1.
Quan Sun was spring, and he was winter.
Sokka thought their differences ended at that, but his constant presence at the Bei Fong estate made it emptier than it was. Larger, looming. As if, one day, the house would just open its mouth (and yes, it had bricks for teeth) and devour him whole.
(But, of course, this was not because Quan Sun had arrived one lethargic autumn afternoon from Chin village or Kyoshi Island or Si Wong Desert or Fire Fountain City Rock bearing promises and gifts and emblems of the flying boar wrought in gold.)
Poppy and Lao had been polite enough when Toph had first brought him to the estate ("Mom, Dad, remember Sokka? He's helping me out with the academy."). They hired a chef specializing in Water Tribe cuisine, but the seaweed noodles were buckwheat noodles with food coloring, and the five-flavor soup was just jook with sea prunes.
("You eat this on a daily basis?" Poppy asked, curiously poking an arctic hen with a chopstick. "He eats anything, really," Toph grinned.)
But during the dinner celebrating Quan Sun's arrival, plates of nuts and beets and moon peaches and steak and roast duck and crab puffs flew by. The dishes tasted sour, and bile rose at the back of Sokka's mouth when he forced himself to swallow another bite. When he didn't ask for seconds, Toph slammed a rock into his feet, and even the Bei Fong couple seemed concerned.
During desert, Quan Sun offered Sokka a pair of chopsticks, as golden as his right incisor. Yellow suddenly became Sokka's least favorite color.
2.
"I never thought you'd have agreed to this."
"Neither did I."
"Then…Why-"
"We all have to grow up some time."
"You don't love him."
"I don't have to."
"You love me."
"I don't want to."
3.
The plants reeked of strange, foreign scents, and Sokka remembered how much he missed the cold. Midnight walks with Toph grew less and less frequent when Quan Sun had arrived. He was able to snatch moments with her, yes, a brushing of fingers during tea, an exchange of smiles. He caught glimpses of her at the Metalbending Academy, sometimes helped her motivation-bend, but there was nothing tangible. Not anymore.
Sokka sometimes wondered if he really was here, and not in some afterlife (maybe he had died in the war, died trying to save her) where even the life he should have gotten slipped right through his fingers because he was winter, and not the spring she deserved.
"Sokka?" He turned around, and saw (not Toph, of course it wasn't her) Quan Sun, clutching a flask of alcohol with his dear life.
"Hey," he replied, trying to sound as amiable as possible (and failing, always failing, because Quan Sun's lips quirked, perhaps in fear, and Sokka realized that he was holding the hilt of his sword too tightly his knuckles went white).
"I don't want to have to do it," Quan Sun blubbered, already half-drunk, "I don't love her."
"I know someone who does," Sokka replied, and left it at that.