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Suki doesn’t stay over with her boyfriend often. Not when Sokka’s room is a glorified coat closet sandwiched between Aang’s room and the one Toph and Katara share, which is conducive to group dinner and fun movie nights but isn’t particularly well-suited to a quiet night in with her boyfriend. Damn paper-thin walls. Her own apartment she shares with Ty Lee is much better for sleepovers, because even with all its awkwardly sapphic kitsch and Georgia O’Keeffe levels of vagina symbolism decorating the place, her roommate more often than not spends the nights with Azula at her place and it gives her and Sokka the privacy his apartment doesn’t quite afford them.
There’s the small fact, too, that Sokka’s room, which just about fits his full-size bed and smaller-than-usual desk, is cluttered . Photos of Sokka and his sister and the rest of their crew are tucked away in any place they’ll fit and nostalgic holdovers like a perfect attendance award from seventh grade and a signed baseball from some minor league player are packed on the shelf so tightly that Suki’s convinced one sudden movement will send it crashing to the floor.
But Katara is spending the week visiting her father and Gran-Gran, and tonight Aang and Toph are helping- or more aptly, annoying- Zuko as he moves into his new house. Which means that for a few precious hours, the apartment is, for once, empty, and the paper-thin walls don’t matter a thing.
(Well, they matter when the next-door neighbor bangs on the wall when the headboard hits it just a little too hard, but Suki only giggles madly and makes an awful attempt at being quieter).
Now, wearing Sokka’s old hockey jersey while he sleeps contentedly on her chest, the only sounds she has to worry about are his quiet snoring and the episode of Kitchen Nightmares currently playing on his laptop. Half-asleep, Suki’s attention drifts every time Gordon Ramsay isn’t screaming at someone; she finds herself gazing absentmindedly over the shelves that hang above Sokka’s desk.
There’s a photo Suki’s already seen a few times sitting on the bottom shelf. Sokka’s maybe seven years old and Katara only five bundled safely in her father’s arms. Next to them is a woman that looks so strikingly like Sokka that there’s no mistaking that she’s his mother. Katara posted it on Instagram for mother’s day last year, and every time Suki sees it she feels those little pangs of sympathy that Kya isn’t around to see how her kids have grown up.
Behind it, though, is one Suki’s never seen before, or maybe just never noticed. It looks like a prom picture in the blue-ish light cast by the laptop’s screen, and Sokka stands next to a white-haired girl in a pretty dress of the same opalescent sheen as her hair. He can’t be more than high school aged in it, and the corsage tucked into his suit lapel screams of something he ordered from the florist a day prior.
It’s odd, though, that the necklace the girl is wearing in the photo is draped over the picture frame reverently. Suki stares at it for a long time as she falls asleep, not quite sure why looking at the girl’s smiling face and Sokka’s lopsided grin makes her heart hurt so much.
The funeral is so quiet Her dad, so solemn and stoic as he always was, gave words that just weren’t enough, that described who he thought she was and not what she was really like.
Sokka feels empty, but he doesn’t really. He’s angry, and he’s sad, and these feelings have just been eating at him for so long now that he can’t really distinguish them from feeling broken and hollow. He watches her coffin get lowered into the ground with a machine that’s too mechanical, too loud, too inhuman when she should be alive and breathing and here .
When he watches them first start shoveling dirt into the hole that’s now her permanent home, it feels a little bit like he’s the one being buried alive under the weight of his grief.
It’s Katara who pulls him out of it eventually, because his sister has this wonderful way of being the logical one while also understanding the swirl of emotions he feels now. With gentle hands and the press of a hot cup of tea into his shaking hands, Katara worms her way into all the spaces Sokka keeps trying to shut people out of. She’s always had a talent for this, for picking apart the seams of his life to stitch them back together like when she was fourteen and mothering him because no one else was there to.
“It’s okay, you know,” he hears his dad say distantly, blinking out of his stupor at the kitchen table. “It’s okay to be upset.”
