Chapter Text
This happens, Dad says. When warriors return home and suddenly it isn't funny haha remember when we almost died that one time, and that other time, and that time after that and the not almost, the for real death, and destruction and blood (so much blood, how could a person possibly contain that much, be flooded by its own, blood?). When you're finally safe and so its finally real and it hits you full on, like a war ship colliding into the ice, except no that doesn't happen anymore, peace, they're at peace, what the hell does that even mean?
What the hell does that even mean? Is what Sokka says when Dad says that's why Katara's spent the better part of the last two weeks, curled up in her bedfurs, sleeping, or pantomiming sleep, working a braided piece of twine around her fingers. There'd once been a time where he'd yearned for Dad's input, his advice, on anything and everything. Now it irritates him.
At best, it just seems irrelevant. Anguna's grandfather, who sits outside their hut, cleaning fish offers platitudes like that to young people.
"Keep your knives pure and your thoughts clean or they'll rust and you'll never find a wife," he warns Sokka sagely. The fish guts spill into the bucket. Sokka nods and promises he will and forgets the entire interaction.
That's talking to his father about anything that isn't fishing and ... well Dad doesn't understand his inventions either. So its fishing or nothing right now. Certainly not Katara.
"You're not her father," he says gently- gentle but condescending, I know, I know that he wants to say.
They were born in the same Mars cycle which is auspicious for siblings in the South (it means you'll be lifelong brothers in arms and it isn't supposed to be literal but he went and got his baby sister caught up in a war or she got herself caught up and he'd follow her anywhere but he's come home and she's still stuck somewhere in the Fire Nation or in that cave with his best friend's dead body across her legs, or somewhere on a Appa flying somewhere that doesn't exist anymore) and considered trashy in the North.
Not everyone in the North, not Yue, who had said that it sounded nice, sounded wonderful, to have a lifelong companion, to have never known loneliness. Yue who had been born lonely and perhaps died lonely (he hopes not, Spirits, he hopes not) and now is alone with only Mars for company).
And Sokka too, in a way. He spends his nights, working sometimes, her light looking over his shoulder at his designs even when he insists they aren't ready yet. Sometimes he puts his scrolls away and just sits with her.
So that's them. Sokka who can't sleep
"Won't sleep," Yue chastises and he tells her to stop nagging, he'll come back to bed in a moment, he just has to sketch something out and she's rolling her pretty pale blue eyes, and glowing in her nightgown, and holding her hand out silently, expectantly and- and Katara who can only sleep.
Gran Gran seems to agree with him that something is wrong but maybe not because she's whistling and puttering around and unlike their father, has no patience for Katara telling her she doesn't have an appetite, she doesn't want to comb her hair.
"That's fine," she says cheerily, forcing a steaming cup of seal milk into Katara's protesting hands. "Do you want one braid or two?"
She wants two braids it seems and doesn't want the milk so they compromise and Gran Gran gives her two braids and Katara hands her back an empty cup.
"Look at my beautiful granddaughter," she tells him, when Sokka enters the hut and he gets barely a glimpse of Katara's face (milk mustache glistening- or is it tear stains? is she crying? still?) before she rolls over and tucks herself back into sleep or whatever she's doing that leaves her more tired than before.
Gran Gran and Sokka eat outside. Home cooking, he thinks, biting into his fish with vigor. They're okay, they're safe, there's halibut ox with Gran Gran's special sauce.
"She's homesick," Gran Gran says when she's finished eating and the fires gone low.
"What?" The fat on the fish skin sparks the flames and he kicks at it without thinking. Sparks on the road were dangerous, they couldn't even have a fire most nights, being tracked, being hunted.
"She's at home," he says carefully, trying to remember that he is no longer the oldest (second oldest when Zuko joined the gang) trying to remember that he is Sokka, next Chief of the Southern Water Tribe (no, no, no, no thank you he thinks whenever someone introduces him as that now. I have somewhere to be that day and for the rest of my life. Fishing trip, prior commitment, can't be your heir, sorry!) and he was brought up to respect his elders.
"Mmnh," Gran Gran says affirmatively, but as though she doesn't see the fallacy. Keep your knives pure and your thoughts clean. "But she's homesick."
"For what?" he asks.
Yue's starting to appear in the sky. He doesn't want to be having this conversation. He wants to go to bed, to go to her, to press his cheek into the slope of her neck and groan and say "you would not believe the conversation I just had with my grandmother," and hear her laugh. Does he remember her laugh or did he make it up? Did he make it all up?
"Oh, you'd probably know better than me," she says unhelpfully. "Our Katara... so spirited, so fearless. So free."
