Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Despite herself, Katara smiles.

She smiles when she sees the telling glow of Aang’s eyes and arrows, the bolt of blinding light rising from his crystal shell. She smiles, because she doesn’t know what Aang’s given up for this.

In a better world, she tears her eyes away for a second - one second - and looks at the girl in front of her. She’s stopped fighting her, and her water isn’t needed. Is it shock?

Azula always lies.

Who is that? It doesn’t matter. Aang is beautiful, and terrifying, and she smiles, because she doesn’t know. She smiles because she doesn’t look. Katara is about to let her water fall in puddles on the floor, to catch Aang when he falls, inevitably, tired, tired, tired. He will, because he always does. And she will catch him, because she always does.

And, inevitably, inevitably, inevitably.

Something will come crashing down.

It happens in an instant. Katara could have blinked and missed everything. In that instant, Aang is falling too soon, Katara is not smiling, and she is not fighting the Dai Li agents that have surrounded her. Because she knew, inevitably, inevitably, she would have to catch him.

And she does.

She catches him, and he does not thank her, because he can’t. His clothes are sizzling, torn at his back - she cannot look at his back. She cannot, will not, because it’s damning. It is damning - the red, bubbling skin, over his back his back his back, and he is dying. She knows he’s dying, because his eyes aren’t looking at her wide wide wide. She knows he’s dying, and she knows that he will not die.

Katara will save him as many times as it takes. This is the price she pays, for every single time he reaches his hand out to her, grip steady but so, so light. This is the price she pays, in her own tears, streaking down her face. She pays it in her bending, the rushing wind in her ears and her hair - she hadn't even noticed it came loose. Appa’s fast, faster than usual, like he can sense Aang fading. His eyes are far too open. Katara would shut them for him if she wasn't too busy fumbling for her bag.

Toph feels it too, and Katara knows this, because she is very quiet and very still, and is gripping Sokka’s arm very tightly. Sokka feels it too, because he is not complaining even when his skin turns red and crescent-moon divots form in his skin. His eyes plead. All of them do.

It’s almost like-

With a grip like an earthbender and a heart racing faster than a kangaroo-puppy, Katara uncaps the little vial of water. It shakes in her hand, the shining stream of water coming out in drip-drip-drips.

It reminds me-

She can’t help but cry, spinning the water into an oh-so-familiar spiral and lifting him, gently, gently. Hand to his back. Spirits, it’s hot. His heart isn’t beating.

Katara listens. She’s patient.

Just the splitting image-

She’s so patient and so stubborn, stubborn enough to ignore everything telling her that this is wrong. That Aang’s eyes are too dark. Too dark.

It’s just so very-

Aang has fallen before, and Katara has caught him before.

Not like this.

-familiar.

Not like this.

Not all at once. Not with his mouth ever so slightly agape, eyes wide wide wide to a world that didn’t care enough. To her. Katara, who wasn’t enough.

How jealousy takes her, when she pictures his soul, shining sky blue against the ink sky. How jealousy takes her, how envious she becomes of the world which he returns to.

Because Aang deserves that world - bright and happy and loving, but doesn’t she deserve it too? Doesn’t he know she’s waiting?

Toph’s voice is so small, too small - everything is too small against an unforgiving sky - because she is small, too small. It’s like squeezing herself against Sokka will make her disappear-

-sort of like-

-into that ink. And she is so-

-mournful, crying out-

-helpless, because she-

-feels his heart beat one-two-stop-

-knows, well enough, why Katara’s eyes are on them and not meeting Aang’s.

And it is not the same as it was. It is not what she expected.

It is violent, and searing - like white-hot metal against bare skin - like ice-cold hands against her - like forgetting everything, all at once - like nothing has ever felt so painful.

Toph’s voice is smaller than she is, and ever so gentle, tip-toeing around admitting it, because Toph is just as stubborn as she is.

“Katara,” she says, and barely that. “C-close his eyes.”

Katara looks down at them.

“I can feel you not moving.”

Katara looks down at them.

“Katara.”

Katara. Looks. Down. At. Them.

…

We know this very, very well.

A drop of water falls on Aang’s closed eyelid.

