A/n: Long time, no see! I was recently recruited for a Tokkaneer "Pic and Fic" workshop, in which I basically... had to write a story. It's that simple! So I did it.

EDIT: Almost a year after its original publication, I went back to this story on a whim and read it, and edited it a bit. Now it should flow more clearly. Thanks to Miyiku, who pointed out a small plot issue, my story is now more culturally accurate!

To understand and fully appreciate this story, you might want to read Brute Force: Desperation first, for it is its prequel and is referenced on multiple occasions... but you don't really NEED to. Things can be inferred from the text; all you need to know is that Toph and Sokka were captured and kept in a Fire Nation prison and treated rather cruelly during their stay. Otherwise, enjoy!

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Happy Reading!

Desperation: The Aftermath

I. Cleansing

"Are you sure there's nobody… it's safe?"

"I was sure last time you asked me too, but then—" Toph broke off suddenly. Thinking of the events that had happened not so long ago had sparked the sound of a terrifying yell in her mind. "Yeah, I'm sure. Unless there's someone in the trees—like last time."

Sokka cast a wary look up and out towards the wall of trees surrounding them, eyebrows knitted together with dark thought. For the last few hours, he had expected to see some sort of ambush waiting for them in the trees, somehow anticipating where they might finally take their rest. Toph could probably feel his heart pounding away in his chest, heightened with survival drive.

No, they were safe here. If not here—so deep within the wilderness that they would not be able to find a way out if not for his superior direction sense—then nowhere. How ironic that they should return to the place where they had been apprehended in order to find safety. They would begin first thing in the morning, as soon as they woke up. He would have insisted on pressing further if he wasn't anxious that they might both faint.

But first things first.

"Well, looks like home for the night," Sokka announced, dropping one of his heavy bags unceremoniously to the ground. He swayed on his feet, afraid for a moment as his vision spun.

His hands found his hips, and Sokka turned in a slow circle to inspect their feeble camp. As far as he could tell, there was nothing in the mountainous region for miles, save for more trees than he cared to count and a number of hot springs, one of which steamed a few feet away. This was as good a spot to camp as he had seen all day. It was clear enough so that nobody could steal in upon them while they slept, but with enough cover so that they could escape in a pinch. The sun, so much hotter here than at home, hung low in the reddening sky, its rays casting an amber light across everything from the surrounding trees to Toph's shiny headband. Dusk would soon follow.

His ear was still ringing from when it had been boxed the night before, a high-pitched sound and a strangely muffled sensation, like water stopped up on the inside. He glanced down at his hands, which still exhibited the remnants of blood from the previous days. Crossing over to the edge of the hot spring, he dipped his fingertips into that water, rubbed them together to clean off some of the blood, and then touched them to his tongue. Salt, he noted with grim satisfaction.

"Back outside for just a few hours and we're already washing it off?" Toph said from behind him.

"We have to. You can roll around in the dirt after if you want."

"I guess I haven't bathed in a month," she said, sighing resignedly. "I'm surprised you haven't fainted from my smell yet."

"I can't smell you over my own stench. If I'm fainting, it's not going to be from a little body odor. But that's not why we need to go in there."

With a small grunt, Sokka stood and shrugged his pack from his shoulders, and then—with some reluctance—set his weapons aside on the soft grass. The hilt of his sword clinked forebodingly against his boomerang case; his fingers twitched at his sides.

One at a time, he unpacked the items from their bags and put them in a neat line. Though someone had gone through all their things, it didn't look like anything was missing, save for the now-infamous pai sho tile. They each had a fresh set of spare clothes. Then there was the usual camping gear, a few coins, even the remains of the bag of smoked jerky he'd bought on the first day of their trip. Looking at it made his stomach gurgle and cramp, both hungry and nauseous at once. Eating normal food might make them both sick after a month of near-starvation, but maybe he could make a broth if they boiled it for a while. They had a pot and a pair of tin cups if they needed them.

"What do you think we should do about this?" Toph interrupted, as he was peeking into a bag of uncooked rice to check for maggots.

When Sokka turned around, she was holding up the arm that had been slashed the night before—or was it just that morning? His mental timeline of their imprisonment had become too muddled to tell for sure. Only a short span of time had passed between their last interrogation and their escape (release?). By the time they left the hold, Toph had bled through his original makeshift bandage. Sokka had wrapped it up again as quickly as possible, not wanting to take any time away from putting miles between themselves and the hold. Perhaps that had been a mistake; the wound had bled through all the layers as if he had done nothing at all. He had a dark inclination about how to fix it.