Sokka looks up at his father, but his gaze is somewhere in the middle distance between them, foggy and unfocused. “I’m not upset,” he lies, futilely so and if only because upset isn’t strong enough to convey the gnawing emptiness that grows in the pit of his stomach when he hears someone refer to Yue in the past tense or when he considers donating some of her possessions.
“When I lost your mother-”
“It’s not like that! I’m not you, and Yue’s not mom and it’s not the same!” Sokka shouts, instantly regretting the look of hurt on his dad’s face. “It’s- it’s- I’m not…” He grasps for words uncertainly, trying to remember how to articulate and share his feelings. His vocabulary fails him and he slumps over at the table, sobbing.
“It’s okay, Sokka,” his dad murmurs, rubbing circles on his back. He feels eight years old again, sinking under the weight of his grief for mom and anchoring himself to dad’s solid arms. “We take it one day at a time. One foot in front of the other.”
Suki decides to ask about the photo the next morning, after she and Sokka have gotten some well-deserved rest and rolled out of bed far later than two self-respecting twenty-somethings should. It’s all yawns and sleepy morning breath kisses for a while, lingering touches across shoulders and waists that say ‘good morning’ and ‘I love you’ when neither of them have had enough caffeine to be truly awake just yet.
She’s eating a slightly too stale bagel smothered in butter and playing footsie with Sokka under the table when the right words finally trip off her tongue before her sleep-addled brain thinks to stop herself.
“Who’s that girl in that one picture on your shelf? Looks like someone’s awkward prom photo… you didn’t tell me you had a girlfriend in high school.” She punctuates it with a gentle kick of her foot against his, her tone light and casual. The sort of subtle prying that accompanies wanting to learn more about the dating history of her boyfriend of two years when he failed to mention the spectacularly gorgeous girl he once presumably went to prom with. She’s not jealous, she thinks to herself. Just the kind of head-over-heels lovesick that makes her want to learn all the little secrets and find all the cracks in Sokka’s life she’s yet to work her way into.
His face goes blank for a moment, and rather than a response Suki hears the clatter of his spoon as it falls into his Froot Loops and slides into the milk. He looks down into it, and the lack of a joke or remark about his now milk-covered spoon betrays the fact that she struck a nerve with her question. “Her name’s Yue,” he responds to her, fishing the spoon out and drying it off with his napkin. It’s like he’s trying not to cry.
Sokka acts so off for the rest of breakfast, so strangely out of it even for his sleep-in Saturday morning standards, and Suki doesn’t have the heart to bring up the pretty white-haired girl whose name is Yue anymore. Instead, she lets them fall into the comfortable silence of routine, of cleaning up the plates because Aang will complain if they pile up in the sink and watching a rerun of Golden Girls because it happens to be on and seems a good idea as any.
By the time she kisses Sokka goodbye and heads outside to her beatup Toyota to drive home, curiosity eats away at her. She pulls up Sokka’s instagram on her phone to search his followers and finds not a single person named Yue. None of his posts are from before he started dating her, either.
The plot thickens.
Sokka never wants to step foot in a hospital again after all this is over.
‘Over’ means something optimistic, he tries to tell himself. Over means when Yue is home and laughing with him while they watch bad rom-coms and they can put the gray curtains and yellow-white walls and stiff sheets behind them and she’s not lying in this bed anymore and everything is okay.
‘Over’ isn’t going to mean saying goodbye, because even if he says it she won’t hear it and he can’t live with himself if she doesn’t. Yue’s going to come home, he thinks to himself, repeating it and turning it over in his head like a mantra. Manifesting it, hoping that saying it enough times will make it happen and he’ll be staring into ocean blue eyes again like maybe nothing ever happened at all.
He squeezes her hand, careful of the wires and tubes that surround her with their awful, awful beeping and whirring like the slowly falling sands of an hourglass. He squeezes her hand, and only feels the cool and cruel stillness of her hands.
Two months pass, and then another, and then more until it’s been almost a year.
