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POT CALLING KETTLE
Chapter Twenty-eight
Across the beach the waves unscrolled and scissored, gold ribbons in their swells, their foam nibbling slowly up the tideline. Sokka took turns looking between them and the pale hands clutched in a knot just above his navel. Occasionally he traced his thumb over the knuckles of the latter. Their owner's chest rose and fell in the space beneath his shoulders and her cheek, a round of warmth, rested against his spine's slow slope. "We're back," he said. He pitched the words quiet. Maybe she was sleeping.
"I hear the surf," she mumbled. "And the birds." Lifting her head a little, she dug her chin into the nape of his neck and huffed, "We gonna land soon?"
"Not so near the coast," he declined, and tacked on, "sorry, but whoever hurt you might be staked out and waiting for us somewhere down there."
He looked over his shoulder. From the corner of his eye he could see Toph frowning, her chapped lips turned down in a disgruntled curl. But, "Yeah," she agreed, "I guess that's true. That asshole—or assholes, plural." Her brows rose. "Maybe it's more than one person?" she ventured.
The notion gave Sokka's stomach an unpleasant case of the prickles. "Could be," he acknowledged reluctantly, pressing his thumb down hard in the divots between Toph's smaller fingers. They flexed under his touch, bending like branches. Toph grinned.
"Don't like that idea, huh?"
"Well geez, let me think. Some crazy person coming after my girlfr—uhm. My g… my guh…"
Again he glanced back at Toph. Her expression was a mix of sly and fond, mouth twisted into a sinister smile now, eyes crinkled at the corners. The wink of the falling sun on her cataracts was akin to a blade's snicker coming out of its sheath, and the words in his mouth faltered and dried up and died. Toph took pity on him. She supplied in his stead, easy, "Some crazy person coming after me."
"…you," Sokka affirmed. It felt like he was weaseling his way out of something, but Toph didn't seem to care and his tongue, Spirits, it wasn't cooperating much either. "You, yeah—some crazy person coming after you, with these bladed boomerang wannabes and stuff—I mean, why would I like that?" Appa's reins squeaked in his hand. Loosening his grip, he wiggled his shoulder under Toph's collar and demanded, "Really, why?"
"Some people get off on being all protective and fierce," Toph opined. "Didn't know if maybe this sort of situation rings your chimes, Snoozles." The nickname went through Sokka like an arrow, a jolt of sharp, familiar heat. He shivered and Toph continued, "Gets you hot and bothered. Stimulated. Arous—"
"Okay, okay—uh, how about no, all right?" He swallowed. Toph's elbows pinched at his hips, rolling softly as Appa went with the wind up westward, and Sokka said, "That blade sticking out of your head—and then your arm later, the second time… that was just…" Terrible. Terrible, awful, his worst nightmare made real, and he remembered, just for a moment, the way her eyes had looked on the battlefield a few weeks prior. Dead. Dull. A mirror's surface, blank and unmoving forever. Without thinking about it he tucked his arm down over hers, folding his palm across the smaller lump her fingers made at his middle.
"Hey, c'mon, don't get all sappy and feelingful on me," Toph sighed. She wriggled closer up against him, her knees two pegs digging into the backs of his thighs. He felt her exasperated smile bloom into the skin of his neck. "You saw me almost die. It sucked for you. I get it. But it's cool now." She could've gone on, Sokka knew—could've said something about how her getting hurt had brought them together, had loosened her lips and given him a clue. Poignancy wasn't Toph's style, though, and she settled for drumming her forehead methodically into the spot where his spine met his neck instead, over and over, like a hammer to a nail. Her brow was slick with sweat despite the breeze. "Whether it's one person or not," she insisted, "why are they after me anyway? And hey, here's another question, surprise! Are they after you too?"
Uncomfortable in the open sky so near the beach, Sokka urged Appa faster into the burgeoning headwind and answered, ginger, "I don't think so."
"No?" The crease of Toph's palm slid over his belt, found the buckle, settled there. "Why not you too? Do tell."
"Well," he managed, turning his face into the breeze to cool it, "I mean, that first time, someone was clearly trying to kill you. And"—her fingertips migrated north, tickling up under his tunic—"they only knocked me out. Could've done the same to me they did to you, but they didn't, they just bruised me and, eheh… Toph?" Her nails made a crescent in the dip of his hip. "What are you doing?"
"Molesting you, probably. Please, continue."
"You're distracting me."
"I'd be worried if I wasn't." But Toph's ministrations slowed, stopped. "They just knocked you out," she repeated, thoughtful. "With what?"
"Huh?"
"What did they use to brain you?" Sokka looked sidelong toward the Kingdom's looming foothills. Already the shrill cacophony of the seabirds was dwindling, the lull of the waves more a memory than a presence. Toph continued, "I don't remember Katara commenting on any weapons around you, or shrapnel. And you didn't see anything either, right?"
"Right. We can ask Katara when we meet up with the group again—we'll be there in a few days. But," he admitted, "she probably would've mentioned anything suspicious. Don't you think?"
"Uh-huh." Leaning back such that her linked hands rose and compressed against his sternum, Toph murmured, "She's pretty observant. Katara, I mean. Gotta give her credit. And if she didn't say anything about conspicuous objects lying near your unconscious body, I'm gonna guess it's because there weren't any." She fell quiet suddenly, gnawing her lower lip. "You realize this person might be an Earthbender," she allowed. "They could've hit you with a bit of flying rock or something. Rocks aren't obvious weapons—Katara would've looked right over one of those."
"If we're going with a flying rock theory, they could've just as easily used a slingshot," Sokka put in. "We already know they're decent with long-range weaponry."
They fell quiet together, each pondering, Sokka with his eyes pointed toward the evening's gathering gloom and Toph's temple wedged tight to his upper arm. Trees whisked by beneath them in a low green blur. "Hey," wondered the Earthbender at last. "Have we ever hurt anybody? Like, seriously hurt—I know we helped put Ozai away, and committed Azula too. But besides them. Can you think of anyone?"
The tribesman frowned. "You think we've pissed someone off so badly that they're determined to kill us now?"
"Determined to kill me," she corrected. "I don't know what they want with you. If they want you," came the mutter. She tightened her arms. "That might be it too. Someone could be coming after you and they thought, hey, better take out Sokka's bodyguard first—"
"Bodyguard? I don't need a bodyguard!"
"You've got one anyway, though. And I'm the best kind too, don't deny it. I come with benefits." She gooshed two of those benefits into his shoulders, touching her grin soft to his hairline. "Nice, huh?"
"Oh don't get me wrong, hey, yeah—I am so appreciative of those benefits." And of you, he almost said, but the words wouldn't come, stoppered up somewhere beneath his collarbone. Toph rubbed her face into his arm. Her hair tickled down to his elbow. He edged back a bit, wanting to be closer to her; her hands folded in his tunic, pulling him, helping to close the distance.
The reins creaked.
"Have we ever hurt anybody, Sokka?" Toph revisited.
"I don't know," he answered, and meant it.
