Chapter 7
Toph,
So, any ideas what to gift the newlyweds? I was thinking I could have Appa's saddle refitted. Or camping gear. Something useful like that.
Zuko
:o:o:o:
Zuko,
. . . You are such a guy.
Toph
:o:o:o:
Toph,
Why do girls keep telling me that?
Zuko
:o:o:o:
"There's another message written on the back of this note from the firelord."
The queen didn't bother to look up from her breakfast, most of her concentration devoted to peeling an orange. "What, is the Fire Nation so broke that he's writing to me on scrap paper now?"
Toph caught the huff of breath that might have been a laugh, followed by the sound of Lien clearing her throat. "The wax seal on the scroll was different from the one that the firelord typically uses," she said seriously, as if the past ten seconds had never happened.
"Hmm." The sharp, sweet scent of citrus filled the air as Toph opened her orange. She popped a slice in her mouth, chewing slowly as she thought. "What was the symbol on this seal?"
"A lotus blossom."
Old memories stirred in the back of Toph's mind. The shuffle of Pai Sho tiles. An eight petal flower carved onto a wooden disc. The fragrance of tea, and Iroh's soothing, gravelly voice. "What did the old man want?" she asked affectionately.
"Information," Lien answered. "To help with an investigation."
:o:o:o:
The early days of the queen's rule were a never ending swamp of meetings and audiences and meetings and luncheons and meetings and state dinners and meetings. Her younger self would have been bothered by it, but Toph had spent enough years following Aang around that she was at least somewhat familiar with the ills of bureaucracy, and she knew that she had a lot to learn if she was going to run the province properly. She didn't set foot outside of the palace grounds for two full months after she assumed the throne, yet she was so busy that this didn't strike her as odd. People came to see her, not the other way around.
She didn't realize something was wrong until the first time she tried to leave the palace.
And they wouldn't let her.
A stoic, broad shouldered guard stopped her at the gatehouse. With downcast eyes and a respectful tone, he explained to her that it would take half an hour to assemble a decent amount of men for her escort. He hesitated, and then, his voice even more exquisitely polite, he told her that there had been no notice that she was to be leaving the palace today, and had she cleared her movements with the advisory council?
The poor man didn't even see it coming. Toph hadn't meant to blast him into a wall, but the stupidity of it all sent her into a raging temper. Bumi had handpicked her to be his successor because she was the World's Greatest Earthbender! She was one of the most powerful, capable people on the entire planet! But apparently all it took to cancel out her accomplishments was to stick a tiara on her head. Then she devolved into just another girl to be protected.
"Screw this," Toph spat. Then she stamped her foot and let the ground swallow her.
She descended past basements and wine cellars and dungeons (The palace had dungeons? Why had no one told her this?), until she hit a cave. A perfectly beautiful cave, all stalactites and crystals and underground pools. Just the sort that everyone pictured whenever a storyteller told them to close their eyes and imagine . . . (It was something that happened fairly often, if you were the type of person who listened to storytellers. Quite a lot of Earth Kingdom tales were set in caves.)
Toph wandered for awhile, getting to know the underworld of the realm she now ruled. To her delight, the earth below the city was riddled with abandoned badgermole tunnels and more of these natural caves, a vast network of crisscrossing space and stone. Men came down, searching for her, but she was truly in her element here, and she tricked and trapped and avoided them, as easily as breathing.
In a cavern beneath the Market District, she discovered a cache of goods: jewelry and carved stone, all packed up and awaiting transportation. If she had to guess their source, she would have said that they had been looted from the museums during the city's brief occupation by the Fire Nation. A thick layer of dust and dirt lay over the boxes, and a peculiar smell hung in the air. Toph poked about in a corner of the room and discovered the source, some barrels of rotting fruit and molding sacks of rice. She shook her head and wiped her sticky hands on her robes. The presence of perishables told her that whoever had hoarded all this stuff wasn't going to come back. They had probably died in the war, leaving their loot behind to gather dust in the dark.
Toph sighed, her desire to explore suddenly gone. She marked the location of the site in her memory and began to make her way towards the surface.