Yue hasn’t woken up. She won’t, most likely. The doctors explain this to him in very slow, simple terms like he isn’t quite an adult yet and he doesn’t quite feel like an adult yet because his twenty-first birthday isn’t for another three months and his wife is in a coma. “Life support can keep someone’s body working until the body is able to resume the functions being performed for it,” they explain, though it all hits his brain kind of muffled like he’s hearing it underwater. “But sometimes the body isn’t able to resume the work.”
They speak to him in the simple, slow terms befitting a child and ask him to make a decision like an adult. They’re asking him if he wants to take Yue off of life support.
He clings to Yue’s hand like it might fix things, like if he rubs his thumb over the silky and unnaturally pale skin over her knuckles enough times her eyes will flutter open and things will be perfect. She never wakes up, and Sokka never wants to stop hoping.
He has to at some point, realistically. Holding onto a sinking boat will only bring him down with it, and he can only take so much of the hollow look in her father’s eyes or the sideways glances Katara gives him when she comes over to help with the laundry or the cooking like she doesn’t trust him to take care of himself.
Yue dies very slowly- but the doctors assure him not painfully - over the course of several long hours. Sokka doesn’t know how long he sits there in the gloom of her hospital room, holding her hand and perched on the edge of an uncomfortably firm armchair. Only that the nurses come by to check on him and don’t say much, just offer sympathetic smiles and packs of cookies or cups of water that sit untouched next to him.
By the time the beeps of the heart rate monitor slow to a lethargic pace like a solemn and pained sort of morse code before flatlining altogether, he doesn’t have any more tears left to cry. Just a silent promise to himself that this won’t ever happen again, that he’ll be better and no one else has to get hurt on his watch.
“Hey, Katara. Do you have a minute?” Suki asks, settling herself in on Toph’s bed opposite the similar one Katara occupies. She has to move some of Toph’s clothes out of the way in order to find a clear spot to sit, and in the meantime Katara looks up from her anatomy textbook and the concerningly large pile of flashcards she’s making.
Katara’s side of the room is considerably cleaner than Toph’s, and every little thing has its place. Her textbooks are neatly organized on her small desk, and even the knick knacks that in Sokka’s room seem to add to the immense feeling of clutter only add to the decorative flair of the room. Toph’s side… not so much. Suki’s not sure how a blind girl manages to find anything among all this mess.
“Shoot,” Katara says, still jotting something down on one of the index cards. Suki makes the mistake of looking at Katara’s medical textbook, and the too-detailed drawings of someone’s insides make her stomach roll a little bit.
She picks at the hem of her shirt while she thinks of the best way to ask. Uncomfortable dread builds in the pit of her stomach, the way she would feel as a child as she snuck cookies from the cookie jar or got into other sorts of mischief she knew she shouldn’t have. She just couldn’t get Sokka’s tone out of her head as he said Yue’s name, the quiet defeat and emptiness as he said all of three words.
“Who’s Yue? I asked Sokka about her because I saw this photo but then he got all quiet about it and-” She stops suddenly as Katara seems to pale and freeze, pen still hovering in midair above her index card.
Something comes over her; it’s not the somber dejectedness Sokka had when Suki mentioned the picture, but something stiffer and more caught off guard. “Yue passed away,” Katara says, and Suki feels all those awkwardly nervous butterflies in her stomach sink down in defeat.
“Oh, shit. I didn’t know, or I wouldn’t have-”
“Sokka doesn’t like talking about it,” Katara says, the same quietly dangerous edge in her voice as the conversation they had two years ago where she promised that if Suki ever hurt her brother Katara would be coming for her. Suki can’t fault protectiveness. The only thing she finds fault with is her own curiosity, which to her chagrin is still burning with questions of how and when and why Sokka still has a picture from his high school days sitting on the shelf.
