Commentary: =) Prompt six. If you see some italics stuck together, please forgive me. This site loves to muck up my formatting and I don't always catch all the errors.

Words: 3,286

Word FORTY-SEVEN: Tease

"Look, Toph, I'm sorry—"

"You"—the Earthbender wheeled on him and stabbed his chest with a rigid index finger—"don't know the meaning of sorry. So just save it, okay? And leave me alone." Turning again, she stomped off toward the trees ringing the group's campsite and snarled over her shoulder, "Or I might just snap your scrawny little neck."

Sokka threw a haphazard prayer for strength heavenward. Resolute, he followed the fuming Earthbender, ignoring Aang's half-sympathetic look and Katara's small frown. He caught up to Toph and argued, reaching for her shoulder, "Hey, c'mon. My neck isn't that scrawny—"

His fingertips brushed the cloth of her tunic. Before he could blink she had him encased in a cocoon of rock up to his nipples. As he grunted and strained at the sudden stone, she pivoted on her heel to face him, her lips drawn back from her teeth, her hands curled into ready fists. Lifting one of the latter to bat it lightly against his chin, she demanded, "What part of leave me alone did you not understand, Sokka?"

"You," he snapped back, "are overreacting! I said I was sorry! Spirits, what else do you want?"

"What else do I want? What else do I want?" screeched the Earthbender. Hooking her fingers in the fabric of his collar, she shook him and exploded, "I want my freaking jerky back! That's what I want!"

"Uhm." Sokka attempted to lift a hand to shield himself from Toph's flying spit, realized it was impossible, and countered instead, "Okay, first off. To be fair. Your supposed jerky was in a little baggie, and that little baggie was stuffed in the pack with the rest of the food—"

"That little baggie," growled Toph, "had my name on it."

"And let me guess. You're the one who wrote your name, right?"

Toph leaned back and folded her arms. "Of course." Her lip curled. "Why? Are you saying I can't write my own name?"

"Well, given that your name was actually an indecipherable squiggle, I think that's exactly what I'm saying—" The rock already clutched so firmly about Sokka tightened still more. He broke off his statement in a strangled geep. His legs went numb; his heart flipflopped helplessly in his chest. As the first vestiges of real fear crept across his vision in the form of bright blue specks, his sister intervened.

"That's enough," Katara insisted. Stepping between Sokka's prison and the Earthbender who had made it in the first place, the older girl stomped a foot and presumably scowled at Toph. Treated to nothing but the sight of his sibling's shoulders, Sokka could only imagine Katara's expression. "You two have done nothing but fight all day. I'm sick of it. Do you hear me? Sick of it."

"Oh boo hoo," Toph snorted. "Did we really offend your precious sensibilities, Sugar Queen? Because if so, maybe you should just butt out."

"Yeah," huffed Sokka. Despite being secretly glad for her help, he didn't really fancy Katara trying to fight his battles for him. He was a war hero, a gifted swordsman—so what if Toph had singlehandedly invented a new Bending art and was probably the best Earthbender on the planet? He could take her. Gasping for breath against the constricting pressure of Toph's bonds, he wheezed, "B-butt out, Katara."

Katara glared over her elbow at her brother. "Toph," she managed through clenched teeth, "let him go."

Toph protested immediately, "But—"

"But nothing," interjected Katara. She went on, "Sokka, ration out Toph some of your jerky."

"But it's the spicy kind!" whined the tribesman piteously.

"I don't care what kind it is!" The group's resident master Waterbender threw up her hands. "You two are going to do what I say and you're going to do it now," she informed the feuding pair, "or I swear by Tui and La that I will not finish tonight's dinner. Have I made myself clear?"

A moment of tense silence fell over the camp. Aang, who had been polishing the ridge of Appa's saddle, watched his friends anxiously from the fire's simmering fringe. Crickets churred. Beads of sweat agleam on her forehead, Toph glowered. Sokka squirmed as a pebble worked its way past the hem of his breeches and scuttered down into the seam of his loincloth.

"Fine," they said together at last. Toph smacked a foot into the ground and Sokka's bonds dissolved into dust—he collapsed, panting desperately. With a grumble Katara slipped from between them and stepped back to their fire. Aang smiled, expression relieved. The hum he produced as he resumed his work on the saddle turned Sokka's stomach.

"Ugh," muttered Toph, echoing the sentiment. She extended a hand down to the tribesman. "C'mon. Up you get," came the encouragement. "You owe me some jerky."