"We can clean it up after we clean up the rest of us. I don't want to touch it with my dirty hands." Then, as if stricken with some sort of brilliance, he stooped for the pile and resurfaced with a small bar in one hand and a cloth in the other. "And look, we even have soap! It's Katara's, I think. It smells like hers…"

He hadn't said his sister's name in so long that hearing it sounded almost odd. For a second, neither of them moved. Sokka stared at where she stood a few feet away with her chin tilted toward the ground, her shoulders rounded. How strange, he thought, that something as simple as bathing could envelope them in such a surreal silence. They were alive, they had a bit of food with them, safety was a lesser concern at the moment. They had suffered for weeks, gone hungry, and had come so close to death that it had appeared inevitable, and they had fought through it together. But something as simple as bathing seemed miles away, even impossible. Sokka wondered if that could be a good thing. The thought crossed his mind to ask "So what do we do?"

He busied himself in the neutral silence that followed by fumbling with the knot on his belt; Toph, sensing his motion, unbuttoned the sash around her hips. Her red and gold vest slipped down her shoulders, leaving her in a yellow undershirt and tan knee-high shorts that fit more loosely than he remembered. Sokka stripped down to his shorts, looked down at his inwardly-curved stomach, and sighed. Every little thing was just another reminder of what he had lost, and the time it would take to recover.

xxx

The first thing Sokka felt upon lowering himself into the water was a most incredible pain. Every cut and burn—shallow or deep, long, short, or zig-zagged—let out a scream at being submerged beneath the lazily-steaming water. The salt crept into every little knick and wound, burn and scrape, almost unbearable. The worst of the damage had been done at the waist or above. Bracing himself, Sokka forced his knees to bend enough to submerge his body up to his chin. Despite his tight-fisted will to remain silent, he couldn't help but let a sharp hiss break through his clenched teeth.

"What's wrong?" Toph demanded, alarmed.

He bit back a groan, waved her question away, and said, "Just a little tingle."

In the few long, drawn moments before his body accustomed to the horrible sting of the salt in his wounds, Sokka had to battle the urge to scramble out. But once the initial searing wore down to a dull, lingering throb, the most wonderful and eerie thoughts occurred to him.

There was soft, even sand between his toes and the gentlest of breezes on his face. The hot water of the semicircular, smallish pool sent lazy swirls of steam dancing all around him. When he straightened back up, the hot water lapped against his waist, the little ripples eddying away from where he dipped his fingertips into the pool. It felt like being in some strange utopia, minus the sun and the sense of ease. Sokka rotated in the pool with his arms hovering parallel above its surface, his pallid face painted with shock at the feeling of the water and the lingering sting.

"How is it?" Toph asked quietly.

Sokka let out a long, slow breath and replied, "It's… interesting. Come on."

He reached out one hand that he assumed she could see, expectant while at the same time maintaining a kind of neutrality. He wondered if he'd picked up this attribute during his interrogations—he must have, because he couldn't remember having it beforehand—but it was a little unnerving to discover that he'd added it into his list of daily expressions. Nothingness.

Toph crept forward as if she feared that she might drop off the edge of the pool and drown. "Is it deep?"

"No," said Sokka, shaking his head. "Take my hand."

Toph hesitated before she reached out and found his outstretched fingertips, grasping them lightly in her own—her hand trembled at his touch, he noticed with a deepening frown, but out of what? Fear, relief, exhaustion? Sokka's eyes dropped from her apprehensive expression to the cold hand sitting in his warm one. If his skin had gone unnaturally pale, then hers was ghostly, though her wrists had not been rubbed so raw with signs of struggle.

She wasn't covered in open cuts like him, so the shock of it should not be so profound. All the better, he thought, his gentle grip never ceasing as he helped her ease down into the steaming pool.

Her initial reaction went much the same as his. The small gasp, the widening eyes—he thought he might have seen tears welling up, but he made no comment. The water came most of the way up his hips, and a little higher on her. Toph was a little hesitant to let go of his hand at first, for fear of drowning or simply being left behind. Sokka, too, found that his hand lingered a little longer over hers before finally pulling away. She sighed and let her hands dip into the water. His makeshift bandage, now saturated, still covered the gash on her arm. If they were to untie it, the effect might be worse than if they just left it there. Her arm jerked up out of the water at first as she felt it on her wound, but she forced it back down.

"Stings," she admitted, gesturing to her forearm. "I can't imagine how you must feel."

"Yeah. But it'll help."

"Where's the soap and towels? My vision's a little fuzzy with the sand and stuff."

"On the ground behind you."

Toph reached her arms through the steam, took up the bar of soap, and peeled away its thin, waxy covering.

"Hmm, it does smell like Katara," Toph conceded, raising the bar to her nose for a good sniff. In her voice, Sokka heard the same note of longing that he himself was feeling.

She wetted the bar, scrubbed a dab of the soap into the palm of her hand, and then held the bar over to Sokka's left. He felt a minute smile tick in the corner of his mouth. A grey humor resided somewhere in their slow-paced motions, their borderline collapse.

