Title: Take Me Up

Summary: When Aang sends Toph off for a special favor, he winds up telling her more than he ever could through words, and Toph can't find the heart to deny him. AxT

A/N: Proof I haven't disappeared, a sincere apology for the sudden hiatus, and a peace offering to hold you all off for a bit while I gather my bearings and start updating in earnest again.

Disclaimer: I own nothing, my dears. God knows how much of a mess the show would turn into if I did. Bryke would have themselves heart attacks.

As far as Toph knew, she was the only one who still believed that Aang was a child.

She admitted that it wasn't an aspect of his personality dominated by immaturity—the monk had proven extensively that both his actions and his forethought were considered with a patience and awareness that seemed to escape him when his emotions and personal interests were so volatile when he was younger. Personally, she felt there was a certain passion in the almost reckless and haphazard way that he undertook his duty and helped the people around him. He relied on instinct and luck to drive him, and she almost missed those days when he smiled so brightly when things were resolved and went his way.

That was long gone and replaced with a demure sense of responsibility—he was no doubt emboldened by the older and more experienced peace-makers he needed to surround himself with as a result of such an occupational hazard. Before, his personality bled and seeped into all that he did. Now, his personality has cracked and split with age.

She seemed to be the only person who still saw the original childlike island that his wisdom had broken off from.

If there was anything Aang was good at lately, it was acting—at least that's how Toph saw it. She could always hear the breathing and feel the heartbeats, but those she had come to know for years, she realized that their feelings and energies were almost palpable. She understood after a couple of years the concept of the auras that a certain Kyoshi Warrior could always read. Toph had consulted with the enthusiastic Fire Nation girl many a time and had asked her about how such mechanisms worked and how they could be felt.

"Usually you see auras," she had explained to her one day. "It's the color, intensity, and clarity that you judge, and it's very telling. Like, Waterbenders tend to have strong green points in their auras. The natural healer type, you know? That's what I see when I look at Katara."

Toph nodded, not really understanding the concept of the color, but understanding the philosophy. "I get it. Go on."

"Well, it's like what you always say about the Earth and its vibrations, but it's the entire world and everyone in it, too. Everything vibrates and gives off energy everywhere. It's more than just seeing the auras; it's feeling them. The agitation and serenity—the balance and imbalance. Emotions literally become tangible."

Maybe she had put too much stock in what Ty Lee had told her, but Toph truly believed it. Over the years, Toph had understood such sensitivities and the ability to look past the exterior and see the conflicts lying underneath. Toph had never been a spiritual person, but found a sort of beauty in the fact that there could be innate aspects detected about you and moods that could be sensed through concentration. Nothing was hidden. All a person had to do was stop and think or feel hard enough and it all became real. It was how she discovered that Aang had been hiding something from the world.

There was no denying the harsh and almost frantic energy coming from him that seemed to be subdued by something. His demure and seemingly spiritually sound exterior was completely thrown off by whatever turmoil he was building up inside him, and the idea was almost startling. Aang's negativity was always explosive and extroverted. It was easy to tell when he was upset. Now…it was like he was screaming on the inside.

"You know, if you're going to be spacing out on me, we might as well stop what we're doing and just leave."

Toph jumped at the voice and her foot slipped. Her toe connected with a broken skull and she heard it scuttle across stone and rock much like a broken, porcelain teacup would. She swallowed hard and tried not to let it bother her. "Get off my back, Fire Pants. I didn't ask you to come and help me. I could've done this by myself."

The Fire Lord chuckled as he jogged up a flight of stairs ahead of her. "You don't even know what it looks like. It's not like it's a sacred treasure kept on a pedestal in the middle of a gigantic room. There are probably dozens of them buried in the rubble here. We have to find the right one."

The girl quickly caught up to him and pushed him over so that he stumbled into the railing of the balcony. Hearing his hipbone connect with the stone along with his grunt of pain cheered her up enough to get her to stop thinking about the monk, his weird emotional state, and his even weirder favors. Quite honestly, this wasn't how she wanted spend her weekend. She should have realized that a temple in the sky would be pretty drafty, especially during late Autumn. She had to take out her bun and let her hair loose just so that the thick strands would help in keeping her bare arms warm. Not only that, but one couldn't exactly get here by walking, which meant that Toph had to suffer an entire hour spent in a cramped, stuffy Fire Nation balloon just to get to the damn place. You would think that this was some do or die mission that involved breaking heads, halting rebels, or at least some excitement. But her imagination always made things more complicated than they were.

No, this was nothing more and nothing less than a hunt for a necklace.

"Does he even realize how big the Southern Air Temple is for us non-Airbender folk?" Toph called back to Zuko. Said Fire Bender was nursing a bruise on his hip as he walked over to her and yanked at a lock of her hair.

