A/N: As usual, I apologize for the delay in chapters, if you still even follow this story (which I hope you do, seeing as I worked my butt off to write it!). Summer is typically a busy time for me, between work and copious trips and what have you. But I finally cracked down and finished it, though I had to use a camera memory card to transfer it over to this computer with internet access, as I forgot my flash drive.
So yeah. Oh, and bonus points to those of you who recognize the reference I made to something I wrote in another story! In fact, if you don't pick up on it, one of the lines in this chapter may seem somewhat awkward to you. But that's okay. Onward!
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Happy Reading!
Chapter Four – The Man at the Bridge
In the Spirit World, there was no night, and no day. The strange sun hung orblike in the sky at all hours, and though it shed no real warmth, they were still forced to retreat from its light beneath the trees when they needed to stop for rest. Even in the dark, sleep did not come easy for the three, whose hearts were full of worry and anxiety; the remaining time had diminished to mere hours.
Sokka's rumbling stomach snapped him out of his light snooze. He sat up, rubbing his eyes and peering around into the unfamiliar woods. Aang had already awoken, if he had even fallen asleep—it had only been a half-hour break, after all—and seemed to be ready to go. Toph slept on, though, her body curled up on the hard ground. Sokka's eyes scanned her over once, taking in everything over the years they had been separated, and came to rest on her feet, which were caked in a normal layer of dust and dirt. Sighing, he reached over and gave her shoulder a gentle shake.
"Hey, wake up, Toph. We've got to go," he said.
Groaning, Toph rolled over and opened her pale eyes.
"I just fell asleep," she muttered, as if being awoken was causing her extreme agony. "We've been walking for hours!"
"Sorry Toph, but we've only got a few hours," Aang responded. He strode over, swinging his backpack around his shoulders as he did so. "We'll stop again after we cover some ground."
Aang's suddenly hopeful attitude told her that she wouldn't be getting any sleep any time soon, so Toph sighed deeply, paused, and clambered to her feet. She knew she wouldn't be complaining, at least out loud, to anybody; she hadn't argued her rights to be allowed to come just so she could be a burden, and she didn't intend on being one. Besides, she wanted to help Katara just as much as the others.
"Let's just keep moving."
-
They had not been traveling long, Aang at the lead with Toph and Sokka close behind, when Toph gave a strangled yell and froze in place. The grip she'd had on Sokka's backpack tightened, and that in combination with her shout caused him to stop, spin around, and ask what was wrong just as Aang did likewise.
Toph took a moment to reply, and when she did her voice was strained. "Stepped on something—a stick, I think. It's not bad, though, I can wal—ow! Agh! What is it?"
Aang had already run over and dropped to his knees in front of her by the time she'd asked what was in her foot. They had forgotten that she was barefoot when they'd left, though Aang doubted that she would have wanted to wear a pair of Katara's old shoes anyway.
"Lift your foot," he ordered calmly.
Toph did so, and he propped her foot up on his knee to get a better look—she lost balance and teetered backwards for a moment, only to be steadied by Sokka's large hands. She winced slightly as he prodded the area around the hole in her foot, out of which a piece of a stick was poking and a trickle of blood already beginning to flow. This would require that they stop again, and sooner rather than later.
After a few more moments of examination, Aang sighed and released Toph's foot.
"You stepped on a stick," he informed her. Toph's lips twitched downward, as if this news were embarrassing, which it must have been for her. "Sokka and I can take it out, but we'll need to stop. If we just cover a little more ground, we can find a place to stop and fix it." Toph nodded and placed her foot gingerly on the ground with a grimace. Aang then added, casting a wary look about him, "Yeah… this isn't the place for first aid. Can you walk on it?"
"I think so," replied Toph. She put her weight on her foot and aimed a small smile just over Aang's shoulder. "It's fine, don't worry about me," she said.
His eyes lingered on the Blind Bandit for a few moments longer before he finally nodded, stood up, and began to walk again. As the sound of his light footsteps faded, her smile did likewise. The pain in her foot was pulsating more so than anything else, but it was nonetheless painful to put weight on. A small cough off to her left told her that Sokka wasn't buying her pathetic attempts at feigning contentedness. One of his ever-warm hands came to rest on her shoulder. Her heart fluttered at his breath in her ear.
