#13. Ice

For yuri4281, who's given me so much incredible feedback that it's amazing he didn't give me any requests before now. Real-world Tokka (hope that's okay?) Enjoy!

Disclaimer: Don't own A:tLA.


"I guess the guy must be a local, because he's wearing just a sweatshirt. He's a lot taller than the girl he's skating with—she's probably five feet or so, but she looks even shorter, because she's hunching over trying to balance. Plus she's got a huge ski jacket on, so it makes her looks even smaller. He looks like he's been skating for years, but I think she's never been on an ice rink before. It's sort of cute how nervous she looks—ow! No, I mean because he's helping her, that's cute—"

"I'm sure."

"You know what else is cute? … You, when you're jealous."

"You know what's really cute? You, when you're not talking."

"Adorable, personified. Right next to me."

"Ssh. Keep telling."

"Well… there's a dad over there. He's got a little girl with him, in a purple coat—"

"Purple?"

He squints. Toph doesn't seem to know that boys don't see colors like girls do: purple is purple is purple to him, but with her that never cuts it. He should start carrying around an index of those little paint samplers, hues with names like midsummer plum or lilac zephyr. "Lavender," he settles for. "She's adorable: really, really little, I mean, like three or four, and he's holding her hand while she skates. She—oh, Christ!"

"What?"

"She fell—no, no, she's okay, it's okay."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah, I'm sure. It looked bad when she fell, but she landed on her butt, she's fine. I think she might be crying, but her dad's giving her a hug."

The smile on her face is painfully bittersweet. "Keep going."

"Right. So… there aren't many people. It's getting kind of cold," he says, not too pointedly but not necessarily just as an observation. He wouldn't expect her to be cold—she's nestled somewhere inside a down jacket that's bigger than she is, a hat pulled down over her dark hair and a scarf tucked up to her chin. Winter in New York is a bitch, and what kind of boyfriend would he be if—

Right. Sorry. Not boyfriend any more. That's going to take some getting used to.

"Do you want to go?"

She says it casually, but it's a kind of casual he can read better than anything else. He learned to recognize that brand of nonchalance a year ago: she started using it more and more after the accident, once she was done with the screaming and crying and screw you, God parts of coping. He saw her go through the first few stages of loss clearly—read: loudly—enough, but the fourth one, depression, is where she went astray. He doesn't know, to this day, if she was really depressed then, if maybe she still is if she thinks too hard about it. He doesn't want to believe it.

What he did see was the quiet, which scared him more than anything else. "I'm fine," she would say, and it was a little bit like denial, but there was a flat, dead note to her voice. He had hated it, not because he was scared any more but because he was angry. If she wasn't fine, she ought to tell him: it was his damn job to know, wasn't it? Besides, she couldn't be fine. No one was fine after that kind of loss, especially not her.

"It's not like you can't keep writing," Katara had tried to console her. "Look at Beethoven: he went deaf, and he composed some of his most famous work then. Or Milton—Aang, Milton was blind, wasn't he?"

Sokka watched his sister gazing anxiously at Toph, who looked very small in the middle of her hospital bed. She had stopped turning her head towards people when they spoke by now. There was the obvious explanation, the wrenched vertebrae in her neck, but Sokka suspected that the reflex itself hurt more than any physical pain.

"Sure," she said, with that soft, vicious edge to her voice she used only when striving to wound. "Yeah, I'll be John Milton Junior. Paradise Lost: Satan Returns—it's the kind of thing I've always wanted to write."

"Toph—"

Toph's head twisted to the side, towards her friend's voice, and a moment later her face twisted in a kind of pain that made Sokka's stomach wrench. "Katara, will you stop, already?" demanded the girl, her jaw gritting. "I don't want you telling me it's okay; I don't want you to try and understand this, all right? You don't effing get it. I'm never going to see again."

"Toph!" Family versus friends cut him to the bone, but Sokka knew well enough that he was one of the only people who could step in when Toph started being cruel. "Lay off, she's just trying to help!"

"Well, I don't want your goddamn help!"

The scream chased them out of the hospital room, like children racing indoors for shelter in the wake of thunder.

