Unexpected After
no wait, that's not right.
[Since When Was I The
no, no, that's not it either.
UA/AU
...ehhh, maybe...
XXIII β
technically, though, this is the alpha version of the chapter...
JUST PICK A TITLE ALREADY, YOU
yes, that's it! perfect!
...sigh
An Avatar: the Last
...do I really need to say it?
GRUMBLE
An Unexpected Aftermath EXTRA
By
EvilFuzzy9
ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?
yes. yes I am.
So. Yeah.
This.
This thing is what I originally wrote for chapter 23 of Unexpected Aftermath. Except I decided that it was too dark, for the direction I wanted to go, so I am working on a new, edited version of the chapter.
By which I mean I excised the more depressing bits, and am currently working on shaped it into something more lighthearted and less OHGODWHYTHEANGST.
WITH THAT SAID, however, I have, for some unfathomable reason, decided to post this, the original version of Unexpected Aftermath 23, as its own semi-stand alone thing. BECAUSE WHY THE FUCK NOT
I should probably get the next chapter finished and up once I stop feeling quite so exhausted. But until then, enjoy this rare look behind the scenes at my creative process!
(by which I mean a paper thin excuse to put what I wrote to use without actually having to make it UA canon because this thing is just all kinds of depressing.
But with that said:
ON WITH THE SHOW
UNCUT
UNEDITED
AND I TOTALLY BLAME LOOPY777 FOR GETTING ME IN A MOOD FOR DEPRESSING SHIT WITH THE FINAL TWO CHAPTERS OF Retroactive WHICH I WILL NOT SPOIL BECAUSE IT WAS BEAUTIFUL AND WONDERFUL AND OH-EM-FUCKING-GEE AAFSFAGFSASFDDG
...what was I talking about, again?
... ... ...OH RIGHT
THIS THING
Ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffuuuuuuu...
Unexpected Aftermath
[Since When Was I The Hero?!]
An Avatar: the Last Airbender plotbunny
By
EvilFuzzy9
TRIGGER WARNING: This shit gets pretty dark. Seriously, about halfway through it just gets fucking DEPRESSING and BLEAK and OH-GOD-WHY-MUST-YOU-MAKE-US-THINK-ABOUT-THESE-THIN GS-FUZZY-YOU-HORRIBLE-EVIL-BASTARD.
I honestly don't know why my brain seems to insist on doing everything in its power to make such a fucking tragic character out of Sokka, between this and Hurt, but I feel I should warn you guys nonetheless that this contains some very dark subject matter, and while I will not explicitly spoil anything, since I left it kinda... well, okay, so it's not really ambiguous at all. But still.
I will at least leave you with these words to think on, before you read this and decide to start flaming me for writing about such horribly dark subject matter, especially after the lighthearted ending of the previous chapter. And these words are:
The Donner Party.
(because I am the worst person)
Sokka had always known that Toph was a girl. He was no fool, whatever anyone else might say. He may have frequently forgotten that she was blind, but not once did he ever forget that she was a female.
He had just never seen why it mattered.
Contrary to what many might think, from first impressions early on, Sokka was not really a sexist. Not anymore, at least. He was an intelligent person. He was perfectly able and willing to realize and acknowledge when he was wrong, and adjust his worldview accordingly.
Why, before meeting Aang and traveling all over the world with the young Avatar, back during the War (and it still really struck him now and again that it was actually finally over), he had hardly even believed in spirits, or the old stories Gran-Gran had used to tell him and his sister when they were little.
Sokk had always been a fairly practical, pragmatic sort, the kind of person who based their worldview on what they could see, what they could perceive with their senses. Before traveling with Aang, he had never seen a spirit, never had any reason to believe they even existed at all, aside from the word of his Gran-Gran and the old stories of their people. And as spirits, before then, had never had any tangible, observable, provable effect on his life, he had not cared about them, had hardly put any stock in the old myths and legends.
Katara might have eaten that kind of thing right up, back when they were kids, but Sokka had always been a more skeptical sort of person.
With that said, however, after traveling with Aang, Sokka had gained a considerably greater appreciation for the reality of spirits, and magic, and junk like that. Hell, he had actually been spirited away once, by the Hei-Bai, and his old girlfriend was now the moon.
And that's not even getting into his encounter with Wan Shi Tong, and the whole Spirit Library thing.