"Painful?"
The one whispered word made her tilt her chin down an inch or so.
"Extremely."
"Here, hold up a second."
Next came a grunt from Sokka and a whoosh of air next to her ear—she instinctively ducked out of the way.
"Okay, put this backpack on," Sokka instructed.
If Toph was confused, she hid it well because she slung the backpack on her shoulders without word or question. He then stepped on front of her, turned around, and sank down on one knee.
"Climb on, Toph."
Finally, some of her confusion shone through an otherwise solid expression. "What?" she asked, eyebrows shooting up in surprise at his gentle command.
Sokka smiled. "I'm going to carry you on my back, just until we can stop and get that tree out of your foot." When no reply came, he shot a glance over his shoulder and was both surprised and thrilled—though he would deny it with all of his willpower if asked—to see that the faintest of blushes had risen to her cheeks.
Now that's something you don't see every day, he thought wryly. "Really, Toph, I don't mind. You're not heavy, and neither is the backpack."
Toph said nothing, but instead nodded and reached blindly out for his shoulders. She found them, and then used them as a guide to fasted her arms securely around him. On Sokka's count to three, she pushed off the ground and jumped. He caught her, hands wrapped beneath each of her knees, and stood up with a small grunt of effort. She wasn't heavy, no—after all, she couldn't have been taller than five two and was in excellent shape, he mused—but still, she was not the Toph Bei Fong he'd known all those years ago.
"Well, the backpack isn't heavy, anyway," he joked, purposely putting a deal of strain into his voice.
Toph cuffed him around the head—he gave a loud "oof!" and laughed—and growled, smirking nonetheless, "Shut up."
Still laughing, and laughing for perhaps the first time since they'd arrived here in the Spirit World, Sokka started after Aang.
-
It did not take long for Aang to find a place to stop: a small, circular clearing on the edge of the woods. However, while Sokka tended to Toph and her wounded foot, Aang walked away to the edge of the clearing and began to pace in long strides, head bent low. Surely his heart had not stopped fluttering since he arrived in this dismal place. His nerves had been on end to begin with, and had only continued to fray as time wore shorter. If he lost Katara after all of this… he supposed there were several insane asylums in Ba Sing Se that would take him.
Of course, there was still the reason he had been granted this opportunity in the first place; under normal circumstances it was usually more honorable to accept death—with the exception of Kuruk, apparently, though Aang figured there was always an exception to the rule—but an entire race couldn't be allowed to die out. Just days ago he and Katara had spoken of starting a family, seeing as the late Fire Lord Ozai's loyalists had finally been under control for a while, and the pair of them had come to a point in their marriage where children would have been a welcome gift. Due to the close spiritual connection that the Airbenders had with the Spirit and Physical Worlds, any child they could have was more or less guaranteed to be blessed with the gift of Bending. Any child, Bending or otherwise, would have been welcome, as long as it was Katara's and Aang's. But without her…
Well, he mused darkly, there was always remarriage. It was the second-to-last thing he wanted to do—right after let some random women have his babies, which he hardly considered to be an option—but he would have to do what he'd have to do to save his race.
Aang stopped his pacing. The prospect was too horrible to even think about the possibility of it being real only made it harder for Aang to contain that swollen feeling in his chest. Frowning, he cast one last glance at the orange sky and resumed, hands clasped behind his back, pacing.
Meanwhile, Sokka had pulled the bit of twig from Toph's foot and was in the process of cleaning the wound, which had yielded a considerable amount of blood. He wiped it clean with a pair of spare socks and ripped of a long strand of fabric from one of the shirts they'd been carrying in Aang's backpack. Neither Toph nor Sokka spoke for a long time. A sort of semi-awkward, pensive silence had engulfed both of them, and both had taken to it in different ways. Toph settled back against a tree trunk and closed her eyes, Sokka watched his hands as they began to wind the cloth around her foot. One question in particular stood out in his mind, had stood out in his mind since he saw her there in Ba Sing Se Hospital—in all honesty, a ton of questions had leapt to his tongue, but the situation itself had erased them all. Now, though, he finally had a proper moment and was more or less alone with Toph for the first time in all these years.
Sokka drew in a shuddery breath and looked up at Toph's pretty face. He was alarmed to find that he was genuinely nervous—oh, how Katara would have teased him!
