Disclaimer: I don't own Avatar: The Last Airbender or any other copyrighted property that may appear in this work of fiction. Lyrics in this chapter are from "Sky is Falling" by Lifehouse.
Sky is Falling
I watch as the daylight crawls
past the shadows hanging on the walls
it's been a long time since I felt the stain
of yesterday getting in my way
I'm alive but tell me am I free
I've got eyes but tell me can I see
the sky is falling and no one knows
we shouldn't be hard to believe
shouldn't be this difficult to breathe
the sky is falling and no one knows…
The first time it happened Toph was convinced she was dreaming.
When it began there was only the slightest of flickers in the otherwise consistent nothingness of her perception—flickers of something, where that something should not exist. Toph had no illusions about her (lack of) sight: she'd been born blind, lived a blind life, and fully expected to die without once opening her eyes to drink in the oft-lauded beauty of the world she resided in.
So when she felt the prickling sensation in her eyes, she ignored it. After the war was over and they all went their separate ways—Aang and Katara, Sokka and Suki, Zuko and Mai—Toph had taken to wandering the edges of the deserts, earthbending great big statues of the Gaang and people they had met on their journeys from grainy silicon and weathered bits of mica. It was her way of challenging her abilities these days, as well as her silent tribute to the things they had accomplished as a group. Most likely it was sand or dust that bothered her now, scritch-scratching at the soft corneas and embedding in the damp edges and corners.
She changed her mind after a week passed and the itching refused to go away. No matter how much she rubbed at them, splashed her eyes with clean water or those antiseptic eye-drops a street apothecary sold her (for a sizeable sum), nothing helped. These days her eyes constantly felt dry and raw, like heated rice wine poured sizzling over a blackened slab of steak.
"It's kinda funny, the way you're glaring at that vase like you're going to set it on fire," Sokka commented laughingly as Toph sat on the kitchen table in his house, swinging her feet and impatiently fidgeting as Katara pulled down her eyelids to examine the irritated flesh underneath. "Too bad you can't see it. It's… attractive, in a weird aesthetic sort of way."
"Hush, Sokka, you're disturbing my patient," Katara pointed out absently, bending a small amount of water and directing it to Toph's eyes, bathing them in soothing coolness. "This is the last of the water I was given from the Spirit Oasis," she remarked as she sent pulsing waves of healing through the liquid. "It's been years; I'd almost forgotten I still had some left. I hope it works."
"I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't. Nothing else has worked so far," Toph snorted dismissively, and as Katara finished up she opened her eyes to see…
Nothing—just as one might expect. The itching was gone, though, and that was a relief.
Wait. She caught her breath, as one of the almost nonexistent flickers suddenly widened, gaping open all cracked and blurry-edged over her right iris. At once, it let in a mind-numbingly white brightness she had never known until that moment, one that faded just as abruptly as it entered.
But during that one fleeting moment of illumination, Toph saw.
A tall darkly-tanned boy reclined in a wooden chair, which stood beside a cloth-covered table. That table bore a bouquet of sweet-smelling flowers, in a misshapen earthen jar that was thickly glazed a deep, rich… color. But what color…?
Green, her mind supplied. Sokka and Suki lived on Kyoshi Island—most things were either green or blue here. Somehow she instinctively knew it could not be blue, not when Katara stood in front of her with furrowed brow and anxious look ("eyes that sparkle like the very bluest of sapphires," Aang once sighed in their praise), peering into her dilating pupils.
And for several speechless seconds, she couldn't believe it was anything other than a dream. When it finally sank in, she laughed in pure euphoric ecstasy and extended her arms, crying out: "Katara, Sokka! I'm healed! I'm healed, I can see—!"
"What?"
"Just now, I saw you guys! I saw you, and that funny thing you call a vase…" Her words halted, and petered off in confusion. Toph knew the sound and scent of incredulity by heart—lessons garnered from the people who doubted her abilities as a true Earthbending Master—and just now as she announced her triumph both sound and smell surrounded her in a suffocating cloud of disbelief.