Honestly, after all of that, Sokka was just much more accepting of the idea of spirits. And in the same vein, while he had once been of the belief that men and women each had specific, written-in-stone roles, and that women could never be as good of warriors as men, this had not been something he had clung to irrationally out of some misguided sense of male chauvinism.
No, this idea, this notion, had been a part of his worldview as a child, growing up in the South Pole where the only warriors and hunters were the men, and the women had their own jobs to take care of. He had, back then, believed that men were naturally stronger than women quite simply because, until he met Aang at the age of fifteen, the only women he had known had been Gran-Gran and the other tribeswomen, all mothers or homemakers, and Katara.
Sokka had always been one to base his worldview on empirical evidence. And back then, all of his experience had pointed to men being stronger, men being natural warriors. Now, of course, he knew that the data had simply been skewed by the small sample size he had to work with as a child, but back then he had not yet been given any reason to question this belief. Not even by Katara.
Especially not by Katara.
Oh, Sokka knew his sister would probably have his hide if she ever heard him say it out loud, but back before they met Aang, before they left to find him and Katara a waterbending master in the North Pole, his sister had been, quite frankly, weaker than him, and he had found it very difficult to take her rants about equality and women can be just as strong as men seriously when Katara herself had been, in all honesty, weak, and really incapable of contributing to the tribe's survival as a hunter or warrior.
It was a strange notion to contemplate now, with Katara being recognized as one of the greatest waterbenders alive – an honest-to-Yue prodigy, who had, after just a short period of formal instruction, risen to a level of skill great enough to be entrusted with valuable scrolls of the Northern Water Tribe's bending techniques, and more importantly the continued education of the Avatar himself – but back when it was just them in the South Pole, Katara's only contribution to the survival of the tribe had been to do what Sokka, back then, would have termed "woman's work".
He had been the one who went hunting out on the ice, staying out for days at a time, on occasions, before finally returning to the village with a kill in tow. Katara had not been strong enough to heft a spear, nor club a down tiger seal in a killing blow. She had never learned how to use a boomerang, how to track prey across the endless white tundra, how to pick out at a glance the weakest, most vulnerable members of a herd or pack, or how to isolate those sickly, young, or elderly specimens from the rest of the group and pick them off alone.
She had, quite simply, not been a hunter. And, back then, when she got on Sokka's case about leaving all his laundry to her, or making some stupid, sexist remark, he could not help but scorn her a little, in the back of his mind. As far as he had been concerned, back in those days, Katara had been full of herself, had wasted too much of her time playing with magic water and dreaming of far off lands and great adventures.
He had resented his sister, just a little, for how much she had really been sheltered from what he saw as reality. She had been the future, the hope of their tribe (she still was, in truth), and Gran-Gran and the other women had always favored Katara just a little bit over himself. They had kept her safe, ignorant, of just how desperate, seemingly hopeless their tribe's situation really was. They had encouraged her to play with water, to waste hours splashing around with her bending, talking about reclaiming their culture and rebuilding their tribe and ensuring the future of the South Pole.
Katara had never truly realized it, how often and close they had come to starvation, to being finally wiped out. Sokka had just been a boy when the men left for war – he had been only a child, really – yet still he had borne on his shoulders the burden of safeguarding the tribe, of providing for it. An inordinately heavy burden to place one so young as he had been, but he had not complained.
Not when it mattered.
Despite how much he had so often wanted to snap at Katara whenever she went into one of her tirades, how much he had so often wanted to grab her by her hair-loopies and shove her face-first into reality, he had nonetheless endured as best he could for the sake of the tribe, had thrown himself mind and body and soul into hunting and fishing and training. He had only been able to get so good, so strong without older, more experienced warriors there to train and guide him in the martial arts and traditions of their people, but he had made it work, he had made it suffice.
Things had been hard, but he had done his best to ensure the survival of his tribe. He had been forced to grow up before his time, in a way, been forced to sacrifice his childhood for the sake of his tribe.
The men of the tribe left for war shortly after the death of his and Katara's mother, ten years before they met Aang.
Sokka's friends, even those who knew the details of his and Katara's childhood, never seemed to stop and consider just what it all meant. Certainly, if they realized how small and young and afraid Sokka had been when the men had left, when circumstance forced him to hunt and fight and provide for the tribe as best he could, they did not show it.
Even Katara didn't realize how dire things had been.
But Sokka did.
