Toph Bei Fong.
If the war took a turn for the worst.
Toph could never accurately describe the ghosts war left behind like crushed cobwebs, how they collected in the course of peacetime years, gathering strength under the banner of nightmares. Recurring in the night, gone in the morning, a scream dead and cold in her throat.
All Toph knows is that, in her waking hours, the ghost walks a half-step behind her, its footfalls of the wispiest vibration, feathery on her senses. It makes her tea bristle in its delicate cup, paints thick congealing fear in the spaces between her fingers, and tilts her head back, making her see, again and again, airships crashing -
At first, she'd fought it the way she knew best: with obstinacy. That was the way she fought with convention, with the need for approval from parents who'd ladled out their attentions like breadcrumb trails that invariably lead to greater traps, with her own limitations. But obstinacy required bravery to sustain, whatever the odds, and they said bravery was like currency: you spend and spend and spend until you've all run out. Maybe, the same could be said about bravado – because that's what she tried next (that's what she won Earth Rumble with - that and those idiots' harsh immediate prejudice - even when she'd been a little girl and earthbenders of every calibre shaped with graceful thrusts the arena around her with precise, unapologetic strength).
Maybe, the same could be said about everything else, and she's run out of all except numbness. So she stays in their grand, palatial house in the heart of the Earth Kingdom, listless, disgusted. Knuckles pressed to her eyes. Her hands trembling.
They're delicately-boned, pale and slim, one would never know they'd crashed an entire fleet. Made the earth run red with blood and, in their own way, fire.
The Avatar visits sometimes. Aang looks at her and blames himself. Katara is disgusted with them both. Sokka regards the state of affairs with the characteristic cold-bloodedness of an academician. Toph, on her part, is ungrateful for the intrusion and would've swatted them away if she could. But she can't bear looking at Aang, can't remember what exactly was she was thinking running off with a band of renegades the night the Avatar crashed on her doorstep, adventure dangling from his outstretched hand, both of them unknowing of the more sinister side of saving the world: piercing stakes of lightning, a shoreline embroidered with thin reeds exploding into a sea of fire, bloodbending, airships crashing.
She locks herself in her room until they leave.
On entire nights she can't sleep, she goes to the courtyard and presses her forehead to the moist earth,
coaxing it to repent from its voicelessness
and divulge which crevasse of rock
it might have hidden
her twelve-year-old fearlessness.