#56. Legacy

Referring, of course, to the legacy of the Two Lovers who got their own cave and everything (and how it continues to affect modern-day youth in surprising and horrifically fluffy ways.)

Disclaimer: Don't own AtlA

He stood, one hand on the torch and one supporting her hurt foot, and began to walk.

And walk.

And walk.

He wasn't one to complain—

No, he wasn't one to complain to her, but this was ridiculous. They must have been walking for an hour, and the torch was burning down, and they hadn't gotten anywhere that he could see, and he kind of wished—kind of. That was very different from actually wishing—that the nomads were there, off-key warbling and all, just to fill the cave's devastating silence. His every footstep was less of a step and more like his foot refusing to stay in midair for a moment longer, crashing instead to the ground.

Toph's foot jarred against his side, and she whimpered. He started at the noise, not because it was loud but because it was so uncharacteristic; catching herself, she turned it into a halfhearted cough. "Careful," she muttered tetchily.

"Right," he replied irritably. "Not like I'm the one carrying dead weight here or anything."

He felt her tense in his arms, and in his peripheral vision, her face contorted into a glare. "Oh, well," she snapped, "I'm sorry my freaking leg is broken beyond repair. It's definitely my fault that I'm crippled—"

"You're not crippled," he scoffed, too exasperated to worry about hurting her feelings. "You've just got a sprained ankle. And it is your fault, because you're the one who made the cave-in happen in the first place, oh foremost expert on earthbending."

There was a pause, and then she squirmed suddenly, writhing away from him. "Put me down," she ordered. "I'll walk, then, if I'm such dead weight."

He tried to protest, but then she kicked him, her foot connecting with his thigh. It was, technically, only his thigh, but it was also very close to somewhere where he really didn't want to be kicked. Instinctively, he loosened his grip on her, and she wriggled to the ground. She glanced back at him, waving one hand, palm open, in front of her eyes.

"Crippled," she said viciously, and as he suddenly got it she turned away. Her new limp was obvious and possibly even exaggerated, but he didn't dare offer to carry her again.

"Sorry," he said, after a couple moments.

She didn't respond.

"Toph, seriously, I'm—"

"Sokka," she sighed, not bothering to look back at him, "there's a difference between me not hearing you and me not talking to you because you're an asshole."

"I'm not an asshole!" he snapped. "And you're not exactly Little Miss Sunshine yourself, you know—"

"Shut up," she interrupted. Her voice was flat, completely inflectionless.

"Why?" he challenged eagerly. "Because it's true? Because the truth hurts, Toph?"

"No," she snapped. "Because I think I can feel something up ahead, and I'm trying to concentrate."

Sokka deflated. "Oh," he mumbled, much more quietly. "My bad."

"Damn right," she muttered, pausing. "But there's… a corner coming up ahead, and past that there's a door—I think. It feels like a door, anyway."

Sokka wondered, briefly, what a door actually felt like, decided it wasn't worth asking, and nodded. "A door to the outside?"

"I don't know," she snapped. "A door. I'm even more visually impaired than usual; cut me a little slack."

He followed her around the corner, half-expecting a dead end, but to his surprise there was a… well, a something. A circular hatch was carved from the wall, embellished with worn but what were clearly painstakingly detailed pictures. There was only one catch—Toph hadn't mentioned the door's height: approximately ten feet, which was approximately four and a little bit feet taller than Sokka. He eyed it dubiously, not sure how exactly he was supposed to open it.

But he didn't have to worry. Toph limped over to it, placing a hand on the center. She paused, inhaling deeply, and then wrenched her hand to the side. Grating with age-old protest, the door rolled sideways, revealing a dark room beyond. A moment later, she slumped against the wall, grimacing in pain.

Sokka hurried over and threaded an arm around her waist, helping her through the hole. "You okay?" he asked, and she harrumphed something cavalier under her breath. He didn't buy it for a second, and set her down with deliberate care, before holding the torch higher to light this new and massive room. Two curling staircases swung around to either side of him, leading down to a large, open floor, in the middle of which stood…

Oh, Spirits. Sokka stared, horrified. In the middle of the floor was a raised section of floor, and on the raised section stood two magnificently patterned boxes. Person-sized boxes.

"Sokka?" whispered Toph, no longer half so confident. "Sokka, is it…?"

"It's a crypt," he nodded, taking a deep, trembling breath. "This must be the two lovers' final resting place, or… something."

She shivered. "Creepy."

"Yeah. Well." He couldn't have said where the urge came from, but he suddenly felt himself straighten up slightly, swallowing his unease. One of them had to be the brave one for the other. If Toph—fearless, unshakable Toph—was scared, then he'd just have to be fearless for both of them. "There's nothing here to hurt us. We'll just keep going."

She hesitated, so long that he almost started to worry, but then came a reply: in a very small voice, but a reply nonetheless, which was always better than the alternative. "There's another door at the other end," she murmured, and he nodded, turning to help her down the stairs. She didn't object—something about the way she was biting her lip and her drawn, pale cheeks made him certain she was still hurting a lot more than she had said.