"I would imagine he does," Zuko responded sarcastically. "He did grow up here."

Toph glared. "That's not what I meant. There are entire groups of hallways and rooms that look exactly the same. His directions could practically mean anything. Added to the fact that the façade of each side of the temple looks exactly the same as the others, who knows if we're in the right part? You're just meant to get lost."

Zuko scratched the back of his head and looked up at the looming archway they were now standing in front of. "You're not very optimistic, are you?"

"I'm cold and hopelessly confused," Toph grumbled. "There's not much to be chipper about."

"Well, weren't you the one that insisted the two of us go on a field trip together?" Zuko smirked. "You're totally ruining it."

Toph groaned loudly and proceeded through the entryway. "I was twelve, you idiot. Let it go!"

Truthfully, she was glad that it was Zuko accompanying her on this trip and not anyone else. As much as Toph enjoyed the company of the Water Tribe siblings, they weren't exactly conducive to a productive atmosphere. Sokka was just as impatient as she was, and putting two impatient people together to complete an endeavor such as this one was just asking for trouble. They probably would've left after about fifteen minutes. Katara had a little bit more commitment, but liked to think that she was always right and would probably take the fact that she had "been here before" as a justification of her superior sense of direction when it came to navigating Air Temples. Toph probably wouldn't get a word in, and they would no doubt kill each other after ten minutes.

Zuko was cool headed enough to keep her on task and trusted in her skills as much as his own when it came to finding something as obscure as a piece of jewelry in such a hopeless wreck. Plus, she secretly thought that he had the most common sense out of all of them, and she respected a person who had a good head on their shoulders.

"What I don't understand is what brought this along," Zuko questioned aloud. The chilling winds died down considerably now that they were back inside. Toph could feel the heat of the flame flickering in his hands so that he might find his way. "Why, after all these years, would he want this little relic now? I mean, he had no interest in it before…"

Toph shrugged. She pulled his elbow to the right when he began turning left. "There's a cave-in that way." He shrugged, took her word for it, and kept walking alongside her. "I don't know. He's been acting very funny lately. Like he's…" She visibly struggled to find the word. "…distracted, I guess. Something's bugging him and he isn't telling anyone. Typical. But it's not obvious, you know?"

"Well I agree with that last part," Zuko commented. "He seems fine when he's with everyone else. All smiles, good words, and pleasant company. But I agree, something seems slightly off. I've noticed it too. He's different lately."

Toph nodded. "He's always so tense, and the way he carries himself is so rigid. It's bizarre. And now with this…"

She really wanted to come here by herself just because she felt like she was the only one who would understand what this mission meant and why he asked her—the most precious person in his life—to do it for him. It felt like cheating that she allowed Zuko to tag along. But over the years, Zuko and Toph had developed a cross between a respected friendship and a brother-sister dynamic that did not allow him to let Toph go on her own once she told him where she was going. But Toph was starting to piece together what this all meant, and she was afraid that Zuko would find out something Aang only meant Toph to figure out. With this recent move of Aang's, Toph knew that it was probably bad.

Zuko hummed in thought. "Depressed, maybe?"

Toph narrowed her eyes. "…I'm not sure. Anyway, it doesn't matter what the word for it is. For someone who seems to preach spiritual tranquility, there's something putrid underneath it all. It only started happening recently. Now he asks me to do him a favor and find this necklace for him. It's odd. He doesn't usually act like this. In fact, I've never seen anything like this from him. It's…unsettling."

They encountered a fork with four different hallways they could take. Toph cursed under her breath and stomped on the floor—half in anger and half to get a better look at what was ahead of them. Zuko, she could tell also, was starting to get frustrated. They had been here for hours already. This was probably the sixth building they had explored and there was no sign of this relic that Aang seemed in a panic to get. According to Aang, the necklace was in a small room branched off of a larger hallway. She would know it when she saw it, whatever that meant. But most of these small rooms that they found were caved in and filled with junk. Nothing that looked valuable. Zuko made sure. To say that she was getting beyond frustrated was an understatement.

Toph sighed and fell down on the ground. The paths all looked the same and led to even more rooms that they hadn't gotten the chance to look at yet. She didn't feel like walking anymore, and she could feel the cuts on her feet from all the bones and broken stones she had tripped over. Not only that, but this place was incredibly creepy. Just the thought of this temple being haunted by the screams of thousands of people filled her with dread. The dead bodies every few feet didn't help matters, and she couldn't imagine how Zuko must have felt walking around in here. There were plenty of Fire Nation helmets buried in the rubble.

Zuko must have noticed that she was bleeding and sat down next to her before pulling her feet in his lap. Those cuts must have been bad, because he started pouring water over the scrapes and wrapping bandages over them.