Sokka dunked his head under the warm water and nearly cried at the feeling of fluid over open cuts, at the sore cleansing of wounds too deep to be restricted to the flesh. The briefest panic washed over him at first, when the water hit the gash on the back of his neck and he thought that he wouldn't be able to raise his head. His pulse jumped, he opened his mouth and almost inhaled the hot water, until a hand closed over his upper arm and gave him a mighty jerk upwards. A moment later, he'd resurfaced to free air.

"Are you trying to drown yourself?" Toph said, aghast and still clinging to his arm. He hadn't believed before now that her knuckles could turn any whiter. "Why put the effort into running off if that was your plan the whole time?"

"Sorry," he choked. "I—slipped."

"You slipped."

"Just—for a—second."

His breath was coming in short, shallow gasps against his will. There was a tightness in his diaphragm. A sort of momentary panic washed over him, and for a few second, he could not draw a full breath. Sokka clutched a hand to his chest as he struggled to gain control over it.

"Sokka, what is it?"

Fighting tears, he drew his attention to the sound of her voice as she said his name aloud. Her grip on his arm was almost more painful than the water, but he grabbed hold of it in his mind. The weight of the earth came back to him, anchored by Toph and her unintentional firmness. Sokka found enough control to force a full breath into his lungs, held it, and slowly let it out.

"It's okay." he said, to himself or both of them. He was wobbly, but stable."It's okay. Here, pass—the soap."

Sokka took some of the soap from Toph, scrubbed at his scalp with his fingers, dunked his head under the water again just to make sure he hadn't lost his nerve—Toph made to grab him a second time, but he reappeared before she had the chance.

They busied themselves in the silence. The flecks of dried blood washed away as he rubbed his palms together and over his arms, over his face. Bathing had never been so much of a chore and luxury. The clear, pristine water began to cloud with a month's grime.

Beside him, Toph seemed just as focused. There came the occasional sigh, the sounds of trickling water as she rung her long, black hair through her hands. Soap bubbles collected at the top of the water in small clusters.

"Hey, Toph?"

She stopped halfway through washing her hair a second time, her hands entangled on top of her head in a lather, and turned her face towards him—more for his benefit than hers. A frown tugged on her mouth as she read his tone. "What is it?"

"I just—would you help me for a second? I can't reach that one spot in the center of my back. Normally I wouldn't care, but… I'm thinking it needs a little work."

"Sure, Sokka."

Toph rinsed herself off and shuffled forward across the sandy bottom of the pool to meet him. She stuck out her hand and he placed the bar soap into the center of her palm, then turned around and knelt so she could reach.

The first touch of her hands across his shoulders felt both soft and excruciating. Sokka clenched his jaw to keep from making a sound as his abrasions screamed their objection against soap and water. She was gentle but thorough in her motions, running over the center of his back with one hand while the other moved upwards. She pushed his hair aside to clean the deep gash on the back of his neck.

"You can breathe, you know," said Toph, after a pause.

He hadn't even realized that he'd been holding his breath. "Right. Thanks… I think."

Sokka felt that she might have smiled at this last comment, but he didn't turn around to see. He had tensed enough already between the pain and the sensation of her touch running up and down his shoulders, and turning around would likely be no help to the situation.

"Is your hair way too long, or is it just me?" said Toph, gathering up his hair in one hand and giving it a tug.

"Nope, it's not you. I almost cut it before we left to find Piandao—you know, to look sharp for the master and all—but we didn't have time, and now it's getting ridiculous."

"Yeah, it kind of is."

Sokka heard the sound as she rubbed her hands together before bringing them to his head. Whatever protest may have half-formed in his mind disappeared at the sensation of her nails scratching lightly along his scalp. Unconsciously, Sokka tipped his head back and closed his eyes. She washed his hair from nape to forehead, pressed her fingers in tiny circles around his temples and behind his ears, raising goosebumps on his skin. It was something he could have easily done for himself, but he was oddly moved at her unspoken understanding. What she offered was something so simple, so contrary to her ordinary manner of affection: a kind touch after a month of terror. Sokka accepted, and wondered in it.

They did not speak again until the last of the soap had been splashed away.

"We're really lucky." Toph sighed it more than she said it.

Sokka nodded, frowning and turning in the water to face her. "We—it—could have been a lot worse. Almost was."

"I just… I don't know," Toph muttered noncommittally. She ran a hand along her arm, lamenting the loss of muscle. "I don't know."

Sokka stared down at his fingers, let the sudsy water trickle over his palms and burn his red wrists. Maybe it was the long hours of interrogation that had left him so without response, maybe it was just concurrence with all that she had said. But he could think of nothing to say. Toph had described uncertainty, as obvious as the trees around them. But there was also fear, and this is what caused him the most duress.

"I know what you mean," he breathed, and he did. If nothing else, he understood her fear. "When we go back home, nobody is going to understand."