Haven’t the two of them experienced enough loss to be so young? It’s hard to miss the keen emptiness in the air when mother’s day or Kya’s birthday rolls around, and the late-night sobs that rack Sokka’s body when he presses his face into her shoulder is enough to tell her how scared he is of losing Gran-Gran, too. “I shouldn’t have brought it up,” she says too late, too guilty, too curious.
Katara doesn’t say anything in response.
She hates that she wants to know now more than ever who Yue is and why she makes Sokka so sad.
His therapist says what he’s experiencing now is a reaction to the very stressful and traumatic events he went through. That the flashing red and blue ambulance lights he sees in the corner of his eyes when he wakes up screaming is not unexpected, that no one can fault him for the way he rolls over at night and cries onto the cool pillow next to him because he always expects Yue to be there and she isn’t. She never is.
It doesn’t make him feel any better to know it’s normal, or expected. It would only make him feel better to stop seeing Yue in his nightmares, crying or screaming or, even worse, saying nothing at all.
Darkness, glass shattered across the dash, perfectly round little droplets of blood spilled on polyester car seats.
He wishes he could see them stop running through his mind every time he closes his eyes. Wishes he could stop gripping his steering wheel so tight every time he finds himself in the driver’s seat, wishes he could be one of those nice and charitable people who could forgive the man facing charges in prison. He’s not, he can’t be, and most of all it scares Sokka to think that he never will be.
Yue is gone, and that’s a reality he will have to live with, that he is a widower at twenty years old. He has to wake up every day with this anger burning a hole inside of him, eating him alive from the inside out until he thinks there’s going to be nothing left of him and then he’ll be a shell of a man-
The therapy helps. Katara helps, too, in the way annoying and nagging little sisters can be helpful, and the first time that Sokka laughs at one of Aang’s jokes--he snorts chocolate milk out of his nose, he’s laughing so hard--without feeling guilty that Yue isn’t here to share in the joy too, it feels like a victory.
One day at a time, like dad says. One foot in front of the other.
Ty Lee professes that her girlfriend is the best at finding people. Suki has never been quite sure why the ability to Facebook stalk someone is something to brag about, until Azula is sitting on the IKEA sofa in her and Ty Lee’s living room with a laptop balanced on her knees and reading glasses perched on her nose. “What’s the girl’s name again? Yuma? Umami?” Azula asks, already typing furiously.
“ Yue , I already told you that,” Suki sighs, sprawled out on the carpet. For all her curiosity, a dead girl named Yue who has white hair is not a whole lot to go off of when it comes to finding out who somebody is. Or was.
Ty Lee, ever-helpful, looks over Azula’s shoulder and narrates what she’s doing for Suki’s benefit. “Just looking over Sokka’s friends lists in case an old account is there…”
“Already did that, guys. Do you think I’m an idiot?” Suki asks. “Azula, don’t answer that.”
More rapid-fire typing. “Where did Sokka go to high school?” Azula asks, and continues before Suki can even open her mouth to answer. “Nevermind. I found it.”
Suki doesn’t quite like the fact that her curiosity has led her to this, to letting Azula dig around on social media sites and god knows what else to try and figure out why this one girl is so important, such a sensitive subject. There’s that feeling of guilt again, the gnawing she felt when she went to ask Katara about it behind Sokka’s back.
She shouldn’t be doing this, shouldn’t be letting Azula snoop around, should just be asking Sokka- “Looking up the school now to see if they ever posted anything in memoriam of an alumni…” Ty Lee supplies helpfully. “Not since 2012 and some guy named-”
“Okay, okay, so it’s not her, maybe we don’t need to…”
“I found her,” Azula announces, triumphant. “Yue Nakasuk. She used to go to some prep school on the north side of the same town. Prom Queen, it looks like.”
That answers some of Suki’s questions, but it leaves more in their wake. Azula’s always ten steps ahead of everyone else, though, and loves to be a show off. She answers before Suki can properly formulate a sentence, scanning some article or other with lightning speed.
“Car crash. Well, a coma, really. A drunk driver hit her car… You’re smart enough to figure out the rest, aren’t you?”
