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Aang moved as fluidly and as continuously as the wind. Or he tried to. He had attachments to the world, like anyone else, but he tried not to let himself be weighed down by them. He always liked when he had time to stop by and see his friends. He typically found Toph the most difficult to find. Everyone else usually replied with the same few places they'd be, in sync with a particular time of the year. Not Toph. For someone so grounded to her element, she was so like an air nomad in many ways to him. He had to write in advance to find her, but if he had the spare time, he'd go looking.
It was a little easier since she'd started her academy, since she had to be there so frequently. Still, it wasn't a guarantee. Like today. He found her somewhere he didn't anticipate. At one of her parent's properties, near her academy. He essentially broke in, old habits, but he found that without a complete disguise, he couldn't really break into anywhere. So basically, security let him in.
He fluttered around the property, the house, the garden, stopping near a tree in the distance when he heard a noise. Music. The plucking of strings. He didn't know Toph had people to play music. How exciting. He followed the noise, figuring he'd just…ask where she was, searching this estate wouldn't be tough, but it still, it wasn't a small place. Besides, he wanted to give his compliments to the musician.
He hopped along large rocks lining the pathways, barely touching the ground until he found the player in the garden, sitting smack in the middle of the stone pathway, rather than underneath the shade of the grand tree, with a long, wooden instrument sitting over them on a short stand.
The instrument was made of the most breathtaking dark wood, with flying boars in the clouds among flower petals, dancing along the edges as decoration. It had a seemingly endless array of fine strings layered one after the other. He wasn't even sure how many there were. Far more than the only stringed instrument he knew how to play, the pipa. And he wasn't even very good at that. His fingers were clumsy, as if they were too light and too heavy to play properly. He could carry a tune, but his fingers slipped and slid along the strings and missed notes he was sure he'd played.
This player was highly skilled. Fingers adorned in tortoiseshell fingerpicks, plucking delicately away at the endless ladder of strings. The player, was Toph. After all these years, she'd never once mentioned she was musically inclined. She didn't seem the type. But there she sat on the ground, long hair pulled back in a lazily done ponytail, head tilted towards the sky, gently tilting side to side as she let her fingers dance along the strings. He could hear her quietly humming the notes right before she played them, creating a delayed effect in the sound. Overlapping, layering quietly and calmly.
Quietly and calmly.
Two words he wouldn't often use to describe Toph.
Yet here she was.
She didn't seem to miss a single string and she didn't seem to be playing any particular piece, just letting her mind go where it would. Aang liked this instrument. Not that he'd dream of playing it, and certainly not half this well, but usually when he traveled to the Earth Kingdom, he could hear it from the windows of certain establishments. Usually high class ones.
He stood perfectly still on a rock, watching her play, almost holding his breath to be sure he wouldn't miss a note. Each note resonated so crisply and delicately, carrying across the breeze. Toph slowly turned her head to the side to "look" in his direction. Despite her lack of sight, he found that she was often eerily spot on when she looked at people and things. Toph's eyes reminded him of jade. Earth. Pale, cloudy, light green, swimming pools of color that were covered yet still so expressive. Sometimes he wondered what color her eyes were, before they were like jade. Maybe like tea? Warm, deep brown, amber and sepia in the light. Or maybe more like…the leaves of a tree. Dark, rich, heavy green. It was a pointless thought, but his mind wandered there from time to time.
"Only one person has an outline as hazy as sand. When'd you get here Twinkletoes?" Her fingers stilled on the strings and she rested her hands in her lap.
"Uh yesterday. I didn't know you played."
"I learned when I was a little kid. Like…little little. And when I started going blind, it was like the only thing I could still do on my own easily besides earthbending. Granted, I started losing my sight pretty early, I barely remember being able to see, but there was still a learning curve. Not that my parents helped that."
Aang knew that. Toph told him once. He stepped down from the rock, walking down the path to stop in front of the instrument, the front of the wooden stand had matching decorations. Once he'd asked how she was able to acknowledge colors when people mentioned them if she had no clue what they looked like.
And she told him that she technically wasn't always blind.
But she called it such a huge technicality that it didn't really count. She could never remember being able to see well. Everything had always been hazy and blurry, but she described it as getting progressively worse as she aged. By five or six, she could only make out shapes and blurs of color. That was when her parents became concerned. The doctor described her eyes as "feeble", claiming that the lenses of her eyes were decomposing. By the time she met Aang, colors were essentially faded entirely, lights were impressively bright, and everything was a pale, cloudy haze of…nothing much. Nowadays, Toph admitted she couldn't see much of anything. Her vision had become splotches of cloudy and dark. She hadn't seen shapes or colors in well over a decade.
"You've been playing a long time then. That's why you're so good." He noted, circling the stand to sit beside her.