A lopsided, half-smirk flitted across her face. "I'll bet you Aang and Katara are a wreck."

"Some bet that is. And they're going to want to know everything that happened. Details. I'm just not sure I'm ready to talk about it."

"Then don't." The smile vanished now. "You don't have to say anything if you don't want to."

Toph and Sokka finished bathing in silence. Sokka picked up one of the thin towels, dried his face on it, and took a measured breath as his open cuts protested against the air. He tilted his head downward and pressed the cloth against his eyes, his forehead, his mouth. It was almost a relief just to feel the woven cloth—or at least it was, until he looked down at it and saw that the cut on his cheek had begun to bleed. He sighed. Just another thing he'd need a hand with before the night and exhaustion swallowed them up.

"There's another towel at your feet. To your left."

The lashes on his torso were too irritated by their cleaning for Sokka even consider a tunic. He stuffed his bloodied travel clothes into the depths of his bag and set his last fresh tunic aside for now. By the time he had finished toweling off and exchanged his sopping pants for dry ones, Toph was still drenched, too busy inspecting her bandaged forearm to care about getting dry. A gentle steam rose from her warm skin in the same way it rose from the spring. She was feeling around the edges of the reddened cloth, inspecting with her fingers what she could not see.

"That bad, huh?" said Toph, once he had peeled back the layers to expose the bare skin.

Only later did he realize she was making the inference based on his heartbeat and not his silence. Sokka wrapped the wound back up, attributing his nausea to grim resolve as he struggled through his memory of emergency first aid, trying to recall which option was best. Having Katara's healing abilities around had made him lazy about these things.

"It's… really deep," he conceded, grimacing. As bad a cut as he had ever seen, but if it hadn't reached the muscle, there was a lot more he could do. "Can you move everything okay?"

She bent her wrist back and forth, wiggled her fingers. "Seems like it," she said, and Sokka sighed in relief.

By his measure, the town where they had been captured was just a two days' walk at their laggard pace, three if they added safeguards to prevent recapture. This would be more than enough for the wound to turn from inconvenient to morbid, and their supply of clean cloth and bandages would run out within a day if they could not stem the bleeding. In the meantime, they had the salt water and the necessary supplies.

The fresh towel still lay, unused, on the ground by her feet. Sokka picked it up and draped it around her shoulders as one might don a cape. He pulled it snug.

"I need to heat some water."

Lighting a fire didn't take long, but in Sokka's distress over a potential recapture, he kept the flame pitifully small. The water seemed to take forever to boil. When bubbles finally began to burst along the surface, he poured most of it into one of their two tin cups containing a needle from Katara's spare sewing kit, a spool of his most resilient fishing line, tweezers, and a small, sharp knife. He then drained the pot and filled it with a few ounces of their fresh water, which went into the second cup with a spoonful of stale tea leaves he'd scavenged from his bag.

All the while, Toph sat on the ground with her jaw in a hard line. She held one arm over her head, clutching a soapy rag to the wound and not seeming to notice the sudsy, red-tinged rivulets dripping on her shoulders.

"We don't have to do this," said Sokka, once he had boiled a second, shallow pot of salt water and set it by her, alongside the rest of his sterilized tools. By then the cup of tea had cooled enough to drink. They passed it back and forth, taking small sips for fear of cramping up. The warm fluid helped Sokka steel his resolve. Another insignificant but colossal luxury.

"Do you have any idea what you're doing?"

"I've seen my dad do it, once or twice…"

"That's reassuring."

"I'm just being honest. We could play it by ear and see how far we get tomorrow. There's no guarantee it'll get infected before we get to Piandao's, and no guarantee it won't get infected if we do this now."

Toph shook her head. "Just do it now, before the numbness goes away."

Once he had cleaned the area and gotten a good look at what was beneath a day's worth of dried blood, he was relieved to find that his task was pretty simple. Azula's knife had cut a deep track across the top of Toph's forearm, but the line was straight and even. The blow had landed in perfect form, but off the mark; if Toph hadn't raised a defensive arm in time, it would have struck her in the face. Sokka set out his mental map for the procedure, pinched the gash here and there to measure the depth of the wound and the sensitivity of the nerves.

"Quit stalling already," Toph snapped, so he obeyed.

Blessedly, Toph did not flinch. The first suture was the hardest. Sokka focused on keeping his hands steady, pushing the needle through decisively, fluidly, tugging the thread as gently as he could manage and tying it off no tighter than he had to. Whether Toph's rocklike demeanor was true numbness or an incredible display of restraint, he could not say. But it helped.

"How's it coming?" she said, as he was trimming off the third suture with his knife.

"Let's just say we might have two sets of healing hands in the family after all."

Toph laughed a little at that. "And here I thought we were going to have matching scars."