"She won't leave her bed." He sounds like Dad (he hates it).
"What's the point if she can't leave?" Gran Gran laughs at his bewildered look. "Oh, don't get me wrong. At my age especially, any moment with your grands all in one place is a blessing. But she's seen the world. Her heart's too big. She misses it all. That sister of yours, she has the soul of a nomad."
Sokka blinks at her. He can't tell if her word choice is intentional or if she's just talking or if his thoughts are rusting.
"Katara!" she calls suddenly, her voice sharp and scolding. "Dishes! Help your brother!"
Gran Gran is perhaps the only one who hasn't treated them as though they've just come home from war (which they have, obviously). Warm welcome, sure, but other than that, its been business as usual. She tells him to descale dinner he does. Katara's got two braids in her hair and everythings the same and nothing is. Home cooking and Gran Gran's special sauce.
They do the dishes in silence. Sokka knows that "do the dishes" really meant "talk to your sister" and "this has gone on long enough" and "back in my day" but he finds himself with nothing to say.
He goes through the motions of drying, ensuring no ice can crystalize. Momo licks some of the sauce off his hand- Momo?!!
Momo's there, holding a tiny pouch in his paws, shivering slightly but seeming happy to see them.
Katara -as he turns to her to say "Momo! It's Momo! This is so great, do you think Aang-" is unsurprised.
"C'mon," she says. "I have seal milk for you."
Inside, Katara gives Momo the seal milk she's meant to be drinking and he gives her the pouch- its a well practiced trade, he realizes, as is the way she retrieves her baleen box, a tenth birthday gift ("For the things you'd dive into a whale's mouth to get back," Gran Gran had teased).
Katara tugs open the draw string of the pouch and it falls open on the floor.
They're pretty stones, river smoothed, five in all. He picks them up and notices how Katara flinches protectively as though to take them back, they're hers not his, he's supposed to ask, she's telling Mom, but stops herself.
They've got some weight to them and fit snug in his palm. Sokka can almost imagine them, sun warmed and glistening in some creekbed somewhere in the Earth Kingdom, Aang hopping from boulder to boulder in that weightless way of his, scouting for the best ones. They'd all look like rocks to Sokka but Aang knows, can pick out the ones Katara would like best. They have a secret language, the two of them, and its laid out here in a collection of stones and trinkets.
"Some monk, huh?" Katara says bitterly.
No kidding, Sokka thinks. Oogies. Then, wait-
"Whadya mean?" he demands because he's still her big brother damnit.
"He isn't supposed to put value in material possessions," she says like he's stupid.
"I know that," he snaps.
She really thinks she knows everything, his baby sister, who really does look like a baby with her hair like that, pulled back and her cheeks look rounder and chubbier, ruddy with the cold like when she was a baby and so tiny and he'd wanted to feed her seal jerky and show her his best hunting knives and she'd look up from Mom's chest and listen to his every word.
"Is it putting value in material possessions if he's giving them all to you anyways?"
That isn't what he means, and he knows where she's gonna go with it Oh, so he's just giving me stuff he thinks have no value? because he knows her even if he doesn't know how to say what he means, doesn't know how to tell her what she probably already knows, is too angry to see.
They only have value to him if they have value to you, maybe. Or he loves you, he loves you, he loves you, he's giving you stones like a dope but he loves you.
But he's still he's still her big brother and thats a bit much.
"He just sends Momo with the-" if he calls them gifts, tokens of his affections, Katara's gonna hit him. He gestures vaguely.
"No, he sends letters too," she says. "Most of the time. Y'know how hard paper can be to come by some places."
She's quiet after she says it because he does know and so does she and so does Aang because it used to be the three of them finding pretty stones (well, that was just them; Sokka would fish, he had two kids to keep alive) and not having paper.
"You don't keep them too?"
Katara fixes him with a cold stare, as though bracing herself for the words to have maximum impact. "I send them back."
"Katara!" Her name slips from his lips, shocked and a little horrified, before he can stop it and her eyes narrow because thats the exact reaction she must've wanted. If its had this effect on Sokka- Aang...
Oh buddy, Sokka's heart twinges and he once again despairs at the developing strangeness of this- this situation which is somehow materializing out of thin air (ha! get it?) and no more surprising than the sun rising in the East. It was always going to be this way because it has always been this way.
All that aside, it would be nice to be able to condemn the cruelty of the girl who sends back his best friend's letters and keeps the trophies as though delighting in her ability to keep him on the line without knowing that it's his sister who keeps all of his presents like they're sacred just because he touched them (Aang, not the Avatar) and can't bring herself to read his words and hear his voice in them when he isn't here and she's home but homesick.
