stop looking at her. It was thanks to a slip-up on her part that they were together to this day, but had that not happened, they might have still been clueless about their feelings for each other. He never imagined his life without her in the first place, but having her like this, was a whole different ball game.
The love he had for her was overwhelming sometimes; he’d never felt anything like it before, but he was sure glad that he was experiencing this with her.
His chest swelled, his body felt warm, and his heart was beating faster than he’d like. But this was love, he knew it, just as well as he knew that he would never, ever want to love anyone as much as he loved Toph Beifong. He wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, and there was no one else he would ever want to do so with.
She was it for him.
“What’s up with you? Your heart’s beating like crazy, babe.” Toph told him casually, popping a piece of the cookies they were working on into her mouth. “Chill out—you’re going to have a heart attack and I don’t want to be the one to have to call Katara and tell her she’s down a brother.”
“Marry me.”
“I—What?”
“Huh?”
Toph moved the leg that she was resting on his lap onto the ground as she sat up and leaned against the couch’s armrest. “You just—you asked me to—to marry you?”
Sokka froze. He said that out loud. He asked Toph to marry him out loud.
Spirits, what the fuck.
There was a beat of silence as he processed the words he had just blurted unthinkingly. What kind of proposal was that? And he wasn’t even aware that he wanted to propose until that very moment! He knew her stance on marriage well, and how much she wanted to avoid it after her parents shoved so many men that were so willing to propose to her starting at age sixteen. The last thing he wanted to do was make her have to consider something she had already ruled out.
And he knew that! He knew that she didn’t want to get married and he was perfectly fine with it as long as he had her . Even if they didn’t get married, they could very well spend their lives together until they were old and grey and gross.
Toph was all he cared about and now, because of his stupid slip of the tongue, he was going to lose it all.
“It—I didn’t.”
“You did—”
“No, shh ,” Sokka interrupted her, taking a pillow and pressing his face into it to hide his chagrin. Into the pillow, he continually muttered, “Fuck, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Fuck, shit, shit.”
Seriously, what was he thinking? They hadn’t even talked about getting married yet and he knew very well that this was a conversation to be had. Eventually. In the future. Not now! Not after all of ten months of serious dating…
He just ruined everything. He was absolutely sure of it. He’s ruined the best thing to ever happen to him—
A snort interrupted his self-deprecating thoughts, and he slowly lifted his head up from the pillow and nervously turned to look at her. There was a bemused smirk on her face, accompanied by the smug raise of her eyebrows. Her arms were crossed over her chest and her head was cocked to the side, the way she usually did when something beguiled her.
Sokka furrowed his brows at her, and before he could question her, she said, “You ever going to let me speak, Snoozles?”
Wordlessly, he nodded, clutching the pillow in his lap for dear life until she scooched closer to him and pried it out of his grip.
“Do you want to tell me why you’re freaking out?”
“I’m just—Spirits. I’m so stupid.”
Toph took his hand in hers, her thumb caressing the inside of his wrist the way he liked. “We knew that already, though.”
Despite his mortification, he let out a quiet laugh at that and squeezed her hand. “I’m really sorry. I—I didn’t mean for that to slip out and I know how you feel about—”
“Ask me again.”
Sokka blinked. “What?”
“Are you deaf?” she asked, pinching the skin near his armpit, eliciting a pained squeal from him. “I said ask me again.”
“I didn’t really ask you the first time—”
Toph groaned, exasperatedly throwing her head back. “Sokka .”
He took her face in his hands, his thumb running against the bottom of her lip. He drunk her in entirely before asking, “Will you marry me, Toph?”
At that, she brought her hand up to trail his face with her fingers. The action was uncharacteristically gentle, and although he loved her as she was—brash and rough and Toph —he relished in these moments where she was soft. She lightly butted their foreheads together and held them there for a second before she nodded.
Sokka couldn’t help the grin that was forming on his face—it was large and foolish and it was making his cheeks hurt, he was so happy. “You’ll marry me?”
“Mhm. It helps to have someone else around here to pay the bills,” she told him, a serious look on her face, her tone just as sobered. “I heard that the complex gives tenants discounts for being married.”
“You—” he snorted, pulling her closer to him. She ended up on his lap, laying her head back against his shoulder, her lips grazing his neck. “You’re something else.”
“Which is exactly why you want to marry me. I get it, I get it. I’m irresistible”
Shaking his head laughingly, Sokka set a hand on her cheek, making her lift her head from his shoulder, and he kissed her. Any worries or fears he had about this working out for them melted away at that moment.
Just as the kiss was deepening, Toph hummed, barely pulling away from him to whisper against his lips, “What do newly engaged people do?”
“Mm, they do coupley things.”
“Coupley things,” she parroted. Then, much to his dismay, she stood up, stretched, and cracked her neck. The sight of her made him both smile and feel Some Type Of Way. She would never know what he did to her. “Fascinating.”
He watched as she slowly made her way to the exit of the living room before she turned back toward him. “Do you not want to do coupley things as newly engaged people?”
Sokka didn’t respond to her question; he figured that the way he scrambled off the couch was response enough.