"Oh, we're still going to." He flashed her his bicep, as if she could see where he had wrapped the bandage after bathing. "This one is the most promising, but you can really take your pick."

The hint of her smile faded. Sokka tied off four, tied off five. The red glow of evening was disappearing more quickly now.

"It's kind of genius," Toph said quietly.

"What is?"

"What they did to us. They knew exactly how to hurt us most."

As Sokka tied off the slippery line for the sixth time and began threading the needle for number seven, it occurred to him that he did not know precisely what they had done to Toph. From their reunion in her thick, wooden cell until the time of escape, they had been too busy strategizing their escape (and then their demise) to discuss it. Then they had been too busy fleeing, and too much in shock. They were still in shock. He'd almost rather not know.

Toph kept going when she felt him pinch shut the next suture site in lieu of an answer. "They separated us because they knew that it would make us desperate, because us being desperate was the only possible way to make us talk. And they knew you would figure out some sort of escape plan, even if they didn't know what it was, so they kept you too weak to go through with it before they could catch you."

"It worked."

"Of course it did. I thought you might not even make it this far, with all of your… Whatever you call this."

Her hand brushed along his side, the physical version of a passing glance over the marks in various stages of healing. For the second time that evening, the unfamiliarity of gentle contact rose goosebumps on his skin. He found himself pausing in his work to blink back tears. Half to clear his throat, he said, "Is this your only injury?"

He immediately regretted asking. After she had just gotten through telling him that he didn't have to talk about his own trauma, here he was, picking at hers. If she felt pressured to talk, though, she didn't show it. In fact, she sounded almost relieved that he had asked. Perhaps she was just fishing for a distraction from the needle pulling fishing line through her skin.

"When they split us up, they just put me in that cell and left me there. The first day was okay. Azula showed up and tried to get me to talk. Plus I was still pretty riled up; it took me a while to give up on trying to get out." She blew her damp hair away from her face with a puff of breath. "But after a while, I was just sitting there. I didn't come out, and nobody came in. Besides when the guards had to talk to me, there was nothing. No earth to see, no people. Just… nothing."

"Sitting in the dark." Sokka blotted her arm with the towel so that he could see through the blood that had welled up in the open parts of the wound.

"It wasn't even like that," Toph said, voice rising. "It was like sitting nowhere. After a few hours of not seeing or hearing anything, you just start to, I don't know. Go away, inside."

Sokka tied off eight.

"I kept telling myself that it's been no time at all, and we'd get out soon, and everything would be like this never happened. So when the guard gave me your shirt and told me you were gone, I just… died."

"I'm sorry," said Sokka.

"Don't be. Hearing your voice on the other side of that door was like the first day of my life," Toph said. "But to answer your question… I don't really know."

Sokka dropped the needle and tweezers into the pot of soapy water. "That's nine, and done."

"Thanks. How's it look now?"

"Better, actually. Just to be safe, I'm gonna wash it a little before we wrap it again…"

He tied off the last of the bandages just as darkness began to fall. They would be safer in the dark; if anyone stomped into their makeshift camp, the pursuers would be the blind ones. Sokka was curious, too—how much of an edge had being imprisoned taken off his fighting? And more importantly, how much darker was the something that had taken its place? Time would tell, but hopefully not tonight.

"Think you can give us some cover?"

She didn't respond right away. The silence eventually prompted Sokka to look up from examining the welts across his chest, at which point he noticed that Toph had turned away from him.

"Toph?"

She had begun to tremble. One of her hands found her mouth and stayed there, clutched to keep any sound from spilling out.

Once again, Sokka felt his chest tighten in that newfound panic. They had not taken his emotion away after all, at least not his empathy. Not completely. In a decisive motion, he moved forward and reached out to touch her shoulder.

Toph, sensing the motion, said, "Don't."

His arm fell to his side. "Are you okay?"

It was a stupid question, and Toph answered it accordingly as she turned to face him, her hand still clamped over her mouth.

"Of course I'm not okay," she snapped through her fingers. "And neither are you. I don't understand what's wrong with you!"

"With me—?"

She seemed to have forgotten that there was quite a lot wrong with him at the moment. From head to ankles, Sokka's body was one dull ache. His ear was still ringing, all other sound stymied. The slow march of oncoming illness had been creeping up on him for days, prompting his failed escape attempt in the first place. He could feel it in his throat and lungs when he breathed, a raw burning.

"Yeah, with you," said Toph. "I'm so, so angry, all I want in the entire world is to go back there and crush them all—" She clenched her fists, and Sokka took half a step back as the ground below him shuddered, fearful that she might tear down the forest, "They left me there to lose my mind. They took everything from me, and I want it back! I'll kill them all, I don't care—"

Sokka tried to approach. "Toph—"

"But you!" Suddenly she snapped out of her round-shouldered stance, flinging an arm at him. "Your heartbeat and your breathing, they're both so slow and shallow… You're not angry at all! I don't even know what to call it."