:o:o:o:
Above her head flowed a constant stream of foot traffic, the vibrations of each individual cart, animal, and person bleeding into one another until all she could sense was a steady rumble. Toph searched for a break in traffic, and she found it: a small, square space miraculously free of movement. Shifting aside a block of earth, she catapulted above ground, upending a wagon of cabbage in the process.
"Sorry," she apologized, shaking dirt from her robes.
"You-me-wha-my-my-cabbages!" a man - presumably the owner of the cabbages - wailed.
Toph cringed at his earsplitting pitch and barely stopped herself from disappearing back down into the dark. She interrupted his breakdown with an imperious wave. "Send the bill to the palace," she ordered.
A startled look flashing across the merchant's face, but Toph continued to stare just past his shoulder, her own expression arrogant and unaware. He leaned forward to peer into her face, only to jump backwards, stumbling over his spilled merchandise. Toph knew the exact moment he realized who she was: his heart had started beating double time. "Yo-your majesty?" the merchant stuttered.
"Good day," she replied, perfectly serene. "Do you know if there are any decent teahouses nearby?"
:o:o:o:
At the cabbage merchant's recommendation, Toph waited for her guards in The Subtle Bloom, an unassuming restaurant at the end of a narrow path. Her sudden reappearance was sure to attract the attention of the Royal Guard, and she had no doubt that they would soon come for her.
The proprietress didn't seem at all surprised to see the queen of Omashu walk through her door. Toph was seated at the rear of the small, quiet shop, a shoji screen discretely shifted for her privacy. She ordered a pot of jasmine tea and made herself comfortable. Their leaf blend wasn't as good as Iroh's, but they served tiny puff pastries and delicate slivers of sandwiches in combinations she had never seen before.
Toph managed to eat an entire platter of snacks before a group of guards arrived. She recognized them by their distinctive march and the rattle of their armor. They stood silent and tense on the other side of the screen, at least half of them braced for a fight. The small signs of distrust made her wince, but she supposed she deserved it-she had sent one of their comrades flying, and trapped a large number of them in underground tunnels. Toph allowed herself one small sigh before shoving her guilt aside. Chin held high, she kept them waiting long enough to finish her pot of tea, knowing that they could see her silhouette as she poured a new cup.
Finally, with a gracious nod to her hostess, she swept right past the men in uniform, taking it for granted that they would follow. The palace was a good distance away, but she chose the long way back, walking instead of being carried in a sedan chair or catching a ride on the city's famous delivery system. The soldiers kept close, surrounding her in a loose circle. She would have been much less conspicuous if they were behind her - or if they weren't there at all - but she endured their presence because she felt slightly guilty for her earlier behavior. They had only been following orders. If she had thought it through, she could have changed those orders. She was the queen after all, the highest authority in Omashu. But she had flashbacked to her childhood, a time when she was invisible and imprisoned. She had run away, letting her memory control her muscles, and the realization made her burn with shame.
"Queen Toph!" a young voice called.
Said queen jerked her head up, surfacing from her thoughts. She stopped abruptly and caused a minor traffic jam. No one had recognized her until that moment, since generally no one expected the reigning monarch to be wandering about the city barefoot, with scraggly hair and muddy robes. The kid must have noticed the uniform of the Royal Guard, which was slightly distinct from the City Guard, and made the connection when he saw them surrounding a woman young enough and short enough to be the queen.
"Yes?"
"Oh, err, nothing, your majesty," the child mumbled. "H-have a good day."
Toph smiled in the direction of the voice, nodding her head slightly in acknowledgement. "You too."
By the time she reached the palace gates, she was actually grateful for her guards. Once they had confirmation that the dusty girl in green actually was the queen of Omashu, people had crowded around her, anxious for a good look. They called out greetings and wishes for her good health, and even a few compliments that almost had her blushing. Sometimes the stall owners they passed offered her free samples of whatever they were selling-fruit or jewelry or some sort of meat on a stick. Whatever she didn't swallow she gave to her guards, to eat or carry. They waited patiently while she stopped to chat or sign autographs, and for that Toph was grateful. It wouldn't do for the public to see their queen hustled off like a criminal, a burly escort on either side.
