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“I can’t believe you made a five hundred dollar profit at the slots,” Sokka whines, enviously watching Suki stuff away the bills she’s just cashed in at the cage. “And I can’t believe I lost fifty dollars. I thought this gambling thing was supposed to be all about luck!”
“Well, blackjack is also about knowing when to quit. And you’ve gotta bet smart, and I hate to say it but… you don’t really know how to bet smart. Or when to quit,” Suki tells him, her shrug all but saying ‘sucks for you’ in her casual, teasing way. So far, this trip to Vegas (which was Toph’s idea) has turned out to be a boon for everyone but Sokka. Katara got to visit the home of the Pawn Stars , which probably made her entire year, Aang has had a blast learning from street magicians and performance artists alike, and Zuko has really enjoyed seeing Lady Gaga’s residency show probably more than any man should’ve.
As for Sokka, he thinks the Pawn Stars are hacks who don’t deserve their fame, all that ‘magic’ is just sleight of hand being passed off, and, well… he’d be lying if he wouldn’t have preferred to see Britney Spears’s show just a bit more than Gaga.
And then to top it all off, he loses money in the casino while of course Suki walks away in the black. He couldn’t win at roulette no matter how many times he bet on his lucky number, 23.
“How about I take you out for drinks to make up for it. My treat?” She suggests, smiling at him in that quintessentially Suki way that’s made his heart flutter since they first met. Oblivious to the effect she has on him, she reaches out and squeezes his arm, and he doesn’t tell her how it makes his brain short circuit to just feel her touch in the most chaste of ways.
She doesn’t give him much room for disagreeing with her as she takes off towards the elevator, ready to head down to the hotel bar whether he’s following her or not. Though he takes a second to admire her, Sokka follows behind her almost immediately, his losses forgotten in favor of being in awe of Suki.
She looks stunning in the shimmery gold dress she’s picked out for the evening, so short it should be a sin and looking like a disco ball in the dim, multi-colored lights of the casino. Red lipstick and wine-colored eyeliner accent her look perfectly, and Sokka marvels every time about how she can make the most elegant outfits look so effortlessly beautiful.
What makes him simp even more than her looks is her easy confidence, the way that she throws back shots at the bar like nobody’s business and holds her own in conversations about every topic, and the way that every patron at the swanky hotel bar is drawn to her electric charisma and charm.
“... he’s just my best friend,” he hears her say to some stranger three margaritas in, and some tipsy, possessive part of him feels his heart break. Okay, Suki is his best friend, and they’ve been that way ever since sophomore year of high school, when he said women belong in the kitchen and she beat him up for it. (He was the one who apologized a day later, despite his black eye and swollen lip and bruised pride). Their friendship was natural from that point on, a give and take and push and shove that just works for them in the way that makes Sokka kind of believe in fate a little bit.
He just wishes that she was a little more than his best friend.
Before he can recognize that it's the alcohol talking and not his own, rational brain, he sidles up alongside her at the bar and murmurs, “We could be more.” In true Sokka fashion, his mind catches up to his mouth just a little too late, and he realizes oh, spirits, what is he saying ?
To his surprise, Suki’s confident smile opens into a full forced grin, and she almost leans into him. “Is that a promise?” She says, a drunken lilt to her voice.
It’s not fair how Sokka can hear Katara’s nagging voice in his head, giving him the same advice she does whenever he says stupid shit while drunk. A drunk mind speaks sober thoughts .
Well, does he want to be more with Suki? The answer there is obvious, that of course he wants more with her. He’s wanted more since their senior year of high school, when he went to prom with some random girl and realized he spent all night wanting to dance with Suki instead. The only problem is, he never intended to drunkenly confess as much while on vacation in Las Vegas.
“I mean, uh…. If you want to,” he stammers dumbly, knowing full well none of this even matters should Suki not want him back; but then, Katara’s voice rings in his ear again, and he has to wonder. Could she actually want more with him?
She leans into him more , slumping slightly with her back against his chest and looking over her shoulder at him. With eyeliner just slightly smudged and the glimmer of an idea in her eyes, combined with the way his blood sings with warmth and attraction to her.