Desperation, Sokka knew. A month of scrambling on his hands and knees to get away from it, only for the world to tip and slide him right in. Desperation had been waiting for him all along—a culmination of all his failures amassed in the form of panicked despair. And yet, as he stood there now, staring while Toph visibly struggled to contain her rage, he also felt hollow.

"I just want this to go away," Sokka said, at last. "None of this should have happened. The invasion… I had every reason to know that Azula knew about the day of black sun, but it just never even crossed my mind. Maybe if I hadn't messed things up so bad—"

Toph clamped her hands to her ears, head shaking. "Don't you dare! I swear, I'll—"

Sokka faltered at the helplessness in her voice; she was supposed to be the tougher one. The sound of her oncoming meltdown gave him a few long seconds of paralysis. He found himself without a comeback. Instead of trying to find one, he closed the narrow gap between them and pulled her into the tightest hug that he could. Toph could have punched him, or thrashed, or screamed for him to let her go, but he knew that she wouldn't.

"It's over," he said, borderline relieved at the tightness in his throat.

His knees shook with fatigue, but he fought through the growing sensation that he was about to pass out. Toph felt so small and frail in his hands, her grip around his waist just as weak as his. But it was there. It was there and neither one of them could complain because they both knew it to be true. If just a few more days had passed… well, he couldn't bear to dwell it. There was no mystery.

Toph began to sob in earnest. He'd never seen or heard anything like it. Her tears were always rare and quickly wiped away with the heel of her hand. This was something new, a gasping, shaking, terrible sadness. Her instability rocked him. But strangely, blessedly, it also saved him. The block inside his chest ruptured, and soon he was sobbing, too. Sokka held tight to her, put his face against her shoulder, and cried.

For now he would push all the rest of it to the side and take solace in that neither of them would have to do this alone. They would sink to their knees in this clearing, arms clutching one another and tears drying on their faces, and that was perfectly fine. Later, he might reflect on the intimacy of the moment and wonder. But not tonight. For the first time in a long time, they had the rest of their lives to worry about the details.

Recovery first.

xXx

II. Initial Sight

Katara cried the first time she saw them. At first she thought that the two figures in the distance heading toward the lotus-imprinted door of Piandao's home were either trouble or a pair of presumably arrogant kids looking to learn from the Master, so when the two blurs became clear, she almost fainted.

"Aang!" She called it out, running down the winding staircase of her favorite balcony as fast as her legs could carry her. The dust kicked up around her bare feet as she ran, the hem of her clothes whipping around her legs in time with her absolute urgency. "Aang, it's them! They're here!"

The morning lessons done, Aang had sat down for a somber game of pai sho with Piandao. Zuko had been heating up the afternoon tea. As Katara's voice came ringing through the courtyard, everyone stood so fast that the table and pot of tea almost went crashing. By the time Katara reached them, she already had tears dripping from her chin.

But when Katara, shaking and frantic because they had been gone for so long and she had worked so hard to find them, opened the door, she had hardly enough time to cry out their names. Sokka had been leaning heavily on Toph as they came up the walk, and Toph's knees buckled as they staggered across the threshold. Sokka collapsed, spent, into Katara's arms as Toph finally let him go. The adrenaline rush was over; they had made it.

She couldn't take it all in at once. Katara tried to assess them in the first few seconds and came up short. They looked ragged, hellish, like a pair of ghosts in black cloaks. Aang and Zuko rushed forward to steady Toph between them as Piandao helped Katara carry her semiconscious brother inside.

The butler closed the door. Right there on the ground just inside, just beyond the security of the walls, they lowered Sokka to the ground. He seemed to fight for consciousness, his breathing fast and shallow. When Katara knelt beside him, he rolled over to bury his face against her leg. His arm—bandaged, she saw, but stained with blood—wrapped around her waist and clung to the back of her tunic like a life raft.

His voice was hoarse when he spoke: "Sorry we're late."

If Katara had not fully melted into sobs by then, she did now.

Still uncharacteristically leaning on Zuko for support, Toph allowed Aang to Earthbend her a seat and sank gratefully into it. Aang received a teacup of water from Piandao and passed it to her, folding his hands over hers so that she would not spill the contents of the cup across her lap. So many questions spun through his mind, each one more frantic than its predecessor. He knelt so that they were at a height where she sat and, aghast, searched for some visible answer to where they had been for all this time. Her face spoke aloud the events too indescribably horrible to say aloud.

"Close one," Toph said, whispering only for lack of will to speak louder.

"Where were you?" Aang asked her in an undertone, relieved and terrified all the same.

She drew her hands out of his to take a tiny sip of water. The drink made her cough a little, but it also seemed to bring strength. Zuko tore his stare away from Sokka and Katara at the sound, almost relieved for the distraction. He squatted down next to Aang so that he could hear her explanation.