At first, Toph kept her expression carefully controlled, regal and distant, but when they finally reached the top of the last hill, her cheeks ached from smiling so much. She had been famous since she was twelve, but she had never realized that she was popular. It was . . . nice. She resolved to mingle with her people more often.
:o:o:o:
Of course, her advisors had other ideas. They were waiting for her in the blue room, a wall of angry, disapproving men and women who immediately lit into her for running off without telling them where she was going. It was like having three sets of overly strict parents scolding her all at once. Toph blinked, temporarily overwhelmed.
"Enough!" she shouted, recovering quickly. She stalked past them towards her desk, the floor rumbling with every step. Dust trickled loose from the corners of the ceiling like confetti. "I'm your queen, not your teenage daughter."
"Thank god," Lord Kung muttered.
Toph arched a brow, letting him know that she had heard his snide remark. "I know that my sudden disappearance was unexpected, but I'm sure King Bumi was a lot worse."
"Bumi was also much older than you when he became king, and by that point in his life he already had a reputation for, ah, odd eccentricities, in addition to great power. He had no need of a guard."
"I assure you, I am just as oddly eccentric as King Bumi!" Toph exclaimed. She paused, thought over her words, and then firmly nodded her head. "And I may be young, but I've been the most powerful bender in the Earth Kingdom since the age of twelve. I do not need a guard!"
"Yes you do!" Lady Gao insisted. "No matter what your skills, you are a vulnerable young woman. All it would take is one archer on a rooftop and you would be dead. If you were in a busy crowd you wouldn't be able to see the arrow even if it came at you head on!"
Toph paused, considering that scenario. Although highly unlikely, it wasn't outside the realm of possibility. "That isn't completely impossible," she acknowledged grudgingly. "But you can't keep me cooped up like, like . . ." In a sudden flash of inspiration, she realized what they had been trying to do. "Like the Earth King of Ba Sing Se! I refuse to be made into a powerless ornament. I will not allow my court to become the awful pit of backstabbing leeches that the Imperial Court was. I will not let you manipulate me just because I am sixteen. The Avatar is sixteen, and he's done more in four years than all of you have in your combined lifetimes!" By the end of her rant she was on her feet, red-faced from yelling, nails digging crescent moons into her palms.
Toph took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. Thinking of Aang also made her remember the few words of advice he had passed on at her coronation: "Try not to lose your temper. And never be unwilling to compromise."
As far as she was concerned, compromising meant finding a way to make both parties equally miserable. It wasn't fair -Toph derailed that train of thought and crashed it into a bluff. Only children and idiots complained about fairness.
She counted to ten and unclenched her fists. In a much calmer tone of voice, she said, "You are my advisors, not my keepers. You tell me your thoughts, but I make the final decisions." She turned her head towards the woman who had just spoken. "Lady Gao, you bring up a good point, one I hadn't considered. I will take an escort with me when I leave the palace - the men I had with me today will serve nicely, and five is a good number."
Sensing that Lord Kung was about to speak, she held up a hand. "But. I reserve the right to come and go as I please. It is the right you would grant to any able-bodied adult, and I am an adult. And it occurs to me that if my every trip through the gates was scheduled ten days in advance, it would be that much easier for an assassin to make plans."
After another slow breath, Toph asked, "Is there anything else that needs to be said?"
Lord Tang had remained silent and unmoving during her entire speech. He shifted his weight, drawing her attention. She felt him nod, a sign of approval. "The Fire Nation ambassador has been requesting an audience . . ."
:o:o:o:
It was mid-morning on the second day of the week when Toph entered The Subtle Bloom and claimed her usual table near the back. Her bodyguards had already performed a quick search, verifying that the rooms were empty aside from the staff. As per Toph's orders, they waited outside, taking up stations near the door and at various points along the steep, cobbled lane. The tea house could only fit ten people at a time, and in such close quarters, her guards tended to make people nervous. They hadn't been happy the first time she insisted that they wait outside, but Toph never lost a staring contest, and after a tense confrontation they had grudgingly given in to her demands. After all these months, it had simply become part of the routine.
The waitress's smile was steady during the whole process; she had served the queen often enough, and was used to the fuss. She had a pot of jasmine tea ready by the time Toph was seated. Thank you," she murmured, accepting a cup.
