Written before Boiling Rock. I realize it's probably been done before. I don't much care.
Zuko's paler than the rest of them, or so Toph hears on occasion. She can't really see to tell and she doesn't really care, since his skin's doing what she always assumed skin's supposed to do. It's keeping his insides in and the dirt out, and she respects that, since even she really, really doesn't want any dust getting into her body.
They're by the fire one night, Zuko sitting away from them (she can tell, feel him breathing too far away, always isolated), when Sokka suddenly laughs. "I think you've got a sunburn there, jerk," he says.
"It happens," Zuko returns.
Toph can tell he's not paying the slightest bit of attention to Sokka, not really. She stirs her toes in the pebbles that she's been collecting and then sends one over Zuko's way, a tiny, stinging indication that she, for one, doesn't like being ignored for the monsters in his head.
She's been thinking about stomping over there and using him as a backrest. Now seems like as good a time as any; Sokka sticking his foot in his mouth is usually a pretty good laugh.
"Wouldn't happen if you weren't such a pale guy," Sokka says. He makes it sound like an insult, Toph notes, and she wonders what color her own skin is. "You know, in my culture? Pale men are considered inferior to the rest of us. They burn too easy on the water. They stay home like women."
She doesn't need to hear Sokka's sudden yelp of pain to know that Katara's smacked him hard enough that his face is in the dirt. She can feel it, after all. She can also feel Zuko heating up at her side and then subsiding, because he's finally figured out there are better things to get mad at than stupid Sokka.
Toph reaches out a hand when Sokka stops whimpering, puts her fingers against one of Zuko's bare forearms. "He still feels like a guy to me," she says a second later.
And, yeah, most people feel the same to her. She hadn't even thought about them looking fundamentally different, not only in hairstyles, but also in coloring until Sokka said something. For all she knows, Aang is... okay, she doesn't know what colors look like, actually, and that's one thing that earthbending isn't ever gonna tell her.
She may look exactly like Zuko or nothing at all like the rest of them and that bothers her, all of a sudden. Toph knows her own eyes are wide, her own nose turns up at the tip. Her cheekbones are small, her face is round.
Her fingers itch to test out what the others look like, for the first time ever.
So she does. She starts with Zuko.
"What are you doing?" he darn near shouts when he fingers migrate from his arm to his face.
"Seeing what you look like," Toph tells him, unruffled. She puts her other hand on his neck, to hold his head still, and makes one slow pass over the right side of his face. The left is no-man's land. The left side is like her eyes, and she's fine with people looking at them, but if someone tried to touch them? She'd kill them. "Now shut up and let me look."
"Stop touching me!" Zuko demands.
"What's the matter, Zuko, afraid of a twelve year old girl?" Sokka makes little kissing noises off to the side. Toph, without taking her fingers off Zuko's face, stomps a foot on the ground to make a fist sized rock hit him in the head.
"No," Zuko mumbles back to Sokka, then, under his breath, whisper of a sound that only Toph can hear, "Don't touch my scar."
She's not stupid. "I'll touch it if I want to, Princey," she whispers back. "Just your luck that I don't, huh?"
His eyes tilt more than hers, is the first thing she realizes. They're smaller, neater, his eyelashes a soft spike of feeling on her calluses. It's weird. His eyebrow is finer than hers, his cheekbones are higher, his lips are rounder. Even his skin feels softer than hers.
She's never felt this self-conscious before.
Zuko looks more like the ideal woman than she does. Well, alright, he's too angular, she knows, her fingers skipping down his sharp jaw line and up towards his ear, but, still. She guesses it's all those generations of firebending nobility inbreeding with each other or something like that, but it makes her feel awkward and ugly and that's never something she tolerates well.
Toph almost says that out loud, but he's being nice, really, he's not heating his skin up or doing more than grumbling under his breath and under that she can tell that he is scared of her being this close to him. Then again, if she'd grown up with someone who was smaller, meaner, and more crazy than she was, she'd probably be scared of little girls too.
She just doesn't think that's something she should give Sokka, that's all. It can be their secret.
"So," she says, lifting her hands off of him, "Who's next?"
Sokka makes an indignant squawk. "You don't already know what we look like? You've been traveling with us for months!"
"I know what you feel like, stupid," Toph says back, patiently, she thinks. "I just wanna know what you look like."
"Me, me, me, me!" Aang's over to her in a flash, settling beside Zuko on his knees. Zuko takes in a startled breath, still not quite used to Aang, Toph thinks, but then realizes it's because Aang's actually leaning on him.
Good ol' Aang. If Toph's noticed Zuko's isolation, he's noticed it too. And he knows better than she does how to fix stuff like that.
Still... "He is a little pale," she declares right as she's setting her fingers on Aang's face.
Sokka starts making victory noises. She lets him have it. He'll figure out in a second that she can't see Zuko to tell if he's pale or not.