He knew that the men had had no hopes of ever returning alive, had had no illusions that Sokka would be able to provide for an entire tribe by himself, even with the women and elderly pitching in where they could. It had been, for all intents and purposes, a suicide mission, intended as one last hurrah for the Southern Water Tribe. Better to go down fighting to the last man, than to slowly dwindle and diminish, cowering in the frozen wastes of their home.
But still it had been the duty of the women to do what they could to ensure that there would still be a home for the men, even if they never returned.
Did Katara never wonder why there were no other children their age in the tribe? She might not have remembered it, and Sokka never brought it up, but it had not always been that way. Did she never wonder, how someone so small and young as Sokka had been, back then, could have managed to keep food on the table, or why, aside from themselves and Gran-Gran, the only surviving members of the tribe, by the time they finally met Aang, had been a few mothers with young children?
Kanna had not been the only elder, when the men left for war. Himself and Katara had not been the only children. Not back then.
And yet, by the time Sokka had grown big and strong and skilled and experienced enough to reliably bring in game and fish to feed the tribe, there had only been himself, Katara, Gran-Gran, and that handful of others. After the men left, their numbers had dwindled even more, and Katara had been too caught up in the death of their mother, the departure of their father, to really notice. She never thought about what happened to truly leave so few alive.
And Sokka TRIED not to think about it, tried so hard that after traveling a while with Aang, almost he could tell himself that the memories were only nightmares, merely dark dreams brought on by dark times.
Almost.
There were things no child should ever be forced to do. It was not starvation which had diminished their numbers, in those years after the men left. No, even when Sokka had been too small and weak and young to bring down the hardy beasts of the antarctic, he had still always managed to keep meat on their plates.
It was probably for the best that Katara had never questioned where it came from, back then.
Sokka still had nightmares about it, himself.
The threat of hunger could force people to do terrible things. The Water Tribes knew this better than most.
Sokka especially.
Was it any wonder he had been so grim, so serious, so confrontational, back then? That kind of thing stayed with a person.
But Katara had not realized, and if Sokka had anything to say about it, she never would. She might have resented the thought, but there were still ways he could protect her.
He always would. Not just because she was his sister, either. No, he could remember when she had been so vulnerable, so helpless, when she had needed to be protected and safeguarded at any cost.
She had been that way up until relatively recently, in all honesty. Before leaving the South Pole, Katara's waterbending had been entirely self-taught, without even any waterbending scroll's to work from. She hadn't even known that the moon was the source of waterbending, for ocean's sake!
That was just how fragmentary and incomplete his sister's understanding of the art had been.
So, naturally, even with as talented as she eventually proved herself to be, there was only so much Katara could have done just by teaching herself. Without any documentation to work from, or elder benders to study under, or even anybody who could show her what the proper forms looked like, Katara had had to essentially develop her waterbending through trial and error, try to build up an entire martial style from scratch.
Even Sokka himself had been better off, in teaching himself how to fight, because he was at least able to draw from vague childhood memories of watching the men of the tribe train and hunt and fend off raiders. Until reaching the North Pole, Katara had never before even seen another waterbender.
So even with as much as her brother's abilities as a warrior had languished and stagnated and poorly developed, without senior warriors to show him the ropes and correct him when he made a mistake, Katara's abilities as a bender had suffered even more.
Quite frankly, until they met Aang and began traveling the world, Katara had been weaker than Sokka. And until they met the Kyoshi warriors, Sokka had not been given any reason to doubt his preconceived notions as to the natural order of things.
Until Suki had made a fool of him, and forced Sokka to reevaluate his worldview.
And sitting there, blushing in spite of himself as he sat next to the Kyoshi Warrior and Toph, and the Fire Lord and his girlfriend, Sokka tried to focus on the positive of this, and not the negative.
He tried to think of how much he loved Suki, how he was sure they would be able to make things work, how he would do his damnedest to figure out a way for everything to work out. He clung to that though like a lifeline, even as his introspection brought up deeply buried fears and regrets, and terrible things he wanted so badly to forget.
He tried to focus on how to solve the problem before him, tried to distract himself with plans and ideas and plots and stratagems. Slush, even the strange feelings that now bubbled up in his stomach whenever he happened to glance at Toph's still faintly pink face would be a preferable avenue of contemplation to what things now presently gnawed at the back of his mind, creeping up from the deepest, darkest, blackest recesses of desperately repressed memory.