"Can I get you anything else, your majesty?"
"Yes, actually." Something a lot like doubt flickered across Toph's expression, but it was quickly chased away by stubbornness. "Leila," she said, and the girl's eyes widened at the use of her first name. "Is there another exit in the back?"
"Ah, yes, your majesty," she replied. "It's just a narrow alley, though, and it's all fenced in. There's no way out except the drain. "
"Good," Toph said. "I need to leave here unseen. Can you help me?"
"Are you joking?" she blurted out after a minute of stunned silence.
"I'm one-hundred percent serious, Leila."
"Are you sure?" the waitress asked, her voice faint.
"Quite," the queen said between sips of tea.
"If I-" she bit her lip, hesitating. "Will your guards be punished if I let you go?" she managed to ask, her voice trailing into a whisper on the last word.
Toph hid a smile. It was a a running joke among her guardsmen that Rei, the youngest of them, was head over heels in love with Leila. Everyone assumed that his infatuation was one-sided, but maybe the quiet waitress actually shared his feelings? Toph quickly revised her strategy.
"Not a chance," she said. "If all goes according to plan, I'll be back soon and no one else will ever know I was gone." She tried to smile reassuringly, but she must have gotten the expression wrong because still Leila hesitated.
"If I help you and something happens, I'll lose my job," she said.
"Nothing is going to happen to me," she said, projecting every ounce of confidence she possessed into her voice. "World's Greatest Earthbender, remember?" She heaved a dramatic sigh. "Don't make me bribe you, because I will."
Leila exhaled sharply, an indignant gasp of breath. "I won't take your money!"
"Of course not," Toph replied. "I wasn't going to offer you any." Taking the silence as a signal to continue, she said, "But I can guarantee that Rei gets the night of the Lovers' Festival off," Toph paused, and then mentally shrugged. In for a penny, in for a pound. "And the morning after, too."
"Oh," Leila murmured, a deep blush staining her cheeks.
Oh, indeed. Toph had her, and they both knew it. But she kept quiet, giving her the space to think it over.
"What do you need me to do?" she asked, voice pitched low.
"Three things," Toph said, already taking down her bun. "First and most obvious, don't let anyone take my spot. Stop by the table, pretend to ask me if I need anything, whatever, just keep up the illusion that there's a customer back here, even if there aren't any other people in the store. You never know who might be listening. Second, I'll need an old apron. Third, in about an hour, Rei is going to pop his head in here to check on me. When he does, you need to distract him. Don't let him set foot past the doorway. Tell him that I'm fine, but I don't want to be disturbed."
Leila's eyes were a bit wild after that information dump, but she nodded in understanding. "Let me get you my spare apron."
Alone behind the carved shoji screen, Toph stood, thin fingers rapidly picking apart the knot of her sash. She shrugged out of the heavily embroidered garment, revealing the thin tunic and leggings she wore underneath. Some rebellious part of her mind wanted to leave the robe in a puddle on the floor, but that might cause wrinkles and she still had to wear it later. With a sigh, she draped the robe over a chair, her jeweled headband tucked into one of its pockets. After a moment's thought she kicked off her thin soled slippers and stretched, wriggling her bare toes.
"Queen Toph?"
She turned, shaking long strands of hair into her eyes. "I'm ready."
:o:o:o:
The alley behind The Subtle Bloom was even tinier than Leila had implied. When Toph stretched out an arm, her fingertips brushed against a solid wall of earth - the base of the hill that supported the residential district one level up. From this vantage point, no doubt it appeared massive and impenetrable. Yet appearances were almost always deceiving; this hill and all the others that made up the city of Omashu were practically hollow, infested with tunnels like a worm-ridden apple.
Toph drew her attention downward, where a damp drain gurgled erratically next to her feet. Drains meant sewers, and the strongest waterproof pipes in the world couldn't contain the smell. Her nose wrinkled at the thought. She wanted to linger out here in the relatively clean air, but she was on a time limit and had to keep moving.
:o:o:o:
The maintenance tunnels ran parallel to the sewer system, tight, narrow shafts tucked alonside the wider concrete pipes. Toph could just barely fit; she had to move in an awkward shuffle, her back occasionally brushing against roughly cut limestone.