"Hey, Toph?" Toph made a grunt-like noise as an affirmation that she was, in fact, listening. Can she feel my hands shaking? Sokka stopped winding the cloth to adjust the sock that he had used as pre-wrap. "Why… why did you leave?" he asked hesitantly. "It was just so out of the blue. One day you just came up to me with your bag packed, told me that you were leaving and that it wasn't our faults, told us not to follow you, and then you just sort of… left."
He felt Toph tense up beneath his hands. Her head bent forward, milky eyes facing her lap.
"I had to," she breathed. "I had to get away for a while. Be alone."
"A while? You were gone for nearly five years!" exclaimed a flabbergasted Sokka, loudly but not enough for Aang to hear. "Where did you even go?"
Toph frowned, sat up uncomfortably, and retorted, "I traveled for a while, all over the Earth Kingdom, then eventually got an apartment in Gaoling and stayed there for a year or two."
"So why were you at the hospital?" Intrigued, Sokka began to tie the bandage without looking and succeeded in tying a part of his own shirt into the wrap. He glanced down, cursed as he saw his error, and began to untie it again.
"I was in the city and I heard a group of people talking about how the Avatar's wife had been attacked, and that she was at the hospital."
"I see." He paused. "But why exactly did you leave us in the first place?"
The frown on her face deepened so much that he suddenly had to fight the rising impulse to reach out and pull her small frame—a more filled-out frame than six years ago, but still smaller than broad-shouldered Sokka's—to his in a tight hug. But instead of doing that, which may have been awkward in this particular circumstance, he glanced downward to make sure that he was re-wrapping her foot the right way this time.
Toph sighed and furrowed her eyebrows. "I couldn't stop thinking about the war. I killed people, Sokka, felt their hearts and their lives just… stop. I was only twelve, for crying out loud! And people were trying to kill me!"
She was clearly getting worked up about this, realized Sokka. No, her voice hadn't gotten any louder, but on the inside she must have become hysterical.
"And when you got stabbed right after Fire Lord Ozai was killed, I thought you were going to die—we all did. Even a year later, it was all too surreal. I couldn't handle the feeling of…" She trailed off for a moment, "attachment. I couldn't handle it, it was too intense. I thought that if I left and traveled the Earth Kingdom like I'd wanted to as a kid, challenging the best Earthbenders of all time and living off my winnings, that it would make me, I don't know, harder or something. So, one day, I packed up and left."
Sokka stopped wrapping her foot now. His heart was hammering so loudly in his chest that he was sure she could feel it; he let go of her foot and stared at the silent Earthbender—the silent woman—before him. Of all the things he had gotten from her responses, only one thing was perfectly clear to Sokka, whose heart and brain seemed to be working as a single unit for once: she had felt that attachment to him, had left for a number of years to stop thinking about him, and she had failed. Which meant that, surely—
"Toph…" his voice faded. "When you left, I… Do you still—?"
"How's it coming, Sokka?"
Both Sokka and Toph jumped in alarm and turned their heads towards Aang, who Sokka had not, in his semi-trance, seen or heard walk up to them. And evidently, from the surprised look etched on her face, Toph hadn't heard him either.
Sokka hastily finished the tie on Toph's foot and sat back. "Done!" he announced.
Aang nodded. "Great! Now let's get moving."
"Right." Sokka scrambled to his feet and offered his hand to Toph, who didn't respond to the gesture. Then he remembered why and gave her a sharp prod in the side, embarrassed. "Come on, Toph."
Toph wordlessly held out her hand for him to take. He did so, guiding her to her feet and offering the support she needed until she could test her foot. Toph put her weight on the foot gingerly at first, jaw set against the pending pain, then balanced the weight out and nodded.
"Perfect," she said.
That was enough for Sokka and Aang. Again they began to briskly walk, not entirely sure that they were heading the right way or of how long they had left to get there.
-
Then, at long last, after many hours of nonstop walking and aching feet, something came in to sight that none of them had seen since they'd arrived in the Spirit World. Amidst the typical roots and trees of the Spirit World forest was a single wooden bridge, which stood over a foot gap in the ground that Aang assumed must have been a river at some point. But there was no river now, and the bridge looked unnecessary, even silly. Atop one of the bridge's rails sat a man. Only, this man was like no other that they had ever seen, because his arms appeared to be those of a bear. Sokka tightened his grip on Toph's hand, but nevertheless followed Aang towards the unnecessary bridge.