She’s never looked so beautiful.
“Sokka,” she whines, drawing out the vowels and adding some vocal cry and Sokka just knows a request is coming. That’s her ‘Sokka will you buy me Taco Bell’, ‘Sokka will you ride this rollercoaster together so many times we throw up’, ‘Sokka will you help perform a full-out rendition of Les Miserables in Zuko’s living room’ voice, and he gives in to her requests without fail every time. “Sokka, we should get married.”
He wonders for a second if he’s died and went to heaven and didn’t realize it, because it doesn’t stand to reason that the real world includes Suki, asking to marry him so casually as if he hasn’t been trying to ignore the romantic tensions between them for years. “We should what?”
“Get married , Socks!” She repeats, poking at him with one finger. She turns, winding her arms around his neck and getting so close he can smell the light notes of her perfume instead of the overpowering stench of alcohol. “We should go find one of those chapels and get married, and it’ll be like those rom coms you hate for being cheesy!”
Sokka doesn’t hate those rom coms for being cheesy, he hates them for being unrealistic (except, he actually loves them because he knows Suki does too). And even though he knows this is a terrible idea, and that tomorrow this will be something they will laugh about if regard it as a bad idea that they never actually brought to fruition, he takes another shot of… something, grimaces, and then grins at her.
“Okay, yeah. Let’s go get married.”
The Gaang 😤
[23:32] Sokka: guysss guess what I jsut did
[23:32] Katara: finally win something at the slots?
[23:33] Toph: ouch, sugar queen. serving up those harsh browns
[23:35] Aang: that’s a good one, Toph!! I’m stealing that line.
[23:40] Zuko: Are you going to tell us what you did?
[23:41] Sokka: got married in Elvis
[23:41] Sokka: by a vegas impersonator
[23:43] Zuko: Do you mean in Vegas by an Elvis impersonator?
[23:43] Sokka: nO
[23:45] Suki: yes he does mean that
[23:47] Toph: how would you know?
[01:23] Suki: :)
When Sokka wakes up late the next morning, he first becomes aware of how their hotel room really smells like a Glade Plug-in (Hawaiian breeze, for the record) and how underlying it is a strong mask of nicotine embedded in likely every surface in the room. The stench of old cigarette smoke is so profound that he doesn’t realize for a moment longer that the bed is heavy with the weight of another person.
And then, he realizes the bed has dramatic, red satin sheets on it.
And then, he realizes the bed is heart shaped.
And then, he realizes the bed has mirrors mounted above it. On the ceiling .
His own reflection, complete with bedhead, isn’t enough to startle him entirely awake, but the figure next to him is. Lying on her side, curled into him with reddish brown hair splayed out across the pillow and her lips just slightly parted and pouting with each soft breath, is Suki.
Suki, who is no longer in her shimmery gold dress, but in his shirt.
She’s never looked so beautiful. Sokka is well aware he has that thought every time he sees Suki, but this time is somehow particularly poignant.
The way he shifts around on the bed in his confused state must be enough to wake her, because her eyelids flutter open to reveal soft blue eyes looking at- or, maybe through him- and for just a moment everything in the world is perfect. Suki is the prettiest girl he’s ever seen, even half-asleep- no, especially half asleep- and the only thing that exists is her and her smiling at him and the dawning realization that he is completely, irrevocably in love with Suki and there’s nothing he can do about it.
Then, he sits up, and what takes over from his feelings of love and admiration is replaced by the splitting headache of a hangover. The urge to vomit suddenly hits him like slamming into a brick wall, and the only way he manages to avoid it overtaking him completely is to lay his head back down and stare at the ceiling.
Which means staring at his reflection and seeing how Suki lays lazily next to him, and how, despite being awake, she actually curls in closer to him. Her head finds his shoulder, and the way she so easily slings her arm over his stomach feels so normal and so casual that Sokka wonders if maybe he’s dreaming.