Each tunnel was marked, the numbers scored deeply along the sides and traced in bright paint. Toph kept one hand on the wall, feeling for these signposts. A carefully memorized chant repeated in her head:branch 301 to intersection 296 to branch 593. . . She had spent months studying the sprawling layout of these tunnels, learning which numbers corresponded to different parts of the city. Before today the blueprints had existed as a chain of words read out in Lien's voice, but as her feet made sense of the spaces above and below her, she was finally able to add these details to the diagram of Omashu she carried in her head.
She reached another crossroads, but instead of going left or right she moved down, pushing past limestone to fall through the ceiling of the cavern she knew would be directly beneath her. Her grasping hands caught hold of a stalactite. It stretched as she pulled at it with her bending, turning it into a rope that brought her safely to the ground.
Some people were useless this far down under the earth, paralyzed by fear of the dark, but Toph was at home here, her wits sharper than ever. It only took a moment for three seperate maps depicting three separate layers of the city to come together in her mind. Within seconds, she had pinpointed her location: a few hundred feet below Hightower street in the Diamond Quarter, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Omashu.
The only way out of the cave was what appeared to be an old badgermole tunnel. Toph followed the path, carried by a wave of stone that moved much faster than she could run. As the gentle incline turned into a steep grade, she pushed more power into the earth, increasing her speed.
When the ground evened out she was less than fifteen feet below street level. The rich were big on indoor plumbing and outdoor waterworks, and the pipes needed to carry the water rested very close to the surface. Some of them were made of metal, which only intensified the resonating rush of moving liquid. At this depth the sound was a slow, steady hum in her ears.
Distracted, she almost missed the man trying to hide in the alcove off to the right. A stack of crates kept him from view, but it wasn't like she had eyes to see anyway, and it was his human heartbeat that gave him away - too fast to be stone, too slow to be water. Toph skidded to a stop, sending up a plume of dust that coated everything, including him, this would-be smuggler. He sneezed, and she had him, one of life's little jokes.
"You can come out of hiding," she called, a mocking challenge.
She heard the scrape of shifting boxes and the creak of his leather boots as he rose, but he didn't take her bait. "Who are you?" he asked. Any chance she might have been intimidated by him disappeared when his voice cracked into a thin whine on the last word.
"Someone who has a legal right to be here," she snapped back, even though she wanted to tell him to run on home and play with his toys. "Can the same be said for you?"
He didn't answer, and she felt him taking slow steps backwards, muscles tensing as his fight or flight instincts tilted in favor of the latter. She would have preferred to let him run off so that she could have a look at the crates in peace, but for the sake of thoroughness, she blocked his escape.
Toph shifted her weight and he sank into stone, trapped up to the waist with his hands pinned at his side. His pulse picked up as she approached. "Smuggling is illegal in Omashu," she told him, her tone implying that she knew everything about him, including his embarrassing middle name and how many times he had wet the bed last year.
Really, she was just fishing for a reaction. But it wasn't a bad guess. Omashu had complete control over one of the only safe routes through the Kolau mountains, and trade was the lifeblood of the city. After her escape into the tunnels earlier in the year, it had occured to her that these labyrinthine passages would be the perfect haven for smugglers and other criminals. This hapless fellow didn't strike her as that type, but he seemed useless enough to get mixed up in something foolish.
"Hold on, wait, this isn't what it looks like!" he cried out. If his hands were free, they would have been above his head.
Toph rolled her eyes in disbelief, hands on her hips. "Oh, really?"
"Some guy hired me to come down these tunnels and see if there was anything in here. He wanted an earthbender in case it wasn't safe. I'm not involved in any smuggling! I swear! He even had a key to the gate!"
"You're an earthbender?" Toph asked derisively. "Geez, grow a pair."
"I didn't want to harm anything in these crates, or risk bringing down the tunnel on our heads. And then I saw that you were just a girl . . ."
She snorted. Just for that remark, Toph decided to leave him buried for awhile.
:o:o:o:
The tunnel ended at a solid wall of rock. She could make a path through it, but she seriously doubted that junior over there was anywhere near the level of skill required for such a technique. He'd probably forget to factor in the need for air and suffocate to death.
