Commentary: Happy early Valentine's Day! =)
Set post-series.
Words: 2,920
Word SEVEN: Therapy
Toph slaps Sokka's shoulder and sums up what she perceives as his problem and its solution in five words: "Suki's a bitch. Drink up."
She presses a cup—no, a tankard into his hand. The liquid in it sloshes out over his knuckles and he groans, miserable and appreciative at the same time. He brings it to his lips and swigs down one, two, three gulps, waiting for the familiar burn—
"It's TEA!" he gags, exhaling in a hrrugh-hack! of lemon-scented surprise. "I don't want TEA!"
The woman across from him leans against her counter and puts on a pouty face, clad in nothing but breast-wraps—donned at his expense—and a pair of light linen breeches. "Aw, I'm sorry," she coos. "I didn't want to be roused at three in the morning by a wailing idiot either, but apparently we don't often get what we want."
"I wasn't wailing!" Sokka defends. "I was just moaning loudly!"
Toph glares at him. Well, technically she glares at the space somewhere just to the left of his ear, but he gets the idea. Around her head her hair bristles in a boarcupine halo; her eyes glint in the room's shadows, mint and quicksilver slung together. There are no lamps here because she never needs them, but Yue gleams near full tonight in the window and sends her pale fingers hesitatingly over half of Toph's scowling face.
"How many times are you going to do this, Snoozles?" wonders Toph. She gestures emphatically between them. "Not that I don't relish the company, but this is—what? The seventh night this month you've wandered to my house at an otherworldly hour to mope?"
"Eighth," he corrects absently. His fingers worry around the lip of the mug she's given him. The tea inside it is cold, foul-tasting, metallic. It reflects Toph's current temper perfectly.
"Yeah, well—we're not even two weeks into the month. So. Concern. That's what this is." She stabs at herself with a rigid thumb. "Also: sleeplessness. You see this face? I hope you do because I don't, but even blind I know that I look like absolute shit, okay?"
Sokka gazes at his best friend, contributing no comment. There are shaded furrows under her eyes, a queer pinch to her mouth—tiny wiggly lines on her brow signify the start of wrinkles, his name written in every fledgling canyon. A candle of guilt flares in him. Heaving a sigh, he turns his gaze to his chilly tea, slurps at it, and slumps at Toph's table.
Quiet persists a moment, but then she forks out a sigh of her own, crosses the room, and takes a seat in the chair next to him. Her elbows come to rest on the table's surface. Along one of her wiry arms a new burn ripples in a weal toward her shoulder: evidence of an insurgent Firebender's lucky shot, no doubt. Prodding him beneath the table with her toes, she asks, "What do you want me to say?"
What does Sokka want her to say? He flicks a glance up at her again and is startled to find her eyes on him, focused in that peculiar pewter stare she's so good at conjuring. Clearing his throat, he finds himself offering, "Half a year."
"Ah-huh?" Up go her eyebrow and her palm, the latter to muffle a yawn.
"Half a year," he repeats. "Since Suki and I split."
"Hmph." She nods. Her lashes lower. "Yeah. I know. Half a year since you started showing up on my porch at two past midnight at the earliest—"
"Half a year since you let me in anyway," Sokka interrupts. "You've never left me out there."
Toph makes an odd sound in her throat, a little clinking noise. "At first it was fun," she mutters. "I can appreciate unannounced drinking parties as much as the next girl, after all. And you brought all that Kyoshi booze."
"Which you still have. Why didn't you serve me any of it tonight?" Sokka looks forlornly down into his tea again, barely able to suppress a sniffle. "Not like you to hold out on me, Toph."
"Hey. Hey. Don't talking to me about holding. You don't have any idea how terrible it is to hold someone's head while they barf out their guts all over your couch—"
"Blasphemy!" Sokka disagrees. "You threw up in my lap at your coming-of-age party! I held your head then! "
"That doesn't count," Toph says peaceably. "I was supposed to get shit-faced and throw up everywhere. It's your fault you were in the line of fire." Her toes brush his flesh again, little daggers of frigidity. She seems to delight in putting them there. "But you—you weren't supposed to get shit-faced. You were supposed to drink enough to forget about Suki for a while. Those are not the same thing and as much as it pains me to admit this, you're intelligent enough to know the difference."
"Well, uh"—and Sokka gropes for a comeback—"your couch was ugly anyway."
Toph's scowl intensifies, a thunderstorm rippling over the plains of her face. She can't deny his claim, though, because she never actually saw her couch (she threw it away the morning after Sokka christened it with his disgusting stomach juices). "Lame," she accuses him.
He sticks out his tongue at her. She can't see that either, and she runs the tips of her fingers together under her chin, a steeple dissolving and reforming over and over. Seconds pass—a minute. She is thinking about something. Sokka waits to find out what. He's got nothing better to do and more than a small part of him is curious, because Toph doesn't often go all introspective and broody on him.