Sokka accepted the proffered limb. Heaving himself aright, he dusted off his tunic, shook free the intrusive pebble from his breeches. "Yeah, whatever," he groused. "Geez, I've got grit in my armpits here."

"Aw, don't complain too much." Patting his hip, Toph leaned up on her tiptoes and crooned quietly into his ear, "I mean, it is all your fault. Since you apparently don't know how to read."

"You don't know how to write!" the tribesman yelled back, rounding on the diminutive Earthbender. "You and your freaking SCRAWL—"

"That's it!"

A finger-thick tendril of water sliced them neatly apart and gave them each a swat on the buttocks for good measure. Toph cursed; Sokka yelped. Both looked sidelong at Katara, who was brandishing a wooden soup spoon in one hand and a water whip in the other.

Gesturing angrily with that spoon, the group's self-appointed matriarch snarled, "Okay. Seriously? You're both adults!" The ladle spun and dipped. "But since you two want to behave like children, I'll put you in time-out like children! Toph." Frowning across the clearing at her fellow Bender, Katara mandated, "You go back to that giant rock on the footpath. Sokka—the crook of the stream."

"But she—"

"You two will stay at those places," seethed Katara, heedless of her brother's plea, "until I come to get you later. Neither of you will move or—"

"Yeah," interrupted Toph. "Or what, Sugar Queen? Huh?" She flexed her biceps and squared her shoulders, scuffing her heels on the clearing's floor as a bull might paw a pasture when given a rival.

"Or I'll throw the rest of the jerky into the fire," the Waterbender said solemnly. "Every last bit of it. The barbecue-flavored. The honey mesquite. The"—her voice lowered to a growl—"teriyaki."

"It's imported!" Sokka squawked, outraged. "Toph and I had to pay a fortune—"

"Don't care."

"You wouldn't," hissed the Earthbender.

"Oh," insisted Katara, withdrawing from her vest a tightly-wrapped and particularly meat-smelling package, "but I would."

She lowered the package toward the fire. The paper crackled. At that faint sound Toph stiffened, chewed her lip. Finally she performed an about-face and stalked off into the trees.

"You're barbaric," Sokka lamented when the Earthbender was lost to sight.

"You're leaving," Katara reminded him. She dropped the package another inch. "Oh no," she sighed. "My fingers are so slippery—"

Sokka scowled and, hitching his boomerang high on his shoulder, strode sullenly from the campsite.

The night pressed in around him, balmy for the summer season and full of mosquitoes too. Swatting a good few and missing still more, the tribesman muttered occasionally to himself, "Over twenty years old… thinks she can treat me like a kid… stupid damn jerky…" He reached the stream after about five minutes and followed it another ten to its signature bend, where he hunkered down next to a rock and watched the evening's thin moonlight play over the water. It was beautiful, and Sokka was a poetic sort of guy. Any other time he might've appreciated the spectral scene. Now, though, he jerked up handfuls of grass and shredded the blades methodically, too deep in a sulk to think of anything but sisterly injustice.

"I can't believe we're missing dinner because of this," commiserated a voice somewhere off to his left.

"Yeah," Sokka agreed, and lurched around in surprise next. "Geez! Toph?"

"Don't shout, Meathead," hissed the Earthbender. Her slight shadow slipped around the rock at the stream's edge and dropped at his side, all knees and elbows. "We're pretty far from camp, but don't underestimate your sister—her killjoy senses have a huge range."

"No kidding. What are you doing here?" Sokka demanded. "She told you to go back to—"

"Big rock, footpath, yadda yadda." Leaning over, Toph dropped her head in the tribesman's lap and sneered up at him. "What? Do you always listen to your sister, sweet little obedient Sokka?"

"You know I don't." Shoving Toph's head forcibly off its cushion and into the grass, Sokka yanked his knees up to his chest. "I hope that hurt," he added nastily.

"Look at you," laughed his companion. "All vindictive and shit! Wow! I didn't know you had it in you, Sokka!"

"And I didn't know your vocabulary was broad enough to include a word like vindictive," snipped the tribesman, "so that makes two lessons we've learned tonight, huh?"

Toph arched her brows. Working herself up on her elbows, she deposited her chin in her hands and observed frankly, "Someone's pissy tonight." Her legs hooked at the ankles and waved behind her, toes stretching midair.