Suki feels a wave of nausea wash over her until she might as well be drowning in the sudden guilt of knowing more than she should, finding more than she bargained for, understanding why Sokka’s eyes suddenly seemed so dull when he said her name.
Azula continues on, unaware or uncaring of the rollercoaster ride of emotion Suki’s currently going through as she lays back on the slightly gross berber carpet of her and Ty Lee’s apartment. She’s found an obituary, it seems. “Predeceased by her mother… survived by her father and her husband,” she reads dryly. The article might as well be a textbook, for all Azula cares.
“She was married,” Suki says numbly, her head swimming as she looks up at the popcorn ceiling.
“Her husband, Sokka Ashoona.”
Suki doesn’t realize she’s started crying until Ty Lee points it out gently, tissue already extended out to her. She wipes at her eyes and blinks rapidly, trying to process what she’s just learned. It wasn’t a prom photo but a wedding photo, and Sokka had married Yue.
She feels suddenly very sick, and looks up towards Ty Lee and Azula with red-rimmed eyes that burn with held back tears. “I think maybe you guys should go.”
All of the memes on the internet about drunk girls being the friendliest people on the planet are so true. Sokka realizes he’s a bit late learning this fact, but the time that he could’ve spent partying in college was mostly spent trying to keep his head above water and not sink into grief.
So he learns it now, while Zuko is taking entirely too long in this dive bar’s bathroom and he notices two girls on the other side of the room very obviously looking at him and bursting into giggles. The one in altogether too much pink points in his direction, and in a half-pitying way Sokka finds it amusing. He flashes the girls a smile, kind without being overly provocative. He isn’t that drunk.
When Zuko gets back and the two of them make their way up to the bar again, Sokka is too invested in his drink to realize someone else has come up next to him until she bumps into him, whether from unsteadiness or on purpose he can’t say. He looks, and it’s the girl that was with the girl-in-pink, with red eyeshadow and lips to match . In the dim lighting of the bar it looks positively sultry, but the idea of dating still scares Sokka too much for him to attempt being with anyone at the moment.
“Hey, stranger,” she says, her voice a little too loud for the setting. She shouts like she’s at a club; she’s dressed like it too, so Sokka imagines her and her friend must be either coming or going from one. “You come here often?”
He winces slightly at the bad pickup line, taking it more as a sign of how drunk this girl is than her actually flirting with him. “No, as a matter of fact,” he says amusedly, trying to humor her.
“I knew it! I knew your face didn’t look familiar. I would recognize a face that handsome anywhere,” she drawls, and his bemused smile turns sheepish like he can’t quite accept how smooth that line almost was. “Are you single?” She asks, suddenly shocking him with her boldness. “Because I would love to take you home tonight.”
He stammers, suddenly bashful around this strange girl in a way he hasn’t felt in years. Zuko finds the most inopportune moment to return from the bathroom, and Sokka feels two strong hands grip his shoulders. “He most certainly is,” Zuko says, ignoring the way that Sokka gives him the stink eye.
“Well-” Sokka interjects before the girl can get any ideas. “I think you’re a little too far gone for you to be taking strange guys home.” And, because Zuko smacks his shoulder, he adds, “but how about I give you my number?”
When the girl with red eyeshadow digs a sharpie from her bag and writes her name and phone number on his hand, Sokka feels slightly apprehensive about texting this ‘Suki’ despite Zuko’s encouragements.
The next week, however, when he returns from his first date with Suki, he thinks running into her in a bar might’ve been some sort of sign.
This time, Suki doesn’t ask Azula to do any digging around in internet archives or social media pages for her. With a last name and a general area of where she lived, Suki finds it considerably easier to track down the white-haired girl on her own. Besides, it’s not like Yue is going anywhere anytime soon, she thinks rather morbidly.
The cemetery is easy enough to find with GPS directions, and there’s a weird haze over the day as if the weather knows Suki is exploring parts of her boyfriend’s grief she shouldn’t be poking around in alone. She curses the cloud cover of the day, gray and dreary in the way that reminds her of hospital room walls and the couch in her old therapist’s office.