They were most of the way across the room, at the other side, when she stopped, placing a hand against the wall. "Good bending," she said, high praise. "That's really detailed."

"There's a painting, too," Sokka told her, lifting the torch and letting the firelight roam across the stone. The two lovers knelt across from each other, lips bare centimeters from a kiss. "It's the lovers—them, kissing. That's pretty good, too."

"Here?" Toph reached, slapping at the rock with a splayed-fingered hand. As luck would have it, however, it landed on the man's rear, with such square-on aim that for a moment Sokka actually doubted her blindness. He glanced around, suddenly aware that the woman lover's ghost—if ghosts existed, which they didn't, but still—might not appreciate the current situation very much.

"Yeah," he agreed nervously, tugging Toph's hand away. "There. And…" There was writing along the bottom, and he rubbed away a thin veil of reddish dust to read it. "It says, 'Love'," he quoted, squinting, "'is brightest in the dark.'"

Toph snorted. "That sounds like a load of bisonshit."

Sokka, who had been thinking the same thing, bit down a grin. "Kind of," he agreed.

There was a pause. He looked at the picture. Toph tilted her head to the side slightly, face inscrutable. She opened her mouth slightly, closed it as if suddenly reconsidering, and then blurted, "Hey… Sokka?"

"Yeah?"

"Um…" She paused, and he stared: was this really Toph Bei Fong, stuttering? "I just had an idea," she said slowly.

"What is it?"

"Well… in the picture, you said it says 'love is brightest in the dark', right? And there's a picture of them kissing."

"Uh-huh…?"

"And so I was thinking, maybe, uh…" Spirits, was it just him, or were her cheeks going darker all of a sudden? Was she blushing? "Maybe," Toph suggested tentatively, "um, we should kiss."

His jaw dropped, and he stared. Honestly? He'd never thought about it before, mostly because it was so completely unthinkable. He wasn't adverse to the idea, if he was being totally honest—after all, kissing was rarely a bad thing, and Toph was sort of pretty in a hardcore kind of way, but… kissing her? Now?

"Us… kissing?" he managed weakly. Spirits—but that was wrong. Not even considering the fact that they were in a tomb, she was three years younger (all right, so he was only just fifteen, and she was almost thirteen, but still…)

It was the wrong response, and he saw her frost over, turning away. "Sorry," she muttered. "It was a stupid idea."

"What? No," he protested, adding quickly, "I mean, no, you just surprised me, because it wasn't something that I'd really thought about—"

"No. Stop," she repeated. "It was stupid, okay?"

"No," he objected, "it wasn't stupid, I just hadn't considered it..."

"Everything you say," she announced, turning for the crypt's exit, "just makes this a million times more awkward."

He opened his mouth to reply, but then her words sunk in, and he fell silent. Anyway, it likely had been a stupid idea—obviously they were already great friends, but they'd never had any interest in being more than that. Kissing Toph in a cave with the excuse of survival was probably a really, really bad idea.

"Come on," she said, without looking at him. "The tunnel keeps going over here."

She shoved open a door with only the slightest wince of pain, leaving him to follow. For a moment, he just watched her go. There was some distinct eeriness to watching Toph, ghost-pale, limp away into the pitch-black tunnel. Obviously, darkness held no sway over her, but it could certainly send a chill down his spine. Hand tightening on the torch, he hurried after her, careful to drag the door closed after them.

"Ow," Toph said.

Immediately, Sokka winced. It was the first time she'd admitted how much it hurt without a trace of sarcasm, and he had no idea what to do. Toph's 'ow', after all, was the general equivalent of most people's 'ohhh the pain make it stop make it stop'. "You want to stop?" he offered, and without a pause she flopped against the wall and slumped to the floor.

"Ow," she repeated, gingerly stroking her injured foot.

"I'm sorry," he offered lamely.

She hesitated, hand still resting on her ankle. "Sokka?"

He bit his lip. Plenty of experience had made it clear his bedside manner left a lot to be desired, and Toph was a veritable minefield in conversations even when healthy. "Yeah?"

"Sokka, I really want to get out of here."

"I know," he admitted. "Me too." His eyes flickered to the torch, which was only a stub in his fingers now. Soon they would both be blind.

But she wasn't done. "And... I think," continued his friend, with the most timidity he'd ever heard from her, "that maybe, if we have any ideas, we should try them. Even if they're stupid."

He sat down next to her, a smile half sympathy and half concurrence on his face. "I think you're right," he replied.

The torch guttered out as he placed it on the floor, leaving him sightless. There was a huge pause, tension so thick in the air even Boomerang couldn't have cut it. Sokka hesitated, feeling blood rising to his cheeks. Tongue darting nervously along his lips, he slowly leaned in, craning his neck towards her.

For a moment, it was awkward. Nothing but. Toph had frozen the second his face started to come closer—expert though she might be at practically everything, this left her lost for what to do. Help! an unconscious part of her shrieked. It didn't even matter that she did sort of maybe think Sokka was cute; this was uncharted territory, and she was terrified.