He can't imagine, even now, what it must have been like. One minute she was driving in the taxi, the next waking up in hospital. They said it was some kind of head injury, the name of which he's long since forgotten but is sure she hasn't. They also said that loss of vision was a small price to pay, when she was lucky to be alive.

He doesn't think they understood Toph at all. Being dead might have hurt her less for the first few months. Toph loved New York with the kind of passion that hurt with its intensity: loved the skyscrapers, loved the parks, loved the museums and taxis and streets and ever-moving people. She loved its cindery, hot-as-hell summers and its vicious snowglobe winters, and when she went to college it was NYU, English major, so much happiness she seemed she might explode. Never seeing her city again now—more than that, her city becoming no longer a home but a danger—was a kick in the teeth like no other.

She didn't write a word for three months, until one day he came home and she was sitting with a pen in hand, laboring over chicken-scratch letters that wove back and forth on top of each other.

"I can't write straight," was all she said, and he said, "It looks fine."

And now he's struggling, almost painfully, to give her sight again through his eyes, but the words he finds are nothing like the ones she used before. Toph painted masterpieces with metaphor and adjectives, and Sokka might as well be drawing in crayon. He feels ashamed. He should do better than this—she deserves better than this.

So when she says, "Do you want to go?" in the kind of casual that never means casual, he knows he can't be wrong.

"No," he answers, "I'm fine." A pause, and then, "Do you want me to keep going?"

"Please." She pauses, thinking. "Except not people now. Tell me what it looks like."

The Rockefeller ice rink is beautiful in February. When they were here a year ago, they could have been that couple out on the ice right now—except she would have been the one who looked like she'd been born with skates on her feet, not him. Irony is how now she shuffles even on ice-trimmed pavement, looking decades older than she is.

"It's all light," he says quietly. "That's how it looks from here. The rink is silver, with all the lines of people who've been skating there standing out against the ice, a little bit whiter. The buildings rise up all around it, with their windows lit up in places. The tree—you remember the tree?—is gold, so it stands out, because everything else is gray. And the lights on it… they're like fireflies, a million of them, all glowing onto the ice. It makes everything feel warm."

Toph is looking… no, not looking, but her face is angled forward, as though she can see something ahead of her that's beyond his sight. "Yeah," she murmurs. "Yeah, I remember that."

"The tree?"

"No. Light. It does make you feel warm."

He knows when she's faking her casual, and he knows her voice is only quiet when she's scared it'll break. That's the kind of thing a boyfriend—right; not anymore—is supposed to know, or maybe even just a best friend. He wraps an arm around her shoulders.

"I miss it," she whispers.

"I know."

"Sokka?"

"Yeah?"

"Is it beautiful?"

He stops to consider. "I see it every day," he tells her at last. "I don't think so then, but I do now."

Hesitantly, she smiles.

"Let's go," she says, standing up in a rustle of fleece and down parka. "It's getting cold."

It's the first time they've been out in a year, and with the Tiffany's box now light in his pocket—selfish as it is to think in front of her—New York seems like the most gorgeous place in the world. It seems to him Toph's given him her eyes, and if it takes him years or decades to find the right descriptions for her, then it'd be all he could ever do to pay her back for this moment.

He takes her hand without hesitation, feeling the brush of the new ring against his skin like electricity. Fiancé, he thinks with a shiver of happiness, not boyfriend, and with the thought of years of word-finding glowing in the pit of his stomach, he begins to lead her out of the park.


I'm not a New Yorker. This is to say, I've been there, and I love the city, but I'm not actually a local—so actual NYC'ers, if I screwed anything up, apologies in advance.

As said before, a request from yuri4281, who asked for Toph and Sokka as a happy, well-adjusted, comfortable couple. Quite honestly, this may have still verged into dysfunctional, but—as requested—it's my take on it. Hope it worked all right ^_^

In a roundabout-ish way this brings me to an important point. It's winter and miserable at home right now, and it's pretty tricky getting inspired in winter, so if you have a request, I'd love to hear it! I know there are plenty of people who've been amazing with reviews and general encouragement (yeah, you know who you are...) so especially you guys, but if anyone has a oneshot they'd like to see, please let me know.

Thanks, guys!