WHY DOES NOBODY TELL ME THESE THINGS

Tokka Week 2013 drabbles

By

EvilFuzzy9


A/N: This is the darkest and angstiest of all the prompts I have written for Tokka Week, hands down. Seemed appropriate, and it certainly felt like it would be a more creative execution of 'REALITY' than something like, say, a modern day AU. *coughcough*

Also, Toph and Sokka are in this one probably the youngest they've been in all of the prompts yet, as this is set maybe a year or two after the original series finale, at most.


Prompt Seven:

REALITY

They didn't know, exactly, when the nightmares first started.

Perhaps it was in the aftermath of the post-war celebrations, when the high of victory began to fade, leaving them with the sudden, sharp awareness of just what they had done. Maybe it was when they met up with Zuko at the coronation ceremony, and he was unable to look them in the eye, casualty reports and funerals weighing heavily on his mind.

Maybe it was when they were first confronted by the mourners, the anguished family members of the deceased. Or perhaps it was when they traveled to Wulong Forest searching for Boomerang and Space Sword, only to come across the twisted, charred hulks of the airships, and the mangled corpses that Toph could sense trapped beneath the great steel beams and struts.

The hundreds of corpses.

After that, for certain, they became aware of the nightmares. They began waking up in the middle of the night, screaming and drenched in an icy cold sweat. They started to be haunted by the sounds of dying men and woman screaming in abject terror and mortal agony, the noises of groaning iron behemoths crashing together in a great, grinding, gnashing, screeching clamor.

They woke frequently from confused, incomprehensible dreams with the feeling of a great heat on their skin, as though they had fallen asleep in front of a roaring bonfire, the last ghostly embers of which still imbued their flesh with a painful, lingering warmth. Night terrors became the norm for them, the scrambled impressions of death and destruction and the horrors of war flashing constantly through their subconscious minds. In their dreams they remembered the fear of death which chilled their bones, and the trauma of murder roiling hot in their guts.

They lost sleep, growing gradually gaunter and more haggard. Guilt plagued them in their waking hours, haunting them at every step. They felt blood on their hands, hot and thick and sticky, smelling so strongly of iron and death. Even the sweetest foods were like ash on their tongues, like the ashes which coated the landscape of their "greatest feat", as it was proclaimed by those around them.

After all, had they not, with the backup of but a lone Kyoshi Warrior, all but singlehandedly halted the advance of the single most powerful and advanced military force in all of recorded human history? Such an act, surely, was worthy of the only highest praises!

...Or at least so many of the Earth Kingdom's people seemed to insist. Why, even King Kuei and his Council of Five all spoke so highly of them and their deeds in that final great battle of the Hundred Year War. They were proclaimed as heroes, their names cut into the imperishable stone records of Ba Sing Se, alongside the greatest of the great, the legendary champions and defenders of the Earth Kingdom throughout the uncounted millennia of its history.

They were heroes, everyone insisted, yet Toph and Sokka did not much feel the part. They were too shaken, too horrified by the reality of what they had done.

There was blood on their hands, the blood of hundreds. They had killed so many, they now understood. Dismal few had escaped alive the wrecks of the dread Fire Nation airships. So few of them survived. So many simply died.

It was sobering, knowing that they were responsible for so much loss of life. So much more than they could ever in good conscience take pride. Not after seeing the wrecks firsthand, not after realizing in that single, terrible moment of epiphany the reality of the innumerable deaths they had caused in that single battle.

It was a weight which bore even down upon them at all times, all hours. There was no respite to be gained for them in nocturnal oblivion. The nightmares followed them wherever they went – a painful, hideous reminder of their crimes.

And that was in truth how they had come to perceive their past actions. They loathed themselves for what they had done, and any attempt to justify their deeds left a taste most dreadfully bitter upon their tongues.

They ate little, and slept even less. They threw themselves into their respective duties, taking on as many responsibilities as possible, even if only to distract themselves from their own dark, hateful thoughts.

They loathed themselves, saw themselves as monsters. Their nights were filled with restless sleep and ghastly dreams, and their days were punctuated by flashbacks and panic attacks.

At times, they forgot themselves and their surroundings. Increasingly often, as the nightmares grew worse and more frequent, they would, if jarred or startled by some loud noise or sudden movement, seem to forget that the war was over – or else perhaps become trapped in waking memory of some past battle – and panic, lashing out blindly at those around them, as though attacking some unseen enemies whose presence only they could perceive.

Nobody really knew what to do with the two as these fits, these episodes, became more prevalent, and more frequent. Even the best healers in the Earth Kingdom and the Fire Nation and the Northern Water Tribe could do little more than prescribe sedative herbal incenses and mind-numbing elixirs to mitigate the symptoms of whatever affliction it was that so tightly gripped the pair. But these methods were only temporary solutions, at best, doing nothing to address whatever was at the root of the issue.

And also, Toph and Sokka were incredibly loth to accept these so-called "remedies", hating the sensation of having their wits so dulled, of living half-awake at most, and existing with their minds swaddled in a deadening haze of numbness. They resented all of the diagnoses and medications of these unqualified leeches, loathing the pitying, condescending treatment almost more than they feared the nightmares and flashbacks.

More than once, many suggested that the two be placed in a sanitarium or asylum – for their own good, of course – but the two adamantly refused every time, and their friends did not have the heart to force this onto them. They did, however, insist on getting the two somewhere peaceful and quiet to live, out in the countryside, away from all the stress of their duties.

It was a small, single-story ranch house attached to a tiny plot of fallow, long-abandoned fields. Earth Kingdom in fashion, with walls and floors of stone, and a small creek running through the back-end of the property. The grounds were overgrown, choked with weeds and tall grass, and the house itself was dustier than a vegetarian's meatlocker, but something about it just made the pair feel so at home.

Here, Sokka and Toph felt, they could live in peace, at least for a while. Perhaps there was something about the very air they breathed in this place that seemed to soothe their troubled hearts, a sense of simple serenity that pervaded the homely, country stead. Maybe it was the sense of being really free from all of their obligations and responsibilities back in the city, of finally being able to just live at their own pace for the first time they could remember.

Or maybe it was the sense of really being in this together, as they lay side by side under the sole set of blankets, on the only futon, in the entire house. For the first time since the end of the war, Toph and Sokka could really be there for one another, uninterrupted as they talked and joked and reminisced together, their hearts lighter than they had been in what felt like ages.

When they had been separated from one another by changing circumstances after the end of the war, they each had felt like they'd lost a part of themselves. But now they were brought back together, in this quiet, unassuming setting, and once again they felt really whole.

Perhaps this, in the end, was why Toph and Sokka were able to sleep in peace, that first night – and every one after it – just lying in each other's arms as war buddies and best friends and maybe, even then, something just a little bit more.


A/N: Because even when I am consciously writing angst, I will still somehow wind up with a vaguely optimistic ending. XD

This chapter, which is my final one for the first Tokka week in which I have ever participated, somehow wound up way longer than every other one, by an order of something like fifty percent even for the next longest one. It is also the most serious, taking a number of cues from one of my proudest works yet, Hurt, a Sokka and Katara sibling-bond hurt/comfort fic which really explored the idea of stuff like PTSD in the Avatar world, and the possible consequences of the whole Airship Fleet sequence in the series finale.

In some ways, even, I suppose you could maybe even take chapter this as a sort of spiritual sequel to Hurt, with less self-loathing and alcoholism and more Tokka-ish feels. :P

As a final word for this Tokka week, though, I think I will try to sum up my perception of Tokka as a pairing in three simple words:

"Closer than lovers."

TTFN and R&R!

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