She stiffened further the instant his mouth touched hers. His lips were dry and sort of chapped, but very, very gentle. In fact, Toph realized, he seemed to be touching her as little as possible. This is kissing? she wondered incredulously. World's biggest rip-off, more like.

Well, screw this. She was lost in an endless, cursed cave—it was the best excuse she would ever have, ever—and she wasn't going to die without having had a freaking decent first kiss. She leant in, tilting her head to the side slightly and, after a moment's pause, lifting a hand up to his face.

The effect was instantaneous. Sokka went rigid for a moment, and then he bent closer in, lips suddenly less chaste and more curious. His hands moved to her face, warm and slightly calloused, and his mouth was suddenly moving faster, the recoil reflex lost completely. Toph tried to keep up for a moment and then abandoned the effort, letting him figure it out. Might as well let him have one thing he was better at. He didn't seem to mind, though—as far as she could tell—and for several moments there was just them, and dark, and his face on hers, and a totally new experience.

And then he pulled away breathlessly, and suddenly they were Sokka and Toph again, and he was holding her face. She had a hand on his cheek, and was panting for breath. She felt his heart stutter, freeze, and then take off in a panic.

"Okay...?" she offered, breaking the silence.

He jerked and dropped his hands. "That… that was, uh…" Kind of hot in an unexpected kind of way, supplied his mind, but his tongue choked on a reply. "Agg…" he felt himself say, and convulsed inwardly with humiliation.

"Feel curse-free yet?" she asked, and he slumped with relief, freed by the excuse of the cave.

"Uh…" he mumbled. "Uh…" One of her eyebrows was raised ever so slightly, and her hair, usually so carefully pulled up, was slipping out from its bun. She looked expectant.

Wait…

It occurred to him, with a jolt, that he could, in fact, see her.

Which meant that there was light.

His gaze rose slowly up to the ceiling, following the strange, alien color, until they met their own aurora borealis, a teal-green trail stretching off into the distance. His eyes widened, and, lost for words, his mouth took the opportunity to curve into a grin.

"Hey, Toph," he heard himself saying. "You know that quote on the picture that we thought was bisonshit?"

"Sokkaaa!"

Barely had he stepped into the daylight, ready to enjoy it, when Katara flung himself at him. "Sokka!" she yelped. "We were so worried! Don't ever, ever, ever do that to me again, ever!"

He made a vague choking noise, the best he could manage, and patted her on the back awkwardly. Beside him, Toph cleared her throat.

"Oh, no, don't mind me. Not in pain over here or anything."

"Toph!" Katara exclaimed, and in an instant she was squeezing the life out of Toph instead. "Toph, you're okay! I was so scared—the ceiling fell, and you were right there, and the earthbending was my idea—"

Toph—in a motion that would earn Sokka's undying respect—grabbed Katara's shoulders, yanking her away. "I forgive you," she interrupted firmly. "Now, can you please do your thing with magic water, before my foot falls off?"

Instantly, Katara had the water out, and was waving her hands to let it envelop Toph's foot. The earthbender gave a groan of relief. "So how'd you get out?" Sokka asked, mainly to stop Katara from gushing again.

Aang, nearby, went rigid, but Katara just smiled. "We let love guide the way," she said, her cheeks flushing the slightest pink. Toph made a scoffing noise in the back of her throat, and the waterbender's smile vanished. "Well, what about you?" she challenged.

Both Toph and Sokka went slightly pale. "Erm…" he started.

"Badgermoles," Toph interrupted quickly.

Katara looked stunned. "Really?"

"Yeah," Sokka interjected. "Yeah, Toph can… talk to them."

Toph's eyes flew open in disbelief. Damn it, Sokka—you couldn't just leave the lying to me? "Oh… yeah," she elaborated, through gritted teeth. "With earthbending. It's... complicated. But I really can't take all the credit; it was Sokka's way with animals that really pulled it off."

Katara raised an eyebrow, opened her mouth to comment, and then thought better. "How's your foot feel, Toph?" she wondered tactfully.

Toph, grinning with two kinds of relief, sat up eagerly. "It's great," she replied. "I can see! Man, it sucks being blind."

"Good," Katara nodded, deliberately ignoring the irony. "Come on, then—Appa's ready to go."

"Okay," Toph agreed. "Just a second, okay?" Satisfied, Katara turned away, making her way towards the air bison. The moment her back was turned, Toph drove her fist mercilessly into Sokka's arm.

"Badgermoles?" she demanded. "Really?"

"She bought it!" he protested. "It worked, right?"

Toph shook her head pityingly. "Leave the lying to me," she told him. "Badgermoles. Spirits, Sokka, Momo could have come up with something better—"

And Katara, who was in fact more perceptive than they'd given her credit for, glanced back at the two of them and gave a small, knowing smile.

OMG. This was loooong. And, technically, late for Valentine's Day, but considering the bucketloads of fluff... worth it? Hopefully?

Well. R&r, anyway ^_^