When they reached the foot of the bridge, Aang bowed low and greeted the man. "My name is Aang, the last of the Air Nomads and the Avatar. Are you the Guardian of the Pass?"
The man closed his eyes and nodded. "It is I. And you are the bridge between the Spirit and Physical Worlds, much like my bridge separates the paths to the living and the dead," he observed in a low tone of voice. "Your wife passed this way shortly beforehand. She fought her escorts to the next life with much passion in her soul."
Aang nodded and indulged the surge of pride that coursed through his chest on Katara's behalf. Keeping eye contact with the Guardian was difficult, as the man's eyes had a frightful, empty look about them, as if they did not belong in his head. Come to think of it, realized Aang, many of the body parts on this man seemed unfit for the body; besides the bear arms he bore, the ears were far too small and the legs far too long beneath the fabric of his cloak. The color of his beard was a silvery—contrasting much with the deep brown of the hair atop his head.
Eager to get moving, Aang asked, "Do you need to ask us anything, Guardian?"
The man nodded again, his paws clenching in an odd fashion. "The gates are just beyond this bridge, over the crest of the hill behind me." He gestured behind him, where a massive hill stood. "Only the souls and their escorts may pass without question. Some men try to cross the dried River of the Pass, but those who jump vanish, and those who attempt to fight me suffer an even worse fate. The rest, those who truly wish to pass and are willing to risk anything to do so, must prove that they truly know whom they seek, and may only pass if there is a chance of fetching said soul. My goal is not to trick, but to screen.
"Five questions I shall ask, each pertaining to your wife, Katara of the Water Tribe. Five correct answers shall earn you the right of passage. If you answer incorrectly, however, then I will take the body part most essential to your lifestyle or your survival in the Physical World, the part that means most to your success in living or fighting."
Sokka leaned over a bit and whispered in Aang's ear, "You'd better answer right, Aang, or there'll be no repopulation for you."
Aang grimaced and shifted uncomfortably before looking to the mismatched man again. His blood seemed to run cold at the very sight of him. The small part of him that had hoped the Guardian would allow him to pass because of his status as Avatar had vanished. Now not only was he running against time, but he also stood face-to-face with someone who had the power to take his—
"My first question is this: Who is the woman who assisted in raising Katara until the age of 14?" The guardian didn't seem to move other than to speak.
Aang and Sokka looked at one another, eyebrows raised and the same incredulous thought in their minds: This was it? This was the first of five "difficult" questions? Sokka smirked and turned back to the Guardian.
"Her name is Kana of the Water Tribe, but better known to Katara as Gran-Gran," he said.
The man nodded and the shaggy hair on his head shook around. "That is correct. Next: What alias did Katara use in an attempt to fool the former head of Dai Lee, Long Feng?"
"Uh…"
Had Katara tried to fool Long Feng? If so, she hadn't told Aang or, by the way the warrior was scratching his beard in a puzzled manner, Sokka. Aang glanced at Toph, whose head was still bent low with her eyes focused on the ground. Her face was more or less blank, but the men could tell that she was delving into her memory. Toph eased her hand away from Sokka's and wiped it on her tunic, nervously.
"I think I know…" she began slowly. "Was it—? Yeah, I think so."
"I hope you're sure, because if I lose my hands then I'll have to find a different way to strangle you," Sokka deadpanned.
Toph scowled. "Well it's my guess or we all go, so… the name Katara used in an attempt to fool Long Feng at Bosco's party was Kua Mei."
It was not until the Guardian nodded his approval that Aang realized he had been holding his breath. He let it out, slowly, and closed his eyes in relief. Okay, so perhaps the questions weren't as simple as he and Sokka had assumed, but they were two down with three to go. Hopefully he'd be able to answer the next one without too much—
"In what specific location did Katara and her future husband, Avatar Aang, proclaim their feelings for one another for the first time?"
Oh. Aang felt the blood rush to his face. The question was easy enough to answer—how could he forget that particular memory? It had obviously been monumental to their relationship and a major crutch to his hope at the time—but he'd never told Sokka or Toph, both of whom had been, for lack of a better term, "out of it" at the time, and the situation would seem a little… a little awkward out of context.