She climbs out of her car and walks into the wrought iron gates of the cemetery, and it starts raining . Still, pressing forward feels slightly inevitable. Curiosity eats away at her the longer she puts off her little quest, and there’s a small pang of guilt every time she sees the screenshot from findagrave.com in her camera roll between a picture of Sokka at their favorite pizza place and a photo of her and Ty Lee’s attempt at a pie from last week.
She wants to think this will satiate that curiosity, that coming here will give her some kind of closure. Closure she doesn’t even deserve because she didn’t even know Yue and shouldn’t get to grieve a girl she never met, a girl whose death Sokka had to pick up the pieces of because she was his wife and she was too young to die.
She’s read over the obituary so many times she thinks she might be able to recite it from memory. Survived by her husband, Sokka Ashoona. Her husband, Sokka. Suki’s boyfriend, her husband, the same man. The knowledge that both phrases mean the same thing doesn’t sting as much as she thought it would. It only reminds her of the taste of bile in the back of her throat and the terrible guilt that washed over her as Azula read the article aloud.
The ground underfoot squelches into mud the longer it rains and the more Suki walks through the grass, tracking down the stone that she knows is here somewhere ; but she doesn’t make a habit of navigating her way through graveyards to find people she’s never met before, she trudges through row after row of headstones until she finds the one she’s looking for.
Considerably more damp than before and with her hair frizzing underneath the hood of her jacket, she finds it eventually. Approaching it feels the same as treading down the stairs of her childhood home to sneak a midnight snack, avoiding the floorboards she knows will creak and give her away.
There are fresh flowers at her grave.
White lilies, heavy with the weight of rain and looking just as mournful as Suki feels. She tries not to think about who exactly left them here, and settles for leaving the bouquet of tulips that were on sale at the supermarket next to them reverently.
Yue Nakasuk , it reads, etched into the granite with a full moon carved above her name. Always in our hearts, always watching over us.
It’s kind of cheesy in the way memorials always are, and Suki feels like maybe she should say a prayer or at least shed a tear or something. That feels right, appropriate. Like it’ll make her feel better to pretend that she’s here for more than selfish reasons like discovering things she shouldn’t.
“Hi, Yue,” she says instead, under her breath. If dead people can hear then Yue will surely hear her whispering; if they can’t, Suki would rather not look insane standing in the middle of an unfamiliar cemetery. “Sokka misses you a lot, and it hurts him. I don’t know how to make it better. I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if I should .”
It sounds silly now that she says it out loud. It sounds silly and selfish and like she cares more about herself than Sokka- but she loves him like the tides love the sand and the moon loves the sun- and she hates herself for this and all at once she starts crying. She feels like a fucking fake, and maybe she is, but the tragedy of it all pulls the same heartstrings that looking at old pictures of Kya does and Suki hates that people keep falling out of Sokka’s life in the worst ways.
She wants to be different.
Even as she stares at the hewn letters in the stone, Suki tries to keep herself from doing the math. But it’s too easy, her brain does it automatically and it makes more tears replace the ones she wipes away with her jacket sleeve as she turns around.
Yue was only twenty .
Suki trudges through the grass to the sidewalk, shaking a bit of mud off her sneakers before she turns to head back to her car. The ground feels slightly unsteady beneath her like a tilting carnival funhouse, and she shuffles slowly to the gray Toyota with the faded bumper stickers and the little blue elephant plushie sitting on her dash.
In the time that she’s been here, another car has pulled up. A man gets out, and Suki finds herself imagining maybe he’s here visiting his wife or his dad or a brother that he misses dearly. He gives Suki a sympathetic smile with the same puffy eyes and red-tipped nose she knows she wears, like they share some sort of bond in grief that seems to say ‘it’ll all be okay’.