Except, in his dreams, he doesn’t usually feel the splitting headache that accompanies a hangover. It seems like drunk Suki and drunk Sokka actually had some foresight in the midst of last night’s shenanigans, because he finds a bottle of water alongside his wallet and phone. His phone, which has a concerning number of texts both from the Gaang’s groupchat and from his friends individually. As he skims through them all, a pattern emerges: the later in the night the texts came in, the more sure his friends seem that he might’ve eloped with Suki.
Oh, spirits, did he elope with Suki? The night comes back to him in flashes and he does remember, at some point, stumbling down the strip with Suki. There was an Elvis impersonator involved somewhere, and… yeah, he did elope with Suki. What the hell is wrong with him?
The sudden shock startles him awake and he jolts out of bed, even despite the world spinning and his stomach contents threatening to come up. He frantically starts texting Zuko (Zuko, who is so well known for his advice about love and girls), all while Suki barely stirs as if she isn’t equally as terrified by the prospect of them accidentally getting married. She just presses her face into his pillow, letting out a tired, petulant groan, and eventually rolls onto her back and yawns. “Hmm, Sokka,” she whines, and Sokka wonders how he could possibly spend the rest of his life not hoping to hear that every morning. “I had the craziest dream last night.”
Sokka has a sinking feeling he knows what this dream is going to be about, but he lets her continue anyway. “Yeah?” He asks, trying to hide his sneaking suspicion that he already knows the answer.
“Yeah. I had this weird dream that we decided to get married by a guy in an Elvis costume, and then I think we got upgraded to the honeymoon suite of our hotel? And then- oh fuck,” she says, suddenly stopping mid sentence when she discovers the awkward-if-swanky mirror suspended above their bed. Whether it’s that alone or the sight of herself in his shirt, Suki bolts up in bed and does the same thing he did a few minutes before: reaches for the bottle of water at her bedside.
After downing half of it in one go, Suki finally looks over at Sokka with something akin to horror and dawning realization in her eyes. “That wasn’t a dream, was it?”
His phone buzzes in his pocket, and he figures it’s Zuko, confirming his fears. “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t, because otherwise we somehow had the exact same dream.” He remembers vague snippets of the night before, of telling Suki they could be more than just friends. From there, things are fuzzy, and he can only imagine his own desire for his best friend spilled out and he somehow convinced her to get married to him and it’s all his fault. “I’m sorry,” he says quickly, ready to apologize profusely for his massive fuck-up.
But just as he says it, he watches Suki’s eyebrows draw together, and she tells him, “I’m sorry.”
Blankly, dumbly, they both stare at each other. Suki manages to come out of her stupor first, and she cuts in before Sokka even has time to think of a response. “I mean, obviously I suggested it, and I can only imagine I made you do it, and I just… look, does it even count as a real marriage? We can surely get it annulled because we were drunk.”
“Why would you have suggested it?” It seems to Sokka so horribly obvious that he was the genius responsible for such a terrible idea, when he’s been in love with Suki for so long and has kept it a closely guarded secret for years.
Suki looks suddenly nervous when he asks her, and her eyes pull away from him to look at the carpet (which is probably stained with god-knows-what). “Because I’m in love with you even though we’re supposed to just be best friends?” She says sheepishly.
All the stars in the universe have aligned. The gods of fate are on his side and rooting for him, and there is nothing, nothing in this world that could bring Sokka down at this moment. Suki loves him, she actually loves him, and all this time he’s spent pining for his best friend hasn't been for naught. In two long strides he crosses the room and kneels on the bed where she sits. He crashes his mouth to hers in a thoughtless, passionate kiss, and what is fueled by pure relief quickly melts into something tender, slow, gentle.
When she comes up for air, Suki looks at him with the same relief, but a hint of surprise in her eyes, too. “Does this mean what I think it means?”
“That I’ve been in love with you for years too, and I’ve been so worried about letting you know in case you didn’t feel the same way and it entirely ruined our really great friendship?” He said, barely taking a breath to get all the words out in one go.
“No, silly,” Suki says, and kisses his cheek. “That we might as well just stay together and not worry about that annulment?”
“Oh, oh yeah, that too.”
Turns out their Vegas vacation isn’t such a bust for Sokka after all.