"What happened?" asked Zuko.

The words would not come. Toph shook her head.

xXx

III. A Suitable Explanation

"Sokka."

No response.

"Sokka?"

"Hmm…?"

The right side of his head had been resting on the hideous blanket he stole from Piandao's butler. This was not the first time he had failed to respond to sounds coming from the left.

Arms set apart in the Bending stance she typically used for healing, Katara stared down at her brother's back with some doubt. Sokka lay before her on his stomach, shirtless so that Katara could better examine his wounds. He had accepted the invitation for a healing session and followed Katara out into the sunny courtyard without so much as a word. There hadn't been many words between them in general in the two days since he and Toph came stumbling up the front path.

Her eyes darted from his upper back to his face, then back again. With his head resting on crossed arms and his eyes closed, Sokka appeared more at peace than he had since his arrival. The healing, Katara mused, probably had something to do with it. But while Sokka as a whole, clean-shaven with his hair freshly cut, seemed all right, some parts of him remained a plain mess. His back, for example, was littered with welts and bruises and—now cleaned, for the most part—cuts that still made her wince. Each one was like a story, a mystery that she attempted to close with little success. The especially deep gash on his upper arm, the long thin lines crisscrossing the length of his torso, all signs of some epic struggle.

What had happened was fairly obvious: raw and scabbed wrists only come from being bound, and burns like the ones blotting his arm and side only came from Firebenders. The who's and the why's were unclear for now, but from the little hints the rest of the group had picked up, it seemed clear that the pair had been captured, questioned, starved, and—though it scared her to admit—tortured.

The natural curiosity and horror she felt wasn't unexpected or even unwarranted, but it was burdensome for her and Sokka both.

"What—?" Faltering, Katara sighed again and let her hands fall to her sides. She shifted the towel upon which she knelt and re-bended a glove of water onto her hand, just as she had been taught to do. In times like this, she wished she had been taught how to ask sensitive questions.

Sokka lazily opened one eye to peer at his concerned sister. One look at her relayed her exact thoughts without even a word passing between them. He merely shook his head and closed his eyes again. The chasm in Katara's heart swelled.

"They all told me not to ask about it, but I can't believe that it's good to keep it all inside," she began again. "Aang said he asked Toph what happened, but she couldn't say anything. Looking at this mess—" she gestured to his back, "I guess a lot happened. And I understand that it must be really hard to talk about, but when I look at all of this… I mean, especially this one on the back of your neck… they're fairly serious. I can't stop thinking about—"

Yet again she stopped, mid-sentence. In her explanation, she had brushed back the hair away from his neck and traced her forefinger along the ridge of the gash that dwelled there. In turn, his entire body had tensed, eyes clenching shut tighter than before, and it occurred to Katara not a moment later that he was holding his breath as if he were drowning…

Instantly, as if she feared she had burned him, Katara jerked her hand back—the water in her other hand splashed down her front once she lost her concentration—and she cried, "Oh Sokka, I can't live in the dark like this. You two disappeared for a month out of nowhere, and then one day just show up here looking like you've died and come back to life."

No response. "Who captured you? Why did they do this? I need to know—it's killing me, Sokka."

Sokka buried his face in his arms, fully blocking his face from her view. Then, to her immense surprise, his shoulders began to shake and that sound of staggered breathing told her that he was crying.

No, not crying. Laughing.

He's lost his mind! Katara thought frantically, recoiling backwards in horror from his shaking figure.

"Ahaha…" Sokka rolled over, then sat up beside his sister on the blanket. "Oh man, I think I'm losing my mind."

Katara eyed her brother suspiciously as he wiped a tear of apparent mirth from his eye. "Wh-what's so—why are you laughing? What happened?"

Sokka took one look at her and replied, smiling through watery eyes, "I had a bad day, all right?"

She stared. "You—you had a bad day…?"

He grinned ironically at her. The understatement of the year, maybe even of a lifetime. Perhaps he wasn't so ready (stable?) to talk about his feelings after all.

Katara ran a hand over her face and let out a slow breath. "I think I need to lie down."

xXx

IV. True Aftermath

He still has nightmares about it. Given, it's not yet been a year since their capture, and the whole ordeal caused him more harm than most his age could deal with, but he's for some reason always surprised when he wakes up in the middle of the night, holding his breath as if to keep his lungs from filling with water. Tonight is going to be one of those nights, it would seem.

Sokka rolls onto his back with a sigh and covers his eyes with the palm of his hand. Everyone else has long since fallen asleep in their rooms, still recuperating a week after the war's end. Since then, they've been in the new Fire Lord's palace, enjoying fancy parties and sitting through grueling meetings about tackling poverty and war reparations and the like. The stress is probably what brought the nightmares back. He's not thrilled at the prospect of dealing with them—they'd been gone for a while now, and he'd sort of hoping that they'd just stay away—but he's not surprised at their unwelcome return.