Chapter Text

Sokka recalls a very long time ago when Katara was still sitting next to him, instead of a Katara-shaped hole in the air, clinging so desperately to something like it'll explode into dust if she lets go.

She isn't wrong. She isn't wrong.

In both his and hers defense, that could be three days ago. Or four. Sokka can’t keep track of the time with his brain as it is, tired enough to shut down everything that isn't allowing him to take hold of Appa’s reigns, to say yip yip without feeling metal prongs scraping down his throat.

He recalls her grasping Appa’s leather reins in both her steady hands, shaking with worry instead of sobs. Recalls himself, lounging against his saddle. Insisting they should turn back.

Maybe they should have.

And, oh. How far they have fallen.

And, oh. How long they have flown.

Three days. Or four. Appa, he thinks, deserves more praise, for carrying one person, two black holes, and a nightmare on his back.

And, oh. Death is such a grating thing.

Katara feels death in the hands that press into wounds like she can bend the life inside them too, in the blistered finger tips up close, catching catching catching and never holding tight enough, in the life line that stretches far too long.

Toph feels death in both her optic nerves with nothing to carry, willing them to send her colors she can name but never know and names she has never known at all, tearing them out when they fail to show her the sight she never wanted to feel. You see so many things when you can't.

Sokka is trying very, very hard to clear his mind.

Sokka is trying, and he is failing. His attempts are at best disappointing and at worst the most favorable way out. He closes his eyes over seawater, willing spray to turn into soft snow, and he tries very, very hard to clear his mind of a nightmare that started with the cold and ended with the cold.

Cold hands. Cold feet.

When he lands, he stumbles, and he falls, and it is his father that catches him and not air. Murmured words are exchanged, coos of apologies and silence of grief.

It makes the shrieking all the more sudden.

“Get away!” Katara screams, like the ground beneath her has burst into flames. The ocean surrounds her like a captive and she holds what she's holding all the more tight. “Get away from me! Don’t- stop it! Stop touching him!”

It's cruel, horrible, awful, how he can't bear to see what she clings to so desperately as him. Katara is not wrong, and neither is Sokka, and neither was Aunt Wu. Spirits, the skin. Colors in shades that skin should not be. Purple in places there should not be purple. Eyes have never been more closed.

But her screams are nothing more than sound at this point, and men he grew up forgetting are backing away in partial fear, and Katara is still screaming bloody murder.

“Katara,” he says, gently, gently. He is mimicking what he's heard and seen, what he's allowed himself to remember. Something breaks. It's not either of them. “He's… he's not here anymore.”

-he never was never will never is-

There is someone kept inside Sokka’s chest like a secret he shows and doesn't tell. The someone that knows how to respond to Katara’s voice, horse from screeching, shaking in desperation and exhaustion.

Katara is very, very stubborn. She has been holding onto dust for a very long time.

But when Sokka takes her hand away from the small of its back and holds it in both his, ignoring how cold it is, she looks up at him with eyes sparkling from something very different from wonder.

“But he was,” she whispers. “He was.”

____________

Sokka is ashamed to say that he’d forgotten about Toph until the deafening crack of stubborn skin against the cliff shielding Cameleon Bay sounded.

Stubborn skin won.

Toph hit, and hit, and hit, and Sokka was too busy thinking about Katara and her accusations to watch what she was making.

A statue. It looked like nothing.

Nothing to him.

Sokka is there to catch her when she falls, hands and knees on the dense sand below her; and he is there to brush her bangs from her face, looking straight at her blank, dry eyes.

He looks at her for a split second before she decides she can’t do it anymore. His arms are full of Toph, of a shaking ball of rage that’s hardened and blackened until it became nothing more than grief, until it became nothing more than nothing.

He looks at the largest tent in the bay, set up for meetings, not containment. Tears in the fabric that would usually indicate attack, that would usually spark fear in Sokka’s chest, only indicate resistance in his mind.

He looks at the men of his tribe gathered around a mound of the herbs they could find and dried leaves as replacements for the ones they couldn't. A water tribe burial doesn't suit the occasion, but Sokka didn't know what else to do.

He’s not Katara. He isn’t-

He isn’t Aang. He isn’t mom.

He’s just a fifteen-year-old man-

You still are a kid!