"If you were bleeding, we could have stopped a while back," Zuko commented. "Plus, no one said we need to find it today. We can come back. Things are slow in the Fire Nation. I'll always take time off to help you two."

Toph hung her head. "I know you would. But…I can't help but think that maybe this isn't random—like he's trying to tell me something that I'm just not seeing on my own. I want to figure it out now before he spends too long in a funk. That's never good. He's like this for too long and you can hardly snap him out of it. His emotions are infectious like that."

Zuko tipped his head and kept wrapping up her feet. "I didn't even know that about him."

She nodded and continued to explain. "He's very into his element, but if he's around anything for too long he adapts to it. I don't need that to happen to him now that he's in a horrible mood." She remembered the time when Aang was getting letter from a Fire Nation noble who was criticizing the plans he passed and how his priorities were ordered. Of course, he didn't show the letters to anyone, and Toph didn't see them until she accidently found them in his house about three weeks later. The guy was just a selfish jerk worried only about his class and his nation—and in her perfectly honest opinion, an Ozai supporter who was still sore about the new order of things. But Aang had been taking it to heart for so long and not gaining any assurances from anyone about the matter, that he fully convinced himself that he was doing something wrong and failing the people around him. It took Toph ages to get him out of that switch of moods.

"The poor thing is just walking on eggshells all the time," Toph admitted. "He has to please so many people, and he takes everything to heart when things don't go the way they should. He's not used to things not falling into place for him. He starts to get lost and wish for things."

Zuko tapped her ankles, indicating that he was done. She wriggled her toes around to make sure that she could still see, and immediately got back onto her feet. The third hallway from the left seemed to have more empty rooms to choose from, so she figured that they could go that way and see what they could find. Apparently this room was towards the end of a hallway. Maybe they were close.

"You care a lot about him, don't you?" Zuko asked.

Toph snapped her head towards him quickly and immediately denied it out of a defensive habit. "No! I just got the kid figured out. That's all. Plus, we all care about each other. We've been friends for years."

"That's not what I meant," Zuko chuckled. "You're so attune to him. Besides, now that he's not with Katara, he seems to trust you over everyone else."

Toph rolled her eyes, but also tried to ignore how her heart clenched beautifully when she had heard what he said. "I wouldn't say that. We're friends. Isn't he supposed to trust me?"

"Well, he certainly didn't call me to do this for him, did he?" Zuko commented. "The only reason I'm here is because I insisted and you let me."

Toph furrowed her brows again. She definitely knew that this seemed personal—something that he only wanted Toph to do, to know, or to see. But she never interpreted it to mean that he trusted her to degrees that exceeded everyone around him. She just thought that he wanted to keep this a secret. He wanted as few people to know about this as possible—for whatever reason she hadn't known. But since he was a good friend and she was always willing to do whatever she needed to do in order to help him, there was no hesitation in her actions despite how much she really would rather be doing something else. But Zuko wasn't buying that this was a secret. Zuko seemed to think that this was something far more meaningful.

"Well, why?" Toph asked. "It's just a necklace, isn't it?" A necklace, two beads missing, a pendant hanging from it with a chip on the bottom and an air symbol inscribed on the front. She figured that it was an old relic that he used to own that he wanted back. She didn't know who it might belong to, only that Aang really wanted it—seemed like he desperately needed it.

Zuko shrugged. "I don't know. I'm just as confused as you."

The Fire Lord was alluding to something. He might not know the specifics, but he seemed to know the motives, and that frustrated Toph. She wasn't too good with emotions or interpreting them. She felt things and she knew the state of a person's emotional state. But that didn't mean she knew how to interpret it or knew where the problems stemmed from. It was like when her mother forced her to study poetry in addition to the essays and novels she was meant to study growing up. She was good with straightforward prose. There was nothing complicated about that. All you had to do was read it. Poetry was often beyond her. There was a lot of reading, stopping, thinking, interpreting, reflecting, and philosophizing. Emotions were like that—in need of being interpreted and broken apart. They couldn't be taken at face value, since they often lied to you or didn't tell you the whole story. After all, they were tangible energies that shifted and changed so easily. Maybe that's what she was doing with Aang. Not looking deep enough.

The two of them finally reached the end of that hallway and noticed that it had opened up back to the outside again. The wind hit her and chilled her arms again. Her teeth chattered and suddenly she realized that maybe she was looking at this entire endeavor the wrong way. Zuko was right. There was something she wasn't seeing and this was meant to help—Aang's version of a call for help. A clue.

Her fingers brushed along the last doorway on that hallway, and she didn't have to go inside to know that she had picked the right one.

"Oh—," Zuko breathed.