"Booze hasn't ever helped you," Toph finally observes. "The parties were fun, sure, and yeah, they pissed off the neighbors, which is certainly a goal of mine whenever possible—I mean, their stupid cats. But… you still woke up miserable, didn't you? Afterward. Every time."
"Hmm," he wonders.
Six months since the first time he opened his eyes to the sun shining in through her window, his foot in a flowerpot and her hand—covered in mustard, the spicy kind from Gaoling—splayed over his chest. Miserable? Was he miserable then? And every time after?
Sokka considers.
He opens his mouth to give Toph his answer when she speaks again: "So I thought, hey, this time can be different. I'm your friend and I'm supposed to help you as much as get drunk with you, right?" She taps her fingers on the table near his elbow. "Therefore, tonight is the night for tea. Not booze. And talking."
Something about the way she says that last word makes Sokka's belly prickle. "Talking?" he hedges.
"Talking," she affirms, serious as the face of a mountain. Leveling her gaze at him—she's spot on, now—Toph insists, "You are going to tell me what happened. Between you and Suki. So I can try to fix it."
"Toph," Sokka reminds her, "the last time you tried to fix something, you killed a guy."
"He didn't die," she protests.
"Yes he did. He was dead for two minutes until Iroh gave him that nice round of shock therapy, and as much as he deserved your, uh, fixing, I don't want Suki dead."
"Fair enough. I won't kill her. I'll just maim her a little." Toph cracks her knuckles. When other people do this, popping their digits one by one in a manner that's supposed to be threatening, Sokka doesn't worry. When Toph does it, his testicles crawl—because he knows she means it. "Come on. Start talking, Snoozles."
"No," he has the audacity to say.
She demands, "Yes." She rocks onto her knees in her chair, leaning over him. Tresses of her feral hair sweep his cheeks and she bares her teeth: they glitter in Yue's light, slick and white and deadly. "Now."
He lets out a breath he was unaware he was holding at all. "Let me get this straight, Toph. You want to know what happened between me. And Suki. You want me to—to divulge my man-pain. Talk it out. To get"—he arches his brows—"squishy."
"I think the word is mushy, and no—Spirits, I hoped the booze would work." Flopping back into her chair, Toph flings her hands high. "I don't want to hear about it. You never seemed to wanna get into the specifics even when you were standing up-falling down drunk, and I'm probably not the best person to tell those to anyway"—her eyes run away from him suddenly; he has to wonder why—"so I left it alone. Six months. Half a year. Had a good time. Loads of awesome parties.
"But let's face it, Meathead," she finishes, "I'm losing too much sleep. And what's been happening isn't doing good by you, if you keep coming back almost every night." Her jaw clenches. "I guess talking's what you need. So here I am." She squares her shoulders. "Let's do this."
Reet-keet, reet-keet. Outside, the crickets chirp as they do most nights. The sound swells now for the slip of spring into summer, and Sokka remembers the first time six months ago his feet carried him here, to his best friend's house in Ba Sing Se, when the ground was so cold it cracked under his boots and his breath fogged in the air before him. He remembers how he pounded on her door, not quite crying but almost: he remembers the press of the night around him and the feeling of being alone, alone for the first time in years, and what if she wasn't home, what would he do then—
And her door opened and the darkness of her house swallowed him, and he stumbled into her, and she socked him in the arm even though he was sniveling all over her, and—
"I left her," Sokka tells Toph plainly. "I left Suki."
Reet-keet, reet-keet.
Across from him, Toph blinks. Her mouth opens, works, closes again. "What?" she attempts.
"I—"
"No. Shut up." Toph slaps the tabletop. Whk! "You mean to tell me that you've been letting me tend your sorry sobby ass for six months and—and YOU broke up with HER?"
"Well—"
"'I'm so lonely!'" Toph mimics, pitching her voice into a whine that sounds suspiciously, Sokka has to admit, like a certain Water Tribe peasant they both know and love. "'I don't know what to do. I'm conflicted.' You ass," she seethes, "I liked that couch."
"I liked Suki too," Sokka defends, and clarifies, "a lot, and I still do, but sometimes things we like just aren't the best for us! Spirits, sometimes we're not the best for those things either—"
"Sokka," Toph interjects for the second time. "You're comparing your girlfriend of—what? Four years? Maybe more? To a piece of furniture." She looks a mix of deeply amused and absolutely horrified. In her stalwart voice there is something rare, something that makes Sokka squirm. It's disappointment. "We're not talking about home decorating here—"
"I wasn't good enough, okay?" Sokka cuts in, unable to stand the idea that Toph thinks less of him for how he handled the heart of a Kyoshi Warrior half a year past. He starts to say something else—starts to layer his defense. But the words die before they reach his lips—and really, what else is there to offer but the truth, especially to his best friend? He mutters once more, softer now, "Just—not good enough."