Rubbing the side of his face, Sokka rolls to the edge of his fancy Fire Palace bed, sits up, and swings his legs over the side. The moon outside hangs high in the sky, glowing white, which tells him that midnight has come and gone. He heaves himself to his feet and makes his way out the door, down the stretch of tapestried and red-marbled hallway, and onto the terrace. The wind plays gently on his face, it gets beneath the tunic he'd fallen asleep in a few hours ago and cools his damp skin. As his eyes adjust to the new semi-light, Sokka takes a deep breath of salt air. And then he nearly chokes on it as a voice sounds off to the side.

"You, too?"

He whips around, grabbing around his waist for a sword that sits back in his room before he recognizes the speaker and breathes a sigh of relief. "Oh—it's you, Toph."

"Scared you, did I?" He can see her smirk in the moon's dim light.

"Not at all!"

"Sure. I can feel you puffing out your chest from over here."

"Oh ha ha."

He strides across the veranda and takes a seat beside his companion. Toph looks distinctly tiny in the oversized red and gold tunic that she uses for sleepwear. Her feet remain bare, of course, and covered in dirt from making small trails in the ground with her heels. Her head falls to Sokka's shoulder as soon as he scoots down beside her and props an arm against the wooden seat.

This is normal for them—the waking late at night and finding one another parked outside in the light of the moon. Even the head-on-shoulder motion is just another ritual. What isn't so normal is the sudden desire in Sokka to tell her what he'd seen in what he thought had been his last dying moments, back in the Hold. Whose laugh had echoed through his ears as his vision had faded to black, just before he had been spared.

But Sokka holds his tongue. The post-nightmare times are generally not the most romantic.

"Do you think it'll ever end?" sighs Toph, reaching and grasping his hand where it sits on his thigh.

Sokka looks down at their hands, her pale one a stark contrast against his tan one. The gash on her arm looks like a long, thin scratch now. Thanks to many sessions of healing with Katara, his own scars look much the same, a small mountain range of ridges and lines across his otherwise smooth skin. He shrugs. Most of the time it feels like it has ended. When they're not dealing with board meetings, the four of them screw around on the outskirts of the village, Aang practicing with Toph and Katara while Sokka sits with Momo and Appa, sharpens his machete, and makes sarcastic quips until one of them knocks him off his seat. Just like old times. Most of the time, the only indication that anything ever happened is the montage of ugly scars that he prefers to keep out of sight.

"I like to think so. I mean, I guess it'll always be there, but sort of in the background," he says in response, casting his gaze towards the moon. "Those kinds of memories don't just go away."

"We can talk about it, at least."

"Sometimes, yeah."

Usually Sokka can't make it very far past that first meeting with his interrogator before he needs to stop talking. He's only relayed the entire story twice, once to Aang and Piandao and once to his father, who had sat somberly before him with his jaw taut. When he'd tried to tell Katara the first time, she'd had to stop him so she could keep her lunch down. The second time, he had been the one to end the conversation. Toph was a little better at storytelling than he, anyway, and what she had experienced was enough to satisfy the usual enquirers, to answer their questions. When it came right down to it, the only things that had changed after their experience was them; the war had been largely unaffected.

Toph shifts at his poignant silence, raising her head from his shoulder and cocking it slightly in his direction, listening.

"You all right, Sokka? Is it that dream again?"

"No, I'm okay. What about you?"

"Better now." She squeezes his hand. "A little better than I was ten minutes ago, and a whole lot better than I was a year ago."

Now Sokka does the only thing that feels like the right thing to do. He turns his head to Toph, rests his free hand on her shoulder, and places a kiss on the side of her temple. In turn, Toph swivels around on her seat with raised eyebrows.

"What was that for?" she asks, baffled and leaning away from him an extra inch or so, as if afraid that he's going to try it again.

"I'm not sure. It just felt like the right thing to do. Sorry."

The color rises to her face, but she's smiling nonetheless. She lets go of his hand to punch him in the shoulder, and by the time she does he's already begun to quake with stifled laughter.

"You're such a meathead," Toph mumbles, trying to hide her smile behind an affectionate scowl. "But don't be sorry."

Sokka drapes his arm around her shoulder and pulls her closer to him once more. Toph shakes her head and rests her temple against his shoulder once more.

Some things don't change, he supposes as he wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. Through the ordeal they've managed to salvage what was left of their characters and piece it back together, together. Other things—well, sometimes it's not so much a change as it is an adjustment.

What's happened to us? She'd asked him, not so long ago.

Even now he doesn't know, but his fear of the future has begun to fade, as sure as the memories that blend together in the back of his mind. Sokka looks down at their interlaced fingers, and they sigh as one.