I'm so sorry that the beginning of my story is so dark, kind of over-dramatic, and somewhat rushed. It has to be dark and dramatic because of the horrifying world Aang losing to Ozai would surely create, and the rushing is kind of an error on my part but also kind of necessary so we can get to the thick of things without me having to waste time writing twenty filler chapters. The first 9 chapters have been a bit weird for me as well, being that I usually write humorous oneshots/drabbles, not full-on stories, especially not anything this heavy. This is, in fact, my first full Taang story, and I have big plans for it :D

Also, I'm really like'n them reviews :] If we could break 100 before chapter 12/13 I'd be ecstatic (and I'd probably write faster)

Enjoy this chapter! It's kind of a traveling montage ;D

Disclaimer: Yeahno.

Chapter 10: Traveling Again Part 1

When his mind wakes up, his eyes don't open.

He feels like a thousand tons of lead has been piled onto his back, weighing him down, keeping him attached to the ground. His clothes stick to him like they've been soaked in tree sap, a very unwelcome feeling. His bones seem frozen down to the marrow, almost as if they're incased in ice, and the feeling make his teeth chatter relentlessly

Some kind of liquid rushes up from behind him, swallowing his feet, then his calves, and traveling all the way to his upper thighs, amplifying the cold deep inside him and making it new and raw, like ice water is in his veins. He can feel something resting under his arm, the thing also shivering when the liquid consumes him. That's when Aang remembers where he is.

Opening his eyes slowly, he tries to recall exactly what happened. All he can clearly remember is jumping off the cliff, landing into the water, and swimming himself and Toph to safety before falling unconscious. The mass under his arm wiggles again, and something bumps into Aang's chin.

He opens his eyes as much as he can manage, the morning sun being his only true foe at the moment. Despite its unmatchable light, the day star sends him no cold-relieving heat.

All that he can see directly in front of him is hot, tan sand, the coastline of the lake, and more sand. Still squinting, he looks down and sees a mass of damp blackness with a few loose tendrils sticking outside of the main clump. He recognizes it to be hair when he feels the tickling of it against his facial-haired chin. Aang shifts a foot or so away from the surprisingly soft thing resting under his arm and looks at it fully, never pulling his arm away.

She's still sleeping, her exhaustion most likely due to the flailing she must have done when she landed in the water last night. Her bun is still intact, for the most part; many strands of hair stick out from all angles, the majority of them plastered to her pale face. She lies on her side so she's facing him, her mouth slightly parted as her body breathes peacefully in sleep. While just his boots and the majority of his pants are wet from the rising and falling water of the lake, Toph is wet up to her mid-torso and is visibly shivering, her bare toes curled up due to the cold. Aang's arm is snaked around her lower back, something that must have been done unintentionally while pulling her onto the shore late last night. He pulls his arm away gently as to not wake her.

Aang shuffles back into his previous position, moving until Toph's slightly unkempt hair touches his chin again. His muscles feel so heavy that he could almost allow himself to fall back to sleep, to drift off and wake up later feeling at his peak strength. Aang closes his eyes and adjusts his arm so it rests between them, ready to push him into a defensive position. But, until a threat rises, sleep seems to be the most rewarding option.

Then the poking begins.

For some reason, someone is currently finding it very necessary to poke at his head. Aang groans restlessly and opens his eyes again.

Kneeling above him is a girl no older than the Duke with cropped mousey-brown hair and a curious expression on her face. She has white arm bands and a white collar; the rest of her clothing is blue, much like the soldiers who'd invaded their camp last night.

"Oh," she exclaims in surprise when Aang opens his eyes. "Hey," she turns and yells to someone that must be behind her. "He's not dead!"

The brown-haired girl looks back and pokes Toph in the shoulder repeatedly. "Is she dead?" She asks Aang in a voice that he can only describe as much too loud. Before Aang can even think of trying to respond, an angry, bear-like growl vibrates from Toph's throat.

"I guess that's a no," the young girl confirms with a slight laugh. Her voice is like her hair: mousey. She has grey-brown eyes and a thin smile that seems oddly familiar, though not as much as Toph's had been. Maybe Aang had passed her in a crowd at some point in the past. He couldn't be sure; he scans his mind but finds no clear memory of the light haired girl.

Aang looks back at Toph after she grumbles again. Her eyes are fluttering not-so-graciously open now, and she rubs them before pushing Aang out of her way so he no longer stands between her and the newcomer. "I don't need protection from a squirrely little girl, Twinkles," she mutters sleepily.

The teenage girl looks rather derailed, brownish eyes splayed wide. "I…Wha...Little?…Squirrely?!" She sputters, tripping over her own tongue as it abandons her.

Toph stretches her arms above her head in a colossal yawn after sitting up straight. "Yeah," she says on the cusp of her yawn. She rubs her dead eyes again before smirking her usual smirk. "Squirrely."