He looked into Suki's bright hazel eyes, and tried not to think of the light leaving the painfully similar eyes of sweet, innocent young Aumanil and her brother Issitoq, who had looked up at him so confusedly, in their last last few moments of life, moving their lips without sound as if to ask him why he stood above them, a bloodstained bone hunting knife in his hand. He glanced at Toph's cloudy eyes, and tried not to remember the tears in the eyes of old, weary, blind Anik, or his wife, Atiqtalik, who had submitted themselves with resignation, knowing what needed to be done for the future of the tribe.
Fiercely he shoved back these memories, the memories of kind Estuuya, capricious Kadlu, steadfast Ilannaq, lighthearted Natsiq, and clumsy Palluqtuq, and how each of them had met their end, how he and Gran-Gran and Katara and the young mothers and their children had survived the long famine of harsh antarctic winters. He did everything he could to avoid thinking about this, to keep his mind on track and push these black, dreadful thought back into the furthest depths of forgotten memory.
He did not think about these things, because if he did, he knew that the fear of failure would overwhelm him.
He had been too weak, too inexperienced back then, and so many others had died because of his failures, but no longer. He could not let these fears rule him.
Suki and Toph were counting on them.
And he would do everything in his power to not let them down.
A/N: It's always perplexed me a little how so many writers seem to show Sokka with sexist tendencies even post-series, considering how quickly he changed his tune in canon – his misogyny lasted all of four episodes, until he met Suki. After that, it was never really brought up again. Considering the environment in which Sokka grew up, it was only natural that he would have held certain inaccurate preconceived notions about women, yet once he met the Kyoshi Warriors and Suki, got his ass kicked by them, then agreed to train under them, he pretty much dropped those facets of his personality entirely.
To me, it seems clear, in hindsight, that all Sokka needed was empirical evidence that women could be just as strong as men. Once he got that from the Kyoshi Warriors, he adjusted his worldview accordingly. And to be fair, Katara really wasn't much of anything in those first episodes, her ragebending an iceberg into pieces notwithstanding.
Furthermore, I think it really is to Sokka's credit that he never seems to resent Katara once she starts getting truly skilled, never appears to be jealous of her for her talent.
And, considering how quickly he managed to pick up the basics of swordfighting in Sokka's Master, it strikes me that Sokka and Katara really are both prodigies of a sort, and if Sokka had had someone consistently teaching him how to fight, he probably could have gotten pretty damn good as a fighter in his own right a whole lot sooner than he did in the actual series. It's not as though the Water Tribe armed or unarmed fighting styles are inferior to those of the rest of the world, because if they were we wouldn't have gotten much of a show because the South Pole would have gotten utterly steamrolled and destroyed early on in the War, as opposed to simply dwindling due to constant attrition over the course of a century of war and raids.
Really, if Sokka'd had older warriors there at the South Pole to really teach him as he was growing up, he probably could have become as good in his own styles of fighting as people like Mai or Suki or Ty Lee.
...I put way too much fucking thought into this sort of thing.
...and then I wind up going somewhere really goddamn dark while expanding on stuff in the middle of the tangent. I DON'T KNOW I'M TRYING TO KEEP THINGS FUNNY BUT MY MIND NATURALLY GOES DARK PLACES LIKE THAT
I swear, it seems like between this chapter, a few earlier ones, and Hurt, it's almost like my goal is to make Sokka as tragic a character as I possibly can.
WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME
TTFN and R&R!
– — ❤
...ck that was a depressing chapter.
So yeah.
I THINK YOU GUYS CAN SEE WHY I AM OPTING TO DO A REWRITE.
Also, notes on the Inuit names I used, from some name meaning website or other:
Aumanil - male or female; In Inuit mythology, Aumanil is a kind and beneficent spirit. Also, it is said that this god lived on land and controlled the movement of the whales.
Issitoq - male; In Inuit mythology, Issitoq is a deity that punishes those who break taboos. He usually takes the form of a giant flying eye.
Anik - male; means "seer"
Atiqtalik - male or female (apparently); "Polar bear mother"
Estuuya - female; no meaning listed
Kadlu - female; In Inuit mythology, Kadlu refers to either one goddess or three sisters who presided over thunder.
Ilannaq - male or female; means "friend"
Natsiq - male or female; means "seal" (the animal, that is)
Palluqtuq - female; "Falls flat on her face"
This is ugly and crazy and wtf, but whatever. I am hot and sleepy and have been typing for too damn long. THIS THING IS GOING UP, AND YOU CANNOT STOP ME.