She doesn’t really deserve it, she thinks as she cranks the heat in her car and warms up from the damp and cold rain. She doesn’t deserve it, but maybe there’s something to learn from it.
Falling in love with Suki is so easy that it scares him. Being around her is so natural and easy and it is terrifying how quickly he begins to find her a fixture in his life like something he can’t imagine being without. He finds it so easy to think of a forever with her and how difficult it is to remind himself that falling feels just like flying until you hit the ground.
Sokka feels so at home like this, so comfortable like he hasn’t felt since the accident, with Suki half asleep on his chest and The Princess Bride on the television and so, so much love in his heart. Lazy fingers rake through her auburn brown hair, and he can’t help but laugh at the way she stumbles through reciting lines the way only someone who’s seen a movie a dozen times can.
This feeling isn’t unfamiliar to Sokka, but it is different. Suki’s personality is so electric, blazing like a wildfire with that outgoing nature he’s come to expect from the girl who can out-eat him at Taco Bell and thinks that going hiking is a fun date idea. She’s loud and laughs like there’s no tomorrow and can kick his ass without even thinking and she’s wonderful and beautiful and so perfect -
And he’s always comparing it to Yue. How Yue had been so endearingly prim and proper when he introduced her to his dad and how Suki is as boisterous as ever like she’s known Hakoda her whole life. How they both get along with his sister, but how Yue would follow Katara’s lead where Suki takes charge. How Yue took her tea as is and Suki likes to dump more creamer than any human should ever drink in her coffee.
He knows it doesn’t make either of them lesser, or worse, or bad at all. He only wishes he didn’t have to compare Suki to impossible standards of a girl she’ll never be, a girl that exists only in his mind and has been laying cold and gone for years.
“Hmm, Socks? Whatcha thinking about?” She asks, her head picked up to look at him with a half-grin and tired eyes that seem impossibly blue, impossibly enamored with him. He feels his heart both melt and sink, and he didn’t know that one person could feel so sad and so happy all at once.
“Nothing really,” he says as she tucks her head against him again, the curve of her jaw fitting so neatly against his collarbone and neck that it might have been made for her (like it had once felt made for Yue). “Just thinking about how much I love you.”
“I don’t know how many times we can have this argument, Suki,” Sokka sighs, his head cradled between his hands as he leans forward on the bed. How many times have they had this argument? The one where Suki wants to move in together, to find an apartment or house and get engaged and maybe get a dog and all those nice things couples do when they’ve been together this long.
Suki sighs, pacing up and down the length of her bedroom and stepping around piles of laundry that needs to be done. “I know, I know. You want to wait until you’re done with school and until this and that happens,” she sighs. If she’s heard the arguments she’s heard them a thousand times, and none of them seem to stick all that well in her mind. She sounds frustrated to her own ears, her voice high-pitched and straining not to yell the way she tends to in arguments like this. “But Sokka- ”
“Suki, please,” he says, and he sounds so tired, so weary and done with talking about this that she reacts on instinct and pulls out the trump card she shouldn’t even be holding onto.
“Yue is the reason you won’t marry me!” She shouts at Sokka, because she wants to provoke him. Wants to feel him angry too, to feel the way adrenaline sings through her so maybe this argument will be solved and over and she can quit bringing up the fact that her lease is almost up and if they looked in the right places they could find a nice house together.
It doesn’t work that way at all. She sees the fight leave Sokka’s body immediately, watches his shoulders sag and his eyes lose their luster and he doesn’t get angry. He’s just sad, and the knife edge of that twisting in her gut hurts more than Sokka yelling at her could, more than waiting a million years to get proposed to could. “I know she is,” he says, and the thin, strained quality of his voice is salt in the wound. “But you didn’t have to say it.”
She reaches for him and hesitates halfway, her hand outstretched and hanging in midair before it reaches his shoulder. “Sokka, I-” Her voice is the one that breaks then, sounding thin and reedy before she loses it entirely, sobs and apologies and half-angry babble all choked out at once.