Aang tries to contain his chuckles at her remark. Toph inclines her head toward him at his laughter, her face that of someone contemplating something. Her milky, lifeless eyes narrow suddenly and just as quickly widen slightly in realization, and whatever she realized makes her pull her arm back and wallop him in the arm, hard.

"Ow! What was that for?" Aang cries in pain before rubbing his soon-to-be-bruised arm.

"For pulling me over a cliff into a freaking lake, Airhead!" Aang shrugs under her angry glare, a perplexed look on his face.

It's this part of their friendship, the bickering and yelling, that seems to be the main way they're able to communicate at this point.

Lovely.

The brown-haired girl backs away but continues to watches them squabble, silent and a tad confused.

"Do you recognize them, K?"

Another voice comes up from behind the girl, a deeper feminine one, and the young girl is soon joined by a girl about her age with a bit more maturity set in her eyes and hair that's a few shades darker. She too wears all blue, hold for her white belt.

What's with all the blue and white? Aang asks himself silently.

The first girl cocks her head to the side before standing up to her full height. "Not really," she informs her friend slowly. "Though he does seem slightly familiar."

"I doubt that," the other girl says. "I think you'd remember meeting him," she says with a slight wiggle of her eyebrows as she elbows the first girl in the side. The mousey-haired girl blushes slightly.

Toph asks bitterly from her spot on the ground, "Are we done here?" She scratches at her limp hair and yawns again as she adds, "We've got places to be." Using Aang's shoulder to push off, Toph moves so she's standing. She appears to be close to the two girls' height if not an inch or two taller, and it's evident in the accents of her womanly facial structure that she has a few years on the both of them.

"Oh, don't worry about that," the second girl replies in a somewhat taunting manner. "You won't be going anywhere."

"Oh, yeah?" Toph counters with crossed arms. The midmorning sun beams down from the clear sky above, illuminating her fully and leaving an accurately sized Toph-shaped shadow in front of her on the ground. "And who, exactly, is going to stop us from leaving?" Her light eyes send an insubordinate, blind glare their way.

Aang gets up rather quickly despite his lucid mind, not sure if he means to help his friend or stop the impending fight. He steps back so he's standing beside Toph, eyes flitting between her cold, unseeing gaze to the stiff forms of the younger girls.

Exchanging quick glances, the two girls grin before setting their eyes back on the older pair. With a movement quicker than a heartbeat, they each whip out a pair of marigold fans that seem to have materialized from nothing. Aang raises his hands in front of his torso defensively after noticing that Toph has already adopted an attack stance.

"We don't have to fight them," he mutters sidelong to her.

Her thin eyebrows narrow. "Are they really giving us much of a choice?" Toph counters deftly, stomping her foot forward to make the ground beneath the fan-wielding girls tremble. As they stumble, she kicks the earth, her toes digging in, churning up the ground and sending the disturbed earth their way. At the end of the disrupted ground's trail, rock spires shoot from the ground and hit either girl in the abdomen, not injuring them terribly but still sending them reeling.

Not wanting to have Toph do everything, Aang thrusts his stiff arms right then left before raising them abruptly, creating a heavy dust cloud to cover their retreat.

The two young women stand up slowly, groaning in pain as they retrieve their discarded fans from the ground. By the time they turn back to the cloud, coughing as it irritates their lungs, their fans at the ready again, the dust has begun to settle and the two mysterious earthbenders are gone.

0o0 Nine Days Later 0o0

Toph turns her blind gaze towards him from over her shoulder, the bustling town behind her completely unaware that they're within ten feet of them. Toph's stolen crimson get-up hangs off her a bit loosely, very similar to the one she wore so many years ago in the Fire Nation. "You ready?"

Aang tightens his headband, musses his hair about, and shakes his red-clad shoulders a bit before giving her a thumbs up. "Yup."

She turns her back to him, her hands clutching the corner of one of the buildings that creates the alley they're currently hiding in. Her garb makes her look younger than she is, like she's gone back in time and put her present-day soul into her twelve year-old body. A smirk graces her lips, an evil one that Aang knows all too well. "Let's do this."

Nodding curtly, Aang slips past her and walks casually into the town plaza.

This will mark the fourth time they've scammed to get supplies as well as the seventh town they've passed through on their way to locate the scattered members of the Gaang. Their travels have been a bit…rocky, to say the least. After just ten days of being in each other's presence, any amount of odd-feelings between them have evaporated, leaving them with nothing but everything they had ten years ago. Aang finds it very comforting that Toph's cocky, brash demeanor hasn't changed very much from the way it was back then. He knows that he can count on her stability to act as a stable sense of normalcy, and that fact is immensely reassuring.

