Commentary: =) Hope everyone had a good weekend! Let's get this party started again, shall we?

POT CALLING KETTLE

Chapter Twelve

She unfailingly fell asleep before he did every night, but she always woke up first too. The fifth morning of their travels he blinked awake and her face was inches from his own, her eyes staring through him, her cheek in her hand. The shock almost made him wet his pants. The following day the process recurred: cracking his eyes open and finding her almost on his bedroll with him, he jolted upright and barked his head sharply against the rock overhang they'd chosen as their nightly shelter. A cave-hopper skittered into his ear. He clawed at it, mistakenly scraped the overhang's ceiling, and upended a whole colony of the insects from a crevice in the rock. They landed all over him, their legs tickling across the bare flesh of his chest, throat, face. With a shriek fit to rival the best efforts of a four-year-old girl, the tribesman shot out of his bedclothes and into the surrounding forest. Toph's choking laughter chased him as far as he ran.

When he had mustered the courage to return to the campsite, he grouchily demanded of the breathless Earthbender, "Why do you do that? Geez!" He hitched up his sleeping pants. A lone cave-hopper fell through the seam of his fly.

"Why do I do what?" asked Toph, sniggling into her blanket. She hadn't even bothered to get up yet.

"You, agh"—Sokka flicked off the invasive pest—"you get all close and you look at me—"

She propped herself up on her elbow. "Uhm, about that."

"Fine. It looks like you're looking at me. And you're, what, millimeters away, right?" He took her lack of reply as agreement and muttered, kicking dirt over the circle of their dead fire, "It's kinda unnerving. Scary, almost."

"I'm that ugly, huh?" Toph sat up and grinned, ruffling a hand through her hair. Unkempt and ridiculous, it was almost long enough even tangled to brush the ground. The ends of it frothed, black and shining, halfway down the curves of her hips.

"No. No, you're not ugly at all—but being that close to you is, I dunno, like being close to a huge sharp-taloned beast or something," Sokka answered. Kneeling to roll up his bedclothes, he smacked a closed hand into his palm. "One minute the beast's all docile and sweet and the next, wham! It gnaws your face off."

"…I am pleased by this comparison," Toph admitted. She stretched. All the bones in her spine cracked simultaneously and the sound was nearby that of a thunderclap. "Oooh," approved the Earthbender, "yeah baby."

"Nice. But could you maybe"—and he nudged her with his elbow—"not get so close to me in the mornings like that? We can't both afford to be concussed." Glancing up, he wondered, "Why'd you start doing it anyway? You never tried it before."

"Never tried what?" Probably for his benefit, her eyes rolled toward him.

"To get, you know, snuggly. Are you cold at night or something without your earth tent?"

By now Toph had wound most of her hair up into its signature spherical twist. "No. I wouldn't sleep that close to you even if my toes were icicles," she offered.

This statement was something of an indignity to Sokka. "Why not?" Beneath his thin tunic his chest puffed in resentment. "I'm perfectly cuddlesome!"

Toph smirked. "You want reasons? Okay, here's a few." She held up three fingers. "First reason: you kick. Like a wild horse. You've already woken me up about twenty times thrashing around." Her smirk widened. "If you did ever manage to land a hit on me in the night, I'd probably kill you before I fully regained consciousness and I do need a seeing-eye person to get to that fancy Spirit Oasis place, so—yeah." The fingers wiggled. "Second reason: you drool by the bucketload. Haven't you ever wondered why your pillow smells so bad?"

"It does not smell bad!" Correction: it smelled terrible.

"Uh-huh. Third reason: you snore. We're talking earthshattering, earsplitting cacophony kind of snore here, Snoozles." Her hair more or less in order, Toph slid from beneath the overhang, dragged herself into her clothes, and began to vigorously pick her nose. "You scare away the nightbeasts effortlessly with the racket you make."

"You've never complained," he noticed peevishly.

"Because I get to drop spiders in your mouth," came the cheery rejoinder.

Sokka squinted at his best friend. "You're… heh. You're kidding." She blinked at him and he pursued, stomach stirring queasily, "Right? You are kidding? Toph?"

"Aw c'mon." She beamed. "You've never swallowed one. At least, I don't think so. But then again, how could I possibly know for sure?" She maneuvered a hand before her eyes demonstratively.

"…you're kind of cruel, you know that?"

"You like it."

Cinching the knot of his bedroll, Sokka fumbled in his things for his toothbrush and determined to steer the conversation back to its stem. "So okay, you obviously don't want to sleep near me. Why do you get so close in the mornings, then?"

He glanced sidelong at Toph. Seated on the heap of her things, she gazed off into the gray woods. Here and there light lanced down from above and tinted bits of the brush golden, but the occasional feathery beauty of the dawn was lost on the Earthbender for obvious reasons. Shifting instinctively into a patch of that sunflower warmth, though, she laced her hands and murmured, "I'm just listening, that's all."

"Listening to…?"

"You." She pointed at him, then waved to their surroundings. "That. Everything. Mostly you, though."

She said it as easily as she might have said, "I like cheese," or, "That tree is dead," but Sokka blushed to his roots regardless. "What do you mean?"

"Dawn's a concert." She turned her face up toward the forest's canopy. Her split lip was fully healed now, and most of the bruising had faded too. Only a single dark smudge lingered on the swell of her cheek. "It's always different, always changing—the bugs, the trees, the wind, damn—even the bark on the trees stretching as it warms up or cools down. But you, see, you're pretty much a constant." Drawing her fingers in toward her chest in a furl, she tapped the spot above her left breast. "You're a drum. And percussion's my favorite part of any ensemble."

Sokka was abruptly aware that he'd never felt more flattered in his life. "Oh."

Toph shrugged. "But if it makes you uncomfortable—"

"No, no! It's cool. I don't care if you—if you listen." He swallowed. "But you can tell when I'm about to wake up, right?"

Making a circle with her thumb and forefinger, she confirmed, "You betcha."

"Great. So could you maybe, uhm, scoot away? When you notice that? Just so you don't scare me," he rushed on. "Yeah."

Popping upright, Toph made a little bow in his direction and then, after looping her bag over her shoulder, set off for Appa. "No problem, Snoozles. I guess I can find something else to amuse me for those few minutes."

"Thanks, Toph."

"What can I say?" Upon reaching the bison, Toph gave his nose a good-morning scratch and smiled over her shoulder at Sokka. "I'm a giver."

True to her word, Toph found another pastime and was nowhere near Sokka the next morning. He woke to thick clouds of billowing black smoke and the stench of what might have been burning hair. His heart flip-flopped in his chest and he lunged from his bedroll, stubbing his big toe mightily on the way out and jabbing his eye into a tree branch for good measure. He expected to stumble straight into a battle with enemy Firebenders.

He was instead greeted by the (somewhat watery, thanks to the branch) sight of Toph crouched next to a skillet over their resurrected cookfire. Poking the unholy contents of said skillet with a stick, she grinned and said proudly, "Look, Sokka! I made breakfast!"