-on sand that is far, far, far from the cold where his story starts, holding a girl that is so strong, usually, and staring at the entrance to Katara’s tent.

“Sokka,” she screamed. “Let go of me! Let- where is he? Where’s Aang?”

He crouches, allowing Toph to climb onto his back. Her arms shake around his neck.

“Gone.”

“Sokka?” Toph chokes against his shoulder. “Is everything going to be okay?”

No. Nothing is ever going to be okay again.

“Yeah,” he says instead. “We’ll be okay.”

____________

Sokka is proven once again to be a liar when the next six days are far from okay.

Fish traps come up with nothing. Food supplies run out. Three fire nation ships pass in a span of an hour. Katara tries to bury herself at least twice. All the flowers he plants die in a day.

It makes a little sense.

Summer gets hotter and hotter. Katara’s skin is cold to the touch and she keeps reaching for a hand that isn’t there. Sokka finds her one night three inches from low tide, knees to her chest, drawing symbols in the sand with a stick.

“Hey,” he says. He recognizes the symbol of the air nomads in her drawings, beside the symbol of their tribe. “Can’t sleep?”

Katara grunts. “Wish I could.”

She’s turned away from the lonely stone. It’s not an accident.

“I’m sorry.” Sokka crouches, letting waves lap over his knees. He looks at the moon’s reflection on the waves. It’s different; he sees her every night. “About…”

“Sokka, it’s fine.” No it isn’t. “I don’t care.” Yes, she does.

They don’t say anything else, even though there’s a million things they could. They could talk about Toph’s habit of bending the sand into shapes that hadn’t existed yet, shapes she remembers through her extra sense, wandering for hours at a time and coming back angry and sad and small, small. They could talk about the weather. They could talk about the way their father looks at Katara because I get it, and the way he looks at Sokka because you don’t, actually.

Katara didn’t mean to yell. She was just angry. It happens sometimes.

“I need to get out of here,” she says, finally, finally. “I can’t stay. I’ll take Aang and-”

She catches herself, slaps her hand over her mouth, squeezes her eyes shut.

“I’ll take Appa. We’ll go and find somewhere in the- maybe the North.”

Sokka neglects to mention that there is not going to be a North in the next two months. “You’re not leaving without me,” he insists instead. “Or Toph. We’re a team.”

“Not without him.”

“Not without him,” he agrees.

They don’t say anything else. Sokka looks back at the moon, and thinks.

In the morning, Toph neglects to mention Sokka’s eyebags, focusing instead on his plan.

He’s never noticed how much emotion she expresses, despite her perpetually blank eyes. Her shoulders hunch over, just slightly, holding her elbows. Afraid. He’s just never looked hard enough to see it.

He coughs. Toph neglects to mention it.

“It’s risky,” she says finally. “Very risky.”

“We’ve done plenty of risky things before. I think we can pull it off.”

“How does Katara feel about it?”

See, that’s the thing. “I haven’t… brought it up to her yet.”

They both look over Sokka’s shoulder, him with his eyes and Toph with her feet. Not at the stone, but at the girl. She tends to the flowers Sokka planted, bending their stems, humming something. It almost looks like it used to, at their village, before everything.

She almost looks happy, when her eyes are closed.

“She won’t leave him.” Toph, observant as ever, crosses her arms and scowls at the ground. “Someone needs to knock some sense into her.”

It’s been a week. A week is not as long as it used to feel.

“I thought-”

“...that if everyone else agreed to it, she wouldn’t have a choice?”

Sokka nods, and Toph’s scowl deepens.

“Fine. Let’s get to work.”

____________

Katara hates it.

None of them expected her to like it. They all know her well enough to know that Katara wants less than nothing to do with the Fire Nation. None of them expected her to smile for the first time in a week and say, great plan, Sokka! Let me go pack my things. You’re the best big brother ever.

Maybe Sokka hoped.

Naturally, she hates it, and she makes that very clear when she slaps Dad’s hand off her shoulder and backs away from the men, and Toph, surrounding her.

“No,” she says, voice harder than Toph’s statues. “I’m not doing that.”

“You just said you wanted to leave!” Sokka argues, hands thrown out like she’s being unreasonable. In fact, she’s being perfectly reasonable.

A week is not as long as it used to feel.