He must have come another way. Toph closed her eyes, a useless gesture, but it helped her think. Overhead was a thin layer of limestone, and then damp, crumbly dirt, neatly divided by a grid of metal pipes. Someone's garden, complete with a fountain, and maybe a sprinkler system? The invention was an utter waste of resources, but sprawling green lawns are rare in mountain ranges, so of course they were all the rage in the Diamond Quarter.
She finally discovered the entrance because it didn't belong. What need was there for a twelve-foot shaft of steel buried in the earth? She almost mistook it for another pipe, except for the fact that it didn't connect to any of the others. As far as she could tell it began at the surface and ended. . . here. Her hands found a jagged lip of metal hidden by a strategically placed pile of rubble. Toph shook her head in admiration. Any other earthbender would have completely overlooked it. They were trained to ignore metal. If the outside entrance was disguised to look like a water tank or something, no one would have given it a second glance.
The chute was too steep and slippery to climb using muscle power alone, so she looked for and found some shallow depressions in the metal. She supposed that they were handholds.
Toph frowned, but up she went, half of her attention focused on the climb and the other half trying to determine what could be waiting for her at the top. She sensed one human heart beat - slow and steady - and deep, even breathing. She came up with three possible explantion for her observations: the person was a zen master, or he was meditating, or he was sleeping.
It turned out to be the third. She could tell by the snore.
The very familiar snore.
Just to make sure, Toph creeped up behind him and tugged on his pony tail. The startled yell confirmed his identity.
"Hey, Snoozles."
:o:o:o:
"Let me get this straight. Some weird guy hired you to sneak into my city and "retrieve" some items from a secret tunnel, and you didn't think it was the least bit suspicious?" Toph rewarded his stupidity by punching him on the shoulder. Hard.
"Ow!" He yelped, rubbing the sore spot. "Cut it out! It wasn't like that. A merchant friend from Ba Sing Se approached me on behalf of his friend. The story goes that this guy was selling off some property in Omashu, but he had left some possessions behind when he moved out and needed someone to pick them up."
Toph snorted and began walking faster. She had twenty minutes to get back to the tea house. Sokka's hired goon had been easily dealt with, yet she hadn't been able to get rid of the man himself. She had tried to tell him that they should meet up later, but he had insisted on accompanying her back to The Subtle Bloom. After a few token protests, she had stopped arguing and started walking. Sokka and Suki were more or less married, but she still had a soft spot for Captain Boomerang, even if he had ditched said implement in favor of a sharp, pointy thing made for stabbing people. Besides, she hadn't seen him since her coronation last year. His company was so far proving to be just as frustrating and amusing as she remembered.
Sokka lengthened his stride, catching up to her easily as he continued his explanation. "I thought it was completely legit. I've known Chang for years, and I trusted him to put together a good deal. They paid me half up front, and gave me very detailed instructions and a key to the garden gate. And the house really is empty. I went up front and rang the doorbell, just to be sure."
Toph wrestled with the urge to punch him again. "The only people who build these kind of secret hidey holes are either crazy or guilty of something."
Sokka shrugged. "Or they're just rich," he suggested. "One thing I've learned these past few years is that people with money are really, really weird."
"Yeah, usually because they're plotting something! Do you know who really owns that house? Lord Ziyang, the former ambassador from the Fire Nation. The one Zuko-"
"Fired?" Sokka finished, elbowing her in the ribs as he grinned at his imagined cleverness.
Toph glared and held up a fist in warning. "I had my agents search every inch of his rooms at the embassy, and guess what they found?"
"A lot of ash?"
Toph nodded. "We didn't even know he had bought this property until the tax people noticed the missed payments and came around to collect. When they saw it was empty, they did a little digging and traced the purchase back to the ambassador."
"And you're here to investigate?" The gleeful tone in his voice had her thinking that he'd pulled out his "detective" costume, the one with the hat and the magnifying glass. "What exactly are you looking for?"
Toph hesitated, unsure of how she should answer that question. She settled on the truth. "I don't really know. Anything suspicious."
