Two updates in a row because I missed a day lol
Sokka supposed that the chimps were better than no company at all. They would swing from the trees and whip twigs and bundles of leaves at him. On one occasion, one of them had chucked a whole coconut. But it was still better than being entirely alone. In some ways it reminded him of being in the boy's locker rooms. It was just as much barbaric shenanigans and provided just as many feral pranks. They were just about as messy and mischief too.
He had to admit that it was fun for the first few days, until the glamor wore off and he began to realize that he had gone from one type of stranded to another. But at least this space was larger and teeming with food options. At least this one provided a canopy that took his skin out of the direct sunlight. He was beginning to feel like a vampire; cut off from the world and fearing sunlight. Instead of bats he had primages. Instead of sucking the blood out of people, he suckled knotweed and bamboo stem.
After what could have been a month on the island, he had come to observe things. Curious things like the way mosses trapped water. The dew they gathered was crucial when he hadn't the energy to try to make a drink of knotweed and bamboo.
His days on the island were not as monotonous as the ones spent in the waves. He found that he rather enjoyed exploring the island until the mosquitoes started to swam and bite. But he couldn't return to the camp that he was steadily erecting. Not just yet. He still had to gather food. He managed to craft a spear, with luck he could capture a small animal to cook. The palm fronds swished in the breeze a rather soothing sound that was so rudely interrupted by the jabbering of his chimp companions.
He fell into a sort of routine that made him feel normal again. One that helped him, however delicately, pick up the fragments of his mind a piece them together again. By day, he would hunt and gather and work to make his camp secure. Sometimes he would go for a swim in the freshwater pond he had found a week or so into exploring. That little swimminghole had been a sanctuary. It provide him with fish, drink, and recreation after its discovery. He had moved his camp over to it and gleefully bid a goodbye to his days of sipping at plants for hydration.
Though the sores and blisters were still a problem and the mosquitoes were just as attracted to them as they were to the bond. They never truly cleared and he could never truly seem to get them clean. He was beginning to worry about them.
At night he liked to lay on his back and observe the moon and stars through the palm fronts. The night sky was breathtakingly mystifying without city lights to hinder it. The moon especially was nice. When the chimps turned in and quieted for the night he would have conversations with the moon as though she were a cognizant entity that could hear him. She...for some reason he liked to call the moon a she. He would speak to her, messages that he wished for her to whisper to Katara and Kya and Hakoda. He would crack quips and witticisms at her to send off to Azula and Zuko. He hoped that the celestial body would craft some message that he was alive and stable but needed help that could be sensed on cosmic level.
He thinks that it might have worked, even if a little late.
He can't imagine any other reason for Azula being out in that storm.
He didn't know how much time had passed but eventually, he had resigned to that no help would be coming. He hadn't seen a ship or a plane to short off the emergency flares for. A part of him, that part of his mind that he couldn't quite mend or get a grip on, considered that the world might have ended. That he was the last man on Earth, spared only by the coincidence of an unfortunate event that turned out to be a lucky one.
His logical mind told him that he had simply ventured into some remote corner of the world. A place so small that no one bothered stopping there.
His logical mind compelled him to leave the island.
He wanted to stay; the island was much more hospitable than the open waters. But there on the island he was stagnant. He would never get home.
He offered his chimps a farewell. He was going to miss them, especially Hou. He cried the first night he'd left the island. Though he had with him a more stable supply of food and water, he was still horrified at the prospect of being adrift again. His second era of floating by in a raft wasn't so dreadful as the first. The stretch wasn't as long before he reached an atoll. It was significantly smaller and had no food, but it was a break from the maddening roll of the waves and it was a much safer place to endure the storm.
He found another small island. Desperation and a hardened mind gave him the ambition and strength he needed to slay a boar. Its left tusk became a cup and its right tusk a weapon. The right tusk is the only thing that he has managed to hang onto during the storm, a keepsake of his misadventure and struggles.
Though he savored the tusks, its pelt was the most useful of his treasures. It had become a blanket while the boar's meat was the first real meal he'd had in a while.
It was the last meal.
For the longest time he drifted from atoll to atoll-some greener than others but none of them had any real bounty. At best they were safe spots to hide on when clouds darkened and waves punched away at the sand.
And soon he was back to drifting with no land in sight at all. He had gotten so used to a plentiful helping of atolls that he had deluded himself into believing that the chain of them would be endless or that they would lead him to the mainland. For his assumption, it struck like a punch to the gut when days rolled by and he found nothing but endlessly rolling waves.
At night, he spoke to the moon more often. During the day hid from the sun's rays beneath the blanket. It could only do so much though, the blisters were rising again and irritated once more by the saltwater.
He felt as though he were being cooked alive.
He started praying for death.
He watched clouds roll in, darker than he had ever seen and accented by bursts of lighting so powerful I could only think of a hurricane.
He smiled, knowing that his prayers have been answered.
Though he hadn't realized that it was his prayers to see civilization that had been answered until a shrill beeping pierced his ears.
.oOo.
She is at the foot of his bed clutching his hand. It is so sublimely wonderful to have human contact again and exceptionally so to have a familiar face. A familiar touch. A touch that is absurdly warm, Azula always had been very warm.
"I guess that it's kinda weird but I kinda miss the chimps. I thought of bringing one home for you!" He finishes.
"What would I have done with a whole chimpanzee?" Azula crinkles her nose. He laughs, he had forgotten about the way her face bunched up when he said something particularly dumb.
"You would have loved it and cherished it." Sokka declares. "He would have been our son."
Azula gives a humored sniff. "How do you even care for a chimp?"
"The wonderful thing about the mainland is that we can look it up on the net."
"Dad would have never allowed a monkey in the house." Zuko comments from across the room.
"I'd keep it at my house." Sokka replies. "Can you hand me that glass."
Azula rolls her eyes. "It's been what? A three days now? I think that you can reach over and get a glass yourself." She hands it to him anyways.
"If you'd been stranded out at sea, I'd get you as many glasses as you asked for." Sokka tries a smile.
"Without complaining?"
He thinks for a moment. "There would be a minimal amount of complaining."
"And this is a minimal amount of complaining."
He chuckles, "that's fair." Frankly, he is glad that she isn't completely doting over him and babying him. He doesn't think that it would feel normal if she cried and gushed over him. He doesn't count the stress of the first day. She was rather weepy the first time he'd really opened his eyes. The first day that it settled in that he was truly back. He thinks that it is much more comforting to get his daily dose of sass and sarcasm. Because it is normal. It makes him feel as though he hadn't been gone for so long after all.
Maybe the world hasn't left him behind and discarded his memories.
Maybe it hasn't moved forward without him after all.
Maybe she had been waiting for him all this time.
He grips her hand as tightly as he can with his sores and weakened muscles. Katara enters the room with lunch. He may not be home yet, but home has come to him.