Sokka, sensing his friend's unease, crossed his arms across his chest and raised his eyebrows. Toph almost smirked, and probably would have if the situation had not been so desperate or tense. "That's a good question, Twinkletoes."
Aang's heart beat wildly in his chest. Keeping his eyes on the Guardian's mismatched features and pushing away the thought that he'd like to keep this particular information between him and Katara, he intoned, "Katara and I first shared our feelings for one another in our apartment in the Fire Nation—the shower, specifically." He ignored Sokka's sudden repulsed spluttering and added, "She was trying to heal my back at time, and we sort of ended up telling one another."
When the Guardian nodded yet again, Sokka shot Aang a swift glare. "Right under my nose, Aang?"
Aang held up a hand to Sokka without taking his eyes from the Guardian, effectively silencing the indignant brother. "We'll talk later."
Eyes narrowed to slits, Sokka responded, "Yes, we will—"
"But for now, questions," Toph cut in.
"Right, sorry."
Now that all three were once again silent, though each could have sworn that they could hear one another's rapid pulses, all eyes (save for Toph's) turned to the Guardian, whose unblinking stare was fixed on Aang.
"When, specifically, did Katara kill for the first time?"
Another tough one, it seemed, and this time Aang knew that he didn't know the answer. Or, at least, he would need to speak with the others if he wanted to piece together the right answer. He hastily asked the Guardian if he could privately discuss with Toph and Sokka, and when the Guardian nodded he grabbed his friends' arms and spun them around.
"I have a hunch, but I'm not sure," Aang informed them.
Sokka nodded. "Same here. It really could have been when we were fighting the guards to get to the Earth King—remember all those guys we fought?"
"Yeah, but I'm pretty sure nobody died in that," Toph added. "A few broken bones, head trauma, and one guy got his nerve pinched in the blocks Aang and me flipped, but nobody died."
"Right, then it must have been when we were fighting Ozai in the Palace. I know that's the first place I killed anybody."
"Yeah, well you couldn't exactly just send a blast of ground or an icicle at somebody's chest, Sokka."
"True enough. But still, when exactly did Katara do it?" Sokka sighed and glanced back at the Guardian, as if the Guardian would give them an answer.
Aang frowned and muttered, "Look, Katara spent most of her time flinging around icicles and, once she ran out of water, blood. I don't think she could have killed somebody with the Water Whip, and drowning somebody is sort of unlikely." He dropped his voice further so that the man could not hear them, though Aang wasn't sure how well those mismatched ears could hear. "I suppose, if we don't know, that we could take an educated guess."
"A guess?" Sokka hissed. "There's too much at stake to be guessing: Katara's life, Toph's feet, my hands, your—!"
"We haven't got any other options, Sokka," Toph reminded him, voice solemn. "I'll answer this one, if you like." In the pause that followed, she allowed herself an ironic laugh. "Maybe he'll take my eyes; it wouldn't make a difference."
Sokka rolled his own eyes. "Pleasant, Toph, but really. What are we going to do?"
Aang felt that swollen feeling in his chest again, only this time it had nothing to do with despair. Or, he mused both silently and without expression, perhaps it was a different type of despair that was associated with hopelessness. Either way, they could only try to piece together the story that makes the most sense and hope that it fit, for Katara's sake as well as theirs.
"Let's just do this." Aang turned around before the others could voice an objection, and said to the Guardian, "The first time Katara killed someone was in the Fire Lord's palace, with a Waterbended icicle."
Toph grabbed on to his arm and held it in her iron grip, her fear transferring to Aang through her sharp nails. The pain seemed distant to Aang, though, who had blocked out everything but the Guardian and his bear claws, the Guardian and his eyes that neither matched nor held expression…
"Very good, Avatar Aang," said the Guardian.
From between Aang and Sokka, Toph gasped slightly and released Aang's arm from her talon-like grip. Sokka put the side of his fist—of the hand that was not holding Toph's—to his mouth and cast his eyes upward, as if silently thanking the Spirits for giving them the right answer. Aang, however, did nothing. Yes, his heart had leapt for joy when he'd been acknowledged, but there was still a last question, and he wanted to have his whole attention on the Guardian of the Pass.