"I suppose a pile of crates hidden away in a secret underground room would definitely fit into that category." His deadpan delivery made Toph laugh. "But we looked inside a couple of them. They're just . . . jars."
"Vases," she corrected him. " From the Ming Dynasty. The quality is flawless. They're worth a fortune. If I had to guess, I would say they were actually moved there within the last few weeks, as payment for services rendered."
"And I was supposed to deliver it," Sokka muttered angrily. He clearly did not like the thought of being a pawn in someone else's game. "Payment for what?"
"It could be anything," Toph said. "But all my theories involve illegal things. Smuggling. Selling state secrets - the Fire Nation's or the Earth Kingdom's." She paused and took a deep breath. "Assassinating the firelord."
"You think-"
She cut him off. "I don't know. But Iroh is back in the Fire Nation trying to put a stop to all the attempts on Zuko's life, and he specifically asked me for information on Ziyang."
"And two and two make four." Sokka shook his head. "I thought Chang was a good guy, but he did lose a lot of family during the war."
"We've all sacrificed something," Toph snapped. "That doesn't mean you should throw assassins at the one person trying to make everything better."
"Wait, who's trying to kill Aang?"
Toph gave in to temptation and punched him again. "I was talking about Zuko."
"Oh, right." Sokka laughed awkwardly. "Him too."
:o:o:o:
They left behind the opulent splendor of the Diamond Quarter and descended into the controlled chaos of the Market District. As soon as they had joined the crowd, Toph took off at a sprint. Messengers and errand boys were always dodging every which way in this part of the city, and despite her dirty clothes she blended right in. Sokka, on the other hand, drew far too much attention. He had grown tall over the past few years, and he looked like he knew how to use the sword he wore at his waist. She tried to keep ahead of him, hoping that no one would think they were traveling together.
A few blocks away from The Subtle Bloom, Toph ducked into an empty doorway and took a moment to clean up her appearance. She shook the dust out of her hair and clothes, and then tied on Leila's apron, hoping it covered up any stains. Sokka watched her preparations with curiousity, one hand resting on the hilt of his sword. That was a new habit, and she wondered when he had picked it up. "Why can't you just walk right past them? They're your servants, aren't they?"
"Yes, and they're supposed to keep me safe," she said. "They can't do that if I wander off whenever I feel like it."
"But that's their fault for not keeping a better eye on you," he pointed out.
Toph bit her lip. "Maybe. They'll still be punished by their captain if he finds out that I slipped past them. I could order them to lie for me, but I wouldn't betray their trust like that. And besides," she continued, her voice softening unconsciously, "I promised the waitress at the teahouse that I wouldn't let that happen."
She almost jumped out of her skin when Sokka came closer and began combing his fingers through her bangs. "What are you doing?" she hissed, seconds away from punching him in the stomach.
He chuckled. "I'm helping you. I'm a master of disguise, remember?" His arms encircled her as he retied her apron. Toph stood completely still and tried not to breathe too loudly. "Come on," he said, reaching for her hand. "You've got less than three minutes."
Toph followed mutely, most of her attention on their joined hands. Three years ago she would have been blushing hot enough to boil water, and yet . . . she flexed her fingers experimentally. Sokka squeezed her hand, the pressure warm and reassuring and utterly platonic.
"I see one of your guards," he whispered. "Keep your head down, and your face turned towards me. I just have to get you through the doors, right? There won't be anyone inside?"
"No," she whispered back.
He let go of her hand, only to wrap an arm around her shoulders, pulling her close. Toph stifled a gasp, but after the initial surprise had passed she relaxed enough to slip an arm around his waist and grip the fabric of his loose shirt. She kept her head down and concentrated on matching her pace to his.
"Stairs" he murmured. It was an unnecessary warning; Toph had this path memorized.
They strolled right past Rei and into the dim coolness of the shop. Sokka tensed, his fingers digging into her shoulder as they heard the sounds of someone approaching. A bright voice, cheerful and familiar asked, "How may I help-oh!"
Toph stepped away from Sokka, a mischievous grin on her face. "Am I late?"
x
A/N: A lot of stuff is thrown at you guys in this chapter, so let me know if it's too confusing. Please R&R! I do take constructive criticism into account and will try to fix any issues you guys raise.