He’s calm . His hands don’t shake when they hold her shoulders and guide her to sit on the bed, and there’s no anger in his tone when he finally addresses her after what feels like lifetimes . “Suki,” he says, interrupting her rambling cries. “Sukes, please.” It’s blatant pleading, helplessly desperate, and though her heart sits in her stomach her sobs die down into sniffles and she can’t quite make eye contact.
Instead she focuses on his collar, where she knows underneath his Old Navy t-shirt there are three freckles in a triangle. She draws lines between them like constellations while he sleeps sometimes, even in the dark because she knows Sokka like she knows herself, all the lines and planes and details that make him up and she loves every bit of it. “I’m sorry,” she says, sniffling pathetically and wiping her nose with her sleeve. “I didn’t-”
“I know you didn’t,” Sokka says, his hands steady on her shoulders. His lips press against her forehead and she feels his tears as they drip from his chin onto the top of her head. Another round of tears overtakes her when Sokka pulls her into a tight hug, and she feels so undeserving of the unconditional love he gives her when she’s always been too selfish with him and never quite gh. good enough even though he’d give her the world on a silver platter if he thought she wanted it. “Someday, okay, Sukes? I want that and I just…. I can’t, right now.”
Suki doesn’t know how it feels to be in his shoes, and she prays to every deity she knows that she’ll never get it. But she doesn’t have to, she realizes now, to understand that Sokka’s in pain and hurting and needs healing she can’t quite provide.
The idea to marry Yue is a sudden one, the kind of genius that strikes Sokka as he lies awake at three am and startles him into alertness so he doesn’t sleep at all. With Yue fast asleep beside him, her white hair fanned out across the pillow and the delicate curve of her waist illuminated by pale moonlight, Sokka is certain he wants to marry Yue more than he has ever been certain of anything in his whole life.
She looks so peaceful laying there, her lips pursed just so and the subtle rise and fall of her chest coming in time with the beat of his heart and something in him aches. He feels bad for it the moment her shoulders jump and she’s roused from her sleep, but the smile that curves across her face makes him melt all over again, and it’s just like when he first fell in love with her. “It’s not morning yet,” she mutters, turning over and nuzzling her face into the pillow. Her eyes flutter closed again, and Sokka shuffles around until they’re face to faces, noses almost touching.
“I know, I know. I’ll let you go back to sleep. But Yue?” He says, her blue eyes opening to look at him so earnestly that his heart skips a beat. “I want to marry you.”
She smiles a sleepy smile at him, something in her gaze a little hazy and unfocused. “Mhmm, Sokka, of course I will. But can’t it wait until the morning?” She asks, falling asleep before he can hope to answer.
And in the morning he asks her again, and by that very afternoon they stand on the steps of the courthouse in a prom dress and old tux, with a bouquet and corsage made from whatever the supermarket florist had on hand.
It’s a perfect wedding.
It’s a perfect wedding.
Suki has never been happier, she thinks, than when she’s surrounded by some of the best friends a girl could ever hope to ask for and marrying the love of her life. Between the excitement of laughter and popping champagne bottles (and a failed attempt at sabering champagne on Sokka’s part), the tenderness of their first dance and the gentle ribbing of their friends speeches, Suki feels a bit like a princess; her fairytale dreams have come true, and knight-in-shining armor Sokka has showed up to be her prince charming.
Late in the night, when everyone has left and the dance floor is covered in confetti and her feet ache so much that taking off her heels is painful, Suki asks Sokka if they can do one last thing before they go home. Though nearing midnight, Sokka agrees, and he doesn’t seem to recognize the little cemetery Suki directlys him to until they’re right around the corner.
With a soft smile and a gentle tug on his hand, Suki leads him to Yue’s grave she found so long ago, so still and unchanged when so much between her and Sokka has. She pulls a white lily from her bouquet and drapes it on top of the stone, and pretends she doesn't notice when Sokka sniffles next to her.
"Hey, Sokka?"
"Yeah, Sukes?"
"I love you."
"I love you too."