"I am pretty good. Wanna give it a try?"
"Oh absolutely not. I'm more of a dizi person. I'd probably break one of your strings." He laughed as he settled down beside her, just admiring the woodwork of the instrument up close. "Yeah maybe it's for the best that you don't play. I'd hate to have to tell everyone I caused the next stage of the Avatar Cycle because I killed you for breaking one of my strings."
"And you know what? I'd deserve it. Would be pretty embarrassing to have to tell the new Avatar when they visit me in the Spirit World."
"I'm sure it wouldn't be the most embarrassing way an Avatar has died." She shrugged, pulling the picks off of her fingers, reaching into her lap for a small bag, placing each one into the bag before closing it.
"No…probably not." He sighed, watching her drag a finger down the strings in a cascade of ethereal notes. Her hands were nothing like this when she was earthbending. Here they were so loose and relaxed, flowing and dancing with the music coming from the instrument.
"Oh well come on, if you're gonna keep staring at it, you can at least play a note or two."
"No, no, I'm still traumatized from you teaching me to earthbend actually."
"You always say that as if it was more traumatic than the literal war. It was years ago Twinkletoes."
"I mean it was pretty bad…"
"Yep, and now you're a master earthbender. You're welcome! Come here."
"I- I don't think I can-"
"Oh shut up. The guzheng doesn't bite. I do."
"Exactly! So-" His protests were futile as she slapped her palm over the back of his hand, pulling it towards the instrument.
Aang always felt strange about the fact that he'd grown up. Time and experiences and lessons and sacrifices forced him to. And maybe it wasn't always obvious by hearing him speak, but people knew it by looking at him. Especially when he considered himself in comparison to Toph. They used to be around the same size when they met. Both small, scrawny, stick limbed children. They actually were able to share clothes and shoes, they were so similar in size. Not anymore. Toph had stayed relatively tiny, she only grew a pinch taller. While her body and face had changed, in general, she was still small.
She was muscular and solid, but her face was slim and impressively adherent to Earth Kingdom beauty standards when not much else about her was. Small, but full lips. Slender, but sharp eyes. Pale skin, like mountain snowfall. Pink cheeks and pink rose petal colored lips. Heavy lashes, as dark as her hair. She was actually very classically beautiful. Not that she knew or cared. Actually, he didn't know if anyone ever told her in recent years. Everyone probably figured she wouldn't hear any of it. But that was in face alone. Maybe if she didn't earthbend and exercise the way she did, her figure would match the standards too. But Aang found it impossible to imagine some slender, swan limbed, fragile, skinny variant of Toph. It seemed so silly even in his imagination.
But her stature remained small.
His had not.
Where they used to be able to stand up straight and be perfectly eye level with one another, he'd sprung up, grown to be irrefutably taller than her. And all his other friends. Her forehead stopped at about his shoulder and if he stood before her and looked straight down, he usually just saw the top of her head. He remembered when he first started growing taller. Toph was the first to notice. Specifically because one day, she reached forward to poke him in the forehead, as she so often did, and nearly poked him in the eye. Everyone else had been a bit taller than him when they all met so they'd yet to notice the difference, but Toph pointed it out almost immediately. And shortly thereafter expressed her discontent for it. She used to be able to push and shove him even without bending because they were so similar in weight, and he still would let her do it now for the most part, but only an ounce of effort could make most of that irrelevant. She wasn't as strong as him anymore. Not even close. Now, she'd always be the better earthbender, but without bending, a battle of pure strength wasn't as much of a battle as it used to be.
And their hands.
As she took his hand in hers and lifted it towards the strings, he was reminded how they'd changed. Her hands were still far rougher than his, covered in callouses, small cuts and scars, and fingernails of different lengths with both smooth and jagged edges. But his hands had a few marks of their own. They weren't as soft as they once were. But their hands also used to be the same size. Now hers were so small compared to his. It wasn't often that Toph and Aang held hands or…whatever this was, but it reminded him how much they'd changed.
She angled his hand up slightly, using her other hand to position his fingers at the top of the strings before dragging his hand straight down. The strings sang out in a bright, cheerful resonance, though it wasn't the same as when she did it earlier. His fingers were tense and clumsy, they caught on a string or two for a second longer than necessary. But it didn't sound bad.
Then she took his hand and dropped it back into his lap. "Look, you played it and nobody died and nothing blew up."
"Yeah. It wasn't as good as yours, but still cool."
"The day you're better than me at this is the day you learn to metalbend Twinkletoes. Here, try. It won't sound the same because you can't wear my picks but it's fine."