The Guardian took a moment to ask the last question, and when he did a strange pause ensued. "Why did each of you traverse the Spirit World on behalf of one individual?"
Aang's eyebrows shot up in surprise, and when he looked around at his friends he saw that each of them was equally as stunned; Sokka's mouth was hanging slightly ajar, and Toph had lost her rocklike expression. This couldn't be it—it was far too easy of a question! And yet…
The Guardian had specifically said that he did not mean to trick or fool those who truly needed to pass, but to allow only those worthy of doing so. Maybe, he thought, they shouldn't be so surprised at all. Maybe they should have expected it all along.
Aang made to speak, but Sokka beat him to it.
"Katara's my little sister; she means the world to me," he explained. "All my life I've been protecting her and trying to help her grow up, and I came all this way to continue that."
When Sokka finished, Toph piped up next. "Katara and me, we're complete opposites. But we're still best friends, even though we're so different. I couldn't just let my best friend die like that and leave us all behind," she said. "I came all this way because I didn't want to lose my friend."
Toph stepped back beside Sokka and frowned. One of Sokka's large hands came to rest on her shoulder and stayed there while Aang spoke.
"You see, Guardian, I was only told that I could come here because it is my duty, both as Avatar and as the last of the Air Nomads, to repopulate," said Aang. "If I didn't have Katara, my only other options were to remarry, or to just find some other woman to have my children. But really, there's only one real reason I came all this way, across the Spirit World." Aang shrugged and stated simply, "I love her."
The words of the Avatar seemed to ring in the otherwise silence of the World. Then—and the very sight of it frightened Aang more than anything else—the Guardian gave Aang a small smile and bowed low, his bear paws pressed together.
"Sokka, Toph, and Avatar Aang, it is my pleasure to allow you right of passage," he said in what sounded almost like a pleasant tone. "Go quickly across my bridge and fetch your wife, friend, sister."
They didn't need to be told twice. Aang and Sokka shared a quick glance, and then Aang turned back to the Guardian to bow. "Thank you."
Then, on that last note, the Guardian stood aside to let the trio pass. They did so, with Aang in the lead and Sokka and Toph close behind, Sokka leading Toph by the hand as before. Aang had just reached the foot of the hill when he heard the Guardian shout at his back.
"Be aware, Avatar Aang and friends! The escorts are a nasty sort, and will not hesitate to fight you, should you challenge them and their desires."
Aang did not stop. Instead, he waved his hand backwards as a signal that he had heard and understood, and continued to press on up the slope. They traveled wordlessly, Aang wrapped up in his own determined thoughts. The gates were so close that he could almost see them in his mind's eye, even though he had no idea of what to expect.
When finally they did reach the crest of the hill with Aang in the lead, Aang stopped and dropped to his stomach. Sokka, who caught on quickly, did the same, pulling a surprised Toph—she emitted a loud, uncharacteristic squeak of surprise—down with him. Behind the cover of the hill's crest they could watch and formulate a plan with a less chance of being seen.
"You see them, Sokka?" asked Aang.
Sokka narrowed his eyes. "Oh yeah, I see them."
Just past the bottom of the hill was Katara, flanked on either side by a burly man. The three of them headed down a long stretch of road towards a towering iron-looking gate, but they were making very slow progress on account of Katara's increased struggling against the men. Previously Aang had doubted that they would catch them in time, but at the rate Katara and her escorts were going it seemed hardly a feat at all that they had caught them, though if they had been but minutes later they would have been too late.
And Katara was putting up a marvelous fight, Aang observed with pride. Her long braid had come loose at some point during her journey, so her long hair whipped around as she struggled against the grip the escorts had on each of her arms. Otherwise, though, she seemed unscathed; the damage that had been done on her body had done nothing on her soul, apparently. Toph's harsh-sounding whisper brought them all back to attention.
"What's the plan?"
At this, Aang rapped his fingers thoughtfully on the grassy knoll. His eyes darted over to the other man. "What weapons have you got, Sokka?" he asked.
"Ah, I'm glad you asked, my friend," Sokka responded, sounding almost cheerful. He yanked the backpack off his shoulders and began digging around in it. "I have the usual, of course—a boomerang, machete, club—then an assortment of throwing knives courtesy of Mai, and this dagger that I took from Zuko back in the Fire Nation." He finished his spiel by pulling the previously mentioned dagger out of its sheath and examining it.