"I'm not pissy," Sokka denied. "I'm hungry. And," he added, "I'm tired of fighting with you. I mean, debating is one thing. One fine, fine thing. I can debate all day. I can debate until the stars fall down. But Toph"—he fisted his fingers in the grass and yanked up another chunk of it—"this is, what? The third time this week we've been at each other's throats about something stupid?"

"I don't really think jerky is stupid." She blinked at him. He said nothing, picking apart the grass by the roots. Squick-squick, squick-squick.

Heaving a sigh, Toph folded her arms and dropped her face into the circle they made. "All right," came the muffled admission. "Okay. Maybe we've been arguing a little more than usual. But I mean, you got all huffy when I used that soft fluff in your bag as toilet paper—"

"That was my pillow's stuffing, Toph."

"And that was my jerky you ate, so—"

Slamming his fist into the soft earth of the stream's bank, Sokka insisted, "I didn't know it was yours because you can't write your own freaking name, okay?" She opened her mouth to object and he rebuffed her, "No. Just no, Toph. You wanna know what it looked like? Huh? You want to know what the writing"—he felt he was being generous calling it that—"on your precious little jerky baggie looked like?"

Giving her no chance to answer, he dug his fingers into the streambed's silt, came up with a slopping palmful of mud, and slapped it against the flesh of her bare arm. He used his pinky to squiggle nonsense in the mud's slippery canvas and finished, furious, "That! That's what it looked like! Nothing! It looked like nothing, Toph!"

The badgerfrog croaked again, louder this time. The cattails made hush-hush gossip. In the moonlight Toph's mouth curled down and twitched; her fingers clenched, and the mud rolled off her arm like rain off a roof. "Yeah?" she whispered. "Nothing, huh?"

Sokka felt the attack coming. He had time to scramble halfway upright before Toph lunged and slammed into him, her arms knifed over his ribs. One of her hands dug into his hip, the other his shoulder—she bent him backward over the rock that marked the stream's curve, her elbow a merciless pestle in his kidney, her knee a high peg between his thighs.

"Ow!" the tribesman cried. "Toph, what the hell—"

"You wanna throw dirt on me?" she interrupted. Leaving off his shoulder to grope out beyond the rock, Toph resumed, "You wanna pretend you're some kind of Earthbender? Okay, that's cool. I'm a big girl. I can take it." She found what she wanted and lifted her hand back into view. It was full of thick dark mud, glops of it running down her arm to the elbow. "C'mon," she finished, and smacked the mud into his startled fingers. "Do it right. Show me how it goes, big man! Write my name. Write my name."

She jerked his arm aloft. The stuff spattered: over his chest and down her front too, the spots almost black in the moonlight. "Uhm," he said.

"My face," she replied, as though he'd asked a question. Her mouth split into a grin, ear to ear, as she dared him, "Write it on my face, Sokka. Don't be shy."

Sokka flicked his eyes to the mud in his hand—looked back up at Toph. "Let me get this straight," he insisted. "You, uh—you're giving me… permission. To smear mud on you. On your face," he clarified.

Leaning back to spread her arms, Toph beamed and allowed, "Lay it on me, Snoozles."

She was heavy, her leg pressed over him still. Sokka nevertheless wormed partway upright beneath her and held up his handful of mud, considering, studying the canvas of Toph's face. Pale, smooth—but there was a nose in the way, and a mouth bound to interfere with his work. Where to start…?

Sticking out his thumb, he brought it close to Toph's ear and admitted, "This is a pretty unconventional teaching method, you know. Also, you're kinda crushing me."

"I'm an unconventional student," Toph replied, and tacked on, "deal with it. I'm punishing you."

"For what?"

"For being a moron. For eating my jerky. Now write my name, Sokka, before I decide to take more serious measures."

Sokka frowned and, with his free hand, cupped Toph's chin to hold it still. He maintained as he brought his mud-covered thumb to her cheek, "I told you I was sorry. I am sorry. But you're making a mountain of a mole hill and—" He wrote her name. Her flesh dimpled under his touch; her eyelids shuttered. Sketching a radical's root over the shelf of her lip, he finished, "—it should have looked like this. Your name, I mean. If it had looked like this I would've known and left the jerky alone."

He drew back to survey his handiwork. There it was, Toph's name, stretched cheek to cheek and shining stark against her porcelain skin. The characters wobbled but hey, so did their canvas, and gingerly Toph reached up with two careful fingers to map the spaces between them.