So Aang slid close, suppressing his fears of damaging the majestic instrument to let Toph be his teacher once again. She'd gotten…marginally less harsh over the years, but not by an insanely notable amount. He let her handle most of the notes while he just tried to one or two things. He felt that same spark that ignited him when he trained in earthbending. But it didn't feel the same as before. That had been a hearty blaze that caught on his face and stuck in his throat. That tightened his hands into irate little fists. Now that same spark felt…just warm. A pleasant warmth, in his chest, in his stomach. Like a candle in a lamp.
"Come on Aang, if you lean on me any more, you'll crush me." Toph chuckled, leaning back against Aang who, over the course of his music lesson, had gotten close enough to Toph to not miss a beat in hopes of playing anything more impressive than what a toddler could manage.
"Sorry." Aang turned and looked at Toph who had her hands still dancing along the strings even though he'd stopped. He never knew Toph could be so graceful.
"I can hear you staring." Her hands stilled and she turned her head to face him. He raised his hand and brushed his thumb across her cheek to wipe away sweat from them sitting in the sun. Toph always reddened and sweated easily in the sun, but they'd all given up years ago on telling her when to go inside. She scoffed and placed her hand on his wrist, turning her head toward his hand slightly, rather than away.
"Sorry."
"Twinkletoes, Defender of the Universe. Always with the apologies. You know, I don't think you have the hands to play this. Not really. Stick to your air instruments." She slid her hand upwards, running her fingers along his, tracing their outlines lightly.
"So I failed your lesson?"
"Yeah, pretty much." Toph wasn't a touchy feely person in the emotional sense, but in the literal sense, she was a pretty tactile person because it was the only way she could make out detail. She'd touch food, plants, animals if she could, fabrics, people if she knew them well enough, walls, floors, anything she wanted to have a clearer image of. She reached out and poked him in the forehead, right between the eyebrows. He couldn't escape it since they were sitting.
She ran her fingers across his forehead, then his cheeks, tracing a line down his nose and gently brushing her pinky over his eyelashes. Now that he knew what instrument she played, her delicacy and precision when touching people's faces made all the sense in the world. It was the same way she played. There was something…nice about knowing that. Her fingers ran along his jaw and she frowned. She raised her hand to the top of his head, dragging her entire hand across his head. Aang cracked a smile once he realized what she was trying to do.
"What?" He asked with pretend nonchalance.
"Are you trying to grow a…beard?" She asked with an extremely puzzled frown.
"Yeah! What gave it away?"
"Your jaw is fuzzy, but your head is smooth, meaning you shaved recently and made the choice to not shave your face. Why in the world are you growing a beard?" She frowned more deeply, bringing both hands to hold both sides of his face and brush her thumbs across the stubble on his face.
"I thought it might look cool. More grown up?"
"I don't care how it looks, I can't see it. I don't like the feeling. But if I could see, it would probably look dumb."
"Okay well don't touch my face anymore and you won't have to worry about it." He pulled her hands away from his face.
"A beard. Pft. Stupid."
"Maybe the beard will help me play better!" Aang offered with his signature dose of sunshiney optimism.
"It won't!" Toph replied, mocking Aang's tone. She pressed her hands into the ground, beginning to stand.
"Come on Toph, it hasn't even grown yet! Give it a chance. Sokka thinks it'll look good on me."
Toph brushed her hands off and shook her head in disappointment, still facing his general direction even though she was standing now. "Oh that's all the more reason to shave it. What does Sokka know about fashion?"
"I think Sokka is cool and fashionable. I didn't realize you got a say in how fashionable I was or wasn't."
"Yeah well, I do." She shrugged, turned, and started off down the pathway. Aang sprung to his feet, landing silently and following after her, laughing. He was thoroughly entertained by her dislike of his beard. He never considered she wouldn't like it. He knew she'd have an opinion on it, she had an opinion on everything. He just hadn't expected that she wouldn't like it.
"Where are you going?" He practically glided across the rocks on the trail beside her as she walked, following the path of stone. It was undoubtedly easy for her to keep up with in comparison to the rest of the area.
"To train students. Are you crashing here?"
"Yes please."
"Coming to school with me?"
"Sure."
"Good, I can show you up in front of my students. Been a while." She spoke plainly, like it was now a new thing on her to do list. Casually beating the Avatar himself in a bit of earthbending. So together they went, spending the rest of the day there and being tired enough upon their return to just eat, wash up, and go to sleep.
There was no more mention of the beard.
When Toph woke up in the morning, Aang's face was clean shaven once more.
For no particular reason.
When Toph brought a hand to Aang's face, hoping to complain some more, she only cracked a smile, scoffed, and crossed her arms over her chest. "They moved my stuff inside since apparently it may rain this morning. Wanna listen to me play?"
"Absolutely. Let's go! Just…promise I don't have to play anything today."
"I will make no such promises. Come on Twinkletoes."