Commentary: My kingdom for a chance to post updates! Sorry this one was delayed, but here ya go!

DELIVERY

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Warmest Regards

or

In With the New

Sokka realized two things about being engaged almost immediately after Appa touched down at his doorstep in Ba Sing Se.

The first was that he wasn't going to be given the opportunity to announce his new non-single status when he saw fit. Having arrived a few hours before Sokka and Toph thanks to his speedy little glider, Aang had already taken it upon himself to act as Sokka's personal messenger boy by bestowing the news upon Katara. As Sokka slid down Appa's flank and found his feet once more on the Earth Kingdom capital's sandy soil, he discovered that very woman waiting for him.

Katara did not look pleased.

"I hear you went and got yourself married," she said. She folded her arms. The fountain nearby their neighborhood's center square suddenly spurted three-foot-long icicles of varying degrees of sharpness.

Katara, Sokka reflected, looked pissed.

"Engaged," he corrected her gingerly. "I got engaged. I'm not married. I mean, not yet—"

"Engaged," attempted his baby sister, rolling the word over on her tongue as she might a special beverage. Her lips parted—she licked her teeth, a severe snap of white in her otherwise soft cinnamon face. "Engaged," she tried again. Behind her the icicles in the fountain crunched and crackled outward, groping like fingernails.

Instinct drove Sokka back against Appa's undulating ribs. "Eee-yeeeah—"

"ENGAGED!" snarled Katara. The word thundered across the residential street—passersby previously preoccupied with the fountain turned to eye the angry Waterbender and her cowering sibling. Stabbing a finger into the empty air between them, Katara resumed, "Engaged to TOPH?"

Fwump! From the corner of his eye Sokka saw the Earthbender in question land at his side, legs akimbo, expression inscrutable. She blinked, tipped her head—said nothing. Across Appa's fur her fingers provided idle strokes, and Sokka heard himself say as he watched those rough little digits dip and dart through the coarse white mat, "Sure." He tacked on, simultaneously thoughtless and decided, "Seriously, Katara, who else?"

Toph's hand stilled. Startled, Katara paused. Someone out of sight shouted an enthusiastic, "You know that's right!"

The voice responsible for the shout sounded suspiciously like Aang's.

Collecting herself, Katara threw up her hands. "Did you ask her first, Sokka?" she demanded. "Did you, oh, I don't know, run it by her before you dragged her into your scheme?"

Sokka defended, "It was a good scheme! And hey, she dragged me into her scheme first, so—"

"Did you"—by now the architectural structure of the fountain was lost in the burgeoning cluster of icicles; some of those were taller than the neighborhood awnings and still spiking skyward—"ask her to marry you? Before you asked her parents? Before you, wow, sealed the whole deal up in a pretty little envelope and got her into a situation that entails sticking around with you for the rest of her life?"

Sokka blinked. "You say that like I'm bad company or something," he observed.

"…you didn't ask her, did you?" Katara's eyebrow gave a pulsing, quivery twitch.

"Am I bad company?" pursued the tribesman. He turned to look at Toph, whose face was still locked in its usual mask of bored indifference—he gesticulated desperately at an adjacent vendor who, clutching at an armful of cabbages, inched away from him. "I always thought I was a pretty fun guy! Life of the party! The comic relief, even—"

"You didn't ask her." Katara buried her face in her hands. The icicles on the fountain cracked, crumbled into bits. Those bits wafted harmlessly down along the street like snowflakes and more than a few people reached up, wondering at the sight of such in summer, to pluck at them. One found Toph's cheek, stuck there. It melted. Running down her face next, reminiscent of a tear, it teased the corner of her mouth and she licked it away, smacking her lips appreciatively at the cold.

"You don't understand, Katara." Sokka carefully approached his sister. He extended his arms as though he meant to hug her, and maybe that was his plan. "There just wasn't time—"

In a motion as fluid as the medium of her Bending, Katara reached up, grabbed Sokka's chin, and hauled him in close. Pinching that wedge of his jaw between her thumb and forefinger, she shook him. Once. Twice. His head nodded on his neck and the neighbors stared and Katara, so furious and indignant her voice nearly broke, hissed at him, "Sokka, how could you? Toph's feelings—don't tell me you don't know; don't tell me you could just overlook—"

She stopped abruptly, sucked in a breath, and made to say something else when a pale hand interceded between the Waterbender and her sibling. It furled over dark fingers, plucked them away one by one—ultimately its efforts freed Sokka. As the tribesman straightened, the arm belonging to the pale hand hooked about his waist and Toph, sighing, ducked under his elbow. She held on to him for approximately two seconds before shoving him away again, this time to enfold Katara in a tangle of limbs. She shoved her face—mistakenly—into Katara's breasts, flushed, shifted her cheek aside, and ended with her brow tucked to the taller girl's collarbone. Over her spine Katara's hands gave a startled flare, then settled.

"He didn't know, actually, because he has a brain the size of a pebble"—Toph said this succinctly—"but he does now, and he did the best he could and I'm glad, and as much as I appreciate all your righteous indignation on my behalf, Sweetness, you've gotta cut it out or I'm seriously going to just throw up sparkles all over you. Okay?" Sensing Katara's bristle and predictable retort, Toph tightened her arms to proceed, "Besides, you know something?"

Mouth a dubious crescent, Katara arched her brows. Leaning back in the loop of the Waterbender's arms, Toph grinned, thumbed over her shoulder at Sokka, and provided, "It's not your job to take care of me anymore. It's his. And do you know what that means?"

"Cosmic intervention to keep you alive and not imprisoned come your next birthday," opined Katara dryly.

"Hey!" Sokka squawked.

"Exactly," allowed Toph, and the tribesman goggled at her, wounded. "He's gonna need all the help he can get," his fiancée continued peaceably, "and that includes yours. So it would be really great if you two could, you know, not fight. For," she stressed as Katara's cheeks puffed with a cross reply, "my benefit. Unless, of course"—her voice dropped in feigned insecurity; her arms loosened—"you don't want me to eventually be your sister."

Never could it be said that Katara was an uncaring or unreasonable person, especially when it came to her friends and family. Deflating, she jerked a nod. She dropped her face into Toph's windblown hair, dragging the smaller woman close. The two Benders tenderly embraced and it provided the onlookers—of which there were now several—a moment of soft, cuddlesome warmth.

But then Katara gasped, thrust Toph out to arm's length, and said weakly as her face lost all its color, "Oh Spirits. You're eventually going to be my sister."

Toph smiled. It was a wicked, wicked smile. Turning to point her face in Sokka's general direction, she motioned gently to Katara, cocked her head, and wiggled her eyebrows. "Your move," she told him.

The second thing Sokka realized about being engaged was that it meant he now had a partner with whom teasing his sister was always going to be an absolute success.

That epiphany was better than meat.