Toph falls quiet, lips pursed. Were she not blind, the look she aims at him might be considered appraising, all lowered lids and tight scowl. But she can't see him: she can only listen. She does that—she always does that. One foot braced near his chair, her hand flared on the table between them, she feels out the sounds of his breathing, his heartbeat, his sincerity. It's not that she thinks he lies much, or that he would lie now, to her of all people. It's that habit has her check anyway.
At last: "What do you mean, you weren't good enough?"
Her voice shifts, just like that. Gone is the disappointment, in its place something else, something new. Sokka strains his ears. His aren't and never will be as good as Toph's, but he thinks—no. He's certain he hears disbelief under her words. It's not accusing. More importantly, it's not directed toward him at all. In her tone and on her face there is a question: How could Suki think such a thing?
"I mean—uh. I mean," Sokka tries. He flares his hands helplessly and shows them to Toph, who waits for something that means more to her that the rustle of fabric and the quickening rumble of his heart in the kitchen's quiet air. "It—we…"
He stops. He looks at Toph sitting across from him, waiting expectantly, her head cocked and her eyes narrowed. She breathes and he breathes and her breasts shift beneath her wraps, and he forces himself not to look at them, and outside the crickets have stopped their chirping.
"Suki's not a bitch," he says. Toph squints at him and he goes on, "We're still friends. We always were friends, and when we tried to be more than that, it wasn't—"
"If you're going to tell me about bad sex involving you and Suki," Toph intrudes, "let me know right now. I'll need to start looking for something sharp so I can stab it into my eye the instant you finish."
He huffs. "It wasn't," he continues, "good enough. It worked for a while and we were okay—sometimes we were even happy. But…"
His heart is beating faster now: Toph notices and blinks, leaning in a little, curiosity evident in the lines of her face.
"But when we were apart," he begins, "we didn't… need each other. Not that we didn't miss the company, but… we each came back to where the other was because we had to, you know? That's what was first. She had to keep training her warriors, didn't she? And I had to maintain the negotiations between the island and the rest of the world." He shrugs. "When she'd come home from her expeditions, it was like, 'Oh, there's Sokka! Good!' And it was the same. With me, I mean."
Ta-tmp-ta-tmp-tmp-ta-tmp-ta-tmp-tmp and his pulse is a throb in his ears. A tiny frown has crawled onto Toph's mouth. It looks like a crack in a porcelain pot.
"That's not how it's supposed to be, Toph," Sokka tells the Earthbender earnestly. "You're not supposed to feel so… so complacent about reuniting with the person you love, even if you've only been away from each other a couple of hours. You're supposed to feel like—"
Like he felt when Toph's knuckles hit his shoulder in the dark six months ago. Like he felt every time he saw her before that: on a surprise ferry to Kyoshi Island, bundled in winter furs; in the Jasmine Dragon during the gang's thrice-yearly gathering; beneath the slopes of a mountain pass near Omashu, her saucer hat canted down over her useless eyes. Like he feels now, each night she opens the door to him—and every morning he wakes up to find her still with him, hauling out her desecrated couch for the garbage-pickers or vomiting into that special antique vase her mother sent her all the way from Makapu Village.
"Like," he whispers, and looks at her, and longs to reach for her and to tell her. He fails—at both things.
The crickets are still quiet.
"Oh," Toph says. Her frown deepens, cracks spreading, fissures erupting beneath her eyes and along her cheeks, shadows carved where not even Yue's light can touch them. And again, "Oh. Sokka. Oh. Geez."
"When the negotiations were over, I made plans to leave and she didn't try to stop me," he babbles suddenly. He feels like he has to finish it. She has to know. "Suki said goodbye. She told me to write. But there wasn't a kiss—not from her, not from me, and it was okay, it felt fine that way, and—"
Toph stands.
"That's enough." The words are rigid, brutal. Why not, coming from the world's greatest Earthbender? "Stop. I've heard as much as I need to hear."
She holds up a hand to cement the statement. Across her palm run continents of calluses; the arc of her arm bleeds silver under the window and the light it admits. She steps close to him. She plucks his cold tea away and throws it. It leaves a wet spatter on her wall; the cup soars through the window. He hears it shatter against the neighbors' fence.
"I can fix your problem," she insists. "You meat-guzzling moron. We should have talked about it sooner."
She ladles herself into his lap.
Sokka observes, "Uhm!"
Her arms snake around his neck.
"Er," he provides.
Her mouth finds his. She doesn't kiss him—she doesn't know how. So instead she bites him, branding him with her grin because she does know how to do that, and she growls into his startled, laughing yelp, "Like this, Sokka. Reuniting with the person you love—it's supposed to feel like this."
Later, when she finally allows him space for words, Sokka tells her that he agrees completely.