"Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye".
-The little Prince.
CHAPTER I: The World of Colors
"Sokka…"
"Mhhh?"
"What does the moon look like?"
Spring nights are strange. Sometimes they're too cold, almost as cold as winter nights. Sometimes they're as rainy as summers' days. But that night in particular was very cloudy, yet a fresh breeze was coming from the north that would soon remove all of the clouds from the sky.
Sokka was watching over his friends as they slept, lying on Appa's fur with his sight fixed in the dying flames of the campfire that had been giving him light and warmth. He was thinking of absolutely nothing when he heard his youngest friend asking at the same time she took a seat besides him. Apparently, right now the girl was having the same problems to fall asleep as she had to wake up in the mornings.
"The moon... mmhh... I don't know; it's just a massive boulder stuck in the sky..." he said casually. He didn't even turn his gaze to her; after all, she wouldn't notice his eyes.
"And why you sound so sad when you talk about it?"
"It's a long story that I just don't want to tell right now." The boy turned his face to the sky, looking for the heavenly body, but then he remembered the clouds.
"Would you at least answer my first question?" her voice was acid, even through she knew she'd touched a sensitive thread in her friend.
"The moon..." he started looking for something in the ground, finding a little round and smooth pebble, which he placed in Toph's hands. "Ok, the moon is like this, round but huge. Like a massive cold and white ball of light."
She took the pebble and started to touch its surface. Then she made a mocking face and threw the rock above her shoulder.
"Err... Sokka... do you remember that I'm blind? That means I'm not able to distinguish one color from another..."
"You never asked someone about that?"
"No..."
"Your parents or your silly earthbender babysitter never told you?"
Toph took another pebble and threw it toward Sokka, who couldn't evade the hit. Then she turned her back to him.
"Ok... ok... my mistake," he tried to excuse himself. "But really... you never asked or someone never explained to you what colors looked like? You have never been interested in the color of the clothes you're wearing?"
"I'm so sorry for not being the little fragile girl who always wanted the help from her parents sayin 'Please! Mommy and Daddy, I'm alone and scared! Please tell me everything because I can't see!' My world doesn't have color or light or shadows. Just sound, smell and vibrations, those are my eyes. I don't really care about that. You know? Sometimes it's funny to guess even if I'm a good looking or an ugly girl... Ha! I don't even know how someone is supposed to look pretty." She was trying to be sarcastic, but the fact that she wasn't talking facing Sokka meant that it was more important to her that anyone could imagine. Certanly, her gift to sense someone else's lies didn't meant that the rest of the people couldn't see if she herself was lying.
Sokka waited for a minute before talking again to her. "Yeah, you're right. You are blind, and that means the only color you can "see" is black, isn't it?"
"What? The "thing" I see is a color?"
"Well, it isn't a color exactly; it's just the absence of light. But it's commonly called "black" color," he said while removing the fireplace's ashes.
"And... what do the other remaining colors look like?" she said with growing interest. For some reason, she was starting to show curiosity about the world she couldn't see, and curiosity about the boy who was explaining that world to her.
"Well," he said, "most of the time you look so sure of yourself and your blindness that everybody thought that you don't care about the...Ouch!" he finished when Toph struck Sokka's arm.
"Just tell me, meathead."
The boy sighed and closed his eyes, first to find a way to explain the colors to a blind girl and second to feel for himself her blindness, even though for a moment.
"Well Toph, if you can 'see' the black color, just try to imagine the opposite."
"How?"
"I don't know how, but try to imagine anything that means exactly the opposite of what you 'see,'" He turned to her side and saw her with her eyes closed and focused in her thoughts. "If you can concentrate on that, then you can have the picture of the color white."
"Wow..." Toph sighed, then she inmersed into a deep silence. Sokka was watching her with a mix of curiosity and expectation. He knew so little about this girl and it was so difficult for him to talk with her that most of the time he felt so intimidated. He sighed and turned his sight to the fireplace, waiting for her to start talking.
"Sokka?"
"Yes?"
"And the remaining colors?"
"Red, blue, green... where would you start?" he said. Although he was starting to fall asleep, he enjoyed the first talk in months that didn't involve the words like "Avatar" "war" "Fire Nation" and things like that.
"And... how do the peoples' eyes look like? I've heard that they're different colors and the soul sometimes escapes through them," Toph's curiosity was growing, and it seemed like she was going to ask about everything.
"Is it that 'the eyes are the mirrors of the soul' thing?" he said to mend the girl's thoughts.
"That's it!" she said excitedly.