There were so many bones and skeletons piled on top of each other, it felt like a fragile little palace about to topple over and crackle against the floor into millions of pieces too small to grab and put back together. It made Zuko freeze, and it made Toph's blood run cold. She felt like an intruder, a thief amongst a catacomb of memories and families and lives that were cut so abruptly that it made her sick. She was a war hero. She was no stranger to death and pointless fighting, but just the sight of this made her so sick to her stomach, she wondered how Aang hadn't started falling apart at the seams sooner.

The upper half of a skeleton was at the base of the pyramid of bones, but the vibrations felt off. There was something heavy and solid on this skeleton that wasn't present on the others. Not used to having to feel the vibrations of bones, it took her a moment of concentrating and focusing to make her realize that it was made out of wood, and it was a necklace hanging from the neck.

"Zuko—"

"I know," he whispered. "I see it. Two beads missing. It's chipped. It's the right one." She nodded. She knew she was right without even having to ask.

Tears were prickling in her eyes and she had no idea why. "Sparky, I don't like this. I can't…"

She backed up until she collided with his chest and he held onto her shoulders. "Hey, hey, come on now, Champ. Gather your nerve up a bit, huh? You said you'd do this for him."

"I know I did," she sobbed out without meaning to. She didn't know why she was crying. She didn't know why her chest hurt. She didn't know why she suddenly just wanted to run to Aang and just hold him and never let him go just to let him know that not everything was burned and killed and that there was still someone here to take his hand and just be with him.

Toph scrubbed at her eyes furiously, the salt water already leaking down onto her chapped lips. This wasn't what she was expecting, and all of a sudden she felt like there was this huge weight that she just shouldered for the monk that she hadn't realized she would be coming here to take. But for some reason, the heaviness pushed her toward the piles of the dead and helped her kneel down before it and carefully—oh so carefully like would break Aang too if she wasn't careful—she pulled it from its neck and cradled it in her hands.

Katara had told her something like this. How Aang, her brother and she had happened upon a similar scene—a dead monk among a pile of bones that triggered Aang into such anger and grief that he had tapped into his Avatar State without even realizing it. She fought through the hurricane and grabbed for him, pulling him back down to Earth—out of his memories and back to the present—and straight into her arms. It was all the poor boy needed. He lost his people and he needed to be loved. And for a while, Katara did love him. She told Toph so. Toph believed her, and didn't blame her when she said that the love just stopped being what Aang wanted it to be. But, Aang had lost it all and he needed an entire nation's worth of love and adoration. It sounded selfish, but Toph thought that he reserved the right to be so.

Her fingers curled over the engraving she felt on the back of the pendant. It was writing, she was able to tell right away. Aang was teaching her little bit by little bit. She knew how to write all the names of her friends and even her own. She could read simple sentences and sound together most words if she was met with them. It happened after she had rushed to him when he was staying in Ba Sing Se after Katara had insisted they stay friends. The moment she opened the door, he pulled her inside, tears still running down his cheeks and asked her, "Would you like to learn how to write?"

It was a little secret they had between the two of them. That night, after he taught her a few simple symbols, he would rest his head on her lap and just sit there—sometimes crying, sometimes talking, sometimes doing nothing—and just take comfort in the fact that someone would drop the world to rush over to him and help him when he needed it. Sitting there, in the cold with the pendant in her hands, she wondered just how long he had been waiting, thinking he could plow through life like this.

They had done that for weeks—her coming over to learn how to write sentences with a brush, and he hoping that maybe Toph could piece him back together just a little bit. She teased him at first, telling him that it wasn't the end of the world if one girl turned him down. He was still young. There were many others that he could find later. But that wasn't the point of it all. That wasn't what he was trying to tell her. All this time she was trying to tell her something, and it was only now that she understood it.

"Hey," Toph called back to Zuko. "I think I know what it says, but I'm not sure."

He lifted a brow. "You can read?"

Toph shrugged and ignored him for the moment. Now, she didn't feel like telling anyone this little fact. "It's faded. The engraving is hard to make out. Can't you read it?" she asked, holding it out for him.

Zuko kneeled down next to her and flipped the necklace over that was in her hand. "Um…Gyatso, I think it is. Is this it?"

Her breath caught in her throat. Of course he had told her of his most beloved teacher that had been so forcefully snatched away from him—probably the only monk in that entire temple that loved him with an affection that meant more to the lonely Avatar than anyone could ever realize. In front of his corpse and in front of his memory, Katara was the first to pick up the torch to make him know that he would never be alone and that yes there was someone now who would be there. He was still a child. He needed someone to love him.

Now that Katara had let it go, Aang had led Toph here to fill the hole again. The Earth Bender almost felt like crying again. But more than anything, she wanted to run to him and tell him that all he ever needed to do was ask.

He hadn't lost it all. Not everyone was gone. There was still hope. Toph would make sure that he knew that much.

"Yeah," she laughed, clearing her chest and breathing in sweet air. "Yeah, that's the one."

A/N: Reviews are appreciated ^.^