Her only proof, her sight, was gone as quickly as it had appeared… swallowed up by the nothingness of her blindness.
Finally Sokka chuckled, and ruffled her hair as one would pet a precocious tamed animal that has just performed a clever trick. "Pfft. Dang, Toph… you and your jokes. You almost had me with that one!"
"It wasn't a joke," she muttered tightly after he and Katara left to find Aang in the town. She felt strangely overcome with fierce, unreasoning anger, and consumed with a pathetic yearning emptiness that stretched inside her and begged to be filled. She wanted to scratch and scream and destroy things, before this new terrible feeling ripped her shaking frame apart from the inside.
No one else believed her either, not even Katara. The Waterbender had simply laughed wistfully, saying that it had taken countless bathings to heal Aang's wound, and no doubt it would take thousands more to cure a blindness incurred at her birth. "You were probably just imagining it," she concluded with great gentleness, wiping away the tears that stubbornly seeped from under Toph's closed lids.
Aang, the innocent simple-minded dork, was just confused. "Why are you so upset, Toph? You never cared much about being blind before." He brushed back her bangs a little, his thumb grazing her cheek and drifting along the edge of her lower lid. Tense and frustrated, it was a few seconds before she noticed… but when she did, the still-petite Earthbender stiffened in harsh rejection.
"I am NOT upset, and I really DON'T care," she bit off, finding the lies were easiest uttered when she was distracted… like this. It seemed to Toph that the light roughness of the whorls scoured her skin like a sandpaper file and shaved off layers like sediment, digging closer to the rapidly accelerating pumping of blood through the underlying capillaries. It flushed her skin with embarrassing heat, filling her mind with dangerous thoughts she was only too willing to deny.
Twinkles and Sugar Queen. Twinkletoes and Sweetness. Toph chanted it over and over in her head, willing herself to remember how Aang proudly referred to Katara as his 'Forever Girl' and how his heartbeat still quickened like a teen's when she kissed him. It should've been against all laws of Nature, but somehow Aang's love remained as pure and unblemished as it had been ten years ago, when he first woke from a hundred-year-long nap and looked into the eyes of an angel.
He wouldn't understand. None of them did, so why would he be any different?
………
You leave me hanging on
only to catch my breath
I've got you and I've got nothing left
don't leave me all alone down here
with myself and all of my fear
………
The sight came back when she slept, and figured prominently in her dreams.
Actually, calling them 'dreams' was exceedingly generous, for it was just one dream—one long nightmarish dream that unfolded its horrors bit by bit with every passing night, so that Toph sweated and fretfully tossed and turned, weeping sometimes when it got really bad. Nothing Katara prescribed did any good, and none of Sokka's well-intentioned counseling sessions seemed to have any effect either.
Finally, Aang made the inevitable offer: to sleep with her.
"WHAT?!"
"Your dreams are getting worse, Toph," the Airbender argued, perched on the sill of her bedroom window as his former Earthbending Master slammed through her room like a miniature earthquake, her boundless energy pent up and shackled by her Healer's orders. "It's just a thought, but… Maybe if you had a friend to see you through the night, it would help you—" and the rest of us— "find some peace."
Katara and Sokka sat at the table in the room's center, looking somewhat uneasy as Toph growled imprecations under her breath, pacing back and forth like a caged pygmy-panther. Aang studied her—pale, withdrawn, and yet unequivocally uncompromising. Her hauntingly murky eyes loomed large in her slightly pinched face: glowing faintly milky green and surrounded by dark circles of bruised, papery-looking skin.
Despite being less than a shadow of her former self, Toph Bei Fong was still incredibly, amazingly, and most stunningly beautiful.
It'd had only been a few years ago that he first recognized the thought for what it was, and when he did the realization had very nearly torn Aang in two. Even now it wasn't so much guilt as guilty desire, a peculiar yearning that sapped most of his energy in denying it to himself. They were the same age— twenty-two years old (Aang never counted the extra hundred; the memory made him uncomfortable). They were adults now, no longer kids who could squabble and roughhouse and knock each other about like ninepins.