However, with their revived relationship has come the teasing and bickering that ran rampant between them when they were children. Toph takes every chance she gets to make a snide remark regarding what he's doing wrong, and, even at nearly twenty two years old, she still refuses to call him by his first name.

And he wouldn't change it if he could.

Peering about with his peripherals, Aang meanders through the crowd, using his superior height to see over heads and find the stand Toph had pointed out earlier, all the while trying to avoid drawing suspicion.

His keen eyes locate the stand quickly. It's a medium-sized caravan full too many different types of produce to count: fruits and vegetables and even some nuts, all of so many different varieties and colors that the excited sight almost makes his eyes hurt. Next to the produce stand is a metal-works caravan with pots, pans, and things of the like hanging from nails slammed into the wooden walls of the large cart.

Aang whistles to himself as he makes his way to the fruit stand, a look of forced innocence plastered to his face. A man tips his head towards him in respectful acknowledgement, and Aang responds with a raise of his hand.

He finds himself smiling after that small exchange. It may be a very normal and human thing, but being acknowledged makes him feel like he's finally not blending himself to the mixture of mindless civilians Ozai has painted onto the world.

Above it all but still focusing on the task at hand, Aang approaches the merchant with a jubilant grin. "Good morrow my kind hotman," he greets with a flick of his hand.

The man chooses to ignore his outdated language as he nods back. He's a stout man with sunken eyes and a long nose, almost as if the latter appendage was stretched to belie his miniscule organs. His beard looks coarse to the touch. "What kind of fruit are you searching for, young man?"

Aang, still smiling in pseudo naivety, shakes his head slowly in accordance to Toph's plans. She's proven to be almost as mad a genius as Bumi when it comes to devilish ideas, though without all the insane snorting and giggling, not to mention that she's not a one hundred and twenty two year old man. Speak of the woman, she's already slipped out from between the buildings and is meandering through the crowd. He can sense her nearing him, but he doesn't turn around for fear of ruining the scam.

To the caravan keep, Aang says, "Oh, I don't want any fruit."

The man is unfazed and unaware, right where Toph wants him. "Well that's perfectly alright. You'll want some vegetables, then?"

Toph inches around a mother coddling her child and a round man trying to collect change by playing a broken weed whistle. Her footsteps ate ten feet behind him, two feet to his left.

Aang leans a hand against the worn wood of the stand. "No. I can't afford to buy either."

Toph is behind him now, hidden from the merchant's view due to her inferior size.

Now the bearded merchant is a bit confused. "If you don't have the means to buy my fruit and vegetables, then can I ask you why you're standing at my produce stand?"

Toph leans her back against his, and Aang can picture her smug smirk.

"Because," Aang drawls as he taps his fingers rhythmically against the wood. He taps fast three times then slow twice, and Toph hears the signal loud and clear.

She is surprisingly silent as she clenches her fists and pulls her elbows taught against herself. He feels her shoulder blades shift with every honed shift of her body, and he can almost swear that the otherworldly power she possesses is radiating from her as she effortlessly bends ever knife from the metal-works standoff of their spot on the stand and makes them hover dangerously over the produce merchant's fuzzy face. The man swallows, his face pallor and acquiring the look of a hunted animal

Aang leans forward and Toph moves the blades accordingly, some of them just inches from the man's receding hairline. The knives all seem to curve up at the merchant with Cheshire grins, and each one reflects his haplessly terrified expression.

"You're going to give me some food, right, friend?" Aang finishes with excessive kindness dripping from his voice. "Being that I can't buy it, of course."

Fuzzy-Beard appears to be in need of a new pair of trousers. "What are you?" He shakes tremulously, his eyes splayed wide enough that Aang can see the dull green sprinkled within the brown in his irises. "Some kind of demon god?"

"No," Aang replies, though he throws his voice in a way that makes him seem all powerful; Toph isn't fazed, being that he can hear her squelched snickers. He leans forward even more so his nose is touching the merchant's beak.

"I'm just a really hungry man."

0o0 One Week Later 0o0

"I'm telling you, we're lost."

Aang scoffs and whips the map forward in an attempt to straighten it out. "Toph, my people were nomads," he refutes. "We traveled everywhere. There's no way we could ever be lost when I have the map."

Top would roll her eyes if she could. "Even if that map is upside down?" She tosses over her shoulder.

"What?" Aang's eyes shoot down to the paper in his hands and he looks closely at it. "What are you talking ab-" his expression drops as he remembers her blindness. "Oh."

Up ahead by just a few feet, Toph sniggers and puts her arms behind her head as she walks. "You waltzed yourself into that one, Twinkles."

Aang just sighs and goes back to reading the map. Could they be lost? It was possible if not highly likely. Would he ever admit that to her? No.