“I didn’t mean that! You know that’s not what I meant!”

“Katara, it’s our only choice. The fire nation is getting closer every day and they’re going to find us eventually.”

Sokka looks at Bato, eyebrows raised. Bato was the person most opposed to the plan - aside from Katara herself. To hear him speaking up in defense of it…

He appreciates it.

“It’s too risky.”

“Less risky than staying here!”

There are voices, then, most agreeing. Some are gentle and some are not. Katara takes a step back like a cornered animal, eyes wide. Sokka steps forward, arms raised in mock-surrender. “Katara, I know you don’t want to leave,” he whispers, in as gentle a voice as he can muster. Him goes unsaid. “But we can’t stay here. Please, trust me.”

She looks down at his shoes, lips pursed and eyes watering. Sokka takes her hand - clenched into a tight fist, ready to hit - and squeezes.

A breath. “Fine,” she says. “Fine.”

____________

Toph discovered the art of bending metal in a tiny metal cage on the way to a home that suffocated her in itchy fabric and tasteless food.

It seems strange, to be out in the open air, twisting the hull of a ship and tearing it apart, ushering her friends in after her. Appa is left outside, with Katara. She knows it’s mid-afternoon because it’s Summer, and daytime in summer is hot and noisy. There’s five, maybe six soldiers out on the deck. More below. It isn’t a very well-equipped ship, nor are they well-equipped soldiers. At least four of them are asleep.

A cold, trembling hand catches her wrist as she’s leaping from Appa’s saddle. Katara’s voice is clear as day, wet as the ocean beneath them.

“Be careful,” she begs. “I can’t lose you too.”

Toph nods, slipping her arm from Katara’s grasp. Normally, she’d grin, say something snarky like, “I’m always careful, sugar queen.”

Not now.

Down the hall, she hears the clang of metal against skull, a cut-off cry to sound the alarm. A body - still breathing, just very knocked out - hits the ground by Sokka’s feet. Behind her, Katara dips under the waves, thin tentacles of water reaching up and sliding around a guard’s ankle.

She’s quiet. That’s the thing about water.

Quiet enough so nobody hears her, only her victim thrashing in the waves before being dunked in the salt. Above her, his fellow guards rush to the edge of the deck, like fools with no self preservation.

Normally, she’d grin.

Instead, she follows after one of Sokka’s friends from the Southern Water Tribe - what was his name? Vareq.

Vareq would probably be quiet if he wasn’t wearing too much armor, slamming together at his joints. They might as well have left the guard awake to scream with how quickly more soldiers rush down the hallway, spears drawn, matching scowls hidden under their helmets.

Toph is not deterred by those scowls, or those helmets, because she cannot see them. She can see the metal surrounding them, the entire layout of the ship she could so easily send crashing to the ocean floor.

“Don’t destroy the ship,” Sokka had warned her before they’d taken off. “We’ll need it.”

So, she pulls and pulls at the edges of the hole she made, twisting them back together as best she can. She listens for dripping water, and hears none.

Behind her, Vareq is putting up a good fight with his own weapon. Toph makes a mental note to never tease Sokka about his choice of weapon again. The shout of a female guard as his boomerang meets her skull is pleasant enough.

He’s left three standing. Toph binds their feet to the floor, bending strips of metal to wrap around their ankles. She hits two of them in the head with the third’s spear and knocks him out with her trusty fist.

She can almost hear the warrior’s eyebrows raising. It may have been satisfying in literally any other situation.

Above them, she counts three Fire Nation soldiers left. Someone she assumes is Sokka is fighting fire-to-spear with one of them. Another gets dragged off the deck of the ship by what can only be Katara’s waterbending. The last one is still asleep. Spirits, this is easier than she thought it’d be.

In the end, they steal their clothes and throw them overboard. Katara turns away and sobs into her new Fire Nation cape while Toph and the rest of the Southern Water Tribe do it, leaving her with Sokka to compose herself.

Toph is not deterred by her cries because she cannot bring herself to care. She is not deterred by the sight of bodies hitting the ocean floor because she cannot see nor feel them. She is not deterred by pestering voices in the back of her head - all merging into one.

It doesn't matter. It cannot matter if she intends to survive in this new world. Those who fall behind are going to have to catch up to her.