So... I'm moving in two weeks. Away from my favorite duty station ever. Needless to say, I'm kind of struggling with this. So I wrote this completely random drabble that is absolutely unconnected to any of my other modern AtLA stories, which more or less does not accurately describe my feelings - except the sentence where it talks about Toph's options being blasting music in her ears or running laps around the neighborhood. Ah, adrenaline... So this is, I guess, very slight Tokka. I don't know. I own nothing.

Toph sat on her bed, staring at nothing, her iPod on and pumping dangerously loud Flyleaf in her ears. She hugged her knees to her chest and didn't blink often enough. Sokka sat on the floor off to the side, leaning against a pile of collapsed cardboard boxes with his laptop on his legs, which were stretched out in front of him, his ankles cross. Supposedly he was playing Solitaire, but he was mostly staring at the younger girl.

Toph didn't notice. She was vaguely aware of the fact that men were walking through her house and packing all of her worldly possessions, but she just focused on the beat of the song. Not the words; that required too much concentration. One, two, three, four. One, two three four. One, two, three, four. A surge of energy, pure adrenaline, coursed through her, and she hugged herself more tightly.

She could either jump up and run out of the house at top speed, screaming and covering her ears and demanding they stay right where they were, or she could sit very still and try to block out the world with music.

Sokka just sat there and watched her self destruct, at a loss. He himself was upset, but he had nothing on Toph. She was more miserable than he had ever seen her, absolutely torn up inside and barely showing it, laughing slightly when her friends expressed distress at her imminent departure.

It was only around Sokka that she let down the barriers, just enough to show she wasn't as invincible as she was pretending to be. She didn't confide in him, just asked if he would come and keep her company while her life was packed away in cardboard boxes. He'd been here two hours, and they had barely spoken more than ten words to each other. Sokka had pulled out his laptop a few minutes after Toph had put her headphones on. Every so often one of her parents would walk by as though expecting the see their sixteen-year-old daughter making out with her twenty-year-old friend, but the two had not moved from their respective positions in hours. Sokka just ignored them, and Toph, neither seeing nor hearing them, didn't react, either.

The teenage girl removed her headphones and flung them away from her; the movement was so sudden, violent, and unexpected that Sokka jumped. "What?" he demanded, dreading the tears he had expected for hours and was sure were coming now. To his relief, Toph's eyes were dry.

But that didn't mean she was okay. When she spoke, her voice was small and shaky. "Are you going to miss me?"

He thought of the bruises on his arms where she was always punching him, the way she was able to cut him down with just a word, the way she was always stealing his food, the way she would laugh in his face when he tried pulling his four-years-your-elder-so-listen-to-me card.

"Of course I am," he said honestly, thinking of the way she offered to beat up Aang when he and Katara started dating, the way she could always cheer him up with either an encouraging word or an absolutely filthy joke, the way she would laugh at the lamest of his own jokes. Toph smiled quaveringly.

"I'm gonna miss you, too."