He steals a few quick glance at her back while they walk. In all honesty he shouldn't expect anything but her quips and snide comments, being that he's traveled with her before. Maybe he'd secretly been holding the hope that the years had softened her razor-sharp wit and made her a bit more open to accept other people's feelings and opinions. She had almost seemed that way back when they'd been with her group of refugees, but with every passing day since they left, she'd been falling back into her old routine.

Maybe she is, he muses to himself. But you just have to become very close to her in order to see that part of her.

Aang just shrugs and returns his eyes to the paper in his hands. They pad down the forest path without any set destination, really. All they know is that they're looking for their lost friends, so they travel between towns, stopping at every one no matter how small, and try to gather information on what any sort of war prisoner or refugee of any kind may have succumbed to. They've had to be very discreet and unspecific with their questions as to not raise suspicion, and every time they ask they typically get one, or, or a combination of these answers: imprisoned, assigned as a servant to Azula, or dead.

That being said, the pair of them haven't wandered from the path they'd set for themselves; Aang's visions hinted at their friends being alive, and they're going to hold fast to that hope.

"So," Toph calls, elongating the vowel. "Where are we, again?"

Aang turns the map sideways as well as his head, eyebrows raised, perplexed. "I have no idea."

She turns herself around and grins in victory. "Hah! I knew it! You have no idea where we're going!"

"And that's a good thing because…?"

Her smile collapses and she halts her backwards stride. Aang stops next to her and looks down at her face as she narrows her thin eyebrows.

"...Just read the damned map."

Aang obliges, though he isn't sure how much good it will bring them, if any at all, being that he's just noticed that the map had in fact been upside down the whole time.

0o0 Two Days Later 0o0

Toph stretches her legs out next to the small fire Aang had started a bit earlier in order to cook dinner. Momo is curled in her lap, practically purring as she seldom scratches his head between his ears. Aang sits across from her, one hand on his full stomach, the other resting on his one bent knee; his other leg lies straight out in front of him.

He looks up and observes the stars silently, thinking back to when he used to gaze at the beautiful faraway orbs of light with Sokka and Katara. Their names are still like an ice pick to his heart, but the pain is significantly less now that it's entirely possible that they're still alive somewhere, even if it's in this crazy, messed-up world.

His light eyes fall back down to his traveling companion. Is she feeling the rush of memories as well? She must be; the lazy way her eyes capture the moonlight insinuates that she's lost somewhere in the catacombs of her own mind.

"What was it like for you?" She asks suddenly. "To be alone for so long? It must have stunk something awful."

Aang shrugs, though he doesn't really think his decade of loneliness can be brushed off so easily. "You get used to the quiet, especially when you're a mourning masochist most of the time." He watches her bangs ghost wind-caused caresses on her face. "What about you? What made you want to lead a group as big as that?"

Her eyes lower and her expression hardens. "I have my reasons," she replies brashly. "But I think the main reason was to create a sense of normalcy in my life." Toph leans her head back against the earth she'd raised as a back rest and chuckles. "Being that I'm a borderline loon, doing so wouldn't have been possible without them."

He nods slowly in understanding. His next question is asked without much thought:

"And your parents?"

Toph grimaces and ceases petting the lemur in her lap. His inquiry didn't need much more elaboration than that. "I'm as over it as I ever will be."

"Did putting those flowers on their grave help?

She shrugs idly, though her expression still holds the weight she'd tried to brush off. "I guess; sorry you had to see that, by the way. I was a bit overdramatic, wasn't I? Talking to my dead parents."

Aang shakes his head and rests his hands in his lap. "Not necessarily; I used to have full conversations with you and the rest of or group in my dreams."

That's the complete truth; on the nights when he wasn't plagued by nightmares, he would dream that he was sitting around the campfire with his friends chatting the night away. The dreams had almost felt real, but when he noticed that he grew older and his mental images of his friends didn't, they began to feel like a cold lie.

Toph tilts her head in confusion. "Did your mind do that on purpose as a way to make us live on in your subconscious?" She doesn't add: Even after you thought we were dead?

He shakes his head again. "I think it was more of a way to numb the pain more than anything else." Aang half smiles at her as her expression slowly relaxes. "I think having the real thing is better."

Yes, he realizes slowly. Having her around has improved his whole view on life significantly, not to mention that he's smiled and laughed more in the past two and a half weeks than he has in the past ten years.

Toph grins wide with her eyes closed, arching her back and cracking her joints in order to get comfortable on the ground. "You bet your twinkly butt it is."

Thank you all for favouriting, following, reviewing, etc. and PLEASE keep it coming! !I love to hear from you!

I'll be back sooner next time, I promise!

Oh, and to avoid confusion, I'm going to let you all know that we have NOT re-met any members of the Gaang other than Toph and Aang, meaning that neither Sokka nor Katara have made appearances in my story as of late, as some of my readers seem to think. I'm sorry if I confused you.

-Katiebunchesofoats