Aang raised his eyebrows. "Did you really bring all of that?"
"Yeah, well I figured we should be prepared anyway," Sokka said, shrugging. He then took one of the throwing knives and handed it to Toph. "Here, Toph, have a knife."
Toph took it and glared over his right shoulder. "Gee, thanks Sokka. I'll try not to stab you with it when I'm waving it blindly around," she quipped.
Aang forced back a quiet chuckle as Toph's words sunk into Sokka's head. His focus was not on Sokka's hasty apology ("Sorry Toph, I forgot again."), but on Katara and the plan he'd yet to hatch. He saw Sokka put his boomerang and its holster on his back in his peripheral vision and turned to his friend.
"No weapons, Sokka; we don't want to hurt them unless we have to," Aang reminded him. "If we can just talk to them, maybe—"
Toph suddenly cut across his sentence, fingers reaching out and grabbing the not-quite-normally-colored grass for no particular reason other than comfort. "Shh!" she hissed. "Listen!"
The trio fell silent, and sure enough, three voices drifted up across the otherwise quiet slope:
"No! Let me go, now!"
"Cut it, sweetheart. We told you a million times: 'aint nobody comin' for you, and there 'aint nothin' you can do about it!"
"Yes, so why don't you just make it easier for us and cooperate, before you make us become unpleasant?"
Katara continued to struggle against her captors, thrashing about and attempting to tug her arms out of their grasps. In the process, the belt of her tunic came loose and a glint of silver flashed before their eyes. One of the escorts yelped; Aang squinted in an effort to see exactly what was going on.
"She's packin'!" exclaimed the first escort. "If we din't have her arms, she'da cut us up already!"
This comment only made Katara struggle more. She continued to hurl insults and objections, hair flying wildly and legs kicking. The escorts seemed unfazed, though, as if her desperate attempts at escape—or just slowing them down. Both seemed possible—were laughable to them.
The second escort bent over and, with his free hand, picked up the knife that had been tucked away in Katara's tunic. He examined it under a critical eye before tucking it in his own belt.
"It seems that we have a bigger problem on our hands than I'd thought, Kumni," said the second escort. A faint smirk appeared on his face. "It's been a long time since a soul has protested quite like this; I think it's best that you search her. Strip her down, Kumni."
The first escort, Kumni, have a hoarse laugh. "You got it!"
Aang was on his feet in a flash, his expression outraged. A bout of adrenaline flooded through his veins, adrenaline that washed away his better judgment in a fit of sudden anger.
"Give me a weapon, Sokka!" he demanded. His hand was held out expectantly towards Sokka, but his eyes remained fixed on the struggling three at the bottom of the hill.
"You said no weapons, Aang!" reminded Sokka, who nevertheless reached into his bag, pulled out his machete, and handed it to Aang.
"And we still need a plan—Katara can take care of herself!" Toph hissed.
"Forget the plan!" Aang twirled the machete in his hand and stuck it in the waistband of his robes. His gray eyes were filled with vengeance, all fatigue gone now. "When they try to violate Katara, they've gone too far. Nobody strips my wife but me!"
With that, he took off down the hill. Sokka grabbed the grass in his fingers and let his head fall on the hill, exasperated.
"Can't you just try to be sensitive when I'm within hearing distance?" he groaned.
Toph was on her feet now, and readjusting her sash. She reached down and grabbed the first part of Sokka that she could, and pulled him up by his ponytail; he gave a shot of surprise and picked his head up. "Come on, Sokka!"
"I'm comin', Toph," he replied, hastily leaping to his feet and taking up his club. He began to run down the hill as well, and Toph grabbed his upper arm for guidance only just in time. "I just wish we had a plan."
The Blind Bandit, laughing, could only reply, "Sokka, when have we ever had a plan?"
A/N: Yeah, so I wasn't sure when to end this chapter and begin the next one, but I think this is a good place, for reasons you shall understand later. The next chapter will be the last one, and then an epilogue if everything works out according to plan. The next chapter shouldn't be this long, and I hope to update relatively soon. So now I have to go write an action sequence. Yikes!
Thanks for reading!