One dagger-sharp look from Toph in his direction and Aang could feel his limbs go weak as water, limp as laundry pinned to a line and drying in a dying breeze. I love Katara and Katara loves me, he thought to himself—and he reminded himself many, many times as the green-clad Earthbender halted and fixed him with a scathing, weary glance.
"Twinkletoes, you may have matured some... but it's obvious your brain is still a pile of cotton candy fluff and lint balls. Do you REALLY want to give up your nights' sleep to keep me company; to try and stop me from dropping further off the deep end of Crazy than already is happening?"
"You're my friend," he said simply, trying to ignore the pounding of his heart and praying against prayer that she wouldn't hear and wonder why. "Friends are supposed to be there for each other, always."
Her arms dropped to her sides, and her gaze fell to the floor like a leaden weight. "You can't fix me, Aang. I'm already fixed… and that's the problem."
At this point Sokka coughed, which was about as delicate a disruption as Sokka could ever manage on short notice. "Uh, guys, I don't mean to interrupt this heavy, emotionally-charged conversation you have going here, but… we've got a time schedule to worry about.
"Toph, we've already agreed that one of us is going to stay with you, and unfortunately it can't be Katara. Just yesterday a messenger hawk came with a message from Zuko, saying he needs her to examine Mai—she's sick or something. Suki would KILL me if she found out I spent the night with another woman... so Aang's the only one who can do it on short notice."
Aang couldn't help but wrinkle his nose in puzzlement. "Don't exaggerate, Suki wouldn't kill you. She's nice!"
"Yeah well, just wait until YOU get married," Sokka muttered ruefully, rubbing his cheek and glancing at his sister with a knowing look in his eyes. "Katara's quite the possessive type too. Plus, she snores."
"I do NOT! Sokka, that's a lie!" Katara gasped in sisterly outrage, eyes flashing as she smacked his bare shoulder, eliciting a loud yowl of pain.
"Yeesh. See what I mean, Aang? A violent, snoring, drooling, harpy-woman… YOWCH! Quit that!!"
"Oh come and make me, Mister Strong Man. Besides, you're the one who snores and drools, according to Suki—"
"LIES! ALL LIES!!" screeched Sokka, as he jabbed an accusing finger at his sister. "Suki would never… How did you know??"
"Sokka, we're siblings, remember? I should know… not to mention we've ALLhad the chance to hear you sleeping at some point." Katara gave her brother that smug little grin she sometime wore when she knew she'd won, curling the end of her water whip around her fingers before bending it back into her little pouch and turning to Aang. "Will you be all right with this, Aang? It shouldn't take more than a week or two… a month at most, to get there and back."
"Yeah, I'll be fine," he answered, a bit startled that Katara had asked. Usually he'd thought he was supposed to ask her if it was okay to stay the night with another girl—maybe Katara thought that since it was Toph, nothing could come out of it. Funny, though, how it seemed like she was asking his approval for her trip… "Mai and Zuko need you, and you can help. Take Appa for as long as you need."
Something relaxed infinitesimally in her eyes, and the brown-haired Waterbender got up out of her seat to approach him. Leaning in and kissing him on the cheek (whereupon he blushed, predictable as always), Katara said, "Thanks, Aang. You… be sure to take care."
Take care of Toph. The unspoken words hung heavy in the air and Aang swallowed, pasting a cheerful smile on his face as he answered. "I will."
The blind Earthbender grumbled and turned her head, and in doing so Aang caught a glimpse of her face. It must have been a trick of the light… but for a moment it almost seemed like her clouded pupils followed the others as they departed from the room.
………
I'm alive but tell me am I free
I've got eyes but tell me can I see
the sky is falling and no one knows
the sky is falling and no one knows…
………
TBC.
A/N: Another Taangy plotbunny that kicked me in the head when I should've been working either on schoolwork or Sand and Stone... and demanded to be written. Originally intended as a one-shot, it reproduced as quickly as plotbunnies do, and now... it's no longer a one-shot.
It's a bit of in continuity from Will You Wait? (which is kinda funny since I started this one first) but can be read as a stand-alone. Please review and tell me what you think of it so far!