"Momo takes them back?" He's at an impasse it seems, might as well succumb to curiosity.
"Yeah," Katara says, clearly a little surprised he isn't calling her heartless, maybe she wants to be heartless, wants not to feel it. Sokka knows the feeling. "Didn't want to the first few times but I fed him some Snowgull and convinced him."
Snowgull Katara was probably meant to be eating, but Sokka lets that one go.
"You're corrupting the vegetarianism of his pet?"
"Momo's mine too!"
Is that true? Maybe. Sokka gets the sense there isn't much Aang would ever want to possess solely for himself (he is a good monk, he thinks protectively). He also gets the sense there isn't anything he could ever deny Katara (let her take Appa for Spirits sake).
His sister's the opposite. She needs to know somethings her's or it going to go away, be lost forever, to time, to war, to duty. She needs to hold it close, to go with it, to-
Aang spent close to two years (two years he was supposed to be saving the world mind you) staring at her and still theres things about Katara he'll never understand, chief among them leaving Wolf Cove, letting her watch him go on that beach where Dad's left a thousand and one times.
"Did you tell him not to let me come with him?" she asks and her voice is so broken, so desperate, so sad, it cleaves his heart in two. "Did Dad?"
Sokka shakes his head. He wishes he could tell her differently. That it was him, or Dad, men, misogynists, the lot of them.
He wishes it was somebody else, some boy from their tribe, any tribe, so he could put his arm around her and tell her that guys sucked. They were lying liars who lied and she could take it straight from the monkeyhorse's mouth.
They'd tell you they'd write and not, they'd tell you they loved you and not mean it, they'd tell you they were going to get you out of this: a marriage, a war, your dying breath, and they'd be lying.
"He wants you to be with your-" the words die in his throat, they're stupid anyhow. What's even left of their family? How often was Dad home when they were? How long has Mom been gone now? "We were gone for two years Katara."
She breaks down, falls into his shoulder -the place where his arm dislodged from the socket catching Toph funnily enough. It twinges painfully but he bears it anyways as though he could suffer his way into comforting her.
He kisses the top of her head (they do that a lot, I love you when you're not looking don't make it a big deal, you're still annoying, sometimes its the only thing he really knows how to do anymore) and thinks of the time Katara was five and obsessed with the orcabear cubs. How when autumn came and they migrated back to open ocean to grow up and defeat the Fire Nation and send back letters without reading them, she'd cried and cried for days.
"Bring them back," she'd wailed and Sokka's heart had broken and he'd been furious at his parents who couldn't quite contain their amusement at their tiny daughter who loved finding new and magical things in the ice and begging to keep them (might've wanted to nip that in the bud, upon reflection, but who was he to judge their parenting).
"I can't," he'd told her. "But they'll come back someday."
She'd cried harder, hard enough that his mother swept in, kissing his head (is that how that started? He knows his memory's flawed because he's picturing a taller Katara pick up a five year old Katara) and putting her to bed.
Sokka had seriously considered diving into the icy tundra to bring her back an orcabear.
When Momo comes again, ten days later, holding a wilted flower with an expression of "Yeah, I told him this wouldn't travel well too, what do you want me to say, he feeds me?" he felt he had found an ally in a lemur.
"Hey there," Sokka takes the letter, feeling a little bad about letting the flower fall to the ground (but really, Aang, come on). "Come with me okay?"
They go to what Sokka has taken to thinking of as his office and he sets the letter down on his desk. He wonders suddenly what happens to the rest of the letters when Momo brings them back from Katara unopened. Does Aang throw them away, resolving to try again at the next town, the next time he can get his hands on some parchment? Or does he carry them with him, all the things he wanted to tell her but couldn't?
"I'm gonna make you a trade, okay?" Momo is nibbling on a sea prune and seems very okay with this as Sokka slips the letter into a drawer, unopened and grabs one of his failed sketches (the fulcrum would never work, he realizes that now) and flips it over.
Come back, he scrawls. You've been everywhere else, you're going to cause a diplomatic incident.
He briefly considers signing it as Chief Sokka (seriously people will not shut up; Aang would understand that he supposes) to make Aang laugh but doesn't want to write it into existence like the rest of his blueprints.
We miss you, he decides on instead because it's true. And then (he can't resist) P.S. Katara fed Momo meat. And he liked it!!
"Here," he says, handing it off to Momo and feeling only a little guilty like he's sending a little kid home with a note they can't read about their misbehavior.
The lemur seems to understand the urgency, flapping away before he can say goodbye, circling back only to take the rest of the sea prunes. Sokka watches him go. Night is falling. He has time to wait.