"Okay," she said. "Okay, yeah." Rolling her hips up against his—her knee inched higher between his legs—Toph draped herself sidelong over his chest and dropped her fingers to his cheek. She drummed them there, thoughtful, her other hand still tracing the letters he'd marked on her face. "Like this?" she wondered, and feathered her palm down his jaw.

Sokka said nothing, instead staring up at Toph's silhouette superimposed above him. Her thumb worried the corner of his mouth; her face fell, her head close enough to him that a damp trellis of her hair, a headband escapee, tickled his chin. She smelled of dirt and sweat, of strength and steel. Her cheek touched his—the letters of her name smeared. Her shoulder rolled into the seam of his arm and her chest ghosted over his ribs.

Grinning into his chin, she asked again, "Like this?" Down his throat her hand slid, her fingertips warmer than the night around them.

"You're not asking about your name anymore, are you?" Sokka managed.

She popped open his tunic's clasp a second later in reply, raking her nails down his chest next. Sokka yelped and jerked. Their hips jounced; their foreheads knocked together and Toph shrieked helplessly with pained laughter, rolling from atop him and back into the grass. At Sokka's wordless bark of frustration she gasped, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry—I'm sorry, it's just—I've been trying to get up the courage to do that for, what, forever? And you—you clumsy bastard, ow, my head—"

She clutched at her skull, half-giggling, half-crying. Still sprawled over the rock she'd pinned him to like some sacrificial offering, Sokka goggled at his best friend and echoed, "Forever?"

"Forever! For-freaking-ever, Sokka. I mean, what the hell, okay?" Pressing a palm flat over her brow, Toph shrugged and said, "I gave you space after the Suki thing. I didn't say a word when Ty Lee tied you up and left you naked in the middle of that tent—"

"I wasn't completely naked!"

"—that buttfloss loincloth did not count as clothing and you know it." Heaving a sigh, Toph wiped the remnants of mud from her face and finished, "But it's been over five years since I started trying this, all right? Since I started following you around. I even went with you to the pole. And I just—I just pretty much, I dunno, molested you here out in the warm summer moonlight, didn't I? Isn't that a scene right out of a smut scroll?"

"The mosquitoes are different," Sokka opined, and smacked at one. "But pretty much, yeah." And then, "How do you know what's typically in smut scrolls?"

"Katara reads them to me sometimes. Says they're educational." Toph tipped her head toward him. Sokka slid down the rock and settled next to her, and she muttered, "Well? What else can I do to get you to either notice and ravish me or tell me to get lost?"

Scratching at the back of his neck, the tribesman admitted, "I think I'm noticing you pretty hardcore right now."

Her temple thunked into his shoulder. "So?" she wheedled, wiggling her eyebrows. "Gonna ravish me now?"

"I," he denied, "am going to take a few minutes to let the revelation sink in, if you don't mind."

Shrugging again, Toph closed her eyes and acknowledged, "I have a headache anyway. Thanks, Snoozles." She chanced next, slow, "You're not running away screaming."

"Is that okay? I mean, if you want me to run away screaming—"

"No, no. I'm good."

Elbow to elbow, they sat for a while in stifling quiet punctuated only by the whine of the night's biting insects and the shush of the stream.

"So," Sokka said at last. "That was pretty embarrassing for both of us."

Toph's toes contracted in the grass. "Uhm. Yeah."

"I think we should start again," suggested the tribesman. Turning to face Toph, he reached for her hands and drew them up to his cheeks, where he pressed her palms flat and said through the slant of her fingers, "If, uh. If that's cool."

Toph's thumb twitched. "You're good with this?"

A moment passed. Two. Sokka admitted finally, "You said you've been waiting five years? Well, uh, I've been wondering at least six, okay, Master of the Mixed Signals, and I think this is maybe the best thing to happen to me in... what, you said forever? Yeah, forever. So uhm, see. You should've maybe done this sooner."

"Oh," Toph assured him, forcing him back against the rock again, "don't worry. I'll make up for lost time."

She kept her word.

"I can't find them," Katara told Aang later, crouched by the fire with her chin on her knees. Glancing over at the Avatar, she wondered, "Do you think they're okay? What if they're killing each other?"

Aang smiled into his bowl. "I'm pretty sure they're working out their differences just fine," he said. Holding out the ladle, he offered, "More soup?"