"Well... people used to say that. Eyes are intense. They're like crystals, polished and shining. And despite every emotion is shown by the muscles of the face, the eyes can tell if that emotion is true or not"
"I'm not following."
"Well, you can detect someone else's lies through their heartbeats and breathing rhythm variations. Well, lots of people say they can detect someone's lies by looking them directly into the eyes." Unconsciously, Sokka started a crude drawing of an eye into the soil, without notice Toph could sense his moves through the Earth.
"What are you doing?" the girl pointed with a finger the place where she could sense the vibrations Sokka was making. Suddenly, he took Toph's hand and started to trace the drawing with one of her fingers.
"I'm not good at drawing, but this is what an eye looks like." He explained while tracing the lines he had done. "This is the eyelid, these are the eyelashes… and this circle is the iris. This part of the eye is the one where there are different colors," He released Toph's hand and watched her tracing the drawing on her own.
Sokka was feeling rather strange teaching her such simple things. Although he was older than her, she could easy bury him below tons of rocks and earth in a blink. She was a master of her craft. The Avatar's teacher, for the spirits' sake! And there she was, captivated with a crude drawing he made, learning something from him. For the first time in months, Sokka was feeling like the one he really was, the elder of the gang and for the first time in the short time he was traveling with Toph, he was looking at her as the 12 year old girl she really was.
"Each person has something about their native element in their eyes," continued the boy. "Like Aang, he has that silvery gray color from the clouds on stormy days, when the sky is dark and the lightenings strike. We, the proud Water Tribe members..." he said arrogantly, "have blue eyes, like the ocean and the sky"
"So... Fire Nation people have fire-colored eyes and Earth Kingdom citizens have earth-colored eyes?" she said sarcastically.
"Almost. Fire is something really hard to describe. It's fluid like water, but at the same time volatile like air. Its colors are red, yellow and orange. Fire Nation people's eyes are golden, like amber. On the other hand, Earth Kingdom people's eyes are different colors." Sokka watched how Toph turned her head to him, hiding her eyes in her dark hair, but listening to him carefuly.
"Aren't they just green?"
"Mostly. But some people have brown eyes, like the fertile soil of the forest. But the majority of them have green eyes, like the leaves of the trees and the emeralds".
"My eyes are not like theirs... mine are useless..." She turned down her head and started to draw doodles over the soil. There was no sadness or self-pity in her voice, but sharpness.
"Toph... Do you know why women use jewerly?" asked Sokka when an idea crossed his mind.
"Because they're silly. To show how wealthy and rich they are, I suppose... I hated to wear those stupid things..."
"Women use jewels because they are pretty and those things make them look beautiful."
"And why do a bunch of shiny stones and metals makes women look good?"
"I dunno... It's not the stones or the gold by themselves. When a woman wears jewerly, she feels beautiful, and that feeling makes her looking really gorgeous..." He said looking into the sky, where the clouds had made it clear in the shadowed night.
"What has that to do with my useless eyes or the color of other people's eyes?" she said eagerly.
"There is a very rare type of jade stone, a special one. Few jewels are made of this material, but they are exremely expensive. Common jade has an intense shade of green, bright and deep, beautiful but common after all. But this jade, the Fen Jade has a paler green color, almost white. Most of the people ignore it because of its faint color without knowing it is precisely what makes it the most valuable of all."
"Yeah.... more rocks. Where are you taking this conversation?"
Still watching the cloudy night and playing with Appa's fur between his fingers he thought for a second, unsure he should say what he was thinking about.
"You said you eyes were nothing like the ones of other Earth Kingdom person. Actually, they're nothing like anything I've ever seen." He watched her closing her eyes, as if she was ashamed of something. "Your eyes are like the Fen Jade... White, pale... unusual..."
Surprised, she turned her head to Sokka, with incredulity in her face, knowing that he was looking her straight into the eyes.
"Useless..." She stuttered, feeling his gaze over her and thinking about nothing else.
"Yeah... useless". He threw a bunch of dirt onto the fireplace to extinguish it, laid down and closed his eyes prepared to sleep. "As useless as a Fen Jade jewel..."
She closed her eyes and caressed the closed lids with her fingers, thinking about the meaning of the jewelry and the talk Sokka had given to her before. She realized that his comments had taken away her steadiness.
"Was that... a ... compliment?" She thought. She fell to his back, but not to sleep but to think. To try to imagine the white color and keep it in mind, just like the moon, just like the precious Fen Jade...
Hope you like it. Thanks a lot to Avatarone3, who helped me a lot with the english version of this fic.
I own nothing but a Fanfiction account. Toph, Sokka and all related character belongs to other people who are making money with them. Not me.